I used to say that upscale, whitebread Seattle’s favorite “minority groups” were (1) upscale white women, (2) upscale white gays, and (3) dead black musicians.

When I said that, I’d forgotten about a fourth ethnic fave–the mythical Native American Symbol-Person.

Nearly every Seattle Caucasian loves this fantasy figure, in one pose or another.

Athletes and corporate-motivation fans love the Warrior.

Stoners and ex-stoners love the Wise Philosopher attuned with the Earth.

New Agers love the Healing Shaman.

Art collectors and interior decorators love the Anonymous Artisan. (I once met a young white sculptor who griped that no local tribe would let him buy his way into membership.)

All these groups tend to be somewhat less fond of actual, living, flesh-n’-blood indigenous men and women; particularly those who fail to live up to the symbols.

All this is a prelude to a plug for Native Seattle, a new UW Press book by UBC historian Coll Thrush.

Mary Ann Gwinn’s
Seattle Times review covers Thrush’s basic plot points well. To summarize: Amerindians weren’t just icons and muses. They were real people. And they still are. And they’ve remained a vital part of the city’s life, whether whitey’s aware of this or not.

Native Seattle is an important book, despite its shortcomings. Thrush has a stilting, academic writing style; he repeats the same arguments over and over. He admits to gaps in his research, particularly in finding actual living native folk willing to talk with him. And in the introduction, he audaciously compares his own “outsider” existence as a gay man with that of the First Peoples. (In real life, there’s no comparison. Trust me on this.)

In one sense, Thrush also stereotypes the local native people, as Tragic Colonial Victims whose story requires a Brave White Liberal to tell it.

But if Thrush fails to fully grasp the human side of his tale, the research-wonk side still fascinates.

He vividly depicts the seasonal camps and full-time settlements in and near the present-day city. He’s particularly fond of discussing the topography of these places, before Seattle’s great regrades, landfills, canals, and drainage projects changed it all.

And he rightfully notes that natives didn’t just “go away,” peacably or otherwise. They were integrated (sort of) into the urban economy from the start, as mill workers, cannery workers, sailors, cooks, maids, hookers/mistresses, etc.

Even as the reservation system developed, local Amerindians continued to live and work here, full-time or seasonally, through all of Seattle’s 156-year history.

They intermarried with whites and Filipinos. They came here from outlying tribal communities. They worked for Boeing, for construction companies, and for fishing fleets.

And they’re still some of us. Not ghosts, not apparitions, but actual humans, who live and die and think and feel and love and try to muddle through somehow.

David Postman informs us that Seattle Times reports vocally cheered when Karl Rove’s resignation was announced on a newsroom TV.

Postman, defending traditional media “objectivity,” said they shouldn’t have done that.

Dan Savage replied that the departure of Bush’s favorite manipulative operative was something “worth cheering for.” Savage claims, “Maybe the reporters cheered because they, of all people, are in the best position to recognize Rove’s departure as a positive development for the nation—and for the ideal that all journalists everywhere honor the most: the truth.”

I’ve no problem with professional reports having minds, nor with them speaking their minds, even if it’s just amongst themselves.

As for the “Mayberry Machiavelli” himself, Rove was the dirty trickster who always got away with it, and now he’s away with getting away from DC. It’s not as if he had anything left to do for Bush, having played such a big hand in every ruination, disgrace, and failure of Worst-Preznit-Ever. Rove’s first love has always been the next election cycle, for which he’ll surely work as a string-puller for the GOP or one candidate. Expect the anti-Hillary mud to start slinging, and soon.

Danny Westneat thinks we can outfox the Oklahomans who bought, and now overtly want to take away, the Sonics. Westneat thinks we can freeze ’em out with a megadose of “Seattle polite” and “Seattle process.”

I’m not so sure.

It’s true that the Okie cowboy-capitalists who bought the team are firebrands, and that the best way to fight fire is with water.

But frozen water, perhaps not.

As you know, I was never a sports-hating hippie. I believe in bigtime sports as community institutions.

I want to keep the Sonics and Storm (no, not just the Storm).

Yet, the NBA’s business model is broken. Fewer TV viewers (the inevitable result of new home-leisure technologies) mean less money to pay overpriced diva superstars. Limited arena capacities (even in bigger arenas than ours) means ticket revenues have inherent caps, no matter how high teams raise prices. Team ownership has become a speculative hobby–a zillionaire buys a team, loses money on it, then sells it at a profit to some other zillionaire.

That’s who Clay Bennett and Co. are. They know they’re unlikely to turn an operating profit on the team, wherever it is. They want pro basketball in their town as means of boosting their town’s nightlife and tourism industries, in a place traditionally lacking in both. They’d only keep the teams here if we paid them such ridiculous amounts of corporate welfare that they just couldn’t say no.

Like ex-Mariners owner George Argyros and ex-Seahawks owner Ken Behring, Bennett and his cohorts are parasitical figures who need to be expunged from the local and national sports scenes.

How?

If we all boycott the teams, Bennett will just claim we don’t deserve ’em.

If our socio-economic upper crust shuns the owners, they won’t mind; they never intended to make any friends here.

Nope. We gotta do to Bennett’s crowd what we did to Argyros and Behring–push back with legal threats and procedural stalls, until a new local ownership group can be formed.

…Marlow Harris n’ Jo David have a nice, pretty puff piece about ’em in Sunday’s Seattle Times.

Meanwhile, yr. ob’d’n’t Web-ster’s continued the crowd-control detail at the orthodontists’ convention. Fortunately, I didn’t have to do usherin’ duty at a Philips-Sonicare sponsored free concert at Benaroya Hall, starring the ultimate dentist’s-office musician.

…playoffs begin with Seattle fans once again relegated to spectator status, Danny Westneat suggests a simple, elegant solution. If the Sonics/Storm owners put up as much money as they would have put up for a new suburban arena, let’s get the state and/or county to front the remainder of what it’d take to fix up KeyArena (hey–remember that joint?) with a bigger food court and a few more tiers of seating. The teams not only stay in Seattle, they stay in Seattle. Everybody’s happy except the sports-hating hippies (and the owners, if they were really only looking for an excuse to move the franchise).

…that couldn’t be saved has been saved. In a stunning victory for the Hearst Corp. and print-media-diversity lovers, the P-I and the Seattle Times have settled, suddenly ending four years of litigation over the papers’ joint operating agreement.

Apparently, the lightly-substantiated “expose” of Times anti-P-I business practices posted on the first day of Crosscut.com may have been at least somewhat accurate. The terms of the settlement seem to imply that the Times feared losing big when the dispute reached binding arbitration, which would have begun this week.

Under the terms, the Times promises to beef up P-I promotion, and to treat the P-I equally in production/printing/delivery infrastructure. Hearst gives up a JOA provision that would allow it to a share of Times profits if the P-I closes.

The new pact runs for the next nine years. By that time, online news-consumption might become so dominant that the manufacturing and shipping of printed newspapers won’t matter.

Let’s not judge Crosscut, the new local-affairs site run by Seattle Weekly refugees, on the basis of its day-one product. Presumably, like many Web ventures, this is a “soft launch,” a live test of the systems and features before a fuller site rolls out.

Given that caveat, the thing’s pretty colorless and shallow at its debut.

The “big expose” piece, about the still-churning legal case between the Times and P-I, is a mealy-mouthed treatise whose allegations (of Times management actions to bury the P-I) are wonky and obscure. It doesn’t help that the writing itself is wonky and obscure.

Then there’s Knute Berger’s piece charging the Seattle School District with not kowtowing enough to the demands of upscale white families….

Peter Donahue has written a positively gushing review of Vanishing Seattle in the Seattle Times today. It’s just too lovely.

Wednesday’s Seattle Times devotes its entire above-the-fold front page to a warning announcement, in six languages, pleading with people in de-electrified homes not to generate carbon-monoxide fumes indoors.

…not to trust the mainstream news media: SeattleTimes.com listed the Vanishing Seattle premiere party as a “Hot Ticket,” but then got the date wrong. As a result, many people may show up at Epilogue Books (2001 Market Street in brilliant Ballard) tonight, Monday, instead of the scheduled night, Tuesday. I’ll show up both nights just in case.

Both the Vanishing Seattle book and the September Belltown Messenger are outta here and on their way to your adoring eyes. So I can now resume this here corner of what used to be euphemistically called “Cyberspace.”

Among the things I haven’t gotten the time to write about these past almost two weeks:

• The 25th anniversary of the first IBM PC. Personal computers had already been around a half decade. IBM saw the character-generating on the wall and realized it had to be in that market, before its own sub-mainframe workstation computers were obsolete. An “Entry Level Systems Division” was set up in Florida, far from IBM’s mainframe designers in upstate New York. A workable and expandable machine was swiftly designed, mostly from off-the-shelf parts. Corporate schmoozing between IBM bigwigs and UW Regent Mary Gates got Mary’s son Bill the chance to bid on the operating system contract. He bought the existing QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from a couple of Seattle nerds. His then-small staff made two variants, PC-DOS (for IBM) and MS-DOS (which, under the MS/IBM contract, Gates & co. could sell to anybody). From this one deal arose the Puget Sound country’s new #1 economic force, the driver of real-estate hyperinflation and the flow of money into local “alternative” culture.
• 
  The first sign of hope for saving the Sonics and Storm. The Okie owners say they’d be perfectly happy with staying in Seattle Center, as long as it’s not in KeyArena. They suggested the Memorial Stadium land, already set to be cleared under a blue-ribbon committee’s master plan for the Center grounds. That’d be perfect with me. The high school football games can go to Husky Stadium or even Qwest Field. KeyArena can be re-remodeled as a concert and convention facility. We can get an indoor arena big enough for a National Hockey League team, plus the food-court and amusement-arcade sections the Okies want. I may be the only one I know who believes this deal can indeed be worked out without excessively draining local tax coffers, but I do believe it.
• 
  Safeco Insurance plans to leave the U District; the UW plans to buy the Safeco Tower. Let’s just make sure the U keeps the IHOP, next to the tower on Safeco-owned land.
• 
  A dog-days lull in the Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer soap opera. I’ve been talking with others who, like me, would like to be involved in starting a new local-news venture should the P-I call it a day. Should this project progress, and should I become a real part of it, I’ll wind up saying less and less about it due to the ol’ non-disclosure falderal.

“PVC may not be sexy…” Boy, the Seattle Times really needs to get out more.

(via Arthur Marriott):

The piece in the P-I about the “white-ification” of the neighborhood surrounding the Jimi Hendrix memorial is rather coincidental with a photo in the Sunday Times accompanying an article about several local high-school jazz bands’ participation in the national “Essentially Ellington” competition. It showed the Garfield band, and except for Clarence Acox (the director) everyone on stage was white.

In recent days, I’ve talked to two Post-Intelligencer staffers. One of them (I won’t say who) confided in me that the staff consensus is that the paper’s doomed. The joint operating agreement with the SeaTimes can’t go on indefinitely, not if the Times is itching to get out; and few if any P-I staffers can imagine a second daily paper competing on its own.

I, however, can imagine this.

Of course, I don’t have access to the P-I’s or the Times’s financial data. I don’t know how much the P-I spends a year, or how much ad revenue it would take to pay for that and a newly independent P-I sales and distro staff—particularly in today’s business climate where free want-ad Web sites threaten to drain one of the newspaper biz’s revenue mainstays.

I would deeply love to see the coolest newspaper name in America preserved. But if the Hearst management in NYC chooses to retire the P-I name if and when the JOA ever ends, let’s start an all-new paper to replace it.

It’ll take a lot more than just me to do this. (Goodness knows my track record at starting business ventures is less than spectacular.)

I’ve fantasized about this previously here, but let’s get the fantasy going to a level of a little more detail. Let’s imagine a local daily print newspaper for the Internet age. What would it have and not have? What would it emphasize and de-emphasize? Would it have a cover price? Who would advertise in it? How would it tie in with a Web presence? Would the online edition carry more or less content than the print edition?

Lemme know what you think.

Let’s do it!

Every few years or so, somebody comes up with a huge master plan for Seattle Center. The latest of these somebodies is a Mayor Nickels-appointed task force. They’d like to modernize Center House and the Fun Forest, and demolish the awkward, rickety High School Memorial Stadium.

Meanwhile, ex-Seattle Weekly mogul David Brewster has submitted a more extreme plan. In keeping with his lifelong ideology of baby-boomer bias, Brewster’s plan would eradicate all Center facilities that serve clienteles significantly younger or less affluent than himself.

Brewster would raze Memorial Stadium, Mercer Arena (formerly the Arena, formerly the Ice Arena), the Fun Forest, Center House (formerly the Food Circus, formerly a National Guard armory), the North Court meeting rooms (including the Snoqualmie Room, where the Vera Project’s all-ages rock shows will move later this year), and maybe even the new and popular Fisher Pavilion. And he apparently wouldn’t mind seeing the Sonics leave town so he could erase KeyArena (formerly the Coliseum) as well.

In the place of all these funky, un-slicked-up, well-used facilities, Brewster would like to see—nothing.

Albeit, it would be a lushly landscaped nothing, with lotsa grass and trees. Maybe there’d be some gourmet sidewalk cafes and used-book pushcarts. Maybe there’d be some outdoor ampitheater spaces, which would replace a few of the many indoor performance venues Bumbershoot and Folklife would lose.

Brewster’s Seattle Times essay notes that when Seattle Center was originally being planned to take over the 1962 World’s Fair grounds, it was made to accommodate many interest groups and population segments. He’d now like to replace that “cacophany” with a unified vision of a “glorious urban park.”

I happen to love the cacophany. And I want to keep it.

Too much of Seattle (hell, too much of America) has already been subsumed by the ultra-bland upscale monoculture. Publicly-owned treasures such as Seattle Center should resist this trend. They should always belong to everyone. They should always have a place for senior square-dancers, for working families, for teens, for minorities, for fast-food eaters, and for us Century 21 nostalgists who still want to believe in a festive future.

We can have contemplative green spaces, too. And we can have upscale dineries and theatrical venues. Just not only those.

So, I propose: Anything cut out from today’s Center gets put back into tomorrow’s Center. The only exception would be the high-school football games. They can move to some current school-district-owned property (such as one of those grade schools threatened with closure), or even to Husky Stadium or Qwest Field. Down in the Beaver State, Corvallis High has long played its football games at Oregon State’s stadium (and often had better winning records than OSU). The fact that neither Brewster nor the Nickels task force bothers to talk about where the high-school games would go just shows how ivory-tower (or condo-tower) their POVs are.

As for the rest: The Sonics, in their plea for another taxpayer-subsidized arena remodel, say they want a food court and an amusement arcade. Fine. Let ’em buy out the Fun Forest operators. An altered arena complex could incorporate replacements for the Fun Forest and the Center House food court. (These restaurants and arcades should be open to the general public, not only to arena event-goers.)

The arena should also be refitted to be more favorable to hockey. The NHL is dying in Sunbelt cities where it doesn’t belong; I’m convinced one of those southern-tier teams would fare far better in a northern town with major Canadian connections.

I’d keep Fisher Pavilion and its popular rooftop deck.

The empty lawn surrounding KCTS east of Mercer Arena could become a landscaped play area, replacing the wading pool north of KeyArena (and relocating the “atomic” neon lights from there).

The other Center House and Northwest Court functions (Vera, the Center School, the Seattle Children’s Museum, the square dances, the conferences, Bumbershoot’s visual arts) could go into new structures on the Center’s periphery, perhaps at the Mercer Arena site and retaining its facade. These new buildings could be included in the same funding package and construction schedule as the arena redo.

That would leave Center House available for implosion. In its hole might go some of the green spaces and outdoor amenities Brewster wants.

But, in my heart-O-hearts, I like Center House. I like the swords-into-plowshares idea of a bulky military warehouse now devoted to fun and games. It’s a grand old building, with a lot of life left in it. And besides, I like the Mongolian BBQ and the Pizza Haven.

Maybe Brewster would slag folk like me for not possessing a will to civic greatness. Too bad.

I don’t want a civic center with good taste. I want a civic center that tastes good.