* 2:00 PM: Elliott Bay Book Company hosts Christina Pratt, author of An Encyclopedia of Shamanism. [LINK]

* 2:00 PM: “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes,” is something Seattle-ites say a lot. Why? Why is our weather so messed up? Cliff Mass, UW atmospheric scientist and radio personality explains it all in his book The Weather of the Pacific Northwest. Finally! He’ll be at SPL Central Library, Level 1, Microsoft Auditorium, to answer our burning, freezing, and rain-drenched questions. Mass says, “The weekend looks generally dry (a few light showers perhaps in the north half of the state) and cloudy. Highs in the mid 50s.” Shocking. [LINK]

* 2:00 PM: The Ballard Branch Library hosts local author Michael Schein. He’ll be reading and signing Just Deceits: a Historical Courtroom Mystery. Strangely, I can’t find any holdings at SPL, so don’t expect to be able to check out the book from the Library. Schein is director of LitFuse Poets’ Workshop. Sponsored by Secret Garden Bookshop. [LINK]

* 3:00 PM: Local science fiction/fantasy author David Page will be at the Northgate B&N to talk about his latest novel, Mithras Court: A Novel of the Mists. [LINK]

* 4:00 PM: Travel writer Rolf Potts has travelled back in time from the future to talk about his book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There: Stories and Revelations from One Decade as a Postmodern Travel Writer, at Elliot Bay Book Company. Ask him how! [LINK]

* 5:30 PM: Michael Eric Dyson, author of a ton of books on race and class, is hosted at Mount Zion Baptist Church (1634 19th Ave, Seattle) by the Bush School and Seattle King County NAACP for a lecture entitled “Power, Justice, Freedom: Vote!” The election may be over, but the topic lives on. And can I just take a moment to say, “Yes, we can!” WOOT! I’m finally recovered from the almost debilitating relief. [LINK]

* 7:30 PM: Leslie Walker Williams, author of The Prudent Mariner, yet another novel of the American South, will read and sign at Elliott Bay Books. How many gripping, wise, lucid, inventive, evocative novels of the American South have been written and published to date? Way, way too many. [LINK]

No comments

~James Russell Lowell

* SPL’s Ballard Branch Library has decided that there are not enough poetry months in the year, and thus has declared October as Alternative Poetry Month. They’ll be kicking off the alternative festivities at 6:00 PM tonight with a program by Band of Poets, a bunch of poets who read aloud to the accompaniment of improvised jazz, blues, and country music. Yee-haw! LINK

* Tony Wagner, co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and adviser to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, speaks about his book, The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need — And What We Can Do About It, 6:30 PM tonight at the University Child Development School (5062 9th Ave. NE, U-District, Ph: 206 547 8237). Apparently, he was at Town Hall Seattle, last night, so anyone who missed him yesterday can catch up to the rest of the class today. LINK

* Marilynne Robinson will read and sign her new novel, Home, 7:00 – 8:30 PM in the Microsoft Auditorium (Level 1) of the SPL Central Library. Set in the same time and place as Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, Home tells the story of the Boughton family. Robinson won the PEN/Faulkner award for Housekeeping; any ideas for what Home is going to win? LINK

* Also at 7:00 PM, U-District UW Bookstore hosts Rowan Jacobsen, author of Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis. Jacobsen writes about colony collapse disorder and the end of the world as we know it. I can’t get too excited about the topic, myself: honeybees are not native to the America’s (they were introduced by European immigrants: N. American honeybees are a motley hybrid of three European and an African subspecies) and somehow native people managed to survive without them. Jacobsen also wrote A Geography Of Oysters : The Connoisseur’s Guide To Oyster Eating In North America, which I highly recommend for its readability as well as its subject matter. Mmmm, oysters… although, I suppose honey is tasty, too. LINK

* Elliott Bay Books is hosting Danny Goldberg, in-store, at 7:30 PM. Goldberg has written Bumping into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business. Goldberg combines cocktail party-type anecdotes with occasionally unsavory revelations about the music business. LINK

Comments are off for this post

If you’re a casual fan, you’ve probably forgotten all about the Mariners. You may even think that by now, after several years of miserable personnel decisions and a mostly lopsided win-loss record, they may be headed for a rebound. Please allow me to disabuse you of that notion vis-à-vis commentary regarding the Mariners’ recent choice not to part ways with starting pitcher Jarrod Washburn and his absurd contract:

U.S.S. Mariner:

In case you weren’t sure, today was a great reminder that we’re all rooting for the worst run organization in baseball. There’s not another franchise with worse leadership or more incompetence in positions of power. From the CEO on down, these people don’t know baseball. They don’t know how to run a baseball team, build a roster, or win baseball games.

This organization is a massive collection of failures. They pile ridiculous decisions on top of each other, only outdoing their stupidity with an arrogance that refuses to learn from their mistakes. They are the Pets.com of MLB, only they refuse to go out of business.

I’m far too attached to the childhood memories I have to ever root for another team, but if the M’s screw up this offseason and don’t completely overhaul the baseball operations department, hiring somebody who actually understands baseball, I’ll spend the next few years rooting for these people to fail miserably and be embarrassed publicly.

These people don’t deserve success. They deserve to be looking for new jobs.

Fire them all.

Lookout Landing:

For some reason the Twins generously granted the Mariners a glorious opportunity to at least partially undo one of their greatest recent mistakes, and they passed it up. In so doing, they only confirmed that, while Bavasi may be gone, his legacy remains, and that this is an organization that doesn’t understand the first, most fundamental thing about building a baseball team. This was a gimme. This was some higher power saying “hey you guys have been through enough, here, let me give you a break.” And the Mariners didn’t care. They just didn’t care. Were this a college exam, the exam consisted of one question, and the question was “Spell the word ‘blue’,” and the multiple choice answers were (A) blue, (B) green, (C) yellow, (D) black, and the Mariners wrote “6″ on their Scantron. This was the easiest test you could imagine, and the Mariners failed.

They failed.

Just sayin’.

1 comment

• In a shocking turn of events [mb] Paste (no really, it’s up to you) Magazine has decided that maybe Seattle’s music scene is actually irrelevant after all. [bigblog, everywhere except paste's site]
• Maybe Death Cab for Cutie isn’t snubbing Seattle on their spring tour. Then again, maybe they count “Sasquatch” as Seattle, which is actually further from here than Bremerton. [reverb]
• La blogothèque comes to Seattle, takes the Bainbridge ferry with Throw Me the Statue, shoots some (as usual) beautiful concert videos. [blogotheque]
• Holy scoop! Victrola soon to be under new Whidbey management. [seattlest]

AGENDORAMA: tonnes of great shows this weekend. Probably most notably is the Mountain Goats at Neumo’s. That one’s bound to be a regular sweat lodge of dudes singing along and getting in touch with their deepest hidden sentimentality. But maybe still worth it! [neumos] There’s also the semi-annual Great Lineup in a Weird Venue of BOAT, Menomena, and Blitzen Trapper who play tonight on campus at the University of Washington to celebrate the fifth [!!] birthday of RainyDawg Radio. (As a onetime campus technology funding bureaucrat, the half-decade survival of that student-run station fills me with pride and makes me feel old. Nicely done, big dreamers!) [UW]
What else are you up to, dearests?

4 comments

• P-I television critic Melanie McFarland says goodbye to newspaper, hello to IMDB. [tvgal]
• Paste still thinks Seattle’s music scene has some life left in it. [tig]
• Today is a big day for new releases, particularly for Northwest-connected bands like the Helio Sequence, Xiu Xiu, Chris Walla. [reverb]
• Join with NWFF to secure the culture of 4Culture. [hotsplice]

Comments are off for this post

Held as part of “Dawg Days”, the Gossip, LCD Soundsystem, and Arcade Fire helped to welcome UW students [back] to campus two nights before the start of the academic year. For those of us not headed off to class on Wednesday but who nonetheless headed over to the edge of campus, it served as the unofficial kickoff to the cool evenings of autumn and the beginning of a jam-packed season of more shows that we know what to do with.

The kids, they start on time. When we arrived about an hour after the time printed on our tickets, the Gossip was long finished and LCD Soundsystem was already well into their set (I thought I heard them playing “Someone Great” while my bag was being checked). I don’t remember what I did a few days before my first undergraduate year began, but I’m certain that it wasn’t as momentous as humanist dance party under a giant glittering disco ball thrown by James Murphy followed immediately by a series triumph through despair, nostalgic, motivational speeches set to tempestous music by Arcade Fire.

Although reactions were much grumpier from the stands (Hec Ed instituted a bracelet system, whereby the first 2,000 people were admitted to the floor and the rest were relegated to the nosebleeds), I couldn’t help thinking, as I always do when seeing the Arcade Fire, of Matthew Derbey’s “Not Enough Protection From the Song” [believer] and finding it ever more impossible to believe that the band ever played anything other than amphitheaters, vast showrooms, and basketball arenas. I have seen them at least a half-dozen times, and the effect has yet to wear off. By the end I am always trying not to sing along too loudly and screaming “Lies” along with the band during “Rebellion”.

This time, with the occasion of students marching off to a new year, meeting what are likely to be lifelong friends, pumping fists enthusiastically, dancing in the crowd as Win dives among them, Will scales the scaffolding, Richard tries to destroy anything in reach of his drumsticks, Regine furiously rotates between Hurdy Gurdy, accordion, and sining duties, in the background violins, saxophones, french horns swell, and the image of Jeremy Gara happily drumming projected against the giant curtain, the show and lyrics like “is it a dream? is it a lie? i think i’ll let you deceide”, “hold your mistakes up”, “sleep is giving in”, and seem all the more momentous. Definitely more memorable than whatever they say at convocation.

6 comments

• Bridge Motel: “the clog of bodies on the stairs and in the temporary galleries was stunning” [arttogo]
• Mars Hill holds “halleiujahpalooza” mass baptism in the company of baby seals. [westseattleblog]
• the Weekly’s music blog has planned a pretty excellent local music festival to takeover Ballard on 6 October. [reverb]
• At least one sea bird had a good weekend. Great photos of the eagle of West Seattle. [beachdrive]
• Sub Pop interview with Jeff Kleinsmith reveals the ace designer’s most humiliating internet moments. [subpop]
• The SpaceToilets, almost constant use, are such “havens for drug deals and prostitution” that the city might be willing to lose $750,000 to be rid of them. [sfgate]
• The perfect excuse to delay viaduct planning? Downtown will be fine, but look at what happens to Seattle’s waterfront when global warming causes the the sea to rises by three meters. [horsesass/abc]

Comments are off for this post

• Is anyone surprised to learn that George Bush doesn’t care about spotted owls? [times]
• Talk about burying the lede: the pink elephant is likely to be going the way of the dinosaur [crosscut]
• As evidence against argument about horse meat being a more “natural” meat source for zoo animals [times], please see this photo of a lion eating a birthday cake made of horse, whipped cream, and a carrot. [times]
• Silly fashion game: ballard vs. brooklyn [threadcount]
• A few years after the demise of the Stranger’s Pizzazz! competition, Bumbershoot rejuvenates the talent show idea by hosting Bumbershoot’s Got Talent. Brush off your best act and have it whittled down to three minutes: auditions take place on 31 August. [bumbershoot]

2 comments

• Hey! BOAT in a basement. [seattlepowerpop]
• This almost makes me excited for Autumn: Jens Lekman will be in Seattle in November. [tig]
• When I-5 closes, traffic will suck so much that the P-I is firing up a special weblog just to keep track of the suckage [seattletraffic]. Not only that, we don’t even have enough buses in the Metro fleet to compensate for people trying to ride instead of drive [times]. And, taxis are jacking up fares for suffering through the construction to take you to and from the airport. [times]
• “the tragic tale of grape bubble yum” [accidentalhedonist]
• On the bright side, if you can brave the freeway Wonderland is back in business for Rainier hiking [bunnieswithsharpteeth]
• holy shit! that’s an armadillo on a leash, isn’t it? [jackwilliambell]
• Because I love you: buy your tickets to the Arcade Fire & LCD Soundsystem now, before they’re wrapped in “service” fees on Friday. [musictoday]

P.S. AGENDA ITEMs: William Gibson’s new book, Spook Country comes out today. Hear him read from it at the University Village Barnes and Noble tonight. free, 7 pm [upcoming]; Papercuts and Eux Autres make pretty music at the Crocodile. $10, 9p[croc]

Comments are off for this post

• summer = time for stealth pictures of unsuspecting targets [threadcount, slog]
• heroic twelve-year-old girl partially responsible for crackdown on nude cyclists [iht]
• peeking into the coffers of city council candidates [dailyweekly]
• name that park [flickr]
• help West Seattle kids by buying books and backpacks [wsb]

1 comment