UPDATE: A loyal reader called to report some longer Greyhound routes already do offer in-bus movies, having had to endure Parenthood on the way to Vancouver.
THE SILVERY SKIN: Didn’t see as much of Bumbershoot as in prior years (either the crowds have finally gotten to me or my ongoing diet left me too carbo-depleted to stand in hot lines). But I did find out that the Squirrel Nut Zippers’ stadium show really could produce Lindy hopping in the moshpit.
I also saw a few dozen wholesome grownups watch an hour of ’30s-’40s stripper movies (projected in an outdoor courtyard) without turning into rampaging degenerates. On a beautiful night, in a beautiful setting (right by the atomic neon art near the North Court meeting rooms), a mixed-gender audience got to witness beautiful B&W footage of beautiful women (including burlesque legend Sally Rand and someone billed on the re-release print as Marilyn Monroe, though I have my doubts) making beautiful moves in beautiful costumes of various small sizes.
After the dance shorts, the projector was stopped while various bigwigs conferred whether to show an encore segment. When they finally gave their OK, the crowd saw 10 minutes of naughty-funny XXX animations from the early ’30s (gags involved beastiality, oversized and detachable penises, and copyright-violating renditions of Krazy Kat and Bosko). As the audience strolled happily into the night, I realized the end-of-porn essay in this paper last month was right when it proclaimed a truly vital city needs a healthy element of public vice. There’s nothing like a little good clean sex to bring people together. These exhibitions like these also help prove the apparently little-known fact that people have been having sex since before you were born.
COMING HOME TO ROOST: Seattle’s affordable-housing crisis can be interpreted as a counterpart to the International Monetary Fund’s prescription for third-world economies: Enforce “austerity measures” on the masses, so a caste of financiers and speculators can have unfettered opportunities. Just as IMF shock-treatments are officially justified as being for everybody’s ultimate trickle-down benefit, Mayor Paul Schell’s proposed tax-and-zoning breaks for big condo developers are being touted as help for the thousands of citizens being priced out by the very developments Schell wants to further encourage.
Another intrepretation: When Schell became mayor, he inherited a municipal establishment that for over a decade had actively pursued a system of policies intended to prevent Seattle from becoming one of those islands of urban poverty surrounded by suburban affluence. We’ve had a government/ business elite devoted almost exclusively toward making Seattle’s population as upscale as possible–not by improving the lot of those already here, but by encouraging the upscale to move and stay here (and by almost criminalizing the underclass, when and where that was deemed necessary). You could see it in Rice’s caving in to Nordstrom’s every demand; in the school district’s use of busing to prop up enrollment in affluent-neighborhood schools; in the developer-friendly Urban Village and Seattle Commons schemes; and in city attorney Mark Sidran’s crackdowns against anyone too publicly black, young, or unmellow. If the pursuit of demographic purity meant other populations were discouraged (actively or passively), even when it made a joke of our professed love of “diversity,” it was considered a necessary cost.
But now, it’s gone far enough to price middle- and upper-middle-class folk out of Seattle–the core voter base of Seattle’s pro-corporate Democrat machine. So the insiders are reconsidering their policy of demographic cleansing, at least on the PR level. They’re talking about providing special incentives to make homes affordable to the merely well-off instead of just the really-really rich.
It’s way too little, and for the politicians it might be too late. If the “single-family neighborhood” populists who stopped the Commons and the Urban Villages spread the idea that Schell’s scheme will help only developers by encouraging more replacement of existing affordable housing by new “market rate” units, we could witness a movement that could eventually topple the municipal regime like, well, a house of cards.
