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The Seafair Torchlight Parade is more than a relic of “a simpler time,” or an opportunity for Seattle merchants and restaurants to make money from visiting suburbanites and exurbanites.
It’s an opportunity for all of us to get back in touch with the values and aesthetics that helped make this city great.
At a time and place where these values are often scoffed at, Seafair proclaims there’s still plenty to admire in squareness.
Squares gave us the Space Needle. Squares gave us Boeing (and, hence, the “international jet set”). Squares gave us computers and software.
Towns at at least a little removed from the metro core still understand the positive aspects of squareness, and revel in them. I come from one of these.
Remember: Square DOES NOT necessarily equal boring or white. Values of family, tradition, and togetherness cut across all ethnic and subcultural lines.
There are three special things to mention about this year’s parade. The first is the Seafair Clowns’ heartfelt tribute to Chris Wedes/J.P. Patches.
The second thing was something I’d previously noticed last month at the gay parade—spectators using cam-equipped iPads to get a better-than-the-naked eye view of the proceedings.
And finally, what was Grand Marshal (and Fastbacks drummer #2) Duff McKagan doing in a horse and buggy? Wouldn’t a bitchin’ vintage muscle car be more his flavor?
The Burke Museum has posted a lovely You Tube video showing how the Pioneer Square area was not only settled by Seattle’s founders but altered, filled in, and transformed from a little isthmus into the historic district it is today.
This is the UW’s Lander Hall dormitory, where thousands of students over the past four-plus decades have slept, drank, toked, screwed, and even studied. It’s being razed this summer so the U can build a new (though not necessarily less ugly) residence-hall complex. It was really time for the building to come down. So much so, that a big slab of a concrete wall cracked off during demolition last Saturday. It crashed down on the closed cab of the excavator machine. The operator is still in the hospital.
the bon marche at northgate circa 1956, via mallsofamerica.blogspot.com
There aren’t many cities that would seriously consider turning their backs on an investment of nearly $300 million in private capital within their boundaries, particularly during trying economic times.
pleasantfamilyshopping.blogspot.com
u.s. geological survey
Happy Mount St. Helens Day!
The recession has claimed another victim, the Betsey Johnson boutique on Fifth Avenue.
I don’t think you do love America. At least, not as much as you hate everyone in America who isn’t exactly like you.
sobadsogood.com
meowonline.org
Every person I talk to at a signing, every exchange I have online (sometimes dozens a day), every random music video or art gallery link sent to me by a fan that I curiously follow, every strange bed I’ve crashed on… all of that real human connecting has led to this moment, where I came back around, asking for direct help with a record. Asking EVERYBODY.… And they help because they know I’m good for it. Because they KNOW me.
udhcmh.tumblr.com
to earn enough money so that you can behave in a way that makes the very existence of other people irrelevant.… Wall Street is far too self-absorbed to be concerned with the outside world unless it is forced to. But Wall Street is also, on the whole, a very unhappy place. While there is always the whisper that maybe you too can one day earn fuck-you money, at the end of a long day, sometimes all you take with you are your misguided feelings of self-righteousness.
to earn enough money so that you can behave in a way that makes the very existence of other people irrelevant.…
Wall Street is far too self-absorbed to be concerned with the outside world unless it is forced to. But Wall Street is also, on the whole, a very unhappy place. While there is always the whisper that maybe you too can one day earn fuck-you money, at the end of a long day, sometimes all you take with you are your misguided feelings of self-righteousness.
last.fm
Pere Ubu founder, noise-rock legend, and great Clevelander David Thomas is, by his own admission, a middle class boy.
And in a recent interview he claims that…
…all adventurous art is done by middle-class people. Because middle-class people don’t care. Because middle-class people don’t care. “I’m going to do what I want, because I can do something else better and make more money than this.”
At the Collapse Board site (started by ex-Seattleite Everett True), blogger Wallace Wylie begs to disagree:
It surely does not need pointing out that almost every adventurous musical innovation of the 20th Century came from working-class origins. The blues, jazz, country, rock’n’roll, soul, reggae, disco, r&b, hip-hop, techno, house; the list goes on. It would take a mixture of ignorance and arrogance on a monumental scale to appropriate all of these innovations for the middle-classes.
You can probably think of your own exceptions, in music and other artistic fields as well.
Then the Scottish-born Wylie goes on to repeat the longtime meme that most American middle-class teens didn’t know about large swaths of American blues and R&B, until they heard them from British rockers:
…While British bands were playing Chuck Berry, embryonic American garage bands were cutting their chops on ‘Gloria’ by Them. In other words, rock music is a British creation that Americans subsequently copied. Bob Dylan named his fifth album Bringing It All Back Home in reference to the fact that British bands had shown Americans music from their own country that they didn’t know existed and now it was time for an American to take these influences back.
That familiar tale neglects the role American “hip” whites (including Cleveland’s own DJ legend Alan Freed) played in bringing R&B across the color line, leading to the commercial teenybopper variant Freed billed as “rock n’ roll.”
It neglects the white garage bands (such as Tacoma’s own Fabulous Wailers) who studiously covered and imitated their favorite R&B sides, especially during the pre-Beatles years.
Methinks Wylie has his own cultural blinders with which to deal.
irwin allen's 'the time tunnel' (1966), via scaryfilm.blogspot.com
…building businesses whose only way of making money will be through advertising. Are there as many different ways to slice things as all the startups, collectively, would have you believe? And when they’re done, what will happen to them?
joybra.com, via seattlepi.com
j.r. simplot co./idaho dept. of environmental quality, via kplu
painting the needle for its big b-day party
Keith Seinfeld at KPLU recently asked, “Why does Seattle still care about the world’s fair?”
That’s an excellent question.
As international expos go, Seattle’s was relatively small.
And it took place a full half century ago.
Until Mad Men came along, that era was widely considered to have been a dullsville time, a time wtih nothing much worth remembering.
The “Space Age” predicted at the fair would seem would seem ridiculous just a few years later. It predicted domed cities and cheap nuclear power. It predicted computers in the home (in the form of fridge-sized consoles) and video conferencing (with a special “picturephone”), but it didn’t predict the Internet.
It sure didn’t predict the racial, sexual, musical, and social upheavals collectively known as “The Sixties.”
And a lot of the fair’s attractions were so utterly corny, you can wonder why they were taken seriously even then. Attractions such as the world’s largest fruitcake. Or the Bubbleator (essentially just a domed platform on a hydraulic lift). Or the adults-only risqué puppet show (by the future producers of H.R. Pufnstuf).
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Yet a lot of us do care about all that. And not just us old-timers either.
And not just for the physical structures the fair left behind (the Space Needle, the Science Center, etc.).
The fair was the single most important thing that happened in Seattle between World War II and the rise of Microsoft. (The launch of the Boeing 707 was the next most important.)
The fair revved up the whole Northwest tourism industry, just as jet aircraft and Interstate highways were getting more Americans to explore other parts of their nation. This once-remote corner of the country became a top destination.
The fair was a coming-out party for a new Seattle.
A Seattle dominated not by timber and fishing but by tech. Specifically, by aerospace. Boeing had only a secondary role in equipping the U.S. space program, but its planes were already making Earth a seemingly smaller place.
The fair didn’t start the Seattle arts and performance scenes, but it gave them a new oomph.
Seattle Opera and the Seattle Repertory Theatre were immediately established in the fair’s wake.
ACT Theatre came soon after. Visual art here was already becoming famous, thanks to the “Northwest School” painters; the fair’s legacy led to increased local exposure to both local and national artists.
The fair established a foothold for modern architecture here.
Before the fair, there hadn’t been a major change to Seattle’s skyline since the Smith Tower in 1914. (The few new downtown buildings were relatively short, such as the 19-story Norton Building.)
The Space Needle became the city’s defining icon, instantly and forever.
The U.S. Science Pavilion (now Pacific Science Center) established the career of Seattle-born architect Minoru Uamasaki, who later designed the former World Trade Center.
Speaking of tragedy and turmoil, some commentators have described the fair’s era as “a simpler time.”
It wasn’t.
The Cuban missile crisis, revealed just after the fair ended, threatened to turn the cold war hot.
The whole Vietnam debacle was getting underway.
The civil rights and black power movements were quickly gaining traction.
The birth control pill was just entering widespread use.
Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, which helped launch the U.S. environmental movement, came out while the fair was on.
So yes, there were big issues and conflicts in 1962.
But there was also something else.
There was optimism.
In every exhibit and display at the fair, there was the notion that humans could work together to solve things.
And, at least at the fair, most everything was considered solveable.
I wrote in 1997, at the fair’s 35th anniversary, that its creators sincerely felt Americas would strive “to ensure mass prosperity (without socialism), strengthen science, popularize education, advance minority rights, and promote artistic excellence.”
It’s that forward-looking confidence that got lost along the road from the Century 21 Exposition to the 21st century.
It’s something many of us would like to see more of these days.
And that, more than Belgian waffles or an Elvis movie, is why Seattle still cares about the World’s Fair.
And why you should too.
(Cross posted with City Living.)
souvenir display at the world's fair anniversary exhibition
