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Of all the annual summer mega-events in Seattle, the Bite of Seattle is the most divergent from its officially hyped image.
In the media previews and recaps, it’s almost always billed as a perky-bland, homogonous ritual in which nice upscale suburban families can partake of the finest dishes from the region’s finest restaurants.
It’s really the one big free annual gathering of KIng County’s middle-class and lower-middle-class masses (the people Sidran would like to deport from the Seattle city limits).
They come to pig out on empty calories from a larger array of the same junk-food and fast-food booths you see at any street fair; to collect freebies and promotional trinkets; and to listen to the region’s most pathetically smarmy oldies-cover bands.
Yeah, it’s a “family” event. But it’s one for real families: screeching kids, horny/sullen teens, ulceric grownups, and cranky oldsters.
And I love it.
Along with Seafair, it’s one of the last truly populist huge happennings in a town that’s increasingly at odds with its industrial roots and frightened of non-affluent people, particularly if said non-affluent people are darker-skinned.
During the post-Mardi Gras rancor this past February, certain talk-radio goons branded the Bite as a “gangbangers’ ball.” Bah. It attracts regular ol’ folks of all kinds, some of whom are young and/or black. And like working-class teens of all ethnic types, they can act loud and boistrous if given the opportunity to do so.
IT’S QUITE EASY to bash the Bumbershoot arts festival these days.
There’s the admission ($16 per person per day, if you don’t get advance tix, which are only available at Starbucks, that nonsupporter of alternative voices).
There’s all the corporate logos and sponsorships (radio stations “presenting” musical artists they’ll never play on the air in a million years; the auditoria labeled in all official and unofficial schedules with company names they never hold the other 51.5 weeks a year; and everywhere dot-coms, dot-coms, dot-coms).
There’s the big lines at the food booths where you get to pay $4-$7 for hastily mass-prepared fast food entrees.
There’s the annual whining by the promoters that even with all this revenue, the thing still barely breaks even, because of all the money they spend for big-name stars to attract mass audiences and all the logistics needed to handle these same mass audiences.
There’s those mass audiences themselves (who’s more troublesome: the fundamentalist Christians or the fundamentalist vegans?) and the complications they create (the lines, the difficulty in getting between venues on the Seattle Center grounds, the lines, the lack of seats or sitting room, the lines).
There’s the annoying rules (I missed all but the last 15 minutes of Big Star’s gig because I couldn’t bring my Razor scooter into KeyArena and had noplace to put it).
Then there’s the whole underlying implicit demand that You Better Start Having Fun NOW, Mister.
But there’s still a lot to like about the festival, Seattle’s annual big unofficial-end-of-summer party.
Principally: It’s a big Vegas-style lunch buffet of art. Those high admission prices give you all the culture you can eat. You can sample some “controversial” nude paintings, a slam poet or two, a couple of comedians, some of that electronic DJ music the kids are into these days, an ethnic folk ensemble or two, an hour of short art-films, and (particularly prevalent this year) late-’80s and early-’90s rock singers rechristened in “unplugged” form.
(Indeed, this year’s lineup included a whole lot of acts aimed squarely at aging college-radio listeners such as myself–the aforementioned Big Star, Tracy Chapman, Ani DiFranco, Modest Mouse, Sleater-Kinney, Ben Harper, Pete Krebs, the Posies, Quasi, Kristen Hirsch, etc. etc.
For its first two decades, Bumbershoot was programmed clearly for relics from the ’60s. Now, despite promoters’ claims to be after a youth market, it’s programmed clearly for relics from the ’80s and ’90s. Mind you, I’m not personally complaining about this at all. I like all these above-listed acts quite a bit.)
Some genres don’t work in the buffet-table concept. Classical music’s pretty much been written out of the festival in recent years; as have feature-length films, full-length plays, ballet, cabaret acts, and panel discussions. Performance art, modern dance, literary readings, and avant-improv music are still around, but in reduced quantities as organizers try to stuff as many crowd-pleasers onto the bill as they can afford.
Other genres have been shied away from, especially in the festival’s past, for skewing too young or too nonwhite. (I’m currently at home listening to the streaming webcast of DJ Donald Glaude mixing it up on the festival’s closing night; not many years ago, Bumbershoot would never have booked an African-American male whose act wasn’t aimed at making Big Chill Caucasians feel good about themselves.)
But all in all, the concept works. It’s a great big populist spectacle, a four-day long Ed Sullivan Show, a vaudeville spread out over 74 acres.
There are, of course, things I’d do with it. I’d try to figure a way to charge less money, even if that means booking fewer touring musical stars. I’d try to figure a re-entrance for classical, and bring back the “Wild Stage” program of the more offbeat performance stuff.
But, largely, Bumbershoot has turned 30 by actually gaining vitality, getting younger.
(Or maybe it’s really been 30 all along; changing fashions to keep up with its intended age like Betty and Veronica.)
(P.S.: The Bumbershoot organizers booked Never Mind Nirvana novelist Mark Lindquist at the same time and 500 feet away from the rock band whose singer’s real-life legal troubles are believed to have been roman a clef-ed for Lindquist’s story. But an attendee at the festival insisted to me that, despite what I’d written about the novel, Lindquist insisted he’d thought up his plot over a year before the real-life legal case, which occurred while he was trying to sell his manuscript to a publisher.)
TOMORROW: Riding the Mariners’ playoff roller coaster.
ELSEWHERE:
FIRST, A BIG THANX to all who attended our fantabulous dual premiere event for the new LOSER book and MISCmedia the magazine last night; and to the Two Bells Tavern staff (especially Mark Harlow) for making it plausible.
YESTERDAY, we suggested proclaiming a year-long or longer Seattle Jubilee Year, climaxing with the 150th anniversary of the city’s founding at Alki Point, as a way to make up for the canceled Seattle Center New Year’s party.
We mentioned that this should be as big a bash as we can arrange; but that we shouldn’t depend too much on city funding.
What we didn’t mention was that the city’s millennium project had been a botched affair even before its climactic evening was shut down. The canceled party was a lot smaller in scale than first planned; associated schemes to light up the town eventually whittled down to the lighting of a single bridge.
Mayor Schell, the story goes, had apparently handed off to the Seattle Arts Commission the task of raising private dough for this, but gave the commission no help to speak of. The city’s old money, seldom interested in public gatherings, didn’t contribute much; the city’s new money, mainly interested in permanent architectural monuments to itself, also largley demurred from the opportunity.
But I’m pleased to report of at least one new-money figure in this town who’s putting his cash into a populist spectacle.
Seems there’s this Microsoft stock-option tycoon named Chris Peters. His idea of gaming has always had nothing to do with Tomb Raider and everything to do with tenpins. He’s now offered to lead an investor group to buy the Professional Bowlers Association and its national championship tour.
The PBA, heretofore member-owned since its 1958 inception, has fallen upon hard times. It lost its network TV contract in 1996; ABC apparently thought the sport wasn’t hip enough to draw the ever-prized young demographics. The PBA board decided that bringing in private owners was the only way to save the tour–and, perhaps, to give pro bowling a newer, younger, hipper image for the cyber-age.
The only problem with this scenario is bowling’s already way cool; precisely because it’s not frenetically “hip.” Happenin’ local nightspots like the Breakroom and Shorty’s are full of bowling imagery. The Soundgarden/Mudhoney guys are avid bowlers. The Jillian’s sports-bar chain’s supposed to start work this summer on building a new near-downtown alley, Seattle’s first new bowling joint in decades.
It’s not youth disinterest that caused the closing of Village Lanes, Bellevue Lanes, Lake City Bowl, and Green Lake Bowl since the early ’80s. It’s real estate. A bowling alley uses vast (by urban standards) square footage, which developers believe is more profitably used for retail (or for other recreation concepts, such as video-game parlors). The Jillian’s folks think they can make bowling pencil out by making it part of a whole leisure-time complex, including pool tables and full booze service, and by renting out the space in whole or in part to dot-com companies’ staff parties.
Chris Peters doesn’t have to make bowling cool. Indeed, any attempt to market it as something loud and “X-treme” would ruin the coolness it’s already got.
What Peters will need to do is more effectively market the sport in all its existing glory–loud shirts, whispering announcers, and all.
TOMORROW: Late-’90s nostalgia.
ALL LONGTIME READERS of this print-turned-online report have read of my early-childhood visit to, and continuing fascination with, the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, a.k.a. the Century 21 Exposition.
Its theme: How wonderful everything was going to be in the 2000s.
At the time, I used my already blossoming mathematical skills to figure how old I was going to be in the year 2000 (nobody then used unelegant rubrics such as “Y2K”). Turned out I’d be in the alleged prime of my life. I could hardly wait.
Hence, when the big 0-0 finally approached, I knew exactly where I’d be. Despite having a paid-up credit card and no work or family obligations to speak of, I could only see myself being at the site of the fantasy Century 21 to celebrate the arrival of the real Century 21.
(And yes, I know there are literalists out there who insist the century doesn’t start ’til the following year. I treat these people with the same distanced acknowledgement with which I treat people who complain about explosions in outer-space movies making sounds.)
Only it ain’t happening.
Just like my folks used to announce cool vacation trips and then announce the week before that I couldn’t go along, Seattle Mayor Paul Schell cancelled the big free Seattle Center New Year’s bash on just three days’ notice.
The official reasoning: An international gadabout, with suspected terrorist ties, was caught trying to enter Wash. state from Canada on 12/14, with stuff in his car that might be useful in making bombs. He also turned out to have had a motel reservation near the Center for 12/31.
Since then, and despite highly media-publicized border crackdowns, no further evidence of any plot to blow up civilians in Seattle has been revealed. Nonetheless, and after several days of promising not to, Schell canceled New Year’s.
The free, open-to-the-public New Year’s, that is.
Paid-admittance events elsewhere in town, including some run by Schell’s pals in the local mover-‘n’-shaker community and costing from $50 to $500, will continue to occur.
If I were a conspiracy theorist (which I’m still not), I’d ponder whether Schell and his upscale-baby-boomer cohorts wanted to jump-start ticket sales at these costly commercial bashes; some of which are nowhere near selling out.
Or, I’d at least ponder whether the nouvelle cuisine-chompin’, Lexus-drivin’ corporate stooges surrounding Schell just didn’t really care about keeping a for-the-people New Year’s, as long as the hi-ticket private parties they’re going to stay on track.
The media spin on the cancellation, and Schell’s own official statement, are invoking the WTO-protest-response fiasco from Nov. 30 and Dec. 1 as a contributing factor to Schell’s decision.
In that disaster, you recall, Schell and his team over-reacted to a few deliberately-planned (and announced-in-advance) acts of “anarchist” property damage against big chain stores by sicking large goon squads, with tear gas and pepper spray, on non-vandalous protesters and civilian bystanders.
That was a panicky over-reaction; evidence of a lack of trust by the city’s elite toward its populace. So is this.
Despite this Grinchesque act, the new century will still start on time. I, for one, refuse to give up the dream of a better “World of Tomorrow.”
Already, before the terrorism hype, a friend had invited me to a private party in an apartment-building basement, to be redecorated as a mock Y2K-survivalist “concrete bunker.” I’ll probably go to it for a while. But I also insist we still have a public celebration, at the proper time if not at the proper place.
We should all gather as close to the Center as they’ll let us. Let’s surround the gated Center grounds with a human chain of defiant frivolity. No drinking or drugging or vandalism–just an insistence on enjoying a good loud midnight, whether the powers-that-be want us to have one or not.
I don’t expect Schell’s heart to grow three sizes that day, but it’s worth trying.
TOMORROW: Remembering the ’90s, a time segment lost in the century/millennium hype.
IN OTHER NEWS: Here’s a look at part of what was canned: Local art veteran Carl Smool’s Fire Celebration. It’s a funky, populist spectacle; and hence expendable in the eyes of the Brave New Seattle’s power structure.
TO OUR LOCAL READERS: You’ve still one week to see the Pacific Science Center’s traveling exhibit honoring the career of Japanese cartoon pioneer Osamu Tezuka.
The exhibit (organized by the official Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum in Japan) is a small one, but it’s packed with power, pathos, and inspiration–just like Tezuka’s most enduring character, the flying child-robot hero Mighty Atom, a.k.a. Astro Boy.
The exhibit consists of four video screens, a couple dozen panel displays, and a giant Astro Boy balloon figure “flying” on the ceiling. The panels chronicle Tezuka’s best known print and TV cartoon series through original cels and comic-book art. The video monitors play prime examples, not only of Tezuka’s own works but of the Japanese animation industry before and after his influence took hold.
A trained M.D. and a devout post-WWII pacifist, Tezuka (1928-89) brought a sense of morality and beauty to his work. His stories were “educational” without being preachy, because he used childlike characters such as Astro and Kimba the White Lion (the all-but-official inspiration for The Lion King to teach the kids about the complexities of life and of caring for one’s fellow creatures.
If Tezuka was a prime example of postwar Japanese antimilitarism, he was also a prime example of postwar Japanese capitalism. He had several serials running in different children’s magazines simultaneously, keeping the reprint and character-licensing rights.
The exhibit claims he produced 150,000 comic-book pages over his 41-year career. That averages out to almost 75 pages a week, a figure almost impossible without a cadre of assistants.
But he didn’t just produce quantity. He added many “cinematic” visual techniques and complex storylines (some of which stretched out over years) to what had been a formulaic manga scene.
Some critics might argue that manga’s still a formulaic scene; but Tezuka added many more ingredients to the formula. His influence brought a popularity (and an adult audience) to comics in Japan that the medium still has to fight for here.
These advances in technique worked to prepare Tezuka’s team for moving beyond elaborate-but-still drawings into primitive animation. Starting in 1961 (Astro Boy was Japan’s first TV cartoon series), he adapted many of his works for the small screen, produced by his own studio using, and expanding upon, Hanna-Barbera’s newly-established time-and-money-saving techniques (collectively known as “limited animation”).
Having already worked for over a decade at making print comics seem “cinematic,” Tezuka and his team were able to create stirring adventure stories and likeable characters on paltry early-TV budgets.
And as the boss of his own studio, animating characters already well-known in print form, Tezuka held a degree of both creative and business control U.S. TV animation has almost never seen, then or now. He used that authority to “smarten up” his shows with complex storylines, involving characters audiences could identify with.
Today, Tezuka is revered in his homeland and among the global manga/anime cult as “the God of Anime.” A review of the exhibit bore an unfortunately misleading headline, which may have sent kids in expecting to see Pokemon characters. Tezuka didn’t create Pokemon; he merely established the story structure, drawing style, and aesthetic tone which Pokemon, and dozens of other Japanese print, TV, and theatrical cartoon products have followed, to varying degrees of success.
If there’s a note-O-irony in this story, it’s that Tezuka, who regularly placed environmental messages into his stories, almost singlehandedly created an industry that destroys old-growth forests throught Asia (and imports whole logs from the U.S. Northwest) to make millions of throwaway, phone-book-sized manga magazines every week.
TOMORROW: Top candy picks for this Halloween.
YESTERDAY, we discussed how Y2K survivalists are becoming less communitarian and more capitalistic.
In a way, it’s a hopeful sign that more folks are seeing the supposed global computer crash (which I don’t think will happen on the scale the scaremonges hope for) not as the end of the world but as just another opportunity to sell stuff.
But I’m still longing for an older, more optimistic future.
The future we were promised at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, a.k.a. the Century 21 Exposition.
I’m far from the only one with such retro-futuristic longings. Manray, a new predominantly-gay “video nightclub” on Seattle’s Capitol Hill (one of several clubs started this year to siphon audiences from ARO.Space), takes its logo from a slightly-altered version of the Fair’s logo, an oval with an “arrow of progress” pointing up. (Local label Up Records also uses a version of the fair’s symbol.)
Alas, the Manray folks tell me most customers think the logo’s just a “male” symbol. But the thought’s still there, and that’s what counts.
The rest of the bar’s equally Jetsonian, by the way, with recessed white lighting, Eames-esque furnishings, and curves instead of corners just about everywhere.
IN OTHER SPACE-Y NEWS, I recently attended what might be the last “Gothic Surf Shop” art party, at a group of four houses in Lower Queen Anne all occupied by visual artists (painters, photographers, installation-builders, and at least one car customizer) and sharing a common back yard.
You can guess the story here: At least one of the houses is being threatened with condo-replacement. The Gothic Surf artists are hoping to pitch in and buy the place, but nothing’s certain yet.
Anyhoo, the Gothic Surf complex is a simply gorgeous hidden treasure in the heart of the city. Between the different plywood-based installation pieces, the gardens, the “art cars” parked in front, the separate bar building (reused from an old COCA installation), the woodshop/studio in an old carriage house, and the many art collections inside the houses (including both the residents’ own works and collections of such artifacts as bakelite radios and Asian masks), it’s a site that should be saved.
It’s also a potential harbinger of the future. As the yupscale “urban revival” continues apace, here and in select other urbs across North America, less-than-wealthy creative types may end up living in the older suburbs, the already-decaying beige-rambler subdivisions surrounding airports and ex-industrial sites. It’s easy to imagine artsy folk combining their resources to buy up several adjoining cul-de-sac properties and spending the rest of their lives transforming them into neo-art-colony spaces, with folk or “naive” art decorations and self-built alterations all over.
(You can see some other examples of the endangered species that is local, affordable artist’s space during next weekend’s “Art Detour,” a program of self-guided studio tours around town.)
TOMORROW: Some more of this, plus the lost art of seductive architecture.
PITCH IN: This time, I’m looking for cultural artifacts today’s young adults never knew (i.e., dial phones, non-inline skates, and three-network TV). Make your nominations at our MISC. Talk discussion boards.
IN OTHER NEWS: Buried in a Macworld story is the factoid that commercial printers these days are making fewer huge press runs, instead churning out “a greater number of small- and medium-volume projects than ever before.” Cultural decentralization continues…. Buy a magazine, help a struggling neighborhood institution….
ELSEWHERE: The Virtual Talking Mom (found by Bifurcated Rivets) is ready to give you a virtual scolding any time of the day or night…. The last days of the original Prodigy, inventor of the Banner Ad and the censored chatroom…. Musings on the real nature of creativity….
TO OUR LOCAL READERS: By all means, see the Bumbershoot visual arts exhibition at Seattle Center this weekend. Edgar Leeteg’s South Seas black-velvet nudes (exquisite and sensual); the group exhibit More: A Show About American Consumption (highlighted by Ellen Forney’s lovingly-painted tribute to Pam Anderson and Anna Hurwitz’s plastic “gingerbread house” covered by baby dolls), scary oils by Alexi Kolesnikov, and a retrospective of Seattle’s greatest living painter Jacob Lawrence (I could mention how much his solid-figures-of-color style now seems like a precursor to the South Park look, but Lawrence would undoubtedly hate it if I did).
I’VE SAID IT BEFORE and I’ll say it again: Junk food (the things we eat or drink for pleasure rather than strictly for sustenance) just might be the most telling tangible artifact of a culture, especially ours.
Herewith, some links to astounding fun-food related items throughout the Net.
TOMORROW: One more how-to-save-baseball quick fix.
ELSEWHERE: As found by Anita’s LOL, some comic book covers with “perverse themes…”
TODAY’S MISC. WORLD is dedicated to artist Paul Horiuchi, whose World’s Fair mural still provides an elegant backdrop to every Pain in the Grass concert every summer.
AS PART OF A FREELANCE GIG I conducted with Everything Holidays, I’ve been looking in on what might be the top costumes this upcoming Halloween.
(I know, some of you around here in the PacNW don’t want to hear about mid-Autumn during this Coldest Summer of Our Lifetimes. But some of the site’s Eastern Seaboard readers might enjoy a beat-the-heat fantasy.)
Anyhoo, here’s some of what I told that commercial Website might be in style this 10/31, plus some additional thoughts:
The year’s biggest horror movie has no “costume” characters, but that won’t stop partygoers from appearing as the doomed student filmmakers, carrying camcorders while running around acting terrified.
TOMORROW: We play with our food again.
ELSEWHERE: A healty antidote to the Nordstrom Way… Just when I was wondering when the feminization of the professional ranks would result in a further eroticization of men, here comes the latest look for dudes with “cool ankles”…
>PORTLAND HAS HAD its own “hip” interior design look for some time now.
You can see it down there at nearly every Pearl District record store, book store, bar, clothing boutique, and coffeehouse. You can see it up here at Hamburger Mary’s and the McMenamin’s brewpubs. It’s a look that even makes efficient new buildings look quaint and lived-in, at least on the inside. It involves “weatherbeaten” paint hues, retro wallpaper, “antiqued” wood paneling, and reproduction posters and metal signs. It doesn’t really look old; it looks like a stage set for some nice little play about how sociable life used to be, back before the sterility of modern design and the hectic pace of advanced-industrial society.
Seattle now has its own “hip” interior design look, and it celebrates everything the Portland look implicitly renounces.
We’ve previously mentioned it in regards to the ARO.Space dance club and its associated venture, the Ace Hotel. Now, the look’s spreading further.
Example #1: The Lux coffeehouse on 1st used to be a homey, comfy little joint, intimate and coccoon-ish. Now it’s been redone in “clean” off-whites. The overstuffed chairs and heavy tables have been replaced by lightweight, curvy, Scandinavian Modern-inspired furnishings.
The old Lux was a womblike shelter, a respite from the day’s stresses. The new Lux is a more engaging environment, a place to recharge one’s batteries.
Example #2: Pages is the new independent, capitalistic bookstore in the Capitol Hill space formerly occupied by the leftist Red and Black Books Collective. Red and Black was tastefully crammed with products of feminist, gay/lesbian, ethnic-minority, labor, Beat, and other un-corporate thought systems. Pages is much cleaner-looking and much, much airier; almost a boutique. It carries far fewer titles than Red and Black did, and it displays them far more “elegantly.”
Red and Black was like a reassuringly-cluttered general store for vital information. Pages is more of a boutique.
(Being on Capitol Hill, Pages still carries gay books, but they tend to be celebrations of out-ness rather than struggle-for-respect broadsides.)
Out-of-towners can see the principles behind this look in the UK-based magazine Wallpaper*. It’s like a Charles and Ray Eames revival blended with a Herman Miller fetish, stirred through with less-cheap versions of Ikea designs, and strained through a seive of World’s Fair-style futurism.
And it is not, despite everything Wallpaper* and others claim, foreign to Seattle. As I wrote in Seattle magazine, the ARO.Space name implies a reference to our leading pre-Gates industry. We make planes here. We know a thing or four about sleek lines, functional streamlining, and making small interiors look roomier than they are.
And, 37 years ago, we built the Space Needle and the arches of the Pacific Science Center as parts of the Century 21 Exposition.
As the real 21st century approaches, the homey-clutter look is getting turned into upscale preciousness by the likes of Restoration Hardware and The Pottery Barn; while the new hipsters, inspired by Euro-chic and Tomorrowland nostalgia, are heading back to the futurism.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be trapezoidal.
TOMORROW: The potential next great civic task, humanizing the suburbs.
ELSEWHERE: Speaking of Oregon-based trends, the L.A. Times has discovered Eugene’s punk anarchists, about 20 years after their first appearance–and starts out the article with yet another dumb ’60s nostalgia lead.
BOOKING A WOMEN’S CONVENTION by the religious-right pressure group Focus on the Family the same weekend as ArtsEdge was the best Seattle Center scheduling serendipity in years. Even better than situating the big Cobain memorial in ’94 right outside, and just after, a Sonics playoff game.
Alas, no catfights or shouting matches broke out between the blue-haired conservatives and the green-haired artsy-types–not even with the entrants in the tattoo contest, some of whom paid as little heed as was legally possible to the contest’s fine-print rule, “If your tattoo is in an area normally covered by clothing, please be prepared to wear clothing that reveals your tattoo but not the genital area. Ladies, that means nipples too–sorry, it’s the law!”).
The body art was among the highlights at the third ArtsEdge. Other notables: The parade of art cars, the Butoh Race (three women in angel-of-death-white makeup tried to run as slowly as possible without stopping), musical gigs by Rockin’ Teenage Combo and the Bosnian emigres of Kultur Shock, the neo-vaudeville of Circus Contraption and Cirque de Flambe, and Elaine Lee’s art installation in which short tales involving the artist’s “secrets” were stored inside beautifully-lit, small metal boxes.
A lot of it was fun and entertaining. Some of it was even art. Little of it, though, had any edge.
The problem: economics, natch. This year’s ArtsEdge, like the two prior installments, failed to attract many of the region’s best fringe art-theater-music people due to its policy of not paying them. (The event’s $100,000 budget goes entirely to Seattle Center staff and facilities services and to publicity.)
As long as the Seattle Center management’s allowed to think “edgy” art means art by young adults who’ll do anything for a public showcase, you’ll get an ArtsEdge that’s got little art and almost no edge. This year’s event proved it could be popular, even under less-than-ideal weather conditions. It could be more popular if more pro alterna-artists, with their already-built followings, were added.
Consider this another case of the “If-we-can-build-these-big-ass-sports-palaces-why-can’t-we-…” routine, which we’ll talk a little more about on Thursday and Friday.
Tomorrow: More reasons why Pokemon is such a hit with the kids and so incomprehensible to the grownups.
FROM THE LAKE TO THE SOUND, it seems everybody in Seattle’s just giddy to find our once-fair city depicted as the fictional headquarters of the arch criminal Dr. Evil (Mike Myers) in the new sequel movie Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Someone who’d been frozen as long as the movie’s hero might not understand why, but from the present day it’s easy to get.
Back in 1969, when most of the film’s time-traveling plot takes place, Seattle’s World’s Fair-derived aspirations toward “world class” status were starting to stall. Boeing was heading toward massive layoffs; the Seattle Pilots baseball team was struggling through its one-and-only season before moving to Milwaukee; and a generation of young adults was starting to turn the cusp from wannabe-revolutionaries to sedate Deadheads (and, before long, to domesticated urban professionals).
Nowadays, the municipal zeitgeist’s a little different.
No longer is Seattle seen as a town to move to when you wanted to stop doing anything; a semiretirement home of smug baby-boomer complacency.
It’s now seen, by its residents and outsiders alike, as a dynamic, bombastic, even arrogant burg of hotshot movers-‘n’-shakers. Dennis Miller has referred to Bill Gates as the only man in the world with the kind of power once held by governments. And Starbucks, the booming mass-market food-and-beverage chain that still claims to offer “gourmet” products for persons of quiet good taste, is openbly reviled by Frisco elitists and by aging bohos who cling to far homier notions of what a coffeehouse should represent.
So, while the swingin’ hero Austin Powers continues his retro-mod “mojo” thing, Dr. Evil moves with the times by setting up HQ atop the Space Needle, which has been festooned (in the digitized stock-footage establishing shot and the studio-set interior) with Starbucks signs inside and out. An image of late-modern, Global Business treachery. And Seattleites love it, even if it’s a throwaway gag with no ultimate plot relevance. Oh we’re just so bad, don’t you know–but bad in a sleek, stylish way, just like Dr. Evil’s shaved head and shiny white suits.
(The film’s titular hero also gets a Seattle connection of sorts: During the opening titles, he dances to a remake of an old track by Seattle’s own musical legend Quincy Jones.)
Meanwhile, I’m surprised nobody’s compared the Starbucks reference to a similar corporate-conspiracy plotline in another thriller-spoof movie. The President’s Analyst, directed in 1967 by Barney Miller co-creator Theodore Flicker, starred James Coburn (whose In Like Flint is briefly excerpted in the new Austin Powers) as a shrink who personally treats an unseen Commander-In-Chief, only to get chased and trailed by many nations’ spies who all want whatever secrets he might know. But the ones who want Coburn most, the most dangerous force of treachery in that peak-of-the-cold-war era: The Phone Company!
Monday: Speaking of swingin’ hipcats, there’s a U.K. social critic who sees the “sexual revolution” and “queer culture” as just more consumer-culture selfishness.
UPDATE: A loyal reader called to report some longer Greyhound routes already do offer in-bus movies, having had to endure Parenthood on the way to Vancouver.
THE SILVERY SKIN: Didn’t see as much of Bumbershoot as in prior years (either the crowds have finally gotten to me or my ongoing diet left me too carbo-depleted to stand in hot lines). But I did find out that the Squirrel Nut Zippers’ stadium show really could produce Lindy hopping in the moshpit.
I also saw a few dozen wholesome grownups watch an hour of ’30s-’40s stripper movies (projected in an outdoor courtyard) without turning into rampaging degenerates. On a beautiful night, in a beautiful setting (right by the atomic neon art near the North Court meeting rooms), a mixed-gender audience got to witness beautiful B&W footage of beautiful women (including burlesque legend Sally Rand and someone billed on the re-release print as Marilyn Monroe, though I have my doubts) making beautiful moves in beautiful costumes of various small sizes.
After the dance shorts, the projector was stopped while various bigwigs conferred whether to show an encore segment. When they finally gave their OK, the crowd saw 10 minutes of naughty-funny XXX animations from the early ’30s (gags involved beastiality, oversized and detachable penises, and copyright-violating renditions of Krazy Kat and Bosko). As the audience strolled happily into the night, I realized the end-of-porn essay in this paper last month was right when it proclaimed a truly vital city needs a healthy element of public vice. There’s nothing like a little good clean sex to bring people together. These exhibitions like these also help prove the apparently little-known fact that people have been having sex since before you were born.
COMING HOME TO ROOST: Seattle’s affordable-housing crisis can be interpreted as a counterpart to the International Monetary Fund’s prescription for third-world economies: Enforce “austerity measures” on the masses, so a caste of financiers and speculators can have unfettered opportunities. Just as IMF shock-treatments are officially justified as being for everybody’s ultimate trickle-down benefit, Mayor Paul Schell’s proposed tax-and-zoning breaks for big condo developers are being touted as help for the thousands of citizens being priced out by the very developments Schell wants to further encourage.
Another intrepretation: When Schell became mayor, he inherited a municipal establishment that for over a decade had actively pursued a system of policies intended to prevent Seattle from becoming one of those islands of urban poverty surrounded by suburban affluence. We’ve had a government/ business elite devoted almost exclusively toward making Seattle’s population as upscale as possible–not by improving the lot of those already here, but by encouraging the upscale to move and stay here (and by almost criminalizing the underclass, when and where that was deemed necessary). You could see it in Rice’s caving in to Nordstrom’s every demand; in the school district’s use of busing to prop up enrollment in affluent-neighborhood schools; in the developer-friendly Urban Village and Seattle Commons schemes; and in city attorney Mark Sidran’s crackdowns against anyone too publicly black, young, or unmellow. If the pursuit of demographic purity meant other populations were discouraged (actively or passively), even when it made a joke of our professed love of “diversity,” it was considered a necessary cost.
But now, it’s gone far enough to price middle- and upper-middle-class folk out of Seattle–the core voter base of Seattle’s pro-corporate Democrat machine. So the insiders are reconsidering their policy of demographic cleansing, at least on the PR level. They’re talking about providing special incentives to make homes affordable to the merely well-off instead of just the really-really rich.
It’s way too little, and for the politicians it might be too late. If the “single-family neighborhood” populists who stopped the Commons and the Urban Villages spread the idea that Schell’s scheme will help only developers by encouraging more replacement of existing affordable housing by new “market rate” units, we could witness a movement that could eventually topple the municipal regime like, well, a house of cards.
WELCOME TO A MIDSUMMER’S MISC., the pop-culture column that hereby calls for a one-year moratorium on any further motion pictures depicting the violent destruction of computer-generated replicas of New York City.
UPDATE: The Cyclops restaurant, closed last year when its building was demolished in the Belltown redevelopment mania, will be reborn later this summer as a beneficiary of that same mania. It’ll be in a part of the ex-Peneil Mission/ Operation Nightwatch building, whose new landlords wanted more potentially lucrative tenants than the perenially underfunded social-service sector could provide. Since the building’s side sports half a faded old Pepsi sign blending into half a faded Seven-Up sign (the two have long had the same local bottler, which was once based in that building), it’d only be appropriate if a mixture of the two took a place on the beverage menu…. In other real-estate news, the nearby Casbah Cinema’s turned its SIFF-month closure into an indefinite one. The beautiful screening room in an alley location without dedicated parking is still for sale. And the former U District Clothestime juniors’ clothing store is now a National Guard recruiting office (talk about your yin/yang dualities).
OVERREACTION DEPT.: The supposed “gang riot” last Saturday at the Fun Forest was, as far as I’ve been able to determine, really just either an argument or an exhibition of horseplay by a handful of rowdy teens; climaxing either with a few gunshots into the air or (more likely) firecrackers. The ensuing scramble among sweaty, crowded kids set cops scrambling into crisis mode and herding all opposite-race youths off of the grounds. Live TV reporters got all hussied-up about a Sudden Threat to Public Safety, while the kids passing by just giggled or mugged it up to the cameras–this was a big Dionysian revel that had merely gotten a bit out of hand, not the huge angry mob depicted. More telling was the scene the following late afternoon, in which teams of cops with plastic face masks and billy clubs shooed any and all groups of three or more young Af-Ams not just off the Center property but out of the larger vicinity. It’s not just the Sidran gang and the anti-affirmative-action cadre who fear blacks, particularly young blacks. The fear is ingrained in the popular image of a clean, ordered city where everybody’s soft-spoken and unassuming. Lots of real Af-Ams are just like that, of course; but lots of whites still think (consciously or sub-) that Black + Young = Gangsta. (White teens can get rowdy too, but tend not to inspire such wholesale crackdowns.) Elsewhere last weekend…
DAYS-O-FUTURE PASSED: The Mariners’ Turn Ahead the Clock Night promotion, with uniforms and stadium signage supposedly harkening forward to 2027, finally let the Nintendo people put their graphic stamp on the team they co-own, at least for a one-game gimmick. The oversize, maroon-and-black, not-tucked-in jerseys with the huge, tilted logos and the “Xtreme-sports” style lettering, accessorized with metallic-colored batting helmets and racing-stripe pants legs, harkened back to an early-’90s computer-game interpretation of cyberpunk’s retro-modernism. Of course, it was all completely antithetical to the modern-retroism of the new Mariner stadium; so no regular Ms’ uniforms will probably ever look like that. (‘Twas also fun to ponder the fake out-of-town scoreboard listings for Venus and Mercury. If you think the thin air in Denver affects the game…)
DESIGNS FOR LIVING: A bookseller of my acquaintance recently tipped me off to one of the nonsexual passages (yes, there are several) in the Kama Sutra: a list of “the sixty-four arts and sciences to be studied” by a learned man or woman. They include some universals (“singing,” “dancing,” “tattooing”), some obscure-around-these-parts cultural practices (“binding of turbans and chaplets”), and some practical matters of life in ancient India (“storing and accumulating water in aqueducts, cisterns, and reservoirs”). Anyhow, it’s inspired me to compile 64 arts and disciplines (from the practical to the spiritual to the just plain fun) a modern person should know. As always, I’d like your suggestions, to clark@speakeasy.org. Results will appear in this space in three weeks.
(Here’s a link to the original Kama Sutra list)
(Next week: The 1998 Misc. Summer Reading List.)
REASON FOR THE SEASON: The oldtime Euro-pagans (and the Catholics who re-defined many of the old Euro-pagan holiday dates) had a reason for a holiday of romance this week. It’s the end of the 13 darkest weeks of the year. While not the time of fertility and blossomings, the waning of S.A.D. season is a reminder that more fruitful times are indeed ahead.
SIGN OF THE WEEK (marquee at the Oak Tree): “Fallen, Half Baked, As Good As It Gets.” Considering the quasi-pickled state of many Aurora nightlife patrons, this might be the most saleable set of letters they’ve ever put up there…. In other film-hype news, commercials for the quickly-disappeared Phantoms referred to its originator, hack writer Dean Koontz, as “The Master of Suspense.” At least when Brian De Palma stole that slogan from Hitchcock, he inserted a qualifier: “The Modern Master of Suspense.”
APPLYING YOURSELF: I’m sure it’s a coincidence that the folded cover of this year’s Bumbershoot performing arts application pamphlet looks amazingly like the Scientologists’ famous “Personality Test” flyer. So far, though, no reports of B-shoot’s selection committees hooking up any entrants to E-meters.
NO PLACE LIKE HOME: So new mayor Paul Schell’s official priority #1 is the city’s housing crisis, a topic loudly ignored by the prior regime. My first thoughts: Certain pundits used to say it took a Democratic president to get us into war and a Republican to get us out. Maybe it takes a member of the developers’ clique, rather than a politician merely working on the clique’s behalf, to deal with speculative overdevelopment’s effects on the social fabric.
But after reading preliminary accounts of Schell’s plan, a more realistic assessment seeped in. Rice was a politician who sucked up to developers. Schell’s a developer reasserting his roots as a politician. And pro-business-Democrat politicians love construction schemes better than anything in the world. Schell’s answer to runaway development: More development, via “targeted incentives” to builders, relaxed density and parking codes in selected neighborhoods, etc.
Schell’s plan also echos the Rice-era Seattle Commons and urban-village schemes (which weren’t really promoted as answers to exploding home prices and rampant evictions) in a less publicized goal: To get more people living in town, by increasing one of the lowest homes-per-square-mile ratio of any big U.S. city. It won’t slow down suburban sprawl that much, but the political extablishment undoubtedly hopes it’ll slow the decline in Seattle’s portion of the county’s and the state’s population–and hence stem the city’s loss of influence within the county council and the state legislature.
DISHING IT OUT: I hear from more and more people these days who’re getting, or wish they could get, a satellite dish. There’s even one guy who works on a public access program who told me he wants to replace his cable TV connection with a dish, even though he’d no longer receive his own show at home. The cable companies, meanwhile, are still feeling the PR fallout from prior censorship drives and are shying away from promoting the access channel as an asset you can only get with cable.
The cable people promise to combat the dishes with digital transmission and dozens more channels–one of these years. If that doesn’t stem cable’s loss of market share in time, how will access producers make their works available to ex-cable households? Maybe via web sites with “streaming video” files, particularly if promised higher-speed modems and more powerful home computers make that more feasible. But that won’t be free to producers, unless somebody donates server space at an Internet service provider. I could imagine that happening for shows allied to established political or religious groups. But what of the more personal statements? Who’ll support the streaming of Goddess Kring or Tea Talk with Leroy Chin? An arts group or producers’ co-op could do it, but even those outfits would probably have somebody deciding who could or couldn’t use their services. The freewheeling, no-gatekeepers thang that is today’s access channel might be something we’d better enjoy while still in its prime.
Due to early holiday-season deadlines, this Misc. installment’s the first to get to comment on that very peculiar New Year’s, during which those Seattle residents not blotto-drunk might as well have been, since all attempts to see the Space Needle fireworks resulted only in a fog-blurred haze of colors like something from a Mark Tobey painting.
ERROR MESSAGES: Hardly a day goes by without somebody saying something nasty about Microsoft. The Dept. of Justice disses the way MS tries to strong-arm PC makers. Nader warns about MS trying to monopolize “electronic commerce” tools, wanting a piece of every buck that’ll ever change hands online. Sun and Netscape claim MS wants to quash their “cross-platform” software lines, which threaten the notion of an MS-dictated computer universe. Mother Jones charges an MS-funded antipiracy group promising not to prosecute offices for using unpaid-for software if they promise to not only buy their warez but to buy all-MS software. And MS’s temps and perma-temps complain about their second-class treatment within the firm (including, thanks to new state legislation, no more overtime pay).
In most of these cases, the company claims it’s being unfairly targeted due to its “success” at creating products that just happen to be “popular among consumers.” That’s not quite the way it is, of course. Just about anybody who’s not working for the company (or for one of its media joint-venture partners) will acknowledge MS writes better contracts than code. Instead of innovation and competition, it operates by buying friends and crusing enemies. While its staff ideologues publicly pontificate about a cyber-future of decentralized societies and limitless opportunity, it behaves like an old-fashioned oil or railroad monopoly. In the past, MS’s enemies wanted the feds to split the company in two, spinning the DOS/Windows side into a separate company. That move by itself wouldn’t solve anything now, since the DOJ’s main argument is against MS turning Internet application software into a piece of Windows, making it tough for others to sell separate browser programs. It’s not just using its operating-system dominance to sell application software, but to give away software other companies want to sell. In other industries, it’d be called anti-competive “dumping.”
Our fair region is the born-‘n’-bred home of perhaps the most widely hated American company outside the oil or media businesses. Gates and Allen come from what passes for “old money” in this relatively new corner of western civilization. What does it mean to the longstanding image of this place as, for better or worse, “The City of the Nice” (as proclaimed by Tom Robbins in ’81)?
That, of course, always was an exaggeration. We weren’t “nice” so much as polite and businesslike, eager to please when it’s in our interest. (Author Roger Sale wrote in ’75 that Seattle was “bourgeois from the start.”) Despite the popularity of drunks, scoundrels, labor radicals, and whoremongers as local historical icons, most of the real settlement of the city was led by would-be timber, transportation, and real estate barons. The ones who made it didn’t just have what the new agers call “prosperity consciousness;” they maneuvered themselves into the right places, befriended the right people, made the right deals. Behind today’s Boeing boom lies a heritage of sales execs who forged long-term friendships with airlines, sealing deals Lockheed and Douglas couldn’t match. Rainier and Oly stayed prominent as long as they did because regional Teamster boss Dave Beck used his influence to make sure local beer outlets preferred local beers. The burgeoning Seattle biotech industry’s due to Sen. Warren Magnuson’s pipeline of federal bucks into the UW med school. MS started by signing deals with early hobbyist-computer maker Altair, and became a giant by signing deals with IBM. Much of the Seattle/ Oly “indie rock” philosophy has to do not just with alternative kinds of music but with forging alternatives to the music industry’s contractural practices.
Seattle’s a town of dealmakers as much as it’s a town of engineers. MS took this craft to a hyper-aggressive level. The extent to which this aggression succeeds and/or backfires will affect the company, the region, and the world.
