"Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming..."

A couple of items we thought you might like to know about:

From the Associated Press, by way of Yahoo News:

SEATTLE (AP) — A downtown march and rally in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement turned briefly chaotic as police scattered a crowd of rowdy protesters — including a pregnant 19-year-old and an 84-year-old activist — with blasts of pepper spray.

Protest organizers denounced the use of force, saying that police indiscriminately sprayed the chemical irritant at peaceful protesters.

The Occupy Seattle movement released a written statement late Tuesday expressing support for "a 4-foot 10-inch, 84-year-old woman, a priest and a pregnant woman who as of this writing is still in the hospital." ...

http://news.yahoo.com/pregnant-teen-elderly-woman-among-pepper-sprayed-113054448.html

From the Atlantic Wire, a blog associated with the Atlantic Monthly magazine:

There were reports that both Occupy San Francisco and Occupy Cal (on the Berkeley campus of the University of California) are being raided on Wednesday morning. The week of police crackdown comes amid reports that the federal government and is coordinating with multiple on legal strategies that can shut down the Occupy protests.

The woman in the picture is not just any elderly woman ... she is well known to Seattle residents. Dorli Rainey is a former school teacher who has been active in local politics since the 1960s. In 2009, she ran for mayor, but eventually dropped out by saying, "I am old and should learn to be old, stay home, watch TV and sit still." We guess she didn't learn.

Rainey emailed The Stranger, Seattle's alternative paper, to say she stopped by the march to see what was happening when her group got pinned in by police and nearly trampled in the chaos. ...

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/11/84-year-old-woman-becomes-pepper-sprayed-face-occupy-seattle/45035/

Strange Season featured in Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly, Volume 12

The Seattle-based musician Jack Shriner, leader of the band Strange Season is a singer-songwriter, a multi-instrumentalist and an exceptionally talented guitar player.

All of these qualities are on display in his contribution to the current edition of the Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly. His song "Inside Voices" -- like most music worth listening to -- is kind of difficult to describe. A track culled from Jack's eclectic second album A Tour of Brief Reunions (available through Jack's Myspace page), "Inside Voices" concerns a zigzagging bass groove that is put through its paces by the jazzbo-tribalism of Dave Flaherty's drums. Flaherty's timekeeping is precise, as close attention to his high hat and bass drum will confirm. However, his toms and snare are engaged in a fascinating dialogue with this metronomic pulse, while Jack's melodic and jerky precision bass slips in and out of the gaps between beats.

All right; enough crap metaphors. Alongside the above-described activity, an interesting ambience emerges from the interplay of 1980's plastic Yamaha synth-stringscapes, swirling piano chords, and obscenely inventive electric guitar lines.

Jack plays lots of shows these days in the pacific northwest, sometimes as a solo artist, and sometimes with his band Strange Season. In addition, his guitar playing and vocals appear on the début album by the Chicago-based band National Tryst, to be released this upcoming fall.