Seattle’s ambitious Office of Arts & Culture has allocated $10,000 this year to pay a poet or writer to create a work while present on the city’s Fremont Bridge drawbridge. The office’s deputy director told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in January that the city wants to encourage “public art” and that the grant will oblige the recipient to create a work of prose or poetry from the bridge’s northwest tower, to help the people of Seattle understand the function of art in the city. The artist will not be “in residence,” for the tower has no running water.
The continuing crisis
The dominant-submissive lifestyle soared to higher-brow status in February when The New York Times reported on the recent marriage of the celebrated composer of “moody, queasy” works — and compulsive dominant — Georg Friedrich Haas to Mollena Williams, who blogs introspectively about her own kinky bondage as “The Perverted Negress.” Friedrich had introduced himself to her on a dating site with the note, “I would like to tame you,” and credits her acceptance for his improved productivity — because, he said, “I am not [any longer] disturbed by unfulfilled thoughts.” Although Williams-Haas is a black woman submitting to a white man, she explained that, “To say I can’t play my personal psychodrama out just because I’m black, that’s racist.”
New world order
∎ Exasperated Columbia County (Pennsylvania) District Judge Craig Long felt the need to post a sign outside his courtroom in January informing visitors that they should not wear pajamas to court. However, even Judge Long acknowledged that his admonition was not enforceable and that he was merely trying to encourage minimal standards.
∎ In its brand-new communications stylebook this year for city workers, San Diego officials noted that the city’s then-upcoming Presidents’ Day announcements should, to be bias-free and inoffensive, never refer to America’s “Founding Fathers” — even though they were all males — but only to “founders.”
Bright ideas
∎ The roadside billboard giant Clear Channel Outdoor Americas announced in February that it would soon be recording the cellphone locations of drivers who pass the company’s signs in 11 cities in order to give advertisers more information on how to pitch products to people with those particular travel patterns and behaviors. Clear Channel asserts that no individual identifications would be sought, but privacy advocates fret about potential abuses, and even a Clear Channel executive acknowledged that the program “does sound a bit creepy.” On the other hand, as Clear Channel pointed out to The New York Times, cellphone users’ locations and characteristics are already being extensively monitored by advertisers.
∎ “Medical” marijuana will take on a new meaning soon if the Food and Drug Administration approves Foria Relief cannabis vaginal suppositories for relieving menstrual pain. Currently, the product is available only in California and Colorado, at $44 for a four-pack. The company claims the inserts are targeted to the pelvic nerve endings, but International Business Times, citing a gynecologist-blogger, noted that the only studies on the efficacy of Foria Relief were done on the uteruses of rats.
Not the usual suspects
∎ A then-married couple, both graduates of elite California law schools, were convicted of felonies and went to jail briefly two years ago for a criminal scheme inexplicably tawdry — and in February 2016 lost a resultant civil lawsuit for $5.7 million to the scheme’s victim. A woman at their child’s school had referred to the lawyers’ son as “slow,” enraging Kent Easter, a University of California at Berkeley alumn, and then-wife, Jill, who graduated from UCLA. The two retaliated by planting drugs and parapherna
