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AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.
BILL GATES MAY DICTATE Seattle’s currently ascendant “Attitude” problem.
But it’s Gates’s ex-partner, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, who’s been remaking the city’s look–whether we like it or not.
Allen’s projects have been the subject of three public votes. Two of them, about the Seattle Commons scheme, led to citywide “no” votes against building a big city park in the middle of industrial land he wanted to turn into condos. (He’s going ahead with the condo-izations anyway.) The third vote, on public subsidies for his Kingdome-replacing football stadium, was a statewide plebescite in which “no” votes in Seattle (and Eastern Washington) were outnumbered by “yes” votes in the ‘burbs.
An NY Times piece a couple weeks ago (no longer on the paper’s website, except for a $2.50 fee) spent 1,600 words doting on how Allen, “who bounces around from being the second- to the fourth-richest person on the planet,” is plopping one “world class” structure down after another throughout the greater downtown Seattle area (the Union Station remodel and its adjacent new office buildings, the Cinerama Theater restoration, the waterfront sculpture park) and the UW campus (the Suzallo Library and Henry Gallery additions).
And in three weeks (by which time Allen’s Portland Trailblazers will have either won or lost the National Basketball Association championship), Allen’s most expensive and monumental structure opens–the Experience Music Project.
Known unofficially in its early planning stages as “the Jimi Hendrix museum” (before Allen and the Hendrix estate parted ways), EMP remains a quarter-billion-buck tribute to Allen’s love of the rock guitarist who left Seattle at 18, and subsequently and repeatedly expressed his disdain for it; only to get posthumously enshrined as the favorite “local musician” of a generation of modern-day geek Medicis.
One could talk about how such a huge sum of dough could’ve been used to build housing and/or transportation solutions, support more street-level arts projects, or save any number of development-threatened properties in town and in the exurbs.
But that’s moot now. Allen wanted to do this. If he hadn’t wanted to do this, he would most likely have instead put that money into his software and cable-TV investment portfolio.
EMP is here. And it will attract tourists, employ people, provide a locus for regional public-school music-ed programs (those that haven’t been destroyed totally by budget cuts), and give some support, publicity, and occasional gigs to living area musicians.
And it gives pundits such as myself plenty of sarcastic-remark fodder.
(My own current idea of what it looks like: A belly dancer lying on her side.)
TOMORROW: Why the Seattle International Film Festival was, and is, the pre-Microsoft Seattle’s favorite “arts” event.
ELSEWHERE:
BEFORE TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It’s Thursday, 5/18 (20 years after the Big Boom) at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
“GIRLS RULE; BOYS DROOL” says a bumper sticker in my neighborhood.
It’s a popular sentiment these days, even among males of a certain “sensitive” pretense.
Now, it’s beinig confirmed, at least in secondary and post-secondary education in North America.
In the May Atlantic Monthly, a female member of a leading conservative think tank cites several research studies from recent years to assert that, contrary to assumptions held in some circles, females are on the whole doing quite better in academic performance and college admission than males, and that this gap’s been getting wider.
I could certainly buy the article’s arguments.
In my own childhood, and later as a secretarial temp in the Seattle schools, it was the girls who consistently dominated the top-math-scorers’ lists, the student governments, the non-athletic scholarships, etc. Non-athletic boys were pretty much stereotyped for life as either troublemakers or geeks; while official and unofficial school programs encouraged girls to strive to become anything they wanted. Adolescent-psychology books and self-help programs in the ’70s and ’80s pretty much ignored the existence of emotional problems or learning difficulties among boys; presuming that all guys always had everything easy.
The emerging new stereotype of boys-in-trouble may have first attracted notice in the inner cities, where early-’90s studies showed some high schools’ graduation rates as up to two-thirds female. Later on, criticisms of gender-specific schemes such as “Take Our Daughters to Work Day” challenged the popular practice of giving girls special attention while expecting boys to fend for themselves.
Now, the Atlantic cover story (following a mini-slew of “saving-our-sons” books last year) has firmly established the new gender-divide concept in the country’s conventional wisdom.
Of course, both the oppressed-girls stereotype and the abandoned-boys stereotype are gross overgeneralizations, which work better as headline fodder in punditry magazines than as schemes to help individual kids.
What would be better for all genders of kids would be to treat them as individuals, with individual strengths and issues, rather than to shove them into the Diagnosis Du Jour.
With the WNBA coming to Seattle later this month, we’re going to get a lot of PR about encouraging girls to be good at sports.
In my ideal school system, it would be OK for a girl to be good at sports. But it would also be OK for a boy to be bad at sports.
TOMORROW: On a similar note, how to be a male feminist without hating yourself.
Stadium Blackmail, Tacoma-Style
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist wrote about Safeco Field, that tax-subsidized sports palace where the most expensive seats can be among the worst. Today, he contrasts that with the supposedly more populist ideal of the minor leagues.)
RATHER THAN BROOD like a nowhere man, I try to be a good citizen of the contemporary sports utopia.
But then, I’ve always been a sucker for outdoor baseball.
A cloudy forecast sent me to Tacoma the weekend the Yankees were in Seattle, because I’d rather spend hours in the rain than any time sitting inside a domed stadium because of a mere threat of rain.
Unfortunately, but predictably, Triple-A baseball in Tacoma is threatened by a series of factors, some of which are all wet. The Tacoma Rainiers, owned by chicken mogul George Foster of northern California, demanded $22 million from the city last winter for stadium improvements (i.e., luxury boxes).
Then, as if to facilitate an exit strategy for the 40-year-old franchise, the Pacific Coast League gave them more weekend games in April and May than in August (one weekend series).
Since Foster bought the team from a Tacoma group put together by ex-GM Stan Naccarato, he had taken some drastic and initially effective measures to deal with the utopian math of minor league attendance figures, where giveaways inflate totals but, nonetheless, fill the park with thirsty and hungry fans. He cut back on freebies and created an “on-deck club,” doling out special perks to the country-club set.
But how do you sell luxury boxes in a town that’s 35 miles away from a stadium that, except for the luxury boxes, exudes luxury? Tacoma big shots might rather spend a few thousand bucks on a season ticket plan in Seattle.
And why spend $5 to get into Cheney Stadium when that’ll get you into a Mariner game? Last year the Rainiers appeared to fall back into the Tacoma Tiger policy of having a lot of free ticket promotions. Beer is cheaper in Cheney ($4.75 for a big Grants vs. about that much for a 12-oz. Bud in the bigs), but smuggling food is legal in Seattle’s taxpayer park and allegedly illegal in Tacoma’s.
Other than that, there’s Tightwad Hill, looming over the right field wall, offering the ultimate utopia for the outdoor baseball fan, a place to smoke cigars and drink cheap beer for free.
Ballparks age, die, and get razed or imploded. Somebody has to pay for all of this destruction. Why shouldn’t it be you?
If Paul Allen buys a special election to build one football stadium on the contingency of annihilating of another one, rather than denounce this as a travesty of democracy, maybe we should appreciate the civics lesson.
It doesn’t matter that he spent more money than anyone ever did on an election, or that the people in Seattle voted against his scheme. He won.
And in the utopia of sports, winning is everything.
MONDAY: For May Day, a piece on the Way-New Left.
Dream of Fields
NOWHERE DO I FIND the notion of utopia more tantalizing than in sports.
Stadiums get demolished and built, in defiance of the voters they are supposed to benefit and with subsidies for rich team owners who actually benefit from these glorified playpens.
The teams that play in the stadiums may enjoy a storybook history of heroes as well as a corporate history of business leaders who pull together when the going gets tough in order to provide a venue for an All-American pastime; but these enterprises are also masters of illusion, promising only a vicarious thrill of victory for fans who would be identified with winners.
Then there’s the side show of teams selling stadium naming rights to sponsors (who pay a fraction of the cost the public pays for the building and maintenance of the stadium)–sponsors whose dot-comic monikers often defy recognition, but whose cheap advertising is nevertheless slavishly echoed by sportscasters and even by people who don’t get paid to lie.
This is a national trend, but Seattle is leader in the clubhouse, thanks to record construction costs, public payments, and game attendance costs of the Mariner stadium.
Except in San Francisco, where a string of defeats on election day effectively called the bluff of the Giants and forced them to find their own investors for the new park, public will seems powerless to resist the way to build a public facility for private industry. Even cities in small markets with deteriorating attendance figures (Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Detroit) legislators finagle deals to please team owners, lending hope to truly hopeless markets (Montreal) that they, too, can win simply by building.
The pathetic examples in Tampa, Miami, and Chicago miss the cut when promoters talk stadium, as they sensibly focus on Baltimore and Cleveland. And we may pretend to separate Church and State in our one nation under God, but woe to anyone who might suggest that football and baseball be forced to share the same facility.
Pantywaist Park: While it remains to be seen how the Mariners will sell tickets with Griffey gone and Rodriguez on the threshold, consider the utopia of a retractable dome stadium. Supposedly the solution of all possible weather problems, the retractable dome has become a dome with a vengeance, closing whenever there’s the slightest fear of rain.
Then there’s the utopian meteorological phenomenon that occurs only in Seattle: Closing the roof of the unheated stadium makes the field 10-15 degrees warmer (according to the sensitive ballplayers).
Weather or not, another aspect of the new Mariner stadium defies expectation: The best seats in the house are the worst.
The luxury boxes offer a season in hell, from their inner living room with all the comforts of a Holiday Inn to their outer seating area with a dome-like overhang that aggressively funnels every last in-house TV commercial to the people with the money.
The cheap seats, in terrific (and dystopic) contrast, are great–but only if you don’t sit down. Buy a $5 ticket and roam around the upper regions of the center field bleachers, pity the rich, and finally get something for your tax dollars.
TOMORROW: This continues with stadium blackmail, Tacoma style.
IT’S SPRING EQUINOX TIME at long last.
And around these parts, that’s come to mean one primary thing–the imminent end of snowboarding season and the associated “X-treme” marketing loudness.
But each year, that relief seems to come later and later. I won’t be surprised if it eventually goes year-round, with fake-snow machines spewing forth human-made slipping and sliding stuff for the soft-talking, hard-playing dudes ‘n’ dudettes.
Of course, X-treme hype goes on all year round anyway.
It’s come to cover not only those athletic activities invented during the years the name’s been in use, but also older activities such as surfing and skateboarding. Anything involving individual athletes (preferably male; preferably just barely old enough to sign their own contracts) proving themselves in grandstanding, gravity-and-common-sense-defying stunts.
Activities that can be turned into context-free images of near-superhuman achievement, for the selling of soda pop, cereal, cars, energy bars, Ore-Ida Bagel Bites, etc. etc.
This ultimately corporate marketing iconography devolved from what had once been celebrations of individuality, of rebellion against the squaresville realm of organized sports (particularly team sports).
But that’s something you all should’ve expected from the start. (Precedent: The original re-imaging of surfing from something vaguely rebellious into the milieu of Frankie and Annette.)
Slightly more improbable is the role “X-treme” marketing played in the mainstreaming of punk rock during the middle of the previous decade. The music that, for nearly two decades, symbolized the near-ultimate in uncommerciality suddenly became soundtrack music in sneaker commercials.
Whole books, or at least whole masters’ theses, could be written about this transition. How high-school punk rockers used to be the scrawny ones, the unathletic ones; but then their freaky-geeky little subculture got taken over by jocks and ex-mullet-heads.
Other full-length works could be written about how the sports themselves, once tightly-knit subcultures of relative egalitarianism (or at least meritocracy) became, under the corrupting influence of sponsor bucks, into annexes of the mainstream sports universe complete with celebrities, endorsement deals, and star/spectator dichotomies.
Snowboarding participants of my acquaintance insist to me they don’t bother with all that advertising-related image crap. While some of these folks enjoy the equipment shows, videos, and promotional events corporatization has brought to the sport, they insist it’s still fundamentally a DIY, make-your-own-fun scene if you want it to be.
I have a hard time explaining to these folks another, more insiduous aspect of the corporatization–how it’s redefined these sports, even on the individual-participant level, in corporate-friendly ways.
It’s a whole X-treme world these days. The corporatized image of X-treme sports meshes perfectly with the X-treme-ized image of business. Today’s CNBC and Fast Company heroes are self-styled “rebels” who (at least in the business-media fantasies) “break all the rules,” take “big risks,” and turn into IPO gazillionaires while they’re still young enough to snowboard.
There’s nothing really all that extreme about X-treme anymore. It’s not rebellious, and it offends nobody (except maybe some old downhill skiers).
Maybe the way beyond the X-treme hype is to acknowledge it’s all square and mainstream now, but that you like to participate in it anyway.
To refuse to either blindly follow or blindly reject the sports’ fashionability.
Besides, the marketers have already started planning for any X-treme backlash; as evinced by Nabisco Sportz crackers–which let armchair athletes get fat whilst ingesting images of old-style team sports gear.
TOMORROW: Bye bye Muzak.
IN OTHER NEWS: Artist Carl Smool’s quasi-apocalyptic “Fire Ceremony” performance, postponed from New Year’s, was finally held on a perfect mid-March Sunday night. The reschedule date was picked because it was the closest weekend date to the spring equinox. It turned out to be even more appropriate–the pagan New Year, for a vaguely neopagan rite. Giant effigies of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were lit by fireworks and slowly burned away, followed by the centerpiece figure of a giant egg (with a figure of the mythical roc bird revealed inside). Thousands gathered for the under-publicized makeup date, and stood in shared solemn awe at the spectacle. It was the biggest gathering I’d seen at the Seattle Center fountain area for one shared experience since the Cobain memorial. Next Sunday, at sunrise instead of sunset, comes another rite of destruction which will signify a change of eras and which will be watched by thousands–the Kingdome implosion.
FIRST OF ALL, a huge thanks to all who attended the group lit-fest I participated in last Sunday at Titlewave Books.
Whenever I do something like that, I pass out little questionnaires to the audience. Here are some of the responses to this most recent survey:
Favorite food/drink:
Favorite historical era:
Favorite website:
Favorite Pokemon character:
Favorite word:
What this decade should be called:
My biggest (non-money) wish for the year:
I think the Experience Music Project building looks like:
Favorite local band/musician:
The Seattle music scene’s biggest legacy/lesson?:
How I’d preserve artist and low-income housing:
What This Town Needs (other than construction projects):
MULTIPLE CHOICE PORTION
What should be done with Schell:
What should be done with Microsoft:
What should be done with Ken Griffey Jr.:
What I’d like in MISCmedia magazine:
I’d pay for MISCmedia magazine:
What I’d like on the MISCmedia website:
TOMORROW: Confessions of a Microsoft refugee.
OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
FOR THE LONGEST TIME, the local and national sports media portrayed Ken Griffey Jr. as the Nice Guy Who Finished First, at least in individual baseball achievements.
(Unfortunately for him, baseball’s a team sport, a lot more of one than basketball. Mariners fans have long known what Cubs fans have recently learned–that a singular home-run titan doesn’t make a championship team.)
Then, during the recent contract re-negotiations, Griffey was portrayed in the local press as having always really been the Mean Guy Who Wanted His Way. (As if any true superstar player didn’t have an overriding ambition to do his best and to push those around him to do the same.)
Now, by accepting a new contract worth millions less than he would’ve gotten from the Mariners (or the Yankees or Braves) just to finish his career with his hometown (small-market) team, he’s being portrayed as the Nice Guy once again. He probably always a guy who enjoyed being nice when he could but who was also subject to stress and frustration like anyone in his hi-pressure position. He didn’t change; just the image.
My only regret,besides that of not being able to watch him break a few batting records here in town, is that Griffey’s personal “best company to work for in America” has had such sleazy owners.
No sooner was the borderline-racist Marge Schott out of the Cincinnatti Reds’ front office than insurance tycoon and financier Carl Lindner came in. Lindner’s best known nationally for his hostile takeover of Taft Broadcasting (a TV-station chain that had also owned the Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio and Aaron Spelling’s production company).
Lindner later sold pieces of Taft to finance his takeover of Chiquita Brands. You may recall last year Lindner quashed a Cincinnatti Enquirer investigative series into financial irregularities at the food company (previously known for its former violent role in Latin American politics). Lindner not only got the paper to stop running the results of its investigation, but it successfully redirected the national media spin on the story to the tactics of the reporters, not the funny-money dealings the reporters were investigating.
How could such a Nice Guy like Junior want so badly to work for such a meanie like Lindner?
And will this change my view of how nice Junior is or isn’t? (It won’t. Really.)
TOMORROW: Another great human space gets threatened with removal.
IN OTHER NEWS: Roger Vadim, who passed on last Thursday, directed 26 films and an assortment of French TV projects. Several of his films have endured as classic entertainments of eroticism and verve (And God Created Woman, Barbarella). Others remain as unsung treasures awaiting rediscovery (Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Ms. Don Juan) or period pieces of what one director once thought audiences would find sexy (Night Games, Pretty Maids All In a Row, the remake of And God Created Woman). But the headlines and the TV obits barely found time to mention his work; preferring to describe Vadim only as the ex of Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, and Catherine Deneuve. Years ago, the U.S. publishers of his (now out-of-print) memoirs took the same angle, retitling the book Bardot, Deneuve, Fonda. One of cinema’s greatest celebrants of female beauty had attained a traditionally-female fate, becoming known only as a shadow behind the achievements of his spouses.
FIRST, A BIG THANX to all who attended our fantabulous dual premiere event for the new LOSER book and MISCmedia the magazine last night; and to the Two Bells Tavern staff (especially Mark Harlow) for making it plausible.
YESTERDAY, we suggested proclaiming a year-long or longer Seattle Jubilee Year, climaxing with the 150th anniversary of the city’s founding at Alki Point, as a way to make up for the canceled Seattle Center New Year’s party.
We mentioned that this should be as big a bash as we can arrange; but that we shouldn’t depend too much on city funding.
What we didn’t mention was that the city’s millennium project had been a botched affair even before its climactic evening was shut down. The canceled party was a lot smaller in scale than first planned; associated schemes to light up the town eventually whittled down to the lighting of a single bridge.
Mayor Schell, the story goes, had apparently handed off to the Seattle Arts Commission the task of raising private dough for this, but gave the commission no help to speak of. The city’s old money, seldom interested in public gatherings, didn’t contribute much; the city’s new money, mainly interested in permanent architectural monuments to itself, also largley demurred from the opportunity.
But I’m pleased to report of at least one new-money figure in this town who’s putting his cash into a populist spectacle.
Seems there’s this Microsoft stock-option tycoon named Chris Peters. His idea of gaming has always had nothing to do with Tomb Raider and everything to do with tenpins. He’s now offered to lead an investor group to buy the Professional Bowlers Association and its national championship tour.
The PBA, heretofore member-owned since its 1958 inception, has fallen upon hard times. It lost its network TV contract in 1996; ABC apparently thought the sport wasn’t hip enough to draw the ever-prized young demographics. The PBA board decided that bringing in private owners was the only way to save the tour–and, perhaps, to give pro bowling a newer, younger, hipper image for the cyber-age.
The only problem with this scenario is bowling’s already way cool; precisely because it’s not frenetically “hip.” Happenin’ local nightspots like the Breakroom and Shorty’s are full of bowling imagery. The Soundgarden/Mudhoney guys are avid bowlers. The Jillian’s sports-bar chain’s supposed to start work this summer on building a new near-downtown alley, Seattle’s first new bowling joint in decades.
It’s not youth disinterest that caused the closing of Village Lanes, Bellevue Lanes, Lake City Bowl, and Green Lake Bowl since the early ’80s. It’s real estate. A bowling alley uses vast (by urban standards) square footage, which developers believe is more profitably used for retail (or for other recreation concepts, such as video-game parlors). The Jillian’s folks think they can make bowling pencil out by making it part of a whole leisure-time complex, including pool tables and full booze service, and by renting out the space in whole or in part to dot-com companies’ staff parties.
Chris Peters doesn’t have to make bowling cool. Indeed, any attempt to market it as something loud and “X-treme” would ruin the coolness it’s already got.
What Peters will need to do is more effectively market the sport in all its existing glory–loud shirts, whispering announcers, and all.
TOMORROW: Late-’90s nostalgia.
ON WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY, we briefly touched upon some of the impacts Microsoft has had on the Seattle area.
Along with the rest of the high-tech and e-commerce industries, MS has brought this once-forgotten corner of America into full boomtown mode.
And, along with the rest of the software and Internet businesses that have grown here, it’s led to a building boom.
Many American cities have gone through boomtown eras this century. Seattle itself had one starting with the 1897 Yukon gold rush and continuing (in greater or lesser spurts) until the 1929 stock crash.
Recent decades have seen booms overtake Denver, Houston, Miami, and (in several waves) Las Vegas.
In each of these, big new buildings have arisen. In most of these, the character of the new buildings has expressed a more extreme, more intense version of the cities’ former character. Houston’s glass towers could be seen as reflecting the same bluster as an old Texas ranch mansion. Miami became even more shallow and glittery. Vegas became even brighter and louder.
Seattle’s current boomtown phase is significantly different from those other booms–precisely because it marks such a break from the city’s heritage. And I don’t just mean behaviorally.
It’s changing the face of the city. But it’s not just replacing old buildings with newer, bigger buildings of the same basic aesthetic.
Boomtown Seattle’s new buildings replace an old local architectural shtick of a quiet engineers’ and lawyers’ town trying desperately to become “world class” and failing spectacularly) with real world-class-osity, expressed in big, costly, and monumental public and semi-public structures.
The Kingdome’s final scheduled event, a Seahawks football game, takes place in 16 days. Sometime between then and the start of baseball season, the Dome will be imploded. In its place will eventually rise a luxury-box-heavy new football stadium, the last of the three structures replacing the Dome’s different functions. Already up: Safeco Field and a new exhibition hall (where Chris Isaak and Squirrel Nut-Zippers will ring in the millennium).
While all three post-Kingdome building projects have substantial public subsidies, all were instigated by software fortunes–Nintendo’s Hiroshi Yamauchi for Safeco Field; Paul Allen for the football stadium and the exhibition hall.
Steps away from the soon-to-be ex-Dome, Allen’s refitting the old Union Station as a posh gathering place, and building a fancy new office building next to it.
Allen’s also been involved in the newly rebuilt UW Henry Art Gallery (subtitled “The Faye G. Allen Center for the Arts”), the restored Cinerama Theater, and the sculpture park to be built at the old Union 76 waterfront terminal site; and is the sole sponsor (to date) of the Experience Music Project, the huge blob-shaped pop-music museum rising in the Space Needle’s shadow.
Allen’s erstwhile partner Bill Gates fils has taken smaller, but still significant, roles in putting up the new Seattle Art Museum (essentially the first of Seattle’s current generation of culture palaces) and the big new wing of the UW’s main library, and is contributing to rebuilding neighborhood libraries (just like that prior monopolist, Andrew Carnegie).
And Bill Gates pere, the corporate lawyer, has used his networking skills to help assemble local “old money” (i.e., non-computer-related wealth, from the likes of real estate and broadcasting) to join with the new cyber-rich in backing, and pressuring governments to further back, still other temples: A new symphony hall, a new basketball arena, the Pacific Place shopping temple, a new domed IMAX cinema, new or heavily-remodeled homes for four big theater companies, three old movie palaces reworked for Broadway touring shows, and (announced last month) a rebuilt opera house.
Still to come, with various funding sources: A new central library, a new city hall complex, a rebuilt UW basketball arena, and a light rail network.
On smaller scales, the new Seattle architectural aesthetic has influenced everything from condos to discos to Catholic churches. The new St. Ignatius Chapel at Seattle U. is asymmetrical, sparse, and airy–values you’d ordinarily not expect from Jesuits, but would expect from a high-tech town awash in new money.
The Seattle Boeing built was a place that attempted brilliance-on-a-budget. A town that tried to avoid wasteful extravegance even as it wanted the world to notice it.
The Seattle Allen & Gates are building is a place that settles for nothing less than the most spectacular, the most “tastefully” outlandish.
UPDATE: Coronation Street, the long-running U.K. working-class soap opera, is now on the Net. A startup company called iCraveTV is streaming all of Toronto’s over-the-air TV stations to any Net user who can type in a Canadian telephone area code (such as 604, 250, or 416). The stations are taking legal action, to try to stop this unauthorized re-use of their signals. But for now, you can see the Street on the web at 12-12:30 p.m. PT Mon.-Thurs. and 6-8 a.m. PT Sundays. (Click on “CBC” from iCraveTV’s site).
MONDAY: Bad beers I have known.
YESTERDAY, we ended a piece on the decline and fall of the thrift-store lifestyle with a couple of links to thrift-store art on the Web.
Those links, natch, lead to other links, and those links lead to other links. Enough for a whole ‘nother day’s episode.
So herewith, some fun eye-openin’ viz-art sites for ‘ya.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: A-Rod’s 40-40 Crunch, exploiting Mariners baseball star Alex Rodrieguez, is one of a whole line of regional sports-star cereals being put out by NYC-based Famous Fixins, “Producer of Celebrity Food Products.” It’s meant for box collectors, but the frosted flakes inside the box are quite good in their own right. They’re thicker and coarser than the Kellogg’s variety, and somewhat less sweet. (Now, if I could only get the company to put out “Frosted MISCberry Crunch” with my own picture on the box….)
IN OTHER NEWS: Buried at the end of this sports brief is potential great news–the just-maybe return of everybody’s favorite basketball benchwarmer, the immortal Steve Scheffler!
TOMORROW: How to make a book called Faster even faster: Just read the review.
DESPITE THE HOOPLA over Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and several new stadia, the industry that is Major League Baseball still has fundamental problems.
The so-called “small market teams” are having trouble meeting superstar payrolls.
Some of these teams are still threatening to move if they don’t get tax-subsidized homes with lotsa luxury boxes. Some pundits earlier this year claimed some teams might actually go out of business.
And without salary caps or TV revenue sharing, the economics of the game are still out of whack.
Well, here’s my modest proposal to fix it all, or at least some of it.
The way I see it, baseball’s problem isn’t too many teams but too few.
It needs a third league, a second-division league, whose top-winning teams would cycle into the AL/NL schedules yearly (the bottom AL/NL teams would cycle back into Division 2, a la British Soccer).
The Division 2 league would serve a full six-month season; its players would work directly for those teams (i.e., not a “farm system”). It would permanently provide quality baseball entertainment to the “small market” cities (New Orleans, Washington DC, San Antonio) and the cities that haven’t supported MLB lately (Montreal, Pittsburgh). No more stadium blackmail. No more threats to move. Communities asked to support ballpark construction could at least be assured of a long-term amortization of their investments.
The Division 2 League would be more popular than AAA ball (and hence attract better local TV and regional cable deals) because its players would be employed by the local teams, not by farm systems. Fans could get to know their local heroes for a season or two before they moved on.
The Division 2 League would share, on a reduced-percentage basis, in MLB’s marketing and merchandizing revenues (and in any future TV revenue-sharing deal). With this income “floor” to count on, team owners could plan budgets based on reasonably-stable revenue projections. Or they could, within limits (if we’re starting a new league, let’s give it a salary cap from the git-go), work to make the leap into the AL/NL ranks.
This idea would, natch, greatly alter the game’s landscape. As many as eight to twelve AAA teams might be either displaced or forced to change their whole player-contract setup. The whole farm-system institution would be thrown into reorganization; and the initial outfitting of the new Division 2 League teams would throw a curve at players’ and coaches’ salary structures in both the majors’ and minors’ ranks.
But a little more instability in the short term would lead to a lot more stability in the long term.
And baseball is a game that thrives on stability, at least if you believe all those smarmy baseball essayists out there.
(I’d already been thinking of these concepts when I read that the old Pacific Coast League had essentially operated as a non-farm, near-major league during its approximate 1938-57 heyday. The PCL’s president once suggested turning that outfit into a third major league, but the NL moved into LA and SF instead.)
TOMORROW: Some of the worst influences on young writers.
ELSEWHERE: Training cats? These guys claim it can actually be done, if you buy their product… “A parable, of sorts, about us, the ‘descendents’ of Adam and Eve, in the state of exile that is our lives”…
BEFORE WE BEGIN TODAY, a gracious thanx to all who came to my big event last night at the downtown Seattle Borders Books. Another such event’s coming next Thursday (see below). And, again, apologies to those who couldn’t access this site earlier this morning. (I’ve been assured, again, that it won’t happen again.) But for now…
I CLOSED LAST NIGHT’S SHOW with some aphorisms and words-O-wisdom. Here are some more. (Some of these I’ve used before, on the site or in other scattered writings.)
IF YOU MISSED last night’s wonderful live reading/event, there’s another promo for The Big Book of MISC. next Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there. Aloha.
MONDAY: How can one be “hip” when there are fewer and fewer “squares” to rebel against?
ELSEWHERE: Some of the top cliches in bad erotic writing: “Everyone has a perfect body you could break a brick on…” “All women in a position of authority have secret desires to be submissive…” “Any woman described as having a scientific occupation will invariably be occupied with making her breasts larger…” “No jealousy…”
A YEAR OR SO AGO, we wrote about the revived interest by hip bars in bowling iconography (balls, pins, shirts, trophies).
But a revival of bowling images, we warned, didn’t necessarily mean a revival of bowling.
In the past 15 years or so, the Seattle area’s lost the Green Lake Bowl, the Lake City Bowl, Village Lanes, and Bellevue Lanes (now a Barnes and Noble!). The DV8 dance club and the Alley minimall on Broadway also stand where lanes and pinsetters once ruled.
While entertainment complexes of all shapes and sizes have sprouted around here lately, real bowling hasn’t been part of any of them.
One oft-cited reason: Those Kids Today aren’t supposed to be interested in the kegler’s art; and adults are finding it harder to keep league-bowling commitments.
A more plausible reason: Entertainment-center developers simply felt bowling couldn’t provide income-per-square-foot at the rates of, say, video games or water slides.
But now, the Jillian’s yuppie pool-hall chain wants to build Seattle’s first new bowling alley in decades. The proposed 16-lane alley would be built next door to the existing Seattle branch of Jillian’s on south Lake Union. That building now houses an outlet of the Video Only big-box retail chain, central Seattle’s only remaining consumer video-electronics store. But that joint could easily move, maybe to one of the many new retail developments downtown.
Knowing Jillian’s pool schtick, you can expect a Jillian’s bowling alley to be all fancy-schmancy and costlier than your average suburban pin palace. But as long as it’s not too gussied-up, it’d be a great step toward bringing back one of America’s greatest pastimes.
Now, if only Fox Sports Net would bring back the women’s bowling matches that had been a weekly staple of its predecessor channel Prime Sports.
Speaking of the grace of the female form in motion, clueless mass-media people went mildly agog last week when a member of the victorious U.S. Women’s World Cup team took off her jersey at the end of the match, revealing a new-model Nike sports bra that’s far more modest than what beach-volleyball women wear. For one thing, end-of-match shirt-doffing is a long tradition in men’s soccer. For another thing, I dunno about that particular player but women’s soccer has this rep of attracting women who enjoy other women’s physiques. In other words, what’s the big deal here? (The obvious answer: A lot if you’re Nike and you’d like lotsa free publicity for your new garment.)
TOMORROW: The end of Seafirst Bank as we know it?
ELSEWHERE: Thanks to nubbin.com, here are some English-language instructions on Japanese-model Pokemon character model kits:
“Our Company motto is ‘Give safe and enjoyable toys and dreams to children’. That is why we research & improve out produets all the time. This might create out toys to be slightly different from each other amony same iteu depending. On the diffarent lots. As for as out product quality is concerned we pay extre affention… “It is advised not to take off all the parts because you may may be confused. Tske off and assemble one by one according. Some parts are point so please take care not to be hart.”
“Our Company motto is ‘Give safe and enjoyable toys and dreams to children’. That is why we research & improve out produets all the time. This might create out toys to be slightly different from each other amony same iteu depending. On the diffarent lots. As for as out product quality is concerned we pay extre affention…
“It is advised not to take off all the parts because you may may be confused. Tske off and assemble one by one according. Some parts are point so please take care not to be hart.”
A LOT OF ARTY TYPES love to hate Seattle and always have.
Oh, you could live here cheaply enough. And the neighbors were plenty easy to get along with, just so long as you didn’t expect ’em to welcome you with gregariously open arms.
But, the old line went, there was no money here and no decent arts infrastructure–the networks of (depending on your genre) museums, galleries, gallery customers, recording studios, record labels, nightclubs, film producers/distributors, publishers, agents, publicists, etc.
(An exception was the theater community, where patient troupes and producers gradually assembled their needed resources from approximately 1963 through approximately 1978. But to this day, local actors complain, management at the Rep and ACT still cast too many lead roles in New York.)
Today, things are a bit different. The region’s awash in cyber-wealth. Lotsa arts-infrastructure people have moved or at least passed through the place. A lot of culture-management enterprises have indigenously risen here, especially in popular and commercial music.
And with the new communications technology (much of it developed here) and the DIY-culture boom, that oldtime culture bureaucracy’s starting to seem less necessary to a lot of folks.
But all that’s not enough for some boho-folks.
As we noted back in April, the boom’s left a lot of local old-timers behind, some of whom are culture-biz old-timers. The tech biz has produced a lot of low-paying day jobs and perma-temp gigs, but the big-money positions all seem to require either hyper-aggressive sales skills or five years’ experience on software technologies that just came out last year.
As COCA’s current “Land/Use/Action” series of exhibitions and events depicts, real-estate hyperinflation and gentrification mean it’s harder every year to live here–especially if you’re a visual artist who needs adequate studio space, a musician who needs a place to play, or a creator in any discipline who needs to invest time in your work before it’s ready to go out into the world.
(Many of these cyber-employers demand 60 or more hours a week from their staffs, plus a sense of devotion-to-the-empire so fanatical as to pretty much exclude any self-styled free thinkers as potential hires.)
This leaves Seattle as an exciting place to document, with physical and social changes and confrontations to be seen just about everywhere, but still not an optimal live/work site for the would-be documentor.
Contemporary-art galleries still struggle as always. The big-bucks out-of-towners who plopped a couple of fancy gallery spaces down here, hoping to siphon some of that cyber-spending-money, have closed up shop and split.
Literary publishing here still means the gay-and-theory-oriented Bay Press, the feminist-oriented Seal Press, and the tourist-oriented Sasquatch Books.
Bands and musicians can still make stuff here, but managers and promoters find a career ceiling they can’t breach without heading to N.Y./L.A.
Art-film exhibition’s big here, but art-film making is still just getting off the ground (and commercial/industrial filmmaking here has nearly collapsed).
So the new Hobson’s choice, for many, seems to be to either take up a Real Career (if possible) and leave one’s real life’s work to semi-commercial or hobby status; sell out another way and make glass bowls or other stuff the moneyed people here will buy; move to the old-line Big Media cities; or move further out into lo-rent land.
(These topics and others will be discussed in “Where’d the Artists Go?: Art and Development in Belltown,” a COCA-sponsored forum tonight, July 13, at the reopened, remodeled (but looking-exactly-like-it-used-to) Speakeasy Cafe, 2nd and Bell.)
TOMORROW: The new local art neighborhood?
ELSEWHERE: Perservering hippie-musician Jef Jaisun has his own list of reasons to dislike Seattle. Alas, most of them involve weather, and seem intended to discourage inmigration (the old Emmett Watson “Lesser Seattle” schtick). And there’s a whole “Weblog” site to “Why (BLANK) Sucks.”
THE KINGDOME WAS TWO YEARS OLD, and had housed the Mariners for one season, when Esquire contributing editors Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin published a coffee-table picture book, High Tech: The Industrial Design and Source Book for the Home.
Here’s what an out-of-print-books site says about it:
“High-tech is a term being used in architectural circles to describe an increasing number of residences and public buildings with a nuts-and-bolts-exposed-pipes technological look or to describe residences made of prefabricated components more commonly used to build warehouses or factories. The authors have expanded this definition to include a parallel trend in interior design-the use of commonplace commercial and industrial equipment in the home.”
The Kingdome was a high-tech design of the old school (before the trends discussed in the book). That is, it took a purely utilitarian approach to its purpose of housing entertainment.
It was a perfect symbolization of the Seattle civic zeitgeist circa 1976-77. In a town just a few generations removed from the frontier, and just six years removed from the massive Boeing bust, it was a monument to frugality and efficiency. It lacked not only the creature comforts of modern stadia but the basic aesthetic principles of a facility whose tenants had to compete for the public’s discretionary leisure spending.
But it was an engineering marvel, despite having been built to less-than-precision by the low bidder. Boeing, and its engineering mentality, still ruled the Seattle spirit back then.
That spirit adored the miracle of the thin concrete roof, of the whole nine-acre interior room built for only some $50 million. It marveled that our then-fair city could finally become A Big League Town, simply by turning some old railroad yards (on filled-in tide flats) into a just-adequate-enough home for baseball, football, basketball (for a couple years), soccer, evangelists, monster trucks, RV shows, and gift expos.
But, as they say, that was then.
Today, the Seattle civic zeitgeist is much better symbolized in the new Mariner park, Safeco Field.
The old ballpark was done on the cheap. The new ballpark’s the most expensive ever built, at a cool half-billion.
The old ballpark was old high-tech: All business. The new ballpark is the new high-tech, as prophesied in Kron and Slesin’s old book: Industrial luxury.
From the faux-aged brick false front along the 1st Avenue South side to the green steel girders buttressing the mammoth sliding roof, it embodies the same design aesthetic as the Bemis Building a block to its west. That’s one of those old warehouses that’s been gussied up into costly condos, where the cyber-nouveau-riche put up their Chihuly glass bowls among exposed pipework and concrete structural columns and imagine they’re living in “artist housing.”
Safeco Field is a way-cushy entertainment palace that merely looks old-fashioned as a luxury-design choice, intended by the architects to reinforce that George Will baseball-as-Americana feeling while still lushly pampering its patrons and charging them accordingly.
While neither Bill Gates nor Paul Allen is directly involved in the team or its management, the team’s new home clearly reflects the city as the suburban-residing Gates and Allen have helped re-define it.
A city where industry, the making and moving of tangible objects, is treated as a nostalgic memory.
A city where everything and everyone is expected to serve The Upscale, to the point of tax-subsidized luxury suites (still not sold out) within a tax-subsidized luxury stadium.
A city with no more patience for such quaint notions as thrift or mere adequacy; where everything must be World Class (even if it sports a back-to-basics look to it).
ELSEWHERE: The L.A. Times reports a clever Russian company’s found the perfect brand name for its cut-price detergent: “Ordinary Detergent,” copping the name and box design seen in ubiquitous Russian ads for a Procter & Gamble product. I’m still waiting for the chance to start my own band, “Special Guest” (they’d never headline a gig, but would open for everybody).
TOMORROW: Re-examing the age-old question, Does Seattle Suck?
