Monthly Archives: October 2010

News

The Weekend Wrap is Storing Up Nuts for Winter

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The Seattle Times says these are shaping up to be the most intense La Niña conditions since 1955, which is ironic because the Eisenhower administration still seems more progressive than the Times editorial board. ZING! (No, we have fun.)

Typically, La Niña simply brings the wetness until about January, when we see more snow than usual. So you have some time to stock up on snow shovels, hot chocolate, and sleds. But there’s never been a better time to adopt-a-drain and make sure your street doesn’t flood.

Back in June, the FDIC warned Shoreline Bank to find some more money, and they couldn’t, so Shoreline Bank was seized and sold on Friday. It had deposits of $100 million, which doesn’t seem bad for a three-branch bank. It was the tenth Washington bank to fail this year, and the 129th nationally. In other big money news, the office towers at The Bravern in Bellevue sold for $410 million, and the Seattle Bubble knows where you can pick up a 6,500-home planned development cheap.

Now let’s turn to our neighborhoods. The Belltown Messenger is a) now online-only and b) a good place to read Ronald Holden’s restaurant coverage. Capitol Hill Seattle looked into restaurateur Linda Derschang’s stand on I-1100. CD News dug into the plans for the 12th Avenue streetcar barn. Eastlake Ave. has a story on funds for improving (but not eliminating the absurdity of) the intersection of Fairview Avenue North and East. Will Theo Chocolate win Green Business of the Year?

Mayor McGinn visited the Rainier Valley and got an earful. You can get another kind of earful on Rainier at A.R.S. Records, says Southend Seattle. “Bike thefts on the rise again on UW campus,” reported the U District Daily. Library and SHARE funding were two hot topics in Wallingford. Green Lake kids are born gardeners. Greenwood’s food bank funding is endangered. Fall is spider-time, reassured Maple Leaf Life, no invasion imminent. Discovery Park’s sewage treatment plant is getting upgrades.

Music

Seattle Symphony’s Rush Hour Concerts Unveil Hidden Side of Schwarz

Gerard Schwarz

The Seattle Symphony has new Friday night “Rush Hour” concerts, so our classical schmoozing correspondents made a trip to try it out.

The Benaroya Hall lobby opens at 5:30 p.m. with small plates and drinks from Wolfgang Puck Catering, then an abbreviated, no-intermission concert begins. Tickets start at $14. (The full program, featuring Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony, plays tonight at 8 p.m. Here’s The Gathering Note’s review.)

After the first piece–Aaron Jay Kernis’s On Wings of Light, which contains at least three candidate segments for news program themes–conductor Gerard Schwarz swung around to face the audience, prompting a quickly suppressed Wait, he can see us?! reflex.

He had the orchestra give us a brief preview of the Pelléas et Mélisande Suite (his own arrangement), explaining how the choice of instruments gave emotional color to the work (brooding basses, melancholic cellos). He had the orchestra (and audience) clap in cross-rhythm to demonstrate what Dvořák was doing in his symphony. The orchestra, interestingly, are far better clappers.

You wouldn’t know it with his back turned toward you the whole time, but Gerard Schwarz is a really warm, engaging man, and his channeling of Leonard Bernstein prompted an unfamiliar sensation in this context–it was fun. The snippets of music played beforehand act like signposts as you run into them again (Cue SNL skit: “I know you. I know you.”). There’s that ole oboe, you tell yourself smugly.

At 75 minutes, the concert lasts exactly the right time for your limited Friday night mental resources, and releases you with the evening still ahead–or in time to head home for The Good Guys on FOX.

Food

UW’s Red Square Invaded by Food Trucks

Now University of Washington students can snork down all the street food they want without leaving campus, during the Husky Union Building (HUB) renovation. No hurry, y’all have until September 2012 to sample the goods at Red Square. The kids don’t have to stand out in the rain and snow, of course–there are also “expansions at multiple locations such as By George, Eleven 01 at Terry/Lander, and 8 at McMahon.”

We sent SunBreak street food correspondent Lucas Anderson out to provide photographic proof of the al fresco dining options, and he has delivered. You can read all about UW’s street food here, but here’s Lucas’s thumbnail guide if you’re pressed for time:

  • Hot dog place: Hot Dawgs – $4 hot dogs, with specialty relishes. Vegan sausage too!
  • Burger place: Red Brick BBQ – $7 ‘sammichez’ with $2 sides (slaw, beans, and potato salad). No vegetarian option.
  • Taco place: Siganos – $2 tacos, $6 taco plate (tacos with beans and rice). Vegan/vegetarian option. I tried a couple of vegan tacos, and it was a pretty good snack for only four bucks. Better than the oily Thai food or the same old pizza they used to have in the HUB.

Red Brick and Siganos are in one trailer from Kitchens to Go, and Hot Dawgs in another. Unlike many other food trucks, these only take cards, no cash. Still fairly fast service. They have student workers up front with non-student cooks. No rain coverings, so great for sunny days, but other days…not so much. Don’t have the novelty, wheels, or epicurean feel of Maximus or Skillet, but it’s still a fun change for UW students.

News

Seattle Shakespeare Co. Breaks Out Big Guns for “Hamlet”

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Seattle Shakespeare Company plans to kick off their 20th season with a big number–Hamlet, starring fifteen Northwest actors, with staging by John Langs. The show opens October 27, so you have time to pick up the play and read it if you want, or research the sociopolitical history of Denmark as it appears in Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum.

There, our hero makes out considerably better than at Shakespeare’s hands: “Amleth, triumphant, made a great plundering, seized the spoils of Britain, and went back with his wives to his own land.” (Who knew Arnold’s version–see video–hewed so close to the original?)

Your Hamlet will be Darragh Kennan (Twelfth Night, Electra), and you also get Charles Leggett (The Merchant of Venice, King Lear), Richard Ziman (Henry IV, Part 1 & 2, Chamber Richard III), Mary Ewald (a founding member of New City Theatre), David Pichette (Henry IV, Part 1 & 2), and Brenda Joyner (Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing with Wooden O).

John Langs’ Merchant of Venice at SSC was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen in Seattle, so if you’re shopping for theatre tickets, you could feel confident in snapping up these now.

Theatre

Seattle Shakespeare Co. Breaks Out Big Guns for "Hamlet"

2 Comments

Seattle Shakespeare Company plans to kick off their 20th season with a big number–Hamlet, starring fifteen Northwest actors, with staging by John Langs. The show opens October 27, so you have time to pick up the play and read it if you want, or research the sociopolitical history of Denmark as it appears in Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum.

There, our hero makes out considerably better than at Shakespeare’s hands: “Amleth, triumphant, made a great plundering, seized the spoils of Britain, and went back with his wives to his own land.” (Who knew Arnold’s version–see video–hewed so close to the original?)

Your Hamlet will be Darragh Kennan (Twelfth Night, Electra), and you also get Charles Leggett (The Merchant of Venice, King Lear), Richard Ziman (Henry IV, Part 1 & 2, Chamber Richard III), Mary Ewald (a founding member of New City Theatre), David Pichette (Henry IV, Part 1 & 2), and Brenda Joyner (Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing with Wooden O).

John Langs’ Merchant of Venice at SSC was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen in Seattle, so if you’re shopping for theatre tickets, you could feel confident in snapping up these now.

Politics

Op-Ed: Balancing Budgets on the Backs of Librarians Hurts More Than Helps

Readers of The SunBreak will have noted we have been relatively quiet on the subject of Mayor McGinn’s proposed budget for next year. (Vote for your cranky cost-saving measures here.) I simply have not been able to get my arms around the beast, outside of general outlines.

One delineation to make is that this budget crisis is a revenue problem, not a wasteful city spending problem. In 2008, the general fund budget was $925 million, last year it was $905 million, and this iteration is $888 million. Meanwhile, the city’s four main revenue streams–taxes on utilities, sales, businesses, and property–growing at six to eight percent annually in the boom years, fell off a cliff in 2009, entering negative territory.

Another bright, shining line is the difference between the general fund and the total city budget, which last totals over $3.8 billion dollars. That is, almost 80 percent of what the city spends annually lies outside the general operating budget. Instead over 200 city staff are being fired. That’s why Ken Schramm, no mayoral ally, says suck it up when it comes to parking rate increases. There ain’t no easy way out.

Still, Mayor McGinn says he welcomes fierce argument over his budget choices, and Blogging Georgetown has responded with a critique of cutting library hours and services at a time when they are needed more than ever. “The old man” has graciously allowed us to republish his broadside:

 

The mayoral candidate that allegedly lavished such love on South Park during the election is proposing cutting librarians from the South Park branch of the Seattle Public libraries. According to the [Seattle] Times, the budget that he submitted to the city council included cuts from SPL, including “Delridge, Fremont, International District/Chinatown, Madrona-Sally Goldmark, Montlake, New Holly, South Park and Wallingford — [which would] would lose their librarians. The buildings would be open 35 hours a week for collections, computer access and holds-pickup.”

The current trend in all libraries has been to take up a lot of the slack where other social services used to provide information services–from computers to do job searches and write resumes, on over to using the information portals to access information about government resources. With the staffing cuts in social services, this will continue to increase demand on library services.

Librarians represent the skill set to help people with research in these areas (says an article from the New York Times from last year, which gets more into the nitty gritty). Typically they also provide children and teen services, including early literacy programs for young readers.

Libraries in Seattle are a large component of civil society for the neighborhoods, as public space continues to get harder and harder to come by. So I guess we ought to reconsider McGinn’s view of himself as a neighborhoods kind of guy.

In the comments section of the post, the author elaborates on his criticism of McGinn’s decision:

Over the years, the kind of support to the community that libraries provide is not just books and information; job placement and other assistance at WSES has been cut and or eliminated. Educational programs, especially literacy programs for youth and children, are under pressure in the schools. Libraries are becoming more of a public space, because the trend of development and the idealization of private property has eliminated a lot of public space over the years. They are more accessible, and because of the decentalized nature of our library system, more responsive to the local community.

To add insult to injury, we are talking about a library that people had to twist arms to get built, and public space seems to be a particular importance to a place like South Park–lots of kids, generally isolated from the rest of the city, etc.

Hours and furloughs are one thing, but to cut parts of the staff that are cornerstones to the libraries’ increased component of our public social structure goes against all of the rhetoric that McGinn was putting out during his campaign. He talks about public space in terms of a “private” urbanist project, then undermines it as a “public” project. My beef with him is that he is fiscally far right by contemporary standards, but he demands a free ride on this as a proponent of “sustainability.”