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Some local activists had a great idea, to hold a “Reclaim the Streets” party Saturday afternoon, along the lines of similar events in England and across the U.S.
The premise: A party, a celebration, an outdoor rave of sorts (albeit without a DJ booth) in a big public place, unauthorized and unofficial.
The justification: The streets, and the city, belong to the citizens, not to politicians or cops or retail chains.
The organizers wanted the event to be a celebration, not a protest. Instead of complaining about society, attendees were asked to make positive statements about creating a new world without cars or malls or dumb laws.
But that was enough of a premise to draw the usual protest infiltrators from the Revolutionary Communist Party and other bands; plus individual marchers who believed in taking any opportunity to call attention to fervently believed-in causes (Mumia Abu-Jamal, police brutality).
And, natch, it was enough to draw great phalanxes of cops (who, at one point near the event’s end, may have outnumbered the participants).
There were cops in riot gear, cops on bicycles, cops on horses, cops in cars, and cops in a big van. There were lines of cops guarding the Convention Center, a Starbucks, the new Hyatt Hotel, and Pacific Place.
There were pepper-sprayings; there were cop horses sticking their heads out at protesters. There were an estimated 18 arrests (almost 10 percent of the marchers).
“Rioting” on the protesters’ side, meanwhile, was limited to just a couple of hammered-at windows at the Gap and Banana Republic, which attracted the extended gazes of the TV news crews, which were apparently out to tell a violent-assault-and-righteous-retribution story no matter what the real situation was.
So why the heavy police over-reaction?
It’s been pretty obvious these past few weeks that Mayor Paul Schell, heavily trailing in the polls for his re-election bid, has been staging silly PR stunts to make him look better in the public eye. The amassing of all those cops (clearly instructed to protect private property above all other priorities, just as they were at Mardi Gras) may have been, at least partly, a show intended to make weekend downtown shoppers believe Schell’s finally got his act together.
And what of the event itself? How could it have more effectively communicated its message and attracted a larger, more diverse set of supporters?
The “Reclaim the Streets” ideology, borrowed whole from out-of-town and out-of-country events (the first was a protest against a British highway project), wasn’t specific to the particular situation of downtown Seattle (or even of U.S. big-city downtowns in general). There are already lotsa Northwesterners who like to live and play where there aren’t malls or cars; these people are sometimes called exurbanites or backpackers. People who’ve chosen to live in town have often done so because they enjoy the bustle and the excitement. A New-New Left celebration in Seattle ought to welcome those who actually like city life, inviting them to help try and take charge of how their city develops.
(Of course, that means it would also have to be inviting toward older people, nonwhite people, non-vegans, and people who don’t necessarily enjoy wearing face bandanas.)
Yes, longtime MISC. readers, it’s time for our annual defense of Seafair, the set of local summer rituals poshed at all these years by would-be tastemakers of both the “world class” and bohemian varieties.
Seafair is, above all, a reminder of where this city and region have been. It’s a glorious, unpretentious, homespun celebration of traditional Wash.-state values–hokum contrasted with mannerism, “wholesome” emotional repression (and its noisy release valves), and an engineering-nerd aesthetic.
We’ll discuss the latter trait a little later on. But first, the Torchlight Parade.
It’s admittedly a perennial also-ran compared to Portland’s Rose Parade. It’s smaller, it’s rowdier (partly due to its sunset timing), and has less support from local high society. But it’s ours, dammit.
The drill teams, the beauty queens, the less-than-zany clowns, the not-as-naughty-as-they-used-to-be Seafair Pirates–they’re examples of folk culture from a specific place, dating from a specific time (the early ’50s) when enough people here believed in making up their own shit, not in desperately trying to be sophisticated.
The Seafair organization (formerly Greater Seattle Inc.) also incorporates a score of neighborhood parades, kiddie festivals, and other assorted events around King County.
But the big stuff consists of three pieces: The aforementioned parade, the “scholarship pageant for young women” (also a pale cousin of the Rose Festival’s pageant), and something neither Portland nor most of the rest of North America has.
I speak, of course, of the hydros.
Yes, I still like the hydros after all these years, despite all the hipster flack I’ve taken for it.
Yes, they’re loud. Yes, they’re testosteronic. Yes, they’re not seen in, or approved by, NY/LA/SF.
But those are some of the reasons why I love them.
They’re also a pleasant childhood memory for many NW natives.
But more than that, they combine no less than six of our region’s innate qualities in a single spectacle:
Our love of the water and nature, and our traditional wish to express this love by leaving our mark of conquest upon them.
Our engineering-nerd aesthetic, represented here by the obsessive attention paid to the boats’ custom designs and engine systems.
Our love of clean lines and “clean” living, evinced by the boats’ aerodynamic beauty and the insistant proclaimations that this is a “family” event.
Our historic dichotomy between the squeaky-clean and the down-and-dirty, as shown in the giant floating drunken orgy of yachters that is the Log Boom.
Our manic-depressive nature, shown by monster machines that either go 260 m.p.h. or lie dead in the water.
Our combo of ambition and envy, symbolized by all the underfunded crews trying every year to beat the Budweiser.
Anyhow, this year’s race was one of the best in years.
Thirteen boats were entered. Each of them finished at least two heats, and there were no “Did Not Starts.” There were no serious crashes. There was real competition throughout the day. And the winner-take-all final heat was a battle two of the little-guy teams; the Bud only made second place on a penalty.
Last year, we worried whether the hydroplane racing circuit had a future after Bud boat owner Bernie Little and partners sbought up the whole organization (renamed HydroPROP). Instead, the new bosses installed new rules to relieve the Bud’s dynasty status and make it a race again. The rules worked.
Perhaps this could be a lesson and inspiration to those trying to lessen a certain other Lake Washington dynasty’s power.
Submitted for your approval (can’t help it, I saw five hours Sci-Fi’s Twilight Zone marathon yesterday), some images from the Fourth of Jul-Ivar’s.
Thanks to decent weather for the first time in the past ten 7/4s, the crowds at Myrtle Edwards Park (not to mention the sailboats and yachts just offshore) were even larger and swarmier.
What they saw and experienced: The usual all-white boogie blooze bands, the usual curly fries and kettle corn, the usual vintage-aircraft flybys, a strange promotional touring-van exhibit called “The National Peanut Tour,” a woman in a Bugs Bunny suit handing out samples of banana flavored milk to the kiddies, and a 50-foot inflatable figure of a cartoony bodybuilder guy bearing the name “Ironman.”
Then, just after 10 (well after the kids had gotten pooped and suburned while the adults had gotten drunk and hazy), came the big blast-o-rooney (seen here from upper Queen Anne).
In short, a perfect normal Fourth; a holiday almost completely free of any patriotic or other official reason for its existence other than the universal need to gather and see stuff blow up. A ritual of lowbrow mechanized “fun” every nation oughta have at midsummer, under one excuse or another.
ELSEWHERE:
Can anyone or anything stop the major labels’ legal putsch to stop Internet music?
The old joke is that the British created such beautiful dinnerware in order to distract attention away from British food. Yet the U.S. holds enough expatriates and Anglophiles for several companies, including “Expatboxes.com,” to specialize in importing hard-to-find Brit packaged food products, from Marmite yeast spread to McVitie’s Digestive Biscuits and Heinz treacle sponge pudding.
Seattle’s annual Gay Pride Parade (officially, the “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Parade, March, and Freedom Rally”) long ago ceased to be a niche-subculture celebration.
Today it has only slightly more specifically-gay meaning than the modern St. Patrick’s Day has specifically-Irish meaning.
It’s become the day when everybody claims or pretends to be, if not a proud queer, at least a proud friend of proud queers.
The floats, performance troups, and marching units of actual lesbians and gays (and their support groups) are heavily interspersed with those of officially gay-friendly corporations (Microsoft), marketers (KUBE-FM, Starbucks, lots of beer companies), and politicians major and minor.
Why, even petty-tyrant-wannabe mayoral candidate Mark Sidran showed up to aggressively shake everyone’s hands, whether folks wanted their hands shook or not. (Sidran was accompanied by a small entourage holding up yard signs, whose logo bore a loud rightward-pointing arrow).
Some gays might consider this mainstreaming as a sign that gays and gay rights are increasingly accepted in American society, yea even among the power brokers of business and politics.
But other gay activists, who’d dreamed their liberation movement would lead to a larger public questioning of the so-called “dominant culture,” have branded such mainstreamed celebrations with such terms as “assimilationist.”
They allege that the organizers of rituals such as Seattle’s Pride Parade are helping destroy not just the larger queer-lib political agenda but the distinct GLBT subculture.
I can leave such distinctions to those within the community.
But I can say that the overall trend in this country is for more subcultures and social niches, not fewer. Even within LGBT there are subgroups (gay men, lesbians, bis, M2F trannies, F2M trannies, cross-dressers, etc.) and sub-subgroups (bears, leather, butch, femme, etc.) and sub-sub-subgroups (too numerous to even sample).
That’s one of the aspects of the Pride Parade’s smiling, family-friendly homosexuality that helps make it so appealing to so many straights.
Thousands of Americans who’ve never been erotically attracted to someone of the same gender wish they could belong to a subculture like GLBT; though preferably without the job-discrimination and general bigotries so many real GLBTs face.
And I don’t just mean those urban-hipster straight women who think it’s cool to pretend to be bi, or those college-town straight men who wish they could be as sanctimonious as radical lesbians.
We’re all “queer” in one way or another, in the older and larger definition of the term. We’re all different, from one another and from any dictated vision of “normality.”
And we all have a sexuality; and many of us wish (at least secretly) that we could be part of a culture in which we could proudly proclaim our sexual selves, without fear of being branded as sluts or chauvanist pigs or unfit parents.
Postscript: The night before the parade, Showtime ran Sex With Strangers, a documentary by Joe and Harry Gantz about three couples (two from Olympia), and the bi-female “friend” of one of them, who are all in the swingers’ lifestyle. The closing “where are they now” titles revealed that three of the seven individual protagonists had lost their jobs after their nonmonogamies became known. (The other four were either self-employed or were now on “extended vacations.”) The lesson: You don’t have to be gay to need the more progressive social attitudes gay-lib promotes.
Post-postscript: The loneliest-looking entry in the Pride Parade was the car sponsored by the Capitol Hill Alano Club, with its plain signage, few passengers, and fewer attending marchers. The 12-Step group was almost directly followed by a succession of beer-company vans and trucks (even a delivery semi rig).
Went to the Fremont Fair. The unauthorized naked bicyclists were out in force once again, beloved by paradegoers of all ages and detested (but unarrested) by cops.
This year, the baring bikers all had elaborate body-paint designs, and almost all were female. Both factors helped make the experience more of a display and less of a statement.
Mind you, I do eternally adore the work of heavenly creation that is the adult female body. And I have nothing less than total admiration for those women who selflessly share the sight of their physical beauty with the world.
It’s just that the Fremont Fair’s bike brigade has been a situation in which adults of all genders could appreciate this beauty, and in which children of all ages could glimpse adult bodies presented as something neither disgusting nor overtly sexual. It’s been a proclamation of freedom, in which the bikers invited the audience to share the spirit of wholesome naturist body-love and innocent norm-breaking.
I’d like to see that continue.
IN RELATED NEWS: The Gun Street Girls, those lusciously costumed neo-burlesque dancing dames, are apparently splitting into two new troupes, neither of which will be Seattle-based. One will be in New Orleans; the other in Portland. Let’s hope both will still visit often, for either separate or combined shows.
A MONTH AGO, we began a countdown to the gigantic MISCmedia 15th Anniversary celebratory fete on June 2 (details at the left side of this virtual page), 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, some more.
#14: 4533 9th Avenue NE. A small, cruddy room in the basement of a small, cruddy house in the U District. Occupied March-April 1982.
Following my winter’s exile in Ballard, I returned to the local Ground Zero of ultra-cheap ex-student housing. My room was the one with the window seen in the bottom left corner of this picture. It was the room’s only window. I shared the kitchen and bathroom with the owner and his sons, who lived in the rest of the basement. The main floor was rented out to four lesbians who played Frank Sinatra records at full blast.
The week after I moved in, a “For Sale” sign appeared on the front lawn. The owner assured me that day that I wouldn’t have to leave. The lesbians and I were evicted three weeks later.
After I moved (to a commercial rooming house), I learned that author Thomas Pynchon may have lived there while working as a Boeing technical writer and starting his first novel V.
NEXT: Another entry in this series.
“WORDS: WHO NEEDS ‘EM?”
Says Word Culture “Passe;” Excited by Switch to Images
SEATTLE (May 3): Declaring the written word “a passe institution,” longtime Seattle writer Clark Humphrey has announced he’s changing careers to become a documentary photographer.
He’s holding a coming-out party for his vivid color images, titled Words: Who Needs ‘Em?, on Saturday, June 2, 7-9 p.m. at the Belltown Underground Gallery, 2211 First Avenue in Seattle (north of the Frontier Room).
The event will be held on the 15th anniversary of Humphrey’s original “MISC.” column in the old Belltown-based monthly Arts Focus (it later appeared for seven years in The Stranger). The exhibit will remain on display through July 5.
A professional writer for nearly 20 years, Humphrey wrote Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, still the most complete account ever written about the early-’90s “Seattle Music Scene” hoopla. In addition to his Stranger tenure, his material has appeared in The Seattle Times, Seattle Weekly, Seattle magazine, Washington Law & Politics, The Comics Journal, Tower Records Pulse!, Penthouse Hot Talk, and The Washington Post Book World.
He continues to contribute a biweekly column and crossword puzzle to Tablet, a new alternative arts tabloid. He also maintains an ongoing “online column” at www.miscmedia.com; and for the past year and a half has published MISCmedia magazine, a print version of the website.
But his future projects (books, exhibitions, and a revised print magazine), several of which will be previewed at Words: Who Needs ‘Em?, will all involve original photographs and art in one form or another.
Why the switch? After losing a dot-com crossword-writing gig, Humphrey trolled around for writing assignments and found the trough crowded by laid-off web writers. Realizing the online fad (email, chat rooms, personal web sites, etc. etc.) had reinvigorated written-word culture to the point of decimating it as a career profession, he turned to the not yet totally demystified world of visual images.
“Everybody’s writing these days,” Humphrey said. “Or, rather, everybody thinks they can write.”
At the show, Humphrey will offer previews of one upcoming book and two larger-scale exhibitions:
In addition to the Belltown Underground Gallery, the Belltown Underground space also houses the Ola Wyola Boutique, the Belltown Ballet and Conditioning Studio, and Internet radio station Belltunes.com.
Exhibit of new color photographs by Clark Humphrey
OPENING: Saturday, June 2, 2001, 7-9 p.m. (free admission, all ages)
ON DISPLAY UNTIL: July 5, 2001
AT: Belltown Underground Art Gallery, 2211 First Avenue, Seattle WA 98121
INFO: (206) 448-3325
NEXT: How I noted the seventh anniversary of the Cobain tragedy.
AS ANOTHER PREVIEW of our fantastic 15th anniversary bash (Saturday evening, June 2, at the luscious Ola Wyola boutique-studio-gallery just north of the Frontier Room on First), some more photos by y’r ob’t web r’p’t’r.
This time, we dispense with words in the display of images which have also dispensed with words.
NEXT: Previewing the Great Jewish Baseball Graphic Novel.
IN OTHER NEWS: It’s curtains for Mr. Showbiz and Wall of Sound, two Seattle-based web content sites devoted to the repurposing of celebrity-gossip news. Big bucks (originally from Paul Allen, later from Disney) couldn’t find a profitability plan out of this content (much of it written by my fellow local freelance drudges)…. But in happier news, the Internet Underground Music Archive, your one-stop source for thousands upon thousands of unsigned (and often unlistenable) music acts from across North America, is back in business.
WHEN THOSE TECH STOCKS were collapsing in recent months, pundit after pundit compared the rampant speculation in and subsequent rapid decline of these securities to “Tulipomania,” the rampant speculation in and subsequent decline of tulip-bulb prices in 1630s Holland.
There were problems with that oft-used metaphor.
For one thing, tulip bulbs, unlike many dot-coms, came with a business plan. A bulb of a new, rare, and appealing variety could be propagated and sold all over Europe and Asia Minor.
For another thing, tulips are tangible physical objects of beauty and desire, as shown off at the annual Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. (Somehow, it’s hard to imagine hordes of tourists descending by car, bus, and Victoria Clipper boat to see the blossoming of the latest business-to-business turnkey solutions website.)
I went on the tour last week. I found it to be about what you might expect me to find it–a gentle clash between the sublimeness of nature (albeit heavily selectively-bred nature) and the institution that is modern middlebrow tourism.
It was all cute little kids, nature-awed adults, and ploddering garden-buff oldsters. Just about the only people I saw in the fields (out of hundreds) who were between the ages of 13 and 30 were working at the food wagons, the flower-sales stands, and the identically “unique” shops back in La Conner (where the Victoria Clipper docked).
Central La Conner itself is, as other writers elsewhere have oft mentioned, a tourist-trap nightmare. Not a single storefront (except a Bank of America) exists there anymore which is not totally dedicated to one or more of the following: Espresso, ice cream, desserts, cat toys, “fine art” (that stuff that’s not as creative or interesting as just-plain art), windsocks, repro “antiques,” etc. etc. Each and every one of these buildings bears an historical-society plaque stating what they were originally used for, back when it was a close-knit fishing town far from the main highways and further from the suburban consciousness.
I’m told there are still eateries and watering holes for locals to hang out in, where you can sip a cold one and watch a game without being expected to be one of the white upscale Monoculture, but I couldn’t find them in my brief time there. I did see a couple of real fishing boats tooling up the Skagit River, amongst all the hordes of big-ass yachts and middle-class recreational power boats.
I’ll have to go back there and find the real town, whatever of it is left.
NEXT: John Keister gets canceled again.
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.
>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.
MONDAY AND YESTERDAY, we began a countdown to the gigantic MISCmedia 15th Anniversary celebratory fete (June 2, all ages, 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, some more.
#13: NW 57th Street and 28th Ave. NW. A small, cruddy, windowless room built into the basement of a small, cruddy house in Ballard. Occupied November 1981-March 1982.
Following my Wallingford misadventure with hardcore punk-rock housemates (a story I’ll have to get into later), I needed a cheap and immediately available place.
It belonged to a single mom of a character type very familiar to me at the time, the square baby boomer. She wore large glasses and a dour disposition, liked Coors, and hated any music that was too “weird” (i.e., not boomer-blues or the Eagles). Her six-year-old son was smart and spunky, but was instructed by mom not to talk to me more than necessary.
The winter of ’81-’82 was one of my life’s nadir moments. I was too depressed to look even for temp jobs. I wrote nothing, created nothing. I had no amenities in that damp room but my TV, a percolator (which I used to make hot water for tea), and a tiny space heater. I’d stay up with KING-TV’s overnight movies, then half-sleep until noonish. I had only limited privileges in the house’s main floor–the bathroom, the kitchen (when mom wasn’t cooking), and the phone (brief calls only).
Finally, I found another cheap room in another basement to move into. That’s another story I’ll try to get to eventually.
NEXT: Still more of this.
YESTERDAY, we began a countdown to the gigantic MISCmedia 15th Anniversary celebratory fete (June 2, all ages, mark your calendars now), with a glimpse of the art show that’ll be part of the festivity–digital pix (presented out of order) of every home yr. web-corresp’n’d’t had lived in. Today, another installment.
#18: The Consulate Apartments, 1619 Belmont Ave. A small but well-preserved studio apartment, with a former Murphy Bed closet.
I lived there from ’84 to ’87, during which I dumped a horrible job, was dreadfully unemployed, reluctantly went back to the horrible job, and finally found a better job. I also got my first Macintosh, ran a short-lived mondo-film screening series, and began the original Misc. print column.
Entering and leaving the building often involved charging through the phalanxes of bums and panhandlers who hung out at Glynn’s Cove tavern down the street (which later became Squid Row, then Tugs Belmont, and is now Kincora).
A Dymo Labelmaker note was stuck inside the Consulate’s back door: “Don’t let strange people in. We have plenty.”
The live-in building manager was a flamboyantly out gay man who loved to go to Chinese restaurants very late at night, a task which involved the ten-minute revving of a motorcycle parked directly beneath my unit. By the time I moved out, he had become very thin, pale and weak, and it wasn’t because of Chinese food.
NEXT: Some more of this.
TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, the car customizer, model-kit designer and inventor of the printed T-shirt industry, whose Rat Fink characters will live forever among preteen boys of all ages.
AS A COUNTDOWN to the gigantic MISCmedia 15th Anniversary celebratory fete (June 2, all ages, mark your calendars now), we’ll be running some occasional glimpses of the art show that’ll be part of the festivity.
It’s a public coming-out of sorts for my new digital-photography thang. It’s not the big Seattle coffee-table book (that’s still without form or void), but a much smaller documentation project–every home yr. loyal web-corresp’n’d’t had lived in.
(Because they haven’t all been photographed yet, they’ll be presented here out of order.)
#5: 4052 Woodlawn Ave. N. My first home in Seattle. An unlicensed mother-in-law apartment on the second floor of a home owned and occupied by a sweet Italian-American couple with five sons, ages 8-16. They ran a furnace-cleaning business out of the home, and kept a small but exquisite painted-statuary shrine to Mary in their front yard. In 1976, they were the first people I knew to acquire a VCR–and a selection of hardcore porn tapes (the Swedish Erotica series).
AT FIRST, I’d not planned to mention rain in my new Seattle picture book. It’s a cliche, I thought; the topic of too many cutesy-wootsy “jokes” in newspaper living-section columns and dorky greeting cards.
Then something happened. The rain went away, and stayed away most of this past winter.
Dunno ’bout any of you, but I came to miss it. Without the rain and the overcast, winter in Seattle is merely a slightly warmer version of winter in Liverpool.
It was as if all the changes wrought upon the city in recent years had altered not just its economy, its ethnography, and its cost of living but its very climate. All became bright, sometimes glaringly so.
Our usual, predictable seasonal-affective-disorder season got supplanted by nine-hour days of Technicolor brilliance interrupting fifteen-hour nights of crisp (but above freezing), starry skies. Instead of the grim, fatalist aesthetic of Cobain, Lynda Barry, and Ray Carver, we had a cheery, thought-free, go-for-it look and feeling better suited to techno music, glass art, and demographically-correct magazines. (Too bad the economy couldn’t keep up with the sunny disposition, particularly those once high-flyin’ tech companies.)
It was a disconcerting experience for someone accustomed, both psychologically and physiologically, to spending week after week under the low silver canopy of overcast (which inspired the surreal image of a giant indoor city in Stacey Levine’s novel Dra-).
The main salient feature of western PacNW rain isn’t really the precipitation. It certainly isn’t the volume of downpour, which even in an average year is less than NYC and several other big cities. It’s the dim, diffused light that makes going from indoors to out seem like those early Masterpiece Theatre shows where the interiors were in brightly-lit video and the exteriors were in drab 16mm film. (On a heavily overcast day, my new digital still camera insists on flash outdoors at high noon). It’s the lo-visibility “grey-out” conditions on the water. It’s the water-torture drip drip drip. It’s the mildewy scent that gets in your clothes and never goes away.
This past week, the drizzle came back, at least for a few days. Not enough to relieve the alarmingly low levels in our hydroelectric lakes, but enough to remind us what it’s like.
NEXT: Millions are reading and writing more than they ever did before. That’s supposed to be bad?
