The Mariners have just lost their last regular-season game as I write this, and enter the playoffs tied for the best regular season in baseball history (based on number of wins, not winning percentage).
As most of you know, I’m of the generation that came of age with the indelible image of the Ms as a lovable-loser team playing in a lovable-loser domed stadium in a lovable-loser city. Even Seattle’s attempts to become a Big League City were typically of a feebly predictable variety (e.g., taxpayer subsidies for chain-owned luxury shops downtown).
But the Century 21 Ms are different. They’re the Real Freakin’ Thing. I adore the team’s stunning success like nothing else; but still have a hard time comprehending it. It’s off the visible spectrum of good news, just as the terror attacks were far further off the visible spectrum of bad news.
The Ms’ spectacle provides as good an excuse as any to survey the cultural status of this once-remote port city on the occasion of its sesquicentennial.
IN THE ’90S, Seatle seemed on the verge of bigtime cultural-capital status; corresponding to the city’s approach toward bigtime business-power status.
But the movie and TV location work mostly moved to Vancouver; the “Seattle Music Scene” craze was successfully crushed by the major-label conglomerates; and the local web-content companies that had been on the seeming verge of displacing both print and audiovisual media giants have either died or been fiscally chastized into safer market niches.
While Seattle still hasn’t permanently muscled in on NY’s hold on publishing or LA’s hold on film production, we remain a hotbed for many DIY-level arts genres (contemporary dance, experimental music, indie rock, snowboarding apparel, comix).
The recent, and apparently now ending, tech-biz gold rush meant some creative-type folk found the chance to finance some of their dreams (restaurants, coffeehouses, shot-on-video movies, self-released CDs). Many others took tech-biz jobs in that hope, but found themselves too drained by the hours and stress.
The upside of the dot-com collapse is many writers, painters, musicians, etc. who’d found themselves stuck working 60-hour weeks in Redmond now have the time to resume their real work (and real-estate hyperinflation is slowing, so they might be able to keep their studios and practice spaces.) The bad news: Many of these people lost much of their savings in the stock collapse (particularly those who worked for stock options).
THE REST of the local economy now lies as fragile as the world economy to which it’s become ever more closely interconnected.
Boeing, once synonymous with both Seattle and U.S. industrial-export might, is turning (or was trying to turn before the recession) into a financier-oriented investment company whose holdings only incidentally include airplane factories, and whose execs live and work far away from any of its physical-stuff-making operations.
Microsoft and Starbucks, those companies everyone loves to hate, are still here, still increasing their world domination of their respective industries, and still making enemies while insisting on their innate goodness.
And Amazon.com, the company that persued Bigness at any cost, used the end of E-Z deficit financing as an excuse to can hundreds of Seattle workers and ship their jobs to lower-wage locales.
“GET BIG FAST” was the title of a book about Amazon, based on the now-discredited mantra justifying the high burn rate of money-pit dot-coms. Amazon’s strategy meshed nearly perfectly with the ongoing insecurities of a city elite forever fretting about Seattle’s stature, ever concocting jump-start schemes to make us (yes, I know I overuse the phrase, but so do they) World Class. World Class-ness means we get big new “arts” buildings but can’t keep our artists from getting evicted. It means we’ve got all this private wealth but (thanks to the anti-tax Republicans some of these wealthy ones support) we can’t house our homeless, feed our hungry, or relieve our exurban sprawl and our traffic jams.
But the phrase “Get Big Fast” also expresses the craving to get beyond juvenile frustration ASAP, to give birth to a company and have it immeidately be “grown up.” Only things don’t quite work that way in the real world, or even in the real corporate world.
Seattle still doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. But it’s anxious to grow up, or rather to act like a gangly adolescent pretending to be grown up. And it always has been. Like that Here Comes the Brides theme song goes: “Like a beautiful child/Growing up green and wild.”
But the result, all too often, is like seeing the adult actors in Porky’s II walking around in their receding hairlines, pretending to be hormone-stricken teenagers pretending to be worldwise grownups.
IF WE CAN just all forget for a moment about Getting Big Fast, maybe we can start to really grow up.
The Mariners became a powerhouse mainly by de-emphasizing the big cheap home run (to the point of buildiing a stadium where they’d be tougher to achieve); instead focusing on doing the little things right and pulling together.
Exactly what this town needs.
(This article’s permanent link.)
