COMMON SENSE: The one, the only Common is in town tonight at Showbox SoDo! Yes, we avoid SoDo, but we don't avoid good rap--and neither should you. It's bracing! To prepare, put on one of Common's eight albums (try Be) and click through to the Seattle Times' interview with the hiphop royal. Also on the bill: the fast-becoming-ubiquitous N*E*R*D (here's a good MTV intro to the production team). 8 p.m. // Showbox SoDo, // $40......

Tonight the Elliott Bay Book Co. hosts a trio of writers touring as the "Akashic All-Stars." Akashic is a small literary press based in New York (specifically, Brooklyn--is anything cool left in Manhattan?). Only ten years old, Akashic is a sign of a promising future for American letters. Like the music industry, publishing is being transformed by technology, allowing for smaller firms run by people with both business smarts and passion for what they......

That's the final installation of Monkey's Hate You which was recently axed from the Stranger. Here's the artist's call to arms: My crappy cartoon just got the boot from THE STRANGER. Probably because it sucked. Here is the final one. I am calling on all Seattle-based fans to riot!! I expect all three of them to *represent*!! xojimmy Should Seattlest pick it up? You may not know this, but Seattlest once had a regular......

We asked our fellow Seattlests: What's the last good book you read? And what's coming up on your summer reading list? James: I just finished Songs of Innocence, Richard Aleas's second book about ex-PI John Blake. Like Aleas's first book, it's a noir mystery where you're a little ahead of the hero; the tension comes from wondering how the hero will handle the truth. On deck: another dead woman and the detective obsessed with her,......

LAist was comped front row seats by the Dodgers due to Malingering being struck by a foul ball last week, and she came back with some great photos, and earlier made fun of 4th of July on Venice Beach. But the biggest stories of the week was that the Mayor's Hot Tamale was revealed, and that a Kwik-E-Mart was erected in Burbank. Phillyist was busy doing the Fourth of July up right, exercising their......

Once upon a time you could write a book on the typewriter in your attic, bundle the pages together with some butcher paper and twine and schlep it to New York to give to your publisher and then forget about the whole thing until it was time to blow the dust off the keys for the next go round. Or so we imagine it. Then came the critics. And then the book tours. Then Amazon.com......

C'mon, Seattle Times. You get a press release related to the McMenamins affair in Kenmore from some mysterious source claiming that the whole deal is off and you turn around and announce it to the world without so much as a phone call to McMenamins? When Seattlest gets a release in the mail detailing the city's plan to dye the sky green we immediately start ranting about how blue skies were good enough for us......

Seattle will continue to have two daily newspapers, at least for the immediate future. It sounds like both papers were unwilling to leave things entirely in the hands of the arbitrator who was set to deliver a binding verdict on the dispute: They settled with each other and the terms include the Times buying the P-I out of JOA stipulation that the smaller paper would continue to receive revenue in the event that that paper......

FILM: The NW Film Forum is screening the potentially watchable Climates, which won a less than inspiring 71% at the rotten tomato site. Of course you can't go by those ratings since a masterpiece like Anchorman scored a feeble 64%, but an over-rated gorefest like Pan's Labrynth won a ludicrous 95%. That's worse than Al Gore losing to George Bush. 7, 9:30 // 1515 12th Ave // $8.50 MUSIC: The last time we did......

Monday LESS IS MORE: In Trance of Scarcity: Stop Holding Your Breath and Start Living Your Life, Victoria Castle asks why we feel that nothing is ever enough. Castle's book shows us how to escape this malaise and become more relaxed and alive. Hopefully it doesn't involve crisscrossing the U.S. on a book tour. 7pm // Third Place Books // FREE NATURE WRITING: Robert Michael Pyle's Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps......

Sunday. Usually, a quiet, contemplative day in the Blogosphere. But not here in the Ist-a-Verse. Nonono! Just look below and see all of the wild and crazy stuff our staffs are up to. In Austin, bands are beginning to confirm for SXSW and the rumor mill is up and running. Good thing, too, because we all know how much Austinites love live performances. Austin also found itself in the national spotlight, with Longhorn Legend......

One of Seattlest's favorite Christmas presents this year: Clark Humphrey's Vanishing Seattle, a new entry in Arcadia Publishing's Images of America series by retro-Seattle authority Clark Humphrey. We're a Seattle transplant, ourselves, but we've been interested in Seattle history since we decided we wanted to stay here (about a week after we arrived, as we recall), and we quickly noticed that Humphrey was a consistent, articulate voice advocating for that history. We wondered if......

The announcement on Dec. 29 that San Diego-based Advanced Marketing Services is seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection could have big effects for Seattle's tiny book publishing world. AMS owns Publisher's Group West (PGW), a 30-year old distribution company specializing in small and medium-sized publishing companies. The bankruptcy filing by AMS casts in doubt PGW's ability to make payments to its publishers for last quarter's earnings--typically the highest grossing quarter for the publishing world, with holiday......

Apparently, near-genius Seattlest Seth keeps writing stuff, and people keep publishing it. Granted, you hear a lot from him here at Seattlest, but as you all know our standards aren't spectacularly high. It's good to see others finally figuring out what we've known all along (we're not worthy). Now he's got another "Voices" piece up over at the P-I (and in the Thursday print edition), and in characteristic Seth style, it features furor loquendi the......

Wednesday, September 20 >>>Town Hall, 7:30pm. James Fallows, correspondent for The Atlantic, leads the congregation in a hymn to the virtues of foresight. Fallows is flogging his book, Blind into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq, and would like you to know it didn't have to be like this. We can't wait for Tone-Deaf into Tehran. $5 at the door. >>>University Bookstore, 7:00pm. Ah, chess. We knew there was some reason besides the coup that......

-The contract the P-I's union has tentatively accepted stipulates higher severance packages if the paper stops publishing. Well played, union. -Ben Gibbard's playing Lance Armstrong by offering these guitar string bracelets for charity. Via Indieblogheaven. -Sound Transit has decided to build light rail alongside I-90. Construction begins 2045. -"Here is a molester!" Tokyo subway groping ain't what it used to be. -The B.C. guys who spent a year and $400,000 digging a drug tunnel......

Ah, oral history. A genre built to tell the stories of SNL, porn films, and whatever piqued Studs Terkel's curiosity this week. And now Fantagraphics. Tom Spurgeon is putting the finishing touches Comics as Art: We Told You So, an oral history of Seattle's little comix company that could. It was going to be published this summer, but it's been delayed until fall to give them time to make it ever-so-much closer to perfect.......

Back in our freelance days, Seattlest was happy to get 50 cents a word. So imagine the triple cherries that flashed before our eyes when we learned that down in PDX you can get 250 writers for three measly bucks! This literary super value menu is Wordstock, a three-day confab that kicks off today through Sunday at the Oregon Convention Center. In addition to local folks Charles D’Ambrosio and Garth Stein and omnipresent indie publisher......

The P-I shows what a sensible newspaper operation can do in the wake of a tragedy today by publishing a number of pieces that don't directly admonish the Seattle Times (because fancy dailys don't play like that), but could be seen as a reaction to yesterday's idiocy in the Times. One is headlined "No rave crackdown coming," and contains passages like the following: "Some tragedies defy any sort of rational response in terms of regulation......

The names of all of the victims of Saturday morning's shootings are still not being reported in the press. Christopher Williamson, Jason Travers and Jeremy Martin (pictured above) have been widely reported. It can be inferred from this Seattle Times article that Suzanne Thorne, 15, is also dead. Two victims, then, are still unknown and no names have been released by the police as of this morning. And a motive isn't known. And likely......

That guy that's usually tapping at his laptop and gazing off into the middle distance at the cafe has suddenly disappeared. He's at home furiously typing his tell-all memoir: "The world knew me as a female refugee from the Phillipines who escaped a life of political oppression, violence, prostitution and drugs but now I must reveal myself as a midwestern white boy who lied about it all to sell a few books. The ironic thing......

According to this USA Today story (hat tip to the Spurge), the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will attempt to reach a younger audience next year by publishing the Lindsay Cibos and Jared Hodges manga Peach Fuzz in their Sunday comics section starting early January. The comic in question (sample here) about a delusional nine year old girl and her pet ferret, was first published earlier this year by Tokyopop after the artists submitted the work to that......

Electronic voting machines. Depending on what side of the political fence wall you sit you think that they're either responsible for election frauds in Florida and Ohio and handed GW the presidency illigitamately, or you think that their use in King county would allow us to have a fair election for once. To obliterate any illusions of objectivity here, Seattlest thinks they're the devil and that not only are Diebold devices responsible for our current......

A local jackass who will remain nameless pranked his co-workers at a local publishing corporation last Friday in a manner that totally failed to eclipse another miserable anniversary much less the miserable news of more recent misery. Said prank consisted of the unsolicited gift of individually wrapped chocolate treats, which, unbeknownst to the jackass' co-workers/victims, had actually been scavenged from a dumpster the night before. The jackass in question had attended one dumpster-diving tour of......

Seattle resident Michael Montoure pursues a few of the more solitary activities that mankind has been able to dream up during our time on Earth: writing, web development. Maybe he started the blog community site Seablogs to counter that. We checked in with him recently in an attempt to figure out just what motivates a man to put in the hours necessary to create a directory this extensive. Introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Michael Montoure, a......

It looks like Bellingham might be experiencing the dark side of sex offender registration. Published names, addresses and descriptions of their crimes makes these ex-cons targets for any would-be Batmen out there. Three such offenders were paid a visit over the weekend by what appears to be a FauxBI agent who allegedly alerted them that one of the men was listed on a web site hit-list before killing two of the roommates. The third roommate......

The scofflaw gun-fetishists behind local funny book factory Fantagraphics Books pushed the avant-garde comics publishing envelope even further on Sunday, August 14th when they blew up a lawn mower (photo credit Eric Reynolds) in the Sultan river basin during their semi-annual summer shoot-out event, a tradition that goes back more than a decade and has even included the blowing up of cars with dynamite in years past, not to mention the senseless shooting of a......

Buy a book & give a warm welcome to the latest incarnation of Dave Eggers’s non-profit writing/tutoring organization, 826 Seattle. Dave Eggers, noted author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and founder of the revered indie publishing house McSweeney’s, poured money from his early literary success into the writing/tutoring center 826 Valencia in San Francisco. The landlord insisted they sell something on the property, so they opened a Pirate Supply store as the front......

The wildly popular and absolutely hilarious online comic Penny Arcade is penned in Seattle; Fremont and Kirkland, last we heard. It's mostly about video games so if you play video games religiously there's a good chance you follow the strip religiously. If you follow the strip religiously than you've already heard that the creators are coming out on the bright side of a long legal tunnel involving their books and their rights to publish......

We hope you've been enjoying everything that Seattlest has been serving up lately, and if you're not reading every post, well, we're trying to throw in a little something for everyone so hopefully you come across something interesting every now and then. If there's something we've done that you particularly liked we'd love to hear about it, but we're even more interested in the stories we're missing. If there's an event that you think......