The recession has claimed another victim, the Betsey Johnson boutique on Fifth Avenue.

• King County Exec Dow Constantine was caught with an email revealing he’d had an affair with a co-worker. At a press conference, “No Drama Dow” (who has an unmarried live-in partner) quietly admitted the indiscretion.
• The city and county could announce they’re signing off on the Sodo arena plan as early as today.
• KOMO’s Ken Schram insists that the poor (and everybody else) should still get to buy things with cash.
• A community activist group says light rail has accelerated the gentrification of the Rainier Valley, making the mixed-race neighborhood a lot paler.
• Video footage helps a May Day protester escape prosecution.
• The wages of not supporting the iPhone: T-Mobile USA‘s laying off another 900 workers.
• First it was nuns. Now the right-wing Catholic bishops are harassing the Girl Scouts. (Make your own joke about how everybody knows they prefer boys.)
• ‘Future of News’ Dept.: A spokescritter for Rupert Murdoch’s iPad news app The Daily (no relation to the infinitely more distinguished UW Daily) insists the online newspaper is on the road to profitability.
• Even with health insurance, medical care is getting prohibitively expensive.
• America’s real first gay president? Buchanan.
• Michael Lind at Salon asks, “Why do conservatives hate freedom?”…
• …while “MinistryOfTruth” at Daily Kos makes brutal accusations toward your sterotypical teabag conservative:

I don’t think you do love America. At least, not as much as you hate everyone in America who isn’t exactly like you.

• Here are some lovely pix of a Kansas City amusement arcade circa 1968. Not a single video monitor in sight.

sobadsogood.com

liem bahneman, via komo-tv

• There’s a moon! It’s in the sky! It’s called the supermoon!
• From the Sunday Seattle Times: The Smith Tower is on the rebound; there are sympathetic words toward Occupy Seattle sympathizers; the ex-Kleenex factory in Everett is a toxic waste site; and local students are learning to compose soundtracks for movies and video games.
• We knew it was coming. Now the original QFC supermarket on Roosevelt Way closes on Saturday.
• What the heck does Jay Inslee gotta do to get some press?
• Silicon Valley analyst Farhad Manjoo can’t figure out Amazon’s long-term business strategy, and ponders whether the company even has one. Hey, I don’t fully understand gravity, but I still know it’s there. Of course Amazon has a strategy. Several of them. It aims to be the world leader in online sales of tangible physical stuff, plus intangible digital stuff; to be the go-to company for online retail back-end functions and fulfillment; to rule “cloud computing” and outsourced computer services; and to remain the 500-lb. gorilla of the book biz. There now, wasn’t that simple?
• At the same site, Trevor Gilbert believes he’s figured out why Seattle has so many leading video-game companies.
• The voters of France, like the protestors of Greece, have utterly and thoroughly rejected recession-extending “austerity” regimes. They’ve elected their first Socialist government in 16 years and sending Nicolas Sarkozy packing. Will this send Sarkozy’s wife, ex-supermodel Carla Bruni, back on the runways?

alliance for pioneer square via seattlepi.com

• An artistic ad poster, promoting the native American cause “Honor the Treaties,” was wheat-pasted in multiple copies all over a series of artists’ murals in Pioneer Square. The “Honor” campaign didn’t do it, and neither did the poster’s original artist. It was PosterGiant, the city’s leading poster putter-uppers.
• Congress just might kill off “Boeing’s bank.”
• One idea to save journalism is the concept of a nonprofit news website. Several of these are already up in scattered spots around the country. But the IRS is taking its own sweet time processing some of their applications for official nonprofit status.
• Here’s King County Metro’s current plan for bus changes effective September. A few new routes would be added, but a lot of key current routes would be reduced or dropped.
• You’ve only got 44 more days to enjoy your state liquor stores.
• This story speculating about potential “robot prostitutes” reminds me of (1) that whole “dildonics” nonsense in the 1990s, and (2) Westworld. Remember: Nothing can possibly go wrong….

david eskenazi collection via sportspressnw.com

And a happy Friday the 13th (first of the year) and Mariners home opening day to all of you!

• Richard Beyer, 1925-2002: The Waiting for the Interurban sculptor didn’t invent Fremont’s image as a funky/artsy neighborhood. But his work publicized this image as much as anything.
• Something You Might Not Have Known Dept.: Seattle gets a small but impressive portion of its electricity from methane at an Oregon landfill.
• You’ve got two more chances to have your say about Metro’s plan to ax the downtown Ride Free Area, at County Council meetings on the 16th and the 25th. Let ‘em know you want/need/demand robust free downtown transit service.
• Third Avenue in Belltown now has those “daylight-like” street lights. Next step in resurrecting Third: making the street and its buildings look cleaner.
• With the legislative session finally over, Rob McKenna can legally raise campaign money. Thus, Washington’s gubernatorial campaign is now truly underway. Watch for McKenna to simultaneously run with and against the national Republican agenda—something Jay Inslee will try to stick onto McKenna at every opportunity.
• St. James Cathedral is among the churches that won’t take part in the Catholic archdiocese’s initiative petition campaign to overturn gay marriage.
• When can you start getting a legal drink in Wash. state after 2 a.m.? Perhaps in November (just perhaps).
• Bizarre Patent Application of the Day: GeekWire says Microsoft wants to patent “monetizing buttons on TV remotes:”

It’s called “Control-based Content Pricing,” and the basic idea is dynamic pricing of video content, based on the preferences of the user at any given moment—essentially setting different prices for different functions of the TV remote.

• Frances Cobain still can’t get away from her mom’s meddling.
• A Spokane nursery put up a billboard reading “Pot Dealer Ahead.” The ad was complete with an image of some flower pots, in case people didn’t get the joke (it being Spokane and all). Some people are vocally not amused (it being Spokane and all).
• The U.S. Border Patrol in this state continues to behave like a gang of racist tools.
• North Korea just can’t keep it up.
• Reversible male contraception is finally in the domestic testing stage, despite Big Pharma’s longtime disinterest.
• Jed Lewison at Daily Kos parses the anatomy of a Mitt Romney lie, that over 90 percent of U.S. job losses have gone against women. In reality (instead of Fox News Fantasyland), most folks laid off in the Great Recession were men. But new or revived jobs the past two years have also gone mostly to men (56 percent).
• The Murdoch media empire’s phone and email tapping scandal is reaching the U.S. But Murdoch’s domestic properties are not implicated, at least not yet. This is still about Murdoch’s U.K. papers, tapping into Hollywood celebrities’ phones and emails.
• Ari Rabin-Havt at HuffPost claims right wing racism no longer bothers with coded “dog whistle” messages, but now spews its hate openly and proudly.
• What Omar Willey says about seeking good web comics applies to just about all web “content”: “How do you find all this stuff?” (The stuff worth reading, that is.)

gjenvick-gjonvik archives

Three of the Big Six book publishers (Hachette, News Corp.’s HarperCollins, and CBS’s Simon & Schuster) have settled with the U.S. Justice Dept. in the dispute over alleged e-book price fixing.

The publishers still insist they’re innocent; but they agreed in the settlement to not interfere with, or retaliate against, discounted e-book retail prices.

Apple, Pearson’s Penguin, and Holtzbrinck’s Macmillan have not yet settled; they also insist they did not collude to keep e-book prices up. Bertlesmann’s Random House was not sued.

This is, of course, all really about Amazon, and its ongoing drives to keep e-book retail prices down and its share of those revenues up. The big publishers, and some smaller ones too, claim that’s bad for them and for the book biz as a whole.

In other randomosity:

• Thanks in no part whatsoever to regressive cuts-only Republicans and their pseudo-Democrat enablers, Wash. state has a budget, and not nearly as horrid a one as we could have had. The real issue, fixing the state’s ultra-regressive revenue system, was again kicked down the road.
• The Legislature also failed to approve new means to pay for transit. However, it turns out Seattle still has the transit-funding mechanism approved a decade ago for the scuttled monorail campaign. That’s what the group called “Seattle Subway” hopes to use to fund more in-city rail miles (which, despite the group’s name, wouldn’t necessarily be below ground).
• Emily Pothast has unkind, not-nice, really un-positive things to say about the Kirkland developers who want to gut Pike/Pine’s anchor block.
• At the formerly Microsoft-owned Slate, Tom Scocca explains, in detail, just why today’s iteration of Microsoft Word so greatly sucks.
• Matt Groening reveals, 22 years later, that yes, The Simpsons‘ Springfield is based on Springfield, Ore. (also known as Eugene’s evil twin).
• Another crack in the edifice of Homophobia Inc.: The guy who first promoted the idea of “curing” gay people through “therapy” says he now believes it’s a crock of shit.
• Meanwhile in the world of Incarceration Inc., two Penna. judges admitted they took bribes from a private prison operator to sentence juvenile suspects to terms at said private prisons.
• A 25-year-old bride got herself a lavish wedding for free by pretending to have terminal cancer. The marriage has already crumbled; jail might be next.
• Someone’s posted to Facebook a cartoon chart-graphic about “How to Focus in the Age of Distraction.” Rule #1: Get the heck off of Facebook.
• Sometime in the mid 1990s I made a throwaway music-scene prediction, as part of a larger rant that the future is seldom linear. I said, “There could be a big hammered dulcimer revival in the 2010s, causing teens in the 2020s to yearn for the good old days of techno.” Speed up the timeline, substitute the recent “beard bands” for the dulcimers, and we seem to have gotten there.

vintage seattle bus on 'ride free day,' available at allposters.com

Bad idea: King County Metro still plans to axe the downtown Seattle Ride Free Area in September.

Worse idea: The county and the city plan to replace this valuable service, not with a full equivalent service but just with an infrequent “short bus” circulator route, intended strictly to help poor residents get to social-service offices and medical appointments.

Not nearly enough.

Not even nearly nearly enough.

Free downtown bus service has been used here since the 1970s by all economic castes.

Before that, Metro and predecessor Seattle Transit ran a “dime shuttle” looping around downtown.

This kind of service can and should return.

First, the current #99 route, looping Alaskan Way and First Avenue, should become a more frequent, all-day, free (or lower-fare) service.

Second, another free (or lower-fare) route should go up and down Third Avenue, from Seattle Center to Pioneer Square and doglegging to the International District.

(Alternately, this could be two routes; one looping north on Fourth and south on Third, the other looping north on Third and south on Second. That would so help people avoid downtown’s steep slopes.)

If the county and the city can’t fund this service themselves, bring in the Downtown Seattle Association and the Downtown Metropolitan Improvement District to pitch in.

Because this is a service to the shoppers, diners, workers, and residents of greater downtown (and also to human-service-agency clients).

It reduces auto traffic, and helps people avoid costly parking.

It makes downtown a better place to be in and to live in.

If it can’t be in place when the Ride Free area ends in September, it could at least get instigated by the Xmas shopping season.

Let’s get this vehicle on the road.

• Seattle voters will have the chance to bring library service back from several years’ worth of drastic cuts. You know where I stand on this.
• Meanwhile, in the land of Jorge Juis Borges’ surreal library stories, the Argentine government has banned all book imports. The lame excuse is that they could contain dangerous levels of lead. Ebooks and their reading machines, and domestic reprints of foreign books, aren’t affected.
• The local Catholic Archdiocese, once a liberal “social gospel” bastion, has turned hard homophobic.
• Northwest fishermen worry about Japanese tsunami debris showing up in their waters. Talk about your deadliest catch.
• An activist group called Seattle’s greatest family-owned bakery an unfair employer, and staged a protest. Loyal customers staged a counter-protest. Cookies were tossed. Literally.
• The two African Americans who publicly claimed Seattle Police had stopped them for no good reason, got stopped by Seattle Police again.
• A dead orca in Washington waters has caused some to sing “Blame Canada.”
• The UW invented kidney dialysis. Now it’s working on what might replace it.
• The rise in cable-TV subscribers becoming former cable-TV subscribers has attracted even the financial community. One analyst hints there’d be even more cord-cutting, except that many folks are keeping cable subscriptions for Internet access.
• The alleged “liberal media” in a “liberal state” sure don’t seem to like Jay Inslee.
• We’d earlier mentioned that print newspaper ad revenues had sunk to 1984 levels. Someone took those figures, adjusted ‘em for inflation, and concluded newsprint ad money is actually at its lowest level since 1950. (The U.S. population then was about half what it is now.)
• Young adults aren’t just not reading print newspapers. They’re also driving a lot less and biking a lot more.
• I’m pretty sure the only people who read the Seattle Times editorials anymore are the bloggers who righteously trash them.
• “In Russia, a lack of men forces women to settle for less.”
• How can something that barely has 10 employees and has not apparently made a cent in profits be worth a billion dollars?

ap photo via newstimes.com

• At the time of this writing, the Seattle Mariners are in first place as the winningest team in Major League Baseball! (This may be subject to change by the time you read this.)
• In other sporting news, the Husky men’s basketball team valiantly lost its NIT semifinal game in overtime; thus tying for the status of this year’s 71st best college team.
• You might be able to ski on the Fourth of July around here this year.
• Two years in the making, the downtown Target is set to finally open on July 29.
• Metro Transit’s downtown Ride Free Area ends two months after that.
• Meanwhile, Washington’s first food-only Walmart store is about to open at an ex-Kmart site in Bellevue.
• One-third of all homes sold in King County these days are sold for all cash (i.e., to speculators or rental operators).
• An Army PR guy says Joint Base Lewis-McChord is “not having any issues that other Army bases aren’t having, too.”
• This is from October but still fascinating—an in-depth look at the Columbia River, its watershed, its hydroelectric industry, its fishery, and the people who try to balance the needs of each.
• Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon would really like you to know there really are non-wingnut Christians out there.
• The rumored Apple-branded TV set is still just a rumor. But Farhad Manjoo at Slate reports that Microsoft’s XBox already brings the magic of online streaming-video search to TV sets.
• Slate also has a fond remembrance to the inventor of the frozen bagel and a handy guide to Quebeçois cuss words.
• Now we know why Bud, Miller, and Coors all sold out to foreigners. Light-beer sales are in a nosedive, perhaps a permanent one.
• John Cassidy at the New Yorker claims the right-wing assault on health care reform, as seen this week at the Supreme Court, is “a very bad joke.”

• As a treat for those of you who actually read these things (and I know there are at least a few of you out there), here’s the original version of the song that was at the center of last night’s Mad Men season premiere. It’s “Zou Bisou Bisou.” It was originally recorded in 1960 by Gillian Hills. One of the stars of the French “ye ye” genre, she also appeared in the landmark British films Beat Girl, Blow Up, and A Clockwork Orange.
• Questionable medical study of the day: Somebody says regularly eating chocolate can make you thinner.
• Here’s the site for the folks who want to bring the Seattle monorail project back from the dead. (By sticking with the previous monorail proponents’ planned Ballard to West Seattle route, they’re also inheriting its high cost, requiring two major all-new bridges.)
• Here’s WashDOT’s CGI video of how the new 520 bridge will look. Without, you know, the highway noise or smell.
• And here’s what Amazon’s proposed three new high rises would look like.
• “Unemployed Nation” is a series of “hearings,” in which the mayor, city council, and others will “listen to the men and women who have lost their livelihoods and more.” The sessions are Friday afternoon at the UW’s Kane Hall and Saturday afternoon at City Hall.
• There’s a new site up helping locals find affordable rental housing.
• The fired transgender Miss Universe Canada contestant from Vancouver would like you to think of her as “a woman—with a history.” (The protest petition is now online.)
• How to make money despite being in the news business: A Houston Chronicle society reporter was outed for moonlighting as a stripper. Apparently at least as much for the money as for any undercover writing gig (though she has made a pseudonymous blog about her stripping life).
• Under the British common-law heritage, prostitution per se has been quasi-legal in Canada. But businesses facilitating prostitution have been banned. Now, the province of Ontario’s highest court has approved legalizing brothels. The common-sense reason: it’s better for a sex worker “to work indoors, in a location under her control.”
• Another country where hooking is legal, but making money from other people’s hooking isn’t: France. That’s where the ex-Intl. Monetary Fund boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn, already disgraced from sexual assault charges, has been accused of involvement in a pimping ring based at luxury hotels. (I know people who believe those IMF/World Bank guys have always been pimps for the corporate elite, but this is something different.)
• Big Brother Dept.: A public school district in Brazil is issuing school-uniform T shirts with computer chips sewn in, capable of tracking every student’s every move.
• If you believe the New Yorker, the most influential and sleaziest newspaper in Britain isn’t owned by Murdoch.
• Even before the Legislature revived state tax breaks for filmmakers, one feature project (from a local writer-director) was already underway. And it’s got such great stars—Lee Majors! Gary Busey! Margot Kidder! Edward Furlong! Seahawks player Marshawn Lynch! I tell you, I sense a date with Oscar!

'water wood' by bette burgoyne; via roqlarue.com

• In deservedly glowing terms, Emily Pothast reviews Red Current (Sweet Fruit), the all-local (and all-female, though that part isn’t advertised) group show now on display at Belltown’s raucous Roq La Rue gallery. If you were there at the even-more-packed-than-usual opening night, go back and actually look at the art.
• Next step for the Seattle “Storefronts” program, in which art-related entrepreneurs take over vacant retail spaces: Auburn.
• Think Bellingham’s full of sports-hatin’ hippies? Think again, as we congratulate the WWU men’s basketball team for winning the NCAA Division II national title.
• There’s just one indignity after another in the sordid tale of a 62-year-old Spokane woman who was ordered to reapply (at less money) for her her food-service job after 19 years. With the new reduced offer too little for her to live on, she turned it down. Then she was denied unemployment benefits. Then her ex-employer contributed a Spokesman-Review guest opinion calling for harsh crackdowns against “bogus” unemployment claims. She eventually got her unemployment back, but she’s still out on her own with no health insurance and not enough retirement savings, at an age when it’s damn tough to get back into the workforce.
• Microsoft is now in the business of raiding botnet-spam operators.
• You might wish otherwise, but most holders of major public offices, and major candidates for those offices, just aren’t comfortable with supporting legalized pot. They don’t believe there’s enough mass support for it. They don’t think it’s an issue worth sticking their necks out.
• The Occupy Tacoma protest was held at a state DOT-owned park near downtown. The state’s not only closed and fenced off the park, they’ve now put it up for sale.
• A flashback to the ’00s: Some folks want to restart the plan for a Ballard to West Seattle monorail!

• We’ve got the indie alcohol entrepreneurs. We’ve got the apples (though perhaps not the right kinds). So let’s get a bigtime hard cider industry going in Wash. state already!
• The Central Cinema, which insists it needs to serve beer and wine to adult patrons at screenings, to survive, will apparently get to keep doing so. Even during all-ages screenings.
• Dept. of Just Sayin’: In three years, it will be a novelty to find a new hiphop artist who’s not white. Like with jazz after 1965, or with soul after 1985.
• Death Cab for Cutie (you know, the quasi-local band whose singer now lives in L.A. (until recently with Zoey Deschanel)) has entitled its spring 2012 tour “Return to Bellingham.” The tour does not actually include a show in Bellingham.
• Does current Seattle zoning need to be revised, to require more off-street parking in new developments? The Seattle Transit Blog apparently doesn’t think so, at least in one instance.
• Knute Berger looks at Seattle Center development schemes and would really like someone to explain them in non-buzzword-talk.
• If you know them, you love them, and you just can’t get enough of George Tsutakawa’s fountain sculptures. Seattle gallery owner John Braseth tracked one down in Indiana, and is arranging to have it fixed up and placed somewhere in town.
• There are a few non-Deja Vu strip clubs left in the region. Just not many.
• Oliver Willis wants more real progressives running for office, and wants them to actually “stand for something“…
• …while Chris Mooney at AlterNet thinks he’s figured a way progs could successfully appeal to “the right-wing brain.”
• The Economist notes that divorce, abortion, unwed pregnancy, and violent crime are all way down in the U.S. these days. So, the essay asks, why are Republicans still exhorting about “moral decline“? Perhaps because U.S. church attendance is also way down.
• Naomi Wolf insists elite private K-12 schools are bad for America and even bad for the kids who get sent there…
• …while Adam Levin at HuffPost suggests the Feds consider ordering a cap on public-college tuition, so taxpayer-supported universities don’t become only for the 1 percenters.
• Blogger “Angry Black Lady” really doesn’t like the Republican woman who claims the Democrats are just making up the whole “Republican war on women” meme.
• It wasn’t just Marx. Keynesians and other macroeconomists are also often guilty of forgetting the human factor in their systems constructs.

existing blue tree in vancouver bc; konstantin dimopoulos via kplu.org

• Get ready to see some blue trees next month, in Westlake Park and along the Burke-Gilman Trail. The tree-painting art project is part of a public awareness campaign about global deforestation.
• The first big tunnel digging machine finally broke through at the Capitol Hill light-rail station site, hours too late to make the late TV news.
• Microsoft tries the self-deprecating “we’ve learned from our past mistakes” funny commercial schtick, and it doesn’t even seem awkward or forced at all.
• At least 40 percent of all post-traumatic stress disorder patients at Joint Base Lewis-McChord found their diagnoses later “reversed.” That means they were declared not PTSD-stricken after all, and therefore eligible to be sent right back into combat duty.
• Couldn’t happen to nicer guys: A Goldman Sachs affiliate may be about to default on 11 Seattle and Bellevue office buildings, which the firm bought for nearly $1 billion five years ago.
• Sara Robinson at AlterNet blames “conservative bullying” for making America into “a broken, dysfunctional family.”
• Sixty years ago this week, the first live event billed as a “rock n’ roll concert” ended in riots on the streets of Cleveland. The reason: The ticket printers accidentally printed tickets to two different shows as if they were the same show on the same date.
• A handy rule-O-thumb: Any previously unheard-of singer performing mechanical rote versions of black musical styles from 20 years or more ago is probably white.
• As Danny Westneat insists “art is no excuse” for Mike Daisey to make stuff up about Chinese tech-gadget factories, blogger “La Bohrer” concludes that the late beloved fiction author David Foster Wallace also stretched the facts in at least a couple of his “nonfiction” essays.

american institute of architects—seattle

• If we must get rid of High School Memorial Stadium at Seattle Center, it ought to be replaced by a municipal “back yard,” not yet another municipal “front lawn.” Consider this while perusing some architects’ proposal to turn the site into a “Seattle Jelly Bean.”
• Back from the dead like a James Bond villain, it’s the Wash. state film tax-break program! Resurrected by the Legislature, just before the end of the regular session. Will this mean at least a few “set in Seattle” movies might actually, you know, be made here?
• We’ve said that one possible fiscal end game for the Seattle Times could involve it becoming subsidized by local business bigwigs, either directly or via vanity ads. Here’s an example of the latter: Boeing’s in-house magazine Frontiers, which will now be a monthly ad insert in the Times.
• Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy #1: Mr. Bellevue Square just lost another anti-public-transit crusade.
• Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy #2: Professional faux-populist power monger Tim Eyman just lost another anti-common-sense crusade.
• “Tukwila now has the most diverse school district in the nation.”
• Here’s another tribute to art director extraordinaire Dale Yarger, by my fellow Fantagraphics refugee Robert Boyd.
• Elaine Blair at the NY Review of Books compares single-male characters in novels (deathly afraid of being spurned and belittled by women) to the male authors of these novels (deathly afraid of being spurned and belittled by women readers).
• Arts activist Scott Walters takes aim at the so-called “progressive” nonprofit arts community, in which a few big institutions grab most of the funding and expect the rest of us to wait for the wealth to “trickle down.”
• Here’s a wake-up call to all the defeatist lefties I know who still believe, as one friend once wrote, that “Fox News is the most popular TV channel.” In reality, “Jon Stewart Crushes Fox News in the 2011 Ratings.” (Yet still, this aging, shrinking audience is the only audience today’s Republican Party bothers with!)
• A long, cute infographic compares Apples® to apples.

• It’s not just for writers anymore. Now fashion models, even those doing runway work at high profile industry events, are being expected to work for free.
• Does anyone even know how many listeners Limbaugh really has?
• “Modern technology can save languages as well as destroy them.”
• Construction on the First Hill (and Capitol Hill and I.D.) Streetcar starts next month. Still no decision about extending the line up Broadway.
• Oil tankers just keep getting huger and huger. And they’re coming here, or dangerously close.

stranger cover, 8/30/95, art direction by dale yarger, illo by neilwaukee

I haven’t gotten all the details yet, but it appears Dale Yarger, a mammoth force in Seattle publication design, passed away over the weekend.

He’d been living in California for at least the past four years. But his local work is still a huge influence around here.

Yarger was one of the Rocket’s several rotating art directors in the 1980s. He created many memorable covers there and also made an early iteration of the Sub Pop logo, back when that was the title of Bruce Pavitt’s indie-music review column.

During that time he also co-founded a gay paper called Lights, art-directed The Oregon Horse magazine, and collaborated with artist Carl Smool on a memorable anti-Reagan bus sign.

Yarger became one of Fantagraphics Books’ first Seattle hires after the comix publisher came here from L.A. He redesigned the company’s Comics Journal magazine (where I first knew him), and essentially did every visual thing on its comics and books that wasn’t done by the artists themselves. He instilled the appreciation for top-notch design, typography, and production that now marks the company’s admired graphic novels and comic-strip collections.

By 1995 he transferred over to that other hip bastion, The Stranger. In his three-year stint there, Yarger took the alt-weekly from the look of “a zine on steroids” into the slick product it’s been ever since.

He also had a hand in the visuals of Seattle Weekly, the University Book Store, and Dana Countryman’s Cool and Strange Music magazine.

I will always remember him as a cool head even when surrounded by hot heads, a perfectionist who still understood schedules and budgets, a man with a knack for making even the most mundane assignment sparkle.

UPDATE: Now I’m told Yarger had stomach cancer, for which he’d had surgery some time last year.