OH HEY… HELLO. HI THERE. Welcome to Smokestack Volume Four. Thanx for coming. It’s nice to have you over. Feels like it’s been forever, right? What’s it been, a month? We gotta get together more often. Yeah, no, kids, they’re great. You? Yeah? That’s great. You like what we’ve done with the place? Oh, yeah, thank you. Just moved some stuff around, you know, got rid of some stuff. Got some new plants. It’s a work in progress. Been going through that whole organizing kick thing. Little bit here, little bit there. Anyways… let’s get down to business. We added another page this year, but we still only have so much space for our illustrious year in review…
[Yes. We are aware that it is now two months into the new year. Don’t worry. We do this every year. And don’t judge. We like to party.]
And no. The smokestack app is not a thing. Made you look though! We did start an online podcast with Josh Farley this year. And we got a website that’s legible via smartphones, finally. Plus, there’s an interview in this issue written entirely over text. That’s pretty techy, right? And, we even changed things up a little bit on you weirdo ‘print readers’ too. Did you notice? New year, new format. More pages. Flipped the thing on its side so it’s easier to keep all the stuff together. Feels good in your hands. Calendar still fits in your pocket. Put some more cool photos and art and stuff in here. Making more space for even more cool stuff. But, have no fear, we haven’t sold out yet. We’re still a newspaper. That’s right. News. On paper. Delivered. In person. Tactile. Physical. Real. Well, I guess, actually you might consider us more of a stuffpaper. If you’re new here, welcome. People call us a lot of things. But it all comes back to people doing stuff… and stuff that’s happening in your town… In print. For you. For free. Every month.
Made possible by people doing stuff in your town.
And this is the part where it gets sappy. I’m already starting to tear up a little bit. Bear with me. The amount of gratitude and support we’ve received over this past year and beyond, the amount of positive energy that is building behind this ludicrous idea of starting a print newspaper at this point in history has been fucking bonkers. Of course, it’s necessary, and vital to democracy and community and all that. And independent community news sources are, and have been, evaporating across the country at an alarming rate. And that is potentially a really scary thing and all. But, seriously, who ever would’ve thought this would actually work?! But really though, if we can figure out a way to do this thing, to do it together, and do it right, we might just have a chance to make things better by helping everybody have a little bit more fun. So big thanks to every bookstore, brewery, coffeeshop, cafe, dive bar, restaurant, record store, music venue, pub, library, doctor’s office, donut shop, salon, diner and the like that has made space for us on their counter. Thank you immensely to every local business and individual who has put time, effort or money into this thing because they believe it is important. And thank you, yeah you, for increasing your attention span and spending some time with us and the stuff that’s happening in your town each month.
And… with that, let’s get to the year in review. It’s a good one. It starts with Bill Man accidentally deleting the entire website to start the new year in 2023…
So, yeah, our website has always kind of sucked. We’re a print publication. While everybody else went the way of putting all the resources and all hands on deck into the web stuff—eventually giving the keys, jobs and dollars to computers, ahem—we went the other way. Anyway… in trying to keep up with the times and update the appearance and functionality of our geriatric wordpress blog last year, instead of leaving it to the professionals in our crew who actually know what they’re doing, Bill Man got wiley one morning and tried to do it himself. While he was messing around with themes and CSS things he didn’t understand, he accidentally deleted everything on the site from public view.
And couldn’t get it back.
There was no undo. Blank.
“Your software is out of date.”
Duh. Fuck.
We scrambled to put it all back together before the release of Volume Three in February last year, but our burned out volunteer digital content department only went as far back as November 2022 before they called it quits and didn’t call us back. Hopefully one of these days we’ll post archives of all the different smokestack volumes on the internet. Or at least drop some copies off to the library so the professionals can archive it. On the plus side, when we finally got everything back together, the site was navigable by mobile phone. Bonus! Our online robots said website traffic increased nearly 100-fold this year. We see you out there, doing digital stuff. Thank you for reading!
FEBRUARY 2023 Our 2022 Year In Review releases as a 16-page zine, limited to 50 copies because we traveled around to three different local libraries for the tax-funded free 50 prints and stapled them all together by hand. Plus Cravin Moore talks to local hotrod builder Horsepower Northwest about a car of theirs that showed in the Barrett Jackson Auction and we get to meet media extraordinaire Mike Barnet who just took a post at the local cable access station BKAT.
MARCH 2023 As the end of February marked one full year of the russian invasion in ukraine, we had homemade frenchpress coffee with a local ukranian refugee family and tried to feed day-old bread to seagulls at illahee park. Plus Cravin talked to midwest punk band Off With Their Heads and Nick Sledge slept thru poulsbo duo Rising Sons’ CD release show.
APRIL 2023 Our most clicked-on internet story of 2023 comes out in print talking with port-orchard-born-and-raised musician Jack Moriarity about his travels with Queer Country Music Icon Patrick Haggerty of Lavender Country. Plus Mike from Ploy interviews local artist Dave Ryan across from the ferry dock about Dave celebrating five years as a shopkeep at Pike Place Market and Caffe Cocina takes up a second location in the iconic building at Front and Jensen in downtown poulsbo.
MAY 2023 In another of our most clicked internet stories of the year, downtown-bremerton-by-way-of-the-east-coast librarian extraordinaire Priya Charry flips the script on smokestack. Plus, after successfully launching a movie house, the Tracyton Public House tries its hand at retail wing sauce by the bottle and smokestack gets in on the inside jokes with a two dudes in a band, in their mid-20s, with successful blue-collar careers… and a new album out.
JUNE 2023 Spent all-too-many morningtime hours in an east bremerton sports bar trying to no avail to get the story of the place from the one lady who has been there the entire time as the Cloverleaf turned 50. Plus Nick Sledge drives two-and-a-half hours for an album review but ends up reviewing the town of Joyce instead, and local band Generation Decline talks about what it’s like to tour the DIY punk rock way in Europe.
JULY 2023 We get a phone interview during a rare quiet hour with the fourth-generation bremerton resident Sunny Saunders who is the organizer behind the Bremerton Bridge Blast and the new Kitsap Food Truck Festival. Plus pride fests and the power of Ash Van Otterloo’s new middle grade novel ‘The Beautiful Something Else’ and Jordan Eller, former guitarist of Russian Blue, puts out a nostalgia-laden solo album.
AUGUST 2023 The moment smokestack has been waiting for, kitsap gets a zinefest as midwest-transplant Dani Gray says, ‘what the fuck? why not?’ and puts in the work to debut the inaugural small press festival. Plus the WSU kitsap extension hosts kitsap’s first-ever farm tour, we have probably too much fun linking local band Chameleons’ new album up as a soundtrack to nature documentaries and 60s-era Tacoma legend from the band Moby Grape plays Brother Dons.
SEPTEMBER 2023 The local breakfast dining scene takes a hit as the Hi and the Lo behind bremerton’s Hi-Lo’s 15th Street Cafe hang up their aprons for retirement. But I’m pretty sure we partied. Plus our newest writer Keely Riggs takes smokestack out to the West Sound Film Festival, local band MxPx releases their 11th studio album and tours the world over the internet in four days from their Bremerton studio and MxPx frontman Mike Herrera is the first guest in our live, local, podcast Local Legends w/ Josh Farley. True to form for a newspaper’s first attempt at swimming into the digital world, we completely botch the audio. Sorry Mike.
OCTOBER 2023 Bill Man gets in touch with his long-dead relatives and ancestors thru a zoom call with local psychic medium, musician, leader of local ghost tours and Port Gamble townsite manager Pete Orbea. Plus Keys covers our second-most-clicked-story about the Divas Of The Northwest drag company and local indie singer Alessandra Rose rides the covid wave to Nashville and releases her first album in a decade.
NOVEMBER 2023 We nerd out completely on space stuff and the story behind Bremerton’s Pacific Planetarium which is run by a company that is a globally leading manufacturer of portable, educational planetariums. Plus local community TV anchor Ash Black talks with local record label owner Doc Blackwell about being honored with an NAACP acheivement award and a holiday from the mayor and we time travel through the recent history of kitsap bands via a digital Robbi Perez rabbit hole.
DECEMBER 2023 The fifth-most-clicked-on internet story of the year, with only two months viewing time, goes to the man with the museum in his garage as local wine-and-beverage salesman, Bruce Reed retires from supplying the county with booze. Plus the Krampus thing inspires a list of unconventional christmas traditions and sequim-by-way-of-bainbridge author Jonathan Evison etches a puzzle into his new novel “Again and Again.”
JANUARY 2023 After an all-night battle with a deadline, we get to spend a piece of the big slow down drinking coffee, talking about making art and positivity one morning at the north kitsap home studio of the artist CBennett. Plus local OC Professor Sean McGinty takes us on an existential trip thru his book ‘Rainbow In The Dark’ and our ‘I Love Bremerton’ correspondent Razor reflects on the actual new year, and on trying something new, at east bremerton’s new-ish pole dance studio.
CHECK OUT ANY and all of these stories at kitsapsmokestack.org <3smokestack
