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Sherman Alexie, novelist, poet, lives in Seattle: “I’ve been thinking and talking about him a ton in the last month or so, because my new novel is directly influenced by Slaughterhouse-Five and I’ve been getting some scathing reviews. My publisher, Morgan Entrekin, was giving me a pep talk yesterday and he mentioned that Slaughterhouse was savaged upon publication (I hadn’t known that Morgan, as a young pup, edited Slaughterhouse), that Vonnegut’s mix of sci-fi time travel and moralism was pummeled. So I looked up the New York Times Book Review of Slaughterhouse-Five and was stunned by its absolute condescension. And I thought, ‘Jeez, if Slaughterhouse-Five can be treated that way, then my own meager novel has no chance.’ So I was feeling, if not vindicated, then at least relieved. And then, this morning, I walked down the stairs to my wife’s stunned expression. ‘Kurt Vonnegut died today,’ she said. I mean, jeez, every conversation in my house for 10 days has revolved around Vonnegut and now this. I was sad for the man, for his friends and family (I’d never met him), and sad for the literary world. What I will miss in his ability to laugh at everything, to mock all conventions, and most tellingly, to see the madness in both sides of any conflict, any war. I know we certainly need a Vonnegut novel to explain Iraq, and we won’t get it. A fucking madman suicide bomber just exploded the Iraqi parliment, and I thought, ‘And so it goes.’ In my imaginary graveyard, Vonnegut’s tombstone reads, ‘And so it goes.’ I mean, for the first half-dozen books of his career, Vonnegut was ignored. Then he was a huge figure for around 15 years, and then he was ignored again. We should have never let him go… I’ll never let him go… Man, he lived a great and painful and long and glorious life. Good for him. Good for us. And let us keep talking about him for weeks. Let’s sing a thousand songs to mark his passing.”

Jonathan Raban, novelist, political and cultural critic, lives in Seattle: “Breakfasting at a town in Utah named Hurricane. Unrepentant chain smokers who die at 84 deserve a toast, and I hereby raise a glass of Laphroaig to Vonnegut’s memory, and I’d light up a cigar if we weren’t stuck in a non-smoking room in Eureka, NV right now. Nevada/Arizona have amazingly powerful NPR stations that seem to reach everywhere, and this afternoon I was driving through snow over sagebrush red desert when I picked up Vonnegut reading—a little haltingly, and very touchingly—from Slaughterhouse-Five. Wished that [my daughter] Julia had heard of—let alone actually read—him.”

George Saunders, fiction writer, lives in upstate New York: “Just sitting right here at this computer. Very sad, very proud that we had such a great writer at all, you know? He was The Man, for sure.”

Sarah Vowell, author, NPR star, lives in New York: “Talking on the phone after a flight from Pittsburgh. Those are always the best deaths—the ones of oldsters who had a good run and left behind things to be proud of.”

More responses from other writers and artists here and here.

You know all those abstinence education programs we’re funding with our tax dollars (87 million of them)? And you know how the Bush Administration says teaching abstinence is the most effective way to prevent kids from having sex? To the point that real, medically accurate sex ed is pretty much verboten from coast to coast? Well, the numbers came out today on how abstinence-only programs (like Washington State’s “No Sex, No Problems” campaign) are working out. The numbers speak for themselves, but here are some pretty pictures to illustrate them.

You’ll notice that both bars are basically identical in every graph. In other words, the programs made absolutely no difference. You could tell these kids their genitals would rot if they have sex and they’d still have sex. That’s because kids aren’t stupid—and they like having sex.

And from the report:

The study found that youth in the four evaluated programs were no more likely than youth not in the programs to have abstained from sex in the four to six years after they began participating in the study. Youth in both groups who reported having had sex also had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same average age.

We spend $87 million a year on these programs, and they have NO effect. Awfully quiet from the White House, isn’t it?

The controversy surrounding Karl Rove’s missing e-mails ballooned today when it was revealed that the White House may have deleted as many as 5 MILLION e-mails from their servers.

“We screwed up, and we’re trying to fix it,” said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.

The Democratic response:

“You can’t erase e-mails, not today,” said Leahy, D-Vermont. “They’ve gone through too many servers. They can’t say they’ve been lost. That’s like saying, ‘The dog ate my homework.’ ”

Leahy said the e-mails would have remained on party or campaign computer servers, and he compared the situation to the famous 18½-minute gap in one of the Watergate tapes.

Via CNN

Members of the state House were expected to vote today on a scaled-back version of the family leave bill, which would only give time off to bond with a new child (the earlier version would have allowed family leave to care for sick relatives, too) and which doesn’t include a specific funding source. The earlier bill would have funded the program with a two-cents-an-hour payroll tax. The new version would have the legislature convene a 12-member task force that would come back the following year with a funding proposal and a detailed outline of how the program would work.

Oh, and the amount of family leave (currently $250 a week) won’t be indexed to inflation—that measure got stripped out too.

Does it surprise you to learn that Gov. Christine “Process” Gregoire and House Speaker Frank “Consensus” Chopp both supported watering down the family-leave bill? It shouldn’t, because both Chopp and Gregoire wanted to send the bill to the voters, where it would face a certain multi-million-dollar campaign by businesses to kill it, followed by a likely death. What leadership.

The bill to protect Maury Island from strip mining— the bill that got stripped late last month thanks to some serious lobbying by mining company Glacier NW, needs to come up for one more vote today if it’s going to be amended back up to speed and/or at least pass the legislature in some form. (Today is the cut off for bills that passed one house earlier in the session to make it out of the other.)

It already passed the Senate back on March 6.

Activists who support the bill fear that the bill may just die in the House in the next hour.

Rep. Joe McDermott (D-34, West Seattle) has a series of amendments to strengthen the bill. I’ve got a call into McDermott to see where things are at as we tick toward 5 0’clock cut off.

UPDATE
Rep. Joe McDermott (D-34, West Seattle) just left a message on my voice mail (4:40pm) saying, “it’s a sad day for Puget Sound.” He says the Maury Island bill is dead.

The Republicans offered up 60 amendments “using the process to slow down the bill… to kill time” —and kill the bill.

McDermott explained that he and bill supporters Rep. Dave Upthegrove (D-33, Des Moines) and Rep. Eileen Cody (D-34, West Seattle) worked continually all week to get the bill to the floor, but “even if we stripped away some of the Republican amendments,” McDermott said, there still would have been enough—with amendment sponsors allowed three minutes each—to run interference.

“It’s extremely disappointing,” McDermott says.

Subject: protocol for munching my nuts

dear beloved co-workers,

god knows i don’t mind if you help yourselves my desk nuts and god knows i love when one of you munchers leaves a couple bucks for future nut purchases.

however, please don’t leave cash directly in a bag of nuts, as that’s kind of gross.

thank you,
david schmader

In the early morning hours of April 6th, Seattle Center security witnessed two individuals carry a “device” onto the campus, leaving it attached to a metal pole with a note.

Seattle Center, who cancelled its New Years Eve celebration in 1999 due to terrorism fears after Ahmed Ressam was caught with explosives while crossing into the US from Canada, called in Seattle’s Bomb Squad to deal with what the police report describes as “a collective of plastic, wires, paper, cardboard and metal tubing.” When police arrived at Seattle Center, they discovered the ‘item…buzzing and blinking [and] the surrounding area was secured with police tape,” while the bomb squad “took control of the scene.”

A one-page manifesto attached to the device read

Good morning, Seattle. It’s time to wake up. I watch you all. Every day. Watch you try and make sense of your wars, of your hatred…because [you don’t] fit with what the rest of the world expects them to be.

The manifesto continues, addressing what its writer believes to be the root of society’s ills: fear.

Fear, a great pulsing, beating heart that drives the human race’s blindness. A great pulsing, beating heart that – instead of the spark that’s inside all of you, instead of your common humanity and in that, DIVinity – connects each and every one of you. An organ of control that drives everything you do. This beating heart…right here. Take a look. A good look.

The bomb squad assessed that the device was “non harmful” and removed it for disposal.

You’d think the bomb squad showing up to the Seattle Center in the middle of the night would be big news, but none of the city’s papers have reported on the incident.

The Stranger contacted the device’s creators, who turned out to be a Bremerton couple who go by the names “Neo” and “Trinity.”

I met with the couple at a Capitol Hill coffee shop and asked about their connection to the Matrix film series. Neo and Trinity told me that they enjoyed the action in the Matrix films, “but they didn’t really accurately portray our lives”…and they were totally serious.

Sitting in the coffee shop, Neo—short and round faced, dressed in a torn black trenchcoat, hair dyed blue and eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses—said, “People are making the same mistake they did in Zion,” referencing his alleged past-life in The Matrix.

Neo believes “quantum reincarnation” has brought him to our world to open humanity’s eyes and save us from ourselves.

When asked about detractors on his website (currently down terrible) that have accused him of being an extremely dedicated role-player or a loon, Neo responds, “Technically you’re only crazy if you can’t function. I’d like to be able to roll a D-12 and forget the memory of being raped on the deck of The Logos,” referencing elements of The Matrix series Neo says were not accurately represented. Additionally, Neo and Trinity claim to run an international grassroots organization, with over 1200 members dedicated to their cause.

Neo’s device, which he claims to have seen in a vision, says his piece represents “the human race being connected and driven by the heart of fear.”

Stranger art critic Jen Graves stared at the photos of Neo’s device for a solid five minutes before declaring “It’s just terrible. There’s a million reasons why.”

I called Seattle Center to find out their take on the incident.
A public relations representative called it “a non-event.”

PS
I have some great pictures of “Neo” and “Trinity” that I took yesterday but I left my camera at home. I’ll update later today.

Google has reached an agreement to buy web ad behemoth DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in cash.

If that sounds like a lot of money, consider this: it’s about 1/5th as much as the U.S. Army has paid to Halliburton in no-bid contracts since 2001. I got that information from this website, which also features interesting drawings of how big different amounts of money are. I assume, of course, that their information is accurate.

You may not know DoubleClick, but they know you—likely a lot more about you than you’d like.

Getting RVNG: DJ Justine D’s creative mix.

Rock ‘N’ Roll Olympics: Episode two with Andrew WK (maybe) and Shane from the Divorce (really).

At the Bus Stop: Lil Jon in the morning.

R.I.P Joe Crawford: Memorial tomorrow afternoon.

Missed Her Train to Mars: So she’s outback downloading hard-to-find Hum songs.

New Blog: A love letter to Synopsis Elektronica.

BSE (TW): “Don’t Touch My Bikini” by the Halo Benders.

We Got the Beet: Ted Leo’s delicious dinner.

Hey Local Bands!: Enter to win a slot at Endfest!

Charlie Says: A 13-year-old reviews Pink Floyd.

Need a Name?: Bands, take note.

Also, did you know a baby bat is called a pup? Aww! Actually, it’s not cute. It’s kind of creepy…

First, the news.

Insider baseball: Chicago film critics throw a fit over studios’ manipulative screening practices.

Government scolds: The FTC released its report about marketing “torture porn” to young’uns.

Preemptive propaganda: Iran says it’s making a movie and a book out of the British hostage situation. (Via the IFC blog.)

Hearts aflutter: The Joe Wright adaptation of Atonement has a teaser. (Via the IFC blog.)

And a barrage of openings: In On Screen this week, Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters (gee, thanks, Borat), Perfect Stranger (Halle Berry annoys Megan Seling, and Bruce Willis scares her), Wild Tigers I Have Known (fashion, not film).

Okay, back to On Screen: Black Book (from the director of Showgirls: a Holocaust adventure movie that is “epic, old-fashioned, and genuinely moving”), Pathfinder (there are B-grade Viking epics, and then there are D-grade Viking epics), and the sturdy, sensitive, entirely unpronounceable Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams (it’s about Balkan rape babies).

Not yet reviewed, but available for your movie-times searching pleasure: the teenybopper Rear Window takeoff Disturbia, the automobile porn Redline, and the “urban” Usual Suspects ripoff Slow Burn.

In Limited Runs this week, accessible via Get Out: The very, very, actual last weekend of the brilliant locally produced documentary Iraq in Fragments; the loose, gorgeous bumpkin-in-the-big-city tale Entre la mer et l’eau douce; Sean Nelson’s favorite movie EVER, The Third Man; Three Dollar Bill’s very cool ’50s queer cinema series continues with the women’s prison drama Caged; and Pacific Place presents a previously recorded screening of Metropolitan Opera’s Eugene Onegin. And in SIFF Cinema’s lovely Janus series: Roman Polanski’s debut Knife in the Water, the Aussie outback drama Walkabout, Hitchcock’s slightly nutty The Lady Vanishes, and a couple by Kurosawa starting Wednesday and Thursday.

“Has anyone here ever been to Hooters?”

“Of course, I’m from Florida.”

Sometime around the turn of this century, what was then just a glimmer in the eyes of its founders—chiefly George and Jane Russell of the Russell Co. in Tacoma—came to be called the Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art.

And a great groan spread throughout the land.

The museums would be the Henry, the Frye, SAM, BAM, TAM, and MOG: ICCA.

And after the first wave of dread passed, and shoulders had shrugged themselves tired over whether MoG or MOG was correct, why, people started wondering just what was the epistemology of that little old colon. Was this a “Museum of Glass” or an “International Center for Contemporary Art”?

Considering the split between the world of studio glass and mainstream contemporary art, this division took on meaning inside and outside the museum, and ultimately confused the hell out of just about everybody who wondered where, anyway, was the Chihuly? (Dale Chihuly visited the museum to work in its hotshop approximately once a year, but there was no permanent display of his work—that display was over at the Tacoma Art Museum, further confusing things. Chihuly, in fact, is not involved in the glass museum. Further complicating matters, the City of Tacoma, not the museum, owns the Chihuly Bridge of Glass leading from downtown to the museum. And yet plenty of people still persist in calling it the Chihuly Museum—maybe because their eyes glazed over at the prospect of deciding between MoG: ICCA and MOG:ICCA?)

In any case, a new day has dawned. A day of nomenclatural clarity, at the very least. I can only imagine that the whole of Tacoma—where the Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art was and continues to be the largest arts organization hands down—will breathe a sigh of relief to hear it.

The glass museum will now be called the Museum of Glass.

No more colon.

No more “international center” of anything, let alone contemporary art. (Did anyone ever hear of a name so provincial and depressing?)

This, I imagine, does not mean that contemporary art from around the world will not be seen in the museum. But I presume that when it appears, it will have something, at least marginally, to do with glass.

The board also approved a new, streamlined mission: The Museum of Glass provides a dynamic learning environment to appreciate the medium of glass through creative experiences, collections and exhibitions.

I should give the place a visit. Haven’t been there in a while.

In any case, the Unbearable Length of Museum Name is dead, and maybe the Unbearable Confusion of Museum Mission is, too.

To pin things down even more, the museum specifies in its press release that MOG, with all caps, is the preferred acronym.

After five years open, the museum finally has a legible name on its birth certificate. Long live clarity!

Thanks to all the helpful commenters who weighed in on the plight of my pigeon.

Joe suggested it could be a reincarnated spirit, and pointed me to this lovely New Yorker piece about a pigeon that, for a time, came daily into a Burmese restaurant on the Upper West Side, walked down some stairs to its favorite landing, and took a nap. The Buddhist waiters at the restaurant believed the pigeon might have been the place’s former owner.

Tenspeed suggested I enlist the help of a Pelican:

Keshmeshi warned that sometimes well-fed pigeons attract much bigger pigeons.

And Lloyd Clydesdale told me to call PAWS already.

Which I did.

The PAWS people discouraged me from leaving a nonflying pigeon on the streets to fend for itself, which had been one of my plans. They basically suggested that if I abandoned my pigeon (a bird I never asked for, by the way) I would probably become complicit in this poor creature subsequently getting mauled by a dog, hit by a car, scratched by a cat, or tormented by “mean humans.” They got to me with those images. Once I could envision the chain of events I might set in motion by releasing an injured rat-with-wings into the wild city, I couldn’t live with the thought.

So I agreed to take the bird down to the Seattle Animal Shelter, where the PAWS people swoop through each day and pick up certain animals that they then rehabilitate up at their Lynwood facility (my pigeon, I was told, would be one of the PAWS picks).

The PAWS media representative wrote me:

Thanks for showing compassion toward urban wildlife.

And so I headed home to box up the pigeon and take it down to the animal shelter. But when I arrived the deck was empty again. The pigeon had disappeared, leaving nothing behind but uneaten bread and bird droppings.

Was it just toying with me earlier this morning when it showed me it was unable to fly away? Did it simply require a little more rest? At this point, I like Joe’s reincarnated spirit theory best.

Via Fleshbot.

Here are two teasers from last night’s Gong Show! A longer edit, with all the contestants, coming soon….

Patricia Douglas for President!

As a boxer, “Iron Mike” Tyson was known for pulverising his opponents with his power rather than dazzling them with his agility. Now Bollywood wants to develop his rather leaden footwork by casting him in a new action film later this month.

The Mumbai film producer Firoz Nadiadwala, whose last movie Phir Hera Pheri - More Fraud - was a big hit in India, is lining up Tyson for a dance sequence in his upcoming film Fool-n-Final.

The only way this could get better is if it included a guest spot on Dancing With the Stars.

Full story (via Guardian Unlimited) can be found here.

Thanks to Matt Garman for the tip.

Check out the title of this press release from the Kitsap Board of Commissioners.

You walk into a bar again and again for five years, sit in the same booth a hundred times, and then you look up one day and see something on the wall…

…and you ask your drinking buddies, “When did they hang that thing up there?” And your drinking buddies look at you like you’re crazy and say, “That’s been there since the bar opened.”

How does that happen?

This Wednesday afternoon, I was at the Seattle Center, working on another story, but there were a bunch of kids and parents milling around on the grass. There were booths teaching lessons in “financial literacy” for kids—how to save, how to budget, that charitable donations are good. Moonjar was there. And Jumpstart.

The most popular station, by far, was “Financial Windfall,” a clear box the size of a telephone booth filled with real money and a fan. Kids got in, the fan turned on, blowing the bills everywhere, and they grabbed what they could. And kept what they grabbed. One volunteer said that that morning, the booth started with $2,500. I passed a clutch of little kids on the grass, counting out their stack: “fifty-six, fifty-seven, fifty-eight…”

The saddest part—even sadder than me being kind of broke that day and envying the seven-year-olds and their stacks in the grass, even sadder than the hobos milling around—was a father who obviously cared about the financial windfall more than his kids did. He kept pushing them through the crowd, saying, “We’ve got to stay focused, team! Let’s go get some money!”

They looked embarrassed. I was embarrassed for them.

What a way to commemorate the launching of the Washington quarter.

This arrived just now, April 13, at 1:38 pm:

SLOG TIP: Kurt Vonnegut is dead.

You can buy this madeleine for a buck at All City Coffee, Pioneer Square.

The main reason why madeleine’s are easy to find in Seattle is Remembrance of Things Past. A bite of the petite sweet opens one of the longest and greatest novels of the 20th century.

She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place…

Jen took a bite but was not inspired to write a very long novel about how she became herself, an art critic. She was even not happy to bite the madeleine. It seemed like a waste of time to her. Indeed, the world of the madeleine has left us for good. Like some temple artifact that has survived its age of meaning at the total price of its religious power, the madeleine has survived its age at the sad price of persisting in a world that is dead to the novel.

…and it featured a whole bunch of gongs.

Thanks to everybody who came out last night to the Crocodile for the first-ever Stranger Gong Show, which was an effin’ blast. Extra-special thanks tinged with non-denominational worship for every single one of our brave and generous contestants—from the filthy-joke-spewing Easter Bunny to the unjustly gonged chicken-themed performance artist and everyone in-between—without whom the night never could’ve been what it was: a tornado of wonderfully talented freaks.

Among the surprises: the ferocity of the judges (who gonged a good half of the acts), the corresponding ferocity of the audience (who seemed to be taking their cues from Showtime at the Apollo), and the eternal surprise instigated by the question, “Do you have a talent you’d like to share?”

Among the highlights (for me, at least): the insane and largely indescribable Doors-themed performance poem of the grand-prize-winning Lizard Queens, the jaw-dropping riding-a-unicycle-on-a-tightwire-while-making-balloon-animals skills of Alooishus Von Bootcrack, and, my personal favorite, the young Ms. Patricia Douglas, who channeled the spirit of the original Gong Show’s legendary Gene Gene the Dancing Machine by kicking off her shoes and doing a full-on, this-is-how-I-dance-when-I’m-alone-in-my-bedroom blowout to Sheila E’s “The Glamorous Life.”

Ultimate highlight: The aforementioned ferocious passion displayed by both judges and audience, which created a vibe wisely identified by Stranger Gong Show mastermind Caroline Dodge as “totally un-Seattle.” It’s true: the points-for-trying condescension frequently displayed by Seattle audiences was nowhere to be found, or at least it was easily shouted down. And the passion ran in all directions: Yeah, lame acts were promptly gonged, but mind-blowing acts were treated to the type on long, hard, lusty screaming applause typically reserved for stadium rock stars. It was delightful, thanks again to all who came, and I imagine we’ll be doing this again sometime. We’ll keep you posted.

P.S. In case you haven’t already heard, Fnarf wore a suit and put quarters up his nose. It was entrancing.

Photos by Kelly O.

I loved your answer to HELP, the person who’s roommate is into BDSM porn. You actually helped me realize something about my own porn proclivities. Like any decent, upstanding, patriotic American, I like a little light bondage but I’d never been particularly interested in anything too hardcore or complex, usually finding it kind of silly. However, I just recently started looking into some BDSM porn sites and was surprised to find how much I enjoyed it. I think you put your finger on two reasons why. 1: Almost without exception, the models on BDSM sites are clearly actually getting off. That almost never seems to be the case with regular porn. While my suspension of pornographic disbelief is often enough to make even the most rote, passionless sex seem real enough to get the job done, there’s nothing like the real thing to get me really turned on.

2: All of the BDSM sites I have happened to check out bend over backwards (pardon the pun) to show that the sex is consensual. There’s always the conspicuously posted consent documentation you find on a lot of sites, but I often find that they’ll do things like show “after” footage of the models hanging out with their tormentors proving not only that it was consensual but also talking about how much they got into it.

I find that regular porn is often ironically far more degrading to women in general than the BDSM stuff I’m seeing. A lot of the time when I’m watching regular porn, there’s an underlying conflict going on in my feminist head as I imagine the circumstances that drove the poor model into the porn industry. I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions and I may even be deluding myself but I’d go as far as to say that the BDSM porn I’ve seen is somehow empowering for the models. Sure, the sex is degrading but it’s clearly a fantasy acted out under established and very protective circumstances that respect the boundaries and rights of the people involved. To me that’s hot.

Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing

Well, it’s Friday, so I’m thinking LAUGH and then DRINK whilst jamming on some SEXY-FUNKY BEATS (DJ Freakazoid,presiding).

What are YOU gonna do?

So I wake up this morning and there’s a pigeon walking around on my deck. It won’t fly away when I try scare tactics. It flaps around, but can’t seem to achieve liftoff. It looks tired, perhaps injured. I call Brendan.

I’m not feeling hugely sympathetic toward this creature. I’m also not feeling ready to put my fingers all over a flapping, possibly injured bird first thing in the morning. I want the pigeon gone. I want it to stop shitting all over the place. But I don’t want to get my hands dirty, so to speak. I’m a heartless wimp.

I figure Brendan will be both heartless and ready to get his hands dirty. I think: Perhaps he’ll make a lunch of it. You know: snap the pigeon’s neck, pluck off its feathers, garnish with a sprig of parsley.

Or, at the very least, I figure Brendan will be supportive of getting this nonflying pigeon off of my deck somehow—either by carrying it down to the street for me or by tossing it over the side and letting it sink or fly, so to speak.

Harsh, I know. But the urban jungle is harsh. What else am I going to do? Nurse it back to health?

This, it turns out, is exactly what Brendan recommends. This man, who once stalked 12th Avenue in search of pigeon prey, now tells me to fetch a cardboard box and some breadcrumbs so that he can make a nest for my weakly flapping house guest.

How could I not comply? The urban hunter was more sympathetic than I was. I felt ashamed.

The pigeon gets 24 hours.

(Cross posted)

From Manohla Dargis’s review of Year of the Dog (which opens in Seattle next week):

What gets everything moving, including [the writer-director’s] somewhat sneakily or perhaps cautiously articulated intellectual interests (this is, after all, a studio-bankrolled comedy), is [the beagle] Pencil’s untimely death, which tears a hole in Peggy’s world and eventually her psyche. For Peggy, a woman who greets her beloved four-legged friend with a toothy smile that rivals the sun for warmth (Pencil shines right back), this isn’t the death of some adopted stray, one in a line of carelessly loved dumb beasts. It is a shock to the system, a life-altering tragedy, a terrible end that becomes—movingly, through one odd story kink after another—a radical new beginning.

Reader, she becomes a vegan.

Now, I am an ardent fan of the reigning queen of American film criticism. Especially that time she compared Santa’s bag of toys to a scrotum. This is a more general query.

Aren’t Jane Eyre paraphrases getting a bit tired? The, um, attempt at bathos (? I think that’s what’s happening here—“Reader, I married him” is this terse climax in the original; veganism is always good for a laugh) is overwhelmingly ridiculous. And it’s such a slutty phrase! As long as you start with “Reader,” pretty much anything goes—first to third person, slightly transgressive active verb to the flaccid “become.” And it’s everywhere. Unfortunately, Google won’t do caps-sensitive searches with commas, but trust me on this one. I’m sure I’ve done it myself.

Is it time for a moratorium on nonessential Charlotte Brontë paraphrases in criticism? Perhaps we can get with some Milton or George Eliot instead? “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”? “So spake the grisly Terror”? “Imagination is a licensed trespasser”? “Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities”? There must be a solution.

The Stranger Gong Show last night at the Crocodile was friggin’ hilarious. The over 30 acts were a mishmash of everything—earnest a cappella singers to freaky performance art to the Easter Bunny. The best acts had a definite shtick, even when their talents were questionable.

First prize—a giant package of tickets and gift certificates and $100—went to the fabulously entertaining Lizard Queens, “the Doors do performance-art spoken word” remembers judge Jonathan Zwickel. I thought people might fall over, they were laughing so hard during the act.

Some noteworthy also-rans: Fnarf putting 14 quarters up his nose, the slack-rope-unicycling balloon-animal tier, the “Glamorous Life” dancer, and the WTF?! woman regurgitating Twinkie bits for her rubber-chicken babies.

The audience was gustily participatory, both with the loving and hating, as well as freely expressing opinions on acts’ gong-worthiness. The judges were appropriately drunk and opinionated, throwing out one-liners and snap judgments. Host David Schmader kept things going, trying to keep bedlam at bay while soothing the hurt feeling of gonged-off participants, one of whom actually looked like he might hit someone.

Have no fear: Our video-production team is working on getting some video together for viewing soon.

Thanks to Kelly O for the photos!

Okay, make that 1.2 percent.

The feud continues. Weekly writer whines. Tim Harris of Real Change calls the whaaambulance.

On Wednesday I tossed something up on Slog about my reluctance to wash my hands in the toilets on airplanes. (You have to touch the sink, the spigots, the soap dispenser—ick! My dick, I figure, is the cleanest thing in an airplane bathroom.) In the comment thread attached to that post someone—not a Stranger staffer, a commenter—suggested that some of the other comments were posted in the thread were written by Weekly trolls. Which prompted My Two Cents to make this comment:

You don’t have to be a “Weakly troll” to be sick and tired of all of the petty rants against the Weekly and every other paper in town lately. Do they think that these posts will boost their circulation? Yeah, right. All I can do is scroll through the crap and look for something more interesting.

The slog used to be a really fun destination, but now we have to endure this juvenile turf war, compliments of the “cooler-than-you” Stranger staff. I think that’s why there are so many negative comments these days.

The Slog used to be fun, way, way back before we started beating up on the Weekly and every other paper in town. But… uh… we were beating up on the Weekly and other fine local publications before the Slog came along. To me the amount of Weekly-and-every-other-paper-in-town bashing on Slog seems pretty minimal. (And necessary, as I’ve written in previous posts.) We have unlimited space here and we could post rants about other papers ten times a day, every day, if we cared to. But we don’t care to. We post about them once in a while—and they post about us every once in a while too. (Hi, Mike!) But is it really excessive? Or is this just a case of “why can’t we all get along” pansy-asses and Weekly trolls lurking in our comments trying to create the impression that we post rants about the Weekly and other fine local publications all the freakin’ time?

So I asked one of my subordinates—it’s good to be the king—to go through the last month’s worth of Slog posts and count up the total number, the number that ranted about other local publications, and give me some stats.

Okay, that was tedious… here’s what I found: I tallied all the Slog entries containing snarky comments aimed at the Weekly, the Seattle Times, and the P-I. I did not count mere mentions of these papers, or posts where we discussed serious issues therein—I only counted “look how lame they are” and “we scooped them” -toned posts. The rants.

In a three month period in 2007 (Jan-March), out of 1,881 posts, 21 were nasty toward another paper. That’s 1.1 percent of the total posts.

I looked at the same period in 2006 (Jan-March) and found something very similar: out of 1,625 posts, 18 (again, 1.1 percent) were mean-spirited or petty.

So: We’re about as mean as we ever have been, and we don’t target these newspapers all that often.

1.1 percent of posts—1.1 percent! And no spike in the number of “petty rants” over the last year. We get about 150+ posts up on Slog in any given week. So that works out to about one rant every week and a half. So quit whining, Weekly trolls.

I was out too late last night at Schmader’s Gong Show to make this morning’s 8:30 Senate Ways and Means Committee meeting on the Sonics subsidy bill.

However, no gong for $400 million in public susibidies for the Sonics this morning. The bill made it out of committee.

Postman’s got some fat reporting on it.

Initially, it looked like Seattle Sen. Jeanne-Kohl Welles (D-36) was going to be the swing vote on it, putting her in the awkward situation of bucking big labor (the Northwest Labor Council supports the bill) or bucking Seattle—74% voted against subsidizing the Sonics last November. (Although, another labor group, the hard ball SEIU Local 775 is against the bill too.)

However, as Postman reports, Bellingham Senator, Republican Dale Brandland (D-42) eventually provided the vote to move the bill out of committee.

One of my favorite legislators, Republican-turned-Democrat, Sen. Rodney Tom (D-48, Medina) took the lead against moving it out of commitee.

I did get an interview with him today. Here’s what he told me.

I don’t think we should be subsidizing professional sports when we can’t pay our teachers. People don’t understand. We’re not buying the stadium. The ownership group gets the naming rights and seating licensing. All we are doing is subsidizing player payroll. Paying Ray Allen $16 million a year when we can’t eve pay a teacher $31,000.

… and another thing…

Key arena was just renovated 10 years ago. [Tom is right. And we’re still paying that off and more.] I don’t see us renovating schools every 10 years. There are schools in Seattle where you can’t even drink the water.

Sen. Tom said he doesn’t think the bill will pass the full Senate because everyone knows it’s not going to pass the House. (Speaker Chopp says he won’t give the bill the time of day.)

Tom says that passing the bill would “take away from all the good things we’ve done this session on education, transportation, and health care.” (The Dems have done some good things there: funding health care for low-icome children and getting money into school construction and education grants. Not so sure about the transpo piece.)

Tom says if they pass the bill the GOP will slam them, saying: “You’re funding stadiums not schools.”

I’m not sure the GOP, with its share of sports fans in the base, would go there, but perhaps Tom is right. After all, he used to be an R.

Tom also trashed Sonics owner Clay Bennett—saying “this isn’t who King County shoud be joining hips with.” Tom was referring to Bennett’s wife’s family, the Gaylords, a prominent Repbulican family, which owns the ultra conservative Daily Oklahoman. I’ve been talking to the Oklahoman Democrats about the Gaylords. More on that later.

Sen. Tom may be onto something. As I reported earlier this year, the new Sonics ownership has worked to deny rights for gays and lesbians (hello Storm.)

Oh, it was a beautiful night at the Crocodile. I was not there long. But I did see the ventriloquistish woman who allowed the tiny imaginary man inside her puffy-cheeked mouth to speak and sing his heart out.

I saw Jim Morrison and his mother. I saw a comic who made me laugh but whose jokes I do not remember. I saw a rhyming poet who is quite angry with the Bush administration and seemed scary in general. The gongers were afraid.

I feel I missed so much …

A press release this morning announces that the Portland Art Museum will be expanding its biennial—which for years has been Oregon-only—to include the entire Northwest. Exactly what the biennial will look like will remain a mystery until this coming Monday morning, when the museum will unveil its “plans for a broader Biennial exhibition program celebrating the most compelling contemporary art of the Northwest” at a press conference in Portland.

I won’t be there, but I’m dying to hear PAM’s plans. Tacoma Art Museum has had a lock on the Northwest Biennial for the better part of two decades, and now a larger institution will step into the fray, giving TAM a run for its money. What will become of the two shows? How will their reputations and their values differ? Which one will be better?

It should be fun to see how it all plays out, considering how contested and overheated biennials get, and ultimately how important they can be seen to be. Also, will PAM’s plan urge TAM to revise the wrongheaded strategy that I believe it employed this year? We’ll see …

I reached TAM curator Rock Hushka on his cell phone in New York and delivered to him the news about PAM’s expanded biennial plans. “How fascinating,” he said. TAM has no plans to overhaul its biennial, he added.

But fascinating indeed.

Welcome to our new video series, Rock ‘N’ Roll Olympics! In these videos we take “rock stars” that you may or may not have heard of and make ‘em do silly sports in an epic battle of the mind and spirit. Then we declare an arbitrary winner (in the endgame, there is no real winner).

Enjoy our second episode featuring Andrew WK (?) vs. Shane from the Divorce!

Make sure to check out our first episode with Leslie & the Lys vs. Scream Club while you’re at it!

Right here at the start I’m going to state that, hey, I don’t really know what the hell I’m talking about. I’m not an expert on Africa—but I have been a regular reader of multiple newspapers over the last 25-or-so years. And over that quarter of a century I’ve been reading pretty much the same stories about Africa again and again—you know: regional war, grinding poverty, famine, habitat loss, endangered species in decline, AIDS, “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” Bono, etc.

Anyway… Thomas Friedman wrote a column about Africa in Wednesday’s New York Times. (Can’t link—it’s behind the TimesSelect firewall.) He focused on Kenya and the impact that climate change is going to have on that long-suffering country. Kenya wasn’t in great shape to begin with and climate change is already fucking with the weather there—in ways that are potentially devastating for humans and wildlife. The rainy seasons are changing as “worldwide precipitation” shifts “away from the equator and toward the poles.”

Kenya also has to worry about deforestation and poaching, although poaching is now under better control. Kenya’s forests have been reduced from 10 percent of the country’s land-mass at the time of its independence in 1963 to 2 percent today, while in the same period its elephant population went from 170,000 to 30,000 and its rhino population went from 20,000 to around 500…

Climate change could worsen this…. Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of global CO2 emissions since 1900, the report noted, yet its 840 million people could suffer enormously from global-warming-induced droughts and floods and have the fewest resources to deal with them.

Sounds pretty grim. It makes a guy think that maybe buying RED t-shirts at the Gap and RED Nokia phones isn’t enough to save Africa after all.

Friedman’s column focused on the plight of wildlife and humans in Africa, and that struck me. When we talk about “saving Africa” we have two goals—goals that, when you pause to consider them for a moment, are in almost direct conflict. We want to save the wildlide—the elephants, the rhinos, the gorillas in the mist, and all the other endangered species on that continent. And what’s wiping them all out? Habitat loss and poaching. Basically, humans—Africans—are wiping them out.

The population of Africa in 1900 was roughly 108 million. Today it’s 840 million. If we’re concerned about saving the elephants and the rhinos and apes then we need to recognize that one of Africa’s chief problems is… well, all those Africans. It’s the overpopulation, stupid.

But we want to save the Africans too—from AIDS, from genocide in Darfur, from batshitcrazy Robert Mugabe. And we should not only want to save Africans, we should do something about saving Africans. But saving Africans isn’t in the best interests of all that African wildlife, our concurrent concern. They’re almost mutually exclusive. So what do we do?

It seems to me that we can save Africans and Africa by… getting Africans the hell out of Africa.

Back to Thomas Friedman:

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just concluded that two-thirds of the atmospheric buildup of heat-trapping carbon dioxide has come—in roughly equal parts—from the U.S. and Western Europe. These countries have the resources to deal with climate change and may even benefit from some warming.

Gregg Easterbrook wrote an article in April’s Atlantic Monthly titled “Global Warming: Who Loses—and Who Wins?” (You have to be a subscriber to read the article on their website, but you can read letters about it here.) Guess what? We win—the northern hemisphere. Canada wins, parts of the United States wins (Alaska wins), northern Europe wins. Freakin’ Siberia wins—that frozen wasteland may become the breadbasket of the world.

In a March column in The Nation on how the west is reacting to falling birth rates, Katha Pollit wrote…

If fears of population implosion result in paid parental leave, improved childcare and more support for mothers’ careers, it won’t be the first time a government has done the right thing for the wrong reason. But isn’t it weird to promote population growth while we wring our hands over global warming, environmental damage, species loss and suburban sprawl? The United Nations projects that in 2050 the world’s population will reach 9.2 billion…

Getting a better deal for mothers has been at the forefront of the feminist agenda for decades, although you’d never know it from the way the women’s movement is always being accused of attacking women with kids. So it’s ironic that what is finally driving at least some governments to act is the desire to boost fertility rates. The aim is to breed the next generation of workers—ethnically correct workers, too, not the troublesome immigrant kind…. [Why] not learn to live with [population decline]? Economically, the problem is a coming dearth of young workers to fund social security and care for an aging population. Yet while demographers fret about those unconceived second and third babies, every country on earth throws away plenty of children who are already here. Poor children, for example—why can’t they grow up to be those missing skilled, educated people and productive workers? What about the children of France’s Arab immigrants… The Gypsies of Eastern Europe… Vladimir Putin bemoans Russia’s free-falling population, but babies are still being stashed in his country’s appalling orphanages…. Instead of cajoling or bribing women into gestating the home-health attendants of the future, states should start treasuring the people—all the people—they have right now.

That includes immigrants.

Yes. We’ve got a birth-dearth in the west. The west has made a mess of the planet and the people of Africa in particular are going to suffer for it. And there are too many people in Africa, eating up habitat and poaching wild animals to survive. So why not… open the doors? Without a doubt tens if not hundreds of millions of Africans would welcome the opportunity to immigrate—legally, with dignity—to, say, Canada, Russia, the United States, Northern Europe. We shouldn’t force anyone to leave Africa—um, of course not, never again—but it seems pretty clear that, given the opportunity, many millions of Africans would willingly leave Africa.

And that would be good for Africans, good for Africa, and good—good penance, good environmental policy—for us.

If you haven’t read Sudarsan Raghavan’s terrifying Washington Post piece on yesterday’s Iraq parliament bombing, do so now.

When the new chocolate-coloured sofa set was delivered to her Brampton home, Doris Moore was stunned to see packing labels describing the shade as “Nigger-brown.”

She and husband Douglas purchased a sofa, loveseat and chair in dark brown leather last week from Vanaik Furniture and Mattress store on Dundas St. E.

Moore, 30, who describes herself as an African-American born and raised in New York, said it was her 7-year-old daughter who pointed out the label just after delivery men from the Mississauga furniture store left.

“She’s very curious and she started reading the labels,” Moore explained. “She said, `Mommy, what is nig … ger brown?’ I went over and just couldn’t believe my eyes.”

Hot tip courtesy of Fnarf.

(ART) An Evening of Sin revolves around Franz von Stuck’s most famous painting, the 1893 femme fatale nude Sin, which is just luscious and ridiculous enough to have made great album art for the right ’80s hair band. Stranger Genius Award winner Victoria Haven will talk, choreographer Zoe Scofield and her dancers will perform, and poets and breakdancers will join in. I only wish they were taking confessions, too. (Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave, 922-6250. 7 pm, free.) JEN GRAVES

(HAPPENING) This event has trouble describing itself. According to the invitation, it is a “maelstrom” in “a cathedralesque barn of a space” with a “steaming sulfuric acid bath.” Matt McCormick plays a new music and video piece. Matthijs Bouw gives a slide talk, Michael Brophy’s paintings are auctioned, DJ Masa mixes, and the few who made reservations eat dinner. (Chateaux [sic] Duwamps, 207 S Horton St. Dinner at 7, register at onepot.org. Auction/party at 8, no registration required. The invitation says: “Money will be recycled at the door.” We’re not sure what that means.) JEN GRAVES

In this week’s paper, I got an important fact wrong about the domestic partnership legislation— which passed on Tuesday afternoon.

I wrote:

the bill grants about 10 rights to domestic partners—such as allowing domestic partners to have hospital visitation rights, allowing partners to give informed consent in medical decisions, allowing partners to make funeral arrangements, and allowing partners to inherit property in the absence of a will.

That is true. However, I added:

The bill leaves a host (423 and counting according to the latest study) of other rights off the table, like access to a partner’s health insurance or pension benefits, the ability to file a wrongful-death suit if one’s partner is killed, and the right of “spousal privilege,” which would shield one half of a domestic partnership from being compelled to testify against the other.

While the new domestic partnership legislation does leave out over 400 rights, the bill was amended to include the right to sue for wrongful death.

Meanwhile, I’m happy to report the bill now includes two other rights that were not in the original version: the right to be named on a deceased partner’s death certificate, just like a spouse and (while a bit isolated, still important)—the bill gives gay or lesbian doctors the right of health care power of attorney for their partners.

Reports Rep. Jamie Pedersen (D-43, Seattle), the main co-sponsor of the bill in the House: “The existing law [said] that a health care provider cannot hold a health care power of attorney for another person unless that person is a spouse or blood relative. That has been a real problem for gay or lesbian couples where one is a doctor, because —contrary to what the opponents have been saying about how we could get all of the rights in the bill by private contract — the law actually prohibited couples from making arrangements to take care of each other.”

This is yet another sign of how expensive it’s becoming to own a house or condo in Seattle, and perhaps it’s also a sign of how salaries in this city aren’t keeping up with the cost of living here. But it’s a good development for a few lucky home buyers:

If you’re single and you make less than 80 percent of King County’s median income (which means you make less than $41,700 per year), then you now qualify for help from this home-buying assistance program.

What would that help look like? A grant of up to $110,000 that doesn’t need to be repaid.

Ever since he discontinued doing “Media Availabilities” several weeks ago, the Olympia press corps has been griping that they can’t get interviews or even basic comments from House Speaker Rep. Frank Chopp (D-43, Seattle).

Seattle Times writer Nicole Brodeur even wrote a column today about staking out Chopp’s office and getting zippo.

I’ve got a feature on Frank Chopp in this week’s Stranger.

And while I also ran into a brick wall trying to interview Chopp—eventually relying quite a bit on quotes he had given me earlier in the session, like this obstreperous model Chopp moment—”Do you want agriculture to go under in this state? I don’t. Hell no. It’s too important for our state. [Ending business tax breaks] isn’t as clear cut as you think”—I did ultimately get Chopp on the phone for about 10 minutes earlier this week.

It was more of a lecture from Chopp than an interview, but here are some new quotes from the recently reticent Speaker:

But he said, “The caucus was still working something out.”

“The Republicans try to bring division between voters with wedge issues between urban and rural voters, between the environment and business. Well, we’ve had enough of that. We want to bring people together and balance different perspectives.”

(Chopp says the BIAW had nothing to do with his decision. The bill wasn’t ready for prime time, he says.)

“One legislator [Representative Bill Grant from Walla Walla] asked me to keep it alive and I did.”

But he said, “The caucus was still working something out. “There is significant opposition in the house and senate,” Chopp says. “In the house I could work it, but obviously I haven’t figured out a way to pass it.”

“I’ll try to resurrect it next session,” Chopp says.

“Representative Grant has a beef manufacturer in his district,” Chopp says.

Chopp also told me, regretting that the condo conversion bill got killed this session, that he was close friends with Seattle activist John Fox, the leader of the Seattle Displacement Coalition. Chopp said he recognized that Fox’s bill had serious merit. Fox was the lead advocate for the condo conversion bill. The bill would have protected displaced tenants and given cities the right to cap condo conversions. There were 2,352 condo conversions in Seattle in 2006—average price: $250,000.

Investigations: The Republican National Committee is “missing” at least four years worth of e-mails from Karl Rove.

Apologies: World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz is “sorry” for giving a woman he was involved with an “automatic ‘outstanding’ rating and the highest possible pay raises during an indefinite posting at the State Department, as well as a promotion upon her return to the bank.”

Borders: Australia Prime Minister John Howard says his country’s borders should be closed to HIV-positive immigrants.

Porn: China is cracking down on internet pornography because it has “perverted young China’s minds.”

Apologies Part Deux: Having just been fired from the radio, Don Imus met with Rutgers women athletes yesterday.

Investigations Part Deux: The Pentagon has opened a criminal investigation into whether U.S. Marines fired into a group of civilians in Afghanistan last month.

Science: Protein has been recovered from the bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex.

New Chief in Town: The Seattle School Board has found their woman.

Rx: The Washington State Board of Pharmacy ruled yesterday that even freaked-out christians must fill prescriptions—even for Plan B.

Sexy Presidential Fact of the Day: From My Life by Bill Clinton:

What I had done with Monica Lewinsky was immoral and foolish. I was deeply ashamed of it and I didn’t want it to come out. In the deposition, I was trying to protect my family and myself from my selfish stupidity. I believed that the contorted definition of “sexual relations” enabled me to do so, though I was worried enough about it to invite the lawyer interrogating me to ask specific questions. I didn’t have to wait long to find out why he declined to do so.

From the Starr Report:

At about 10 p.m., in Ms. Lewinsky’s recollection, she was alone in the Chief of Staff’s office and the President approached. He invited her to rendezvous again in Mr. Stephanopoulos’s office in a few minutes, and she agreed. (Asked if she knew why the President wanted to meet with her, Ms. Lewinsky testified: “I had an idea.”) They met in Mr. Stephanopoulos’s office and went again to the area of the private study. This time the lights in the study were off.

According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President kissed. She unbuttoned her jacket; either she unhooked her bra or he lifted her bra up; and he touched her breasts with his hands and mouth. Ms. Lewinsky testified: “I believe he took a phone call … and so we moved from the hallway into the back office … . [H]e put his hand down my pants and stimulated me manually in the genital area.” While the President continued talking on the phone (Ms. Lewinsky understood that the caller was a Member of Congress or a Senator), she performed oral sex on him. He finished his call, and, a moment later, told Ms. Lewinsky to stop. In her recollection: “I told him that I wanted … to complete that. And he said … that he needed to wait until he trusted me more. And then I think he made a joke … that he hadn’t had that in a long time.”