The Stranger

The New Hometown Heroes

Adam Willems — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 16:04:00 -0700

The Salmon Bay Football Club Fills an Important Gap in Our Local Soccer Scene—and in Fans' Hearts

by Adam Willems

Photos by Billie Winter

It’s June 18, 7:30 on a Wednesday evening at Interbay Stadium, a hideaway athletic venue adjacent to the railyard and a smidge north of the Interbay driving range. More than 1,400 sports fans have flocked to the stadium to support their hometown heroes—who are playing for both the home and away teams.

Fans watched Salmon Bay FC host the West Seattle Rhodies in a decisive cross-town rivalry game. And after 23 minutes of play, UW women’s soccer veteran and West Seattle Rhodies forward Hailey Still scored the first goal. With a running windup into the penalty box, Still shot the ball into the lower-right side of the goal—just beyond the reach of Salmon Bay FC goalkeeper and Ballard High School alum Elena Milam.

A goal halfway into the first half isn’t exactly a nail in the coffin: For the losing side, it can be an early setback that lights a fire under players’ asses to come back and beat their opponent. But for Salmon Bay, the home team, it was the first time they’d ever allowed a goal in franchise history.

Granted: Salmon Bay FC isn’t very old. This was its sixth-ever game in history. Hard-launched to the public in October 2024, Salmon Bay is one of 27 brand-new teams playing in USL W, a burgeoning pre-professional women’s soccer league now featuring 93 clubs spanning the continental US. The franchise helps address a “missing middle” in athletics, particularly in women’s sports, by incubating talent between college soccer and professional leagues through high-caliber games and training over the summer. Partially owned by Rough & Tumble’s Jen Barnes, as well as Seattle Reign players Lu Barnes, Jess Fishlock, and Olivia Van Der Jagt, Salmon Bay is the sibling team to Ballard FC, the men’s club that’s enjoyed a die-hard following since its kickoff in 2022. Both teams are buoyed by fierce neighborhood-level pride, top-tier talent, and silly rituals.

Ballard FC has frequently gone far into the postseason—including a 2023 league title, as well as a spot in the 2025 championship finals—proving to locals that superlative talent lives just down the road. Salmon Bay is here to further prove that point, and aspires to go consistently far into the postseason, eventually securing a championship title of its own. “Everything really relies on these next two weeks,” the team’s vice president, Tiffany Mallick, told me on the sidelines three minutes before the Rhodies’ goal in June. Salmon Bay had been neck-and-neck all season with division leader FC Olympia, which had won its first seven games. (Its defense allowed some goals.) Only one team per division makes it to the playoffs, a postseason structure Mallick considers a “discrepancy,” since the men’s summer league, USL 2, admits two teams per division.

“Showing up and having to perform at 100 percent every single game is a lot to ask for in a small window of time during the summer, so allowing some grace with that would help,” she said, adding the team will “probably have more conversations postseason” with the league to see if that structure might change.

Before Wednesday, Salmon Bay trailed Olympia FC in the USL W standings due to a single tied match—its season-opening away game against the West Seattle Rhodies, which ended in a 0-0 draw.

But things are far from a draw off the field. The home team’s fan base and energy blow those of opposing teams “out of the water,” according to Salmon Bay defender Ella Hatteberg. “It's been the best that summer could have gone, and it's been so much fun, and the intensity is so good,” she said. Midfielder Fiona Doherty, who grew up in Sunset Hill and plays professionally in Greece during the regular season, noted that all of their home games had been “full, sold-out matches.” She said Salmon Bay has helped bring “really accessible viewing of good soccer” to Ballard, which can be inspiring for kids, helps make locals “amped” about the team, and can generate good exposure for her teammates.

Several Salmon Bay players said the team benefits from its relationship to Ballard FC, as the men’s team’s success in building a fan base has helped them do the same—assisted by a parent organization well-versed in involving community and getting people to show up.

Some team rituals spill from Ballard FC into Salmon Bay FC, like free Dick’s burgers thrown into the stands when the home team scores a goal. But Salmon Bay’s energy is distinct, not derivative. Sam Zisette, founder of Ballard FC and Salmon Bay FC, and president of their ownership group, observed that a subset of ticketholders tend to sit criss-cross-applesauce next to the goals at Salmon Bay games, bringing a gentle vibe to the stadium’s beer garden. More families attend Salmon Bay games than Ballard FC games; Zisette said he’s heard “over and over and over again” that parents see the team as setting an example for their daughters.

At the same time, Mallick, the vice president, said she hopes rowdier fans will show up for Salmon Bay too, bringing more of the high-octane energy she’s seen at Ballard FC matches. Notably absent at the Salmon Bay game I attended, for instance, were the “Bushkeepers,” a horde of Ballard FC supporters who hang out in the bramble on the south-side hillock outside official stadium grounds; they’ve been known to beat big drums and get loud.

But Salmon Bay FC players are building a flourishing team culture on top of a thoughtful foundation set by the parent organization, and are doing it quite compellingly. Take the team’s special-edition jerseys, which they wore at the rivalry game: a funky floral and fungal kit designed by local artist Sarah Robbins. Salmon Bay’s players took it upon themselves to mark the occasion by showing up in floral outfits to the pre-game. That included some groovy, flowy flower-power-esque pieces in addition to more crafty and whimsical getups that transformed human heads into golden-hued daffodils. See the montage here. Even the team’s chant to break the huddle feels organic and on-brand: a simple “Bay!” does the job.

The consistently celebratory and inventive air at Interbay Stadium is only compelling, however, because of the impressive athletics on display. And, at that Wednesday game, the rivalry felt real (not an artificially manufactured rivalry merely weeks old), no doubt aided by the fact that the Salmon Bay and Rhodies head coaches are spouses (ooh!), and that the opposing team’s roster featured plenty of familiar faces, creating a who’s-who of UW soccer stars competing on both sides. The home team found firmer footing following halftime and made some impressive attempts on goal, with Maia Tabion’s stubborn drive particularly on display. But ultimately to no avail this time around: The Rhodies defeated Salmon Bay 1 – 0, the latter’s first-ever loss.

It was a nail-biter, portending, possibly, future rivalry-laden nail-biters. Scuttlebutt says Salmon Bay had been planning a cheeky boat-paddling pantomime like the one the Rhodies pulled off at the game, which might justify some revenge pantomiming next year. The rest of the season was a nail-biter, too: Salmon Bay shook off the loss to beat division-leading Olympia FC on the 21st, thanks to a banging header from Sadie Sider-Echenberg placed deftly in the right spot by defender Ella Hattenberg, which briefly brought playoff contention back into the picture. Salmon Bay ultimately placed second in the division: just barely behind Olympia FC—which lost in the postseason to Utah United, this year’s USL W champions—and narrowly ahead of the Rhodies. It only allowed two goals over the entire season, making its defense the best in the entire USL W league. The home team won its last game 8 – 0; hopefully a cathartic blowout.

Be a GCal stakhanovite and block out your calendar now for next year’s season. It’s worth the hype and wait. Breaking with Seattle tradition, franchise ownership won’t break your heart. The spirits are high and flowing: There’s a tequila zone. You can order a hot dog with lingonberry jam on it. How Svensk. Reuben’s sells special-edition tallboys. You can even bushkeep in the bramble. Or go do the same for the Rhodies, for Maple Valley’s Bigfoot FC, and other local squads. Witness the next generation of hometown stars in wholesome environs before they enter the Lumen Field limelight in a few years. Bay!

Trans Rights Event to Counter Christian Nationalist Rally

Adam Willems — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 13:45:00 -0700

Anti-queer Christian nationalists are coming back to Seattle this weekend for Sean Feucht's worship rally at Gas Works Park. To counter the hate, Lavender Rights Project (LRP), a Seattle-based transgender rights group, is organizing its own event, “Louder Than Hate: Trans & Queer Joy as Resistance.” Fifteen community organizations, including the Church Council of Greater Seattle, the Seattle LGBTQ Commission, and the NAACP Alaska Oregon Washington State Area Conference, are standing with them. by Adam Willems

Anti-queer Christian nationalists are coming back to Seattle this weekend. To counter the hate, Lavender Rights Project (LRP), a Seattle-based transgender rights group, is organizing its own event, “Louder Than Hate: Trans & Queer Joy as Resistance.” Fifteen community organizations, including the Church Council of Greater Seattle, the Seattle LGBTQ Commission, and the NAACP Alaska Oregon Washington State Area Conference, are standing with them.

Sean Feucht, a Christian nationalist celebrity, evangelical musician, and preacher who made his name touring the US and Canada to protest COVID restrictions, is coming to Seattle just three months after a provocative anti-trans Christian nationalist rally in Cal Anderson Park ended in the Seattle Police Department arresting 23 protesters, sometimes brutally. Feucht, who has called for a nation in which “Christians are making the laws” and who calls “transgenderism” “demonic,” originally planned to bring his “Revive in 25” rally, a tour of the nation’s “darkest, most broken cities,” to Cal Anderson on August 30. But after last-minute talks, the city convinced organizers to move the event to Gas Works Park.

Lavender Rights Project also planned to be in Cal Anderson, but moved the event to Washington Hall in the Central District for “safety reasons,” organizers say. Taking place at Washington Hall in the Central District on the same day and time as Feucht’s rally, “Louder Than Hate” will feature live performances from Black, Trans, and queer artists; offer food and music; include speeches from community organizers; and provide spaces for rest and celebration. Event organizers say moving the event indoors can help prevent any unpermitted events allied with Feucht from coming into contact with “Louder Than Hate” attendees and their supporters. Any clashes between these groups could be disseminated by Feucht-allied groups to support their claims that Christians’ freedoms of speech and religion are being attacked in Seattle—a content strategy Christian nationalist groups have used to effectively grow their influence across the country.

“We want to gather, to be in a place that feels like home, to love on each other, to celebrate all the things that make our beautiful community in Seattle unique, and to take time to learn more about the threat that Washington is facing in these coming years,” says Jaelynn Scott, LRP’s executive director.

The last major public appearance of Christian nationalist groups in Seattle—which featured local Christian nationalist pastors Jenny Donnelly, Matt Shea, and Russell Johnson and was organized by Mayday USA—ended with violence. The Seattle Police Department (SPD) pepper sprayed some zip-tied protesters before arresting them.

Mayor Bruce Harrell later denounced Mayday USA’s “far-right rally,” stating that the event was designed to “provoke a reaction by promoting beliefs that are inherently opposed to our city’s values.”

Groups tied to the worshippers threatened to sue and/or “hold to account” Mayor Bruce Harrell and the City of Seattle for allegedly violating their constitutional rights, inspiring another rally, “Rattle in Seattle,” outside City Hall—leading to police arresting more protesters as well as substantial right-wing and local media attention. Mayday USA announced Monday that it sued the city of Los Angeles for similar reasons.

Many Christian nationalist groups see controversy and conflict as an effective way to swell their ranks, says Jessica Johnson, an independent scholar who wrote a book about the rise and fall of Mars Hill, a Seattle-based network of megachurches that dissolved in 2015 following allegations of abuse against its co-founder and spiritual leader, Mark Driscoll.

Feucht’s movement effectively produces propaganda that complements positive depictions of movement members praying together with videos of clashes with counterprotesters, Johnson says. This social media strategy can make Christian viewers who are not part of Feucht’s movement “feel more compelled to join forces, and to really take these kinds of actions themselves into whatever spaces they are in … so that they feel compelled to be combative towards others,” she says.

LRP spokesperson Mataoe Aiden James Nevils says there’s a greater chance that an outdoor event would give groups associated with Feucht “the Fox News footage that they’re looking for,” and the “fight that they’re begging for.” Nevils says the organization moved the event indoors because they are concerned that Feucht may still hold an unpermitted march in Cal Anderson, despite the negotiations that moved his rally to Gas Works. After the city announced the change in venue, the event’s Facebook page showed a planned “Jesus March” at Cal Anderson at 3:30. It’s since been deleted.

Johnson noted that Mars Hill held a mass baptism at Gas Works during its heyday. She says both Driscoll’s and Feucht’s religious practices are attempts to “occupy” liberal cities. Citing Feucht’s use of members of the Proud Boys neo-fascist militia as bodyguards at a rally in Portland, Johnson says Feucht is both anti-LGBTQ as well as intentionally masculinist as a way to elicit violence and attention.

Much like Driscoll, who resigned from his leadership role at Mars Hill following accusations that he “bullied” dissenting members of his church, Feucht faces allegations of “spiritual, emotional, and psychological abuse” from former associates. Feucht has also been accused of embezzlement, and has been barred from holding rallies in eight cities in Canada, where some local governments labeled his activities as “hate speech.” Driscoll has rehabilitated his image since his downfall a decade ago, Johnson noted, saying that non-denominational groups led by a single figure lack structural forms of oversight, complicating attempts to hold figures like Driscoll and Feucht accountable.

Following the Mayday USA event, local community organizers, in conjunction with the city’s LGBTQ Commission, talked with the city about how to prevent violence when Christian nationalists come to town in the future, both from far right groups and the police that often protect them. After the last rally, Seattle Police Officers Guild President Mike Solan told local radio station KTTH that violence was the outcome of putting a "peaceful group" in "Antifa land, Cal Anderson Park.” He was referring to the Christian nationalists as peaceful. LRP’s Scott says the city consulted LRP and other groups on their approach to interacting with the city’s LGBTQ community.

“What [SPD] did was completely out of line: They pitted themselves against our community in protection of a religious extremist group,” Scott says, noting that LRP is “supportive of those who make a decision to engage in direct action.”

A man who will hate kazoos by 5:08 p.m. on August 30th.

Direct action is clearly on the mind of whoever is putting up posters for the “WORLD’S LARGEST Kazoo Performance” of Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club”—240 kazoos provided—during Feucht’s rally at Gas Works park.

Johnson, the scholar, added that Christian groups in attendance at events like “Louder Than Hate” should prioritize broadcasting their support via social media as a way to “counteract” what figures like Feucht frame as ‘correct’ Christian beliefs.

Tara Miller, co-Executive Director of the Church Council, a 106-year-old faith-rooted community organizing group in Seattle, says the Council has been sharing its social media strategy with LRP leading up to its event. They say the Council’s partnership with LRP is the outcome of reflecting on how to respond “when white Christian nationalists show up,” and reflecting on the visits of previous reactionary figures to Seattle, such as that of orange-juice-spokesperson-turned-anti-gay-rights-crusader Anita Bryant in the ’70s. They’ve been working with LRP on this event for six weeks.

“As we've been in conversation with Lavender Rights Project, they were asking, ‘How can you gather faith folks who can speak to this moment?’” Miller says.

They say the Council’s community plans to be with LRP “wherever the location is.”

LRP secured city funding for its “Louder Than Hate” event in collaboration with Dominique Stevens (an advisor to Mayor Harrell) and Councilmember Hollingsworth. The funding, granted through the Seattle Parks “Recreation for All” program, is exempt from the program’s typical requirement to be held in a park. “The event will still be eligible to receive the funds even if they move to a private location,” according to a spokesperson for Mayor Harrell’s office.

The Mayor’s office acknowledged the “Jesus March” that briefly appeared on the “Revive in 25” event’s Facebook page, but writes that organizers “have not submitted an application to hold a march in or around Cal Anderson Park.” The Mayor’s office says it is “not aware of a planned ‘Jesus March.’”

LRP isn’t taking chances. “We're not going to bite the hook, and we don't want to play into their game,” Scott says.

Going Up in Smoke

Adam Willems — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 10:26:00 -0700

Our People Brings 2020's BLM Energy Back to the Opera House

by Adam Willems

Grammy Award-winning tenor Freddie Ballentine and (equally accolade-laden) Indian-American pianist Kunal Lahiry premiered their recital Our People, a celebration of LGBTQ and Black artists and histories, at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center in December 2021. It’s a production that Ballentine, who is Black, says was a response to the Black Lives Matter movement following the death of George Floyd. “It was something that represented the times, and represented us, and represented as many queer and Black people as we could imagine in one setting,” Ballentine says.

Things have changed and things haven’t changed since that 2021 debut. For one, Ballentine and Lahiry, who both grew up in the US, now live in Berlin, which is home to a “gorgeous” music scene, three great opera houses, and parties Ballentine says feature “everything that my wild little heart desires.”

The Kennedy Center, meanwhile, is a hyperpoliticized version of the institution it once was following President Donald Trump’s purge of and ensuing self-appointment to the Center’s board, placing an executive director of allegedly “unhinged” nature at its helm. All of that against the backdrop of continuously worsening political and social conditions for many Black people, queer and trans people, immigrants, and others, who historically and presently confront fascism’s entrenchment.

Our People comes to Seattle Opera’s Tagney Jones Hall on Sunday, April 27, marking its first return to the US since 2021. And, like the political conditions to which the performance is a response, parts of the recital have changed while maintaining its core qualities.

The recital is centered around four core pillars, tracking—the way I see it—the life cycle of many political movements. The first chapter, “Shut me out (Isolation),” highlights otherness and exclusion. Starting with the traditional spiritual “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,” Ballentine and Lahiry also perform pieces by composer Aaron Copland (who, using present-day terms, was arguably “closeted”), as well as Black composer Margaret Bonds, whose music, Ballentine says, sometimes touches on exclusion.

“Going up in smoke (Damnation)” looks at the AIDS crisis and at oppression as vectors of death and damnation. This section includes “The ’80s Miracle Diet” by David Krakauer and the well-known anti-lynching piece “Strange Fruit” by Abel Meeropol (recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939). Ballentine and Lahiry see the mpox epidemic as one example among many of these forms of oppression continuing today. “I got monkeypox back when [it] was going around, and I have never felt so alone,” says Ballentine. “It was shocking how quickly the government in Germany just locked us all down saying, You can't leave your houses. I never felt so close to death. If it wasn't for my really great Ukrainian refugee roommate at the time, who had a smallpox vaccine so he was protected, I don't know how I would have pulled through on that."

They follow this up with “Requiem (Remembrance),” where the performers “pay homage to those in the first and second sections” using pieces like “The Man I Love” by Earl Wild and “Dido’s Lament (When I am laid in earth)” from Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas.

The final chapter, “So Loud, So Proud (Revolution),” includes songs like “My People” by Ricky Ian Gordon (lyrics by Langston Hughes),” Backlash Blues” by Nina Simone, and “Mr. Brown,” a piece written by Zach Redler for Ballentine and Lahiry, which honors Ballentine’s “proud, loud, and audacious” childhood chorus teacher.

If the repertoire sounds heavy, that’s because it often is. At its Kennedy Center debut, the concert was “longer” and “sadder,” according to Ballentine, in part because of the social movements and specific injustices to which Our People was responding. The performers have truncated the sets and introduced breaks, but say “it’s almost heavier singing it now.” In addition to redoubled authoritarianism in the US, Ballentine mentioned political conditions in Germany, where four people who protested against the genocide in Gaza are potentially facing deportation. Ballentine and Lahiry also don’t know if the Kennedy Center would allow them to perform the repertoire today.

But the recital travels on more than one wavelength. That heaviness is a means toward awareness and coalescing around shared ideas for what the human experience should look like, and offers space for levity and creativity in the process. Lahiry, for his part, just performed at the Kennedy Center, making a point to get make-up done by a drag queen before going on stage. “It is a revolution at this point in time, and that is because we as a queer community are a revolution. We are always fighting to be heard and fighting to let our natural joy and uniqueness take precedent and not be pushed down by society,” Ballentine says.

The performers said they want to see people of all stripes at the performance, noting that parts of the recital focused on AIDS remembrance have been especially poignant for older members of the audience. At the same time, seeing the girls and the queens show up matters to the artists. (Heaviness and levity going hand in hand.) “I want the queens there. We did this for us. When we did it in Berlin, I felt so happy because Kunal and I took a peek out into the audience … and all of the people there were just our friends and loved ones from Berlin,” Ballentine says. “It was all the girls from the parties, like, they were all there ready to sit through their first fucking recital.”

Seattleites have—at least relatively speaking—a decent number of opera performances focused on social-justice issues and Black and queer culture they can attend. Last year saw drag queen Anita Spritzer perform a recital; McCaw Hall, meanwhile, was home to X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X. Seattle Opera also just announced its first full production of a queer-focused opera in February 2026. Our People is in line with that repertory trend.

“I am a strong believer that artists have the obligation to be a reflection of the times and to protest whenever possible, and I think that this is a really solid way for me to use a platform and to protest,” Ballentine says. “I'm happy to sing this recital. I think it's a gorgeous collection of pieces. I think it tells a really powerful story. I think it still tells a very relevant story to what we're going through today.”

A Future for the El Rey and the Fight to Keep Seattle Livable

Adam Willems — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 13:44:00 -0700

There are almost as many ways to describe the El Rey as there are years under its (metaphorical) belt. One can outline its year of establishment (1910), construction material (brick), number of stories (4), square footage (30,000), and crossroads (between Lenora and Blanchard Streets along 2nd Avenue in Belltown). Another method is to list the El Rey’s many functions over the years: At the start of the 20th century, it was a four-story apartment building with three ground-floor retail spaces;; by the end, it was a 60-unit mental health residential facility.Or finally, you could describe the El Rey through the existential crossroads it sits on: It might become artist-focused affordable housing, or alternatively, in just a few days, it’ll become a pile of bricks. by Adam Willems

There are almost as many ways to describe the El Rey as there are years under its (metaphorical) belt. One can outline its year of establishment (1910), construction material (brick), number of stories (4), square footage (30,000), and crossroads (between Lenora and Blanchard Streets along 2nd Avenue in Belltown). Another method is to list the El Rey’s many functions over the years: At the start of the 20th century, it was a four-story apartment building with three ground-floor retail spaces; by the end, it was a 60-unit mental health residential facility. Or finally, you could describe the El Rey through the existential crossroads it sits on: It might become artist-focused affordable housing, or alternatively, in just a few days, it’ll become a pile of bricks.

The main group pushing to save the building is Common Area Maintenance (CAM), an arts collective, studio, and gallery in Belltown. Currently renting two properties, including one owned by mogul Martin Selig, CAM began working with a real estate agent last year in the hopes of establishing a more permanent footprint in the city.

“For the past 10 years I've been working at Common Area, one of the key conversations I have is, How do we survive in the city?” says Timothy Firth, a sculptor who co-founded CAM a decade ago and serves as its director. “That conversation has become more and more potent as the years go on.”

The Belltown arts collective has spent the last decade carving out a home in the city’s shifting landscape, but now, CAM is reckoning with a question as pressing as ever: Can artists hold their ground in Seattle, or will the city’s creative core be priced out of existence?

CAM’s efforts to find firmer footing kicked into high gear in December 2024 after local construction company BNBuilders reached out to Critical Ventures Housing Partnership II, which owns CAM’s 2nd Ave property, to conduct staging work on the building’s roof. BNBuilders intended to use the roof as a platform to demolish the property next door: the El Rey.

CAM’s 2nd Ave landlords, along with Firth, “got into a broader conversation about the structural stability of the roof and what we had to do to shore it up,” Firth says. They considered fighting the demolition, as the two buildings were built at the same time and have been “sinking down into the earth together for the past 100 years,” he explained.

The idea of demolishing the El Rey raised a litany of questions. Could CAM’s 2nd Ave building structurally survive the demolition of its neighbor? How soon would demolition happen? And, if it went through, what would become of the lot where the El Rey once stood?

The path to demolition

As the cost of living has risen in Seattle, so too has the frequency and intensity with which politicians, renters, landowners, and others have debated what to do about local housing, especially the shortage thereof. Climbing rents and property asking prices have led to especial cost burdens for people of color, and have encouraged people excluded from top earning brackets—including creative workers—to move somewhere more affordable. Among other consequences, this kind of displacement and gentrification can raze and homogenize a city’s culture and identity, blurring the lines between its civic essence and the office parks and lanyard-festooned fashions of its most affluent ilk.

While the Harrell Administration has touted “downtown activations” as one way to address Seattle’s multifaceted hollowing out, residents have responded to these realities with votes in favor of social housing—twice—as well as a slate of progressive tax policies. In aggregate, electoral outcomes suggest a public mandate to render Seattle more dynamic, diverse, and affordable by taxing wealthy people and corporations, expanding equity-attuned government initiatives, and funding middle-income housing.

The El Rey is just the latest spot to draw public attention to the region’s structural shortcomings. And, over the years, it’s been home to much more than demolition-focused debates. In September 2019, SOUND Behavioral Health, a regional non-profit, acquired the El Rey following its merger with Community Psychiatric Clinic (CPC). This expanded SOUND’s network to 18 locations, serving 26,000 people. At the time of the merger, the El Rey functioned as a residential facility for 60 people, representing 13% of King County’s contracted mental health treatment beds.

By August 2020, SOUND had shuttered the El Rey, citing “deferred maintenance,” including a sewage leak and plumbing problems. The organization estimated that bringing the building “up to where it needed to be” would cost several million dollars. SOUND’s tax filings show a drop in revenue from $99.5 million to $79.4 million between 2019 and 2020, while executive compensation climbed from $1.4 million to $2.4 million. (In 2023, it hovered around $1.6 million, following nearly $3 million in 2022.) Public reimbursements for care have remained relatively stagnant while property operating costs have increased. An October 2020 article by The Seattle Times suggested that after SOUND shut down the El Rey and relocated residents, at least one former El Rey resident became homeless.

According to Nona Raybern, a spokesperson for the Seattle Office of Housing (SOH), the El Rey’s operational and services costs were “funded by local and federal homelessness dollars and the behavioral health system, including Medicaid” prior to 2020, and “ended after the project was no longer financially or operationally viable.” The building is now monitored by the Seattle Department of Construction & Inspections (SDCI) under its Vacant Building Monitoring program. “The building as it currently stands does not meet the health and safety standards required for human habitation,” Raybern told The Stranger via email.

“We want to find a way that [the El Rey] strengthens our presence in Belltown because we think there’s a pretty big need for our services in Belltown, especially with the homeless population,” Paul Eisenhauer, SOUND’s former Chief Financial Officer, told The Seattle Times in 2020 at the time of the El Rey’s closing. “We’re hoping to find a way to do that. I just don’t know what it is at this point.”

SOUND’s calculus and priorities have shifted since then. Damage to its fire panel, electrical systems, and plumbing led to the building’s water and electricity being cut. The city then ordered SOUND to put the building on fire watch: round-the-clock, in-person supervision.

“Due to the extent of deterioration, restoring the El Rey would require significant capital investment to make it habitable even as an emergency shelter. After assessing the building with King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA), it was deemed unsuitable for such purposes,” Raybern explains.

“In its current state, maintaining the vacant property costs approximately $45,000 monthly due to necessary fire watch and insurance coverage expenses,” SOUND Chief Operation Officer Guy Delisi told The Stranger in an emailed statement. “Demolishing the building would significantly reduce costs while allowing for a future use that aligns with the property's current covenant.”

If permitting comes through, SOUND and BNBuilders could begin tearing down the El Rey as early as April.

Transferring ownership & CAM’s vision

SOUND “owns” the El Rey insofar as it possesses a favorable loan on the property from SOH. Attached to the loan is a property charter stipulating 60 affordable-housing units for residents earning up to 30% of the area median income, prioritizing intake from local shelters.

In conversations with SOUND COO Delisi, Firth learned that SOUND would be open to transferring ownership of the El Rey (and its loan of around $2 million) rather than knocking it down. Ongoing fire watch costs in addition to the uncertainties of redevelopment after demolition—in part due to current interest rates and the rising cost of construction materials caused by recent tariffs—may help a transfer pencil out from SOUND’s perspective.

With rising costs of living in Seattle in addition to stagnant wages for creative workers, CAM believes that providing affordable housing is a step toward addressing this systemic issue. As a community-arts organization, CAM intends to reconvert the El Rey to create 10 affordable housing units for artists at 80% area median income.

A repurposed El Rey would also include a floor dedicated to short-term residency spaces, addressing the need for community organizations to cover lodging costs for visiting artists, mentors, and other guests, which often strains their budgets. “There's no other place in Seattle that offers affordable flex residency space for any other organization everywhere,” Firth says. “What a radical idea, we thought, to take one of these floors and have it be a resource for all these other … organizations that bring in artists and performers from other cities, or that even have in-city residential programs, and give them really affordable, beautiful, flex residency space.”

Offices for local orgs and retail space would take up the bottom two floors, including a mixed-use performance venue. CAM has secured $500,000 in funding from philanthropic sources since January as part of those efforts.

Regulatory approvals

But CAM’s vision for the El Rey is far from guaranteed and requires navigating a hodge podge of Seattle housing- and property-related entities. First and foremost is the SOH, which would have to change the El Rey’s charter to make the CAM-led project possible.

“Generally, [SOH] will only approve reinvestment in existing rental housing when the cost to preserve is less than or equal to the cost to produce replacement housing at similar affordability levels, and when preservation will not adversely impact the ability of the provider to maintain the rest of its portfolio or to create new, needed affordable homes,” explains Reybern, the Office of Housing spokesperson. She adds that SOH has “had early conversations with Common Area Maintenance about a transfer” but no decisions have been made, and they will continue their evaluation once a plan is submitted that meets the required criteria.

Firth acknowledges that these proposals involve the thorny question of amending a mental health- and low income-focused property charter—especially amidst a shortage of mental health beds. He supports reducing the number of units required in the building so that they can offer studio-sized units, increasing the income requirements to 80% of the area’s median income, and striking the mental-health focus of the charter. In his view, upholding the original charter isn’t feasible on a small lot the size of the El Rey, where SOUND previously housed more than one person in some rooms to meet its statutory obligations. CAM is attempting to retain some amount of affordable housing in the neighborhood, and bring it back within a shorter period, avoiding the uncertainty that would come with the building’s wholesale demolition.

“There’s this sliver of a chance that it can become housing; that feels really hopeful and exciting to me,” Firth says. “I think that kind of contributes to the broader spectrum or ecosystem of livability, survivability in the city … We're a small community really trying to do the best work that we can, and we see people and a lot of systems failing in the city, and we're just trying to hold on to any little piece that we can.”

CAM would also face an uphill battle financially, and would most likely have to secure funding from the Equitable Development Initiative as well as Doors Open. Not to mention wrangling the potentially unforeseen costs that come with attempting to retrofit a 125-year-old building for multipurpose use.

For now, all eyes remain on SDCI. Will SOUND get the green light to demolish the El Rey? Come April, Belltown may be the nascent home to a repurposed affordable-housing project—or another razed lot.

Look Her in the Eyes

Adam Willems — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 13:49:00 -0800

A New Exhibit at the Frye Explores Surveillance and Dispossession in the Asylee Experience

by Adam Willems

In the center of Hayv Kahraman’s exhibition at the Frye Art Museum, lies a sound booth of sorts. Surrounded on three sides by a taut, semi-opaque synthetic skin, a speaker dangles from the ceiling and plays a woman’s measured, assertive voice on a 22-minute loop. It’s from a tape Kahraman’s mother sent to Swedish immigration authorities over a quarter century ago: a rejection of their rejection of her family’s asylum application.

The piece is called Sizar, and it is the oldest material in her exhibition, “Look Me in the Eyes.” In the audio, her mother, Sizar Barzendji, invites Swedish immigration authorities to cut into her skin, take DNA samples, and look at her cells to verify her identity. She asserts that she is “not a cockroach to be stepped on” or denied or erased.

Kahraman's mother's voice fills the exhibition at the Frye. JUEQUIAN FANG

Born in Baghdad, Kahraman fled Iraq during the Gulf War when she was 11 years old. She and her family landed at Stockholm's Arlanda airport following a month-and-a-half-long journey organized by a paid smuggler. Upon arrival, Kahraman’s mother instructed them to flush their fake Danish passports down airport toilets, beginning a yearslong challenge to secure asylum in Sweden as (literally) undocumented refugees. Swedish authorities declined her family’s application after five years, stating that their story and identity could not be verified. Their application was ultimately approved.

Through a range of artforms and media, the exhibit consistently rejects the surveillance, ecocide, and dispossession defining how and why millions of people seek asylum worldwide.

Take Sizar’s walls: Made of mylar, the booth’s surface resembles marble. Kahraman encountered the pattern during recent studies of Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-century scientist from Sweden who established modern taxonomy and remains a source of national pride there. After reading a blog post criticizing Linnaeus due to the devastating effects of his taxonomies, which included rankings of human races, Kahraman traveled from her studio in Los Angeles to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, which holds a copy of Linnaeus’s Hortus Cliffortianus from 1737. The book’s endpages were decorated using a technique called “marbling.”

COURTESY OF INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN FRANSISCO. GLEN CHERITON, IMPART PHOTOGRAPHY

Interested in the book’s contents as well as its marbled design, Kahraman revisited Turkish artists who use the nearly-millennium-old artistic technique; she started experimenting with the artform herself—splattering paint onto water mixed with carrageenan, a seaweed-based thickening agent, all held in a five-by-ten-foot tray, and then dipping canvases into the pigmented fluid. How this process looks in its final form—the three-dimensional swirls of colored water transplanted onto the planar surface of canvas—is inherently random and uncontrollable, governed far more by fluid mechanics than artistic intervention (save for the occasional stir or blow on the water to herd the diffusing paint just so).

Kahraman says marbling’s aleatory nature is curative; her systematic approach to work and her desire for control are, in her eyes, tied to experiences as a refugee and marginalized person in Sweden. “If I made a mistake, it would mean that I would get deported … this is the thought process that went through my mind [in Sweden],” she says. “Imagine having to let go of that fear of making mistakes and really embracing the glitch, the error. It was very therapeutic.”

Marbling patterns undulate across the four rooms holding Kahraman’s work at the Frye, albeit deployed for a range of purposes. For Brick Palm, onyx-colored marbling gives a trio of towering stacked bricks the charred look of burnt and dead trees, an homage to the millions of palm trees that have died over the course of many wars in Iraq, yet remain physically erect because of the strength of their root systems.

Meanwhile, in Eyeris, a large-format painting situated in the exhibit’s first room, greyscale billows of marbled linen creep from the top left and bottom right of the canvas, offering austere surroundings for the four women in the painting’s center, all of whom resemble Kahraman but lack irises. One of the women is lifeless and a plant sprouts from her eyes; irised eyes dangle from the tips of the plant where blossoms should be. One woman reaches out toward the eye-blossoms, while another prepares to place an irised eye on top of her own like a contact lens.

Kahraman dubs her pseudo-cyborgian flora her “‘fuck you’ plants”—rebuking the Linnean worldview. Her iris-less subjects are a nod to the techniques some refugees deploy to subvert and refuse surveillance. She says her painted subjects aim to say, “I know you're looking at me, but you don't get to look at me. You don't get to scan me. You don't get to pin me down like a pressed plant.”

COURTESY OF INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN FRANCISCO. GLEN CHERITON, IMPART PHOTOGRAPHY

At the base of Sizar’s trusses, Kahraman includes grains of silicon carbide, a crystal resembling sand used in ballistic vests and sandpaper, once again pointing to the forms of self-erasure that are sometimes necessary for people seeking asylum. (Asylees will sometimes remove their fingerprints with sandpaper or acid.) The booth’s sandlike base as well as its mylar envelope symbolize refugees’ claim to their right to opacity—including her mother’s vocal insistence upon that right.

Her mother was diagnosed with lung cancer in late 2018, and she passed away in July 2020. Unsurprisingly, the marbling for Sizar is unlike the others. Kahraman avoided swirling the paint as it floated in water so that the globs retained their cellular resemblance. Grieving her mother’s loss, Kahraman says she struggled to find the right balance between the “personal” and the “political.” In particular, she hesitated listening to her mother’s 22-minute tape to Swedish authorities, though she knew the recording could help her recover memories of her life as a refugee and stake political claims through art. The final process of that work, pouring sand-like crystals into Sizar’s trusses during installation at the Frye, ultimately felt “ritualistic” to Kahraman.

“This is an altar for my mother,” she says. “The personal is political, and I utterly believe that the political is personal, all of it, but a part of me was a little afraid … I was afraid that if I were to include her voice, it would just be about her voice. But it's not. It’s not only her voice. It's the voice of millions of people.”

Look Me in the Eyes is on view at the Frye Art Museum (704 Terry Ave, Seattle) through February 2, 2025. Free admission.

Writing the Ship

Adam Willems — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 09:30:00 -0700

This season’s Nonfiction for No Reason events are Friday, October 11, at Little Saigon Creative, and Friday, November 1, at Northwest Film Forum. by Adam Willems

On a gloomy May evening that seemed best suited for introverted lethargy, 60 people shuffled into Common Area Maintenance (CAM) in Belltown. Congregating under the builder space’s lofted ceilings, marinating in its artsy allure, and snarfing down cozy snacks from Off Alley, attendees seemed happy to mingle in a cultural venue that stands out along an otherwise dive bar- and NFT Museum-dominated stretch of Second Avenue.

The crowd was gathered for the tenth edition of Nonfiction for No Reason (NFNR), a literary reading series highlighting local nonfiction writers hosted by the event’s founder, Katie Lee Ellison. A foil to the low-energy drizzle pattering on CAM’s large front windows, NFNR offered a dynamic cast that rewarded extroversion and excitement for what Seattle-based writers can bring to the table.

Moonyeka, an interdisciplinary artist often found at Jack Straw Cultural Center, kicked the night off by recounting their partner’s woeful experiences navigating medical systems as a trans person. (“Trans healthcare is pretty garbage,” they concluded.) Putsata Reang likened her sexuality to a river running through Phnom Penh. Anu Taranath described her young daughter’s sense of solidarity with an elderly Black couple—the only other people of color at a gospel performance near Seward Park—and their positive reaction to her daughter’s enthusiasm. Kamari Bright presented some spoken and video essays, including an entreaty for strangers to stop commenting on her womb. And Jay Aquinas Thompson meditated on grief and queerness and Catholicism.

Jordynn Paz reads at September’s Nonfiction for No Reason event at Jude’s in Rainier Beach. BILLIE WINTER

The event didn’t seem to intentionally carry a theme, but all eight readers focused on identity. With writers sharing work steeped in personal experience, listeners—while eating duck rillettes and sipping wine—risked being the wrong audience to match such vulnerability.

But a mix of sincerity and levity throughout the lineup kept the audience attentive and capable of meeting the moment. Some writers even deftly channeled a range of tenors, including Amy Hirayama, who, to close out the event, traced her lineage via Hawaii to her family’s ancestral hometown on Okinawa, describing the Japanese island’s experiences of colonialism and war—all through the pork and other delicacies she ate while touring the area with her father. Hirayama’s reading was a master class in discussing deeply serious topics through appropriate and sensitive levity.

NFNR was born last year and resulted from a disappointing writers’ convention. The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) and its 12,000 annual conference-goers descended upon the Seattle Convention Center in March 2023. Every year, these writers, teachers, publishers, and editors assemble in a different city to rub shoulders and catch up on the latest and greatest in literature. In most cities hosting the conference, local literary institutions will kick their programming into high gear, platforming a region’s writers to the industry’s who’s who through offsite readings near the convention centers. In Seattle, a UNESCO-certified “City of Literature,” the conference struggled to showcase a healthy regional literary community.

To Ellison, a Seattle-based writer who grew up in Los Angeles, the Emerald City’s lackluster showing for AWP was an iodine trace for the ails afflicting the area’s writers. She was a fellow at Hugo House—once the state’s largest writing-focused nonprofit and an anchor in the community—between 2016 and 2017. But in 2020, the organization began weathering a financial crisis following allegations of racial discrimination and its executive director’s ensuing resignation, and it’s still struggling to recover. Ellison says the nonprofit’s dwindling presence in Seattle, in addition to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on cultural programming, made her feel “totally unmoored” and unsure of where Seattle’s writing community stood. It also meant Seattle writers had few ways to promote their work while a potentially career-altering conference was in town; if the city’s literary institutions were stronger, Ellison thinks she and other local authors would have had a presence at the conference.

Ellison hopes to make NFNR more than just a Seattle thing—she’s already hosted events in Los Angeles and Tokyo. BILLIE WINTER

Instead, many of the city’s writers heard crickets. “When I knew AWP was coming here in March of 2023, I was like ‘Are you guys fucking serious? Nobody’s going to ask me to read anywhere,’” Ellison says. “So I said, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna just do my own [reading], and I’m gonna make it the dream reading that I want it to be.’”

The final result of Ellison’s efforts took place at Capitol Hill nightclub the Woods; it was somewhat informally and unintentionally cohosted by the literary publication The Rumpus, due to scheduling and venue SNAFUs. The reading saw more than 100 people in attendance and cast a spotlight on writers like Wolfish author Erica Berry, short story writer Corinne Manning, Portland essayist Katherine D. Morgan, and journalist Kristen Millares Young.

The lineup also featured Anastacia-Reneé, formerly a poet-in-residence at Hugo House and the inaugural Seattle Civic Poet from 2017 to 2019, during the city’s first year of UNESCO status. They overlapped with Ellison at Hugo House and served as her mentor, encouraging her to publicly share her works in progress: a way to get feedback that nonfiction writers often avoid.

“As a hybrid writer[-poet], it was freeing reading in a space that was ready for nonfiction but [that was] receptive to humor and very serious things all enmeshed in one another,” Anastacia-Reneé says. “It was a packed crowd, and I saw the bringing together of the community. I read a piece that was in its draft state, and even though I was nervous, I did not feel unsafe.”

A sense of propulsion following the March reading—vocal interest from other writers, a seemingly endless list of eligible locals to platform—meant it was far from Ellison’s last, instead becoming NFNR’s inaugural event. Its programming is growing in frequency and scale, but NFNR continues to harbor small but mighty intentions by fostering a sense of writerly community and unabashedly celebrating it, by providing some remuneration to writers, and by offering a forum for writers to promote upcoming work. Or, hell, to even successfully sell something they’ve published.

Those last financial tenets aren’t particularly sexy but are especially important in Seattle, where artists, including writers, are struggling to keep up with the city’s rapidly rising cost of living.

Hirayama, for example, who read at the May event, grew up in Shoreline and still lives there. She exemplifies the frustrating chasm between superb skill and material shortcomings that seems to define being a writer in Seattle. She juggles four jobs—roles at South Seattle College, Writers in the Schools, Clarion West, and CAM—to make ends meet. “I think my mode of operating is probably not for everyone,” she admits.

Ally Ang, a local poet and editor who previously worked at Hugo House and now makes their income as a grant writer for a reproductive justice nonprofit, performed at NFNR’s second event in 2023. They said NFNR strikes a healthy medium as a noninstitutionalized but reliable space where people are coming together “for the love of it.”

“It’s important to not solely rely on institutions that are often beholden to boards of directors or… don’t necessarily represent the needs of the community, and to instead make sure that we are creating spaces that really do represent us,” they say.

Ellison is working to slowly transform NFNR into a modest Seattle-based institution, while keeping true to its roots and its small-scale values. She’s taken the series on the road, hosting events in LA and Tokyo, and she showcased writers with Seattle origins—including Anastacia-Reneé—at Book Club Bar in New York on September 12. She’s secured fiscal sponsorship and is looking to land larger grants in 2025; she also wants to pay writers more, and pay herself more. Of the $7,500 Ellison has raised so far that hasn’t gone to venue fees or taxes, she’s distributed $25 to each of the program’s 80 participating authors and paid herself $2,100 for hundreds of hours of work. She acknowledges that that remuneration is far from enough for the writers, and she knows that NFNR is far from sustainable income relative to her output.

“A lot of times you have to either choose to be community-based and DIY or extremely polished and extremely beholden to the funders, and I feel like that’s bullshit,” Ellison says. “You can have a really fucking nice thing that also platforms people you’ve never heard and pay them a lot of money… That’s a lot of the motivation for doing this. It’s creating something that does actually do it differently from how we’ve all been told it needs to be done.”

It’s not just Ellison who seems doggedly committed to centering literature in Seattle’s future. NFNR participants named a range of spaces to that end—Mam’s Books in the C–ID, Charlie’s Queer Books in Fremont, Open Books in Pioneer Square, Writing Black @ The House—many of which are less than a year old.

“Writers in Seattle really do support each other… which does make me hopeful, despite the fact that it’s really hard to live here as an artist or a creative person,” Ang says. “They keep raising my rent every year, so who knows. But I love living in Seattle, and I want to stay here as long as I can afford to.”

This season’s Nonfiction for No Reason events are Friday, October 11, at Little Saigon Creative, and Friday, November 1, at Northwest Film Forum. Find more info at nonfictionfornoreason.com.

Inhumane Clown Posse

Adam Willems — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 11:55:00 -0700

See Seattle Opera's Pagliacci at McCaw Hall Aug 3-17. by Adam Willems

Ask the average Seattleite what they think of when they hear the word pagliacci and they’re almost guaranteed to answer “pizza”—or, maybe, “class action lawsuit.” One hundred years ago, though, the average denizen would have almost invariably responded with the word “opera.” And, come August 3, so can you.

As this year’s season opener, Seattle Opera will stage Pagliacci, Italian composer Ruggero Leoncavallo’s bread-and-butter œuvre from 1892. Slapstick funny in some parts, frighteningly dramatic and violent in others, and lyrically miraculous throughout, the 90-minute production was once synonymous with “opera” the way a buxom Bugs Bunny in a viking helmet belting an adapted Valkyrie ditty took over the public’s operatic imagination in the mid-20th century.

If you’re an opera neophyte: Pagliacci is about as good a chance to dip your toes into the artform as you’ll ever get. Try everything once, amirite? This opera’s plot is relatively straightforward and moves quickly, the music is divinely pretty, and wow-factor things happen on stage. I pinky prommy you won’t fall asleep, and you’ll be out of there in about the same time it takes to watch Deadpool & Wolverine. Totally nbd if you decide thereafter that you hated it and never return to the Opera; at least you gave it a shot.

Monica Conesa as Nedda (left) and Michael Chioldi as Tonio (right) in 'Pagliacci' at Seattle Opera. Philip Newton.

As far as “greatest hits” that have historically defined an entire genre go, though, there’s still plenty to criticize. In particular, most versions of Pagliacci typically use violence against women as a platform for entertainment, and, crucially, often elicit flattening sympathy for the perpetrator of that violence. But this quandary-ridden classic is a stunning production at McCaw Hall thanks to Seattle Opera’s self-reflection and attendant adaptation. This act of creatively rebirthing Pagliacci for the 21st century—doing so without heavy-handed revisionism or glossing over a plot’s thorny patriarchal essence—is what makes this opera even more worthy of your attendance and sincere contemplation.

***

Pagliacci means “clowns” in Italian and obliquely refers to how the opera is structured as a play-within-the-play. Canio, a destitute and peripatetic performer, his colleagues Tonio and Beppe, and his wife, Nedda, have traveled to an Italian village and are putting on a play in the commedia dell’arte style.

Canio, who plays a clown (Pagliaccio) when performing for villagers, is a threateningly jealous and possessive husband offstage. Nedda assumes the role of Pagliaccio’s wife Colombina onstage, but in real life grew up on the streets and found herself wedded to and begrudgingly dependent upon Canio; hoping to escape a life of abuse and servitude, she and her secret lover, Silvio, have schemed to run away and elope after the troupe’s performance. But Canio’s henchman-of-sorts Tonio, after making spurned advances of his own toward Nedda, lets Canio know of Nedda and Silvio’s plans to run away, eventually leading to a double homicide and the simultaneous ending of the troupe’s performance as well as the opera itself.

Most stagings of Pagliacci depict Canio as a heartbroken clown driven to do horrible, murderous things because of his cheating wife, who is his everything. You may have seen iconic images or video recordings of opera superstar Luciano Pavarotti crying as he dons his clown makeup when playing Canio as one such example of this sympathetic slant (listen to the rapturous and positive applause at the end of his aria!).

With those shortcomings in mind, Director Dan Wallace Miller’s version of the opera situates Canio, Nedda, and the other performers in Italy in 1947. Artistically inspired by Italian neo-realist films, especially those of Vittorio de Sica, Miller’s setting for Pagliacci is an attempt to place as much weight on characters’ interiority as on their desperate socioeconomic conditions. Miller said these efforts frame “the awful thing that happens at the end… in an even more tragic light” by highlighting the circumstances and decisions that push Canio to murder; the director took other adaptational liberties to cast Canio as a more clearly antagonistic figure. In his version, Canio is more plainly an alcoholic, and Nedda has a black eye from Canio’s physical abuse.

“I don't have an interest in prettying up or denying the abuse that happens in a narrative like this, I think it needs to be expressed. But I do have a vested interest in examining where sympathies need to lie, and showing that the expectations of who you need to suture yourself to and align yourself to in this narrative are way different now than they were 100 years ago,” Miller said. “That, I hope, is reflected and comes through quite strongly and in a way that… if audiences come to see it now, they'll just think this is exactly how the piece was always done.”

Miller, who grew up frequenting Seattle Opera with his dad, said he realized that operatic adaptations going “against the grain of expectation” have to be executed convincingly. “As someone who is young and who has a lot of different forms of entertainment vying for my attention at all times, I try and make something… that I would want to go see,” he said.

Monica Conesa as Nedda in 'Pagliacci' at Seattle Opera. Sunny Martini

Soprano Monica Conesa will make her US debut as Nedda. In her early teens growing up in Florida, she “fell in love” with Nedda’s performance in the final act of Pagliacci, where Nedda shuttles between her real self and her onstage, coquettish persona, Colombina, in an attempt to prevent her bloodthirsty husband Canio from breaking character and ruining the show they’re putting on.

“Finding the sweet spot of doing the transition of where she finally comes out, and she's not only Nedda, but a Nedda who’s had enough and stands her ground… it's just my favorite thing to do,” Conesa said. “I used to play the act on a speaker and pretend to act it out in my room, so in a way, I’ve been rehearsing this since I was 15.”

Simply put, Conesa is spellbinding and her voice possesses cavernous potential; its distinct timbre filled every nook of the rehearsal room I was lucky enough to share with her and the rest of the cast two weeks before showtime. She seems splendidly suited to augment Miller’s creative bent as a thought partner and agent. Conesa cited Betty Boop as her inspiration for Colombina’s mannerisms, which explains her impressive, spry athleticism on stage while full-chest singing; she, like Miller, subtly uses film to render this opera more salient and poignant for viewers.

Conesa, who performed in Italy for two years as the launching pad for her up-and-coming career, is joined onstage by tenor Diego Torre, a resident singer in the Sydney Opera House who grew up in Mexico City. A veteran who’s graced the stage for 15 years, Torre said he’s grown to approach high-stakes roles like Canio’s with maturity and nuance, and has learned how to separate his own self from the characters he plays. “You are playing with their emotions, really, on your skin,” he said.

Torre departed slightly from Miller’s view on Canio. He said he sees Canio as a victim of his situation, and strives to evoke some sympathy from viewers through his performance. (“For someone to act villainous on stage and have an understanding that what they're doing is justified makes the performance much, much better,” Miller told me.)

Whether those adaptational disagreements make the art more persuasive or more diffuse, Torre will make you feel something, for sure. Compellingly afflicted by the complex emotions of a possessive, morose clown, Torre’s Canio will stay with you. He’s very, very talented.

John Marzano as Beppe in "Pagliacci" at Seattle Opera. Sunny Martini

Another lovely performance is seen in local tenor John Marzano, who assumes the role of Beppe. Marzano did a delightful recital in drag at Seattle Opera a few weeks ago; show up for a queer icon, or else you’re homophobic.

Gays on stage or not (there’s almost always at least one), how Miller’s thoughtful adaptation deploys formidable operatic talent for thought-provoking ends is ultimately what sets this version of Pagliacci apart from the countless productions preceding it.

“Opera is weird: We’re the only artform that routinely engages with centuries-old pieces of art,” Miller said. “I view it as my job to take the kernel of that story and twist the prism a little bit until it starts to make sense and have some kind of meaning and purpose today.”

See Seattle Opera’s Pagliacci at McCaw Hall Aug 3–17.

Into the Soil

Adam Willems — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 16:47:00 -0700

An interview with Yakima-born author Noé Álvarez. by Adam Willems

It’s hard to categorize Accordion Eulogies by Noé Álvarez in genre-stable terms. Wisps of memoir, musical theory, travelog, political treatise, and dirge combine to spawn a searing commentary on neglect and healing and belonging. Immersive beyond words, it’s even got a playlist to accompany its punchy prose.

At its core, Álvarez’s second book is about a haunting absence. His paternal grandfather—named Eulogio (eulogy)—abandoned Álvarez’s father growing up, leaving him to face homelessness in Mexico. With Eulogio no longer around, cautionary tales about him took his place. Some stories about Eulogio, however, praised his dexterity on the accordion playing corrido music: sweeping ballads about oppression and existential struggles.

By encountering accordion players spanning the globe, and by picking up the instrument himself, Álvarez uses the accordion to learn more about his grandfather, himself, as well as the myths cursing his family.

In an interview with The Stranger, Álvarez, the Yakima-born and -raised son of farmworkers, explains the stakes involved in his search for truth, reflects on the interplay between death, catharsis, and birth, and interprets the accordion as a writing utensil.

The pursuit at the core of your book seems like something you were willing to put your life on the line for. In the last third of your book, you're navigating cartel wars and state violence and industrial violence and so forth, all to reach your grandfather in Michoacán.

I appreciate that. I hadn't really thought about it like that, I guess. I felt like I was part of this journey whether I wanted to be or not, like I was a part of something bigger, and I was just trying to look for a way to articulate what it all meant. A lot of my life was geared towards running away or turning away from a certain pain or a certain past, and I think, with this music, with this instrument, I just felt a little bit more empowered to confront it.

I told myself that I needed to go through with it to find closure, however much I could find. Maybe on a superstitious level, I felt like I needed to do something with this past. The landscape itself has such a hold over our family, over our narrative spiritually, historically; it continued to rear its head even more strongly over the years. And having not confronted it all my life, I felt that if I didn't do something about it, I was maybe going to crumble in some way. And I didn’t want that, and so I thought that maybe I could bring some healing to the story, and pass that down to my child. When I got to a certain stage in Mexico, I just felt like there was no turning back, like I was a part of this momentum that I couldn't escape.

I felt like there was a curse on the family, and I thought that maybe part of that curse had to do with the fragmentation of our story. And maybe I needed to go and collect some more stories, collect some more experiences so that I could maybe assuage some of this or some of the spirits in the ancestral home of my family. If [in the end] it meant turning my back on it for good, at least I could know that I tried, because I think part of the trauma is knowing that you could have done something more but didn't. So I didn't want to carry that baggage with me. I knew I could still reach out to this relative of mine, and I wasn’t going to be able to look myself in the eyes if I didn't do this.

A throughline I identified over the course of reading your book is this idea that death will happen and in some ways you get to choose it. Some of the deaths you were affected by in Mexico were very sudden, for instance, or were more languishing in the United States, the death of being removed from the place you’re from. After meeting your grandfather, you mentioned how you felt like a part of you had died, but maybe sort of in this cathartic way. You made this effort to try and find this meaning and closure—and regardless of whether or not that happened, there was still some growth or birth that came out of that darkness. I don’t know if that resonates at all.

It's definitely true. I titled the book Accordion Eulogies because I was learning how to eulogize the things in my life currently and in the past. There was an aspect of sacrifice that I was kind of embarking on. I needed to confront these stories and surrender myself to the land and the stories as authentically as possible. I needed to see things die on their own, I needed to see things exist or fall away.

When I saw my grandfather—which I won't go too much into because that’s in the book—I had to choose between a fast death or slow death. That's where I feel like I exist. I structurally see and symbolically see my instrument, my accordion, embodying these different realities of mine. The accordion in music embodies so much death, and the music can be both depressing and enlivening. The lyrics in corrido music contend with death, people who are just taking it a day at a time, and so there are lessons in that for me. Maybe I just needed to musically hear what was inside of me and experience the texture of the land.

I'm a writer and a lot of it is silent work, and I find a peace to that, but musically, lyrically, I didn't know what the sounds of agony sound like. And so the accordion was the instrument that really pulled out those emotions. A lot of the men, especially, that I interviewed were like, “This is my way that I mourn, this is the only way that I know how to cry.” In my very cowboy-tough tradition, you're not taught or encouraged to cry, and the only times were during this kind of music, corridos and so on. So I thought, okay let’s tap into that a little bit more and see what I can do with it.

Why did you include a playlist at the end of the book?

It was to show what I'm trying to do with writing and what writing means to me. I’m very much community-oriented. I'm a firm believer in giving back. I couldn't have written any of my books without others—without my parents, without the musicians in this book. I structurally wanted to show that by writing chapters about them. I wanted to cross-promote.

I originally intended to have QR codes in every chapter so that readers could listen to the music as they're reading about a specific artist and so that spiritually, audibly, they could become submersed in the story as they're reading, but we decided [on one playlist at the end of the book]. I didn't grow up with reading as a culture, it was a luxury in my life. I'm visually oriented and also understand that words aren't necessarily the most accessible to people, especially my parents. So if, at the very least, I can guide them towards the QR code and invite them to just listen to that, then I've made the book more accessible to people like my parents and people who don't read.

I am trying to honor the other musicians who shared some really awesome things with me, who opened their hearts to me, and so it's a collaborative thing. That's how I see myself as a writer: I'm always bringing in the people who matter to me and have had an effect on my life.

What was the process of writing about music like?

It's funny, when I ordered this instrument from Castagnari in Italy, I asked them to recommend the saddest instrument they had. I wanted to tap into my soul, I wanted to maybe find some power and give it some sound. I would sit for hours [playing the accordion], sitting with those beautiful sounds, feeling those vibrations in my chest, and then just let it introduce thoughts into my head—stories and memories—and I would close my eyes. And it would take me to specific memories of my family and my upbringing. And then I would write those stories as a result of playing this music. And then when I’d sit with musicians who played music in front of me, I would ask them to play music, and seeing them play would provoke memories. And then they would share very personal hardships about what that instrument means.

Speaking of emotions, I'm curious what your relationship to Yakima is like now. Toward the end of your book, you say you have to believe that things are headed in the right direction in Yakima, despite your experiences there growing up, and despite the visual markers of poverty and struggle you continue to see during your visits. Have those feelings changed at all since the book came out?

I think that is still where I'm at today. The story of that land was always rearing its head, it was always coming out of my writing and coming up in my conversations, coming out in my nightmares. It was always there, so I had no choice but to turn back. Especially now that I have my two-year-old, I want him to have a different mentality and a different approach to wherever he goes, because it's only going to be a matter of time before he decides to embark on his own crazy journeys.

The reason I have to believe Yakima’s in a better place is that it motivates me, it gives me hope to work with it more, work with the people, and so it gives me maybe a little bit more courage to go back and do things differently. For instance, growing up, we didn’t have the luxury of pursuing some of the trailheads that are around there. My parents already worked 10-, 15-hour jobs in the fields. To then say, “Hey, do you want to go walk as exercise for fun in addition to that?” was crazy talk. Similarly, I remember the first time I told my dad that I went to a U-pick farm where you pay to pick fruit, and he said “You did what?”

The lessons my father gave were mainly about escaping Yakima and getting out of there. And he was right. Part of me does believe that Yakima, one day, on a superstitious level, will be the end of me. I can only stay there for a weekend; any longer is still very, very difficult for me, because I continue to see and feel even more emotion around the things that haven’t changed or have gotten worse. So when I see those things, it's hard not to take it personally, it clouds me and affects my work. And so, unfortunately, I still have to maintain my distance.

You wrote in the book how you wish you had the resources to buy up an orchard and let it lie fallow, turning it into its original ecosystem over time. And it's interesting, like, with the resources you have, how you're still sort of trying to nurture that but maybe in a slightly different way.

It’s an effort to restore and reconcile our relationship with the land. I wonder why there are so many deaths in Yakima. That's why I'm a little superstitious about that. My dad tells me there’s an element there that just feels haunting. Some traditions ask the ancestors for permission when you enter a land, and I’m wondering if there have been violations with us as a people either harvesting the land or just coming at it and assuming we’re the rightful owners of the land. What are we doing to speak to the history that's happened to that land?

When I think about the orchard, there’s just so much mixed baggage. On the surface, it’s beautiful, and it does provide food for people, but I see it from the other way around. I see it from the inside out. And I can't help but still feel devastated by that, and I see more warehouse labor too, and it seems like there’s maybe no way out of it. There's some distance there between what the people are deciding is necessary for the world and what the land is experiencing. And as a result, it's taking a lot of our people, taking us into the soil. There's so much hurt in the soil. I'm trying to address what's in there before I, too, am taken down there. Before my parents are taken down there, I'd like to know how to mourn that. I'd like to have a home and not break into pieces when my parents depart. I’m just trying to start up a conversation a little bit more realistically in Yakima.

Your Local Baseball Besties

Adam Willems — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 04:00:00 -0700

You read that right: The Seattle Mariners are doing a good job! by Adam Willems

I, an enlightened being, have been tasked with convincing you, an ignoramus, to care about Mariners baseball at the midseason. I’ve held off on writing this article as long as possible to ensure that my pontificating carries at least mild prophetic power by the time it hits the presses. But, knock on wood, the Mariners have channeled their chaos ball proclivities to win many games (!!), portending an exciting second half of the season.

Hear ye, some reasons to back our boys in blue (I don’t mean the cops—I mean the sports guys with the way smaller payroll):

Sweet Victory (?)

At press time, the Mariners hold a promising lead in the AL West: a whopping eight games ahead of the second-place Astros. Fancypants statisticians give the team an 86.3% chance of making it to the postseason.

You read that right: The Seattle Mariners are doing a good job!

That is, um, not really the norm. The Ms have only made it to the postseason on one occasion since 2001 and are the sole team to have never made it to the World Series. The franchise also suffered a sizable revenue hit due to Comcast-induced whatthefuckery at the end of last season, encouraging ownership to approach 2024 with the kind of economic caution that leads to self-defeat. Management executed a number of salary dumps, dropping beloved players like Eugenio “Good Vibes Only” Suárez and slightly less beloved players like Jarred “Water Cooler” Kelenic. They also picked up some inconsistent players during the offseason, teeing up the team for yet another year of sub par acquisitions and performance.

But call it a Tax Day miracle. After a tepid start—going 6–10 before April 15—the Ms found their groove and have since recovered to record 11 wins over .500. The team’s bons temps remain tenuous, however. The Mariners still hold a league-leading strikeout rate, depend too heavily on their (splendid but slightly injured) closer Andrés Muñoz, and lack offensive consistency as well as bullpen depth. If these shortcomings remain, we could witness the team’s eventual disintegration into all-too-familiar mediocrity, as they proved during their horrendous road trip to Ohio and Florida in late June.

Money, Meet Mouth

Yet fear not, nescient child. Local oligarch and Mariners owner John Stanton might actually come to the rescue and adequately finance the Mariners, helping them go far into the postseason. In a 180 from the austerity mindset he seems to typically espouse and endorse, Stanton told Seattle Times reporters Adam Jude and Ryan Divish in early June that he’d help Mariners leadership secure the resources needed to develop a successful team. Couple that with recent scuttlebutt from The Athletic—money isn’t expected to “be an issue” for the Mariners when conducting midseason trades—and it starts to seem like Seattle could be home to batters with star power and offensive talent by the trade deadline. That includes names like Bryan De La Cruz, Eloy Jiménez, Tommy Pham, and Jazz Chisholm Jr. If you don’t know them: They’d be nice to have at T-Mobile Park on our side.

If all else fails, I think ownership should apply its austerity approach to non-player payroll. Following the team’s consistent struggles to turn swings into hits, the Mariners fired bench coach Brant Brown in late May. The Ms’ bats started to heat up almost immediately; they swept the Angels the next day and pulled off some clutch hits, helping them lead MLB in one-run games. Correlation, causation, tomato, tomahto—my oracular powers tell me that past is prologue. In other words, laying off the entire Seattle Mariners coaching staff will resolve all the batting, pitching, and fielding issues the Mariners face, while also freeing up more money for player payroll. Good riddance to the coaches! I love Moneyball!

Mariners Manna

Back to the proselytizing: Feel free to be a fair-weather fan and come cheer on the Mariners, because they have a lovely winning record and will soon feature more famous people on the field. “It’s a free country,” et cetera, et cetera. But even if the Mariners play total horseshit baseball for the 60-odd games left this season, it’s still worth going to a game at T-Mobile Park, and going often.

The energy is so positive and infectious that it’s hyped the Ms toward a 27–12 record at home (let’s gloss over their away-game record, lol). It’s hard not to see why: The Park has something for everyone. You can witness the sassy salmon run, double-fist $4.50 value beers in moderation, catch hot dogs from the heavens above as they parachute into your grubby grateful phalanges, and partake in the cheugiest calisthenics class of your life with a Macklemore-heavy seventh-inning stretch and rally song. It’s everything you need and deserve.

And look at how much fun our tight-pantsed callipygian Mariners are having on the field, even when they can’t end the ninth inning with a little celebratory jig. They’re all buddies and having a great time! And so many of their names are eerily similar; we love a rhyme or homophone or whatever! You’ve got the two Mitches and their monstrosity of a portmanteau sandwich, the Double MitchWich; close pals Cal Raleigh and Luke Raley and their late-game rallies; father-son-duo-but-not-really Ty France and (now AAA-optioned) Tyler Locklear sometimes showing off on first base (Ty’s on first!); and Josh Rojas and Julio Rodríguez sharing initials, defensive dexterity, and extra-base-hit prowess.

At its core, Mariners spectatorship is an immersive lesson in appreciating that, win or lose, the real victory is the friends we made along the way. I’m only half-kidding. Lean into that can-do attitude and boom! You’ve just found Seattle’s cheapest antidepressant.

Fandom of the Opera

Adam Willems — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 12:05:00 -0700

In case you’re wondering, there’s no need to bring cash for tips! We asked. by Adam Willems

Have an honest talk with a drag artist about their schedule during Pride Month and they’re likely to paint their weekslong frenzy of back-to-back gigs in Dickensian terms. The best of times financially but the worst of times for one’s heels and homeostasis.

Tacoma-based performer Anita Spritzer is no exception to this double-edged windfall. She embodies booked and busy: bouncing from Seattle Men’s Chorus rehearsals to TV studios to glitzy hotel brunches and whatnot. But perhaps most notably, Anita’s itinerary—which she describes as “super fun”—features not just some fierce lip-syncing, but also a range of activities and talents matching the variety of venues graced by her presence. That includes high-class singing in one of the gayest “non-gay” institutional spaces in Seattle.

On Thursday, June 27, Anita will star in “Divo to Diva: Anita Spritzer in Recital” at Seattle Opera’s Tangey Jones Hall. Accompanied on the piano by her longtime friend and coach Jay Rozendaal, Spritzer will showcase the professional-grade prowess of her tenor chops, which have graced Seattle Opera’s main stage (outside of drag) in La traviata, Alcina, Carmen, and other major performances. But she’ll chin-up-shoulders-back belt a more blended repertoire than one sees during a standalone production, weaving a narrative on the queer experience through composers such as Puccini, Bernstein, and Rodgers & Hammerstein.

To Spritzer, the drag and operatic worlds are not that different. They both balance comedy and elegance, costume and realness, to deliver important messages. Whereas drag is whimsical and exaggerated, however, Spritzer sees opera as more structured and tradition-conforming. Her repertoire uses drag to expand the boundaries of opera, juxtaposing “big show-stopping arias” with “fun musical theater” to help “tug on all the strings” in a way that proudly celebrates Pride.

Spritzer thinks opera features an underappreciated queer history by virtue of its many gender-bending traditions. From the centuries-long presence of dan performers in Beijing opera to trouser roles in European operas, Spritzer sees drag in its simplest form as core to opera’s history. Bringing these two art forms together more explicitly, she hopes, may celebrate that drag presence explicitly, while also bringing together the genres’ somewhat disparate audiences and educating both of them on the other.

As is the case with so many other drag-related events—from children's story hours to drag shows—local Facebook users with 'concerned citizen' energy reacted homophobically to Seattle Opera's “Divo to Diva” announcement, suggesting, to say the least, that there’s plenty of educating to do. “It’s on me to … talk about the hard things and to touch on how meaningful it is for multiple worlds to come together in a time like this,” Spritzer continued. She mentioned that reactionary legislative measures to police LGBTQ+ people through anti-drag and -trans bills make her presence in more formal spaces like Seattle Opera all the more significant.

Spritzer’s opportunity to bring drag into a more formal venue came about organically, according to Aren Der Hacopian, the director of artistic administration and planning for the Seattle Opera. After many years of working with Spritzer out of drag, Hacopian saw “a great talent on stage” when Spritzer performed in drag at Seattle Opera’s gala. Opera administrators, with Anita’s interest, framed a recital as an opportunity to collide worlds while also showcasing the “importance and beauty of recitals,” which Hacopian thinks are underappreciated as a presentational form in Seattle. Recitalgoers can hear a wider range of genres and styles than they would at a traditional performance, and do so in under 90 minutes. (For reference: Seattle Opera put on a 4-hour and 47-minute production last year, so 90 minutes is Quibi in comparison.)

“To match the true human voice, which is especially trained for a particular style of vocal production that does not necessarily require microphones, and putting that into the world of a drag queen … is a beautiful combination,” Hacopian explained. He expects “die-hard operagoers,” the opera-curious, and drag neophytes to come together under one roof on Thursday for the recital.

Hacopian said he is “pushing” for queer performers and narratives to take the stage—including Seattle Opera’s main stage—on a more regular basis, not just during Pride Month. “It is very much time for this mixture … to be out and forward in our storytelling as well,” he said, noting that Seattle audiences care about the social and social-justice implications of the art performances they see.

Spritzer’s recital is seemingly a step toward greater representation in one of Seattle’s most tenured cultural venues, and, possibly, a path toward a more financially viable and stable professional practice. Spritzer sees the recital as an opportunity to showcase the uniqueness of her opera-drag-nexus-straddling before taking her numbers on the road.

Just don’t expect acrobatics and such from Spritzer. She’ll be in the crook of the piano “singing my face off ”since she “won't get back up” if she tried to do a death drop. She’ll also lean into her wacky drag persona to develop an intimate recital environment. With that in mind, she invites her viewers to dress in whatever Pride-at-the-Opera getup would make them happiest.

And, in case you’re wondering, there’s no need to bring cash for tips! I asked.

Can Seattle Drag Afford to Stay Weird?

Adam Willems — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 13:05:00 -0700

Artistic experimentation feels riskier when rent’s rising. by Adam Willems

In the fall of 2022, Seattle drag queen and then-newcomer This Girl encountered a dancing dialectic in the Kremwerk basement. Rowan Ruthless was doing a comedic Fergie cosplay number as part of a Black Eyed Peas-themed drag night, using a water bottle to simulate wetting her pants.

Reading Ruthless’s faux pee against the grain, This Girl interpreted her seasoned colleague’s urine-forward number as a lesson in artistry and economics.

“That shit’s so funny,” This Girl said. “But also Rowan is simultaneously the most beautiful, glorious supermodel of Seattle… [and] someone who deeply understands the balance between that classic, messy, grimy Seattle drag and also glamor.”

Ruthless’s piss bit offered This Girl more than just an intermission from Seattle drag’s recent “showgirl, showgirl, showgirl everywhere” homogenization: It also showed her that artistic versatility and professional success go hand in hand.

“That’s maybe where some of the wires get crossed,” This Girl said. “I think for all of the glamor that you see now, a good majority of those girls started off doing weird, dirty, messy stuff in the bottom of the Kremwerk basement.”

That is, prominent Seattle drag queens whose glamorous standard This Girl and other up-and-coming artists strove to attain—often at great economic cost—were successful because they had local practice weaving grime and glamor together, not because they pulled off Drag Race-esque allure alone.

It’s easy to judge up-and-comers for crossing their wires and pursuing the markers of seasoned drag queens’ success, skimming over their iconoclastic paths to more regular gigs and incomes; but entry- and mid-level queens are confronting a different financial and artistic landscape than their predecessors did. The same macroeconomic forces causing housing and other costs to skyrocket are driving drag artists to make tough choices about the balance between business and art and between making steadier money through tried-and-true looks or hustling to stand out. The dwindling number of beginner-friendly venues, in addition to disadvantageous financial agreements with many venue owners and Drag Race-informed viewer tastes, has imposed a higher barrier to entry for drag performers as well as a longer path to (often paltry) profitability. Artistic experimentation feels riskier when rent’s rising.

***

Lavish The’Jewel Stephen Ansun

Tacoma-based drag and burlesque performer Lavish The’Jewel first began doing drag in the Seattle area seven years ago, getting her start at beginner-friendly venues like WERKshop Wednesdays, the precursor to Kremwerk’s Studio Saturdays. While The’Jewel has established her presence in Seattle and refined her craft over time, she’s also seen many alternative and entry-level spaces lose their edge or fold altogether. Some establishments, like R Place, are gone, period; others have changed their drag programming to match general consumer tastes instead of nurturing an ecosystem of drag performers.

In The’Jewel’s eyes, the growing popularity of drag through Ru Paul’s Drag Race carries artistic and economic consequences. Audiences now expect drag artists to sport more upscale looks like the ones they see on TV, she said; performers often choose between “buying a wig or paying rent” in pursuit of embodying that perceived standard, which flattens the kind of drag Seattleites encounter across the city.

“It sucks because as inspiring as drag can be, those kind of off-kilter shows… inspire me to not be afraid to do something stupid or weird or silly,” The’Jewel said. “It kind of gives you a different view of what drag is, because it really is everything.”

This Girl asserts that Seattle-based drag star Bosco’s 2022 appearance on—and podium finish in—Ru Paul’s Drag Race had an especial effect on the local scene and unintentionally homogenized much of it.

“I say this entirely with love for Bosco, but I love to say that we’re living in a post-Bosco-on-Drag-Race world,” This Girl said. “When I first started [doing drag in 2021], it felt acceptable to be buying Leg Avenue lingerie and Amazon bodysuits and call it a day, and… almost instantly [after Bosco’s Drag Race appearance]… the city had a completely new standard.”

That new standard encouraged This Girl to spend “a heinous” amount of money in that first “post-Bosco year” trying to match that new standard. Thanks to her faux-Fergie lesson at Kremwek, in addition to the input of drag-mentor friends and a more disciplined approach to her money and time, she’s since learned to be more economical with how she constructs her looks, including by sewing many of her own clothes.

Beau Degas, a drag artist who performs at Clock-Out Lounge’s Tush and Queer/Bar’s Bang the Gong and who’s known for her campy and comedic numbers, first performed in public in January 2018 at a now-defunct show called Fresh (alongside Bosco, whose team didn’t respond to The Stranger’s request for comment). She thinks that, without spaces for new performers to break in and “make a name for [themselves],” it will be very hard for up-and-coming performers to get booked more often the way she has, or to make any viable income from this work.

Degas also criticized the homogenization of Seattle drag, typified by “a different person with the same look doing the same schtick.” But she acknowledged that she accepts some gigs for monetary gain, not because they’re spaces that will “push me artistically,” though she makes a point to take gigs that make her feel like an “artist first,” rather than “just a performer.”

Complementing drag work with a career as a cook lets Degas balance money, identity, and art. Lavish The’Jewel (aesthetician) and This Girl (social worker) do too. Degas said “drag isn’t for everybody” as a profession— whether full- or part-time—and it requires passion and hard work, especially since performers often confront a two-year financial deficit while they hustle to land regular gigs. “I feel like the main thing is that you just need to be the right person,” she said.

Through her role on the permanent cast of Clock-Out Lounge’s Tush in Beacon Hill, Beau Degas has taken advantage of the program as a monthly, two-night destination for artistic experimentation and as a reliable income stream. “We’ve created this space where people expect a certain level of creativity, innovation, or artistic sense, and the venue pays us really well,” she said.

Tush was founded in 2018 by Betty Wetter in collaboration with Clock-Out Lounge owner Jodi Ecklund. Unlike many other owners, who stipulate a minimum number of show attendees or else force performers to pay for lost revenue, Ecklund and the Clock-Out Lounge offer performers fair pay and collaborate with Wetter to monetize the event sustainably. Ecklund encouraged Wetter and the cast to increase ticket prices by $5 this past year, for example, to ensure that the show’s performers could meet Seattle’s rising cost of living.

To Wetter, although performers shouldn’t put all their eggs in one basket or rely solely on a venue’s owner, “a show really is as good as the love that the owner puts into it.” Tush’s function as a sandbox has let the cast develop a local reputation and land other gigs. Wetter, who emcees Tush shows, now works full-time as a drag artist, doing everything from hosting drag bingo and fundraisers to officiating weddings.

Ecklund, meanwhile, said she is “grateful that Tush is able to remain a viable show for both parties,” especially as venues operate on “razor-thin margins” due to rising costs. She said she believes that artists should be able to make a living making their art and, as a queer-identifying person, sees developing community as “the heartbeat of everything I do.”

This Girl. ERIC RICHARD MAGNUSSEN

This Girl likened finding a supportive commercial space like Clock-Out Lounge to striking gold. Some interviewees also recognized Queer/Bar for its artist-friendly efforts. When performers can focus on their acts rather than pushing tickets, their performances tend to be of higher quality and can attract a more sustained following organically. “Can we ever readily count on businesses or capital to make sure we have a space to create art?” This Girl hedged. “Of course not.” The’Jewel similarly asserted that more owners should pay more since they often make money “hand over fist” without paying performers what they’re worth; she also noted that Seattle’s drag scene will remain on its homogenizing path as long as discrimination and gatekeeping prevent racial and gender diversity in its greenrooms.

Yet Betty Wetter contended that it’s “past time for performers to be asking for what they’re worth,” and to be more disciplined about refusing exploitative rates and conditions. “You’re kind of appeasing [owners and managers by] saying, ‘I’ll take this amount of money,’ when in all honesty, they can pay you more [and] they do have the money,” she said.

Wetter knows spaces like Tush are rare sources of artistic and economic vibrancy, even if they shouldn’t be. “It’s so valuable to me and I am eternally grateful and I’m also always so scared it’s just gonna disappear one day,” she said.

Leaning into the weird has helped Tush stay viable despite the lingering threat of its impermanence, she concluded.

“We’re all swimming in this pool, and you pull your head above the water, and you look around and see there’s like so many people out sunbathing and living a different life than you are in the pool,” Wetter waxed. “It comes back to leaning into what you’re good at, because there are people who want to follow that. There are people who want to see that.”

Inspired to see a show? We've got tons of drag shows, brunches, and performances listed in our calendar, EverOut!

Time in Tent City

Adam Willems — Fri, 03 May 2024 11:49:00 -0700

An interview with author Tony Sparks. by Adam Willems

To Tony Sparks, author of Tent City, Seattle: Refusing Homelessness and Making a Home, the self-governing tent encampment Tent City 3 is as iconic and integral to the city’s social fabric as the Space Needle. Made possible by a 2002 consent decree that allowed the group to live legally on privately held land for 90 days at a time—the first such move by any US city—the camp is a “regular feature of Seattle’s neighborhood landscape,” Sparks writes, due to its “persistent peripatetic existence.”

As a graduate student at the University of Washington in the mid-aughts, Sparks lived in Tent City 3 for seven months, contributing as other residents do to the encampment’s ongoing maintenance and negotiation with landowning religious groups, city officials, service providers, NIMBY neighbors, and others governing the place of Tent City 3 and its residents. Tent City, Seattle, which Sparks says he began writing in 2020 “entirely as a rage piece,” is the culmination of that work. It argues that self-governance lets encampment residents rebuke how housed people and homelessness services perceive them, opening up cracks in the colonially determined ways Seattle governs shelter and movement.

In an interview with The Stranger, Sparks shares how he gained Tent City 3 residents’ approval to conduct research there, contextualizes his academic approach, and describes potential policy changes that could change how Seattle addresses shelter and the right to call a place home.

I'd love to start off by hearing more about how you arrived at Tent City 3 as the site of your research, both in terms of the negotiation with camp residents to have that happen, as well as the intellectual and ethical questions that drove you to Tent City 3 specifically.

Tent City 3 as a research site was almost an accident. I found out about the tent city because they were just right down the street from me. I was living by Seattle University, and they had set up down there. So I literally walked by them every day, and I became sort of hi-bye friends with some of the people who lived there. When it came time to actually start research, the process was pretty simple. I called up [grassroots housing organization] SHARE/WHEEL and told them what I was thinking about doing, and they said, “Okay great, come to a camp meeting and pitch it.”

I went to a camp meeting and by that point they were no longer at Seattle University. They were at a terrible, awful, rat-infested, abandoned motel parking lot just north of the Tukwila border, and there were maybe 30 people at this camp meeting, and we were all huddled under this tent, and it was rain-snowing, and it was miserable. And so the discussion started, and what it came down to was, if I was willing to move in and share this miserable environment with them, then they'd be fine with it. I think they wanted to see if I would be willing to be there and participate with them. The next week, we had to move out of that place, and they wanted me to help them move before I moved in. People who were at the prior meeting knew me, but I introduced myself at the first meeting because a lot of people show up when you come to Capitol Hill. I did a Q&A and then just became known as the graduate student guy.

How quickly was your role or position within the camp de facto accepted? You mentioned a turnover of people coming and going, so I imagine the 30 people who voted yes to you being there were not the same group on Capitol Hill or later.

Two things worked to my advantage. First, weekly meetings, where I could say, “This is who I am, and this is what I'm doing.” Second, the thing about living in tents with 100 people is that the gossip is ongoing and relentless. So everybody knew, and everybody peppered me with questions. But that doesn't mean I was universally accepted. There were definitely people who had no interest in talking to me or being anywhere near me, and I just sort of let that roll. If they stayed long enough to where I got to know them, then sometimes that changed.

You participated in the weekly requirements of the camp, but you were also in grad school. So I'm interested in what you were doing day-to-day while also living in Tent City 3.

It was a lot, and it really made me appreciate how it is to be unhoused on a daily basis and have a job. I was teaching, so I would get up, do my security shift [at the camp] early in the morning, jump on the bus, take my classes, teach my classes, then go back and do whatever other meetings or other volunteer stuff was on in the camp. After I had been there for a couple of months, when [school] went from winter to spring quarter, I invited everybody at the camp to come take my classes if they wanted to, so I always had three or four people from the tent city traveling around with me to my class. And that was great, they got to share their experience with students, and I hope they maybe learned something also.

But it was hectic because I had to look nice to teach. And you can only carry what you have with you to laundromats and gyms. Five dollars a shower, $5 a load—it's expensive to just get up, go to work, do the things you need to do, and come back, especially If you don't have a place where you can stash everything, or a place where you can do laundry, or a place where you can keep your food. So a lot of my time was spent doing social reproduction, keeping myself going. Luckily, I could take my clothes to my girlfriend's house for laundry, so I did that a lot.

Speaking of this interplay between the academy and your interlocutors: A core thesis of your book is that residents of Tent City 3 rejected a lot of external perceptions in a way that rebukes settler-colonial tendencies or forces. I'm curious how much of that is sort of an intellectual lens versus something that was stated pretty explicitly by the people you knew who lived in Tent City 3.

No, it was stated extremely explicitly. As a matter of fact, that's one of the big things I learned in this whole process. People's motivations were expressly to counter the experiences of being identified as “homeless” or being forced into those subjectivities. It was absolutely explicit. I don't think I put this in the book, but somebody told me, “The worst part of being homeless is not not having a place to live. It's being treated like you're a homeless person.” And that was universal.

There's this point where you're talking about Tent City 3’s community credits system, and a Tent City resident mentions churches, outreach, and charity. “Instead of poor African babies, it’s us,” was the quote from the encampment resident, speaking to Tent City 3’s receiving a very Christian form of charity. It seems like the most explicit mention in direct quotes of a colonial practice. I don’t know what you make of that.

I'm glad you picked up on that. In an earlier version of that chapter that got taken out, I had a whole little treatise relating the management of unhoused people to a famous theory, Rostow’s stages of growth, which you've probably heard of as social evolution—“primitive” societies are hunter-gatherers, and then once we become advanced and modern, we're all good capitalists. People in the camp were making those sorts of connections between the spaces they were relegated to and assumptions of their backwardness or ignorance or inhumanity.

Maybe I’m reading this historical development incorrectly, but Tent City 3 established this precedent of self-governance, and then city government co-opted the self-governance model and expanded the number of sanctioned encampments that exist within Seattle that depart politically from Tent City 3. These other camps are often referral-only and talk about service provision, like you say, instead of governance. I wonder if you think that's too pessimistic of a view—whether those sanctioned encampments exist so that unsanctioned ones can be swept.

That's a complicated question. I think there is simultaneously room for hope and dread. The expansion of sanctioned encampments does provide fodder for cracking down on and illegalizing encampments that aren't sanctioned. That said, I think that as long as the nugget of the idea of self-governance exists within those Seattle camps, there is room for experimentation, there's room for expansion, and there's room for conversations to happen. I've had the unfortunate opportunity of visiting encampments where there was no nod to self-governance and that were just essentially outdoor prisons for people who hadn't committed any crimes.

When I set out to write this book, it started entirely as a rage piece. I started writing it in February of 2020. At the same time, I was doing outreach here in San Francisco talking with people who are being shoved into just horrible, horrible conditions. And then I came up to Seattle, for a funeral of all things, and saw the same thing there. But as I went back to my research interviews and documents, it became much more hopeful, seeing that, in any sort of condition, people will refuse and then reclaim their humanity. And it becomes possible for other people to recognize that humanity. It made me feel like it's not a done deal. There is space.

But how much do you think that kind of optimism would still exist if you had conducted your research in 2024 rather than 2006?

Most of my interactions now are with people who are living in unsanctioned encampments just trying to get by. And, you know, there's this case before the Supreme Court now, the Grants Pass case, whether or not it's cruel and unusual punishment to take away all the conditions of living for another human. I don't know if I were to do this exact research over again if it would be as positive. But I do feel like, by telling the stories of the cracks in what seems like a totalizing, punitive carceral system, that it leaves more space to find new ways of being. So, you know, at the end of the day, it's not so much whether this research would be different, but can this research be part of a growing symphony of other people doing other things differently?

At the end of the book, you insert this caveat that you're not trying to be prescriptive in your conclusions. But is there anything you see as a feasible policy shift or other intervention that could address the lack of shelter in Seattle?

From a policy perspective, opening ourselves up to understanding the various ways in which people can be at home, when, in homeless policy, there is no concept of home, and there’s no concept of being together. And so I think policies could be formulated that foreground the idea of home. What would it mean to have a right to belong somewhere and to someone? This is slightly different from Land Back or Right to Remain, because the right to be at home is something that extends beyond geography a little bit. It's a different thing to say there should be a right for housing, which there absolutely should, and that there should be reparations and lands back, which there absolutely should. But there also is space to question our ideas of exclusion and hierarchy, foregrounding home as a right to membership or right to being in community that is spatial and social and political at the same time.

Tent City, Seattle: Refusing Homelessness and Making a Home by Tony Sparks is out now on University of Washington Press.

Queen of Our World

Adam Willems — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 12:45:00 -0700

Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe will be at Third Place Books Lake Forest Park Tuesday, April 16. by Adam Willems

With just a handful of pages to go in Thunder Song, a series of essays from award-winning Coast Salish author Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe, LaPointe asks her reader, “Are you listening yet?”

She breaks the fourth wall, but she isn’t speaking for just herself. With poignant essays that center her own experiences, the Coast Salish landscapes, livelihoods, and people who were lost to colonialism—while unapologetically celebrating those who survive—LaPointe sees herself preventing Indigenous erasure in multigenerational company. She traces the ongoing struggle from Chief Seattle, to her great-grandmother and namesake, Upper Skagit elder Vi taqwšəblu Hilbert, to herself.

In an interview with The Stranger, LaPointe, who says she read The Stranger as “a little twerp on the rez” and decorated her bedroom walls with its print covers, picks up where her previous book, Red Paint, left off. She discusses the forms of loss that inform her writing, revisits her experiences as a Native punk rock artist, and highlights the local communities and groups sustaining her today.

Place is a big part of what your book is about—everything from “the landscape of your identity” to “the landscape of your body”—but there’s also such an emphasis on time. You write how, in the thick of lockdown, “All these white women on Pinterest are baking loaves of sourdough, and I am trying to time travel.” Which is a great zinger, but is also reflective of how you’re connecting pandemic loss to how Chief Seattle must have been grieving, and naming the fact that you’re the descendant of survivors of smallpox. So I’m curious how much the reality and compartmentalization of the COVID-19 pandemic is something you’re consciously trying to emphasize in these essays.

[Laughs] Not to just like, you know, outwardly throw shade to all the people making sourdough, but there came a time where I felt like, as a Coast Salish person still living on the reservation, it felt different, it hit different. I remember crawling out onto my roof and seeing construction stopped for months; things are already so hard to get done on the reservation or to develop. And then it would be frustrating and almost rage-inducing, to see people on social media in their “baking era” while thinking about, you know, my ancestor Comptia Koholowish, who was the sole survivor of smallpox that wiped out her entire village. So it wasn’t like a cute break from work for me. Writing about it was absolutely intentional and something I was grappling with.

You write that, “To honor grief, one must first acknowledge loss.” There’s a lot of acknowledgment of loss in your book: the loss of landscapes, of your great-grandmother, the list goes on. It seems like something that really strings this book together. You have this refrain, “Are you listening yet?” And I feel like a big part of that is you trying to say, “Look at how much loss is around you—everything from tulips, which reshaped the geography of Skagit Valley in settlers’ image, to, like, sourdough eras.”

This is such a great point. Your observation means a lot to me because I think the through line of these essays is this confronting of erasure. Even the city that I was so enamored with and couldn’t wait to get off the rez to get to: It erases something. As an adult, I learned more about the landscape of Seattle. Settlers literally had to bring in dirt from elsewhere to build it up. Settlers had to transform the tide flats to make them livable. There’s grief and loss, even anger, sometimes, over the erasure of people who were here and thriving. You know, Pike Place Market is built over a place where there were abundant shellfish gathering, and, even worse, I’ve heard that there were burial sites. This place that I was so enamored with is also just another kind of representation of erasure.

In the essay “Reservation Riot Grrrl,” you mention the old-school femme attendee in the crowd of a local punk concert who was a total shithead to you, a time capsule for what the punk scene looked like 15 years ago. How have you seen these spaces change, and where do you think they’re headed?

I 100% see it changing; these spaces were predominantly white dude spaces and white feminist spaces. I love that you brought up that show, because the crowd was multigenerational, part of the crowd was brown and Native folks, and then of course, the woman who was really nasty to me, an older-generation probably OG riot grrrl. She wasn’t quite getting it right. And so to see these two generations butted up against each other in the same space was frustrating at one point, but also gave me hope for the future of punk spaces that even just 15 or 20 years ago I felt really outside of. Now I see Native bands coming up, I see more representation and less of a white boy party, and I think that’s really exciting.

Speaking of music, how do you see it influencing your writing? It seems you’re multi-hyphenate in many of the same ways that your great-grandmother was: being really skilled in music, writing, and storytelling.

Well, major props to my great-grandma, because she was my biggest inspiration and influence. She was incredible. Someone asked me once, “You have punk in the title of your memoir [Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk]. How would you apply that term to your great-grandma or your ancestors?” If you think about activism and the things that drew me into punk when I was younger, she was the OG activist. She literally saved a language from extinction and did a lot of language revitalization activism. So I feel like I have to give her a lot of credit for that.

And in the early days where Red Paint leaves off, I had never been able to be in a band. That had to do a lot with the crowd that I was hanging out with in my teens and twenties. It wasn’t until my thirties that the folks in Medusa Stare approached me and said they wanted me to be in their band. And that was really empowering for me. It lined up with that point in my life when I was burning my entire life down and walking away. I think it inspired my writing, supported it, nurtured the little voice in me saying, “Hey, you can be loud.” I finally had permission. And I think that that absolutely carried over into my writing, where I was less intimidated to write about the things I wanted to write.

When I was writing Thunder Song, I was playing music with Kari, who was the drummer of Medusa Stare. When we started playing music together, it was just a two-piece and it was super weird. I think we got a review once in Razorcake that was like, “If you want a slumber party with your girlfriends and watch The Craft and have a séance, they’re great for that.” I thought that was the coolest review ever. So it was just really experimental and strange.

Kari would write music and be like, “Do you have lyrics for this?” My essay about tulips in Thunder Song came out of a song because I had more to say about that. I think that my relationship with music, and especially my connection with Kari, nurtured my writing process.

It seems like your initial contact points for both punk and writing were really empowering. You talk about having punk songs making you feel less alone. And then you describe the experience of contributing to a zine as a teenager, cutting up a shitty ex-boyfriend’s nudie magazines that he gave you into a collage. It sounds like the relationship between music and writing was kind of there for you, even before working with Kari.

Punk was like a gateway drug into poetry for me. As a teen runaway and alternative high school dropout—who does that?—I didn’t arrive at writing through any academic way. I didn’t go to college until I was in my mid-twenties. So the first time I heard bands like Bikini Kill, that kind of opened this doorway. I heard spoken word, and then Sylvia Plath—so predictable, right?—and then I got real into the confessionals. And then I wanted to see more performance poetry and then and then it just grew and grew and grew from there.

So both really connected you with a community, even if they’re imperfect?

Definitely. The “Reservation Riot Grrrl” essay is half a love letter to Riot Grrrl. Even though it ended by the time I had stumbled upon it, that movement still had such an impact on me and fired me up. It opened up doorways into more of the underground DIY kind of music scene that was in Seattle, which saved my life in a lot of ways.

Are there communities or groups sustaining you now in the Seattle area?

When I think of community, it’s impossible not to think of the Native Pathways Program. I started teaching with them last year. It’s so incredible. To be in community, especially academic community, and to be able to teach creative writing at a program that is geared for Native students and Indigenous pedagogy… it feels like a family to me. Even yesterday, I drove out to the Peninsula College House of Learning, the longhouse there, to see my friend and coworker have her first big art opening. It was so badass. Her photos were all of Indigenous women, and were multigenerational. Being in that space, walking around the gallery, and seeing all of my buddies while she was playing this cover of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” but singing it in a traditional language, I was like “I am where I need to be.”

What do you hope people glean from Thunder Song?

It’s not just “Please listen to my stories and my experiences.” I hope there’s more visibility of the culture, the language, the people who were here pre-contact. I hope the book shifts their thinking about what it means to be a guest on this land, to occupy Coast Salish territory. There are really beautiful things happening around the city, like Real Rent Duwamish, the yəhaẃ Indigenous Creatives Collective, that can help people shift how they are occupying this territory.

And hopefully, that should carry over in the sense that attempted genocide is not unique to the Coast Salish experience. Settler-colonial trauma happens all over the world. I guess I’m hoping that people pick up this book and experience some of these stories, some of these histories, and can try to see the world through a more decolonial lens.

Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe will be at Third Place Books Lake Forest Park Tuesday, April 16. Tickets are available at thirdplacebooks.com.

Stranger Suggests: Eliza McLamb, Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe, Pizza Week, Tina Fey & Amy Poehler: Restless Leg Tour, DREAM TEMPLE (for Octavia)

Adam Willems — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 13:40:00 -0700

One really great thing to do every day of the week. by Adam Willems WEDNESDAY 4/10

DREAM TEMPLE (for Octavia)

(VISUAL ART) Artists Mia Imani and Mayola Tikaka call upon the extraordinary visions of Octavia Butler for this installation, which features a low-lit resting space, an altar, and imagery of Black rest. Head to King Street Station to contemplate Butler's visionary worlds, which counteract intergenerational trauma and stress often experienced by Black people with a "portal of healing and imagining." By the way, Butler prophesized an eerily accurate, destabilized world in 2024, so Imani and Tikaka's rest space has arrived just in time. Throughout the exhibition, visitors can engage with rest rituals, hear interviews, and watch performances by the artists. (King Street Station, 303 S Jackson St, Wed-Sat through May 23, free, all ages) LINDSAY COSTELLO

THURSDAY 4/11

A Special Event with Steve Almond: How to Conquer Writer’s Block and the Other Evil Voices Inside You

Steve Almond will be at Hugo House Thursday, April 11. COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

(BOOKS) Earlier this week prolific author Steve Almond hosted a class at Hugo House to help writers overcome some of the most common—and most annoying—creative obstacles. If you missed it, do not fear! Tonight Almond will join Stranger co-founder and former publisher Tim Keck to discuss Almond's new book Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories and also offer hard-earned insight regarding the creative process. Are you plagued by writer's block? Fighting imposter syndrome demons? Dying to tell your story but worried you'll piss off friends, relatives, and/or enemies? Almond can help! Bonus: The bar will be open (with both alcoholic and non-alcoholic options) and Hello, Robin is bringing cookies, which is perfect because, in my personal experience, nothing gets the creative juices flowing faster than heaps of sugar. (Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 7 pm, free) MEGAN SELING

FRIDAY 4/12

Eliza McLamb

(MUSIC) I am a regular listener of the feminist philosophy/pop culture podcast Binchtopia—a "Binchie" to be precise (IYKYK)—so, the fact that I will be in the presence of my parasocial bestie Eliza McLamb this week has me shaking in my boots. If you know anything about her podcast with Julia Hava, then you know that McLamb is incredibly insightful about the trials of girlhood, which is the heart of her debut album, Going Through It. Exploring female friendships ("Glitter"), parentified children ("Bird"), social media addiction ("Modern Woman"), and being mythologized by boys ("Mythologize Me"), the album chronicles her own experiences of growing up through tender folk-tinged lullabies and ferocious indie rock anthems. She will support the album alongside the LA-based indie rock project Mini Trees. (Barboza, 925 E Pike, 7 pm, $16-$18, all ages) AUDREY VANN

SATURDAY 4/13

Tina Fey & Amy Poehler: Restless Leg Tour

(COMEDY) Few comedic roles live on in the public consciousness like Tina Fey's Liz Lemon and Amy Poehler's Leslie Knope—even if you've somehow never watched a single episode of 30 Rock or Parks and Recreation, you know damn well who they are. The comedy queens, who, unsurprisingly, are also BFFs, will celebrate 30 years of camaraderie with jokes, stories, and "conversational entertainment," which I hope involves Tina eating her night cheese. (WaMu Theater, 800 Occidental Ave S, 3 and 6 pm, tickets were still available for both performances starting at $111.50 at press time, all ages) LINDSAY COSTELLO

SUNDAY 4/14

Jim Gaffigan: Barely Alive Tour

(COMEDY) Despite being nominated for seven Grammys, Jim Gaffigan still feels like an everyman—like, I think I could talk to him about my landlord's refusal to replace my broken dishwasher, and he'd at least attempt to understand it. I'm probably completely wrong, but you know what I mean, right? Anyway, the relatively family-friendly dude will crack some jokes about his impressive food consumption and the trials and tribulations of daily life on this tour. (Promotional materials report that he lives in Manhattan with his wife and five "loud and expensive" children, so prepare for anecdotes about their antics.) (Paramount Theatre, 911 Pike St, April 11-14, tickets were still available for multiple nights starting at $39.50 at press time, all ages) LINDSAY COSTELLO

MONDAY 4/15

Stranger Pizza Week 🍕

The Primo at Ballard Pizza Co. SLU. COURTESY OF BALLARD PIZZA CO.

(FOOD) More than a dozen Seattle-area restaurants are participating in The Stranger's Pizza Week from April 15-21. We've got spots from Northgate to Kirkland to Burien and everywhere in between all slinging slices for just $4 and whole specialty pies for $25. To name a few: 32 Bar & Grill is offering a lobster pizza, Big Mario's has the OG Ranch (with both ranch and buffalo sauce!), Kobo's serving up a Yuzu Smoked Salmon pie, and Stevie's Famous is keeping things simple but still undeniably delicious with slices of CHEESE!, a cheese pizza with a naturally leavened sourdough crust. Yum! (Various locations, April 15-21, see the full list of participants here) THE STRANGER'S PIZZA-LOVING PROMOTIONS DEPARTMENT

TUESDAY 4/16

Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe with Tayi Tibble—Thunder Song: Essays

Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe will be at Third Place Books Lake Forest Park Tuesday, April 16. Photo by BRIDGET MCGEE HOUCHINS

(BOOKS) With just a handful of pages to go in Thunder Song, a series of essays from award-winning Coast Salish author Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe, LaPointe asks her reader, “Are you listening yet?” She breaks the fourth wall, but she isn’t speaking for just herself. With poignant essays that center her own experiences, the Coast Salish landscapes, livelihoods, and people who were lost to colonialism—while unapologetically celebrating those who survive—LaPointe sees herself preventing Indigenous erasure in multigenerational company. She traces the ongoing struggle from Chief Seattle, to her great-grandmother and namesake, Upper Skagit elder Vi taqwšəblu Hilbert, to herself. Read more in our interview with LaPointe here and then see her Tuesday night at Third Place Books Lake Forest Park in conversation with poet Tayi Tibble. (Third Place Books Lake Forest Park, 17171 Bothell Way NE Lake Forest Park, 7 pm, all ages, free) ADAM WILLEMS

Icing Out Pride

Adam Willems — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 11:00:00 -0700

The NHL deserves a loser trophy. by Adam Willems

The Seattle Pride Hockey Association (SPHA) has a sticky origin story.

In 2019, Joey Gale, who had recently moved to Seattle from the Midwest, hit the ice to play in a local rec league game. But his stick stood out among the rest, as he’d wrapped his in Pride Tape, a rainbow-colored departure from the black adhesive players typically use. The tape set off queer hockey peer Steven Thompson’s gaydar.

“Steven… emailed me the next day and was like, ‘Hey, I don’t see that rainbow tape a lot, fellow “community member,”’” Gale told me, laughing at Thompson’s friend-of-Dorothy-esque euphemism. “So that was our beginning: Steven clocked my Pride Tape.”

Gale and Thompson went on to co-found the SPHA in the basement of a local hockey arena. They had one eye on the institutional gaps Seattle’s LGBTQ+ hockey players and fans faced, and the other eye on timing. The impending launch of an NHL expansion team in Seattle promised infrastructure, programming, and funding.

Now five years old, the SPHA serves as the region’s leading queer- and trans-focused hockey org. It also puts on the country’s largest LGBTQ+ hockey tournament, the Seattle Pride Classic, which will see 300 players from across the gender and sexuality spectra—it’s not a masc4masc bacchanal!—compete in June.

Gale and Thompson were right to expect an infrastructural and monetary windfall from the local arrival of an NHL franchise: The Seattle Kraken and Symetra (an insurance company and Kraken corporate sponsor) both provide financial support to the SPHA and its tournament. The Kraken’s annual Pride Night, which takes place on Thursday against the Anaheim Ducks, is core to those efforts. Player-worn Pride-themed jerseys will be auctioned off at the event, with proceeds going to the SPHA as well as to the One Roof Foundation, which is the Kraken’s philanthropic arm.

But while the SPHA proudly traces its origins to a platonic tape-inspired meet-cute, and while Gale describes the Kraken as setting the “gold standard” in financial and institutional support for LGBTQ+ hockey communities—albeit through a classically byzantine patchwork of for-profit and nonprofit work, auctions, corporate sponsors, and the like—the NHL as a governing body cannot rest on inclusive laurels in the same way. If anything, the NHL is brooding in the homophobia penalty box.

***

In June of 2023—during Pride month—NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman announced a ban on players wearing special edition warm-up jerseys on the ice for events such as Black History Night, Military Appreciation Night, and Hockey Fights Cancer Night.

The real controversy and impetus for the ban surrounded Pride Nights; a handful of players across the league refused to wear Pride-themed gear, citing religious beliefs, the anti-gay laws of their home countries, and/or ideological differences.

The NHL framed a blanket ban of on-ice regalia as a way to prevent individual player disagreements from overshadowing the ethos of themed nights.

“It’s become a distraction,” Bettman said at the time to justify the nix on warm-up gear.

I spoke with Andrew Ference, the NHL’s director of youth strategy, to understand how the policy squared with the League’s trademarked initiative, “Hockey is for Everyone.” In our conversation, he was more comfortable speaking to his subjective experiences—an NHL veteran with 16 seasons and a Stanley Cup under his belt, in addition to many years as a prominent ally to queer people in hockey—than functioning as a League spokesperson.

Ference said he could understand why critics saw the policy as “frustrating,” but he also believed in the “power in non-mandated initiatives.” The ban shouldn’t distract from the progress that’s been made programmatically and culturally within the NHL, he said, where inclusive locker rooms beget winning records.

“We live in North America and we can celebrate the fact that we don't always have to agree on everything,” Ference continued. “As long as people aren't hurting others, and [aren’t] being bigots or being damaging with things that they're saying and are doing, I think it is important to respect the fact that they can disagree.”

But to Luke Prokop, who played with the Seattle Thunderbirds last season before joining the AHL’s Milwaukee Admirals as a defenseman, and who became the first openly gay person signed to an NHL team when he came out publicly in 2021, the ban was “mind-boggling.” He argued the decision lets Pride-naysaying players, of which there were less than ten, effectively dictate League-wide policy. There are more than 700 players on active NHL rosters.

“They kind of put the spotlight on those players rather than actually focusing on the night itself and… showcasing the queer hockey community,” Prokop said.

The NHL’s hasty edict also threw teams and their LGBTQ+ community partners into confusion. Prokop, who’s also participated in the SPHA’s Pride tournament, said the teams he’s associated with reached out to him and let him know they were moving ahead with Pride-themed nights. “They wanted to make sure that… I didn't feel like I was isolated,” he said.

Meanwhile, in Seattle, following the NHL’s decision, Gale said Kraken representatives reached out to the SPHA and clarified that they did not support the policy change. The Kraken asked them how it could continue showing support for LGBTQ+ hockey players and fans while remaining “handcuffed by the league.”

“We provided them a handful of recommendations, and they were all-in from day one,” Gale said. The SPHA recommended that (willing) Kraken players wear Pride-themed gear from the time they got to Climate Pledge Arena until they ventured out onto the ice. (The Stranger’s interview with Kyle Boyd, Kraken director of fan development, suggests that player-worn and -signed jerseys also generate higher auction winnings for nonprofit partners such as the SPHA.)

Mari Horita, executive director of the One Roof Foundation and head of the Kraken’s social impact and government relations efforts, said the policy change, while “very traumatic for a lot of people,” may have inadvertently done some good, as it proved the need for ongoing discussion around and support for LGBTQ+ communities in hockey.

Conversations among the Kraken culminated in Assistant Athletic Trainer Justin Rogers’s blog post titled, “A Letter To My Younger Self.” The piece, a self-addressed description of Rogers’s path to becoming an openly gay athletic trainer in professional sports, framed the Kraken as an accepting organization in locker rooms, front offices, and arenas, softly rebuking the notion that hockey “is presumed to be a hypermasculine sports world“ filled with Pride-phobes. (Rogers declined to comment for this article.)

Highlighting team support for LGBTQ+ and other minoritized communities, Boyd, the director of fan development, said Kraken players were involved early this season with the design and marketing of themed jerseys as well as the programming surrounding them. The front office has also looked at ways to sustain community engagement and issues beyond one-off events, ensuring that concerns like LGBTQ+ inclusion aren’t limited to Pride Night or Pride Month; it also supports other Seattle-based groups, such as YouthCare, which provides services to youth experiencing homelessness, a disproportionately high number of whom are queer.

At the same time, Horita said, the end result of the current Pride-related policy is “not that different” from the policy preceding the NHL’s antics, since jerseys can still be worn and sold, just not on the ice. “There seemed to be a lot of back and forth to end up at a pretty similar spot to where we started,” she said.

Pride versions of corporate sponsors’ logos will be visible on TV coverage of the game, and broadcasters will be wearing Pride-themed pins, ties, and other accessories, getting in the way of the NHL’s desire for ice free of “controversy.” (Though it should be noted that, within this regulatory nebula, companies can full-throatedly support gay stuff, but athletes can’t.)

Ference, the NHL director, echoed Horita, saying that Pride-adjacent policies have been a “non-existent issue” within his subfield of NHL work. He saw “almost every stick” wrapped in Pride Tape at youth tournaments hosted by the NHL and its partners. “Who doesn’t love rainbow tape?” Ference asked.

***

Well, the League answered Ference’s question in October of 2023, when it banned Pride Tape, a symbol of LGBTQ+ inclusion on the ice for far more players than just Gale and SPHA co-founder Thompson. Arizona Coyotes defenseman Travis Dermott—not an openly gay player, just an incensed one—publicly protested the ban by using Pride Tape during the Coyotes’ home opener, forcing the NHL to quickly reverse the ban.

“I think there's this… unique inflection point of what the Kraken are doing and sort of forging their own path,” Gale said. “And then you have the NHL sort of walking back… decisions on Pride Tape.”

I asked Boyd and Horita of the Kraken whether more Dermott-esque noncompliance could encourage the NHL to undo its Pride Night rules; they said such a decision would be up to players and their operations teams. That kind of fork in the road could present itself on Thursday, though the odds seem slim.

Either way, Gale said the Kraken can continue to push themselves to improve the way they serve players underrepresented in hockey, especially by helping with the cost of ice time at the Kraken Iceplex. As long as cost remains a barrier to access, hockey will perpetuate differing levels of “discrimination amongst different groups,” Gale said.

The Seattle Kraken could get trounced in Thursday’s game and in every game remaining this season and still avoid being the losingest entity in the National Hockey League from the past year. And, no, I don’t mean the Ducks: The loser trophy belongs to the NHL alone.

Losing Record

Adam Willems — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 14:32:00 -0800

Shaun Scott will discuss his new book at Town Hall on Wednesday, November 29. by Adam Willems

Shaun Scott’s Heartbreak City: Seattle Sports and the Unmet Promise of Urban Progress unfolds like a baseball game. First through its structure: divided chronologically, recounting a people’s history of Seattle into nine innings—and some extra bits—corresponding to key eras between the start of white settlement and today. Then through a vibrant array of characters shaping how history unfolds: divulging their shared hopes, committing errors, moving through losses, rallying.

Heartbreak City is as much about casting a light on keystone, bygone sports dynasties—from the superspreading Metropolitans hockey franchise to the stunning Seattle Owls—as it is about questioning Seattle’s teams, champions, and projects the city rallies behind. That the city doesn’t rebuke its “Loserville, USA” moniker by proudly citing the Seattle Storm’s impressive record, or OL Reign’s winning proclivities, or Floyd Patterson’s historic boxing match against Pete Rademacher (who? read the book!) speaks volumes. Misguided affinities shape, and are further re-entrenched by, the city’s collective identity and its political roadmap. Leading to whopping investments in professional sports infrastructure but not housing or community centers or other elemental needs; and making only some worthy of citywide celebration for their victories after defeat.

In an interview with The Stranger, Scott, a political organizer and one-time City Council candidate (and occasional Stranger contributor), describes the loss driving his work, dives into the book’s non-sports lessons, and analyzes the political economy of stadium projects.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I know you wrote the book in part because you were commissioned by UW Press, but I’m interested in why sports is your lens. And I’m wondering to what extent that has to do with the multi-constituent political vocality you wish to espouse.

The project itself didn't really materialize until the stillness and the quietness of quarantine set in in spring 2020. The sports calendar was put on hold in ways that I had not seen in my lifetime; 9/11 was the only other time that I could really remember reams and reams of games being canceled, entire portions of the sports calendar being put on hold and delayed.

For many people, the impact of quarantine was felt as not being able to go to their favorite coffee shop or not being able to go to their favorite movie theater. For me, I think the civic connection that is felt through the games that we play and the games that we watch was a real felt loss. So the book, in a lot of ways, started from a place of mourning for that lost connection or for that deadened connection.

Putting together a people’s history of Seattle and trying to tell the truth about the city and aspects of its politics that played out: I don't think that it's possible to really do something like that from a calculated perspective. In other words, I found after being very, very busy nonstop campaigning for three or four years, I actually really embraced the lack of political calculation and “strategery”—as George W. Bush [played by Will Farrell on Saturday Night Live] put it years ago—that the writing process presented.

No matter where you are, as a writer, there you are. It's impossible to divorce a lot of the memories you might have about how certain things have played out politically and, from that, attempt to tell the truth about the city's history. I think any connection that might arise between the diagnosis of the city's history—which goes all the way back to settlement and comes all the way up to the recent era—and politics just comes about as a matter of trying to find the truth.

Totally. I mean, the Genesis or Original Sin of settler history starts off with the Denny party’s arrival while Indigenous people are playing sports. That’s something that transpired rather than a forced connection [between sports and history]. Or there’s the way history rhymes with George W. Bush throwing the first pitch at the World Series, just as he did in 2001, with geopolitical conditions being in many ways the same as they were 22 years ago. A throughline you don’t need to force as much as it is just being. Regardless—presumably—quite a bit of this history wasn’t knowledge that you already had; what sort of information did you stumble upon versus actively seek out to create this sports-oriented lens for a people's history of Seattle?

Well, the research process comprised the majority of the labor of putting this book together. Very early on, I decided that I wanted to try to tell a moralistic story rather than a periodized one—focusing on the entire city's history, rather than on a particular era—because the throughlines that you mentioned come out, and are that much more apparent, when you see exactly how far back they go.

Now, of course, with that vision comes a considerable research burden, because now you're attempting to do a lot more uncovering versus a lot of interpreting. I would venture to say that somewhere north of 70% of the content of the book was information I did not know about before the research process. To give you an idea of what that process looked like: I want to say seven or eight versions or drafts of this book were generated over the course of two and a half years.

The majority of the energy was spent on the primary source data. And somewhere in the negotiation between that primary source material, which was the richest part of the research process, and that secondary-source big picture perspective is where you get the narrative that comes through in the book.

And you juggle the two [source types] really, really gracefully. This book came out of an era of quarantine and loss of connection, and your archival research further uncovers reams of missed opportunities: whether it's Forward Thrust, a floating stadium, genuinely equitable municipal policies, or the sustained existence of the Seattle Owls. I'm curious how you moved through that dual loss over the course of writing the book.

It's a question of how a city deals with defeat, how populations deal with disappointment, and how individuals can remain resilient in the face of (at times) overwhelming odds. This idea came up over and over again by looking at the individual characters that were in the book. The hope was to try to put something together that read in some ways as much like a novel as it did a history book, in the sense that you have characters that lead really interesting lives that overlap eras, maturing at the same time and in the same ways as the city is maturing.

It's Lenny Wilkins receiving hate mail when he's instituted as the Sonics’ player-coach in the latter 1960s. It's Helene Madison, the swimmer during the Great Depression who falls apart after she puts Seattle on the map and becomes the city's first sports superstar. It's the story of Robin Threatt, the guard who played briefly for the Seattle Storm as a woman in her early 30s, who had given up on the idea of being a professional basketball player, sees that the WNBA is formed, moves to Seattle sight unseen, tries out for the team and beats out women 10, 11 years her junior.

I think the recovery aspect of these stories are way more important to me than the disappointment aspect. I think the initial disappointment in so many athletes’ athletic careers and in so many political pursuits is almost an inevitability. But the real question is: What can the city do to recover? In a sense, recovering these stories from the archives of history, and from history books, and from microfilm was the part of this whole process that was the most inspiring to me.

That's where the reconciliation comes in: in realizing that disappointment is inevitable, and defeat is inevitable, but what is not inevitable is the recovery. That's the decision that we have to make. In the same way that I think every athlete had to make that decision for themselves about whether or not they were going to let initial defeat define what they were about or whether or not they were going to push forward. The Sonics won the title in 1979, the very year after losing to the same team that they ended up beating in '79 in the finals—and with Lenny Wilkins as the head coach, a guy who had been receiving hate mail from the city's fans only a decade prior. As you read stories like that you can’t help but understand that the real value in these stories is in their value as a model for resilience and for recovery.

You mentioned in the first few pages of the book how sports shape the city hand in hand with frontierist practices—like being a lumberjack or having a predominantly male population. How much do you see that ethos continuing today? I mean you talk about “frontierist rambunctiousness” at one point when talking about the Seahawks in your book. So I'm wondering how much you still see that ethos impacting the forms of leisure and self-identity that define the city today.

I think there is an inherent settler mythology that is inseparable from athletics and the idea of a population venturing out West and building, in their minds, a city from thin air. Politically, what you see in the city at present is a kind of libertarian progressivism and a fear of bigness, be it big government, or big development, or big huge corporations. But there's a perennial identity crisis that I think exists in the city—where at the same time that the city’s pro-business boosters want to be recognized as belonging to a very metropolitan city, many of the people here have reason to actually fear what taking those steps into the future might mean.

So Seattle as a city always feels like it’s almost arm-wrestling with itself about how to move forward, or whether to move forward. All of that is really not separable from our geographical position historically, and from the kinds of fights that we've had over whether to build transit, whether to build housing—if so, where to put it—whether or not a huge stadium is the thing that finally can make the city say it arrived, or whether that actually is just a waste of money. These are civic debates that cut to the identity of the city, ones I tried to unfold layer after layer and look at how they played out over generations.

I think it’s interesting that you are, in a lot of ways, very pro-stadium. Often stadiums are seen as this pork-barrel, billionaire-pocket-lining form of civic infrastructure. You add nuance by describing how certain stadiums are funded. Regardless, something that can congregate 50,000 people in one venue in the name of a collective identity or a collective pastime is the locus of so much debate.

The section that deals with the implosion of the Kingdome and what the Kingdome represented gets at the heart of this. I mean, in deciding to detonate the Kingdome and build the facility that eventually became Lumen Field, I think I do describe that as “pissing away close to a billion dollars,” so it's not a completely pro-sports-boosters apologist take.

No, no, no, of course not.

I would say that the celebration comes from the fact that sports facilities are some of the most visible examples we have of the collective mobilization of huge gobs of public resources, with a layer of emotional excitement added to it. It’s not just public and civic investment as a form of eating your vegetables; this is something that people really happily embrace.

If there's a criticism, it comes from the fact that similar forms of public mobilization, which probably would cost less money and require less effort, are not made. We see huge stadiums go up, constructed with organized labor in a matter of four or five years, in the same city where we have people sleeping outside. So you wonder, where is that engineering might? Where's the civic vision? Where's the enthusiasm for marshaling those resources when it's a question of the stakes being much higher? So therein lies the conflict.

By framing the stadiums as strange deviations from the capitalist ideal—when you consider not just the gobs of public funds it took to build them, but the fact that the workers in the stadiums, from the concession stand workers to the players, are majority organized laborers—sports come with a specter of socialism that I think a lot of people would not recognize at first glance. But when you break it down, you see a lot more collectivism in our sports than you do the individualistic capitalist ideal.

Shaun Scott discusses his book, Heartbreak City, with Jesse Hagopian at Town Hall Wednesday, November 29 at 7:30 pm.

To the Moon

Adam Willems — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 16:33:00 -0800

"I look up at the Space Needle and it’s a tall-ass dick." by Adam Willems

When the Space Needle originally opened in 1962 for the World’s Fair, management hired an all-women team of tall “Sky Pilotesses” to operate the tower’s elevators. Their job responsibilities involved careening visitors more than 500 feet in the air to the observation deck, rocking atomic-age uniforms with authoritative flair, and embodying a futuristic but ultimately homogenizing vision of womanhood.

Fast forward 51 years and a supergroup of local drag queens—Arrietty, Irene (the Alien) Dubois, Miss Texas 1988, and MyAikõ—are ascending those same elevator shafts to the Needle’s top to serve a gayer, weirder “sky pilotess” redux (and a more expansive vision of gender) as “Queens of the Cosmos,” the first drag show ever to be held atop the world-famous landmark.

Irene (the Alien) Dubois performing at Queens of the Cosmos. Jonathan Ochoa

The queens came packed with iconic space-age looks, extraterrestrial numbers, as well as their own interpretations of what performing at a globally recognized (corporate) landmark means for the state of drag and queer rights in 2023.

Arrietty, a regular presence at Dreamland and Queer/Bar, sat on one end of the meaning-making spectrum. “The only thing I know about here is: I look up at the Space Needle and it’s a tall-ass dick,” she told me before the show, sporting a galaxy-sized, black, curly wig and a star-twinkling sequined gown.

Irene (the Alien) Dubois performing at Queens of the Cosmos. Jonathan Ochoa

Tush mainstay Miss Texas 1988 offered a less phallic take. Bodiced in a piece that’s equal parts outer space and Joan of Arc—cherried on top by a swooshy pink ‘do and fuzzy green alien antennae—she said the Space Needle is home to several significant personal firsts. While on a visit from Minnesota, her mom saw Miss Texas do drag for the first time and then overcame her fear of heights at the Space Needle; she now wants to visit the Needle every time she comes to Seattle. “It was a fun full circle to be like, ‘Well now I’m doing drag on the Space Needle,’” Miss Texas said.

“What is a more mainstream Seattle thing than the Space Needle?” added Irene the Alien, the show’s host and a RuPaul’s Drag Race alum. “At this point, we're sort of breaking the glass floor of the Space Needle; I think the last thing for us to do would be to run for mayor.” This was her first time at the Space Needle. She said it was cool to pop that cherry in drag—wearing what she called a “Bab Mockie” (a mock Bob Mackie)—and to do so in a professional capacity outside Pride month.

MyAikõ performing at Queens of the Cosmos. Jonathan Ochoa

The Space Needle’s status as a tourist attraction and non-queer space shaped how the Queens of the Cosmos approached their performances. Politicians, media, and even mass shooters have targeted drag performers and their workplaces, in lockstep with efforts to deny trans people their rights. Irene said she hoped visitors seeing drag for the first time could sway relatives’ thoughts on drag and gender nonconformity.

MyAikõ performing at Queens of the Cosmos. Jonathan Ochoa

Though some of them would put on more accessible performances than they would for their regular fans, MyAikõ said the Queens of the Cosmos were still representative of Seattle’s diverse drag scene. “Since we all have different drag [styles] and we all work at… different venues, we all give a different aspect of what you can do with drag,” she said, pulling off an all-orange look reminiscent of the Needle’s bygone roof color. (Irene dubbed her a “slutty little carrot.”)

Miss Texas 1988 performing at Queens of the Cosmos. Jonathan Ochoa

A mostly local crowd of seasoned drag aficionados below the age of—I’m eyeballing here—35 doled out no shortage of singles or enthusiasm for the queens’ assorted numbers. No shortage of space-themed references to boot.

Miss Texas 1988’s nods to the theme were the most clear-cut. She channeled cheekiness through her setlist, including Katy Perry’s “E.T.” and “Cosmic Love” by Florence + the Machine. Her final act took the cake, involving some mad-scientist cosplay set to “Space Time Motion” by Jennifer Vanilla and “Vibeology” by Paula Abdul, reaching a climax with a magic trick and an outfit reveal. Two graduated cylinders and some suggestive sniffs/licks later and our woman in STEM was done for the night. (Did she make VCR cleaner?? We’ll never know.)

Miss Texas 1988 performing at Queens of the Cosmos. Jonathan Ochoa

Irene was similarly transparent with her music choices. Performing to “Big White Room” by Jessie J in a… you guessed it; giggling at the first line of the classic “Disco Inferno” (“To my surprise, one hundred stories high…”) given her own impressive altitude at that moment; and lip-syncing to “I Can’t Do It Alone” from the musical Chicago when, at some points, she did do it alone—dancing, juggling, hosting, and rearranging the lineup on the fly when a queen was slightly delayed getting into her new look.

Irene (the Alien) Dubois performing at Queens of the Cosmos. Jonathan Ochoa

Arrietty and MyAikõ’s performances weren’t as Needle-reference-laden but, true to Seattle drag’s breadth and caliber, they still offered gems of their own. MyAikō exploited every inch of the runway, pulling off acrobatic moves to the delight of the audience. To the tune of “Touch” by Little Mix, MyAikō’s second act culminated in a shower of singles from a stylish audience member donning Mike Teavee-esque sunglasses.

Arrietty performing at Queens of the Cosmos. Jonathan Ochoa

Arrietty’s numbers ran longer than others, which was a welcome change of pace and seemed savvy from a cash-flow perspective. But it made for a smidge-awkward moment at the tail end of Beyoncé’s listless “Rocket” in Arrietty’s sultry Act III, which Irene cut off prematurely (seemingly by accident, given the observation deck’s blind spots). “I know she’s experiencing post-nut clarity right now,” Irene joked to smooth things over. But Arrietty as sky pilotess handled the jolty finish with grace, and she gifted the audience with memorable accessories across her three acts, including a nine-foot loofah-ish scarf as well as a dance partner wearing a Disneyland Paris sweatshirt (venez comme vous êtes!).

Arrietty performing at Queens of the Cosmos. Jonathan Ochoa

Maybe I’m gay and have an agenda or whatever but I fear the Space Needle has peaked. Kinda hard to recover from queer excellence with same-old, same-old. (That the house DJ chose “Moves Like Jagger” by Maroon 5 as the girls’ curtain call doesn’t bode well for the months to come on-site lol.) The Queens of the Cosmos haven’t abdicated yet, and a new dynasty is destined for 2024.

The Queens of the Cosmos (from left): Arrietty, MyAikõ, Miss Texas 1988, and Irene (the Alien) Dubois. Jonathan Ochoa

Stranger Suggests: Freakout Festival, Queens of the Cosmos, Short Run Comix & Arts Fest, Macbeth: A Rock Musical, and VOTE!!!!

Adam Willems — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 12:35:00 -0700

One really great thing to do every day of the week. by Adam Willems WEDNESDAY 11/1

serpentwithfeet: Heart of Brick

(DANCE) Josiah Wise, aka serpentwithfeet, will bring his otherworldly tenderness to the stage with his new theatrical dance piece Heart of Brick, which is set to his songs from his latest album Deacon. The piece is a passionate study of love—particularly Black queer love—that embodies the sweetness and sincerity at the core of Wise's electronic project. (Moore Theatre, 1932 Second Ave, 7:30 pm, $22.50-32.50, all ages) AUDREY VANN

THURSDAY 11/2

Freakout Festival

<a href="https://allah-las.bandcamp.com/album/zuma-85">Zuma 85 by Allah-Las</a>

(MUSIC) Acid Tongue’s Guy Keltner started Freakout Festival with one thing in mind—he wanted to throw a gigantic party for his friends. Now in its 11th year (and newly operating as a non-profit), the festival's lineup may be bigger and more diverse than ever, but the spirit of the weekend remains unchanged. Hop between multiple venues across Ballard to hear mindbending psychedelic tunes while tripping out to Freakout's notoriously hypnotic visual projections (the festival has a strict no-kids policy, so substances are common). You won't want to miss performances from LA-based psych-rock band Allah-Las, pioneering garage rock band the Gories, chaotic punk quartet the Spits, cumbia-punk outfit Son Rompe Pera, dancey goth project Sextile, and so many others. (Various locations in Ballard, Nov 2-5, $65-$150, see the full Freakout schedule here) AUDREY VANN

FRIDAY 11/3

Queens of the Cosmos: The Space Needle's First Drag Show

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(DRAG) Your life post-Halloweekend will reek of anticlimax; what better way to cure your malaise than (literally) landmark drag performances? Haul ass and bring wads of singles to Queens of the Cosmos, the first-ever drag show at the Space Needle. Local queens—Irene (the Alien) DuBois, Arrietty, Miss Texas 1988, and MyAikõ—will transform the Observation Deck into a launchpad for atomic-age glamor and realness. All ages are welcome! (Space Needle, 400 Broad St, 7 pm, $26-$39, all ages) ADAM WILLEMS

SATURDAY 11/4

Short Run Comix & Arts Festival

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(BOOKS) In 2018, Stranger editor Rich Smith wrote of Short Run: "You’re going. You’re bringing at LEAST $50 cash. You’re picking up new art books, zines, buttons, and little strips of beautiful screen-printed ephemera from internationally/nationally/locally-renowned comics creators." Challenge accepted! This year's edition of the now-legendary DIY fest includes special guests Arantza Peña Popo and Simon Hanselmann, plus cool creative exhibitors, art shows, a "draw jam," and an after-party at Mini Mart City Park. (Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St, 11 am-6 m, free, all ages) LINDSAY COSTELLO

SUNDAY 11/5

Macbeth: A Rock Musical

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(THEATER) "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes." That's right—Shakespeare's eldritch tragedy Macbeth is back, and you can spread out upon the "blasted heath" of Seattle Public Theater for a gore-flecked tale of witches, madness, paranoia, and civil war. There's a catch, though: Director Amy Poisson's Macbeth: A Rock Musical offers up a femme, punk rock rendition of the tale, so don't go unless you're into strobe lights and jangling guitars. (Earplugs will be provided, though.) (Seattle Public Theater, 7312 W Green Lake Dr N, Thurs-Sun, $10-$100) LINDSAY COSTELLO

MONDAY 11/6

Anatomy of a Fall

(FILM) In one of Burial's unreleased tracks, you will find a sample that makes this claim: "It's like people had forgotten how to make a tune." Something similar can be said about the cinema of the procedural. It's hard to find a director who can do it right, who deeply understands the form. This is why Anatomy of a Fall, a French film by Justine Triet, is so remarkable: It's 100% a thriller. There is a crime, an investigation, a suspect, and, of course, lots of drama in the court. Triet builds all of the questions (Who did it? What are we missing? Why is the man nearly blind? What about the music? The aspirin?) into a solid maze. And the tension increases the closer we get to its core. Anatomy of a Fall (what a great title) deserved the Palme d'Or it won at this year's Cannes Film Festival. (SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave N, various showtimes Nov 3-9, $13-$14) CHARLES MUDEDE

TUESDAY 11/7

VOTE!

And so should you. TERESA GRASSESCHI

(CIVIC DUTY) You know the drill. You should have received your ballot in the mail by now. (If you haven't, call King County Elections to find out what’s going on.) Grab your favorite pen, fill out the bubbles in accordance with our legally binding endorsement guide, stuff the ballot in the envelope, SIGN THE ENVELOPE, and then stuff that big beautiful package into the nearest drop box before 8 pm Tuesday, November 7. Not sure if you’re registered to vote? Check here. Need to register to vote? Do it here. Want to track your ballot after you send it in? Bam. Want the quick and dirty version of our endorsements? We live to serve! Now GO VOTE! STRANGER ELECTION CONTROL BOARD

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Climate Pledge Arena
November 6

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The Paramount Theatre
November 10

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Gears of War

Adam Willems — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 10:17:00 -0700

"The bike is just a tool that can be used. It is not inherently a good thing. It's up to the people to do good with it." by Adam Willems

The history of mechanized transit has, since its genesis, been a history of tragic death and casualty. Take the train: Its invention also birthed derailments and collisions, leading nineteenth-century British doctor John Eric Erichsen to discover “railway spine,” a diagnosis for what we call “trauma” today.

The bike’s introduction to modern life didn’t come with the same inherent risks; but the rise of cars and their infrastructure—only years after bikes established a toehold in cities like Seattle—had superlatively disastrous consequences. Razing neighborhoods, killing pedestrians and bicyclists, and arguably shaping every aspect of life in their smoggy image.

This unfortunate reality compelled independent journalist Tom Fucoloro to write Biking Uphill in the Rain: The Story of Seattle from Behind the Handlebars through a bifocal lens. Chronicling bikes’ ascendance in Seattle, while also keeping an eye out for the cars tailgating behind them and crashing onto the scene. “In a city that once sported an awesome web of bike paths cross-crossing our communities, why did citizens let cars take over?” Fucoloro asks. “What happened?”

Fucoloro answers these core queries in an interview with The Stranger, depicting Seattle’s first bike and car owners as “Spider-Man Pointing at Spider-Man”-esque characters. Appreciating bicycles as a tool people deploy for a range of political goals, Fucoloro further describes how Seattle became home to politically engaged biking culture, including through extensive organizing efforts, and comments on the ways bicycles were used both for and against social justice during protests against white supremacy and police brutality in 2020.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

To start off: You've been writing Seattle Bike Blog since 2010. What drew you to writing a book in addition to that ongoing work?

Writing a blog, everything is very plugged into the current moment. I'll come up with an idea, write it, and publish it, often within the same day. So the idea of being able to just take a huge step backward, zoom out, it was just a really cool opportunity: getting a chance to really dive into the history in a way that didn't need me to turn something around immediately.

As I wrote this book over the period of a couple of years, the meaning of things that I had previously collected kept changing as I learned new things. The book is not really all that similar to the proposal that I first wrote. I just let it lead me. Initially, I thought I was going to write a bicycle culture book, and it turned into more of a Seattle history book. I think it turned out better than my proposal, so I'm happy with it.

Sorry for the pun, but the book uses the bike as a ~*vehicle*~ for covering several histories at once: real estate, white supremacy, resource distribution, local politics, the built environment, and so forth. The reason I bring that up is that you mentioned expanding the scope beyond biking culture; did you widen your lens because of the archival research you did? The early history you dig into shows how the built environment was so contingent upon the bicycle for quite a large chunk of Seattle’s early early years as a settler city.

Some of it was also the pandemic. I started writing this book in 2019, and the original version of it was supposed to have long-form personal profiles. But the pandemic basically made that not really cool to do. That's when I shifted to what I had access to: newspaper archives, digital archives, things like that.

I started out with the assumption that I knew little bits and pieces of the early bicycle history stuff, but I assumed that it would be the beginning of just Seattle bicycling, and then it dawned on me that the early bicycling stuff was not actually the start of the city's bicycle culture, but the start of the city's car culture. The question I wanted to answer was, “How did the bicyclists allow cars to take over these awesome bike paths?” We had bike paths all over the city. “How did they let the cars take over? What happened?”

And then I'm doing research and reading the columns of The Argus, which was an alternative weekly that had a weekly cycling column. In one of the final columns in 1904, the writer says, “You can't help but notice that most of the new auto owners are the former bicyclists.” It's kind of eye-opening like, “Oh, they didn't let the car drivers take over, they became the car owners—they’re the same people.”

So that's what led me down the road of following how car culture developed: into chapters doing research about how the city responded when people started just killing people with their cars, which very quickly became an enormous problem. You know, traffic deaths in Seattle peaked in the 1930s at just an eye-watering total—way, way, way, way, way more than today, even with far fewer people. I wanted to see how people responded to car culture, which ballooned into the freeway explosion in the 1950s and ‘60s, which was at the peak of its powers in the ‘60s before the public revolted. That provided a really interesting context to understand how the modern bicycling movement came to be, which was really sort of a counter-cultural movement, separate from car culture this time.

One notable vignette involves snooty Montlake residents working together with Black Panthers to mobilize against extremely destructive highway projects. Granted, those projects were more about stopping something versus building civically minded infrastructure like the Burke-Gilman. That difference represents a core theme in your book, and I’m wondering if you could speak more to that.

The freeway revolts were this huge political movement that built itself grassroots-style and was successful at pressuring city leaders to back off their support for some major freeway projects, including the RH Thompson expressway through the Central District and the Arboretum and also a much wider version of I-90, which would have destroyed much more of Judkins Park and Mount Baker. (It still destroyed a lot of the International District.)

This movement was successful at not only convincing city leaders to back off from supporting these big freeway projects, but it was also able to get a city-wide voting majority on its side. So the city put two freeway projects up to referendum, and voters said no to both of them, but then very shortly later, they put forward the Forward Thrust measures to voters, asking them if they wanted to fund a mass-transit system. And voters also said no to that. So, you know, they could successfully stop a freeway, but building support to create something new was so much harder to do.

So we were stuck in this period of indecision, and I think that's where biking really comes back in. There was a group of people in Northeast Seattle who noted that a railroad line was going to be abandoned, and they tried to figure out how to keep the railroad right of way connected, complete, and as a public good. So they came up with the idea of a hiking and biking trail, which is something that just had not existed before. They had to organize a community door-to-door and gather support. A lot of the people who were in the proposed path of the RH Thompson fought against the freeway and also organized to stop the trail. It’s so much easier to be against something than it is to invent a vision and then sell it.

It's really impressive what they were able to accomplish building the Burke-Gilman Trail. They had to get the federal government to invent a process by which a city or county could take ownership of a rail right of way that was being abandoned to preserve it as a public good. And that's what became what's now known as the Rails to Trails program, which is nationwide, and there are thousands of miles of these trails all across the country. This was an extremely influential project, which is why it's funny that we still haven't finished it.

There are a few instances in your book where individual leaders exert [unilateral] agency to start or stop things. The transfer to the city of Burlington Northern’s rail on the south end of Ship Canal, which is now a bike path, just because an outgoing railroad exec was willing to get flack for transferring the land during his very last minute at work before retiring. It's entertaining to read, but also just wild to think about the scale of power, where on one side, you need to create these constituencies of thousands of people to generate buy-in, and on the other side, you just need one guy to sign a piece of paper. Do those power dynamics still exist in the city today?

It absolutely does. One of the lessons that we've learned, especially during the early Jenny Durkan administration, is like, you know, we can have these moments where we’ve successfully aligned the full stack around an idea—all the way from the low-level staffers within a department, to the department head, to the mayor, to the city council, and they're all perfectly in line with each other on a goal. And when that happens, we can achieve so much and so much can happen really quickly. We've had these bursts of the city doing that. But if you lose even one part along that chain, it's wild how damaging that can be.

That's the role bicycle advocacy serves in the city: constantly trying to convince the city that we can do something new and different. The actual building of bike lanes is extremely easy. It's the alignment of political interests along with the bureaucrats within the departments that's the hard part. It was just very frustrating to realize that we had everything set up, and then we lost the mayor. I think it's healthy to know exactly what the power structure in Seattle needs to look like in order to create something new.

SDOT is excellent. Very, very, very, very smart people working there, and they know what needs to get done. And our city council has been very favorable. We got way behind, and now we've got a lot of key projects that were on pause that are all sort of moving. This is going to be a really big year for biking in Seattle. The department's trying to play catch up to get some of the promised mileage done before they put up another transportation package in 2024. We'll see if they all come through.

When you explain your motivation behind using the bicycle as this lens for talking about such a wide range of social issues in Seattle, how do you tell people why they should care about the bicycle?

Nothing about public spaces ever exists in a vacuum from the larger cultural issues at the time. When a decision is made about how public space is going to be used, that decision is being informed by the whole of society. Nothing that happens on the street is confined just to the space between the curbs. And the bicycle is just this tool. It's this thing that is affordable [nowadays] and simple and powerful and sometimes full of joy.

But if you look throughout Seattle history, each generation seems to see the bicycle in a different way and use it in a different way to achieve different goals at different points. In the early days, like when the bicycle first arrived, it was super expensive, and an elite status symbol. You look at the names of bike club members and it reads like a list of Seattle street signs—the Nickersons, the Dennys, Judge Thomas Burke. It was an elite group of plugged-in, wealthy people who were trying to use it as a development tool for their claimed land plots, while they're profiting off colonial expansion and genocide.

Later, when biking kind of comes back, it's much more egalitarian. More recently, during the protests in 2020, the Seattle Bike Brigade used bikes as a means of traffic control to keep protests safe. So they're using the strategies developed through Critical Mass and other mass bike ride events over the years. Biking was just the tool by which to keep a protest safe, to create a space in public on streets that are not designed for that use. I just thought that to be such an interesting evolution—how this generation is using bikes in a way that hadn't been used before. We're reinventing what the bike means and the role that it plays all over again. This is the way it's always been. People always see the bike as a tool and they're finding different ways that it can fit into what they need to do now.

So sort of the evolving need to use this tool for a range of political beliefs and even just pure human needs, like being protected from 2,000-pound vehicles.

But the bicycle is just a tool. The most prolific users of bikes at the protests were certainly the Seattle Police Department. There’s the officer who ran over a protester’s head while the protester was lying in the street. Rolled his bike right over his head, was caught on camera doing this. The bike is just a tool that can be used. It is not inherently a good thing. It's up to the people to do good with it.

Tom Fucoloro discusses Biking Uphill in the Rain on Thurs Oct 12 at REI.

Bring Back the Bullpen Boat!

Adam Willems — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 12:32:00 -0700

They never should've gotten rid of the M.S. Relief, tbh. by Adam Willems

Maybe it’s delusion, maybe it was the Pacifico coursing through my veins, but witnessing the Mariners’ shutout game against the Rangers on Friday got me h-word (hopeful). From J.P. Crawford’s grand slam to a (seemingly) deep bullpen’s dexterity, the home team gave us reason to believe in a potential Rangers sweep, one in which chaos ball could prevail and usher in a second straight year of postseason thrills.

But God’s not listening to your baseball prayers, dipshit. Friday’s athleticism was followed—as if on cue—by Saturday’s bumbling mess, locking the M’s out of the postseason. It’s the fourth time since 2014 that the team’s been eliminated in the last or second-to-last game of the regular season, suggesting Jerry Dipoto sees edging the general public as his job, rather than baseball operations.

It’s easy to blame Dipoto or manager Scott Servais or designated hitter-emeritus Tommy La Stella for the Mariners’ woes, when in reality our tradition of blunders can trace its roots much further back. A worrying confluence of grave errors brought us here—but they’re trespasses for which we can be forgiven, mistakes to be easily overturned.

Bring back the boat(s)

The Mariners’ original sin was jettisoning their bullpen car. Evoking the fireboats one sees toot-tooting around Seattle’s waterways, the “M.S. Relief” offered a splendid seating area in the aft that belied its humble golf-cart chassis. Relief pitchers, if they chose to do so, could hitch a ride on Seattle’s coolest-ever mode of transit, intimidating opposing-team hitters with a one-two punch of maritime camp and brackish flair.

But, riddled with fragile masculinity, Mariners pitchers instead chose to be buzzkills and (metaphorically) sunk the boat. Closer Bill Caudill hid the keys to the M.S. Relief during the vehicle’s public launch in 1982. His practical joke delayed the game’s start and made it clear that the bullpen wanted nothing to do with the prop. “The Tugboat was quickly put in dry dock,” the Mariners PR team wrote in a retrospective about the episode; no pitcher ever rode on the boat during its short tenure at the Kingdome. And no Mariners pitcher rode the wave to World Series glory following this blunder, either. Coincidence? I think not.

It’s high time for Mariners leadership to do the right and brave thing: bring back the M.S. Relief! Rebuking Caudill’s antics, the more cosmopolitan and level-headed pitchers of today will no doubt respect the vessel’s utility and beauty. To see Gabe Speier or Andrés Muñoz’s coiffes undulate in the breeze as they get chauffeured to the mound? That’s a game-changer. Smile and wave, boys.

Bring back the USS Mariner, too.

Make August longer

The team celebrated a record-breaking 21 wins in August, with six series victories in a row. It was a delectable combo of hard-earned wins, like against the Kansas City Royals, as well as easier Ws, like a sweep of the Astros. Fans even caught their first glimpse of Dom Canzone’s now-trademarked 🤌.

“There’s like 60 days in August, right? I wish there were,” Scott Servais joked in an interview during this golden era. “What a month.”

Then came September and the tides shifted once more. An unfortunate 11-17 record this past month suggests that things need to change. But before we call upon management to, say, recognize team leadership by naming J.P. Crawford captain, or invest in a solid hitting-coach team instead of inviting players to rely on private training, or allocate the franchise’s league-leading profits to sign league-leading players, maybe we can help Servais’s dream come true. That is, if Mariners calculus dictates that the best of times be followed by the worst of times, then the most logical way to unfuck that equation is by making the best of times far longer than the worst of times. So make August longer than September. (How? Cyberbullying the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or getting Democratic frontrunner Marianne Williamson to add August enlargement to her 2024 political platform, idk.)

Deliver more value to shareholders

There’s been plenty of scuttlebutt surrounding “greedy” Mariners owner John Stanton, namely his refusal to spend the Mariners’ $84 million operating income on major talent. Stinginess, these rumors say, explains why the Mariners ranked 29th of 30 teams in offseason spending—with only one of the players acquired during these lackluster trades actually lasting through the season.

But sorry, sweetie, capitalism works! It just does! It’s filled with suuuuper rational actors and efficiently allocated resources and stuff. John Stanton went to Harvard Business School and you didn’t. So instead of complaining, maybe just trust the process. And pay more for season tickets while you’re at it, peasant scum.

When in doubt, can it

Okay, so hear me out: Use the center-field camera field to steal opposing catchers’ and pitchers’ signs. Then, using a set number of bangs on a garbage can, players in on the ruse can know in advance if an off-speed pitch is coming their way. It’s a tried and true method! What are they gonna do—take away your World Series title?

Maybe It's the Seattle Freeze, Maybe It's White Supremacy

Adam Willems — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 11:32:00 -0700

Megan Asaka on how her book 'Seattle from the Margins' can inform public engagement with contemporary local issues. by Adam Willems

Seattle was built by poor and minoritized seasonal workers. Well into the early 20th century, it was Coast Salish groups, Chinese immigrants, single white men, Japanese people, Filipino families, and Black workers who kept the region’s hops farms, sawmills, laundries, canneries, and lumber yards running; between stints, they developed racially integrated worker communities in strictly circumscribed and annexed pockets of the city south of what’s now Yesler Way. While simultaneously depending on and exploiting these workers, the white ruling class erected a draconian scaffold of ordinances and rules to surveil, punish, and shape nonwhite worker districts to advance ruling-class aims, oftentimes razing workers’ neighborhoods altogether to make way for whiter and wealthier places and people.

Dr. Megan Asaka, who grew up in Seattle and is Assistant Professor of History at UC Riverside, spent 15 years tracing the history of these racialized and largely transient worker populations between the mid-1800s and early 1900s. She presents her research in Seattle from the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City. Weaving together fire department reports, building records, public health ordinances, oral histories, and other overlooked archival sources, Asaka deftly foregrounds the experiences of transient and surveilled workers to tell the story of Seattle’s intercultural commerce and communities. Asaka’s tour de force offers lessons and strategies for local mobilization today; Seattle from the Margins proves the white-supremacist origins of policing practices that continue to oppress the city, showcasing, notably, how anti-vagrancy laws in Seattle explicitly find their roots in settler-government efforts to limit the movement of Indigenous women.

In an interview with The Stranger, Asaka describes the clash between personal family history and public scholarship that compelled her to write the book, makes a case for approaching marginalized histories through built spaces, and outlines how Seattle from the Margins can inform public engagement with contemporary local issues.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Let’s start by discussing your impetus for writing the book, especially the dissonance you describe between your own personal experiences growing up in Seattle as compared to the predominantly white or community-specific scholarship about Seattle that you encountered.

My great-grandfather immigrated from Japan in the early 20th century and came to Seattle, so my roots go pretty far back in Seattle history. I come from a Japanese-American family, and my family experienced some of the things I talked about in the book: segregation, exclusion, denial, citizenship, but also mass removal and incarceration during World War II.

And then, for me, the more profound connection to that history was also when my family returned from camp and literally returned to nothing—everything was gone, the community was shattered, and people in Seattle didn't want them back. So that's the Seattle that I grew up knowing about through my family history. My grandmother was very open about her experiences, so it wasn't hidden in any way for me.

I had that knowledge of Seattle history that never really was reflected in the scholarship. When I was growing up, museum exhibits, journal articles, newspaper articles—all of these different outlets about Seattle—were from very much a white perspective, and uncritically so, I think, and very much celebrating the settlers and the idea that Seattle possessed an exceptional and unique history that was more open-minded and progressive than other cities, especially when it came to race. It was that distance between those two narratives that really interested me, frustrated me, and motivated me to tell a different kind of Seattle history. I didn't set out to become a historian, or even a writer, but that's just the path that I followed.

You buck against that kind of history through the lens of the built environment. What did it take to tell such a textured history through physical spaces?

I’ve always been interested in that spatial dimension, because it helps me make sense of the past and really complicated histories if it's grounded in a particular place. That was always something that really attracted me, even as a college student. But also I highlighted the built environment out of necessity, because there were so few records available about migratory and transient populations, so the built environment was a way to tell a social history of people really missing in the scholarship, but to do it in a way that highlighted the social worlds and different forms of intimacies that were formed in these specific places.

I focus on things like so-called “slum districts.” So Profanity Hill is one neighborhood that I focus on that was deemed a slum, but I questioned what a slum is: There is no objective definition, and officials use it for their own purposes when they want to clear out a particular neighborhood. I talk a lot about hotels and lodging houses as being really important economically for the city, because they housed a lot of migratory workers who are moving in and out. I used a lot of building records, fire department records, and a lot of photographs of labor camps to reconstruct not only the economic function of these spaces but also the worlds contained within.

And this connects to present-day issues: I make a very explicit argument in the book about the intentional erasure of these hotels and labor camps and so-called “slum districts” in the ‘30s and ‘40s. It’s the erasure of the inhabitants in the historical memory of the city. So there's a connection, in my opinion, between erasure of the landscape and erasure of historical memory. What are the physical traces? There are so few.

There are many ephemeral and highly policed sites that exist or have recently existed in Seattle like CHOP/CHAZ as well as encampments. I'm wondering what sort of throughlines you've seen in terms of the ordinances or punitive measures that exist from the era that you study that are still being applied today.

Sites like Profanity Hill, shantytowns like Hooverville, and labor camps were created in some ways as spaces to contain people that the city relied upon, but did not want to deal with. A lot of times, segregation emerges out of this tension. We see vagrancy laws start to emerge in the 1860s. So Seattle was officially founded in 1853, but incorporated as a city in the 1860s, and when it incorporated as a city, one of the first ordinances that was passed was about vagrancy and defined a vagrant, actually, as a Native American woman who was walking around in public after 9 pm. That was directly tied to settlers trying to establish a residence district, this permanent city of white families, and then rendering indigenous people as outsiders in their own lands. Vagrancy grew out of that origin to then encompass other “threatening” populations, including white male migrants and Chinese men.

There are all these ways that we see municipal policy and laws being used by different agencies in the city, not just the police—the fire department against Japanese hotels, the building department, public health officials—to target certain people at certain moments, and then to create a narrative that they are somehow dangerous to public safety.

There’s a bias, and not just for historians, that people who move in and out of the city or don't have a temporary presence in the city are somehow unimportant, or they don't have a “real” connection to Seattle, or that they’re dangerous or threatening to the social order. That's the story I also tell in my book: a cautionary tale of how this is what happened in the past, and it's not disconnected from the present, and how those fears around who is seen as worthy of inclusion into urban society are so wrapped up in race and gender and class.

A lens you use to interpret multiracial neighborhoods is the perceived racialized threat of the single white man. I’d love to hear more about that racialization as it relates to two things. First: To what extent was it a heterosexual panic—like, “Hey, there are a bunch of single guys, what are they doing together?” Second: Were they racialized given their greater tendency to form labor solidarity with minoritized workers?

It's important to tease out which men were threatening at which moment. Chinese men, for example, were also threatening but at an earlier moment in time in the late 19th century. They were seen first of all as a possible sexual threat to white women before the Chinese Exclusion Act, and it became part of the discourse around passing immigration restrictions. Chinese men lived in these bachelor communities and did work that was seen as feminized—working as domestic servants or in laundries or as cooks, because that’s the only work that was available to them—and that was a threat but in a different kind of way, and was used to make a claim that they were unfit for inclusion into US society, and that they possessed a “deviant” sexuality that made them undesirable citizens.

Something that I don't get into as much is there was also this concern about white male migrants in the American West, in part because they were seen as disruptive to the white settler order. They weren't fulfilling their role in heteropatriarchal society, which almost made them more threatening than a Chinese man in the late 19th century, as white male migrants could be citizens and own property and have rights, but were seen as deviating from that path. In the lumber industry, they lived in all-male bunkhouse communities in the woods and had encounters with men of color; there was a lot of consternation about that and policing of that.

Nayan Shah is someone who talks about how the policing of migrant men in the American West was rooted in policing their sexuality, and that's where you begin to see the policing of male sexual encounters. I didn't get into it as much as I wanted to, but a lot of the scholars who work on that topic use police records. But interestingly, Seattle does not have police records that are open to the public. You have annual reports that go back to the 19th century that are summaries of data, but you don't have the police records like you have in California.

Are there any developments in Seattle since the book’s publication last fall that have tweaked your arguments or altered the significance of the book to you?

The fight against displacement in the Chinatown-International District was a big one that had always been on my radar in terms of understanding that it had always been a vulnerable neighborhood. In the post-World War II era of so-called “Urban Renewal,” it was cut in half by the construction of I-5. It’s been a vulnerable space to displacement and development and these kinds of urban renewal projects. That was a really important connection that people were making with the book in terms of how to apply insights from the book to present-day struggles against displacement.

What would it mean if the C-ID continued to be taken piece by piece? Buildings are such an important part of our understanding of history. A building is a container of memory and attachments to the past. There’s a lesson about preserving vernacular and everyday spaces that tell the history of our city in different ways—and that aren't necessarily the buildings of like the rich and famous people in Seattle history, but those of our everyday people, our workers, which are so valuable to preserve and for us to protect. And, at the same time, pushing back against the displacement of the people who are there who are low-income.

And there are concrete lessons in the book in terms of municipal policy. A policy can seem really great on its face, but when it's implemented, it can reinforce rather than disrupt inequality. Profanity Hill, which was cleared out for the Yesler Terrace housing project, is a good example of that, even if it was very radical for its time; it created well-designed housing for poor people, yet the way it was implemented was highly exclusionary. I think those kinds of concrete things can be illuminating for moving forward in Seattle today.

Heat Waves

Adam Willems — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 16:08:00 -0800

An interview with author and climate journalist Jake Bittle. by Adam Willems

Nowhere—not even “climate-proof Duluth” or Buffalo—is safe from the ravages of climate change. Even seasonal-affective-disorder-inducing cloud cover can’t protect Seattle from a now-annual wildfire season and the occasional devastating heat dome. Have droves of Seattlelites fled the Emerald City and tanked real-estate prices, though? Not exactly.

After spending significant time in post-disaster communities across the United States—from California to Louisiana to Virginia—Jake Bittle, climate journalist and author of The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, concludes that where we choose to live in the midst of ecological collapse is a question of belonging and economics. It’s a “fallacy,” Bittle says, to think that people move from climate change-affected areas once the perceived risk is too high. Rather, they stay until it’s too economically difficult to do so—or until they don’t have a house, period. To Bittle, that difference means the US won’t experience climate migration (people moving to safer places), but climate displacement: being pushed from place to place without a specific refuge in their sights.

In an interview with The Stranger, Bittle explains the rationale behind his multi-sited reporting, predicts the effects of events like heat dome on the PNW, and proposes policy changes that could mitigate the ravenous effects of climate displacement.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

It's interesting that this book contains so many places, sort of this mosaic of different geographies. What compelled you to go that route versus staying in Louisiana or any other place discussed in the book?

The first time that I reported on this topic, I was reporting in Houston on the FEMA buyout program that I talked about in the beginning of my chapter on Houston. I had written an article about that for The Baffler. I had a bunch of free time during [the start of] COVID, and I was looking into how this program had worked in other places, and it immediately became clear that it just looked really different depending on the place that it was happening in.

So in Houston, it was a pretty effective program in a lot of ways, because the people who lived in the developments were really new and didn't mind leaving. (Mostly.) But in North Carolina, in this [Black] community that I write about, there was much more history there, and people saw the buyout and how the community was dissolved as a racist act of elimination. And that had a lot to do with the specific histories of the place, but also to do with the natural environment.

And there were so many other big disasters going on that were causing people to move; I felt like it wouldn't work to talk about climate change unless I talked about the different ways that climate disasters worked. It turns out that they work really differently in different places. It'd be impossible to cover unless I played the field a little bit.

Part of why the book does its job well is that it shows these ecological symptoms; you demonstrate how sudden flooding in a place like Houston differs from a place like Norfolk, VA, which is facing a gradual 15-foot rise in sea levels. How did you choose these places, then? Did it require an understanding of what symptoms afflicted those different geographies?

I wanted to talk about disasters using a longer lens than typically is done in news coverage of a hurricane or a wildfire. My idea was, “Okay, let's take these things and show what happens to people as they move over longer periods of time.” The story doesn't really end when the disaster ends, so that was what I was trying to do. I really focused on time, and then I looked for representative examples. Covering the Colorado River drought was the exception to that, but that's because it’s been in the offing for like 100 years, so it doesn’t quite fit that mold.

Getting to the PNW: There are several points where you bring up the absolute madness of the 2021 “heat dome,” in which a billion sea creatures died and hundreds of people died. Did you do any sort of preliminary research trying to see if that was a site of climate displacement?

It happened too late in the process of writing for me to shift and do a chapter, but I did think about it. I mean, there were whole towns in British Columbia that were destroyed—giant, giant devastation from the wildfires that were caused by the heat.

I also had wanted to do something about the cherry farmers, I think around Yakima, who were forced to work under incredibly bad conditions. That was actually a piece of things going on in Oregon and the Central Valley, where heat was becoming a huge issue for agricultural workers. I didn’t have time to do it, because the heat dome happened in June or July 2021, and the book was due in November.

But I don't think something like the heat dome will cause large numbers of people to move from places like Portland and Seattle because it is rare. But it is an example of how a lot of the labor systems and infrastructure that we have are just not up to the task of dealing with this. And the cost of adapting is so massive.

It seemed very important to me that the heat dome happened in the Pacific Northwest. When I started working on the book, the frame of mind that I had was that there are certain places where certain things are going to happen, the most vulnerable places, and those are the places people are going to move from, and they're going to move to the places where those things don't happen. By the end [of writing the book], there were so many things, like that heat wave, that so clearly contradicted that frame. Things are gonna happen everywhere, there’s instability everywhere, and there are certain places where it's even more so—but nowhere is “safe.”

I'm wondering to what extent the throughlines you describe across your book are distinctly American versus something applicable to other regions.

The book is very concentrically focused on the US because I was trying to write about federal policies and certain markets that were causing [displacement due to climate disasters]. But when you look at migration as an issue, it really is not just a US issue; the big kind of elephant in the room is immigration to the United States from Mexico and the Northern Triangle, which is extremely driven by climate change. It's a huge reason for why there's been a lot of migration, and has been for a long time. It's difficult to talk about in the context of something like FEMA, because it's treated as a totally separate political issue in this country.

When you talk about climate migration in the United States, you really can't talk about it without talking about migration to the United States.

That dovetails with the caveat you have at the end of the book: Climate displacement isn’t that visible right now. In Phoenix, you mentioned, for every person leaving for climate-related reasons, way more people are arriving for economic reasons. It seems like there's that same sort of obfuscation at the US-Mexico border of climate versus economic migration, which obviously aren’t mutually exclusive, but still.

The asylum system in this country doesn't allow somebody to say, “I'm moving because of climate change.” We have a hard enough time with progressive immigration policy in this country when you're talking about people who have been displaced by wars, let alone by something that half the elected officials don't even believe is a real issue. So it's just not even in the picture.

At what point over the course of your research did you start to form the core thesis of your book: that we’re witnessing climate displacement, not climate migration, in the US? It might be worth explaining how you differentiate those two.

When people talk about migration, they generally mean a voluntary decision to move from one place to another because of something that's in the place that they're moving to. So the Great Migration in the United States is the primary example.

Before I wrote about climate change I wrote about housing and homelessness, and this concept of displacement is a universal word in that context. It means somebody's gentrified out of their neighborhood or they're evicted. They're displaced. They're not moving, they’re not migrating, they're being pushed around. I sought to apply that concept really early on, and it was in the preliminary pitch for the book; I wanted to reframe this nascent idea of climate migration, which was an international phenomenon—talking about people from Southeast Asia and Oceania moving to other places because their islands are sinking—and present another kind of migration that's already happening.

You bring up a series of legal loopholes that exacerbate [disaster recovery] for families and for entire communities, like the fact that folks selling real estate [in some states] don't need to disclose where there have been floods. Are there particular policy changes, even minor ones, that you feel could be materially helpful?

There's a ton to do. You could tighten up real estate practices way more. I don't think I mentioned it in the book, but the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the United States has the authority, in theory, to spend billions and billions of dollars to help people recover after disasters. They can sort of be the long-term assistant after FEMA leaves, but the statute that allows them to do this is not permanent. So every time a disaster happens, Congress has to pass a law saying it authorized the Department of Housing and Urban Development to spend billions of dollars for recovery on a specific disaster. That can often take a year; it's extremely political.

In Louisiana, after two hurricanes in 2020, it took more than a year for Congress to authorize HUD to spend money. All Congress has to do is pass a law saying HUD has permanent authorization, but nobody will do it. It’s tanked the hopes of many communities from recovering from storms. It’s too late. People have already left, and they’re not coming back.

So you can't hit Ctrl+Z and send communities back to what they were before disasters: Catastrophes disintegrated the culture of a lot of the places you visited. Are there similarities in the kinds of cultures that do form in those places post-catastrophe?

That's a really, really good question. I think in 10 to 15 years, or 20 years, you're gonna be able to report on the places that grew after disasters, the places that absorbed people and what happened there.

I mean—and this is like a pretty, unfortunately, apolitical statement—I will say that, in these communities after these disasters, the social barriers that normally characterize a community, even a small town, completely break down. Every place I went, people were generous and benevolent in ways that I really didn't think were actually true. Especially in the Keys after Hurricanes Fred and Floyd, and after floods in Louisiana, people were just really there for each other. And people do make up for a lot of the money that the government won't allocate—people just do things themselves.

And then years pass, and things go back to normal. And the barriers go up again.

California Über Alles

Adam Willems — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 12:35:00 -0800

The Stranger interviews author Malcolm Harris. by Adam Willems

At first glance, it might seem contradictory that Palo Alto, a cursed Bay Area enclave riddled with arms-akimbo tech founders, unassuming office parks, and meh Stanford grads, is, despite its flaws, fairly consistently understood as a “promised land” for ~*innovation*~ and techie brilliance. Redmond isn’t exactly worshiped on blue-chip altars in the same way; so why does Palo Alto have such stay? Does it matter?

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris, who lived in Palo Alto as a child, offers an expansive retelling of the town through a range of incarnations and actors. From the birth of the California engineer as an archetype during the Gold Rush, to the successful machinations of anticommunist technocrats, to the clear-sighted work of anti-colonial agitators, to the shit show that was Theranos, Harris demonstrates how Palo Alto, through its two-tiered ecosystem of winners and losers, has consistently exported its vision of progress onto the world, “pivoting” to new things (like ChatGPT) when its farces (like crypto) come to light. Palo Alto is revered because it’s cursed.

We don’t love civilizational collapse brought on by tech chodes like Elon and Zuck and Jeff and Bill, but Valentine’s Day has to do with love (and capitalism), and Palo Alto comes out on February 14, so it all works out. We’re both swooning and pulling out our wallets. In an interview with The Stranger ahead of his book’s release, Harris explains why a long view of Palo Alto matters, discusses the implications of recent mass layoffs like those at Microsoft, and sternly refuses to talk about the Grateful Dead.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

It might be interesting to start with horses: namely, the equine genesis for what you call the “Palo Alto system.”

The Palo Alto we know starts as this stock farm for producing horses. And horses at the close of the 19th century are really like the engine of America: They’re the most important agricultural machinery, military machinery, and transportation machinery.

[Railroad industrialist] Leland Stanford starts a stock farm to raise his horses, and he goes about it in a new way; he and his trainer, Charles Marvin, as well as the whole staff of this huge stock farm change the way they’re raising horses by racing them a lot younger, and basing everything on speculative promise.

And so with that, they're able to raise the fastest, youngest horses in the world. And because of their understanding of genetics, they were able to sell on those genes faster and easier than other horse raisers were able to do. And the Stanford stock farm becomes Stanford University, which becomes Palo Alto, CA. In a lot of ways that’s the genesis of this story.

Stanford is one of them, but throughout the book you discuss key historical figures (Richard Nixon and Bill Gates being others) that are perceived as decisive actors—but you argue that others could have taken their place within a capitalist system where, you write, “capital meets as men.” At the same time, so much of Palo Alto’s history rhymes with Seattle’s, with a gold rush, a booming rail industry, the influx of defense cash, unrecognized Indigenous sovereignty, and so forth. So, just like people within a capitalist system, can places, too, be somewhat interchangeable in history’s unfolding?

That's a great question. I think to a certain degree, when you're dealing with a world system with a totality, you can find the whole in every part. So if you looked at any town—like not just Palo Alto or Seattle or Los Angeles, whatever, we could pick a small town—you could dig down and you could find the shape of the whole system. Walter Johnson's book on St. Louis does this really well; my friend David Banks has a book about upstate New York and how it's changed in the past decades. So you can take a lot of places and find the same story in terms of the story of the 20th century.

Definitely.

And at the same time, I do think that Palo Alto has certain aspects or attributes that make it deserving of exceptional study. And part of that is it being the last link in this chain of the capitalist system as it closes around the world.

A sort of biblical “the last will be the first” ethos or logic.

That's just a dialectical structure, where things transform into their opposites. California—Palo Alto specifically—is a great example of that.

You bring up the notion of bifurcation a lot in the book—this widening rift and entrenchment between winners and losers, which seems to tie back to the Palo Alto system in its original form. Winners in the current Palo Alto system (tech founders, venture capitalists) can be rewarded for their hubris (like “failing upwards”). That’s something humans can get away with but horses can’t.

In the original Palo Alto system, an expert in horse racing, Leslie MacLeod, goes and reviews the system and is pretty impressed. One thing he says as a drawback is that you’re gonna accidentally screw up some pretty good horses. And that's the cost of doing business and it all washes out. But there are costs to the system.

Some of those costs continue today: for example, a really unhealthy, and often lethal, high school culture in Palo Alto. It seems like that fact is part of what convinced you as someone who grew up there to do such an expansive history of this place in particular.

If you're going to do a psychoanalytic read you can also go back to my first book and see the same thing. And yeah, I lost friends and classmates at a rate that was unusual, and it was noticeable, and it freaked us out. So did my brother and my sister and so did everyone who lived there, so there is a collective trauma there. I think through this project I was able to contextualize that historically. I think I have a very different perspective on it now, which is a positive experience, I guess. So that was definitely part of it.

And part of it is I think it's a significant topic, and I wanted to understand that history better because it bears on today in a lot of important ways. I'm working for money, but it's nice if I can figure out some stuff while doing it.

You mention in the book how people are sort of rewarded for “convenient amnesia” in Palo Alto. Are powerful people intentionally avoiding looking into the past, or are they looking in the past and then pretending that they aren't?

I don't think that when you think of Silicon Valley people these days they have a strong sense of Silicon Valley history at all. One of the most indicative examples is that Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos really consciously modeled herself after Steve Jobs, who was the most recent example or icon. But she was running a testing company, and the obvious comparison was with Hewlett and Packard!

To a certain degree, there's a self-historicization within Silicon Valley where they tell some stories, but the scope of that is usually very short. I don't know if the people working on crypto today have much sense of the browser wars or whatever, but I don't think they are like looking to that for models.

On Twitter, you mentioned that you intentionally didn't discuss crypto. I’d love to hear more about the triaging that went into the book, and what steered those choices.

I mean, I constantly had to cut things; there’s tons of stuff that I wish I could have included. One that I know I’m going to get tons of shit for is that there’s no mention of the Grateful Dead anywhere in the book. And there are a lot of people who are obsessed with the Grateful Dead, who come from Palo Alto, so to have a history of Palo Alto with a psychedelic-looking cover without even mentioning the Grateful Dead is an insult to many, many people.

I had to sacrifice tons of great material because I really maxed out; this was about as much as I was going to be allowed to publish. But crypto wasn't that kind of decision. I wouldn’t have included it even if I could have, because I don't think it's a significant phenomenon historically. And I think one of the things that Silicon Valley history has suffered from is a perceived presentist bias. A whole sub-chapter on crypto definitely dates the book.

Discussion of scams ties to something you discuss in Palo Alto: this ongoing process where people in Silicon Valley should fail. There should be a conclusion to the rise with a fall, but that doesn't happen. And it seems like it's the result of impersonal forces in the form of capitalism, where you can fuck up, and then there's still more money out there, and you'll just do something until it makes a ton of money.

I talk about the emperor's new clothes, but if you don't have the political power to overthrow a naked emperor, it doesn't really matter whether he’s wearing clothes or not: You can point at him and call him naked all you want. I hope people learned that during the Trump years a little. But people have been “realizing the truth” about the Valley’s tech clusters for a hundred years, and they do it every brief cycle, and then they forget again and get excited about the new thing, which just happened very quickly in this last round. You saw what the crypto coverage looked like, and now you can look at what the AI coverage looks like.

Returning to the intention of what made it into the book: you included such a textured and in-depth history of the Black liberation struggle both locally and globally.

The story of the 20th century is the story of the color line. And the history bears that out, especially looking at California politically. The emergence of Black Power in the ways that it does in California rocks a whole world. You have everyone looking at California. And if you look at the history of Black people in California, of this cohort that triggered this global eruption, it’s relatively recent, right? So it's a synthesis of this cohort of Black immigrants from the American South, who had already bent the 19th century around them as historical movers, who then encounter these historical circumstances when moving out to California. And it's that mixture that’s explosive: globally explosive. I spend time on that because it’s the most important thing in the world.

And it's a global story that I wanted to put California in very clearly. And it's not always how California or American history and certainly not the history of that period is understood: as part of the global anti-colonial struggle. I quote Malcolm X on that and Richard Nixon on that; both sides understood what was going on as a global struggle for the future of the world.

And it’s just the tip of the iceberg, but there are so many clear instantiations of Silicon Valley continuing to operate along the color line today. Palantir may be one of the more symptomatic, though secretive, examples.

Yeah, or you can look at the way Tesla has operated at the Fremont plant, and look at racial segregation in workplaces, and go all the way back to [former President and Stanford University linchpin] Herbert Hoover, who's inventing this as a management strategy in South Africa.

There's this really interesting single sentence—I mean, obviously, the whole book is interesting—but there’s a sentence where you talk about how the historical appeal of tech companies to investors is that there weren’t many employees to lay off. The news of the past few months is very much not that—

I mean, they've definitely grown their headcount: Look at Google, Microsoft, whatever, they’ve got a significant workforce. But we're not talking about the layoffs at fucking Lockheed in the '70s after the moon landings, which was a much bigger wave. Right now you're seeing pretty big numbers at some of these firms—10,000 people at Microsoft—but those people are going to get jobs and that’s not going to affect the national unemployment rate.

It’s a non-employee-intensive business, which is one of the reasons that capital likes it. Insofar as they succeed also, it’s in their ability to reduce their promises to their employees. So to do these layoffs, they didn’t have to negotiate with their unions. Microsoft didn't have to negotiate with its programmers and other people. They said “Bye!” and they’re gone because they don’t have a union.

And the coverage has been so historically small. “Oh, the great years of tech employment are over after 10 years.” These things have been so totally cyclical for close to 100 years.

And the cycles will just continue, it seems, like the emperor will keep getting naked and then move on to a new outfit.

“I’ve got new clothes! And these clothes are different from the other clothes!” It’s pretty funny to go through the history and see a cycle over and over again, but I think it is useful to understand that knowing that doesn't change it, necessarily.

Adam Smith: The Worst Influencer

Adam Willems — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 13:30:00 -0800

Glory M. Liu’s new book argues Adam Smith may not be the genius economist he’s often remembered as. by Adam Willems

If you have any, the scholarly encounters with eighteenth-century Scottish thinker Adam Smith you recall most vividly may go something like this: You’re a high school history or undergrad econ student. Lo, an “invisible hand” force feeds free-market ideas into your credulous synapses foie-gras style—and, all the while, you scribble silly little notes on “laissez-faire” ideals and the worship of market forces as a perfect determinant.

Repulsive and cringe, says I! As well as ahistorical and monolithic, says Glory M. Liu, author of Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism.

To Liu, the Adam Smith most familiar to US publics is the phantasmagoric lovechild of politicians and theorists who, across centuries, have built idealized versions of Smith to achieve particular political goals. Not unlike scripture in that sense—a selective sentence wielded here to justify a particular thing, an antonymic snippet there for the obverse.

Despite his near-mythical status, not much is known about Smith, Liu tells us. Like most writers named Adam, Smith was, in fact, just some guy. Not exactly a looker either; history (read: correspondence between super judgy French people who saw Smith during his visits abroad) suggests he was “ugly as the devil.” Which maybe explains why only two visual depictions of him survive—fewer than expected given how long his words have stuck around. But even his writings are in relatively short supply. Smith, a perfectionist, ordered his unpublished manuscripts to be burned upon his death, which is so goth, but it leaves us with only student notes (useful ones!) to reconstruct his lectures, along with two major published works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations.

Smith’s legacy overcame that paucity thanks to his books’ style. The Wealth of Nations in particular gained a foothold in the US through the study of political economy, an interdisciplinary science “which teaches to obtain the maximum of Good with the minimum of Expenditures,” as one now-long-dead professor defined it. Smith’s ability to string words together in nice, understandable ways made The Wealth of Nations a useful text for students, establishing Smith to nineteenth-century intellectuals as the “father of political economy.”

But those books are bigguns, and passages therein can contradict arguments made by Smith elsewhere. We all contain multitudes, and Smith is no exception. It’s therefore both telling but unsurprising that Antebellum proponents of “Southern free trade,” as in chattel slavery, evoked the “authority of Adam Smith” to endorse an economic system that, in their eyes, promoted the “patriotic spirit of a free people,” with “free” being an intentional and white-supremacist fraction; and that abolitionist lawmakers wielded other Smithian passages to underscore the cruelty of people who enslave others. Then and now, Smith’s relative malleability makes him moral and rational fuel for a range of agendas.

This means you’ve encountered Adam Smith far beyond the classroom, whether you knew it or not; and we can, in no small part, blame the Midwest for that, namely the Chicago School of Economics, which shamelessly held the Scottish thinker—and, by extension, us—hostage to their idea of him. Rhyming with Justin Bieber’s cursed visit to the Anne Frank House, Milton Friedman, high priest of the Chicago School, ballsily venerated Smith as a thinker “who but for the accident of having been born in the wrong century… would undoubtedly have been a Distinguished Service Professor at The University of Chicago.” Further decoupled from the moral frameworks of his first book, rendering economics a question of numbers alone rather than a moral discipline, the Chicago version of Smith grew into an “invisible hands only” kind of guy.

We can’t singularly attribute the Chicago School’s success to how it deployed Smith as currency—thank political receptiveness in the form of vitriolic anticommunism and greed, idk—but the School’s successful co-optation of Smith helped its ideology claim a storied legacy, grow legs off campus, and eventually shape King County and other places in its image. Chicago Price Theory, which posits that prices can fully explain the behaviors of buyers and producers, helps render a balls-to-the-wall, potentially bankrupting money pit like the SR 99 Tunnel appear a seemingly rational endeavor deserving public debt. This same thinking sustains green capitalism and the market-centric political agendas of local oligarchs like Bill Gates, who see carbon pricing and offsets as satisfactory paths to decarbonization, despite plenty of local and global evidence to the contrary.

“Perhaps the greatest consequence of the Chicago Smith was the way it served to reframe the problems of modern American capitalism and modern society as problems that stemmed from government, rather than the market itself,” Liu concludes. That shift has affected poor and disenfranchised people most acutely. Friedman, the shameless epitaph-prone prof, repackaged Smith’s writing on how monopolies wield undue political influence to claim that “trade unions, school teachers, welfare recipients, and so on and on” were “‘tribes’ of ‘monopolists’” too, intentionally confounding labor movements with the supposed ills of “big government,” thereby justifying the destruction of both. Chicago School thinking was adopted by Democrats and Republicans alike, informing the Clinton-led disembowelment of the welfare state through the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 under the guise of “bipartisanship,” as well as the overturning of the Glass-Steagall Act, signed in 1933 to prevent the kind of profiteering and volatility that helped spark the Great Depression. These windfall legislative changes contribute to Seattle’s Janus-faced economic landscape: at once deeply unaffordable for some and profoundly lucrative and speculative for others.

Across Adam Smith’s America, Liu emphasizes how public perceptions of Smith—and, by extension, what economics should accomplish—can shift during periods of major change. Forrest Gumping his way across intellectual history, Smith stays frustratingly relevant due to his authority and breadth; he can even come in regional flavors. If shit really hits the fan in Seattle’s teetering tech sector, for instance, where a deluge of layoffs leaves a managerial overclass reeling, and more importantly, risks effectively deporting thousands of H-1B visa holders and their families, there’s a possibility we’ll see new rebukes of the “move-fast-break-things” logics of bluechip capitalism, rejections of capital’s borderlessness at the expense of people’s, and critiques of mealy-mouthed euphemisms like “market corrections,” which Smith would tell us is a decidedly moral and economic term. Maybe it’s a moonshot to imagine lanyard-festooned Seattleite techies as a revolutionary vanguard, but, whatever your political visions: There’s a Smith for that.

Accounting for an Apocalypse

Adam Willems — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 16:00:00 -0700

Adrienne Buller’s 'The Value of a Whale' exposes the dark side of "green capitalism." by Adam Willems

If you think long enough about it, Climate Pledge Arena stops looking like a sports/concert venue and starts looking like an existential threat. By which I mean, if we peel back the layers and look at the pledge behind the Climate Pledge—a smarmy, hyper-corporate response to the climate crisis that tries to legitimize itself through hockey games and Coldplay concerts—then we can see that the beliefs undergirding the arena’s namesake might eventually kill us.

Co-launched and co-named by Amazon, the Climate Pledge revolves around “green” investments and net-zero promises by some of the world’s largest businesses. Projects like it, in which Fortune 500 companies pinky promise to do better and stop wrecking the planet, hold serious sway in halls of power as a way to prevent ecological and civilizational collapse. Seattleites don’t exactly ~*swoon*~ over Amazon-founded projects; so what is it about the Climate Pledge, and green capitalism writ large, that give it legs and muscle, not to mention a sports complex?

Researcher Adrienne Buller diagnoses and critiques the intricate web of technocrat-wonky initiatives that make up “green capitalism” in her recent book, The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism. Green capitalism is an umbrella term encapsulating a patchwork of market-based responses to climate change—think cap-and-trade schemes, carbon offsets, carbon taxes, and “sustainable” investment portfolios. Supporters of these strategies present themselves as “the adults in the room.” They advocate for a mindful capitalism in which environmental damages are written into the cost of goods and services. Part of this logic submits that once the true cost of climate loss is literally accounted for in our economic systems, then businesses and consumers alike have an apolitical incentive to opt for eco-friendlier things—solar power over coal power, for instance—or to consume less.

But as an aggregate, Buller argues, green capitalism “is an effort to address environmental catastrophe through new paths to accumulation while minimizing disruption to our current economic systems and modes of living,” regardless of whether these efforts actually live up to their expectations or, worse, do further damage in the process. And, more importantly, these measures won’t save us from doom in time: They distract us from more accelerated and centralized strategies that can decarbonize our economies before it’s too late. Efficiency be damned.

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The greater Seattle area is rife with dodgy green-capitalist initiatives that bolster Buller’s core theses. Heading east runs us into the territory of a recently abandoned green-capitalist scheme in the Snoqualmie Tribe Ancestral Forest. In late September, the Tribe pulled out of an agreement with Forterra, a land-conservation nonprofit, claiming that Forterra had tokenized them in order to secure USDA grant money and bankroll a shoddy “sustainable timber” project that, in reality, would have harvested five times as much timber on Ancestral Forest land as would have been ecologically responsible. A schlep over to Medina, meanwhile, brings us to the pulpit of local oligarch Bill Gates, who guns for investments in new technologies like eco-friendlier concrete manufacturing as a way to prevent apocalypse, and has played the long game to write climate-change legislation in his image. (It’s worth noting, Buller says, that Gates’s most recent book mentions the word “innovation” 90 times but doesn’t mention “inequality” once.)

Buller explicitly names notable PNW sites as canaries in the coal mine, such as the vast swathes of land in Oregon’s Klamath East forest that burned in last year’s Bootleg Fire. Much of the destroyed landscape was privately managed and set aside as designated carbon offsets for Microsoft and BP. Despite the company’s zealous interest in boosting fossil-fuel production through cloud computing, Microsoft can, like other corporations, buy pieces of nature to bill itself as carbon neutral and environmentally friendly while doing little to mitigate the long-term effects of their core operations.

“Not content to try and unpick the dubious assumptions and, often, practices underlying those schemes, the Bootleg Fire instead sent these claims toward carbon neutrality quite literally up in smoke,” Bueller writes. “I envy it at that.”

In part, though, carbon offsets are useful PR and political fodder because of the dubious assumptions at their core. The carbon-offset industry is largely unregulated and unstandardized, letting companies buying them aggrandize the stated effects of their token measures. Part of French gas giant Total’s $600,000 “offset” for 17 million dollars worth of natural gas, for example, didn’t go to planting new trees, but instead went to volunteers in Zimbabwe clearing underbrush; Total then valued the carbon offset according to a far-flung scenario in which underbrush-clearing had saved the entire forest from a wildfire. Not how math works! The US-based Nature Conservancy has even gotten away with “doing nothing at all” as a carbon-offsetting measure and profiteering scheme, selling offset credits for land that was already under its management, and for which it didn’t install any new protection measures.

These examples may inspire us to think of green capitalism as merely a fraudulent enterprise. That Amazon spent an estimated $300 million to $400 million on branding a stadium in the Climate Pledge’s honor instead of funneling that money toward ecological efforts definitely feels like an Herbalife redux! The shoddy accounting work and legal troubles plaguing the space further encourage that framing, too.

But it might be more constructive to approach green capitalism as an ideology—or, donning a little Protestant hat, to think about green capitalism in religious terms. Throughout The Value of a Whale, Buller refers to the “beliefs,” “commandments,” and “myths” sustaining green capitalism. To name one: A neoliberal faith in the global economy’s inherent complexity and limitlessness, which makes it incapable of being effectively regulated by governments. Pairing that with neoliberalism’s approach to the environment, which says ecological systems can and must be effectively measured and quantified, births a dizzying tautology. This line of thinking sees market-based regulation for the environment as better than direct political regulation, despite the former’s reliance upon a massive ecosystem of businesses and services and arbitrators to keep itself in check. Needing, in other words, more regulation than direct regulation does. A world-building nebula of cognitive dissonance helping destroy our current world.

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Which brings us to the eponymous whale. Buller describes how researchers at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) hoped to incentivize whale-conservation efforts by assigning a monetary value to all the great whales living on Earth. Their tabulations value each whale at $2 million due to their role as carbon-sequestering devices (they capture 33 tons of CO2 over their lifetimes) and their utility as cash cows for eco-tourism. The researchers concluded that pouring money into whale conservation may be more fruitful for humankind than doing so for other carbon-capturing strategies: All the great whales combined are worth at least $1 trillion, and they can offer a promising and efficient return on investment.

What does this calculus do? Do we really believe that the 73 orcas, the lowest number in 46 years, who grace the Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia coasts are worth specifically $146 million—just a fraction, supposedly, of Climate Pledge Arena’s appraised branding value? And what does that apples-to-apples farce accomplish? Rather than evangelize the sanctity of life, or contemplate the lethal effects of colonialism and capitalism, these researchers and the worldview they espouse assign a bottom dollar to every living thing as, supposedly, a way to keep ecological systems humming for our wellbeing. “Plugging variables into a spreadsheet to evaluate the cost-benefit of saving a species like you would a hostile takeover is a tough equivalence to take seriously,” Buller concludes.

It’s easy to knee-jerk minimize The Value of a Whale as a naysaying treatise lacking concrete solutions. Buller, anticipating such a call for “constructive critique,” accepts that her work isn’t hoping to stop global doom by drafting its own regulatory mechanisms. But acknowledging inadequacy is an invaluable first step. Green capitalism has been hoping to bamboozle the public into a catastrophic decline, presenting the market as the preeminent balm for our ecological ills. Accepting that businesses do little more than submit marketing copy supporting the corporate right to emit encourages a pivot away from their bells and whistles. Looking elsewhere tells us to raise red flags when dam removals are contemplated in monetary terms or when landmark climate-change policy secures Joe Manchin’s approval because of its deflationary effects. Shirking “adults in the room” bullshit and affirming political will in the image of people without MBAs can set us on a less disastrous course.