BEFORE WE BEGIN, one last request for you to attend our fantabulous dual premiere event for the new LOSER book and MISCmedia the magazine; both at 7:30 tonight at the gorgeous Two Bells Tavern, 4th & Bell in Seattle’s not-as-hip-as-it-used-to-be Belltown area.

LAST THURSDAY AND FRIDAY, we superficially discussed how the complacently affluent Seattle I used to know and get frustrated by, which I used to call City Light, has been succeeded by an aggressively caste-divided City Extra Light.

It’s a town where the ruling elite’s become openly afraid of its own citizenry; as witnessed by Mayor Schell’s pathetic cancellation of the municipal public New Year’s party (while $150 private bashes went on as scheduled).

The first thing the city gov’t can do to overcome its own paranoia is to quickly reschedule as much of the scuttled 1/1 gala as possible; especially artist Carl Smool’s “Fire Sculpture” interactive installation/performance piece.

One letter-to-the-editor writer suggested a bigger, better New Year’s fete this next 12/31, for what math nerds insist will be the “real” new century mark. I think that’s too far off.

Seattle Center had already announced it had given up on mounting a third installment of its struggling ArtsEdge festival, which had exposed a number of (unpaid) cuttin’-edge visual, performing, and musical artists in early June. The dumped New Year’s acts could be shuffled into a reconstituted ArtsEdge. Alternately, Smool’s piece and some of the performing acts could be incorporated into the still-going Folklife Festival in May.

Or, we could go one better and start our own new tradition. Call it “Seattle Day.”

It just so happens that we’re less than two years from the sesquicentennial of the first permanent white settlement in Seattle’s present-day city limits. The first settlers showed up at what’s now Alki Point on Sept. 25, 1851. The city dates its official founding to that Nov. 12, when those first settlers and a few subsequent arrivals chartered what they originally called “New York-Alki” (“…By and By” in Chinook Jargon, a short language invented by white pioneers to facilitate trading with different indigenous groups in the region).

The NYC-eventually bit we’ve essentially reached by now. Our once-remote harbor town’s become a hotbed of financiers, tycoons, media entrepreneurs, arrogant jerks, awful car traffic, shameful race- and class-division politics, immigrant-smugglin’, terrorist scares, and many other NYC-esque urban features.

(Indeed, the Rudolph Giuliani administration in NYC has all but officially borrowed its civic agenda from many of Seattle’s longstanding “mandatory mellowness” crusades–crackdowns on nightlife, the homeless, and the poor; sweetheart deals with tourist-restaurant and millionaire-housing developers.)

Anyhoo, we can and should start right now to turn all of 2001 into a 150th anniversary jubilee year, climaxing on Nov. 12, 2001 with an all-day, all-night, mellowness-be-damned party at Alki.

We don’t need to hold off until this November to kick off the fete, either.

We can hold the 2000 edition of Seattle Day as soon as it can be arranged. It can be as big or as small as we can schlep together.

We can hold it at Seattle Center if feasible; or at any other large public space within the city limits. If Mayor Schell’s minions don’t like it, we can hold it without city approval, on non-city-owned property if we must (the UW campus, the Stadium Exhibition Center, a Boeing Field hangar, the Consolidated Works arts space, etc.). We also shouldn’t become too dependent upon city funding for this, either. There’s enough private wealth lying around here; if we can pitch this to them as a celebratory party all our own, a positive rejoinder to the awful global PR Schell’s given the town, and a chance to bring everybody together to honor the town’s heritage and future.

We’ll talk about this some more, most likely. ‘Til then, contribute what you’d like Seattle Day to feature at our lovely MISCtalk discussion boards.

TOMORROW: At last, some Microsoft money’s being spent on something worthwhile.

ELSEWHERE:

• “Modern culture as it manifests in and around that hotspot on the surrealistic powergrid known as Spokane, WA….”
• Some corporate Americanisms don’t translate well into certain other cultures. Some, however, do….