Monthly Archives: December 2011

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Leroy Bell Brings His X-Factor to the Moore Theatre on New Year’s Eve

Saturday night brings the countdown to the start of a new year, and the unofficial start of LeRoy Bell’s life after The X Factor with a concert at the Moore Theatre.

Bell, a former postal carrier who hails from Edmonds, is the local hero who went deepest into the inaugural season of The X Factor. A spin-off of sorts from American Idol, Simon Cowell’s newest show expanded the age range of the contestants, allowing Bell (now 60, though you’d never know from his looks and voice) to perform in the “over 30s” group. His soulful sound propelled him to final eight before elimination.

He had strong national support on the show, and a good local following performing as LeRoy Bell & His Only Friends. Now, unshackled from Nicole Scherzinger’s tutelage and the constraints of singing two-minute versions of pop songs, Bell will take to the stage for a special New Year’s Eve concert. Tickets start at $32.50, the show starts at 9pm (with reggae artist Clinton Fearon), and Bell should be counting down the minutes close to midnight.

For those not familiar, here’s Bell’s final performance on The X Factor:

Business, News, Politics, Travel

Craziest Budget Cut by Washington State Legislature in 2011?

“The Picasso show at SAM last year generated $66 million for Seattle; half the museum-goers were from out of town,” writes Ronald Holden at Cornichon, in a post in defense of Seattle tourism marketing.

But last July Washington State made the New York Times for closing down its tourism office, becoming “the only state in the nation with no statewide tourism office and no state money to promote itself to travelers.”

“Tourism is the fourth-largest industry in Washington,” noted the Times.

When the state tourism office was shut down, its budget was $1.8 million against the $50 million budgeted by British Columbia or California. California expects to have made some $104 billion from tourists during 2011, which seems a reasonable return.

Travel spending in Washington State (Image: Dean Runyon Study for Washington State tourist office)

In 2010, tourists spent an estimated $15 billion in Washington State, resulting in almost $1 billion in additional tax revenue. That Seattle is a draw will surprise no one, but Washington State is large and offers a multitude of get-away-from-it-all excursions, from its coast to Eastern Washington wineries to the Columbia River.

The state’s tourism office, when it still existed, found that travel and tourism had significant impacts in rural areas:

In 2009, the six counties with more than 10 percent travel-generated jobs were all non-urban. Further, the 14 counties with more than six percent travel-generated jobs were also non-urban. Travel spending generates more than 15 percent of local sales and lodging taxes in eight counties, all of which are non-urban.

Ironically, the tourism office’s reward for success was falling under the budget axe. Though their budget was slashed the last few years, tourism dollars appeared relatively unaffected–at least from a tax-revenue viewpoint. It appears that a majority of legislators did not ask themselves if adding funding for tourism, the state’s fourth largest industry, remember, was an obvious way to increase revenue. They may not have eaten the goose that laid the golden eggs, but they seem to think that starving it is an ace idea.

While keeping in mind that steady increase in tourism dollars charted above, you also want to keep in mind how hard it is to maintain top-of-mind awareness. Treading water isn’t attention-getting. There’s an easy (if unscientific) way to get a glimpse of what people are interested in, and it’s free: Google Trends. So take a look at the results for “Seattle” and “Washington State.” The last eight years show an unbroken decline in search volume. (Not true of Amazon or Nordstrom or Starbucks, but true of Microsoft and Boeing as well.)

This story is something to keep in mind when you hear howling from the State Capitol about our dire economic situation. Many budgeting issues are complex, but this one is not. If your attempts to fix a decline in tax revenue involve, short-term, defunding offices that have been providing increases in tax revenue, you are doing it wrong. The sooner the Governor and Legislature stop working against our state’s fourth largest industry, the better.

Business, Health, News

Alcohol Where You Least Expect It: Online Shopping and OJ

Drunk shopping. Clearly a thing.

The news that people spend more when at home and shopping under the influence is not news to me. Nothing else  explains my late-night 1998 purchase of a Gateway desktop system but drunkenness, and I wasn’t even online yet.

I don’t begrudge my earlier inebriated self for the Gateway purchase–it ran Win98 for me until 2004–just for the boozy assurance with which I loaded it up with peripherals that added another 30 percent to the total. So much for saving money via Gateway’s à la carte scheme.

TechFlash points to a New York Times story suggesting that online retailers are shifting their efforts to take advantage of happy hour disinhibition. Reports Stephanie Clifford:

On eBay, the busiest time of day is from 6:30 to 10:30 in each time zone. Asked if drinking might be a factor, Steve Yankovich, vice president for mobile for eBay, said, “Absolutely.” He added: “I mean, if you think about what most people do when they get home from work in the evening, it’s decompression time. The consumer’s in a good mood.”

The famously intoxicated British are, like drink-stunned lab rats, leading the way for researchers. The Times again: “One comparison-shopping site, Kelkoo, said almost half the people it surveyed in Britain, where it is based, had shopped online after drinking.” TechFlash points to the Kelkoo survey results that indicate 43 percent of Brits have shopped online after having a few, and by “few,” we mean that only 53 percent remembered making their purchase. More impressively:

Almost one in ten (8%) shoppers were so drunk that they had to abandon their transaction as it was too expensive and their credit card was declined, 9% fell asleep and 13% couldn’t focus on the screen or use the keyboard properly.

(Photo: United States Department of Agriculture)

It’s not due to their orange juice intake, though you might be surprised to learn, as I was, that regular OJ contains trace amounts of alcohol. Wine economist Mike Veseth mentions this in an aside in his post on no-alcohol wine: “De-alcoholized wine actually contains a tiny bit of alcohol, but can be sold as a non-alcoholic beverage so long as it contains less than 0.5 percent alcohol by volume. Amazingly, this is about the same amount of alcohol you will find in orange juice. Really!”

For the truly curious, Paul Davis, of the USDA Market Quality Research Division, has determined which OJ “vintages” pack the most fruit punch:

Fruit picked towards the end of the harvest season was highest in ethanol (because the yeasts have had longer to convert sugar to alcohol). The exception was the Valencia Orange, which had a fairly constant alcohol content throughout the season.

Most people can metabolize this small amount of alcohol from swallow to swallow, so you never get drunk from orange juice benders. Online shopping just after breakfast, then, remains a prudent option.

Arts & Entertainment, Music, Theatre, Visual Arts

For New Year’s, a Cafe (Un)American Benefit at Washington Hall

If you’re tired of the same old, same old for New Year’s Eve, Cafe (un)American may be for you. It’s a 21+ takeover of historic Washington Hall by 35 performers (burlesque, music, and more), with specialty cocktails from Sound Spirits liquors, food from Madison Park Conservatory, and desserts by Victoria Yee Howe and Theo Chocolates.

Presenting artists include but are not limited to: Jherek Bischoff and band, DJ Darek Mazzone, Gabriel Teodros, Buffalo Madonna, Sten Skogen, King Dro, Jed Dunkerley, DJ Steve Miller, Kate Ryan, and Celeste Cooning. Also, I’m told there will be a kissing booth.

Your ticket will total $103.50, and include an open bar and a champagne toast at midnight. In the interests of full disclosure, I know some of the people behind this production, and have no doubt that this will be an incredible evening. Also, full disclosure, your name will probably go on some kind of FBI watch list, so you have that going for you, too. You can’t buy that kind of notoriety.

A watch list? you ask. Yes, do you know the strange saga of Cafe (un)American?

Many years ago now–who even remembers 2006 and 2007 any more?–there was an outlaw arts speakeasy that used to regularly defy the letter of Washington state law regarding liquor sales and gambling. Past closing time, you could stop in at the secret location for illicit cabaret, burlesque, music, and games–people went in costume, so to speak, decked out in their finest vintage wear. It was a traveling show, popping up once in a building owned by Costco’s Jim Sinegal.

Perhaps thanks to zombie institutional memory–remember that Capone and other gangsters were often behind the speakeasies that regular people used to attend, glory days, they’ll pass you by–the FBI came to believe that the proceeds of these evenings was funding “domestic terrorism.” (So did the Seattle Police Department, which has just been the subject of a major Department of Justice investigation itself.)

Here we refer you to Brendan Kiley’s definitive story on what became a major operation that, after years of surveillance, bagged a small-time dealer and put an end to Capitol Hill hipster poker games alleged to involve more than $5,000 per month in stakes:

“That would seem to be an absurd waste of state financing and funding,” Rick says. “And that actually scares me more than the charges… You guys aren’t after anything bigger than this? This is it?”

One of the accused, belatedly, was artist DK Pan, whom King County prosecutors portrayed as Le Chiffre-like in his poker skills, while failing to provide actual…ah, yes…evidence of his wrongdoing. After DK Pan decided to fight the charges, the State decided to drop them: “After filing this case, the State learned that Pan’s involvement is more minimal than first thought and more similar to individuals who were not changed as part of the gambling enterprise.”

All’s well that ends well…except for DK Pan’s $50,000 in legal bills, incurred in preparing to mount a defense. (You, the taxpayer, are on the hook for the State’s costs, and for that years-long investigation.) Thus, Cafe (un)American returns as a DK Pan benefit, in particularly poetic way of thumbing one’s nose at the authorities. Drink up.

News, Politics

Washington’s Unemployed Get Two Months to Turn Economy Around

(Photo: our Flickr pool's Great_Beyond)

Over in the other Washington last week, they cooked up a Christmas compromise that extended access to the federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation program by two months. People who had run through their 26 weeks of state unemployment (meaning they lost their jobs back in July and August), and people who had finished the first “tier” of EUC, were granted another 20 months. (There are four tiers, of 20, 14, 13, and 6 weeks’ length respectively.)

Here in the state of Washington, that means some 40,000 unemployed people who were looking at losing benefits on Dec. 31 can now recalibrate their estimated destitution for the end of February. (That’s not counting a further 20,000, who would have been out in the cold sometime between January and February.)

“Combined, that’s the equivalent of every adult in Yakima being spared a sudden loss of income in the next two months,” says the state Senate Democrats blog, The Hopper. They also mention that the unemployment line “shrank” in 2011, by 12 percent. They quote Employment Security Commissioner Paul Trause saying, “Some of the decline is due to an improved economy, and some of it is due to unemployed workers simply running out of benefits.”

“Some” is a questionable word to use when you absolutely know the percentage of people who have dropped off unemployment rolls because their benefits have expired. A record 503,000 people claimed unemployment during 2010, compared to 470,000 in 2011. That’s a difference of 33,000. About 70,000 workers were set to fall off unemployment rolls by end of this year, said the Hopper on Dec. 21. The extension helped 40,000, as noted. So that would indicate that 30,000 “expired.”

Not much room for the improved economy in there. (For those of you keeping track at home, yes, October’s preliminary unemployment rate was revised back up to 9.1 percent.) Perhaps you think that it might be interesting to compare the number of people whose benefits simply expired that month, versus people who found a job? Washington State’s employment security department doesn’t agree–you won’t find that data in their monthly employment report. When you fall off the unemployment rolls, you gain the gift of invisibility.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Sara Gazarek Should Bear the Title “Adjunct Sunshine”

Just a quick recap, then:  Sara Gazarek, due at Jazz Alley next Monday and Tuesday, started out (oddly enough) as a child, abosorbing sounds from the Seattle streets; attended Roosevelt High School where she signed up to the school’s illustrious jazz program and traveled to NYC with the Roosevelt Jazz Band.  She earned the first-ever Ella Fitzgerald Outstanding Vocalist Award and took herself to L.A. to seek her fortune.

Her first album Yours, from 2005, captured her out of the gate with imaginative arrangements of Joni Mitchell (who herself owes more to jazz than many realize); a smattering of original tunes; and of all things, a song many of our mothers sang to many of us as starting-out children.  Gazarek realized “You Are My Sunshine” was at its core a sad song.  But she boldly sung sweetly through sadness.  Her voice, simple on the surface, threw out more facets with each listen.

Her second studio album Return To You, two years later, brought back some Joni, threw in some Billy Joel, and re-affirmed that she could (co-) write some tunes deserving of standard-status through everybody else.  She also cut “Hallelujah,” in danger of becoming a worn-out shoe, but once again distinctive and deceptively-simple arrangement, helped along of course by her band, spun her into the clear.

She’ll appear at Jazz Alley with second singer Johnaye Kendrick; pianist John Hanson; drummer Sean Hutchinson; and bassist David Dawda.  Her old record label sank, alas (try buying her stuff from her directly), but she’s inked a new deal with Palmetto Records and a new studio album should hit shelves in the spring of 2012.  She recently became a professor through the Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California.  She won’t reveal her exact set list, but she promises “old tunes, new tunes and a splash of holiday magic.”  I do hope to see you there.