Stormy Daniels Is A Patriot

News • Slog AM/PM

Slog PM: Lime Is Bringing Cars to Seattle This Week, California Is (Still) Burning, Stormy Daniels Loves Us

by Nathalie Graham • Tuesday at 6:15 pm

Itll be like this, but a car.
It'll be like this, but a car. LIME BIKE

You’ve heard of airpods, now get ready for… LimePods: Lime is breaking into the car-share market and they’re starting in Seattle. It’ll start with just a fleet of 50 cars but Lime expects to grow to 500 by the end of the year. I’m pretty sure that means the end of 2018 because GeekWire says that they’re expecting to grow to 1,500 by 2019. Talk about growth! The LimePods are tiny little branded Fiats. We’re getting more cars but e-scooters are still banned. Sad.

That Queen Anne fire was arson: Firefighters have confirmed that the fire that set a Queen Anne lumberyard ablaze was intentional. Gascoigne Lumber was established in 1926. It’s ashes now. The damage clocks in at around $4.3 million. The owners say they’re going to rebuild.

Continue reading »
2018

Ballot Update: A Few State Races May Be Headed for Recounts

by Rich Smith • Tuesday at 6:10 pm

(L-R) If Pinky Vargas and Emily Randall win, Democrats will increase their majority by four in the State Senate.
(L-R) If Pinky Vargas and Emily Randall win, Democrats will increase their majority by four in the State Senate. Courtesy of the Campaigns

We're still waiting on the outcomes of two State Senate races (one in the 42nd LD and one in the 26th LD) and two State House races (one in the 42nd LD and one in the 10th LD), neither of which will likely be decided for a few weeks.

In the latest drop, Democrat Emily Randall narrowed the gap between her and Pierce County Republican chair Marty McClendon to 74 votes. She was losing by more than 200 votes on Friday. They're both running for State Senate in the 26th LD, which includes Kitsap and Pierce counties, and the race will probably remain close as votes continue to drip in. The big question is whether the race ends up being close enough to trigger a recount. Right now it's close enough, but that could change in the coming days.

Continue reading »
Sponsored

KEXP Yule Benefit: Moby, with members of the Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra, December 6th at McCaw Hall

On Thursday, December 6th at McCaw Hall, musician and activist Moby will showcase the breadth of his career with an orchestral performance, featuring his many hits, accompanied by members of the Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra, with Emil de Cou conducting. This is Moby’s second-ever performance with a full orchestra, and currently no other performances of this kind are scheduled. Proceeds from this special evening will benefit KEXP’s programming. Supported in part by Lyft and Umpqua Investments.

Tickets available now HERE

News • Cops

Seattle City Council Approves Controversial Police Union Contract

by Lester Black • Tuesday at 4:50 pm

Sawant was the only councilmember to vote against it.
Sawant was the only council member to vote against it. Seattle Channel

The Seattle City Council passed a controversial contract with the city's largest police union Tuesday, despite heavy protest from community groups across the city. Mayor Jenny Durkan needed seven of the city council members to sign off on her new deal with the union; she ended up with eight yes votes.

The council passed the contract over the protest of dozens of community groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington and the city’s own Community Police Commission (CPC). The CPC, which was created by the city to provide community input on policing issues, claims that the new contract makes it harder to fire police officers for misconduct and weakens police accountability in the city.

Councilmember Kshama Sawant was the lone vote Tuesday against the contract, calling the agreement an “unacceptable rollback of police accountability.”

Continue reading »
Food & Drink

Homer Brings Bright, Wood-Fired Mediterranean Flavor to Beacon Hill

by Kara Tiernan • Tuesday at 4:35 pm

Order a drink from Homer’s cocktail window while you wait.
Order a drink from Homer’s cocktail window while you wait. Brooke Fitts

Named after the owners' beloved golden retriever, Homer—Beacon Hill's much-buzzed-about new restaurant—has an intoxicating, gluttonous aroma of charred bread and cooking pita that spills out the door and lures in expectant diners. You can smell it from a block away. And if that's not enough to convince you to hightail it over, I have two words that will: cocktail window.

Chef Logan Cox and wife Sara Knowles have been planning the logistics for Homer for more than nine months and are excited to bring it to their neighborhood. "We shopped around but knew we wanted to be close to home," said Knowles. "We live two blocks from here and love local spots like Bar Del Corso. It's been a journey, and we're happy to finally be able to serve the community."

Continue reading »
Music

Inbox Jukebox Track of the Day: The M.I.A.-on-Downers Dubstep of "Beliefs" by Lo-Fi Badass Sneaks

by Dave Segal • Tuesday at 3:43 pm

Beliefs is an early contender for best song of 2019.
"Beliefs" is an early contender for best song of 2019. Sofiane Boukhari

Sneaks, "Beliefs" (Merge)

Merge Records' most interesting artist returns with a sneak preview of her forthcoming album, Highway Hypnosis (due January 25, 2019). Past Sneaks releases like It's a Myth and Gymnastics pitched her somewhere between the lo-fi post-punk of Young Marble Giants and ESG (in "You're No Good" form) and the lo-fi bedroom electronica of Magnetic Fields... but with a much less lugubrious and much higher voice than Stephin Merritt.

"Beliefs," though, is another thing altogether. Sounding like M.I.A. on heavy downers, this track is like the most skeletal dubstep pitched to -16. There's an incredibly soothing quality to the backing vocals, an ectoplasmic bliss not heard since Seefeel's Quique. "Beliefs" is a total Robitussin®-funk charmer; it's my favorite song of 2019, and we haven't even scraped our way out of 2018 yet. If you play your cards right, you can catch Sneaks performing Friday, November 16 at Tractor Tavern during Freakout Festival.

Arts

Tacoma Is Passing the State's First Cultural Access Program

by Rich Smith • Tuesday at 3:25 pm

Art museums for everybody!
Art museums for everybody! Courtesy of Tacoma Art Museum

Here's one more reason to seriously consider a move to Tacoma. With over 65 percent support for Proposition 1, a.k.a "Tacoma Creates," it looks like Tacoma will have the first cultural access program in the state of Washington. Thanks to the wisdom of voters, the city will enjoy better access to arts, science, and heritage programs in schools, as well as new arts festivals in town, free tickets to events, and the ample economic benefits that redound to municipalities that have the good sense to broadly invest in the arts. And all of this for the low-low (but still regressive) average price of $13 per household per year.

If any of the above language sounds familiar to you, you're probably also still dealing with the traumatic loss of Access for All, a similar measure that King County voters rejected in the summer of 2017. That proposition, which would have levied a 0.1 percent sales tax to raise $70 million annually for arts (and science! and heritage!) access, lost here by a little less than two points, much to my enduring chagrin. So, what could arts proponents in King County who want to see another cultural access program on the ballot learn from Tacoma? Like all answers to questions of arts administration and governance, the answer is both incredibly simple and stupidly complicated.

Continue reading »
Amazon

Seattle Is Now the Future of Three Cities

by Charles Mudede • Tuesday at 2:10 pm

Long Island City should now be called New Seattle...
Long Island City should now be called New Seattle... Charles Mudede

So it's official. Amazon is opening new offices in three cities: NYC and Northern Virginia (which will both be home to HQ2) and Nashville, where there will be a new Operations Center of Excellence. The corporation will also receive a total of $2.2 billion "in performance-based incentives." These cities are essentially buying jobs. That is the state of our post-crash economy. Jobs are no longer created by exciting private investment; they are purchased outright with the public's money. The rationale for this kind of planning is that the jobs will pay for themselves in the long run. The public has been forced into this pitiful corner because it's prevented from funding plans and programs that can lead to local job creation and economic activity.

Under the regimen of a fully implemented neoliberal discipline, municipal budgets must be constrained in bad times and good. And so, the post-war logic of procyclical fiscal policies has been abandoned. The federal government authorized massive tax cuts during a period of economic expansion, nixing any hope of the kind of budget surplus the US enjoyed during the end of the Clinton years. Seattle's mayor, Jenny Durkan, is in the process of imposing budget cuts during a boom. But when the downturn eventually occurs, we can expect emergency tax cuts to be applied, like defibrillator paddles, on the arrested animal spirits of entrepreneurs (they will, of course, pocket the free cash—this is the much ignored law of "liquidity preference"), and budget tightening to reduce deficits that are only mounting because of declining tax revenues. You can't win.

Continue reading »
Savage Love

She Fell in Love With One Guy but Wound up With Another

by Dan Savage • Tuesday at 1:49 pm

1525120010-1516999045-savage-letter-of-the-day-stamp-2018.jpg

This might seem as a pretty ordinary issue compared to the ones I usually read about on your blog but I could really use your help. I am 29-year-old hetero woman in a monogamous relationship. I love my boyfriend and I am OK to fuck him only. When I met him, he could barely carry a sexual act to its end. He had some issues from his past relationships and we worked on them together, to the point where we now have great sexual chemistry and a lot of sex.

Early on I realized he liked to fantasize a lot about friends, family, and people we met. It was quite new to me, but I gradually started to appreciate that and explore new ideas and fantasies myself. We role played, we used Chatroulette and YP, and recently I went on vacation and came back with a couple of toys to have fun with. Things like that.

But he seems to NEED to comment on every slightly sexy girl passing by, or who appears on TV, on in his Facebook news feed. He knows it makes me jealous and uncomfortable when he does this—it makes me feel like I am not sexy, beautiful, or transgressive enough—and I don’t see the sense of telling me stuff that makes me unhappy. To make things even worse, Dan, he has stopped telling me how sexy, beautiful, or even nice I am.

There are times when he is jealous about friends or colleagues that showed an interest on me and I tried to show him respect and avoided engaging in behaviors that made him uncomfortable. I embraced his point of view regarding these interactions and put a stop to them. But every time I try to point out that this behavior makes me sick it’s like I’m telling him to not be himself. He gets angry and tells me I sound just like his mother.

When I've tried to speak with him about this he gets upset and says I can't possibly understand him and that I need to get over this stupid stuff and that I am mediocre girlfriend. And tonight he randomly friended on fifteen pretty girls on Facebook to see if I would get angry. It actually made me cry.

I feel like shit at the moment and I would like to know your opinion. I have always thought of myself as open minded—a tiny bit jealous, yes, but still a reasonable person. And I never felt so diminished and not-attractive as during those episodes. I am not sure what I am doing wrong.

Just A Jealous Girl

Continue reading »

A Defense of Justin Timberlake: Why I’m Following Pop’s Leading Man into the Woods

by Jenni Moore • Tuesday at 1:37 pm

jt-ryan-mcginley.jpg
Ryan McGinley

Man of the Woods isn’t Justin Timberlake’s best work by any means, but you probably already knew that. Timberlake’s fifth solo album is his most criticized work to date; it’s been called a misstep, “failed fusion,” “incoherent,” “underwhelming,” and worse. Critics didn’t love it, but fans gobbled it right up—the record performed well, debuting at number one on the Billboard 200.

While I’m definitely not whelmed by Man of the Woods like I was by 2006’s near-perfect FutureSex/LoveSounds or 2013’s massive, two-part The 20/20 Experience, I do find Timberlake’s latest to be enjoyable listening. It shows JT and longtime co-producers Timbaland and the Neptunes playing with the boundaries of genre more than ever before.

Continue reading »
Amazon

Jeff Bezos Scams States Out of $2.2 Billion

by Katie Herzog • Tuesday at 12:52 pm

The future home of HQ2 in National Landing, née Crystal City.
The future home of HQ2 in National Landing, née Crystal City.

My deepest condolences to Queens, New York and Arlington, Virginia, both of which are soon to welcome thousands of lanyard-wearing, Solowheeling-ridng, tech-money-making Amazon employees into their environs.

In Arlington, Amazon will be headquarted in the Crystal City neighborhood, although according to Amazon's press release announcing the decision, Crystal City is now known as "National Landing." In Queens, it will be headquarted in the Long Island City, and while some state and city leaders in both places are crowing Amazon's decision ("Think of the jobs," etc) not everyone is so pleased, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Socialist darling who will soon represent the Bronx and Queeens in Congress.

Continue reading »
Music

Techno/House DJ Gag Reflex Spins Music That Inspires Catharsis and Exaltation

by Dave Segal • Tuesday at 12:34 pm

Its a very exciting time in Seattle right now for queer techno.
"It's a very exciting time in Seattle right now for queer techno." CECILIA CORSANO-LEOPIZZI
DJ GAG REFLEX (aka ODESSA SWAN; TUF)

Current top 5 tracks:

IVVY, "Up to My Chest in Trash" (MOTOR)

Continue reading »
Food & Drink • Crime

It Never Ends

by Rich Smith • Tuesday at 11:31 am

That horrible thing poking out of the jack-o-lanterns head is a pair of SOCKS.
That horrible thing poking out of the jack-o'-lantern is a pair of SOCKS. RS

I thought I was meeting a friend for a drink at a bar last night. As it turned out, I was actually meeting my greatest enemy.

When I walked into the bar and ordered my regular boilermaker, the bartender said he was out of whiskey, but that he did have "one of these." He then presented that horrible Halloween bouquet you see in the photo above. My mouth dropped. I started shaking with rage. I demanded my booze and vowed to drink it alone in the bathroom, until finally my "friend" showed up cackling behind me.

Continue reading »
Weed

Canadian Cannabis Supplies Are Going Up in Smoke

by Josh Jardine • Tuesday at 11:19 am

1539796626-1538160544-gettyimages-50929584.jpg
DONALD WEBER / STRINGER / GETTY
Now that the Great White North has gone Green, it may be a good time to check in to see how Canada is faring with cannabis legalization. Did they suffer multiple mass shootings and numerous racist gerrymandered elections of questionable validity? No, that was us. The worst problem that seems to have developed up there is... they are running out of weed.

Weed became available for purchase in stores and online on October 17, and since then, Canadians are racking up the purchases with moose-sized enthusiasm. Shopify, the e-commerce provider of software used for online cannabis sales in some provinces, said that on the first day, Canadians were placing orders online at the rate of more than 100 per minute.

Continue reading »

Want to Change the Way White Women Vote? Move to a Red State and Join an Evangelical Church.

by Katie Herzog • Tuesday at 10:55 am

GettyImages-1055775660.jpg
Getty Images/Joe Raedle

As I wrote last week, despite increasingly positive results for the Democrats in both the U.S. House and Senate, after the election, blame for progressive losses in Texas, Georgia, and Florida were immediately cast upon white women—and not just the white women who actually voted for Republican candidates. If you were paying much attention to social media, you may have gotten the message that white women, even those who voted for Dems, are due for a reckoning. And this rhetoric wasn't just limited to Twitter, a site that runs on instructing women what to do. Vox called the election results a "betrayal of white women voters," the Washington Post accused women of choosing their party instead of #MeToo, and in the Guardian, Moira Donegan (of Shitty Media Men list fame) asked: "What is wrong with white women?” and then answered her own question: They find “racist sadism gratifying," Donegan wrote. "It is fun for them."

Maybe Donegan is right and over half of white women are not much better than the white family in Get Out (at least those people didn't vote for Trump), but her evidence comes more from feminist theory than from actual surveys of white women themselves. She cites feminist philosopher Andrea Dworkin, but not a single Trump-voting woman. While Donegan could, I suppose, have tapped into some secret zeitgeist of racist, sadist white women, there's another explanation that Donegan and other professional scolds have largely failed to consider in their haste to assign blame for Democrataic losses: white women, as I wrote last week, lean conservative. It's possible they voted for Trump simply because he ran as a Republican.

Continue reading »
Music

Ten Years Later, Alopecia Still Sounds Sad, Weird, and Fun

by Lester Black • Tuesday at 10:00 am

In Berlin I saw two men fuck/ In the dark corner of a basketball court
"In Berlin I saw two men fuck/ In the dark corner of a basketball court" Lester Black

I was an 18-year-old heading into my freshman year of college when Why? released their seminal, irony-filled album, Alopecia. My teenage self found an immediate kinship with the dark lyrics, which sounded like they were scrawled down in suburban parking lots and high schools. Like the disease he stole the album's name from, Alopecia laid out all of frontman Yoni Wolf's most embarrassing, disgusting, strange, and unappetizing stories in unmistakable clarity.

I spent the next decade reciting the lyrics back and forth until I could match the tempo of Wolf's every stutter and self-deprecating line. But Alopecia has always been a private album for me, I had never seen Why? live, and a fondness for confessional songs about jacking off in art museums isn't something I'm in the habit of sharing widely.

That changed Monday night when I felt what was either joy or shamelessness, as a room full of people that looked like generally mopey misfits sang nearly the entire 45-minute album in unison, sometimes drowning out Wolf's own voice.

Continue reading »

Next