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The Seattle School Board has just decreed that West Seattle High School’s sports teams shall no longer be known as the “Indians.”
Fair enough; about time, some of you might say. But the board also declared the name be replaced before the start of the next school year. That means the school’s students might not get to vote on a new name.
So it’s up to us, the loyal friends of youth, to help come up with some possible replacements.
The best new WSHS team name I can think of, the “Alkis,” isn’t a tribal name but does derive from the
old “Chinook Jargon” trading language, and hence might still be too native-oriented to qualify. (And besides, some say the name’s correctly pronounced “al-key,” something the authorities might not want to be associated with minors.)
Other possibilities, equally neighborhood-centric but more palatable, include “Admirals” (from the north WS business district) and “Cranes” (from the beautifully rugged cargo-container lifts flanking the Duwamish River). But there’s gotta be something better out there. Email me with your suggestions. I’ll pass them all along to the school officials.
INANE POLITICAL IDEA OF THE HALF-WEEK: Sanctimonious, bipartisan hypocrites in the U.S. Senate have drafted an all-purpose bill to allow police to shut down virtually any public gathering at which drugs might be consumed or even discussed—raves, Hempfests, neo-hippie country festivals, and potentially even scrictly political events at which someone might state that the war on drugs wasn’t a great thing. The bill has already passed one Senate committee. You might consider letting certain people know you think this stinks.
The latest research sez tobacco could be even worse for you than the previous accepted wisdom believed. That’s tobacco in and of itself. Yes, even without additives.
Medical researchers now claim to have evidence that longterm pot smoking can cause memory loss, disoriented thinking, and a lack of ambition; and can be at least psycologically, and perhaps chemically, addictive, with withdrawal symptoms that include anger, aggression, and irritability.
Well, like DUH.
Now we have to figure out what chemical agents make certain heavy tokers believe themselves to be at one with the plants and the animals, but treat non-pot-smoking humans as a separate/inferior life form.
…or what would at least make for interesting new stories:
…Santa Fe Natural, makers of that “natural” cigarette whose addicts often mistakenly believe to be (1) made by Native Americans and (2) “good for you” just ’cause it doesn’t have additives. (News flash: Tobacco alone is lethal enough.) Maybe the brand will lose some of its unwarranted hipster mystique, now that it’s just another part of an oldline mass-murdering cig empire.
Last weekend’s Seattle Hempfest crowded Myrtle Edwards Park more successfully than the Fourth of Jul-Ivar’s did a month and a half previous, for a familiar mix of music, handicrafts, facial hair, and political speechifying.
What was new this year: A reinvigorated message.
Hempfest used to be about, or pretend to be about, promoting the non-THC-related uses of the marijuana/hemp plant. Speakers and flyers made all manner of inflated claims for hemp as the miracle substance that would save the planet, as the ideal basic material for everything from paper and fabrics to foods, plastics, and motor fuels.
As one who believes in the ingenuity of North American agribusiness, I believe such claims should be thoroughly investigated for possible practical use. But the ’90s Hemp Movement seemed comprised only of True Believers, with no interest in plant research beyond what they’d read in Hemp Movement books. (Placing True Belief above scientific impartiality is what doomed Soviet agricultural research back in the Lysenko era.)
In any event, it’s hard to sustain an ongoing political-cultural movement on the premise of a potential rival to flaxseed fiber. So the event’s organizers did the smart thing and admitted what everyone’s known all along–that Hempfest is really a public celebration of recreational pot smoking and a call for its rightful legitimacy. The event’s name officially became an acronym for “Help End Marijuana Prohibition.”
It was a two-afternoon-long statement of defiance against the brutal hypocrisy of the War on Drugs, which has arguably hurt more lives in recent years than drugs themselves have. It became a more vigorous and more important event.
I’ve long scoffed at pot, pot aesthetics, pot humor, and particularly pot-influenced politics. I don’t orgasm at the terms “420” or “chronic.” Arguing politics with pot smokers usually frustrates, with all the sanctimony and square-bashing involved.
But Hempfest 2001 showed a path out of that trap. It asked thousands of users and sympathizers to stop wallowing in their self-perceived superiority and to start working to change things. It asked the mainly-white victims of pot busts to join up with the mostly-black victims of coke busts.
I’m still indifferent to pot and the pot culture. But the only way this society’s ever gonna get sane about the issue is to get over the phony righteousness of both pot-lovers and pot-haters, fueled by its outlaw status.
That “natural” cigarette which so many young-adult hipsters mistakenly believe to be “good for you” has been putting out back-of-the-pack promo cards honoring “America’s Endangered.” All the pictures depict birds, animals, fishes, etc. As far as I’ve been able to determine, none depict or represent that real endangered species, the cigs’ own consumers.
Singles to Jingles
by guest columnist Charlotte Quinn
IN THIS WACKY WORLD, TV ads create the music hits.
The radio stations wouldn’t touch Sting’s new album, but suddenly got bombarded with requests for his new song after the Jaguar commercial aired. So now we have greedy and artless ad execs chosing our records for us (rather than greedy and artless radio producers).
Then there is Moby, who deserves brief mention, since he sold every song on his album Play to advertisers. The Chemical Brothers sold out to Nike, but most horrible of all is, of course, the old Nair commercial that some how got the rights to “Short Shorts.”
This leaves us with the obvious question: Is there any dignity left?
I wonder if it has anything to do with 100 TV channels, or the MTV generation, or the gradual coorporate overtake of the music industry, or… oh whatever! Truth is, when this generation gets older, our favorite songs, the anthems of our generation, will be fuel for Rolaids, Paxil, and feminine itch products.
Here are some possible ads we may see in the future:
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:
>MONDAY, TUESDAY, AND YESTERDAY, we’ve been counting down to the huge MISCmedia 15th Anniversary gala (June 2, mark your calendars now), with a glimpse of the art show that’ll be part of the festivity–randomly-ordered pix of every home yr. web-pal had lived in. Today, another.
#17: The Towne Apartments, 1414 12th Ave. A cheap, spacious studio in a dingy, crime-ridden building. Occupied January-May 1984.
After an apartment-sitting gig ended prematurely (the guy I was sitting for decided not to finish his year-long exploration of G.I. Gurdjieff’s philosophies), I had to find a place quickly. As was usual for me at the time, the place had to be cheap. The Towne appeared to fit the bill, on the basis of a quick tour escorted by the building manager. Yes, I’d have to use a bathroom down the hall, but I’d get a huge space and free basic cable.
The day I moved in, said manager was nowhere to be found; neither were the promised window shades. What I did find were filthy hallway bathrooms (all except the one first-floor example I’d previously been showed), gazillions of cockroaches, several loud arguments/fights clearly audible through the thin walls, and central-heating pipes that loudly banged and clanged all night long.
Several shabbily-dressed residents came up to me over the next few days with complaints about the bathrooms, the heat, etc. I had to patiently tell each of them, “I’m not the manager. I just live here.” Their unanimous response: “You live here?” (Implying I was too clean-cut or too clean-and-sober for such a creepy building.)
It turned out the real manager had been fired hours before I moved in. The management company offered to discuss the firing with any tenants who could make it to an evening meeting at the company’s offices in outer Lynnwood, a difficult trick for these mostly-carless tenants.
Over the following twenty weeks, all but four of the other units in the building would be vacated, some by eviction orders. I was regularly panhandled, saw at least one attempted break-in, and had to vacate the place twice when sleeping bums inadvertantly set mattress fires in the basement. And the cable was no longer free after the first month.
A woman who helped me move out of there told me she’d never seen a building that gross when she lived in inner-city Cleveland.
The end of my residence at the Towne (which looks a lot nicer in this modern-day image, at least from the outside) marked the end of 32 months in which I’d had six addresses. From now on it was only real jobs and real apartments.
NEXT: The last of this for now.
IN OTHER NEWS: Kozmo.com is closing. We now may never know whether there was really a market for the home delivery of ice cream sandwiches and Pauly Shore videos.
THEY’RE BACK. Eight years or so ago, I thought we were rid of them for good. But now they’re reasserting themselves, and again threaten to subjugate us all under a numbing regime of enforced mindlessness.
I’m not talking about the Republicans but about the hippies.
Humans of my acquaintance, whom I thought were safe from the infestation, have succumbed one by one. Could you be the next? Take our handy quiz.
Patchouli smells like:
(B) Stale beer.
(C) The breath of the angels.
Television is:
(B) A pleasant-enough diversion.
(C) The root of all evil.
Spectator sports are:
(B) A great way to spend the afternoon with the guys and/or the family.
Lower-income working Americans are:
(B) The key toward establishing a permanent progressive movement in this country.
(C) All redneck fascists.
Tobacco is:
(B) An unfortunate addiction.
(C) Good for you if it’s American Spirits, right?
I buy my groceries:
(B) Where I get the best selection.
(C) Someplace small and dark where I have to bring my own unbleached cash-register paper.
Medical marijuana should be prescribed:
(B) To the extent it can be shown to relieve extreme pain among the seriously ill.
(C) For tummy aches and bad-hair days.
The answer to global warming is:
(B) Concerted efforts to make industry cleaner and reduce automobile use.
(C) Hemp.
The answer to racial inequality is:
(B) Diversity training in schools and workplaces.
The answer to Fermat’s Last Theorem is:
(B) Now believed to be known, but too complex to be quoted here.
The purpose of politics is:
(B) To realign society’s structures of power.
(C) To let me proclaim how perfect I am.
SCORING:
Score one point for every (A) answer.
Score two points for every (B) answer.
Score three points for every (C) answer.
RESULTS:
11-17 Points: You’re safe for now. But creeping hippiedom can occur to anyone, so be careful.
18-25 Points: You’re in serious trouble, dude. You should consider total-immersion therapy: Eighteen hours at the Riverside Inn casino, playing high-stakes poker in between line-dancing lessons.
26-33 Points: If you don’t act now, you might be just days away from tie-dying your bedsheets and taking up the hammer dulcimer. You need professional help; or at least a few days’ worth of sensory realignment at a Tokyo pachinko parlor.
If you didn’t even finish the quiz, you might have lost the ability to concentrate. Get to your nearest aerobics class or sports bar immediately, or as soon as you can gather enough energy to put some shoes on.
NEXT: Boeing becomes just another global corporation.
I’M DOWN ON DRUGS.
I know that’s a controversial statement in some circles of cyberdom; particularly among the coke-snortin’ dot-com bosses, the speed-gulpin’ Microserfs, the pot-inhalin’ cyber-Libertarians, and the e-gobblin’ ravers.
I can’t help it.
I’m an incurable rationalist, you see.
I happen not to believe frying one’s brain makes one part of some new advance in human evolution. I don’t believe pot-induced complacency will revolutionize the world or end all wars. (And I certainly don’t orgasm at the mere presence of pot-leaf imagery or at words such as “harsh realm” or “chronic.”)
I prefer liveliness to waking-sleep, reality to hallucination, and awareness to stupor.
However, the rationalist in me is also well aware that there are many kinds of addictions and “trips” people go through that don’t need to involve chemical assistance. (In my more jaded younger days, I used to say I didn’t need drugs, I was strung out on life.)
One of the most dangerous of these un-drugs is mass hysteria. Which is one of the tools being used by proponents of our 30-year-old, and still futile, War On Drugs.
The drug war has incarcerated, killed, or otherwise destroyed the lives of thousands of American and foreign citizens. It’s disenfranchised countless minority males and turned some inner-city neighborhoods into quasi-military occupation zones. It’s been used as an excuse for the suppression of civil liberties and assorted military misadventures (if you disliked the Panama invasion, you’ll loathe the fledgling Colombia incursion).
It’s increasingly clear, even to a few politicians (particularly a few Republicans of quasi-Libertarian bent), that the drug war will never permanently reduce the amount of addictive stuff made in or shipped to the U.S. It won’t significantly reduce the number of people who become addicts, and can’t do anything to get those addicts off the stuff.
It succeeds at providing jobs, cash, and political influence to police departments and their suppliers, to prisons and the contractors that build them, and to the military and its suppliers. These have become powerful lobbies, peddling influence to politicians of all stripes to keep getting “tougher” at policies that serve to increase international instability and domestic crimes (turf wars, thefts for drug money) and to turn small-time users into lifetime members of the criminal-justice system.
As is often the case when U.S. trends enter into obsessive-compulsive-disorder territory, it takes foreigners to point it out, to examine it from a clear distance.
For instance, one of the most thorough and objective online reading sources about the drug-war tragedy is a series of stories by Canadian newspaperman Dan Gardner. “Humans have used psychoactive drugs,” Gardner writes, “in just about every society in every time in history. There has never been, and can never be, a ‘drug-free world.'”
For another instance, certain European territories are succeeding with different legal strategies that treat drugs as an inevitable social element and addiction as a disease rather than a crime.
It’s just the clean and sober way to do it.
TOMORROW: What if America’s big team sports all went coed?
IN OTHER NEWS: Dennis Miller’s obscure jokes have nothing on the homespun election-night allegories of Dan Rather!
“Bush Or Gore: ‘A New Era Dawns….'”
Haunted Ground, Part 2
by Guest Columnist Donna Barr
(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist started to explain how her adopted home of Bremerton, the town across Puget Sound from Seattle, just might be the most surreal town on the planet. Today, she continues.)
A FEW STRAINS of “pedigree” pets–especially Siamese cats, Pekingese and Pomeranian dogs, and pit bulls–are used in a Ponzi-scheme breeding system, to make a little cash.
A “Bremerton purebred”–one of several unoffical local strains, unrecognized by the regulation kennel clubs–a female, is bought, impregnanted, and then her kittens or puppies sold. No attention is paid to inbreeding; an uncle may be bred to a niece, with a hand-job to help ’em along, so long as saleable young are produced.
If they don’t sell, they’re dumped into a Humane Society and Animal Control system already overloaded by the transient naval population, and its habit of leaving its pets behind when it is transferred. The local naval commanders don’t do anything about the problem. Females who aren’t profitable are put down.
Pit bull fighting is common–it’s nothing to see a big uncut male missing an eye, or with a gash that runs half the width of his neck. And I don’t know any vet, even in Bremerton, who sews up wounds with dental floss.
The pit bull puppy-mill in the place across the alley didn’t get broken up until we had an attack. The big stud-dog tore after a little dog that was being walked down the alley, and when the little dog’s owner tried to save him, he got the stud-dog’s teeth in his ribs. The little dog was usually walked by a twelve-year-old boy whose throat was about rib-high. The dog was destroyed and the mill run out by the landlord.
Drug dealers aren’t much of a problem, not even the gangs that come in with the Navy ships. The block-watches are pretty easygoing. So long as a drug dealer doesn’t set up a crack house, or let the kids cut the crack on the front table with the door open, if the dealer doesn’t bring in customers all night, with cars coming and going and running up on the sidewalk, people will leave them alone. And no drive-bys. The block-watches know they’re not targeted, but the problem with druggies is they can’t shoot–and whenever a bullet goes loose, all the kids in the neighborhoods become bullet magnets.
So if the dealers will just go down to the Callow Safeway, where a nice big concrete-pit parking lot has built to contain the bullets, then nobody will bother them. If they show up on the street, the old Detroit trick–the sign that says “Drug Parking, Fifteen Minute Limit”–will make them leave. Or you can sit on their cars and drink beer. They hate that. What is it with drug dealers that makes them think they don’t have a neon-green sign on their forehead that says “Get your smack here”?
Bremerton is only an hour from Seattle, and only an hour from the Olympic Penninsula, so you can go do the city or go camping without a lot of driving.
Getting out of town once in a while is important. You can drive out to the reservation and buy really great fireworks, at places like Ill Eagle and Pyro Mama’s. M-100s and nearly professional-level rockets, the kind that wake up all the dogs in the neighborhood and make Bremerton look like a war-zone, with all the blue smoke floating through the trees. My husband and I always get the impression that the locals sell ’em with the attitude of “Go ahead, you dumb white folks–blow your hands off.” Which we think is pretty funny, after what the U.S. government got away with up here, burning down Old Man house for one.
Once the U.S. officials tried to stop the white folks that were coming off the reservation with fireworks, and they ran into the reservation chiefs and their back-ups, who told them to get the hell away from their customers.
Everybody thought that was pretty funny.
All the plastic car fish-logos are here: Blank Christian, Darwin, Survival, Alien, ‘n Chips, and Gefilte.
Bumper sticker: The Christian Right is Neither.
The black drag queen dresses fine, but he seems to have a hard time finding quality shoes.
TOMORROW: A Halloween roundup, among other short items.
Haunted Ground
ASK ANYONE–the students and off-duty sailors and shipyard workers that hang out at the local coffee bars. Even the guy at the once-a-month Gay Bingo, that is held along with a spaghetti supper in the basement of the Episcopalian Church, the guy that just moved up from San Francisco.
They’ll all tell you Bremerton is the most surreal town they’ve ever known.
Bremerton isn’t really a consolidated town; it’s made up of different populations, the students at Olympic College, the floating drug-dealers barking like seals downtown, the poor down west and the not-so-poor up east.
In Bremerton “West” is actually south of the bridges, “East” actually north. Callow used to be a village on its own, like Manette, before they were both assimilated by Bremerton. Now one is a street, the other a neighborhood.
There aren’t any ethnic neighborhoods in this town; everybody is all mixed in together. At a block-watch party, you’re likely to be served chicken adobo, Cajun barbeque chicken, and chicken-and-rice soup. If there’s been a sale on chicken down at the Callow Safeway, there will probably be lemon chicken and chicken-foot soup.
On Callow is the world’s smallest native-people’s reservation. It takes up about of a city block, standing out among the surrounding houses by tall second-growth Douglas firs. It’s been reserved because it’s a graveyard.
The graves are marked by low stones, that lie between the trailers of the mobile-home park. The locals have always lived with their dead. There were a lot of locals here at one time, and they left a lot of dead, but this is all that’s left of their graves. The rest have been gouged up and paved over. You’re better off if you’re psychicly deaf; at night this town walks like Edinburgh.
On the Bremerton map, a very faint cross was used to mark the reservation; you’ll have to look hard to see it. Now it’s marked by a very faint bow-and-arrow. Some kind of politics went on, but I don’t know what.
The city graveyard on the south side has graves in it from the 1800s. Some of the people in it fought in the Civil War–there’s a little walled plot for them. The graveyard dog is a big black dumb Labrador named Brutus. If you call him The Graveyard Dog, you have to make sure you mean the LIVE one–otherwise, people get spooked.
When we came home from a funeral, we found the big fool locked up in our back yard, looking all confused and stupid. He wore a tag, so we called his owner, who came to get him, and had a hard time driving away with a big happy cloud of Brutus jumping all over the front seat with him.
If you walk in the city graveyard in the southeast corner in full daylight, you may catch a glimpse of a tall heavy man wearing a black suit and a white waistcoat out of the corner of your eye. If you turn and look at him, he’s not there. The old guys in town say that if you go down to the shipyard late at night and watch the mothballed ships, the old dead air-craft carriers and destroyers, you’ll see the crews lined up, faintly, in the moonlight.
The politics in Bremerton are pretty surreal, too. Water’s cheap, sewer’s expensive–Bremerton is paying for Gorst’s rebuilt sewer system.
The downtown is gutted, because everybody who’s holding the old, asbestos-laden houses won’t sell until they get full market prices, so no projects to improve the waterfront or the downtown can go forward. The businesses went to Silverdale, where the malls were built in the middle of an important salmon watershed–and get flooded out every time there’s a heavy rain.
Ha ha ha.
The boys catch bullheads in the bay and make “meat-puppets” out of them, partially gutting them with pocket-knives or nail-scissors, so they don’t die too quickly, then sticking their fingers through the torn bellies and making them “talk.” Or they catch the fish on lines, then whip them to death on the surface, laughing their heads off.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
I SOMETIMES LIKE TO SAY I used to laugh at people stuck in the ’60s, until I started meeting people stuck in the ’80s.
Sometimes I worry I might become one of the latter.
I spent a recent night remiscing with some pals about the good old days of 1978-86 or so, when Seattle had several intersecting underground scenes of hedonism and revelry.
Beneath the city’s then-acceptable faces of entertainment (white blues bands, fancy restaurants, middlebrow art galleries) was a social labyrinth of drag queens, women who took style lessons from drag queens, swingers, tantric sex-cult members, new age hookers, hardcore punk-rock crusters, LSD and MDA takers, disco-ers, performance artists, metal sculptors, bicycle messengers, down-and-out poets, eastern-spirituality seekers, tattoo artists, cartoonists, urban vagabonds, and a few anarchists.
We had different goals and paths, but were more or less united in and by our shared contempt for upscale bourgeois squareness–the state religion of Seattle in that era, when the thoroughly domesticated ex-hippie was the official role-model archetype.
One of my chatting companions on this particular recent evening said she missed those days, and felt the city had gotten far too tame since. (Though she admitted that she herself had aged beyond such shenanigans, so she might not know whether anything like that’s still going on.)
I tried to assure her that yes, there were indeed folks still doing wild things. Mostly different people, and often very different wild things, but still something.
But the more I thought about it, the less convinced I was of my own statement.
Sure there are kids having sex, but it’s hard to create a “rebellious” stance out of sex in our age of porn superstore chains, beer-sponsored gay-pride parades, weekly-paper escort ads, and suburban swing clubs.
Sure there are kids doing drugs, but a lot of the drugs they use are the drugs of social withdrawal and/or self-destruction.
Sure there are kids playing rock n’ roll, but certain self-styled tastemakers insist rock n’ roll’s passe in a modern age of electronica and avant-improv and hiphop.
Sure there are kids having rowdy times and “rebelling” against ordinariness, but dot-com fratboys and Libertarian libertines do that all the time these days too.
Young adults are indeed doing the wacky-n’-wild things young adults tend to do. But, far as I can discern, they’re not doing them with the sense of mission or community we had back in the pre-Nirvana days.
What this is all leading up to is a lesson for You Kids These Days.
I want to see you doing all the outrageous things your youthful energy and/or ignorance lets you do (well, maybe not the worst of the drug parts, and the sex parts oughta be done with certain protections).
But I want you to do these things with a purpose.
Yes, you’re sowing the proverbial wild oats, making memories with which to brighten your lives when you’re old and annoy kids when you’re middle-aged.
But if you do it right, you’ll be doing more.
You’ll be finding, through trial and error, the precise points where today’s mainstream society (as opposed to yesterday’s) gets uncomfortable; the points where progress starts. I don’t know where those points are; you’ll have to find them. God knows somebody has to.
TOMORROW: An anthology of would-be “edgy” writings.
IN OTHER NEWS: Women are now the majority of Net-users in the U.S. That probably won’t stop them from being condescendingly marketed to as a “niche.”
