I just spoke to Lynn Bradach, the Gold Star mom from Portland who I profiled recently in The Stranger.

Turns out Bradach, a 53-year-old woman who hasn’t received a parking ticket since she was in her 20s, much less been arrested, decided to be a part of that sit-in outside the White House on Monday at which Cindy Sheehan and about 370 other people—including Bradach—were hauled away in handcuffs.

I didn’t realize Bradach had been arrested until recently because she’d told me over the weekend, while we were at the huge anti-war march in D.C., that she wasn’t going to do any illegal civil disobedience. I’d assumed she’d stuck with that plan. But apparently she ended up in a crowd of other mothers of dead soldiers on Monday, mothers who, like Sheehan, were hanging pictures of their dead sons on the White House fence—which is apparently illegal. Bradach knew this, and handed to someone else her picture of her son, Travis, who was killed in Karbala in 2003. But as she did this, she told me, she “felt like I was giving Travis away, sort of deserting him. I mean, I’m his mother and I didn’t have the courage to be arrested for hanging his picture on the White House fence?”

So she took the picture back, hung it up herself, sat down in the street in front of the White House, and was promptly arrested, charged with protesting without a permit, and at 4 a.m. the next morning, was let go with a $75 fine.

Bradach admitted that the protesters who got arrested on Monday were trying to get more attention for their weekend march, which was almost ignored by much of the mainstream media. It worked, getting Bradach on several radio stations and in at least one print news story in Portland.

If getting arrested is what it takes to get attention for their anti-war message, will she and the Gold Star families be doing more civil disobedience?

“If it’s a necessary thing, yes,” she told me.

Good news for people who like adventurous, soulful breakbeat-oriented music: the SunTzu Sound collective are now broadcasting on KBCS 91.3FM.

Here’s the gist of the press release:

City Soul (1-3am Wednesday Night/Thursday Morning) focuses on connecting the dots between genres, cities, and people. On City Soul you’ll hear music from Tokyo and London, to Rio de Janeiro, the streets of Detroit, and beyond. City Soul intends to highlight the sounds from underground clubs, neo-soul hotspots, independent recording studios, and the streets of the world. The show’s hosts are Atlee, AC, and J-Justice; well-known local talent who are part of the DJ collective SunTzu Sound, based in Seattle. Tune into City Soul every week at KBCS 91.3FM or streaming live at http://www.kbcs.fm.
CitySoul.org (http://www.citysoul.org) will feature archived playlists and coming soon a downloadable podcast feature.

More on SunTzu Sound here.

Last night I went to a really random corporate event at ConWorks and was happy to escape into a room that I’ve since learned houses a show opening on Friday Sept. 30. It’s work by Trimpin called Sheng High that consists of large hunks of bamboo that move seemly randomly up and down. They’re connected to a larger contraption with wires and make this eerie horror movie soundtrack sound as they shift position. Standing amid this installation of sound art filled my friend and I with the good kind of dread that you might get in a particularly suspenseful horror movie. It’s a really cool piece, I recommend checking it out. The reception starts at 8pm.

I just got this letter today, about a story I wrote in June. Little does this reader know how relevant the comments are—I have a feature due out tomorrow that revisits the separation of church and state problems over in the Lake Washington School District.

I just finished reading your article Separation Anxiety.

I was surprised to read how obviously intolerant you are towards Christians and the church. “Herbert, however, taking a page out of the Christian right’s persecution complex handbook,â€� That is a ridiculous statement. You seemed to neglect telling your readers that Kevin Teeley is a homosexual. Don’t you think that he may have an obvious bias towards the church? Wouldn’t that be the real reason he wants the church out of the school?

It’s sad that the liberal media influences society so much.

Shawn

I had the pleasure of replying. We’ll see if I get a reponse…

You got me: I’m intolerant toward Christians who use their personal religious beliefs to try and influence politics and public life. Keep it in the church, please.

a homosexual with an obvious bias,
amy j

Today the blog DailyKos has an interesting post (by Kos himself!) that uses the recent anti-war march in D.C. as a jumping-off point for an inquiry into whether marches are even useful anymore.

He concludes, basically, that marching around in the streets is an anachronism that lefties need to jettison in favor of events that more effectively manipulate the media. I disagree. I think massing people in the streets — if you mass enough of them — will always be one of the most effective ways of getting the attention of politicians. (See the Ukraine for the most recent example.) And there are lots of comments on his blog from people who share my disagreement. But it’s a really interesting debate, and an important one considering how little coverage the massing of 150,000 people in D.C. received.

Now that Tom Delay (who represents my parents’ congressional district in Sugar Land, Texas, southwest of Houston) has been indicted for felony criminal conspiracy (the indictment alleges that DeLay illegally funneled corporate PAC dollars through the Republican National Committee into Republican Texas House campaigns in 2002, leading to the redistricting plan that gave the state a GOP Congressional majority two years later), the time may have finally come for Sugar Land, Texas to have a Democratic representative.

Could Nick Lampson be that Democrat? Lampson, a former US Rep who lost his Southeast Texas seat after his district was redrawn under DeLay’s plan to elect a Republican, has raised more than $500,000 so far, and political analysts were already giving him strong odds to take down the former bug man before DeLay’s indictment Wednesday.

I’ve now joined the masses whose iPod batteries crapped out, so now my spendy little portable music player plays only half the songs I’ve downloaded into it and always says the battery is empty. I took it to the Apple store, where the helpless clerk informed me that that’s pretty much the way it goes, that Apple wasn’t forthright in saying their players crap out at some point, and that I’ll have to spend a ton of money to fix this mess (after standing in a long line at a different Apple store, because of course this one will forever be out of batteries, they’re in such high demand).

My question is, has anyone had success dealing with this infuriating iPod situation? What’s the best (and ideally cheapest) way to fix this junk?

The DeLay indictment came on the last day left for the Texas grand jury that was investigating him and his allegedly illegal campaign financing.

Which reminds me: There’s another hot grand jury of the moment out there, the one that is investigating who in the Bush administration may have illegally outed a covert CIA operative. Its last day is Oct. 31.

Perhaps a season of indictments is upon us.

Last night I went to Cal Anderson Park around 9 with my laptop to do some work, and sat on the grassy hill, facing Vivace, writing and thinking that what would be truly amazing is if the park had wi-fi (as parks in New York City do), and then suddenly I saw that I was picking up free wi-fi from some magical, wi-fi-having house nearby. If you sit anywhere else on the hill other than the side that faces Vivace (or anywhere else in the park for that matter), no wi-fi. It’s all about being in the right place at the right time.

I know I’ve posted already about Cal Anderson Park, but I can’t help myself, I love the place…

The fall issue of the regional architectural journal Arcade was edited by me, Mr. Mudede. Personally, I think I did a great job, and the journal—which features new work by writers and artists like DJ Spooky, Matthew Stadler, and Jerry Garcia—is available at most magazine stores around town (Bull Dog News, J and S News on Broadway, and so on). This is the issue’s introduction:

UNION STATION
Charles Tonderai Mudede
The three train stations embedded in the three major cities of the Pacific Northwest — Vancouver, Seattle, Portland — are in the processes of being resurrected. And now many of us are waiting: Will they (can they) bring together the main centers and make for all of us one big urban reality?
This feature package is not a professional study of this possibility, or a hard look at its feasibility, or a useful estimate of the losses and benefits of increased intercity travel. It is instead a soft experiment by six writers (myself, Bess Lovejoy, Matthew Stadler, Nic Veroli, Paul D. Miller, and Amy Kate Horn) and a photographer (architect Jerry Garcia). A soft experiment that puts some of these emerging energies into a language that drifts between what has happened in the (real/unreal) past and what can happen in the (real/unreal) future. For us, something is definitely happening, and so we must look at this something and say something about it.

For the week of September 29-October 5, 2005:

The Stranger: 116 pages.

Seattle Weekly: 120 pages.

It’s a special issue for them, a regular issue for us.

Tom DeLay has been indicted.

Harbor Steps, the luxury apt. complex in downtown Seattle between University and Seneca on 1st Ave., sold for a possible record $191.1 million a few days ago. That’s $70 million more than the assessed value. Why did Harbor Properties make such a killing? Hot real estate market, as the Seattle PI reports this morning?

Maybe. But there’s something the PI doesn’t mention. Here’s my theory: Nickels caved to Harbor Properties earlier this year by quietly taking the blocks around Harbor Steps off of the downtown rezoning plans. (Nickels famous downtown rezone would have raised nearby buildings and blocked views at Harbor Steps, but Harbor lobbied against that portion of the rezone.)

Nickels, supposedly committed to downtown heights, caved to a downtown property owner. Imagine.

p.s. to Dan: I spell fellate correctly in today’s paper. It’s in a story about Casey Corr and Mayor Nickels.