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ANOTHER YEAR, another MISCmedia anniversary party, another in-person questionnaire.
Here, in no particular order, are a few highlights of the two dozen or so responses filled in by attendees at last Thursday night’s big event at the Ditto Tavern:
Favorite food/drink:
Favorite store:
Favorite website:
Favorite catch phrase:
What I’d like on the MISCmedia website:
What I’d like in MISCmedia magazine:
The chief legacy of the WTO protests:
What should happen to Microsoft:
The Experience Music Project building books like:
What this town needs (other than construction projects):
If this region has so much wealth, why can’t we…:
TOMORROW: Short stuff, including that other monopolistic company Paul Allen used to be involved in.
ELSEWHERE:
AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.
BILL GATES MAY DICTATE Seattle’s currently ascendant “Attitude” problem.
But it’s Gates’s ex-partner, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, who’s been remaking the city’s look–whether we like it or not.
Allen’s projects have been the subject of three public votes. Two of them, about the Seattle Commons scheme, led to citywide “no” votes against building a big city park in the middle of industrial land he wanted to turn into condos. (He’s going ahead with the condo-izations anyway.) The third vote, on public subsidies for his Kingdome-replacing football stadium, was a statewide plebescite in which “no” votes in Seattle (and Eastern Washington) were outnumbered by “yes” votes in the ‘burbs.
An NY Times piece a couple weeks ago (no longer on the paper’s website, except for a $2.50 fee) spent 1,600 words doting on how Allen, “who bounces around from being the second- to the fourth-richest person on the planet,” is plopping one “world class” structure down after another throughout the greater downtown Seattle area (the Union Station remodel and its adjacent new office buildings, the Cinerama Theater restoration, the waterfront sculpture park) and the UW campus (the Suzallo Library and Henry Gallery additions).
And in three weeks (by which time Allen’s Portland Trailblazers will have either won or lost the National Basketball Association championship), Allen’s most expensive and monumental structure opens–the Experience Music Project.
Known unofficially in its early planning stages as “the Jimi Hendrix museum” (before Allen and the Hendrix estate parted ways), EMP remains a quarter-billion-buck tribute to Allen’s love of the rock guitarist who left Seattle at 18, and subsequently and repeatedly expressed his disdain for it; only to get posthumously enshrined as the favorite “local musician” of a generation of modern-day geek Medicis.
One could talk about how such a huge sum of dough could’ve been used to build housing and/or transportation solutions, support more street-level arts projects, or save any number of development-threatened properties in town and in the exurbs.
But that’s moot now. Allen wanted to do this. If he hadn’t wanted to do this, he would most likely have instead put that money into his software and cable-TV investment portfolio.
EMP is here. And it will attract tourists, employ people, provide a locus for regional public-school music-ed programs (those that haven’t been destroyed totally by budget cuts), and give some support, publicity, and occasional gigs to living area musicians.
And it gives pundits such as myself plenty of sarcastic-remark fodder.
(My own current idea of what it looks like: A belly dancer lying on her side.)
TOMORROW: Why the Seattle International Film Festival was, and is, the pre-Microsoft Seattle’s favorite “arts” event.
BEFORE TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It’s tonight at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
IT TOOK THE P-I to point out one of those startling bookends-O-history:
“Mount St. Helens blew at exactly 8:32 a.m., on a Sunday. Nearly 20 years later, the Kingdome was imploded at 8:32 a.m., on a Sunday.
“Coincidence?”
Actually, even if the eerie time synchronicity hadn’t happened, I’d have thought of St. Helens and the Dome as the defining boom-booms of the late-modern PacNW.
St. Helens killed 57 people, thousands of trees, and dozens of old codger Harry Truman’s cats, and disrupted thousands of folks’ routines. The Kingdome only killed two ceiling-tile workers, who had a construction-crane accident a couple years before it was deemed unworthy of continued existence.
The pre-blast St. Helens was considered by most a jewel of a peak. The pre-blast Kingtome was considered by many an eyesore.
But both blasts were popular spectacles that generated marathon TV coverage, souvenir sales, and “where were you when…?” popular memories.
In 1980, a spectacular natural “disaster” was about what it took to get the Evergreen State on the network news. (The eruption didn’t make the top of the NY Times front page for two days; the paper being otherwise occupied covering Miami race riots.)
In 2000, hardly a week goes by without big headlines about Microsoft, Starbucks, police brutality, or gypsy moths.
But the near-universal thrill at watching the Dome go kablooey proves we haven’t lost our ability to find wonder and thrills in the sights and sounds of mass-scale destruction.
P.S.: I can never get tired of reruns of the TV footage of St. Helens.
For one thing, despite having been five years into the era of minicams and even home VCRs, and despite the weeks of warnings and buildup on the mountain, the only real footage of the blast itself came from a still photographer who simply hand-forwarded his film as fast as he could.
For another thing, it was one of the last domestic TV news events at least partly covered with 16mm film cameras, rather than live video feeds. To folks my age and up to 10 years older, the scratchy, dark, washed-outy look of 16mm reversal film will always signify scruffy, raw news footage (or the exterior scenes of British miniseries that were otherwise shot in brightly-lit studios on video).
I find myself having to tell Those Kids Today that there was a time when prime-time news promos really did say “Film at 11,” and when local newscasts weren’t burdened by endless, uninformative, live “standup” chats with reporters on the scene of something that had ended hours before.
TOMORROW: Those annoying “My __” websites.
BEFORE TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It’s Thursday, 5/18 (20 years after the Big Boom) at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
AFTER AN HOUR of watching architect Rem Koolhaas’s slide presentation at Benaroya Hall on 5/3, I finally figured out the dual schemes behind Koolhaas’s design for the new Seattle library:
(1) It’s a giant, 15-story, uneven, vertical pile of books. (Imagine the stack of law books in the Perry Mason closing credits)
(2) It’s also the linear, angular, rational counterpart to the Experience Music Project’s touchy-feely curves and textures.
Seattle’s a town where yang-oriented geeks and eggheads have long been prized (Boeing engineers, software coders, biotech researchers). But it’s also a town where more yin-ish salespeople and dealmakers have brought the real money in.
The new library and EMP, while situated some two miles apart from one another, will provide a balanced tribute to both sides of the city’s character.
I could bore you with rundowns of how Koolhaas (yes, it’s pronounced “cool-house”) discussed the building’s schemes for foot-traffic flow, seizmic safety, natural-light bringing-in, computer access, balance between public-gathering and info-storage functions, and ability to handle expanded multimedia collections. But if you’re anything like most of the packed Benaroya audience, you want to know about two particular aspects of the design:
(1) The translucent floors on certain levels won’t be so see-thru that enterprising Net-entrepreneurs could use them in making “upskirt” image sites.
(2) And the spiraling central corridor of book stacks (officially devised not as a tribute to the labyrintian monastic library in The Name of the Rose but to allow “the uninterrupted flow” of the Dewey Decimal system) won’t be too steep for either wheelchairs or employees’ carts, Koolhaas insists. It’ll just be a gentle four-percent grade, much easier to handle than the steep 20-percent-grade Benaroya Hall aisles (or the spiraling galleries at NYC’s Guggenheim Muesum).
Koolhaas tried to prove his point with still photos of a full-size mockup of the sloping stacks, built on short notice by the Seattle Opera scene shop. The photos showed humans and wheeled devices ascending and descending and stopping on the ramped floor with ease.
You might be able to make your own test; the mockup might be installed for a couple days or so at the current downtown library later this month. If that happens, you might even be able to give it the real test–how well it allows for the descent of marbles, Hot Wheels cars, and Slinkys.
CORRECTION OF THE WEEK (Tom Heald at TV Barn: “A few weeks ago this column may have implied that pop stars Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears may not be ‘naturally curvy.’ What I meant to say is that they are untalented. I regret possibly offending their fans.”
TOMORROW: You don’t have to be a Republican to be tired of demographic-butt-kissing paeans to the Sixties Generation.
(NOTE: YESTERDAY AND TODAY, we’re running excerpts from “Tropisms,” a slide lecture given in March at Richard Hugo House by Matthew Stadler, author of the novels Allan Stein and The Sex Offender.)
BY THE 1960s, one highway was insufficient and a ring-road was proposed to save downtown.
The Monson Plan, 1963. Inspired by Le Corbusier’s ideal of a Radiant City, Seattle planned a ring-road and high rises to clear out open space in the downtown.
Four parking reservoirs, one at each corner of the ring (capacity, 13,000). Entire reconstruction of the waterfront, including the elimination of the Pike Place Market. A new government center. Leveling of Pioneer Square with slab towers to be built in the cleared open space. And more!
The battle of competing visions was carried out not only through bureaucracies and debate, but also through drawings. Most of the plans we’ve been looking at are just powerful drawings–political tools.
A professor of architecture at the UW, Victor Steinbrueck, published his own vision of Seattle, Seattle Cityscape (1961), just before Monson became a public plan. These competing visions could not have been more starkly realized:
SLIDE: MONSON PLAN SMITH TOWER BIRD’S-EYE VIEW
The Monson Plan.
SLIDE: STEINBRUECK SMITH TOWER STREET SCENE
Steinbrueck has taken us down to ground level–now we’re pedestrians, not planners; we live here, not lord over here.
Steinbrueck asserts so much with these drawings–with his style of densely overlapping lines he asserts that the urban fabric is so tightly, intricately woven that no one part of it can be removed without damaging the whole; he asserts this is a place of hidden, obscured lives, into which we may project/find our own fantasies and meanings.
Steinbrueck’s drawings were as powerful, even successful, a projection of the private imagination into civic realities as were the Monson drawings, or any of R.H. Thomson’s less delicate or graceful projections.
SLIDE: MONSON PLAN, OVERVIEW
The Monson plan was funded by the city in collaboration with the downtown business group, the Seattle Central Association. It was received enthusiastically by the Times, which helped argue for the $225 million in public money that was being asked to fill out the $575 million budget.
Within a few months, opposition news began appearing in the Times’s back pages.
Finally, the news (in Seattle, the equivalent of an obituary) of the decision to defer and “make a study.” (Headline: “Central Plan Foes Win Partial Victory”).
This process helped catalyze the ideology and infrastructure of preservation in Seattle: Allied Arts. Save the Market.
Also, drawing styles changed; so even the pro-Monson reports of the Urban Design Commission in the mid-’70s feature Steinbrueck-style populist street scenes.
By the late ’60s and early ’70s, both consciousness and practice in the city were well prepared to resist proposals such as John Graham’s 1966 proposed renovation of Pioneer Square.
The meaningful give-and-take that determined the place and impact of these projects–themselves the product of many private visions colliding–was as much effected by forms such as drawing, public speaking, even party-going, as they were by government and city planners.
There are no clean dividing lines between “real” projects and the fantasies from which action springs. Victor Steinbrueck’s drawings are merely different in scale or degree from R.H. Thomson’s regrades–they are not different in kind.
Built projects can also be graceful, leaving a delicate trace, nimble, and mutable in the hands or minds of the present:
SLIDE: A.Y.P. AT NIGHT
Buildings from the Alaska-Yukon Exposition stayed with us (the architecture building on UW campus is the only structure still remaining, other than the Drumheller Fountain); the images have also persisted.
Even real buildings can function the way I think fictions and drawings do–flexible, intimate yet autonomous, available to each of us to be made or remade into meaning.
SLIDE: SEATTLE TOWER BUILDING IN FOG, WITH MT. RAINIER IN BACKGROUND
Notice how this most-beautiful, most flexible and graceful of the city’s buildings pays its respects to the humbling forms around it, the enormous ones on the horizon.
And, most astonishing of all, this vision is real, material, built here in this city, yet as it stands is as unreal and available as a novel or a dream of the city.
All our projections of the private imagination into the civic space should be so graceful.
TOMORROW: Yet another doomed cool place.
Dreaming the City
by guest columnist Matthew Stadler
(NOTE: Today and tomorrow, we’re running excerpts from a slide lecture given in March at Richard Hugo House by Matthew Stadler, author of the novels Allan Stein and The Sex Offender.)
EMMETT WAHLMAN proposed a salmon stream in 1977.
The stream would leave Volunteer Park, traverse south across Capitol Hill to Denny Way where it would turn west and cross the freeway into downtown, then run along Pine, forming a half-dozen pools between Fourth and Sixth on Pine, before turning north and running along Westlake to empty into Lake Union.
Emmett was a city engineer in Seattle in the ’60s and ’70s. Reached by phone in Hawaii, he told me he couldn’t recall exactly when the idea occurred to him.
He said, “These things pop into your mind, all sorts of things are just popping and popping all the time, they keep bombarding you like Nissans. There’s just no shortage of them, is there? But I wanted my idea to have validity.”
Emmett talked about his idea. He sketched plans. He asked his friend, city engineer Paul Wiatrik, to asses its viability. He sought support from the city’s Department of Community Development.
“Working as a field engineer gave me some insight into what we are disrupting with these suggestions; you’re tearing right into the heartbeat of the city.”
This movement from ‘ideas popping and popping’ to engagement with civic discourse and its matrix of “validity” seems to me a fundamental challenge, even duty, of every city dweller.
It is in fact the founding act of our city—this projection of a private vision into civic space.
Faced with this:
SLIDE: TREES
Settlers saw this:
SLIDE: 1850s DOWNTOWN PLAT
And they drew it. Astonishing! Heroic!
SLIDE: SEATTLE PLAN, 1855
Already the purity of vision has been diluted by the demands of the civic space. Notice how competing [street] grids are made to co-habitate. The city grew, events continued apace.
SLIDE 6: BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF 1890 SEATTLE
A truly fabulous metropolis.
By the 1890s, fabulation and projection insinuated themselves into the built environment. Where before, faced with trees men saw grids, now presenting a city, they sketched fantasies.
The cityscape itself had now become the ground for fantasies such as Sullivan’s Opera House, and a courthouse.
SLIDE 7: SULLIVAN OPERA HOUSE
The Seattle Opera House, as Louis Sullivan designed it in 1890, to be built at Second and University, the current site of a different concert hall entirely. This plan shocked me because I had once imagined so grand an opera house, years ago—as an indispensible part of my fictional Seattle—I had written it [in the novel The Sex Offender], never knowing the plan of this grand opera house had been real (and a failure) rather than made up (and a great success).
I was further astonished (while reading the self-published memoirs of Henry Broderick, real estate giant) to find a photograph of this fantasy, Seattle’s Grand Opera House (with the attendant throngs that I had thought were simply my outlandish fiction) built and standing in our city at the corner of Second and Cherry (admittedly less grand than Sullivan’s or my conception, but still).
SLIDE: CORT’S OPERA HOUSE
Such a scene had been caught on film featuring throngs of men pressing against the doors.
So the city and its exaggerated throngs had been real! But then, what’s this, the photo itself was a sham, the throngs, indeed great swaths of the very faÂade, had been painted in by amateur hands!
This real opera house was itself the wishful fantasy of some past booster imagining a more glorious city than the one he truly occupied.
And this dizzying vertigo was typical of my encounter with the intersection of the private imagination and our civic realities.
SLIDE: SULLIVAN OPERA HOUSE FLOOR PLAN
Back to Louis Sullivan. The proposed building had a 1,200-seat auditorium, apartments and offices, and was budgeted at $325,000 (with the land costing an additional $300,000). By November 1890 the site had been cleared and construction was about to begin when a bank in England failed, and the money for the opera house dried up, but not soon enough to keep it off the attractive Bird’s Eye View maps city leaders distributed alongside brochures advertising this future metropolis to target markets in the Midwest and East.
As archivist and historian Dennis Andersen remarked, “What’s the difference between real and projected? The city was nine-parts plans and intentions, and these are what they advertised.”
The legal obligation of homesteaders in the American West was to clear and work the land—one did not own it until one worked upon it.
One thing the West promised was malleability. So there was an abundance of ideas and not much shyness about visions. The city’s evolution was powered by this promiscuous engine. On to every hill and valley, slide and swamp, private visions were projected, and sometimes realized.
Which made for conflicting visions.
SLIDE : WASHINGTON HOTEL ON DENNY DEGRADE
I find these competing visions equally beguiling: the fantasy of a grand European-style hotel and that of a port city of gently sloping hills.
What a delight to see the one fantasy trapped in the embrace of the other! James Moore, who owned the hotel, would not accede to the plan of R.H. Thomson, city engineer in charge of regarding, until after a long battle of wills.
SLIDE: WASTELAND OF REGRADE
Thomson was a very focused man with little room left between vision and action. His memoir is a straightforward, common-sense read, revealing a practical man whose field of action was unusually large.
Maybe Thomson’s greatest strength was his imperviousness to questions of scale. Judging from his archive and memoir, he doesn’t seem to have seen much of a difference between a hangnail and a 300-foot hill. He saw obstacles and removed them.
In the Denny Regrade the results look a little like the founding fantasy, though now the abstract geometry was real, while the fantasy to be projected on it was more hodge-podge.
SLIDE 18: BIRD’S-EYE REGRADE DRAWING
The cleared “real” land–now an abstract geometry–made a fresh canvas for the painting of visions and fantasies.
The abstract grid had been drawn with real dirt and earth; while the rich future “ecology” of the city became a pencil-drawn fantasy.
It was, thus, impossible to locate a “real” Seattle landscape separate from the projection of fantasy.
SLIDE: BOGUE’S PLAN VIEW
Despite the founding fantasy of the American grid, planners including Thomson and Virgil Bogue (of the 1910 Bogue Plan) studied European cities with their broad boulevards and plazas, to shape visions of our future city.
Thomson also imagined a subway and rail system for the city. Like most Seattle subway plans (Luther Griffith’s in 1907, A.H. Dimock’s in 1920, Carl Revves’s in 1926, D.W. Henderson’s and the DeLeuw Cather designs for Forward Thrust in the 60s and 70s) Thomson ran his main downtown line under Third Avenue. The central station was to be built at Riverside. Thomson’s plan, which included a region-wide rail system and the downtown subways, was budgeted at $1.3 million.
The Washington State Arts Association was going to build this state-of-the-art convention center to establish Seattle’s supremacy once and for all, in 1911. I am reminded of the dire promise, just a few years later, that the machine gun, recently developed, would be the unmatchable weapon that would end all wars.
Just last Friday, I watched an army of welders work on our Star Wars-scale convention center, which will surely establish Seattle’s supremacy, at least over San Diego.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
Stadium Blackmail, Tacoma-Style
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist wrote about Safeco Field, that tax-subsidized sports palace where the most expensive seats can be among the worst. Today, he contrasts that with the supposedly more populist ideal of the minor leagues.)
RATHER THAN BROOD like a nowhere man, I try to be a good citizen of the contemporary sports utopia.
But then, I’ve always been a sucker for outdoor baseball.
A cloudy forecast sent me to Tacoma the weekend the Yankees were in Seattle, because I’d rather spend hours in the rain than any time sitting inside a domed stadium because of a mere threat of rain.
Unfortunately, but predictably, Triple-A baseball in Tacoma is threatened by a series of factors, some of which are all wet. The Tacoma Rainiers, owned by chicken mogul George Foster of northern California, demanded $22 million from the city last winter for stadium improvements (i.e., luxury boxes).
Then, as if to facilitate an exit strategy for the 40-year-old franchise, the Pacific Coast League gave them more weekend games in April and May than in August (one weekend series).
Since Foster bought the team from a Tacoma group put together by ex-GM Stan Naccarato, he had taken some drastic and initially effective measures to deal with the utopian math of minor league attendance figures, where giveaways inflate totals but, nonetheless, fill the park with thirsty and hungry fans. He cut back on freebies and created an “on-deck club,” doling out special perks to the country-club set.
But how do you sell luxury boxes in a town that’s 35 miles away from a stadium that, except for the luxury boxes, exudes luxury? Tacoma big shots might rather spend a few thousand bucks on a season ticket plan in Seattle.
And why spend $5 to get into Cheney Stadium when that’ll get you into a Mariner game? Last year the Rainiers appeared to fall back into the Tacoma Tiger policy of having a lot of free ticket promotions. Beer is cheaper in Cheney ($4.75 for a big Grants vs. about that much for a 12-oz. Bud in the bigs), but smuggling food is legal in Seattle’s taxpayer park and allegedly illegal in Tacoma’s.
Other than that, there’s Tightwad Hill, looming over the right field wall, offering the ultimate utopia for the outdoor baseball fan, a place to smoke cigars and drink cheap beer for free.
Ballparks age, die, and get razed or imploded. Somebody has to pay for all of this destruction. Why shouldn’t it be you?
If Paul Allen buys a special election to build one football stadium on the contingency of annihilating of another one, rather than denounce this as a travesty of democracy, maybe we should appreciate the civics lesson.
It doesn’t matter that he spent more money than anyone ever did on an election, or that the people in Seattle voted against his scheme. He won.
And in the utopia of sports, winning is everything.
MONDAY: For May Day, a piece on the Way-New Left.
Dream of Fields
NOWHERE DO I FIND the notion of utopia more tantalizing than in sports.
Stadiums get demolished and built, in defiance of the voters they are supposed to benefit and with subsidies for rich team owners who actually benefit from these glorified playpens.
The teams that play in the stadiums may enjoy a storybook history of heroes as well as a corporate history of business leaders who pull together when the going gets tough in order to provide a venue for an All-American pastime; but these enterprises are also masters of illusion, promising only a vicarious thrill of victory for fans who would be identified with winners.
Then there’s the side show of teams selling stadium naming rights to sponsors (who pay a fraction of the cost the public pays for the building and maintenance of the stadium)–sponsors whose dot-comic monikers often defy recognition, but whose cheap advertising is nevertheless slavishly echoed by sportscasters and even by people who don’t get paid to lie.
This is a national trend, but Seattle is leader in the clubhouse, thanks to record construction costs, public payments, and game attendance costs of the Mariner stadium.
Except in San Francisco, where a string of defeats on election day effectively called the bluff of the Giants and forced them to find their own investors for the new park, public will seems powerless to resist the way to build a public facility for private industry. Even cities in small markets with deteriorating attendance figures (Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Detroit) legislators finagle deals to please team owners, lending hope to truly hopeless markets (Montreal) that they, too, can win simply by building.
The pathetic examples in Tampa, Miami, and Chicago miss the cut when promoters talk stadium, as they sensibly focus on Baltimore and Cleveland. And we may pretend to separate Church and State in our one nation under God, but woe to anyone who might suggest that football and baseball be forced to share the same facility.
Pantywaist Park: While it remains to be seen how the Mariners will sell tickets with Griffey gone and Rodriguez on the threshold, consider the utopia of a retractable dome stadium. Supposedly the solution of all possible weather problems, the retractable dome has become a dome with a vengeance, closing whenever there’s the slightest fear of rain.
Then there’s the utopian meteorological phenomenon that occurs only in Seattle: Closing the roof of the unheated stadium makes the field 10-15 degrees warmer (according to the sensitive ballplayers).
Weather or not, another aspect of the new Mariner stadium defies expectation: The best seats in the house are the worst.
The luxury boxes offer a season in hell, from their inner living room with all the comforts of a Holiday Inn to their outer seating area with a dome-like overhang that aggressively funnels every last in-house TV commercial to the people with the money.
The cheap seats, in terrific (and dystopic) contrast, are great–but only if you don’t sit down. Buy a $5 ticket and roam around the upper regions of the center field bleachers, pity the rich, and finally get something for your tax dollars.
TOMORROW: This continues with stadium blackmail, Tacoma style.
SOME SHORTS TODAY:
THE MAY ISSUE of the MISCmedia print magazine may be delayed a week or so, for reasons to be discussed later. (I’m feeling fine and everything; just job and personal complications have taken their time toll.)
THE FOLLOWING is the actual text of the story in the bottom-left corner of the Seattle Times front page on Sunday, 4/16, under the headline, “In Europe’s eyes, America becomes uglier and uglier”:
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Newspaper
This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading. It should be replaced with the real story. You now have 1 inch of standard body copy. 1 inch.
This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading with standard tracking, hyphenation and justification.
It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 2 inches of standard body copy. 2 inches.
It will be replaced with the story when it is ready.
You have 3 inches.
It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 4 inches of standard body copy. 4 inches.
This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading.
With standard tracking, H & J.
It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 5 inches of standard body copy. 5 inches.
This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading with
PLEASE SEE Story slug on Xx
STACKED: More fascinating info keeps emerging about Rem Koolhaas, the “world class” (code word for out-of-state) architect picked to design the new main Seattle library. For one thing, he just got his profession’s top award. Even cooler, the Times reported he once wrote an unproduced screenplay for everybody’s favorite sexploitation filmmaker, Russ Meyer! (I don’t know if it had anything to do with the naked-in-the-library fantasies occasionally reported on with bemusement in the Abada Abada weblog.)
DID YOU FEEL TIRED last Friday? Everyone I met that day said so. At least those who had enough energy to get out of the house. I was in line at Tower Records at 4 p.m. and everybody was yawning.The bars I hopped among were nearly deserted later that evening; folks who should’ve been bouncing and dancing were shuffling and moping instead.Was it just the arrival of cool weather after a week of warm temps, or was it a post-full-moon energy drop, or unconscious Good Friday solemnity?
TOMORROW: Seattle as photo-copyright capital of the world.
HERE ARE SOME MORE visual glances at recycled real estate; this time with an emphasis on the now almost-disappeared middlebrow sector of downtown retail in my town.
Before it moved to its current site in 1928, the Bon Marche had two prior downtown buildings. The first, at First and Cedar, survived until the 1980s. The second, at Second and Pike, became a J.C. Penney from 1930 to 1982 (for many of those years, it was the chain’s largest store). Vacant almost a decade, it was finally razed for a condo tower and indoor mall called Newmark (as in “New Market,” implying the developers hoped to draw shoppers from the nearby Pike Place Market). Newmark’s mall and movie theaters failed; the space was turned into bank offices.
In the middle of the Great Depression, the F.W. Woolworth Co. built what it modestly called “The Wonder Store” at Third and Pike. The two-level emporium offered everything from clothes and jewelry to candy and toys, all at bargain prices. But more than that, its architecture and interior design told its customers they deserved to be welcomed and pampered in a shopping environment just as handsome as those of the “carriage trade” stores for the rich. The Woolworth chain staggered to a final collapse in the mid-’90s; the parent company now calls itself Venator and runs such mall-based stores as Foot Locker. The downtown Woolworth site’s now a Ross Dress for Less.
During the Woolworth chain’s heyday, it had many variety-store rivals. One of the biggest was the S.H. Kress Co., which built many stores across from Woolworth’s bigger outlets–including one at Third and Pike in Seattle, now housing a Sam Goody record store among other tenants. Founder Samuel Kress amassed a huge collection of mideval and baroque-era religious art, which he donated to several museums (including the Seattle Art Museum). The Kress chain was eventually bought by financier Meshulam Riklis (then-husband of singer-actress Pia Zadora), who shut down the stores so he could make more money from the real estate.
Back when Nordstrom was just a shoe store, Rhodes of Seattle advertised itself as “Seattle’s Home-Owned Department Store.” (The long name was meant to differentiate it from the separately-owned Rhodes store in Tacoma.) By the ’60s, it had become part of the M. Lamont Bean family’s local retail empire (Pay ‘n Save Drugs, Ernst Hardware, Pizza Haven, et al.). In the early ’70s, as the Boeing recession struck Seattle and Nordstrom grew into a full-line clothing store, the Beans closed Rhodes’ downtown store (now housing a Kinko’s and a Seattle’s Best Coffee) and renamed its suburban branches “Lamonts” (now owned by others and in financial troubles).
TOMORROW: USA Today turns 18, asserts its adulthood with a style makeover.
TO OUR READERS: There may or may not be an announcement in Wednesday’s online edition, which may or may not affect how the site’s updated later this month.
MADONNA SONGS are rarely part of the “soundtrack of my life” (actually, my life doesn’t have a soundtrack so much as it has a DVD “commentary track,” but that’s a topic for another day).
Yet I couldn’t help but running a Madonna song through my head last Sunday–“This Used to Be My Playground.”
I was at the former art-studio building at 66 Bell, where I wrote my first Misc. column in June 1986 for the old Lincoln Arts Association paper. This was my first time there since the building owner had kicked all the artists out and arranged to have the whole place redeveloped into luxury condos.
It wasn’t ugly (the new interior was still heavily under construction, so it still had that “unfinished” look and didn’t have any pretentious decor-elements yet). But it was still creepy.
What used to be a cheap, funky space for young Caucasian adults who sought creative careers and urban lives, is now going to be an expensive, slick space for young Caucasian adults seeking creative careers and urban lifestyles.
What people like me have been calling the strangulation of the local contemporary-arts subculture has been interpreted by others (including some condo sellers) as the ultimate triumph of the scene’s aesthetic.
These condos are being marketed as artsy experiences for gals ‘n’ guys who always wanted to live the artsy life but who haven’t had the chance (or the fiscally-ruinous compulsion) to try to make a career out of painting/sculpting/designing/writing/acting/music-making.
Instead, a lot of these buyers are in what euphemists sometimes call “the information industry.”
They may design and sell software, engineer computer-networking schematics, set up corporate databases, schlep books for Amazon, or think up PR campaigns for business-to-business e-commerce solution enablers or whatnot. But what they really want, in the condo marketers’ ad fantasies, is to live in the middle of all the artistic stuff.
This pattern has already occurred in several other “artistic neighborhoods” in several other North American cities. By the time enough condos are installed in one of these “artistic neighborhoods,” much of the “artistic stuff” devolves into commercial activities designed to service the condo dwellers–cheese shops, sushi bars, thumpa-thumpa electronica bars.
It’s not that the gentrifiers hate the milieu of struggling artists. They love it. To death.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
If some of the material resources of some of these “artistically minded” info-biz professionals could get ploughed back into the artistic communities that used to reside in some of those buildings, everyone involved might become a little better off.
TOMORROW: A little more of this.
TODAY’S COLUMN IS DEDICATED to that timeless vaudeville comic of the Stiff Records era, Ian Dury.
WATCH THIS SPACE: No sooner had we printed the precarious status of the Frontier Room than rumors spread about potential changes at Belltown’s other remaining old-folks’ drinking house, the venerable Rendezvous.
For the sake of our out-of-town readers, some background: The area surrounding Second Ave. and Battery St. used to be Seattle’s “Film Row,” where the major studios had their regional distribution offices. The Rendezvous restaurant and lounge was built on this block in the ’30s by a company that built and furnished movie theaters. Its back room, a former private screening room where the movie distributors previewed their latest offerings to theater managers, was designed as a miniature version of the auditoria this company designed and supplied.
In recent decades, the Rendezvous has had two simultaneous main uses. The beautiful back room has been a reasonably-priced rental hall for Belltown’s young hipsters to hold birthday parties, film screenings, performance-art pieces, and music shows. (At least three music videos have been shot there.)
The crowded barroom, meanwhile, has proudly served strong cocktails and cans of Rainier beer to merchant seamen, fishing-boat shoreleavers, old-age pensioners, working-class widows, and young adult alkies-in-training. As building after building in Belltown has gotten torn down or upscaled, the Rendezvous is one of the neighborhood’s last remaining unpretentious dive bars.
But for how much longer?
Here’s all we’ve been able to confirm: The building’s been sold. The new landlors have evicted the apartments, band-rehearsal spaces, and bicycle shop, which had all been on month-to-month.
The Rendezvous itself, and the Sound Mail Services private-mailbox service next door, have long-term leases, which will apparently be adhered to for now.
But eventually, rumor-mongers claim, the new landlords would like to assume management of the restaurant-lounge and (yes, that dreaded word arises once more) “restore” it.
As one who’s held public events in the Rendezvous’s classy old meeting room, I’d loathe any changes that would make the pensioners and fishing-boat people less welcome there.
Maybe we could hold a benefit toward keeping the Rendezvous more or less as-is. I’m sure we could get Dodi, the local band named after the Rendezvous’s legendary veteran barmaid, to play at it.
TOMORROW: Boy, we’ve sure got some demographics.
SOME SHORT STUFF TODAY:
WORKIN’ IT: I-Spy, the sanitized-for-your-protection DJ club in the former Weathered Wall space on 5th, has started an ’80s-rock night on Tuesdays called “Raygunomics: An ’80s Experience.” Among the attractions on the event’s premiere week: That recently moderately-popular fad, “New Wave Karaoke.”
I think the concept could be extended even further, into “Seattle Rock Karaoke.” You could have Chris Cornell karaoke, Scott McCaughey karaoke, even Carrie Akre karaoke….
METROPOLITAN LIVING magazine had a good, if superficial, March cover story about our ol’ pal Alex Steffan and his crusade, as current head of the civic-advocacy group Allied Arts, to keep Seattle “funky” and human-scale.
Revealing just the mindset Steffan’s up against was the back cover ad, displaying the rear end of a gaudy Cobra penismobile at the Pike Place Market with the slogan, “Not your average groceries. Not your average grocery getter.” The image defines the Market’s as no longer a funky working-class value venue, but as just another upscale-gourmet-emporium-slash-tourist-trap.
JOHN CARLSON, KV-Lie demagogue and an old personal nemesis of mine, is running for governor. For the past decade, Carlson’s either been the instigator or principal cheerleader for almost every regressive piece of legislation or initiative measure in Washington state. Perhaps a high-profile personal campaign will finally publicly expose just the kind of shallow-but-slick, self-serving operator he really is.
BACKSTAGE MUSIC & VIDEO in Ballard closed in early March. It marks the end of two local-biz institutions. It was the last remnant of what had been the Peaches Records chain. In recent years, it had been owned by the operators of the Backstage music club on the same block, which shut its doors circa ’97.
IN CASE YOU switched from cable to a satellite dish and haven’t been able to watch, the local public access channel has been running in tape-only mode this past fall and winter. The access studio up by 98th & Aurora has been undergoing a much-dragged-out remodel and refitting. This meant, among other things, that many cult-favorite access shows (Bend My Ear Seattle, Don’t Quote Me On This) have been in rerun mode or off altogether, and that lefty journalist-types who wanted to comment on the WTO debacle had to do so in prerecorded fashion; no live reports or studio call-in shows were feasible.
But the city (which is taking over a larger share of control over the channel from AT&T Cable) has announced the access studio will finally reopen to producers. The date, appropriately enough for much of the channel’s fare, is April 1.
TOMORROW: Another cool space in transition.
IN ALL KNOWN TRAVELOGUES about historic U.S. Route 66, the traveler is always driving from Chicago to Los Angeles. Never the other direction.
In books such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld, in the old “Manifest Destiny” ideology, in the legacies of Reagan Republicans and Beverly Hills Democrats, and in the history of the entertainment biz, the movement American economic, political, and cultural activity, of the nation’s overall zeitgeist, inevitably moved in one direction–from Northeast to Southwest.
Everybody who was anybody moved to L.A. or wanted to, as proclaimed in the Go-Gos’ song “Our Town” and the last verse of Don McLean’s “American Pie.”
L.A. was the dominant pop-cultural force of the whole world, and the model of commercial and residential development for the nation, for better or for worse.
Whenever certain folks saw something developing in Seattle they didn’t like, from sprawling subdivisions to traffic jams to cookie-cutter chain stores, they publicly bemoned that Seattle was “becoming another L.A.”
But while nobody up here was noticing, L.A. ceased to be the unchallenged icon of American inevitability.
The region’s aerospace and defense industries have been shrinking, and much of what’s left is now controlled by Boeing.
With the single exception of Disney, all the major Hollywood entertainment giants are now under the thumb of conglomerates based in other cities or other countries. Those highly hyped “new media” outfits are more likely to be situated in northern California, the Northeast, or the Northwest.
Educated young adults across the continent are clamoring to move into “real” neighborhoods and communities, not SoCal-style sprawlsvilles.
The image of a “Southern California Lifestyle” once romanticized in movies like L.A. Story and TV shows like Beverly Hills 90210 has devolved into the more dystopian depictions of Tinseltown seen in Showtime’s Beggers and Choosers (filmed in Canada!).
And we won’t even get into southern California’s increasingly lousy reputations for race relations, education funding, and police corruption.
Among all this bad news, word recently came that Times Mirror, parent company of the L.A. Times, would be merged into the Chicago-based Tribune Company.
The L.A. Times, just like the Chicago Tribune, used to be known as a financially prosprous but editorially weak paper, a mouthpiece for its owners’ right-wing opinions. But both papers learned to get more respectable in recent decades, while their respective parent companies expanded into other media ventures. (The Tribune Co. owns Seattle’s KCPQ-TV and operates KTWB-TV under a management contract.)
Now, Times Mirror (the “Mirror” in the corporate name refers to an L.A. evening paper that died in the ’50s) will fold its papers, TV stations, book companies, and assorted other endeavors under Tribune’s control.
Some commentators have bemoaned the loss of local newspaper ownership as a sign of L.A. “losing its civic identity” (sound familiar?).
Los Angeles used to collectively think of itself as The End of the Line; the inevitable receiving place of all America’s energies and dissemination point for all America’s entertainment. All roads led, like Route 66, to L.A. All eyes and ears were attuned to Hollywood product, as signified by the RKO logo’s radio tower beaming one signal to the world.
It’s not just that L.A.’s not the End of the Line anymore, but that there’s no more “Line.”
TOMORROW: Some short stuff.
A KIND READER, noting my recent obsessions with the changing, increasingly hype-ridden language of business journalism and P.R., advised me to check out Cluetrain, a site which talks about just that–among many other “revolution in business” topics.
The site includes the full text of something called “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” a Martin Luther-esque set of “95 Theses.” It also offers samples from a book the manifesto’s four co-authors are selling.
The book adds details to the manifesto’s arguments that the Net is bringing about “The End of Business As Usual”–not just because of online retail but also because “people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed.”
On the surface, the manifesto writers are proclaiming the imminent decline and fall of corporate gobbledygook and meaningless bureaucratic procedure, in favor of human-scale conversation and systems that make sense.
Dig one level down from that, though, and the “Theses” read like the worst Wired-style bombast. Meet the new hype, same as the old hype.
Like Wired, the manifesto-ists claim their “revolution” is an inevitable, linear, historic course; and that when they call for corporations to change their ways, they’re just helpfully advising these corporations to accept the inevitable or fade into the dustbin-O-history.
(Typical excerpt: “There’s a new conversation between and among your market and your workers. It’s making them smarter and it’s enabling them to discover their human voices. You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and happytalk brochures. Or you can join the conversation.”)
But dig one level beneath that, and you could ascertain at least the faint beginnings of a post-hype order.
Not an inevitable post-hype order, but at least a possible one.
Certainly, a hype-reduced business universe would be welcomed by most people, with the possible exception of those who work at generating the hype (capitalism’s equivalent of the USSR’s old “ministers of ideology”).
Instead of buzzwords like “business-to-business solution paradigms” and “the dynamic realignment of restructured global opportunities,” the folks who sell and buy stuff would have to, or even want to, explain exactly what they’re really doing. If they know.
But, as can be seen in Chechnya and the Balkans, a brutal regime that drops its old ideological excuses doesn’t necessarily become less brutal.
And the regime of Global Business, shorn of Dilbert-esque B.S., would still be the regime of Global Business.
It would still seek profit and/or organizational growth to the neglect of other goals or values. It would stil, to a large extent, view the environment as raw materials, employees as machine tools, and human beings as target markets. It would still do everything it could to merge, consolidate, downsize costs, move industrial work to low-wage countries, and remove any governmental or other impediments to its ambitions.
It would simply do these things honestly and directly.
At least with the old buzzwords, companies admitted they had to disguise some of their ambitions and behaviors under convoluted excuses.
TOMORROW: Even in L.A., they complain about losing their civic identity.
IN OTHER NEWS: The Kingdome implosion, held the week after the spring equinox (the old pagan new year) was everything Carl Smool’s Fire Ceremony, a sort of neo-pagan new year’s ritual (rescheduled to the previous Sunday), had been created for.
It was a huge, populist moment–a dramatic goodbye to the past, a shared big spectacle in the present, and a greeting and/or dreading to the future.
(Indeed, several TV and radio commentators made comments to the effect that this was the millennium celebration Seattle didn’t get in January.)
I was at the Dome’s opening party in ’76. The show wasn’t much, but the feeling was warm and electric. Amid the marching bands and ethnic dance troupes and politicians’ speeches was the sense of civic triumph, of having become a gosh-darn Big League city in our own modest, thrifty way, via a big building best appreciated by structural engineers.
But now, the Brave New Seattle has no room for a homely yet functional multi-purpose room. So, a millennial Destruct-O-Rama brought one more community gathering experience.
And it was damned cool. That dome blowed up real good!
(Dome-TV marathon moment (KIRO anchor Susan Hutchison): “Look; there’s an armored personnel carrier. I feel like we’re back at WTO.”)
