UNLIKE APPARENTLY MANY OF YOU, I still believe in reading local newspapers. Sure, the NY Times has lotsa pretty real-estate ads for fantasy palatial mansions, but there’s still tons to be said for reading up about your own place.

There’s also the fun tea-leaf-gazing ritual of discerning what gets into the paper and why. F’rinstance, the Sunday SeaTimes’s virulent anti-monorail editorial and the accompanying, heavily inane, editorial cartoon by the paper’s new staff art-hack Eric Devericks. Devericks, like his P-I counterpart David Horsey, can be sort-of amusing when attacking some targets, but astoundingly unfunny and uncreative when called upon to visualize an editorial stance dictated by the publisher, who in turn probably got his marching orders from the Downtown Seattle Association and/or Washington Alliance for Business.

In this case, Devericks’s drawing portrays a quartet (actual) nuts, spouting the anti-monorail campaign’s shameless distortions of the pro-monorail campaign’s arguments. Being mere nuts, they have no facial expressions or body language. There’s no personality, no artistry, not even any vitriol.

The Oregonian once had an even duller cartoonist, an old guy with the perfectly geezeroid name of Art Bimrose. His idea of illustrating an idea was invariably to depict a seersucker-suited guy pointing to a newspaper headline and either smiling or frowning.

But Bimrose was consistently dull, day after day. Horsey and Devericks are selectively mediocre. When they draw a dud, you can be fairly sure they’re following orders—even, just perhaps, attempting to sabotage their assigned opinions by depicting them as opinions with which only a witless geezer would agree.

Elsewhere in that same edition, human-interest columnist Jerry Large ran selected, edited letters responding to a prior piece of his, which pondered whether Seattle was a good place for African-Americans to move to.

Large cleverly didn’t ask whether the town was merely “tolerant of diversity,” a phrase which usually refers to upscale white people’s images of their own smug perfection. No, Large wanted to hear from actual black people about their own actual experiences across the whole spectrum of life’s needs (love, career, family, community, finding a decent BBQ place, etc.).

Either by his own drive to be fair-n’-balanced or by his editors’ wish to preserve the “tolerant” civic image, Large made sure to include several letters from people who liked it here. These letters tended to list safe, “tolerance”-type reasons. The negative letters were more passionate. Their arguments tended toward a few main areas:

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

In my prior refutation of white “this town sucks” whiners, I’d said Seattle indeed is a real city, with lots to offer. But it’d have even more to offer with more Af-Ams around, what with all their immeasurable-contributions-to-the-American-milieu etc. etc.

For those Af-Ams reading this (and I know at least a few are), please consider becoming part of our city. We’re northern but not freezingly so. We’ve only got two or three indirect-race-baiting politicians, none of whom currently hold elective office. We’re awfully white, but not in a Boondocks extreme. You can find hiphop recordings here (though it is easier to find stores selling obscure German techno CDs). We’ve got our gosh-durn own African Heritage festivals, breakdancing contests, and typo-abundant black newspapers. While our local economy’s become the nation’s worst, there’s a new source of minority venture capital in the form of families who sold their city houses to rich white people at the peak of the market.

And all my dorky white brethern & cistern can do more to be fully welcoming toward (not just “tolerant” of) these neighbors. A good place to start is to start realizing black people aren’t always like what white people think they’re like (so leave those stereotypes behind). If you’re an employer, start hiring some (and not just as janitors and receptionists). And don’t think you’ll automatically become their friend if you start acting like some dorky white person pretending to be black. Just be the most honest, life-loving, gracious dorky white person you can be.

This summer marks the 10th anniversary of the movie Singles, writer-director Cameron Crowe’s light-‘n’-fluffy love letter to Seattle and the striving, sincere young adults therein.

At the time of its release, it was the victim of a Warner Bros. marketing campaign that emphasized the suddenly-hot local bands in its audio background (the soundtrack CD came out months before the film did), rather than the characters or plot(s). When it turned out to be a frothy tale of six dating-scene survivors, only one of whom was a musician, certain audience expectations were shattered. Nevertheless, it had a respectable theatrical run and remains a decent-selling video title.

It’s also the rumored unofficial inspiration for the Warner-produced sitcom Friends. (Check-list the similarities: A sextet of dreamy looking young Caucasians, representing a variety of serious and artistic careers, all of whom hang out at the same coffeehouse, most of whom live in the same apartment building that inexplicably has a couch in its front courtyard, and who head into and out of assorted romantic entanglements, sometimes with one another.)

According to the “grunge” stereotype popular in the national media of the film’s time, young Seattlites (especially those involved in the rock scene) were alleged to be listless, rootless, directionless slackers. Crowe saw something quite different: Aware, ambitious moral-decision-makers who want to take charge of their lives, to make a difference in the world and to experience ultra-ecstatic true love, but who are (to varying degrees) thwarted by an urban society that wants to stick them into confining, unfulfilling roles.

Campbell Scott (the film’s real male lead) plays a state transportation planner who’s staked his whole up-n’-coming career on a proposed elevated-rail project he calls the Supertrain, bound to resolve rush-hour jams, slow down suburban sprawl, and create a more Euro-like urban community. (Any similarity to currently hyped elevated-transit proposals is purely coincidental.)

Scott’s main affection object, played by Kyra Sedgwick, has some not-completely-identified job trying to stop water pollution.

And Matt Dillon’s messy-haired musician character is shown by film’s end to be the most courageous of the lot. He systematically, indefatigably works on getting his girlfriend bac, just as he works on getting his musical career off the ground. His no-compromise stance toward realizing his dreams makes him a heroic ideal to which the other characters can only try to emulate.

That said, Singles remains a fairly dumb film. The gag scenes and plot complications are way too predictable. The drab lines and situations given to the characters mirror the drab life-destinies they’re trying to escape. But it gives its characters far more dignity than so many later mating-n’-dating comedies.

And, of course, local viewers l love the many geographic inaccuracies (Sheila Kelley’s character bicycles from south Lake Union across the Fremont Bridge and into the Pike Place Market in successive shots), the now-gone sites (RKCNDY), and the now-gone cameo players (Wayne Cody, Layne Staley).

They were partying like it’s 1999 again last Friday when another WTO protest march took place. This one didn’t directly connote the anniversary of the Seattle trade-meeting debacle but rather noted this year’s meeting in Qatar, a land that doesn’t let such foolishness as freedom or democracy get in the way of making deals and bucks.

Of course, here in the U.S. it’s quite harder these days to demonize something with “World Trade” in its name, without giving an audience all sorts of other unfortunate memories. Thus the banner proclaiming WTC and WTO to be equally disastrous. The rest of the visuals in the march rehashed common protest topics not directly related to word trade (the Iraq sanctions, the drug war, and, of course, Mumia Abu-Jamal).

They’ve torn down the Flag Plaza Pavilion at Seattle Center. Another of the Center’s dwindling inventory of 1962 World’s Fair buildings, it hosted everything from cat shows and rave parties to the touring King Tut artifact show. Bulldozers are now at work preparing the lot for the replacement, Fisher Pavilion (KOMO’s parent company bought the naming rights).

The comforting sights of the Standard Time rainy season in the great PacNW include those of kids defiantly playing at the Center’s International Fountain and a Metro bus’s unwiped windshield portion glistening in another vehicle’s taillight.

THE SOUND TRANSIT LIGHT RAIL SCHEME, approved by tri-county voters back during the Clinton years when Fed bucks for local transit projects were much more feasible to attain, is unraveling fast.

It was first promised to go from Northgate Mall to Sea-Tac Airport by 2004. Now the professional transit planners say they can’t meet their most recent promises of a U District to Sea-Tac line by 2009. They suggest the politicians tell them which segment to build first: Either downtown to U District (with that way-costlee subway tunnel under Capitol Hill) or downtown to South Lander (by Sears). The rest of the plan will have to wait until the following decade, or until the Democrats retake the White House, or both.

Right now, many of the Powers That Be in the downtown biz establishment apparently want to trash the whole rail scheme. Their hired guns on the newspaper editorial pages are issuing forth increasingly shrill screeds against Sound Transit.

They’re not–yet–directly calling for the abandonment of public transport and a return to full-bore highway-building. No, they’re just calling for “further study” of the rail plan. And in the jargon of Seattle governance, “further study” is a well-known euphemism for euthenasia.

My suggestion: Save transit. Dump the planners.

Start from scratch with the Monorail Initiative. Build the whole thing above ground so folk will more likely want to ride on it. Offer riders a chance to sit back and enjoy some local scenery instead of cooping them up in some hole in the ground.

At the very least, replace the subway portion with an above-ground or ground-level route north from downtown.

Above-ground isn’t as cheap as surface trains but far cheaper than tunnels, as well as potentially more popular. It also would provide a new, tourist-friendly visual icon to the cityscape.

(Further arguments for sky-riding can be found at the Friends of the (Seattle) Monorail site.)

NEXT: Words, who needs ’em?

ELSEWHERE:

• Who doesn’t love bizarre LP covers? Nobody, that’s who….

Dinero Habla, Everybody Rides

by guest columnist Doug Nufer

“THEY DIDN’T EVEN give me five minutes to consummate my marriage!” ejaculates from the video on the Primera Plus autobus en route to Zamora, Mexico.

While the able-bodied seaman on the tube is snatched from his wedding in order to perform some mystery mission against a Nazi U-boat, the Spanish subtitles of the American war movie can hardly explain what the hell is happening.

To the people around us, five minutes is neither a joke nor the measure of a man: It’s simply the length of time you wait for a city bus.

Even in the smallest towns, it takes about five minutes for the coming of the next combi (a 10-20 seat van). Fifty cents and a half hour later, you’re where you wanted to go.

While Sound Transit wastes fortunes to conjure a commuter line for car-dependent suburbanites, monorail supporters jump through hoops to provide a better way for city dwellers to get around, and Tim Eyman files initiatives to destroy what public transportation we do have, Mexicans make good use of a system most Americans should envy.

And, before the World Bank began urging that debt-ridden nation to tighten its belts, the system used to be even better.

Some years ago, in a fit of greedy desperation that only a consortium of international investors could love, the government sold the railroads to private companies, who ended passenger service in favor of freight trains.

This wasn’t a complete disaster. Long distance bus rides down there are a lot easier to endure than they are in the U.S., and service between cities is frequent. But then, as the intercity bus lines made room for more passengers, terminals had to expand and so moved far from the centers of cities and towns, making them almost as hard and/or expensive to reach as airports.

A tourist getting about ten pesos for a dollar doesn’t have the same appreciation for value that a resident making the equivalent of $10 a day would have. Between these extremes lies an enormous middle class of people who migrate north of the border to work for most of the year. They send money home to support families and build houses, fill their driveways with pickup trucks and cars packed with stereo systems that seem custom-built for cruising with the music at top volume.

No matter how many vehicles or how much or little money anyone has, though, it’s usually easier to catch a ride than to drive. Unfortunately, $10 is at the upper end of the pay scale for day labor. Offered $4 a day to work in a shoe store ten miles from home, who wouldn’t turn it down? Would you spend $10 riding Metro to and from a job that paid $40 a day?

Whatever the expense, the value of public transportation in Mexico is above reproach. On New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day in Guadalajara, the streets are full of busses going everywhere. The First World idea of tailoring public transit to commuter schedules (cutting service when people don’t have to go to work) doesn’t seem to have trickled down to this civilization.

“People have places to go on the holidays, maybe more than ever,” says the driver. “Why have fewer busses?”

NEXT: Some more of this.

IN OTHER NEWS: Phillips 66 is taking over Tosco, the parent company of Union 76. Will they call the new company “142?” I sure hope so.

ELSEWHERE:

• Sad to say, I’ve only read 19 of last year’s 100 most-often banned books….

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:

• A campaign to preserve the poor man’s Space Needle, the Marysville water tower!…
• How dare this guy name the Hollies or Squeeze among the 25 lamest bands to be into!…
• “A Lexicon of New Orleans Terminology and Speech….”/UL>
  

SINCE LAST FRIDAY, I’ve been remembering the far different Seattle of the fall of 1975.

It was a time of gas lines, of stagflation, of post-Watergate cynicism, of post-Vietnam shellshock, of continuing doldrums in the Boeing-centric Seattle economy.

In short, a perfect time for an up-‘n’-coming hardbitten-journalist wannabe such as myself.

Seattle was still a “company town,” and that company was Boeing. (Microsoft was just getting underway, selling software to hobbyist programmers out of New Mexico.) Boeing had just begun to recover from its massive 1970-71 slump when the U.S. pullout from Vietnam brought drastic military plane-buying cuts, thusly plopping the region right back into recession mode.

(At least Boeing, thanks to its head start in the passenger-jet biz, was less dependent on Pentagon contracts than other planemakers were. That’s why it was able in the ’90s to take over McDonnell Douglas and outlast Lockheed.)

A then-united OPEC (a few years before the Iran revolution set off squabbles and wars between Mideast oil nations) was in one of its price-hiking, supply-restricting movements. Radio Shack sold CB radios with ads claiming they’d help you “Find Gas Fast.” Companies like Gulf, Amoco, and Phillips 66, which had boldly moved in on the Northwest gasoline trade just a few years before, either sold or abandoned their area stations. The great muscle cars and land yachts faded from popularity and rusted on used-car lots (many of which were set up at abandoned gas stations).

Politicians tried to allay citizens’ fears by adopting bland feel-good personas. Gerald Ford was marketed as the emotionally stable, ambitions-in-check anti-Nixon. Jimmy Carter, already running to displace Ford in the White House, billed himself as half good-old-boy, half engineering nerd.

Seattle politics was run, then as now, by a downtown Democratic machine that pretended to be a neighborhood progressive movement. (It did a little more pretending of that sort then than now.)

The machine’s figurehead at the time was Wes Uhlmann, a glib, silver-haired gladhander. Uhlmann’s mayoral regime had survived a police-payoffs scandal and took (perhaps too much) credit for starting Metro Transit and saving the Pike Place Market from high-rise development. He’d retire in 1977, leaving a mayoral race between machine functionary Paul Schell and TV-news pretty boy Charles Royer. Royer would win handily, leaving future generations to deal with Schell.

TOMORROW: The sleaze district, and other places that are gone.

ELSEWHERE:

• Do political activists need simple messages to succeed, just like business-motivation books?
• Today’s competing models of womanhood–Tokyo teens and Dr. Laura….

ONE WEEK AGO, Sound Transit started running morning and evening commuter trains between Seattle and Tacoma (to far fewer than expected riders). Later this winter, a daily Seattle-Everett run will commence.

It marks the real start of the regional transit authority’s operations. (It’s already been running some commuter bus routes, including a few formerly operated by Pierce Transit.)

For at least the first six months, and perhaps another year thereafter, the trains will only run into Seattle in the morning and back out in the evening.

Those of us who reside here in Seatown can’t use the trains to get to the hi-tech jobs being lured to the south and north; but we can enjoy the scenic sunset rides through sprawl and small towns and the yet-unsprawled spots of countryside, into those two economically-bereft yet beautiful industrial cities. (The Everett run also includes lotsa Puget Sound views.) Then, to get back into Seattle you’ll have to ride the ST Express bus down dull old I-5.

The assumption that riders only want to go in one spoke-to-hub direction, or can be made to want to go that way by the machinations of civic planning, is a common mistake among transit bureaucrats. This dream of a Singapore- or Sim City-style ordered-from-above urban community is only one thing the Sound Transit brass has gotten wrong.

They’re also stuck in a similar rut of engineering and systems design. It could be due to the lobbying and salesmanship by the light-rail industry; or it could just be the natural tendancy of timid officials to “play it safe” with off-the-shelf technologies, whether they’re appropriate for this particular area’s needs or not.

Thusly, we get a light-rail technology that can’t climb Seattle’s hills, being put through deep subway tunnels under Capitol Hill and on a neighborhood-bisecting surface route down the Rainier Valley; along a Northgate-to-airport route which, like the commuter-rail route (running with regular passenger cars on, for now, existing Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks), only goes north-south.

As for the exploding growth of travel to and within the Eastside, ST plans only a few more commuter bus routes and some park-and-ride lots.

And as for getting around within Seattle, they offer only the same ol’ Metro buses on the same ol’ clogged surface streets.

And the whole thing’ll cost much, much more than it ought to. Not only because of all the tunnelling and surface construction, but because potential ridership (and hence potential farebox revenue) will inherently be limited to those who need to go only between the light-rail and commuter-rail systems’ limited destinations.

I supported Sound Transit when it came up for a vote back in ’96, flawed as it was. Any alternative to auto-dependence these days is a good thing.

It’s just that it could be a better thing.

What ex-Seattle Weekly publisher David Brewster would like: Putting all the light-rail money into more commuter-hour bus routes, then cutting bus fares, eventually to zero.

What I’d like: The original Monorail Initiative’s cross-city plan, extended south to the airport (and eventually to Tacoma), north to Lynnwood (and eventually to Everett), east along additions to the floating bridges, and with an additional Eastside loop roughly parallelling I-405.

Can this be done? Physically, yes. Fiscally, yes–if there’s the will to see it through.

I don’t mean the “civic will” the daily papers and the politicians talk about–the voters and the populace getting up the guts to do what the politicians ask them to.

It’s the will to lead, so as to eventually get our “leaders” to follow.

TOMORROW: Some non-retail downtown buildings.

ELSEWHERE:

• Could Gore-Lieberman be more liberal than Clinton-Gore?…
• This year’s Forbes list of America’s 100 top celebrities is a curious mix of real movie and music stars, Wall Street financiers, Washington D.C. lobbyists, website operators, and one poet (but no Northwesterners)….
• Remember, you can use those brand-name-food kids’ activity books just as effectively with the store-brand cereals and cookies….