CONFIDENTIAL TO THE ICON GRILL: Sorry, but I just can’t eat in a place that’s got all that glass art on display. Though your huge back-entrance archway reading “NONE OF US” is intiguing in a mysterious/incomprehensible sorta way.
IN PORT: If the local daily papers were as interested in servicing the mass of their readers as much as in kissing up to big advertisers, they’d have hyped the Old Navy opening just like they hyped the Nordstrom opening. They could’ve run a gushing editorial like this: “There have been many milestones in the transformation of downtown Seattle into one of the country’s most vibrant city centers, and there will be more before the year is out. But no one event embodies local history, business success, and civic accomplishment as does the opening of the new downtown Old Navy. The former I. Magnin building on Pine between Sixth and Seventh has been remodeled into an elegant, easy-to-shop Old Navy. The exterior art deco facade, which dates back to 1926, has been restored and lends a familiar grace to the the city’s now-bustling retail core. On this eve of the opening of Old Navy’s fourth-largest store in the country, we offer congratulations to an out-of-state chain that has prospered for nearly half a decade.”
BUT SERIOUSLY FOLKS, this moderately-priced Son-Of-Gap chain has gone from zero to 400 stores in four years as part of an aggressive corporate strategy to become, as Gap’s annual report states, “not a retailer but a portfolio of global brands.” Its heavy emphasis on brand-logo T-shirts and sweatshirts means its customers pay to be the chain’s chief ad vehicle. And its relatively understated retro-chic look not only appeals to all ages, it might prevent or delay customers from aging beyond the place. This ain’t no plunder-and-split Viking contingent; it’s a well-equipped invasion fleet out to establish permanent colonial settlements. On the other side of the brow scale…
NOTES OF WORSHIP: The old multipurpose Opera House, with its acres of steak-house red wallpaper, symbolized a peripheral town trying (too hard?) to prove it had come of age. The new symphony hall, by contrast, symbolizes a civic establishment of Nordics and WASPs out to prove they’re so already-there they don’t need to shout their world-classness, just sit and bask in their own solemn collective presence; not unlike church ladies & gents. Indeed, from the organ pipes at the back of the stage to the dark paneling on the main hall’s relentlessly-angled walls to the seat-back brass plaques each honoring a different well-heeled donor (indeed, just about everything in the place except the toilets honors some rich person or company), the joint looks a lot like a tasteful mid-’60s Protestant church such as Plymouth Congregational or University Unitarian–only built to the scale of a suburban evangelical megachurch.
I was in the joint three times during its opening month. Two of those times, I stood in line in front of middle-aged boomers saying they hoped this prominent heart-O-downtown hall would help promote symphonic music to Those Kids Today. Both these overheard parties spoke under the unquestioned assumption that all Americans born after them were, virtually by definition, headbangin’ ingorami desperately needing conversion to the secular religion of high culture. As if these oldsters’ parents hadn’t said the exact same thing when the boomers were kids. As if there weren’t orchestral scores in every old movie and lots of recent movies (a few of which were recorded by the Seattle Symphony). As if the new leading-edge music here in town weren’t neo-improv and contemporary-composer stuff heavily based on hibrow and pre-rock traditions. As if such a huge cut of our dwindling public arts funding weren’t already going to arts-education programs (aside, that is, from the money going to auditorium-construction projects). No, most kids’ musical souls don’t need saving. But it’s nice to know some oldsters at least care.
(Next week: Goodbye to the Stranger edition of Misc.)
