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Friday night, I somehow managed to get into what was billed as the last local show ever by the world’s greatest rock n’ roll band, the Fastbacks.
The gig, at Ballard’s fab Sunset Tav, was only announced as the group’s farewell gig in the Stranger two days before; Kathleen Wilson wrote that singer-bassist Kim Warnick wanted to give up the grind (though she’ll continue with her own new band, Visqueen). Thus, apparently, ends 22 amazing years of Warnick, guitarist-songwriter Kurt Bloch, guitarist Lulu Gargiulo, 14 successive drummers, and some 160 (more or less) of the greatest happy/angry noise-pop created anywhere.
The show itself was sold out (I only managed to get in toward the end of openers Droo Church’s set). Many of the crowd had been FBX fans since the ’80s; others were young enough to have been conceived in the bathrooms during early Fastbacks shows.
It was a racous, intense, gorgeous night. Guys with middle-aged backs and knees were pogoing like the old days. Bloch, Warnick, Gargiulo, and alternating drummers Mike Musburger and Jason Finn were tight, loud, and completely Hi-NRG. Fun, sweat, and great memories were had by all, for nearly two hours.
But this is not to imply the Fastbacks are, or ever were, a nostalgia band. Their music is timeless; their basic sound has remained virtually unchanged all this time (except for becoming smarter and more professional). They never lost their classic garage-rock charm or sassiness.
The Fastbacks’ sound is built on simple, solid ingredients: Passionately belted vocals, alternately-keyed female harmonies, workhorse rhythm-section parts, deceptivel intricate guitar riffs, and, most importantly, the complementary interplay between happy music and sad/angry lyrics.
To have ever been a Fastbacks fan is to have fond recollections of having listened to, and identified with, Warnick’s spirited deliveries of Bloch’s negative messages. Typical topics include generalized loss and depression, loneliness, busted friendships, insufferable and/or uncaring authority figures, and frustration at the dysfunctional world of Reagan-Bush America (now more relevant than ever!).
On the bus over to the Sunset, I happenned to be perusing a John Gray self-help book I’d picked up at a bookstore remainder rack. In it, he talked about the need to express your angers and frustration, lest the negative energy build up inside you as a toxin to the soul. That’s the effect I’ve always gotten from the Fastbacks’ songs. They help me exorcise my depressions, and make me happy, at least for the moment.
And they always will, whether or not any more are released.
Though I’m certainly hoping more will be released, or at least “reunion” gigs will take place, or at least-least that Bloch can find a new performing outlet for his particular brand of genius.
THE NEW YEAR opened with almost exactly the same Space Needle fireworks routine (seen here from halfway up Queen Anne Hill) that began the last year.
It’s as good a time as any for a year-in-review. In 2001, this region faced:
On the at-least-somewhat brighter side:
THIS QUAINT FIGURE who appeared at Westlake Center on New Year’s Eve day is Captain Drift. He doesn’t speak much, but here’s part of what his accompanying written plaque has to say:
WHO IS CAPTAIN DRIFT? The Captain was a humanoid from the universe next door, and a frequent visitor to planet Earth. During the return voyage following his last visit, he collided spectacularly with his dream self and slipped into the inter-universal cosmic subconscious. This portrait, commissioned by his clan, is an artist’s interpretation (based on heresay tabloid evidence) of what the Captain’s reincarnted self probably looks like.
WHO IS CAPTAIN DRIFT?
The Captain was a humanoid from the universe next door, and a frequent visitor to planet Earth.
During the return voyage following his last visit, he collided spectacularly with his dream self and slipped into the inter-universal cosmic subconscious.
This portrait, commissioned by his clan, is an artist’s interpretation (based on heresay tabloid evidence) of what the Captain’s reincarnted self probably looks like.
AGAIN THIS YEAR, those fun-lovers at the Seattle Cacophany Society came out in force for “Santarchy” (aka “The Night of 100 Santas”), a Friday-night Belltown pub crawl.
The premise is extremely simple. Several dozen Santas (plus some elves, clowns, reindeer, and the occasional Mary and Joseph) walk from bar to bar, brightening the evening by their raucous presence.
They ask some random bargoers whether they’ve been naughty or nice. Those who say “naughty” get a small candy cane. Those who say “nice” are given a gentle lashing and a scolding “Wrong answer.”
Despite the costume-party parody aspect of the event, it’s one of the purest Christmas Spirit spreaders I know of. No sales, no soliciting, no pressure, no be-happy-or-else intimidation. Just good old kitschy joy.
(The Cacophonics do other stuff year-round, and can be reached at this link.)
Meanwhile, the most appropriate holiday greeting this year could well be the simple message at Ross Dress for Less: “Hope.” (It’s just too bad the sign’s tree-ornament caricature looks too much like a lit cherry bomb.)
‘TWAS A GLORIOUS 20th anniversary party Sun. night for the Pink Door, our official fave gourmet-Italian eatery. (And not just because the name discreetly alludes to something I always like to go into.) The event had the swingin’ acrobat depicted here, a stilt walker, an accordian-tuba combo, several torch singers, a sax player, and street-music vet Baby Gramps. Fun was had by all.
AN EGYPTIAN INTELLECTUAL claims “Terrorism is the antithesis of self-determination.” (found by Rebecca’s Pocket.)
ROGER EBERT’S glossary of movie cliches (found by Robot Wisdom).
With an uncomfortable Thanksgiving thankfully, now out of the way, the big Xmas shopping season is officially underway. Around here, it’s begun for the last seven or eight years with the Bon Marche Holiday Parade.
It’s a modest parade in comparison to its nationally televised big brothers (such as the one mounted in NYC by the Bon’s sister chain Macy’s). It runs for less than an hour and a half. Its floats and balloons are much closer to human scale. There are fewer celebrity guests, none of whom stop to lip-sync a song for the cameras.
But the Bon parade effectively accomplishes its job–to get a couple thousand or more folks downtown for the opening of the stores on Friday morning.
This year’s parade ended with a massive downpour of paper and foil confetti squares on Fourth Avenue in front of the Bon. Kids and adults alike reveled in the faux snow. But only for 20 minutes or so. In order to quickly reopen the parade-route streets to auto traffic, crews were set to immediately sweep up the confetti, a task they accomplished right on cue.
But by the time the confetti was all gone, so were most of the paradegoers. Whether due to the recession, post-9/11 jitters, or whatever, the stores on Day One of Xmas Shopping weren’t much busier than they’d been the previous Friday.
The downtown retail bosses planned for this situation by staging a second big event later that day, the lighting of the Bon’s exterior “star” lights and of Westlake Center’s big tree live on the 5 p.m. local newscasts. The regular downtown Christmas Carousel is back up, and the stores downtown and elsewhere are planning other crowd-drawing gimmickry over the next four weeks.
Hey, we could all use the free entertainment. Especially those among us who can’t afford all those fancy trinkets and baubles this year.
‘TWAS A PERFECT DAY for the low-key recreation of the Alki Landing that served as Seattle’s official 150th birthday rite. That is to say, there was heavy rain, wind, cold temperatures, high tide, moderately heavy waves, and a near-total greyout (no visible horizon).
Some 1,000 people and 800 umbrellas braved the elements to witness volunteers playing the Denny Party showing up on a restored clipper ship playing the schooler Exact, then taking a small rowboat to the beach (where the real pioneers had been met by nearly-nude natives, not Gore-Texed honky families enjoying freebie chicken wings and Starbucks coffee).
The scene then moved down the shore to the 1905 landing-memorial obelisk, for a ceremony dedicating two plaques just added to it honoring the landing-party’s women and the local natives.
Lame-duck mayor Paul Schell gave a short speech, comparing his appearance to that of Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the far-better-attended 1951 100th birthday: “We do have one thing in common. We were both asked to leave.”
ELECTION ’01 UPDATE: The absentee-vote counting resumed today after the Veteran’s Day holiday weekend. Our boy Greg Nickels still leads, but by fewer than 1,600 votes. Today’s count, however, still included a number of early absentees, who trend more conservative. It’ll be the makeup of the late absentees, some of which were counted today and more of which will be counted in the next two or three days, that will decide it all.
ELECTION ’00 UPDATE: The news-media recount of the Florida ballots has finally been announced. Most headlines about the unofficial recount claimed Bush won it. But buried in the stories (or played up in ‘alternative media’ analyses of the results), you find that Gore would’ve won under six of the nine possible recount scenarios, other than the one the Republican-dominated Supreme Court threw out.
In other words, one can still plausibly say the election may have been stolen by the GOP sleaze machine, now hard at work attempting to recreate the social conditions of the Cold War.
They were partying like it’s 1999 again last Friday when another WTO protest march took place. This one didn’t directly connote the anniversary of the Seattle trade-meeting debacle but rather noted this year’s meeting in Qatar, a land that doesn’t let such foolishness as freedom or democracy get in the way of making deals and bucks.
Of course, here in the U.S. it’s quite harder these days to demonize something with “World Trade” in its name, without giving an audience all sorts of other unfortunate memories. Thus the banner proclaiming WTC and WTO to be equally disastrous. The rest of the visuals in the march rehashed common protest topics not directly related to word trade (the Iraq sanctions, the drug war, and, of course, Mumia Abu-Jamal).
They’ve torn down the Flag Plaza Pavilion at Seattle Center. Another of the Center’s dwindling inventory of 1962 World’s Fair buildings, it hosted everything from cat shows and rave parties to the touring King Tut artifact show. Bulldozers are now at work preparing the lot for the replacement, Fisher Pavilion (KOMO’s parent company bought the naming rights).
The comforting sights of the Standard Time rainy season in the great PacNW include those of kids defiantly playing at the Center’s International Fountain and a Metro bus’s unwiped windshield portion glistening in another vehicle’s taillight.
THIS HALLOWEEN WAS as restrained and low-key as many media folks predicted it would be, at least at the places I and my crack team of MISC informants attended.
These pix are from the party at Consolidated Works’ (way unfinished) new space, behind Ducky’s Office Furniture on Mercer Street. There, and elsewhere, I and my informants saw the usual Batgirls and Xenas and male maids, plus a heckuva lot of Harry Potters. (Unfortunately, I didn’t get a successful image of the woman dressed as an anthrax envelope.)
The Rendezvous bar’s closing night (see prior item below) was also Wednesday. Our on-the-spot correspondent says it was also a quiet night, devoted more to reminiscences than to rowdiness.
…is this one at Phil Smart Mercedes-Benz. The big flag in the window is of the old 48-star variety. That was the type of flag this country had during a certain previous military conflict, one for which Mercedes-Benz manufactured equipment for this country’s chief opponent.
THIS HALLOWEEN NIGHT marks the demise of the historic Rendezvous restaurant and bar, and of its small but sumptuous Jewel Box Theater.
We were there Friday for a lovely show of dissonant art-noise starring horn meistro Wally Shoup and a group calling itself Gidrah. While they played, beautiful scenes from Toho Studios monster movies played on the Jewel Box’s silver screen.
The Rendezvous first opened in the ’20s, as an adjunct to a company in the same building that outfitted the interiors of movie theaters. (Second Avenue was Seattle’s “Film Row,” where the big studios had their regional distribution offices and warehouses). The Jewel Box inside the Rendezvous was both a showcase for the theater-building company’s wares and a screening room where theater operators would preview new films.
In recent years the Jewel Box has hosted art-film screenings, music-video shootings, fringe-theater shows, literary readings, band gigs of all imaginable types, and AA meetings.
The Rendezvous bar, meanwhile, became one of greater downtown’s last refuges for old-timers and blue-collar drinkers. The recently broken-up local band Dodi was named after the joint’s tuff-but-lovable, beehive-coiffed, longtime barmaid.
Former OK Hotel mastermind Steve Freeborn is taking over the place and promises to reopen it early next year, restored and brought up to code. He also plans some of the OK’s old brand of art exhibitions and progressive performance bookings at the new Rendezvous.
But it just won’t be the same.
…of the Stateside war hype this time around. Here, a woman strolls downtown in the type of full-body veil prescribed by the Taliban. This particular woman might be an actual conservative Muslim, or she might be trying to drum up war support by presenting an image of the Taliban’s repressiveness, or she might be another journalist on some “chador-for-a-day” assignment.
Elsewhere downtown, a dozen or so women stood up at Westlake carrying the name of “Women In Black,” an international group opposed to both the Taliban and the war.
While four blocks away, Deja Vu (a company, and an industry, that historically has depicted governments as censorious threats to porn-lovers’ civil rights) bares its patriotic support toward making the world safe for lap dances.
Some things seen around town recently, starting with longtime street musician Richard Peterson strolling through Pioneer Square and announcing (as he has done several times before) that “this is my last day on the streets.” I met him at the end of a tiring week schlepping print MISCs around town, and could instantly sympathize with the sentiment/threat.
You know that big white fabric rectangle on the back of the Bon Marche parking garage, that had a sign at the bottom apologizing that Salmon Streaming had been suspended due to the power shortage? Now we finally get to see what the heck Salmon Streaming is. It’s a short, looping, silent film projected onto the giant outdoor screen at night. Sponsored by Seattle City Light, it’s a promo film for fishery-restoration efforts near its Ross Dam project in the Skagit Valley. It’s also an odd bit of nature imagery in the heart of Seattle’s most urban-decay-looking block.
The Northwest Bookfest was held again this year in the Stadium Exhibition Center, and again failed to fill even the front room of that vast space. (Curtaining off sections of the room is apparently not practicable or feasible, because the center’s restrooms and concessions are situated along the side walls.)
The result: While attendance was apparently comparable to last year’s event (which had more touring big-name authors), the room energy (and, perhaps, consequently the booth sales) just wasn’t what it had been back when Bookfest took place in the cozy confines of Pier 48 (where, as I’ve oft mentioned, Alice Wheeler shot the cover of Loser at one of Nirvana’s last shows). The pier, alas, is no longer available for public rental. The State Convention Center, whose more flexible floors hosted the 1999 Bookfest, is apparently not available at the right time of year to land a lot of big-time touring authors.
Last year, I proposed revamping Bookfest to fit the space. Since it’s a space built for auto show-type events, I said Bookfest should become more like one of those–a World Of Words Literama, full of pomp and circumstance and balloons and gold lame jumpsuits.
The promoters did successfully attract a few new types of vendors (paper-ephemera dealers, f’rinstance), but still more could be sought out–home office supply stores, computer dealers, college writing programs, grey-sweater and tweed-jacket merchants, magazine publishers (Ed McMahon could even show up to give away some bucks!).
Other possibilities to fill more of the vast room, or otherwise make the thing more exciting: More word-game and puzzle competitions; after-hours no-kiddies-allowed readings from the “good parts” of highbrow novels; Appalachian-style storytelling fests; banks of computers where visitors could add-a-line to ongoing stories; bulletin boards (real, not computerized) where visitors could post index-card-borne answers to pollster-type questions (favorite literary character, first book ever read, etc.); classic poems displayed on big LED-readout walls; maybe even a literary-character costume contest.
Yes, these suggestions go beyond Bookfest’s laid-back-and-mellow dictum of good taste, and that’s part of the point. Reading and (especially) writing are largely solitary pleasures. It’s good to get readers and writers in one big place to share their joys and receive one another’s support. And as a mid-October event, Bookfest marks the beginning of stay-inside season; thus it should be more festive and celebratory, the better to help its attendees stave off Seasonal Affective Disorder and remain cozy and happy thru the dreary months to come.
My ex-Floridian neighbor across the hall, who is wont to ring my doorbell at assorted hours for assorted reasons, rang early Thursday morning.
“Do you KNOW what it is outside?” she proclaimed with baited breath.
“It’s AUTUMN!!
“Do you KNOW how long it’s been since I experienced autumn? Fifteen YEARS! The air is so crisp and biting. It’s not hot. The leaves are becoming beautiful. It’s amazing. You’ve got to appreciate it.”
And I hope you appreciate it as well.
