AN IDES-OF-FEBRUARY GREETING from Misc., the online column that just couldn’t make up anything stranger than the image of Stevie Wonder driving a car during a Super Bowl halftime show sponsored by a car-insurance company. (And using James Brown music for a commercial during the game, against images of aging white businessmen playing golf, all in order to sell an obscure business-to-business service firm? Dumber than dumb.)
THE OCCASION WE KNOW as Valentine’s Day has little, as some of you may know, with the martyred Catholic figure of that name. Rather, it was one of those Catholic co-opting ploys to take over what had been a Euro-pagan holiday–which, as you might expect, originally had a lot to do with celebrating mid-February (which in post-Roman days was closer to early spring) as a time of hope and renewal. Yet this year, at this time, we’ve several things to mourn in our own local community:
LOSS #1: Red and Black Books. The nearly 20-year-old, collectively-run lefty-lit outlet (which used to give out matchbooks embossed, in bright red, “Capitalism Is Organized Crime”) is probably, after a long battle, gonna go the way of many other general-interest indie booksellers of less-ideological bent, unable to compete against the big-box consolidators.
LOSS #2: The Bathhouse Theater. Just as at one time Seattleites were expected to attend first-run films playing only at Northgate or Lake City, so were we once accustomed to attending live theater beyond the downtown-Queen Anne-Capitol Hill triangle. The current Empty Space in Fremont and Hokum Hall in West Seattle are among the few remaining exceptions to a trend that’s seen the inward relocation of Seattle Children’s Theater, On the Boards, and the Group Theater (which didn’t survive the transplant). The feisty Bathhouse Theater at Green Lake, born of the ’70s arts-funding boom, had had its recent money problems like several other troupes (the Group, Alice B) that were too big to depend on volunteer labor, too small to get a lot of those government grants and corporate endowments whose donors prefer to support “major producing organizations” (preferably in the form of construction projects).
The Bathhouse tried to make more of its own way by staging one or more surefire cash-cow projects every year, most infamously its cycle of boomer-nostalgia oriented Shakespeare-gone-doo-wop musicals. But those projects didn’t always succeed; and when they did, they didn’t always succeed enough to fund the company’s more “serious” productions; and even when they didn’t, they gave the Bathhouse a quasi-commercial reputation that may have ultimately hurt its fundraising efforts. The Bathhouse’s last hope was to host that ritzy, commercial tent-cabaret show, Teatro ZinZanni. But a few Green Lake area residents expressed fear that erecting the circus tent by the lake would set a dangerous “privatization” precedent, and threatened enough citizen action that the cabaret’s producers instead pitched their stakes at the ex-Moose Lodge block on lower Queen Anne where the symphony once expected to move. ZinZanni became a commercial hit, but the Bathhouse didn’t get its planned piece of it. It’s canceled the rest of its ’99 season and probably won’t be back.
LOSS #3: The Speakeasy Cafe. The Speakeasy organization’s Internet services division, which provides server facilities for this site, will continue. But with that becoming an ever-more competitive endeavor, they didn’t wanna use those earnings to keep supporting an ever-less-profitable cafe and performance space, and announced they’ll close it in May. For the past four years, the Speakeasy’s been one of those odd ducks that still manages to waddle around. It’s a coffeehouse, a beer-and-wine hall, a computer-rental space, a gallery, a community meeting center, and a performance center whose two rooms have hosted assorted music shows (acoustic, electric, DJ), films, plays, political rallies, and corporate-promo gatherings.
But the Liquor Board said last year they couldn’t have all-ages music shows in the same big front room as their beer taps (even though apparently no minor ever got served there); they claim cafe revenues dropped by half when they had to go 21-and-over on music nights. Besides that, their landlord’s been passing on complaints from the 211 Billiard Club upstairs, whose serious-pool-playin’ customers felt distracted by some of the louder concerts. Faced with the decline and possible total loss of what had become the space’s chief profit center, they’ve decided to throw in the towel.
Like pop-music genres, pop-music venues often have natural life spans. By becoming dependent on its music shows, the Speakeasy space fell prey to this principle. As a cafe, it sometimes felt too big and understaffed. As an Internet cafe, it was only useful before the evening loudness (and cover charges) commenced around 9 pm.
The solution, for either current Speakeasy management or any parties who might wish to take over the space, would be to remodel it into something more workable. Turn the back room into a better-soundproofed, booze-free listening zone (like the OK Hotel had for a while). Perhaps carve the big front room into two spaces; one where eating and latte-drinking and chatting and Web browsing can quietly go on all evening, one where meetings and readings and less all-attention-commanding performances might occur. It could work. Whether the Speakeasy crew, or anyone else, has the cash-and-sweat to try and make it work is another question.
LOSS #4: The portending death, sometime next year or so, of the afternoon Seattle Times. That’d end its status as the last evening paper to be #1 in a two-paper city, and the second-biggest remaining PM paper in America altogether (after the Detroit News, which like the Times is part of a Joint Operating Agreement, wherein two papers share all non-journalistic aspects of their business).
I’ll miss the notion of newspapers coming out all day, with the possibility of something new and exciting coming out in midafternoon. The Times (which used to use the slogan “Today’s News Today”) used to take pride in its ability to hit the streets with headlines from this morning (or this afternoon back east). It even published a street extra when the Gulf War started, which will now probably be the last true “extra” in Seattle newspaper history. Of course, we’ve got TV, radio, and now the Web for breaking news. Certainly, the Web has obliviated the need for a paper with same-day stock prices, one of the Times’ prime selling points. Indeed, one reason the P-I agreed to revise the JOA to let the Times go AM was so the P-I could post all its news content on the Web, something the Times had previously sought to prevent under a JOA written back in the pre-Web days of ’83.
After the change, then what? The Times will likely continue to emphasize “value-added” journalism, downplaying the headlines in favor of meandering long features, mealy-mouthed analysis, public-opinion polls, and lifestyle pieces aimed at nice affluent suburban families; while the junior partner in the JOA, the Hearst-owned P-I. will remain the newsier newspaper. Times management would like to so fully overtake the P-I in morning circulation that Hearst would eventually be persuaded to shut down, in return for a piece of all future Times profits. But I don’t see it happening. In the 15 and a half years of the JOA, the two papers have established clear identities and market segments. The Times is for the fat and unsassy, for the lawyers and Chamber of Commerce members and subdivision dwellers. The P-I is for go-getter entrepreneurs, smart-mouthed sports fans, active people, DINK couples, and condo dwellers. It’s the latter set of groups advertisers crave these days. But by the 2010s, will all those AARP-age boomers come to prefer a more sedate news source? Only time will tell.
GAIN #1: For every major loss, though, there’s at least one attempt going on to add something to our sociocultural landscape. An ex-MS exec’s starting the first real, legal Internet pharmacy, with offices in Seattle and in Ohio (near the private airports of big overnight-shipping companies) and using the name Soma Corp. Brave New World readers know “Soma” as the name of a mood-altering and mind-numbing drug, which in Aldous Huxley’s classic dystopian-future novel was, among other uses, dosed out to lower-caste people in order to keep them pacified yet productive. Is the name a comment on some of the prescription mood-alterers the firm will likely dispense to attitude-challenged businesspeople? Or, perhaps, could it refer to the glassy-eyed state in which one might find oneself after too many hours spent online?
WE STILL SEEK your favorite beautiful “ugly” building. Name your pick by email or at our fantabulous Misc. Talk discussion boards. Until then, then, try to make it through the last few weeks of a rather miserable winter with these cheery thoughts from Rita Mae Brown: “The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they’re okay, then it’s you.”
