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There was a time when the governor’s mansion in this state was in the hands of a “centrist” Republican named Dan Evans.
He was followed by Dixy Lee Ray, a right-winger who ran under a Democratic Party flag-of-convenience. She was followed by John Spellman, another corporate Republican.
Then came Booth Gardner.
He ran in 1984. If you recall, that was the time of Ronald Reagan’s re-coronation (and its accompanying royal jubilee, the L.A. Olympics).
He’d been a state legislator and Pierce County Executive. But his statewide rep was relatively obscure.
He also had the Republican establishment (at the start of its drift into far-right insanity) going against him fierce. (One particularly ludicrous TV attack ad had a heavy-set actor playing a cigar-chomping “big union boss” who’s “got this Gardner guy right in our pocket.”)
What he had going for him was family (Weyerhaeuser family) money and connections, and access to Sen. Henry M. Jackson’s donor/organizer mailing list.
And he had the support of just enough “swing” voters who admired Reagan’s national public image but were less enamored toward Spellman.
Gardner beat Spellman. The Washington governorship has been in Democratic hands ever since.
That’s not to say it’s been easy to lead this state, then or now.
Entrenched interests, inter-regional feuds, the unelected would-be dictatorship of Tim Eyman, our regressive but hard-as-hell-to-change tax system, have all held back the pace of reform (now more desperately needed than ever).
But with Gardner, it all at least seemed possible.
•
Some politicians retire to the golf course. Others find new causes, new campaigns.
In Gardner’s case, his encore on the public stage was thrust upon him, with a diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease just a year after the end of his second term.
As his appearance and health deteriorated (to the point that he had to tell people, “I used to be governor of the state of Washington”), he became an increasingly outspoken advocate for the rights of the terminally ill.
In 2008 he campaigned for a (successful) “death with dignity” initiative.
He took his crusade national with an Oscar-nominated documentary short, The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner. (You can watch part of it at this link.)
architizer.com
via cartoonresearch.com
Lots of people love and remember View-Master 3D photo reels, including those involving dolls based on cartoon characters.
Not many people realize View-Master was invented, and based for the longest time, in Portland.
View-Master’s expertise in making cartoon models and settings was the real basis for the Portland stop-motion animation tradition of Will Vinton (The California Raisins) and Laika Films (Coraline, ParaNorman).
Success Story, a documentary series made by KING-TV and its Portland sister station KGW-TV, produced a live half-hour tour of the View-Master studio and factory in 1960.
A kinescope film of the telecast made its way onto the collector circuit. It’s now been posted online by animation historian, scholar, and restorer Jerry Beck.
The factory was the site of an eco-scandal much later. Drinking water at the plant came from the company’s own supply well, on the factory site. Years later, that well was found to be contaminated with residues from processing chemicals (mostly an industrial solvent). Perhaps 1,000 employees over the years received long-term exposure to the tainted water. The factory closed in 2001; the site’s supposed to be all cleaned up now.
miyavik.deviantart.com, via sodahead.com
Acoustic/emo/neo-folk/whatever singer-songwriter John Roderick has helped bring back an old tradition at the again-locally-owned Seattle Weekly.
In the heritage of such long-remembered Weekly cover stories as “Should Gays Act ‘Gay’?” and “Is ‘Grunge’ Too White?”, Roderick has crafted the zeitgeist-challenging manifesto “Punk Rock Is Bullshit.”
Before we get into the critique of his critique, let’s let his critique speak for itself a little:
Ultimately, punk rock was a disease of the soul, a doctrine of projecting and amplifying feelings of insecurity and fear outward and inward until the whole world seemed like an ice cave. It wasn’t necessary to judge every new piece of art against unwinnable criteria, or ourselves against imaginary standards of altruistic correctness. It wasn’t preordained that fun, lighthearted inspiration was shallow or contemptible; nor was it true that everything sucked, that life sucked, or that the world sucked. Successful art isn’t always garbage, and lazy, shitty art isn’t always teaching us something.
That’s harsh. (Or, in the made-up “glossary of grunge” published by an ignorant NY Times, “Harsh Realm.”)
Did an entire neo-bohemian generation really let itself be suckered into something this terrible?
Well, no.
“Punk rock” meant many different things to many different people.
To some, it was simply the continuation of dirt metal, stripped down for greater immediacy.
To others, it was a movement to strip rock n’ roll back to its garage rock (if not its R&B) roots.
And yes, to some it was an excuse for drinking, drugging, vandalism, and other unhealthy behaviors.
Calvin Johnson famously redefined punk broadly enough to include innocent teenage love songs—just as long as they were created and distributed in adherence to a strict “indie” ideology.
That was a near-exact opposite of Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren’s “cash from chaos” motto, which involved staging scandalous events for maximum publicity (and commercial) value.
Yeah, there were punks who got all self- (and other-) destructive.
But there were also punks who took the DIY ethos seriously, who built venues and labels and movements.
Punk was/is big enough to include skinheads and longhairs; junkies and straight-edgers; riot grrrls and Suicide Girls®; vegans and 7-Eleven fans; born-again Christians and neo-pagans and devout nihilists and even a few Jews.
But, for argument’s sake (and what punk rocker doesn’t like a good argument?), let’s say there’s one particular strain of punk ideology that (1) makes kids believe (for the rest of their lives) that everything completely sucks, and (2) prevents them from doing a damn thing to improve their lives or their world.
It wouldn’t be “punk rock,” whatever that is (see above), that does that.
It’s something within them that does that.
Call it a mental/psychological condition, if you will, with “punk rock” as a thin excuse smeared on top.
As ex-Funhouse bar owner Brian Foss said in response to Roderick,
In my life I’ve always seen joiners, people who need some kind of rule book to live by. Be it religion, or politics, or sports/D&D, or yes, music scenes, some people have little imagination. I’ve also seen people take inspiration and make up their own shit from whatever culture they were exposed to. Something to prime the pump, jump start their own creations.
In my life I’ve always seen joiners, people who need some kind of rule book to live by. Be it religion, or politics, or sports/D&D, or yes, music scenes, some people have little imagination.
I’ve also seen people take inspiration and make up their own shit from whatever culture they were exposed to. Something to prime the pump, jump start their own creations.
Other responses: Megan Seling noting how punk wasn’t intended to defeat Reaganism but help people survive it; Grant Cogswell seeing it as a natural response to the media-conglomerate controlled pre-Internet culture.
With the recent and forthcoming disappearances of so many, many unsnobbily cool places on Capitol Hill, it was perhaps only a matter of time before Canterbury Ale & Eats on 15th Avenue East went away.
Unlike many other closures, though, this is not predicated on the end of its building. The Canterbury’s on the ground floor of an “affordable” apartment building run by Capitol Hill Housing. The building’s staying put. It’s just the Canterbury that’s going, when its lease expires at the end of this year.
It’s a long story that apparently has to do with a long-running dispute between CHH and Stefanie Roberge, who’s owned the Canterbury for the past 13 years.
There’s already a “Save Our Canterbury” website.
And, yes, the place is indeed worth saving.
It dates back to the mid-1970s, but was designed in that “Olde English” kitsch style popular among college-student dive bars at least a decade before that. There’s even a full suit of armor in the entryway.
The space wends its way through several adjoining rooms. These contain shuffleboard, foosball, and pool tables, and a classic arcade video game or two and a real fireplace.
The bar food is bar food, not “pub grub” or “cuisine.” The drinks are good n’ stiff. It has microbrews these days, but they’re not the focal point.
Moreover, it’s a place without airs or pretensions. Artists, students, construction workers, jocks, office clerks, nurses from nearby Group Health—all these and more can be found there on any given evening.
Let’s keep it that way.
roadfood.com
For sale: One herd of cows (ceramic, plywood, fabric, paint, etc.). Comes with a supply of warm, gooey cinnamon rolls and a classic cafe.
After 25 years, Jeanne Mae Barwick is retiring from Mae’s Phinney Ridge Cafe in Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood. She’s put the place up for sale, and threatens to close it in March or April if an appropriate buyer isn’t found.
There’s been a cafe at this location since the 1920s. But when Barwick took it over in 1988, she transformed it from a neighborhood destination into a city institution.
phinneywood.com
Michael Stern at Roadfood.com describes it as “a multi-room cafe decorated everywhere with pictures, statues, blow-up dolls and every sort of nick-nack imaginable, all depicting cows (an ode to the proprietor’s Wisconsin roots).”
On weekend mornings, it can take as long as an hour to get seated. Besides the cinnamon rolls (baked in-house), it offers large portions of your basic American breakfast and lunch fare, plus such specialties as trout and eggs.
It closes at 3 p.m. daily; in offering the business for sale, Barwick notes a new owner could make more money by opening for dinner and offering alcohol.
In an email sent to customers, Barwick says she may hold an “open house and garage sale” at the cafe in March. Depending on what items a new owner may want to keep, the sale could include the cafe’s cow-shaped salt and pepper shakers “and other miscellaneous moo-morabilia.”
Barwick also says she’ll continue to host her popular “Karaoke Bingo” once a month at the Greenwood Senior Center.
(Cross-posted with Unusual Life.)
via quietbabylon.com
There’s quite a story behind the controversial “Keep Calm and Rape a Lot” T-shirt.
Turns out none were ever sold or even made.
It was offered on Amazon as a print-on-demand item, along with several hundred other slogans. This was done by a company that used a software algorithm to create the phrases.
Tim Maly offers a very poetic account of the fiasco at his site Quiet Babylon. In it, Maly also offers this image of the e-tail realm:
Amazon isn’t a store, not really. Not in any sense that we can regularly think about stores. It’s a strange pulsing network of potential goods, global supply chains, and alien associative algorithms with the skin of a store stretched over it, so we don’t lose our minds.
fox broadcasting via cbs news
Following Netflix’s online streaming debut of House of Cards (a remake of an acclaimed UK TV series), its even more highly anticipated revival of Arrested Development will show up in May.
As with House of Cards, all 14 episodes (up from an original order of 10) will show up on the service’s menu screens on the same day. All the producers say about the content is that each episode will focus on a different character.
It’s been seven years since the critically-beloved, low-rated sitcom ended its original 2.5-year run on Fox. Fans all have their ideas on what they want to have happened to the highly dysfunctional Bluth family. Here’s mine:
<FAN FICTION MODE>
</FAN FICTION MODE>
Meanwhile, one Helen Rittelmeyer at FirstThings.com makes a good case that Arrested Development could be an uncredited remake of The Brothers Karamazov!
"Children play in the yard of Ruston home, while a Tacoma smelter stack showers the area with arsenic and lead residue. Ruston, Washington, August 1972."
In the 1970s, those early heady days of the U.S. ecology movement, the federal Environmental Protection Agency sent photographers into the field, to document environmental problems and programs around the country.
As it happened, these photographers also captured many moments of life across these United States.
Ninety of these images are in “Searching for the Seventies,” an exhibit at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The exhibit opens March 8 runs through Sept. 9.
"Housing adjacent to a U.S. Steel plant. Birmingham, Alabama, July 1972."
The EPA project, known at the time as “DOCUMERICA,” was inspired by the depression-era Farm Security Administration photography project. Just as that project translated the “dust bowl” and other phrases into real lives, DOCUMERICA was meant to show the daily realities behind pollution, gas shortages, and dump sites.
"Michigan Avenue, Chicago (couple on street), July 1975."
And, just like the Farm Security Administration photos did, the EPA photos have become an historic glimpse into their time, bringing the past to vibrant life.
"Two girls smoking pot during an outing in Cedar Woods near Leakey, Texas. (Taken with permission.) One of nine pictures near San Antonio. Leakey, Texas, May 1973."
(Cross-posted with Unusual Life.)
scarfolk.blogspot.co.uk
No, today’s princess is not about romance: it’s more about entitlement. I call it “girlz power†because when you see that “z†(as in Bratz, Moxie Girlz, Ty Girlz, Disney Girlz) you know you’ve got trouble. Girlz power sells self-absorption as the equivalent of self confidence and tells girls that female empowerment, identity, independence should be expressed through narcissism and commercialism.
These Streets, the musical revue/play at ACT (running through March 10) about four women in the ’90s Seattle rock scene and two (mostly) supportive boyfriends, was constructed as a series of non-linear “moments.”
Scenes bounced between the past and present; the “past” storyline covers five years in the characters’ lives. Many of these short scenes and mini-monologues depicted single ideas or emotions.
In the show’s spirit, this piece is also a sequence of moments.
I mentioned in my 1995 book Loser how the national media’s false “grunge” stereotype included “no women in sight, not even as video models.”
But in the real Seattle scene, women were involved in leading roles from the start. Women were singers, instrumentalists, managers, promoters, venue owners, zine publishers, photographers, DJs, and record-label owners.
In keeping with the scene’s ethos, most of these women weren’t vying for fame and fortune. (The exception, Courtney Love, already had a record deal before she came here.)
But then a scene that, to many of its members, was an alternative to the major-label machine, became re-defined as fodder FOR the major-label machine.
The global music industry, at what turned out to be its peak of money and power, trawled Seattle fishing for superstars. The Gits were negotiating with a label when singer Mia Zapata was killed. Seven Year Bitch released one album on Atlantic, then broke up. But most of the scene’s women were ignored.
Over the years, “grunge nostalgia” books and documentaries (most made by out-of-towners) continued to ignore artists from the scene who hadn’t become big stars, including the women.
One of Harley and Rudinoff’s goals with the play was to remember this forgotten history.
These Streets, along with its concurrent poster-art and oral-history exhibit at the Project Room gallery on Capitol Hill, received massive coverage in local and national media.
The show includes parts of 18 vintage songs, originally recorded by 14 different female-fronted Seattle acts. Having four different characters singing the songs allowed the show’s makers to feature diverse musical material, from ballads (“power” and other) to straight-out punk blasts.
If any of those bands at the time had received a fraction of the publicity These Streets received, who knows what could have happened?
In keeping with the do-it-yourself spirit, These Streets was staged and produced by Gretta Harley and Sarah Rudinoff, who’d also written it (with Elizabeth Kenny).
Kenny and Rudinoff played the older versions of two of the characters. Harley sang and played guitar in the show’s tight backup band. Harley had been in the ’90s rock scene with the bands Maxi Badd, Danger Gens, and Eyefulls. She and Rudinoff currently perform as the duo We Are Golden.
ACT Theatre provided the auditorium space and various production services, under its “Central Heating Lab” program. (Carlo Scandiuzzi, ACT’s executive director, had promoted punk and new-wave gigs at the Showbox in the early 1980s.)
Harley, Rudinoff, and Kenny spent two years developing the script and score, based in part on interviews with some 40 Seattle-scene veterans. Twenty-three of these women were featured in historical graphics installed in the ACT lobby.
The show’s present-day storyline involves five of the six characters (yes, that’s a plot spoiler) reminiscing about their days of non-stardom, while surveying their later lives of houses, kids, divorces, and stints in rehab.
And they still have the urge to make music and art, to be on stage, to be loud and passionate in front of a crowd.
The world of their youth, the pre-dot-com Seattle of 1989-94, has largely vanished. The city isn’t the same and neither are they.
According to Harley, the present-day scenes refer to a time when “you’re in this stage of life and you look back and take ownership of it. But then you’re also looking forward for first time in a very particular way. I hope the show helps to illuminate that ownership of this time in our lives, and also look back and say, ‘Hey kid, you had a lot of guts to get up and do that.'”
Harley says the making of These Streets was “a great experience. People who lived it seem to really love it; they feel that it’s very authentic. A couple of people said it inspired them to pick up music again.”
While no further performances have been scheduled past its three-week run, “we’re taking it one step at a time at this point.”
(Cross-posted with City Living.)
editorandpublisher.com
Former Seattle Times staffer Glenn Nelson has thoughts of his own about the paper’s pending online paywall (or, as he calls it, its “digital tin cup”).
Nelson mentions how, following his Times years, he served in several “subscription-model Internet startups.”
At those places, Nelson kept fretting that the Times would suddenly wake up and smell the digital coffee, then trot out online products based on the vast manpower the paper had (at the time) in sports, entertainment, food, and business coverage, and in photojournalism. (Nelson doesn’t think a better Times local-news site would have mattered, because “general news already was being rendered a commodity on the Internet.”)
These sites, had they been created, would have blown away any indie-startup competition.
But they never showed up.
Meanwhile, news-biz pundit Alan D. Mutter dissects why many people under the age of 45 don’t like print newspapers. It’s because they’re just too inconvenient to have around.
Mutter quotes venture-capital exec Mary Meeker as claiming…
…that young people don’t want to own CDs, haul around books, buy cars, carry cash, do their own chores, or be committed to a full-time job. Instead, they use their smartphones to buy, borrow, or steal media; rent shared cars at home and book shared rooms when they travel; hire people to buy groceries or cut the grass; and use apps from Starbucks and Target to pay for lattes and redeem coupons. Many of the digital natives even prefer short-term gigs that allow them to arrange their work around their life, rather than arrange their life around their work.
Actually, many younger (and older) adults would like full time jobs if there were any around to be gotten. But that’s beside the point here.
More important is Mutter’s observation that…
…The warmed-over digital fare offered by the typical newspaper falls well short of the expectations of two whole generations of consumers who are not only empowered by technology but also damn well sure of how to get what they want.
via vintageseattle.org and capitolhillseattle.com
In 1964, Seattle voters soundly defeated an “open housing†ordinance that would have let anyone live anywhere. It lost by more than 2-to-1.
