MISCmedia for 3/9/01
The I-5 Jive

IT'S BEEN A WILD COUPLE OF WEEKS for many of us. So today, something lighter, from my forthcoming Seattle photo book with ace shutter-clicker Lori Lynn Mason.

FOR THE LONGEST TIME, I believed the Interstate Highway System was one of the things that ruined American society in my lifetime.

It destroyed urban neighborhoods, ripped cities' internal social fabric, and propagated suburban sprawl. It destroyed the glorious creativity that was once roadside America, and instead gave us malls and bland chain motels.

But I've more recently learned to like a few things about the freeways, particularly our own I-5. Still not necessarily as a road, but as an engineering feat and a public artwork.

So it was easy to see the idea behind a poster some folks put up around town last year, trying to promote car-free and greener cities. The poster's illustration of a fantasized post-car future had I-5 still standing (as was the Kingdome), only used for bicycles and P-Patch gardens.

There's a beauty to the freeway, both graceful and grandiose.

Especially where it rises into the sky, and where its lanes combine and recombine with other highways' lanes. Such spots include the Spokane Street interchange with the West Seattle freeway, and the almost Greek-ruin-esque pillars west of Capitol Hill.

The freeway's sheer, outscaled beauty in these places makes one almost forgive its sins.

Almost.

NEXT: Another piece of the Seattle character--its work ethic.

ELSEWHERE:

• Selling Buddhism to hip white Americans: Emphasize the meditation and the personal growth, leave out the religion and the self-discipline....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• The end of our little makeover parable.
• PBS discovers marketing to kids.
• Courtney Love reinvents herself as an anti-major-label crusader.
• Handicapping the Seattle mayoral race.
• The local Mardi Gras ought to be just as dumb and naked, just less fight-prone.
• Fun, sort of, with earthquakes.
• Hardcore porn producers tone down their works for a new mainstream market.
• Comparing a couple of WTO protest videos.
• That integral aspect of the Seattle zeitgeist, complaining.
• Previewing a whole empire of MISCmedia products.
• Does the "Northwest Lifestyle" personality type even exist?
• An amateur experiment in age-regression therapy.
• A fantasy-fandom HQ pulls a disappearing trick.
• A photographic ode to the wonders of snow in Seattle.
• How a conspiracy theorist might view the power-crisis mania.
• Complaining about the Filmlooked versions of Red Dwarf.
• Learning to like Valentine's Day.
• Parts one and two of a cash-strapped single mom's travails thru the welfare bureaucracy.
• A personal account of being pushed out of dot-com employment.
• A fashion makeover gone very wrong.
• Parts one and two of a mild pique of jealousy for Mexico's public-transport system.
• Amazon.com tries the wrong way to become a respectable company.

ARCHIVES:

• 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1986-94 columns
• Reviews of literature & art, nonfiction & culture criticism, movies & videos, and music & noise
• Longer articles and essays
• Some slightly weird little fiction pieces
• X-Word crossword puzzles, now with on-screen solving
• Cyber Stuff, links to cool and/or useful sites
• A listing of many Things I Like (and a few things I hate)
• The origin and future of MISCmedia