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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.
Best of ‘Times’
IN FEBRUARY, John Hartl and The Tentacle more or less called it quits.
Apart from the coincidence of timing, these events wouldn’t strike most people as being connected in any way. A daily newspaper movie critic and an avant-garde music magazine collective of editor/publisher/writers might even seem to be enemies.
Besides, what common cause could there be between a hugely commercial art form, as exemplified by the Hollywood blockbuster known to all, and an assertively bizarre artistic foray, as exemplified by performances where the players have been known to outnumber the audience?
Maybe nobody in management at the downsized Seattle Times now appreciates that publication’s erstwhile status as Washington’s “paper of record,” but John Hartl did.
He made it his business to review everything. No matter how obscure the film or broke the theater or short the run, for 35 years Hartl went out of his way to let you know what was out there and what he thought about it. His consistency of views, depth of experience, and breadth of interests made his writing a reason to subscribe to that paper.
Although he will continue to cover movies for the Times as a freelancer, this coverage is bound to be less comprehensive than it was.
In the aftermath of a six-week strike, in which the paper lost $21 million while resisting contract demands that would have cost the company $3-4 million over one year, paternalist rules force returning strikers to be nice to bosses and scabs while bosses are free to sneer as they please, and morale is about what you would expect it to be at an office run by zombies whose Bible is The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
By not calling most striking reviewers back to work (and by urging long-time employees like Hartl to take early retirement), the paper has slashed arts coverage.
NEXT: Another fond adieu, this one to a most peculiar music zine.
SEATTLE’S PIONEER SQUARE MARDI GRAS began in the mid-’70s, under the Anglified/sanitized name “Fat Tuesday.” It was intended less as a public celebration than as a promotion for the neighborhood’s music clubs and their already-calcified formula of superficially aggressive but ultimately tame all-white “blues” bands.
After the first year, the New Orleans-style rowdiness so incensed the powers-that-be (a notorious Times headline called it “Lawless Tuesday”), that the organizers scaled back their offerings to special nighttime promotions within the bars and family-friendly, daytime-only outdoor events (such as the Spam carving contest and the “Miss No Fat” beauty contest).
But revelers in recent years have refused to be denied. They began to hold their own informal, unofficial “real” Mardi Gras bashes in the streets, here and in a few other big cities.
Last year’s Seattle bash, three months after WTO, felt a lot like WTO without the politics–young folk getting rowdy and mean; cops getting stern and meaner.
So this year (from which all of this page’s pictures date), Paul Schell’s Forces of Order announced plans to harshly deal with any attempts to create a giant outdoor moshpit in the streets. The result, last Saturday night, was a lot of rowdy overgrown boys (and a few flash-happy ladies), a few drunken fights, heavy police over-reaction to the fights, and heavier crowd reaction to the police-heightened violent atmosphere.
Monday night was a kind of halftime in the revelry, with more cops than partiers on the streets.
Then came Tuesday night.
Thousands crammed the area. Most were young and male. Some were attracted by hopes of a Woodstock ’99-style “rage rock” riot. Some, including the small but particularly violent black street gang the TV cameras particularly loved to point to, apparently wanted to hit at anyone and anything in sight. Some just showed up hoping to get shitfaced and to scream at women to raise their tops.
Most just wanted to share a non-mellow, non-rational bacchanalia–a universal human desire, and one for which any community worthy of the name provides regular outlets.
Yes, there were fights and other assorted rowdinesses. A poilce department (like New Orleans’s) trained for such an event would spend less effort tryng to impose order, and more effort stopping specific looting and fighting incidents while letting the rest of the crowd get happy, naked, and/or stupid.
For that matter, a city that was truly comfortable with human behavior in this “Xtreme” age would be prepared to welcome and channel this energy, to curate a celebration that would let young adults vent their energies in a more sociable manner, with folk having fun together without turning against one another.
The old Seattle image of an overgrown small town where everybody was a mellow, upscale, white baby boomer was never as real as the media and the politicians wanted it to be, and now has become a dated cliche.
So let’s lot fear or try to re-ban a big outdoor Mardi Gras, but instead start planning now to make it better.
We’re more diverse than we used to be, but we’re still not particulalry overflowing with cajuns, Latinos, or Catholics. The pre-Lenten excuse for Mardis Gras doesn’t really work here except on a rent-a-culture basis.
But we can purposefully stage a big, fun, inviting tribute to the lengthening days, the slightly drying climate (in most years), and the chance to get back outside. Imagine a spring-equinox party, only as long as a month before depending on the wandering Passover/Lent season. Let the noisy boys and flashy girls show up, but also make it inviting to a wider swath of the populace. Have mood-setting music, art, dance, street performers and other elements to add an infusing/diffusing element that would discourage violence more effectively than any baton-holding police stormtroopers ever could.
IN OTHER NEWS: The next MISCmedia print mag will be a combo March-April, out in a couple of weeks.
NEXT: Handicapping the mayoral race.
YESTERDAY AND TODAY, some recent departures from the pop-cult scene, locally and nationally.
THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #5: Our Love and War Man already misses Mike Mailway (real name Larry M. Boyd), whose locally-based syndie trivia column ended a week and a half ago. Always wished I could write like him. That staccato, crime-movie-soundtrack rhythm. The eternally provocative mix of historic, scientific, and just odd facts gathered from all times and places. Had the privilege of meeting him a few times; always the perfect gent. I wish him well.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #1: What with all the sanctimonious gnashing-O-teeth that’s gone on over the threatening might of big-box chain bookstores, you might not expect any tears for the demise of such an outlet. But loyal customers are indeed huing and ado-ing over the impending loss of Tower Books on lower Queen Anne. Cause of death: The usual (mercenary rent hike).
The store’s annual 30-percent-off pre-inventory sale is being extended until closing day, Feb. 4. It’ll be missed, partly because Tower’s one chain that acted sorta like an indie in its niche-marketing prowess. Because most of its other outlets were attached to Tower Records stores, it was big on the sorts of books CD buyers like. Glossy pop-star tomes, yes; but also coffee-table art and photography, sci-fi, erotica, student reference, self-help, astrology, comix, lefty-politics, Beat-generation nostalgia, and literary-hipster fiction. (Although the approach had its drawbacks, such as when they had to put the Bukowski novels behind the counter to prevent theft by suburban down-and-outer wannabes.)
Tower says it wants to eventually build a book annex on the site of its current record store six blocks away, but has given no timetable for the project.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #2: Puget Consumers Co-op is closing its oldest alterna-food and vitamin store, in Ravenna. Way back in the early ’80s, when PCC really was a cooperatively-run small merchant, Ravenna was its only space (it had previously been an even smaller food-buying club). It was a subculture, a ‘tribe’ if you wish.
As you may know, I’m something of a skeptic about many of today’s neo-Puritanical food religions (macrobiotic, organic, vegan, ‘live,’ etc.). But I had, and have, every respect for the healthful values of community, of being part of a circle of humans who care about one another. That’s something PCC gradually lost as it became a professionally-managed chain store.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #3: The Seattle Times Co., citing a need to cut costs due to recent circumstances (see below), is shutting Mirror, its eight-year-old monthly tabloid for teenagers.
I was a part-time assistant on Mirror’s first five issues. The yup-ladies who ran it had believed those mainstream-media scare stories that Those Kids Today were all a bunch of illiterate louts; so the yup-ladies thought they’d need an adult to write the paper. But the editors soon realized that many public high school students really can read and write (they just choose not to read the Seattle Times); so my services proved unneeded.
THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #4: With the end of the Seattle newspaper strike comes the end of the strike paper, the Seattle Union Record.
As I’ve said previously, it was about two-thirds of the way toward becoming the real opposition daily this town needs. While the Newspaper Guild won’t be publishing the Union Record anymore (or drumming up other unions for sympathy ads), many of the Seattle Times strikers won’t be returning to their old jobs, and hence might be available to continue their Record work under new management. I’d love to be a part of making such a paper happen.
Let’s all talk about this again real soon.
TOMORROW: People you’re not better than.
THE YEAR’S BIGGEST local news story, the one with the most potential impact on our lives, didn’t have a single big event at its heart.
It’s the decline (and, in some cases, collapse) of dot-com stock speculation. It made its presence felt in small-scale ways (office closings; layoffs; fewer and sparser “networking” soirees; and a slight but accelerating slowdown in real-estate hyperinflation).
(Its related story, the possible Microsoft bust-up, had its spectacle elements take place in Washington, DC courtrooms.)
But several big here-and-now events did take place here which had an impact beyond their immediate sights-‘n’-sounds. Here are some of them.
1. The Kingdome Blows.
After Paul Schell cancelled the official, public New Year’s, Paul Allen staged a great pyrotechnic celebration during Spring Equinox week (the ol’ pagan New Year’s). It was also a half-minute rife with symbolism; deconstructing the onetime triumph of the pre-MS Seattle’s attempts to Go Major League (on a budget, and without needless ostentation).
2. The E.M.P.-ire Strikes Back.
Mr. Allen taketh away; Mr. Allen giveth. The Experience Music Project is almost all needless ostentation, a whole quarter-billion worth of it. It doesn’t really represent the spirit of Northwest pop music (its cocktail lounge doesn’t even have Rainier, let alone Schmidt!). It does represent the spirit of the new regional powers-that-be, who’ve got gazoods of dough and want to show it off as show-offy as can be.
The museum’s opening weekend was a big, mostly free, bash of all the top touring acts Allen could afford (and he could afford a lot of them), plus a nearly-complete local all-star lineup. (The biggest nonparticipants: Pearl Jam, who still have this beef with one of Allen’s former properties, Ticketmaster.)
3. End of Jem Studio Galleries.
Gentrification hit arts spaces hard; knocking out one of the city’s oldest and largest visual-arts workspaces (and First Thursday ground zero).
The Jem artists went out with essentially a four-month-long party of exhibitions, installations, performances, DJ events, live-music shows, etc., ending on the last night with a going-out bash that included a coed nude body-paint wrestling match.
4. Ralph Nader “Super Rally,” KeyArena.
The post-WTO Way-New Left had its biggest show of strength when about 10,000 paid real money to see the first real liberal Presidential candidate in 28 years and assorted celebrity guests.
5. Daily Papers Go Scab.
The JOA-married bombastic voices of the civic establishment, which had been proclaiming for so long about how things were just so great here and could only keep getting better, got a dose of reality. Just as the Times was running a huge feature series about the winners and losers in today’s concentration-O-wealth thang, the papers’ editorial and ad employees rejected a pitiful contract offer that wouldn’t help them keep up with housing costs.
The Times and P-I instantly turned into waify simulacra of themselves. Thin papers, bereft of their usual interminable “analysis” and huge feature series (and of their regular writers and photographers, and of the previous evening’s sports results, and of arts reviews). Papers that, had they been produced by competent people, would’ve been improvements on their prior bloated formats.
TOMORROW: A Dot-Com Christmas Carol.
REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.
Police Action
by guest columnist Sky Callahan
AT ABOUT 8:30 P.M. ON NOV. 30, I arrived downtown by bus, after having worked late. A resident of Belltown, I’d originally planned to make a quick stop at the Bon Marche, then a subsequent stop for groceries at Ralph’s Deli before returning to my apartment near Fourth Avenue and Bell Street.
Upon reaching the Bon, I discovered that a large number of protestors had reoccupied Westlake Plaza, after having earlier dispersed for the purpose of attending a candlelight vigil at Seattle Central Community College. I also noted that a large number of police officers were forming lines around the knot of demonstrators.
Employees of the Bon were applying duct tape to all the entrances for the purpose, I was told, of preventing possible damage from any tear gas assault that might occur. The store was effectively closed for the night, so I lingered outside one of the Fourth Avenue entrances for awhile, intrigued by the scene around me.
At about 8:45 p.m., police issued their first order for the crowd to disperse. This was followed by another order at about 8:50, and a third at 9:00. Each order saw the departure of any number of protestors and, by 9, almost everyone had completely dispersed and the intersection at Fourth and Pine was reopened.
At this juncture, the demonstrators began moving north on Fourth Avenue, toward Denny Way, followed by a large contingent of police. The procession was slow, and someone operating a megaphone informed the crowd that a party would shortly be underway on Minor Avenue.
It seemed quite apparent to me that the group, numbering perhaps 200 at this point, was truly dispersing.
I stopped at Ralph’s Deli to pick up my groceries, and exited the store with two bags. Upon stepping back onto Fourth, I saw that police lines had begun forming alongside of the street on both sides, and I asked an officer if it was possible to continue down Fourth to Bell Street. He assured me there would be no problem, and urged me to continue on. I did so, noticing more and more police were arriving and taking up positions along the street as I walked.
Upon reaching Bell Street, I realized I’d forgotten to pick up soft drinks, and went into a small convenience store on the corner to rectify my oversight. I was in the store perhaps five minutes, and exited to realize that a police line had taken up a position spanning the width of Bell Street where it crossed Fourth.
At this point, I was half-a-block from my apartment, laden with grocery bags, and approached to police officer to ask if I could pass through the line. I explained my purpose, pointing my apartment building out to him, but was denied passage. I was instead directed to retrace my steps one block back to Blanchard, turn east and walk north on Fifth to circumvent the now-restricted area.
I did as instructed, only to find my passage was also blocked at Blanchard. I proceeded to each intersection, only to be turned away at each. I found that the police had completely hemmed in the length of Fourth Avenue between Lenora Street and Bell Street, and were not allowing anyone to pass out, for any reason.
I was eventually directed to speak to a sergeant commanding a line on the west side of Fourth and Blanchard, but this proved to be of no avail. The sergeant told me he’d been given orders to let no one pass in or out, and couldn’t find his commander to allow him to do otherwise.
As I stood there, I saw a line of police in riot gear move toward us, from the west, on Blanchard, and noted that a similar line was forming on the east side of the intersection. As the minutes passed, more helmets and bulletproof shields materialized, and I began to get the sense a baton charge was imminent.
Meanwhile, an increasingly large number of people, both individually and by megaphone, began to assert that they only wanted to leave the area and either go home or go to the party. The police refused to allow them to do any such thing, and a feeling of tension began to rise precipitously.
My own concern was reaching epic proportions. I’d taken to visualizing any number of possible scenarios, and only wanted to get home after a long day at work. I’d been repeatedly assured by a couple of different police officers that I could achieve this goal by going here or going there, only to find I’d become further enmeshed in this situation.
I suppose an increasing alarm began to register on my face as, finally, a young bicycle officer asked to see my driver’s license. It naturally indicated my address, just a block away, and he took it upon himself to escort me past the police line and to Third Avenue. He did so with some concern, as he had no particular authority on the line, and was ostensibly going against the wishes of his sergeant. I suspect that the fact I was carrying grocery bags, reasonably well-dressed, and middle-aged probably convinced him that I had been mistakenly swept up in this situation.
For about the next hour, these protestors were completely trapped in this three block length of Fourth Avenue, and refused permission to exit although there were openly requesting to do so.
I dropped my groceries off at home, and made my way to the Two Bells Tavern, near my apartment building. There, I sat with friends while watching a new police line form just outside the door of the tavern. We would occasionally stick our heads out to see Metro buses taking up positions, and cops milling about in rather massive numbers.
After a bit, the police waded into the crowd they’d trapped, and arrested something on the order (according to newspaper reports) of 140 of them. The Seattle Times states that the arrest were for failure to disperse and pedestrian interference.
No protestor was ever allowed the opportunity to disperse, and had even been engaged in the act of dispersing from Westlake Plaza when they were surrounded and stopped. In fact, after the separation from Westlake, no subsequent order to disperse was ever given.
Additionally, the only pedestrians suffering interference could have been other demonstrators. Several friends and neighbors found themselves swept up in the arrests, having been out to dinner or shopping, or simply taking walks with significant others.
So far as I know, I’m the only person who was ever allowed to leave the scene, and the precise reason why is still something of a mystery to me.
TOMORROW: Nostalgia for nerd-dom.
YESTERDAY, we took the WTO-protest anniversary as an excuse to notice the Way-New Left and its ongoing efforts to bring positivity, vigor, and accomplishment back to a progressive movement that had been stuck in self-defeatism for years and years.
Activists, authors, and even some political candidates are taking back the language of liberation, empowerment, and democracy from those who’d define “revolution” strictly to mean “revolutions in business.”
And it’s about time, as Baffler editor Tom Frank notes in his new book One Market Under God.
Frank details, in 360 brisk pages, a decade or more’s worth of blathering agitprop about the “business revolution,” how it’s supposedly good for everybody. He contrasts this with pithy asides about how the market-as-everything ideology has helped ruin journalism, academia, downtowns, rust-belt communities, third-world conditions, etc.; how it’s brought downsizings and layoffs and sweatshops, all in the name of the inevitable, unerrant tide of globalization and privatization.
If there’s a complaint to be made about Frank’s work, it’s that he spends too much time sneering at his subjects and too little time explaining why we should share his ire. Long passages in One Market Under God read too much like the work of lefty “media analyst” Norman Solomon, who’s notorious for shouting that the news media aren’t telling us what’s really going on, but who seldom gets around to telling us what he thinks the real story is.
I want to hear from Frank what he directly believes democracy and liberation are, instead of keeping this ideas in the shadows, delineated only in the context of his criticisms of corporate culture.
Besides, one of Frank’s central theses-that corporate idealogues are using Orwellesque “newspeak” techniques to redefine the language of liberation so that any real challenge to the plutocracy of Global Business is literally unthinkable-is thankfully yet to be proven successful. If anything, the proponents of real empowerment are getting more vocal in exposing the contradictory bombast of the “New Economy” hypesters.
(Why, the latest Utne Reader even has a piece on “Five Signs of the Coming Revolution.” And the notoriously centrist Utne isn’t talking about a mere reorganization within the corporate ruling class, but an on-all-fronts challenge by those of us who believe business isn’t the end-all and be-all of everything (even if we disagree on almost everything else).
Still, there’s much to admire about Frank’s latest weighty tome.
He’s got a lot to say, and even more to hilariously quote, about the truly dumb ideas and convoluted doublespeak being bandied about by op-ed pundits, techno-Libertarians, and Republican think-tankers to justify the new corporate order.
Just as long as you remember that the old corporate order wasn’t all that hot either.
MEANWHILE: The WTO-protest anniversary began according to script. Hundreds of “get-tough” cops waited impatiently for some anarchist ass to kick. A few thousand old hippies and neo-radicals gathered in four locations to speak out about the usual boho-lefty topics (Mumia, Peltier, pot, veganism, animal rights, and just a little bit about global trade issues).
By midafternoon, they’d gathered in the little Westlake park and the two adjacent blocks of street. They had a great time intimidating the cops, grinning before the TV cameras, dancing and partying. (There was even a return appearance by the duct-tape-pastied women from last year’s protests.)
But by evening, enough of the crowd had withered away for the forces of order to feel assertive. The remaining, outnumbered, bohos were hounded and chased up Fourth Avenue (safely outside the Xmas retail zone). By Fourth and Blanchard, right in front of Sit & Spin, another phalanx of cops gathered on the other end of the block, preventing the remaining protesters from obeying the bullhorned orders to disperse. Paddy-wagon buses were moved in, nonviolent mass arrests were made. It played out like a touring-show version of the original–the same actions played out by a smaller cast on a smaller stage with more practiced choreography and far less spontenaity.
NEWSPAPER STRIKE WATCH: The Seattle Scab Times and Scab P-I have grown in their second strike-bound weeks to 18 pages of non-ad space, up from 15 at the strike’s start. As they gain bulk but not their experienced staffers, they’re becoming even duller than their pre-strike versions.
The Seattle Union Record, however, is getting slicker and livelier. It’s now out three times a week, at regular free-newspaper dropoff sites. (And it was much more sympathetic to WTO and WTO-anniversary protesters than the big papers ever were.)
MONDAY: The possibly-misplaced nostalgia for industrial unionism.
IT’S BEEN A WHILE since I did an all-list column, but this and the next will be such.
Today, in a post-Thanksgiving gesture of sorts, are as many Things I Like as I can think of right now (just to placate those readers who falsely complain that I never seem to like anything), in no particular order:
(Though there’s also much to be said for daydreamt fantasies involving Adrienne Shelly in a private railroad car with piped-in Bollywood movie music and a few cases of Reddi-Wip.)
(The new “Imagined Landscapes” show at Consolidated Works includes a group of three hyperrealistic paintings by NY artist Peter Drake based on ’50s nudist-mag images, only with suburban front yards for backgrounds instead of open picnic grounds.)
(If this amused you, there’s also a separate Things I Like page on this site, which duplicates almost none of the items on this list.)
MONDAY: Another list, this one of people who aren’t really better than you.
IN OTHER NEWS: Thursday saw a skinny scab-edition P-I but no Times, at least not in the downtown, Capitol Hill, and North End neighborhoods of my holiday travels. Today will likely see no Friday entertainment sections; causing movie-time-seeking readers to grab for weekly or suburban papers. What will the Sunday Times look like, aside from preprinted feature sections? We’ll find out.
IN A SHORT-SHORT FICTION PIECE I haven’t uploaded to this site yet, I once imagined some potential Playboy magazine nudie features of the future: “America’s Sexiest Female CEOs,” “America’s Sexiest Female Judges,” “America’s Sexiest Congresswomen,” etc.
One I skipped: “America’s Sexiest Anchorwomen.”
It’s an odd omission. TV stations and networks have been hiring pretty ladies to share anchor desks with hairspray boys for decades. (One of Seattle’s most memorable, Sandy Hill, was an ex-Miss Washington who wound up co-hosting every newscast on the station from noon to 11 pm, before becoming Joan Lunden’s predecessor on Good Morning America.)
All this talk is a lead-in to discussing a peculiar softcore-fetish website, The Naked News.
It’s a 15-minute streaming video newscast, with a new edition each weekday. While it has no field reporters or on-the-scene footage, its four Toronto-based studio anchors read competently-written briefs headlining the day’s news, weather, and sports.
All the anchors are young women. All of them either appear on camera fully nude, or strip from dress-for-success outfits until they’re wearing only their microphones.
The concept’s borrowed from a Russian program that appears on regular TV over there. That show’s bare news readers have occasionally even staged (nude) on-location interviews with (clothed) major government officials.
The American Naked News anchors all keep straight, tho’ perky, faces during their readings. Their only variation from standard newsreader behavior is a short rump-wiggling walkoff at the conclusion of their segments. Their faces, hair styles, and (when they have any) costumes are standard-issue anchorwoman style, not stripper or porn-star or dominatrix style. If not for their perfect (perhaps surgically perfected) figures, they could be the sort of women a young-adult male Internet user might work alongside–or for.
Their straightforward demeanor also differentiates The Naked News from the constant, screeching hard-sell tactics common to sex sites. The streaming video contains commercials, but they’re relatively tame ones (for other entertainment websites). The site’s lack of constant selling is just as relieving as its lack of hardcore crudeness.
None of this means many female Net users would enjoy viewing The Naked News, or even approve of its existence.
The site’s stars might be pronounced non-bimbos, and they might project in-charge images, but they’re still portraying male fantasies, performing to be stared at.
To such potential critics, I might say that heterosexuality has always been with us and likely always will be. As long as most het-male brains are wired to respond to visual stimuli, such stimuli will be produced. They might as well be stimuli that emphasize beauty over crudity, with at least a modicum of brains and humor and friendliness.
And while The Naked News may be a trifle, a light-entertainment novelty work, it’s really no more entertainment-oriented than many news and “reality” shows on broadcast TV. (And it’s no less journalistically respectable than some of them either.)
IN OTHER NEWS: The first strikebound editions of the Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer came out yesterday. They’re flimsy li’l 24-page things, full of wire copy, syndicated columns, and database features (weather, TV listings).
Because they were printed even earlier in the day than Tuesday’s last pre-strike papers, they didn’t include any evening sports results, stock listings, or even the Florida Supreme Court’s Presidential-recount ruling. Classified ads were truncated on a quota basis, unseen since the days of WWII paper rationing.
The result: Morning papers you didn’t need all day to read. A partial vindication for my long-held wish for a brisker, more immediate, even “alternative” daily; the sort of concept that could potentially bring true competition to the print-news biz and dislodge the local-monopoly papers such as those currently being struck.
(More strike news, and new material by picketing newshacks, is at The Seattle Union Record.
IN OTHER OTHER NEWS: George Clark, who’s self-published several occasional parodies of The Stranger and The Weekly over the years (so typographically accurate, many readers originally thought the Stranger staff had actually produced them!), has issued another, spoofing both tabloids in a double-cover format. The issue seems to have been in the works for some time; it contains parodies of features The Stranger hasn’t carried for two years or more (including my old section, cutely relabeled “Miscellanal”).
TOMORROW: Some things I actually like.
TODAY’S PREVIOUSLY-ANNOUNCED CONTENTS have been postponed so we can instead discuss the biggest Seattle media story since the Kingdome boom-boom.
It’s the big strike by the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild. It’s the town’s first newspaper strike since ’53 (and, thanks to the Joint Operating Agreement, the first to hit both the Times and P-I).
Already, the effects have been felt. Monday’s papers included the big ad stuffers normally seen on Thanksgiving; Tuesday’s papers were printed early in the evening to avoid any truckers’ sympathy walkout, and thusly didn’t mention Monday Night’s NBA or NFL results.
The big changes start today, when the papers try to put out at least a semblance of their normal product; to be distributed for free and staffed by management and out-of-state scabs. (I briefly considered applying to be a replacement newshack, but quickly dropped the idea.)
Striking reporters, editors, ad sellers, and deliverers have already started an online strike paper, the Seattle Union Record. A print Union Record is currently scheduled to start next week.
The Union Record name, as editor Chuck Taylor describes it, comes from “a labor-backed paper during the time of the General Strike of 1919, during which 65,000 Seattle workers silenced the city for five days. Before it began, Union Record editor Anna Louise Strong predicted it would lead ‘no one knows where!’ We know how she felt.”
So how might the strike affect the local media landscape?
It will immediately hurt the papers’ finances during the start of the big pre-Xmas ad season.
If it drags on, it will further erode the Times/P-I consortium’s fat and non-sassy hold on regional discourse.
Locally and around the country, newspaper circulation’s failed to keep up with population growth. Local daily-paper readership hasn’t fallen as precipitously as local TV-news viewership, but it’s still flat. (When the Times moved to morning circulation earlier this year, it mostly took readers away from the P-I.)
And while the JOA might have a monopoly on bigtime daily circulation in town, its franchise is beset on all sides by insurgent suburban dailies, weeklies (“alternative” and otherwise), news and want-ad Websites, and the three big national dailies.
For a few years now, I’ve found rarified souls in the Capitol Hill-Belltown-U District belt who, when I tell them about something published that day in “the Times,” automatically assume I mean the New York Times. There were even a couple of early Stranger writers from out of town who took their refusal to read local papers as a matter of pride; even when the resulting ignorance led them to attempting to cross Fourth Avenue on the night of the Seafair parade.)
And if it really drags on, the Times-owning Blethen family just might finally give in and sell their controlling interest in the paper to the Knight-Ridder chain, which owns 49 percent of its stock currently. Knight-Ridder is partnered with Gannett in the JOA-run papers in Detroit, which have been stuck in a protracted strike/lockout mess that’s gone on for year after year, with no end in sight, to the papers’ detriment as well as the workers’.
Perhaps that looming threat will serve as enough incentive for the two sides in Seattle to find a settlement.
TOMORROW: A different way of exposing the news.
