Ken Kesey’s classic Sometimes a Great Notion is arguably the great novel about the Pacific Northwest; it’s also a damn good movie.  Knockout performances from Paul Newman and Henry Fonda are highlights in this chronicle of Read more…

In a letter earlier this month, City Council members Sally Clark and Nick Licata asked Mayor Mike McGinn to set up a formal selection committee to choose the replacements for the outgoing directors of the city’s Read more…

Jim Lazar, an economist and open-government advocate in Olympia, has asked the state Public Disclosure Commission (PDC) to revamp state campaign disclosure rules so that telephone campaign polls would be considered political advertising, among other changes. Read more…

Today’s pick:
1. Mayor Mike McGinn is giving a guest lecture tonight at the UW College of Built Environments, the university’s urban planning, architecture and design program (which the college’s site says aims to “integrate poetic Read more…

[ 1960s subdivision in Medfield, a Boston suburb; click image to enlarge ]

Sticking up for a presumed silent, oppressed majority—real or imaginary—is an unbeatable marketing strategy. Just ask Fox News. And so it goes with noted sprawl apologist Joel Kotkin, who writes:

“A year into the Obama administration, America’s dominant geography, suburbia, is now in open revolt against an urban-centric regime that many perceive threatens their way of life, values, and economic future.”

Joel Connelly exemplified the local version of this pseudo-drama, writing in a column entitled “520 bridge debate shows Seattle at its worst,” that “Seattle politicians should briefly depart from their insular world of interest groups and come [to Medina, the wealthy Eastside suburb] to get a broad view of State Route 520 and how to bridge the problem of cars occupied by just one person. ”

The tired meme goes like this: Those who are critical of the suburbs are an urban elitist minority who don’t understand the suburban way of life, and who hope to use “social engineering” to force suburbanites to swallow a more urban lifestyle. Case in point: State Rep. Ross Hunter, D-Medina, fretting, in Connelly’s paraphrase, that the 520 bridge project “has become a playground for social engineering.”

The first flaw in that argument is that it’s pretty much impossible to be an American and not have had significant direct experience with the suburbs. Our landscape is thick with them, and our culture is drenched in the suburban American dream.

It’s not that critics of the suburbs don’t get the suburbs.

Read more…

For the past week and a half, I’ve been wondering what’s going on with the Sasquatch! lineup for 2010. May isn’t that far away and despite a few confirmations (Pavement, Miike Snow, Wale, etc.), the Sasquatch! camp had been mostly quiet.

That is, until now. This morning, Live Nation sent out a press release stating that for the first time in the festival’s history, the lineup will be announced live.

The announcement will happen at the Crocodile next Monday, 2/15, with performances by Surfer Blood, Fresh Espresso, and Atlas Sound. Check out the full press release after the jump. Read more…

1. Voters have two more days to mail in their ballots in this year’s school levy election. We strongly agree with last week’s superior court ruling that the state isn’t meeting its constitutional obligation to Read more…

Today’s pick:
1. St. Vincent is playing at Neumos tonight. Her music (and her voice) is remarkably pretty, lulling, français, almost boring, and then, all of a sudden, it’s overwhelmed by a wave of computerized whooshes Read more…

Over at the Weekly—to which, by the way, I’m extremely grateful for giving PubliCola credit for a story we broke, credit that not every news outlet was willing to give—Caleb Hannan has a piece asking Read more…

Trying to reinterpret the music of Miles Davis is no easy task.  Any musician who sets out  to cover the revered trumpeter’s repertoire is in for a serious challenge. But that’s exactly what Read more…