Friday, April 18, 2003

HERE'S ANOTHER INFINITELY-COOL HIGHLIGHT from CBC's now-on-hiatus arts series Zed: A RealVideo clip presenting the hauntingly beautiful song stylings of Northwest Territories throat singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis, with a live electro-ambient backup band.

posted by clark 12:59 AM

ROBERT FISK, the UK pundit who's become a demi-hero to antiwar North Americans, now claims the occupation of Iraq is now "going wrong, faster than anyone could have imagined...."

...AND NEWSWEEK'S ANNA QUINDLEN proclaims that "each time the United States becomes imperial, it betrays the very keystone upon which its greatness rests."

posted by clark 12:51 AM

Thursday, April 17, 2003

IN RESPONSE to many of your requests, we're cutting down on the site's ad volume (particularly those pop-ups nobody seems to buy anything from).

THURSDAY WAS A HUGE NEWS DAY LOCALLY. Here are just a few of the goings-down:

• SEATTLE'S BEST COFFEE got sold out from under itself by its Atlanta conglomerate owner. SBC and its Torrefazione Italia sub-chain will be absorbed into Starbucks' operations, with only the brand names continuing to exist. Thus ends what had been one of Seattle's hottest retail rivalries since the demise of the Frederick & Nelson department store. (SBC is technically a year older than Starbucks, tracing its roots to a 1970-vintage Seattle Center House ice-cream stand called the Wet Whisker.) The hipster crowd has already publicly eschewed both chains in favor of mom-'n'-pop indie cafes. Last winter, the Stranger essentially chided local indie Cafe Ladro as being too chainlike to be truly cool, despite having a mere eight stores.

• APPLE COMPUTER said it would open one of its own retail stores in Bellevue Square, invading not only the home turf of Microsoft but also that of Computer Stores Northwest, one of the country's top independent Apple-only retailers.

• THE SONICS' SEASON ended quietly with a decisive, meaningless victory over the Phoenix Suns. The team's ought-two/ought-three campaign really ended weeks ago with the Gary Payton trade; it's been in rebuilding and reloading mode ever since.

• ACT THEATER said it had raised enough emergency donations to would survive for the time being, albeit with major cutbacks. Let's hope it gets back to the funky, audience-friendly aesthetic of its heritage, after a half-decade of dot-com-era largesse and pretentions.

• KCTS KICKED its longtime president Burnill Clark into early retirement and fired 35 employees. Yeah, it's a recessionary cutback, but it also marks the end, at least for now, of the Seattle PBS affiliate's years-long drive to become a major player in supplying national network programming. The ambitious venture generated some great shows (particularly Greg Palmer's Vaudeville and Death: The Trip of a Lifetime). The loss of KCTS's network-production unit is another setback for the local film/video production community, already struggling under the dual blows of the overall economic ickiness and cheap Canadian filming.

• THE EXPERIENCE MUSIC PROJECT announced it would replace its "Artist's Journey" attraction, the least museum-like and most theme-park-esque of its offerings, with a separate museum of science fiction memorabilia. It only makes sense for an institution founded upon computer-nerd largesse to partially rededicate itself to the nerds' most favoritist art form of them all. You might beg the question: Will it be tacky? I damn hope so.

posted by clark 8:46 PM

HAROLD MEYERSON ponders whether the current White House occupant might be the "most dangerous president ever..."

...WHILE ARIANNA HUFFINGTON explains "Why The Anti-War Movement Was Right."

posted by clark 3:54 PM

Monday, April 14, 2003

HOW WOULD YOU ADVERTISE a new car you're promoting as a simple, reliable machine? How about with a two-minute, one-continuous-take TV commercial that reuses the car's parts as a Rube Goldberg invention?

posted by clark 5:09 PM

THE GOP SLEAZE MACHINE is pushing on all fronts, from public schools to research labs, to promote fundamentalist pseudo-science. Can "two plus two equals five" be far behind?

posted by clark 3:54 PM

GEOFFREY NUNBERG ponders what the heck "patriotism" means anymore.

posted by clark 3:05 PM

IRISH WRITER NUALA O'FAOLAIN believes "we need to make love to the Iraqis after we've made war."

posted by clark 3:01 PM

Sunday, April 13, 2003

PREVIOUSLY SCHEDULED ANTIWAR MARCHES went on in Seattle and other cities worldwide on Saturday, despite the war having been mostly turned into an occupation mission by the previous Thursday. As I'd expected it to be, it was a smaller affair with a greater concentration of the hardcore protest community, some of whom went "off topic" with speeches and signs about assorted other issues. It also attracted a couple of aged-male dittohead counter-protestors shouting, vehement but pre-practiced insults.

Yes, I still believe those of us who protested this war were right to have done so.

Saddam Hussein could've been restrained and/or removed without this life- and infrastructure-wasting tragedy. The twelve years of sanctions only kept him and his cronies iin power while impoverishing the rest of the nation. And the UN weapons inspections were working, it now turns out. Saddam was effectively a threat only to his own citizens.

Because Iraq's government and institutions were designed solely to serve him, he leaves behind a big nothing, a land without a society except that of the US/UK occupation force and the long-simmering ethnicities and other revenge-minded factions.

Iraq might seem now like a big-budget version of Panama or Grenada, a quick-and-relatively-clean invasion/coup. But it puts the U.S. in what still might become a morass of Vietnam proportions.

We're now going to create, and will have to keep propping up, a client state with powerful, permanent, internal and external opposition. The Republicans talk about promoting "democracy" there, but will certainly try to devise a system in which U.S. stooges and yes-men have all the power. The Islamic fundamentalists (whom Saddam was never one of) will exploit this at every opportunity. This could get messier and messier for years to come.

Antiwar "radicals" like to oversimplify geopolitical situations even more than prowar "conservatives" do. But complication is what we're gonna get anyway.

Some side topics:

• That much-telecast image of a Saddam statue's demolition was probably a staged media event created entirely by the US military, with a couple dozen Iraqis brought in as extras.

• Meanwhile, the situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate for everybody except US business interests.

posted by clark 6:01 PM

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