Amazon.com Widgets
The recession has claimed another victim, the Betsey Johnson boutique on Fifth Avenue.
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.
sobadsogood.com
It is with a heavy heart that we must say goodbye to Publicola, for three years the go-to site for insider wonk-knowledge about Seattle political minutae.
Josh Feit and Erica C. Barnett studiously roved the corridors of City Hall and associated parties, fundraisers, caucus meetings, and planning conferences, always coming back with clear, engaging reports.
But, as we previously noted in regards to the equally ambitious SportsPress Northwest, local content sites just can’t make in on banner ads alone.
Goodness knows, Feit and Barnett did all they could.
They added arts and entertainment reviewers (officially billed on-site as the “Nerds”), then dropped them when their contributions didn’t lead to added revenue.
Later they did the same with veteran crime reporter Jonah Spangenthal-Lee.
More lately, their initial financial backers pulled out. Feit and Barnett asked for donations from readers to keep the site going. That helped them to meet an immediate cash shortage.
But Feit, Barnett, and their initial backers knew the site’s long-term prospects as a for-profit, stand-alone entity were poor.
So Publicola, as its own thing, is shutting down.
But Crosscut.com, Seattle Weekly founder David Brewster’s nonprofit local commentary/analysis site, is bringing Feit and Barnett on board. Their coverage will continue at Crosscut in twice-daily installments. Brewster and co. will stage a fund drive to support permanent employment for the two.
meowonline.org
Every person I talk to at a signing, every exchange I have online (sometimes dozens a day), every random music video or art gallery link sent to me by a fan that I curiously follow, every strange bed I’ve crashed on… all of that real human connecting has led to this moment, where I came back around, asking for direct help with a record. Asking EVERYBODY.… And they help because they know I’m good for it. Because they KNOW me.
liem bahneman, via komo-tv
painting the needle for its big b-day party
Keith Seinfeld at KPLU recently asked, “Why does Seattle still care about the world’s fair?”
That’s an excellent question.
As international expos go, Seattle’s was relatively small.
And it took place a full half century ago.
Until Mad Men came along, that era was widely considered to have been a dullsville time, a time wtih nothing much worth remembering.
The “Space Age” predicted at the fair would seem would seem ridiculous just a few years later. It predicted domed cities and cheap nuclear power. It predicted computers in the home (in the form of fridge-sized consoles) and video conferencing (with a special “picturephone”), but it didn’t predict the Internet.
It sure didn’t predict the racial, sexual, musical, and social upheavals collectively known as “The Sixties.”
And a lot of the fair’s attractions were so utterly corny, you can wonder why they were taken seriously even then. Attractions such as the world’s largest fruitcake. Or the Bubbleator (essentially just a domed platform on a hydraulic lift). Or the adults-only risqué puppet show (by the future producers of H.R. Pufnstuf).
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Yet a lot of us do care about all that. And not just us old-timers either.
And not just for the physical structures the fair left behind (the Space Needle, the Science Center, etc.).
The fair was the single most important thing that happened in Seattle between World War II and the rise of Microsoft. (The launch of the Boeing 707 was the next most important.)
The fair revved up the whole Northwest tourism industry, just as jet aircraft and Interstate highways were getting more Americans to explore other parts of their nation. This once-remote corner of the country became a top destination.
The fair was a coming-out party for a new Seattle.
A Seattle dominated not by timber and fishing but by tech. Specifically, by aerospace. Boeing had only a secondary role in equipping the U.S. space program, but its planes were already making Earth a seemingly smaller place.
The fair didn’t start the Seattle arts and performance scenes, but it gave them a new oomph.
Seattle Opera and the Seattle Repertory Theatre were immediately established in the fair’s wake.
ACT Theatre came soon after. Visual art here was already becoming famous, thanks to the “Northwest School” painters; the fair’s legacy led to increased local exposure to both local and national artists.
The fair established a foothold for modern architecture here.
Before the fair, there hadn’t been a major change to Seattle’s skyline since the Smith Tower in 1914. (The few new downtown buildings were relatively short, such as the 19-story Norton Building.)
The Space Needle became the city’s defining icon, instantly and forever.
The U.S. Science Pavilion (now Pacific Science Center) established the career of Seattle-born architect Minoru Uamasaki, who later designed the former World Trade Center.
Speaking of tragedy and turmoil, some commentators have described the fair’s era as “a simpler time.”
It wasn’t.
The Cuban missile crisis, revealed just after the fair ended, threatened to turn the cold war hot.
The whole Vietnam debacle was getting underway.
The civil rights and black power movements were quickly gaining traction.
The birth control pill was just entering widespread use.
Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, which helped launch the U.S. environmental movement, came out while the fair was on.
So yes, there were big issues and conflicts in 1962.
But there was also something else.
There was optimism.
In every exhibit and display at the fair, there was the notion that humans could work together to solve things.
And, at least at the fair, most everything was considered solveable.
I wrote in 1997, at the fair’s 35th anniversary, that its creators sincerely felt Americas would strive “to ensure mass prosperity (without socialism), strengthen science, popularize education, advance minority rights, and promote artistic excellence.”
It’s that forward-looking confidence that got lost along the road from the Century 21 Exposition to the 21st century.
It’s something many of us would like to see more of these days.
And that, more than Belgian waffles or an Elvis movie, is why Seattle still cares about the World’s Fair.
And why you should too.
(Cross posted with City Living.)
souvenir display at the world's fair anniversary exhibition
foodbeast.com
The renovation (read: upscaling) of the old Food Circus in Seattle Center’s Center House had one sad, unpublicized aspect.
The project pushed out the last Pizza Haven.
It was an unsung end to a company founded in 1958 by Ron Bean (son of Pay n’ Save Drug/Lamonts Apparel mogul Lamont Bean).
It started with a single dine-in location on University Way and a home delivery operation (the first of its kind around here). Instead of baking pies to order, Pizza Haven’s trucks originally cruised around with pre-made inventory in warming ovens, ready to go wherever radio dispatch operators sent them.
At its peak the chain had 42 outlets down as far as northern California, and even franchises in Russia and the Middle East. It had a cute cartoon “Mr. Pizza” mascot, and fun TV commercials with angels welcoming you to “Haven—Pizza Haven, the place all good pizza eaters go when they’re hungry.”
Then Domino’s came to town, and Pizza Hut added delivery-only stores.
Pizza Haven repositioned itself into slice stands in mall food courts. But fiscal troubles continued.
The chain declared bankruptcy in 1997. The following year, every branch except Center House closed.
Bean tried to relaunch Pizza Haven in 2001, but it didn’t get off the ground.
The Center House slice stand continued for another decade, feeding the tourists and the local old-timers who’d grown up with the brand.
Until now.
will deluxe junk's giant plastic hot dog become homeless?
via 'what makes the pie shops tick' at flickr.com
a&p store in wallingford, circa 1938; via pauldorpat.com
My former employers at the Stranger have come out with a new ad-heavy arts quarterly. Its title: Seattle A&P (for “Art and Performance”).
It gives me an excuse to discuss one of my personal obsessions, with the company known as A&P (its official name: The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company).
It was once the largest grocery chain in America. At its peak it essentially owned the food biz east of the Rockies, and also had outposts in Seattle and L.A.
It was even considered a dire threat to the existence of small business.
But after decades of mismanagement, the brand today only exists in the New York suburbs. (The company also owns five other Northeast regional chains acquired over the years.)
The last Seattle A&P stores were sold or closed in 1974. The largest single batch of these selloffs (five stores) went to QFC, forming a major jump in that chain’s drive toward local dominance.
p-i carriers, 1942; mohai/seattlehistory.org
Three years ago Saturday, the print Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its last issue.
There’s still a P-I sized hole in the regional info-scape.
SeattlePI.com doesn’t even partly fill it.
What’s worse, that site is shrinking when it should be growing.
From 20 journalists and “producers” at its launch as a stand-alone operation, it’s now down to 12.
The way I figure it, a local mainstream news operation here would need about 40 editorial full-timers to come close to comprehensively covering the community and to producing a thorough, compelling daily product:
This also happens to be close to the reporting staff numbers of today’s Tacoma News Tribune.
I can say it would be nice to have a bigger, fuller PI.com site.
But can I reasonably ask Hearst New Media to front that kind of money, considering the site’s probably not profitable at its current budget (and considering the money Hearst’s probably losing at its still-extant newspaper and magazine properties)?
I believe I can.
Even though I believe web ads will never come close to supporting a local site of the size I’m talking about (or, really, much professional journalism period).
That’s because online content won’t always be tied to the ugly, inefficient, insufficient genre known as the commercial website.
I’m talking about tablet apps, Kindle/Nook editions, HTML 5-based web apps.
Products that bring back the concept of the “newspaper” as a whole unified thing, not just individual text and directory pages.
Products whose ad space can be sold on the basis of their entire readership, not just individual page views.
Products that could even command a subscription price.
A renewed P-I would be the perfect vehicle to test and refine this concept.
And Seattle is the perfect place to do it.
And if Hearst doesn’t want to, let’s get together some of our own town’s best n’ brightest to do it instead.
Let’s make a news org that wouldn’t just be a “corrective” to the Seattle Times‘ square suburban worldview, but would present a fully expressed alternative worldview.
A site that lives and breathes Seattle.
That tells the city’s stories to itself.
That shows how this could be done in other towns and cities.
washington beer blog via seattlepi.com
First, thanks to the more than 50 people who crowded Roy St. Coffee and Tea for the History Cafe presentation on old Seattle restaurant menus Thursday evening. And thanks to my fellow panelists Hanna Raskin and Taylor Bowie for making it easy for me. Each of them had so many insights about the old restaurants, their menu designs, their food items, and their respective places in cultural history, that I didn’t have to say much.
After you’ve had your Caesar salad to celebrate the Ides of March, join me in celebrating the ghosts of meals past.
I’m participating in a History Cafe session about old Seattle restaurant menus. It’s 7 p.m. Thursday at Roy Street Coffee (the off-brand Starbucks), Broadway and East Roy on crunchy Capitol Hill. It’s sponsored by KCTS, HistoryLink.org, MOHAI, and the Seattle Public Library.
stephen crowe via brainpickings.org
Today, go out and celebrate Pi Day (3/14). Tomorrow, learn about pies of the past.
I’m participating in a History Cafe session about old Seattle restaurant menus. It’s 7 p.m. Thursday at Roy Street Coffee (the off-brand Starbucks), Broadway and East Roy on cantilevered Capitol Hill. It’s sponsored by KCTS, HistoryLink.org, MOHAI, and the Seattle Public Library.
Try writing the same line of dialogue three different ways: 1) the quippy version, 2) the version that simply conveys the meaning of the line, and 3) the emotional subtext of the line. And then try to find the version that combines 2) and 3) as much as possible. You might find you end up with a line that’s more quotable than the witty version you originally had.
