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ANY POP-CULTURE GENRE that’s washed up, or at least on the decline, can be given a new life, or at least an afterlife.
All you have to do is revamp it for a born-again Christian audience.
It’s been done with hippie folk music, soft rock, and even hardcore punk rock. It’s been done with thriller and romance novels. It’s been done with form-follows-function modern architecture. It’s been done with superhero comics and action video games.
How you do it: Take a genre (such as those above) with by-now cliched rules and formulae. Slap on a devotional, evangelistic, or crusading-for-the-faith message (doesn’t matter how trite). Make sure the protagonists are (or claim to be) morally forthright. Wrap it up in sanctimony and sell it thru Christian niche-market outlets (specialty bookstores, websites, catalogs, magazine ads, etc.)
There’s one genre out there that hasn’t yet been Christianized, at least on any visible scale; yet is clearly ripe for it. It’s got an established schtick and an established audience, but has gotten completely ritualized, commercialized, artless, non-entertaining, and otherwise meaningless.
I speak, of course, of pornography.
But the ol’ American puritan hypocrisy thang’s prevented much experimentation with Christianizing porn; at least as far as I’ve been able to find.
A simple web search of the word “Christian” with “porn,” “erotica,” or “sex” will get you a lot of angry anti-porn preachers, many prayer-based programs for overcoming “sex addiction,” and a few over-the-top parody pages (some apparently created by disgruntled ex-Christians).
But no actual Christian porn, verbal or visual.
The closest you get are a few pages that provide potential ideological justifications for Christian porn. Some of these are by members of the Christian-swingers and liberated-Christians sub-subcultures, such as Rebecca Brook’s recent essay “Body and Soul: Confessions of a Kinky Churchgoer.” “God is a caring top,” Brook writes, “not a rapist.” Brook, like other members of these subgroups, believes there should be no contradiction between exploring one’s spiritual potential and exploring one’s sensual potential.
Similar thoughts are promoted on the “Christian Sex” pages of Poppy Dixon’s Adult Christianity site. That’s the same semisatirical site that’s got The XXX-Rated Bible, the “good parts” chapter-and-verse listing that could indeed be the original Christian porn.
So what might real, commercial, non-parody, Christian porn be like?
It could build on the sensual traditions of medieval mystery plays, the ecstatic traditions of holy-roller evangelists and speaking in tongues, sensual Catholic imagery, pro-sex interpretations of Scripture, the works of pro-sex artists and writers with spiritual inclinations, and Christianity’s historic ability to absorb pieces of other spiritual traditions (including, and why not, Tantra and sacred prostitution and “pagan” mating rituals).
This genre would not be “anti-family,” or contradict Jesus’s real teachings, by any means. There’s much that the preadolescent can learn about body self-esteem and living a life of connection with one’s surrounding world; and there’s plenty the adolescent needs to learn about dealing with raging hormones in the context of respecting oneself and others.
MONDAY: Some more thought on what what this new sub-sub-genre might be like.
ELSEWHERE:
THE YEAR’S BIGGEST local news story, the one with the most potential impact on our lives, didn’t have a single big event at its heart.
It’s the decline (and, in some cases, collapse) of dot-com stock speculation. It made its presence felt in small-scale ways (office closings; layoffs; fewer and sparser “networking” soirees; and a slight but accelerating slowdown in real-estate hyperinflation).
(Its related story, the possible Microsoft bust-up, had its spectacle elements take place in Washington, DC courtrooms.)
But several big here-and-now events did take place here which had an impact beyond their immediate sights-‘n’-sounds. Here are some of them.
1. The Kingdome Blows.
After Paul Schell cancelled the official, public New Year’s, Paul Allen staged a great pyrotechnic celebration during Spring Equinox week (the ol’ pagan New Year’s). It was also a half-minute rife with symbolism; deconstructing the onetime triumph of the pre-MS Seattle’s attempts to Go Major League (on a budget, and without needless ostentation).
2. The E.M.P.-ire Strikes Back.
Mr. Allen taketh away; Mr. Allen giveth. The Experience Music Project is almost all needless ostentation, a whole quarter-billion worth of it. It doesn’t really represent the spirit of Northwest pop music (its cocktail lounge doesn’t even have Rainier, let alone Schmidt!). It does represent the spirit of the new regional powers-that-be, who’ve got gazoods of dough and want to show it off as show-offy as can be.
The museum’s opening weekend was a big, mostly free, bash of all the top touring acts Allen could afford (and he could afford a lot of them), plus a nearly-complete local all-star lineup. (The biggest nonparticipants: Pearl Jam, who still have this beef with one of Allen’s former properties, Ticketmaster.)
3. End of Jem Studio Galleries.
Gentrification hit arts spaces hard; knocking out one of the city’s oldest and largest visual-arts workspaces (and First Thursday ground zero).
The Jem artists went out with essentially a four-month-long party of exhibitions, installations, performances, DJ events, live-music shows, etc., ending on the last night with a going-out bash that included a coed nude body-paint wrestling match.
4. Ralph Nader “Super Rally,” KeyArena.
The post-WTO Way-New Left had its biggest show of strength when about 10,000 paid real money to see the first real liberal Presidential candidate in 28 years and assorted celebrity guests.
5. Daily Papers Go Scab.
The JOA-married bombastic voices of the civic establishment, which had been proclaiming for so long about how things were just so great here and could only keep getting better, got a dose of reality. Just as the Times was running a huge feature series about the winners and losers in today’s concentration-O-wealth thang, the papers’ editorial and ad employees rejected a pitiful contract offer that wouldn’t help them keep up with housing costs.
The Times and P-I instantly turned into waify simulacra of themselves. Thin papers, bereft of their usual interminable “analysis” and huge feature series (and of their regular writers and photographers, and of the previous evening’s sports results, and of arts reviews). Papers that, had they been produced by competent people, would’ve been improvements on their prior bloated formats.
TOMORROW: A Dot-Com Christmas Carol.
REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.
MORE LITTLE ANECDOTES inspired by real estate (perhaps the last batch, at least for a while). This time, we ponder why old fake architecture’s more durable than new fake architecture.
Just ’cause Seattle’s only 149 years old and in North America, that doesn’t mean we can’t have Roman ruins (well, sort of). The four, beautifully-decaying columns adorning this lookout point near Pine and Boren came from the original University of Washington building, which had been where the Olympic Hotel is now. These days, neighborhood activists are trying to preserve the lookout’s views, threatened by city plans to permit more high-rise buildings in the Denny Triangle district just beneath it.
Compared to the box-of-leaky-fake-stucco look of many modern “luxury” apartments and condominiums, Frederick Anhalt’s Capitol Hill buildings of the ’20s look more astounding than ever. His Tudor brick and Norman-style bungalow apartments featured individual entrances and felt more like homes than rental units. The Depression wiped out his company; until his death in 1996, he ran a garden-supply store and nursery near University Village. Many of Anhalt’s buildings today command premium rents or condo prices–including this classic on East Roy Street, known to ’80s comic-book readers as the “Sherwood Florist” building in DC’s “Green Arrow.”
The former Capitol Hill Methodist Church was built back in the late 1880s, as the area surrounding 16th and John was first filling with residences. In the 1990s, the dwindling congregation (one of the first in the state to openly welcome gay and lesbian churchgoers) formally dissolved. While the exterior is protected as a city landmark, the interior was redone as an architects’ office. (Former workers there claim the building’s haunted by a former pastor.) Now, One Reel Productions (producers of Bumbershoot, WOMAD USA, and Summer Nights on the Pier) are reportedly interested in the structure as an office for its growing entertainment empire.
The “golden ages” of some entertainment genres are hard to define. But many connisseurs of sex films define that form’s peak as the 1970-87 era of theatrical porno; after “stag films” emerged from the underground into real theaters, but before home video and zoning restrictions across the country put many of the theaters out of business. After ’87, when the last on-film theatrical porno was released, most remaining adult cinemas switched to video-projection systems. The Apple Theater was one of the last film-based porno houses left in the U.S. when it was razed in 1998, as part of an affordable-housing project. The new building’s storefront tenant is in a different “skin trade,” that of tattoos.
TOMORROW: Bremerton, just possibly the most surreal town on the planet.
IN OTHER NEWS: Perhaps never has so much fuss arisen over the firing of a prize-pointer.
Here Today, Gone to Kenmore (Part 1)
by Guest Columnist Sean Hurley
WHEN I TELL PEOPLE where my family and I live, which is in Kenmore, I’ll often get a chuckle or smirk, and some reference to the general grimness of suburban life.
It’s no coincidence that this reaction is more typical to people still living in Seattle’s denser neighborhoods. For all the snideness that urban hipsters have traditionally had for the idea of suburbs, it took a move there for me to understand that, while they are clearly disasterous from an environmental and aesthetic perspective, nothing is all bad.
It took a move there for me to like Seattle again.
If there is an exodus of urban hipster types from the heart of Seattle into the ‘burbs, it begs the question of whether Seattle in fact has a heart at all; it goes without saying that it has no brain, another topic altogether.
If it is true that the creative types that have historically formed the core of Seattle’s artier neighborhoods are being driven out, a fact only an idiot would refute, then perhaps it indicates a few things beyond a flush economy and the cookie cutter tastes that such an economy can manifest. For some, perhaps you really do need to get away from something to appreciate it.
We moved out of the downtown area for some really simple reasons. I had been growing steadily wearier of the area we had been for over four years, one block away from Harborview, the constant wail of sirens rattling the windows of our basement apartment which, while spacious (if oddly laid out—it had earlier in the century been the building maids’ quarters) was perpetually dim.
The other residents of the neighborhood, a term I use very loosely here, were largely poor, ethnic-minority, coping with the inner city realities they lived with in a variety of manners.
Our building was in fact an anomoly, its residents typically youngish, white, professional or arts-related in occupation. The area’s poverty and ethnic diversity were themselves certainly not factors in our growing itchiness to get out. Rather, the hopelessness that can accompany poverty, an almost willful ignorance and a deadeyed lethargy seemed to be infecting my own perception.
I had lived in the city since I was a teenager, and in all that time, it had never seemed so stupid and ugly as it was beginning to seem to me then.
This reached an apex when a drunken man threw a huge piece of concrete through our living room window. I was home alone when it happened, and he just stood there, swaying and muttering about his son, how his son had done it. He swiveled around and lurched off slowly, and a quick phone call to SPD had him in custody within minutes.
I had not at any point been afraid, and had been angry only momentarily, as he had walked by me half a minute after the big smash. I had called 911 and dashed upstairs out to the street, and as he ambled by, he had no idea who I was, no idea what he had just done.
He walked by stinking and wretched, and my heart was broken for me and for him.
He would never get well, and neither would the city.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to the memory of Julie London, the former B-movie actress who was turned into the prototypical lounge singer by second husband Bobby Troup; then was hired, with Troup, by first husband Jack Webb to star in his TV show Emergency. We’re all crying a river over you, Julie.
MORE LITTLE ANECDOTES inspired by real estate. This time, memories of rock joints of the recent past.
Linda’s Tavern opened in early 1994 on the site of what had been the Ali Baba restaurant. Four years earlier, the Ali Baba had hosted some of the first freak-show performances by former pest-control salesman Jim Rose (advertised with word-heavy flyers headlined “He Is NOT A Geek”). Shortly after Linda’s opened, the Ali Baba sign became part of a shrine to Rose and his “sick circus.” The shrine wasn’t at Linda’s but at Moe’s Mo’Rockin’ Cafe, at the present site of ARO.Space.
The Kincora Pub is in one of those buildings that’s had umpteen different identites. In the ’70s and early ’80s it was Glynn’s Cove, one of Capitol Hill’s last true dive bars. Then it was the live-music club Squid Row, which (after a failed jazz-fusion format) emerged in 1987 as one of the few places to hear those loud, slow rock bands everybody in America would soon think was the only kind of rock band in Seattle. (Things got so loud iin there, the doors could only be opened between songs to appease the neighbors.) More recently it was Tugs Belmont, successor to the still fondly-remembered pioneering gay dance club Tugs Belltown.
The Vogue, dean of Seattle dance clubs, now resides within the DJ-circuit neighborhood on Capitol Hill anchored by ARO.Space. Its former site on First Avenue, seen here, still stands vacant after more than a year. It had first opened as a leather gay bar in the mid-’70s; then in late 1979 became Wrex, one of the first joints in town devoted to that new wave/punk/whatever-you-called-it music. It became the Vogue in 1983, pioneering a post-disco, not-exclusively-gay dance shtick (including the town’s longest running fetish night). It still hosted live acts on off nights, including Nirvana’s first Seattle gig in 1988.
The Hopvine Pub on 15th Ave. E. was once a somewhat more rough-hewn joint called the Five-O Tavern. The Five-O had hosted blisteringly-loud rock gigs in the mid-’80s. Even after noise complaints stopped those shows, it remained a hangout for young-adult heteros at a time when most other Capitol Hill bars were either gay or yuppie. It’s now a finely-appointed microbrew joint, but still attracts some of the ex-Five-O crowd, with singer-songwriter gigs by the likes of Pete Krebs and Marc Olsen.
TOMORROW: Secrets for making a magazine catch on.
‘TWAS A QUARTER-CENTURY AGO THIS MONTH that yr. humble reporter first settled in the Jet City, embarking upon adulthood after a forgettable adolescence in smaller places.
With all the hype these days about ’70s nostalgia (or was that already over by 1998?) and all the talk these days about the monstrously “World Class” burg Seattle’s become, it’s a good time to look back upon the Seattle of 1975.
Even then, the municipal cliches and cliques still plaguing us now were in force. There were the business boosters out to make us a Big League City (the Kingdome was under construction on the site of a disused railroad yard).
There were the grumblers who blamed Californian newcomers for ruining everything, who bitched at the “provincial” ways of the folk already here, or both. There were other grumblers who said Seattle was too much like Los Angeles, not enough like San Francisco, or both.
There were the folks still in their late ’20s who seemed to feel that their real lives had already ended with the end of “The Sixties,” and who saw the verdant Northwest as a place to live out their remaining years in smug contentment. There were young proto-punks who craved passion and excitement, and who naturally loathed their elders who demanded an entire city devoted to peace and quiet.
Downtown Seattle’s transformation had begun seven years before with the Seafirst Tower (now the 1000 4th Avenue Tower), and was well underway by ’75. Freeway Park and the first phase of the Convention Center had been built. But thre were still plenty of blocks of two- to six-story brick and terra-cotta buildings. The most stately of these, the White-Henry-Stuart building, was being demolished for the tapered-bottomed Rainier Bank Tower (now Rainier Squre).
Nordstrom had expanded from a shoe store into a half-block collection of boutiques, and had instituted its infamous sales-force-as-religious-cult motivational system (later imitated at Microsoft and Amazon.com). Frederick & Nelson was still the grand dame of local dept. stores; J.C. Penney still had its biggest-in-the-company store where the Newmark tower is now.
Also still downtown: Florsheim, Woolworth, the old Westlake Bartell Drugs (with a soda fountain), and a host of locally-owned little restaurants, some with dark little cocktail lounges in the back.
The “Foodie” revolution in the restaurant biz had begun, and Seattle was one of its strongest outposts. Because the Washington Liquor Board demanded that all cocktail lounges have a restaurant in front, and that those restaurant-lounges earn at least 40 percent of their revenue from food sales, operators were constantly scrambling for the latest foodie fad–French, fusion, Thai, penne pollo, nouvelle cuisine, pan-Asian, sushi, organic, and that “traditional Northwest cuisine” that was just being invented at the time (mostly by Californian chefs).
And in the U District, a little alleyway-entranced outfit called Cafe Allegro had just begun serving up espresso drinks to all-nighter exam-crammers; while Starbucks’ handful of coffee-bean stores had already been promoting European-style coffee to Caucasian office warriors. One of Starbucks’ founders, Gordon Bowker, would later help start Seattle Weekly and Redhook Ale.
There was no Weekly yet; but there was a small weekly opinion journal for movers-and-shakers called the Argus, which had just been sold by Olympic Stain mogul Philip Bailey to the Queen Anne News chain of neighborhood papers. There was also the Seattle Sun, a struggling little alterna-weekly which ran, between neighborhood-vs.-developer articles and reviews of the latest Bonnie Raitt LP, some of Lynda Barry’s first cartoons.
MONDAY: A little more of this; including the old sleaze district, the daily papers, the TV, the economy, entertainment, the arts, and politics.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some local Green Party candidates don’t get to share the stage at the big Ralph Nader rallies.
MORE LITTLE ANECDOTES inspired by real estate. This time, three buildings that aren’t primarily used to sell stuff, and one that is.
Only a few corners in today’s downtown Seattle are devoted neither to making money nor to celebrating those who have a lot of it. One of these is the YWCA, whose ’30s-era building still bears two pairs of terra-cotta reliefs honoring women’s strength (symbolized by a warrior woman with a shield) and women’s wisdom (symbolized by a seated woman reading, deep in contemplation). While the current YWCA logo emphasizes the “W” in the organization’s name, nobody’s likely to confuse this handsome brick building with the stark-black W Hotel just down the street.
The Olympic Hotel, built in 1923, used to advertise itself as “the hotel Seattle calls home.” It was THE place for important business meetings, posh wedding receptions, and stays by government dignitaries. It was also the original flagship of a regional chain, Western Hotels, which after several corporate morphings became Westin and which sold the Olympic in 1980 to Canada’s Four Seasons chain. It’s now officially called the Four Seasons Olympic. Northwest old-timers still call it “the Olympic” for short; only clueless newbies (and the hotel’s management) call it “the Four Seasons.”
Amid today’s hoopla over the proposed “world class” new downtown library, one may forget the library we have now was originally thought the most modern thing one could imagine. It had replaced a grandiose old Carnegie-funded structure which, by the early ’50s, was considered too small and too worn-down. Instead of the old library’s bricks and pillars and a neo-classical facade, we got a structure of clean lines, neutral pastel colors, bright fluorescent lighting, and the same “efficient” construction methods that have helped make all of downtown Seattle’s government-built buildings of the period into prematurely collapsing eyesores.
Amid the classic gas-station signs adorning the General Petroleum Museum on Pine Street is one vertical sign advertising not gas but “V-I-D-E-O.” It’s a remnant of the video store that used to be in the building’s street-level storefront, where a couple of retro furnishings shops stand now. The sign was refitted in the ’80s; it originally spelled out R-A-F-F-‘S, the name of a shoe store previously in the space. A horizontal Raff’s sign has been moved to the building’s roof; you can see a portion of its script letters from certain angles the streets below.
TOMORROW: The possible end of the Olympic Games as we know them.
YESTERDAY, I briefly discussed a recent trip to Vancouver, B.C. Like a similar trip discussed here last year, it was on the utterly beautiful Amtrak Cascades (if there’s a nonsexual experience as completely striking as a full-moon sunset on a trestle over Chuckanut Bay, it’s one I’ve yet to confront).
Today, some other reminiscences of what I found there:
The re-imaging of big-ass motorcycles as costly toys for corporate warriors appeared to have reached a nadir with a raffle of a C$27,000 Harley for, of all folks, the Vancouver Opera.
But the new brand-image of biking still isn’t total. Canadian news media regularly refer to a couple of organized-crime rackets, now violently battling for control of the Montreal drug-smuggling trade, as “biker gangs.” Members of one of these rackets are suspected in the recentnear-fatal shooting of a Montreal tabloid reporter who was investigating it.
(That reporter’s near-tragedy coincided with a remarkable syndicated series by another reporter, Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen, detailing just why North America’s War On Drugs is destabalizing society and ruining lives far more than the drugs themselves. We’ll discuss this topic later, I promise.)
The B.C. economy still has a ways to go. It’s still heavily based on tourism, agriculture, “extractive” industries (timber, mining), and the Port of Vancouver’s shipping of Sonys and Lexuses into the rest of Canada. The province, and the country, doesn’t have the virtual infrastructure of venture capital and hi-risk speculators that’s fueled so much of the hi-tech biz Stateside. Canadian capitalists have traditionally tried to pass off chancy ventures, either to government subsidy programs or to U.S. parent companies.)
The result: You can get a house in Vancouver for maybe two-thirds of the price of a similar Seattle abode. And thanks to recent trends in the Canadian dollar, consumer goods there are no longer significantly costlier than here. Wages are stagnant.
Taxes are still higher than here. But the corporate-friendly Liberal Party is vowing to do whatever it takes to cut taxes and increase “investor confidence,” even if that includes potentially gutting a broken-but-fixable public health care system. (They appear to be a little less anxious to dismantle government subsidies to corrupt mining and oil ventures.)
Things I did:
One reason for its popularity: It runs underground downtown but on elevated tracks along the rest of its 17-mile line, providing a more aesthetically pleasurable ride (and less neighborhood disruption) than Sound Transit’s planned subway and surface-level route. It doesn’t use monorail technology (which would let it climb Seattle-scale hills), but it’s otherwise a living proof of why the Monorail Initiative guys have a better idea than the Sound Transit bureaucrats.
MONDAY: What’s wrong with Sound Transit.
IN OTHER NEWS:Whither department stores?
YESTERDAY, we mentioned in passing the Seattle Mariners’ new “classic” baseball stadium.
The movie-theater biz is also trying to get neoclassical.
OK, they’re not going back to single-screen palaces of architectural wonder. (And they’re sure not going back to old-fashioned ticket or concession prices.)
But the big chains are trying to make moviegoing an entertaining experience again.
After decades of building big, bland, boxy multiplexes, they’re now putting up much fancier joints. The new multiplexes still have umpteen screens serviced by a central projection room; they still play the same dorky big-studio formula movies.
But they’ve got plushier seats, fancier carpets and lighting, and prettier lobbies and signage. They’ve got hi-tech projection and sound systems. They’ve got doublewall construction between auditoria, so you’re less likely to hear the movie next door.
Some of them even have curtains concealing the screen between shows (amazing what they’ll think up!).
But the new movie boxes are costly things to build and run, especially with the high rents in some of the “restored” big-city downtowns where many of the biggest and fanciest megaplexes are going up. And the chains aren’t closing their older multiboxes at the same rate they’re opening new ones. (For one thing, chains are building these partly to encroach on other chains’ established territories. For another, they’re often stuck in long-term leases, especially at malls.)
So even with movie attendance holding steady, and even with the high ticket prices and the high concession prices and the on-screen ads and the hawking of CDs and posters in the lobbies, the big cinemonster chains are in trouble. Three have already filed for bankruptcy protection; two others may do so this week. The biggest current circuit, Loews Cineplex (formed by the merger of several already-big chains), is being propped up by steadily cash infusions from Sony (which hasn’t been making big profits in its movie-production arm either). But even that isn’t keeping the chain afloat.
As one to always see an opportunity where others only see trouble (and vice versa), I can foresee many uses for the movie boxes that might become immediately abandoned if these bankruptcy moves go through. When Cineplex Odeon (now merged into Loews Cineplex) shut down its Newmark fiveplex, a local nonprofit theater briefly used one of its rooms before the whole space was redone for offices. We can do that again, all over North America.
Let’s turn some of these umpteenplexes into multidisciplinary fringe-arts centers. I can see it now:
Not only would such a scheme provide valuable, centrally-located space for these sometimes neglected resources in the heart of their respective cities and/or suburbs, they’d provide a modicum of historic preservation to these buildings.
This way, kids in the 2030s will be able to see the places in which films like Rambo III were meant to be seen. It may help them understand why such films got made.
MONDAY: Both major Presidential candidates (heart) censorship.
FOR THE FIRST TIME ALL SUMMER, we resume our occasional habit of looking for meaning in real estate.
A Bell System ad from the late ’40s claimed, “It takes 500 tons of equipment for just one telephone exchange” (that is, for the central-office connections among the 10,000 phone numbers sharing one prefix). As you may have noticed, electronics are a lot smaller these days. So, even with the explosion of phone numbers due to modems, cell phones, and fax machines, US West didn’t need all the downtown buildings it had inherited when Ma Bell was broken up. One of these buildings was extensively reworked (with exterior windows and other amenities) to become the Hotel Monaco.
The view of downtown Seattle from the Camlin Hotel’s top-floor Cloud Room was forever ruined in the early ’70s by Pacific Northwest Bell’s new headquarters tower. Originally, it was officially billed as being at the made-up address of “1600 Bell Plaza,” confusing out-of-town phone company officials and everyone else who didn’t know it was really on 7th Avenue. With the Baby Bell spinoffs in 1984, the building went from PNB’s head office to a mere divisional outpost of the Colorado-based US West–which, in turn, was just acquired by the long-distance provider Qwest (no relation to the Quincy Jones-owned record label of the same name and spelling.)
The Bauhaus Cafe complements its retro-modern appearance by posting its phone number with a lettered prefix. These were remnants from the early days of telephony, when local service was hard-wired into named “exchanges” of no more than 1,000 lines. Before the rotary dial was invented, callers were initially put through to an operator, who manually patched a switchboard to connect the caller to the number he or she verbally asked for. As phone use grew, exchanges grew and numbers got longer. The Seattle Times, for instance, had the successive numbers over the years of “Main 300,” “MAin 0300,” “MAin 2-0300,” and “622-0300,” before the paper installed a new office phone system that required a block of separate numbers.
The El Gaucho steakhouse and cigar bar’s in a building that used to service a different end of the management-labor equation, as the meeting hall of the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific. Its downstairs (now the Pampas Room and the Big Picture) was the Trade Winds, an irony-free tiki lounge whose back bar was decorated with exotic coins from around the world, collected from sailor patrons. A small sculpture in front of the building, in the form of a beret adorned with union badges (including that of the radical Industrial Workers of the World) remembers the site’s heritage.
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, black empowerment became a rallying cry in the suites as well as on the streets. African-American-owned banks started popping up in cities across the U.S., including Liberty Bank in Seattle’s Central District. It sold home loans to people and neighborhoods underserved by the big banks; it provided business-banking services to the black-owned construction companies that had emerged to do affirmative-action subcontract work on government building projects. But the big banks soon went after the more profitable segments of Liberty’s business. A reorganization under the name Emerald City Bank didn’t last; it was sold to Key Bank in the late ’80s.
TOMORROW: Real Seattle fiction.
NOW LET US PRAISE the greatest Northwest pop-cult book ever written (other than Loser, of course.)
I speak of Wet and Wired: A Pop Culture Encyclopedia of the Pacific Northwest, by Randy Hodgins and Steve McLellan.
The two Olympians have previously written a history of Seattle-set movies, published a short-lived print and web zine called True Northwest, and produced a comedy radio show. This modestly-produced, large-size trade paperback is their masterwork.
Its 226 pages cover over 500 of the most famous and/or influential people, places, and things in the Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver metro areas (plus a few side trips to Tacoma and Spokane). Mixing and matching the region’s three big cities means even the best expert about any one town won’t already know everything in the book (though I, natch, was familiar with at least most of the topics).
In short, easily digestible tidbits of prose (curiously laid out at odd angles), you get–
…and lots, lots more.
The book’s only sins, aside from a handful of misspelled names, are those of omission:
But these are relatively minor quibbles that can (and, I hope, will) be rectified in a second edition. What Wet and Wired does have is well-written, accurate (as far as I’m able to tell), and a great mosaic of glimpes into our rather peculiar section of the planet.
TOMORROW: Cirque du Soleil pitches its tent in Renton’s Lazy B country.
HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (Tacoma News Tribune, 8/21): “Giant Salmon a Scary Prospect.” I can see the horror movie ad campaigns now….
IN OTHER NEWS: Sometimes justice does occur!
PIONEER SQUARE, most agree, has been lost as an art neighborhood.
The machinations of the Samis Foundation, the old neighborhood’s most influential landlord, have resulted in building after building being transformed from artist housing and little galleries into nouveau-riche condos and dot-com offices. Rock clubs have died off (even some of the Square’s trademark bad baby-boomer-blues venues have disappeared).
The artists, musicians, et al. can scatter (and are scattering) their residences to the new hipster-diaspora neighborhoods in the near suburbs. But they still need a place to gather, to hold the all-important par-tay thang that regularly celebrates folks’ emerging from their studio drudgeries and showing off their wares.
The most recent candidate: Ballard Avenue.
The diagonal, partly-cobblestoned street of paint factories, fishing-industry offices and residential hotels has long been a favorite of hipster types who adored its old-world charm and its reasonable rents. A music scene developed there in the mid-’80s with the club now known as the Tractor (headquarters of the local alt-country community). Other venues with similar musical fare followed. In the early ’90s, Hattie’s Hat (a beautiful old working-class eatery and bar) was rescued and “restored” by new owners associated with the Tractor crowd.
In the years since then, art studios and small galleries have popped up along the street. A tattoo parlor followed. Most recently, the old Sunset Tavern was gussied up into a not-too-slick rock club.
The street had a coming-out party of sorts on July 1. In the galleries, wine and Costco pretzels flowed freely. In the Sunset, a DJ played the Young Canadians’ “(Let’s Go to Fucking) Hawaii” in honor of Canada Day; a neo-burlesque troupe stripped (incompletely but with great skill and spirit); and four bands played. In back of the tattoo parlor, a neo-folk-rock band played tunes reminiscent of the neighborhood’s Nordic heritage. Around the corner at Mr. Spott’s Chai House, an all-female singer-songwriter bill warbled and crooned.
Great times were had by all. There will be further gallery evenings the first Saturday of each month. I can’t promise they’ll be as carefree and wild as this was, but it’s a hopeful start to what might be a renaissance of boho spirits and creative community.
But it’s already changing in the creeping-gentrification manner that often accompanies a neighborhood’s “arrival.” The working-stiff hotels and the industrial storefronts that had coexisted with the hipster joints are being decimated. Already, there’s a trendy day spa and hair salon in the area. And developers have announced plans to demolish the Wilson Ford lot on nearby Leary Way for, you guessed it, luxury condos–complete with a “neo-urban” pedestrian corridor to Ballard Ave.
So enjoy the parties, and the music and art, while you can.
TOMORROW: More de-subbing the suburbs.
YESTERDAY, we began a look at Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project.
Today, a few more thoughts on the building and what it might mean.
7. The commodification of “rebel” images as corporate and safe has reached an apex with architect Frank Gehry’s gargantuan shrine. No longer can rockers, especially Seattle rockers, romantically imagine their milieu as a stronghold of anti-Establishment defiance. (Unless EMP becomes a symbol of everything to be rebelled against (see item 5).)
8. It’s a hallmark of “smooth” industrial design, the same aesthetic principle seen in the New Beetle, the Chrysler PT Cruiser, the iMac, Nike shoes, etc. etc.
Two essays in the July Harper’s (not posted online) discuss this aesthetic as a symbol of global-corporate power and the ascendancy of soft-edgedness in all social endeavors: Mark Kingwell’s “Against Smoothness” and Thomas de Zengotita’s “World World–How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blob.”
9. The opening was almost exactly three months after another Paul Allen-instigated event, the Kingdome implosion.
The latter event took place on the Spring Equinox weekend, that traditional time of new beginnings. The EMP celebration, featuring a Seattle Center-wide weekend of free-to-$140 concerts (several of them quite good, especially Patti Smith’s), took place on the Summer Solstice weekend, that traditional time of celebrating the bounty, the harvest; the time when all is, to quote a title of a certain Seattle songwriter, “in bloom.”
10. The opening ceremony itself, in which Allen smashed a custom glass guitar made by Dale Chihuly, was one of those singular moments encompassing so many references. In this case, it encompassed many aspects of the Seattle baby-boomer fetish culture–Allen’s Microsoft bucks; Chihuly’s eternal cloyingness; and the Seattle white guys’ cult of Hendrix.
11. People still don’t know what to think of the building. One woman told me she thought it was supposed to “represent a heart.” I replied that that couldn’t possibly be so; it would have required Mr. Allen to have been aware, at the project’s outset, of musicians who’d actually lived in Seattle as adults.
But my personal conundrum of what the design’s supposed to represent was finally satisfied by this image of the Monorail tracks entering a strategic opening through the building. (Amazing, the raunchy content that can get into a so-called family newspaper these days.)
12. It’s bound to be a classic tourist trap. See the fish-throwers, Ride the Ducks, eat at the Space Needle, take a ferry boat, do the EMP.
One of these months, I might even go inside the thing myself.
(I did go into the merchandise shop, which you can enter without paying admission to the rest of the place. So far, they’re not selling a certain book that no Seattle music museum merchandise shop should be about. If you go there, you might ask them for it.)
TOMORROW: Reality, what a concept!
IT’S A COUPLE OF DAYS since the massive pre-opening hype and the opening weekend concerts for Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project, and a couple of days before the tape-delayed cablecasts of the concerts show up on MTV and VH1.
So maybe you’ll be able to stand reading a few items about it today:
1. It’s done now. We’re stuck with it. The building was fun to look at while it was going up. Its form and silhouette changed almost daily. But now, it’s in its final shapeless shape. Will it age gracefully into a welcome part of the skyline, or will it become a premature eyesore? (A few observers not bought-and-paid-for by Allen’s PR bucks suggest the latter.)
2. It really is World Class, and that’s one of its biggest problems. Its out-of-scale gaudiness clearly marks it as the product of a town trying too damn hard to prove it had “made it,” too concerned with becoming “New York By-And-By” (The Chinook-jargon translation of “New York-Alki,” Seattle’s original name).
3. We won’t stop hearing about it. Allen sank nearly a quarter-billion into building the thing, but wants the museum to pay back its operating expenses. That means selling annual memberships and bringing casual visitors (local and tourist) over and over. That, in turn, means installing and promoting new attractions (unlike zoo-goers, museum-goers tend not to visit the same old exhibits repeatedly.)
4. Music in Seattle is now a Big Business to stay. EMP’s need to keep itself in the local and national media spotlight means big-name rock and rap stars will be continually trotted out here, at no small expense, to perform or speak at the place or to announce the donation of some collectible trifle. Bigtime concerts and “once in a lifetime” festivals will take place at EMP, or will be sponsored by EMP at other venues, for years to come.
5. Local bands of any degree of street-cred will be regularly “invited” to become shills for EMP (performing at it, appearing at kids’ workshops under its aegis, donating stuff). Will any significant artists (other than Pearl Jam and the Kill Rock Stars label roster) refuse? Will the Seattle Scene be divided into EMP-Friendly and EMP-Unfriendly camps?
6. Rock music is a corporate institution, as if all the previous evidence of this fact (Hard Rock Cafes, House of Blues, Rolling Stone, MTV, the Grammies, Mr. Allen’s former ownership of Ticketmaster, the record industry’s suit to kill Napster, the use of James Brown songs to sell laxatives) hadn’t convinced you.
(A lesson in rock as big business: The reason EMP exists in its present form was because Allen was thwarted in his original scheme to create a “Jimi Hendrix Museum,” honoring the rock god of all Seattle white baby boomers (who himself left Seattle promptly after turning 18, only came back on tour, and told everybody how much he hated it).
Seems Allen had helped the Hendrix family pay for its umpteen-year suit to get back the rights to his music. In return, Allen only wanted the right to create a Hendrix Museum–and, he later decided, the right to control all rights to Hendrix’s music, name, and image for the next 100 years. The family decided to part ways with Allen.)
IN OTHER NEWS: The locally-based Home Grocer is combining with a similar grocery-delivery operation, Webvan. Webvan’s actually a smaller company than Home Grocer, operating in fewer metro areas. But one of those areas is San Francisco, which means Webvan is regularly covered as “the” Net grocery company by those ever so Frisco-centric computer news outlets. Hence, the Webvan name’s far better known than Home Grocer among investors; so that’s the name (and the management team) that will survive the merger.
EVEN IF THE DOT-COM STOCKS all go phhhhht, as some have threatened to do of late, we’ll still be left with an urban landscape shaped by high-tech bucks and high-tech aesthetics.
We’ve already discussed many of Paul Allen’s pet projects (and will do so again tomorrow.) But for today, here’s a glance at a couple of other buildings redone for tech people’s work and/or play, and some other buildings near them.
Pier 70, now reopened for dot-com offices and a swank restaurant, was one of the central waterfront’s first shipping piers, and one of the first to be coverted to non-cargo uses. In the ’70s, the Pier 70 bar and disco (known in its final mid-’90s incarnation as the Iguana Cantina) was the site for leisure-suited guys to attempt the polyester rub-across with lime-green-dressed gals. But the touristy mall lost ground to retail-and-restaurant sites further south on the waterfront. MTV’s ‘The Real World’ got to use a large part of the pier because it would soon be closed for remodeling.
Shakey’s Pizza Parlor and Ye Public House was a circuit of some 300 family pizza restaurants that dotted the west from the early ’60s until 1991. Besides the pies and pitchers of beer, it was known for piped-in “rinky-dink” piano music, pseudo-rustic decor, and supposedly hand-lettered wooden signs inside (“Shakey made a deal with the bank. Shakey doesn’t cash checks, the bank doesn’t make pizza.”) The restaurants’ looks were modernized in the ’80s, but even that couldn’t help the chain survive industry turmoils and shakeouts. Many ex-Shakey’s sites (identifiable by the shield signs) survive as independent restaurants, including RC’s on the Seattle waterfront.
The long waterfront building known today as the Seattle Trade and Technology Center (housing Real Networks, Discover U, and part of the Art Institute of Seattle) was originally an American Can Co. factory. Kids on their way to a birthday meal at the Old Spaghetti Factory up the street would often stop and stare at a skybridge connecting the can plant with a pier across Alaskan Way. You could see unlabeled steel cans on a conveyor belt, traveling single file on their way to being boxed up and shipped to food and beverage processors.
The Edgewater Inn, where you once could “Fish From Your Window,” was built as part of a local hotel-building boom in preparation for the 1962 World’s Fair. The Edgewater first gained a “rocker hotel” reputation when the Beatles stayed there in ’65. This rep was cemented in the early ’70s as the setting of the Zappa song “Mudshark,” relating the raunchy tale of a fish and a Led Zeppelin groupie. Its neon, block-letter “E” was a waterfront landmark for more than three decades, until new owners replaced it with this fancy, “upscale” revision.
The Ace Hotel opened in early 1999 with management vowing to make it THE place for visiting rock musicians to stay. (The hoteliers’ own musical tastes, if its opening-night party was any indication, tend not toward rock but to thumpa-thumpa DJ music.) The building originally housed a soft-drink bottler; that’s why the side has faded dual 7 Up and Pepsi billboards. Later tenants included a costume shop, a home-neon-lights store, and the Seattle Peniel Mission (which helped ex-cons re-enter society and stay out of the slammer). The mission luckily owned an interest in the building; so when the building was upscaled, the mission got some decent relocation money in the deal.
TOMORROW: A review of the Experience Music Project PR hype.
