Posting from a Net-cafe again today. My re-un-fixed laptop went back to the shop (actually to some central repair facility in Houston) today.

FUN QUOTE #1 (Snoop Doggy Dogg in the SeaTimes on women who’ve complained about his fully-clothed MC jobs on Girls Gone Wild videos–specifically, women who’ve complained about the lack of Af-Am breast-barers in the videos): “They’ve been complaining to me like crazy… They think I like the white girls because I’m on there with them, and I don’t, I just did that for money.”

FUN QUOTE #2 (Vendetta Red singer Zach Davidson in the same SeaTimes issue, on having become the client of an LA-based voice teacher): “He’s very good at that, how to preserve your voice. … When your voice goes, it’s like losing your penis.”

Seattle officials are planning to crack down on the unofficial open-air art market along Occidental Avenue during the Pioneer Square First Thursday art walks. They’re talking with gallery owners and official neighborhood booster groups, but apparently not with the outdoor art vendors themselves (except to give ’em stern warnings not to come back in July without a permit).

The SeaTimes quoted gallery owner Greg Kucera as saying the unauthorized, un-curated, un-mediated art sales on the sidewalks “erases the work we’re trying to do” as per “trying to get people to understand the difference between good art, bad art, high art, low art.”

If you ask me, erasing such hierarchical boundaries is a Good Thing. We oughta encourage more of it.

If the street art’s popularity is overcrowding Occidental, then expand it into Occidental Park across the street. But don’t have screening committees or “quality control” bureaucrats deciding who gets to sell what. We don’t need another exclusive spot that only offers the same slicked-up, blanded-down, tourist-friendly “fine” art you can already find at every summertime street fair.

That mellow-but-meaningless image, of course, is precisely what’s caused so many hipster critics and scenesters to scoff at Seattle’s most commercial contribution to the art world, glass art. This week’s international Glass Art Society convention here in town, and all the associated local gallery shows, might be changing a few minds about this. COCA and Roq La Rue have found plenty of pieces to display that show typical COCA and Roq La Rue subject matter, only in glass. The pliable, moldable, clear or semi-opaque material can be utilized for a lot more than just prosaic giant bowls.

In other words, glass artists don’t always blow.

Among the seminar speeches and dry-research releases put forth at the recent newspaper-biz convention in Seattle was one study that claimed the elusive youth market started reading daily papers more often during the Iraq war, but didn’t stick with the habit. The trade mag Editor & Publisher quoted the survey company’s boss John Lavine as saying:

“Coffee in a can is a dead ringer for where newspapers were: It was a mature product, it was dying, everybody said its time was over — and then Starbucks came along.”

We’ve already written that the current push by the Seattle Times to kill its joint operating agreement with the Post-Intelligencer, and by extension to kill the P-I itself, could instead be an opportunity to reinvigorate the P-I as a truly independent paper, and by extension to revive the newspaper biz.

I’m convinced it can be done. Yes, a JOA-less P-I would need to get its own ad sellers and delivery vans, and either buy or hire printing presses. Getting the financing for such a venture just might be easier if it were for a new paper for a new era, something this country hasn’t really seen since USA Today first targeted the everywhere/nowhere of shopping malls and airports 21 years ago.

A post-JOA P-I, or an all-new paper that could be launched in the wake of the current JOA mess, could be a paper devised from scratch to meet the ink-on-paper needs of the Internet age. It could be neither old-American-journalism boredom nor Murdoch sleaze, but something lively and forward-looking and written to be read.

I’ve freelanced in the past for the Seattle Times, and hope to do so again. But that doesn’t mean I want it to succeed at its current drive to become a true monopoly paper.

I opposed the original joint operating agreement between the Times and the Post-Intelligencer, which took effect 20 years ago this month. Unlike the JOAs in some two-paper towns, which set up a joint-venture agency to handle the papers’ non-news operations (sales, printing, distro, promotion, etc.), the Seattle JOA put both papers’ fates squarely under the Times’ control. The Times was free to undersell the P-I to subscribers and advertisers alike, or to be laggardly about trucking the P-I off to outlying corners of the region. All of which it’s been accused of doing at one time or another.

The 1999 revision to the JOA only increased the Times’ capacity for mischief. When the World Wide Web came along, the Times ruled that a P-I website would fall under the promotional duties ascribed under the original JOA’s terms to the Times. In other words, the Times got to choose what kind of website the P-I could have, and naturally chose a bare-bones PR page without any actual news items. In return for the right to put its full text online (and a slightly higher share of the JOA’s proceeds), the P-I agreed to a revised JOA that would allow the Times to (1) come out in the morning, and (2) invoke an escape clause should it report three consecutive money-losing years.

The latter clause, in retrospect, was a lot like the escape clause former Mariners owner George Argyros demanded from King County in the mid-’80s. Argyros claimed, and the Times and P-I editorially agreed, that the only way to keep the M’s in Seattle was to rewrite the team’s Kingdome lease so Argyros could more easily move the team to Tampa. (Really!) Argyros got his new lease, then promptly attempted to invoke his bug-out option at his first contractual opportunity; the team’s future wasn’t secured until the 1992 sale to the Nintendo-led group that still owns it today.

Similarly, the Times took an agreement that was ostensibly meant to keep both papers in business, and has reconfigured, interpreted, and exploited it in order to try to kill the P-I. The Hearst Corp., which has owned the P-I since 1921 while allowing so many of its other once-mighty dailies to die over the decades, is taking the whole mess to court.

It could end up in any number of ways. Times bossman Frank Blethen says he wants the Times to emerge alone from the fray, and he insists it’ll do so with his family still in charge. But there could conceivably also be a full merger of the papers into one lumbering goliath, or a Hearst buyout of the Times.

What nobody’s openly considering is a return to full competition, with Hearst or some future P-I owner amassing a separate load of presses, trucks, and ad sellers.

But that’s what I’d like to see.

It’d be a perfect opportunity to try and re-invent daily newspapers for the Internet age, when the tiny-print items that have continued to make dailies essential for urban society are more handily available online (movie times, stock prices, sports stats, want ads). In the TV age, dailies survived (albeit in consolidated, monopolized forms in most cities) as the only place you could get such data. With that advantage gone, what would a paper need? Perhaps a strong aesthetic, a sense of the zeitgeist, a coherent package of articles and pictures that at least pretends to try and make sense of a crazy world.

That’s where the P-I, the closest thing the Northwest has to a progressive daily, shines best. Its livelier copywriting and more aggressive feature coverage make it a more intriguing read than the Times has ever been (though both papers were sufficiently compliant suckers for the Bushies’ propaganda massages this past year).

I prefer the P-I as a news product, but I want both papers to live. Any industry that can’t figure out how to make that happen ain’t much of an industry.

THIS SUNDAY, the Seattle Times ran a long and lovely story about the Grand Illusion Theater, where I curated a strange-matinees series in 1987 and where, under the name The Movie House, the Seattle alterna-film exhibition scene began back in 1970. Under various owners over the years (it’s currently part of the nonprofit Northwest Film Forum), the 78-seat GI has epitomized the best of the Seattle filmgoing scene: Friendly curiosity, wild eclecticism, and a healthy indifference to celebrity BS.

The same day the times ran its Grand Illusion piece, Scarecrow Video held a public wake at its Roosevelt Way digs for the store’s founder George Latsois. (He’d died earlier in the month, from the brain cancer that had forced him to sell the store four years ago.)

Latsois essentially took the aforementioned Seattle film-consumption aesthetic and built a video-rental superstore around it. He’d started with a handful of Euro-horror titles he’d consigned to the old Backtrack Records and Video store north of U Village (a sponsor of my matinees at the Grand Illusion). From there he opened his own 500-title store on Latona Ave. NE, which by 1993 had grown to take over a former stereo store on Roosevelt.

He built it from there according to that mid-’90s local business mantra, “Get Big Fast.” It had 18,000 titles when it moved to Roosevelt and over 60,000 now. But like many other local ’90s entrepreneurs, Latsois spent more money on expansion than he was bringing in. He became ill before he could sort it out, but the new ex-Microsoftie owners have honorably continued the store’s operations and its wide-ranging buying policies (want DVDs of Korean films dubbed into Chinese? They got ’em!).

Scarecrow Video, and the Grand Illusion four blocks away on University Way, are hallmarks of the city’s intelligence and unpretentious sophistication. These qualities were quite ludicly expressed in the current Seattle Weekly cover story. In a lengthy essay originally commissioned for The Guardian (that Brit paper that’s become the newspaper of record for un-embedded war coverage), local UK expatriate

Jonathan Raban depicts a city where just about everybody (except the cops and the sleaze-talk radio hosts) is adamantly antiwar, from the coffeehouses to the opera house. Around here we don’t have to escalate Bush-bashing protests into disruptive confrontations, because we’d rather try to send a more positive message out to the world.

Compare Raban’s depiction of the local antiwar movement with that of the current Stranger, which trots out that ages-old self-defeatist whine that Seattle’s (fill-in-the-blank) isn’t an exact copy of a (fill-in-the-blank) in San Francisco and therefore automatically sucks.

I say Seattle people only accomplish anything when they don’t settle for imitating shticks from down south, but instead dare to create their own stuff. We don’t have to break things or shut the city down to get out point across. We can forge our own path toward a less-stupid, less-violent world. We can show, by daily examples large and small, individual and massive, that, as they said in the WTO marches, another world is possible.

…”Seattle totally sucks, man” whining came today in the unexpected spot of the Seattle Times Sunday magazine section.

Writer William Dietrich compared Seattle’s downtown to that of Portland and Vancouver BC. He gave our town last-place marks in everything from public transit to residential development. He blamed Seattle’s perceived failings on a lack of a strong, paternalistic planning bureaucracy capable of deciding what’s best for everybody and acting freely on its decisions.

Reality check time.

Yeah, we’re over a decade late with starting a big multi-county transit scheme; but the Times doesn’t particularly love the one we’ve now got (Sound Transit) and opposed the grassroots alternative to it (the Monorail initiatives).

We’ve had bureaucrats with big designs for how we were supposed to all want to live. They gave us the “urban village” and Seattle Commons schemes, which many citizens denounced as giveaways to private developers. (Oh yeah: Dietrich’s story highly approves of government givewaways to private developers. He praises Vancouver’s heritage of politicians who’ve been exclusively devoted to such giveaways.) So now we’ve got unofficially planned zoning schemes to promote luxury condos on every block that isn’t reserved for single-family homes (i.e., any block where the non-affluent might currently live).

What Vancouver really has, besides the land giveaways and the SkyTrain: A downtown constrained to a two-square-mile isthmus, surrounded by a city equally water-confined, discouraging highways and sprawl. It also has a Canadian political system in which the “highway lobby” has traditionally had less clout.

What Portland really has, besides the light rail: A flatter central downtown with smaller blocks and no alleys, encouraging more foot traffic and tying the “hip” areas (Burnside and the Pearl District) closer to downtown than our Capitol Hill and Queen Anne are to our central business district. This lack of topological barriers between the business district and residential districts is the chief reason why Portland has a downtown high school and supermarket and we don’t. (Of course, it didn’t help that Seattle closed Queen Anne High in the ’70s.)

Seattle’s transportation and sprawl problems haven’t been solved, and probably can’t be solved, by professional bureaucrats acting by fiat. It’s the bureaucrats we’ve got who’ve made such a mess of Sound Transit, led the fight against the Monorail, and helped promote sprawl. (Remember that failed state transportation referendum last November, that would’ve given trickles of cash to transit and gushes of cash to more suburban highways?)

Dietrich, and the Times, want a Seattle with more potentials for insider dealmaking and fewer democratic checks and balances. I want better. So, I’m certain, do most area residents. And that doesn’t suck at all.

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:

• The “this town completely sucks, man” argument I often hear from white art-hacks, and which I’ve attempted to refute prevously;
• the “where’s the rest of me?” argument, bemoaning the relative paucity of Af-Am individuals and related community institutions in a town with more Asians than blacks; and
• the “what tolerance?” argument, referencing icy social receptions, public stares, and racist remarks. (Trigger-happy cops weren’t mentioned in the letters Large chose to print.)

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:

• A spectacularly horrific mass-murder-suicide attack back East, leading to the U.S.-led overthrow of a particularly odious Third World dictatorship.
• A massive economic slump.
• Skyrocketing electricity prices.
• The loss of Boeing’s HQ, thanks to a CEO who thought he could re-image the company to stock buyers as a financial-services company that also happened to make stuff.
• A daily-newspaper strike that ended with few employee gains.
• A Mardi Gras riot, followed hours later by a massive yet fatality-free earthquake.
• The closure of the OK Hotel (to the earthquake), Tower Books, Pistil Books, the Frontier Room, the Speakeasy Cafe (to a spectacular fire), the Rendezvous Bar/Jewel Box Theater, the Ditto Tavern, the Korean-owned gangsta rap T-shirt store at 3rd and Pine, the Washington Film and Video Office, assorted dot-coms (including HomeGrocer, Kozmo, MyLackey, and MediaPassage), and a couple of upscale mags intended toward the dot-com crowd.
• The deaths of journalist-historian extraordinaire Emmett Watson and Two Bells Tavern owner Patricia Ryan.
• Tenth-anniversary-of-Nirvana hype in the national media.

On the at-least-somewhat brighter side:

• The Mariners had a once-in-a-lifetime regular season. (We’ll forget about the AL Championship Series.)
• The UW football team won the 2000-2001 Rose Bowl (we’ll forget about the 2001-2002 Holiday Bowl).
• Evictions and demolitions of funky old buildings slowed down, thanks to a collapsed market for shoddy-yet-costly condos.
• Our own delicious print MISC mag blossomed into an even tastier broadsheet with nearly two dozen contributing writers and artists (thanks, cats and chicks!).

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:

• LYNDA BARRY: South Seattle native and acclaimed cartoonist and author. Her novel Cruddy was set in a fictionalized Rainier Valley.
• STEVEN J. “JESSE” BERNSTEIN: Poet and short-story writer of urban decay and dystopian fantasy.
• TED BUNDY: Clean-cut law student and serial killer.
• DYAN CANNON: West Seattle native who became a movie sex symbol at age 32.
• RAY CHARLES: R&B legend whose career started in Seattle’s old Jackson Street jazz scene.
• FRANCES FARMER: West Seattle-born actress with an ill-fated Hollywood career.
• CHET HUNTLEY: UW grad and pioneering network TV news anchorman.
• MARY KAY LETOURNEAU: Middle-school teacher who bore two children by a student, causing much public hand-wringing and analysis.
• MIKE LUKOVICH: Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and UW Daily grad.
• FLOYD SCHMOE (1895-2000): Seattle Quaker leader, mountaineer, and tireless peace activist.
• LESTER SMITH & DANNY KAYE: Seattle businessman Smith, first on his own and later in partnership with movie star Kaye, ran a string of radio stations (including KJR); they also were the Mariners’ original owners.
• DEWEY SORIANO: Was awarded ownership of the 1969 Seattle baseball franchise on the basis of his skill in managing the Pacific Coast League. He didn’t have the financial resources to keep the Pilots going, and the team was sold and moved to Milwaukee after one season.
• ICHIRO SUZUKI: Mariners sensation; first Japanese-born “position player” (non-pitcher) in the U.S. Major Leagues.
• EDDIE VEDDER: Singer for the rock band Pearl Jam. The group’s dispute with TicketMaster in 1993 presaged many later disputes by artists and fans against the bigtime music industry.
• ANN & NANCY WILSON: Leaders since 1973 of Heart, the first Seattle rock band to attain international prominence. Proved you could be all woman AND all rock.
• TOBIAS WOLFF: Acclaimed author and memoirist (This Boy’s Life).

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:

• DICK BALCH: Local Chevrolet dealer and irreverent pitchman for cars (smashed cars with sledgehammer on TV ads).
• OLE BARDAHL: Proprietor of Bardahl, the Ballard-based engine additive company known for its hydroplanes (the Miss. Bardahl) and its giant neon sign.
• SIR THOMAS BEECHAM: A renowned English conductor, Beecham became the director of the tiny Seattle Symphony in 1941. He is remembered most for his quote, “If I were a member of this community, really I should get weary of being looked on as a sort of aesthetic dust-bin.”
• PETER BEVIS: Founder and director of the Fremont School of Fine Arts and the Fremont Foundry, established in 1986. An artist who makes molds of road kill, Bevis’s work illustrates the recklessness of people in nature. He bought the Kalakala back to Seattle.
• BOB BLACKBURN: Longtime voice of the Seattle Supersonics, from their first season in 1967 until the early 1990s.
• BOBO THE GORILLA: Bobo introduced Seattleites to the great apes and to “exotic” wildlife in general; he taught a whole generation to abandon diabolical “King Kong” images of gorillas. He inspired better zoo husbandry and perhaps paved the way for primate preservation attempts. In his current taxidermied form, his legacy lives on.
• STAN BORESON: Scandinavian musician, comedian, and host of the long-running children’s program KING Clubhouse.
• BERKLEY BREATHED: Cartoonist, Bloom Country.
• FRED BROWN: The former Sonic star, who help lead them to their only title in 1979, influenced a generation of ballplayers locally and nationally through his long-distance gunning which inspired the term “From downtown…” now heard in broadcasts everywhere, but is as Seattle–and omnipresent–as “Skid Road.”
• HIRAM CHITTENDEN: An officer in the Army Corps of Engineers and one of Seattle’s first port commissioners, Chittenden worked to develop the Port of Seattle. He oversaw the construction of the Lake Washington Canal and locks, which now bear his name.
• JOHN CONSIDINE: Considine’s “People’s Theater” was a Seattle success, which led to his preeminent career as an impresario. He helped pioneer early Edison films and established the famous vaudeville circuit. Considine and his brother Tom were involved in the notorious killing of Seattle’s police chief, William L. Meredith.
• LLOYD COONEY: Former KIRO-TV station manager and editorial commentator.
• D.B. COOPER: Infamous airline hijacker (flight from Portland to Seattle) who may or may not have gotten away.
• JACK ENDINO: Recording engineer/producer who made early studio recordings of Nirvana, Soundgarden, the U-Men and other proto-grunge acts.
• JEAN ENERSEN: Television news anchor for KING-TV.
• RANDY FINLEY: Founder of the Seven Gables Theatre chain, which, along with the Seattle International Film Festival, fostered and bolstered Seattle’s appetite for fine cinema.
• CHARLES FRYE: Frye was a partner in Frye and Bruhn, Meatpackers. He founded the Frye Museum atop Seattle’s First Hill, an institution that is one of Seattle’s leading museums today.
• BOB HARDWICK: KVI disc jockey in the 1960s and 1970s, known for wacky on-air antics.
• DENIS HAYS: Director of the Bullitt Foundation; created Earth Day in 1970.
• SAM ISRAEL: A hermit who lived in Eastern Washington, amassed over 500 properties, worth between $100-$200 million at the time of his death (1994). He owned over 30 downtown properties, 14 of which were located in Pioneer Square. Due to his negligence many of his properties were vacated and fell into disrepair. However, the low rent helped spawn a lively artists’ scene in Pioneer Square.
• QUINCY JONES: Garfield High School’s musical prodigy has more Grammy nominations than anyone else in history. Jones has written film scores, sonatas, and popular music, done arrangements for other artists and performed throughout the world with his own band and orchestra.
• RICK “PEANUT MAN” KAMINSKI: If you attended an event at the Kingdome from the 1970s to the 1990s, you saw Kaminski throwing bags of peanuts to his customers, along with a tennis ball sliced open enough for the patron to place his money inside for the return toss.
• JOHN KEISTER: The quintessential bittersweet Seattleite who remembers how it used to be before so many people moved here, Keister used his position as host of KING -TV’s Almost Live! weekly comedy program to poke fun at Kent, Bellevue, Ballard and other Seattle suburbs and neighborhoods.
• NORM LANGILL: Founder of One Reel, producer of Bumbershoot and other cultural events.
• GARY LARSON: creator of The Far Side, a hugely popular cartoon panel. Prior to Larson’s retirement in 1995, the cartoon strip appeared in 1,900 daily newspapers in 40 countries, and was translated into 17 languages.
• GYPSY ROSE LEE: West Seattle’s Lee, with her sister June Havoc, performed in a kiddy vaudeville act that toured the nation. She parlayed her experience into a famous striptease that was a hit at the Zeigfeld Follies. Her life was portrayed in the musical Gypsy.
• LOGGERS: When white men first came to the Seattle area travel was long and difficult between Seattle and Tacoma. With the arrival of the loggers travel became significantly easier.
• DARRLY MACDONALD: Co-founder of the Seattle International Film Festival and purveyor of Seattle’s now firmly-established reputation as a city of cinematic connoisseurs.
• HELENE MADISON: When 19-year-old Madison returned to Seattle with three gold medals in swimming from the 1932 Olympic games, the city raised a celebration, including a ticker tape parade. Two pools in Seattle are named after Madison.
• VIC MEYERS: Seattle jazz-band leader who ran for mayor in 1930 on the whim of some practical jokesters at the Seattle Times. He was eager to lend himself to the joke, and Times reporters wrote him up throughout the “campaign.” After losing the election, he won the election for the lieutenant governor of the state.
• LORENZO MILAM: Founder of KRAB radio in 1962. KRAB was among the earliest community radio stations in the country. It was one of the voices and centers of the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s.
• SIR MIX-A-LOT (Anthony Ray): Seattle’s first national rap star, who hit it big with his “Posse on Broadway” single.
• DAVE NIEHAUS: He has been delivering colorful descriptions of Mariner baseball since the team was established in 1977. His enormous contribution to Mariner baseball was recognized when he was asked to throw out the ceremonial first pitch in the inaugural game in Safeco Field.
• MARNI NIXON: Broadway singer. Among her famous roles was singing for Audrey Hepburn in [the film version of] My Fair Lady.
• BILL NYE: Seattle star (and former Almost Live! character) on PBS’s Bill Nye The Science Guy, seen by millions of kids nationwide.
• PAT O’DAY: High profile disc jockey on KJR radio through the ’60s. The first disc jockey in Seattle to really start playing rock ‘n roll, an action for which he earned 37 percent of the radio audience.
• JOHN OKADA (1923-1971): Author of No-No Boy, winner of the National Book Award, a novel that explores the return home to Seattle of an interned Nisei Japanese, who refused to forswear allegiance to the emperor of Japan and to fight in uniform for the United States when those questions were posed in the internment camp.
• JIM OWENS: UW football coach. Took team to three Rose Bowls
• MARTIN PANG: Started the 1995 fire in the Mary Pang qarehouse downtown. Four firemen died while subduing the blaze. In his confession, Pang said he started the fire to relieve his parents the burden of running the facility.
• BRUCE PAVITT & JONATHAN PONEMAN: Co-founders of Sub Pop, Seattle record label that originally signed Nirvana, Soundgarden and other grunge acts.
• ANGELO PELLEGRINI: Italian immigrant who settled with his family in Southwest Washington; made his mark as a UW English professor and food and wine expert. He wrote many books and gave talks on Italian culture.
• GEORGE POCOCK: Designer and builder of racing shells, including those used by 1936 gold medal US Olympic Team. Also designed the hull of Boeing’s first commercial plane.
• THE PROSTITUTES OF THE 1800s: The main reason many men originally came to the Seattle area.
• DIXY LEE RAY: Washington’s first female governor. The idiosyncratic Ray was at the helm when Mt. St. Helens erupted.
• LARRY REID: Early director of COCA (Center on Contemporary Art).
• ROSIE THE RIVETER: Popular symbol during WWII of women entering the blue-collar work force in order to keep up industrial production to support the war effort; believed to be based on women in Boeing’s work force.
• BILL “THE BEERMAN” SCOTT: Kingdome concession employee who became the defacto yell king for the Mariners, Sonics, Sounders and Seahawks (when all played under the same concrete roof).
• RUBEN SIERRA: Founder of the “multi-cultural-before-its-time” Group Theatre.
• JEFF SMITH (FRUGAL GOURMET): Author and chef who popularized good cooking for a mass audience.
• DICK SPADY: Founder, with two partners, of Dick’s Drive In, which opened in Wallingford in 1954.
• ELBRIDGE A. STUART: Created the Carnation Co., which initially focused on evaporated milk. Stuart developed a dairy farm near Tolt, which was renamed Carnation. In 1926 Carnation entered the fresh milk and ice cream business. The firm [now merged into Nestle] was known for its slogan “Milk from Contented Cows.”
• CONRAD UNO: Egg Studios owner/producer who recorded and/or released records by up and coming Seattle acts in the 1980s and 1990s, including the Young Fresh Fellows, Posies, and Presidents of the United States of America.
• GORDON VICKERY: Driving force in getting Medic One in the Fire Department. Many thousands of lives have been saved because of this.
• BURKE WALKER: Founder of the Empty Space Theatre.
• BOB WALSH: Seattle entrepreneur behind the Goodwill Games (1990) and attempts to bring the Olympic Games to Seattle.
• ROB WELLER: Former UW Husky yell king and Entertainment Tonight host credited with creation of the circular, undulating group cheer known as “The Wave.”
• BILL YEEND: Longtime host (25 years) of KIRO radio’s number-one rated morning news program.
• MARION ANTHONY ZIONCHECK: Born in Austria, Zioncheck attended the UW. After passing the state bar exam he won a seat in Congress. His mental deterioration and suicide (leaping from the Arctic Building in Seattle) were national stories.

(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.