I’ve avoided reviewing Fred Moody’s personal-essay book Seattle and the Demons of Ambition: A Love Story in the half-year it’s been out.
Perhaps I didn’t want to potentially hurt the feelings of Moody, a former acquaintance (and a fellow member, with me, of the dwindling breed of humans who still remember how to run a CompuGraphic phototypesetter).
Of course, Moody would cite that reluctance to criticize as part of the Old Seattle mindset, a zeitgeist marked by reflection, introversion, and near-fanatical politeness. To that, he contrasts a New Seattle, both dominated and demonized by rambunctious corporate go-getters out to unwittingly fulfill the city’s original name of “New York-Alki” (“…Pretty Soon”).
To his credit, Moody acknowledges the superficiality of this dichotomy. He also acknowledges his contradictory affections toward each side of this divided ideal. Too bad he doesn’t acknowledge some of the other holes in his narrative, and in the image he constructs of himself as your near-perfect Mr. Progressive Seattle.
Throughout the book, Moody tries to psychoanalyze his former home as if the city was one collective entity. He may have learned this limited perspective as an early staff writer at Seattle Weekly. He spends a lot of his book’s verbiage waxing about Weekly founder David Brewster, a benevolent dictator who’d imposed a singular ideological vision on what was, for a decade, the town’s only major “alternative” rag. Brewster’s vision of Seattle, to which Moody writes about eagerly agreeing, was of a town in which white, upscale, professional-caste baby boomers (such as Brewster and Moody) were the only people in sight, or at least the only people who mattered. Moody admits the paper’s myopia caused it to miss out on Seattle’s biggest arts story, the rise of the local rock scene—even though the Weekly and Sub Pop Records were housed in the same office building, and future Pearl Jam member Stone Gossard worked as a barista in the ground-floor cafe!
All these little prejudices were fundamental to the “Old Seattle” Moody nostalgizes about; or rather to the transitional Seattle of Moody’s local-journalism heyday, between the Boeing-dominated past and the Microsoft-dominated present. And squarely in that middle era, as big as the shoulder pads on an old Nordstrom office dress, lie the roots of the ambitious Seattle Moody rues.
Moody writes, with no little degree of self-congratulation, how he spotted the Microsoft phenom almost from the start, and got plenty of work from it for his typesetting enterprise in the pre-laser-printer years. Imagine, right there in Seattle’s prefab Eastside suburbs, an outfit not just surviving but getting rich and huge, all from this ephemeral “software” stuff, stuff made by writers, and employing writers to document it all! Ex-English majors were making enough money to buy houses, and even move to Bainbridge! How cool! So what if this home-computer technology would make phototypesetting obsolete; Moody would simply bounce back by writing a couple of books about the whole e-revolution.
But soon enough, it got out of hand. Dot-com hustlers raised millions in venture capital based on faulty or nonexistent premises, went bust, and left behind hordes of overmortgaged, overqualified ex-employees. The bad old days of the 1970 Boeing crash returned, only this time the food-bank lines were filled by NPR listeners and Weekly readers.
Moody sees the high-tech depression and the jobless recovery a well-deserved comeuppance for Seattle, a collective spanking for the city’s previous lusts for wealth and glory. He even sees the 1999 WTO riots (in which mostly out-of-town protesters ranted about out-of-town conventioneers) as a rebuke to Seattle’s will to “world class” status.
But that’s a silly overgeneralization, one of many in Moody’s book. He chides the city’s political/business nabobs for trying to artificially inflate their own importance, as he artificially inflates the importance of his statements about them.
He frequently admits, in a doth-protest-too-much type of confessing, how he, as a dutiful member of the Seattle establishment’s favorite constituency (upscale boomers), got caught up in the hype he was supposed to be covering. But even his mea culpa moments seem hyped-up, in that smug Big Chill-generation way.
I know Moody; I’ve read his prior books. I know he’s capable of better stuff than this.
Which is what I’d say to Seattle as well. The city doesn’t have to be World Class. But it can still be the best darned regional gathering place it can be.
And that’s not putting anybody down. That’s criticism meant to instruct, to improve. It’s something Moody, Seattle, and I need.
