“Marijuana is now Washington state’s No. 8 leading agricultural product. In other news, Cheetos and Ho-Hos remain the state’s leading imports.”

Actually, no. Frito-Lay has a plant just off the Columbia in Vancouver USA, and Hostess is still ensconced in Seattle on Dexter (or “Dextrose”) Avenue.

Now we know why Spokane’s called “the lilac city.” The Spokesman-Review newspaper has forcibly outed Mayor Jim West, a onetime right-wingnut in the State Legislature, as a public homophobe but a closeted gay and, allegedly, as a long-ago child molestor. West denies the last part, but has admitted to having sex with men in the past.

It’d be sooooo easy to simply dis West as another dangeorus hypocrite, but I see something more poignant, more sad. Like most homosexuals in most of Euro/American society in most of modern history, West had to conceal his true self from the public world around him. As someone who chose the profession of politician representing conservative monied interests, he apparently felt he had to “double-closet” himself by outspokenly supporting the suppression of people such as himself.

One particularly ironic part: Spokane’s traditionally been an oasis of progressive-populist politics amid the reactionary-dominant deserts of eastern Washington and northern Idaho. It’s one of those places where gays gather to escape the bigoted attitudes once expressed in public by West. Last year, Spokane civic promoters floated the idea of creating a specific gay-nightlife district, expressly to create the lucrative urban image of a “creative hub.”

L’affaire West is a personal tragedy, irregardless of whether or not the boy-abuse part is true. I don’t go as far as the Seattle Times, which insists West resign. But I do believe he ought to pubilcly atone for his past public stances. He’s blundered himself (or rather, been shoved) into the opportunity of a lifetime. He can call, from deep inside the Republican Party’s street level, for an end to the GOP’s cynical hatemongering.

…in the current Capitol Hill Times, expanding on my recent thoughts i.r.t. the silly Republican drive to split Washington into two states.

…to Gwendolyn Knight, the grande dame of Seattle painters, whose work only received “serious” professional attention following the death of her more famous hubby Jacob Lawrence.

I GET TO SPEND this sunny Saturday all inside, giving a fourth thorough scrub-down to MISC Towers in preparation for its open showing on Sunday. Yes, you can view this lovely little jewel of a hi-rise condo, and then make it your very own. It’ll be open 1-4 p.m. There’s nothing worthwhile on TV then (I’ve checked); the ski slopes will all be mushy and gross; you’ve really no excuse not to come down. A professional representative of the real estate industry will be on hand to answer all of your concerns.

BILL WHITE BELIEVES “there needs to be a new genre created to describe Seattle’s country music. It is as different from Americana and alt-country as Burgundy is from Chablis. Closer to European folk music than the hard-kicking roots music of the South, [Jesse] Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter evoke a Scandinavian sense of dread that savagely denies itself the merriment of a Tennessee waltz.”

There’s a reason for this uniqueness, and it’s called Glitterhouse Records. Thanks to them, many of Seattle’s leading alt-country acts (the Walkabouts, Terry Lee Hale, et al.) have typically had great distribution in Europe but a spotty (if any) market presence on our own continent.

Thus, Seattle alt-country’s been defined less by attempts to re-create the pre-Opryland country sound, and more by an intellectualized, upscale, English-as-a-second-language Euro audience, and by Euro-influenced imagery of the American open road, American isolation, and American detachment. (Cf. the US-set films of Wim Wenders and Lars Von Trier.)

IT’S NOW A MONTH since my father died. I’ve got more to say about that, and might post it soon.

In the meantime, please be edified by this remembrance of the mother of an acquaintance of mine.

SOME REPUBLICAN LEGISLATORS are suggesting that Eastern Washington secede into a separate state. I wouldn’t mind that, actually. When the original Oregon Territory was split in two back in the mid-19th century, it should have been cut east-west instead of north-south. Under the new scheme, we’d keep our two U.S. Senators; the realm of Hanford and the Gorge Ampitheatre would get two of its own.

I’d also like to see statehood for Washington DC, and for certain “blue” territories that sometimes get dominated by their “red” outskirts in state and federal elections (NYC, Chicago, etc.).

We haven’t been among the local-politics sites that have followed the Gregoire-Ross gubernatorial count hour-by-hour. We figured by election night that the race would drag out to automatic-recount status. The only surprise is that it’s Rossi, a “moderate” Republican who nevertheless ran plenty of ordinary-Republican attack ads, who’s in the teensy-tiny lead for the time being.

…accidentally sent to a parody Bush website, GOP election chicanery’s going on in our state too. (Note the county names.)

…Congressional candidate Dave Reichert’s hair.

…in rural Eastern Washington can be found today at the unlikely spot of SexNewsDaily.com. Scroll about halfway down the hereby-linked page to find the memories of one “Larry K.” concerning the girls he knew back home, who drank and cavorted like rebel girls everywhere but who disdained abortion or even contraception—because they saw what used to be called the “shotgun wedding” as a path to an at least marginally-better existence.

Mr. K also chides college-grad feminists for not seriously considering the plight of the non-affluent:

“To lower class women the world doesn’t look like patriarchy; it looks like it’s run by a class of women and men who run it to their own advantage.… Feminism failed because it failed to seriously consider the fears of the mass of women who don’t have many options.”

I also see the world, or at least the non-Moslem world, as controlled by “a class of women and men who run it to their own advantage.”

White affluent women are the second most privileged class in this country. It’s not surprising for such a woman to see only affluent men above her socioeconomically, and then to perceive the whole of society as “The Patriarchy.”

I’m not denouncing such women. It’s easy to fall into limited perspectives. It’s harder to imagine life from somebody else’s point of view.

But it’s vital.

THE WASHINGTON STATE LOTTERY’S been running TV spots fantasizing about a big winner buying the Space Needle and moving it from Seattle to the remote Eastern Washington town of Moses Lake. Some viewers might see the ads’ computer-animated imagery of wide-load trucks transporting the Needle across Snoqualmie Pass and imagine it represents just another outmoded tribute to individual greed.

But the ads’ clever creators are also tapping into another fantasy—that of transferring wealth and prestige away from Seattle (where the economy’s been horrid lately) to rural Washington (where the economy’s been even worse, and has been for a much longer period of time). It’s a blatant exploitation of what lotteries, and gambling in general, have always exploited—the dream of the futureless underclass citizen finally Making It.

True, the Needle’s fictional purchaser in the commercials isn’t depicted as a country cracker or a world-beaten working stiff, but the implication’s all there: Buy a lottery ticket and, just maybe, you can transcend your dead-town life.

‘A BRIEF HISTORY of banned music in the United States” contains snippets about various censorship drives, conservative and/or “radical” denunciations of songs and singers, and other assorted sanctimonious nonsense (including Wash. state’s thankfully overturned “erotic music” legislation).

…and, as the commentators have commentated, it’s a challenge to find things to be thankful for (other than the ol’ “at least things aren’t worse” standby).

On top of the mass murder, war, riots, earthquake, dead dot-coms, runaway Boeing execs, general economic malaise, and other calamities affecting this world, nation, and region this year, government analysts just announced Washington state’s unemployment rate is the highest in the nation. And that’s before the 32,000-ish Boeing layoffs kick in.

And now comes something bound to dishearten the most hardy U.S. proponents of the war in Afghanistan–its stunning, nearly-complete success.

This was supposed to go on smoldering for months and years of stalemate. Now, the Taliban are only holding on to four provinces and a couple of surrounded townships; and that principally due to foreign mercenary soldiers. By year’s end, the Taliban could be crushed. Their house guest and patron Osama bin Laden could be captured any month now, or maybe he’ll just disappear as just another powerless refugee, or maybe he’ll be found dead of natural causes sometime next Autumn.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The Pentagon/GOP strategists almost admittedly wanted the start of Cold War II, the resumption of what some Vietnam-era activists called “the permanent war economy.”

This was supposed to be so pervasive, so intense, and so drawn-out that three decades’ worth of domestic anti-military sentiment would permanently disappear. The public would unanimously support the re-direction of the federal money spigot back toward weapons contractors.

Citizens daring to speak non-Limbaughesque points of view were to be silenced, either by the shouts of mass disapproval or the heavier hand of new anti-dissent regulations. We were expected to rabidly cheer the piece-by-piece dismantling of due process under the law. Even the mildly authority-questioning satires of Saturday Night Live and e-mail joke lists, the mid-October conventional wisdom went, would have to fall in line with a new and permanent spirit of disciplinary obedience, or face publc obsolescence.

Instead, we’ve got a war that debuted in the fall and just might leave the airwaves in midseason. (Unless, of course, the Bushies try to get it renewed by adding the plot-twist of invading another country or two.)

Maybe, instead, some of us could start scripting our own midseason replacement. One with the far more difficult (hence more intriguing) storyline of trying to build a lasting peace and a more equitable lot for the folk (including the female folk) of that once-obscure land.

Call your cable or satellite provider (or, more directly, your Congressional representatives). Tell them you want to see The Peace Show.

(This article’s permanent link.)

I KNEW I’D SEE Lars von Trier’s film Dancer in the Dark, so I decided not to read Don Wallingford’s excellent Tablet review-essay beforehand. I should have. That way, I’d have known it’d be two and a half hours long, and would have a scene of almost unwatchably graphic violence at its midpoint.

What I knew about the movie when I went in: It stars Bjork, in a Cannes festival-prize role. It alternated hyperrealistic dramatic scenes (in von Trier’s handheld “wobbly cam” style) with musical numbers shot with 100 stationary video cameras, featuring Bjork’s current style of orchestrally-augmented techno. Her character is slowly going blind, and so will her character’s son if she doesn’t save up for an operation.

And it’s set in rural Washington state in 1964.

As one who’d lived in rural Washington state in 1964, I was of course curious to see how well von Trier could capture the look and feel of the place, especially since the film was mostly made in Sweden. (A few minutes of location footage were shot here, by a second-unit director).

Von Trier got the look almost exactly. The cars and trucks weren’t all shiny, collector-restored ’64 vehicles but lived-in working vehicles from several prior model years. The costumes were appropriately rural salt-O-the-earth. Important props held accurate regional touches (an Almond Roca candy tin, a Great Northern freight train).

There’s even a subplot about a community-theater production of The Sound of Music, with a reference to the cranky-nun character (the role played in the Sound of Music movie by Seattle’s own Marni Nixon, better known for dubbing the leading ladies’ songs in that and many other film musicals)!

And the characters (despite the cast’s half-suppressed Euro accents) were pure Nor’Wester–country but emphatically not redneck; modest folk of quiet self-respect and unassuming centeredness.

(The only thing that looked out of place was the Scandi-modern architecture of the eye clinic.)

Into this well-realized setting, von Trier weaves a tale that’s pure fantasy, about the clashes of fantasies among (and within) individuals.

Bjork’s character, Selma, claims to be enthralled by old Hollywood musicals. But she’s built her whole life and personal identity around another Hollywood formula, the tragic heroines of three-hanky weepers such as An Affair to Remember or Dark Victory. Everything Selma does is in the spirit of self-sacrifice and in a view of her life as a predestined, linear path toward certain doom; from which song-and-dance fantasies are the only, temporary, escapes.

Almost until the end, Selma could have gotten off of her mostly self-imposed trajectory.

She could have allowed her wannabe suitor into her heart. She could have let more people know of her condition and her son’s need for a sight-saving operation. She could have allowed friends to help her raise money for the operation. When her landlord steals the money she’s been saving up, she could have walked away from his demand that she kill him. At the resulting murder trial, she could have told the truth on the witness stand. In prison, she could have accepted a highpowered attorney’s offer to take on her case, and figured out some way to pay for it without giving up on the son’s operation.

But Selma had come to America envisioning it as the land of the movies.

And in the movies, at least in the old-Hollywood movies of Selma’s fascination, there’s no divergence from the script.

MONDAY: Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics–or is he?

REMEMBER: It’s time to compile the highly awaited MISCmedia In/Out List for 2001. Make your nominations to clark@speakeasy.org or on our handy MISCtalk discussion boards.

ELSEWHERE:

• Saving the endangered landmarks of ’50s chain-restaurant architecture….

THE STEADILY RIGHTWARD-DRIFTING Pee-Eye ran a big feature package last month on rural Washington state’s political climate for Indecision 2000.

The piece was full of the usual Grumpy Small-Town Conservatives (an archetype made for urban consumption if there ever was one). They dutifully blamed all of non-urbanized Washington’s economic problems on pesky bureaucrats and, in one interviewee’s description, “environmental Communists” meddling in these salt-O-the-earth folks’ need to make a rightful off-the-land living.

The reality, natch, is more complex.

The main reason for the economic gap between greater Seattle and the rest of Washington is that the Metroplex has had this here boom in hi-techy and other professional employment this past decade; resulting in the traffic jams, the real-estate hyperinflation, the proliferation of “Market Price” gourmet restaurants, the Blob-shaped music museum, and all the other detrius of gentrification we’ve complained about here.

But, despite the cyber-libertarians’ occasional claims that the PC Age would result in the death of cities (since, these pundits used to profess, doesn’t everybody really want to live in horse country?), eastern and southwestern Washington remained stuck in 1991-recession conditions.

The same global-corporate machinations that clogged Issaquah with condos kept farm commodity prices low, while diverting more pennies of the consumer food dollar toward processors and middlemen and marketers (which, in turn, have been merging and consolidating as fast as the financiers can close the deals).

The timber biz is in a similar predicament, with three additional complications:

• The rise on the world market of cheap wood stocks from Indonesia and other countries with low wages and few enforced environmental protections;

• The legacy of two or three decades’ overcutting here; which has pretty much just left the most environmentally-sensitive old-growth forests left (aside from the timber-company-run “tree farms” that are still years away from “reharvesting”); and

• Consolidation and automation within the sawmill side of the biz; allowing companies to close smaller mills and blame the environmentalists.

A true progressive movement in this country, somethiing along the lines of the old-line Minnesota and Wisconsin rural populists, would be able to capitalize on these real reasons for rural recession. It would feed this simmering frustration into a movement to check corporate power and promote sustainable forestry and agriculture.

Not “environmental Communism,” but a green-but-not-red campaign that would preserve both the land and the people who’ve depended upon it.

The leaders of today’s Democratic Party, concerned almost exclusively with raising $$ from the likes of Archer Daniels Midland and courting voters from affluent suburbs, couldn’t care less.

They’ve all but officially written off wide swaths of the nation’s heartland to the Republicans, who are more than willing to accept country folk as voters, volunteers, talk-show callers, and newspaper-interview subjects–all while the GOP politicians continue to prop up the pro-corporate policies that leave farming and timber communities stuck in their rut.

TOMORROW: The disappearance of the old-fashioned bicycle.

ELSEWHERE:

• Ideas–what a concept!…
• “The business of America is show business, and show business isn’t always pretty….”

AS PROMISED about a month ago, here’s my reiteration of my sordid past with current Republican gubernatorial candidate and sometime talk-radio hatemonger John Carlson.

It’s a tale that goes back two decades and a few months, to the start of his career.

I was editor of the UW Daily. Carlson was an up-and-coming political operative who, thanks to a little frathouse gladhanding, had become a student representative on the Board of Student Publications.

Two of Carlson’s buddies had submitted freelance pieces to the paper. One was a dull profile of country singer Larry Gatlin, written on one of those old script-typeface typewriters. The arts and entertainment editor, Craig Tomashoff (later with People magazine) asked the writer to resubmit it on a regular typewriter, with changes. The revised version was still in script-type and was only marginally better; Tomashoff declined to use it.

Carlson’s other pal submitted a “humor” piece for the opinion page about Ted Kennedy (then challenging incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination). I forget the specifics of the “jokes,” but I think one of them was that a President Ted would have no qualms about sending our boys into war, having already been a killer. I ran it, but with the more gruesome and potentially libelous remarks toned down.

I would soon learn that no matter how glibly Carlson boasted about his hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, he could instantly turn into a sniveling self-proclaimed victim when he didn’t get everything he wanted.

He put in a motion to the board to have me fired as editor, proclaiming me a one-man PC Thought Police out to spitefully stifle his noble friends’ courageous voices of dissent.

At the board meeting, only Carlson’s two freelancer pals spoke in favor of his motion, which was defeated (I either don’t remember the vote tally or never knew it).

It soon came out that this was all part of a larger scheme of Carlson’s. He was raising money from rich guys to start his own right-wing paper, The Washington Spectator. Its content was fashioned after similar unofficial right-wing papers at Dartmouth and a few other campuses; lotsa cheap insults, borderline-racist “jokes,” wholesale character-assassination attacks on just about everybody who wasn’t a conservative, all of it in the supposed name of protecting family values or Christian heritages or the free-market system.

Carlson went back to the Board of Student Publications when his Spectator was ready to roll. He wanted to use the Daily‘s on-campus dropoff spots for his paper on Daily non-publication days. The board turned him down. He threw another tantrum, calling on the moneyed and powerful men he was already sucking up to to try to force a deal through the UW bureaucracy.

Even without the coveted Daily drop boxes, Carlson’s Spectator got enough attention to help Carlson get funding for his own conservative think tank, which led to his newspaper columns, his radio bully pulit (emphasis on the “bully” part), his KIRO-TV commentary slots, his campaigns to kill affirmative action and public transportation in Washington state, and now his drive to become the state’s chief executive.

It should be said that Carlson’s own signed material in the Spectator wasn’t as insulting or as bigoted as some of the material in the other off-campus conservative papers during the Reagan era. Carlson probably was wary of anything that could haunt him in a future run for high office.

And I don’t believe he personally disliked me, or even really wanted me ousted as Daily editor.

He was simply perfectly willing, at the time, to step over anyone on his way to the top.

Some who’ve known him in more recent years tell me he’s become a civil, polite gent in private, even as he remains a smirking demagogue in public.

But if, through some unfortunate happenstance, he becomes governor of the state of Washington, we all could be in for a wild ride. The moment any legislator or separately-elected department head says anything different from his line, the second one piece of his legislative agenda gets voted down, will he turn on the crocodile tears to his zillionaire benefactors again? Will he whine about being the trampled-upon little victim, just because he wanted to give more powers and privileges to those who already have most of these?

TOMORROW: Can Stephen King jump-start the e-book biz? Should he?

ELSEWHERE:

• The next great post-Napster hope?…

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:

• The recursive trap that is media writing about media writing about media etc. etc. (found by Media News)….
• I predict: More women would have mammograms if they seemed this fun…./UL>