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The P-I unexpectedly endorsed Mark Sidran, the Seattle City Attorney and mayoral candidate loved by nobody but suburban Republicans and the downtown business establishment.
The paper’s endorsement editorial (in the tiny P-I Focus corner of the Sunday Seattle Times (the Times hasn’t endorsed a candidate for mayor yet)) lauded Sidran as “the right choice for Seattle.” (You can, of course, take the term “right” several different ways.)
It praised him as a dynamic, forthright leader who courageously dared to say what big business wants to hear (that the minorities and the poor are the sole creators of their fate) and to do what big business wants done (“cleaning up” the city into a post-democratic theme park where only money and power would matter).
OK, the paper didn’t specifically say all that in quite such a skeptical manner. But a careful between-the-lines reading could easily make one suspect the anonymous staff editorial writer might not have totally agreed with the opinions dictated by the paper’s publisher, and might have deliberately crafted the piece to show up just how ludicrous and potentially dangerous Sidran is.
Or, the piece might have been drafted by someone who actually admires Sidran and actually believes the arguments it makes on his behalf. If that’s the case, the Sidran campaign could be in even bigger trouble than it seems to be.
Just two days before the editorial, a P-I news article noted Sidran’s big-money-backed campaign lagged in fourth place in opinion polls. Sidran trails County Councilmember Greg Nickels, incumbent Paul Schell, and populist gadfly Charlie Chong (who’s running this time with little more than the name recognition from his ’97 mayoral attempt and his previous one term on the City Council). But never you mind those odds, the paper now insists; Sidran’s supposedly got lots of fans (many of whom even live within the Seattle city limits!).
The endorsement editorial was accompanied by a David Horsey cartoon depicting four lily-white upscale folk (the only folk Sidran even confers human-being status to), all of whom secretly admire Sidran but won’t admit it out loud. It’s the dumbest thing Horsey’s drawn since his (at least sincere) ’94 cartoon wishing Kurt Cobain had taken up hiking instead of heroin. (In the case of the Sidran cartoon, Horsey just might have been instructed by management to promote opinions he didn’t personally share, just as the editorial writer just might have. But that’s something we might never officially know, one way or the other.)
JUST AS I START to get bored with my existing selection of cable channels, AT&T Digital Cable serves me up a fresh batch. In an effort to stave off the juggernaut of home-satellite-dish ownership, they’ve quickly gone and snagged up a bunch of the secondary and tertiary program services dish owners have long enjoyed.
Among them, in no particular order:
Still not on local cable screens but wanted, at least by me: The Food Network, ABC SoapNet, Boomerang (Cartoon Network’s oldies channel).
NEXT: If you’re really nice, I might share some pieces of my next book.
IN OTHER NEWS (Mike Barber in the P-I, on unseasonably-low levels in hydroelectric lakes): “A walk down through the terraced brown bluffs is a stroll through the history of modern beer. Colorful newer cans and bottles glimmer in the sun at the higher levels, giving way to more faded cans tossed overboard in the pre-Bud Lite era.”
ELSEWHERE:
YESTERDAY AND TODAY, some recent departures from the pop-cult scene, locally and nationally.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #5: Our Love and War Man already misses Mike Mailway (real name Larry M. Boyd), whose locally-based syndie trivia column ended a week and a half ago. Always wished I could write like him. That staccato, crime-movie-soundtrack rhythm. The eternally provocative mix of historic, scientific, and just odd facts gathered from all times and places. Had the privilege of meeting him a few times; always the perfect gent. I wish him well.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #1: What with all the sanctimonious gnashing-O-teeth that’s gone on over the threatening might of big-box chain bookstores, you might not expect any tears for the demise of such an outlet. But loyal customers are indeed huing and ado-ing over the impending loss of Tower Books on lower Queen Anne. Cause of death: The usual (mercenary rent hike).
The store’s annual 30-percent-off pre-inventory sale is being extended until closing day, Feb. 4. It’ll be missed, partly because Tower’s one chain that acted sorta like an indie in its niche-marketing prowess. Because most of its other outlets were attached to Tower Records stores, it was big on the sorts of books CD buyers like. Glossy pop-star tomes, yes; but also coffee-table art and photography, sci-fi, erotica, student reference, self-help, astrology, comix, lefty-politics, Beat-generation nostalgia, and literary-hipster fiction. (Although the approach had its drawbacks, such as when they had to put the Bukowski novels behind the counter to prevent theft by suburban down-and-outer wannabes.)
Tower says it wants to eventually build a book annex on the site of its current record store six blocks away, but has given no timetable for the project.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #2: Puget Consumers Co-op is closing its oldest alterna-food and vitamin store, in Ravenna. Way back in the early ’80s, when PCC really was a cooperatively-run small merchant, Ravenna was its only space (it had previously been an even smaller food-buying club). It was a subculture, a ‘tribe’ if you wish.
As you may know, I’m something of a skeptic about many of today’s neo-Puritanical food religions (macrobiotic, organic, vegan, ‘live,’ etc.). But I had, and have, every respect for the healthful values of community, of being part of a circle of humans who care about one another. That’s something PCC gradually lost as it became a professionally-managed chain store.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #3: The Seattle Times Co., citing a need to cut costs due to recent circumstances (see below), is shutting Mirror, its eight-year-old monthly tabloid for teenagers.
I was a part-time assistant on Mirror’s first five issues. The yup-ladies who ran it had believed those mainstream-media scare stories that Those Kids Today were all a bunch of illiterate louts; so the yup-ladies thought they’d need an adult to write the paper. But the editors soon realized that many public high school students really can read and write (they just choose not to read the Seattle Times); so my services proved unneeded.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #4: With the end of the Seattle newspaper strike comes the end of the strike paper, the Seattle Union Record.
As I’ve said previously, it was about two-thirds of the way toward becoming the real opposition daily this town needs. While the Newspaper Guild won’t be publishing the Union Record anymore (or drumming up other unions for sympathy ads), many of the Seattle Times strikers won’t be returning to their old jobs, and hence might be available to continue their Record work under new management. I’d love to be a part of making such a paper happen.
Let’s all talk about this again real soon.
TOMORROW: People you’re not better than.
MANY ARTS AND THEATER PUBLICATIONS have come and gone, nationally and locally, over the years.
The local attempts have mostly foundered or struggled on a lack of cash flow. Artists and artsy-type folk are often considered insufficiently upscale for advertisers to bother with. Already-strapped funding organizations have had other priorities than merely documenting whatever visual or performing projects are already out there. That’s left these would-be documentors to work on an all-volunteer basis, with the personal-burnout rates and marketing weaknesses built into that concept.
One local outfit thinks it has the answer. Their magazine’s aimed not at artists, nor even at the bulk of their audiences.
Instead, Arts Patron (whose third issue should be out this month) is aimed squarely at upper-crust good-life-livers who (as a common stereotype goes) “Support the Arts” partly out of a good-works motivation, partly for the tax breaks, and partly for social status.
It’s mailed free to addresses on the fundraising mailing lists of ten participating theaters, museums, and hibrow-music ensembles. The rest of us have to read it online. (Thus keeping those downscale painters and actors and other assorted boho types from lowering the print edition’s advertiser value).
Seattle didn’t used to have very many of these patrons. Certainly not enough for a slick nine-times-a-year magazine to be aimed just at them. But post-Bill Seattle apparently has enough for publisher Jonathan Nichols to give it a shot. (If the concept works, Nichols may try to expand it to other towns.)
Should us non-gazillionaires care about the whole endeavor? From the looks of the first two issues, yes. Editor Douglas McLellan (who briefly was the best thing that had ever happened to the P-I arts section) has gone beyond mere PR hypeage for the mag’s participating institutions. Sure there are big pieces about the new Bellevue Arts Museum and the John Singer Sargent show at the Seattle Art Museum. But there are also big pieces about the Total Experience Gospel Choir, filmmaker Sandy Cioffi, the alterna-art space Howard House, and local mural-preservation advocate Roger van Oosten. McLellan himself contributes an important item about a UW study showing ballet dancers can have careers as short and injury-prone as pro football players (at far lower salaries).
So go to the site. Let its makers know you like it, and that you deserve the chance to see it in print even if you’re not a gazillionaire.
IN OTHER NEWS: Loyal reader Danny Goodisman writes, “Rumor has it, Paul Schell may run for re-election. To help him along, here are proposed slogans for Paul Schell’s re-election:
10. Still not a wimp.
9. Support international child labor.
8. Affordable housing for the rich.
7. Once a developer, always a developer.
6. Give corporate welfare a chance.
5. Blacks and Hispanics ‘raus.
4. Known round the world.
3. More ugly architecture for the Center.
2. King County multi-billionaires agree: Paul Schell for mayor.
1. Leadership which can bring tears to your eyes.”
TOMORROW: How to revive any waning popcult genre–make it Christian.
THE YEAR’S BIGGEST local news story, the one with the most potential impact on our lives, didn’t have a single big event at its heart.
It’s the decline (and, in some cases, collapse) of dot-com stock speculation. It made its presence felt in small-scale ways (office closings; layoffs; fewer and sparser “networking” soirees; and a slight but accelerating slowdown in real-estate hyperinflation).
(Its related story, the possible Microsoft bust-up, had its spectacle elements take place in Washington, DC courtrooms.)
But several big here-and-now events did take place here which had an impact beyond their immediate sights-‘n’-sounds. Here are some of them.
1. The Kingdome Blows.
After Paul Schell cancelled the official, public New Year’s, Paul Allen staged a great pyrotechnic celebration during Spring Equinox week (the ol’ pagan New Year’s). It was also a half-minute rife with symbolism; deconstructing the onetime triumph of the pre-MS Seattle’s attempts to Go Major League (on a budget, and without needless ostentation).
2. The E.M.P.-ire Strikes Back.
Mr. Allen taketh away; Mr. Allen giveth. The Experience Music Project is almost all needless ostentation, a whole quarter-billion worth of it. It doesn’t really represent the spirit of Northwest pop music (its cocktail lounge doesn’t even have Rainier, let alone Schmidt!). It does represent the spirit of the new regional powers-that-be, who’ve got gazoods of dough and want to show it off as show-offy as can be.
The museum’s opening weekend was a big, mostly free, bash of all the top touring acts Allen could afford (and he could afford a lot of them), plus a nearly-complete local all-star lineup. (The biggest nonparticipants: Pearl Jam, who still have this beef with one of Allen’s former properties, Ticketmaster.)
3. End of Jem Studio Galleries.
Gentrification hit arts spaces hard; knocking out one of the city’s oldest and largest visual-arts workspaces (and First Thursday ground zero).
The Jem artists went out with essentially a four-month-long party of exhibitions, installations, performances, DJ events, live-music shows, etc., ending on the last night with a going-out bash that included a coed nude body-paint wrestling match.
4. Ralph Nader “Super Rally,” KeyArena.
The post-WTO Way-New Left had its biggest show of strength when about 10,000 paid real money to see the first real liberal Presidential candidate in 28 years and assorted celebrity guests.
5. Daily Papers Go Scab.
The JOA-married bombastic voices of the civic establishment, which had been proclaiming for so long about how things were just so great here and could only keep getting better, got a dose of reality. Just as the Times was running a huge feature series about the winners and losers in today’s concentration-O-wealth thang, the papers’ editorial and ad employees rejected a pitiful contract offer that wouldn’t help them keep up with housing costs.
The Times and P-I instantly turned into waify simulacra of themselves. Thin papers, bereft of their usual interminable “analysis” and huge feature series (and of their regular writers and photographers, and of the previous evening’s sports results, and of arts reviews). Papers that, had they been produced by competent people, would’ve been improvements on their prior bloated formats.
TOMORROW: A Dot-Com Christmas Carol.
REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.
SOME SHORTS TODAY, starting with some great news.
THE NEXT MISCmedia book project is provisionally entitled City Lite (until we think of something better).
It’s my tribute to the city I have a lifelong lover’s quarrel with, in words (by me) and pictures (by hotshot photog Lori Mason).
It’ll be a personally guided tour-in-print of Seattle’s people, places, things, group gatherings, workdays, and playtimes.
With any luck, it’ll be out in time to coincide with Seattle’s 150th birthday in September 2001. If we can get the right financial backing, it’ll even be in color.
What we need from you now: Please feel free to send in your ideas of what images, scenes, scenic views, buildings, personalities, signs, and spectacles ought to be in it. Leave your suggestions by email to clark@speakeasy.org or on our luscious MISCtalk discussion boards.
HEY KIDS, WHAT TIME IS IT?: Yep, time for the annual MISCmedia In/Out List, another chance to ask your input. Send in your nominations for the people, places, things, fads, fashions, foods, and socioeconomic constructs you predict will rise or fall in prominence over the coming year (not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot right now).
NEWSPAPER STRIKE WATCH: The scab dailies are veering further and further rightward. Most blatant example: A Seattle Scab Post-Intelligencer front-page piece on Wednesday which began by quoting a few leftys who’d like a WTO-anniversary event every year–then, after the story jumped inside, audaciously compared it to Detroit’s once-annual arson sprees! (As if to imply the WTO protestors were out to destroy stuff, not to construct a more democratic or eco-friendly society.)
All character-defamation aside, an annual celebration of global solidarity/economic democracy/eco-awareness/worker rights/etc., celebrated here and wherever else enough gatherers can gather, could be a great thing. It needn’t, and shouldn’t, directly have to do with the WTO protests; but can instead use “N30” simply as a convenient date on which to publicly question the machinations of Global Business and to renew the spirit of empowerment and action. In a generation or two, it could even become the next big national holiday.
MONDAY: The rearing of Generation S&M.
YESTERDAY, we took the WTO-protest anniversary as an excuse to notice the Way-New Left and its ongoing efforts to bring positivity, vigor, and accomplishment back to a progressive movement that had been stuck in self-defeatism for years and years.
Activists, authors, and even some political candidates are taking back the language of liberation, empowerment, and democracy from those who’d define “revolution” strictly to mean “revolutions in business.”
And it’s about time, as Baffler editor Tom Frank notes in his new book One Market Under God.
Frank details, in 360 brisk pages, a decade or more’s worth of blathering agitprop about the “business revolution,” how it’s supposedly good for everybody. He contrasts this with pithy asides about how the market-as-everything ideology has helped ruin journalism, academia, downtowns, rust-belt communities, third-world conditions, etc.; how it’s brought downsizings and layoffs and sweatshops, all in the name of the inevitable, unerrant tide of globalization and privatization.
If there’s a complaint to be made about Frank’s work, it’s that he spends too much time sneering at his subjects and too little time explaining why we should share his ire. Long passages in One Market Under God read too much like the work of lefty “media analyst” Norman Solomon, who’s notorious for shouting that the news media aren’t telling us what’s really going on, but who seldom gets around to telling us what he thinks the real story is.
I want to hear from Frank what he directly believes democracy and liberation are, instead of keeping this ideas in the shadows, delineated only in the context of his criticisms of corporate culture.
Besides, one of Frank’s central theses-that corporate idealogues are using Orwellesque “newspeak” techniques to redefine the language of liberation so that any real challenge to the plutocracy of Global Business is literally unthinkable-is thankfully yet to be proven successful. If anything, the proponents of real empowerment are getting more vocal in exposing the contradictory bombast of the “New Economy” hypesters.
(Why, the latest Utne Reader even has a piece on “Five Signs of the Coming Revolution.” And the notoriously centrist Utne isn’t talking about a mere reorganization within the corporate ruling class, but an on-all-fronts challenge by those of us who believe business isn’t the end-all and be-all of everything (even if we disagree on almost everything else).
Still, there’s much to admire about Frank’s latest weighty tome.
He’s got a lot to say, and even more to hilariously quote, about the truly dumb ideas and convoluted doublespeak being bandied about by op-ed pundits, techno-Libertarians, and Republican think-tankers to justify the new corporate order.
Just as long as you remember that the old corporate order wasn’t all that hot either.
MEANWHILE: The WTO-protest anniversary began according to script. Hundreds of “get-tough” cops waited impatiently for some anarchist ass to kick. A few thousand old hippies and neo-radicals gathered in four locations to speak out about the usual boho-lefty topics (Mumia, Peltier, pot, veganism, animal rights, and just a little bit about global trade issues).
By midafternoon, they’d gathered in the little Westlake park and the two adjacent blocks of street. They had a great time intimidating the cops, grinning before the TV cameras, dancing and partying. (There was even a return appearance by the duct-tape-pastied women from last year’s protests.)
But by evening, enough of the crowd had withered away for the forces of order to feel assertive. The remaining, outnumbered, bohos were hounded and chased up Fourth Avenue (safely outside the Xmas retail zone). By Fourth and Blanchard, right in front of Sit & Spin, another phalanx of cops gathered on the other end of the block, preventing the remaining protesters from obeying the bullhorned orders to disperse. Paddy-wagon buses were moved in, nonviolent mass arrests were made. It played out like a touring-show version of the original–the same actions played out by a smaller cast on a smaller stage with more practiced choreography and far less spontenaity.
NEWSPAPER STRIKE WATCH: The Seattle Scab Times and Scab P-I have grown in their second strike-bound weeks to 18 pages of non-ad space, up from 15 at the strike’s start. As they gain bulk but not their experienced staffers, they’re becoming even duller than their pre-strike versions.
The Seattle Union Record, however, is getting slicker and livelier. It’s now out three times a week, at regular free-newspaper dropoff sites. (And it was much more sympathetic to WTO and WTO-anniversary protesters than the big papers ever were.)
MONDAY: The possibly-misplaced nostalgia for industrial unionism.
IT’S BEEN A WHILE since I did an all-list column, but this and the next will be such.
Today, in a post-Thanksgiving gesture of sorts, are as many Things I Like as I can think of right now (just to placate those readers who falsely complain that I never seem to like anything), in no particular order:
(Though there’s also much to be said for daydreamt fantasies involving Adrienne Shelly in a private railroad car with piped-in Bollywood movie music and a few cases of Reddi-Wip.)
(The new “Imagined Landscapes” show at Consolidated Works includes a group of three hyperrealistic paintings by NY artist Peter Drake based on ’50s nudist-mag images, only with suburban front yards for backgrounds instead of open picnic grounds.)
(If this amused you, there’s also a separate Things I Like page on this site, which duplicates almost none of the items on this list.)
MONDAY: Another list, this one of people who aren’t really better than you.
IN OTHER NEWS: Thursday saw a skinny scab-edition P-I but no Times, at least not in the downtown, Capitol Hill, and North End neighborhoods of my holiday travels. Today will likely see no Friday entertainment sections; causing movie-time-seeking readers to grab for weekly or suburban papers. What will the Sunday Times look like, aside from preprinted feature sections? We’ll find out.
IN A SHORT-SHORT FICTION PIECE I haven’t uploaded to this site yet, I once imagined some potential Playboy magazine nudie features of the future: “America’s Sexiest Female CEOs,” “America’s Sexiest Female Judges,” “America’s Sexiest Congresswomen,” etc.
One I skipped: “America’s Sexiest Anchorwomen.”
It’s an odd omission. TV stations and networks have been hiring pretty ladies to share anchor desks with hairspray boys for decades. (One of Seattle’s most memorable, Sandy Hill, was an ex-Miss Washington who wound up co-hosting every newscast on the station from noon to 11 pm, before becoming Joan Lunden’s predecessor on Good Morning America.)
All this talk is a lead-in to discussing a peculiar softcore-fetish website, The Naked News.
It’s a 15-minute streaming video newscast, with a new edition each weekday. While it has no field reporters or on-the-scene footage, its four Toronto-based studio anchors read competently-written briefs headlining the day’s news, weather, and sports.
All the anchors are young women. All of them either appear on camera fully nude, or strip from dress-for-success outfits until they’re wearing only their microphones.
The concept’s borrowed from a Russian program that appears on regular TV over there. That show’s bare news readers have occasionally even staged (nude) on-location interviews with (clothed) major government officials.
The American Naked News anchors all keep straight, tho’ perky, faces during their readings. Their only variation from standard newsreader behavior is a short rump-wiggling walkoff at the conclusion of their segments. Their faces, hair styles, and (when they have any) costumes are standard-issue anchorwoman style, not stripper or porn-star or dominatrix style. If not for their perfect (perhaps surgically perfected) figures, they could be the sort of women a young-adult male Internet user might work alongside–or for.
Their straightforward demeanor also differentiates The Naked News from the constant, screeching hard-sell tactics common to sex sites. The streaming video contains commercials, but they’re relatively tame ones (for other entertainment websites). The site’s lack of constant selling is just as relieving as its lack of hardcore crudeness.
None of this means many female Net users would enjoy viewing The Naked News, or even approve of its existence.
The site’s stars might be pronounced non-bimbos, and they might project in-charge images, but they’re still portraying male fantasies, performing to be stared at.
To such potential critics, I might say that heterosexuality has always been with us and likely always will be. As long as most het-male brains are wired to respond to visual stimuli, such stimuli will be produced. They might as well be stimuli that emphasize beauty over crudity, with at least a modicum of brains and humor and friendliness.
And while The Naked News may be a trifle, a light-entertainment novelty work, it’s really no more entertainment-oriented than many news and “reality” shows on broadcast TV. (And it’s no less journalistically respectable than some of them either.)
IN OTHER NEWS: The first strikebound editions of the Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer came out yesterday. They’re flimsy li’l 24-page things, full of wire copy, syndicated columns, and database features (weather, TV listings).
Because they were printed even earlier in the day than Tuesday’s last pre-strike papers, they didn’t include any evening sports results, stock listings, or even the Florida Supreme Court’s Presidential-recount ruling. Classified ads were truncated on a quota basis, unseen since the days of WWII paper rationing.
The result: Morning papers you didn’t need all day to read. A partial vindication for my long-held wish for a brisker, more immediate, even “alternative” daily; the sort of concept that could potentially bring true competition to the print-news biz and dislodge the local-monopoly papers such as those currently being struck.
(More strike news, and new material by picketing newshacks, is at The Seattle Union Record.
IN OTHER OTHER NEWS: George Clark, who’s self-published several occasional parodies of The Stranger and The Weekly over the years (so typographically accurate, many readers originally thought the Stranger staff had actually produced them!), has issued another, spoofing both tabloids in a double-cover format. The issue seems to have been in the works for some time; it contains parodies of features The Stranger hasn’t carried for two years or more (including my old section, cutely relabeled “Miscellanal”).
TOMORROW: Some things I actually like.
TODAY’S PREVIOUSLY-ANNOUNCED CONTENTS have been postponed so we can instead discuss the biggest Seattle media story since the Kingdome boom-boom.
It’s the big strike by the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild. It’s the town’s first newspaper strike since ’53 (and, thanks to the Joint Operating Agreement, the first to hit both the Times and P-I).
Already, the effects have been felt. Monday’s papers included the big ad stuffers normally seen on Thanksgiving; Tuesday’s papers were printed early in the evening to avoid any truckers’ sympathy walkout, and thusly didn’t mention Monday Night’s NBA or NFL results.
The big changes start today, when the papers try to put out at least a semblance of their normal product; to be distributed for free and staffed by management and out-of-state scabs. (I briefly considered applying to be a replacement newshack, but quickly dropped the idea.)
Striking reporters, editors, ad sellers, and deliverers have already started an online strike paper, the Seattle Union Record. A print Union Record is currently scheduled to start next week.
The Union Record name, as editor Chuck Taylor describes it, comes from “a labor-backed paper during the time of the General Strike of 1919, during which 65,000 Seattle workers silenced the city for five days. Before it began, Union Record editor Anna Louise Strong predicted it would lead ‘no one knows where!’ We know how she felt.”
So how might the strike affect the local media landscape?
It will immediately hurt the papers’ finances during the start of the big pre-Xmas ad season.
If it drags on, it will further erode the Times/P-I consortium’s fat and non-sassy hold on regional discourse.
Locally and around the country, newspaper circulation’s failed to keep up with population growth. Local daily-paper readership hasn’t fallen as precipitously as local TV-news viewership, but it’s still flat. (When the Times moved to morning circulation earlier this year, it mostly took readers away from the P-I.)
And while the JOA might have a monopoly on bigtime daily circulation in town, its franchise is beset on all sides by insurgent suburban dailies, weeklies (“alternative” and otherwise), news and want-ad Websites, and the three big national dailies.
For a few years now, I’ve found rarified souls in the Capitol Hill-Belltown-U District belt who, when I tell them about something published that day in “the Times,” automatically assume I mean the New York Times. There were even a couple of early Stranger writers from out of town who took their refusal to read local papers as a matter of pride; even when the resulting ignorance led them to attempting to cross Fourth Avenue on the night of the Seafair parade.)
And if it really drags on, the Times-owning Blethen family just might finally give in and sell their controlling interest in the paper to the Knight-Ridder chain, which owns 49 percent of its stock currently. Knight-Ridder is partnered with Gannett in the JOA-run papers in Detroit, which have been stuck in a protracted strike/lockout mess that’s gone on for year after year, with no end in sight, to the papers’ detriment as well as the workers’.
Perhaps that looming threat will serve as enough incentive for the two sides in Seattle to find a settlement.
TOMORROW: A different way of exposing the news.
LAST FRIDAY, I began a recollection of what Seattle was like in the fall of 1975, when I first came to the allegedly Big City after a childhood in much smaller burgs.
I’d already mentioned the only “alternative” paper at the time, The Seattle Sun; and its target audience niche, a Capitol Hill-centered clique of 25-to-35-ers who just wanted to settle down after doing whatever they’d done in The Sixties.
The mainstream media in town were also fairly tame at the time.
The Seattle Times, still an afternoon paper, was still as wide as the Wall Street Journal and as plain-looking as a cheap suburban tract house. It always ran a half-page photo on Page 3, which was almost always of a dog or Mount Rainier. Its features section, then called “View,” had many cute stories about somebody doing something important who was–gasp–a woman!
The P-I, meanwhile, was a feisty archrival to the Times in those pre-Joint-Operating-Agreement days (well, except for the editorials, which usually touted the same Chamber of Commerce party line). It still had some of that old Hearstian spunk in it; at least in the sports pages, which were then mostly about the Sonics, college sports, and out-of-town stuff. There were no Mariners or Seahawks yet; though the P-I’s lovable geezer Royal Brougham (who’d been at the paper since WWI) was already drumming up oldtime rah-rah support for our soon-to-be local heroes.
Local TV was a far different animal then than now. Newscasts were heavy on in-studio commentators and grainy 16mm film. Portable video cameras were just being introduced, and were largely used as gimmicks (as they mostly still are). That meant a lot of interviews, press conferences, and staged media events (held before 1 p.m. so the film could be edited by 5); interspersed with a few of the fires and police chases that now dominate local newscasts across the country.
And there was still a good deal of non-news local TV. J.P. Patches and Gertrude still ran a bizarre, funky kiddie show on KIRO, whose influence on the local theatrical and performance scenes lasted for decades. KING had morning and evening talk shows, providing endless interview slots to all the itinerant book-pluggers crisscrossing the nation. KOMO had a “religious program” called Strength for These Days, which ran at 5:45 a.m. weekdays and consisted entirely of the same film footage of ocean waves and windblown trees every day, accompanied by choir music.
Seattle radio was an even odder beast. For one thing, AM stations still dominated.
For the grownups, KVI’s dynamic eccentrics Bob Hardwick and Jack Morton engaged a spirited ratings battle against KOMO’s personable square Larry Nelson and KIRO’s fledgling news-talk format.
For the kids, KVI and KING-AM played an odd top-40 melange of anything that happened to be popular (Dolly Parton, Lynard Skynard, Helen Reddy, Barry White, Edgar Winter, Tony Orlando, Donny Osmond).
For the older kids, the FM band found KISW and KZOK blasting Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and their metal brethern out to Camaro-drivin’ teens from Spanaway to Stanwood.
The UW, meanwhile, had a little FM operation, KUOW, which played blocks of classical music (competing with the then-commercial KING-FM) and that newfangled network newscast with those really soft-talking announcers. (The U also ran a smaller operation, KCMU, as a laboratory for broadcast-communications students to play Grateful Dead songs and mumble their way through the weather report.)
And there was an honest-to-goodness radical community station, KRAB-FM. Its announcers often hemmed and hawed their way through a set list, but they played everything from Thai pop to big-band to political folk. It had talk blocks, too: Vietnamese children’s fables, classical lit, rambling speeches by already-aging hippie celebrities about why Those Kids Today had become too apathetic. KRAB stumbled through internal politics and mismanagement until 1984. Its frequency is now occupied by KNDD.)
TOMORROW: The Seattle arts scene at the time.
IN OTHER NEWS: Here’s a fun rumor for all you conspiracy theorists (which I’m not): Could OPEC countries be scheming to raise oil prices and engender U.S. voter restlessness against Gore/Lieberman? (found by Progressive Review)
THE STEADILY RIGHTWARD-DRIFTING Pee-Eye ran a big feature package last month on rural Washington state’s political climate for Indecision 2000.
The piece was full of the usual Grumpy Small-Town Conservatives (an archetype made for urban consumption if there ever was one). They dutifully blamed all of non-urbanized Washington’s economic problems on pesky bureaucrats and, in one interviewee’s description, “environmental Communists” meddling in these salt-O-the-earth folks’ need to make a rightful off-the-land living.
The reality, natch, is more complex.
The main reason for the economic gap between greater Seattle and the rest of Washington is that the Metroplex has had this here boom in hi-techy and other professional employment this past decade; resulting in the traffic jams, the real-estate hyperinflation, the proliferation of “Market Price” gourmet restaurants, the Blob-shaped music museum, and all the other detrius of gentrification we’ve complained about here.
But, despite the cyber-libertarians’ occasional claims that the PC Age would result in the death of cities (since, these pundits used to profess, doesn’t everybody really want to live in horse country?), eastern and southwestern Washington remained stuck in 1991-recession conditions.
The same global-corporate machinations that clogged Issaquah with condos kept farm commodity prices low, while diverting more pennies of the consumer food dollar toward processors and middlemen and marketers (which, in turn, have been merging and consolidating as fast as the financiers can close the deals).
The timber biz is in a similar predicament, with three additional complications:
The rise on the world market of cheap wood stocks from Indonesia and other countries with low wages and few enforced environmental protections;
The legacy of two or three decades’ overcutting here; which has pretty much just left the most environmentally-sensitive old-growth forests left (aside from the timber-company-run “tree farms” that are still years away from “reharvesting”); and
Consolidation and automation within the sawmill side of the biz; allowing companies to close smaller mills and blame the environmentalists.
A true progressive movement in this country, somethiing along the lines of the old-line Minnesota and Wisconsin rural populists, would be able to capitalize on these real reasons for rural recession. It would feed this simmering frustration into a movement to check corporate power and promote sustainable forestry and agriculture.
Not “environmental Communism,” but a green-but-not-red campaign that would preserve both the land and the people who’ve depended upon it.
The leaders of today’s Democratic Party, concerned almost exclusively with raising $$ from the likes of Archer Daniels Midland and courting voters from affluent suburbs, couldn’t care less.
They’ve all but officially written off wide swaths of the nation’s heartland to the Republicans, who are more than willing to accept country folk as voters, volunteers, talk-show callers, and newspaper-interview subjects–all while the GOP politicians continue to prop up the pro-corporate policies that leave farming and timber communities stuck in their rut.
TOMORROW: The disappearance of the old-fashioned bicycle.
IF YOU KNOW THE NAME OF EMMETT WATSON, you might associate it with a weekly Seattle Times column, which usually consists of cute dog stories or reminiscences about Seattle’s quieter olden days.
He’s 81 now. It’s OK in my book for him to take his life, and his writing, a little easier these days.
But you should’ve seen him in his prime.
Unfortunately, the only way you can do that (besides coming through newspaper microfiches in the library) is to stumble upon Watson’s three volumes of memoirs–all of which are, apparently, out of print.
Aside from a handful of ex-UW Daily cartoonists (Mike Lukovich, Lynda Barry), Watson may be the only truly great creative mind the Seattle newspaper industry has generated. (And yes, I’m fully aware that Tom Robbins had been a newspaperman here.)
During his peak years (essentially the era of his main P-I column, 1959-82), he was one of the master practitioners of the three-dot column, that now nearly-forgotten American art form in which dozens of seemingly unrelated items would share the same space, rattled off in crisp stacatto brevity.
But Watson did more than just chronicle the comings and goings of local politicians, business bigwigs, TV-news personalities, and other “celebrities.” He captured the soul of the city he loved.
Each of Watson’s books fits as a discrete part of a whole, like the items in a three-dot column.
The first, Digressions of a Native Son, was put out in 1982 by the Pacific Institute, an employee-motivation-seminar outfit Watson was copywriting for after the P-I reduced him to part-timer status. (How that Lovable Curmuddgeon wound up, even temporarily, with such a Think Positive Thoughts outfit is one story he’s never completely told.) Digressions is mostly autobiography, with long pauses to reminisce about the World’s Fair, press agents, colorful local characters past and present, etc.
A decade later, Watson’s own Lesser Seattle Press came out with Once Upon a Time In Seattle. This slim volume profiled a dozen local leaders and characters; most of whom, like Watson, came of age in the Prohibition and Depression years.
He immediately followed that with My Life In Print. It starts by reprinting the most important autobiographical scenes from Digressions. That’s followed by some 370 pages of Watson’s old newspaper writings, culled and edited for Watson by longtime friend Fred Brack. After a few examples of his early work as a sportswriter (he was 40 before he got to write general-interest columns), My Life gets down to business with brilliant examples of his P-I and more recent Times work.
The three-dot material isn’t included; that, apparently, has proven too perishable, its shortness necessitating an audience pre-familiarity with the eprsons and topics at hand. Rather, My Life collects the single-topic, full-length essay columns that would fill his daily slot once or twice a week. It’s not that he was doing the daily goings-on-about-town stuff to draw a salary and a forum for the longer material; rather, he put into these 900-word profiles and rants everything he continued to learn on the daily grind about pacing, brevity, and writing for impact.
That’s what makes the pieces in My Life still work so well; whether they’re profiling authors and senators and Supreme Court justices, complaining about all the skyscrapers going up downtown even then (he says their massiveness reduces street-level humans to the insignificance of ants), crowing for the preservation of the Pike Place Market, or promoting his only-partly-joking anti-civic-boosterism crusade, “Lesser Seattle Inc.”
Get any or all of Watson’s books. Look on the auction boards for them, if they’re not at a library near you.
Learn about the heartbeat of a community, and read some of the best prose ever “forgotten tomorrow” while you’re at it.
WE’LL BE OUT OF TOWN THE REST OF THIS WEEK, BUT ON MONDAY: Paul Schell’s latest miscalculation.
GENDER EQUALITY has taken another giant stride as of late.
Men’s designer fashions have become just as silly as women’s designer fashions!
The last time guys were so willing to look like clueless fashion victims in public was in the now fondly-remembered leisure suit days. Back then, flamboyance was the goal and new synthetic fabrics were the tools used to achieve it. “Hip” white guys tried too hard to mimick what they thought black guys looked like (i.e., like pimps and gangsters).
The backlash against Qiana and Fortrel was swift and severe. For almost two decades, men’s fashion headlines almost all contained that soon-overused phrase “A Return to Elegance” or some variant on it. When fashion trade magazines talked about exciting new trends in “menswear,” they almost always referred to the “menswear look” for women, not to clothes for males.
There have been trends and subtrends over the years, of course (logo sweaters, “casual Friday” khakies, Abercrombie & Fitch’s gay-crossover look, the unisex sportswear look, etc.) But the main trend, at least as marketed for adult males by prominent design houses, has been a narrow oscillation between “casual elegance” and “elegant casualness.”
But that’s apparently changing. And, once again, it’s at least partly inspired by white middle-class guys who hold an overgeneralized image of black guys as sexy criminals.
In some prisons, clothes are supplied in few sizes and belts are outlawed. Thus, baggy pants and butt cleavage became icons of gangsta toughness in the ’90s, especially to the suburban middle-class kids who became gangsta rap’s biggest market.
That concept “filtered up” to the department stores. Labels such as Tommy Hilfiger came up with big, low-riding pants and boxer shorts with logo waistbands meant to be seen in public. Rap stars were hired to wear these things in videos.
While that particular look hasn’t “graduated” to the couture-designer level, the general principle of flashy outrageousness has.
Few people directly buy couture fashion, but the industry has come to use it as an early-warning marketing device. Looks that get sufficient media attention at the major runway shows soon get altered into tamer, more easily-manufacturable versions for the department stores.
So we might actually see kilt-like shorts, meant to be worn with formal shoes and a suit jacket, in six to twelve months’ time.
And who knows? They might actually attract the attention of women. A woman might actually see a guy in one of these new getups and think, Now THERE’S a total clueless fashion victim. He obviously doesn’t have a woman in his life to tell him how stupid he looks. He doesn’t know it, but he needs me.
TOMORROW: We are driven.
BEFORE TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It’s tonight at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
IT TOOK THE P-I to point out one of those startling bookends-O-history:
“Mount St. Helens blew at exactly 8:32 a.m., on a Sunday. Nearly 20 years later, the Kingdome was imploded at 8:32 a.m., on a Sunday.
“Coincidence?”
Actually, even if the eerie time synchronicity hadn’t happened, I’d have thought of St. Helens and the Dome as the defining boom-booms of the late-modern PacNW.
St. Helens killed 57 people, thousands of trees, and dozens of old codger Harry Truman’s cats, and disrupted thousands of folks’ routines. The Kingdome only killed two ceiling-tile workers, who had a construction-crane accident a couple years before it was deemed unworthy of continued existence.
The pre-blast St. Helens was considered by most a jewel of a peak. The pre-blast Kingtome was considered by many an eyesore.
But both blasts were popular spectacles that generated marathon TV coverage, souvenir sales, and “where were you when…?” popular memories.
In 1980, a spectacular natural “disaster” was about what it took to get the Evergreen State on the network news. (The eruption didn’t make the top of the NY Times front page for two days; the paper being otherwise occupied covering Miami race riots.)
In 2000, hardly a week goes by without big headlines about Microsoft, Starbucks, police brutality, or gypsy moths.
But the near-universal thrill at watching the Dome go kablooey proves we haven’t lost our ability to find wonder and thrills in the sights and sounds of mass-scale destruction.
P.S.: I can never get tired of reruns of the TV footage of St. Helens.
For one thing, despite having been five years into the era of minicams and even home VCRs, and despite the weeks of warnings and buildup on the mountain, the only real footage of the blast itself came from a still photographer who simply hand-forwarded his film as fast as he could.
For another thing, it was one of the last domestic TV news events at least partly covered with 16mm film cameras, rather than live video feeds. To folks my age and up to 10 years older, the scratchy, dark, washed-outy look of 16mm reversal film will always signify scruffy, raw news footage (or the exterior scenes of British miniseries that were otherwise shot in brightly-lit studios on video).
I find myself having to tell Those Kids Today that there was a time when prime-time news promos really did say “Film at 11,” and when local newscasts weren’t burdened by endless, uninformative, live “standup” chats with reporters on the scene of something that had ended hours before.
TOMORROW: Those annoying “My __” websites.
