Robert Irwin’s 1982 Nine Spaces Nine Trees, originally designed for the Public Safety Building, is being moved to just outside Odegaard Undergraduate Library on the UW campus this fall. The site-specific artwork’s original location was demolished recently, but Irwin was re-hired to design an implementation plan for the UW campus. Seen here from the top floor of the library, work procedes on pouring the foundations:

(image, alissa anderson [flickr])

• Gawker spent last week dissecting [#] the appropriate category for Marisha Pessl’s hotness. Decide for yourself tonight when she reads from Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which has gotten a series of stellar reviews — including a favorable front pager at the New York Times Sunday Book Review [nyt] and high praise from Seattle’s own Sean Carman [maudnewton]. The reading starts at 7:30; get there early and work on a clever comment for the Q&A or signing line. [elliottbay]
• Chan Marshall, once known as much for her potential for onstage breakdowns as for producing disc after disc of great songs, pulls a double-header set of solo shows this evening. When Cat Power came through Seattle earlier in the year with a backing band, local reviews of her show were gushing [interimlover]; let’s hope the trend continues tonight (early show, all ages; late show 21+) [neumos]

image, via wildlife

At least some of this video by Karolina Sobecka was filmed in Seattle, it seems, and I’m not just a little bit sad that I missed it. (I love her Chase, and, in fact, just about everything else she does as well.) They’ve rigged up some sort of complicated machinery to project the image of a wild animal off of a car and onto whatever that car happens to pass.

“The animal’s movements are programmed to correspond to the speed of the car: as the car moves, the animal runs along it speeding up and slowing down with the car, as the car stops, the animal stops also. The framerate of the movie corresponds to the speed of the wheel rotation, picked up by a sensor. If the presence of a moving object (such as another car or pedestrian) is detected with proximity sensors, its animal “avatar” appears in the projection.”

As a bonus, there’s this account of We Make Money Not Art riding around in the car with her as the piece was being made.

Via The Slog.)

Salon reveals the shocking truth about kids: they like sugar and caffeine. Not surprisingly, they enjoy the sweet buzzy beverages sold by Starbucks and other gourmet coffee chains. One teen describes the joy of the fix:

“… Coffee is lunch. It’s like the new mashed potatoes. Coffee is comfort food, especially when it rains.” And that’s comfort to Starbucks and other makers of gourmet coffee, who are capitalizing on a boundless new world of teenage customers. To the Beyoncé set, coffee is the new cool. It hops them up with a wallop of caffeine that’s much stronger than soda. [salon]

While the conclusions aren’t terribly surprising to anyone who’s seen a television teen drama — kids like coffee for the same reason adults do, cafés provide a much-needed “third place” in urban social life, caffeine is addictive, et c. — the narrative is an interesting look at youth culture. It also features a thrilling opportunity to read comments from a nutritionist pleading with consumers to at least grab a muffin to go with that latte.

Related: Anecdotal evidence suggests that area teens are a part of the national trend sweeping the teen demographic? Long morning lines have been observed at a Tully’s adjacent to a prep school [capitolhillseattle].

I’d like to tell you where I’ve been for the last couple of weeks, but it’s a long and boring tale involving Dick Cheney’s undisclosed location, 144,000 “devil ducks” from Archie McPhee’s, and the phrase “The emulsifiers are ready, sir.” Dull stuff.

Anyway, while I was away, a few things piled up:

• Jamie Moyer may be pitching for Philly these days [mb], but he’s turned commuter. His wife Karen has been talking to reporters [Seattle Times] and FSN to assure everyone that the Moyers, and the Moyer Foundation, remain in Seattle. Good for them. The Moyer Foundation has raised millions of dollars for child abuse prevention and kids with cancer. How come many other local sports superstars (*ahem* Ichiro) don’t contribute to the community like this?
• I was looking online for something else when I found a 25-year-old scholarly paper called “Origins of the Fear of Success,” published in the American Journal of Psychiatry. At last, I thought. Somebody has explained the Mariners. They can only win reliably when they know they’re out of contention for a playoff spot.
• The Times published an article the other day talking up the rose-colored lives of summer associates, law school students on summer internships at prestigious law firms. That article pissed off several law students of my acquaintance, who would like you to know that law school is three years of utter stressful hell, and that summer associate jobs are part of a bait-and-switch tactic designed to lure new lawyers in before loading them up with every undesirable job that can be squeezed into a 70 hour week.
• Samuel L. Jackson called me the other night. Well, sort of. It was all the fault of one of the fine people at my local bar and this site. Share the love and screw with your friends’ minds, before the Snakes-On-A-Flying-Object movie disappears into cult immortality.

I’ve been enjoying Jetty Island all summer long. My trip there last weekend was especially exciting (trip notes after the jump) but we’re getting down to the final few days that the Jetty Island ferry runs. Although the island itself is open all year long (to people who can get there themselves), anyone who doesn’t own some sort of floating implement will be cut off from the island starting September 4. So if you’ve also been enjoying Jetty Island, then on September 3 between 12 and 4, why not go out to the island for their annual Trash Bash and clean up the island? Please, I’m begging you. The weekend before last, we walked past something that looked like either most of a TV or monitor. Not to mention countless bits of broken glass.
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Despite going into the ceremony with all sorts of nominations (11), Seattle’s favorite fictional doctors took home a whopping zero statues in tonight’s 58th annual Primetime Emmy Awards. Grey’s Anatomy’s flirtation with bomb scare plotline wasn’t enough to upset 24’s hours of all terror all the time in the race for best drama. Unfortunately, there was no category for use of opening and closing voiceover for the purpose of thematic summaries, depiction of Seattle as a rainy ferry [boat] wonderland, or medical love triangles.

I guess the show did grab an Emmy for casting last week [wapost]; so at least they were recognized for their eclectic choices of actors to round out all of that medical geometry-defying drama.

If you missed the telecast and need to do some Monday morning fashion critique (which is the real point of these things anyway, right?), more than a few pictures of the Seattle Grace crew in something other than scrubs are yours for the viewing at GettyImages [#,#].

photo, new york times (Lee Clower) [nyt]

Old schoolers who remember Rachel Trachtenberg as the tiny girl behind the drum kit for the Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players may be surprised to see her in the Sunday Styles section of today’s New York Times [#] making a ‘tween fashion statement. Now, relatively all grown up at age 12, she’s still the rhythm section for the onetime Seattle band who made a name for themselves by charming audiences with poppy rock stories crafted around estate sale finds. The family relocated to New York a few years ago, but Rachel still spends a few months going to Alternative School 1 here and they’ll be making a stop in town for a Seattle show on 9 September at the Crocodile Cafe.

Mom took a bite of her mini-donut sample, made a face, and said, “this doesn’t taste very nice.” “Pass it here, mom,” I said, and took a bite. It tasted just like a freshly cooked cake donut, no better, no worse. But it certainly underlined the importance of bringing a partner along to a dessert festival, because god forbid you should have to finish the entire mini-donut by yourself. And as mom always says, there are starving children in China who would be glad to have that donut right about now, so don’t just toss it in the trash. Here, I’ll eat it.
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You usually find bikini-clad carwashers raising money for a trip for cheerleading camp or a leadership retreat. Today on Capitol Hill, you can get your car (or bike or self, presumably) scrubbed down by art lovers. The parking lot of the brand new Hillcrest Market (Denny & Olive) will be all sorts of sudsy until 5 pm today while volunteers do the dirty work of bringing in donations to support the Crawl Space Gallery.

Hurry! Our supply of sunny summer weekends is limited.

(via the brain tru$t [#])