I wish I had as many followers as Hitler.

Local filmmaker and former city council candidate and monorail activist Grant Cogswell and a friend were attacked in Belltown last night in what appeared to be a gay-bashing that sent both men to the hospital.

At about 1:30 this morning, Cogswell says, he and a friend (who was in drag) were leaving a party at the Free Sheep Foundation in Belltown when a group of men in a late-model, red Dodge Magnum wagon began harassing them. One of the four men in the car shouted “you fucking faggots,” at Cogswell and his friend. (Cogswell says his friend is straight and he is “mostly straight”.) Cogswell yelled back “go back to Yakima if you don’t like seeing people in drag.”

The car stopped and as the four men piled out, Cogswell says he sat down on the sidewalk, hoping to avoid a physical confrontation. “I don’t know how we’d have outrun these four dudes and I didn’t want to square off in fisticuffs,” he says.

When the men approached Cogswell, he says, he asked them, “Guys, what’s up? There’s four of you [and] my friend’s in high heels.” Cogswell says he spoke briefly with one of the men before one of them attacked him, kneeing him in the face several times.

Cogswell ran out into the street, turned back and saw the men were attacking his friend. Bystanders approached the group of men, who then jumped back in the car and drove away.

Cogswell and his friend were taken to the hospital, where Cogswell received five stitches in his cheek, and doctors found that his right orbital bone—one of the bones around the eye socket—had been fractured and his front teeth badly chipped. Cogswell says there’s a possibility that his fractured orbital bone could pinch a nerve or a muscle and require surgery. Cogswell’s friend had with scrapes and bruises.

Cogswell was only able to give police a vague description of his attackers, but he says the man who kicked him was about 5’8 and Hispanic, wearing a white T-shirt. Cogswell says the attacker was accompanied by two tall black men—one of whom was wearing a blue jacket—and a tall white man with brown hair.

In the last year, there have been a number of recent violent attacks in Belltown, but Cogswell—who used to live in the neighborhood—says he’s never seen anything like this happen.

I’ll update with info about the SPD investigation when it becomes available.

Due mostly to my long and celebrated history of totally attracting bat-shit crazy people to me like some sort of bat-shit-crazy people super-magnet, I am slightly afraid to announce that I will be appearing live as a guest on the chatty and very late Stay Up Late Show with Rebecca Davis tonight at the Balagan Theatre. What’s the damn Balagan Theatre? What’s the damn Stay Up Late Show? Who the hell is Rebecca Davis? Let’s find out together. The show begins tonight at 11:00 PM (Late! LATE!), and Balagan Theatre is at 12th and Pike, across from Satellite, by Boom Noodle.

Delightful!

You heard about naked gay soccer. You wondered about naked gay soccer. But unless you went to the Rain City Soccer naked gay soccer game today—like my hung over ass—you missed shirtless tops versus unclad bottoms running across the playfield at Cal Anderson Park.

Slog comment anchor Jubilation T. Cornball, playing for team no-pants, was on the winning team (which included lots of hot guys in briefs). Here he is in victory pose, wearing a tutu.

Condolences to the hot shirtless tops, and cheers to the junk-flapping bottoms.

…but comedian/comic actor Bernie Mac has died.

His publicist is attributing the death to “natural causes,” but Mac was recently hospitalized with pneumonia, three years after he announced that the inflammatory disease sarcoidosis had taken root in his lungs.

RIP, Bernie Mac.

music

Son Ambulance

• See what else is happening in Music on Saturday »

theater

‘Eat Fight Fuck’

• See what else is happening in Theater on Saturday »

Two open mics and a few mystery reading today.

At Seattle Mystery Bookshop, Gabriella Herkert reads from Doggone, which is a mystery about a Seattle-based detective who solves pet-related crimes. The first book is called Catnapped. Here is the first bit of the Amazon description of the book:

After accidentally treating her in-laws to a peep show upon their first meeting, and having a catfight with her husband’s vengeful ex, legal investigator Sara Townley hopes her next assignment is a simple one.

Then a black lab starts following her around and they fight crime together, like Batman and Robin.

Also at Seattle Mystery Bookshop, Matt Richtel signs Hooked, which is his new mystery. Here is what Rupert Holmes had to say: “If Michael Crichton and John Grisham decided to collaborate on a novel set in Silicon Valley,” it would read a lot like Hooked. This, I think, is meant as a compliment. Richtel also reads at Elliott Bay Book Company later in the day.

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

A new war: Russia invades Georgia; 1,500 civilians reported dead.

An old war: South African president Mbeki travels to Zimbabwe to mediate power sharing deal.

Olympics, day one: Opening ceremony viewership breaks records; Phelps off to quick start.

Also in Beijing: Relative of U.S. volleyball coach killed.

Hot spot: Hindu-Muslim tensions play out in clash over 98 acres of holy land in Kashmir.

Bernie Mac: Dead at 50.

Edwards affair: John Edwards admits to 2006 affair, denies fathering baby.

Strange but true: Joseph Lieberman on the list to be McCain’s VP pick.

Hypocrites: Washington Democrats accept large sums from BIAW.

The sound of change: Pollution Control Hearings Board sets rules for development in Puget Sound area.

Cougar hunting: State considers scaling back legal hunting.

Uh. Apparently Snoop Dogg is making his Bollywood debut this weekend:

Wearing a tradition Indian turban and a tunic, Dogg and Akshay Kumar were filmed for the song in Chicago.

In the track, Dogg sings: “This is Snoop Dogg/Singh is the king/This is the thing.”

The words in the song are a combination of English, Hindi and Punjabi language lyrics and rap.

The rapper’s introduction to the song gives an indication.

He says: “Yo, what up. This Big Snoop Dogg. Represent the Punjabi. Aye ya, hit em with this.”

But don’t think you have to fly to Mumbai to catch these amazing lyrics. Singh Is Kinng (only 135 minutes!) is playing at Kirkland’s Totem Lake Cinemas tonight through Thursday. Fo’ shizzle. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

The Surge at Home: McCain’s neighborhood plan.

On Friday at the National Urban League, McCain suggested he’d fight crime using “tactics somewhat like we use in the military.”

He went on to describe how it would work: “You go into neighborhoods, you clamp down, you provide a secure environment for the people that live there, and you make sure that the known criminals are kept under control,” he said. “And you provide them with a stable environment and then they cooperate with law enforcement.”

One Life in Bangkok: Thailand to open high-security drug prison.

Last Hurrah: Medical examiners office employee charged with stealing pills from the dead.

Reuters Strike: Reuters columnist whacks the drug war.

Sponsor Ship: Pot bill picks up supporters in the House.

Oh, What a Night: Executive of National Night Out, a drug and crime awareness event, paid $322,000 a year.

Above the Law: Police drop charges against mayor—whose house they raided for pot that wasn’t his and shot his Labradors—but they refuse to apologize.

Prince George’s County Police Chief Melvin C. High … exonerated the mayor and his family and expressed regret that they were victimized by drug dealers and that their dogs had been killed, but he stopped short of apologizing for any action by law enforcement, police and [mayor Cheye] Calvo said. …

“The chief called and told me that me and my family had been absolutely and completely cleared of any charges. He also said that he did not apologize for any action or wrongdoing by the police department, although he did express regret about what has happened to my family and me,” Calvo said.

Heath Ledger OD Case Dropped: Federal prosecutors won’t pursue grand jury subpoena for Mary-Kate Olsen.

Creepy: Scientists develop test for law enforcement to test fingerprints for presence of drugs and other substances; test could be mass produced for widespread use.

Blown Away: Local police dismantling meth enforcement teams; now the labs are safely in Mexico.

Herb in the Wine: Pot growers supplant Washington vineyards.

It was pretty clear 20th Century Fox did not have much confidence that Mirrors—set to be released next Friday—would impress critics.

They had scheduled the press screening for Thursday at 8 pm, the kind of timing that effectively discourages reviews in weekly papers and puts daily critics under a no-thinking-allowed deadline. But it takes a very special kind of movie to get a studio to do this:

Dear Member of the Press: The screening of Mirrors, to which you were invited, has been cancelled per 20th Century Fox directives. A letter confirming this will be mailed shortly. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Thank you.

Damn! It’s really bad! Now I want to see it even more.

The Parallel Universe Film Guide is at once incredibly funny and dizzying in its depth and scope.

There are film titles, descriptions, quotes and trivia about hundreds of movies that don’t exist, set up in a Wikipedia-style format. Most impressively, you can follow the fictional careers of the fictional actors and directors who made these fictional movies. Scott Salomon, for instance, directed three films in the late eighties/early nineties, including Commander in Chief…of Love.

Here’s a list of movie titles randomly pulled from the Ns. Each of these titles links to a full movie page.

Nazis, Schmazis (1961)

Need Faded Actresses for Gothic Hijinks (1962)

Needle Dick (1932)

Needle Dick, You Motherfucking Fuck (1983)

Negro ‘n’ Nuns…Awww (1963)

Neurotic Sisters a’ Plenty (1986)

News at Six, Ethical Dilemma at Eleven (1987) (updated!)

New York Gritty (1971)

Next of Mannequin (1929)

And further down the list are my favorites:

Nobody Doesn’t Like ESP (1976)

No Ifs, Ands, or Robots (1973)

No Legs, No Problem (1950)

I can already tell that I’m going to spend hours on this fucking website.

Forget about local politics. Right now I’m incredibly intrigued by this exhibit of temporary and modular architecture in Spain, in which architects and artists adapt spaces and buildings and put them to entirely new uses.

For example, in this project, FNP Architects took a 1768 pigsty and converted it, Russian doll-style, into a functioning house, adding a roof on the top.

In this one, architects Ali Ganjavian, Key and Maki Portilla-Kawamuram and artist Tadanori Yamaguchi created a free call center to Latin America in the center of the Plaza de Colon in Madrid—a nod to the fact that the plaza commemorates Columbus’s journey to the Americas (Colon translates as Columbus).

An LA-based firm called Electroland created the Urban Nomad Shelter pictured below. According to their web site, the shelters were conceived as both art project and “humanitarian act,” providing “a highly portable and inexpensive shelter to protect from cold, rain, and hard sidewalks.” Pretty, isn’t it?

But it probably won’t surprise anyone to learn that my absolute favorite is this one, called Real Landscape/Real Mistake. By a German firm called Heri und Salli, it’s a four-kilometer-long crosswalk that zigzags through the urban areas of Salzburg and adjoining forest of Salzburg.

In Seattle, the closest we’ve come to an event that repurposes car-oriented urban spaces for people is Park(ing) Day, a worldwide, one-day event in which people turn parking spaces into temporary installations. Although the original event in San Francisco turned a single parking space into a park to protest the city’s relative lack of public spaces (see below), Park(ing) exhibits now include sidewalk cafes, banks of massage tables, croquet lawns, and lending libraries. I’ll be out of town, which is a bummer, because I was really looking forward to setting up the People’s Republic of 4329 Rainier Ave. South. If you’re interested in participating, this handy guide will show you how.

Eric Grandy proclaimed this week that copy editors are a violently uptight bunch. While this may or may not be true, this sign in the Value Village window is bothering me.

1. Frankenstein is the DOCTOR, not the monster. I doubt this text is saying what they want it to.

2. It is August! Let me enjoy the summer and not be thinking about Halloween already!

That is all.

What’s most impressive about Grace Jones’ new video is it offers the viewer no access to enjoyment or thrills. The whole work is unpleasant to watch and hear—a grinding beat, a morphing monster. This is not a spectacle of corporate capital, corporate greed, corporate hunger. A spectacle seduces the thing it exploits and annihilates. With Jones as the corporate beast, there is no seduction, no sugar, no soft suffocation. Grace Jones makes every effort to fully represent the terrifying force of today’s global rich.

Go back to 1985 and listen to “Slave to the Rhythm,” which with good reason is referenced in “Corporate Cannibal” (“Lost in this cell, in this hell/Slave to the rhythm of the corporate prison”). Produced by Trevor Horn, the older tune has several seductions: the then-new seduction of the go-go beat; the seduction of Grace’s appearance (at once elemental and futuristic), and the seduction of her lyrics, which expressed the sublime of world-historical labor.

Axe to wood in ancient times. Man machine
power line.
Fires burn
hearts beat strong.
Sing out loud the chain gang song.
Never stop the action - keep it up
keep it up.

We have in these words the same sublime that gave much of the Communist Manifesto its beauty and poetry.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization or rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

We are amazed and seduced by the spectacle of production itself, the awesome power of social labor.

With “Corporate Cannibal,” the moment of Debord is over. We no longer look at capital (or the history of productive forces) from a safe distance (“don’t cry, it’s only the rhythm”) but directly at its dark mouth, as if we were on a white plate, soon to be devoured. Nothing about this situation is pleasing or thrilling. All we want to do is find a way out of this place/plate; but the image of corporate hunger is fluid: it shifts its shape like some sort of digital snake (“…Digital criminal/Corporate cannibal/Eat you like an animal”). Writes Steven Shaviro:

The modulations of “Corporate Cannibal” don’t give us the sense that anything can happen, but rather one that no matter what happens, it will be drawn into the same fatality, the same narrowing funnel, the same black hole

And you can not shake the hand of this snake. You can’t even mistrust it, bribe it, distract it with talk about the importance of civility (verses barbarism), of re-investment of the surplus value, or saving for a rainy day. All of those possibilities are long gone. With this form of capital, neoliberal capital, every barrier to its desire, the negation/consumption of all value, has been removed. What’s left is for you to await the inevitable on a plate.

Pleased to meet you/Pleased to have you on my plate”

You won’t hear me laughing/As I terminate your day/You can’t trace my footsteps as I walk the other way.

Note
For those who think we are living in the fairest of times, please read this article (sent to me by Comrade Erica C. Barnett).

A taste:

How much, we asked our group, would it take to put someone in the top 10% of earners? They put the figure at £162,000. In fact, in 2007 it was around £39,825, the point at which the top tax band began. Our group found it hard to believe that nine-tenths of the UK’s 32m taxpayers earned less than that. As for the poverty threshold, our lawyers and bankers fixed it at £22,000. But that sum was just under median earnings, which meant they regarded ordinary wages as poverty pay.

“We work harder and aspire the most,” one said. The longer we talked, the more they turned to moral reasons for success and failure, moving away from the structural globalisation reasons given above. One banker said: “It’s a fact of modern life that there is disparity and ‘Is it fair or unfair?’ is not a valid question. It’s just the way it is, and you have to get on with it. People say it’s unfair when they don’t do anything to change their circumstances.” In other words, they see themselves as makers of their own fortune. Or, as another banker said, “Quite a lot of people have done well who want to achieve, and quite a lot of people haven’t done well because they don’t want to achieve.”

This website can determine what your blog’s reading level is. You can also test entire websites.

Slog is high school reading level:

Also in the high school reading level: Defamer, Wonkette, Bookninja, Bookslut and the New York Times.

But The Stranger as a whole website rates higher:

And we apparently have the smartest film section in town, because when you run the Stranger film page alone, you get this result:

Perez Hilton and Gawker are both junior high school reading level.

The only elementary school level blog I could find? Ain’t it Cool News. Me no surprised.

1. Last year’s Stranger Genius Award winner for visual art, Alex Schweder, has decamped to Berlin for the time being. He’s still keeping his studio here, and he’ll be traveling back and forth for the next year, “mostly forth.” In an email, he wrote, “There are many like minded thinkers here and heaps of opportunities. Mostly, though, I like being incognito for a while. There was no frustration with Seattle at all, I just needed to expand the reach of my practice.”

2. Cat Clifford, one of five recipients of the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards this year, is moving to Houston. Her husband is going to graduate school at Rice. They may be back when he’s finished: “We are hoping to come back to Seattle,” Clifford emailed. “The Pacific Northwest is really our home.”

The truth is, an artist’s work can really only improve in the context of a new metropolis rich with art. Which doesn’t keep me from crossing my fingers in both cases.

The Hugo House has announced the names of their new writers-in-residence for the next year or two.

Angela Jane Fountas is a writer of both short fiction and non-fiction. She has a story, titled “Queendom,” online at Pindelyboz. Here’s the opening:

A bomb drops on Myrtle, Iowa. It was only a matter of time. Mothers make do with what’s left in their cupboards; they milk cows and collect eggs. Sorghum fields go to ruin and root cellars overflow. Winter is imminent.

“We won’t go hungry,” Frances says. Her father is gone. All the men are gone. They are in the sky and on the ground. Some have fallen already.

“Quiet, hush,” her mother says.

It’s a good, disturbing story.

And Ed Skoog, whose name I will say aloud many, many times over the next two years, is the other writer in residence. He’s a poet who has lived in Montana, California, and New Orleans. His lovely poem, Bela, is here. Here’s a stanza from that poem:

Several years later, to the publicity dept.

at Imperial Studio, in answer to a questionnaire,

he became Bela Lugosi, twenty-eight,

six-one and blue eyed as a Wichita quarterback.

High spots of life? “It is no one’s business.”

He was unwilling to share his beauty secrets.

Congratulations to Fountas and Ed Skoog. These are both great choices. There will be an event to celebrate their arrival in October, and I can’t wait to see what they produce, along with the Hugo House’s Belltown writers in residence, Storme Webber and Cienna Madrid. It should be an exciting couple of years for the Hugo House.

The opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics reminded me most strongly of Blade Runner. Not in a good way.

The filthy air made every light cast a shadow. It was difficult to make out the spectators on the far side of the stadium.

So began the first modern Olympics in an authoritarian state, since the 1936 Olympics in Berlin (depending upon how you wish to count Moscow in 1980, or Sarajevo in 1984.)

The United States—and our form of self-governing, divided power capitalism—is in decline. The Chinese new combination of authoritarian capitalism is on the ascent. Our time on top is dwindling. The Chinese, and despotic forms of government, will succeed us. So goes the dominant thought in our culture, one that should be thoroughly enforced by GE over the next few weeks of Olympics coverage. Authoritarian capitalism: it’s the future!

Bullshit.

Left or right, liberal or conservative—everyone cannot eat up enough of the notion that repressive, undemocratic, imperious governments are more successful than our, now quaint, notion of a government of the people, by the people in which the law is king and all is overseen by a vigorous judicial system.

On the right, you have the Unitary Executive neo-con movement—epitomized by “I’m my own branch of government, beyond reach” Dick Cheney. Extra-judicial detentions, torture, denial of oversight and a private security force above the law—all the trappings of an authoritarian state. Most of the discussion of these horrors assumes a trade-off: Yes, it’s all horribly corrosive to underlying principles of the Constitution. But, such tools just work better than things like Habeus Corpus, warrants, proper trials, Judicial oversight and civilian police operating under strict rules and supervision.

Truth is, all of these special powers have netted us no benefit. None. Nada. Zip. The new authoritarian system has performed far more poorly than the old civilian judicial system. Compare the results of the recent trial of Bin Laden’s driver—detained, tortured, tried and convicted under the despotic system—to the results of the trial of the shoe bomber—under constitutional civilian law, courts and oversight. The system of checks and balances, of laws and rules, of openness and transparency simply works better. It’s not a matter of style, but results. We are less safe when abandoning the principles laid down by the founding fathers.

The left’s insidious embrace of authoritarianism might be more terrifying.

Take Michael Pollen’s loving, vigorously anti-science, embrace of serfdom at the end of the Omnivore’s Dilemma that underlies his shallow, and ultimately hollow, stance against empiric discovery of nutrition and agricultural science. (I dislike Pollen’s analysis, but in retrospect think I’m being unfair here. So, away it goes!)

Even more telling is Jared Diamond’s description of China in Collapse. After 19 pages of detailed accounting of the environmental horrors of present-day China, he ends on a strange hopeful note. Yes, China’s rapid development over the past two decades has ridden on an unsustainable wave of environmental degradation. But, with one wave of the authoritarian magic wand, the government of China could reverse this trend—like they did with the One Child Policy. This logic was already weakened by Diamond’s own accounting. Yes, population growth had been dramatically slowed—but not household growth, nor growth in resource consumption or pollution.

In the months and weeks leading up to the Olympics, the Chinese government has done exactly what Diamond wanted. The wand has been waving, ever more vigorously as today approached—ordering drivers off the road, factories closed, pollution to halt, the rain to fall. The full peremptory force was activated and the skies over Beijing (just one city, for only a couple of weeks) could not be cleared.

(The pollution of Beijing, as viewed from a satellite.)

With all the bitching on the left and right about the EPA, and all the wrangling and compromising that goes into crafting environmental regulations under a democratic government, the United States has done a vastly better job of containing pollution than China (or any other authoritarian state.) Period. There is no magic wand, no way of forcing a desired outcome—only hard fought compromise by all.

On the left, it’s assumed that the past decade has gone so poorly not because of the ever larger levers of power handed to the president, but the man wielding them. While watching these Olympics enfold, I suggest you consider the levers of power themselves are the problem, that no man or woman can be a success, for us all, with such power.

Local televisions stations have refused to run an infomercial about marijuana laws because, according to one executive, the infomercial promotes the use of marijuana. But one of those stations, KOMO TV, made thousands of dollars without even airing the show.

“Smoking marijuana is illegal and we don’t promote things that are illegal on our television station,” says Jim Clayton, KOMO’s vice president and general manager. “We don’t tell people to go rob banks, either.” He says he rejected the program because airing it would jeopardize the station’s license with the Federal Communications Commission.

“It supported that people smoke marijuana,” Clayton says. But when repeatedly pressed for an example of how the show advocated marijuana use, Clayton told me, “I don’t know. I watched it a few weeks ago, and I don’t remember anything specific.”

Producers of Marijuana: It’s Time for a Conversation, hosted by mild-mannered travel writer Rick Steves, say the program doesn’t advocate pot smoking, only talking about pot laws. Alison Holcomb, director of the ACLU of Washington’s Marijuana Education Project, which created the show, says, “There’s nothing in the show that advocates that anyone use marijuana.” The script never advises that anyone smoke marijuana, nor does the screen ever flash an image of pot. “In fact, there are specific statements addressing situations in which individuals shouldn’t use marijuana, and that young people should not use marijuana.” She adds: “Everything in the program is about the impact that marijuana laws have on communities.”

In addition to KOMO (the ABC affiliate), KIRO (with CBS) rejected the 30-minute show outright, and KING (along with its sister station KONG, both with NBC) would only allow the program to air after 1 a.m. Neither of those stations returned calls to The Stranger.

More than anything, KOMO’s decision seems more about the political conviction of the ad rather than its content. But that came as a shock to the ACLU.

Holcomb says the ACLU provided copies of the script in advance on the condition it would be approved before renting KOMO’s studios and paying for KOMO’s crews at Fisher Plaza. She says she asked KOMO to “tell us if you will have objections to the content before we incur the expense of filming the audience portion in their studio, and we never heard any objection.” But, she says, “Once we filmed it and handed it to them, they wouldn’t sell us any time slots.”

Clayton says he had initially supported airing the show because he thought it was about medical marijuana. “We looked at it differently because it would be for a specific medical service,” he says. But he changed his mind on Monday, August 4, after a meeting with ACLU of Washington director Kathleen Taylor.

But if KOMO was actually afraid of losing its federal license, whether or not the show focuses on medical marijuana would be irrelevant; the federal government doesn’t distinguish between recreational and medical pot.

Clayton says that if the ACLU wants his station to discuss marijuana laws, the group should run a ballot initiative. The problem, of course, is that only a minority of the electorate supports reforming marijuana laws, so, in order to win a ballot measure, the ACLU must first encourage a public conversation about pot.

“We’re trying to provide information that’s not tainted by either the hysteria of reefer madness, nor by the giggle factor of Cheech and Chong,” says Holcomb. However, KOMO and the other stations can’t resist cashing in on commercials for the White House’s hysterical anti-drug campaign or ads for beer and Viagra during breaks in movies and sitcoms that depict pot smoking. But when presented with the bland truth of pot policy, local TV stations can’t afford it.

The ACLU’s show is now only available on Comcast’s On Demand cable and at MarijuanaConversation.org.

…but The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is available for viewing over at Hulu. I just saw it for the first time a few months ago, and it’s a really fine thriller that makes most of the heist movies made in the last few years—with their nanosecond-perfect timing and high-tech gadgetry—look stupid. Walter Matthau is great as the frumpy hand of the law, and the ending is one of my all-time favorite movie endings.

Unfortunately, Pelham is currently being remade by Tony Scott (boo!) Denzel Washington (yay!) and John Travolta (boo! unless he’s inexplicably wearing the fat lady suit he wore in Hairspray, in which case double-yay!). I fully expect it to be one of those annoying modern heist movies described above. I do think that Denzel Washington is one of the few prettyboy mega-actors who could conceivably fill Matthau’s shoes, though.

Our sister paper the Portland Mercury has a nice piece this week about the marketing of Scientology. The story is about an ex-Scientologist living in Portland who claims to be the man behind the rise of Dianetics in the 70s and to have been physically beaten by David Miscavige on several occasions. The Mercury got a 14-page letter from the church’s international spokesperson and even a phone call from that person’s boss denouncing this guy, so they must have touched a nerve.

And they have a great map of the “Sea Org” headquarters with notes like “The lake is used to throw staff in as punishment.”

I love this shit. Stupid Scientology.

Too lazy to slog through 4,400 words of endorsements? We hear you. To simplify your decision-making in the August 19 primary election, we’ve put together a handy, printer-ready cheat sheet that tells you which candidates we support.

The Stranger Election Control Board cheat sheet: Easier than thinking for yourself!

Mayor Greg Nickels’ Office is getting in on the fight between North Seattle residents and the Seattle School District over the district’s plan to remove nearly 100 trees from Ingraham High School’s campus.

The dispute has been tied up for months while the district waited for permits but yesterday, residents near Ingraham received letters from the school district, informing them that the district had pulled its permit applications, and would be moving ahead with the tree removal sometime next week.

“The city is not happy with the school district,” says Mayor Nickels’ spokesman Alex Fryer.”To submit an application and withdraw it…is just not the way anyone should do business. It certainly looks like an act of bad faith.”

Fryer says the city plans to “apply some political and moral pressure” on the district and look at whether the city has any legal authority in the matter.

School District spokeswoman Patty Spencer was not available for comment.

Pissed off tree lovers in North Seattle

I’m off in feature-writing land, and as a result am a little late in learning about the Edwards affair. If I had more time, I’d have a lot more to say.

But my guess is that the big question most Democrats are asking themselves right now is:

Which am I more furious at Edwards about?

A) Running for the Democratic party’s nomination while knowing that he was lying to the press about this affair, and not caring. Or, B) Releasing this information now and distracting from the pre-convention march toward Obama officially becoming the nominee?

How about a poll:

These movies have been open for days:

Sorry, I neglected to do This Wednesday at the Movies, but here are the movies your cool friends have already seen:

Pineapple Express. Andrew Wright: “Aping the feel of ’80s action-comedies, Seth Rogen and Even Goldberg’s script follows an amiable process server (Rogen) and his pot dealer (James Franco), who are on the bleary-eyed run after witnessing a murder. Director David Gordon Green captures the appropriate air of bong ennui, but proves far less capable of accommodating the shifts to action.” I interviewed Green earlier this year for Snow Angels, which isn’t the best movie ever, though it does costar Olivia Thirlby. Have you guys seen George Washington, though? That is a fantastic film.

Speaking of fantastic films (kidding!), Wednesday also saw the release of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. Me: “The plot of this movie remains a fantasy whipped up for the sole and express pleasure of 16-year-old girls. If the audible weeping and gasps of the preview audience I watched it with are any indication, the filmmakers have their demographic down.”

And then there’s Bottle Shock, the gagworthy closing night movie at SIFF this year. I still can’t stand it: “Never mind the ‘true story’ that inspired it: Bottle Shock is a jingoistic light drama, so crude and clueless it flirts with outright racism.”

Opening tonight:

Did you know that Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern, Hero) is directing the opening and closing night ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics? The New York Times has a front-page story about his transition from censor-ducking provocateur to state-endorsed director of nostalgic martial arts epics. The ceremony will be broadcast (delayed, obviously) on NBC starting at 7:30 pm tonight—or you can try to chase down one of the YouTube clips that are constantly being posted and taken down.

If you’re looking for a slightly less ethically complicated emotional high, the best movie opening this week is Man on Wire, a riveting account of a tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. Me: “In August of 1974, a redheaded Frenchman with the perfectly precious nom de cirque Philippe Petit (along with a crew of coconspirators) sneaked into the newly erected World Trade Center, smuggled cables and equipment up to the unoccupied top floors, strung a tightrope from the roof of one tower to its twin in the dead of night, and then walked and knelt and saluted and lay supine between them for the better part of a morning hour. The feat sounds impressive on paper, but until you see this documentary, you won’t realize how hushed and beautiful the performance was, how completely it dazzled passersby and police.”

Or is the best movie Boy A? Brendan and I will have to fight it out. Brendan Kiley: “Boy A has an exquisitely melancholy mood, a dark brooding and a bruised sweetness. If it sounds like a drag, that’s because it is—but it’s a pleasant, aching drag.”

Also worth your time: Baghead, from Jay and Mark Duplass. Andrew Wright: “The combination of horror and emo-speak may sound precious, but it works like a champion here, with each element somehow diffusing and enriching the other: After the first few genuine scares, whenever the handheld camera drunkenly moves towards a window during the middle of a fumbling conversation it’s difficult not to shudder, on levels both ironic and otherwise. Those expecting a gorefest will most likely walk away perplexed, but viewers able to latch onto its wobbly wavelength will have a blast.”

Probably not worth your time: Elegy, an adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal. Me: “In contrast to the book, which is told in the first person and explicitly concerns the impact of the sexual revolution on an essentially conservative man born in 1930, the film does very little to get inside the head of its protagonist. We’re left to wonder, uncomfortably, whether Consuela is indeed as one-dimensional as she seems, or if the professor is pressing her flat with the iron of his enormous ego. There’s no point dwelling on the problem. Between the ugly digital photography, the repellent characters, and the free-floating misogyny, Elegy is an unpleasant film.” I have a lot more to say about it in this Slog post, below.

And definitely not worth your time: Hell Ride. Paul Constant: “As Pistolero fights the villainous 666 motorcycle gang in an incomprehensible plot that involves—oh, God, no—a peyote trip, he and his gang drop wince-inducing puns and rhymes and alliteration with all the self-importance of a drunken poetry slam. It’s painful to watch the vanity and brain-dead ‘artistic’ flourishes.” Dennis Hopper is, if you haven’t noticed, in a frightening number of movies out in theaters this week: Swing Vote, Elegy, and this. Enough already.

As if that weren’t enough to keep you busy, I’ve got a bunch of littler releases to tell you about, too. There’s the unoriginal but juicy body-image doc America the Beautiful at the Uptown; a clumsy but fascinating Full Battle Rattle, about training Iraq war soldiers in the Mojave Desert at Northwest Film Forum; a lovely documentary about Tintin at NWFF next Thursday; and the live-action RPG doc Monster Camp and the homeless soccer league doc Kicking It at Grand Illusion. In repertory options: A Jean Renoir series kicks off with Boudu Saved from Drowning at Seattle Art Museum; a Jean-Luc Godard series at SIFF Cinema begins with a week of Contempt; Orson Welles’s celebration of all plots Falstaff (with Falstaff played, naturally, by Welles himself), Chimes at Midnight, is at NWFF through Sunday; the lovely 1993 adapation The Secret Garden is the kid’s movie at SIFF Cinema tomorrow; and Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru is the Metro Classic (category: Axis) next Wednesday. Plus: Last week’s Varsity calendar show Chris & Don is extending through this week.

Use us for all your movie times needs.

Over at the P.I., Marc Mazique (who is, full disclosure, an old friend of mine) has written an editorial about birthright citizenship and the close relationship between African Americans and the current battle over immigrant rights. Rather than running an excerpt of the article, I’m going to run some of the dissenting comments:

…as for Mazique’s assertion that denying illegal immigrants’ rugrats citizenship is racist? he obviously has been drinking the La Raza Kool-Aid. the only people who think cracking down on illegal immigration is racist are those who know they’d get their butts kicked back across the border to taco-land if they got caught…

and

Clearly, this author is an Afro-Marxist communicating the ideas of James Cone and Black Liberation Theology.

If this anti-white racist Communist and his philosophies ever attained any power or influence, freedom of speech would be the first victim with opposing ideas being labeled as “hate speech.”

The opinions of this man are frightening. His heart is full of hate against America and revenge against white people. I pity him and his ilk.

Now, seriously, if the article is pissing off these sorts of morons, it has to be worth reading, right?

Happy Friday from you-know-who…

This is breaking: He had an affair and lied about it, he says.

Well, not entirely naked (though the organizing group did supply me with a photo racy enough to require placement behind a jump). At tomorrow’s Shorts vs. Shirts game, Rain City Soccer players will either be topless or bottomless, but not—NEVER!—both.

As Rain City says:

“Shirts vs Shorts, what the hell is that?”…It’s a soccer game, in the heart of Capitol Hill, in the middle of summer, where you can either wear a shirt, or you can wear shorts, but you can’t wear both. Team Shirts team can wear normal underwear, jocks, thongs, whatever as long as it shows off some skin, likewise for Team Shorts. There will be festivities afterward at the Elite.

If you wake up in the mood to watch a bunch of sporty gays run around and kick things in their underpants, show up at Cal Anderson Park at 10:00 am tomorrow.

Alabama:

A trusted church member is accused of crossing the line with two young girls.

The former youth minister at Ardmore’s First Baptist Church, Carl Thomas, was charged with two counts of solicitation of a minor after allegedly exchanging some racy text messages with underaged girls.

“He had been sending text messages to two of the 14-year-old girls of a sexual content,” said Limestone County Lt. Joel Massey.

Illinois:

News that a popular youth minister had been charged with predatory criminal sexual assault brought the pastor of the church where he worked to tears. Terrence Jenkins, 36, of 4318 Walnut Ave. in Alorton, was charged July 23 with predatory criminal sexual assault.

The mother of the 8-year-old victim went to East St. Louis police and filed a complaint against Jenkins in December.

Minnesota:

New youth pastor has BMX skills, passion for children

I just got an email announcing that for $250 a head, the LGBT community in Seattle is hosting an Obama fundraiser at Greg Kucera Gallery next Saturday night, August 16, starring Gray’s Anatomy celebs Ellen Pompeo and Justin Chambers (you know, the troubled Alex). Click here for more info. (The Deborah Butterfield horses currently on display at the gallery—some call them “cash horses”—will be the backdrop.)

And in other Obama art news: No sooner than I’d written in this week’s paper about the current explosion of nervous Obama “art” did I hear that there will be an Obama-worshiping art show—in something called the Manifest Hope Gallery!—at the Democratic National Convention later this month. (More here.)

Slog tipper and superstar commenter PopTart writes:

I know the majority of Slog readers would rather bite the heads off live rats than travel to the Eastside, but just in case they are lured to the dark side for any reason this weekend, I was wondering if it would be servicey to remind them that the Wilburton tunnel is getting destroyed this weekend and so south 405 in Bellevue will be closed between SE 8th and I-90.

Here’s the link. I had no idea that a tunnel was going to be destroyed this weekend. It sounds like it’ll be awesome: Can I watch?

Thanks to PopTart for being servicey so that we don’t have to, and woe betide anyone who dares to head east this weekend.

The subject of Peter Menzel’s photographs is the amount and types of food consumed by people in different parts of the world and class situations:

Chad: The Aboubakar family of Breidjing Camp
Food expenditure for one week: 685 CFA Francs or $1.23
Favorite foods: soup with fresh sheep meat

United States: The Revis family of North Carolina
Food expenditure for one week: $341.98
Favorite foods: spaghetti, potatoes, sesame chicken

Bon appetit!

^{Jesse Burke’s Shame (2007), c-print, 14 by 11 inches}

It is one of my enduring regrets as a critic that I did not review Jesse Burke’s show at Platform Gallery last year.

Burke’s visions of New England and its men—they really should be considered as a soft, hulking total body of work, as on Burke’s web site here—are like falsetto singing. A great and proper falsetto voice is a thick, proud thing, unlike its false brother, the lightly misogynistic wheeze used to mock wussery.

The real falsetto—this is something I learned by listening to my father sing—is remarkable for its departure from stereotypical masculine noise. It’s a surprise when it comes out. An alternative. The same goes for Burke’s portraits of guys in landscapes, guys with beers, guys with bellies, guys being affectionate with each other, guys to whom the camera is being affectionate. Maybe I’m being dim, but I have no idea whether Burke is gay or straight from these, which is a sort of triumph in itself.

Tonight at Platform from 5:30 to 8, there’s a party to celebrate the release of the first book of Burke’s photography, and the artist will be in attendance for you to ogle. The party is also in honor of two other new photography books by the gallery’s publishing arm, DECODE Books, devoted to the work of John Jenkins III and Doug Keyes. Former Seattle contemporary curator Sheryl Conkelton (recall her terrific show What It Meant to Be Modern at the Henry in 2000, and her equally refreshing Northwest School exhibition and catalog for Tacoma Art Museum in 2003) will also be there.

Admission is free! Books, I believe, are $35.

For one:

The son and grandson of Navy admirals, he attended Annapolis where he did poorly. Nevertheless, he was commissioned as a pilot, where he performed poorly, crashing three planes before he failed to evade a North Vietnamese missile that destroyed his plane. McCain spent more than five years in a prison camp.
After his release, McCain knew his weak military record meant he’d never make admiral, so he turned his sights to a career in politics. With the help of his new wife’s wealth, his new father-in-law’s business connections and some powerful friends had made as a lobbyist for the Navy, he was elected in 1982 to a Congress in a district that he didn’t reside in until the day the seat opened up. A few years later, he succeeded Barry Goldwater as a senator.

For two:

McCain hasn’t accomplished much in the Senate. Even his own campaign doesn’t trumpet his successes, probably because the few victories he’s had still rankle Republicans.
His campaign finance law failed to significantly reduce the role of money in politics. He failed to get a big tobacco bill through the Senate. He’s failed to change the way Congress spends money; his bill to give the president a line-item veto was declared unconstitutional, and the system of pork and earmarks continues unabated. He failed to reform the immigration system.

For three:

McCain says he doesn’t understand the economy. He’s demonstrated that he doesn’t understand the workings of Social Security, or the political history of the Middle East. He doesn’t know who our enemies are. He says he wants to reduce global warming, but then proposes ideas that would stimulate — not reduce — demand for fossil fuels.

And for four:

McCain has done one thing well — self promotion. Instead of working on legislation or boning up on the issues, he’s been on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” more than any other guest. He’s been on the Sunday talk shows more than any other guest in the past 10 years. He’s hosted “Saturday Night Live” and even announced his candidacy in 2007 on “The Late Show with David Letterman.”

^{Isaac Layman’s Pool Table (2007), sculptural photograph: archival inkjet print mounted to Plex, painted wood plinth; 30 by 108 by 43 inches}

The man pictured above is not Isaac Layman, but in this audio, Isaac Layman is standing above this pool table photo-sculpture, talking about the ultimate luxury:

(*To hear the entire In/Visible podcast with Isaac Layman, click here.)

Lady Jesus

Dolly Parton

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posted by jenerally speaking

Slate has a bizarre article about a newspaper—the Montgomery County Bulletin, circulation 20,000—behaving like a blog. An ill-behaved blog that aggregates content without links and attribution.

Over the course of three years, stories from Rolling Stone, Slate, the Boston Globe, USA Today, the Guardian, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune were all reprinted—slightly altered—in the Bulletin, sometimes under the byline “Mark Williams,” sometimes under no byline at all.

The Bulletin lists just five employees—”Mark Williams,” a calendar editor, a sales person, and the publisher, who was reluctant to cooperate with Slate on the story.

The publisher’s name? A fake-sounding “Mike Ladyman.”

And the simulacrum is complete.

I can’t take it anymore. This Dino Rossi commercial is on constant rotation on cable news and I’ve seen it seven or eight thousand times in the last two weeks:

My reaction to this ad? I’m almost ashamed to say—almost.

Dino Rossi is a huge fag. The hugest. My God, how could the same state Republican party that once nominated Ellen Craswell for governor—the party of god, guns, and anti-gays!—get away with nominating this deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love?

Here’s how: Because they know Democrats won’t employ gay-baiting as a campaign tactic.

Gay-baiting and anti-gay smear campaigns are an old Republican standby. Karl Rove got George W. Bush’s ass elected governor of Texas—the first step on George’s very short walk to the White House—by conducting a whispering campaign against then-incumbent governor Ann Richards implying that she was a lesbian. Rush Limbaugh calls John Edwards “Breck Girl.” Ann Coulter calls John Edwards—currently embroiled in a love-child scandal—a faggot; she claims Bill Clinton—notorious womanizer—is secretly a gay man. Hillary Clinton is a dyke. Republicans run against “San Francisco values,”. The tactic dates back to Reagan’s attacks on hippies when he was governor of California. Says Digsby:

For forty years the Republicans have been winning elections by calling liberals “faggots” (and “dykes”) in one way or another. It’s what they do…. The underlying premise of the modern conservative movement is that the entire Democratic party consists of a bunch of fags and dykes who are both too effeminate and too masculine to properly lead the nation.

And they’re going to do it to Obama. Republicans are going to question his masculinity, feminize him, and insinuate that the man who married this woman is really a great big homo. Hell, they’re already doing it.

Now go back and watch that Dino Rossi ad again. Could the guy be any swishier? Isn’t his face just a little too expressive? Isn’t his voice just a little too soft? Is it just me, or is the man actually mincing? I’ll bet you there are two campaign aides just out of camera range holding onto Dino’s arms so that his wrists don’t float up into the shot and start flapping around. I don’t look or sound that gay with my boyfriend’s cock in my mouth. Let’s apply the ultimate test of male heterosexuality: Can you picture this man performing cunnilingus? I sure as hell can’t.

Another test: I asked the Stranger’s Kelly O to doctor this ad a bit—to add gay images and themes—to see if the ad still worked. I wanted to see if Dino was convincing as Washington state’s first openly-gay Republican nominee for governor. Does the ad still work? Hell, it’s seamless—or “theamless,” as Dino might put it. Check it out:

Yes, yes: the pink dildo in Dino’s hands at the Crypt is a little gratuitous. But the point isn’t that Dino likes sex toys big & pink. The point is this: Rossi makes an entirely plausible openly-gay candidate. And if Rossi were a Democrat the Republican attack machine would be after his suspiciously trim ass. I suppose it’s an open question as to whether Dino really is this swishy in real life or if it’s an act. The same Dino who’s running from the Republican label—listing his party affiliation as “GOP” instead of “Republican” to confuse voters—may be adopting fey ways to further confuse voters (“No way is that sissy a Republican…”). Or, heck, maybe Dino’s hoping to scoop up some votes from suburban soccer moms and sad old fag hags who are still upset about the cancellation of Will & Grace.

Whether Dino’s really swishy or he’s just playing gay on TV, Dino knows he can get away with it—and the state GOP knows they can get away with nominating this deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love—because the state Democratic party would never stoop to gay-bait Dino because that would offend the gays and lesbians in the Democrat base.

A note to the Democrats: Go ahead and gay bait Dino Rossi. We won’t mind. It’ll actually be nice to see one of them getting gay-baited for a change. Because so long as the right is exploiting homophobia to elect anti-gay politicians, I don’t see why we shouldn’t use it—carefully, surgically, rarely—to defeat anti-gay politicians. Let’s grease up their petard and hoist one of them by it.