One of Seattle’s (and the world’s) most prominent people passes. Also: KeyArena razing starts; more deliberate far-right violence; dams vs. orcas.

Seattle’s art and performance scenes are fighting back; protests over KEXP’s axing of protesters’ favorite show; a local angle on the Kavanaugh scandal; Amazon’s anti-union video surfaces.

The Storm closes out KeyArena in style; two more local arts-scene deaths; ‘Shout Your Abortion’ the book; what might really be behind Bezos’ philanthropic push.

Pearl Jam’s ‘Home Shows’ raise $11 mill; competing plans to ‘save’ the Showbox emerge; orca-rescue drive continues; an architect defends the stalled downtown streetcar project.

Tracking every tree in south King County; life in an Amazon warehouse; celebrating the Fourth when you’re not so proud of your country.

A park’s disappearing viewpoint; parsing the latest homeless stats; a union win for Boeing’s S. Carolina workers; a bomb threat staged as a YouTube stunt.

Drag protesters at Amazon’s shareholder meeting; Durkan’s big new shelter plan; LCD license plates and their discontents; harassment claims against ex-UW track coach.

Anti-head-tax campaign begins with big funding; kayakers vs. pipeline redux; Susan Hutchison redux; Seattle’s not immune to hate-talk after all.

What a white woman got wrong about a black woman’s experience; an Ed Murray associate’s own past scandal; Rep. Jayapal says “we failed.”

The aware, activist teens behind March For Our Lives; ‘Portlandia’ RIP; the state of booze in the state; a possible precedent toward Net censorship; one affluent guy you’re glad you’re not.

The Fremont Solstice Parade, even more than last year, was essentially an anticlimactic epilogue to the hundreds of body-paint bicyclists.

Even the arrival this year of “The Resistance,” a single overriding topic of protest in all its branches and aspects and sub-topics, as the right wing sleaze machine takes near complete control and rushes out an all-fronts attack against literally every good thing in our society (from government aid programs to social civility itself), failed to bring out more volunteer street-theater performers, marchers, musicians, etc.

Last year, there was talk that parade organizers would crack down on the nudes in hopes of attracting more participants in the parade itself, participants who might not want to be part of the same spectacle as all the poons and peens on public pubic display.

That didn’t happen. But the underlying issue remains.

The parade could fade out and die along with the original hippie generation out from which its aesthetic was formed.

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Oh, and the parade got “trolled” by an entrant who showed up with a seven-foot costume puppet of a stereotype black “mammy” figure in a rasta hat.

According to some social-media commenters, the (apparently white) guy who performed in the costume was asked to leave the parade’s Friday-evening prep session. He then crashed the Saturday-afternoon event after it had already started, before again being shooed away.

Still, the Solstice Parade’s organizers have managed for almost three decades to keep motor vehicles, corporations, politicians, and even written signs out of the spectacle. But this thing looked just enough like a regular Solstice giant mascot costume that the guy got to strut it down a large segment of the parade route.

(After all, hippie graphic aesthetics used to include plenty of one-dimensional “ethnic characterizations.”)

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Also troublesome for the parade’s future, it can’t store its floats and costumes in a city-owned warehouse space any more. (Slog) (PI.com)

Friday’s MISCmedia MAIL ponders the Fremont Solstice Parade’s meaning in a year when just about every public act has political import. Also: a beloved fabric-arts store closes; the co-owner of Seattle’s coolest hardware store dies; alt-right dorks come to Evergreen; and a strange floating mega-balloon appears on the Tacoma waterfront.

As you’d expect, we talk a lot in today’s MISCmedia MAIL about Chris Cornell’s life, death, and legacy. Plus: more on the “My Family’s Slave” controversy; Ed Murray’s accuser wanting a trial anywhere but here; Mount St. Helens memories; and the usual plethora of weekend events.

In MISCmedia MAIL: Can there really be such a thing as a new color? Will Ed Murray drop his re-election bid? Can the arts relieve societal future shock? Will Yakima’s city government ever be responsive to its large Latinx population? Can we all move to France?

Another month, another MISCmedia MAIL, and another set of May Day protests. Let’s make this one inclusive instead of destructive, ‘K? We also discuss the recent Punk Rock Flea Market; the Folklife Fest’s serious fiscal woes; one thing that could halt Amazon’s big growth; and a “salmon cannon.”