Category: Arts

Arts, City Council

An Interview With the Creator of the Seattle City Council Sock Puppets

By Erica C. Barnett

City Hall has been speculating for months about who’s behind a series of short Youtube videos featuring the members of the Seattle City Council as sock puppets—each meticulously designed to highlight or scrutinize some aspect of each council member’s character.

The vertically shot videos are deceptively simple—each Muppet-style puppet speaks in turn, lip-synching to audio of a council meeting—and often include visual jokes that range from subtle (a tiny Maritza Rivera can barely get her eyes above the dais) to blunt, like the most recent video featuring books the council might be reading on their two-week summer vacations. (Former Councilmember Cathy Moore, who frequently became indignant when people opposed her politically, is reading a copy of White Fragility at the golf course. Layers!)

One of my personal favorites came from a meeting when Rob Saka, unprompted, brought up a supposedly untranslatable Finnish concept called sisu, then proceeded to translate it, at great length, while the rest of the council just kind of sat there. In the video, Saka—the son of a Nigerian dad and a Finnish mom—bobs around in a tiny replica of the dashiki he wore during his 2023 campaign as the Finnish flag unfurls behind him and the Finnish national anthem plays in the background.

The identity of the “The Seattle Channel” puppet master has been a topic of fierce speculation at City Hall. As recently as primary election night, an elected official told me they knew for a fact that it was someone who works for city government, and they were so confident, I believed them. But they were wrong.

“The puppets,” as they’re referred to at City Hall, are the product of a group of people, but the project was launched by one person—a longtime visual artist who lives on Capitol Hill and has never worked at City Hall. We asked for an interview earlier this year; this week, the originator of the puppet channel finally said yes, on the condition that we not reveal his identity. The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I love the puppets. What made you decide to start doing these videos?

My story is that I started really tuning in to local politics, I think like a lot of people, in 2020, with the Black Lives Matter/George Floyd/Breonna Taylor uprising in my neighborhood, on Capitol Hill. Through that experience of those protests and the experience of having police bombing my neighborhood and seeing all of that firsthand, I got involved in some local activist groups [like Solidarity Budget and Stop Surveillance City] that are are particularly focused on the mayor and the city council and local politics—groups that are really focused on trying to push the city toward an idea of public safety that’s much more about solidarity and human services and less on policing and courts.

Through that work I started tracking city politics and the city council. When they started with the original legislation proposing CCTV, I was really frustrated at how this particular council seems to be extremely uninterested in listening to public feedback and data and taking in information. Especially with the surveillance bill, because there was such a huge amount of skepticism expressed by the public and the official surveillance working group recommended not passing it. There were lots of reasons they should not have passed that bill and they did it anyway

There are so many amazing details in your sock puppets that I feel like it takes a keen observer of the city council to notice—like the fact that Bob Kettle’s eyebrows are the same color as his skin. What’s your process for identifying and including all those details?

At first, I was trying to find socks at a thrift store to try to match the complexion of the council members. I think of Kettle as being a very, very white man, and somehow one of those athletic socks just seemed appropriate. I love making things. I’ve only made some of the puppets. Some of them were made by other people who are also very talented puppet makers. The thing about puppets that’s amazing as an art form is, it takes so little to turn an inanimate object into something animate. You just put some googly eyes on a sock and it suddenly has a personality.

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I’m obsessed with the way you chose to do Sara Nelson’s hair—it’s somehow exactly her hair, even though the yarn is a bunch of tangled-up colors and her actual hair is gray.  

She was the first puppet I made and I think it’s partially just kind of the materials I had on hand. It seemed like it worked.

Tell me more about your goals for this project.

The group that is working on the puppets is a group that has been going since 2020. We make all sorts of media for different kind of activist campaigns. The question is, how do you take complicated issues that the city is facing and distill it down in a way that’s poppy enough that it catches somebody’s attention that may not be following it closely and doesn’t simplify and flatten it. We’ve done a lot of stuff on social media to try to get people to pay attention to what is happening. This puppet project is in that same spirit. Puppets as a metaphor for politicians who seem to be beholden to interests that are not in the public interest.

In terms of process, there are actually several people in the immediate group who make it with me, and a larger group of people who are regular watchers of the council through the official Seattle Channel because of the activist work that we do. So people send me bits and suggestions. Originally they were going to be much shorter and kind of sillier, which is how they started, but increasingly we got this idea of really trying to base it on whatever happened in the council the week before. And then, obviously, we take audio from the Seattle Channel’s recordings of the meetings

Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth has complained that she doesn’t have a puppet. Do you only make puppets for the “bad guys”?

I mean, kind of, yeah. The ones who seem like they’re acting the worst are going to get puppets—the ones that seem most unwilling to think about public opinion and be swayed by what people in Seattle really want.

Have you gotten any feedback from anyone featured in your videos?

No, I haven’t really heard from anyone. The only person who really provided feedback from any government position was [CARE Department Chief] Amy Barden. There was video of a meeting where she presented [and was represented by a Barbie doll], and she posted “career highlight!”  Because it’s all anonymous, the only feedback I get, really, is from my friends.

Everyone at City Hall watches your videos. I mean, everyone.

Oh my god! That’s so funny to hear.

I love that it’s become such a thing in City Hall, and also among the people who follow your reporting closely. I would love to try to reach a broader audience. It’s hard to get people’s attention. There’s so much stuff going on and it’s hard to get people to tune in. We’re all so overwhelmed by things that are happening nationally and internationally, but in terms of ways that we can really survive this upcoming time, where I think things are going to get really bad, I think [we should be] focusing locally on city and state politics, and trying to make sure we have a representative democratic government that is focused on how we keep people safe and housed and fed.

The video I think about the most is the one where Bob Kettle says “happy birthday” to Sara Nelson in a bunch of different languages, and then you see the top of Maritza Rivera’s head pop up above the dais and add “and Feliz Cumpleaños!” 

That’s one of my favorites ever. Their interpersonal dynamics! We were talking the other day—is the genre sort of like The Office? It’s the same cast of characters, they come in every day and have their little spats and it just repeats, just like a workplace comedy.

 

Arts

Three Fun Things for August 24, 2025

Michael Pollan on Psychedelics, Slacker, and an old favorite in Belltown

Arts

Three Fun Things: Pizza and Protests

1. Homemade Pizza! Specifically, this method.

I used to be intimidated by baking anything that involved risen dough, put off by a few unsuccessful experiments with yeast that had probably gone off from spending too much time in the heat. Like a lot of home cooks, I got bolder with my baking experiments during the pandemic—taking the time to craft homemade Pop Tarts, pecan rolls, and marzipan-filled challah that I documented on Instagram using my new Fuji XT20 camera, another pandemic purchase.

But I never really made baking with yeast a part of my regular routine until very recently, when I stumbled upon a pizza dough recipe that is dead-simple and works every time, as long as you have the patience to follow the steps. Like bagels, this dough from Serious Eats proofs a long time in the fridge—you mix it, dump in a Ziploc, and let it hang out at least a day, although even longer is better—and requires a secondary step (a couple of hours on the counter) to reach a perfect proof. After that, it’s a matter of assembly. Because I always have a lot of random bits of things hanging out in the fridge, I cobbled together a misshapen pizza with what was lying around: A half-cup of simple tomato sauce (use a small food processor to pulverize one 14-ounce can of tomatoes, a pinch of sugar, a drop of vinegar, and salt and pepper), plus sliced halloumi (my preferred local source is Goodie’s in Lake City), shredded parmesan, and some leftover schmaltz-based green garlic pesto, daubed on top.

Cooking has always been one of my primary outlets when I want to turn off the wall of sound in my brain, and it’s also a way I’ve saved money when times have been lean. (I don’t miss much about not having money, but there was some satisfaction in making the most of a food bank haul.) It’s hardly revelatory to point out that the ingredients for two pizzas cost less than a small salad at Pagliacci and that the homemade version took very little time and was an order of magnitude better than a congealing delivery pie. At a time of extreme economic uncertainty, though, it’s kind of magical to have a few culinary tricks up your sleeve for times when you want a treat but don’t want to, or can’t afford, to spend $50 or more on a basic meal.

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2. Windy City Pie

Thinking about pizza did remind me that I’ve been meaning to mention my go-to pizza place: Windy City Pie, just across the street from a former Three Fun Things subject, the nonalcoholic bottle shop Cheeky and Dry. It’s a tough choice between the traditional Chicago-style deep dish pizza (which achieves a perfect balance of crackly crust and filling and is never soupy) and the cracker-thin tavern-style pizza, a more recent addition to the menu—both are great, but the deep dish is slightly more likely to send you to bed at 9. As a bonus, they have RC Cola on tap.

3. #TeslaTakedown

As a local news reporter, I don’t cover national protests very often, but I’m extremely happy every time I get a press release in my inbox telling me the protests against Tesla—maker of the Iron Crossover, the Incel Camino, the Model SS, the Deplorean, the Klaborghini—are going strong.

Besides all the political reasons you should not buy a Tesla and should sell yours immediately if you own one (for everyone slapping a “bought it before we knew he was crazy” sticker on the car you bought two years ago, here’s a damning list from 2022!), Teslas haven’t been state of the art for years and are losing value faster than a basement unit in a flood. (Tesla owners: You can probably still sell your Swasticar and still afford a used Ioniq 6, a superior sedan that looks much cooler, if you act fast).

If you’d like to participate in a protest at the Tesla dealership nearest you, the Tesla Takedown website is a user-friendly resource. Oh, look! There’s one coming up in South Lake Union this Tuesday.

Arts

Three Fun Things: A Prescient Book, Secret Salads, and an In-Depth Examination of Housing First

By Erica C. Barnett

1. Doppelgänger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, by Naomi Klein (2023)

Doppelgänger, the 2023 book by Canadian political theorist Naomi Klein, begins with an simple but vexing question: Why were so many people online mistaking her for Naomi Wolf? Despite their divergent political views (Klein is a left-wing social activist; Wolf has morphed from ‘90s feminist into 2020s right-wing conspiracy theorist), the two Naomis have much in common. They’re both Jewish women, born eight years apart, who became the public face of their respective movements on the strength of blockbuster books (The Beauty Myth and No Logo, respectively). But their paths diverged wildly in the COVID era, as Wolf wandered further and further into what Klein calls the “mirror world” of conspiracy theory and pseudoscience.

Klein begins Doppelgänger by interrogating why the author of a book criticizing consumer capitalism and the branding of daily life would be so distraught over the damage Wolf had inadvertently caused to her own personal “brand” She then expands her lens to consider the impact of political and identity confusion, particularly on the left, more broadly, exploring how mistrust in the medical establishment has morphed into blaming vaccines for autism, for instance, and how this movement has very old parallels—for example, in Hans Asperger’s transformation from an avatar of the Red Vienna movement into a doppelganger who advocated murdering autistic children in the name of “scientific” Nazi.

Somehow, Klein manages to thread humorous observations about Wolf’s trajectory into nearly every chapter, concluding with a section on her own Jewishness that quotes at length from Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, a book that layers doppelgänger upon Doppelgänger. In the book, a Jewish American novelist named Philip Roth confronts an imposter, also named Philip Roth. The “real” Roth is conflicted about his own views on Zionism, while the “fake” Roth advocates for Jews to abandon Israel and move to Europe in anticipation of an Arab-led second Holocaust. In the end, “real” Roth ends up rejecting his double’s anti-Zionism for an undercover assignment to collect intelligence for the Mossad, and the book ends abruptly (and ambiguously). Maybe, Klein writes, “he didn’t want to choose: Maybe he was telling us he was both that and this.”

As for Wolf, she remains in the Mirror World; shortly before Klein’s book went to press, in 2022, Wolf was posting gleefully about buying her first gun, which she believed would give her the power to “resist and deter victimization.”

“Civil war is here, she darkly warns: ‘I am a peaceful person. I do not want war. But war is being waged up on us.’ And like so many others, she is getting ready with more than words.”

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2. The salad menu at the Dough Zone

The Dough Zone, a mostly West Coast chain with 15 locations in Washington State, is well known for its springy, sprightly dumplings, including potstickers, xiao long bao, and wontons. You probably know this. But what you may not be aware of is that its salads also slap. I was reminded of this recently when I ordered the kale salad, an enormous pile of lightly blanched kale laced with sesame dressing and topped with a shower of roasted peanuts. Other options include the same kale salad with sweet and spicy garlic dressing and Romaine lettuce mixed with either dressing. I think their salads may change time to time (I still fondly remember a punchy Caesar from a few years ago); after you’ve picked your dumpling, noodles, and pancakes from the lengthy (and affordable) menu, add a check mark to this underrated section of the menu.

3. “Two Years in a Place Where Homelessness Ends,” New York Times

The New York Times spent a long time getting to know the residents of a permanent supportive housing building in the Bronx, and learned firsthand about the benefits and downside of this type of housing, which offers very low-rent housing, with few or no behavioral or work requirements, to formerly homeless people. Permanent supportive housing is a pillar of Housing First, a response to homelessness that addresses the housing needs of people with addiction and mental illness as well as those who have ended up on the street because of financial misfortune. The approach has come under fire from right-wing pundits and the Trump administration, who argue that people should have to get sober, get jobs, and demonstrate they are cooperating with psychiatric treatment before they “qualify” for homes.

Apartments at the Lenninger Residences are reserved for people struggling with mental illness; they provide a permanent home, but this permanence can create a feeling of being “stuck,” several residents told the Times. Their stories are both hopeful and heartbreaking (one resident featured in the story died after failing to go to the hospital for treatment for her addiction and HIV) and put a human face on an issue that can feel both abstract and polarizing.

 

Arts, City Council

JumpStart Revenues Flatten and Council Questions Plan to Mandate Earplug Sales at Venues

1. As we reported on Bluesky Tuesday afternoon, the city of Seattle’s revenue update for the last quarter of 2024 shows that the JumpStart payroll tax fell about $47 million short of expectations last year, raising questions about the wisdom of discarding the original spending plan for the tax and using it to pay for basic city services.

Instead of bringing in $406 million last year, as the city’s budget forecast predicted, the payroll expense tax yielded $360 million—more than the $315 million the tax brought in for 2023, but more than 11 percent shy of what city budget planners expected. If this trend continues, it could be a major problem; last year, the mayor and city council added tens of millions of dollars in new spending, much of it ongoing, to the city’s budget, using $287 million in “extra” JumpStart revenues over two years to pay for the new spending and close a massive budget deficit.

Revenues from JumpStart are potentially quite volatile, because the entire tax base consists of fewer than 500 companies, with about 10 companies contributing around 70 percent of JumpStart revenues (and about 90 percent of the tax coming from just 100 companies). Changes at any of those companies, such as layoffs or relocations, can lead to dramatic shifts in the amount of revenue the tax produces.

Despite knowing this, the city has increasingly used these revenues to pay for basic, ongoing city services. Last year, the council gutted the original spending plan for JumpStart, making the original spending categories (housing construction and acquisition, economic revitalization, equitable development, and the Green New Deal) optional instead of mandatory. As we’ve reported, even with ever-increasing JumpStart transfers, Harrell’s 2025 budget already projected another deficit starting in 2027.

The city’s Office of Economic and Revenue Forecasts will release its new budget projections in two weeks, on April 10. That forecast should provide a better sense of how much trouble the city is in financially, and whether the council will need to make budget cuts this year to keep the budget balanced. The budget the city adopted last year assumes that JumpStart revenues will grow continually every year, bringing in $430 million this year, $452 million next year, and $469 million in 2027.

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2. Council member Dan Strauss’ colleagues expressed skepticism last week about his proposal to require all venues that host live music to provide earplugs to patrons for less than $1, with fines of up to $50 a week for those that fail to comply.

The proposal, which Strauss called “simply a good little bill,” would create a new business category called “loud music venues,” which would include all existing music venues as well as some other businesses that allow dancing, sell alcohol, or host live music.

Strauss introduced the legislation in his finance committee the morning after a marathon meeting on housing in the city’s stadium district at which Strauss accused his colleagues of voting to destroy Seattle’s maritime industries by allowing 990 apartments around First Ave. South. The plan passed 6-3 with Strauss, Bob Kettle, and Alexis Mercedes Rinck voting no.

Strauss said he decided to introduce the bill after talking to a “concerned audiologist” who spoke to Strauss about hearing loss during his office hours in Ballard. “This bill is about making sure that people have the opportunity to both enjoy Seattle’s vibrant music scene and protect their hearing health, no matter where they go,” he said.

But Kettle, along with Rob Saka, Sara Nelson, and Maritza Rivera, all questioned the wisdom and timeliness of Strauss’ “good little bill.”

Kettle noted that there are many other situations, such as street racing, where people may be exposed to loud noises involuntarily, as opposed to live music shows, where people know what to expect.

Rivera wondered why only two cities in the US—Minneapolis and San Francisco—have adopted similar laws, and “they did it 10 years ago. No one else has done it again.”

Saka—who reminisced about “screaming like a teenage girl” at a Justin Timberlake concert last year—suggested that instead of requiring venues to offer earplugs, the city could require signs notifying patrons about the risks caused by listening to loud music without hearing protection.

And Nelson said she was concerned about the impact the new regulations might have on venues that are still struggling. “What I hear from music venues is that they just got through pandemic, and they’re really focused on rebuilding their businesses.”

Strauss said he plans to formally introduce the legislation on April 16, and hopes to pass the proposal by the end of next month.

Arts, podcasts

“This New Republic Story? It’s a F*cking Sieve.” Adam Penenberg Joins Us on Episode 2 of “Are You Mad at Me?,” a Shattered Glass Podcast

By Erica C. Barnett

As PubliCola readers may know, I’ve been doing a side project: For a year, my great friend and longtime colleague Josh Feit and I will be recording a monthly podcast, called “Are You Mad At Me?,” about one of our favorite movies of all time, Shattered Glass.

The movie, which came out in 2003 and covers events from the late 1990s, is nominally about one of the most audacious journalism frauds of all time, but it plays like a compact, rewarding thriller: Every scene propels you to the next, as the dominoes fall and Stephen Glass, the antihero of the movie, gets his comeuppance thanks to the work of dogged journalists at a digital startup that had something to prove.

Our special guest for the second episode is one of the movie’s heroes, Adam Penenberg. Penenberg, portrayed by Steve Zahn in Shattered Glass, was working for an early online outlet called Forbes Digital Tool when his editor, Kambiz Foroohar, demanded to know why Glass had scooped him on a story about teenage hackers.

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That story, “Hack Heaven,” focused on a kid named Ian Restil who had hacked into a “big-time software firm” called Jukt Micronics; instead of prosecuting him, the company hired him to provide digital security. It was part of a nationwide trend in which hackers, often represented by professional agents, were holding companies hostage and extracting huge payments in exchange for protecting them from other hackers.

Of course, the story was completely fabricated—and Penenberg was the one who unraveled the fraud. In our interview, Penenberg tells us what it was like to uncover the story and reflects on what it was like to be a reporter for a digital startup going up against a venerable institution like The New Republic. He also offers his thoughts on why Glass decided to fabricate stories instead of just reporting them, and tells us what it was like talking to Steve Zahn as he was developing his character for the movie. Today, Penenberg is the director of the American Journalism Online Master’s program at NYU.

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