Belltown Messenger - Grant's Broiler

Swirling in the 18-hour days that constitute principal photography on a feature film, I dropped out for an hour before a long night in the Seattle Underground and stumbled on Seattle Metropolitan, the latest model of glossy regional lifestyle publication, and one clearly going after Seattle magazine's dentist-office niche.

It's a smarter version of the original, with profiles and features more truly native than Seattle's arbitrary suburban city-skimming. Still there is often the kind of breezily desperate tone of someone being forced to write about anything at all they can think of, and things like "WASH IN: Telling visitors it rains here all the time and meaning it; WASH OUT: That whole I'm-cool-walking-without-an-umbrella-thing". Wha ?

The masthead includes the elliptically sharp former Stranger art critic Nate Lippens and Eric Scigliano, who also has written smartly, for Seattle Weekly before that paper started to resemble the afflatus of a Home for Aging Boomers. His piece on former city councilman and current Intelligent Design wacko Bruce Chapman credits Chapman as a savior of the Pike Place Market: If that's true I've never heard it before, Chapman preferring his experience in Republican administrations as his bona fides. This guy doesn't need a profile, he needs to be wrapped in yellow caution tape.

Speaking of wack, Bruce Agnew's airy proposal for a central regional transportation-planning agency gets a credible hearing. Even with the monorail dead, this is a bad idea. The heavy hitters who would direct such an agency are either wed to roads or trophy projects: A unified, top-heavy transit politburo would only insulate these projects from public examination and influence.

Speaking of which, now we're going to get to vote on the Viaduct. Oops, not so fast Mayor Gridlock and the bougie architects' salon Allied Arts want us to choose only between a tunneled and an elevated highway. Peter Steinbrueck, our city's most intellectually curious public servant, is fighting to get a no-highway option on the ballot. Notice how, in all this talk of a multibillion-dollar scheme, we've hardly seen any pictures of the actual outcome? Now with the downscaled tunnel financing this dog will smell even worse. Get the facts at www.peopleswaterfront.org.

Someone is pushing for Initiative 86, to keep military recruiters away from our kids. Initiatives are rare these days. It was two whole years ago we voted down I-83, the developers' first sally against the monorail. There were at least five initiatives filed each year the previous decade, of which two for monorail, one to save parks, and one to virtually legalize marijuana passed. Has the monorail death convinced our most passionate citizens that it's all hopeless anyway?

All these questions seemed connected end-to-end when my film shot at the Stimson-Green Mansion on First Hill this weekend, childhood home of the late philanthropist Dorothy Stimson Bullitt. The Bullitt Foundation became the classic model of Seattle East Coasty noblesse oblige, the timber and TV dynasty 100 years later funding the arts and the soft environmentalism of We-Know-Better Seattle. Soft like a soft penis, something I know about from my dabbling with Mexican painkillers last month. A gorgeous house, but cold. Next day I ran into one-time city council candidate and former monorail campaigner Patrick Kylen. A deep thinker and friend of the late playwright August Wilson, Patrick is one of the few people I know from politics I can stand to talk to these days. He is about to become a big name in political philosophy with his book-in-progress Conditionalism. But I'll let him tell you about it; I have to get back to the movie. (www.cthulhuthemovie.com) Star Cara Buono just got cast on The Sopranos, and evidently ours is the first film to show a man being raped by a woman (!). South By Southwest was all abuzz about it. We're shooting another one in August, with a main character who is a conflation of phony-ass New Age Seattle politicos Richard Conlin and David Yeaworth. Revenge is sweetest served to millions on the screen.