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RANDOM LINKS FOR 8/29/11
Aug 29th, 2011 by Clark Humphrey

  • Those of us who were looking forward to that separatist, elitist Burning Man institution’s imminent demise are outta luck. A nonprofit is being formed to take over future annual festivals. Among other effects, it means those who go there this year for the first time will get to annoy everybody back in their hometowns in subsequent years, with sermons about how much more “pure” the festival used to be.
  • Ex-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held a book signing in Tacoma. Antiwar activists, including the widow of a Ft. Lewis soldier who committed suicide, tried to disrupt the proceedings and got roughed up.
  • Can something really be done to stop drug selling in Belltown? I say, it’s not likely as long as the First Avenue glamour-bar scene keeps attracting so many affluent drug buyers.
  • Ain’t them Sounders something? Well, yes they are.
  • Despite the elimination of state tax breaks for filmmakers, one production is underway on the Eastside—a horrific true-life drama.
  • As Wash. state’s government payroll gets smaller, it’s also getting whiter. Gov. Gregoire’s response: more “staff reviews” and talk about the importance of diversity.
  • Gay marriage—here next year?
  • For reasons I won’t get into, I witnessed the closure of the (high level) West Seattle Bridge late Saturday night. Sadly, it wasn’t due to road work, but to a jumper, who eventually “succeeded.”
  • Gawker’s unsupported rant that Seattle was “a very annoying place” has made Seattlest’s “Seattle stereotyping hall of shame.”
  • Qaddafi, Gadaffi, Gadhafi, however you transliterate the name—he lived the typical dictator’s opulence amid public squalor. And his son and daughter-in-law were grotesquely brutal to the household staff, in ways unimaginable outside of a Japanese gore movie.
  • Megabucks campaign financing just continues to get bigger and more corrupt. But you knew that.
  • And Republicans increasingly bind themselves around an anti-science, anti-thinking ideology. But you already knew that.
  • Ad Age lists some lessons from past recessions, for those businesses that still need to sell tangible products to U.S. consumers.
  • I keep getting asked about this, so for the record: The L.A.-based chain In-N-Out Burger is not, repeat NOT, opening in Bellevue. Not this year, not next year. It was just an Eastside food blog’s April Fool’s gag. Need proof? Just look at the link in the story for “View renderings of the new restaurant here.”
RANDOM LINKS FOR 8/5/11
Aug 4th, 2011 by Clark Humphrey

pride parade viewers at the big popsicle

(A relatively long edition this time, bear with.)

  • So, who’s responsible for the giant Popsicle art piece (an instant popular hit!) at Martin Selig’s Fourth and Blanchard Building? It’s Mrs. Selig.
  • Architecture critic Lawrence W. Cheek sees the Amazon.com campus in South Lake Union as “sleek, stiff, anonymous modern boxes, impeccably executed, with rarely a whiff of whimsy or personality.”
  • Wright Runstad, the real estate developer who’s got the lease on most of the old Beacon Hill hospital building (where Amazon.com was headquartered until recently) have proposed a deal with King County. The county would move its juvie court and jail up the hill (paying rent to WR), while selling WR the current juvie campus south of Seattle U (nine eminently developable acres).
  • UW computer science researchers are trying to write an algorithm to generate “that’s what she said” jokes.
  • Some anonymous person posted crude web-animations snarking about fictionalized versions of Renton police personnel. Renton police want to find and jail whoever did it; thus proving themselves eminently worthy of such ridicule.
  • Without illegal immigrants, say buh-bye to Wash. state agriculture.
  • Local composer David Hahn pleas for an end to the decimation of arts funding.
  • Family and friends of the slain native carver John T. Williams have finished a memorial totem pole. The 32-foot carving is supposed to be installed in Seattle Center. Sometime.
  • White artists in South Africa are now depicting themselves as outsiders.
  • Bad Ads #1: When fashion magazines and their advertisers depict 10-12 year old girls looking “sexy,” are they really promoting anorexia?
  • Bad Ads #2: Did the London Olympics promoters who used the Clash’s “London Calling” in a commercial even listen to the song first?
  • Do violent deaths really rise during Republican presidencies? One author claims so.
  • Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has a new advisor. It’s Robert Bork, the onetime Supreme Court nominee. Bork, you might recall, hates porn, birth control, feminism, the Civil Rights Act, and free speech. Romney, you might recall, is billing himself as the sane alternative to the other Republicans who want to be President.
  • Economist Umair Haque, whom I’ll say more about next week in this space, believes declining consumer spending isn’t part of the problem, it’s part of the solution.
  • For two consecutive years, a suburban Minnesota high school’s idea of homecoming-week fun was to have white kids dressing up like stereotypes of black kids. Somebody finally sued.
  • There’s another political move to negate your online rights. As usual, the excuse is “protecting children.”
  • Contrary to prior announcements, Jerry Lewis will not make a cameo final appearance at this year’s muscular dystrophy telethon (itself no longer a true telethon, just a really long special). Perhaps that means the show can finally stop depicting “Jerry’s Kids” as pitiful waif victims, and instead depict ordinary, fully extant boys and girls (and men and women) who simply have a medical condition.
RANDOM LINKS FOR 8/4/11
Aug 3rd, 2011 by Clark Humphrey

SEE FARE
Aug 1st, 2011 by Clark Humphrey

Another summer, another Seafair Torchlight Parade, the oldest, biggest, and (alas) clothed-est of Seattle’s three big summer parades.

It’s been billed by some local wags as a taste of the suburbs in the middle of town. But that’s not quite the case. A lot of the “forgotten Seattle” shows up too. Working families, even with children. Public school children even.

Some attendees chose to forego the standard T-shirts and shorts uniform.

Teachers’ union picketers showed up to appeal to the family friendly crowd, campaigning for increased school funding and fewer state-mandated tests.

Then the parade itself got underway with its new title sponsor, Alaska Airlines (replacing rival Southwest). In keeping with nostalgia for pre-TSA era air travel, Alaska featured an all-flight-attendant drill team.

Mr. Drew Carey was a thorough professional, shaking hands, kissing babies, selling soccer scarves.

Then, at last, came the real entertainment. The drill teams.

The marching bands.

The floats.

The Clowns and the Pirates.

Yes, the parade could become “hipper” (even while remaining G rated).

But why should it?

Squares need some celebration in their lives too.

RANDOM LINKS FOR 7/9/11
Jul 9th, 2011 by Clark Humphrey

  • A book industry site asks, “What’s the most beautiful word in the English language?”
  • Mayor Mike McGinn, on a crusade to restart big development projects, is proposing, among other things to relax regulations requiring ground-level retail spaces in commercial zones. This would allow all-residential complexes, instead of “mixed use” projects, along retail streets. Publicola’s Erica Barnett hates the idea:

…Recessions aren’t permanent, but land use often is. If we allow developers to build ground-floor housing instead of retail space now, those apartments won’t magically be converted to coffee shops, hair salons, and restaurants once the economy turns around. They will be, for all intents and purposes, permanent residential spaces.

And street-level land use matters. Pedestrians gravitate toward streets that are activated by bars, shops, and restaurants; in contrast, they tend to avoid sidewalks that run alongside apartment buildings and other non-public spaces like fenced-off parking lots.

  • In more “hey, he really is a politician after all” news, McGinn ordered the city to stop advertising in Seattle Weekly. The official reason is because the paper’s out-of-state owners also run an online escort-ad site that actor Ashton Kutcher alleges facilitates underage hooking. The Stranger, which has its own in-house sex ad site (whose managers claim to thoroughly check all advertiser IDs), and which endorsed McGinn’s campaign, is not affected by the order.
  • Elsewhere, authorities in Snohomish County are going after flashing bikini baristas again. As with last year’s arrests in Everett, these Edmonds arrests are based on the specious idea that breast exposure through a window qualifies as “prostitution.”
  • Goodness and Hammerbox singer/songwriter Carrie Akre held her Seattle farewell show on Thursday. She’s been lured away to Minnesota by her day-job career. Now I’ll never get to host the “Carrie Akre karaoke” event I’ve dreamed of.
  • Things that don’t belong in the “Recycling” bin: yard waste, old computer equipment, and, oh yeah, dead people.
  • There was a fire at the McGuire Apartments demolition site in Belltown. The only result: the building’s owners will have less materials to salvage.
  • And, in the only one of these links some readers will care about, there’s a huge scandal a-brewin’ about salmon. Was your last fish dinner really wild-caught Pacific salmon or just a farm-raised Atlantic fish with a false story and a higher price tag?
FOR WHOM THE BELL(TOWN) TOLLS
Jan 21st, 2011 by Clark Humphrey

The Belltown Messenger, the scrappy li’l neighborhood monthly for which I wrote and edited for some six years, has just put out its last, online only, edition.

Publisher Alex R. Mayer, who’s now running a pro-pot rag called Mary Jane, had kept the Messenger going on the interwebs after the last, newsletter-sized, print Messenger came out last August. (I was not a part of the latter, unprinted, incarnation.)

The Messenger’s spiritual roots go back to the late 1980s and Belltown’s Brain Fever Dispatch, published by Elaine Bonow out of her dance studio.

At the time, there were a few scattered condo towers going up, but the ol’ Regrade was still largely a half square mile of print shops, small apartments, car lots, and artists’ studios. It was the latter milieu, that of the painters and musicians and clothing designers in their rustic lo-rent spaces, the original Dispatch covered.

The Messenger’s era of Belltown also contained art and music and fashion, plus a lot of creative “foodie” restaurants.

And it had a lot of other things.

It had the region’s hottest “HI-NRG” bar scene, which was covered more completely in Exotic Underground and later in D List.

It had the high-rise rich (and the merely affluent, spending as if they were rich). The regional slick magazines catered to these consumers’ spending needs much more closely.

And it continued to have more than its share of the various “street” subcultures, chronicled and advocated for in Real Change.

What Belltown didn’t have were some of the things “neighborhood” papers spend a lot of time covering, such as public schools, parks, kids, and community centers.

In the end, the “place” covered in the Messenger wasn’t so much a geographic region as a state of mind.

Any attempt to bring back something like it, which I’m considering, would have to keep that in mind.

LAST CALLS
Oct 15th, 2010 by Clark Humphrey

Many in Belltown are pleased to see the state’s shut down V Bar, site of one fatal shooting and several other violent closing-time confrontations this past year.

But many of us are saddened that Kelly’s Tavern, the neighborhood’s last true “sleazy dive bar,” has apparently closed for good. Its longtime owner has died, and her heirs reportedly don’t want to carry on.

FOUNDERS DAYS, A LOOK BACK
Aug 25th, 2010 by Clark Humphrey

Main stage at Seattle Founders Days

Main stage at Seattle Founders Days

Seattle Founders Days, Belltown’s entry in the neighborhood summer street fair game, have come and gone.

And, in my opinion, they succeeded.

Its instigators were wise not to attempt the scale of the U District or Fremont fairs, at least not in Founders Days’ first year. They were also mindful to concoct a name with potential citywide appeal, and to have both day and evening event schedules.

There was a single main performance stage, right at Second and Bell. It was flanked on Second’s surrounding blocks by a couple dozen tented merchant booths.

In lieu of a separate, fenced off beer garden, attendees were invited into the street’s existing sidewalk bar tables and to the Buckley’s patio (with its own tiny live-music stage).

Along with the on-stage acts, costumed performers milled about. There were civic pioneer characters during the day, more nightlife-esque characterizations by night.

The main stage performers were a good mix of top local bands, rising stars willing to work cheap, and extremely talented friends (Mark Pickerel) and relatives (Ramona Freeborn) of the fair organizers.

Thus, on two of the year’s hottest days, a few dozen to a few hundred people at any one time milled about along the closed street blocks. They enjoyed the sun, the music, the food and drink, the art, and the low-key fun atmosphere. The evening sessions complemented, and contrasted with, the more high-energy partying along First Avenue.

It was all a big advertisement for Belltown, specifically for the artier, Second Avenue aspect of Belltown.

And it said to the rest of the city: Come on down and have some fun. Belltown’s not really that mean, scary place in all the news reports. It’s safe. We’ve got more cops now. We’ve always had great food and different kinds of bars. We’ve got a whole lot of things to do, even if you don’t like to get all pushy and rowdy.

In all, it was a great debut for what organizers plan to be an annual affair.

Yet there’s plenty of room for future growth, even with the single stage layout.

There could be more merchant booths and food booths. Now that Founders Days will be on the regular regional street-fair schedule, the event can attract some of that circuit’s regular vendors. It can also lure in some of the vendors from the Punk Rock Flea Market and from Occidental Park’s monthly art bazaars.

And once Bell Street’s been rebuilt into a “park boulevard,” with less car space and more people space, Founders Days will get space for still more growth. (Though I’d like to see the Second and Bell intersection still closed off, and I’d like to see the Second Avenue bars and galleries still incorporated into the fair’s site.)

Indeed, the future Bell Street can become a site for year-round (or at least dry-season-round) outdoor events and performances of all types.

And Founders Days can become the keystone event of this seasonal series.

(Cross posted with the Belltown Messenger.)

PATRICK MCROBERTS, RIP
May 30th, 2010 by Clark Humphrey

Patrick Alan McRoberts, 57, a longtime Belltown fixture and Seattle political advocate/consultant, died in his sleep on May 26, following a lingering heart condition.

A former longtime staffer in the public relations firm Gogerty Stark Marriott, he also co-founded the local history Web site HistoryLink.org and the literary zine Point No Point.

In the 1980s, he occasionally performed in the SPKN WRDS performance series at the Two Bells, where he remained a regular customer. He was also a performer in a couple of goodtime rock/folk/blues bands, the DelVros and the Peptides.

So far, the only McRoberts obit online is the one supplied by his family to the paper in the Iowa town of his birth.

OUR OWN EINSTURZENDE NZEUBAUTEN
Apr 11th, 2010 by Clark Humphrey

As the cool among you know, the venerable German noise band Einsturzende Neubauten takes its name from the “collapsing new buildings” built quickly and cheaply in the two postwar Germanys.

Now we’ve got one of our own. Just nine years in existence, the McGuire Apartments, all 25 stories and 272 residential units and four storefronts, are going down.

And the biggest irony: It was co-developed by the Carpenters Union, on the Belltown site of its old union hall. Union crews built the building, which contains a small union office and hiring hall on its ground floor.

But it was co-developed with Harbor Properties. I don’t know who chose the building materials, including the cables and concrete that have proven to be of suboptimal quality. The whole structure’s been covered in scaffolding for exactly one year. Finally, its management decided that in the current apartment market, fixing the place would not be worth the cost.

As an all-rental property, the McGuire is legally easier to vacate, and hence to raze, than it would have been if its units had been sold as condominiums.

But this WILL happen to a condo building in the region, sometime this decade. And that’ll be an attorney employment scenario for sure.

BAR WARS: HOW BELLTOWN WON
Feb 24th, 2010 by Clark Humphrey

As the Elliott Bay Book Co. prepares to leave Pioneer Square a business neighborhood without an “anchor tenant,” the Square’s major retail industry, big rowdy bars, is also in decline. The J&M shuttered altogether (it’s rumored to be reopening under new management as less of a bar and more of a cafe). Others are rumored to be in trouble.

I remember the glory days of the Square’s nightlife scene. I remember that milieu’s signature street sound. You’d stand in front of the pergola around midnight on a Saturday. You could hear, from five different bars, five different white blues bands, each cranking out a mediocre rendition of “Mustang Sally,” each band slightly out of tempo with the others. It was a cacophany only avant-garde composer Charles Ives could have dreamt up.

That scene was already waning before the infamous 2001 Mardi Gras melee gave the Square a bad PR rep.

Fast forward almost a decade. Today’s loci for bigtime drinking are Fremont, Pike/Pine, and especially Belltown.

Belltown’s bar scene has its own signature street sound. It’s the arhythmic clippety-clop of dozens of high-heel shoes trotting up and down the sidewalks of First Avenue. Creating this sound are many small groups of bargoers, small seas of black dresses and perfect hairdos.

These women, and their precursors over the past decade and a half, are the reason Belltown won the bar wars.

In my photo-history book Seattle’s Belltown, I described the rise of the upper First Avenue bar scene:

“After the Vogue proved straight people would indeed come to Belltown to drink and dance, larger, more mainstream nightclubs emerged. Among the first, both on First Avenue, were Casa U Betcha (opened 1989) and Downunder (opened 1991). Both places began on a simple premise: Create an exciting yet comfortable place for image-conscious young women, and the fellows would follow in tow (or in search).”

To this target market, the Square was, and would always be, too dark, too grungy, and too iffy. The condo canyons of Belltown, in contrast, were relatively clean (if still barren) with fresh new buildings and sported (at least some) well-lit sidewalks.

The state liquor laws were liberalized later in the 1990s, leading to more and bigger hard-liquor bars. Casa U Betcha and Downunder gave way to slicker fun palaces, all carefully designed and lit, with fancy drinks at fancy prices to be consumed while wearing fancy out-on-the-town clothes and admiring others doing the same.

And, aside from the occasional Sport, nearly all these joints sought to attract, or at least not to offend, the young-adult female market.

You’re free to make your comparisons here to the high-heeled and well-heeled fashionistas of HBO’s old Sex and the City.

I’d prefer a more local comparison, to Sex In Seattle. In case you don’t know, that’s a live stage show that’s presented 17 installments since 2001. Its heroines are social and career strivers, less materialistic and less “arrived” than the Sex and the City women.

And they’re Asian Americans. As are Sex In Seattle’s writers and producers.

As are a healthy proportion of the clientele at Belltown’s megabars these days.

These customers want many of the same things Belltown residents want. They like attractive, clean, safe streets with well-lit sidewalks.

They may make a little more noise outside than some of the residents want to hear.

But we’re all in the same place, geographically and otherwise.

(Cross posted with the Belltown Messenger.)

THE GREATEST BENEFACTOR OF MANKIND?
Jan 4th, 2010 by Clark Humphrey

Alaska Airlines is sponsoring an official fan site for Belltown’s own Olympic speed-skating champ, Apolo Anton Ohno. The site’s name, “followapolo.com,” reminded me of this novelty classic.

IN TODAY'S NOOZE
Jun 1st, 2009 by Clark Humphrey

  • Joel Connelly doesn’t like the idea of still more street construction in Belltown, worrying that all these closed lanes and parking spaces could fatally disrupt business, especially if Nickels’s “park boulevard” idea (reducing Bell Street to one lane of traffic and plaza-izing the rest) goes through. I believe if Bell’s gonna be revamped, it might as well be done now, while all this other work is already going on on or near it.
  • Our favorite expert on the domestic automotive collapse, Michael Moore, says good riddance to the old General Motors. (Say, since we the U.S. taxpayers now own the company, let’s bring back the Geo! And let’s make us some of those hi-speed passenger trains, too, OK?)
  • As the Chase-ification of Washington Mutual nears completion, a lot of WaMu ATM cards have stopped working. The possible culprit: Chase’s deal to switch WaMu’s debit card handling services from MasterCard to Visa.
  • Seattle Business Monthly depicts the Seattle Times-owning Blethen family as a dysfunctional clan worthy of soap-opera depiction.
  • Our pals at the local news site PubliCola have some real investment behind them now, thanks to Greg Smith, the real estate developer who almost ran for mayor this year. Yeah, he almost ran against Greg Nickels, for whom PubliCola cofounder Sandeep Kaushik now does campaign PR.
  • And the equally fine folks at another local news site, Seattle PostGlobe, have published another photo essay by yr. intrepid c’r’s’p’n’d’t. It’s all about the demise of the Summit K-12 alternative public school.
THE BIG UGLY
Apr 18th, 2009 by Clark Humphrey

I’m on a marathon temp job this week and next. Until the 24th of this month, I’m basically doing little but working, commuting, sleeping, and perhaps eating. Expect few if any posts during this time.

Instead, consider a peek at writer-composer Igor Keller’s new blog, Hideous Belltown. Keller claims to have just recently noticed that a lot of Seattle’s artificially flat neighborhood “is downright hideously ugly.”

Well, it always was such, ever since Denny Hill was removed early last century and the resulting lowland became downtown’s low-rent district. It became a place of printing plants, car lots, union halls, social service agencies, warehouses, storefront taverns, and a few stoic lo-rise apartments and hotels.

Belltown was the unassuming generic cityscape in between the Space Needle and the downtown towers. It was what the Monorail helped you bypass between downtown shopping and Seattle Center entertainment. It was a relative nothing, in the middle of everything.

Which is precisely what made Belltown so attractive to artists and musicians in the 1980s and early 1990s.

It was a place of (relatively) cheap rents, funky loft spaces, dive bars, and endless possibilities.

Of course, real estate developers also saw the possibilities.

After a few starts and stops, successive mayoral administrations succeeded in pushing Belltown as a hi-rise residential mecca.

And, either in spite or because of the gentle nudges of city zoning policies, the neighborhood’s big new buildings were generally just as homely as the small old buildings they replaced.

Which, of course, is part of the area’s enduring charm. Seriously.

PENTHOUSE AND PAVEMENT
Apr 8th, 2009 by Clark Humphrey

Yr. humble scribe attended two private events in Belltown on Tuesday.

In the morning, the Escala condo project (Seattle’s last still-under-construction residential highrise) held a “topping off” ceremony on its roof, 31 floors above Fourth Avenue. A city official was there to praise the project as a key component in Mayor Nickels’s “center city strategy.” (Since when did we start calling our downtown “center city” anyway? Sounds like Norm Rice’s failed attempt to rebrand the waterfront as a “harborfront.”)

The ceremony was followed by a champagne toast down in the project’s sales office nearby. Two scale models of the finished building showed it as a shining beacon of quality living. A chart on one wall listed one third of the project’s 270-some units as sold. Another third are currently available. The rest are on hold, withdrawn from the market pending an upturn in conditions.

The second big event came that evening at the Crocodile. It was an invite-only bash honoring the 50th birthday of Kim Warnick, the legendary Fastbacks/Visqueen singer-bassist. The joint was packed with folks who’ve loved Warnick and her work. An all-star lineup of Seattle musicians paid tribute to her on stage.

Here’s the climactic moment of the evening, with Warnick joining in with her ol’ band members Kurt Bloch, Lulu Gargiulo, and Mike Musburger.

And here are more musical moments from the evening.

The contrast between that scene and the Escala fete reminded me of what Jonathan Raban said about NYC as a city of “street people” and “sky people.”

In his definition, “street people” weren’t just those who lived ON the streets but also those who walk and converse and meet friends on the sidewalks, who live in the street-level milieu of bars and shops and cafes.

The “sky people” of NY are those for whom, as Fran Lebowitz described it, “outside” is what’s in between the building you’re in and the building you’re going to. Sky people live in the rarified air of high rises, have household staffs to shop for them, and socialize at private clubs and exclusive bistros. The Escala will have a private club, the first new one in town in 20 years (I believe since the Columbia Tower Club).

Times have been tough for street-level citizens for several years.

Now, they’re becoming tough for sky people as well.

The thing is, we who live close to the ground know how to survive. And to have a helluva good time while doing so.

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