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IT’S THE THIRD AND LAST PART of our look at the LGBT Pride rally/parade. Yesterday we saw the gents; today it’s the ladies.
The Pride festival’s officially all about forthrightly declaring one’s sexuality, no matter what people say.
So I’ll forthrightly declare: I mainly go to Pride to enjoy the presence of the women.
The fact that the women are mostly lesbians (with a few bis and post-op trannies mixed in) matters not one atom.
In my long life, I’ve viewed and adored thousands of women who didn’t want to have sex with me. From this point-O-view, lesbians are merely one subset.
Like a Medieval troubadour toward a lady of the court, my attraction to the Pride Parade lesbians is both defined and enhanced by knowing my desire probably won’t be physically consummated.
Rather, I can only express my admiration and my yearning as artistically as I can, and trust that, at least on some level, these strong women can gratefully accept my highest regard for their faces, their bodies, and their courageous hearts.
Of course, should any one of these women turn out to be bi (or het-curious), and find herself reading this, I would love the chance to channel this high adoration toward a lower plane.
IT’S PART 2 OF 3 of our documentin’ last Sunday’s LGBT Pride Parade.
Today, we separate the boys from the girls, since that’s what gaydom essentially does.
The prime contradiction of the “gender diversity” and gay-rights movements is that they (rightfully) demand society welcome a broader range of gender-types and relationship-types, yet the most common of these uncommon sexualities is that of men who prefer to smooch it up with their fellow men. William Burroughs and other commentators have noted over the years that male-gaydom isn’t a weaker or sissier masculinity but a more exclusive masculinity. It’s manhood uncompromised by the need to live with, or satisfy, women.
Given that, of course, there are still many, many types of man-loving men and man-and-man relationships. I predict that even when (not if) gay-tolerance finally spreads out to the vast suburban and rural stretches of this country, gays will still choose to congregate in the major cities, because only in a large population base (or via net-dating) will a pseudo-Eurotrash fashion victim in search of a leather-bondage cowboy be likely to discover his soulmate.
But then again, bifurcating and bisecting’s what U.S. society seems to be all about these days. We’re (including my own het-self) spinning out into ever-narrower subcultural niches. In this regard, it’s commendable that the Pride people have kept so many queer-culture subsectors involved all these years.
Among these subsectors: Drag afficianados. If we’re to believe the papers, drag-queen performance, on both pro and amateur levels, is significantly less popular than it had been in the ’90s. Still, for those who truly care for the art form, it’s never mattered whether it was considered “in” or “out.”
On his net-radio talk show Sex Life, local “sexpert” Dane Ballard recently discussed why the Pride Parade seems to have become passe to many local gays. You can hear it all here, once the archive file’s been placed online (which should be as early as today).
By the way, ’twas nice that the Seafair Pirates showed up. For some fifty years, the Pirates have represented a just slightly more acceptable image of rowdy male bonding, in a town that’s spent the past century trying to distance itself from its rough-hewn frontier past.
SOME RANDOM STREET IMAGES this Photo Phriday, starting with the lovely statue put up last year atop the former Speakeasy Cafe building (which is otherwise still hardly improved upon since it was gutted by fire nearly three years ago).
THOSE OF YOU who live in easy proximity to downtown Seattle may read the newest incarnation of the print MISC, a column in the monthly Belltown Messenger tabloid. It’s free to pick up at the Two Bells bar, BBC Studio/Ola Wyola Boutique, and several other dropoff points. That column was compiled from items that appeared on this site in the past month or so; any future installments with original material will be posted here.
WITH ONE DAY TO GO in National Novel Writing Month, I’ve posted five more chapters to my successful entry The Myrtle of Venus to this site. As usual, the story starts at this link. The just-posted scenes start at this link.
The final sixteen chapters will be available here sometime within the next week.
…a hopeful mood and awful music.
This morning I experienced a lousy mood and terrific music.
I deliberately stayed away from election-nite coverage, instead watching the surprisingly good Sonics win their fourth straight basketball game. Then I stopped by the new Carpenters’ Hall in Belltown. (The old hall had been razed several years ago for a high-rise condo, incorporating the smaller new union hall.) There, the monorail campaigners held their party. The aforementioned awful music was provided by a lowest-common-denominator “blooze” band, churning out tedious arrangements of the tritest ’60s-nostalgia hits.
(Memo to all campaign organizers: Progressive politics isn’t just for Big Chillers anymore.)
But aside from that, it was a triumphal evening. Asking taxpayers to make a major investment during tuff economic times is always a challenge. (Note the inglorious defeat of the statewide highway levy.) But despite that, and despite the powers-that-be’s smear and scare campaigns, the monorail referendum achieved a solid lead in the polls, pending the late absentees. The city came together to create a better future for itself, in the form of a tourist-friendly commuter system (or a commuter-friendly tourist attraction).
Then in the morning came the horrible news. The GOP goon squad held onto the U.S. House and had regained at least a tie in the Senate. This means the Consitution-busters, the domestic enemies of freedom, have a rubber-stamp Congress to pass any roughshod legislation, appoint any crook, and give away the whole country to the billionaires.
Of course, the Democrats hadn’t provided much of a hindrance to these schemes anyway. Maybe this second-straight electoral debacle will, once and for all, finally discredit the Democratic Leadership Council and its Right Lite policy of subjugation.
The terrific music that cheered me up today came from the previously discredited Trio cable channel. This morning it showed one of the hundreds of British music shows in its library. This particular hour compiled old performance footage by scads of early punk legends (Sex Pistols, Clash, Jam, Iggy, Siouxsie, Joy Division, Buzzcocks, Undertones). It all cheered me up immensely.
You have every right to ask why I’d frown at 1967 nostalgia music but grin at 1977 nostalgia music. Well, there’s a reason. The band at the monorail party interpreted old Beatles and Stones numbers into slowed-down, dumbed-down exercises in collective self-congratulation. The live performances in the punk documentary were brisk, brash statements of mass resistance. The Thatcher and Reagan regimes (like the Bush regime today, only slightly less stupidly) were on jugggernauts to redistribute wealth upward, to spread war and poverty, to make the world safe for corporate graft. Punk rock, at its best, was one big loud defiant NO! to the whole reactionary worldview.
(Progressive politics isn’t just for slam-dancers anymore either. But punk’s classic note of rejecting the given situation, and creating/demanding a more human-scale world, is something we could all use a lot more of now.)
DIDN’T MENTION IT HERE yet, but The Stranger has indeed run a feature-piece by me. It concerns the (slight but extant) possibility of a revival of hipness in Belltown.
A BASTION FALLS: Beginning today, the Wall St. Journal introduces a loud new graphic design featuring bigger headlines, more white space, and color every which where. It’s as much a symbol as anything we’ve seen that the business community (and, by extension, business journalism) doesn’t want to be perceived as having stodginess, solidness, continuity, reliability, trustworthiness, confidence, or understated good taste. Everything’s gotta be NOW-NOW-NOW, POW-POW-POW, all hustle and jive and hard sell.
I’ve long disagreed with almost everything written on the WSJ editorial pages; but I felt I could trust the accuracy of the matter on its news pages. Its front page had always been a form-following-function endeavor–three columns of news briefs (one on a topic that rotated throughout the week), two major news stories, and one well-written light feature. This page-one layout only changed on days when there was real, real big news (Pearl Harbor, 9/11). Now, it’s changed permanently, and will likely change from day to day.
To summarize: The old WSJ was like the reliable, grey-suited neighborhood banker who offered low-key, sensible advice on providing for one’s loved ones. The new WSJ is more like the boiler-room office that spews forth telemarketing cold calls about the latest sure-to-exponentially-rise-to-the-stratosphere tech-company IPO.
A wake was held Sunday afternoon at the Two Bells Tavern for its longtime owner Patricia Ryan, who’d died of lung cancer one week previous. To get to the memorial, one had to traverse the Fourth Avenue sidewalks past the triumphant participants in a breast cancer walkathon. Once inside the event, of course, the cigarettes flowed like pre-dam spawning salmon.
The happening itself was, as expected, a mixture of pathos, celebration, and reminiscence. The bar and its back-alley beer garden were full with Ryan’s family and friends, and with Two Bells employees and regulars past and present. Ryan’s widower Rolon Bert Garner was in relatively good spirits most of the time; he and several close friends and coworkers offered brief, touching remarks.
(‘Twas truly great to see so many old faces again. Let’s hope it can happen again under less unfortunate circumstances.)
Ryan’s legacy, of course, is the Bells, which has (thus far) survived under new owners in the midst of Belltown’s ongoing Monoculture takeover.
One of Ryan’s original ingredients for success, according to several of the speakers at her memorial, was that she continued to make the old regulars welcome after she’d bought the place in ’82. A lesson we hope will be heeded by the nearby Rendezvous’s purported incoming new operators.
IT’S CRUTCH WEEK IN SEATTLE! The downtown streets are filled with normally self-ambulant d00dz & d00dettez (you can tell from their inept, inexperienced limps) hobbling along with leg casts, canes, etc. One can only presume something in the early-summer air got ’em all to try risky, untrained-for athletic maneuvers.
ONE MORE PROBLEM WITH BELLTOWN THESE DAYS: The once-hip neighborhood has all these $100-a-plate foodie restaurants, but no decent bar at which to watch TV sports in the company of one’s fellow sedentary sports fans. Mr. McAlpern, please do something about this.
HAD A LONG TALK the other morning with someone from a prominent local commercial publishing co. about my aforementioned book project. The talks were productive, but I’ve still some persuading to do.
ON OTHER SITES:
Corporate charity-giving as a brand-building strategy.
Not only does eBay have an eternally entertaining “Weird Stuff” section, but it’s now subdivided into “General,” “Slightly Unusual,” “Really Weird,” and (if you dare!) “Totally Bizarre….”
ALL WEEK LONG, we’ve been preparing for the huge MISCmedia 15th Anniversary gala (June 2, mark your calendars now), with pieces of the art show that’ll be part of it–randomly-ordered pix of every home yr. web-mate’s ever lived in. Today, the last such installment for now.
#20: Ellis Court, 2510 Western Ave. A clean, decent, well-maintained studio apartment in a building protected from excess rent inflation. Occupied September 1991-August 2000.
It was a moderate-income building, originally built so the developer could get permission to condo-convert some other existing building. It had been a druggie haven before I’d moved in; but within weeks of my arrival, half the units on my floor were sporting door-posted eviction notices. That didn’t stop guys from buzzing my door buzzer all night long, looking for whoever had preceded me.
Other things that happened in September 1991: Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten were released, KNDD went on the air, and the first Stranger came out. I saw all of these as vindications of my long-held aesthetic convictions.
Months after I moved in, the building was taken over by the semi-subsidized Housing Resources Group. This meant in the nine years I lived in Belltown, my rent rose 20 percent while that of the tenants in most nearby buildings at least doubled.
Things that left Belltown in those years: The Dog House and (original) Cyclops restaurants, the SCUD and 66 Bell art studios, The Rocket, the Belltown Dispatch.
Things that showed up in Belltown in those years: The Crocodile, Sit & Spin, the (new) Cyclops, the Speakeasy, the Lava Lounge, Shorty’s, dozens of restaurants I couldn’t afford, hundreds of condos I couldn’t afford (including new buildings on both sides of Ellis Court).
Things that showed up in Belltown and later left: The Weathered Wall, the Center on Contemporary Art, assorted dot-com and day-trading offices.
Weeks after I left, Ellis Court was subjected to a thorough structural reworking, including the removal of all exterior surfaces for replacement with less-leaky materials. The project is still underway at the time I write this. (Yes, I still didn’t get my cleaning deposit back.)
NEXT: Tulipomania redux.
ELSEWHERE:
Police Action
by guest columnist Sky Callahan
AT ABOUT 8:30 P.M. ON NOV. 30, I arrived downtown by bus, after having worked late. A resident of Belltown, I’d originally planned to make a quick stop at the Bon Marche, then a subsequent stop for groceries at Ralph’s Deli before returning to my apartment near Fourth Avenue and Bell Street.
Upon reaching the Bon, I discovered that a large number of protestors had reoccupied Westlake Plaza, after having earlier dispersed for the purpose of attending a candlelight vigil at Seattle Central Community College. I also noted that a large number of police officers were forming lines around the knot of demonstrators.
Employees of the Bon were applying duct tape to all the entrances for the purpose, I was told, of preventing possible damage from any tear gas assault that might occur. The store was effectively closed for the night, so I lingered outside one of the Fourth Avenue entrances for awhile, intrigued by the scene around me.
At about 8:45 p.m., police issued their first order for the crowd to disperse. This was followed by another order at about 8:50, and a third at 9:00. Each order saw the departure of any number of protestors and, by 9, almost everyone had completely dispersed and the intersection at Fourth and Pine was reopened.
At this juncture, the demonstrators began moving north on Fourth Avenue, toward Denny Way, followed by a large contingent of police. The procession was slow, and someone operating a megaphone informed the crowd that a party would shortly be underway on Minor Avenue.
It seemed quite apparent to me that the group, numbering perhaps 200 at this point, was truly dispersing.
I stopped at Ralph’s Deli to pick up my groceries, and exited the store with two bags. Upon stepping back onto Fourth, I saw that police lines had begun forming alongside of the street on both sides, and I asked an officer if it was possible to continue down Fourth to Bell Street. He assured me there would be no problem, and urged me to continue on. I did so, noticing more and more police were arriving and taking up positions along the street as I walked.
Upon reaching Bell Street, I realized I’d forgotten to pick up soft drinks, and went into a small convenience store on the corner to rectify my oversight. I was in the store perhaps five minutes, and exited to realize that a police line had taken up a position spanning the width of Bell Street where it crossed Fourth.
At this point, I was half-a-block from my apartment, laden with grocery bags, and approached to police officer to ask if I could pass through the line. I explained my purpose, pointing my apartment building out to him, but was denied passage. I was instead directed to retrace my steps one block back to Blanchard, turn east and walk north on Fifth to circumvent the now-restricted area.
I did as instructed, only to find my passage was also blocked at Blanchard. I proceeded to each intersection, only to be turned away at each. I found that the police had completely hemmed in the length of Fourth Avenue between Lenora Street and Bell Street, and were not allowing anyone to pass out, for any reason.
I was eventually directed to speak to a sergeant commanding a line on the west side of Fourth and Blanchard, but this proved to be of no avail. The sergeant told me he’d been given orders to let no one pass in or out, and couldn’t find his commander to allow him to do otherwise.
As I stood there, I saw a line of police in riot gear move toward us, from the west, on Blanchard, and noted that a similar line was forming on the east side of the intersection. As the minutes passed, more helmets and bulletproof shields materialized, and I began to get the sense a baton charge was imminent.
Meanwhile, an increasingly large number of people, both individually and by megaphone, began to assert that they only wanted to leave the area and either go home or go to the party. The police refused to allow them to do any such thing, and a feeling of tension began to rise precipitously.
My own concern was reaching epic proportions. I’d taken to visualizing any number of possible scenarios, and only wanted to get home after a long day at work. I’d been repeatedly assured by a couple of different police officers that I could achieve this goal by going here or going there, only to find I’d become further enmeshed in this situation.
I suppose an increasing alarm began to register on my face as, finally, a young bicycle officer asked to see my driver’s license. It naturally indicated my address, just a block away, and he took it upon himself to escort me past the police line and to Third Avenue. He did so with some concern, as he had no particular authority on the line, and was ostensibly going against the wishes of his sergeant. I suspect that the fact I was carrying grocery bags, reasonably well-dressed, and middle-aged probably convinced him that I had been mistakenly swept up in this situation.
For about the next hour, these protestors were completely trapped in this three block length of Fourth Avenue, and refused permission to exit although there were openly requesting to do so.
I dropped my groceries off at home, and made my way to the Two Bells Tavern, near my apartment building. There, I sat with friends while watching a new police line form just outside the door of the tavern. We would occasionally stick our heads out to see Metro buses taking up positions, and cops milling about in rather massive numbers.
After a bit, the police waded into the crowd they’d trapped, and arrested something on the order (according to newspaper reports) of 140 of them. The Seattle Times states that the arrest were for failure to disperse and pedestrian interference.
No protestor was ever allowed the opportunity to disperse, and had even been engaged in the act of dispersing from Westlake Plaza when they were surrounded and stopped. In fact, after the separation from Westlake, no subsequent order to disperse was ever given.
Additionally, the only pedestrians suffering interference could have been other demonstrators. Several friends and neighbors found themselves swept up in the arrests, having been out to dinner or shopping, or simply taking walks with significant others.
So far as I know, I’m the only person who was ever allowed to leave the scene, and the precise reason why is still something of a mystery to me.
TOMORROW: Nostalgia for nerd-dom.
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.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
THE HOMOGENIZATION OF URBAN AMERICA is sure not something going on just in Seattle–even though Seattleites, who typically try to maintain their collective ignorance about any other U.S. cities besides N.Y./L.A./S.F., might choose not to realize it.
The Brooklyn, N.Y. band Babe the Blue Ox has a song called “T.G.I.F.U.” about the proliferation of the same chain restaurants in town after town across the continent:
“Every city I get lost in Charlotte, Boston, even Austin Has a four-lane boulevard With the same damn grill and bar Every meal will be familiar Rest assured.”
“Every city I get lost in
Charlotte, Boston, even Austin
Has a four-lane boulevard
With the same damn grill and bar
Every meal will be familiar
Rest assured.”
In Seattle’s downtown core, the problem’s only partly the proliferation of the likes of Planet Hollywood and Gordon Biersch, as deplorable as that in itself might be.
There’s also the more pervasive and immediate threat posed by establishments that might be individually owned but with a common (all too common) theme of upscale blandness.
It’s getting so you can’t find any grub in this town anymore. Just “cuisine.” Hummus, penne pollo, “Market Price” trout almondine, etc. etc.; served up at joints with valet parking, “celebrity” executive chefs, and appetizer prices alone that would feed a normal bloke for a month. Joints that scream about how “unique” each of them’s supposed to be, yet are really just about all alike.
Every month, one more of the few remaining real-people places in Seattle gets destroyed for some overpriced “foodie” joint and/or luxury condos. Among the currently threatened: The Jem art studios, the Greyhound station, the Bethel Temple.
Now joining the ranks of the apparently doomed: the legendary, infamous Frontier Room.
It’s a classic dive bar, of the kind they not only don’t make anymore but couldn’t if they tried. It’s a place where, for decades, old-age pensioners and crusty punk rockers have shared the enjoyment of strong drinks, noise, smoke, dark red lighting, crummy yet cozy seats, and a well-lived-in atmosphere.
Up in the front restaurant room, they serve up real food for real folk: Burgers, fresh-cut fries, real ice cream shakes, soup, chowder, sandwiches, omelettes, and blue plate specials.
But the guy who ran the place with an iron hand for seemingly ever died a few years back. His daughter’s apparently tiring of the grind. (Neither she nor anyone else associated with the place will speak on the record.)
A real estate agent’s putting the business up for sale as an ongoing concern (10-year lease, liquor license, and all). His flyer lists a monthly rent of $3700 plus a mysterious added expense listed only as “NNN” (anybody out there know what that means?).
There ought to be enough present and former Frontier Room barflies who’ve made a buck or two in music and/or software. Let’s get some of these folks together to buy the Frontier and keep it just the way it is.
Maybe we could add some menu items to increase the daytime trade, and put a newsstand or espresso machine in the currently-unused portion of the Frontier’s storefront. But nothing the place currently sells should be dropped; and none of its current patronage should be made unwelcome.
We must save this piece of our civic soul. We must keep it from becoming another “cuisine” stand.
If we don’t do this, it would be just like raising the flag of surrender to the armies of gentrification.
TOMORROW: More of this line, concerning artist space.
IN OTHER NEWS: Chief artistic lesson of HBO’s recent Porky’s trilogy marathon: Female nudity is drama; male nudity is farce.
FOR THE FIFTH TIME, here are some looks at recycled real estate around my town. This time, there’s more-or-less a theme: Places that had their moments in the movies.
Second Avenue in Belltown used to be Seattle’s “Film Row.” Movies were neither made nor publicly shown there, but the big studios had their regional distribution offices there. Many were in the Screen Services building at Second & Battery, long since razed for the Belltown Court condos. Still surviving across Battery are the ex-Paramount office (more recently housing the Catholic Seamen’s Club and the Milky World gallery) and the ex-MGM office (currently housing a card shop, a fabric store, and the Lush Life restaurant).
Across Second Avenue from the Lush Life is the Rendezvous Restaurant’s Jewel Box Theater, which had been a promotional screening room used by the local distribution branches of all the major film distributors. It’s where they’d promote their latest offerings to theater operators. The room itself was a miniature movie theater; the display showroom for a theater-design company operating in the same building. During the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, firms such as this would build and completely equip a movie house wherever you wanted one built, based on a complete prototype plan. Today’s strip-mall multiplexes are also often built from prototype plansÑjust much less beautiful plans.
Few feature films were shot in Seattle before the ’60s. One of the first was The Slender Thread (1965). The movie was constructed around the producers’ desire to cast Sidney Poitier with a white actress but with no romance (this was a couple years before Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?). So Poitier ended up playing a Crisis Clinic volunteer called by suicidal housewife Anne Bancroft. (The two characters never meet on screen.) Exteriors of Poitier’s office were shot at what was then the real Crisis Clinic HQ, in this lo-rise Eastlake Avenue building.
The Union Street side of Benaroya Hall used to be a temporary park (as seen in the film American Heart). Before that, it was a construction-staging area for the Metro bus tunnel. Before that, it was the original 211 Club, a billiard palace now relocated to Belltown. The old 211 served as the titular location in David Mamet’s 1987 movie House of Games, in which card shark Joe Mantegna plays a complex scam on psychiatrist Lindsay Crouse. Her office scenes were filmed at the old AFLN gallery building on Capitol Hill (the Madison Market grocery and condos are now on that site).
This site on Lenora Street has housed several different kinds of restaurants over the last decade (another’s soon to open). None of those real eateries was anything like the boistrious diner set there in Alan Rudolph’s 1985 film Trouble in Mind. Run by Genvieve Bujold, it was a classic checkerboard-floored, cuppa-joe joint the likes of which this town sees far too little of these days. The same film used what’s now the Seattle Asian Art Museum as the private mansion of a slimy crime lord (played in male dress by Divine), decorated completely by Seattle contemporary artists.
Singles, Hype!, and Kurt & Courtney depicted the “Seattle Music Scene” the kids know and love; but The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989) depicted a “scene” Seattle civic officials would much rather promote–piano bars and lounge singers. Beau and Jeff Bridges are the ivory-ticklin’ boys; Michelle Pfeiffer’s the torch queen who rescues Jeff from an existence of sullen solitude and tawdry sex. We know about the latter because of a brief scene, shot in the apartments above the 2 Dagos From Texas restaurant, with Jeff and a character identified in the credits only as “Girl in Bed” (played by Terri Treas, later on TV’s Alien Nation).
TOMORROW: What to do with that leftover Y2K-survival stuff.
IN OTHER NEWS: Remember, Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t really the meek-and-mild dreamer of latter-day corporate PR….
A LOT OF ARTY TYPES love to hate Seattle and always have.
Oh, you could live here cheaply enough. And the neighbors were plenty easy to get along with, just so long as you didn’t expect ’em to welcome you with gregariously open arms.
But, the old line went, there was no money here and no decent arts infrastructure–the networks of (depending on your genre) museums, galleries, gallery customers, recording studios, record labels, nightclubs, film producers/distributors, publishers, agents, publicists, etc.
(An exception was the theater community, where patient troupes and producers gradually assembled their needed resources from approximately 1963 through approximately 1978. But to this day, local actors complain, management at the Rep and ACT still cast too many lead roles in New York.)
Today, things are a bit different. The region’s awash in cyber-wealth. Lotsa arts-infrastructure people have moved or at least passed through the place. A lot of culture-management enterprises have indigenously risen here, especially in popular and commercial music.
And with the new communications technology (much of it developed here) and the DIY-culture boom, that oldtime culture bureaucracy’s starting to seem less necessary to a lot of folks.
But all that’s not enough for some boho-folks.
As we noted back in April, the boom’s left a lot of local old-timers behind, some of whom are culture-biz old-timers. The tech biz has produced a lot of low-paying day jobs and perma-temp gigs, but the big-money positions all seem to require either hyper-aggressive sales skills or five years’ experience on software technologies that just came out last year.
As COCA’s current “Land/Use/Action” series of exhibitions and events depicts, real-estate hyperinflation and gentrification mean it’s harder every year to live here–especially if you’re a visual artist who needs adequate studio space, a musician who needs a place to play, or a creator in any discipline who needs to invest time in your work before it’s ready to go out into the world.
(Many of these cyber-employers demand 60 or more hours a week from their staffs, plus a sense of devotion-to-the-empire so fanatical as to pretty much exclude any self-styled free thinkers as potential hires.)
This leaves Seattle as an exciting place to document, with physical and social changes and confrontations to be seen just about everywhere, but still not an optimal live/work site for the would-be documentor.
Contemporary-art galleries still struggle as always. The big-bucks out-of-towners who plopped a couple of fancy gallery spaces down here, hoping to siphon some of that cyber-spending-money, have closed up shop and split.
Literary publishing here still means the gay-and-theory-oriented Bay Press, the feminist-oriented Seal Press, and the tourist-oriented Sasquatch Books.
Bands and musicians can still make stuff here, but managers and promoters find a career ceiling they can’t breach without heading to N.Y./L.A.
Art-film exhibition’s big here, but art-film making is still just getting off the ground (and commercial/industrial filmmaking here has nearly collapsed).
So the new Hobson’s choice, for many, seems to be to either take up a Real Career (if possible) and leave one’s real life’s work to semi-commercial or hobby status; sell out another way and make glass bowls or other stuff the moneyed people here will buy; move to the old-line Big Media cities; or move further out into lo-rent land.
(These topics and others will be discussed in “Where’d the Artists Go?: Art and Development in Belltown,” a COCA-sponsored forum tonight, July 13, at the reopened, remodeled (but looking-exactly-like-it-used-to) Speakeasy Cafe, 2nd and Bell.)
TOMORROW: The new local art neighborhood?
ELSEWHERE: Perservering hippie-musician Jef Jaisun has his own list of reasons to dislike Seattle. Alas, most of them involve weather, and seem intended to discourage inmigration (the old Emmett Watson “Lesser Seattle” schtick). And there’s a whole “Weblog” site to “Why (BLANK) Sucks.”
