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Tacoma’s own Ventures, kings of instro surf-pop lo all these years, have got their totally deserved berth in the Rock n’ Roll Hall O’ Fame.
I, along with some 20,000 other locals, found my way to the Tacoma Dome’s north parking lot bright n’ early last Saturday morning.
We were all off to hear John Kerry give a major swing-state campaign speech.
I’d arrived at 10:30 a.m., an hour after the gates had first opened. It took another hour to wind up the line and get into the outer standing area. An hour after that, those of us without pre-attained tickets were fed through the metal detectors into the inner audience zone.
Almost everyone held an optimistic, celebratory mood. There was a clear air of possibility in the crowd. People felt they really could take this country back, or rather, take it forward, beyond the cynical politics of greed and prejudice.
The conservative counter-protestors were few and brusque. One yelled epithets against “liberal scum,” as if he could persuade people to his side by insulting them.
Most of the homemade buttons and badges were anti-Bush in nature. But the rally’s organizers made sure plenty of professionally made pro-Kerry signs filled the space.
Following the usual round of warm-up speeches by local politicos, “folksy” radio veteran Garrison Keillor led the crowd in a somber a capella rendition of “America the Beautiful.” He then told an anecdote about escorting Kerry to the Minnesota State Fair, where the radio host bought the candidate a corn dog and the candidate had to remind the radio host to put ketchup on it.
A good 45 minutes elapsed between the end of Keillor’s address and the arrival of the candidate’s motorcade. When he finally appeared, he brought two more warm-up speakers. Kerry’s ex-primary opponent Gen. Wesley Clark (below) decried Bush as “an incompetent commander in chief.”
After the general, Kerry’s army buddy Jim Rassmann slammed the TV attack ads questioning Kerry’s Vietnam service.
Finally, the candidate himself took to the mike. He spoke for almost an hour, drawing plenty of whoops and applause along the way.
He made the usual points—reform health care, kick-start the economy, rebuild international alliances, stop tax windfalls for the rich, get folks working again (at living wages), rebuild public education, help real families instead of hiding behind “family values” platitudes.
He said little or nothing about abortion rights, gay rights, ending the Iraq war, ending the drug war, repealing the Patriot Act, getting the FCC off its censorship kick, breaking up the media conglomerates, or bringing a just peace to the West Bank.
Still, Kerry did say what I wanted to hear about the issues he chose to discuss. And he gave the most impassioned, most robust speech of the three of his I’ve seen in person.
John Kerry’s found his proverbial mojo. Whether that’s enough to put him over the top remains to be seen. But at least the Saturday crowd seemed to think it was probable.
IT’S THE LAST CHAPTER of our recent jaunt to Tacoma. Today: Just a few of the magnificently restored stoic downtown buildings.
Tacoma, as you who’ve read regional history might recall, was originally developed as a Northern Pacific Railway company town. Like all the western land-grant railroads, the NP tried to control all commerce in the territories it settled. By siting its western terminus at its own town, the NP hoped for a stranglehold on the Northwest economy and on north-Pacific ocean shipping as well.
But Seattle offered a more wide-open, less regulated form of capitalism. This, along with the help of the rival Great Northern Railway (now merged, with the NP, into the BNSF), the siting of the University of Washington, and the success of a former furniture maker named Bill Boeing, secured Seattle’s dominance. Seattle became the region’s financial and cultural capital; Tacoma became an industrial and military city.
When I-5 came through town in 1965, coinciding with the opening of Tacoma Mall, downtown Tacoma was left to rot.
It took more than three decades and a series of public projects (including museums, live theaters, and a UW branch campus) to bring downtown Tacoma back.
It still doesn’t have a mainstream movie theater, or any retailer bigger than the University Book Store. But it’s got galleries, funky boutiques, antique shops, restaurants, bars, cafes, high-offices, and (most importantly) a spirit of possibility.
I’ll forever remember this Tully’s as Tracey Ullman’s pizza place in the film classic I Love You to Death.
At this “graffiti garage,” young spray-paint artists are permitted to create, then cover-up and replace, their expressions of urban individuality.
Our thanks to John Poetzel and “T.Y.D.” for recommending, and escorting me to, some of the sites shown in this series.
WE’LL HAVE ONE MORE set of Tacoma pix following today’s installment, which focuses on quaint signs and on the city’s seaport.
As far as I know, no late-night Showtime comedy series have ever been filmed on this street.
Unlike the unified port districts of New York/New Jersey and Los Angeles/Long Beach, Puget Sound’s seaports operate separately and competitively. This cuts costs for shippers, but raises costs for taxpayers. The Port of Tacoma’s public history kiosk, at the base of the viewing platform where the above shot was made, still boasts of having snagged Totem Ocean Trailer Express (an Alaska container-cargo operation) away from the Port of Seattle back in the mid-’80s.
(via Kerrick Mainrender):
“Thanks for pix of the 11th St. Bridge, which I think was named after Murray Morgan [not sure]; it is the waterway that’s named after Foss. It is a neat bridge, whose fate has been in question for some time, and so now I have one more thing to worry about. Do you have any links to the people who want to save it? [I know, I’ll search on my own, too.] Not that there’s much I could do, my own condition being about the same as its. [No, no birds, or I’d eat them–maybe just call it a falcon sanctuary?] Way back when, the paper asked people for names for it, and my own favorite is ‘Great 11th.’ Not really any of my business since I don’t live in Tacoma, but still. You have a neat site, BTW.”
“Thanks for pix of the 11th St. Bridge, which I think was named after Murray Morgan [not sure]; it is the waterway that’s named after Foss. It is a neat bridge, whose fate has been in question for some time, and so now I have one more thing to worry about.
Do you have any links to the people who want to save it? [I know, I’ll search on my own, too.] Not that there’s much I could do, my own condition being about the same as its. [No, no birds, or I’d eat them–maybe just call it a falcon sanctuary?] Way back when, the paper asked people for names for it, and my own favorite is ‘Great 11th.’
Not really any of my business since I don’t live in Tacoma, but still.
You have a neat site, BTW.”
The once-forlorn downtown of T-Town’s undergone some magnificent renewal in recent years. Still down-n’-out, though, is the once-stoic 1906 Elks club building.
The Elks themselves want nothing to do with their former palace. The landlord wants to raze it for condos. The civic-preservation clique wants it restored. Rebellious kids climb into it through broken windows for squat parties.
And a local guerilla-art group, Beautiful Angle, posts flyers on its boarded-up doors. This flyer depicts the nearby Thea Foss Bridge, also threatened with razing.
The fine print reads: “I am the fishbone stuck in the craw of a great jazz singer, who wishes it were gone and then wonders afterwards why the songs don’t sound as sweet.”
The couple who escorted me down the bridge called it “the Bridge of Death.” A large bird apparently lives in the upper rafters and attacks smaller birds, whose carcasses litter the roadway beneath.
At least one more batch of T-Town pix is still to come.
IT’S DAY TWO of our photo-jaunt up and down the length of that famed street of independent retail, South Tacoma Way.
Oldsmobile may be gone, but an Olds used-car sign remains at Russ Dunmire. One of the last 100 or so Olds-only dealers that remained, it now sells Mazdas.
Incidentally, the great rock combo Ruston Mire is partly named for this dealership, and for the dealership’s once-ubiquitous TV jingle. The band name’s other, more direct source: The Superfund cleanup site at the Tacoma suburb of Ruston, where an ASARCO copper smelter once manufactured arsenic.
Jack Roberts may be dead, but he’ll still take a pie in the face to give you a deal on a new fridge. And he’s given up a big white wall for one of those murals by at-risk youth.
Ponder the potential meanings of a used-car lot called “Bag Lady:”
1. She sells cars so cheaply, she can’t afford one herself. Let alone a domicile.2. At a bank Dumpster somewhere, there’s a pile of loan contracts she can collect into a grocery cart, which are still legally valid. 3. From her appearance, she’s potentially willing to do more to make a deal than Jack Roberts ever would.
1. She sells cars so cheaply, she can’t afford one herself. Let alone a domicile.2. At a bank Dumpster somewhere, there’s a pile of loan contracts she can collect into a grocery cart, which are still legally valid.
3. From her appearance, she’s potentially willing to do more to make a deal than Jack Roberts ever would.
This no-name restaurant sign now points down to a Subway franchise.
This neon, I’m told, still works at night, sort of.
After a long afternoon of exploring, there’s only one place to go—the taco wagon!
Over the next several days, I’ll show off some pix I took on a recent jaunt to our neighbors to the south.
First off, the signs and other sights of that great street immortalized by Neko Case, South Tacoma Way.
The Starlite Drive-In is, like most un-razed drive-ins, now an all-week swap meet.
Come in to the PI Bank for today’s special interest rate, 3.14159 percent.
The magnificent Java Jive survives, while many other nightspots and merchants have not.
Also surviving, sort of: The B&I Shopping Center. Once a thriving indie discount store, amusement arcade, and private zoo, it’s now a mini-mall at which various scrappy mom-n’-pop merchants hawk telephone cards, T-shirts, religious trinkets, Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and Mexican soda pop. Ivan the gorilla, who lived at the store for years until economics and politics sent him off to a regular zoo, still oversees the place in caricature form.
In the ’70s and ’80s the Tacoma Mall, and its adjacent strip-mall spaces, absorbed most of the City of Destiny’s retail trade. City-planner types moped about the decimation of Tacoma’s downtown, which has only recently begun to rebound. Few such official concerns were raised over the fate of South Tacoma Way (the in-city stretch of U.S. 99).
America’s great retail chains either moved out of South Tacoma Way or never moved in. Today, the only corporate names you’ll see on that street are those on franchised car dealers and gas stations. South Tacoma Way is a haven for independent retailers of all types—at least for those who can stay in business in today’s Bush-decimated economy.
More of these to come.
…aka “Galloping Gertie,” places #4 on an ESPN.com list of “Worst Group Efforts.”
PRIOR TO OUR RECENT BOUT WITH CAMERALESSNESS, we visited the fabulous Tacoma museum district. We’ll go back again soon for the Museum of Glass’s new exhibit of Japanese anime artifacts.
What was around to see that day were two slick yet cool exhibits at the Washington State History Museum.
First, the permanent exhibits about the first century and a half of Caucasian settlement in the Great NW, including a re-creation of the “Hooverville” homeless camp (at the modern-day site of Safeco Field) and a “tree” displaying some of the many valuable products made from local wood.
Upstairs in the same building is 1001 Curious Things, taken from the vast collections of Seattle’s historically vital tourist-trinket stand, Ye Old Curiosity Shop. The shop used to commission Alaska tribes to make authentic totem poles and scrimshaws, and also bought, stuffed, and mounted selected freaks of the animal kingdom (below).
The state museum’s a huge, grand place that’s got its act fully together. It doesn’t just show cool stuff; it mounts entertaining narrative exhibitions with storylines worthy of any Discovery Channel documentary. Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, scheduled to move into the temporary downtown-library space on Pike Street late next year, will have to do a lot to reach the state museum’s level of attractiveness and intrigue.
…honoring the early arrival of the dog days-O-summer.
…that hasn’t already been said and will continue to be said, ad infinitum, about the local mainstream media’s current favorite tabloid-sleaze saga, the tragic case of the wife-abusing Tacoma police chief who fatally shot his estranged spouse and then himself.
Except this: Above-the-law misbehavior, control freakishness, and delusions of omnipotence among the law’s supposed protectors should come as no surprise.
…at the (beautiful) main Tacoma Public Library was a smash. Some 60 Citizens of Destiny listened to me, KIRO-AM’s Dave Ross, and two Tacoma News Tribune writers debate whether or not we’re all amusing ourselves into oblivion. I, as I told you here I would, said we’re not.
If anything, I said, the current would-be social controllers aren’t trying to get us to ignore serious issues by force-feeding us light entertainment. They’re trying to get us obsessed with certain serious issues at a non-rational level of fear and obedience.
As I’d expected, there were several cranky old hippies who pined for the pre-TV golden age they were absolutely convinced had existed just before they were born, and who didn’t believe me when I told them the old newsreels had war theme songs long before CNN. I also tried to reassure some of the library loyalists in the crowd that books weren’t going away anytime soon (even if library budgets are currently big on DVDs and, in Seattle’s case, on building projects rather than on book buying); whether the stuff inside tomorrow’s books will be worth reading is a different question.
One woman in the audience noted that Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (the topic of an everybody-in-town-reads-one-book promotion to which this panel was a tie-in event) ended with a scene of people reciting from their favorite banned books, which they’d cared to memorize. In a variation on the old “desert island disc” question, she asked the panel what books we’d prefer to memorize. I mumbled something about The Gambler and Fanny Hill, saying they represented skills and pursuits that some people in a post-apocalyptic situation might not consider vital to survival but I would. I’m sure tomorrow I’ll think of a few tomes far more appropriate to the hypothetical situation. If you’ve any desert-island books, feel free to email the titles and reasons why you’d choose them.
I’ve been recruited into speaking this Thursday at the Tacoma Public Library’s main branch (1102 Tacoma Avenue South; 7 pm).
They’re running one of those “everybody in town reads the same book” promos, based this time on Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The panel I’ll be at will discuss Bradbury’s premise of a future dystopia where audiovisual media are drugs and books are outlawed.
This nightmare image has been very popular among highbrow technophobes, particuarly by Neil Postman. In his 1986 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman essentially argued that Those Kids Today were all a bunch of TV-addicted idiots; that new info technologies were always inherently reactionary and anti-thought; and that The Word was good for you and The Image was bad for you.
I’ve written about Postman in the past: I disagreed with his premises then and still do.
The Simpsons and The Sopranos are, I argue, more intelligent than the books of Danielle Steel and John Grisham. Secondary and tertiary cable channels provide more highbrow arts and culture than PBS ever did. The Internet has helped to democratize the written word (and helped get the current peace movement jump-started).
And kids’ attention spans seem to be getting longer these days. I’ve written before how every Harry Potter book is at least 100 pages longer than the previous one; and about those PC adventure games where you have to methodically explore and experiment for weeks or months before discovering the solution.
Postman, and most of his leftist pop-culture-haters, apparently believe there had been a pre-TV golden age when everybody was a Serious Reader, every newspaper was a junior New York Times, and every magazine was a junior Atlantic Monthly.
Not so. Escapism has always been with us. We are a species that craves stories, pleasure, beauty, and diversion. Bradbury himself is an entertainer. (In the early ’50s he sold stories to EC Comics, whose Tales from the Crypt and other titles were denounced in the U.S. Congress as corrupters of innocent youth.)
And no, The Word isn’t in decline. We’re more dependent upon words than ever. Rather than dying, the book biz seems to be weathering the current fiscal storm better than the TV networks, and a lot better than the movie theater chains and the cable TV operators.
And those words aren’t always progressive or enlightening. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-Jewish hoax that’s become recently popular among Islamic fundamentalists, is a book. The Bell Curve, a pile of pseudo-scientific gibberish intended as an excuse for anti-black racism, is a book.
Entertainment can give a context for ideas and propose a way of seeing the world. Few people knew this more fully than Francois Truffaut, who directed the movie version of Fahrenheit 451. Truffaut was a lifelong student and admirer of great films. He wrote elequently about how the perfect scene, or even the perfect single image, could immediately express whole ranges of thoughts and feelings.
The question should really be what contexts and worldviews emanate from the entertainments we’re being given. That’s what I hope to ask in Tacoma this Thursday. Hope you can attend.
TWO AND A HALF WEEKS AGO, we briefly mentioned the launch of Sound Transit’s commuter-rail service from Tacoma to Seattle. What I didn’t include was a direct review of the service itself.
We’ll do that now.
As I wrote then, to take Sounder from Seattle during the train’s initial shakedown-cruise period means you go to Tacoma in the evening, then either stay the night there or take a bus back. Because the Tacoma-Seattle express bus runs on I-5, such a round trip provides an immediate comparison between the two travel modes.
It turns out the Sounder track parallels the freeway on the last couple of miles heading into Tacoma. But it’s a completely different scene. The train tracks are below I-5’s elevated little bluff. You can’t see the freeway from the train, nor the train tracks from the freeway. On the train, you go past what’s left of the Puyallup Valley farm belt (this time of year, you pass the now-harvested daffodil fields at that golden pre-sunset “magic hour”) and head right into the beautifully rusty Port of Tacoma district near sea level, offering great views of the water and the cool old warehouses. On the freeway, you’re up among other vehicles, seeing mostly billboards and car lots and chain-motel signs.
Indeed, the whole Sounder run (and intercity passenger train travel in general) offers a glimpse of an alternate America. An America that used to be; or rather a different way modern-day America might have evolved.
From the train, you’re less likely to view the everywhere-nowhere world of malls, strip malls, gas stations, parking lots, used-car lots, subdivisions, and cloverleaf interchanges. You’re more likely to see farms, factories, block-grid residential districts, and main streets.
The Sounder begins in King Street Station–or rather, on King Street’s stretch of track. You can’t go through the station’s lobby to get to Sounder; you’ve gotta use one of two separate entrances, each of which involves many stairs down. I prefer the southern entrance, descending from the little skybridge connecting Fourth Avenue to the future new Seahawk stadium.
(The skybridge is labeled “South Weller Street;” but longtime MISCmedia readers know I’m lobbying to have it renamed “South Long Street,” so the football team will have an official address at Fourth and Long.)
It takes you through the real-town parts of Kent, Sumner, Auburn, and Puyallup, to the true urban beauty that is Tacoma’s old industrial district. A brisk shuttle bus takes you from there, past the new UW-Tacoma campus, down Pacific Avenue’s long strip of great old warehouse buildings (some being revamped into restaurants and futon stores) into the long-dormant downtown, still bereft of major retail chains (other than coffee shops) but now in the process of being artified with galleries, studios, live theaters, bistros, and antique shops.
Toward the northern end of this little strip lies the gorgeous Club Silverstone, a perfectly-preserved old time eatery and bar with an elegant little dance hall to one side. It’s now run mainly as a gay bar (helping closeted Ft. Lewis personnel relieve their loneliness); but the utter perfection of the room makes it a must for any City-O-Destiny trip. (The only other elegant hashhouse I’ve seen this well maintained is the Spar in Olympia).
A historical note: Tacoma was born when the Northern Pacific Railroad wanted its own company town to be the rail line’s western terminus. (Eventually, after years’ worth of prodding, the railroad acceded to extend its tracks to Seattle.)
Central Tacoma’s decline came from the freeway, which bypassed downtown in 1965 and sent shoppers straight to the newly-built Tacoma Mall.
Thirty-five years later, a train revival could help spur the town’s fledgling comeback.
TOMORROW: Could any band other than the Grateful Dead make a living without intellectual-property enforcement?
ELSEWHERE:
