TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to the memory of Wendy Testaburger, Mrs. McCormick, Ms. Crabtree, and Principal Victoria.
AS YOU MAY ALREADY KNOW, I have this thing about San Francisco.
I happen not to think it’s The Absolutely Greatest Damn City That Ever Existed On the Face of the Earth.
In fact, I am of the sometimes unpopular opinion that it’s an arrogant, pretentious land of egos and attitudes, where real artists and writers are far outnumbered by incessantly self-promoting “counterculture celebrities,” many of whom are merely famous-for-being-infamous.
For years, I’ve pleaded with my fellow Seattleites (particularly those in the restaurant and DJ-music businesses). I’ve told them they were trying too hard to follow Frisco-set trends, and not trying hard enough to come up with their own thangs.
All this time, I had a personal image of my own town as not “nicer,” but as more honest. Seattle, I believed, was a place where real people could create real works.
My image, along with the more popular “nice” image of the NW compared to Calif., was in many aspects a subset of the popular image of Canada as compared to the US–a more down-to-earth, honest place, but also a more inconsequential place, a place that seems “innocent” precisely because nothing that happens in it really matters to the larger world.
In recent years, as anyone with a computer surely knows, things happening in Seattle have indeed come to matter to the larger world.
I’ve seen this city develop an attitude and a style all its own.
And guess what? I’m getting to be just as frustrated by the New Seattle as I was of Old Frisco.
The simple knee-jerk response would be to allege “Californication,” to blame everything I don’t like here on them pesky newcomers from down southward. But that would be wrong.
Most everything that bugs me about today’s Brave New Seattle has deep roots in the city’s and the region’s heritage. (Kind of like an inherited susceptability to certain cancers.)
Suburban Assault Vehicles lumbering through the strip-mall parking lots? Nothing could be more Nor’Wester than the craving to feel like you’ve conquered Nature.
Dumb upscale restaurants? Because Washington’s required places selling hard booze to also sell full meals, this town’s always been restaurant-heavy. It’s just that in the competitive climate, these restaurants get pricier and sillier every year.
Real estate hyperinflation rapidly turning this into a city only welcome for the kinds of people who go to dumb upscale restaurants? Darn near nothing symbolizes the NW quite like looking for a buck (or a lot of bucks) to be made anywhere and anyhow. Clear those forests; trap those furs; dam those rivers; make sweetheart deals with airlines that promise to go all-Boeing.
Microsoft? Bill Gates and Paul Allen both come from what passes for “old money” in this relatively newly white-settled region. The infamous MS arrogance can be seen as a cross between Seattle leaders’ classic knack for backroom dealmaking and a rugged-individual pioneer spirit gone horribly extreme.
When Washington state’s own Edward R. Murrow exposed Sen. Joe McCarthy’s corrupt red-baiting tactics on early TV, he quoted Shakespeare to paint McCarthy as a mere exploiter of popular sentiment: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not within the stars but within ourselves.”
Similarly, much as I’d like to, I can’t blame San Franciscans (or attempts to emulate San Franciscans) for what Seattle has become. The fault is, indeed, within ourselves.
TOMORROW: Some ephemeral art forms of the late-century era.
ELSEWHERE:
