Thanks to everyone who keeps our Flickr pool full – it’s great to see so many brilliant photographs.

Today I’m particularly digging Don Bennett’s Coho photos. (Shown here is just one of them.) Salmon are great. I know, I know, some of you would add: “…in my belly” to that, but I really don’t like the taste of salmon very much and seldom eat them. They’re amazing animals just to watch, though, and it’s always an awesome in the literal sense experience to watch them on their spawing runs.

High-Fiving Panda by ~wesa~

Caught this guy walking around Pine in front of Nordstrom.

Treads by smohundro

Is this where SDOT practices lane markings?

art of display by Seadevi

I’ve always loved this eye-catching display down at Pike Place Market. He tends to hang out on the cherries in the spring and the green beans in the summer.

There have been some great photos to the Flickr Pool lately. Here are a few that I liked:

Happy Wednesday by J. Kraemer

Duck Gourd by B.K. Dewey

Sam Sculpture Park by ~Wesa~

Katamari Damacy by Sir Learnsalot

Eddie Vedder during Pearl Jam’s sold out Key Arena show last night

Wow what a show. Not only does Pearl Jam still have what it takes to kill it at a huge venue like Key Arena, but they can do it for over 2 hours. Above all it was just a good old rock show. No fancy screens or effects, just some nice stage lighting and Pearl Jam doing what they do best. The songs were a nice mix of old and new, along with a couple from their newest album, “Backspacer”. (Speaking of “Backspacer”, if you have Rock Band you can download the entire album to play in the game as of today.) As of this morning there were still some tickets left for tonight’s show. If you are still thinking about going though you should act fast!

Here is the full set list from last night. Sounds like people are split 50/50 about what the set is going to look like tonight. I’m guessing they change it up and play a lot of older/obscure stuff along with the songs from the new album.

Set List: Long Road, Corduroy, Gonna See My Friend, Got Some, Hail Hail, Amongst The Waves, Daughter, Even Flow, Johnny Guitar, Unthought Known, World Wide Suicide, Small Town, Off He Goes, Down, Save You, The Fixer, Life Wasted

1st encore: Just Breathe w/the Octava String Quartet, The End w/ the Octava String Quartet, Inside Job, Rearviewmirror

2nd encore: Given To Fly, Do The Evolution, Better Man, The Real Me (Townshend) w/ the Syncopated Taint Horn Quartet, Indifference, Alive

For many many more pictures I took at this show, keep reading after the jump… (more…)

girl talk at the showbox; photo by me; more in the photoset [flickr]

Girl Talk is one of those acts that reminds you how fortunate it is to be in a place with a floor built on a bed of springs. Mere minutes after Greg Gillis ran onto the stage, made a round of front-row high-fives, scaled his table, and settled into his spot behind a card table decked out with plastic-wrapped laptops (”2 laptops and a pair of giant studio monitors are the new 2 turntables and a microphone.” [@asa]), the sold out crowd was putting the structure to the test. A track or two in, and the empty stage began to be filled by a not entirely unreasonable cross section of Seattleites — a low key programmer type for every two neon spectacled party kids — and a duo of jerseyed leaf blower operators who sent toilet paper, confetti, and the occasional inflatable into the house.
Really, though, the onstage spectacle of dancers, a sweaty disrobing (not a) DJ hardly stopping his bouncing while hammering away at the mix, and retro projected graphics, hardly mattered. The stacks of samples, cutting across decades of popular and obscure culture, colliding into each other, being mixed into new mental connections, and made fresh in an on-the-fly live experience made nonstop dancing entirely more compelling than people-watching. I’m sure that someone with a better ear and mind for cataloging will come up with a brainbending setlist; my favorite moments of recognitions were for classic Nirvana, Kelly Clarkson, Journey, the usual set-ending Elton John, and some new (disc of the summer) Phoenix making it into the mix. After something like an hour and a half, the show ended promptly. In the moment, stopping before midnight seemed too soon, until you realized that maybe if it went on forever people would die of dehydrated exhaustion, making the leaving while wanting more just about perfect.