Seattle Theater [2005]

Dear KB: Below you will find a letter I addressed to Misha Berson of the Seattle Times. Ms. Berson replied that if they were to publish it, I would have to reduce it to 500 words, but suggested I try one of the weeklies, which is what I am doing now.
I then suggested that the letter might serve as the opening salvo for a forum, which is probably even less likely to be vented in The Times, but which I am suggesting here, too. The piece may, of course, no I am sure it is, too long as well for your available real estate, I have already pushed some parts into footnotes, and so it is like so many of the local trolls, sprightly on top but bottom-heavy. I keep some nicely inflammatory ammo in reserve in the event of .... I don't know... say, a New York Review of Books type ongoing ex-change. However, I expect that even if the idea of a forum proves uninteresting to you but that you want to publish a less condensed version than would the Seattle Times, you would afford Ms. Berson room. Ms. Berson bit at my attempt to get her goat when I called her a "mere notifier," and I replied that she ought to use the power [of her position], since sports writers - who also have a lot more fun [than do arts reviewers hereabouts], can write "throw the bum out."
A forum of course might involve rejoinders from the artistic directors of what I call "the big three", but perhaps also from some those of the smaller venues, who have half a mind left. Other contributors I would suggest, aside the two theater folk on your staff, might be Steve Pearson of the U.W. Drama School; Herbert Blau, of the Department of English, who has had much to do with theater; Shierry Weber Nicholson, [Exact Imagination: Late Writings, On Adorno's Aesthetics, as fine a book on how two great minds -Adorno & Benjamin's -interacted , in the event this sort of thing interests you; my fellow visiting scholar in Germanics, and a better aesthetician than I; and my purely name-cousin Lee Roloff, who is in charge of the Jungian troupe here, and used to teach aesthetics and theater at Northwestern;] which would lend a few added and different colors to the spectrum. Blind copies, of this communication, went to all those mentioned in the letter, and are available on request in the event.
I am also posting the letter in its near essay ramble at the Seattle page of my developing home site:
http://roloff.freeservers.com/photo4.html
Sincerely yours, M.R.
Something that, Misha Berson, in the Seattle Times, quoted Sharon Ott as saying in her piece on Ott's officially unexpected, sudden, leave-taking as artistic head of the Seattle Repertory Theater -- that "It's part of the Scandinavian make-up or something that it's easier to go out on a boat [1] than to see something that might make you think or challenge you. ... We, of all the arts, should be doing the new and controversial and sparking criticism, and it's hard to do in this town, because the audience isn't necessarily there"[2] -- caught my eye and dropped into this mosquito's mind-puddle, where it has been festering, germinating for some time, now to sting. -- The Seattle Audience indeed is a subject that might make for an extended exchange in one of the indigenous papers, so as to confound the audience to which Ms. Ott refers [Gordon Edelstein made similar comments at his leaving] into some awareness, and I will share observations & suggestions; rather than simply blow the usual Orca of an expletive.
When I started to see theater in Seattle ten years ago, parched of theater for three years though of little else, in Baja Sur, I did not think that I had ever, or would ever, see anything as consistently awful, rarely exceptional. And that includes the audience as much as many of the plays or the way they were performed. It was an awfulness of a unique kind: the audience went ooh ah at each Restoration Hardware set. It applauded uncritically... And I recall Roger Downey complimenting this audience for being so civilized as not to be grossed out by the puerility of a Wendy Wasserstein play at the Rep, an ill-deserved compliment I'm afraid it was. So it is not that unexpected that only in the rarest of instances does one of these shows, mounted at what should be regarded as something like a five-stage, subsidized, non-musical theater, become a voyager on the national circuit, or be consigned to anything but the theater hell that it so richly deserves. [3] No out of town thea ter critic comes to note what is done here, as compared to visits being paid to Louisville, New Haven, Boston, St. Paul-Minneapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, San Diego... some of whose theaters mount plays that interest or are sufficiently noteworthy. Seattle Opera and North West Ballet, hackneyed, too, as are many of their chestnuts, do draw out of town reviewers, and for reason, whereas Seattle, especially once the Aha Theater & Arne Zaselove's Bathhouse gasped their last "Aha"and took its final dip [4], seems innocent of the outside world except insofar as the Asian connection is alive in the International District. The occasional Marivaux adaptation, the rare Ibsen do not really count. Theater has to make its way, within a legion of diversions, in the culture; at present is scarcely central to whatever moral and aesthetic or heartfelt center one might find if one looked long and hard enough; and I don't think that very much has changed in the "big three" - The Rep, The Intiman & ACT - during the ten years I have been here, or most of the smaller venues, no matter the change in interchangeable artistic directors [Dan Sullivan has done better work on better plays, in New York, since leaving the dank North West]. The combination menu that each of these theater offers do not really differ. For it seems that the directors of the three main venues each prepares, has little choice but to, prepare the annual menu of four to eight shows, so as to try to create the right kind of mix, so that if you ate this mix at each of them you would pretty much get the same kind of mixed fare; which means that you could get three somewhat venturesome shows altogether, Alki at ACT this year, the Cruz at the Rep & Singing Forest at the Intiman, a play designed to spend its life in American theater development hell. Each season also brings its share of the tried and true; which constitutes the majority of shows put on at each of the big three this year, and next year too. Then each of them must put on something to demonstrate their social consciousness, as ACT this year did with Good Boys Bad Boys. There is that one SERIOUS show, red meat for the hungry dog, then concessions, as in ACT's case to those who keep the faith of thee-ate-her with plays like Agatha. The bad fence-straddling faith of putting on Agatha is demonstrated by it being "out of season" - the dear souls who eat this kind of bric-a-brac are given their due, but nonetheless are exiled; basically these dogs are served the dog food that they want, while the theater itself pretends that Agatha is not really where it's hear t is at; nor do you want to offend these mongrels of the theater because you hope and pray that they will consume your more serious fare, possibly even subscribe. "Whodunits" do well also among amateur groups, as does the forever Music Man, point to the fact that the local intelligence might be diverted to the puzzling out of matters other than the murder that resides in their hearts. And then you put on One or Two Character show, because otherwise you go broke. Their whore-masters, the artistic directors, serve a certain caste what it wants. The relationship is symbiotic. It is the symbiosis of forever mutually reinforcing mediocrity. I read where Kurt Beattie, the current artistic director of A Contemporary Theater [where the word contemporary represents a falsehood in advertising], thinks of or wishes for theater as a temple - a temple to mediocrity it is I am afraid, and that is not, at least in Mr. Beattie's case, because he is unaware or was not once aware of more substantial fare [6], no matter that he is responsible for commissioning Fiction. - Ah, the accumulating millions that have been spent putting on the forever forgotten mediocrities with which sums something splendid might have been done! And all the necessary effort that goes into selling, having to sell the mediocrities! I don't think there's been a hot cake in town since Tony Kushner's operatic pathos-drenched Angels in America. -
The "artistic censors" as the artistic directors thus might be more accurately called, quite consciously - the censor, as in a dream, and in old Russia or the Soviet Union, always knows more than anyone else, and knows how to rip and tear out what is unpleasing - keep from doing what might upset the prevailing wishful state of delusion into which a particular caste in "the city" prefers to put itself. The big three could vanish with little detriment to the intellectual culture of the town, though not to the eateries on Queen Anne. [5] - The problem is not just dumbing down the repertory to the twenty-five top stage hits, then done over and all over the U.S. of A.; [6] . But that's the culture, you say, it's always been like that, that's how we like it - no: that's how we are made to like it, something that ultimately produces the same great fatigue as does wearing a false self among the directors; so that, then, it is no wonder that many of those so engaged in cens oring out what they themselves would really much rather do, are so frequently weary as a salmon at the end run. Moreover, a further tiresome aspect of that job: you need to appeal to benighted donors who have a tax deductions and good will to spare, etc. "I'm not interested," after all, is the most-heard sentence in Seattle [including its School of Drama I would say]. - Anything really of our time is as unwanted as 20th century music is in this land of the Swan of Tunella, of no end of Tchaikovsky, Karl Orff . The classical radio station KING-FM is squarely settled in 19th century miasma, the Glinka part, you get more challenging classics 24/7 at University Village to keep the cats pleased as they shop; the main Jazz station is stuck squarely in the 60s [the least of my troubles, this]. KCTS, the local public television station, is chock-a-block with Brit shtick, furniture auctions on Friday nite, cooking shows, wood working shows, nature logs, train travel shows to places to which its audience would like to be the packaged to than they are here, when KCTS wants to raise money from the faintly hip it will, at least four times a year, put on its one great Roy Orbison concert tape; or more recently what was described as "light musical fare".
And I think I quite understand the "realism" that ensures such compromises and why the menus do not really differ that much from theater to theater or from year to year... which constitutes the fatality of American culture, not just of its philistine Seattle version, and the fatality of the mediocrity of the regional theater circuit. In that respect, regional theater is part of what is called The Culture Industry.... which, too, wants and needs to be "sold." Kurt Beattie alerted his audience to the potentially offensive nature of Edward Albee's Sylvie, and it turned out that, actually, the possibly offended consumers' - of so much pornography of each and every kind - interest was piqued: what if one tried to pique their interest by learning to sell them, say Handke's Ride Across Lake Constance as an experiential process at the end of which participation in its verbal schemes and a truly roller-coaster ride on the thin ice of identity the world would be as playful and light as it had been when they were happy children and first started to play with words? The ultimate boulevard play as anti-boulevard, Noel Coward but not fey. That is something very real that theater can still do in the age of the other predominating media: create calm, refresh your senses, disabuse you of the accumulating junk in your mind, against which there is no real defense unless... and in Handke's case, the true successor to Brecht, and with a far lighter touch, in an even less Aristotelean cathartic manner. But the artistic directors who work in the regional theater I expect are so hidebound after decades of realistic survival they have lost touch with what drew them to the theater in the first place, and the requisite imagination to educate their potential audience, which is not stupid in any respect except when it comes to matters theatrical, but ignorant of what theater can do in the age of film and television and the internet. Central to what? Y et once it was: Theater was news. Theater has not ever really happened in Seattle, so far. And I don't think entirely because Seattle, as Dan Savage once put it so nicely, is really a town of "breeders." I am puzzled why the fine Seattle Children's Theater fails to produce a large enough audience for deeper hungers than those never quite satisfied by what is put on at the main stages, until the audience is off to the far more adventurous eateries; dinner dress theater yet far less challenging compared to the restaurant circuit: the biggest hit in years were the clowns and food of circus-tent Teatro Zin Zanni, which proves my point far too weightily [7].
And then of course, that TV ate what possibility of mind existed in the audience, especially of the newest generations in this generationally forgetful America, ["Never has a country lost its innocence as often as has the United States," is one of my favorite - it is Christopher Hitchens' - quote, which fails to acknowledge that it never was anything of the kind to begin with.] which responds most positively to what is most like what it sees on Television, so much of which is far superior, especially "all those "comedies," so that even the directors of barely existent little troupes think they should put on... comedies. - Fringe venues such as The Annex and Theater Schmeater subsidize themselves with skits from once popular television series - nothing against camping it up, but how much can such a defense bear? I myself am thoroughly surfeited on hee-haw; on Brit-Twit-Wit. -- Not to speak of comparing theater with what films are shown here. It is said that Seattle was post-modern before its time. I don't think anything truly modern ever registered, and the pre-modern is fossilized. Mother Courage, of which Kurt Beattie, in the full flush of the survival of ACT a few years back, suggested I do a new American translation, before quickly reverting into safe mode [and I had a few discussable ideas how to turn this great war horse into something really American], was finished around 1940, a play that even writers such as Ionesco, who hated Brecht, acknowledged for the one time a playwright had put his thumb on the diminishing substance of the human; it has never been done at one of the main stages, and at this rate Seattle will disappear in aboriginal moraine before Kurasch, and so many other great plays, are done here. Ah, people dream of them, but the dreams never happen. Seattle actually lacks as much of a sense of past as most of the rest of the country, except the South, no matter that i t keeps re-inventing a false Restoration Hardware past, and so is unable to reflect. It votes democratic, but if it were honest would vote moderate Republican.
Yet you keep getting these platitudes, all these Ottish, typical, pro forma assertions, to the effect of "We, of all the arts, should be doing the new and controversial..." which are just a bunch of hoey, sottish verbiage that spills at the drop of the pin, and is never really acted upon because behind it lies a failure to have analyzed or understood the nature of theater and what can be done in it at this historical stage of multiple media, among many other matters. [3] See anon, On Theory.
The three philistine theaters compete for the same constraining funding, and also for the same middle-brow fare as it so frequently comes in pre-tested and preapproved and wanted-to-be reassuringly approved by Good Housekeeping from NY, that's the easy part of the job, it's like going to 7th Avenue for the seasonals, or in the instance of Ms. Ott's predecessor, also in the instance of Gordon Edelstein, Kurt Beattie's predecessor, is put into shape here before it ends up at its grubby N.Y. predestination.
Kevin Lynch, whose Lynch Enterprises, here come the famous "buts and nolts", does a lot of the calling for subscriptions and selling of tickets to these theaters, explained to me recently that during the past decade there had been a decrease of approximately 10,000 subscribers from what at the most was thirty thousand for the big three, perhaps it was even forty once upon a time. The Fifth Avenue, a local operation meanwhile, itself has nearly thirty thousand subscribers, which Mr. Lynch, correctly I would say, accounts for by pointing to the musicalization, or one could say, Broadwayization of theater in Seattle; and why not, since the really serious theater of the world is not done here; and since most folks, in dire or even half way dire times [not that Seattle, at least the theater going part of it, is much affected by all that direness], prefer to be amused, to be diverted; all the young warrior's eyes are looking, at least sideways, at the football screen, of the one same forever game.
Benoroya Hall has 275 performances and is doing well. - 30,000 serious theater subscribers from a population of a couple of million to draw on... is not overly impressive. The possibility of having a Globe Theater in Seattle... for that Seattle would have to become a lot less stratified and segmented on class and income lines, though there is more than that to its multiple segmentations and fault lines than that, the pricey admissions being the most obvious; having money and a curious mind do not necessarily go foot in mouth disease [wake up!]. "Our Town" is really lots of intersecting segments, some quite seedy, some so deeply touched by the Lunar north that I occasionally feel transposed to some Skandi 19th century novel, what with old women of all kinds peaking out behind curtains; much of it - including members of the theater world itself - petty as only small towns can be. - Would the North-Westerners go to truly serious theater if you paid them as the Greeks apparently had to be to attend those shows, though perhaps not the ones that featured Satyrs? The contemporary equivalents of Sophocles, Euripides, Calderon, Shakespeare, Chekhov might appear on the scene here, and they would not be performed, not even if they were acclaimed elsewhere - the other-directness of a fearful audience is married to the "realistic" fearfulness of its managers. An old hand at Samuel French some month ago told me that he thought that one chief reason that the U.S. had become so uninviting to foreign plays was because the NEA, founded under Kennedy, had funded such a plethora of American works.
Part II
Since theater is chiefly museal - it has a great past, a mediocre present, and an uncertain future - let us yet entertain the vaunted positive spin on this state of affairs, and why not: the roots for something better to graft on exist: there exists, I suspect, a core audience of 5,000 who have once snatched a taste of that bit of heaven that is real theater and thus becomes red meat for the forever hungry wolf, that could support one first rate theater [8], whereas the efforts, presently, are dissipated across the various boards, making for a single questionable smorgasbord, yes and what about all those boards of directors, who are they? how much theater sense or what other interests resides there? Therefore, what if one regarded the three duplicating theaters, the three big ugly ducklings, as a single theater with several vectors? Then one of these five stages would be devoted entirely to the classics; one year, five great plays of the Greek repertoire; another year, Elizabethan theater; next Spanish, German. French, Chinese, Japanese... Another of these five stages, the smallest, would be devoted to the truly contemporary, and it wouldn't take twenty five years for, say, a Sam Shepard, and the lightest, to migrate from the Aha to the Rep. Has David Mamet ever been done at one of the big three - scarcely, because his work is even more cutting than what did not fare well at Sharon Ott's place. Not even to mention the internationally important playwrights whose work is not done in Seattle. Too upsetting, not Mrs. Dowdy's taste, too garish, leave it to the Fringe, whose festival, too, has bitten a fairly justified dust in the mean of these ten years, yet thwarting the grass even further.
Not that the mere fact of contemporaneity or the fetishization of "the new" guarantees anything [or the various kinds of tokenism, pressure release valves being all they are, my favorites, the crows, can vent and perform day in day out]. - The too few, the true surrogates, who take the deep pulse of their time of course do exist, not that Seattle knows, since the news is quite consciously withheld from it. The same one or two cutting edge plays - And of course no end of "adapting" of novels! - keep showing up at the second tier theaters, too, the off or off-off-Broadway houses as one might call them. Comparatively little innovation there, either. The same Wallie Shawn play keeps popping up over and over. Sort of like trotting out one of the two big Beckett plays when we want to prove that we can be gravitational. Not the faintest notion exists of how reactionary Beckett is in the meanwhile. - If there is one important metaphysical play since the Becketts it is Hand ke's The Art of Asking: Or the Journey to the Sonorous Land.
Yet a third stage would devote itself to the kind of thing that you now find at all three: the forever middle brow, well mounted, but scarcely challenging . And I scarcely think that Joe Orton or the once again appearance here of Jumpers is challenging, or that it is amazing, as it appears to Joe Adcock, that Orton "only" started to learn English at age two, or the poor man's Orton, which results in Fiction. How many current warblers recall the boborygima while sequestered in the mother's womb? No matter that what warbles from them sounds just like it. - A fourth might devote itself to the serious musical theater, with ventures into its origins in European Operetta - Jacque Offenbach, Straus, the Yiddishe, and the minstrel shows.... A fifth ..... plays by frogs and goats... plays for and by the animals... the squirrels, geese, my favorite friends, the so nimble and skittish crows, and grackles... All of which requires a Paul Allen to be splendiferous...Theater from the top down, a different trickle down effect, since the grass roots isn't doing it either...
At any event, the venture so roughly outlined here, would bring critics to Seattle, the great innovative directors would have to be imported [8], or might really develop here. In this eventuality, the Greater Seattle audience might come to consume more serious fare if outside attention and accolades were paid it. For Seattle-lites [or heavies as so many more of them have become during the past decade, as I was glad to have a front page story confirm the sight collector's impression] are far more venturesome when it comes to food; and if one were to open a theater with prospects of commercial success, a dinner theater it would be. Such a variegated serious theater as I propose would also necessitate an entirely different set of local reviewers - Roger Downey might have to come out from retirement in the vineyards of gourmandaism, which, so I gathered, and finally it all clicked, had been his chief ambition, anyhow... not that theater ought to be treated as though it were food, no matter that, as Adorno so rightly observed, "degustibus disputandum est." Seattle would have to have at least one real critic, not just its one or two barely adequate reviewers, and its share of mere notifiers, such as Misha Bernson and Adcock strike me as being, who see their job also as one of protecting a somewhat fragile if drab flower that is on continuous life support. The sportswriters, who have so much more fun, can always write: "Sell the bum;" though not many of those employed in the various aspects of the theater scene, here, would be bought. And so they stay.
III
What I described & tried to explain in the first two parts requires a bill of particulars as back-up.
For one further important reasons for the state of affairs: THEORY; or rather the absence of any approximation thereof, but animadversion to theory, anti-intellectualism, on the part of some theater acquaintances of mine that accounts for the hotch-potch of what is put on, but for the audience's lack of education in matters of theater, which in this fashion will never become even halfway central to their lives.
The interesting theater movements and artists for the past several centuries have all been spawned by or have created theory. In theater, I am most familiar with the theoretical writings of Bertold Brecht, without which translation into action, its constant dialectic, there would have been no Berliner Ensemble, [ which fossilized too, once the dialectic froze] dozens of interesting directors, a slew of great trained actors, and an influence into film [Godard] and foreign playwrights, no Peter Hacks, Heiner Mueller, no Tankred Dorst, Bond, Sarah Churchill... however these later artists absorbed and overcame, opposed everything that derived from Brecht... And there is as much popular junk in European culture, and has been there for a longer time than the United States existed, and Brecht took no end of it, going back to the Thirties Years War [now that is a capitalizable war if ever there was one!] and used it. Just look at the best sellers during Goethe's tim e, Werther was his only one. So Brecht, whom I am using only as an example, or any other important theoretician, in this context merely means to think matters through. For example, it does not mean that you have ratiocinated if you want to get off your anti-Bush jollies by putting on Arturo Ui, which Brecht intentionally set in the far away [from his audience's experience], nearly entirely mythic world of the crime-ridden Chicago 30s, and to jam in some Shakespeare. Perhaps Haiti would have been a different mythic setting, with its permanent third world aspect, but that would have meant a re-examination, as Brecht the constant re-examiner did, to test the play, not its obvious political purposes. A fine, austere, theory-oriented, critical workshop theater might be in order, perhaps something akin to Uta Hagen and Herbert Berghof's HB Studio in New York, without technological folderol. The Drama School, another pell mell, does not provide it; and, as a matte r of fact, has lost its directing program in the meanwhile, and so has Seattle a terrific director in Burke Walker.
Now a bit about the Sophocles and Shakespeares whose work might have been done in Seattle, under the aegis of yet another faithless once Handke enthusiast, say at Cornish. That is the play that addresses the problem of theater in the age of film: Handke's PLAY ABOUT THE FILM ABOUT THE WAR. For its utterly simple premise it has a read-through of a proposed screenplay for the umpteenth film about "the war": that way you get the film, and its efficiencies, and gaps for the imagination to live in, without need for deconstruction since the entire matter is already parceled out and regarded from a dozen different perspectives. Not a problem-free piece, chiefly because Handke, for reason of realistic pessimism, now writes mytho-poeic plays that are meant to be read as much as performed, and so the speeches become tryingly long even for those who suffer from the opposite of attention span deficiency. I shall stop, here, but have many rounds in reserve.
NOTES:
1] Having spent a fair time by the [Ship] Canal, vicinity Portage Bay, particularly the summer past, I had little choice but to observe the weekend parade of the great variety of local Argonauts - everything from motorized bathtubs, invariably loaded with loaded youngsters, African Queen types, the only ones I envied, slews of elegant motorized more modern yachts, and sailing craft that, no matter a fine breeze, scarcely used it to propel themselves about; there were times when the fumes, from the combustion of diesel reinforced gasoline, was more malodorous than what irritates your nasal passages adjacent the over-crowded arterials. After a month or so of weekends, the vessels themselves became familiar: there were the to-and-fro constants, recognizable also by the live galleon figures, a wench or a dog at the bow, a fair amount of drinking and eating among the frequently obese could be observed as well. All very friendly, waving. Also of course, the not-that-infr equent hot-rod, making the usual hotrod noises from its not too distantly displaced anal machismo.
2] Yes, writing about theater in Seattle you have to be mindful that Lewis and Clark, who "discovered" the United States Northwest, and that the "settlers" who started coming in their wake a hundred fifty odd years ago, were not Thespians. Unlike Coca Cola, which no longer even uses the bitters of the Kola Nut, they were for real, and wrought "real" change: but their motley progeny, so far, have originated nothing to compare to the tribal arts that they displaced. Regarded from that perspective, just think of what theater here will be like in another 100 years unless all our offspring are Tele-Tubbies by then. - I gather that for the longest time there wasn't a bookshop in Ballard, and that the Skandis there had their Bible, and that was that. I am glad that pockets of that Balticum are still preserved, if not quite in amber, more in rust. Perhaps one might even put on a dramatization of one of Ingmar Bergman's grim medieval sagas for these descendants of the murde rous converter St. Olaf, to bring them into the age of theater, which is really pre-Ibsen and pre-Strindberg here. - Seattle is of course more complexly layered meanwhile, somewhat, than an emigre hamlet of robber-founders that becomes haven for incest and its progeny. Still, as a friend said not so long ago: "Too few Jews" & I replied: "Too few French, and too few of a lot of other spices, too." And having a bit of the Thor in my background I am by no means unappreciative.... of the general North European make-up of its basic stock; it came, at first, as a serious relief from the superfices of Los Angeles or New York's own provincialities; although my three year hiatus in a small town in Baja Sur, where even the so well air-conditioned palmetto palapers have T.V. glinting through their many chinks, contains the novel experience of a tiny circus first coming to town: the first live performance of anything but electronically amplified music dances on the local basketball court during the forever summer there and church services and festive processions... something akin to Peter Brook's Empty Space reaction, but not born of the dearth of news and free expression in poverty-stricken circumstances: the wonderful childlike quality of genuine wonder. And so .
As to the history, the origins of the Seattle audience -- in as much as I have been able to make it out - the first of several digressions: The odd thing about emigres, once in a new venue, is that they, as time passes and as they stand still in their memory and habit, tend to become more conservative whence they departed, which locus abscondi keeps changing, as they the comers to a new world have nothing to differentiate themselves from, in this instance the local, emblematic slugs. The theaters in Helsinki especially, Stockholm, Oslo, especially of course in London and in many German cities, [etc etc] tend to be more interesting than what one can find in Seattle & St. Paul-Minneapolis; are frequently of World Theater, whereas here, there also seem to be a goodly share of descendants of those who trekked and trickled in from the Badland [s] that Jonathan Raban described so well, aside whatever memories of many other poverties. And puritanicalitie s... Women judges enforce skirt codes on women lawyers. Noise codes. Repression of the senses is pervasive. [Never mind the zoo on Capitol Hill!] and I have come under the deeply etched impression that cheap runs deep in Seattle. Certain years and dates have registered in a mind that perhaps unduly latches onto particulars, during the decade that I have been here, and juxtapose in a somewhat different from the normal iconographic fashion: the elimination of the after-hours clubs in the late 40s, thus the surcease of interesting jazz musicians stepping out onto the national stage; that Washington State had its own first MacCarthyite, in 1047, who helped shut down a theater... The condemnation for rape of Marie Anne LeTourneau, for a relationship with a South Sea Islander, where you are sexually mature at age 12... an international comedy if ever there was one with Seattle as its butt! The "Witches of Wenatchee" as I think of them... another national drama that made the region look ridiculous. The fuss over a strip club getting an allowance for a few extra parking spaces... Rick Anderson's inveighing, in the Seattle Weekly, at an affair that the previous owner of the Seahawks was having as the newspapers were running him out of town... I recall once making such a time travel, to turn of the 19th century Hamburg, to Swakopsmund and Walvis Bay, in the early 70s, an Easter Weekend among the murderers of the Herero, and kept looking around for my father's mother to appear as a handsomely attired young woman of that time. However, rather than national origins and the sensibilities that come with them, the general niceness, the way Seattle processes processes processes processes conflict, its basic puritanical heritage go further to explain its benighted audiences, I think; to which needs to be added the lack of light during half the year, so that the dear slugs don't really wake up until late summer - again, Jonathan Raban, his description of the inf inite dankness in his Passage to Juneau, points to the forever dank nasal inland passage in the local mind... and the clattering of their chatter of just about any group of them, the Northwest Twang. "The melodiousness of their voices," does no apply hereabouts except to the increasing number of Hispanics. Ah, for the ears to come on the lilt and consonance of an African language on the short wave radio! The imminent, complete desertification of the lower two thirds of California, for it to become like its pendulous Baja, may of course prove, briefly, advantageous to the dank Northwest, before it, too, falls prey to the wages of an economy based on the waste of fossil fuels. The time, in other words, might come when Seattle may be hospitable to the performance of tragedies of all kinds and not go goo-ga at whatever splendid Retro set they are presented with, fall prey to the shallowest lyricalness, pretty picture postcards, retreads, chestnuts, chestnuts in the makings, and perhaps boo instead of applauding any old idiocy that they subject themselves to.
At the more popular end, you have summer pell-mells like the Seafair and its Pirates and Flying Angels [F-16s!]; the hordes of naked white mole rats that materialize at Seattle Center on the 4th of July; plus the Seattle Center Bumbershoot free-for-all - that nice Skandi term meaning protection against rain bombs, and a folk fest. - Fringe venues such as The Annex and Theater Schmeater subsidize themselves with skits from once popular television series - nothing against camping it up, but how much can such a defense bear? I myself am thoroughly surfeited on hee-haw.
3] Critical theater.... the tradition in which I have worked. Brecht, Peter Weiss, Heinar Kipphardt, Rolf Hochhuth... its last example being Handke's The Play About the Film about the War... might have a great subject in the politically mediated current state of affairs....
4] Nothing essentially wrong with any of the tried and true, they were all cutting edge once, when they were NEWS, a fresh breath, that has become blunt and stale, and that the banner of culture employs to waft stale air into an already blunted brain; and especially when done make-believe museum style; every tooth has been pulled from those plays; simultaneously iconicized and neutered into brand names; a production of Pygmalion done 1900 style, frozen in time: in 1900 GBS didn't do Pygmalion 1800 style.
5] - You could also say that it is dress rehearsal theater and that the artistic directors might as well be buyers for Bon Marche; and royally they spend to find their grey mice in the haystacks; that is, they are buyers for Mr. and Mrs. Dowdy or Ms. &Jr. Dowdy who occasionally fancy themselves as being Dowdy Lite, there's the whilish headline that bright colors are back!: the geese and ducks and slugs remain wrapped in pastel versions of mallard green grey and brown, but they appreciate stylish confections, and receive it on a consistent basis, slightly differently wrapped year in year out.
6] The importation of Peter Brook, by the joint theater force, was of someone who was probably a goner by the time he went to perform for the Shah. Brook hasn't done his contemporaries for generations. Starting out in a cellar in Hamburg, he now has a splendid bombed-out looking, former operetta building, the Buffe-du-Nord, perhaps the most mesmerizing actors this side of heaven, but is basically no more than sacred cow. If you wanted to give Seattle a taste of what great directing is like in Europe, that is not where you would turn: it was another typical instance of the ignorant inferiority complex's veneration of an icon.
7] Once upon a time there existed the possibility of a Handke festival here in Seattle, and Roger Downey was planning to take the foursome that it takes to perform Handke's Offending the Audience to the main theaters, a text that confront the audience into becoming somewhat uncomfortably self-aware of what it means to be that second nature, an audience, to be on the world stage: the famous insults at the end are an Austrian's come-on joke; and perhaps if I'd been better informed of the lay of the land the fest might have transpired as the Sarah Nash Gates Handke festival. And perhaps Mr. Downey would have trooped around if it had not proved so agenbitey a task as to bring on an attack of diabetes.
8] The most nauseating show, however, that I have seen in Seattle, was Reza's Art , and not just because I had seen its lead actor go through the same limited routines several times before, or the other actors gave me nothing, from an ungiving text, purely mechanical blocking, or because, at best, its treatment of art as yet another consumer article, like different toothpaste where there is no difference, might serve for an episode in Frazier, but because there really is a deeply meaty play in the subject of the sacred transferring from a religious past to the confines of the use of now? perhaps forever? sacred colors [say a play about Malevitch]. 9] No wonder, then, that real sports are so much livelier, real play, that the best magician is the Gary Payton of the day or Rashard Lewis, and with royal permission to talk "trash," that the popular music scene is far more au courant - and that though the people are fooled every four years, and a hundred billion times inbetween, you can't really fault the level of native intelligence. Bert Brecht, back in the 20s, already asked for theater to be as tempting as the seven day bicyle races, Nascar he might have said now. No, the people are always all right, and so are the actors, who deserve applause no matter the chestnut.
10] In the mean of these ten years, four of the smaller theaters, that did far more interesting fare than the "big three", have disappeared: The Aha , where my adaptation of Tankred Dorst's splendid Fernando Krapp Wrote Me This Letter proved the final nail; Arne Zaselove's Bathhouse through some mismanagement and grandiosity and the bad luck of being at the mercy of the green-possessed; the Pioneer Square Theater. The Empty Space, from whose original version in the 70s emanated most of the few halfway interesting theater people I have met here, has much improved over what it had turned into under the management of a pleasant circus clown, I think from Kentucky, during its second incarnation, but seems to be bankrupt for the second time, during its third act. The "Group Theater," which specialized in ethnically oriented work, went down, too; I haven't the faintest whether for any but the stated reason lack of funding; perhaps the a ttempt to do "ethnic" theater in the world where the dinosaurs are grinding and homogenizing them down, is passe? Or has been co-opted as p.c. by the "state theater"?
10] On Heiner Mueller's death I had the idea for a commemoration of a playwright whose work had not been done here except in Roger Downey's [exclusive] Quartett translation, and after a bit of travail [Mr. Downey wanted to resuscitate his actors] the service was transposed from John Kazanijian's then New City Theater venue at what is now The Hugo House to the U.W. drama school, and the wonderful director Steve Pearson [who to my knowledge is not asked to direct at "the big three"] did a wonderful job preparing a fair sampling of scenes from Mueller's work. Pearson, too, did a first rate production, at the U.W. of Handke's The Hour We Did Not Know Each Other, which Roger Downey, who prepared the great text of the stage directions of this play without spoken words, then covered in a piece in The Weekly. The reason for the world wide success for this summa of Handke's early musically composed conceptual texts, however, probably deriv es from the world's surfeit if not nausea at the falsehoods that start to inundate their ears, perhaps as of their fourth month in utero, at which point the fetus' hearing exists, and not because the infinite play of images forces the eye [this is entirely an eye piece] to regard everything it sees as somewhat strange and different, so that it comes out seeing the world fresh. Hour is the play that derives from the line "all our stories" in Handke's Walk About the Villages [a play far too rich for the thin gruel to which the culture is accustomed] and "all our stories" in this instance do go back to the Gilgamesh, and do so concretely, not by way of the maelstrom of political rhetoric that pervades public discourse. Moreover, such sheer and pure poetry is so healthily cleansing that you could probably attach the the brains of the audience to MIR's to see its working, and perhaps those who believe in genes, which is what people seem to do if not in God, will be convince d of the authentic need for a constant re-poeticization of the world. [Pace, Possum!] Mr. Downey, whom I will always cut a bit of slack, because he is one of the few who has some understanding of all this, nonetheless can be quite bone-headed with the phrase "to help us escape words" in the it's opening paragraph of his piece on the play:
"All humans have feelings. Most learn to talk-about what they feel. Some learn to turn the talk into writing. A few can write and make others feel. Peter Handke has spent a quarter century creating verbal artifacts-novels, plays, reportage, film scripts, memoirs, literary sketchbooks, and indescribable hybrids between-to help us escape words [my itals] , let us forget them, experience the texture of the passing moment without giving that texture a name." Such an intention is most unlikely in the instance of an autistic savant who came through consciousness through words and can use them, at times, as a Mozart, also to make us aware of the misuse of words, and syntax, and how deeply, subliminally we are at the mercy of that. -I recall asking Kurt Beattie whether he couldn't call his then artistic director superior's attention to the piece: but that person was too importantly busy, and it is these kinds of deferences that then becom e as telling as they have.
Somehow Mr. Downey managed to have a diabetes attack at the prospect of the appearance of the chief translator of Mueller's work, Carl Weber, the head of the directing school at Stanford, once of the Berliner Ensemble, where I as a very callow youth had first seen him in the mid-50, knowing full well, prescient as I am, that somewhere down the line we would collaborate on Mueller translations! That fine evening did not lead to anything either here in town, except that a kid who hadn't even attended the drama school, just majored, Joby Emmonds & his Defibrillator Productions [ http://www.defibrillatorproductions.org/ ]then finally did Muller's famous Hamlet Machine, way out on Sandpoint Way at the old Navy grounds, and received one stupid review, from Mr. Fetzer of The Stranger, who wrote as though he knew Mueller's work, whereas it was evident to anyone [at the very least to Mr. Downey and me, and of a handful of others of those who had att ended the memorial service] that in fact Fetzer neither knew nor understood what Mueller was about but had to pretend that he did: the fact that Seattle is also latte Seattle - the mere increase in metabolic activity in the brain, or wherever, is no guarantee.
11] Still, the best and greatest variety of theater is to be found at the Drama School, frequently in interesting pared-down student productions, by its frequently highly talented directing students, who at least choose with interest and passion, probably most of the time anyhow; who will have a tough time putting on what they do now once they graduate to what's called the "real world" hereabouts. The work there, 90 percent of the time, goes unreviewed because of the peculiar compartmentalization to which the beast is subjected here -e.g.- Yale Drama School productions are reviewed by the New York City Press! And of course the much smaller New Haven. And it's the same at the other top schools. The acting students, as the saying goes, "can't talk their way out of a paper bag," but are nimble afoot; they be pick-pockets and jugglers when the time comes.
12]  The Rep, so I feel, has actually improved somewhat under Sharon Ott's ministrations, so has ACT since Kurt Beattie took over from Edelstein, especially during his first strong season, but I feel optimistic, just a tad, only, somewhat about The Intiman under Bartlet Sher's directorate. MICHAEL ROLOFF, a playwright and translator, into American, of most of Peter Handke's plays, of the early Kroetz and other plays, from the German, isVisiting Scholar, German U. Washington
Member of the Seattle Pschoanalytic Institute
In publishing in New York for a quarter century in all capacities except copy editor, unfortunately, as a literary agent for a few years in the seventies he represented the Verlag der Autoren, a German theater collective, one of the few good things to have survived their origins in the year of all our demise, 1968.
 MICHAEL ROLOFF
http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name
Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society
This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html 

http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html
"Degustibus disputandum est." Theodor Wiesenthal Adorno
"May the foggy dew bediamondize your hoosprings + the fireplug
of filiality reinsure your bunghole! {James  Joyce}
"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde." [von Alvensleben]
"Siena me fe, disfescimi Maremma." [Dante]
"Ennui [Lange Weile] is the dreambird that hatches the egg of
experience." Walter Benjamin, the essay on Leskov.

http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/ 
http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/ http://artscritic.blogspot.com/

A GRASS FIRE ON KWAKIUM PRAIRIE

Right now I am taking my afternoon breaks in the shade of a youngish tree 
that stands on the large raised part of the meadow

behind the UW applied arts - sculpture, ceramics - complex of buildings 
at the North Eastern section of the campus, just south

of Fiver Corners, the intersection of 45th NE, Union Bay/Mary Gates Drive,
 and the spur that leads to 35th  Ave NE.

 Around 3:30 I started hearing some fire engines and, looking South, notice smoke
 rising in the eastern part of Kwakium Prairie

as the revitalized once Seattle dump is called, a prairie indeed 
with prairie grasses, ponds, pheasants, night time coyotes,

all kinds of bird life, geese and ducks in its ponds, raccoons, a pair of eagles,
trails... fairly heaven... the prairie grasses very high and dry and yellow. 

I could tell exactly where it was burning, near an area
 that had burnt a couple of years ago. There are some high

stands of poplars there, and the rebuilt Horticultural Center 
is just a tad to the left of the poplars.

Very good, one fire engine shows up, one UW Police car, the new 
small black kind, not one of the lumbering white ones
and pulls in by the Horticultural center.  And stands there for a bit, 
and then drives on to the point where the fire is
and a trail leads off to the right from the main trail to the UW, 
but cant make a right cause the wind is coming from the
Northwest. So the smoke is increasing and really billowing to the East now. 
After a half an hour the engine drives along the trail toward
the bridge across the Ravenna Creek and makes a left at that end of 
the roundabout trail, and chugs toward the fire on the fire's right side. 

Then some more engines show up, 
another couple of UW cop cars, anda couple of batallion chief 
in their personell carrier type fire red vehicles. 
By this time the fire has been burning
for about an hour and the smoke is strong and dark.  Then it starts to subside, 
the first engine evidently has put it out;after all, 
the lake is right next door to it, as is one huge pond that never 
dries up. 

Then two more engines show up,
the kind that carry miles of hoses. Then a ladder truck. Then another engine.
 The fire has been put down long ago.

Even at 7:30 a couple more engines show up and another battalion chief.  
Two more engines show up as two engines pull out. 
Mary Gates drive is completely blocked with fire 
engines around the Horticultural center, they don't
know which way to turn to get the hell out of there. 
It gets too dark to read Handke's MORAWISCHE NACHT
and I go to Burgermaster for din-din and a gallon of lemonade. 
 By the time I walk home past the Horticultural
Center around 10:15 AM there are still a couple of engines 
getting ready to pull out. 

A simple grass fire that was burning toward the lake, 
and was stopped just short of it by a single engine,
involved at least a dozen Seattle Fire Department trucks,
 including the investigative lab truck,  half a dozen
UW cop cars, and a KOMO NEWS truck, that also pulled out
 around 10:15. All at what cost? And of overtime????

Up around 5 AM this morning I take my customary walk
out into the prairie, one man in a white shirt is running
with his black dog. About 10 acres of grass have burned,
revealing several dozen of those this 6 inch diameter pipes that relieve the
methane gas that the old dump is emitting even now. The robins
don't chirp as loud as they used to in Spring, pretty much
everyone has mated by now, other chirpers however are starting
to chirple.

http://seattle-vistas.blogspot.com/

MICHAEL ROLOFF
Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society
this LYNX will LEAP you to all my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS:

http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

"MAY  THE FOGGY DEW BEDIAMONDIZE YOUR HOOSPRINGS!" {J. Joyce}

"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde" [von Alvensleben]

ACCRETION ... the opening of "Steeped in Seattle" + notes

  ACCRETION

The [Truly] Incremental Seattle of My Mind:

SIGHTS and Sounds

1994-2007

Michael Roloff

The light, the clouds, the rolling hills, the ridges, hills and dales, the spits of land, The ten foot tides of the hand of many fingered Puget Sound [1] that reaches down from the North. # A scattering of peninsulas and lakes, of sounds and bays, the gatherings of green. # Mt. Fuji! -- No: Mount Rainier! [2]# The close yet distant jaggedness of the Cascades and the Olympics [3], to the West and East. # Greenlake [4], Lake Washington [5] the big water to the East, Lakelake: Seattle as an island within the largest island in the world. The shores of the Ship Canal [6] and Lake Union [7], their docks thick with wharves, houseboats, aqua planes & pleasure boats. The variegated fishing fleet in Ballard [8], vestigially Baltic. In short: a city for the discovery; for walking boating cycling. These telephone poles are no matchsticks! Drive a truck through was Paul Bunyan's [9] first impress! Yes, the wealth of wood persists. Trees out-peak the Victorian gables; their silhouettes screen the horizons. 50 kinds of spruce, fir, yew, juniper; pine needle carpet, cones litter the sidewalks. The Arboretum-inspired Puzzled Monkey Fir [10] from half a world away, it too flourishes, a huge cactus palm, with grey elephant-toes knuckling firmly in the ground, hundreds of tubular diamond-spike-encrusted ten-foot candelabra-arms dangling about, its monkey much like all the rest. No end of alleys still unpaved, still rich in the memories of farm lanes. Orchards trees, unpicked fruit of every kind. The bear wakens! Crows in crow-capital peck mussels, hold conventions, congregate in the Church of Green; honkers feed on spilled grain on the railroad tracks, drink Haefe-Weizen, legions of them graze on the expansive greens! The profligate squirrel has the best time of all, to play mockingbird, the baby gorillas of hereabouts; one garbage can per family. And no end of trusting cats who haven't caught a squirrel yet, and dance with bumblebees and seek to clasp moth dreams, at least one per house eyes you longingly through the jalousies. The odd possum and raccoon, neither coyotes nor skunks except by the metaphor. Primary acids & sugars, autumn is bunt and multi-hued, kodachrome colorful, over-powering the largely plain mallard shades. Everything continually buds and sprouts, prize-winning pear-shaped slugs, molds, fungi, spiders, mites and mushrooms, but the hopefully planted figs never ripen; north-facing very mossy roofs, gingerbread cottages. The rain forest temperately overwhelms, everything sops, nothing is ever dry. A temperate clime: the Japanese Current, Aleutian storms, [11] the near-invariable California high occasionally diverts Hawaii north, thus the "Pineapple express", the rarer occurrence of the arctic kind, the fog and cabin fever three season oyster shades of grey. An overall many-millennial jet-stream, ocean- going canoes forge on, the drizzle of infinity, Gods snorting their finest from every orifice, a nieseln if ever sieve saw one, the fog that sneaks in through the coastal range and the Straits of Juan the Fox [12]. Lying weathermen, hustling a sun that won't come, diverting jet streams that won't budge. 18 Hours of light at the summer-, barely nine grey ones at the winter solstice. Often it rains right through the blue window between the windy showers onto a defiant paucity of bumbershoots; or, the arctic never more than a mountain range away, three inches leave the city's five supremely deluded snow plows bereft. A disarray of air-currents at every level, the conversion zone in the vicinity of Everett [13], which converts what into what? A confluence of yet more rain! Dramatic clouds moving cross-ways every which way; here too, cloud-watching can lift you up. Spring lasts, April endures from February to May, buds break at all times of year, the Indian Pear February cherry-blossom-time. "Sun-breaks" is common coinage, moon-break might be, too. The state flower the well-bred rhododendron, " Evergreen State" holds even deciduously for the Western part. "Ample blackberries for the homeless, so ample especially downtown, the waste of the great honky-tonk, all those fine lurching wrecks, every shade of black and brown. A turn-of-the-century wealth of Victorian craftsman mansions, in every style, dimension, to clatter 'round or hole up in, their influence fades, becomes sporadic in the newer settlements, the cottages, one self-conscious step from the early Frank Lloyd Wright: that good! Yet: miserable postwar box substitutes when Victoria has been torn down. What happened? Regrades! Not all the hills and dales are any more, the flats south of the Kingdome [14], stadiumopolis, torn between Hometown and & the standard idea of Big Time, more earth was moved than for the Panama canal, on old photos hotels and mansions, castles on a table in a Spanish plain, perch atop crumbling mesas, photogenically defying bulldozers and pressure hoses. The 30s, the 40, and the 50s is what happened, too; something called "rationalization," interstates: the slashes left by automobile and oil and cement giants bifurcate, fuck up, create cul-de-sacs... that, then, protect odd pockets, full of this and that, bric-a-brac, and wealth, Neighbor-hoodS. Yet the plainest facades can conceal delight. Downtown looks like Central Park South at nite: Yes, every butterfly is smitten by bejeweled sky-scraping city lights. In the street-scene Kwakiutl [15] masks pass by. Motley parking lot devastation, twice copy-catted sky-scrapers 'xept for the sleek, black, sculpted Columbia Tower [16] and the three-sectioned Darth Vader hulk; the centerless, bland conglomerate fails to hold but from the tip of Pier 48 [17], and that already sports a sign that advertises this solitary vista point. And bring your compass: First Avenue North runs parallel right next to First Avenue West: the imposition of the Washington D.C. wind-rose onto a heterogeneity = a confusion of abbreviations and directionals, produces a profusion of Northsoutheastwest Sires. The vaunted Space [18] Needle - isn't that ever a silly umbrella, an overly long Chinese U.F.O.? City without an eye? The mercantile memory of Pioneer Square [19], that and other ancient dreams is but the usual tourist trap. Fertile grazing ground for national brands, trucking companies from Broadway. Judging by the theater sets and the ooh-ahhs they draw, Southern Californiaae must be right upon the cultural cuisinard? A lot of sportsbars. A lot of sodden flesh. Droves of naked white mole rats. No amount of coffee will get these slugs moving yet. The burly police. Ferocious meter maids, on an incentive, the friendliest of bus drivers, probably on an incentive too, to abate the gridlock. The Chamber of Commerce booster spirit prevails, a certain self-congratulatory air; that, and a stubborn nativism, semi-provincial as all get out; a lot of "on the cheap," cheap can run deep, memories of the depression, the broken dreams that trickled in from the dried out delusions of the Montana land scams and further East. The way folks hole up, oughtn't there be a summer solstice feast? during house demolding time? Other, even older memories of destitution prevail. As does the annual infusion of the generational American sprightly young. Yet the occasional "real Seattelite," a burst of the pioneer spirit, and the friendliest of guffaws. South-Seattle industrialized no-man's land. Georgetown [20] an ex NY loft inhabitant/s delight. The strips that intrude for ten miles at a time, ill-named Aurora Avenue North, Lake City Way. The incipient blight of the U-District [21], the land- and shop-lord vultures peck and connive and calculate away. The sub-species of the transient, a lot of poverty on the articulated buses, those monstrous, laboring worms with bike-racks for bum legs and chair lifts for the paraplegic, and no end of madmen riding them. The "Eastside" - Bellevue, Redmond, [22] Kirkland - frowns on sidewalks. Occasional glimpses of a more exotic world, small pockets of the Mid-East, of Pakistan, touches of Mexico, babushkas, all of Asia mingles in what's called International District. Not a city without soul, lots of sleepy generosity still, trust, yet sadistic malice laughs forth unselfconsciously in no time at all. Generally civil, especially by compare... a lot of "relative to" can be fitted in there. Fraying at the edges, rutty roads, flickering street lights, a soft looniness, you step into it like dogshit, unawares, or there it is thinking that you're staring at it across the way; far more moon- than sun- light per year. Another island within the biggest island in the world, it costs a buck a day to stay posted to the soft news that the jointly owned Times-Intelligencers [23] purvey! A provincial Mexican daily contains more about the great wide world, the assuaging headline "Let the Mourning Begin" always one keystroke within the impending catastrophe, the fractured underground. Don't upset the folks! Let the make-believe make-believe on. Don't fuck the boat, don't fuck the cradle endlessly rocking. Yes, the papers: nothing to write home about in this city of readers, readings, theaters, bookshops! Rare summer lightning among the freebies. A young Seattle couple making love: the clattering and gnashing of metal, tongues with studs; rings, chains. Youngmen sport astonishing goatees! Day-glow hair as varied as under seas. Vampire kids, magic cards, tattoos, the New Guinea native look, scars inflicted early to prepare, to magic the inevitable away. Young skin will bloom through anything. Grunge, the monster-mash of clean, hard punk, the style of style-less and pallid slugs, the substance here too is a superfice of style, the Swan of Tunella [24] glides except among the children from hell, tossed overboard from the I-5 [25]. The Ave rats. Punks in Reggae rags. Diversity doubles back on itself into universal freakdom, the titillations of perversity and farce. Dramatic sunsets and sunrises at all times of year. The aesthetics of ugliness co-opted. The city democratic arrests its Johns in the outlying lairs. The persistence of St. Olaf's way. The brawny masses on the 4th of July! Or an assembly of drummers on a lake shore! The rememorations of the Indian squish-squash-muk-a-lik suffixes[26] in the widening surround. Mukilteo = a good place to camp. Rumors of a dark side down towards SeaTac, Federal Way [27] SeaTac, Federal Way. Trolls in shorts all times of year. Memories, too, of the Baltic and North Sea and of Camranh Bay [28]. But: look more closely, look even more closely, look inside your looking eye to check its looking in an out. Re-arrange the grammar of your eye. The fortuitously slanting verticals and horizontals. Ochre mingling with the general mallard green and gray... The freight trains and freight yards, the containers, the freighters, the ferries, the vestigial steelyards, and Boeing Field, always also in the sky! The light, the clouds, las brisas, the rolling hills, the ridges, hills and dales, the spits of land, the ten foot tides of Puget Sound, the fog and the seemingly so frequent seemingly eternal thousand shades of winter grey: how easily forgotten at the slightest sun burst. A city for its own discovery; for walking boating cycling... through the gridlock. The light, the clouds, the rolling hills, the ridges, hills and dales, the spits of land, the ten foot tides of the Puget cesspool, even in Vietnamese it says "Don't eat the mercury- livered catch." A scattering of peninsulas and lakes, of sounds and bays, the gatherings of green, Mt. Fuji! -- No: Mount Rainier! The close yet distant jaggedness of the Cascades and the Olympics, a great encapsulator, ten days the soot that half a day deposits in L.A., an hour's walk a smudged face cloth, the pollution bowl of ten year's hence....

Thus: T.b.c

ANNOTATIONS

[For furriners and i don't mean beaver pelts]

1] Puget Sound, deep inlet of the Pacific Ocean, in northwestern Washington State, which you enter through the birth canal of the Juan de Fucas [see below] and which extends 130 km (80 mi) from Admiralty Inlet to Olympia. Vancouver Island, B.C. represents the northern side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

2] Mount Rainier, named after a British Admiral, dormant volcano of the Cascade Range in west central Washington. At 4,392 m (14,410 ft), it is one of the highest mountains in the USA. Mount Rainier National Park 235,625 acres (95,395 hectares) was established in 1899. The mountain is snow-crowned and has 26 glaciers, offering a challenge to serious climbers and a spectacular view; its heavily forested lower slopes are popular with hikers; and should she ever blow again, as she does every 1000 years, she will create a lot more havoc than did the explosion of Mt. St. Helena. Mount Rainier is your chief orientation point, since it rises like a huge, isolated, many + evenly grooved cone out of a sea-level plain to the south of Seattle, highly visible when there/s a wind coming from the northerly direction that blows its view clear of the smog and  so in that respect Mt. Rainier is also something of a weather vane.

For Rainiers prominence in the life of the region, you naturally find a wealth of designations, such as Rainier Brewery, which produces Rainier Beer, that unfortunately is not the pinnacle of the local micro-brewing fame, it might be more accurately called Nadir Beer; the Rainiers were a local baseball team when there was a West Coast League, and so therefore there then is Rainer This and Rainier That, everything from the Rainier Lounge to the Rainier Dog Catcher for all I know. I myself live at present at the inception - or at the northern end of - Rainier Avenue and have a direct view down this very straight artery through the Rainier Valley twenty-five miles south to his ever looming splendid and splendidly proportioned highness.

3] The Cascades and Olympics, mountain ranges to the East and West of Seattle, the Olympics lie across the other side of Puget Sound, some snow year around. Comparatively new ranges, as the age of the world/s crust goes, they have the jaggedness of the coastal range that becomes your old familiar as far down at the tip of Baja California Sur.

4] Greenlake is a lake north of the =ship canal= [as though there were any other! But thats Seattle redundancy for you!] in the same-named section of Seattle, about five miles north of downtown. Greenlake is so named not only because of the belt of greenery that wraps around it, but for a thick growth of green algae which militate against water sports during the warm months; and for all the green that the Canada geese that feed on the grass then deposit on the green. Of course if you lived in the Sahel you would be green just thinking of it or seeing it come as a mirage!

5] Lake Washington stretches from Renton, an ex-coal-mining, now Boeing, town with houses dropping into the honeycombed hillsides to the south, twelve miles to the north to Lake City and Woodinville. It is crossed by two frequently overcrowded =floating= bridges, the State Route 520 & the Interstate-90.

6] The =Ship Canal= begins at Lake Washington, that is on the eastern edge of Seattle, at Montlake Bridge, at the Montlake Cut, where it was dug out, it then extends through Portage Bay, which has a lot of Yacht clubs, through the northern part of Lake Union, and through Freemont, evacuating into Puget Sound at the Ballard Locks The low bridges  Montlake & University & Freemont - make ample congestion in a city that God did not design with the automobile in mind. The Ballard Locks, built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, have some wonderful =ladders= for the Salmon traffic, that is windows through which you can see them working their way up stream.!

8] The Indians in Ballard was originally displaced by Scandinavian immigrants. Annexed to Seattle in 1907, it is today a residential neighborhood with an in every respect strong Nordic heritage. In Ballard is where a very Baltic fishing fleet ties up. To the east of Ballard, along the north side of the Ship Canal, the neighborhoods of Fremont, Wallingford, and the University District stretch to the University of Washington. The Green Lake neighborhood, just north of Fremont, includes Woodland Park Zoo and Green Lake, a popular city park with picnic grounds and play-fields. North Seattle's many residential neighborhoods such as Greenwood, Maple Leaf, Wedgwood, and Lake City run north to 145th Street, the city's northern boundary. Heading south from the University of Washington, the lake-front neighborhoods of Madison Park, Madrona, Leschi, Mount Baker, and Seward Park look east to the city of Bellevue and Mercer Island, a residential island in Lake Washington. West and inland, Capitol Hill, the Central District, and Beacon Hill run north-south, parallel to downtown. Capitol Hill boasts some of the most beautiful older neighborhoods in the city, as does Queen Anne; Volunteer Park, which is home to the Seattle Asian Art Museum and the Volunteer Park Conservatory, sits atop Capitol Hill. The Central District is the historic heart of the African American community in Seattle; the area also used to encompass the heritage of Jackson Streets [long ago] vibrant jazz culture, which was put out of existence with city ordinances in the 40s prohibiting after hour clubs. During the 1940s the Seattle jazz scene fostered the careers of musicians such as Quincy Jones and Ernestine Anderson and trained musicians who worked with famous jazz artists Lionel Hampton and Count Basie, for above cited reasons, not much since. The local term Eastside refers to Seattle's suburbs in King County, covering the towns and unincorporated area east of Lake Washington to the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. The area includes the suburban cities of Factoria, Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond , Renton, and Issaquah. The Eastside has become home to dozens of high-technology industries including Microsoft Corporation, ATL Ultrasound, Nintendo of America, divisions of The Boeing Company, and many other firms. In the 1960s commuters headed to Seattle jobs from homes on the Eastside, some taking the ferry to Madison Park. Today, the the reverse commute is from Seattle homes to jobs on the Eastside is just as heavy, and both streams of traffic cross, or try to cross, the same bridges over Lake Washington at the same times. West of Puget Sound, from Seattle, lies Kitsap County, with the well to do Bainbridge Island, and Port Orchard and Bremerton which has lots of U.S. Navy shipyards. It is possible to commute comfortably via ferry from there as well as from Vashon Island. One long look at the Sound and adventure beckons.

9] Paul Bunyan, legendary hero of lumber camps of the American Northwest. Endowed with prodigious strength, vision, speed, humor, and cunning, Paul Bunyan has become the basis of a saga suited to the vastness of the North American continent. According to legend, Paul Bunyan and his giant blue ox, Babe, left an indelible mark on the landscape of America. Paul Bunyan created Puget Sound, the Grand Canyon, and the Black Hills, and Babe could haul an entire forest at one time, apparently however dropping no end of trunks into Washington in the process, and when his name became Weyerhaeuser clear-cuts in the Cascades. Some authorities find a French-Canadian origin for this modern folklore; others believe that the tale was a fabrication of a logging company during the early 20th century. Still others consider it a European import, elements of which were later magnified. All agree that this fusion of bigness with the =tall story= is a legend peculiarly American. This legend circulated through the logging camps of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, where the rugged loggers first heard and then retold the Paul Bunyan fables, adding local or personal or ancestral embellishments.

10] The Arboretum, which lies between Madison Park and south of the Ship Canal near the University, is one of the wonders of Seattle, not only for its collection of the wealth of North West trees, but also for that of trees from around the entire world, the most curious of them being the Chilean Crazy Monkey Fir, which has the foot of an elephant, the trunk of a palm tree, but the intertwining branches of a cactus, and the cones of a fir tree.

11] The Japanese Current originates where it was christened, but then makes the mistake of coursing via the Aleutians through the Gulf of Alaska, where it deep freeze, frosty water that it propels all along the West Coast as far down as the Cabos, Aleutian storms can drive some very wet weather systems into the Northwest.

12] Juan the Fox - Juan de Fuca Strait inlet of the Pacific Ocean, 100 mi (161 km) long and 11 to 17 mi (27 km) wide, between Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and Washington State, linking the Strait of Georgia and Puget Sound with the Pacific; forms part of the U.S.-Canada border. Victoria, British Columbia, the strait's largest city, is located at its eastern end; ferries connect it with the U.S. mainland. Discovered by the English captain Charles W. Barkley in 1787, the strait was named for a sailor, Juan de Fuca, who reputedly had explored it for Spain in 1592.

13] The city of Everett, in Snohomish County, north of Seattles King County, too, began as a fishing port, but now is famous as a Boeing based city.

14] The Kingdome was an indoor sports stadium until the late 90s: it had a dome, a ceiling which famously kept dropping, a weather all its own, however, it was repairable, if not especially pleasing aesthetically. It has been replaced by two stadiums, one for football, which is played six months a year; and another for baseball, which is also played for just six months a year: both these new stadium have ceilings that can be opened if it is not raining.

15] Kwakiutl group of closely related Native North Americans who inhabit N Vancouver Island and the adjacent mainland of British Columbia , Canada. They, together with the Nootka, their southern neighbors, make up the Wakashan branch of the Algonquian-Wakashan linguistic stock. Kwakiutl culture was typical of the Northwest Coast area (including the custom of potlatch, of which I am especially fond, having been introduced to it by Ruth Benedict). The ethnographer Franz Boas produced a significant number of ethnographic studies on the Kwakiutl. Numbering circa 15,000 before European contact, they are now reduced to around 4,000 and are mainly engaged in fishing and farming, or being drunks in downtown Seattle, or working at Indian run casinos.

16] Columbia Tower is the tallest of Seattles sky scrapers, and the only one that could be transplanted and raise a favorable eye-brow, it is twice as tall as Seattles favorite observation tower, the Space Needle and therefore affords by far the better view of the surround.

17] The Piers with public facilities stretch from # 48 in south as far as pier # 70 to the North: the piers to the south and north of either are strictly working, that is trans-loading piers. The Port of Seattle is chiefly a container port at this point in time.

18] The Space Needle, at Seattle Center [an amusement area adjoining the Opera, and the Seattle Repertory and Intiman theaters and the Northwest Ballet] was constructed during a 60s World Exposition. It tapers both towards the bottom and towards the top, where it sports its Chinese umbrella, with an observation restaurant. I am in the minority as one of its detractors.

19] The Pioneer Square area {P.S. itself is triangular!] has a truly fine collection of turn of the 19th century American architecture, of which I grew appreciative during my ten year stint in downtown Manhattan, which included a two year stint at Duane Park, which Pioneer Square resembles in many ways. P.S. was saved from the wreckers ball by a French restaurateur!

20] Seattles Georgetown bears no resemblance to any of the many other Georgetowns that I know in this country: it is a rundown turn of the 19th century factory district with a little bit of artistic loft development going on. Georgetown lies about ten minutes south of the more modern industrial area in South Seattle.

21] Lake City Way, the incipient blight of the U-District, Aurora Avenue refers to certain commercial strips. Aurora Avenue is actually State Route 99 and runs all the way to Everett and Bellingham

22] Bellevue, Redmond, Kirkland are small cities on the Eastside.

23] Times-Intelligencer combines the names of Seattle/s two main newspapers, The Seattle Times & The Post-Intelligencer, where the latter of the two, though Hearst-owned, is the somewhat more liberal. The two papers have what is called a joint operating agreement, where they share printing plant, distribution, collection of listed advertisements; and a Sunday edition. In fact, there is little to distinguish them from each other. The Times first section consists almost entirely of material from news services, especially that of the

New York Times. There's lots worse, but also about a dozen better papers in the United States. The Eastside has its own paper, the Eastside Journal, and Tacoma, which lies 50 miles south, has the News-Tribune, with excellent coverage of the Puget Sound area, which in many respects is superior to either of the two Seattle papers, at least so this boy feels. Seattle also has two alternative weeklies, The Seattle Weekly & The Stranger . The Weekly has been around since the counter culture days of the 60s, but, by compare with The Village Voice, the L.A. Weekly and many another counter cultural publication is Seattle-staid, presently [2003] is has a fine editor in chief in Knute Berger, who writes a readable and informative weekly lead column, otherwise it is rarely a publication that you would read for its writing, though there are surprising exceptions. The Stranger is maybe ten years old now, and seems to exist in an entirely gay world of its own. Started as an outrage au public, it, too however, now has turned =responsible= with sections devoted to muckraking and the pursuit of civic causes. The writing, far more often than not, is an abomination to the English language. It is most famous for its columnist Dan Savages sex advice column.

24] Swan of Tunella is a composition by Jan Sibelius, a favorite of the local classical music crowd, as is Carl Orff. Such beginnings do not point to what some think as the utter hopelessness of the Nordic mush merging with the indigenous mush-a-lik of the first primates to inhabit the region, since the North American continent used to be both monkey and ape free. No, such taste indicates that Grunge is the equivalent mush for the connected crowd. There is some hope yet, but it will take many more decades of Global Warming before a sufficient percentage of Southern California claritas will dry out not only the climate but the bogs of the minds of the locals. Somewhere inbetween turning into Southern California Norte and its current generally clammy and inclement condition lies Seattles golden age, which, God willing, certainly still lies well into the future, so pull out your Global Warming Calculus, and place a bet with Jimmy the Greek in Vegas. Your descendants may win yet.

25] I-5=Interstate # 5, which slashes Seattle in half. I-5 runs from the Canadian Border all the way to San Diego. Parallel relief routes are # I-405, which, here, runs along the eastern side of Lake Washington. Both routes, during rush hours, are arteries that contribute hugely to global warming.

26] mush-a-lik: e.g. Puyallup, Mukilteo [a good place to camp in Nootka], Tukwilla & the like. However, the oddly named Cedro-Wooly is neither a transmogrification of an Indian word, nor a reference to the Wooly Mammoth who makes its reappearance in local lore as the Sasquatch, but  so I am told  derives from the joining of the two names of two early Anglo Settlers.

27] The city SeaTac is named after the airport, which services both Seattle and Tacoma, Federal Way lies some miles further south. In fact, from Tacoma all the way to Bellingham, this is rally one fairly substantial metropolis, a strip of about 3 million people, built along I-5 and the railway, and Puget Sound.

28] Camranh Bay is an allusion to a famous trans-loading port in Vietnam during the U.S. attempt to dominate the country, and the fact that the only good thing to come out of this war, like so many others that this country fought, is a flourishing Vietnamese presence in the International district in Seattle.

T.b.c.

Michael Roloff

We all live at the mercy of the Jetstream [formal version

RE-ELECT ALEC FISKEN AS WHALE OF THE PORT COMMISSSION

Once more:
RE-ELECT ALEC FISKEN PORT COMMISSIONER
I find Alec smart, patient, by no means obstinately independent such as I can be, and understanding of what constitutes that complicated ball of wax, "the public interest." Alec is one of the few commissioners, I believe Lloyd Hara is one other, who takes a close look at the provisions of some of the contracts, quite a few of them no-bid with SSA Marine/ Carrix the 889 pound Orang Utahn that no paper here will do a close story about!

I have, meanwhile, tried to check out his opponent, Bill Bryant, and he does not appear to be what he presents himself as being: Alec "light", a potentially more co-operative, consensus building commissioner in a consensus fetishized * great dank Norwest [* : note my note on the history of major consens - suses? si? ae? - suggestions from all those suffering from obsessive compulsive grammaticalites welcome !] since its invasion by the empire builders around 3000 + moons ago]

First of all, he was put up by ex-Port Exec Mic Dinsmore [whom I happen to dig if only as a throwback to more royal days] and "ethically challenged" "memory challenged" anyhow thoroughly challenged Commissioner Davis, who also needs a hairpiece! Will she have the chutz pah to run agin in two years! Don't bet against Pat!

Dinsmore had vowed to to replace the fractious Fisken, as an act of vengeance for
giving the "royal" Mic a hard time! Alec smiled all the way.
Even so, Bryant might be all right.
Unfortunately he is not, I regard him to be a demagogue. For one look at his tendentious primitive website: http://www.bryantforport.com/menu.php
For two, regard his false claims: ah another one who has turned all green - actually the port years ago took a green policy, and Dinsmore, the child of that chemical cesspool, that wonder of the accumulation of capital on the backs and intestines and lungs of American labor, the well named Butte Montana,
was in the lead as much as Alec. Green is the slogan when the Port for years now has been going in that direction.
It's an instance of the lazy editorial boards
who don't know what close examination is
who never take a close look at and compare contracts and who thus
who lag behind when they have their sessions: Mr.Malarkey's PCPs in the Duwamish - that the once consensus - beloved of roofers hereabouts for about a 100 years - started being cleaned up several years ago.

To be pro-business? It is hard to be pro-port and anti-business. However, the part of the business community that prefers Bryant likes the status quo of being able to live off the tax subsidy; a tax that doesn't amount to all that much and that keeps the bond rating high but which the port, if run just a tad better and more efficiently, wouldn't need.

Current Port Commission President John Creighton felt that I ought to get to know Bryant, and since John C. is a Republican for whom I have some real liking, and since I was not disposed against Bryant at the time, I sent Mr. Bryant an e-mail asking for a meeting, or maybe we'd just chat for a while - I trust my analyst ear. Despite Creighton's wish and his then intercession Bryant failed to reply. I mean I am of course a real power house, all I can do is persuade my various feathered friends to stuff the ballots with horse feathers, that's about it. I then went to the Transportation Club's luncheon for the candidates. http://www.transportationclubofseattle.org/
After watching Bryant I had not the slightest interest, nay an aversion to make any kind of physical contact; that does not happen often, not often enough unfortunately that my detector gets it right right away.

It's a really weird entity The Port of Seattle, $ 300,000 is backing Bryant, chiefly from interested parties in the bi community. That kind of backing comes for interested reasons. Bryant himself has exclusively given, rather large amounts, only to Republicans, Cheney-Bush being the cut off line for me to trust his good sense. The port buys a rail line from BSNF and then turns around and sells it to King County; it gets into all kinds of strange matters ... a very odd semi-governmental entity.

Here are a few other links to other views of the matter:
http://www.seattleweekly.com/2007-10-31/news/right-leaning-port-candidate-claims-green-but-why.php


http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/337851_port02.html

In the other race, I now prefer Bob Edwards, a bit of a local politico, but an awfully nice one, over National Security wonk Gael Tarleton who is running for Secretary of State, Ayn Rand always gave me the willies and so does Gael.

Below , if you care to read on, an op-ed type piece of mine that expresses my views on the Port Commission, on what is I think an outmoded, anachronistic alderman way of running, over-seeing something as complicated as a sea and airport in these times. Myself, I'd rather canoe and have the 520 covered with dirt for my burro, Durango.
=====================================================================


--
About 150 years ago it was the consensus to string up Indians to show them who was boss....
Then it became the consensus to break those great treaties with them, which could get a street such as Stevens Way named after you...
The names of the original thieves and robbers are Yessler, Denny, etc... and their descendants are amongst us...
Then it was a consensus to run the Chinaman out of town after he had dug the "ship" [yes "ship" not" birth" ] canal to Lake Washington
which lowered the water table by nine feet...
And opened up a huge marsh morass where it became "the consensus" to deposit all that industrial shit....
It became the consensus to hose down them thar obstreperous hills and make a lot of landfill that became Harbor Island....
Then it became "the consensus" to drive automobiles and submit to the cement and rubber and oil industry and then to eliminate the street cars...
Now it is the consensus to be green... and to vote for Prop 1...
These are the bad old times to come as the consensi / ae/ uses/ keep piling on and up....

==================================================================

John, if you could forward this to Mr. Yoshitani, for a more focussed and briefer version of what then spilled out of me yesterday late afternoon..it will endear you to me for a certain duration.
I certainly was impressed with the way your new CEO handled a number of issues.
Then had a wonderful two hour chat with Bob Edwards outside Pier 69 in the settling dusk which I will write you about separately.
xxx
michael


ED PORT [draft]
I became involved in Port of Seattle matters during the 2005 election as supporter of a candidate whom his firm then forced to withdraw when it prohibited all employees from holding public office. Meanwhile I've made pleasant and more or less thorough acquaintance with the various commissioners and the CEO preceding the ascendancy of Tay Yoshitani; and with the by no means uncomplicated issues facing the port in the world such as it is - ah, yes, "the world such as it is!" As the child of a father who ran a fishing fleet I have always found ports sexy, and I think, perhaps mistakenly, that my take on the Port is benign and not colored by immediate self-interest.
In light of these considerations, I am wondering whether the Seattle Port Commission is still able to do the job for which it was designed. Something certainly is quite puzzling, if not amiss, about the way it is currently set up. Judging by the 100s of thousands invested in the last and current commissioner campaign you would assume these offices to be worth more than 6 k per annum. What is really at stake? Not only does the job pay a pittance, commissioners who take their jobs seriously, lacking support staff or a budget for over- and insight, will - on top of whatever other job they have - spend many many hours at slave labor wages poring over contracts and the like; something only millionaires and the retired can afford - unless civic minded beyond the call of duty. The Port C.E.O., knowing of the comparative ignorance of the commissioners, has little choice but to want them to be compliant. However, under these circumstances the commissioners would seem to be easily beholden to the businesses with interests before the Port, which pour such large sums into these elections; certainly not entirely unselfishly I don't think.
The commissioners only perk are much derided junkets to air and sea port related cities where you can either have a good time or, once again, take your job seriously; that is, you can get yourself a translator and, say, haunt the docks; certainly a good thing to get out of Seattle to get an other than rain-drenched p.o.v.!
Thus I ask myself, ought not the commissioners, when their supporters' contractual interests come before the P.O.S., recuse themselves, as some candidates with multiple interest already promise to do? If the answer is yes, would the commission still be a functioning entity?
But what if it were an appointed commission of specialists in the various areas that the P.O.S. touches, and if such a commission were sufficiently funded and staffed, might it not do a far better job? And work far more cohesively with the executive? That certainly is the case at other Ports that also run their affairs far more efficiently per cargo ton.
The second matter of ethics that I find odd is that the previous Port CEO promised to raise money to defeat the re-election of a sitting commissioner, as in the 2005 election he had campaigned for the re-election of a different commissioner. Ought the Port C.E.O. be permitted political activity; no matter how justified it may seem to him from the point of view of running the port? The commissioners themselves also take action to support or defeat each other. Not the sort of thing that is needed I don't think in this instance. It strikes me as though the commission is about to implode.



Taking a less than Seattle-centric p.o.v., I also feel that a regional or perhaps state-wide perspective ought be taken. The age-old {!} competition between the ports of Tacoma and Seattle makes little sense; together they could draw far better contracts with the big stevedoring and shipping companies. Taking the ports of Everett and Olympia, and the birth place of grunge, Grey's Harbor, into state-wide consideration might even make better sense.

OP-ED = THE SEATTLE PORT COMMISSION, ETC

OP-ED PORT [draft]

I became involved in Port of Seattle matters during the 2005 election as supporter of a candidate whom his firm then forced to withdraw when it prohibited all employees from holding public office. Meanwhile I've made pleasant and more or less thorough acquaintance with the various commissioners and the CEO preceding the ascendancy of Tay Yoshitani; and with the by no means uncomplicated issues facing the port in the world such as it is - ah, yes, "the world such as it is!" As the child of a father who ran a fishing fleet I have always found ports sexy, and I think, perhaps mistakenly, that my take on the Port is benign and not colored by immediate self-interest.

In light of these considerations, I am wondering whether the Seattle Port Commission is still able to do the job for which it was designed. Something certainly is quite puzzling, if not amiss, about the way it is currently set up. Judging by the 100s of thousands invested in the last and current commissioner campaign you would assume these offices to be worth more than 6 k per annum. What is really at stake? Not only does the job pay a pittance, commissioners who take their jobs seriously, lacking support staff or a budget for over- and insight, will - on top of whatever other job they have - spend many many hours at slave labor wages poring over contracts and the like; something only millionaires and the retired can afford - unless civic minded beyond the call of duty. The Port C.E.O., knowing of the comparative ignorance of the commissioners, has little choice but to want them to be compliant. However, under these circumstances the commissioners would seem to be easily beholden to the businesses with interests before the Port, which pour such large sums into these elections; certainly not entirely unselfishly I don't think.

The commissioners only perk are much derided junkets to air and sea port related cities where you can either have a good time or, once again, take your job seriously; that is, you can get yourself a translator and, say, haunt the docks; certainly a good thing to get out of Seattle to get an other than rain-drenched p.o.v.!

Thus I ask myself, ought not the commissioners, when their supporters' contractual interests come before the P.O.S., recuse themselves, as some candidates with multiple interest already promise to do? If the answer is yes, would the commission still be a functioning entity?

But what if it were an appointed commission of specialists in the various areas that the P.O.S. touches, and if such a commission were sufficiently funded and staffed, might it not do a far better job? And work far more cohesively with the executive? That certainly is the case at other Ports that also run their affairs far more efficiently per cargo ton.

The second matter of ethics that I find odd is that the previous Port CEO promised to raise money to defeat the re-election of a sitting commissioner, as in the 2005 election he had campaigned for the re-election of a different commissioner. Ought the Port C.E.O. be permitted political activity; no matter how justified it may seem to him from the point of view of running the port? The commissioners themselves also take action to support or defeat each other. Not the sort of thing that is needed I don't think in this instance. It strikes me as though the commission is about to implode.

Taking a less than Seattle-centric p.o.v., I also feel that a regional or perhaps state-wide perspective ought be taken. The age-old {!} competition between the ports of Tacoma and Seattle makes little sense; together they could draw far better contracts with the big stevedoring and shipping companies. Taking the ports of Everett and Olympia, and the birth place of grunge, Grey's Harbor, into state-wide consideration might even make better sense.

Michael Roloff

[is a writer, the former co-publisher of Urizen Books, former visiting scholar in Germanics at the U.W; and member of the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society

http://www.roloff.freeservers.com]

RE-SELECT ALEC FISKEN FOR PORT COMMISSIONER

Alec,
the essential pest to keep its workings honest! Alec, no Lute Fisk, cured in Brine!

Few of you know that I got quite involved in the 2005 Port of Seattle Commission Election. During this for once delightful adventure, I made acquaintance with near everyone at the Port.

http://www.portseattle.org/

One most pleasant surprise was getting to know Alec.
HTTP:// www.alecfisken.com/
He has been the sole stalwart, knowledgeable voice asking for detailed, nitty-gritty transparency in a public agency that conducts its typically Seattleish, nepotistic business practices not only in obscurity, but incompetently, at great waste of resources, with endless boondoggles. -- {Sounds like the Federal Government, doesn't it, the good olde forever SNAFU U.S.A} -- E.g.: The Port has managed to loose money on its "We must have Cruise Ships" venture, looses money on each passenger that is taken straight from the airport to embark on the cruise ships! Now the cruise terminals, at the most accessible part of the waterfront, are going to be converted back to freight and new passenger terminals will be built further north, at the cost of yet another $ 120 Million - at an entity that is 3.1 billion in debt - a foolishness that, to be fair to Mic Dinsmore the Great narcissistically vulnerable Sea Lion, even he opposed, not just Alec!


http://www.munileague.org/cec/ 2007/report/PortComm.htm

http://www.progressivemajority.org/stateprograms/wa/?lk=7092766-7092766-0-28074-BSIDMqXY2CRligZi5EIjnSwUqtp7TkTI

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/325975_vandyk02.htm
Tells us that outgoing C.E.O. Mic Dinsmore promised to raise money to defeat Commissioner Fisken. Just as he raised money to help keep Commissioner Pat ["Foxy Lady"] Davis on the commission during the 2005 P>O>S election. Not only is such an intervention illegal, I meself find it astounding that a C.E.O appointed by the commissioners then injects himself in those races! I hope this backfires good. However, all things being unequal, why don't the activist members of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce who constitute its P.A.C. , the Alki Foundation, and the Port's 8000 pound Orangutan, SSA Marine/ Cerrix Corporation, the one and only major port operator in the entire nation, and then some, really tell us - in the small details at the back of the contract - what their short and long terms interests are in having pliable, entirely underpaid [5 K per annum] and unstaffed commissioners???

Alec's opponent Bryant, a lobbyist for the food exporting industry, with an interesting resume, a die-hard Republican until now, makes me uneasy for his backing from the same forces - the Alki Club [that combine of the original thieves that came ashore there about 150 years ago, is one way of regarding them!] that supports the nepotistic, insider dealing and trading status quo and that has been feeding off the seigneural Mic Dinsmore trough? The fixes are in, not of course as in New York City or Chicago or Ohio or Florida, but still. Whether for some ultimate good? And it might take a Cy Hersh to unravel them, none of the local papers, but none, are doing sufficient investigative work or are willing to fine tune their lenses, unravel the intimacies of the connections. So no wonder, then, at some sweetheart deals being floated so openly.

With the coming this year of, so I hear, sharp Port C.E.O. Tay Yoshitani, a new day may have dawned, no longer "biz as usual," so one hopes. E.g.: The Boeing Field, trail deal negotiated between BSNF, Ron Sims and the Port, by Tay's his predecessor Mic Dinsmore - whom the novelist in me greatly appreciates for his career and color in this city of mallards - has been shelved. A more regional, less parochial approach may be in the offing. To support those objectives, a second term for Alec is essential.

One vote on a five person commission can make a huge difference. What if Jack Jolley had replaced the "Foxy Lady," Pat Davis, at the last election, who came in at 50.5 % in the primary and staid there at the general election. Maybe the electorate was beginning to smell something.

And what a pleasant surprise current Port Commission John Creighton is! A maverick Republican!

http://www.washblog.com/story/2007/7/29/205212/093

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/325761_fisken31.html

http://www.railroadforums.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19322&s=4 a7139b36b42524d050cafd1ea54ede1&


and here the link to the Port's 8000 pound Orangutan:
http://www.ssamarine.com/
============================== ==============

Regarding the 2nd race for Port Commissioner where Bob Edwards is running for re-selection, I feel equivocally torn between
Geal Tarleton
http://www.voteforgael.org/
who has some serious overlap of interest issues.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/19/news/ports.php

and Jack Block:
http://www.washblog.com/


Sitting commissioner Bob Edwards strikes me as a perfectly personable fellow, but then who isn't hereabouts except for meself! He used to be a rubber stump for Mic the Great and, I gather, he now channels County Executive Ron Sims - no doubt an interesting experience if you look at that photo of the two of them http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/zoom/html/2003747131.html
embracing on a railway track, playing chicken with an oncoming BSNF loc! As to channeling he could do a lot worse. But wouldn't it be better if he had a self of his own to chunnel? Jack Block, JR looks interesting, as does Thom McAnn if only for his position that the ports of Tacoma and Seattle ought to combine and so swing a lot more weight, also when it comes to moving stuff, no original native ever needed, to those insatiable consumers to the east.

The born-agin copy editor in you will indulge my punning?