The good folks at Seattle/King County Public Health sent me a list of places that have received tobacco complaints since the ban went into effect. These establishments don’t necessarily permit smoking (there isn’t a clandestine smoking aisle at Safeway), they’re just places that have been smoked in or near in the past couple of months while a complaint junkie was on the premises.

A reader asked me to post the list. It follows the break.

Continue reading "Smokin' in the Safeway. And the Starbucks. And the Elks Lodge. And..." »

Former Seattle Monorail Project board member Cleve Stockmeyer got the boot from voters last November, but that didn’t keep him from having his say about the moribund agency’s actions on the popular Fox News show Hannity and Colmes, where he appeared last Friday, February 10. (His replacement, Jim Nobles, originally agreed to go on the show but reportedly canceled at the last minute; the SMP declined to make anyone else at the agency available.)

The show, part of a series on “eminent domain abuse,” focused on the efforts of a West Seattle businessman’s efforts to buy back his property, which once housed an auto repair shop and video store, from the SMP. The property owner, Dennis Ankeny, is furious that the monorail agency won’t return property it purchased for the 14-mile Green Line, which voters rejected in November. “All 34 [property owners] should get their properties back,” Stockmeyer told Alan Colmes. Currently, state law requires agencies to sell their property at market value. But because the monorail agency is not fulfilling one of the criteria for eminent domain, public purpose, Stockmeyer said, the state should “fix the problem” and change the law.

On Monday, Stockmeyer conceded that Hannity and Colmes did gloss over a few important details “in their zeal to prove that government is bad.” (Like which monorail they were talking about: File photos and computer simulations showed posters from the 2000 monorail campaign and “Freeway Monorail” along I-5, an idea that never made it off the ground.) Nevertheless, Stockmeyer said, “in the case of an aborted project” like the monorail, “the only just compensation is to put [property owners] in the position they would have been in had they held onto the property.”

When you write a long article about something there’s a lot of stuff that never makes it into the article, including how the writer got the story in the first place, what they think of the subject they’re writing about, what hoops they had to jump through to get people to talk, etc. This week in the paper, Jen Graves has a feature about Dale Chihuly’s lawsuits against glass artists he’s accusing of making knockoffs of his work. It’s a great story:

What’s bizarre about all this is that the small-time sales of a few Chihulyesque pieces in a couple of malls pose no threat to the worldwide Chihuly empire. But by suing his former employee, Chihuly himself is drawing attention to the fact that Chihuly is, in some senses, not the real deal. Whatever he wins in copyright, he stands to lose in public image. Chihuly is providing Rubino with a platform on which to call the bluff of Chihuly’s creativity.

For anyone who wants more on this story, now up on our website is a Q&A with Graves about her article, Chihuly, why no one involved would talk, etc. We’ll probably start doing these web-only Q&As with the writers of long arts pieces as a regular thing, since there’s always so much great backstory that never makes it into the paper.

We do a lot of hollering on the Slog about how this headline about a Bush abuse of power or that headline about a Bush administration “scandal” surely spells doom for Bush. We’re starting to sound pretty Boy Who Cried Wolf, if you ask me—a lot like all the Democrat blogs out there. (Frankly, it’s why I’ve stopped reading AmericaBlog.)

But I must say, this story about how Bush’s Medicare lie is going to bite Republicans in the ass is hard to dismiss.

There are 42 million potential voters afffected by the program.

Here’s the Washington State Republicans’ lengthy (Doth Protest Too Much?) talking point press release about DNC Chair Howard Dean’s coming visit to Olympia. Dean’s going to be in Olympia for the Democrats’ annual Crab Feed this Monday.

Continue reading "Know Your Enemy" »

Saturday, February 11

Saturday was the last loud day of the Danish Cartoon controversy (on Slog, anyway) and host to one more vigorous debate.

Sunday, February 12

Slog rested on Sunday.

Monday, February 13

A minuscule Nazi demonstration in Fremont brought back last week’s most-contested catch phrase, freedom of speech. And we saw more proof that everybody’s reading Slog as Seattle Weekly and Stranger staffers threw spit-wads at each other behind the news that the Weekly’s music editor is leaving.

Tuesday, February 14

Cienna Madrid let us in on a good Valentines prank she played on her brother, Carlos. (He flipped some dirt back in the comments thread.) And David Schmader advised us to skip The Wedding Singer.

Wednesday, February 15

Josh Feit wondered if there are better uses for Key Arena besides Sonics games. A courteous and intelligent discussion ensued.

Thursday, February 16

Annie Wagner revealed her fetish for Mormons on film and Paul Constant injected Ace of Base into thousands of heads. Then Dan Savage decided it would be fun to have the 2008 Republican National Convention in Seattle and readers got excited about the protest possibilities. Dan also retired Seattle’s Smaller Weekly Watch and was badgered about returning a proper table of contents to The Stranger.

Friday, February 17

Jen Graves took readers on a little illustrated art walk and Josh Feit ignited a discussion on the latest downtown height-limit plan. Linger a while longer if you can; I’ve got to get back to work but Friday is still in progress.

There is a Very Important Person someone in the office wants to take on a Very Important Date and they’re looking for a Very Important Means of transportation.

Has anybody heard of / have contact information for a individual, possibly named Josh, who operates a mysterious vehicle known as the Free Taxi? Apparently this person is willing to be paid in entertainment. Sounds like a fairy tale, but it’s worth a try. Email me at annie@thestranger.com if you have any pointers.

Here’s a nice story about Guy “Bud” Hart, the man from Placerville, CA who just coughed up the nail that had been loitering in his lung since 1970.

Placerville, by the way, is an intentionally generic name. The town was dubbed Dry Diggins during the Gold Rush, then Old Hangtown because of all the vigilante hangings there (it had a conveniently large oak tree). By 1850, the more upright citizens tried to give the town a friendlier name. The City of Placerville was incorporated in 1854.

Sonics V.P. Terry McLaughlin scoffed at the recent city study that showed Key Arena could make a profit without the Sonics, telling the Seattle Times that the findings only hold up if the team leaves the region.

His point being: If Bellevue builds a new arena, it would steal a portion of the profitable concert business from Key Arena.

Here’s why that’s an empty threat: Because it works both ways. That is, Key Arena will steal concert buisness from Bellevue too.

That’s a big problem for the Sonics. In order for the Sonics to be profitable they need all the revenue from the 20 or so concerts that currently come through Key. This is the NBA model. Since the NBA business plan is unworkable with its crazy high salaries, they ink deals all over the country that give teams the revenue from the concerts. (At Key, the city gets the money from concerts.)

The Sonics wouldn’t set up shop in Bellevue because it couldn’t guarantee them enough concert money.

I’ll take Pam and Tommy over this any day.

Voting ends this Sunday night, so don’t forget to print out a ballot (found here) and vote for your favorite local band.

More info and music for all the bands can be found at www.thestranger.com/bigshot.

Whoever is responsible for the One Punk ad banner in rotation at the top of the Slog must take those five extraneous apostrophes out. I’m all for punk apparel, but sloppy punctuation is neither anarchic nor cool.

After an uncharacteristic delay during which even some of the most jaded among us entertained a small hope of salvation, the leaders of our once-fine country have finally gotten around to seeing to it that there will be no consequences for the Bush administration over their Secret Illegal Domestic Spying Program.

Yesterday Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R - KS) announced that he had made an agreement with the White House to “fix” the illegal wiretapping program.

With at least one confirmed maiming under his belt, Vice-President Dick Cheney is more fearsome than ever and has been holding private meetings with Republican lawmakers where it is said he has been urging them to “not fucking fuck with [him].”

Senator Roberts’ current stance:

“I believe that such an investigation at this point … would be detrimental to this highly classified program and efforts to reach some accommodation with the administration,” Roberts said.

Right, right. We don’t want to investigate blatantly illegal activities for fear of interfering with those activities in the future. And we don’t want to jeopardize any chance we might have to come to an agreement with the people who committed these crimes, because that would be fucked up. What were we thinking? I can’t believe we almost investigated.

Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, Republicans are arguing for a “more limited scope” to their own investigation, arguing that their tiny, black, evil hearts compel them to do so.

No one is saying exactly what kind of a “fix” these unbelievable pricks have in mind, but it’s likely to be something along the lines of a proposal from Senator Mike DeWine (R - OH), which would basically amend the law the Administration broke (FISA) so that they didn’t break it, retroactively. The Bush administration has made clear what their interpretation of the law is (that it doesn’t apply to them, nor does any other law), and DeWine just wants to codify that understanding into the law itself. Of course, the administration won’t have to be bothered with that either, since they don’t have to follow the laws. But it will be the law that says that they don’t have to follow it. So they won’t follow it, if they don’t want to, but not because the law said so, but because they feel like it, since, you know, you’re not the boss of them.

Bye-bye, shred of hope.

Where there’s a will, there’s not necessarily a way. That’s the upshot of last night’s meeting of the Alki Community Council, which hosted five officers (two from liquor enforcement, three from the Department of Planning and Development) who they hoped might be able to answer this question: How do we take our neighborhood back from unruly revelers?

“We do not know the future of our neighborhood,” cried council trustee Gary Ogden, “and we feel threatened!”

They should. What Ogden and the rest of the council like about the neighborhood — the scenic views of the Sound and Seattle, the long flat beach, the leisurely pace — is exactly what makes it ideal for the nightclubs that have gathered in increasing numbers along Alki Avenue SW.

It’s happened all over Seattle: Quiet restaurant with liquor license is purchased by a nightclub operator, who takes over that license and does what nightclubs do: party. And club patrons do what they do: get wasted, make lots of noise, and eject various fluids from various orifices in the vicinity surrounding the club.

Maybe there is some byzantine city code that would give residents the legal right to jettison the more raucous clubs on their shore and/or exclude those who would come in the future? Surely, the loud music is illegal? Or there must at least be a limit as to how many bars can occupy a strip of real estate?

“No,” came the chorus from the liquor enforcement officers and DPD. Diane Sugimura, director of DPD, could offer little more than the suggestion that the residents negotiate with the club owners, but Ogden says they’ve already tried that tack with the most flagrant offender — Celtic Swell, at 2722 Alki Ave SW — to little effect. “They dug in. They were mean,” says Ogden.

The best route might be to talk instead to other residential neighborhoods that have felt suddenly besieged by nightclub development, like Fremont and Ballard, where NIMBYism gave way to pragmatism.

Alki Beach, however, wants to go down fighting. They’re going to hector more local officials about revising codes and draft a neighborhood plan that includes more service-oriented commerce — grocery stores, laundromats, and the like — in the spaces that might otherwise be filled by nightclubs.

A bunch of good art shows opened last night. We’re going to review Lauren Grossman at Howard House and Matt Sellars at Platform in next week’s issue, so I won’t go into those here. But there’s also Keith Tilford at James Harris, Matisse and Louise Bourgeois at Greg Kucera, and Jennifer Harrison at Garde Rail Gallery. I’ll start with Harrison, and since I didn’t see that show yet, I can’t say much, except that in reproduction, the paintings—all of houses crowded up against one another—look likable:

Tilford’s ink drawings are based on scenes of crowds he found on the Internet, and they’re like the particles that would remain of people on a street after a nuclear bomb has hit and just before the human dust falls to the ground. All the flesh is gone, and just these millions of little pieces, made in rapid gestures, remain. The scenes are creepy, too, like they’re full of zombies. (Check it, Brendan Kiley.) Up close, they’re incredibly detailed abstracts. I’m going back to see them again. Here’s one:

And of course, the Matisse prints—just what you think they’ll be, full of curvaceous female nudes that seem tossed off compared to the detailed, heavily worked textiles they wear and sit on—and works, mostly on paper, by Bourgeois, the sculptor working on the nude fountain for Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, which is supposed to open later this year. Bourgeois is mostly known for her three-dimensional works, but I like her on paper, too. In this little show, she gets her perversity and her rectitude across perfectly. All three of these are hers:

I was hoping the title The Marvelous Views of Ice Pirates and Astronauts would be literal, and it totally is. There’s something Rushmore about Chad Wentzel’s show of completely lovable new drawings at Washington Ensemble Theatre. They’re boyish and slightly naively drawn, and they’re framed in white porthole frames, as if capturing the scenery as it goes by during an odyssey through sparkling glaciers and on the moon. The titles are captions written by someone under a wondrous spell: “If Only Every Day Could Be This Good,â€� “I Wish Mom Could See This,â€� “I’m Glad It’s Warm in My Ship.â€� One glacier has pointy ears, like a gnarly, eyeless monster from a child’s nightmare. It’s called “Isn’t It Beautiful.â€�

There aren’t any images of them available for me to show here, otherwise I would. Try to imagine them: Wentzel made them on smooth white vellum. He outlined the snowy bluffs and distant planets and rivers of icebergs in pencil and then painted on light opalescent shadows. Then, he brushed salt water on them, which, dried, gives the magical look of splintered ice. Each scene has this feeling of snowblindness, of the lightheaded delirium of white on white on white.

According to WET curator Ady Kenady Walker, Wentzel is doing a bigger solo show in May at Crawl Space called “Everything I’ve Always Wanted at the Same Time.â€� I can’t wait to see it. For now, I’m focusing on resisting buying “I Wish Mom Could See Thisâ€� for my mom.

Harry Whittington, the man Cheney shot in the face last weekend (and who consequently suffered from a mild heart attack), has finally been released from the hospital.

His first order of business? An apology:

“My family and I are deeply sorry for all that Vice President Cheney and his family have had to go through this week,” Whittington said.

No word yet if Cheney has accepted Whittington’s apology. Stay tuned!

I went to the split dance bill at On the Boards last night and I’ve blogged about it at On the Boards’s site. Serious dance folks should know that I don’t know a damned thing about dance, although I know a couple things about theater, and, as anyone who’s ever read my writing before knows, I know when I’m bored. I’m often bored at dance. But I wasn’t bored last night. I thought both acts went on a bit long, and — I’m going to get rocks thrown at me for saying this — I thought Monster Squad’s piece (they are from Portland) was more interesting than Zoe Scofield’s (she is from Seattle), but I endorse both. Still, I want to know (and I put this on On the Boards’s website): Modern choreographers, why this reliance on the epileptic freakout? Do you have dancers just do this whenever you can’t think of anything else to have them do? Is it the modern dance equivalent to treading water? Spasms, aerobic though they may be, are really not that interesting to watch.

City Council Member Peter Steinbrueck has an alternative proposal to Mayor Nickels’s downtown heights plan. Steinbrueck wants developers to put more money toward low-income housing ($20 per square foot Vs. Nickels’s $10 per square foot) & he wants higher “Green building” standards than Nickels.

However, a study that Steinbrueck commissioned to analyze the competing proposals—which was presented at a council briefing earlier this week—appeared to backfire on Steinbrueck when it showed that under Steinbrueck’s plan, the percentage change in land value was a 23 percent decrease, while under Nickels’s plan, land value increased 36 percent.

Steinbrueck’s colleagues—even lefty Nickels antagonists like Richard Conlin and Nick Licata—seemed shocked at the numbers, and Steinbrueck’s plan seemed doomed.

It turns out, however, that the consultants weren’t comparing apples to apples when calculating the square footage of the buildings under both proposals. Steinbrueck quickly asked the consultants to redo the analysis. With the correct numbers, they found that land value increases 24 percent under Steinbrueck’s plan while land value increases 33 percent under Nickels’s plan.

More important, the new numbers showed that the competing plans are about the same when it comes to the real bottom line for developers, which is something called Internal Rate of Return. Under Nickels’s proposal, the Internal Rate of Return for developers would be 27.6%, and under Steinbrueck’s plan, it would be 26.3%. The industry standard for Internal Rate of Return is 20%. (Under the initial flawed study, Steinbrueck’s plan had appeared to just squeak in at 20.1 percent.)

In the course of working on another story, I learned that Public Health has received 188 complaints since the smoking ban went into effect and they have not issued a single ($100) fine. (“We educate and try to help places come into compliance,” said Matías Valenzuela of Public Health.)

I asked King County Public Health for a list of the complained-against. Among the usual suspect bars (with sky names—the Comet, the Moonraker, the Twilight, Wings Aloft—and tough names—the Buckaroo, the Whisky Bar, Bubba’s Place— and masculine Spanish names—El Gaucho, El Corazon, El Chupacabra), there are a few places that should definitely not be on the list, including: University of Washington Medical Center, Service Paper Company, Fairfax Hospital, First Mutual Bank, the United Parcel Service, and, my favorite, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.

Photos of tiny plastic people living on food = the cutest thing I’ve seen in quite awhile.

Click.

Last week, during the flap about our decision to publish some of the Muhammad cartoons, I posted a list of other U.S. papers that had published the cartoons. It was a list of 8 papers. (Since then, the list has grown to 17 papers.) One of the papers was The Daily Illini, the student paper at the University of Illinois in Champaign, Ill, which published the cartoons the same day we did.

Today’s lead story in the NYT national section is about the Daily Illini’s decision to publish the cartoons. And about the offensive result: The paper’s editor in chief, Acton Gorton, and the paper’s opinion page editor, Chuck Prochaska, were suspended from the paper.

The Plan B laser show was transporting, relaxing, lovely. I only wished there was a good way to watch both the band and the ceiling at the same time. The laser patterns were artfully orchestrated, although short on Pars Kid designs (I only saw two images that looked like his: a big-headed moper kid and the puffy Plan B logo). Dan Paulus went and knows more about music than I do—maybe he’ll describe the aural experience.
It was pretty cold in there. Next time I’ll take a blanket. Also: I looked for the missing beer garden and was told that no one filed a request for an alcohol permit in time (it has to be in 45 days in advance of an event). Still, it was a wonderfully odd, ethereal hour of my life, made exceptional by the company of a good friend who’d been away for too long.
Dave, I’m sorry you missed it. It doesn’t work to come in late to a laser show—it was dark and crowded in there and you might have stepped on a face or two while looking for a seat.

So I arrived at the Laser Dome for Plan B Orchestra’s Laptop Laser concert at 10:25 pm (start time was 9:45) only to discover nobody at the ticket booth, the gates locked, and me and a Stranger coworker contemplating our climbing skills and whether it was worth risking injury to get into the venue. We decided not to try to vault the 12-foot gates and opted to drink to forget this disappointing experience.

I have to wonder why operations were shut down when, according to an attendee reached by cell phone, the actual show hadn’t even begun yet! Can anyone at Pacific Science Center explain the reasoning behind this policy? More importantly, can anyone who caught Plan B Orchestra let me know how it was?

Olympian Seth Wescott, who claimed gold in yesterday’s Men’s snowboardcross, is hot. The women boarders run the course tonight. And did you know the winter Olympics has cheerleaders? Pretty Italians in horrible outfits. They’re jumping up and down haphazardly and singing “Wooo-wooo!” on the piazza right now.

State Representative Ed Murray (D-Seattle) still won’t say whether he’s going to give up his secure seat in the house and make a run for the state senate this fall. But insiders see the run as a sure thing, despite Murray’s very Hillary Clinton-esque ambiguity about his plans right now.

Which means two things, at least to the insiders. One: Murray will ride the wave of his recent successes on transportation and gay civil rights straight into the senate seat held by Pat Thibaudeau (D-Seattle), an aging legislator who hasn’t made a whole lot of noise in recent years. And two: In the meantime, the race for Murray’s open house seat will become one of the most exciting political brawls of the season.

One way you can tell how eager people are for Murray’s official announcement of his intentions (expected after the session ends March 9) is that most of the people who are serious about taking his current job aren’t waiting for any revelations from Murray. Here’s a list of the people who have filed to run for Murray’s seat even before he’s announced he’s leaving it, along with a run-down of how much money they’ve already raised:

Big-shot lawyer and gay rights activist Jamie Pedersen: $23,000

Democratic activist Lynne Dodson: $20,059.34

Former city councilman James Street: $17,739

King County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Bill Sherman: $10,327.73

Chair of the 43rd Disrtict Democrats, Richard Kelley: $6,710

Perennial candidate Linde Knighton: $15

Peter Steinbrueck legislative aide Stephanie Pure: $0

Hackers who tried to pirate Apple’s operating system have encountered, buried deep inside the code, a poem. Apple put it there. And it sucks. It’s a terrible poem. Apple made nearly $14 billion in revenue in 2005 according to CNN — a record for the company. The least they could do is pay someone to write a decent poem. The poet laureate? What’s he up to? (Apparently, writing about stars and cows.)

Via Seattlest:

Seattle is on the list of potential host cities for the 2008 Republican National Convention.

Other cities on the GOP’s invitation list include Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Sacramento, San Diego and Seattle. The GOP is expected to select a city by February 2007.

God, I hope we get it. Could you imagine the protests? The mass arrests? The governor shutting down the border between Washington and Oregon to stop anarchists from coming up from Eugene? Can you imagine all the cute College Republicans walking up Pike/Pine from the Convention Center? It would be a shitstorm of unbelievable scale. I hope we get it!

I take it back, Greg. Don’t tell ‘em to fuck off. Tell ‘em to come…

Is it just me, or is everyone being hit more often with ominously cryptic spam e-mails with subject headers like this NEWººΩ∫øµæÓ-πfl¿Ω±≥¡§√•¿�øÕª˘«√CD¡ı¡§ from senders with baffling names like this: ººΩ∫øµæÓxzbzxvsagfsarwe@yahoo.com?

That’s some scary shit, people. What’s Homeland Security doing about this?

Seeing as how you pretty much have to be the Son of God in order to get your hands on the Xbox 360 (how’s that grand vision of a global launch going, Microsoft?), it’s only fitting that a 360 with the image of Jesus supposedly on the packaging is currently getting monster bids on ebay.

One for the “what the fuck?” files: Vince Neil, winemaker.

This is going to be the final installment of Seattle’s Smaller Weekly Watch. We’ll get to why in a moment, but first a little history…

This regular Slog item began when the Weekly referred to The Stranger as “Seattle’s smaller weeklyâ€� in a news story about their then-rumored, now-transpired sale to what was then New Times and is now Village Voice Media. Once upon a time the Weekly was the bigger weekly, but in the last few years the Stranger overtook the Weekly. Today our page count is consistently higher than theirs, and this irritates the dopes, grandmas, and old hippies down on Western Avenue. On the flip side, all of us up here on Pine get irritated when the Weekly lies about their size relative to the Stranger—we also get annoyed when they lie about their relevance, influence, and sexual prowess, but we’ll let that go for now. Thing is, we worked our butts off to be Seattle’s bigger weekly paper, and I wasn’t going to let liars at Seattle’s smaller weekly paper get away with telling their big, fat fibs.

Now, this may be of little interest to anyone who isn’t employed at the Weekly or the Stranger. Yes, it’s inside baseball. And that’s why I’ve kept Seattle’s Smaller Weekly Watch out of the print edition of the paper. It’s always been here, where it belongs, because the infinite space the Internet provides is the perfect arena for settling scores and petty one-upmanship.

I neglected to post Seattle’s Smaller Weekly Watch last week, so this is a double-header. Let’s get to the numbers, and then I’ll explain why this is the last installment:

For the week of February 9-15, 2006:

Seattle Weekly: 92 pages.
The Stranger: 120 pages.

For the week of February 16-22, 2006:

Seattle Weekly: 80 pages.
The Stranger: 100 pages.

This week’s double-barreled installment is the final one because I’ve decided, after consulting with the refs, that it’s time to invoke the slaughter rule. We were 24 pages bigger than the Weekly last week; we’re 20 pages bigger than they are this week. The Weekly hasn’t done an 80 page paper in February since 1996. Seattle Smaller Weekly Watch had a nice run, but the point is made, and it’s time to retire it.

As word spreads that EMP will host the Star Trek 40th Anniversary “Celebration and Conference” this September, a number of fascinating details are coming to light. Bargain-minded Trekkies will want to snap up the $95 tickets, while true obsessives will have to shell out $995 for the V.I.P. treatment which includes reserved seats (within the first three rows), entry to the Friday Night Gala Celebration on top of the Space Needle (where the Klingon Band will be performing), and, um, a collectible badge and show program. Sorry kids, the $5,000 and $10,000 tickets apparently sold out months ago, according to EMP publicist Christian Quilicci. What, pray tell, would a $10,000 ticket entitle one to? A circle jerk with William Shatner, perhaps? Be afraid Cienna, be very afraid.

The presence of both smoking and non-smoking venues and a commitment to preserving historical architecture are sufficient reasons to embrace our southern sister, but enough good things cannot be said about Portland’s strip club culture. I’ve always had a fondness for the silicone-free vixens and splendid soundtrack found at the Magic Gardens, but rumor has it that Devil’s Point is even more delightful, thanks to the bonus of live rock shows. Now I have the perfect impetus to check it out for myself: Stranger Big Shot nominees the Emergency are playing there on March 25th.

I love me some Mormons, and I love me some Mormon movies, and I really really love LDSfilm.com, which allows me to track both so-called “Mollywood” movies and mainstream fare that happens to feature Mormons in leading roles. Mormons, if you weren’t already aware, are statistically more likely to be hot blonds. (Hot blonds who believe in crazytalk, true, but hey—you’re not dating them, you’re just watching them run around Antarctica in Polartec. Errr.)

Now for some things you can either learn or extrapolate from LDSfilm.com.

1) The upcoming film Thank You for Smoking contains possibly the first-ever on-screen coitus involving a Mormon and a Scientologist. (I learned this while “researching” for my interview with director Jason Reitman this morning.)

2) Brokeback Mountain, which was booted off the schedule of a Utah theater owned by Utah Jazz owner Larry Miller, stars a wholesome Mormon girl by the name of Anne Hathaway. (She’s also the worst actor in the movie—is there some axis of evil that stretches between Mormonism, hotness, and minimal acting talent?)

3) There is a movie entitled Vampire Chicks with Chainsaws. I can do no further justice to this movie than has not already been done by LDSfilm.com:

Imagine a horror film with no swearing, sex, or nudity. Vampire Chicks fills that bill. However, it is NOT for kids. It is a horror film with chainsaws, vampires, and aliens, so it does contain some violence. This feature length film stars Adam Abram (“The Collectorsâ€�), Sarah Bell (“Familiar Spiritsâ€�), RaeAnn Christensen (“Take a Chanceâ€�), Oleysa Rulin (“Mobsters and Mormonsâ€�), Jamie Rosquist, and Jenna Linsonbee. Directed by Carlos Don Diego. All the myths about vampires are just that. Crosses, holy water, garlic—they do absolutely nothing! The only thing that can kill a vampire has been injected into Quinn, a rough and rugged hillbilly with a chip on his shoulder. Now he is wanted by both vampires and those who want to destroy them. Quinn’s only hope of survival is Karel, a renegade vampire warrior who does the unthinkable—she falls in love with him.

[Names in bold are Latter-Day Saints.]

Two minutes ago, Charles Mudede misspoke, and then said: “I want to shoot myself in the foot.”

And then Dave Segal said, “Why don’t you put your foot in your mouth and then shoot it?”

(PS to all you Ace of Base fans: I’m now playing “The Sign” at full volume in the office.)

I hate when this happens.

Wendy Wasserstein (she won the Pulitzer Prize for her play The Heidi Chronicles) is dead. She died last month, at the age of 55, of lymphoma. It was in all the newspapers.

Yesterday in the mail I got an advanced press copy of her new book, a novel called Elements of Style, its cover designed to look like a present wrapped up in a bow, and on the back it says, “Wendy Wasserstein’s first foray into fiction—and what a debut!” followed by her bio, which ends, “She lives in New York City with her daughter, Lucy Jane,” and then, below that, in the publicity information box, it says: “10-City Author Tour: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington D.C.” God.

This also happened last year when John Gregory Dunne died before his publisher sent out galleys of his latest novel, which also promised an author tour, and I kept thinking about John Gregory Dunne’s corpse being shipped around the country on a continent-spanning bookstore/radio show tour. I mean, what the hell? How much do galleys cost a publisher? Would it kill them to print new ones? (Pardon the expression.)

I walk to work pretty much every day, and I pass twenty or so newspaper boxes along the way, so frequently the headlines stick in my head, like a bad Ace of Base song. Today’s particularly heinous offender is the quote from Dick Cheney, on the front page of the P.I., where he refers to shooting a lawyer in the fucking face as (emphasis mine): “…one of the worst days of my life.”
One of the worst days? Frankly, if I shot a friend and acquaintance in the fucking face, that’d probably be my worst day right there. And I’m thinking, for a draft-dodgin’ (sorry, other prioritizin’), millionaire-by-Halliburtonin’, vice presidentin’, catbird-seatin’ kind of guy like Dick is, what could the worst day of his life be? I’ve narrowed it down to three options:

1. When his daughter came out of the closet.

2. When he accidentally fisted that virgin to death, during the Secret Masonic Initiation Ceremony.

3. When he got blotto two weeks ago and had the face of Mohammed tattooed on his ass.

And, honestly, though, if he was drunk when he shot that guy in the fucking face, would somebody please send the motherfucker to jail? Please?

Does the bad of fried negate all the good of tofu?

Get your vote in for the Stranger’s Annual Big Shot competition!

13 artists are on this year’s ballot—Bats of Belfry, Sera Cahoone, Common Market, Diminished Men, the Emergency, Girth, DK Sawka, Panda & Angel, The Pharmacy, Romance, Speaker Speaker, Tennis Pro, and Unnatural Helpers. (If you’re not familiar with the bands, you can read about them and download MP3s here.)

Pick your favorite, print a ballot, and then cast your vote by taking your ballot to your favorite record store on the list of participating locations. It’s that easy! The top four bands will play the Bigshot Showcase at Neumo’s on March 11th, where the winning band will be announced and showered with prizes including free studio time, a slot at this year’s Capitol Hill Block Party, an appearance on 107.7 The End, a wad of cash, and more!

All the details can be found here, www.thestranger.com/bigshot, and the polls close this Sunday night (Feb 19th). Vote now!

Yeah, Apolo Ohno’s the Seattle homeboy and God knows he’s got some visual appeal to the gay viewership, but this media lovefest has gotten out of hand.

Everyone knows about the dubious circumstances surrounding his gold medal win at the 2001 Olympics, when Ohno threw a tantrum on the ice over an alleged foul, resulting in a sympathetic judge disqualifying the race’s winner, a South Korean.

Today’s Seattle Times prints a column celebrating the “zen-like focus of the soul-patched one” and congratulates Ohno for being not just a world-class individual athlete but also a fabulous teammate.

Quite true, but only to certain members of his team. Few remember the other Ohno controversy, which happened just a few weeks before his gold medal, at those U.S. Olympic Trials. Ohno had already made the team, but his close friend Shani Davis, needed to win the event’s last race to qualify for the team. Davis was an underdog. Here is an article that tells the story of that race from the perspective of one member of the team, Adam Riedy.

Continue reading "Ohno Overdose" »

I left out a key piece of info when I announced this a couple of days ago.

The Ken Hutcherson Vs. Ron Sims Debate will be at 7:30pm.

That’s 7:30pm at Town Hall on Thursday, March 2.

And it’s $5. We set this up last minute with Town Hall and all the money is going to Town Hall to cover the costs of putting on the event.

The opening sentence of this report says it all: “Iranians love Danish pastries, but when they look for the flaky dessert at the bakery they now have to ask for ‘Roses of the Prophet Muhammad.’”

For those of you who find certain aspects of Myspace as ridiculous as I do…

Myspace the Movie.

According to BBCNews, US kids might soon have access to an avian flu vaccination because they are (small, cute) germ factories with a penchant for licking anything that moves.

Scientists in St Louis want to test the vaccine, made from an inert form of the potentially lethal H5N1 virus, on 120 children aged between two and nine.

So if all goes well, kiddies will soon be able to cough, shake hands, even kiss chickens and then engage in consensual sex amongst themselves without fear of the bird flu striking them dead.

The World Health Organization, meanwhile, is encouraging everyone else to buy face masks and start bumping elbows to stay healthy. Why elbows? Because hands are like animated germ mitts, and people should be keeping that shit to themselves with the threat of an epidemic approacing (I’m paraphrasing). Alas, hand jobs will also soon be taboo unless you are under the age of nine.

This means, sadly, that two of my favorite forms of physical expression—the high-five and face-slap—are on the brink of going out of style.

There was a weird moment in Team Nickels’s Fire Levy briefing to council earlier this week when Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis began on a supposedly contrite note. (Obviously, there’s something to be contrite about here because the fire levy that voters approved in 2003 is 40% over budget—or $67 million over. And now, the mayor’s office is asking council to cover the overrun.)

But Ceis’s “apology” (“yes, there are significant overruns”) was coupled with an accusation. Basically, Ceis’s acknowledgment that the levy got fucked up was couched in a statement of pseudo collegiality that actually laid the blame on council. He said the lesson here is that the Mayor and the Council should work better together at the outset of major capitol projects to set a realistic budgets. The underhanded message: This was all the council’s fault for low-balling the fire levy.

As Ceis had it: The Mayor’s original fire levy proposal had been more expensive (that is: more realistic) and in trimming it down for voters back in 2003, the council had created an untenable situation where costs were obviously going to balloon…and well, here we are facing sticker shock.

This is obviously ridiculous. To lower the costs back in 2003, the Council wisely cut out specific items—like a gym. So, the fire levy that voters approved included that trimmed down, fixed set of items. It’s those items—items that were also part of the mayor’s original proposal—that have ballooned. It was the mayor’s office that low-balled those items, miscalculating inflation and, DUH!—budgeting for suburban rather than urban fire houses. (Um, somebody on the mayor’s team is not ready for prime time.) Insinuating that the Council set the levy up for failure because they cut stuff out—stuff that now has nothing to do with the cost increase—is just plain weird.

The blame here lies squarely with Team Nickels. Ceis’s attempt to blame the Council was super arrogant and perhaps a sign of things to come when he blames the council for the coming Viaduct tunnel overruns.

Our Up & Comings section was so jam-packed this week that we didn’t have room to write about the Turn-Ons record release party. Silly us—we should have shoe-horned it in there somehow. Tonight they unveil their third and finest record, Parallels, at Neumo’s. Released on their own Childstar record label, Parallels is a gorgeous sprawl of articulate, glam-flavored pop that shimmers with their trademark harmonics and an enchanting Anglophile edge. Pleasing production values are courtesy of Brooklyn tastemaker Paul Mahajan, the wizard behind the Yeah Yeah Yeahs debut who the band met on their trip to NYC a couple of years ago. I swear this is one of Seattle’s most criminally overlooked bands.

Our mailbag is close to bursting with letters responding to last week’s Stranger and the Muhammad cartoon controversy. All of them are now online for those of you who can’t get enough of the issue. Gorge yourself (but be warned that these letters are unedited).

The government responds to terrorists by creating more of them, but WWAD (what would artists do)? Well, a bunch of artists organized by Paul Thomas of the TAR ART RAT Foundation for the Continuation of Humanity are making antiterrorism propaganda for a show opening April 6 at the OK Hotel in Pioneer Square. The inspiration, according to Thomas, is the official government antiterrorism preparedness training and certification web site. For more info, email TARARTRAT@gmail.com.

Could be a good show, or not. But it does stir a fond memory of mine. A couple years ago, when The News Tribune in Tacoma was sending me and photographer Janet Jensen over to Afghanistan to write about the forgotten zone there, we had to go through a required briefing with some brass on the McChord AFB in Lakewood. They made us wait for a half hour in a holding room, and then ushered us into an even more secure room, where they told us they were sharing low-level classified information that could safeguard our lives. I thought they were going to say, bin Laden’s guys hang out on the corner of Main Street and Muhammed Avenue, so do your interviews somewhere else. But instead, they had a more devious plan: If anyone in Kandahar asks where you’re from, they said, say Canada.

That was their official advice. Then we were dismissed.

It’s illegal to publicly wish for Bush’s death, but is it illegal to enact the president’s disembowelment by hungry zombies? “Um, I don’t know,â€� said Cleozombie, organizer for the zombie-political-street theater group Dead Awake. “I think it’ll be goofy enough to show we’re not a threat.â€�

Cleozombie and her undead pals will gore up their meal—this Monday at Westlake between 2:00 and 3:30—with Jell-o innards, pantyhose intestines, and fake blood.

Important facts: Cleo’s favorite zombie movie is Land of the Dead by George Romero (“but I also really like Sean of the Dead). She is a pacifist who likes horror movies (“but sometimes I close my eyes.â€�) She isn’t into Bush-bashing (“I don’t blame him—he’s an idiot—I blame the whole administrationâ€�) but thinks the visual of the prez being eaten alive by 20 zombies is too good to pass up.

And, like our news editor Josh Feit, Cleo thinks zombies are a rich metaphor.

Cleo: “Zombies represent the oppressed that eventually rise up and threaten a society.â€�

Josh: “1968’s Night of the Living Dead is an incredible distillation of the Vietnam television war, Birmingham, Chicago ‘68. It’s a complex metaphor that leaves us with contradictory questions, but we know that the zombies are us, and Night of the Living Dead is 1968… I could talk about this for hours.” (It’s true.)

“People who don’t get involved in politics are dangerous,â€� Cleozombie said. “Like zombies.â€�

But who would win a relative-danger contest? A politically disengaged person or a zombie?

“A zombie, I guess.â€�

And more dangerous to the president?

“A zombie. Definitely.”

From Brandweek:

DALLAS — The Bush administration spent $1.4 billion in taxpayer dollars on 137 contracts with advertising agencies over the past two-and-a-half years, according to a Government Accountability Office report released by House Democrats Monday.

With spending on public relations and other media included, federal agencies spent $1.6 billion on what some Democrats called “spin.”

The six largest recipients of ad and PR dollars were Leo Burnett USA, $536 million; Campbell-Ewald, $194 million; GSD&M, $179 million; JWT, $148 million; Frankel, $133 million; and Ketchum, $78 million. The agencies received more than $1.2 billion in media contracts, according to the report.

What does all that dough buy you? An approval rating in the high-30’s. To be fair, though, defending things like a VP shooting octogenarians in the face can be a tad expensive.

Sure, it’s got elevated rapid transit, two pro-baseball teams (including the World Series champs), it gets shit done—like build a huge new park in the middle of downtown—instead talking shit to death, and the city doesn’t collapse in a puddle of tears every time there’s a piddling little riot.

Today’s news, though, brought another good reason to love Chicago, my home town…

Thanks but no thanks.

That’s Chicago’s answer to an invitation to submit a bid to host the 2008 Republican National Convention.

The Republican National Committee said yesterday that Chicago and 30 other cities were selected to submit bids explaining why they’d be a good choice to host the 2008 convention.

But a spokeswoman for Mayor Richard Daley says City Hall isn’t interested.

Hey, Greg Nickels: You want to be Seattle’s Mayor Daley, but you fucked your city out of rapid transit, which a Daley would never do. Here’s a chance to redeem yourself, if only a little: If Seattle is one the other twenty-nine thirty asked to submit a bid to host the Rs in 2008, act like a Daley and tell the Rs to fuck off. Come on! Act like a big city mayor for once!

Check out this AP story, which finds that marijuana is now Washington State’s 8th most valuable agricultural product, ahead of our famed cherries.

SPOKANE — Law enforcement officers harvested a dubious record last year: enough marijuana plants to rank the illegal weed as Washington state’s No. 8 agricultural commodity, edging sweet cherries in value.

The 135,323 marijuana plants seized in 2005 were estimated to be worth $270 million — a record amount that places the crop among the state’s top 10 agricultural commodities, based on the most recent statistics available.

And that’s just the weed that law enforcement seized.

But is it really that “dubious” a harvest? Imagine if marijuana were legalized in Washington and, like alcohol, its production and distribution was strictly taxed and regulated. Our huge annual marijuana harvest would mean a lot of potential tax revenue for a state that’s always complaining it doesn’t have enough to go around.

…but only in Massachusetts, not nation-wide. Via Americablog:

Wal-Mart pharmacies in Massachusetts must carry emergency contraception pills, the state’s pharmacy board has ruled.Wal-Mart has until Thursday to comply with the ruling…. The drug, which is commonly referred to as the “morning after pill,” or “Plan B,” must be taken 72 hours after sex to prevent pregnancy.

Wal-Mart currently only carries the pill at its Illinois stores, where it is required under state regulations.

I guess this means that Wal-Mart doesn’t carry the morning after pill in Washington State. Is NARAL or somebody working on a way to force Wal-Mart to sell the drug in its Washington state stores? We should try to become the third state to force Wal-Mart to do the right thing.

With Alito on the Supreme Court, and abortion rights slipping away, it’s increasingly important that women have access to emergency contraception.

Josh Feit just told me that this line in my last post on Mike Davis (“Here is one of the many passages that blew my fucking mind this morning”) does not sound like me in the least. I agree, it doesn’t sound like me, and I have no idea why expressed myself in a way that is not myself in sound. Nothing ever blows my fucking mind. I’m not that type of guy. To restore order to the universe, the delicate system of which has been disturbed by my unexpected turn of mind, I offer this adjustment: “Here is one of the many passages that swept me off my feet this morning.” I believe that sounds much more like me.

For those of you who loved this memorable Stranger cover (May 26, 2005), Roq la Rue is offering limited edition Giclee prints, signed and numbered by Lori Earley.

Check it out here.

Mike Davis has done it again! His new book Planet of Slums is awesome—in the root sense of that word. (I’m not sure if it’s out yet—I’m reading a review copy.) So far (I’ve read half of it), the book stands as the most important Marxist critique of globalisation since Empire (by Negri and Hardt, 1999). Here is one of the many passages that blew my fucking mind this morning:

“..Any realistic hope for the mitigation of Africa’s urban poverty has faded from the official horizon. At the annual meeting of the IMF and World Bank in October 2004, Gordon Brown, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and hair apparent to Tony Blair, observed that the UN’s Millennium Development Goals for Africa, originally projected to be achieved by 2015, would not be attained for generations: “Sub-Saharan Africa will not achieve universal primary education until 2130, a 50 percent reduction in poverty in 2150, and the elimination of avoidable infant deaths until 2165.” By 2015 Black Africa will have 332 million slum-dwellers, a number that will continue to double every fifteen years.

Black Africa equals Trouble Everyday

In this morning’s mail…

The 15th of february 2006, SBS a national Australian TV showed horrible images of the torture made by US soldier at Abu Ghraib. Those pictures are now largely published around the world. (At least I’ve seen them in the biggest European Newspapers, Algerian and Maroccan Newspaper, Al Jazeera, and so on…) Those pictures are forbiden in the US!!!

Since the Stranger have been so brave lately and published the cartoon depicting Mohamed, will you be brave enough too, to publish those pictures? Will you carry on standing for freedom of press?

Here are some links :

nhttp://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3218,36-741969@51-740895,0.html
http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=359637

Best regards
Houria

Thanks the note, Houria, but you’re incorrect about these pictures being somehow forbidden in the United States. They were all over television and the papers when the Abu Ghraib story first broke (an American television network broke the story), and these new pictures are all over the place now—they’ve been shown on CNN, in the Washington Post, one was in today’s New York Times, and they’re cropping up in other places. We’ll put one on our website, if you like:

These images pissed off a lot of Americans, particularly conservatives, just as the Mohammed cartoons pissed off a lot of Muslims. And they were published regardless. And it has to be said, Houria: there were no riots, no death threats, no deaths, no burning buildings. So the damning point you think you’re making—that Americans are hypocrites because we’re not publishing these outrageous photos—is doubly faulty. The pictures have, in fact, been published here, and people who were pissed about it—and some people were very, very pissed—tolerated their publication. Some Americans were outraged that when the pictures were published (decent Americans are more outraged by the torture), and they may think they’re offensive and harmful to the war effort, but no one called for the “trial and punishmentâ€� of the editors at the papers that printed them and television networks that showed them.

Finally, it seems that you’re a new reader of the paper. As that’s the case, you probably missed this cover:

Project Runway is on in six hours, and—horrors—I’m in Portland, staying at a hotel that does NOT have Bravo! Oh, the humanity!

Who will be out? Kara, finally? Santino, deservedly? Chloe, inconceivably? Daniel V., over my dead bodily?

I will not be watching, and, as a result, I may die. You, however, may discuss.

UPDATE: Okay, bitches! Who’s out? I missed the whole damn show, and I’m bitter about it. I’m not going to read the comments, but I don’t see how I can avoid hearing the news before i can catch a repeat tomorrow. Argh!

When you write some short story-poems and you superimpose them on silent videos of landscapes, and even if you house the video screens in elaborately crafted plywood cases shaped like blue US mailboxes laid on their bellies, and you put each box on one level of a stair platform, it’s still not an art installation. It’s a poem with a picturesque moving backdrop. Don’t try to fool me. So say I to you, Hugo House, where today I visited your “art installationâ€� called The Eight Essential Ingredients, of which the above sculpturish hoo-haw is the main component.

In other art haps, Seattle U’s new Lee Center for the Arts opened Tuesday. It’s mostly a theater building (what’s with art stuff that’s mostly something else this week?), but it has a gallery fronting 12th Avenue, curated by Carrie E.A. Scott, a writer for The Stranger, who said she plans to devote the space to Seattle artists, especially in solo shows where the artists can interact with the gallery’s particular dimensions and conditions as a street presence.

The first show, though, is a simple thank-you to benefactors of the center who are also collectors. On display are six artworks grouped under the heading Collecting Drama, including Cindy Sherman’s 1995 closeup of herself as a glam spacebot (below), last seen at Western Bridge and owned by Bill and Ruth True; Marc Chagall’s stick-in-the-sand 1973 lithograph “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” from the collection of Ellsworth and Nancy Alvord; and one work each by Kenneth Callahan, Robert Rauschenberg, and Anthony Quinn.

Are there better uses of Key Arena for the City?

Average Revenue per Sonics Game to the City: $28K
Average Cost per Sonics Game to the City: $23K
Net Gain to the City: $5K

Average Revenue per Key Arena Concert to the city: $95K
Average cost per Key Arena Concert to the City: $39K
Net Gain to the City: $56K

Source: City Council Study