IN LAST SUNDAY’S Seattle Times Sunday magazine, my ol’ pal Fred Moody had a memoir piece about his 20-plus years as a freelancer, staff writer, and/or editor at Seattle Weekly. It’s a nice little read; but two aspects particularly struck me:
1. Moody appears to believe, unless he’s being really sarcastic (and he’s been known to get that way), that the original Weekly incarnation under founding publisher David Brewster was a daring, status-quo-challenging “alternative” rag.
Bull doo-doo. Claiming the Brewster-era Weekly had ever been “alternative” is as phony a boomer-generation conceit as claiming Linda Ronstadt had ever been a rock singer.
From the start, the Weekly had been an attempt to put out the content of a slick upscale city monthly on once-a-week newsprint. (Brewster had previously worked on the first Seattle magazine.) The second cover story was about a “foodie” restaurant (the now-defunct Henry’s Off Broadway). Restaurant covers outnumbered arts covers most years, as best as I can recall.
From its political priorities to its entertainment coverage, everything in it was aimed at a small but well-defined target audience–the New Professionals who wore Nordstrom dress-for-success suits to jobs at the big new downtown office towers, attended watered-down “art” movies such as Harold and Maude, and dined on “gourmet” versions of American comfort foods. (The paper’s original backers included Gordon Bowker, who also helped start Starbucks and Redhook.)
If it ever took a “non-mainstream” approach to its topics, it was the same approach as that taken by early NPR or such PBS shows as Washington Week In Review–not the elite speaking to the masses, but the elite speaking to itself.
And if it ever took anything approaching an “irreverent” attitude toward regional politics, it was only firmly placed within official worldview–that The Sixties Generation, no matter how blanded-out and comfortably ensconced in premature middle age, was the absolute ultimate apex of human evolution.
In this worldview, oldsters (including oldster politicians) constituted a squaresville presence to be placated or patronized.
And anyone too young to have needed (or too proletarian to have attained) a college deferment from Vietnam didn’t even count as a full human being.
Thus, rock n’ roll music was never, ever, a priority at the old Weekly. Nor was any black culture too young to have been taken over by whites.
If you think this is just my Blank Generation whining, it isn’t. The Weekly has been sold and totally revamped twice, but old Weekly worldview lives on in the current mayoral campaign of Mark Sidran, whose demographic-cleansing campaigns as city attorney are based squarely on the assumption that upscale white baby boomers are the only “real” people in this town.
2. Moody was right on the button when he noted that, just as the success of the early Stranger proved how old and unhip the old Weekly was (or at least as it had become), so is today’s Stranger heading in the same direction.
But that’s a topic for another day.
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