> ON THE LINE: Jack Whisner, a transit planner for King County, left a phone message claiming Misc. was wrong to describe planned north-Seattle bus changes as favoring commuters instead of the voluntarily carless. He asserts the proposals are really meant to increase cross-town routes, so more people can ride from one neighborhood to another without having to transfer downtown. However, I’ve still got reservations about the scheme. Since the county wants to shovel most new-service bucks toward the ‘burbs, some new in-town routes may start as weekday-only, daytime-only services, and some existing routes some folk have become accustomed to might be cut back or even dropped. Public hearings and comments on the scheme are now being taken; call 684-1162 for details.
THE MAILBAG: Our item a couple weeks back, seeking a replacement term for the ’80s relic “yuppie,” engendered this email response from Bryan Alexander of Louisiana: “Liking your emphasis on their aging, how about `boomer geezers’? Returning to the acronym, how about `ayuppies’ (aging young urban etc.) or `dyuppies’ (decrepit etc.), which raise both senesence and the victims’ delusions of perpetual youth? The former is a more Southern pronounciation, the latter nearly Slavic.” Jesse Walker, meanwhile, takes umbrage at a throwaway line in the original column item which claimed the young adult bourgeoisie didn’t share its elders’ taste for bland pop songs. Walker felt I was wrong to “put Bonnie Raitt on the same level as James Taylor. And what about the revived popularity of the uber-bland Elton John?” John, of course, never really went away, at least not from Lite FM stations. A more serious challenge to my remark might involve the younger Lite FM stars (F. Apple, S. Crow, et al.).
SWANKOSITY: The Pampas Club opening was like a scene out of the 1990 debutante movie Metropolitan, with exquisitely-dressed rich kids of a type I’d not previously known to exist here, all in the former site of the raucous My Suzie’s and Hawaiian-kitsch Trade Winds. It reminds me of a scene in the memoir of a Depression-era UK left activist. After living through nearly three decades of mass deprivation due to the depression, the war, and Europe’s lengthy postwar slump, he was shocked and astonished to find teenagers running around the streets of late-’50s London with the cash to spend on clothes and music and partyin’.
One side effect: The new Belltown wine-‘n’-dine clientele is, on the whole, much better-behaved in public than the Bud Light-chugging fratbar crowd more common in the neighborhood two or three years ago.
Another side effect: The ex-Sailors Union building where Pampas, El Goucho, and the (separately owned) Casbah Cinema are is right across from Operation Nightwatch, where homeless folk line up for shelter-bed tix. What used to be called “limo liberals” climb out of pug-ugly Mercedes SUVs, only to witness the less-than-formally dressed standing and arguing and cussing in line. While few affluent persons feel personally responsible for an economy that creates a few “winners” and a lot of others, maybe the sight will at least give some “winners” a sense of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God humility. In other economix thots…
BUBBLE BURSTING?: Many of Seattle’s art-world and “alternative” denizens like to think they’re not part of the planes-and-software boom economy. But we’re all affected. I’m writing here soon about some of the writers and artists with day jobs at Microsoft. There are also plenty of actors, playwrights, cartoonists, photographers, illustrators, videographers, graphic designers, and audio engineers toiling away at assorted high-tech outfits on both sides of the lake, and at these companies’ subcontractors and spinoff firms. With the ripple effect of these bucks passing among retailers, landlords, etc., the commercial underpinnings of local alt-culture haven’t been higher.
So are its potential commercial underminings. As the Stranger‘s already mentioned, there’s a housing crisis threatening the fiscal well-being of most anybody who’s not rich. When housing prices go up, they seldom go back down. So if the Asian economic slump ravages Boeing and agribusiness exports, and if fears of a coming market saturation in the computer biz come true, even more of us will be scrambling for the remaining affordable abodes.
