• Happy Mt. St. Helens Day!
• Nordstrom was caught capturing and tracking the smartphone data of users who wandered through its (real-world) stores. Once the story broke out, the retail said it wasn’t doing it anymore.
• A UW prof’s using meditation to teach students to conquer online distractions.
• I’m still trying to determine if the Milwaukee slam poet Matt Cook, publicized in the hereby-linked page, is the same guy who was the Stranger’s first editor (and an unsung co-creator of that publication’s informal-snarkiness aesthetic).
• Just as there are with vinyl records (and even 8-track tapes), there are people who staunchly defend VHS videocassettes and the culture they engendered. (Before VHS’s 30-year run as an active medium, the idea of “owning” your favorite movies was little more than a fantasy.) These analog nostalgists now have a documentary about them, taped in part at Seattle’s Scarecrow Video.
• Carl Gibson at the political blog Nation of Change believes we should “move beyond ‘left vs. right,’” just before he iterates what is basically a center-left political platform.
• Frank Zappa, as you all know, loathed drugs but loved him some hot groupie sex. His personal secretary, however, was allowed to turn him down.
• Abstinence-only education, and the growing evidence that it’s really harmful, has proven to be one of the (many) topics that bring web comment trolls into full rabid-bigoted rage.
• The UK’s Daily Telegraph refers to the Fast & Furious action-film series as Hollywood’s first “bisexual blockbuster.”
• Does the still relatively little-used Google Plus have an alluring “tragic beauty” to it?
• From all the hype you can hear about it these days, 3-D printing is either the best thing since sliced bread or the best thing since “industrial hemp.”
• After just three weeks, the online revivals of All My Children and One Life to Live are each cutting back from four half-hour episodes a week to two.
• Here’s a cool public art piece in Australia. It’s a hugeass hot air balloon in the form of a fantasy whale with human breast shapes stuck on, apparently just for fun.

junkee.com

factmag.com

• Somebody thought it would be cool to try to laser-etch a phonograph record onto wood. The result sounds a bit like the early, dial-up-connection versions of RealAudio.
• Item: Indoor pot growing uses lotsa electricity. Comment: You mean stoners aren’t the purest-O-the-pure eco-saints? Next thing, you’ll be saying electric cars and wood stoves aren’t pure-green either.
• Oh, Those Kids Today! #1: Monica Guzman insists today’s under-30 folks aren’t entitlement-obsessed narcissists, but rather are “people waking up to their own power and not being willing to compromise it.”
• Oh, Those Kids Today! #2: Young adults are even driving less than prior generations. How un-American can ya get?
• The Legislature’s special session could see a Dem-controlled State Senate again. Maybe.
• Seattle teachers who refused to administer standardized tests have achieved a partial victory.
• Just last week, we bemoaned the idiotic prose and strained “corporate hip” attitude of KOMO’s “young skewing” local website Seattle Pulp. Now the whole site’s dead, without even leaving its old posts alive.
• Are the Sonics Back Yet? (Day 126): No. But we should have the final, final answer (for this year at least) on Wednesday. Don’t get your hopes back up. But hold on to the love.
• Meanwhile, the Oklahoma Plunder thought it would just be keen n’ dandy to play tracks by Sonics-purist and Seattle’s-honor-defender Macklemore in their arena. Nope, no way, uh-uh, no siree bub.
• Might Microsoft buy Barnes & Noble’s Nook ebook hardware operation just to kill it?
• Amazon’s fledgling in-house book publishing operations might expand to include “literary fiction,” whatever the heck that means anymore.
• Disappeared local institution we neglected to mention earlier: the Green Lake Baskin-Robbins.
• Weird crime story of the week: “Woman who killed ex with insecticide-laced Jågermeister pleads guilty.”
• It’s illegal but it happens anyway: denying employment to people for the sin of being in debt due to being unemployed.
• Katy Evans at the Tacoma group blog Post Defiance notes how indie live music has become a more complicated, bureaucratic, and problematic biz, especially in towns like hers in the shadow of bigger towns.
• Seattle Times Shrinkage Watch: The paper’s own reporters have to pay for website subscriptions to their own work. Except they can “opt out” of it if they insist.
• You remember how the New Orleans Times-Picayune went to only three print issues a week? No more. They’re now putting out newsstand-only editions on the four non-home-delivery days, just like the Detroit papers are.
• Talking into computers and expecting them to understand you has always been, and apparently will continue to be, little more than a screenwriters’ conceit.
• Anthony Galluzzo at Salon wants you to stop the hipster-bashing already. He says it’s old, tired, and becoming classist.
• Jim Tews, who describes himself as “a decent white male comic,” insists that most white guys performing standup are not sexist boors.
• No, Rolling Stone readers, Nirvana is not the fifth worst band of the ’90s. That would actually be Sugar Ray.

• We’ve got to save Metro Transit from the devastating cuts that have decimated Snohomish and Pierce counties’ transit systems. There’s a public forum about it on Tuesday, 5/14, 3 p.m. at Union Station. (Despite the unfortunate, pseudo-snarky tone of the hereby-linked article at KOMO’s SeattlePulp.com, its message is important.)
• While upscale NIMBYs fight to keep those dirty non-upscale people out of their “clean” neighborhoods via attacks on “aPodments” (the only affordable, non-subsidized housing being built in town these days), the building of mass-produced “exclusive” luxury apartment towers continues unabated.
• Seattle Weekly Shrinkage Watch: Restaurant reviewer Hanna Raskin (with whom I appeared last year at a MOHAI/Seattle Public Library “History Cafe” panel) has quit, rather than accept a lower-paying job as a “food and drink editor.” Back in the Weekly’s heyday, restaurant reviews were more prominent than any other “culture” category, accounting for almost a quarter of the paper’s cover stories. Now, they might or might not be part of the paper at all. (The Weekly’s also fired its music editor Chris Kornelis.)
• Meanwhile, the Weekly’s onetime sister paper the Village Voice is down to 20 editorial staffers. Its two top editors received orders from on top to cut five of those positions. Instead, they quit.
• Amitai Etzioni at the Atlantic claims “the liberal narrative,” which he defines as support for big-government paternalism, “is broken.” No, it isn’t. It’s government itself that’s broken, and only the “liberal narrative” has the means to fix it.
• Jeanne Cooper, 1919-2013: The dowager “Duchess” of The Young and the Restless had played the same role for just short of 40 years. Before that she’d been in countless westerns and dramas (The Twilight Zone, Perry Mason, etc. etc.). Her three kids include L.A. Law/Psych star Corbin Bernsen.
• In not-at-all-surprising news, YouTube will add paid-subscription channels.
• Let’s close on a happy note (on the 80th anniversary of Hedy Lamarr’s breakthrough film Ecstasy) with Hysterical Literature, a video project by photographer Clayton Cubitt. In each segment a woman reads from a favorite book while, out of camera range, a second woman gives her a Hitachi Magic Wand vibrator treatment. (NSFWhatever.)

via criminalwisdom.com

neil hubbard via cousearem.wordpress.com

• It was 37 years ago this month: The TMT Show, the first faint stirrings of Seattle punk rock culture. May Day of the Bicentennial year. Three bands rented a hall in the Odd Fellows building on Capitol Hill. About 100 people showed up. From these DIY roots sprang, directly or indirectly, all the noise that emanated from this burg ever since.
• The City Council’s revised South Lake Union rezone: even fewer affordable housing units than Mayor McGinn’s plan, but more preserved Space Needle views for condo owners.
• The old Seattle Rep space, which became the Intiman Playhouse, is now the “Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center.”
• Ray Harryhausen, 1925-2013: The king of stop-motion animated fantasy was better known than his films’ official directors, for a good reason. Those dudes were simply in charge of the live-action scenes. The filler, if you will. Harryhausen was the films’ real auteur.
• Ex-Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein sez search engines are getting rich off of the pirated works of fine people such as himself.
• I’m not so sure that there really is a “Conservative Quest to Eliminate Facts.” It’s more universal than that.
• It’s not so much that the tech companies listed in one woman’s Tumbler blog “Only Hire Men,” but that they seem to presume only men will even apply to work there.
• Dear Crowdfunders: Millionaire celebrities and billionaire media titans don’t need your Kickstarter money. Really.
• Even the bosses of America’s hyper-bloated “security” bureaucracy don’t seem to know all that’s in it.
• Recent “good news” about newspapers’ paid readership (in print and online) seems, in some cases, to be exaggerated.
• Blogger Mark Manson has “10 Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America.” Number 5: “The quality of life for the average American is not that great.” Number 6: “The rest of the world is not a slum-ridden shithole compared to us.”
• Allen Clifton at Forward Progressives isn’t the first, and won’t be the last, to remind you Jesus probably neither a corporate lobbyist nor a Tea Partier.
• The downside of traditional publishing: A Brit lady who writes popular children’s books really wants her publisher to stop putting them inside pink covers. She says pink turns boy readers away and distracts from her stories’ often-serious content.
• The downside of modern publishing: An American gent who’s written three novels “to good reviews” (if not good sales) tries self-publishing and finds it to be “the worst.”
• I’d be more interested in Out of Print, Vivienne Roumani’s forthcoming documentary about the digital publishing “disruption,” if the director didn’t seem so obsessed with making everyone younger than herself look like an idiot.
• Let’s close for today with some wonderful old Greek and Greek-American music from the 78 era.

tom banse via kplu

• Could fewer pesticides mean more bees in Wash. state’s future?
• You know I love old Seattle, and old postcards, and old Seattle postcards.
• “Second-hand pot smoke” exists, and can potentially be grounds for getting fired.
• Against stereotype, Washington ranks among the “most stressed-out states.”
• Affordable housing in these parts is like the weather, as per the old phrase “everybody talks about it but….”
• The decimation of Metro Transit can only be averted in the special session of the Legislature. Which, as you recall, is controlled by turncoat ex-Democrat Rodney Tom (who doesn’t seem to give a damn about anything but appeasing right-wing Big Money, which is anti-transit as a matter of principle).
• Local economics pundit John Burbank says Washington should, and more importantly can, prepare for a post-Boeing future.
• George Jones, 1932-2013: He stopped loving her today.
• Okay, we’re getting a full component of air traffic controllers again. Now can we please work out sequester repeals that would benefit, you know, non-rich people?
• A bestselling author wants the federal government (which, as you recall, can’t even support public broadcasting or arts education sufficiently) to subsidize the big book publishers.
• Anybody remember Blockbuster Video? This will stoke your memories. (Incidentally, there’s supposed to be two still-extant Blockbusters in Kent and one in Edmonds.)
• Let’s close up for today with some video documentaries about women in punk.

networkawesome.com

capitol records via wikipedia

• Among the stories I missed by waiting a week to post Random Links: Heart’s well-deserved induction into the Rock n’ Roll Hall o’ Fame.
• Are the Sonics Back Yet? (Day 108): No. But at least we have a date when we might (repeat, might) find out one way or the other: May 13.
• Seattle’s on-and-off-again Fourth of July festivities are on again.
• Seattle’s interim police chief says he’s really, really, really sorry for the video he made mocking the homeless back in the ’80s, using police training-video production gear.
• Is “alternative” music too female-unfriendly? Or is it just corporate “alternative” music festivals that leave the women out?
• The SunBreak explains just why privatized liquor costs more than state-liquor-store liquor did.
• Starbucks is among the companies asking for expanded U.S. tax breaks on overseas revenues.
• Washington’s attorney general wants you to know that T-Mobile’s “no-contract” cell phone plans can still cost you as much as traditional ones.
• Paul Krugman asks whether no one in power even gives a damn about the long term unemployed; while Jared Bernstein at Salon says rising income inequality can’t be fixed unless the campaign-finance system is fixed first.
• The Boston bombing media circus was a pathetic spectacle that continues to spread misinformation.
• Bad news everyone: Futurama is canceled, again, perhaps this time forever (but that’s what they said the last time).
• Speaking of shows (and characters) which have come back from the dead, the once-dead online revivals of All My Children and One Life to Live have miraculously re-revived like Lazarus Dixie. Episodes stream on Hulu.com starting Monday.
• The film itself has gone on to the big Netflix stream in the sky cloud, but the original website advertising Space Jam lives on!
• One or more of Wikipedia’s volunteer editors had been taking female writers out of a page about “American novelists” and into a page about “American women novelists.” But people complained, and the sex-segregation has stopped. This isn’t much different from indie bookstores (like Seattle’s Left Bank Books) separating “women’s fiction” from “general fiction.”
• Can we really blame the whole ’08 economic kablooey on a few coked-up financiers in London?
• AlterNet reminds you that, yes, your bad memories of George W. Bush are fully justified.

seattle dept. of transportation

• King Street Station, one of Seattle’s two historic railway passenger terminals (and the one still in use by Amtrak) has looked so drab and awful for so long. In the pre-Amtrak desperate last years of private passenger rail, the Great Northern had “modernized” the main lobby with an acoustic-tile drop ceiling and other ill-informed touches. Now, after a half-decade of planning and reconstruction, the city and private partners have finally restored the room to its full grandeur. You can read all about it here. There’s a grand opening on Wed. 4/24, 11 a.m.
• In other grand-opening news, the “Old School Pinups” photo studio has one this Fri. 4/19, 5 p.m.-on, at 1922 Post Alley.
• Something I’ve learned first hand lately: Seattle’s current boom (glut?) of apartment construction hasn’t led to lower rents, but to ever-higher rents.
• In addition to the dilemmas of cabs. vs. “for hire” vehicles and Zipcar vs. Car2Go, now a new alternative appears in town. It’s semi-pro “ride sharing.”
• No, Seattle Times guest commenter Grace Gedye, online sexist trolls existed long before Facebook. But can the rising force of “Geek Girls” conquer and defeat ‘em once n’ for all?
• Another classic bowling alley bites the dust. It’s Robin Hood Lanes, in Edmonds since 1960.
• Are the Sonics Back Yet (Day 100)?: No. And we were supposed to have found out this weekend whether they’re coming back, at the NBA team owners’ annual hobnob session. But that vote’s been indefinitely delayed.
• We do know that any neo-Sonics would have to negotiate cable-TV carriage of their games with the Mariners, who just bought a controlling interest in Root Sports Northwest.
• The Oregon Ducks, aka “Nike U.,” have been slapped with NCAA penalties for football recruiting violations.
• Some Net-pundits are crowing about the simple but apparently devastating “spreadsheet error” at the heart of a 2010 think-tank study promoting “austerity economics” to attack government debt. If not for the faulty math, the study’s critics claim, the study’s claims would be seen as the nonsense they are. Yeah, but facts have seldom gotten in the way of “shock doctrine” partisans, before or since.
• Eco-Scare of the Week (non-fertilizer edition): Even before rising sea levels submerge many small Pacific islands, they’ll fatally disrupt those places’ fresh-water tables, making them uninhabitable.
• Scott Miller, R.I.P.: The Loud Family/Game Theory musician was a leading light in the ’80s power pop revival, as well as a top scholar/historian about the pop/rock sphere. For a limited time, his heirs are making six of his out-of-print albums available as free downloads.
• Blogger Nadine Friedman hates, hates, hates the latest Dove “real beauty” ad campaign. She claims it actually reinforces the standard corporate standards of female ideals.
• Aaron Steven Miller at Medium.com wants book publishers to take the lead in tech-ifying and social-media-ifying their operations, before Amazon completely crushes them. Of course, that would require book publishers to cease being, as Miller puts it…

…historically the stingiest, most fiscally conservative, most technologically resistant and investment-averse people ever, with the highest percentage of luddites per capita.

seatacmedia.org

Earlier this year, KUOW and MOHAI came up with a list of 25 “objects that tell Seattle’s story.”

They range from the obvious (a Boeing B-17, a poster announcing the Japanese-American internment, a Starbucks coffee cup) to the more obscure (an ancient, giant ground sloth).

A little more recently, SeattlePI.com ran a list of “25 things we miss in Seattle.”

These also ranged from the truly famous (the Lusty Lady sign, Frederick & Nelson’s window displays) to the lesser known (the Woodland Park Zoo’s nocturnal-creatures exhibit).

I’ve got my own list of Seattle pop culture icons. All of them are things I’ve personally seen or owned.

And yes, there are 25 of them. (Why break a routine that works?)

In no particular order, they are:

1. A Frederick & Nelson shopping bag.
2. A Dog House place mat.
3. A J.P. Patches plush doll.
4. A floppy disc of MS-DOS 1.0.
5. A P-I vending box.
6. Dr. Belding Scribner’s first artificial kidney machine.
7. The Kalakala.
8. Bud Tutmarc’s pioneering electrified pedal-steel guitar.
9. A Neptune repertory-cinema calendar.
10. A KJR “Fab 50″ newsletter/record chart.
11. A mascot costume for “Nordy,” the old Nordstrom children’s shoe department spokescritter.
12. A first pressing of Nirvana’s Bleach on vinyl.
13. A work of Northwest Coast native art; or, one of artist Preston Singletary‘s upscale “tributes” to Northwest Coast native art.
14. A Space Needle ball-point pen.
15. A set of Peter Bagge-designed “grunge rock pencils.”
16. A first-edition hardcover of Sophie Frye Bass’s book Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle.
17. A Seattle Pilots pennant.
18. The Pike Place Market mural honoring pre-WWII Japanese-American farmers.
19. An Amazon.com shipping box with one of the company’s five early logos.
20. A piece of Kingdome debris.
21. An Ivar’s Acres of Clams kids’ menu.
22. A Smith Tower elevator car.
23. A Washington Mutual savings passbook.
24. The prototype 747.
25. A wooden miniature hydroplane.

via redmolucca.wordpress.com

Margaret Thatcher’s recent death has sprung off a veritable gusher of reaction, much of it vitriolic.

This is to be expected in regard to the woman who oversaw the brutal decimation of the UK’s “welfare state” and the destruction of its once-mighty industrial base.

The woman who so firmly delivered that nation into the hands of financiers that even the opposition felt it had to conform (becoming the anti-working-class “New Labour”).

The precursor (and intellectual superior) to Reagan (whose regime, as you recall, was also run by “a strong woman”) and an inspirer/co-conspirator in the crimes of Reaganism, crimes whose long term effects still plague this country today.

The friend of despots and state terrorists who never met a dictator she didn’t like (so long as said dictator professed to be anti-Communist).

The inspirer of a wealth of deservedly angry protest music, which helped to transform punk and “postpunk” from an aesthetic niche into a sociopolitical movement, at least in the British Isles.

In her day, and since, some have argued that Thatcher should at least be respected as “a strong woman,” and even as a feminist of sorts.

I would argue that she helped disprove one of the most easily disproven tenets promoted by some feminists, that “Women” are innately the Moral Sex.

And Thatcher helped prove another tenet, that a woman is capable of doing anything. Including very, very bad things.

Thatcher, of course, didn’t do all she did by herself.

She was an active frontwoman for a group of movements with different but similar goals—to defund the poor, to smash organized labor, to redistribute wealth into fewer and fewer hands, to turn the state into the tool of financial speculation, to prop up even more brutal regimes from Chile to South Africa.

And Britain, and the world, are still feeling the ills from them.

via seattle bike blog

• Enterprising citizens calling themselves “Reasonably Polite Seattleites” took it upon themselves to install unauthorized “bicycle lane protectors” (reflective plastic pylons) along Cherry Street uphill from downtown. The city vows to remove them.
• Seattle police chief John Diaz will retire, allowing Mike McGinn (or perhaps a successor mayor next year) to put in another figurehead for uncontrolled street-cop brutality.
• In a Belltown where anything non-one-percenty is increasingly out of place (more about that in a day or so), Roq La Rue has been kicked out of its longtime space in the old Film Row RKO distribution offices. Fortunately, Seattle’s premier “pop surrealist” art gallery has found new quarters in Pioneer Square, effective some time this summer.
• Meanwhile, a Crosscut contributor named Andy Fife asks whether there is a “Seattle arts aesthetic.” Actually, there are several. There’s the “world class or bust” desperate slickness of most of SAM’s big permanent displays. There’s the “rich ex-hippie” mellow slickness of Chihuly and company. There’s the “modern monumentalist” big stuff seen at the G. Gibson and William Traver galleries. There are the house styles of Cornish and Gage and their recent alums. And there’s the “let’s put on a show” urban folk/pop styling of most of my personal faves.
• New Orleans city bosses apparently want to simultaneously (1) shut down music venues, and (2) promote their city as a live-music tourist destination.
• NBCNews.com blogger Wilson Rothman claims Apple’s iTunes is “out of date and out of touch.” Specifically, Rothman dislikes the whole idea of having to pay for song recordings. He seems to prefer the Spotify model, in which artists make fractions of fractions of pennies. That’s supposed to be the modern way?
• Here’s one author who hates the new economics of the book biz—Scott Turow, one of the few writers who’d thrived under the old system.
• Joshua Macht at the Atlantic claims Time magazine has perhaps three years to live.
• Hacked computer data shows the global one-percenters are hoarding trillions in secret overseas tax-haven accounts. Leaders of nations other than ours claim to be aghast.
• The newspaper industry has started measuring revenue from online paywalls and ancillary products/services. The resulting figures show papers are now losing a little less money than previously thought.
• The death last week of Spanish exploitation-film giant Jess Franco has been followed by the loss of another of that country’s great directors of sex and/or violence, Bigas Luna.
• Annette Funicello, 1943-2013: The only original Mickey Mouse Club cast member to have a real adult showbiz career was the wholesome sex symbol in the Beach Party movies, and a pop singer of unusual clarity and panache. During her cameo in the Monkees’ film Head, she proved not afraid to parody (without breaking) her squeaky-clean image. She remained gracious and classy, even during her long slow illness.
• We’ve also lost Les Blank, who directed 42 documentaries of varying lengths and topics (all shot on film). He’s probably best known for Burden of Dreams, the “making-of” film about Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. Many critics considered Blank’s behind-the-scenes story to be more compelling than Herzog’s feature.
• And another goodbye, this one to Hilly Krystal, influential owner of NYC punk club CBGB. While he opened it as a hippie spot dedicated to “country, blue grass, and blues,” he quickly adjusted to welcome the burgeoning Bowery underground scene. The result was what the New Yorker called “the ultimate garage—the place garage bands everywhere want to play.” (Update: This hereby-linked story is from 2007. Krystal’s still worth remembering nowadays, though.)
• Femen and associated groups held an “international topless jihad day” across European capitals, though the slogans painted upon themselves seemed to almost all be in English.
• Ending the drug war was never one of Obama’s top priorities. I suspect it’s because the whole bohemian-relaxation vibe clashed with the striving-for-progress zeitgeist that informed Obama’s worldview. But, as with gay marriage, he may be soon forced to act by a groundswell of popular opinion.
• The Nielsen ratings now claim there are 5 million “zero television” households in the U.S., up from a mere 2 million in ’07. (The “kill your television” “radicals” will, naturally, completely ignore this information.)
• Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch’s minions threaten to pull the Fox broadcast network off of over-the-air stations (including affiliates tied up in long-term contracts) and go cable-only, unless the courts outlaw a service to stream local over-the-air stations to local viewers via Internet connections.

The setting: KeyArena, 2:20 on a Wednesday afternoon. The place is filled with 15,000 middle- and high-school students and their adult chaperones. I’m in a staff lounge, preparing to start working on the tear-down crew at the end of this event, watching the on-stage action from a video feed.

From the elaborate stage, event hosts Craig and Marc Kielburger tease an already hyped-up crowd with the promise of a final surprise guest. Then they introduce said guest.

This is followed by the screechingly loudest human noise imaginable, as the young crowd screams in unison.

It is only due to the miracle of modern amplification that local hereos Macklemore and Ryan Lewis (with their full live band) can be heard.

Thus ended the first non-sporting event I’d been to in KeyArena since presidential candidate Barack Obama’s visit in the spring of 2008. That event, like this, was a rousing call to action.

But the Obama rally was a mere toe-tapper compared to the rafters-shaking experience that was We Day, a five-hour celebration of kids getting involved in their communities and in the larger world.

We Day has been staged in cities across Canada for the past six years. This was the first one held south of the border.

Its parent organization, Free the Children, was started by the Kielburger brothers when Craig Kielburger was age 12. Their original intent was to crusade against forced child labor in Pakistan.

Since then, the organization has grown and evolved. It supports activities in 45 countries from Ecuador to India. These include schools, clean-water projects, and cottage industries making craft products. These projects’ overall goal is to “adopt” whole villages, helping create a sustainable infrastructure of education, health, and livelihood.

On the home front, Free the Children works to get kids involved in social change. It encourages kids to raise money and volunteer their time for overseas projects. And it empowers kids to work in their own communities against hunger, abuse, bullying, and dropping out of school.

Every part of Free the Children’s outreach to North American students is about positive empowerment. Burnout, or “compassion fatigue,” has no place in this outfit’s mindset. Everything’s about getting up, getting involved, doing things, speaking out (or, in the case of its forthcoming Day of Silence project, deliberately NOT speaking).

We Day is both a call to action and a celebration for those who’ve already been active. Kids got to go to it by having volunteered for both local and global causes.

In return, they got to spend a day out from school among kids bused in from all over the state. They got gift bags containing motion-powered light up plastic wristbands (donated by Microsoft, one of the event’s local sponsors). They got to partake of an extravaganza of entertainment and exhortation, of high-energy rally speeches alternating with live music and video segments of kids making a difference.

I worked on a part of the setup and teardown crew, and found a highly efficient organization behind it. Perhaps no recent event at the Key had needed so much stuff placed in so many places throughout the building. Besides the huge main stage (with two video walls) on the arena’s south end, a secondary stage with a video floor was set up on the north end. A gift bag was placed on every seat in the auditorium. Booths selling T-shirts and giving away promotional flyers were set up along all the concourses. Some lounges and luxury suites were reconfigured to welcome event staff, volunteers, adult supporters, and sponsors. Ground-floor dressing rooms had to be spiffed up at least a little for all the celebrity guests.

Those guests included Sonics legend Gary Payton, Mia Farrow (Payton Place meets Peyton Place!), Martin Sheen (delivering a rousing secular sermon about making a difference), MC Hammer, Martin Luther King III, Nelly Furtado, and local breakdance stars the Massive Monkees.

The most enthusiastically-received of the announced guests, “Dreamgirls” star Jennifer Hudson, performed two high-energy song and dance numbers.

But even Hudson couldn’t raise louder screams than Macklemore, wearing a replica Sonics jersey embossed with the slogan BRING ‘EM BACK. (A men’s pro basketball team bearing that name may indeed show up in KeyArena later this year.)

But this day was not about sports fandom, despite the presence of Payton, Magic Johnson, and Seahawks coach Pete Carroll and several of his star players including Russell Wilson.

What We Day was all about was getting involved in things bigger than sports, things bigger than yourself.

And having a raucously good time while doing so.

(Cross-posted with City Living.)

The legendary B-filmmaker helmed “at least 199″ films (not counting re-edited and retitled versions) in a six-decade career, many of which he also wrote, photographed, edited, scored the music for, and acted in.

He disguised his massive productivity in part by taking a variety of pseudonyms, including the names of some of his favorite jazz musicians. He always worked on time and in budget (both usually minimal). Among his tricks to achieve this was reusing locations and even entire shots in different films.

He worked in numerous genres but usually dealt in varying proportions of horror and sex (up to and including hardcore).

His best known works include Vampyros Lesbos and She Killed In Ecstasy (both with the ultra-stunning Soledad Miranda), the James Darren version of Venus in Furs, 99 Women, The Awful Dr. Orloff, Succubus, Eugenie: the Story of Her Journey Into Perversion, and The Blood of Fu Manchu.

Even when his financing dried up, he kept working, making shot-on-video features on even tinier budgets. He released three of these last year.

He was preceded in death by his wife, muse, and most frequent star Lina Romay (who was appearing in his productions, and still doing nude scenes, well into the 1990s).

washington dept. of natural resources via kxly-tv spokane

• Here’s the big Whidbey Island landslide from Wednesday.
• “Apartments are expensive, hard to find in Seattle area.” Damn. I need one and soon.
• Update #1: The Elvis statue that got stolen from Mama’s Mexican Kitchen in Belltown was found and returned.
• Update #2: Canterbury Ale & Eats, the legendary Capitol Hill dive bar, is still scheduled to close later this year. But its landlord, the nonprofit Capitol Hill Housing, wants to replace it with another “affordable” eatery-drinkery.
• Update #3: The sudden controversy over artist Charles Krafft’s longstanding ultra-right-wing beliefs has made the New Yorker.
• My ol’ acquaintance, painter Billy King, would like a “1 percent for the arts” program for commercial real-estate developments, particularly the ever-enlarging Amazon campus.
• And local sci-fi legend Neal Stephenson would like his fellow fantasists to get back to the old SF game of imagining practical, possible utopias, instead of the escapist cyberspaces and grim nightmare futures they’re mostly imagining these days.
• Michelle Shocked shows up at clubs that canceled her gigs after her anti-gay rant, claiming to be a free-speech martyr.
• “Shoppers tired of Walmart’s empty shelves and long lines are bolting to Costco and Target.” The empty-shelves part is only partly due to Walmart’s notoriously lousy labor policies that drive potential workers away. It’s also due to suppliers getting sick n’ tired of Walmart’s notorious “my way or the highway” stance toward them.
• Salon asks, “Is there anything 3-D printing can’t do?” Actually, there’s a heckuva lot it can’t do. Yet.
• Many (white female) porn stars still refuse to perform interracial sex scenes on camera. Comment #1: Yes, women (including sex workers) should be able to turn down anything they want to turn down. Comment #2: It’s still a sad sign that some performers (and, presumably, viewers), in a genre once thought to be the cutting edge of “free speech” progress, can’t get beyond one of society’s most tired old prejudices.
• Micheal Schuman at Time sees a new relevance for that ol’ policy nerd Karl Marx, as the global one-percenters wage “class struggle” against all the rest of us. But Schuman doesn’t see, or recommend, any serious counter response.

I’ve known, and occasionally worked with, Gillian G. Gaar for as long as I’ve been writing these MISC ventures.

You know her from her contributions to the Rocket, the Stranger, ArtsFocus, Tablet, the Belltown Messenger, and other local and national periodicals; as well as her books about Elvis Presley, Nirvana, the Beatles, and women in rock.

She needs some expensive surgery to restore the vision in her left eye.

Like so many in and on the periphery of the music scene, she has no insurance.

She’s started one of those online fundraising drives.

She’s a quarter of the way to her goal already, and could use your help getting the rest of the way there.

•

Dennis White, who runs the Dadastic! record label, has been making T-shirts commemorating Belltown’s still-mourned Dog House diner and piano bar.

For a limited time you can get one for $17 (with a free CD thrown in), and have $5 of the proceeds go to Gaar’s medical fund.

(The hereby-linked page says the deal is over, but White says you can just mention it when you order and he’ll still do it.)

• I was at the last day of the Alki Tavern, that venerable unrepentant dive bar. So was videographer Nick Adams.
• “Pot tourism” still has a few snags before it can become big business here.
• The Boeing engineers’ union approved the contract proposal they’d previously rejected.
• Post-dam Elwha River: I’m getting sedimental over you.
• Providence’s drive toward near-monopoly status in the hospital biz of much of Wash. state hits a snag, as Olympia hospital employees go on strike. Among the issues: cuts to the employees’ own health benefits, while the CEO rakes in millions.
• The Rev. Rich Lang, writing for Real Change, compares modern society to that once bemoaned by the Bible’s “apocalyptic” writers.
• Apparently, indie-folk oldie act Michelle Shocked (who’d once sort-of claimed to be lesbian 22 years ago) now says she was just kidding when she made virulently anti-gay remarks on stage in San Francisco.
• In brighter women-in-music news, meet “Laura the Luthier,” the collective name for the women who kept Gibson Guitars in production during WWII.
• By now you’ve heard about the Steubenville OH teen-rape verdict, and about certain cable-news commentators who went all over in sympathy with the young convicted criminals while downplaying or making excuses for their crime. Mia McKenzie at the blog Black Girl Dangerous has a slightly different view. McKenzie acknowledges it’s sad that the convicts will go into the “prison industrial complex” like so many kids who aren’t white or football stars. But she still expresses more sympathy to the rape victim.
• That widely disseminated “meme graphic” of a Swedish department store with “realistic” mannequins? The picture’s real. But it wasn’t taken in an H&M but in another store, and it was photographed three years ago.