As if making a kick-ass 5-song EP, Hoon, and having a drummer with honest-to-God fangs didn’t already make them super-cool, yesterday local country quartet Grownup Trouble won my undying admiration when singer Brent Lorang agreed to swap trousers during our interview at the Monkey Pub. Brent now joins a short but illustrious list of like-minded exhibitionists, including Arlie Carstens of Juno and Britpop pin-up Robbie Williams, and I am out one pair of capri pants for three weeks. Come watch us trade back on stage when GUT rock The Sunset on Sunday, June 26th.

I feel like a 10th grader, sending a letter to Time magazine about how stupid they are, but I just had to:

To: lettters@time.com From: josh Subject: Charles Krauthammer 6/6/05 essay Cc: The United States, Mullah Dobson

Charles Krauthammer writes, “It seems perfectly O.K. for secularists to impose their secular views on America, such as, say, legalized abortion or gay marriage. But when someone takes the contrary view, all of a sudden he is trying to impose his view on you.”
One needs to ask Kruathammer exactly what that “contrary view” is. Because once you ask that question, Krauthammer’s argument falls apart. The contrary view of legalized gay marriage, for example, is outlawing gay marriage. Outlawing gay marriage (which, no matter how oppressed Krauthammer feels by uppity gay marriage advocates, most states have done, by the way) doesn’t just seem to be an imposition on gay people’s rights, it is an imposition on gay people’s rights; i.e. a gay man cannot marry the person he loves and start a family.
By contrast, legalizing gay marriage is not an imposition on anyone. Against gay marriage? Don’t marry someone of the same sex. The fact that one person thinks someone else’s marriage could be an imposition, simply speaks to that person’s arrogance.

Josh Feit

Due to a technical difficulty, many of us lost our new voicemails this morning. So, to the four people who’d left me messages that I now wish I’d checked the second I got into the office this morningI waited, and they evaporatedI’m not being rude by not calling you back. I don’t even know who called. Please call again!

A City Council committee passed the once-controversial Broadway upzone unanimously yesterday, allowing new buildings to go up to 65 feet instead of 40 - the current limit. The upshot is that new buildings may now be six stories high, rather than four, giving developers an incentive to revitalize Broadway with new mixed-use commercial and residential buildings. Likely targets for redevelopment include the old QFC and Safeway sites on the north end of Broadway, which have been sitting vacant since last year. New restrictions will require that all development above 40 feet be used for housing.

Continue reading "Re: It's Density, Stupid" »

speaking of praise for one’s co-workers, I forgot to award my own Personal Pultizer to the estimable Charles Mudede for this line in last week’s review of The Longest Yard:

“Sandler is never funny, Rock is sometimes funny, Nelly (the rapper) is very funny (not intentionally, however), and Burt Reynolds is always sad.”

Bravo, sir.

I just wasted an excellent hunger (i hadn’t eaten anything since 6 pm yesterday) on a bad batch of dim sum purchased at Trader Joe’s. The nicely packaged dim sum usually answers my hunger perfectly, but this time around it kept saying the wrong things in my mouth. I will not make that mistake again. A good hunger is a terrible thing to waste.

But the best sentence to ever come from the man’s mouth was uttered no more than two minutes ago after Annie Wagner called him emo.

“I’m not emo,” he stated. “I’m extremo.”

Someone needs to put that on a t-shirt.

Today my Ballet tofu green curry came with a fortune cookie bearing the prediction “You will find some money.” I laughed at its vagueness. After lunch I took a walk and happened upon two $20 bills folded neatly together in the middle of the sidewalk. This kind of coincidence really fucks with my atheism/skepticism.

Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur rants in her column today about the end of the Pike Place Market garage’s free first hour of parking. She whines about how the loss of the free parking is really going to cramp her style: It will no longer be so easy for her to pop by the market for a lunchtime quickie. Furthermore, she says, the market is snubbing residents like her”unpaid ambassadors” to the throngs of touristsby charging (horrors!) $3 for parking.

Newsflash, Nicole. Seattle’s got a bus system. For $1.25 during lunch, you can hop on the #70, which stops right outside the Seattle Times’ office. That bus runs every 15 minutes, and will whisk you to 3rd and Pinetwo blocks from the marketin five minutes flat. It’d take much longer to drive and park, wouldn’t it?

And was that free parking really free, considering the gas you had to buy to drive your single occupancy vehicle?

Dave Segal weighs in on Goat’s Head Soup from Montreal:

GHS is really an overlooked gem; I don’t understand the critical hate/apathy toward it. The best songs on it are “Can You Hear the Music” and “Comin’ Down Again.” Totally inspirational and consoling songs, respectively. The former is a beautiful, trippy anomaly in the Stones catalog; the latter contains some of Keith’s best singing(okay, that’s not saying much, admittedly) and some truly bizarre lyrics. I find myself listening to GHS more than I do any other Stones LP from that period. I will also defend the merits of Black and Blue (half of it is really good) some other time. I’m on vacation, for christ’s sake.Dave

Re: Amy J’s curiosity about the recent avalanche of I, Anonymous submissions appearing in the web forum: I wish I could say I receive two dozen fascinating submissions a day, but it would be a lie.

95 percent of the hot new entries steaming up the I, Anonymous web forum are submissions sent but never published over the past year. Prior to the new web launch, these runner-up items were left to sizzle in my in-box. Now they belong to the masses, and not a minute too soon.

Even better, I still have a couple hundred submissions left to turn into individual web threads, and I’m wondering if I should be strategic in how and when I parse them out—say, posting 5 to 10 each day, to amp daily interest in the forum? Please share your thoughts.

Dwight Pelz finally makes it official; i.e., he’s chickening out of the Richard Conlin race and running against Richard McIver instead.

I think Pelz’s move highlights 2 annoying things. 1. Conlin is much stronger than people thought, & 2. the Nickels Machine can even make someone like Casey Corr formidable.

Team Nickels, including bad ass fund raiser Colby Underwood, is supporting McIver, though.

Continue reading "Pelz Switches Races" »

There’s an article in the PI today that tepidly discusses the proposal to raise the heights on Broadway. The story’s not very noteworthy, but the poll at the bottom is: Once you vote, you can see the results. As of 10:45 am, an impressive 68% are in favor of upping Broadway to 65 feet. Vote.

Dear Dave Schmader,

Have the I, Anonymous submissions always filled your inbox at a rate of over a dozen a day? If so, I’m jealous that you always got to read them all-I’m becoming a big fan of that section of the forum. If not, perhaps the allure of knowing so many people will read your screed online, whether or not it’s chosen for the paper, is driving the avalanche of submissions. I can hardly keep up.

Curious,
Amy J

Poor Cincinnati. Ah well, at least they can content themselves with the big band programming of my doppelgänger, the amazing septuagenarian DJ Annie Wagner. She’s on WMKV FM. Despite the way she threatens to disrupt my as-yet inchoate Googlism identity, I’m still happy a classy lady like Annie can make her way in the Darwinian world of Cincinnati radio.

When Rolling Stone asked what the rudest thing someone has ever said about her was, pseudo-punk pop princess Avril Lavigne answered:

“People saying that I can’t write, which pisses the fuck out of me, because I’m a writer. Don’t you fucking dare try to take that from me.”

Amen, sister.

Driving on the Viaduct is scary.
Driving on the Viaduct after watching Irwin Allen disaster films all weekend is scarier.

2 Important meetings at City Hall tomorrow address a lot of the urban agenda stuff we’ve been writing about lately.
First, at 2pm, in City Council Chambers, Peter Steinbrueck’s Urban Development Committee will take public comment on proposals to revamp Broadway, including the ever-controversial plan to raise heights.
Second, at 5:30, in City Council Chambers, there will be a public hearing about Mayor Nickels’ proposals to change zoning in neighborhood commercial zones. On the table: lowering parking requirements & allowing more residential uses in outlying portions of commercial districts.

Re: Sean’s mystification over the lack of adulation for the Stones’ Goat’s Head Soup: I had a similar response when I first got the record last year, especially over the glorious second track, “100 Years Ago.” Twelve months later, that song’s the only reason I keep the record around.

My theory: GHS is perfectly fine, but too many of its strengths are captured more powerfully on other Stones records. With a catalog as loaded as the Stones’s, “perfectly fine” records are tossed by the wayside. (Should one feel compelled to enhance the basic Beggars-thru-Exile” Stones canon, go backwards— Between The Buttons, Aftermath, and on…)

In other news, how is it that this record never gets mentioned when people talk about the few undeniably great LPs made by the Rolling Stones? It’s even in the right time period. Beggar’s Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main St., and, yes, goddamn it, GOAT’S HEAD SOUP! In a row, no less. (We needn’t get into the Some Girls/Tattoo You splinter argument. Not at this time.)

just got a tiny bit wastier. Cincinatti’s WOXY was a good station, with a good online presence, and a fairly rich history. Not quite WFMU, but akin to KEXP/KCMU. It’s interesting that they kept the website. I’m really curious to know how the www-only format is going to treat non-non-commercial stations.

Last night’s SIFF premiere of indie film November blew my mind. The movie is purposely and artfully fractured, using a disjointed narration style, a disjoined star (a mentally disheveled Courtney Cox, who successfully moves past the Friends kitsch), and dark, sickly lighting to tell a story that moves in emotional depth rather than logistical time and space. It’s hard to describe the movie without giving away too much, but the film touches on issues of infidelity, insanity, and the violence of having someone forcefully taken from your life—on many different levels. If you can leave aside the need to have loose ends tied tidy at the end of a film, November will leave your wheels spinning long after it ends.

Later this week (Thurs, June 9 to be exact) I’d like to recommend the first of two SIFF screenings of Police Beat, a beautifully poetic movie written by our own Charles Mudede. The film is loosely based on his morosely addictive column for this here paper—but it’s actually much more romantic in tone then you would ever guess from Charles’ cynical exterior. We all now know he’s a softie at heart. The music, the grey Seattle skies, and the thoughtful nature of the lead character (a bicycle cop concerned about the whereabouts of his lover) come together like a dream. The film plays Thurs at 7 at the Egyptian.

Here’s a creepy conversation about W. Mark Felt between Haldeman and Nixon from October ‘72. The scariest thing is that Nixon’s about to win the election in a landslide. No wonder my Jewish mother was freaking out and forcing me to leaflet the neighborhood for McGovern.

Haldeman: We know what’s left, and we know who leaked it.

Nixon: Somebody in the FBI?

Haldeman: Yes, sir. Mark Felt. You can’t say anything about this because it will screw up our source and there’s a real concern. Mitchell is the only one who knows about this and he feels strongly that we better not do anything because—

Nixon: Do anything? Never.

Haldeman: If we move on him, he’ll go out and unload everything. He knows everything that’s to be known in the FBI. He has access to absolutely everything …

Continue reading "(unintelligible) Jewish." »

Two weeks ago, Michael Miner at the Chicago Reader announced the paper’s decision not to join in an amicus brief on behalf of Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper, the two reporters who are threatened with jail time for refusing to tell a federal jury who in the federal government told them the identity of CIA operative Valeria Plame. In his column, Miner pointed out that while it may be true that “a person’s principles, like his or her home, must always be defended,” the facts of the Miller/Cooper case, and its judicial history so far, make it a poor case for testing a claim of absolute journalistic privilege in front of the Supreme Court.

I agree with Miner: The Plame case isn’t the best case to demonstrate a claim for journalistic privilege, especially in a high-stakes forum like the Supreme Court. Ideally, a Supreme Court case on confidentiality would involve a journalist protecting a government whistleblower who provided information about a wrongdoing, in which that information served the public interest. This case doesn’t meet that standard.

What I don’t agree with is the idea that journalists’ privilege only exists when the people they’re shielding are good people.

Continue reading "Strange Justice" »

My daughter and I can’t stop watching the animated film The Rescuers, which stars Eva Gabor and Bob Newhart and was written by 10 people. Anyway, the opening song for the movie is utterly beautiful and haunting and needs to be covered by Bjork or Andrea Parker. I found the lyrics to it on the web and must now share them with the whole wide world.

Continue reading "Who Will Rescue Me?" »

So I took my first trip to the Evergreen Speedway in Monroe last weekend and that place RULES! We went for the demolition derby—a night that included figure eight races by school buses, yellow hornet cars, cars towing boats, and a bunch of burned out, Repo Man-style junkyard scraps on wheels. High speeds, a couple crashes, devil autos that shot fire, and a fireworks finale—you couldn’t ask for much more. Except for being able to tailgate in the parking lot unmolested by security guards (where else does that happen these days?). If you get off on people (nearly and really) crashing into each other faster than the law would ever allow, check out the schedule for the next demo derby here. The three kids in the ironic mullet wigs the night we were there didn’t even need ‘em. It’s a pure adreneline rush.

I think I speak for everyone when I say, I KNEW IT!

For the nine years I’ve lived in Seattle, people have always told me the NW Folklife Festival was utterly uncool. “They have face-painting,” my boyfriend warned as I walked out the door. But in the name of being a good Roots + Americana columnist, today I attended NWFF for the first time… for exactly 60 minutes.

Continue reading "NW Folklife Ain't That Uncool" »

So apparently somebody who isn’t me claimed to be Dave Segal to worm his way into Chop Suey for free on Saturday night to see Caribou. I guess this means I’ve truly arrived: I have an impersonator. Yet somehow I feel vaguely violated…

Speaking of the dominance of childish black music, the chorus of Akon’s current hit “I’m So lonely” (which is on heavy rotation on KUBE) is performed by Alvin Tha Chipmunk. We have regressed from the playground to the cradle. To make matters worse, I actually like the song.

Everyone go and get a copy of Deep Space by Model 500 (Juan Atkins). It was released a decade ago but it will never age. By the way, Dave Segal was right; the main source of Detroit techno is European electronic music and not the blues or any other black-based form. As the brilliant culture critic Kodwo Eshun put it, “Kraftwerk are to techno what Muddy Waters is to the Rolling Stonesthe authentic, the origin, the real… Düsseldorf is the Mississippi Delta.”

Common is the July of this week’s slog. Our hiphop critic, Larry Mizell, has this to say on the matter.

Continue reading "One More Common" »