Which is lame. I had tickets to Batman.

Update @ 7:23

What the shit, Seattle City Light? My power’s still off, and I can’t even open my fridge to get a beer.

Ps- does anyone know how long food in an unpowered fridge keeps?

Update 2 @ 11:05 p.m. Seriously?! What the fuck? First city light said power would be back on at 4. Then it was 8. Now it’s 2-fucking-am! You assholes owe me some groceries.

Pps: I saw Batman. i’m a huge comic nerd and I’ve never thought of the Joker ad scary before. But Heath Ledger’s Joker is a motherfucking terrifying fake anarchist. The rest of the movie is meh, but go see that shit, America.

Update 3: OK, power’s back. How do I know? My building’s brain piercing fire alarm just went off for about 15 minutes.

Nothing appears to actually be on fire.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which I wrote about here, is up in its entirety for free viewing today and tomorrow, and then after that, you’ll have to pay to watch it, either on DVD or as a download.

It’s actually surprisingly touching for a half-hour-long musical internet serial about a super-villain, and some of the jokes are hilarious.

Find it here.

Art

‘The Violet Hour’ at Henry Art Gallery

• See what else is happening in Art on Saturday »

Theater

14/48 at Center House Theatre

• See what else is happening in Theater on Saturday »

^{Kim Rugg’s She Did What She Had to Do* (*The Seattle Times, Main Story, Hillary Clinton canvassing for the primaries) (2008), newsprint, 23.6 by 12.6 inches}

At OKOK Gallery. (Gallery site here.)

It’s ten o’clock, and if you’re reading this, you’re too late to get to the big reading of the day. Eoin Colfer, who I wrote about yesterday in Reading Tonight, and David “The Goot” Guterson will be interviewed at a taping of a weekly radio show. There are also musical guests. Don’t you feel bad for sleeping in now?

Up in Port Townsend, Kim Addonizio, who used to be a poet but now writes novels, and Gary Lilley, who is a poet, will try to figure out which of them works in the art form that is dying faster. Not really. They’ll talk about writing and stuff.

And at Elliott Bay Book Company, Kate Braestrup, who is a “search and rescue chaplain” will talk about her book, Here If You Need Me, which is about her life in Maine. I hate to devalue the work of a fellow Mainer, but if you’re looking for something about emergency work in small-towns and other ruminations on rural life, Michael Perry’s Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time is the way to go. That was such a great book.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

Feminist, according to his sister.

Barack Obama is a dedicated feminist who “lives surrounded by women,” his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, told a mostly female crowd at a Women For Obama event in downtown Tampa on Thursday.

Soetoro-Ng told the crowd that Obama helped rear her and now is rearing two daughters. “Those girls are what make him a feminist,” she said. […]

Her older brother “really was the man in our lives” after their parents divorced, when the two were growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia, she said.

She said he taught her to ride a bicycle, made her practice harder math problems and start an exercise program, took her on college visits and even gave her her first women’s health book - “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” a 1973 guide that came out of the women’s movement and focused on female sexuality, health and hygiene.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is pretty fucking cool.

Mess in Texas: Prosecutors used seized money to rent a margarita machine.

Blow Up in Oklahoma: Publisher sues sports fan for fabricating story about quarterbacks caught with cocaine.

Ayahuasca: Peruvian government approve tripping for “entering the secrets of the spiritual world.”

California: Prison reform and sentencing measure makes ballot.

Ciao: Point one, Italian Rastas exist. Point two, one had pot charges dropped for religious accommodations.

Auf Wiedersehen: Ketamine comas help cure pain in Germany.

Aloha: State of Hawaii accidentally emails medical-marijuana registry to newspaper.

Loco: McCain spokeswoman babbles incoherently about Obama, drugs, and nuclear facilities.

Obama in his book about his father talked about his use of drugs. And I think it’s disingenuous of people to vote for somebody for President when you won’t allow a drug user in any secure or nuclear facility. Yet we as a nation, are willing to consider making somebody President of the United States I think that speaks very poorly…Bill Clinton said he smoked but he didn’t inhale…But he didn’t come out and flagrantly say he used drugs…and if that’s going to be our standard God helps us in nuclear facilities and secure facilities who have this kind of history … and this nation must be very careful when it lowers the bar on who and what it will accept.

Gordon Hamilton, executive director of arts-funding organization PONCHO, was relieved of his duties yesterday at a board meeting.

The news has been a shock for members of the arts community—Hamilton, in the words of one local development director, is “very well thought of.”

“This is stunning news,” says Jim Kelly, director of 4Culture. “I always thought of Hamilton as a guy who was shaking PONCHO up in a really positive way.”

Hamilton was a vice president at Safeco before applying to PONCHO four and a half years ago. Kelly recalls Hamilton telling the story of his job interview: “During the interview, they asked him ‘How do you perceive PONCHO?’ And he said ‘I perceive it as a party for rich white people.’ And they gave him the job.”

In broad strokes: PONCHO is generally regarded as a deep donor to large arts institutions (a lobby in ACT Theatre is named after PONCHO) while 4Culture is generally regarded as a broad donor to organizations large and small, as well as individual artists.

“The strategic direction of PONCHO is changing,” says Janet True, president of the PONCHO board, regarding Hamilton’s dismissal. “PONCHO was always an events-based organization, with our annual wine and art auctions and gala event, but events aren’t the most philanthropic way to raise money anymore. And auctions have changed—it’s a lot harder than before to raise money with them.”

True says PONCHO will continue its wine auction (projected income this year: $1 million) and art auction (projected income: $500,000—funny that the arts organization gets twice as much money from wine as art), but will discontinue its gala event.

Instead, True says, PONCHO wants to institute a city-wide awards ceremony—“like the Tonys”—at which artists will perform and press the flesh with local donors.”We want the donors to connect more with arts and artists than with an event,” True says.

PONCHO seems, in fact, to be drifting more towards 4Culture’s profile—the philanthropic organization for artists, rather than arts institutions.

“That’s fine,” says Jim Kelly. “The more money for artists the better. But if you’re an institution, the last thing you want to hear is ‘You’re too big for us to fund,’ because every dollar counts. While it might be more fun to be more connected to individual artists, it’s important to keep funding big institutions. Every dollar counts.”

Hamilton has not (yet) been reached for comment.

John Burbank, one of two Democrats running for state legislature from the 36th District (Ballard, Magnolia, and Queen Anne), is listing his status as the official Democratic Party nominee on his voter guide statement and boy, is his opponent, Reuven Carlyle, pissed.

Burbank was appointed as the district’s “official” nominee by state Democratic Party chair Dwight Pelz, a longtime friend of his, after the 36th District Democrats declined to nominate either Burbank or Carlyle, citing their objection to the Democrats’ sanctioned nominating process for this year’s top-two primary, which only allowed precinct committee officers to vote.

In an email, Carlyle fumed that Burbank “was APPOINTED by his official beer drinking buddy, Dwight Pelz, as the nominee, not elected by voters, the district organization or any other entity of any sort.”

Asked how his appointment by Pelz constituted elected experience, Burbank seemed a bit flummoxed, eventually responding, “That is the position of the Washington State Democratic Central Committee. If you go to their web site, you will see that their nominee for this position, Position One, is John Burbank. That’s me. ...[The voter guide statement] was approved by the Secretary of State, so if someone has an issue with it they should take it up with the Secretary of State.”

Burbank added: “It’s an odd thing that this is what it’s come down to”—debates over party process, rather than discussions of the issues. That’s a fair point, but in this case, the story isn’t so much about the particulars of any internecine battle (if you really want to see interparty warfare, check out what’s going on in the 46th) as it is about the top-two primary, which has pitted Democrat against Democrat in general-election battles in races that used to be decided in September.

Do you enjoy trolling through mind-numbing court filings? Do you like taking long walks down to city hall to pick up always-exciting legislative action agendas? Do you wish you spent more time interviewing crazy people about everything from the fascinating world of mass transit to gay robot conspiracies?

Then have we got a job for you!

The Stranger’s news department is looking for a few good interns.

If you have any aspirations to be a journalist, can string together a sentence, and don’t mind acting as a drug mule every once in awhile, then send a resume and clips (if you have them) to Barnett@thestranger.com.

Stranger internships: You can’t say you hate it if you haven’t tried it.

Dan! I can’t wait until you get back, not only so that we don’t have to do this to distant sculptures anymore (I’m considering doing it to the local ones, in fact), but also so that I can show you my Renoir holograph postcard. It is a sculpture in itself! When you put your finger on it, because it tricks your eye into thinking it has depth, you think that you are right here in the Stranger newsroom while your finger is on an 1870s Parisian boulevard, waiting for its top hat. It really is something.

But back to what you tell me is a sculpture in Saugatuck, Michigan, called Family of Man IV by Cynthia McKean from 2005. (To see more of these, not only by me and Dan but including an interlude by Erica C. Barnett involving truck-flap ladies, click here.)

I have to be honest. What I’m seeing here (and, to be honest, I can’t be quite sure what I’m seeing here, depth-wise) looks like a fire-engine Miro version of a nuclear family. It even seems to have 1.5 kids, or at least some sort of fractional person there in the lower right.

But my mind is telling me to like this thing, and it’s strictly because of the title, which reminds me of a great photography exhibition that Edward Steichen organized at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. When my grandparents died, I inherited their hardback catalog from this exhibition, with its slightly torn cover, and I still cherish it. The cover of the catalog, paradoxically, is decorated with a sort of abstract design. That’s paradoxical because the images couldn’t be more grounded in things actual and real, and in the belief that photographs give you something actual and real. The show didn’t really make distinctions between photojournalism, sports photography, and fine-art photography. And from the catalog, it looks as though there were hundreds of images in that show. I’ve tried many times to imagine what it must have looked like.

I wish I could have been there, or that I’d asked my grandparents whether they were. Before they died, I never even knew they had it. So you see, when I look at this sculpture, I just feel like I’m holding that catalog.

Safe trip home, Dan!

The most comprehensive coverage of the Rainier Beach traffic circle murder is over at The Sable Verity, where a Seattle-based blogger who writes under that name has been following the story obsessively (and passionately). Her posts range from opinionated (she thinks not just the suspect but the two girls who taunted the victim, James Paroline, should face criminal charges) to factual (a recounting of comments and emails from the community about the murder). Even if you don’t agree with her POV, it’s well worth a read.

As part of his reelection campaign, Oklahoma County Commissioner Brent Rinehart is sending out a comic book to his constituents.

The 16-page comic book makes fun of homosexuals and criticizes Rinehart’s political opponents. It features a man and woman admiring Rinehart’s often-controversial political career.

Other prominent characters are an angel, who supports Rinehart, and Satan, who supports Rinehart’s critics.

“It’s more or less a story of my experiences of the last four years of being the county commissioner of District 2,” Rinehart said.

The story is here, you can download the comic here, and here’s page 4:

(Thanks to Slog tipper Davida.)

Slog commenter Ivan is biking across country with his wife, Mary. They’re going from Seattle to Virginia Beach, a total of 3,300 miles. They’re blogging about the experience.

I’m really fond of the conceit they’ve set up for the blog: he’s blogging, and she’s blogging, and the two blogs are running on their webpage side-by-side, and neither one is allowed to read the other one’s blog until they’re done with the ride. They’re already disagreeing on something: Ivan says it’s day 1 of the trip, Mary says it’s day 2.

If you haven’t noticed (you probably didn’t), I have failed to post This Weekend at the Movies for the past two weeks. I’m sorry—vacation, then a day off to recover from riding to Portland on my bicycle, got in the way.

Here, briefly, are links to reviews of notable recent movies: WALL•E, The Wackness, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Monsieur Verdoux (damn, you missed it), Tell No One, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson, and Brick Lane (only at the Crest this week).

News:

indieWIRE has been sold to SnagFilms, an online documentary hub. More at GreenCine Daily.

After reading reviews of WALL•E (I thought no one did that anymore?), Barack Obama offers his own assessment.

Is the Weinstein Co. in trouble?

And Mara Manus is the new executive director of the rapidly expanding Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Opening this week (we like everything!):

Charles Mudede adores Alexandra (“Because the acting plays a very small role in Alexandra, the cinema is free to flourish”).

Paul Constant reviews The Dark Knight (“Heath Ledger seems as though he’s alternating roles in a dark love scene between Daffy Duck, Marlon Brando, and Hannibal Lecter. It’s a riveting performance, and terrifying”).

Jon Frosch writes about The Last Mistress (“If The Last Mistress hits harder than Catherine Breillat’s previous, more sexually explicit work, it’s in large part thanks to Asia Argento. The actress stalks, gnarls, gnashes, and vamps her way through the movie, yet it never seems like she’s hamming it up; hers is one of the most vivid portrayals of lust that I’ve seen”).

Lindy West actually likes Mamma Mia! (“Sparkling and earnest, hammy beyond all acceptable boundaries of ham, full of slow-motion leaping and young love—it’s the movie equivalent of, well, ABBA. The cast rules: Meryl Streep is adorable; Pierce Brosnan sings (TERRIBLY) and stands on a cliff looking windswept in front of an Aegean sunset. Mamma Mia! entertained the shit out of me”).

And Charles Mudede defends Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (“You do not think of Philip Glass and see a human being, but, instead, you hear a type of sound, a tone, a tune, a movement that is beautiful, repetitive, and architectural. And so the first thing any film about Glass’s music must do is reduce it to a human being”).

For other limited run films and one-time events, including Last Year at Marienbad, Seattle Bike-In, and Planet of the Apes, see our movie times search. There’s also a review of Space Chimps, if you must.

I know that I totally maligned Hulu when it launched. I called it “the Internet’s version of a hideous, six-story primary-colored condo with retail space on the ground floor.” Well, the egg’s on my face because you can watch The Rundown on Hulu for free anytime you want now.

I’d call The Rundown a guilty pleasure, but there’s nothing guilty about it. It’s one of my favorite movies of the last ten years. The Rock is hired muscle sent into the jungle to pick up that douchebag Sean William Scott, who, in the casting move of the century, plays a douchebag. Christopher Walken gets all up in their respective faces.

Don’t get me wrong; I was skeptical, too. And the movie shouldn’t be as good as it is, but it all works, somehow. These disparate elements all came together into one of the most enjoyable action movies I think I’ve ever seen.

I was camping with friends a few weeks ago, and we were all drinking up a storm and somebody started talking about what movie we’d pick if we could only choose one movie to watch for the rest of our lives. I picked To Have and Have Not, but one of my friends paused, and said “I know this sounds stupid, but I think that I’d pick The Rundown, because I could watch it forever.” And she was right. It is stupid, but it’s also the perfect choice. I’ve seen this movie like seven times now, because it’s perfect for everyone. It’s funny and dumb and clever, too.

And its working title was Welcome to the Jungle, which is clearly a better title for the movie. The fact that The Rundown is titled The Rundown is the only flaw that can be found in this movie. Seriously. Go watch it.

The brouhaha earlier in the week about A Streetcar Named Desire—here, here, here, here—which devolved into an accusation (here) that I was “hiding behind” Mary McCarthy (which is sorta true), reminded me of the time, back in 2003 or 2004, I photocopied McCarthy’s review of Franny and Zooey (reprinted in this book) for Sean Nelson, who is a Salinger fan and something of a Salinger expert. Nelson scribbled comments and counter-arguments all over the photocopy (like “No” and “Wrong” and “This is a means of indicting/indicating the protag., you stupid bitch”) and handed it back to me. It has been hanging on my office wall ever since.

[Click on the image to make it bigger.]

In this week’s paper, Charles Mudede writes about a film that succeeds by eschewing cinema’s “fruity old aunt” (those words by Tilda Swinton), theater, Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra.

In the department of crossover artists, I’d also like to point to Implied Violence, a performance company that this weekend begins its triptych, Our Summary in Sequence. (Details and more on IV by Brendan Kiley here.)

I got a sneak-preview image of the setting they’ve constructed for this weekend’s performances, inside a South Lake Union warehouse, and it looks like an art installation in itself.

I think that this is kind of a joke, but kind of serious, too:

Writing is hard. Stringing letters together to make words? Hard. Grouping those into meaningful sentences? Harder. But the hardest part? Ask any successful novelist: the hardest part is writing the opening paragraph. And the first paragraph is crucial: without it, by definition there can be no second paragraph.

They’re selling first paragraphs to aspiring writers.

Here’s Item #PGH48555878:

The President was in a pensive mood as he wondered what sort of arc his second term would follow, and idly surveyed what he believed to be the Washington Monument (but which was, in fact, the Capitol) through the tinted, bullet-proof windows. It had been a tough day, but as his motorcade sped along the edge of the Mall some minutes later, his body tensed as he thought about how lucky he was to have a Secretary of Defense who was so good at sucking cock.

If you want to buy it, it’s $152.25, and I’d like a finder’s fee, please.

Oh Anderson, with you to juggle the talking heads through November, I know we’re in good hands. And that little rat smile you have, like when you told Donna Brazile you wanted to be her ‘boo’, well it melts my heart and helps me forgive you for having complete ass-chancres like Tony Perkins on your show. Je t’aime, my sly little friend.

Here’s my imaginary mother-in-law, glamorous descendant of the original 19th-century robber baron, whose book on collage is in a word, riveting. I picked it up at the Goodwill earlier today, and the photographs of her Southhampton house aswirl in pink gingham were worth the $2.99! I picture Andy and I lolling on the veranda, sipping lemonade from the family crystal and molesting each other through our clothes.

^{Photo by Kelly O}

It’s my last day as a guest Slogger. I found I had much less to say than I thought I would. I’ve also been unusually busy, so that’s kept my postings to a minimum. But it has been grand to post my little things for your amusement. I’ll see you in comments.

See if you can stay in your seat while you enjoy my final video offering!

…courtesy of The Incredible Shrinking Woman, the beloved Lily Tomlin comedy of 1981, which will be screened for free tonight in Cal Anderson Park, as part of Three Dollar Bill Cinema’s Features from the Black Lagoon.

See you there. (I’ll be the one sniffing Galaxy Glue.)

The new McCain ad:

I’ve got an article in this week’s paper on how the county needle-exchange program could be threatened by massive cuts to the health-department budget. It quotes county council budget chair Larry Phillips, who appears to be mounting a campaign against Ron Sims for the county executive seat, as supporting the program. But in an apparent who-can-out-progressive-whom response, Sims sent me this note:

Bud Nicola, a former Director Public Health, recommended to the County Board of Health (BOH) the use of needle exchanges to lower the transmission of HIV/AIDS. County Councilwoman Cynthia Sullivan, Executive Tim Hill, and I were the BOH members who voted to establish the County’s needle exchange program. It was a very controversial vote. We were widely criticized for enabling drug use. We defended our decision by referring people to the successes found in Denmark. I am attempting to save this program and other essential public health programs in my discussions with the legislature and the the Governor’s office.

May the best man win. Considering we’ve seen some very, very backward drug enforcement ‘round these parts this week, it’s good to see electeds vow to fight for common-sense drug programs. Who knows? Maybe county officials will soon show the same compassion for sick and dying pot smokers that we show for injections drug users…

It is entirely our luck that the artist Jim Hodges was born in Spokane (in 1957). It means that his work keeps finding its way back here to Washington. Last summer, he was the anchor of the Tacoma Art Museum group show Sparkle Then Fade. That exhibition included his intense, simple Coming Through (seen above), which I wrote about at the time.

Jim Hodges’s 1999 Coming Through is the beating heart of the show. It’s a grid of naked lightbulbs of all types, struggling not to burn out as the exhibition wears on. They generate a cloud of heat along with the various colors of light—golden, cold marble, orange coil. Coming Through might refer to something otherworldly, or maybe it’s simply the longing sensation of hoping not to be disappointed.

So it was with great joy that I got a press release today announcing a Hodges-Storm Tharp show this summer in Spokane, of all places. Seems that last fall, a new nonprofit contemporary art gallery opened in Spokane called Saranac Art Projects. It’s run by Megan Murphy, an accomplished abstractionist whose work has grabbed me every time I’ve seen it (I think the last time was at Maryhill Museum!).

Here’s the skinny:

Abandon: The Work of Jim Hodges and Storm Tharp

Saranac Art Projects is pleased to announce the opening of Abandon: The Work of Jim Hodges and Storm Tharp on Wednesday, July 16th. The exhibition will run from July 16th through September 6th, 2008. The exhibition highlights the relationship between two artists who have abandoned traditional means of making art to find their own process in the loss of tradition.

Tharp isn’t a connection I would have made with Hodges, but the more I think of it, the more interesting I think it might be. Also, as an adjunct to this main exhibition is a series of works by
Heidi Arbogast, an art educator at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane who studied with Felix Gonzalez-Torres. (FG-T and Hodges were close friends.) It all sounds worthwhile to me. I leave you with a Tharp (The Dalles, ink on paper from 2006).

Saranac Art Projects is at 25 West Main Street in Spokane, and it’s open 11 am to 5:30 pm Wednesdays through Saturdays.

I’ve just recently watched the first two discs of the first season of Mad Men. That’s six episodes. I know that a lot of people are very excited about Mad Men, and critics that I generally trust are really into it, too. I think the show just got nominated for a bunch of Emmys. I really enjoyed the pilot, and especially the opening credits:

I really enjoyed the whole 1960-sure-was-different-from-2008 thing at first. Women are treated like children! The obviously gay guy keeps talking about how much he wants to bang chicks! They hit the kids! It was kind of funny.

But now I’m six episodes into a thirteen-episode run and I feel as though the entire series is all about how different 1960 is from 2008, and it’s kind of boring. I get that there’s infidelity, and some of the women are disappointed with their servile roles and all that, but so far, it’s just a soap opera, and not really an interesting one at that.

Some of the writing is great, but I’ve been waiting for something to happen for five hours now and I feel as though maybe twenty minutes of those five hours has actually advanced the plot. I can’t figure out whether to get the third disc or not; I’m just about ready to abandon the whole thing. So far, Mad Men has done nothing but disappointed me. I still like the credits, though.

We can reduce the struggle for power in American politics to one between the State Department and the Pentagon.

Every day around 8 a.m., foreign policy aides at Senator Barack Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters send him two e-mails: a briefing on major world developments over the previous 24 hours and a set of questions, accompanied by suggested answers, that the candidate is likely to be asked about international relations during the day.

One recent Q. & A. asked, for example, whether Obama supported the decision by Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to include a timetable for American troop withdrawal in any new security agreements with the United States. The answer, provided to Obama with bullet points, was yes — or “a genuine opportunity,” as he put it in a speech on Iraq this week.

Behind the e-mail messages is a tight-knit group of aides supported by a huge 300-person foreign policy campaign bureaucracy, organized like a mini State Department, to assist a candidate whose limited national security experience remains a concern to many voters.

It’s not because Obama is inexperienced that his campaign has established a mini State Department (300 experts) to advise him on foreign policy—no, get that notion out of your head. Stabilizing international relations for segments of American capital that were neglected by the almost decade-long energy/military regime—this is the whole meaning of his rise to power. The Pentagon has one way of dealing with the world, the State Department a completely different one. For its own survival, America is trying to transition from the former to the latter.

“Customer: It’s not much of a cheese shop, is it?

Owner: Finest in the district!

Customer: (annoyed) Explain the logic underlying that conclusion, please.

Owner: Well, it’s so clean, sir!

Customer: It’s certainly uncontaminated by cheese….”

(A few times a week, I take a new book with me to lunch and give it a half an hour or so to grab my attention. Lunch Date is my judgment on that speed-dating experience.)

Who’s your date today? The Lemur, by Benjamin Black, who is the pen name for John Banville.

Where’d you go? Ali Baba.

What’d you eat? Falafel gyro, fries, and a soda ($7.10).

How was the food? I’m a little disappointed, honestly. The fries were great, they were cooked just right and spiced perfectly, too. And I ate at Ali Baba a long time ago and was blown away by the falafel. But the Gyro was covered in this beige, pasty, mayonnaisey glop. It wasn’t the usual tzatziki; it was closer to McDonald’s special sauce. The reviews on our page for Ali Baba are roundly thrilled by the place, and my memory of it is much better than my experience this time. I’ll try it again sometime, but it’s down to last-chance status.

What does your date say about itself? Banville, who has been much more successful writing crime novels as Benjamin Black than he has writing literary fiction as John Banville, wrote The Lemur as a serial thriller in the New York Times’ Sunday Funny Pages. It’s about a researcher who’s dug up some nasty truths about a biographer’s subject. The researcher turns up dead, and the biographer has to figure out what’s going on.

Is there a representative quote? “They walked east along Forty-fourth Street and Glass at last got to smoke a cigarette. The fine rain drifted down absent-mindedly, like ectoplasm. The trouble with smoking was that the desire to smoke was so much greater than the satisfaction afforded by actually smoking. Sometimes when he had a cigarette going he would forget and reach for the pack and start to light another. Maybe that was the thing to do, smoke six at a time, three in the gaps between the fingers of each hand, achieve a Gatling-gun effect.”

Will you two end up in bed together? Yes. I hadn’t realized until I started writing this Lunch Date that the novel was written serially, and that definitely changes the way that I’ll read it—serially-written books, like Dickens, do better if you read a chapter and set the book aside for a while—but it seems like a taut little noir novel and it’s well-written. It should take a couple hours, all told, and it seems enjoyably dark.

My eternal fascination with Russia continues with The Tunnel of Death, aka The Lefortovo Tunnel, and/or the Mad Max Expressway:

The 2.2 km (1.4 miles) long Lefortovo Tunnel in Russia is the fifth longest ‘in-city’ tunnel in all of Europe. There is a river running over it and water leaks at some points. When the temperature reaches minus 38 degrees, like it did last winter, the road freezes and the result is this video taken during a single day with the tunnel camera.

A scrap between the Washington Renaissance and Fantasy Faire (WRFF) and the Mason County Commissioner (MCC) over some illegally removed trees has forced the WRFF to cancel their annual event.

Last March, WRFF spokeswoman Tracy Nietupski says her group, at the request of the fire department, removed “20 or 30” trees—along with dead fall—to clear emergency access roads along a 50 acre plot of land in Belfair,Wa. Nietupski also says some trees were removed to create space for a parking lot.

The Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) found out that WRFF had uprooted trees without a permit, and put a freeze on their event license until the case could be reviewed. “It was a bit of a misunderstanding,” Nietupski says. “We had not at that point applied for a permit to remove the trees. We didn’t know we needed one.”

This would’ve been WRFF’s eleventh year, and Nietupski says nearly 80,000 people were expected to attend the three-weekend event, and Nietupski estimates the fair’s merchants and performers, will lose close to $250,000 because of the cancellation.

While WRFF could appeal the DNR’s decision to withhold their event permit, the process would take three to six months and the fair was scheduled to begin the first weekend of August.

This is what Paul Constant will miss this year:

They should.

For more wonderfully permanent misspellings, see The L Magazine’s comprehensive gallery of tattoo typos.

(And thanks for the heads-up, MetaFilter.)

From the BBC:

Three Chinese reporters attending a police briefing on the success of an anti-gun campaign were accidentally shot, media reports say. An officer picked up one of the weapons on show—a confiscated home-made gun—but it went off in his hand.

Another irony: Historians think gunpowder—lethal, lethal gunpowder—was accidentally discovered by Chinese alchemists searching for an immortality drug.

According to Wikipedia, the first reference to gunpowder is probably in the Zhenyuan miaodao yaolüe, an old Taoist text:

Some have heated together sulfur, realgar and saltpeter with honey; smoke and flames result, so that their hands and faces have been burnt, and even the whole house where they were working burned down.

Then, last year, Chinese artist Cai Guoqiang flipped the equation again, turning lethal, lethal gunpowder into a 59-foot-by-30-foot banyan tree:

1

In simple circulation, C-M-C [Commodity-Money-Commodity], the value of commodities attained at the most a form independent of their use-values [satisfying a need—hunger, shelter, warmth, and so on], i.e., the form of money; but that same value now in the circulation M-C-M [Money-Commodity-Money], or the circulation of capital, suddenly presents itself as an independent substance, endowed with a motion of its own, passing through a life-process of its own, in which money and commodities are mere forms which it assumes and casts off in turn. Nay, more: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it enters now, so to say, into private relations with itself. It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value; as God differentiates himself as God and Son, yet both are one and of one age: for only by the surplus-value of £10 does the £100 originally advanced become capital, and so soon as this takes place, so soon as the Son, and by the Son, the Father, is created, so soon does their difference vanish, and they again become one, £110.

In all honesty, I’m more amazed (enchanted) by the manner rather than the matter of Marx’s writing.

2
Marx must be updated by Manuel De Landa, in the way that Bruno Latour is updating Gabriel Tarde, and António Rosa Damásio is updating Spinoza. Through Damásio, for example, we learn that the mind is in fact “the idea of the body.” The mind is a Spinozistic representation of the whole body. What De Landa can do for Marx, and what Latour is doing for Tarde’s theory of society (which is governed by the laws of imitation), and Damásio is doing for Spinoza’s theory of the body and emotions (the affects), is to connect the best points in Marx’s theory (labor-power, social metabolism, the realization of the world market) to discoveries made in the biological sciences and the growing presence of cyberspace.

3
Three things I recently learned from Bruno Latour. One, the public as a phantom rather than a body. He got the idea from a book by Walter Lippmann, Phantom Public. The idea works like this: The public is a kind of passing through, a monstrous movement, an uneasy feeling that is not clear or singular. The feeling, the movement, the mood is confused and drifting.

According to Lippmann and to the philosopher John Dewey in response to his book, [83] most of European political philosophy has been obsessed by the body and the state. They have tried to assemble an impossible parliament that represented really the contradictory wills of the multitude into one General Will. But this enterprise suffered from a cruel lack of realism. Representation, conceived in that total, complete and transparent fashion, cannot possibly be faithful. By asking from politics something it could not deliver, Europeans kept generating aborted monsters and ended up discouraging people to think politically. For politics to be able to absorb more diversity (“the Great Society” in Dewey’s time and what we now call “Globalization”), it has to devise a very specific and new type of representation. Lippmann calls it a Phantom because it’s disappointing for those who dream of unity and totality. Yet strangely enough, it is a good ghost, the only spirit that could protect us against the dangers of fundamentalism.

Another idea is the separation of object from thing. The philosophical tools that make this distinction possible are Heideggerian—Gegenstand/Ding. An object is simply an object—Gegenstand; a thing is something that interests humans—Ding. The ancient world once had many objects—rocks, bones, sand, earwax—that had no value, no human interest. Our world has no such objects. Everything is a thing; everything is interesting. Even things we do not know about are interesting. We want to find them at the bottom of the sea or in deep space and open them and make human sense of them.

Lastly, Latour points out this series in a lab: a rat, the brain of that rat, a neuron in the brain of that rat. Each step or part in this series has no resemblance to the other parts, though they are parts of the same thing, a rat. There seems to be no continuity from the rat to its brain, and from the brain to the cells or a single cell in that brain. Because each part is radically different, Latour proposes to see the transition from one part to the next as a complete transformation. A single thing is in reality a series of complete transformations. The implications of this way of thinking about unity are magical, particularly in the curious light of Ilya Prigogine’s emergence theory.

“Family of Man IV,” Cynthia McKean, 2005.

Jen?

I sort of love these things that rise and shake and fall down and die, and then do it all over again, all over the streets of New York.

My first, and greatest, black-trash-bag love, however, remains Susan Robb’s Toobs, which have gone on tour. This is them in New Jersey not a month ago.

(Thank you, BJC!)

Newsweek has an on-scener about the recently opened, weird, official art show of the Beijing Olympics.

[This was originally posted last night]

Last night, I got a copy of the warrant used to search and seize patient records from a medical-marijuana group’s office on Tuesday. (Previous coverage is here and here. The full affidavit and warrant are in a .pdf here.)

In a sworn statement used to get the warrant, Officer Brian Rees, an SPD bicycle patrol officer assigned to the University District, said he responded to complaint that a storefront on The Ave emanated the smell of marijuana. A neighbor said the odor gave her headaches, and directed the officer next door. When Rees knocked at the door, he looked in the front window and saw Martin Martinez, the shop’s proprietor, walk up to let him in. Inside, the officer saw lighting supplies, packaged soil, books about growing, and filing cabinets labeled “patient” files. He observed three people at a small table labeling envelopes, one of whom said she was a volunteer doing “secretarial work.” Beyond the main room, the officer observed a desk with an electronic scale that appeared to have marijuana residue, labels that the officer says were for “medicinal marijuana,” and a computer and a printer that Martinez said he used to make identification cards. Martinez explained this was an organization to help medical-marijuana patients (hence all the stuff). Rees also observed a tub containing what would turn out to be 12 ounces of pot leaves, which Martinez is authorized to use under state law. But the officer also said there was unaccounted space in the walls that he believed may have been used for growing or storing pot. Based on these and other observations, plus some “supporting evidence” (a blanket description of narcotics-traffickers’ behavior, which we’ll come back to), the warrant was supported by Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Ellen O’Neill-Stephens, and signed by county district Judge Douglas J. Smith.

After getting the warrant, police searched the premises, and removed a wall looking for plants. They didn’t find any plants. But they did find 500 patients’ medical records, which the officers confiscated.

To cast this in the best light possible, let’s say that these statements provided probable cause to justify a warrant—that Martinez was overstepping the medical marijuana law by growing marijuana out of his storefront and providing it to more than one person.

So what?

We all know the intent of the Medical Use of Marijuana Act, passed by 59 percent of voters in 1998, is to protect seriously sick and dying people from being jailed for using marijuana. The medical files observed by police showed that, if this was dispensary—which Martinez says it wasn’t—all of the patients were authorized under state law. That still doesn’t explain taking private records.

And the officer’s statement doesn’t even indicate Martinez was running a dispensary or growing. A portion of the affidavit describes behavior typical of narcotics traffickers and pot growers. Martinez doesn’t fit those criteria.

Drug traffickers typically “conceal weapon on their person… utilize electronic equipment such as computers, telex machines, facsimile machines… keep evidence of their crimes at their place of residence.” At marijuana growing operation, certain indicators include “a private individual, suspicious of persons who might be interested of his/her activities… individuals [who] … use telephonic pagers… …large amounts of cash… a location that is remote or go to a great deal of trouble to disguise a marijuana grow…use filtering systems to mask the strong odor of growing marijuana… [and] lighting equipment [that] … generate tremendous heat…”

To address those points: No weapons were observed. Everyone has a computer and cell phone these days, not just drug traffickers, and nobody uses a goddamned telex machine anymore. There was no specific evidence of distribution, such as price lists, cash register, cash box, etc. No cash was reportedly observed. Martinez let them in; he wasn’t suspicious of them because he believed he was complying with the law. Okay, this one kills me—a great deal of trouble to disguise the marijuana? His store is on The Ave… with glass windows… that the officer looked right into when he walked up. Some disguise. Obviously no filtering was used to mask the smell of marijuana, as the officers were there because it smelled like marijuana. No report of lighting equipment in use, just the unused legal type on the shelves, and no “tremendous heat,” except for the heat from the sun Tuesday. If this were actually a grow operation, there would have been dirt or water on the ground, but nothing like that was reported. In fact, by the officers description, the place had volunteers labeling envelopes, a computer, and filing cabinets of medical records that made it look like… an office.

So is it any surprise that after Martinez told the officer he wasn’t growing marijuana, dispensing marijuana, or stashing marijuana behind the wall (which officers ripped out after they got the warrant), that the cops found… an office?

More after the jump.

Continue reading "Confiscating Medical Records: It All Makes Sense Now, Or Does It?" »

A former Mansfield youth pastor was arrested Thursday on 10 sex-related felonies reportedly involving a teenage parishioner.

John Picard, 40, of Springboro, was charged with 10 counts of sexual battery, all third-degree felonies. He is accused of having sexual relations with a girl starting in 1992 when she was 13 and continuing until she reached adulthood. Picard was a youth pastor at Grace Brethren Church on Marion Avenue at the time.

Police said they think there are other victims.

“He’s probably one of the most despicable pedophiles that there can be,” Mansfield police Lt. Allen Vandayburg said. “It’s a sad, sad state of affairs when somebody of trust can’t be trusted.”

Four readings tonight.

Up at Port Townsend, Kathleen Alcala and Chris Abani will be reading as part of the Port Townsend Writer’s Conference. Abani wrote the great GraceLand, about a young man named Elvis growing up in Nigeria, and Alcala wrote Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist, which is a collection of stories set in California and Mexico.

At Elliott Bay Book Company, Adrián Arancibia reads from a collection of poems called Atacama Poems. I don’t know anything else about the man, except he founded a group of poets called Taco Shop Poets in Chicago, back in the mid-nineties.

At the Shorewood High School Auditorium, Eoin Colfer reads from his newest in the young adult series, Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox. Apparently, the series is about a teenage boy who’s a real dick, and several people I know who read young adult books say that it’s impressive how dickish the boy remains throughout the series. In this one, he goes back in time to confront his earlier dick of a self.

Lastly, up at Third Place Books, Thor Hansen reads from The Impenetrable Forest: My Gorilla Years in Uganda, which is a book about living with gorillas in Uganda. Which is awesome, and entirely reading of the night material.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

^{Sarah Sudhoff’s Senior Portrait (2006), digital C-print}

At Photographic Center Northwest. (Gallery site here.)

I think that a Watchmen movie is a terrible idea. It’s a wonderful comic book that was planned to be just that: a wonderful comic book. For it to become a movie, it would take a director who could somehow make it as dependent on the medium of film as the original was on the medium of comic books. And I just don’t have that kind of trust in Zack Snyder.

That said, Dr. Manhattan looks fucking awesome, and I will be there on opening weekend. Even if it was as bad as it could possibly be, it wouldn’t ruin the comic book for me.

(Thanks to Slog Tipper Levi.)

Dan, you realize this Sunning Bear is now a Mooning Bear, right?

And is it possible that, with that, I am released from the fun that has been Mid-Sized Sculpture Park Sculpture With Dan Savage this week? I cry a yogafied bear tear, and leave you with this apparently majestically bad piece of public art.

Minutes after closing my eyes last night, a city and a television tower appeared.

The television tower had babies crawling up and down it.

The babies were naked.

Th babies had holes for faces.

Just before my finger entered a hole, I awoke. A long and loaded train was rattling on the tracks.

My dream has a debt. That debt is owed to Christin Clatterbuck.

Violence broke out Sunday in Anderson when an 18-year-old man returned home from a gay pride parade and was assaulted by his father…. The teen told deputies that his father “has a problem with him being gay and that is why he hit him with the baseball bat Sunday,” Weymouth said in his report.

Via Towleroad.

Postman talks a bit about the Seattle Times’ handling of the Doug Sutherland “inappropriate touching” story, and then gets into the not-so-way-back machine to point out a bit of Democratic hypocrisy on this issue:

The documents were provided to The Times, the PI, horsesass and apparently others, by backers of Peter Goldmark, the Democrat running against Sutherland. The reason is obvious: They hope that the story will stain Sutherland’s reputation enough that Goldmark can unseat him after two terms as lands commissioner.

Democrats were quick to try to leverage the horsesass post to help Goldmark. Party spokesman Kelly Steele said in a press release:

These documents speak for themselves, and the facts as presented strongly suggest Republican Doug Sutherland has compromised the public trust, and owes Washingtonians an explanation for his abhorrent behavior.

There’s no doubt the Sutherland story deserved a place in the newspaper. But the Democrats have established a double standard for this behavior that rises above run of the mill campaign hypocrisy.

This is the same Democratic Party that in 2000 financed former Gov. Mike Lowry’s run against Sutherland. Lowry served one term as governor and left without running for re-election after a sexual harassment scandal.

Lowry agreed to pay $97,500 to a former press aide, who left her job after what she said was inappropriate touching and comments from Lowry. Two former Lowry aides from his years in Congress also came forward and talked to an investigator about their own experiences. The scandal began after a female State Patrol employee said Lowry inappropriately touched her…

I’ll be interested to see how the party, Goldmark and his backers continue to use this new Sutherland case as a disqualifier for high office. If this is to be a part of the campaign for lands commissioner, Democrats should explain to voters the sliding scale of abhorrent behavior.

To be clear, I don’t think that “Hey, Mike Lowry did it, too!” is going to be a winning rejoinder for Republicans in this whole debacle. But Postman makes a good point in saying that the burden is on Democrats to explain whether there’s some sort of difference between the two cases, and why one case should be a disqualifier for holding the Lands Commissioner post and the other… not so much.

I’ll be on KUOW’s Weekday this morning, starting at 10 a.m., to talk about the news of the week with other local journalist types.

Topics may very well include: That controversial New Yorker cover, inappropriate touching at the Department of Natural Resources, attacks on the presidential candidates’ wives, Seattle’s toilet auction, and whatever else you call in to demand we discuss.

That’s 94.9 FM if you want to listen in. Oh, and if you want to get inside my head early, the comments, as always, are open.

Court Is In Session: First Guantanamo war trials begin Monday.

Terror Watch 2008: Chertoff says Europe is the latest terror threat, suggests taking off and nuking France from space. It’s the only way to be sure.

Tossed: Convictions overturned for men accused of Madrid train bombing.

Movin’ On Up: Indian politician crosses caste lines.

Canned: Major HIV vaccine trial canceled due to doubts about effectiveness.

A Fool’s Wager: Al Gore totally double-dog-dares you not to use oil.

You and What Army? Bush threatened to send troops to Darfur if that whole genocide thing wasn’t cleared up.

Red Menace No More: FDA says tomatoes now a-ok!

And now, the only man that ever defeated Batman: Wesley Willis.