• When bad covers happen to good novels….
• The (beautiful) wooden Elvis statue outside Mama’s Mexican Kitchen was stolen. We who all adore it need it back.
• Every now and then, civic boosters talk about bringing the Olympic Games to Seattle. Such efforts have traditionally been quashed quickly by locals worried about traffic and local-government subsidies. But this time (for the 2024 Summer Games), could the boosters have the upper hand over the NIMBYs?
• City Councilmember Richard Conlin says housing for poor people should be kept in the south end, away from all the nice-upscale people.
• (Meanwhile, it’s good to remember that America’s urban ghettos were the historic result of specific policy/planning decisions. Do an online search for “redlining” and “blockbusting” to learn more.)
• “Tiny houses” are all the rage in certain circles. But wanting to plop one down inside a city, well that’s news.
• At least one ESPN pundit predicts the Seattle Mariners will be “this year’s surprise team.” In recent years, as you know, the M’s have provided too many of the wrong kind of surprises.
• Wash. state is Number One! (In making higher education unaffordable, that is.)
• Seattle teachers’ protest against standardized testing has reached the eyes and ears of the New Yorker, which notes that this particular test is not used so much to evaluate students as it is to evaluate the teachers themselves.
• The Catholic Northwest Progress, the regional archdiocese newspaper, is the latest grave in the print-media cemetery. The paper’s incessantly anti-gay-marriage stance probably didn’t help.
• The years-in-the-promising Bell Street “boulevard park” project is finally starting construction. When it’s done, Bell will have one lane of traffic and one lane of parallel parking; the rest of the right-of-way will be extended sidewalks and planters.
• The thing about the Vancouver BC company’s inadvertently see-thru yoga slacks: The women who attend these classes and wear these clothes are often trying to show off their figures, not to men but to other women, not to attract desire but admiration/envy. But that doesn’t work if the “exposure” is too blatant.
• In the ten years since the Iraq War, the buildup to same, and the almost unquestioned media cheerleading for same, have we learned anything (except to distrust the media)?
• In the Internet era, news readers have umpteen sources for big national/global stories, but far fewer people reporting local events or investigating local dirt.
• Montana may make roadkill legal to eat: On tonight’s dessert menu, chocolate moose.
• After testing the waters in commercial book genres (romance, mystery, etc.), Amazon’s getting into the “literary” book racket.
• While the “people of the book” were making their usual noisy gripes that everything was going to hell, independent bookstores have staged a quiet comeback.
• Speaking of naysaying the naysayers, Bono would like you to know that many worldwide trends (poverty, AIDS, etc.) are actually on a positive swing these days.
• Is Jay Leno finally being pushed into retirement? For real this time?
• Urban-planning pundit Richard Florida made big bucks from instructing cities how to pursue “the creative class.” Now he says (sort of) that that doesn’t work.
• Following Chris Ware’s acclaimed Building Stories, local art-book press Marquand Books is putting out another “box set” graphic novel, containing objects of different sizes and shapes telling one meta-narrative. It’s The Magician, by onetime Dallas arts promoter Chris Byrne. It’s an ultra-limited-edition product. Its artistic ambitions, if anything, are greater than those of Ware’s work.

There was a time when the governor’s mansion in this state was in the hands of a “centrist” Republican named Dan Evans.

He was followed by Dixy Lee Ray, a right-winger who ran under a Democratic Party flag-of-convenience. She was followed by John Spellman, another corporate Republican.

Then came Booth Gardner.

He ran in 1984. If you recall, that was the time of Ronald Reagan’s re-coronation (and its accompanying royal jubilee, the L.A. Olympics).

He’d been a state legislator and Pierce County Executive. But his statewide rep was relatively obscure.

He also had the Republican establishment (at the start of its drift into far-right insanity) going against him fierce. (One particularly ludicrous TV attack ad had a heavy-set actor playing a cigar-chomping “big union boss” who’s “got this Gardner guy right in our pocket.”)

What he had going for him was family (Weyerhaeuser family) money and connections, and access to Sen. Henry M. Jackson’s donor/organizer mailing list.

And he had the support of just enough “swing” voters who admired Reagan’s national public image but were less enamored toward Spellman.

Gardner beat Spellman. The Washington governorship has been in Democratic hands ever since.

That’s not to say it’s been easy to lead this state, then or now.

Entrenched interests, inter-regional feuds, the unelected would-be dictatorship of Tim Eyman, our regressive but hard-as-hell-to-change tax system, have all held back the pace of reform (now more desperately needed than ever).

But with Gardner, it all at least seemed possible.

•

Some politicians retire to the golf course. Others find new causes, new campaigns.

In Gardner’s case, his encore on the public stage was thrust upon him, with a diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease just a year after the end of his second term.

As his appearance and health deteriorated (to the point that he had to tell people, “I used to be governor of the state of Washington”), he became an increasingly outspoken advocate for the rights of the terminally ill.

In 2008 he campaigned for a (successful) “death with dignity” initiative.

He took his crusade national with an Oscar-nominated documentary short, The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner. (You can watch part of it at this link.)

• Garance Franke-Ruta at the Atlantic wishes U.S. feminist demonstrators had more dignified, less confrontational visual icons under which they could march. Symbols like “Columbia,” the historic female representation of the nation/continent/hemisphere. Of course, there’s this little matter about how this icon is now best known as a movie-studio logo—now owned by Sony….
• Are the Sonics Back Yet? (Day 63): No. But Chris Hansen is taking names for a “priority ticket” waiting list.
• Do you wanna believe Knute Berger, who mourns the pending loss of certain local architectural landmarks to developers and their megabucks lawyers? Or David Moser at Citytank, who believes higher-density urban neighborhoods are the only way to keep lower-income folk from being shoved out to costly, car-dependent suburbs?
• Richard McIver, 1942-2013: The 12-year Seattle City Council vet, who was the lone “token black” on the district-less council, was a regular champion for civil-rights issues and for neighborhoods the city often took for granted. And he made a great foil for Grant Cogswell.
• Military officials don’t like a proposal in the state legislature to let “payday loan” companies trot out even more predatory lending products (which are often, but not solely, aimed at troops and their families).
• Yep, police still don’t want police reforms. But they insist it’s a “labor issue.”
• The Center School can again teach its “Citizenship and Social Justice” class. But the school district has imposed vague, unspecified restrictions on how it can be taught.
• Meanwhile, Ta-Nehishi Coates wants to remind you that even “good people” can turn out to be racists.
• Fret not, Tiffany Willis claims: America is irreversably “becoming more liberal.”
• Cord Jefferson at Gawker believes when journalism is only open to people who don’t need a paycheck, only people who already have money will be journalists; and, possibly, only stories of interest to people who already have money will be reported.

• Sound-effect words in comics: to ugly-art maestro (and great Washingtonian) Basil Wolverton, they were an art form all their own.
• The State Legislature could help save Metro Transit. But will it?
• A Chinese-American family gave a lot of Chinese robes and other objects to the Tacoma Art Museum, hoping they would be a permanent reminder of our region’s ugly racial history. Decades later, the museum’s current management decides to auction them off out-of-state. However, the story’s even more complicated.
• Mr. Kim Thompson, one of by ex-bosses at Fantagraphics, has lung cancer.
• The Belltown Business Association’s got a lovely virtual tour of Belltown’s history.
• It’ll take years to even start getting nuke waste out of Hanford’s leaking tanks. And the sequester’s just slowing the task down a little more.
• As T-Mobile prepares to digest MetroPCS, the layoffs arrive. Lots of ‘em.
• First, the AOL/Time Warner corporate marriage collapsed. Now, Time Warner itself is splitting up, with the Time Inc. magazines and associated properties sent to fend for themselves.
• 3D printing has come to custom fashion, of the purportedly “sexy” variety.
• Ed Wood’s “lost” last film was found this past autumn, in the inventory of a defunct Vancouver porno theater!
• The “other guy” in the Bill and Ted movies is now a documentary director. (I know, just like anybody with a smartphone-cam these days.)
• Paul Krugman says progressives shouldn’t worry so much about appearing “respectable.”

via vintageseattle.org and capitolhillseattle.com

• The old Club Broadway disco on Capitol Hill, previously a Masonic Scottish Rite Cathedral, was torn down ages ago, leaving only a “stairway to nowhere.” Surprisingly, given all the other re-development activity nearby, the lot’s going to stay vacant for the foreseeable future.
• How do you honestly talk about the humanities in high school, when one parent’s complaint means you can’t say anything about “racism and social justice”?
• Meanwhile, Knute Berger has a great piece at Seattle magazine about our fair city’s unfair past; specifically, explicit racial discrimination in housing. It existed openly and legally (with contractual “covenants” binding home buyers to never resell to blacks, Hispanics, Asians, or even Jews) as late as 1968. Berger notes that…

In 1964, Seattle voters soundly defeated an “open housing” ordinance that would have let anyone live anywhere. It lost by more than 2-to-1.

• You know how Amazon’s now building three 50-story towers on the Toyota of Seattle, King Theater, and Sixth Avenue Motor Inn blocks. But word just got out that the e-tail giant has options to buy three nearby blocks from the Clise family, who’ve owned the lots since the 1930s. One of these houses the Hurricane Cafe, which for 19 years has carried on the 24-hour dining tradition of the legendary Dog House that preceded it (without, alas, the previous joint’s class).
• Jon Talton wishes Boeing execs would go on an “apology tour” to their workers, the Puget Sound area, and their shareholders, expressing their sorriness over pretty much everything they’ve done this past decade.
• In where-are-they-now? news, ex-Nirvana drummer Chad Channing is back with a new band, Before Cars.
• Gonzaga men’s basketball: #1 in the nation. UW men’s basketball: don’t ask.
• A Republican apologizes for something! It’s for claiming that bicycles pollute just like cars.
• Pot as a business model goes over well in Yakima.
• There are two pending death-penalty cases in King County. They’re both now on hold.
• Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon asks, “Did the Internet kill Girls Gone Wild?” The answer, for good or ill, is no. Joe Francis, founder of the public-nudity video label, is simply going into bankruptcy protection to weasel out of money he owes to a Vegas casino magnate. It’s a personal matter, not directly related to the company.
• Morrissey is still a self-righteous egomaniac, but at least he’s a morally consistent self-righteous egomaniac.
• An LA record-store chain is selling its own digitized versions of out-of-print LPs for download. The company claims it’s legal (it sets aside a portion of each sale into an escrow account, to be sent to copyright claimants if they ask). But is it right?

via messynesychic.com

• “Quite possibly the most important street photographer of the 20th century was a 1950s children’s nanny who kept herself to herself and never showed a single one of her photographs to anyone.”
• Jay Jacobs, 1912-2013: Yes, there really was a Jay Jacobs behind the local teen clothing chain of the same name, which operated from 1941 to 1999. At its peak, his company had more than 300 outlets around the country, mostly in malls. But, like Lamonts and the Squire Shops and Bernie’s/Bottom’s, Jacobs’ chain couldn’t make it in the age of the Big Box store (which, in turn, is being succeeded by the age of e-tail).
• Another local institution, Mae’s Phinney Ridge Cafe, is for sale, and will close if a buyer isn’t found soon.
• A UW English prof decries grad-student applicants who can’t name-drop a single modern female author.
• Joan Walsh (correctly, I believe) blames the attempted “sick humor” at the Oscars not on host Seth McFarlane but on the Academy bosses, who apparently wanted to latch onto that Farrelley Bros./American Pie “edgy” thang.
• The William Shatner bit at that show’s top was a textbook example of “framing” a piece of sick/sexist humor (the “We Saw Your Boobs” song) via fake distanced “irony,” to make it seem like just a “parody” of sick/sexist humor.
• The “In Memoriam” Oscars segment has its own selection committee, and “is a focus of campaigning.” That’s one reason why a few famous actors get left out every year and a few obscure behind-the-scenes figures always get put in.
• Elisabeth Parker at Addicting Info wants progressives to stop using right-wing catch phrases.
• For fans of old time radio (and of latter-day revivals of same), here’s a site that appears to have .mp3s of every CBS Radio Mystery Theater episode (all 1,339 of ‘em)!

photo by kyle johnson, from the set 'portraits of seattle' on flickr

It’s been more than a week since Jen Graves’ Stranger story, “Charles Krafft Is a White Nationalist Who Believes the Holocaust Is a Deliberately Exaggerated Myth.”

The paper’s print issue is now off of the stands.

The controversy continues.

Like many participants in and observers of the Seattle visual-art scene, I’ve long known about Krafft’s open admiration for neo-Nazis and Holocaust revisionist pseudo-scholars. He didn’t keep his views secret. They just hadn’t been written about in the local arts media, prior to Graves’ article.

While Krafft was out of the country when the article was written, Graves was careful not to allege anything about Krafft’s beliefs that he hadn’t specifically mentioned in national blogs, podcasts, talk-radio shows, newsletters, and his own Facebook posts.

Still, the counter-allegations of “hatchet job” etc. against Graves abound.

In the online comment thread for the original article.

In a spirited defense of Krafft (“despite his occasional idiocy”) by his friend (and my sometime book publisher) Adam Parfrey.

And in an essay by white-nationalist book publisher Greg Johnson, “The Persecution of Charles Krafft.”

Some of the counter-attacks are predictable.

There are people who sincerely defend white nationalism and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

Then there are people who assert that Graves, the Stranger, and the Seattle cultural establishment in general are a bunch of PC do-gooders who can’t handle any real dissent from their party line.

Ah, the last rhetorical refuge of the bigot and the bully; to turn around and whine that they’re really the victims.

By the way, that last remark of mine is directed toward Johnson and some of the other commenters—not against Krafft himself. Krafft has always been open and forthright about his extreme beliefs, and about his fondness for guys who express even further-extreme beliefs than he does. He hasn’t, as far as I know, ever played the faux “victim” card.

•

So how do I feel about Krafft, you might (or might not) be asking?

I believe he’s a sincere admirer of various military and paramilitary aesthetics, including those of the Nazi and Warsaw Pact eras.

I believe he’s got a big flaming ego, that enjoys tripping on the “Oh, aren’t I being a naughty, politically-incorrect cad?” vibe.

And I believe “irony,” at least the kind of irony viewers have long perceived was in Krafft’s ceramic rifles and hand grenades and Nazi-kitsch revival pieces, is a tiresome premise.

Every work of “satire” or “parody” contains, in its aesthetic, the real worldview of its creator.

Andy Warhol, for instance, really was a capitalist. Quentin Tarantino really is an exploitation filmmaker.

And Charles Krafft really does get off on power fantasies.

Even really, really sick ones.

• Seattle artist Ellen Ziegler’s mom was a ballet dancer—and a onetime girlfriend of the great Mexican comic actor Cantinflas. Ziegler’s turning this story into a very-limited-edition art book.
• In other news about local women and art and books and images of hotness, Charlotte Austin and Ciolo Thompson have created The Better Bombshell. In it, a variety of writers and artists of both genders contemplate that age-old issue of female role models and what they should be now.
• Online “cyber-bullying” isn’t just for teens anymore. The disgraced now-former Snohomish County executive did it too.
• The Oatmeal explains why “How to Suck at Your Religion.” (Essentially: if you preach brotherhood but practice bigotry, etc….)
• The drive to preserve the Bauhaus coffeehouse’s building, by getting it named an official historic landmark: rejected.
• The lawsuit challenging the Sonics arena scheme: rejected.
• Even Republicans believe Tim Eyman’s “lying whore” comment against Gov. Inslee went too far.
• PONCHO, granddaddy of Seattle arts fundraising groups (and inventor of the “charity auction”), is no more.
• Can private tech colleges, charging $30,000 or more for degree programs, really solve Wash. state’s learning gap?
• Eastern Washington, now with more radioactive sludge.
• Life imitates Portlandia, at least 30 times.
• Chuck Thompson at the New Republic derides microbrews, and the brewpubs who sell them, as icons of silly urban gentrificaiton. But they’re really, really tasty icons of silly urban gentrification.)
• The sad tale of the “food critic on Food Stamps” finally has a happy ending. Ex-Tacoma News Tribune restaurant reviewer Ed Murrieta finally found a job, after spending years among the long-term unemployed. He now writes blurbs for Sacramento’s tourism board.
• In Virginia, a white mom wants white kids not to have to read books about past racial violence.
• I know I’m not the only one who still remembers LaserDiscs, those 12-inch analog video discs that were the best way to see movies at home in their day.
• Here’s an artistic vision of a future car-free Manhattan, funded by (who else?) a car company.

gawker.com

• Despite the popular belief, Jay Ward didn’t have a thing to do with the ’60s TV cartoon series Underdog. One of the people who did, William Watts Biggers, has died.
• That “retroactive ‘potential dancing’ tax” thang is a real death threat to live music throughout the state. The Legislature needs to hear that you want this ridiculous measure repealed.
• Poor Macklemore. Just as the rest of the nation learns about Seattle’s great white rap hope, people call him a “sellout.”
• We must say goodbye to one of the Seattle art scene’s behind-the-scenes heroes, gallery owner Mia McEldowney.
• Another unexpected fallout of the ebook book: a revived interest in short-story collections.
• Yes, in this Internet age, there are still uncountable films, TV shows, and sound recordings you just can’t see or hear.
• Al Gore asserts that the “Tea Party” movement was really a carefully orchestrated “astroturf” (fake grassroots) “movement,” led by the Koch Brothers and Big Tobacco.
• Those campaigns to get tons of Facebook “Likes”® against cancer, for cute puppies, etc? Yep, they’re scams.

• Welcome Valentine’s season with Mitch O’Connell’s array of 100 unintentionally “unerotic vintage pin-up modeling photos.” (Note: The hereby linked page is, as the kids say, “NSFW.”) Speaking of the un-erotic….
• Emily Nussbaum at the New Yorker likes how HBO’s series Girls reinvents the late-night-cable sex scene, that most hackneyed of video tropes, into farcical pathos.
• The John Keister/Pat Cashman “comeback” show The [206] disappeared after two episodes (which had been shot in one taping, as a pilot). But it will return in April.
• Would you buy your coffee wherever “The Bitter Barista” works next? (He was fired after his employers found out about his blog.)
• The Seattle Transit Blog explains when the new Car2Go company is a better value than Zipcar and vice versa.
• It’s harder to sneak past the NY Times website’s paywall these days, but may are still trying.
• Things people feel nostalgic for these days include VHS tapes and the manual paste-up of newspaper pages.
• Sam Tanenhaus at the New Republic explains just how the Party of Lincoln became “the party of white people.”
• Esquire‘s cover story about “The Man Who Shot Osama Bin Laden” didn’t mention that “the shooter” (the only name the article gives him) does have health care for the next five years, and would have had more benefits if he’d just retired a year and a half after he did.
• On the 50th anniversary of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Ashley Fetters at the Atlantic unearth’s bell hooks’s argument that the book treated the problems of white “leisure class” housewives as if they were the problems all women faced. Fetters then adds Daniel Horowitz’s 1998 snipe that Friedan, under her birth name Betty Goldstein, had been a prolific NYC radical essayist, and hence knew she was deliberately ignoring the plight of non-affluent women.
• The Museum of Vancouver is opening an exhibit all about that city’s cultural history of sex. Yes, it includes the black-cat silhouette that signified adults-only movies in B.C.

boingboing.net

• Seattle artist Shawn (“Beatkit”) Wolfe’s simple absurdist gag about tech product hype, the “RemoverInstaller,” is 20 years old and still going strong in a new “anniversary edition.”
• Alden Mason, 1919-2013: The master Northwest landscape painter deftly switched to beautiful yet playful abstractions, then again to cartoony acrylic works that fit right in with the “pop surrealist” movement (yes, that term again). The point is, he kept looking for something new to do, and always did it well.
• Even before it’s digested Seattle Weekly, the Canadian-owned Sound Publishing has bitten off its biggest local media morsel yet, acquiring the Everett Herald from the Washington Post Co. Not included in the sale are the Herald’s building or its printing plant. (Sound already has a plant in Everett that prints its assorted suburban and small-town weeklies.) The Seattle Times now runs the Herald’s home-delivery operation.
• Surprising nobody, Chris Hansen’s group has officially applied to the NBA to move the Sacramento Kings (which Hansen’s group has already applied to buy) to Seattle.
• REI boss Sally Jewell is, barring Republican obstruction tactics, the next Secretary of the Interior.
• City Councilmember Sally Clark participated in the “One Night Count” of Seattle’s homeless. Her team found a dead woman.
• Does everybody on a gluten free diet really need to be?
• Budapest’s current nightlife fad, that of “ruin pubs,” is threatened both by upscale development and by commercialized fake ruins.
• The Society of Illustrators thought it got a good deal when it contracted the printing of its latest Annual of American Illustration to a Chinese printer. That was until the plant refused to print a page containing an unflattering caricature of Mao. The society got its book copies with a blank page where that piece was supposed to be. It was later printed separately and hand-inserted into each copy.

alex nabaum’s 'the evolution of china'

seattlestairwaywalks.com

• You know I love walking and Seattle and Walking Seattle. So I support “Stairway Walks Day” this Saturday.
• There’s something called “The HUB in Seattle.” It’s a new corporate meeting center in the old Masins furniture store in Pioneer Square. Whoever gave it that name can’t possibly be a UW alum.
• It is possible for a downtown parking garage to lose money. Especially, apparently, when it’s City-owned.
• Reviews of the Super Blackout Bowl range from the usual rants by sports-hating hippies to the usual highlight-hype. Will Leitch, though, has a good piece about CBS’s announcers and their failure in the face of daunting circumstances.
• Was Ed Koch gay? We still don’t know for sure.
• Mother Jones has a vast, yet probably still incomplete, chart of looney Obama conspiracy theories.
• “Freaky” body modifications should not be done without sterile instruments and the supervision of trained professionals. This includes implanting dice in one’s penis, an apparent fad among Australian prisoners.
• MySpace’s latest site redesign seems to have evaporated members’ fan lists. The company’s final, fatal mistake?
• Imagine “Super WiFi,” available nationwide (even in Eastern Washington?), offering beyond-broadband speeds and fancy new services, open to the general public, for free. Some Federal officials believe this is possible, for a modest investment, over existing FCC-controlled bandwidth.

Wash. state’s still got America’s most regressive tax system.

And nobody this year seems to be even trying to do anything about it.

via imcdb.org

• What was that car in that movie? There’s an online database for that.
• As we patiently await the NBA owners’ vote that will likely bring back the Sonics, there’s word of a hockey team that may be in need of a buyer and/or new home. Seattle, alas, doesn’t have an NHL-ready space. The hockey configuration of KeyArena is too small and awkward. Until a new arena’s built, the closest thing we’ve got is the Tacoma Dome, whose ice-making gear was removed and would need replacing.
• City Councilmember Jean Godden vividly explains why we cannot, dare not, return to the bad old days before legal abortion.
• A homeless camp in Bremerton was shut down after five years.
• Charles Mudede finds sublime meaning in Macklemore’s “Thrift Store” rap.
• KOMO has kind words for Jet City Stream, the new all-local online radio station.
• The recently-deceased dad of local music-scene vet Ben London was an innovative avant-garde composer.
• One of those online coupon dot-coms doubled its sales and still lost over half a billion.
• The return of vinyl has inevitably led into the return of cassette-only music releases and evrn cassette-only labels.
• Zoe Triska at Huff Post really hates classic novels with inappropriate, “commercial” covers tacked on, especially when they’re aimed at teen girls:

…But enough for now about the Sonics announcement (more on that to come).

via huffington post

We now have a president, at the height of his power, who has spoken in favor of gay rights, economic fairness, peace, and climate action at the single most public forum available to him.

I know my “radical” friends carp, and always will carp, that Obama isn’t nearly half as progressive as they’d like.

But real-world politics isn’t about a hierarchy of sanctimony. It’s about getting real stuff done, overcoming real obstacles. And right now, this president and this Democratic Party are our best vehicles for that.