• Local business promoters have prepared an “infographic” hawking Seattle as the best place to start a hi-tech company.
• First, Sonic Boom Records said it would close its recently moved Capitol Hill branch. Now Everyday Music says high rents are forcing it out of its own site on the Hill. The store says it will move, somewhere.
• Seattle Goodwill tried several times over the past 12 years to redevelop its Rainier Valley campus. One scheme would have razed its beautiful mega thrift store for a Target. With the collapse of that and other concepts, Goodwill is finally going ahead with a limited plan to build a new job training complex.
• Alex Carson explains why “Seattle Mariners baseball is like an Elvis Costello album.” An album Carson hasn’t actually heard.
• In more tragic baseball news, a fan at a Texas Rangers game leaned over a railing to catch a ball and fell over.
• State Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna spoke to Young Republicans in Bellevue, and tried to have a Democratic Party operative kicked out of the room, even calling police.
• Meanwhile, a national “Christian Left” group bought ad space on Facebook for a quite inoffensive little message. Facebook pulled the ad after conservatives complained.
• A Portland judge approved a bankruptcy plan for the Northwest Jesuits. It sets aside more than $150 million for past victims of abusive priests.
• Meanwhile, a Centers for Disease Control report claims more than half of us had harrowing childhoods, “featuring abusive or troubled family members or parents who were absent due to separation or divorce.” In other news, Leave It to Beaver was never real.

This holiday, as I do on this holiday every year, I sing our nation’s song the way it was originally meant to be sung.

Which is to say, as an ode to the eternal, worldwide, ‪joys of drinking and screwing‬‏.

And if you like your poetic homages to the grape mixed in with a little faux-Terry Gilliam animation, try this version.

• City Council president Richard Conlin claims “Seattle’s Legislative Strategy Worked.” This essentially means urban planning and human services agencies were decimated a lot less than they could have been.
• Meanwhile in Minnesota, Rep. legislators and the Dem. governor just couldn’t get it done. Or rather, the legislators demanded big giveaways for the rich and big cutbacks for everybody else, and the governor refused to cave.
• Speaking of enforced austerity, the Int. Monetary Fund leader whose career has involved imposing such shock treatments onto whole countries? His sexual assault defense team is doing a swell job at discrediting the victim.
• Margaret Kimberly reminds us that proudly backing (upscale white) gay civil rights is not the same thing as building a fairer society for the non-upscale and the non-white.

Back in the alleged good old days of American journalism, chain-owned newspapers would often be ordered by corporate HQ to run the same chainwide stories. (The Hearst papers were particularly notorious for this.)

Now, the Arizona-born company calling itself Village Voice Media has just done this at its papers, including Seattle Weekly.

They’re running the same expose piece, entitled “Real Men Get Their Facts Straight.” It’s an attack on Ashton Kutcher’s “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” PR campaign, which claims “100,000 to 300,000” underage girls are trapped in street prostitution in the U.S. every year.

In contrast, the article claims the real number, while unknowable, is probably much, much smaller. The big number, says the story, comes from a highly flawed academic research piece about kids “at risk” for becoming hookers, a figure that pretty much includes the entire teen populations of U.S./Mexico border towns.

A sidebar item acknowledges a VVM corporate interest in combating anti-sex-work scare campaigns. The fear mongers pressured Craigslist to stop running (unpaid) online sex-work ads, and are now setting their rhetorical gunsights on providers of (paid) sex-work ads, including VVM and its Backpage.com site.

To summarize, the article’s “good news” is: A lot fewer girls (and boys) are underage hookers than you might think. If you hire an escort, you and she/he are breaking some laws, but most likely statutory rape isn’t one of them.

The bad news remains: There still are some minors trapped in underage hooking, even if they’re a lot rarer than Kutcher and co. claim. In Seattle we had our own highly publicized pimping scandal last year, involving a few young-adult males and perhaps a dozen underage females.

(I happen to believe escorting and other sex work should be legal, and regulated. When it is, it will be much easier for law enforcement and social workers to find underage participants, divert them into other lives (perhaps in supervised group homes), and to prosecute any madames or pimps employing them.)

•

UPDATE #1: As if right on cue, Mayor McGinn and police Lt. Eric Sano held a press briefing on Friday denouncing VVM’s Backpage.com and supporting Kutcher’s PR drive against it. Sano claimed “there have been four documented cases of child prostitution openly advertised on Backpage.com.” Seattle Weekly editor Mike Seely, while not directly involved with Backpage’s operations, insists the site’s staff does all it can to reject and/or remove ads offering erotic services by under-18s.

UPDATE #2: Elsewhere in that company, the Village Voice itself has cut 60 percent of its staff in recent years. The New York weekly’s remaining employees threatened to go on strike this past week over wage and benefit cuts. Now comes word the strike may have been averted.

UPDATE #3: John Spangenthal-Lee at SeattleCrime.com said on July 5 that the VVM article was wrong about Seattle Police records concerning juvenile prostitution arrests. Spangenthal-Lee claims there were about twice as many such arrests in 2007-2009 than the article counted. Seattle Weekly managing editor Caleb Hannan, whose staff supplied research for the chainwide VVM article, told Publicola they got their numbers from the SPD.

UPDATE #4: The Sex Workers Outreach Project, an organization supporting legal and civil rights for sex workers, issued a statement “responding” to the VVM story. The statement approves of the article’s reality-checking regarding the extent of the situation. But SWOP goes on to state the real issue here isn’t Kutcher vs. VVM and Backpage.com:

…There are three overlapping issues here: the trafficking of youth into the sex industry, the service needs of youth with experience trading sex for survival and the rights of consenting adult sex workers.

UPDATE #5: Ryan Hodgson pointed me in the direction of a Seattle Weekly item from last October. It seems that before the Kutcher Krusade or the chainwide VVM counterattack, SW editors publicized the FBI’s claim that Seattle was “Ranked Worst City in U.S. for Child Prostitution.”

It’s been months since I reviewed any performance art here. But thanks to the urging of Katie Johnson, I witnessed The Harlequin Hipsters‘ dance/music/theatre piece Passion, Or Death. It occurred last weekend at the Hale’s Brewpub’s back room.

It’s presented by six dancer/performers (evenly split M/F), with a little music (mostly synth with a live violin and guitar) and a few snippets of monologue and dialogue. The premise, set up in these vocal interludes: A mystery illness is overtaking the whole planet. No apparent epidemiological cause. A male newscaster and a female doctor discuss the pandemic with us. The doctor sees sadness and depression as the cause, and dancing and loving as the cure. The newscaster delivers a monologue about becoming a careerist to get the material things he wants out of life, then collapses and dies. We’re then given the moral of our story: Don’t lose yourself making money to get a house and family and fine store-bought foods. Live with Passion, like these dancers.

The color is fading from faces. What are we to do to keep alive? Merely surviving is not enough. We wish to thrive; to not only realize our dreams and passions, but become them.

In truth, it is our only hope.

At the end an enthusiastic alternative marching band (the Titanium Sporkestra) enters the room and invites the audience out into the back parking lot for a short dance party.

It was all very well executed, performed with both with and precision.

And as one who has been neither “thriving” (emotionally) nor “surviving” (fiscally) for much of the past several years, I could readily receive the show’s message.

But can I believe it?

Lots of folks don’t have the option to drop out and be bohemians. They’ve got spouses and kids. They’ve got retirement to worry about. They need health insurance. They can’t run off and join the circus (let alone start their own).

Where do the rest of us find, and healthily exploit, our respective Passions?

• Yay to New York for approving gay marriage. We almost forgive you for that dumb NYT paean on Fri., lauding the Portland Timbers soccer team for being almost as successful as the Sounders.
• In other sports news, the UW is soliciting naming rights to the soon-to-be-remodeled Husky Stadium’s “field,” starting in 2013 and continuing “in perpetuity.”
• Big corporations don’t want to be forced to reveal how their CEOs’ salaries compare to their average payrolls. Ah, poor zillionaires….
• Rolling Stone had a harrowing piece a while back about a teenage girl who set herself up as an Internet fashion plate and video blogger, only to attract adult lechers and worse.
• There’s a new art gallery in town, Prographica, specializing in “fine works on paper.” In one of those happy coincidences, its staff includes a UW MFA grad named Kimberly Clark.

• I’ve ranted here in the past about certain dot-coms whose whole reason for being is verbal content, but which refuse to pay their writers. Turns out that even “content mill” dot-coms that do pay their writers work them to death. Lots of unpaid overtime, high quotas, short schedules, no pretense of quality, everything search-engine-optimized to smithereens. And the results didn’t even work fiscally, as recounted by “an AOL content slave.”
• Non-news of the day: Ebooks don’t need printers but they still need editors.
• The Brave New Films dudes have a handy dandy guide to the Koch Bros.’ moves behind the scenes of the right wing opinion machine; while Mr Jon Stewart lists a few dozen Fox News lies.
• As you know, I don’t like it whenever a woman brands “men,” as a singular collective entity, as “potential rapists.” I also don’t like it when a man does much the same thing—as a convoluted explanation of/justification for sexual assault. This man, whom I sorry to say shares my birth date, is the real Dilbert.
• Daily Kos has uncovered a Congressmember who loves Green Lantern and is willing to admit it.

(in no particular order):

• Yes, I will want to have sex with you. Pretty much immediately. ESPECIALLY if I’m too timid to come out and say so. Be aware of this.
• I’d rather you didn’t complain to me about the guys you sleep with, whilst refusing to sleep with me.
• I have a large repertoire of firmly held, and occasionally contradictory, beliefs. You can try to change some of them if you want to.
• I watch TV. I eat meat. I don’t smoke pot. You won’t be able to change any of these.
• I have a lot of persnickety minor food allergies and strange food dislikes. I won’t expect you to know all of them right away. For now, just know that if you order the two of us an almond-encrusted dessert, you’ll get to eat all of it.
• I enjoy images of the female figure. This does not mean I hate women; it means I like women.
• I may have a “baby face,” but I’m over 50, under 5′ 10″, and beer bellied. Looking for a tall dark prince? Keep looking.
• I’m among the long term unemployed. I don’t think it’s romantic or noble. I want to change it. I want a real job. The specific real job I want changes. Sometimes what I want is an office cubicle with my name on it. I want to process data, perform boring routines, and get a deserved compensation.
• Some women have said they would be too intense for me to deal with. In the past, I have had capital-R Relationships with a D.I.D. patient, a bipolar alcoholic, and two women who expected me to casually agree that all males were intrinsically evil. I believe I can handle “intense.”
• People call me “A Writer.” I’ve always rejected that title, and the “romantic” stereotypes associated with it. I have no interest in living in a cabin on an island. I have no interest in becoming famous only after I’m dead. I have no interest in becoming dead.
• I don’t want to be your dependent, your co-dependent, your enabler, your user, your abuser, your enemy, your submissive, your dog, your platonic friend, your gay friend, or your girlfriend. I want to be your boyfriend.
• My sexual fetish is Love.

In a lot of cases, it was “nice” middle class boys n’ girls powered by alcohol and an anything-goes attitude. In other breaking news, the earth is round.

…and Sherman Alexie defends writers’ right to depict these hells, both realistically and metaphorically.

A Forbes.com story about lawyer/author/TV pundit Lisa Bloom asks the musical question,

How did women go from caring about the Equal Pay Act and Title IX to celebu-tainment and Botox, and what can we do about it?

Whenever I read such all encompassing remarks about “women,” I always respond, at least to myself: WHICH women?

There have always been women who translated their personal concerns and needs into society-wide issues.

And there have always been women who consumed escapist entertainment.

And, yes, there have even been those who did both.

Last November, Capitol Hill resident Ferdous Ahmed appeared in a full page photograph in City Arts magazine. He was dressed to the proverbial nines in a vintage black suit, top hat, sunglasses, and high-top boots, accessorized with a gold pocket watch.

A lifelong vintage-wear fan and collector, Ahmed had just opened a boutique on East Olive Way the month before. It specialized in outfitting “steampunk” afficianados in suitably outlandish retro costumery, with garments and accessories mixed and matched from assorted real-world times and places (though mostly of a Victorian sensibility).

Ahmed’s boutique, Capitol Hill Vaudeville, is gone now.

The Solara Building, where the store had been, is mostly vacated (except for a tattoo studio). Entrepreneurs Shanon Thorson and Laura Olson (the team behind Po Dog on Union Street and the Grim bar on 11th Avenue), in partnership with Alex Garcia (Emerson Salon, Banyan Branch Marketing), are turning the place into The Social, a mammoth (3,000 square feet) gay bar and restaurant. Construction crews are now reshaping the building’s interior to sport a dining room and at least four semi-detached bar areas.

Olson and her partners are keeping the tattoo studio on the premises during the construction period, and say they want to bring back some of the building’s other former tenants (including a hair salon and a role-playing game store) in its peripheral spaces.

Ahmed’s boutique, though, might not get invited back. It was just getting off the ground as a business when it got sent packing. Harem, another clothing shop that had been in the Solara (and had previously been in its own storefront on Broadway), is definitely not returning; owner Victoria Landis has held her liquidation sale and is moving on.

Two features had made the Solara ideal for merchants like Landis and Ahmed.

The first was the interior flexibility of its main floor. It featured a big open space, where the gaming store could hold tournaments and the boutiques could hold fashion shows and receptions, without having to pay full time for the extra square footage.

The second was the relatively low rent. None of the Solara’s tenants had its own street-facing storefront. Without this means to attract casual foot traffic, in a building that was already set back from the street by a small parking strip, the tenants had to draw their clientele with clever promotion to identifiable niche markets. The building’s low rents were priced accordingly, to allow these specialty destination spaces to exist.

But a couple of alt-fashion boutiques and a gaming parlor just can’t bring in the kind of money a destination restaurant, and especially a bar/nightclub, can potentially generate.

Thus, the Hill is getting a new, high profile gay club. Olive Way, in particular, is getting another stop on what’s quickly shaping up as the Hill’s next major bar-crawling scene.

And we’re losing an experiment in providing urban spaces for highly specialized retail, the first experiment of its kind here since the Seattle Independent Mall (on East Pike a decade ago.)

Any “artistic” neighborhood needs some cheaper spaces within its mix. Spaces where the unexpected can happen, where new subcultures can form, where new concepts can germinate.

I was reminded of this when I read the University of Washington Press’s new essay collection Seattle Geographies. One of its longer chapters is entitled “Queering Gay Space.”

The chapter’s authors (Michael Brown, Sean Wang, and Larry Knopp) noted that Capitol Hill hadn’t always been the region’s gay culture nexus. In the first half of the last century, gay and lesbian bars, cabarets, and residential homes existed, with varying degrees of “out”-ness, mainly in Pioneer Square, plus a few scattered spots throughout the downtown core and in the University District and Queen Anne.

But when gay pride first really took off in the early 1970s, the Boeing Bust had depressed housing prices throughout the region. The Hill’s housing prices were further held back by what the essay’s authors called “white flight and fears of inner-city decay.” That gave the Hill a “large number of affordable apartments and rooms in shared houses,” which “drew young queer baby boomers into the area.”

The Hill’s desirability as a place to live, aided in part by then-low housing costs, helped spur its growth as a place for gay businesses and hangouts; and also as a place for bohemian art, theater, and fashion scenes.

Thus, four decades later, it can sprout a venture as monumental as The Social.

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

A new exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery (that won’t be put on tour) suggests that the European surrealist movement was primarily influenced by Northwest Coast indigenous art.

Just imagine the potential meaning: This place didn’t become “cultured” when big money collectors emerged in the region, buying art works made elsewhere. Great stuff has always been created here.

Yeah, we’ve all heard the latest anti-Internet rants. It’s turning us into a planet of text-based vidiots, incapable of coherent thought or sustained reading.

I happen to have been online since the days of bulletin boards systems and acoustic coupler modems. And I’m plenty capable of internal reasoning. Enough that I fully believe the latest anti-Internet hype, expressed most ludicly by The Shallows author Nicholas Carr, is essentially a load of hooey.

And it’s nothing new. As Vaughan Bell noted last year at (the formerly locally based) Slate.com, ol’ geezers have been whining about those newfangled media menaces at least since Socrates griped about the written word threatening to destroy the great living tradition of oral teaching.

Besides, there’s something about “the shallows” I absolutely adore.

Much of the intellectual world has, for too many decades now, extolled the virtues of Depth but denied the equally important value that is Breadth. The Internet is a breadth-of-knowledge machine like of which the world has never previously known.

And cross-pollenized learning, the great miscegenation of knowledge across nations and disciplines, is part (perhaps the biggest part) of what this species needs to survive.

Change a few of the nouns turn a couple of other parts sideways, and this Richard Cohen essay deriding “the myth of American exceptionalism” could easily be used against the myth of “alternative culture” exceptionalism.