• Seattle's best public-artist-who-doesn't-wait-for-a-commission, No Touching Ground, struck again last week—wheat-pasting life-size, photorealistic portraits of 99-percenters on the cement columns under the downtown monorail. They looked so real, people thought a new protest site had sprung up. The city's graffiti-control team tore them down less than 12 hours after they went up—damn you, public officials! No Touching Ground's portrait of John T. Williams on 11th Avenue remains untouched.

• 826 Seattle executive director Teri Hein and Ballard High School student Meron Kasahun were photographed with Michelle Obama in the East Room of the White House on November 2 after 826 Seattle won a 2011 National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award. Kasahun, 17, the daughter of an Ethiopian single mother, says, "I found my community at 826 Seattle," and describes going to the White House as "an experience that I will never forget."

• Stephen Gyllenhaal's film Grassroots, about Grant Cogswell's failed 2001 run for Seattle City Council, was completed in July but still hasn't found a distributor. All it has so far is a series of posts on Filmmaker magazine's blog detailing the struggles of promoting the film without studio distribution—Saskia Wilson-Brown likens this to "running a grassroots political campaign." According to former Stranger writer Phil Campbell, whose book Zioncheck for President: A True Story of Idealism and Madness in American Politics inspired the film, Gyllenhaal is not submitting Grassroots to any of the major film festivals—Sundance, Toronto, Venice—and is going totally DIY. Fair enough. But it's unusual for a film that's packed with studio names (Jason Biggs, Tom Arnold, Cedric the Entertainer, Lauren Ambrose) not to be distributed by a studio.

• A clerk at Platinum Records was overheard saying to a customer, "I hear that by next year, most labels are going to stop making CDs. It's all going to be downloads." Asked if that's true, a Sub Pop publicist said, "It sounds like that record-store clerk did not know what they were talking about."

• The good people of the Twilight Exit are opening a bar in place of Thompson's Point of View (which closed not too long ago—sad!—owing approximately $14,000 in back taxes). The new bar will reportedly be called The Neighbor Lady and will be, sources say, "urban bordello themed." Target date: March 2012.

• Tit Pig, the best-named hardcore band to form in Seattle in recent memory, is breaking up.