Friday, August 31, 2001

IT'S AN HONOR: The Museum of History and Industry has named yr. o'b'd'n't web-correspondent to a panel that will determine Seattle's 150 most important historical figures. The list, being assembled for the town's 150th birthday (topic of our next MISC print mag; get your story ideas in now!), will appear in The Seattle Times sometime in September. Look for it.

posted by clark 3:10 PM

Tuesday, August 28, 2001

MAYOR MAY NOT, REDUX: Yeah, this is another piece about the Seattle mayoral election, whose primary round is three weeks away as of today.

Specifically, it's about a very strange event last night at A Contemporary Theatre, a performance-art circus billed as a candidates' forum on arts and cultural issues. How strange was it? KIRO-TV news guy Mike James was overheard saying, "This is the weirdest thing I've ever seen."

It started normally enough, with 50 or so protesters staging a sit-in in front of ACT, criticizing city attorney/mayoral candidate Mark Sidran's "civility laws," including his ban on sitting on city sidewalks.

But the event inside got off-script once fringe candidate Richard Lee (producer-host of the cable access show Kurt Cobain Was Murdered) stepped on stage, wearing a dress and holding a video camcorder aimed at his own face.

For the next two hours, no matter what question the moderator (James's former KING colleague Lori Matsukawa) asked, Lee spent his alloted minutes and longer repeating the same rant--that he has supposed proof that Cobain was assassinated (or at least might have been), that city and county officials (including the three candidates at the forum currently in government employ) are involved in a cover-up conspiracy, and that anyone who declines to play along with his verbal attacks is also part of the conspiracy.

In one evening of tiresome theatrics, Lee destroyed any remaining credibility in himself or his "crusade."

Worse, he made Sidran look sane.

Notwithstanding Lee's histrionics, the forum's other six candidates also frequently strayed from the questions at hand, into pre-prepared hype statements.

Sidran, smug and grating as ever, made his usual buzzwords about "civility" and "strong leadership." His answer to a question about high housing costs pushing artists and arts groups out of town: Give more "incentives" (read: subsidies) to private developers, and improve the highways so it would be easier to push the non-wealthy out to Kent and Shoreline.

Incumbent Paul Schell and front-running challenger Greg Nickels made nearly identical, nearly meaningless smooth talk about supporting the arts as harbingers of cultural diversity in a cosmopolitan city at the dawn of a new millennium and so forth. The big difference between the two: Schell defended his veto of changes to the hated Teen Dance Ordinance, while Nickels called for new initiatives to promote safe live shows for under-21s.

Omari Tahir-Garrett, out on bail after charged with hitting Schell with a megaphone in July, repeatedly brought every response back to a call to recognize the problems of minorities, especially minority youth. Such statements, by themselves, would've been good toward reclaiming his credibility within the Af-Am community--but he usually segued straight from that line into his personal cause, the proposed African American Academy project that's been years in the making and was taken out of his hands.

(This is an admittedly incomplete telling of what's really a long story. Tahir-Garrett's career, and his relationship within local black leadership, is much more complicated than that.)

Scott Kennedy, one of the two liberal-progressives in the race, showed up late and kept promoting his non-politician status. He insisted that as a small businessman, a rock musician, and a friend and colleage of artists and arts organizers, he'd be more sympathetic to the arts than other candidates, but didn't specifically propose much on their behalf.

Charlie Chong, the race's other left-of-center guy, was soft-spoken and down-to-earth, and stayed the closest to the topics of Matsukawa's questions. Then, in his closing statement, he called himself an "anti-establishment candidate," humorously said that a Seattle under Sidran would be like a Stephen King horror movie and a Seattle under Nickels would be like "four years of Bonanza reruns" (a probable reference to The Stranger nicknaming Nickels "Hoss" during the 1997 election), and apparently offerred his support to Schell, whom Chong fought hard against in '97.

Yes, things can get weirder still. And they probably will.

posted by clark 4:44 PM

Monday, August 27, 2001

DARK HORSE CANDIDATE?: Scott Kennedy, a software engineer who started the (lovely) BitStar Internet Cafe on Capitol Hill, launched his independent mayoral campaign Sunday evening with a short rally outside the former Denny Way car-rental office where he's installed his campaign HQ. The 50 or so supporters did little to fill the huge parking lot in front of the office.

The advertised highlight was a gig by a Beatles cover band, the Nowhere Men, playing on the building's roof. (The real Beatles, as you assuredly know, played on a London rooftop as their final joint public performance--not the right symbolism when you want to be starting something, such as a political career.) The arrangement of the band on the roof and the audience down below kept the audience from getting within 30 feet of the campaign building, except for one dancing fool of a four-year-old boy.

Kennedy's speech at the event, also performed on the roof, showed inadequate preparation and the lack of seasoned campaign handlers on his team to coach him. He interrupted himself twice, to take some gum out of his mouth and to take an earpiece out of his ear. He didn't have anyone introduce him (you know, someone who could give endearing personal remarks about a candidate which the candidate himself would pseudo-modestly then demure from).

I personally like many of Kennedy's stated platforms and ideas, which you can read about on his own site. I just want him to become more effective at stating them, and at the basic nuts-'n'-bolts of campaigning. After all, voters have always, at least partly, judged a candidate's potential adeptness as an office-holder by his/her adeptness as an office-seeker.

posted by clark 2:17 AM

WAY OFF THE MARK: The P-I unexpectedly endorsed Mark Sidran, the Seattle City Attorney and mayoral candidate loved by nobody but suburban Republicans and the downtown business establishment.

The paper's endorsement editorial (in the tiny P-I Focus corner of the Sunday Seattle Times (the Times hasn't endorsed a candidate for mayor yet)) lauded Sidran as "the right choice for Seattle." (You can, of course, take the term "right" several different ways.)

It praised him as a dynamic, forthright leader who courageously dared to say what big business wants to hear (that the minorities and the poor are the sole creators of their fate) and to do what big business wants done ("cleaning up" the city into a post-democratic theme park where only money and power would matter).

OK, the paper didn't specifically say all that in quite such a skeptical manner. But a careful between-the-lines reading could easily make one suspect the anonymous staff editorial writer might not have totally agreed with the opinions dictated by the paper's publisher, and might have deliberately crafted the piece to show up just how ludicrous and potentially dangerous Sidran is.

Or, the piece might have been drafted by someone who actually admires Sidran and actually believes the arguments it makes on his behalf. If that's the case, the Sidran campaign could be in even bigger trouble than it seems to be.

Just two days before the editorial, a P-I news article noted Sidran's big-money-backed campaign lagged in fourth place in opinion polls. Sidran trails County Councilmember Greg Nickels, incumbent Paul Schell, and populist gadfly Charlie Chong (who's running this time with little more than the name recognition from his '97 mayoral attempt and his previous one term on the City Council). But never you mind those odds, the paper now insists; Sidran's supposedly got lots of fans (many of whom even live within the Seattle city limits!).

The endorsement editorial was accompanied by a David Horsey cartoon depicting four lily-white upscale folk (the only folk Sidran even confers human-being status to), all of whom secretly admire Sidran but won't admit it out loud. It's the dumbest thing Horsey's drawn since his (at least sincere) '94 cartoon wishing Kurt Cobain had taken up hiking instead of heroin. (In the case of the Sidran cartoon, Horsey just might have been instructed by management to promote opinions he didn't personally share, just as the editorial writer just might have. But that's something we might never officially know, one way or the other.)

posted by clark 1:21 AM

Sunday, August 26, 2001

RECLAMATION PROJECT: Some local activists had a great idea, to hold a "Reclaim the Streets" party Saturday afternoon, along the lines of similar events in England and across the U.S.

The premise: A party, a celebration, an outdoor rave of sorts (albeit without a DJ booth) in a big public place, unauthorized and unofficial.

The justification: The streets, and the city, belong to the citizens, not to politicians or cops or retail chains.

The organizers wanted the event to be a celebration, not a protest. Instead of complaining about society, attendees were asked to make positive statements about creating a new world without cars or malls or dumb laws.

But that was enough of a premise to draw the usual protest infiltrators from the Revolutionary Communist Party and other bands; plus individual marchers who believed in taking any opportunity to call attention to fervently believed-in causes (Mumia Abu-Jamal, police brutality).

And, natch, it was enough to draw great phalanxes of cops (who, at one point near the event's end, may have outnumbered the participants).

There were cops in riot gear, cops on bicycles, cops on horses, cops in cars, and cops in a big van. There were lines of cops guarding the Convention Center, a Starbucks, the new Hyatt Hotel, and Pacific Place.

There were pepper-sprayings; there were cop horses sticking their heads out at protesters. There were an estimated 18 arrests (almost 10 percent of the marchers).

"Rioting" on the protesters' side, meanwhile, was limited to just a couple of hammered-at windows at the Gap and Banana Republic, which attracted the extended gazes of the TV news crews, which were apparently out to tell a violent-assault-and-righteous-retribution story no matter what the real situation was.

So why the heavy police over-reaction?

It's been pretty obvious these past few weeks that Mayor Paul Schell, heavily trailing in the polls for his re-election bid, has been staging silly PR stunts to make him look better in the public eye. The amassing of all those cops (clearly instructed to protect private property above all other priorities, just as they were at Mardi Gras) may have been, at least partly, a show intended to make weekend downtown shoppers believe Schell's finally got his act together.

And what of the event itself? How could it have more effectively communicated its message and attracted a larger, more diverse set of supporters?

The "Reclaim the Streets" ideology, borrowed whole from out-of-town and out-of-country events (the first was a protest against a British highway project), wasn't specific to the particular situation of downtown Seattle (or even of U.S. big-city downtowns in general). There are already lotsa Northwesterners who like to live and play where there aren't malls or cars; these people are sometimes called exurbanites or backpackers. People who've chosen to live in town have often done so because they enjoy the bustle and the excitement. A New-New Left celebration in Seattle ought to welcome those who actually like city life, inviting them to help try and take charge of how their city develops.

(Of course, that means it would also have to be inviting toward older people, nonwhite people, non-vegans, and people who don't necessarily enjoy wearing face bandanas.)

posted by clark 3:56 PM

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