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You can see yr. humble web editor this Thurs. evening at a Society of Professional Journalists gabfest, Invasion of the Bloggers. Also on the dais will be three other prolific online scribes—Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, Glenn Fleishman, and Rebecca Blood.
It all goes down at 7 p.m. in the Seattle Times auditorium on Fairview Avenue (north of John Street, south of Hooters). There’s no admission fee, so be there or be rhomboid.
Yr. humble web editor’s gonna be a panelist at a Society of Professional Journalists gabfest, Invasion of the Bloggers. Also on the dais will be three other prolific online scribes—Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, Glenn Fleishman, and Rebecca Blood.
It all goes down on Thursday, Nov. 7, 7 p.m. in the Seattle Times auditorium on Fairview Avenue (north of John Street, south of Hooters). There’s no admission fee, so I fully expect everyone within the sound of my typing to get there.
UNLIKE APPARENTLY MANY OF YOU, I still believe in reading local newspapers. Sure, the NY Times has lotsa pretty real-estate ads for fantasy palatial mansions, but there’s still tons to be said for reading up about your own place.
There’s also the fun tea-leaf-gazing ritual of discerning what gets into the paper and why. F’rinstance, the Sunday SeaTimes’s virulent anti-monorail editorial and the accompanying, heavily inane, editorial cartoon by the paper’s new staff art-hack Eric Devericks. Devericks, like his P-I counterpart David Horsey, can be sort-of amusing when attacking some targets, but astoundingly unfunny and uncreative when called upon to visualize an editorial stance dictated by the publisher, who in turn probably got his marching orders from the Downtown Seattle Association and/or Washington Alliance for Business.
In this case, Devericks’s drawing portrays a quartet (actual) nuts, spouting the anti-monorail campaign’s shameless distortions of the pro-monorail campaign’s arguments. Being mere nuts, they have no facial expressions or body language. There’s no personality, no artistry, not even any vitriol.
The Oregonian once had an even duller cartoonist, an old guy with the perfectly geezeroid name of Art Bimrose. His idea of illustrating an idea was invariably to depict a seersucker-suited guy pointing to a newspaper headline and either smiling or frowning.
But Bimrose was consistently dull, day after day. Horsey and Devericks are selectively mediocre. When they draw a dud, you can be fairly sure they’re following orders—even, just perhaps, attempting to sabotage their assigned opinions by depicting them as opinions with which only a witless geezer would agree.
Elsewhere in that same edition, human-interest columnist Jerry Large ran selected, edited letters responding to a prior piece of his, which pondered whether Seattle was a good place for African-Americans to move to.
Large cleverly didn’t ask whether the town was merely “tolerant of diversity,” a phrase which usually refers to upscale white people’s images of their own smug perfection. No, Large wanted to hear from actual black people about their own actual experiences across the whole spectrum of life’s needs (love, career, family, community, finding a decent BBQ place, etc.).
Either by his own drive to be fair-n’-balanced or by his editors’ wish to preserve the “tolerant” civic image, Large made sure to include several letters from people who liked it here. These letters tended to list safe, “tolerance”-type reasons. The negative letters were more passionate. Their arguments tended toward a few main areas:
In my prior refutation of white “this town sucks” whiners, I’d said Seattle indeed is a real city, with lots to offer. But it’d have even more to offer with more Af-Ams around, what with all their immeasurable-contributions-to-the-American-milieu etc. etc.
For those Af-Ams reading this (and I know at least a few are), please consider becoming part of our city. We’re northern but not freezingly so. We’ve only got two or three indirect-race-baiting politicians, none of whom currently hold elective office. We’re awfully white, but not in a Boondocks extreme. You can find hiphop recordings here (though it is easier to find stores selling obscure German techno CDs). We’ve got our gosh-durn own African Heritage festivals, breakdancing contests, and typo-abundant black newspapers. While our local economy’s become the nation’s worst, there’s a new source of minority venture capital in the form of families who sold their city houses to rich white people at the peak of the market.
And all my dorky white brethern & cistern can do more to be fully welcoming toward (not just “tolerant” of) these neighbors. A good place to start is to start realizing black people aren’t always like what white people think they’re like (so leave those stereotypes behind). If you’re an employer, start hiring some (and not just as janitors and receptionists). And don’t think you’ll automatically become their friend if you start acting like some dorky white person pretending to be black. Just be the most honest, life-loving, gracious dorky white person you can be.
Seems like everybody in the civic establishment, and in the just-outside groups lobbying the civic establishment, wants to get rid of the Alaskan Way Viaduct. The Seattle Times wants it gone. The P-I wants it gone. Allied Arts of Seattle wants it gone. And most influentually, Paul Allen wants it gone.
I want it to stay.
By far, it’s Seattle’s most scenic and romantic higher-speed roadway. Driving north on it at night is a visual definition of coming home to Seattle–the office towers shining to your right, Elliott Bay peacefully slumbering to your left. (And that sudden off-ramp onto Marion Street is always a mini thrill ride.) On the few days a year pedestrians can use it, it becomes a heaven of undiscovered angles and photographic possibilities.
Of course, I know the 51-year-old Viaduct can’t stay, at least not in its current incarnation. It’s not earthquake-safe, it’s built on unstable landfill, and the seawall holding up the landfill is itself old and decaying.
This provides the civic-builder clique with the perfect excuse to demand the viaduct’s replacement–not with another elevated scenic drive but with a tunnel. And on the ground level above the tunnel, the parking lots and low-rent storefronts of today’s Alaskan Way would be tossed aside as an unwanted memory of a working-class past the city’s elite would rather forget. In its place: What Times guest writer and architect Karen DeLucas calls “a great urban oasis” comprising “a rich dynamic series of urban places linked together by a pedestrian promenade that stretches the entire length of the Seattle waterfront.”
Feel free to read that as Seattle Commons II: A squeaky-clean, hyper-bland, fantasy playplace for the upscale and the tourists, openly intended to drive up surrounding property values and drive out any remaining outposts of the non-affluent.
Or, as Times columnist James Vesely writes of today’s waterfront, “The cheesy tourist strip was OK for a different Seattle, but there are grander things that could be done, and why not dream them?”
Well, I’ve got my own dreams on what to do with the waterfront. And keeping the cheesy tourist strip, even expanding it, is #2 or #3 on my list.
The rise of containerized cargo and shipboard fish processing means we can’t return the old stevedore docks to their original uses. But we can preserve their current uses–unpretentiously entertaining the citizenry with fish n’ chips under radiant heating units, ferry rides, ice cream cones, street vendors, sea-otter displays, Imax movies, souvenir-plate stores, Sylvester the Mummy, and the occasional tugboat race or Flaming Lips concert. These fine attractions could be enhanced with selective additions, which might include an amusement park with a kickass roller coaster, a summer-long “street fair,” some more exotic-import shops, some nighttime hot spots, fire eaters, stilt walkers, cabaret acts, and, of course, the Kalakala.
Just up from the water, Alaskan Way and its immediate environs between Spokane and Seneca Streets would become, in my dream, a covered (though not fully rain-protected) year-round anything-goes zone. Bars in this zone would have no mandated closing times. Pedestrians (though not drivers) would be permitted to carry open containers along what would be an all-night party place.
Beneath the street and above a traffic tunnel, a new “underground Seattle” would let grownups play safely out of sight from the family-values types: Casinos, strip clubs, rave clubs, odd performance-art venues, etc. South of Washington Street, it would turn into an “Amsterdam West” district offering red-light experiences for consenting adults of all persuasions.
Above the street, a new and seismically-correct viaduct would offer three or four lanes of slow, scenic traffic on its top tier (everyday traffic would be encouraged to take the tunnel). The new viaduct’s lower tier would be a covered pedestrian and bicycle way, with P-Patch planting boxes and art installations, alongside a monorail branch line.
Yeah, it’d all cost money. (Although my plan has more potentially rentable and taxable aspects than the plan the Times likes.) Yeah, it’d need rezoning. Yeah, it’d face political opposition.
But Vesely says we’ve gotta have big dreams if we want this city to become a better place. And my dreams are bigger, and more fun, than his will ever be.
THE NEW YEAR opened with almost exactly the same Space Needle fireworks routine (seen here from halfway up Queen Anne Hill) that began the last year.
It’s as good a time as any for a year-in-review. In 2001, this region faced:
On the at-least-somewhat brighter side:
GEOV PARRISH’S LIST of alternative war-news sources.
SOMETHING I’VE LONG DREAMED OF is finally almost here–the chance to have my own cereal! (A heaping bowl of Frosted MISCflakes, anyone?)
BURIED HALFWAY or so through this Seattle Times story is a great opportunity. The Washington Shoe Building, Pioneer Square’s premier artist-studio space until all the artists were evicted for would-be gentrification last year, is now for sale at a relative pittance to anyone willing to finish the repairs from the Ash Wednesday earthquake.
That’s just the sort of sweat-equity project artists often go for. Let’s bring the Shoe back!
YR. HUMBLE EDITOR was recently awarded the honor of being one of the 18 jurors who selected the “MetropoList 150,” the Museum of History and Industry/Seattle Times list of the 150 most influential people in the 150-year history of Seattle and King County.
I’m quite satisfied with the final list, available at this link. There’s almost nobody on it I wouldn’t have wanted on it.
Nevertheless, there are several names I wrote in which didn’t make the final selection. In alphabetical order, they include:
IN ADDITION, here are some names nominated by other people (with the descriptions these anonymous nominators wrote) for whom I voted, but who also failed to make the final cut:
(This article’s permanent link.)
…the Museum of History and Industry/Seattle Times list of the 150 most influential people in Seattle-King County history, is now up at this link. As attentive readers of this site know, I was on the jury that picked the final selection. Some of my picks, however, didn’t make the final cut. I’ll post some of those names here soon. I promise.
In Monday’s email, I received the Museum of History and Industry’s long list of nominees for “MetropoLIST,” the MOHAI/Seattle Times scheme to name the 150 “most influential” people in Seattle and King County, tying in with the city’s upcoming 150th birthday. (I get to be one of the voters on the final lineup.)
The long list has over 450 people on it. My first cut dropped a bunch of old-family lawyers and Boeing executive vice-presidents and suburban hospital administrators, but still left 192 people I thought worthy of the list. I had to chop that down to 150 to vote for, including any write-in suggestions of my own (the long list didn’t even include such big names as Eddie Vedder, Dyan Cannon, and Mary Kay LeTourneau!).
I’ll get my final votes done and sent into MOHAI probably by the end of today. The final roster, as voted on by the whole panel, will appear in the Times on Sept. 30.
Two weeks later, our own MISC roster of famous/infamous Seattleites will appear, in illustrated-poster form, as a centerspread in the next issue of our print mag.
Sure enough, the Seattle Times (run by a publisher who’s complained that this town’s too overrun with “ultraliberals”) endorsed that dittoheaded dweeb Mark Sidran for mayor today, one week after the supposedly less conservative P-I did likewise. It proves the city’s business establishment is lining up in lockstep behind the KVI-anointed Sidran and dumping their last hand-picked favorite, current incumbent Paul Schell.
And already the apologists are coming forth, as if a Sidran victory were inevitable, trying to reassure us that the city government’s point man on mandatory mellowness and demographic cleansing weren’t so bad. The Times endorsement editorial appeared in the same edition as a front-page story claiming few significant policy differences between Sidran, Schell, and Greg Nickels.
Why, one longtime progressive activist tried to personally reassure me that “Sidran’s not as dangerous as The Stranger says he is.”
Actually, Sidran really is that dangerous. It’s just that he’s not been the lone voice of conservative reaction many have billed him as, including, often, himself.
The Sidran-drafted “civility” laws (assorted attacks on the young, the homeless, the poor, the black, etc.) mostly passed the City Council (often on 7-2 votes) and were mostly signed into law by Schell and/or mayor predecessor Norm Rice.
The corporate clout-mongers who backed Schell in ’97 and back Sidran now clearly want what Jim Hightower calls “business more than usual”–the same power-mongering, insider dealmaking, corporate welfare, and sticking-it-to-the-little guy, only more aggressively persued and with fewer compromises. That’s what they want from Sidran, as the Times endorsement statement clearly states.
If Sidran really were the lone-wolf conservative battling a liberal municipal establishment he’s sometimes claimed to be, he wouldn’t be someone to worry about. But with the daily papers’ publishers and the Downtown Seattle Association types fawning over him like they do, Sidran is definitely a local-elite insider. And if he did get into power, he could definitely accomplish a lot more anti-democratic mischief.
The Museum of History and Industry has named yr. o’b’d’n’t web-correspondent to a panel that will determine Seattle’s 150 most important historical figures. The list, being assembled for the town’s 150th birthday (topic of our next MISC print mag; get your story ideas in now!), will appear in The Seattle Times sometime in September. Look for it.
Seattle Times publisher Frank Blethen has a job that typically dictates civic boosting, the hyping of his own city’s attractiveness as a place to live, work, and conduct trade. He’s now apparently shirking from his professional duties.
The newspaper trade journal Editor & Publisher quotes Blethen as threatening to move all the paper’s operations out to Bothell, except for a small news bureau and ad-sales office. Blethen blathered about the usual gripes corporate bosses itching for government subsidies gripe about, from zoning to traffic to insufficiently submissive politicians. He even invoked the right-wing buzzwords “ultra liberal” and “pro-labor” to bash Mayor Paul Schell.
Schell is no real liberal, let alone an “ultra” one (what is an “ultra liberal,” anyway? Someone who wants to smash the state but keep the Post Office?).
But Schell refused to be interviewed by Times scab reporters during last winter’s strike. This may be the real reason for Blethen’s blast.
Without specifically endorsing the candidacy of the much-hated Mark Sidran (who loves to use the “ultra liberal” expression himself), and by speaking for himself as a businessman rather than settling for his paper’s editorial pages, Blethen may be thinking he can do his part to oust Schell and bring Seattle’s city government even further into line with the corporate-boot-licking norm of so many governments across today’s western world.
Of course, all he may really end up doing is pissing off even more local citizens than he managed to piss off with his obstinate attitude during and after the strike.
TODAY’S PREVIOUSLY-ANNOUNCED CONTENTS have, as local readers might guess, been postponed.
When last I wrote about Emmett Watson, the dean of Seattle newspapermen, I described him as “possibly the greatest self-proclaimed hack writer in Northwest history.”
He was a helluva lot more than that.
He was a city’s chronicler, in a three-dot item column and occasional longer essays, then in three volumes of memoirs (all, alas, out of print).
He was also a city’s conscience, though he’d never admit to such a potentially pretentious appellation.
He would, however, freely admit to being a throwback to both the old days of newspapering and the old days of Seattle.
The former meant he was a master of the now largely-forgotten Art of the Column and the heritage of the classic newspaperman character type, the ink-stained wretch who drank with two fists and typed with two fingers. Watson wasn’t really like that, but he endearingly pretended to be such for droll-comic effect.
The latter meant he gave a damn about this once-forgotten corner of America and the humans of all social strata who inhabited it. He hobnobbed with the powerful, and dropped many a local-celeb name in his columns, but felt at home with the working stiffs, the unsung men and women who actually did things. (It’s sad but appropriate that his final published column appeared in last fall’s strike paper, the Seattle Union Record.)
Even his “Lesser Seattle” schtick, a running semi-gag about trying to “Keep the Bastards Out” and put the brakes on regional development, was really a not-so-disguised paean to the Seattle and the Northwest that he knew, the gruff but lovable place of honest curmuddgeons and simple dreamers–a culture he saw being steadily eroded, not just by loud-talkin’ Calif. immigrants but by local boosters who seemed to hate everything that was great about this place and desperately wanted to turn it into something “World Class” at any cost.
Watson tweaked and stretched the format of the three-dot column so it could say just about anything he wanted it to. He was outspoken (and on what I consider the right side of) just about every big political and social issue of the past half-century.
And it’s not an exaggeration to note that all I’ve done in this online (and sometimes print) column was an attempt, however misdirected and feeble, to try to write like he did.
NEXT: My print future.
ELSEWHERE:
ONE OF THE NET’S first writer-success stories is Aaron Barnhart.
Back in the Iron Age of online communication (circa 1993-94), Barnhart started a weekly e-mailed column, Late Show News, covering late-night TV with a particular David Letterman emphasis.
Barnhart’s searing, witty, and attitude-free insights got him a cult following that led to freelance assignments for “real” print publications, and eventually to his getting a job as TV critic for the Kansas City Star.
Barnhart’s been dealing with leukemia lately, and talks frankly about it at his TV Barn site.
Among his comments is his personal experience with the kind of genetic-based therapies whose early unperfected forms, and their associated tragic human clinical trials, were the topic of last week’s Seattle Times long investigative series.
The Times stories repeatedly depict the therapies Hutch studied, and the trials thereof, as one big horrible disaster, spurred not by scientific inquiry but by the financial interest held by the Hutch and some of its physicians in the products being studied.
But Barnhart (whose paper is owned by Knight-Ridder, which owns 49.5 percent of the Times) notes on his site that if it weren’t for those crude, early versions of the therapies, the more perfected versions he’s using wouldn’t have been developed.
Yes, many people died in the Hutch’s early tests. But many of them would have died from their cancers anyway. And it’s because of what the Hutch and other institutions learned from those tests that the current therapies are around to help prolong the life of one of my favorite online writers.
The remaining issue raised by the Times series is whether patients in the clinical trials knew how experiemental and risky their treatments were. Based on his experience, Barnhart writes that that’s an issue endemic to the whole medical-research industry, not just to the Hutch.
NEXT: Tell me a story.
Critical Mass Exodus
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist discussed the sudden, management-pushed retirement of longtime Seattle Times film critic John Hartl. Today, a look at a quite different critical voice, also disappearing–a highbrow- and experimental-music zine.)
IT’S OFFICIAL: The Tentacle is jettisoning its ink edition. The current spring issue will be followed by a final one in a few months. The web site, www.tentacle.org, will probably continue to list shows, but this activity, like any resumption of the print version, depends on a dwindling supply of volunteer labor.
Although money is always tight in the magazine world, the main reason Tentacle helmsman Dennis Rea gives for quitting is that he and other collective members (Mike Marlin, Christopher DiLaurenti, and Carl Juarez) need to spend more time on their own projects.
A larger problem is that the community The Tentacle serves is too small. Of the dozens who regularly do, as the cover says, “free improv, avant-rock, new composition, noise, electro-acoustic, out jazz,” and other unusual forms, not enough folks contribute to the one publication that pays much attention to them.
Twenty subscribers and a handful of ads pay the bills, and it takes another twenty people to write, edit, lay out, publish, and distribute this 24-page, 8.5 X 11 newsprint denizen of the resonant deep.
In a way, the narrow focus is what made The Tentacle one of the most fascinating magazines around. I speared it when it first surfaced, about three years ago. At the time, I was editing the Washington Free Press and so was drawn to it as a beautifully designed shoestring-budget journal rather than as a kind of lobbying ploy on the part of some artists to get themselves noticed.
As a writer who’s done my share of such lobbying, I was also intrigued by the spirit of this mad venture. To read The Tentacle was to confront the apparent reality of a vast music scene that thrived on presenting experimental work.
In music, writing, or any other artistic discipline, works that fool around with the conventions of their craft are hard to sell. Unlike larger publications that ignore or ridicule such an approach to art, The Tentacle had a sense of humor about its place in the cultural food chain.
Of course, the expectations of artists who book and promote their own shows are nothing if not realistic. Then again, maniacs who spend years composing pieces that nobody may want to play or hear, refining techniques that seem more suited to a carnival than a concert stage, and striving for a perfection that must alienate in order to succeed are so idealistic as to make monks seem like venal hedonists.
The critical questions The Tentacle addressed weren’t the case-by-case judgments the overnight critic makes, but idealistic concerns. Instead of CD reviews and celebrity profiles for fans, there were CD release notifications and interviews and articles for fellow artists. The Tentacle provided a forum to define “creative” music and to discuss the relationship of politics to art; a place for book reviews, concert reports, cartoons, a calendar, and oddball features.
What is art? Why is art important? Which art matters?
These are the lines of investigation John Hartl and The Tentacle have pursued in their various ways.
I know these people and have written for these publications, but my stake in all this is personal only insofar as it is intellectual.
That is, the idea of devolving into a society where attitude-packed cheap shots replace thoughtful reviews and where experience, civil discourse, and consideration give way to picks-‘n-pans arts coverage is a threat to what I write, read, hear, see, and know.
People retire, magazines sink out of sight, and newspapers wrap fish.
NEXT: More things we’re losing.
