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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.
ELSEWHERE:
“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?
We’ve spent the week discussing noted Seattle institutions that are going away. Sometimes, it seems one can’t document them as fast as they go.
Today, some more disappearances. I’ll miss ’em all.
Disappearance #1: The Wonder Bread bakery and thrift store was more than a source of solid union employment to a once run-down area. Its giant neon was a beacon, drawing you toward Seattle’s least whitebread neighborhood. A year after the company moved to the Tacoma suburbs, the Wonder plant is being replaced by a “mixed use project” (i.e., probably luxury housing above retail). At least seekers of cheap baked foods and snacks still have the (alas, Ding Dong-less) Gai’s thrift store just up the street.
Disappearance #2: The First Hill Food Center (which I’ve called the “First Hill Foo Center” after its occasionally incomplelely lit neon sign) was one of Seattle’s last surviving first-generation supermarkets (6,000 square feet or less). It was an indie (albeit allied with the Associated Grocers wholesale consortium) in a retail environment increasingly dominated by chains. Its beautifully rundown building also housed a martial-arts school, where the young Bruce Lee is believed to have once studied. It’s also going away for a condo-retail combine, to include a new supermarket that just won’t be the same.
Disappearance #3: Pistil Books and News was the kind of walk-in gathering place every neighborhood needs. It was Capitol Hill’s chief outlet for small-time zines (including mine). Its used-book selection was carefully curated to local tastes. It hosted regular readings and get-togethers. But it never provided its owners with much in the way of fiscal profits, and a looming rent increase gave them the excuse to get out (moving toward online old-book sales).
NEXT: Music to acompany the mattress mambo.
ONE OF THE BIGGEST ANNOYANCES of my younger days, when I was annoyed at quite a lot of things, was when somebody would tell me bad news and then perkily ask, “OK?”
No, it wasn’t OK that I didn’t get that scholarship, the last ferry back into town for the night had already left, or Kirsten wanted to stay friends.
And it’s definitely not OK that we just lost the OK Hotel Cafe, for over a decade Seattle’s most enduring, and one of its liveliest, spots for music, performance, and art.
I’d known it when it was just a raw, old building acquired first as a rehearsal space, then as a cafe. To the cafe were added art shows (at first in the tiny hotel rooms upstairs; then, after that part was declared unoccupiable by the general public, in the main cafe space). Along with the art shows came occasional live-music shows in the cafe’s raised back area.
As the years went by, owners Steve and Tia Freeborn took over two more rooms on the ground floor. They and their team built a handsome bar-lounge and an intimate back ballroom stage.
For a while, they kept the back room boozeless and all-ages, while hosting 21-and-over shows in the lounge. But the costs and complications of this arrangement didn’t work out, and the whole place went adults-only in ’94.
During both the all-ages and 21-plus segments of the OK’s history, it’s hosted just about everybody of consequence in the NW music scene(s), plus tons of touring acts.
A representative sample: Built to Spill, Mother Love Bone, Beat Happening, the Black Cat Orchestra, Wayne Horvitz, Combo Craig, the Drews, Soundgargen, the Presidents of the United States of America, Bill Frisell, and Rockin’ Teenage Combo.
And it had remained an eclectic and dependable art space; showing the works of, among others, our own regular MISCmedia print mag contributor Sean Hurley (whose multicultural mermaids, shown here, were displayed just above the back-room bar).
But the Ash Wednesday quake damaged the building just enough for its current landlord to evict Freeborn and company on the premise that the place isn’t safely occupiable as a public gathering spot and won’t again be so for some time.
The building, I’m told, has landmark status; but the OK Hotel Cafe operation as we know it is gone. Whether Freeborn and crew will be able to resurface elsewhere is something only time will tell.
The OK was better than just OK. Its sudden loss is one of the most not-OK things I can think of.
NEXT: A fond adieu to a film critic.
IT’S BEEN A WILD COUPLE OF WEEKS for many of us. So today, something lighter, from my forthcoming Seattle photo book with ace shutter-clicker Lori Lynn Mason.
FOR THE LONGEST TIME, I believed the Interstate Highway System was one of the things that ruined American society in my lifetime.
It destroyed urban neighborhoods, ripped cities’ internal social fabric, and propagated suburban sprawl. It destroyed the glorious creativity that was once roadside America, and instead gave us malls and bland chain motels.
But I’ve more recently learned to like a few things about the freeways, particularly our own I-5. Still not necessarily as a road, but as an engineering feat and a public artwork.
So it was easy to see the idea behind a poster some folks put up around town last year, trying to promote car-free and greener cities. The poster’s illustration of a fantasized post-car future had I-5 still standing (as was the Kingdome), only used for bicycles and P-Patch gardens.
There’s a beauty to the freeway, both graceful and grandiose.
Especially where it rises into the sky, and where its lanes combine and recombine with other highways’ lanes. Such spots include the Spokane Street interchange with the West Seattle freeway, and the almost Greek-ruin-esque pillars west of Capitol Hill.
The freeway’s sheer, outscaled beauty in these places makes one almost forgive its sins.
Almost.
NEXT: Another piece of the Seattle character–its work ethic.
SEATTLE’S PIONEER SQUARE MARDI GRAS began in the mid-’70s, under the Anglified/sanitized name “Fat Tuesday.” It was intended less as a public celebration than as a promotion for the neighborhood’s music clubs and their already-calcified formula of superficially aggressive but ultimately tame all-white “blues” bands.
After the first year, the New Orleans-style rowdiness so incensed the powers-that-be (a notorious Times headline called it “Lawless Tuesday”), that the organizers scaled back their offerings to special nighttime promotions within the bars and family-friendly, daytime-only outdoor events (such as the Spam carving contest and the “Miss No Fat” beauty contest).
But revelers in recent years have refused to be denied. They began to hold their own informal, unofficial “real” Mardi Gras bashes in the streets, here and in a few other big cities.
Last year’s Seattle bash, three months after WTO, felt a lot like WTO without the politics–young folk getting rowdy and mean; cops getting stern and meaner.
So this year (from which all of this page’s pictures date), Paul Schell’s Forces of Order announced plans to harshly deal with any attempts to create a giant outdoor moshpit in the streets. The result, last Saturday night, was a lot of rowdy overgrown boys (and a few flash-happy ladies), a few drunken fights, heavy police over-reaction to the fights, and heavier crowd reaction to the police-heightened violent atmosphere.
Monday night was a kind of halftime in the revelry, with more cops than partiers on the streets.
Then came Tuesday night.
Thousands crammed the area. Most were young and male. Some were attracted by hopes of a Woodstock ’99-style “rage rock” riot. Some, including the small but particularly violent black street gang the TV cameras particularly loved to point to, apparently wanted to hit at anyone and anything in sight. Some just showed up hoping to get shitfaced and to scream at women to raise their tops.
Most just wanted to share a non-mellow, non-rational bacchanalia–a universal human desire, and one for which any community worthy of the name provides regular outlets.
Yes, there were fights and other assorted rowdinesses. A poilce department (like New Orleans’s) trained for such an event would spend less effort tryng to impose order, and more effort stopping specific looting and fighting incidents while letting the rest of the crowd get happy, naked, and/or stupid.
For that matter, a city that was truly comfortable with human behavior in this “Xtreme” age would be prepared to welcome and channel this energy, to curate a celebration that would let young adults vent their energies in a more sociable manner, with folk having fun together without turning against one another.
The old Seattle image of an overgrown small town where everybody was a mellow, upscale, white baby boomer was never as real as the media and the politicians wanted it to be, and now has become a dated cliche.
So let’s lot fear or try to re-ban a big outdoor Mardi Gras, but instead start planning now to make it better.
We’re more diverse than we used to be, but we’re still not particulalry overflowing with cajuns, Latinos, or Catholics. The pre-Lenten excuse for Mardis Gras doesn’t really work here except on a rent-a-culture basis.
But we can purposefully stage a big, fun, inviting tribute to the lengthening days, the slightly drying climate (in most years), and the chance to get back outside. Imagine a spring-equinox party, only as long as a month before depending on the wandering Passover/Lent season. Let the noisy boys and flashy girls show up, but also make it inviting to a wider swath of the populace. Have mood-setting music, art, dance, street performers and other elements to add an infusing/diffusing element that would discourage violence more effectively than any baton-holding police stormtroopers ever could.
IN OTHER NEWS: The next MISCmedia print mag will be a combo March-April, out in a couple of weeks.
NEXT: Handicapping the mayoral race.
(NOTE: Today’s previously-announced contents have been delayed to a later date, for obvious reasons.)
EARTHQUAKE IRONY #1: It happened just as Mayor Schell was going to announce plans to re-ban outdoor Mardi Gras celebrations, after Pioneer Square got taken over the previous night by non-laid-back, non-mellow, non-baby-boomer-generation people (some of whom, admittedly, got really stupid and started moshpit-like fights against one another, but who probably could’ve been disuaded from such dumbness with saner civic and poice policies). (More about this in tomorrow’s installment.)
Schell was probably going to bemoan the couple of broken windows and bashed cars from the previous night, when Nature provided its own show of rowdiness.
Earthquake Irony #2: One of the most damaged buildings was the Fenix Underground, Ground Zero of the Mardi Gras raucousness.
Earthquake Irony #3: Just about all the big local institutions hated by local lefties got visibly caught up in the Ash Wednesday Quake:
My Own Story: I was in a high-rise when things started shaking all over. I immediately took to protect the computer I was working on. The coffee cup and other objects on the desk were less lucky. It took about five minutes just to clear my way through the fallen books and shelving to get to the elevators, which were shut down, and from there to schlepping my way down a dozen flights of stairs.
Once outside and among the teeming masses of temporarily displaced downtown office workers (such as the city employees at Key Tower photographed on this page), I shot a few pics of stray bricks and abandoned, broken home belongings such as the TV set depicted here.
Returned home to find a cheap but fondly-remembered little piece of statuary broken. Otherwise, things had been knocked about and tossed to the floor but remained intact.
As I’m writing this, my nervous system is still giving me a little shellshock. I can’t say it was fun, but at least there was only one death (that we know of at this point), lots of kids are getting a day off from school today, most of the seismic-reconstruction work around here has proven sound, and I (and, I hope, you) survived shaken but not stirred.
(OK, OK, I’m understating the emotional/visceral dislocation I experienced, not at the time but starting about 15 minutes later and continuing for several hours afterward. If I’d been a dog I’ve been yelping and jumping and annoying my owner all day.)
NEXT: Pioneer Square Mardi Gras–WTO without the politics?
