I just spoke with Tom Braun, one of the cyclists hit by an irate motorist during last night’s Critical Mass ride.

Braun—a 35-year-old attorney who says prior to last night, he hadn’t been on a Critical Mass ride in years—says he was moving with a crowd of cyclists on 15th and Aloha when he says he heard the driver of a white Subaru yelling at his fellow riders. “I didn’t see anyone “surrounding” the guy’s car,” Braun says.”I saw some cyclists nicely asking the guy to wait.” Then, Braun says, the driver “just floored it” into a crowd of cyclists.

As the driver pulled away, Braun—who was not part of the group talking to the driver—was caught under the vehicle, and the car rolled over his leg. “I literally got run over,” Braun says. “I was hanging on the front of [the] car. I’m glad he made a left and tried to take off down the road. If he’d turned right, I would have been crushed.”

Braun was taken to the ER, and although he miraculously avoided breaking any bones during the incident, he may have sustained internal injuries as doctors found blood in his urine.

Braun says he’s been consulting with other attorneys about filing a lawsuit against the driver. Braun says he’s also getting ready to do an interview with King 5 in the hopes of setting the record straight. “I saw the media reports this morning and I was shocked,” Braun says. “Somebody’s got to get out what really happened. This was a vehicular assault that could have killed people.”

I am one of the cyclists who was run over by the driver of the white Subaru on the evening of July 25, 2008 on Aloha St. in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle.

My perspective differs significantly from media reports by King5, KOMO, The Seattle Times, etc.

I arrived near the end of a Critical Mass cycling ride at the crest of the Aloha St. hill heading east to find the driver of a car with a passenger irately screaming at cyclists to get out of the way.

As cyclists were explaining to him that everyone was nearly past him, he proceeded to yell about being late for a reservation. He was parked on the grass and sidewalk, crookedly perpendicular to Aloha.

Suddenly, he sped into Aloha, directly into the crowd of cyclists.

The front right side of the car struck me and dragged along with my bike as I hung onto the front of the car. Subsequently, he ran over my right leg and bike as he sped down Aloha to the East, in what appeared to me to be an attempt to flee the scene. My bicycle has been damaged beyond repair (see attached pictures).

I saw at least 2 other people hit by his car, a woman, and a man who jumped onto the hood of the car to avoid getting hit head on.

Not until after these events did other cyclists become involved in apprehending the driver, etc.

I would have spoken with reporters, but they were apparently focused on where the driver fled to, and by the time they asked if I had any comments, the scene had been cleared, my wife had loaded my wrecked bike into our car, my right leg was swelling up, I had pains in my left back, and we thought it best to get me to the ER for x-rays and other tests. As it turns out, I had no broken bones, but did have blood in my urine from the trauma, a situation we’re still monitoring.

While two cyclists have been charged, it’s unclear whether the driver has also been charged for his involvement, and I cannot get that information from the Seattle Police Department until Monday. I will be pursuing civil remedies for this incident at the very least.

First off: I’ve been out of cell phone and e-mail range for the past day, so I just heard about last night’s Critical Mass attacks this afternoon.

Having read numerous emails from eyewitnesses who say the driver in the incident deliberately drove into a crowd of cyclists with his Subaru, however, I have a few questions for the Seattle media and police.

Why, if the driver assaulted several cyclists with his car, is he being treated as the victim?

Why is hitting cyclists with intent to harm them—or “nudging” them, or throwing things at them, or forcing them off the road—not considered assault with a deadly weapon?

Why does SPD and the media consider harm to property—the Subaru, whose tires were slashed and whose windows were broken—a far worse crime than running over and potentially killing a defenseless person with a 2,000-pound machine?

Why, when cyclists pay for local roads just like drivers do, do some drivers assume they have more right to the road than cyclists do—indeed, that cyclists have no right to the road at all?

Why do newspapers and TV stations always take the cops at their word—and assume that people they can’t identify with, like greasy-haired cyclists protesting car culture, must be lying?

Why do drivers see any impediment to getting where they’re going as quickly as possible as an assault on their very being (see also: This month’s traffic circle murder)?

Why do we consider it manslaughter or worse when someone carelessly kills another person with a gun—but sympathize with, and utterly fail to punish, someone who carelessly kills another person with their car?

Why do drivers so often regard their fellow humans as less than human the second they get out of their cars and become cyclists or pedestrians?

Why do we let these people keep getting away with it, and getting away with it, and getting away with it?

A nice passage from Frank Rich:

What was most striking about the Obama speech in Berlin was not anything he said so much as the alternative reality it fostered: many American children have never before seen huge crowds turn out abroad to wave American flags instead of burn them.

East Aloha street is the city’s designated route for cyclists to get East and West across Northern Capitol Hill.

Roll that in your mind, if you’re prone to think the Critical Mass people were asking for it. “The driver was in his right to run over, by accident or intent, several bicyclists. They were blocking Aloha—the major car route across North Capitol hill. The cyclists were intentionally blocking his way. And, he had dinner reservations!”

East Aloha street is totally insane as a bicycle route. It’s narrow, barely wide enough for two cars let alone cars and cyclists. Cars are idiodically street parked along the length—half on the grass, half on the street. (The self-centered jackasses who park their cars on Aloha deserve to have their cars sideswiped more often.) The road twists and turns, ramps up and down, with terrible sight lines. Cars, particularly those seeking a rapid zip across the hill, naturally gravitate to this street compared to those North and South of it. Nobody should use it as a bicycle route. East Mercer street, East Republican street or East Harrison street are all better choices, despite being broken up and littered with shitty drivers driving way too fast for narrow residential streets.

The City tells you, as a potential cyclist, to use East Aloha street as your route of choice—via the Seattle Bicycling Guide Map, a delightful service of the Seattle Department of Transportation. The document pretty much epitomizes the city’s contempt for cyclists—on the part of the police, the drivers, the transportation department and the government. East Aloha street is designated the same as 12th Ave East, an excellent cyclist route.

Let’s say you’re a decent, law abiding person citizen of Seattle who wishes to start commuting by bicycle—perhaps because gas, car payments and insurance have become too expensive to afford, because you’re sick of being complicit in our increasingly disasterous oil wars, because you’re sick of being out of shape and on the way to obese, or simply because you want to. You get a sturdy bicycle (with gears and strong brakes), a helmet, a light and rigorously follow all laws—laws you’ve read about in the city’s guide. You plan your route using the City’s suggestions and end up on East Aloha street as a result. Mr. I-have-a-dinner-reservation comes barreling up behind you. He attempts a crazy pass on a blind curve. (Aloha is all blind curves.) A car is coming the other direction, he didn’t see. He hits you, slamming you to the ground. He has a dinner reservation. He keeps going. You’re left bleeding on the street. You call the police. They laugh at you. You don’t have insurance—or your insurance refuses to pay, since you cannot name who hit you—so you collect your smashed bicycle and go home and hope your injuries don’t take a turn for the worse.

What a fucking joke. I don’t care how obnoxious and idiotic a cyclist is acting—if every stop sign is ignored, if every law is flaunted, if he or she is on the most idiotic street imaginable (Westlake, the Ballard Bridge, Fairview, Rainier all included.) If you are operating a motor vehicle of any kind, you simply have no right to run the person down or even attempt to run the person off the road, to assault or even attempt to assult another human being because you find yourself inconvenienced by a situation. And, let’s be honest: Even with the most heinous of cyclist behavior, the inconvenience is never more than minor. Nobody has the right to exact a death penalty. Whine, complain, bitch all you want. You are in the wrong for even threatening the act.

Driving is the single most dangerous thing we do, the most dangerous to ourselves and to others. When you get inside all those thousands of pounds of glass and steel and start moving, you are at your highest risk of causing devastating physical harm to yourself and others. Driving is a massive assumption of responsibility. Most of us take about as seriously as flossing. The effort taken to make the transportation infrastructure as safe as possible—for drivers—is the only reason more aren’t harmed each year.

I both drive and bicycle in Seattle. I’ve been incredibly frustrated by the decisions and behaviors of some cyclists. Nothing comes close to the raw fear I’ve felt as a cyclists facing an insane and incompetent driver. As a cyclist, I want to live. I follow every rule, wear every light, stop at every stop, never pass on the right, take the safest routes at off times of day. Despite this, I’ve been assaulted and left to bleed or die by such inept drivers, without an apparent care. Nobody deserves such treatment. Yet our city’s transportation engineers, law enforcement and politicians view the inconveniencing of a driver, any driver, as justification enough.

As a driver, I long for better infrastructure: Proper cyclist routes, with designated lanes and clear markings. Police that are as interested in the safety of the cyclists as the convenience of drivers. I’d be happier. The cyclists would be happier. The entire city would function better.

And so, “pro-cyclist” activism like Critical Mass doesn’t impress me. Creating “awareness” has done nothing to get such an infrastructure in place. The clot of cyclists on East Aloha street this Friday, on a route that shouldn’t be used by any cyclist at any time, did nothing to make my riding across Capitol Hill safer or more convinient—as a cyclists or a driver. Rather than dozens of cyclists in spandex on every first Friday of the month, I’d be far more impressed by four guys and gals in suits, down at city hall every day, demanding the only sensible thing: A proper infrastructure to match how our roads are used, and should be used.

Jonah just got off the phone with Abigail Wharton, a 25-year-old who was on last night’s Critical Mass ride, along with her husband, her mother, and her stepfather.

From her position about 50 yards away, Wharton says she saw about four or five cyclists around a white Subaru that was being driven by a white, well-dressed man in his mid- to late-20s. She heard him yell at the cyclists, “Get the fuck out of my way! We’ve got reservations!” When the cyclists continued to block his car, “he just got really irrational,” driving his car into the crowd, knocking over two cyclists and backing his car over several bikes left in the road as cyclists jumped out of his way. Wharton says the driver then pulled forward again, forcing one cyclist onto his windshield (and possibly breaking the cyclist’s ankle).

Wharton says the initial report from King 5 news, which characterized the cyclists as aggressors and the driver as an innocent victim, was “totally inaccurate. They painted it as this mob of angry cyclists attacking the car,” which couldn’t be further from the truth, Wharton says. She describes public reaction to news reports as “they got what was coming to them.”

After the man attempted to flee the scene, Wharton says, a cyclist or cyclists slashed his tires to stop him. One cyclist reached into the driver-side window and punched the driver, then opened the door and pulled him out. Later, as he was sitting on the sidewalk covered in blood, Wharton says, the driver asked one of the cyclists if it was his.

Wharton says the fact that two cyclists were arrested and jailed, but the driver wasn’t, is “fucking insane.”

Wharton, who owns a car and who was riding on her second-ever Critical Mass ride, says she doubts she’ll participate in next month’s ride.

Seattle Police Department spokesman Mark Jamieson told Jonah: “The driver at this point is being treated as the victim. He pulled out onto the street and was surrounded by cyclists. … Why didn’t they let him out into the street? The onus is on the people in the group.” SPD has two cyclists in custody, and are searching for a third believed to be involved in damaging the driver’s car. Despite numerous eyewitness statements that he ran over several cyclists with his Subaru, the driver has not been charged; Jamieson says that decision will ultimately rest with the King County prosecutor’s office.

Read all about it on Line Out.

Thank you, Slog tipper Explorer.

Last night brought a general query from Slog tipper John:

What’s this about Critical Mass riders beating the shit out of a driver and his car at 16th and Aloha?

This morning brings a report from KING 5:

A demonstration turned violent Friday night after a group of cyclists taking part in the Critical Mass demonstration got into an argument with a driver on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.

Critical Mass is a group of cyclists that takes to the streets the last Friday of every month to promote cyclists’ right to the road.

It’s wasn’t clear what sparked the confrontation at 15th and Aloha, but witnesses say they saw about a dozen cyclists surround a white Subaru, blocking in the driver.

Apparently, the driver felt intimidated and tried to back up to get away, but he backed into at least two cyclists.

He then tried to take off, but cyclists chased after him, bashed in his car window and assaulted the driver. The driver was taken to an area hospital.

This morning also brought two eyewitness reports sent to Last Days.

Eyewitness #1 was a bystander:

I was just looking up news information about an event that I witnessed tonight and found a frighteningly misinformed article on the event on the King 5 news website. Their “Bicycle demonstration turns violent” article paints a picture of cyclist brutality committed on a vehicle, injuring the driver and scaring the passenger, who they describe as a pregnant woman. While there is no denying that the cyclists circled the car and trashed it, this was all an attempt to stop the car and driver from possibly hurting anyone else, as the scene they describe in their newscast takes place about 200 ft from the scene where the motorist accelerated from 0 to 40 THROUGH a standing line of cyclists at Aloha and 14th, luckily only injuring two of them as his car was pointed at a group of six.

I was standing about 20 feet from the scene and saw the entire altercation. I honestly cannot believe what I saw. Originally, the vehicle was trying to inch (westward on Aloha) into an oncoming mass of cyclists on a narrow road, where he had to pull into the oncoming traffic lane in order to get around the cars parked in his lane. About 6 cyclists peeled off to park themselves in front of the vehicle, explaining that he needed to wait and they would all be out of his way in a minute. The driver, however, remained agitated and expressed that they were “in a rush” and “would be late”. When the cyclists asked what they were going to be late for, the driver responded, “We have reservations!”, which left the group largely speechless until one of the cyclists again explained that he would save a lot of time and trouble if he just waited another 30 seconds for the rest of the cyclists to pass. At that moment, the driver suddenly put his car in reverse and backed up—5 feet into the sidewalk (now the car is parallel to Aloha—thank goodness there were no pedestrians behind him!)—and stopped. This strange behavior panicked everyone and no one moved except to shout “Stop.” This is when his passenger started yelling for him to “Calm down and stop” as well. After staying put for about 10 seconds, the driver then said “fuck this” and accelerated into the line of standing cyclists. When he hit the first ones, he continued to accelerate, but steered into the larger mass of cyclists before turning the wheel and tearing off in the opposite direction (east on Aloha) with one of the hit cyclists still on the roof of his car.

The driver sped down Aloha with a mess of bicycles and cyclists in his wake, a cyclist on his roof, and everyone, including his pregnant passenger, yelling for him to “Just stop!” At the bottom of the hill, the driver stopped at a stop sign and the cyclists swarmed the car, slashing his tires and breaking the windows in order to make sure that he did not continue operating his vehicle through the city like a madman. His door was opened, the driver got out of the car in tears and walked, unmolested back up to where the cyclists were splayed out in the street apologizing to everyone. His passenger was relatively calm, also walked up the street unmolested, and explained that her friend had made a mistake and that she had been yelling for him to calm down and stop the car. While there was a little hysterical yelling by the freightened bicyclists, there was absolutely no physical confrontation.

The reason that I am writing you is that it seems alarmingly irresponsible that such a biased story would be printed and broadcast when King 5 admits that “It’s wasn’t clear what sparked the confrontation”. Not that this is surprising by any means, which is unfortunate. I guess I just want to make sure that the real story is put out there before this damning misinterpretation gains any steam.

Eyewitness #2 was a Critical Mass participant:

Near the end of a particularly hilly ride, on Aloha E near 14th, a driver got pissed that we were blocking both lanes of the road and, after yelling “Get the fuck outta my way, we’ve got reservations!” proceeded to gun it into a crowd of maybe 11 cyclists! He then backed up and—with a young man on his now broken windshield—drove through the cyclists, some of whom had fallen on the road, again. He tried at this point to flee the scene in his car. The uninjured riders absolutely mobbed the vehicle, breaking his back window with a U-lock and stopping the car about half a block later by slashing the front tires. The driver was then pulled from the vehicle by the angry group of riders (a few, maybe 5 or 6?) and assaulted (I KNOW he was hit at least once because I heard a rider admit to hitting him,) though later he kept insisting that he was not injured. He did end up covered in blood but, strangely, it wasn’t his. I know this because a few minutes later, after the confrontation, he sat by the car and asked a rider with a bloody hand, “Is this yours?” There was a passenger in the car and I’m pretty sure it was her birthday party they were headed to. The driver did apologize profusely once he was pulled from the car (maybe this is the reason he didn’t get beaten beyond recognition?) and kept insisting that he hadn’t meant to hit the gas pedal, that he thought it was the brakes. I don’t believe that for a second, his actions looked absolutely intentional and he was angry when he did it, but he did seem genuinely shaken up and said he was sorry over and over. I think he was in shock. In the end, I believe only four cyclists were injured, there were about 20 witnesses to the crazy scene, and at least two bikes were totally wrecked. It took the police about five minutes to show up, by then people on all sides had calmed down a little and the officers handled the situation beautifully. Ambulances arrived less than two minutes after that.

Holy crap. Stay tuned.

UPDATE from Hot Tipper Ersa:

2 of the bikers got arrested for property damage, and they are booked to jail. THEY HAVE COURT TODAY STARTING AT 12.30 PM AT KING COUNTY COURT HOUSE, COURT ROOM #1. So we need people who saw what happened to contact us, because the driver is trying to pull off that he didn’t do anything.

Channel 5 tried to interview us, but we refused to talk with them, and it seems like media is showing the incident like “Violent bikers attacked a car…” Bikers who got hit by the maniac driver, and bikers who got arrested need support from the community. Please contact via e-mail ekirgoz@yahoo.com, if you were witness or if you could show any kind of support, and share ideas…

Again, stay tuned.

music

Capitol Hill Block Party

• See what else is happening in Music on Saturday »
• More Stranger Suggests for this week »

An open mic, a book about Seattle architecture, and a few other readings today.

At Seattle Mystery Bookshop, Brent Ghelfi reads from Volk’s Shadow, which has a terrorist attack and a heist of a Fabergé egg. Also at Seattle Mystery Bookshop are Simon Wood, with a book about people dying at a research firm, and Michelle Gagnon with a book about people dying in Appalachia. I’m pretty fond of the cover of Gagnon’s book, to the left. Wood and Gagnon also read at Third Place Books later today.

And at Elliott Bay Book Company, Kris Steinnes reads from Women of Wisdom: Empowering the Dreams and Spirit of Women. According to the press release, this reading will also feature “Veronica Appolonia, members of the Sacred Fire Choir, and other local contributors.”

It might be a day to take a book to a beach instead of attending a reading.

Full readings calendar, including the next week or so, here.

Senate to the rescue: Sweeping legislation passed in an attempt to save the housing market.

Growing distance: McCain left in the rain as Bush Administration shifts foreign policy stance.

Indian summer: Two dead in Ahmedabad one day after similar blast kills two in Bangalore.

Censored: U.S. government seeks to prevent publication of violent photos from Iraq.

Arrested: Hamas takes Fatah supporters into custody after Gaza Strip attack claims six lives.

Last leg: Obama wraps up world tour in London.

Viral video: Google faces charges in Italy over video of teens taunting boy with Down syndrome.

Illegal campaign: BIAW accused of secretly raising $3.5 million to oust Gregoire.

Busted: Eight Port of Seattle workers fired for derogatory emails.

Spiked: Metal spikes in Green Lake were probably put there by the city for weed control.

“Heroin Logs”: Allegedly tossed out window to police officers’ feet.

A Stash Indeed: Pot found in evidence room after 29 years.

Seized Cars: Become sweet ride for police chief’s daughter.

During Labor Day weekend 2002, St. Louis city police responded shortly after midnight to an unusual call. The police chief’s daughter, Aimie Mokwa, then 27, had crashed a car.

It was a car she didn’t own. St. Louis police had seized it during a drug arrest and turned it over to a private company that holds a lucrative towing contract with the department.

Eight Years: Teen sentenced for giving pot to tots.

Bitter Sixteen: Starbucks closing more stores than announced.

Singapore Sling: Aussie journalist faces 10 years for heroin.

Street Stupid: Non-pharmaceutical fentanyl blamed for rash of overdoses.

Green Giant: Congressional Black Caucus split over menthol rules.

Blogger Brian Davis writes, “When you sit in ‘an office full of PhDs’ all day long, you’re inspired to ask the really hard questions, to plumb the depths of human knowledge and probe the mysteries of the ancients.” Indeed, he’s been plumbing away on the math of Seattle’s relative sunshine deficit to Tucson, Arizona. This weekend should be no exception, as the forecast is unseasonable gray for the this Saturday and Sunday’s Capitol Hill Block Party (formerly running for the title of Heastrokepalooza). Davis devised a method to makes up for Seattle’s solar-energy shortfall that is both energy conscious and festive:

According to CalorieKing.com, a bottle of Budweiser contains 145 calories, or 606 kilojoules (a bottle of decent Russian Imperial can contain up to 1,000 kilojoules). That translates to about .168 kilowatt hours (kWh) per 12 ounce bottle (.278 kWh for the stout)….

This vast difference in solar energy [between Tuscon and Seattle] is the equivalent of about 9,529,916,667 Budweisers (or 5,759,086,331 boutique beers). Given that Seattle has a population of about 592,800 people within the city limits, this means that our denizens would have to pitch in and consume 16,076 beers per person per day (or, if they can afford it, 9,715 thick microbrews) just to equal the power potential of Tucson’s beamy rays.

One problem, though; it looks like Budweiser is out at this year’s block party and the Champagne of fortified soda water is in. Regardless, it can be safely predicted that all energy derived from beer consumed at the block party will be processed into stamina for… more drinking. Bottoms up, hipsters.

Opening this week:

I write about The X-Files: I Want to Believe at a length that probably is not justified. I loved the shit out of that show, so don’t get in the comments and start doubting my geek. Among other qualifications: I wrote a fan letter to Gillian Anderson in approximately 1995 (I was 14 or 15) and received a personalized signed photograph in return, attended not one but two X-Files conventions, and scored an invitation to the set in Vancouver from Sheila Larkin, who played Scully’s mother on the show but was actually the mother of a kid young enough to be in a Centrum theater camp with me. Unfortunately, her son saw through my greedy opportunism and quashed my fondest dreams. Oh, and I wrote some fan fiction once and posted it on ye olde Usenet newsgroup alt.tv.x-files.creative. I think I was 16 at the time. It’s probably still floating around the internet somewhere. How embarrassing.

On a more serious note (no, actually, my discussion of The X-Files is quite serious), Sean Nelson grapples with another fan relationship in an essay about Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (“For this antisentimentalist, in film as in life, ‘acceptable behavior’ is something for other people to worry about. Which is, of course, the whole dilemma of being an ardent fan of Polanski’s movies. Because of what we know and think we know, it’s never easy to find the line between the artist and his work. Because there is no such line. Because the Polanski who made so many titanic works of cinema is the same Polanski who escaped from the Nazis is the same Polanski who not only lost his wife and unborn child to the Mansons but was initially accused of the murders in the press is the same Polanski who gave a 13-year-old girl champagne and a quaalude fragment then had sex with her on the floor of Jack Nicholson’s living room. If the 20th century happened to anyone, it happened to Roman Polanski”).

I review the first feature film adaptation of Brideshead Revisted (“This film, like the book, is told from the perspective of Charles Ryder [slightly-too-old Matthew Goode], an upper-middle-class striver completely out of his depth—but the filmmakers don’t do enough to remind us that Charles is our narrator. The voice-overs are scarce, the cinematography [by Jess Hall] is square and pompous when it should be dazzling, and the score [by Adrian Johnston] thunders when it should be stricken with awe. Still, the acting is more nuanced than the screenplay for director Julian Jarrold’s Becoming Jane ever allowed”).

Former synchro swimmer Jen Graves writes about Water Lilies (“Water Lilies, the ambitious first film from 27-year-old French director Céline Sciamma, is about synchronized swimming. It is also the first film ever to use synchronized swimming intelligently, as the powerful metaphor that it is, representing the fascism and subterranean maneuvering of female adolescence. Above water, or walking down the hallways of high schools, we have only one goal as girls newly confronted with the real possibility of sex: look good, and make it look easy. Underwater we’re working like hell”).

Lindy West has to deal with Step Brothers (“The story of two curly-headed men-children, John C. Reilly and Will Ferrell, forced to live together when their aging parents get married, Step Brothers is dull, ineptly paced, and lazy”).

I write about an adaptation of a book I’d never heard of but which all of Canada is apparently devoted to: The Stone Angel (“Tragedy arrives in fits and starts, and it’s strangely difficult to get invested in Hagar’s emotional life. [Come to think of it, the name “Hagar” might have something to do with it.] Still, there’s always something (or someone) attractive to look at: Watching The Stone Angel is not a chore”).

And Andrew Wright assesses the concert film/documentary hybrid CSNY: Déjà Vu (“Longtime Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young fans may still find things to savor [the sequence where the quartet performs “Let’s Impeach the President” in front of a stadium full of booing red-staters is one for the time capsule], but as a whole, this falls somewhere between warts-and-all documentary and glad-handing publicity piece”).

There’s a lot of good stuff in Limited Runs this week. Charles Mudede went nuts over the Nikkatsu Action Cinema series at Northwest Film Forum: Titles include A Colt Is My Passport, The Warped Ones, and Velvet Hustler. A mysterious David Lynch-related movie with a mysterious David Lynch-related guest is playing tonight at Seattle Art Museum as part of the Twin Peaks Festival in North Bend. Grand Illusion has The Omega Man for those of you who weren’t impressed by the Will Smith version of I Am Legend. Northwest Film Forum is playing an irritating documentary called Operation Filmmaker, about do-gooder Hollywood liberals who decide to give the gift of coffee-fetching to a film student in Baghdad; the Hal Ashby series at NWFF is continuing Tuesday with Shampoo. David Schmader already pointed you to Raising Arizona (on DVD) at Central Cinema, which is also hosting a screening of a new marriage equality doc called For My Wife, about the partner of Kate Fleming, the audio book actor who died in her Madison Valley basement during a flood. I must mention tonight’s South Lake Union outdoor movie, because it’s Bring It On; Fremont Outdoor Movies is doing An Inconvenient Truth tomorrow. And Landmark is reviving the delightful Metro Classics with a series about World War II—sort of. The next three weeks are themed “Axis,” so this Wednesday’s program is a double bill of the German Expressionist classics The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Last Laugh. Finally, The Last Mistress is holding over at the Metro, if you’re still curious about Catherine Breillat’s period piece.

According to a new SurveyUSA poll, 11 percent of voters who opposed light rail said King County Executive Ron Sims’ opposition to this year’s Sound Transit proposal would make them more likely to vote for light rail, compared to just 8 percent who said it would make them even less likely to support it.

I’m not quite sure what to think of that—has Sims’s popularity dropped? Is this good news for Larry Phillips?—but there it is.

At the political blog of Denver’s (VVM-owned) alt-weekly, they’ve got something called “Delegating Denver,” which, with a little sarcasm, is supposed to give Denverites an idea of what to expect from each state’s delegates during the DNC. And they’ve got some choice things to say about us:

Washingtonians will be extremely polite and helpful, but don’t expect to exchange personal information. As the saying goes, they are as “warm as a Washington winter.” Their aloofness has been identified as a pathological disorder called the Washington State Superiority Complex. Studies show that residents of the Evergreen State have very high opinions of themselves, and that they maintain their hipper-than-the-rest-of-America attitude by engaging in a statewide pecking order of “coolness.” Seattle Democrats with standard-issue haircuts, black-rimmed glasses, thrift-store clothes and MySpace pages are the “Starbuck Socialists” at the top of the heap.

I’m from Denver originally, and let me tell you, it sucks. It’s an overgrown cowtown, an unholy hybrid of Seattle hipness and Omaha hickness. (Democratic Senator Ken Salazar is kinda like our Democratic senators. Except he wears a cowboy hat.) All they’ve got is prairie and sprawl and low rent. How dare you, Denver?

Yesterday I Slogged about the Sound Transit board’s vote to put light-rail, bus and commuter-rail expansion on the ballot in 2008. At the end of my post, I wrote, “We told you so.” As in: At a time when the consensus among transit supporters was that last year’s roads-heavy Prop. 1 was our “last chance” to get light rail in the region, we at the Stranger said Sound Transit would be back in 2008 with a smaller, smarter transit-only ballot measure.

Well, I really meant it: We told you so.

Me, June 13, 2007:

No big deal, RTID opponents say—a “no” vote would allow Sound Transit to come back to the ballot on its own, unlinked to the environmentally damaging roads-expansion projects included in RTID. “Some people think we need to defeat bad roads right now and get light rail,” O’Brien says. “We’d rather kill it all now and come back with light rail really soon.”

Me, September 26, 2007:

[I]f the roads and transit package failed, pressure from groups like the Cascade Bicycle Club could make a re-vote on Sound Transit in 2008 a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Me, September 28, 2007:

Proponents of the ballot measure say if we reject it now, it’ll be years before we have another chance to vote again on light rail. They say the governor “won’t allow it” on the ballot in an election year and predict the following year will be too soon. Feh. First of all, the governor would be wise not to alienate transit-loving King County voters, who provided her slim margin of victory last time. Moreover, the last time Sound Transit was rejected, in 1995, it came back the very next year—and won.

ECB, October 9, 2007:

[Transportation Choices Coalition Director Jessyn] Farrell: […] “The governor doesn’t want to run on a tax measure, [House Speaker] Frank Chopp doesn’t want a bunch of Democrats running on a tax measure, and there are a lot of legislators who just don’t like Sound Transit.” […]

It’s interesting to me that TCC and other environmental groups that support roads and transit assume nothing is set in stone about the roads side of the package (“Sure, we’re voting for roads, but only because we’ll take them out later!”) but are absolutely 100% rock-solid certain that Sound Transit will never be back on the ballot if this fails. Seems like serious cognitive dissonance to me.

Stranger Election Control Board, October 17, 2007:

Supporters of the roads and transit package love to talk about all the light rail we’ll be giving away if we don’t vote for the $17.8 billion package. The SECB sees it differently. If we turn roads and transit down, the invaluable transit side of the package can come back next year (which would be great given that Democratic Party turnout will be huge), or else in 2009, when the light rail track from Sea-Tac Airport to downtown will be rolling out and making the on-the-ground case for expansion. True: Voters turned down a rail package in 1968. But this isn’t 1968. This is 2007. Global warming is an international crisis, Al Gore just won the Nobel Peace Prize, and Sound Transit is already building a $5.7 billion line that will demand expansion in its own right.

Josh Feit, November 9, 2007:

Here’s Mayor Nickels in today’s Seattle Times in an article about polling that shows voters would have passed a transit package on its own:

“I recounted to (the Sound Transit Board) what happened in 1995 when the first Sound Transit plan was turned down, and I think that it offers us a pretty good lesson,” Nickels said. “We went back to the ballot in 1996, in a presidential election, with the second Sound Transit plan and it was very different than the first one … and we won going away.” […]

The fact that Nickels is saying bold stuff like this also confirms what the Sierra Club was saying before the election—that this vote could reject conventional wisdom about political “reality” and let voters set the agenda. It also gets the ball rolling on the option we’ve been pushing all along: Expanding transit, not roads, transit.

Me, November 14, 2007:

IThe sudden show of support [among elected officials] for light rail is (promising) anathema to the conventional wisdom pushed by many environmental groups before the election, which said that this was the last possible chance transit advocates would ever have to get light rail in this region, and that Gregoire and the state legislature would “never” let light rail move forward on its own.

Josh Feit, December 13, 2007:

Light Rail is Dead. Long Live Light Rail.

Sound Transit obediently went along with the moronic marriage Gov. Gregoire and the legislature forced on them—going to the ballot with roads this year. Olympia’s harebrained idea was supposed to neutralize anti-transit and anti-roads opposition, but instead it compounded that opposition.

Sound Transit believes the legislature owes them. They’re right.

And just last night, one of the strongest proponents of the this-is-the-last-chance-ever-for-transit point of view, Horse’s Ass blogger David Goldstein, printed a sweet mea culpa:

During their frequent appearances on my radio show, I routinely locked horns with The Stranger’s Erica Barnett and Josh Feit over last year’s “Roads & Transit” package. They opposed Prop 1, arguing that Sound Transit would come back the next year with a better package, sans roads. I thought they were being politically naive, and argued that the powers that be would never allow ST to come back with a transit-only package in 2008, and would be picked apart by the “governance reform” vultures well before 2009. I am not at all unhappy to admit that they were right and I was wrong.

Sound Transit’s on the ballot in 2008—a presidential election year when young and progressive voters will be turning out in greater numbers than any year in recent history. Nothing’s certain, but I think it stands a solid chance in November.

Where (the fuck) were you?

You know, I went with a couple of friends of mine to the Kingfish Cafe, and it occurred to me that it’s a real shame we don’t run something in the paper once a year about how wonderful the Kingfish Cafe is. So here it is:

The Kingfish Cafe is still absolutely wonderful.

Check in next year for an update on the wonderfulness of the Kingfish Cafe. That is all.

From me, and now Matt Taibbi:

These fantasy elections we’ve been having — overblown sports contests with great production values, decided by haircuts and sound bytes and high-tech mudslinging campaigns — those were sort of fun while they lasted, and were certainly useful in providing jerk-off pundit-dickheads like me with high-paying jobs. But we just can’t afford them anymore. We have officially spent and mismanaged our way out of la-la land and back to the ugly place where politics really lives — a depressingly serious and desperate argument about how to keep large numbers of us from starving and freezing to death. Or losing our homes, or having our cars repossessed. For a long time America has been too embarrassed to talk about class; we all liked to imagine ourselves in the wealthy column, or at least potentially so, flush enough to afford this pissing away of our political power on meaningless game-show debates once every four years. The reality is much different, and this might be the year we’re all forced to admit it.

See you at the Block Party.

Sound Transit, this is how you design a station:
The Midrand Station is part of Gautrain, South Africa’s future “rapid rail link between Johannesburg, Pretoria and Joburg International Airport.” The power this future railway system exerts on my imagination is the same the failed train line from Cape Town to Cairo exerted on Cecil Rhodes. Gautrain, this is the rose; dance here.

(Lee Pyne-Mercier sent the me the wonderful link.)

Warren Ellis writes about video mail—raising the question of why we don’t get video mails in our inbox along with the emails—but he also points to a new site called 12 Seconds.tv. You have 12 seconds to record whatever you want. It’s like video Twitter. Most people are using it to keep in touch.

I can see useful (and by ‘useful,’ I mean socially useful, not world-changing useful) applications here, although I’d never use the thing. Still and all, Warren Ellis is where I first heard about podcasting, way back before anybody else was using the term, and I can see this really taking off.

Wendy White, guest-blogging over at Mighty God King, has brought The Lucifer Project to my attention. I had not heard of The Lucifer Project, but it’s apparently pretty popular online. White explains it pretty succinctly:

It suggests that NASA’s Cassini project, which involves a probe orbiting and documenting Saturn and its moons, will conclude in a deadly final act - NASA will plummet the probe into Saturn, where it will detonate and ignite the planet in a glory of nuclear fusion.

Saturn becomes a new sun, frying Earth in the process - but providing the potential of new life on one of its moons for those with plans to escape and found a New World Order.

(As a side note, if you enter The Lucifer Project into Google Maps, the first thing that comes up is the John McCain for president Virginia headquarters. Curiouser and curiouser.) Cassini is supposed to reach the end of its deadly trip…get ready to panic…this month! I just thought you might want to have some inside information on this, in case a second sun appears in the sky. It was nice knowing you, Slog commenters.

I had high hopes for Nocturne, the famous show-length monologue by Adam Rapp that begins with the famously chilling opening:

Fifteen years ago I killed my sister. There. I said it.

Schmader reviewed it last weekend. He didn’t like it:

“Fifteen years ago I killed my sister.” So goes the famous opening line of Adam Rapp’s Nocturne, laying out the central fact of this acclaimed solo play and leading into a characteristically Rappian flourish: “I can change the order of the words. My sister I killed 15 years ago. I, 15 years ago, killed my sister. Sister my killed I years ago 15. I can cite various definitions. To deprive of life: The farmer killed the rabid dog. To put an end to: The umpire killed the tennis match. To mark for omission: He killed the paragraph… To slay. To murder. To assassinate. To dispatch. To execute. You can play with tenses. Will kill. Did kill….”

Thanks to Rapp’s relentless thesaurian pirouettes—the linguistic equivalent of treading water, prettily—his efforts are too often in vain. Saddled with a script so dense and flowery it makes Tennessee Williams look like a minimalist, Doescher is a winning actor in a no-win situation.

The thing is, I like Rapp’s “thesaurian pirouettes”—not everyone’s, just Rapp’s. I became a Rapp fan four years ago, after seeing WET’s production of Finer Noble Gasses (reviewed here), a disturbing, funny play about a small group of strung-out, vacant-eyed friends living in a trashy apartment.

One of the actors (Lathrop Walker, maybe?) had to take an extremely long onstage piss. Marya Sea Kaminski Finer Noble Gasses and told me at the time that it wasn’t a trick—the actor was actually pissing in an actual bucket:

“I think he drinks like a liter and a half of water before the show,” Kaminski said. “He’s got it pretty well timed, but tech week was hilarious—stopping and starting the play, his bladder was in passionate confusion.”

(I’m not sure I believe her, but I will always love her for saying “his bladder was in passionate confusion.”)

Anyway.

Nocturne was supposed to run for three more weekends but, after Schmader’s review came out, actor Craig Doescher emailed to say he was canceling the rest of the shows, but didn’t blame Dave:

… in SUCH an intimate space (25 seats), it is a REALLY hard show to give/receive, no matter how much finessing, and in execution—no matter how well-intended—it just wasn’t achieving what the show could and should achieve. A darn shame, but I see it crystal-clearly, and feel responsible for people who come to my shows, so I made the difficult but necessary decision.

I don’t know exactly what that means, except no more Nocturne. And that Craig Doescher has a rare, valuable sense of responsibility for his audience.

Seattle Police are looking for suspects after at least 12 cars were damaged by objects thrown from an I-5 overpass late last night.

Just before 11pm, Seattle Police received a flurry of calls from drivers, who ended up with broken windows and windshields after someone threw bricks or rocks from the Pine Street overpass. Police swarmed the scene—and even called in a helicopter—but were unable to locate any suspects.

A 39-year-old man, who was parked on the freeway shoulder near the overpass, was also injured by some sort of debris. However, police aren’t sure if the man’s injuries are related to the brick-tossing.

Seattle Police are also investigating a possible suicide after a man was found dead near the 520 bridge in Montlake early this morning. Police haven’t released any information about the man, who was found at 5:28 am. While police believe the man’s death was a suicide, officers are still investigating.

Dale Bishop, a mentally disabled man, was sentenced to death in Mississippi and killed by lethal injection Wednesday night. His final words:

“For those who oppose the death penalty and want to see it end, our best bet is to vote for Barack Obama because his supporters have been working behind the scenes to end this practice,” Bishop said. … “God bless America. It has been great living here. That’s all.”

Probably not the best endorsement for Obama, but it’s a sad and poignant call. Capital punishment is plagued with problems: upholding convictions is exorbitantly expensive, sometimes the penalty can be applied without enough evidence, and, frankly, the people who are guilty murderous fucks—they should be forced to rot in prison. However, unlike most people sentenced to death, Bishop wasn’t convicted of delivering the fatal blows that killed a man—but he was an accessory to a murder resulting from “a fight that had gone too far,” he said. He’s the eighth person in the US to be executed without being found guilty of directly killing a victim. But GoBama ‘08!

Brought to you via TalkLeft, and Slog tipper Nicole.

Ananova has the story of the (handsome) British farmer and his (hilarious) Amy Winehouse scarecrow.

“She’s the best scarecrow we’ve ever had,” says 36-year-old Marlon Brooks. “In fact she’s doing a better job scaring the birds than she is singing at the moment. I’d be happy to offer her a full time job if she needs one when the singing is over.”

Full story here.

It’s Friday already? I guess it’s time for Lunchtime Quickie’s Russia Week to come to an end. I collected so many videos. Boys drinking vodka, boys falling out of tractors, boys who love ketchup, boys reading X-rated poems, skateboarding boys who write really bad rap songs…

So many boys. I almost forgot about the ladies. Russian women are glamorous. And they almost always wear heels. How did I almost forget the ladies?

After the steaming shitpile of dunderheaded ambition that was The Fountain, I am most pleased to see that Darren Aronofsky is aiming a little lower for his next movie: a remake of RoboCop.

Unfortunately, in the Great Wheel of Karma that is Hollywood, this means we’ll have to endure a third Harold and Kumar movie. The law of diminishing returns means that, after the pleasant and funny first movie and the awful and bad second movie, this third film will pulverize its viewers’ eyeballs to liquid. As long as I get to see RoboCop before that happens, that’ll be just fine.

From a German reporter who randomly ended up in the gym with Obama before his big speech in Berlin. First the teaser:

I worked out with Obama!

He curled 32 kilo dumbbells next to me +++ Barack is top fit +++ He didn’t sweat at all

By Judith Bonesky

As thousands waited at the Sieges Saule monument in Berlin to hear Obama’s sensational speech, a BILD reporter met Barack all alone – in the gym! Here’s the incredible account of Judith Bonesky’s meeting…

And from the story itself:

He goes and picks up a pair of 16 kilo weights and starts curling them with his left and right arms, 30 repetitions on each side. Then, amazingly, he picks up the 32 kilo weights! Very slowly he lifts them, first 10 curls with his right, then 10 with his left. He breathes deeply in and out and takes a sip of water from his 0,5 litre Evian bottle.

Shortly before five o’clock Obama comes over and sits directly next to my cross-trainer on the mat. First he does 10 sit-ups, then stretches. Then he looks at his watch and says to his bodyguard: “It’s time, let’s go.” Quickly I ask: “Mr. Obama, could I take a photo?”. “Of course!” he answers, before asking my name and coming over to stand next to me.

“My name’s Judith” I reply. “I’m Barack Obama, nice to meet you!” he says, and puts his arm across my shoulder. I put my arm around his hip – wow, he didn’t even sweat! WHAT A MAN!

Via.

Clearly this fact makes me some kind of butthole, but until last night at the Central Cinema, I’d never seen Raising Arizona all the way through.

How this was allowed to happen? I’m a humongous Coen Brothers fan, having seen Fargo—AKA the greatest American movie not about the mob ever made—at least 150 times. But at the time of Raising Arizona’s release—1987—I required Great Movies to be awash in seriousness. (For me, this was the time of Hannah and Her Sisters (featuring full frames of e.e. cummings quotes), Room with a View (my first Merchant-Ivory swoonfest), and Blue Velvet (severed ears, sexy rape, and symbolism for beginners!).) During this phase, Raising Arizona was too goofy, with too many close-ups of ugly men hollering and chewing with their mouths open, for my taste.

But encountering it now—dear God that’s a good, weird movie. Holly Hunter’s subject line-engendering sob attack remains one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen, and all of the ugliness that sent me running back in the day turned out to be part of a strange and glorious whole, once I took the time to watch it through to the end.

Coen brothers, please accept my apology. Everyone else, Raising Arizona continues through tomorrow night at Central Cinema, where they bring food and booze right to your seat.

Film

‘Water Lilies’

• See what else is happening in Film on Friday »
• More Stranger Suggests for this week »

Bookshelves of Doom links to this amazing blog. Cake Wrecks documents cakes that are (intentionally or not) hilarious.

Besides the above nightmarescape, there’s this well advertised but poorly designed professional wedding cake, this awesome James Bond-themed cake, and this amazing naked-lady-delivering-a-baby cake. The entire blog is awe-inspiring.

From the Wall Street Journal in general, and an editorial by mystery novelist Andrew Klavan in particular:

There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

The entire, wrongheaded editorial is worth reading, just to watch this dipshit Klavan dig himself into a deep hole of stupidity using nothing but a ferocious man-crush on Bush and a superhero comic addiction. I think he actually thinks that the president is wandering the streets of America, punching terrorists out left and right as they try to blow up our Wal-Marts.

Due to a cancellation, there is only one author reading in two places today. Robert Crais, who is the author of the Elvis Cole series of mysteries, is reading at both Seattle Mystery Bookshop and Third Place Books from the newest book in the series, Chasing Darkness. One of the press releases for this book announced that “Elvis is in the hot seat again,” which immediately makes me think of Elvis Presley dead on a toilet, which is not an image that I want to have in my head at ten in the morning on a Friday. Thanks a whole lot, Robert Crais.

Future events are listed on our books page.

Obama, now in France: Second-to-last stop on his European tour.

McCain’s bad week: Nothing a little bratwurst couldn’t cure.

Or maybe a running mate: Maybe that would help.

Obama’s prayer: Taken from the Western Wall.

Yikes: Big hole rips open in 747 bound for Australia.

Puget Sound: Not priceless.

Seattle foreclosures: Up.

And Jon Stewart on the media’s Obama love:

I’ve been a bad, bad blogger. I did a followup interview with Rebecca Hale, Director of Public Information for the Seattle Mariners, back when the lesbians-kissing-at-an-Ms game debate was still roaring along. She was getting back to me about the possibility of having a gay day at the Ms. Hale told me the Ms were open to the idea. Quickly, from my notes…

“We would be delighted to do the same kind of event that the Giants do, the Twins do, we just need someone to work with us on it, to promote it. We could do a t-shirt, a cap, some of the different kind of promotional items. There are a lot of options… We just need to get with someone who can take a leadership role on organizing the event.”

Hale needed a gay community group to step forward and organize the event. (ERW? SMC?) She also pointed out that some of the gay nights listed at this site are defunct, or were one-offs. Toronto’s gay days were cancelled for lack of interest, according to Hale. I intended to call the Giants and the Twins to see if they relied on gay community groups to organize their fully funct gay days, but I got busy, then distracted, and then went on vacation.

Anyway, seems relevant to this debate, and wanted to put it out there. Okay, back to the beach for me…

I’ll be discussing the pros and cons of the city’s design-review process for new buildings—and whether it needs reform—on KUOW from 9 to 10 a.m. I’ll be joining a developer and the head of the city’s design-review program, Vince Lyons. You can listen here.

Mayor Greg Nickels recently suggested that all new townhouses should undergo a review by staff at the Department of Planning and Development. I’m tepid to the idea. It would be an onerous process for the city and developers (there are thousands of townhouses to review each year), but it wouldn’t necessarily reduce the repeating problems with Seattle’s townhouses, such as: four-pack housing separated by pedestrian-hostile auto-courts, living spaces that start on the second floor, and foreboding structural overhangs. Design review could put lipstick on those pigs—but the council needs to revise the multi-family code to require, among other things, shared pedestrian-friendly open space or row housing without several garages or driveways facing the street.

Meanwhile, design review has made striking improvements to bigger buildings. Just walking down any arterial, you can differentiate between the dysfunctional crap built before the program went into effect in the mid-1990s (that would never be allowed now), and the stuff built afterward, which relates to the sidewalk. However, design-review boards need to push more for functional buildings, but dwell less on esthetics and stop rubber-stamping poor designs to unload whining developers.

Think there are better solutions for townhouses? Or that townhouses in Seattle are fabulous just the way they are? Got an idea about better ways to review for function and tasteful design? Toss ‘em in comments and I’ll try to bring it up on the air.

A helicopter is circling a tight circumference above my building, beaming a bright searchlight down onto East Pine and East Pike near Boren Ave. I wondered if Bauhuas was on fire and hustled outside with my laptop, but no, everything seems normal on the steets. The helicopter bears no obvious logo; probably not a news team. Lots of people are about; no one knows anything about the target of the search beam. Police cruisers are zipping back and forth, but without sirens or lights. It looks like a manhunt or vehicle hunt. One cop is stopped on Boren and E Pine with lights flashing. He’s tapping away at his dashboard computer and I’m not brazen enough to rap on his window. Beneath us on I-5 another police car and a state trooper are stopped on the exit ramp. I’m looking for can but see no potential suicidal overpass lurkers.

There’s nothing in the 911 logs besides medic responses. The helicopter has headed off into the night. Wholly mysterious. I’m going back to bed.

Washington’s death-with-dignity petition qualified for the November ballot today, according to Secretary of State Sam Reed. I-1000, if passed by a majority of voters, would allow alert yet terminally ill patients to self administer life-ending medication prescribed by a physician. More info is over here.

The measure, based on an Oregon law passed in 1998, is sponsored by the Death With Dignity campaign, supported by a consortium of progressive health and legal groups, including the Washington State Public Health Association and the National Women’s Law Center. It is opposed the No on Assisted Suicide Campaign, backed discreetly by anti-abortion organizations and Catholic groups and churches.

“Nobody, not the government and not the church, should tell you how much you have to suffer if you are terminally ill,” Nancy Niedzielski, one of the measure’s primary backers, said in a statement released this afternoon. Two years ago she watched her husband die a miserable death and promised him she would “change the law in Washington state.”