15 posts tagged “seattle”

I'm reading Edmund White's 'States of Desire: Travels in Gay America', which I found in a bookstore outside of Sydney for $2. It was written in 1980, the final year of un-ballasted gay hedonism. It opens with a passage about L.A.:

The almost Oriental politeness of the West Coast is one of its distinctive regional features, in marked contrast to the contentiousness of the East Coast. On e may grumble at a television performer out West but never at someone appearing 'live'. So few human contacts in Los Angeles go unmediated by glass (either a TV screen or an automobile windshield), that the direct confrontation renders the participants docile, stunned, sweet.
[...]
The polite friendliness of Californians is an ambiguous quality. Within the first ten minutes a visitor is showered with affection and familiarity, but that may be as close as one is ever likely to get to someone out West. This openhanded but superficial civility, linked to an obdurate and profound reticence, is precisely the granite wedge that all those hostile forms of California therapy are trying to dynamite. There is, however, a great public if not personal benefit to be derived from uniform good manners. People are able to cooperate. They can accomplish things.

This reminds me of Seattle, how everyone you meet is instantly welcoming and impressed with you, but that's as far as you ever get. Denmark has poured some bitter black coffee into the sweet cream of my West Coast superficio-ductions, but I still catch myself doing this.

I also liked this part about a New York acquaintance moving out to LA.

His tenement pallor is giving way to a tan. His monologue pauses occasionally now for reflection or even for listening, and he has discovered in California that politeness I have mentioned, which he mistakes for acceptance.

I'm only on page fucking 21, and I can't stop quoting this thing:

'The real problem here,' [He's now quoting a gay psychotherapist in LA] 'is that smart people don't know each other. In a large nomadic population such as the gay group in this city, the rules must be kept very simple. In Los Angeles the one rule is sexual display and curiosity. Even the most brilliant man, once he is at a party, will succumb to the general vapidness. From nine to five these people are bright, clever, grownup, but after five they become emotional morons. At parties there are no serious conversations and little real warmth. People arrive an hour late (a sign of hostility) and leave saying it was a terrible bore. Of course they were disappointed; what they needed was companionship but what they thought they wanted was sexual adventure.'

You have to resist the impluse to nostalgize this period in contemporary gay life. It's tempting to reclaim the pre-AIDS period in 'those were the days' terms. But they weren't, objectively. A lot of these men were profoundly damaged. No one was out of the closet. The cops openly harassed gay bars and assaulted patrons. Legal and civil rights were nonexistent, as everyone in this book would discover in the next decade. Still, it's hard to not to find a wistful sigh on every page. 

Critical Mass is a group of a few dozen bikers who cycle together down main streets, deliberately blocking traffic to raise awareness of the difficulty of cycling in Seattle. Like everything else on the crackpot end of the ideological teeter-totter, this achieves precisely nothing. Like that arcade game where you mallet as many peeking groundhogs as possible, whatever awareness the cyclists hope to raise is instantly tamped by the honks, revved engines and 'get out of the road, asshole!' being volleyed at the swarm.

So with the regularity of a menstrual cramp, the road-blocking ride took place last Friday. Take it away, local Seattle TV station:

A demonstration turned violent Friday night after a group of cyclists taking part in the Critical Mass demonstration got into an argument with a driver on Seattle's Capitol Hill. It wasn't clear what sparked the confrontation at 15th and Aloha, but witnesses say they saw about a dozen cyclists surround a white Subaru, blocking in the driver. Apparently, the driver felt intimidated and tried to back up to get away, but he backed into at least two cyclists.

  24 hours later, cyclists and eyewitnesses chimed in

While there is no denying that the cyclists circled the car and trashed it, this was all an attempt to stop the car and driver from possibly hurting anyone else, as the scene they describe in their newscast takes place about 200 ft from the scene where the motorist accelerated from 0 to 40 THROUGH a standing line of cyclists at Aloha and 14th, luckily only injuring two of them as his car was pointed at a group of six. I was standing about 20 feet from the scene and saw the entire altercation.

[...]

Near the end of a particularly hilly ride, on Aloha E near 14th, a driver got pissed that we were blocking both lanes of the road and, after yelling "Get the fuck outta my way, we've got reservations!" proceeded to gun it into a crowd of maybe 11 cyclists! He then backed up and—with a young man on his now broken windshield—drove through the cyclists, some of whom had fallen on the road, again. He tried at this point to flee the scene in his car.

Wait, so the driver is an asshole. May he burn in a hellfire made entirely of molten Ford Explorers.

The uninjured riders absolutely mobbed the vehicle, breaking his back window with a U-lock and stopping the car about half a block later by slashing the front tires. The driver was then pulled from the vehicle by the angry group of riders (a few, maybe 5 or 6?) and assaulted.

A reporter tracked down the victim-slash-assailant:

"As soon as I tried to turn around, they completely corralled me in and were shouting things," Mark says. Although he says cyclists were initially "playfully taunting" him, Mark says the longer he waited, the more aggressive they got. "They wouldn’t let me move even after the rest of the bikes went by, he says, adding that he started to panic when cyclists began tugging on his side mirrors and he heard someone say "let’s tip the car."

Mark says he felt intimidated and was concerned for his safety, so he began to rev his engine. "[I] was going to...try to be macho and scare some people," he says. "I didn’t realize my car was in first [gear]."

Mark says he got out of his car and was immediately struck in the back of a head by a cyclist wielding a U-lock. Mark then told the angry crowd he was "sorry" and "didn't know anyone was hurt," before walking up to where the injured cyclists were. This, Mark says, is when cyclists "completely destroyed [his] car," breaking his windows and slashing his tires.

This behavior is absurdly typical of Seattle. Both sides acting completely fucking retarded, then changing the facts afterwards to make themselves look better. It wouldn't surprise me if a group of self-righteous bikers, wielding U-locks, impotence and clip-shoes, ganged up on a driver and wouldn't let him leave until he snapped. It also wouldn't surprise me if a Seattle driver -- imagine an SUV-owning Vermonter, then add eco-guilt and white shame -- responded to a quantum inconvenience with an anger supernova, and decided a few broken bike-legs were worth making it to his Denny's reservation on time.

Picking sides in these things is like rooting for Israel or Palestine -- they'll let you down every time. I did like this part of the driver's roman a clef, though

I’m gay, the person with me was a lesbian and we were attacked by eco-terrorists. It’s the most Seattle thing that could have happened.

Which is exactly why everyone involved should be banished to South Dakota, milking industro-cows on the most inorganic farm possible, driving a tractor from the trailer to the Wal-Mart and eating bacon-wrapped Snickers and instant coffee for breakfast every day until Jeb Bush is elected president.

My friend back home in Seattle has started setting up a volleyball net in public parks and spending afternoons playing with whoever shows up. I think this is distilled genius, and it appears to have fermented nicely:

Friend [on IM]: I hooked up, dude.

Been having sex with a singer/actress from Wisconsin.

Most random and awesome shit in the history of my lameness. Even blind squirrels can find an occasional acorn.

Me: Bout time, sonnn!
How did this happen

Friend: I have been asking myself the same thing.

My only comment is:

VOLLEYBALL NET

And Jah did the rest.

 

I booked tickets to Seattle. I’ve seriously had it with Grey Lady Denmark this summer. Seattle probably won’t be any better weather-wise, but at least it has old friends and abundant teriyaki to take my mind off the cloudy duvet of Inconvenient Truth that’s been hanging over northern Europe all summer.

 

Denmarkians: Lemme know if you want me to pick you up any appallingly cheap American goods. With the Tijuana-ass exchange rate, it's like the whole continent's having a half-off sale.

 

Seattleites: I'll be in my humble hometown from Sept. 6-22. Let's do stuff. Holler if you wanna hang.

I've never been particularly patriotic about America as a whole. People saying nasty things about the States doesn't sting at a gut-punch level, and I'm capable of discussing stuff like lack of universal health care and assorted shitty presidents objectively. But when it comes to Seattle, I am Uncle Fucking Sam.

"Seattle? Doesn't it rain all the time there?" No, punk. Summer starts in fucking March, and unless you're from the goddamn Maldives, our weather is better than yours. Yes, Nirvana is the best band ever, and no, I don't want to talk about the last season of 'Frasier'. I will boast endlessly about Seattle being the most educated city in America. However, the less said about Starbucks, 'Grey's Anatomy' and Modest Mouse, the better.

I came across some delicious Seattle-porn today via Boing Boing.These are old posters and snaps of the Space Needle, the world's only non-phallic towering structure.

See? Sunshine, motherfucker. Proof that it hasn't rained since Microsoft bought all the clouds in 1982.

In the latest step of the Britney Spears-ing of Denmark's international reputation, Copenhagen hosted some youth riots this weekend, turning two central neighborhoods into the last 20 minutes of 'Children of Men'.

The reason for the 'un-relaxedness', as they say in Danish, was that a bunch of semi-squatter kids were being kicked out of a house that the city gave them in the 1980s. A few years ago the house was sold to a nutty, possibly stress-testing Christian group who wanted to tear it down because, you know, that's what Jesus would do and everything.

So: The riots. The city politicians were inarguably being dicks by having everyone in the house arrested, but as soon as the anarchists came out of the woodwork and started setting shit on fire, you could practically hear the entire Danish middle class sighing and folding up their sympathy.

I have to admit that I have a special aversion to all things anarchy. What may have at one point been a legitimate political position is now just an excuse to set shit on fire, yell meaningless slogans, and spray-paint that tired logo (oh, I'm sorry, symbol) on any flat, non-flammable surface.

I remember being at the WTO riots in Seattle in 1999 and asking one of the anarchists about why they were throwing bottles and turning cars over. The answer was something like "Fucking cops, man!" No one could tell me anything about the WTO or what exactly they were protesting. It was just a bunch of idiots equipped with a restless throwing arm and an ideology that never graduated from middle school.

The definitive moment of the Seattle riots was seeing a guy wearing a hankerchief as a mask (and Nikes, as I recall) spray painting the anarchy symbol on a building and forgetting to cross the A. "Are you kidding me?!" my friend shouted. "Being an anarchist is the easiest thing to be! All you have to do is know that fucking symbol, and you can't even get that right!"

I think there's a reason that anarchy (and the whole Extra Value Meal of radical left politics that comes with it) is so popular with teenagers. It is easy. To be an anarchist you just have to be against everyone who tells you 'no'. It's the philosophical equivalent of a 'keep out' sign on your bedroom door.

Yes, it's a shame that the Youth House got torn down, and an even bigger shame that, this being Denmark, either a hair salon or a tanning-farm will most likely be built in its place. But it's also a shame that some accountant living in the funky part of town woke up on Sunday to find his Volvo turned into a hibachi just because Beavissen and Buttheadsdottir wanted to make a political point.

From my friend Chris' blog in Seattle:

For the past two weeks I -- and every other male in my office who has a bladder -- have been going to the bathroom and in the first urineral sits a dime in the water. It isn't too deep, probably going up to my watch if I stuck my hand in.

it got me to thinking. If I was considering it, I'm sure others were too. Just needed more incentive.

So starting last Monday I started dropping a dime in the urinal every day to see how many it takes for someone to either bring gloves from home to pick it up or stick their hand in and pick it up.

Many people I asked believed it would just be two or three days (four or five dimes). I thought it would be closer to seven or eight. [...]

Monday: I couldn't have placed the drop any more perfect. The original one was heads down in the middle. The second one fell just to the north, heads up, barely touching. Absolutely perfect.

Tuesday: My drop wasn't nearly as good, hitting the right side of the urinal, but ended up falling so it almost completely covered up the orignal dime -- just a sliver of the orignal dime is showing on the left side. The third time fell heads up as well.

Wednesday: I couldn't tell if the dimes were at first glance. The person before me didn't flush, and after I did there were some bubbles that made it impossible to tell. Upon my second pee-pee, I could tell they were still there. And then I added the fourth one. Instead of a straight drop, I bent my wrist back and threw it in. Mission accomplished. Tails up. It is getting more difficult to tell how many are in there. Don't know if that helps or hurts....

But after three days, all four dimes remain.

[two weeks later]

$1.40 and counting ...

at this point it just looks like the bottom of a wishing well. it is impossible to tell how much is in there, but people can tell it is probably at least a buck.

But here's the problem... I could really use a buck right now.

So here is my new proclamation: If/when the pile gets to $3, I am reaching my hand in there and getting it myself.

There's no more entries, so I assume Chris just broke down and rusted his watch grabbing his own dimes out of the Goddamn urinal.

I hella want to do this experiment, among other places, A) In Denmark and B) at a human rights organization. The NGOies would break down at the first glint of silver...

A writer on one of my favorite homesick-making blogs got punched in the mouth last night, and posted a pretty good write-up. The Seattlest part of it is this:

First Dude took a step back and then an earthquake—a rumbling in my ears. I never even saw it coming. Then a pain in my mouth. I touched my hand to it and saw blood. All I could think to say was: “Why?”

“That’s why!” First Dude said.

The street where Stakkels Brandon got ganked is the center of the (rather meager) Seattle bar scene, and is also coincidentally the center of the (fucking thriving) homeless-people scene. I once made the mistake of leaning against a building late at night there, and got almost tackled by a street urchin yelling 'Move along! I left a bagel there earlier!'

Things I miss the most about the Bum/Bar Thoroughfare:

Gay-Fights, which usually consist of roughly 8 minutes of flaccid slaps and end with a falsetto 'What-ever. I'm leaving!'

Desperation Street. This is the scene outside the bars when they all close en masse at exactly 2 am. Everyone knows it's their last chance to hook up, so the streets are full of darting, beer-goggled eyes and the rising din of last-resort pickup lines.

A Studio 54-caliber line at the hot dog stand. These are the American equivalent of kebabs, only with the addition of ketchup, relish, and a Southeastern Asian nation's worth of health code violations. I ended up talking to one of the hot dog vendor guys one night, and he said that some drunk-ass twentysomething tries to rob his cash register at least once per night.

Hipsters. My favorite drunken conversation with one of the bescarfed citizens of Cooler Than You Nation culminated with him yelling 'I'm gonna be the black Oprah!', provoking someone across the street to yell, 'I think someone beat you to it, man!'