Seattle’s Smaller Weekly Watch
For the week of September 8-14, 2005.
The Stranger: 112 pages.
Seattle Weekly: 96 pages.
For the week of September 8-14, 2005.
The Stranger: 112 pages.
Seattle Weekly: 96 pages.
Zadie Smith’s new novel On Beauty has been shortlisted for England’s biggest prize. I’ve read the book. It’s awesome. So we’re producing an event around it. Mark your calendar: The Stranger is presenting an event with Zadie Smith on Friday, October 7 at Neumo’s. It will be a reading, there will be music involved, and there will be another special guest from out of town. Also, magically, it will be free.
Check the paper in coming weeks for more details.
The Seattle Weekly endorsed Prof. Al Runte for mayor. They reason that, even though Runte isn’t up on the issues, it’s a protest vote against Nickels.
But if the Weekly is serious about protesting the mayor, why did they endorse Casey Corr? Corr’s entire campaign is being run by Nickels’s staff, including Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis and Nickels’s primo fund raiser Colby Underwood. Corr also openly boasts about how he helped shape the Nickels agenda, including Nickels’s South Lake Union biotech development strategy and Nickels’s development-driven downtown heights and density plans. The Weekly has loudly editorialized against both of these Nickels policies.
When Corr realized he had a Nickels problem, he made some perfunctory noise against a small piece of the South Lake Union trolley plannot against the South Lake Union trolley idea, but against one aspect of the funding plan that would steal bus hours from Metro to support the trolley. (As the mayor’s boy, Corr’s objection isn’t politically risky or brave, though, because the council already passed the trolley plan. So, Corr will never actually have to vote against the mayor on it.)
Oh, and while the Weekly uses Corr’s “anti-trolley position” as a justification for endorsing him, guess who else they endorsed. Richard Conlin. Guess who pushed the trolley plan through council? Richard Conlin.
In addition to all these sloppy contradictions with the Weekly’s endorsements, there’s no way Prof. Al Runte (who’s woefully uninformed on the issues) is going to beat Nickels. So, rather than recommending a real and effective anti-Nickels vote (shooting down Nickels’s proxy candidate, Casey Corr), they recommend a meaningless vote for a political non-entity.
After interviewing Runte a couple of weeks ago, I was so unimpressed that I filed this post about him. Oh, and the same day the Weekly’s endorsement hit, The Seattle Times published this bit of news about the Prof.
Al Runte, 58, a former UW history professor, has had a long-running battle with the university since he was denied tenure in 1985, effectively ending his teaching career.Runte sued the UW twice, claiming he’d been treated unfairly, but both lawsuits were dismissed.
One of these days I need to buy a television, if only for Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. Here are some choice snippets from recent segments about Katrina and its aftermath.
There was one show that about blew my mind at Bumbershoot this year (besides the incident wherein I had to evade security and then sneak back in… don’t ask):
Streb from Brooklyn’s Wild Blue Yonder. It’s dance, I guess, but more like ultra-athletic, death-defying, breath-taking, acrobatic physics experiments… bordering on magical. See them if you ever have the chance.
Whiner Alert! I’d have had more to write about if (a) my press pass would’ve assured me entry into something/anything and (b) if press would have been allowed to rub elbows with the performers in the VIP lounge like we were last year. One Reel, are you listening?
More highlights from last night’s city council candidates’ forum:
• Of all ten city council candidates competing in the primary, only two - socialist Linda Averill (running against Jan Drago) and libertarian-leaning landlord Robert Rosencrantz (running against Richard McIver) opposed the mayor’s punitive proposed strip-club regulations, which would ban lap dances and require bright lighting in the city’s remaining strip clubs -all four of them.
• Port Commissioner Paige Miller, whose plan to save the waterfront streetcar was rejected after further study revealed it would cost millions of dollars more than the mayor’s, offered a convoluted explanation for why she continues to take credit for saving the trolley. “I came up with a plan,” she said. Not an affordable plan, not a viable plan, not the plan that will ultimately be adopted, but a plan nonetheless. That counts for something, right?…
In searching out excellent “office hours” radio, I keep returning to KUSF, A San Francisco community radio station that broadcasts online. Their taste in music is both eclectic and impeccable. In the past week I’ve heard Woody Guthrie, the Flying Luttenbachers, weird tribal techno, Meat Beat Manifesto, the Dead Kennedys, Bauhaus, some Melvins-esque act called the Barbarians (or something), Kinski and out there metal, punk, garage, and pop. It’s like throwing the best indie record store in a blender and coming out splattered with a bunch of new cool shit. I highly recommend hitting their site and streaming a whole new world of great music.
I’m shocked (shocked!) that this Toronto Star article exists. The headline: Geeks Are the Best Movie Critics. It starts off peppy, a film festival fluff piece with an aren’t-we-all-dorks-and-isn’t-it-cute angle. But then writer Geoff Pevere gets a little carried away with his dopey logic: “Personally, I think women make better celebrity interviewers than they do movie critics.” He’s serious. Listen to this biological determinism, which is so comically oblivious it could’ve been a parody by a women’s studies prof: “a woman […] would have a difficult time imagining two cans containing a faded 35mm print of Red River as more important than the human life biology gave her the potential to bring into the world.” (You’ll be happy to learn that Pevere makes an exception for Pauline Kael, but apparently she’s the exception that proves the rule, or something—her legions of cut-rate imitators were “nearly all men.”) Anyway, the piece is good for a laugh or a tear or, you know, whatever expression of emotion your hormones are dictating today.
That was the shouted greeting Dick Cheney received after he landed this morning in Gulfport, Mississippi and the harsh welcome was carried live on cable. Video here.
Specifically, Radar, the pop/politics/scandal/style magazine that originally launched back in 2003, went away for a while, then relaunched this summer.
I love the new Radar for the same reasons I loved the old Radar: It’s like E! with a PhD. No matter how fluffy the subject matter, Radar strives to go deep, or at least faux-deep. This angle is especially valuable in our blog era, where basic pop-culture news is offered up on a minute-by-minute basis, and where Radar’s ambitious, well-researched pieces achieve a relative weightiness that’s unique.
Then there’s the mag’s elegant snark, captured best in the newest issue by Kim Masters’ cover story on celebrities and Scientology.
There’s a pretty extensive post over at MetroBlogging Seattle about our debate last night. They live blogged it. (You have to scroll down just a little bit when you get to the web site.) Mainly, I agree with the blogger’s assessment that Linda Averill (that’s right, Socialist Linda Averill) was the hands down winner last night.
I’ve been too slammed with the city council races, and it just didn’t seem appropriate given the tenor of the SLOG lately thanks to all the Hurricane Katrina/George Bush incompetence news. But I have to report on the best new pizza place in town! It’s called Zagi’s Pizza Ristorante, and it’s located at 2408 NW 80th Street in Crown Hill. My best friend Tom took me there for my birthday last week, and as alwayswhenever we go to check out a new pizza placewe ordered a plain large cheese. At Zaggi’s they call it “The Classic.” I’m not much of a food writer so here’s what I can tell you: spicy sauce, gigantic. Yum.
Oh, but a food writer, Stranger food writer Bethany Jean Clement, did have this to say back when the place opened last spring.
After work today we’re celebrating the launch of ARCADE mag’s September issue, which Charles Mudede guest-edited and devoted to the grand train stations of P-town, Sea-town, and VBC. Slide over to Winston Wachter Fine Art (203 Dexter Ave N at John St) between 5:30 and 7:30 pm for free booze and grooves; Charles will spin Detroit techno and something Specs One composed custom for the event.
FYI….
James Hall, former lead singer of Pleasure Club, got out of his hometown of New Orleans with his wife and his son, a grocery bag of belongings, and two guitars. They’ve lost everything else. James is up here in Seattle to play a show at Chop Suey on Thurs Sept 8TH. Details for the show can be found at here. The show had been scheduled prior to the hurricane hitting, and James is incredibly grateful to have his family safe and to be able to keep making music. Due to his present circumstances, the show will now be directly benefiting James and his family, so it would be great to get a huge crowd of people out in support.
Along with James Hall, the line-up for the show will be Robert Roth, Pat Macdonald and Gruesome Galore.
The key line in the article posted by Dan, “The Bush administration is tossing the media out of New Orleans,” is this:
The move by the Federal Emergency Management Agency [to ban the media from taking “pictures of those killed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath”] is in line with the Bush administration’s ban on images of flag-draped U.S. military coffins returning from the Iraq war….
Even Bush can recognize his own dead souls. If these deaths were not his, if they were nature’s deaths, or a terrorist’s deaths, then he would not try to hide them. But the fact is remarkably clear: the person who owns the bodies flying back from Iraq also owns the bodies floating in the flooded streets of New Orleans.
I’ve yet to see a copy of m+f magazine (which stands for “music + fashion”) but looking at their website, it seems to aim for the same sort of stuff as Tablet. They’re not based in Seattle (seems to be part of some national publisher) but they’re having a local launch party Fri Sept 9 at the Rendezvous with live music, DJs, and no smoking (the event is sponsored by Art Patch). Thanks to Chris Olson for the info.
We had our city council candidate debate last night. There were close to 200 people there (!!), so there was no way we could get to all the audience questions and comments. (We had the audience write down questions and comments and pass them in during the debate.) We managed to squeeze in a bunch of them between our own questions, like this great suggestion from one audience member: “All Candidates: 4-foot rule between you and Paul Allen.” We’ll type up the 30 or so that we didn’t get toand post them here on the SLOG as soon as we can.
Go to the SLOG Forum and check out what people are saying. It looks like the debate is spilling over to this morning.
Here’s the first post that went up on the SLOG Forum last night right after the debate:
Continue reading "Last Night's City Council Candidate Debate" »
So, Kevin Phelpsthe former Sound Transit board finance chair who helped turn that agency’s finances aroundannounced his preliminary findings on the monorail finances yesterday. (Phelps was hired by SMP to help save the beleaguered project.) The dailies have the story today. (Basically, Phelps says the monorail can bring its overall finance plan down to $7 billion instead of the infamous $11 billion and pay it off in 39 years instead of the dreaded 50.)
Phelps’s plan is basically a response to Mayor Nickels’s demand that the SMP come up with a new plan (a tax increase or a shorter line) by Sept. 15 to take to the voters. The SMP doesn’t want to go back to the voters, and so Phelps is doing a bit of a dance with Nickelscoming back with numbers that conceivably say the monorail could move ahead along the guidelines of the 2002 vote. What’s kinda funny about this scenarioPhelps dancing for Nickelsis that Phelps actually replaced Nickels as finance chair on Sound Transit’s board after Nickels oversite proved disastrous with a $1.1 billion cost overrun. And now, you’ve got Phelps having to take direction from Nickels. It’s a cruel world.
Thanks to all the people who contributed a bucket-full of entries to our Slog contest honoring Dick Cheney’s disaster tour. The VP begins his tour today, and as promised, your top ten entries:
Sending Dick Cheney to soothe the hurt of New Orleans is like….
10) …just plain wrong.
9) …sending Sherman to rebuild Atlanta.
8) …sending Tom Cruise to pick up your prescription meds at the pharmacy.
7) …hiring Michael Jackson to perform at your five-year-old boy’s birthday party.
6) …inviting Kanye West to be the keynote speaker at a GOP fundraiser.
5) …letting the guy who knocked your teeth out sell you dentures.
4) …having Godzilla over for sushi.
3) …sending in armed troops to encourage a free-thinking democracy.
2) …going to the Wildrose for a blowjob.
1) …putting a former horse judge in charge of FEMA.
The winning entry was sent in by Cindy Massey of Murphysboro, IL, who was one of many far-flung Slog readers to send in ideas. Thanks to all participants, near and far, and good luck, Mr. Vice President.
Gov. Schwartzenegger said yesterday that he’ll veto California’s marriage equality bill, which passed the state’s legislature on Tuesday.
That doesn’t jive with what his press secretary said:
The governor “believes that gay couples are entitled to full protection under the law and should not be discriminated against based upon their relationship.”
Email Schwarzenegger and tell him vetoing the bill is discrimination.
(On the official email-the-governer form, check “supporting” and pick “gender neutral marriage” from the drop down menu.)