Monthly Archives: July 2012

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Fort Union Reinvigorates Americana at the Tractor

Jace Krause and Jake Rohr of Fort Union. (photo by Tony Kay)

[Fort Union play the Tractor Tavern with Cataldo and Widower tonight. Tickets, $8, are still available. Doors at 9pm.]

If you’re feeling overwhelmed–burnt out, even–by the tidal wave of Americana and neo-folk music generated in these parts over the last five years, Fort Union could likely restore your faith.

Labels suck, and Fort Union likely agree with that: There’s a loose-limbed, almost casual feel to their debut record as it hopscotches over genre expectations. Jace Krause’s unaffected, boyish croon and gently-plucked acoustic guitars feel rooted in the folk/Americana tradition, but the subtle unease in Krause’s songs begins to surface as the record unspools, and a laundry list of influences and surprises emerge. Subtle burbles of electronics, textured guitar, and white noise surge in and out, goaded on with gentle insistence by Jake Rohr’s pulse of a bass. Then it hits you: Fort Union’s crafted one adventurous and strangely enchanting album.

There’s much beauty in these songs–“Will You Come with Me” coasts on relaxed, nostalgic cushions of vocal harmony until a plaintive keyboard sees it to a disembodied fade-out, and “That Part of Me” chimes with an almost paisley-tinged gorgeousness–but Krause, Rohr, and their bandmate Ryan Lynch let the pretty melodic backbone marinate in washes of keyboards and sonic textures that add depth without sacrificing the hooks. “No More Executions” bounces along like a great lost Paul Simon track, but the sometimes-clattering percussion that spikes it feels totally forward-thinking.

The record’s finest tracks skirt a spot-on balance between pop and experimentation: The quietly-eerie, lovely “Solstice Day Parade” spikes its vocal lilt with eddying guitars that echo and repeat over themselves like restless ghosts, and “Life” finds Krause’s affecting falsetto dancing over handclaps and stark piano chords (think David Bowie doing a fractured version of “Imagine”), until more ambient guitars gust in and the piano trails off like an old man walking delirious through a desert.

Krause and Rohr cut their teeth in the underrated Seattle pop band Friday Mile, so they’re sharp musicians. But Fort Union sees these pros spreading their wings and giving in to impulse and odd detours with the abandon of  the most reckless explorers. That tension should make them a riveting act onstage.

 

 

News, Sports

The Whole Olympics Are Live For the First Time, But There’s a Catch

It’ll be an exciting two weeks for Olympics fanatics like myself and yourself. For the first time ever, you can watch every event live.

During the Vancouver Olympics, NBC hid action from American eyes until it had been prepped and packaged for prime-time consumption. Just two years later, NBC’s blackouts are over. “If cameras are on it, we’ll stream it,” NBC’s head of digital media told the New York Times.

The events will still be prepped and packaged for primetime, but NBC’s hope is that the sports influencers who watch events live will help build buzz for that evening’s primetime viewing, through postings on Facebook and Twitter. Thank you, social media!

I watched the opening event of the Games yesterday on my phone while I scarfed down a breakfast burrito. I thrilled to the images, and that was for a preliminary women’s soccer game. How exciting will it be next Tuesday at 11:48 a.m., when Michael Phelps swims in the 200 fly final? No waiting eight hours for NBC to show the match in their primetime coverage…by which time your breakfast burrito is cold, and you’ve probably seen the result on Twitter anyway. Now, you may watch all the major events–and many, many minor ones–live.

That’s may watch it live, because NBC is only extending the privilege to people who subscribe to the network’s premium cable channels, MSNBC and CNBC. If you aren’t a cable TV customer, the only Olympics you’ll be able to see are the ones on free TV. Most of that action will be delayed.

Looking at it from a business perspective, NBC is making the sound decision. The network is 51% owned by Comcast, which has a pretty strong interest in maintaining cable as the must-have product for live sports viewing. Also, the fees NBC gets from other cable operators for carrying those premium channels is based on the fact that those channels will be carrying the Games. The network paid $1.18 billion to televise the London games, and…well, if you paid $1.18 billion for something, you probably wouldn’t want to be give it away either.

Still–BUMMER! So many people who don’t have cable would love to watch these Games live on their iPads or laptops, and won’t have the chance. I guess you could go through the trouble of getting cable set up and then cancel after two weeks, but that seems like a lot of work. What you’d love is if NBC would give Olympics junkies an option to buy access to the live streaming. Not gonna happen.

If you are a cable subscriber, you get access to the livestream by logging in with your cable username and password here. Note: If you don’t know your username and password, call Comcast, but I warn you that the process can be a pain in the ass. For me, it involved getting something mailed to me. Still, I’m so jazzed about this, I created a website that tells you when–in Pacific time–all the most important Olympic events are happening. The Seattle Times did something similar (and much better) for local athletes.

News, Transportation

New War on Cars to be Led by Roads

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Over the weekend, reports KOMO TV, a family was driving I-5 near Northgate when a chunk of concrete from the road flew up, smashed through the windshield, and hit the driver. “The rock hit me so hard in the chest, it literally took my breath away,” Henry Jessop told KOMO.

What may take your breath away is the response from Washington Department of Transportation‘s Paula Hammond: “As our transportation system has more wear and tear on it, and as we go longer without revenue dollars to just take care of the system that we have, we’re unfortunately going to see more of this kind of thing.”

You may well ask why.

Here is WSDOT’s budget for the 2011-13 biennium. About 27 percent of the $9.4 billion comes from gas taxes (37.5 cents per gallon), the rest from bonds, licenses and fees, and ferry fares. In 1921, when Washington State began implementing a gas tax, it was just one cent per gallon. But throughout the 1950s and ’60s, the state’s gas tax in today’s dollars was higher than it is today. As a percentage of the price of gas, today’s tax is even more negligible: if you pay more than $3.75/gallon, it’s just ten percent or less. In 1960, it was 24 percent of the retail price.

Combine that with declining federal dollars, and you just get less. Yet new roadwork hasn’t gotten less expensive. Take the 520 bridge replacement. With just $2.43 billion of its total anticipated $4.65 billion cost “in hand,” WSDOT is pushing ahead with construction. State gas taxes fund about twelve percent of the bridge’s cost. And then there’s the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement project, which is budgeted for just over $3.1 billion. That draws down $1.7 billion of gas tax funds. (The less expensive surface/transit/I-5 option contained funds to deal with the I-5 bottleneck through Seattle–the tunnel plan does not.)

Meanwhile, WSDOT currently has 230 separate maintenance projects on its “backlog of underfunded and unfunded highway preservation needs,” that it hopes to deal with using ARRA funds. In Seattle, the situation is no better, due to some of the same pressures. SDOT gets funding from WSDOT, for one thing, so state gas taxes play a part, but they also have the tension between expensive new projects and maintaining the roadways we already have. To date, maintenance has taken a back seat.