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High resolution Belltown images on our Flickr page!  Delicious City Food Blog  
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misc
Clark Humphrey's MISC 
CONSOLIDATION, WHAT'S YOUR POLICY?: After multiple restructurings and selling off its iconic U District tower, Safeco Insurance has allowed itself to be eaten by Liberty Mutual. Now there'll be one fewer corporate board to hit up for charitable donations, one fewer set of bigwigs to serve on blue-ribbon civic improvement task forces. And they're not yet talking about how many head-office troops will be fired. But the Safeco brand will remain, for whatever it's still worth.
NOT THE FINAL EDITION: Eric Alterman's recent New Yorker essay on the death spiral of the newspaper biz is a worthy encapsulation of the industry's current conventional wisdom-that circulation and ad revenues are down for good, that no amount of "rightsizing" or firing people will bring papers back to stable profits, that ad revenues from papers' Web sites can't make up for collapsing print revenues.
In short, this CW goes, daily papers are doomed.
 And with them goes not just the romantic image of the ink-stained wretch and Citizen Kane but the very flow of information a democratic society needs.
If reiterating this CW were all Alterman did in his piece, I wouldn't bother discussing it. But he also discusses some of this premise's limitations.
One has to do with the idea that the urban/suburban daily, as we've known it in our lifetimes, is the only business model that could ever support serious, professional reporting. Alterman knows this is a crock.
A Times of London essay a few years ago noted the typical newspaper's particular package of information and infotainment wasn't some eternal set-in-stone formula, but grew over decades of industry practice. Why should there be only one paper in most towns? Why should everyone have to get a sports section? Why do those sports sections cover a few big spectator sports in minutae, but ignore most participant sports?
I happen to believe journalism isn't dying. It's evolving. Into what, I don't know. But I'm convinced an answer is out there.
As this election year unfolds, so will online journalism.
The business model for these sites will lag about a year behind the development of the sites themselves. And it has to be this way; otherwise, idiotic speculators will pour in and ruin it all.
WHAT I'VE BEEN READING: Naomi Klein's weighty tome
Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
Klein painstakingly traces the entirety of the global tragedy that is right-wing power-grabbing (coups, dictatorships, Iraq, even the response to Hurricane Katrina) back to Milton Friedman. Before Friedman ran the Federal Reserve Board (where he was credited/blamed for holding puppet strings on the entire U.S. economy), he ran the U. of Chicago's school of economics, where pundits and scholars produced ponderous statements offering complex arguments for letting big business do any damned thing it wanted to.
Klein's own reasoning is lucid, and her documentation is voluminous. But it's incomplete.
Economic theory is only one head of the Hydra-like monster that comprises power and privilege in this world. A more worthwhile look at the evils done in America's name would look with more breadth, even if it meant less depth.
AS PREDICTED in many quarters, the NBA's team owners voted to pursue commissioner Stern's screw-Seattle strategy. Only our own Paul Allen (representing the Portland Trailblazers) and Allen's pal Mark Cuban (representing the Dallas Mavericks) said no.
It's not over. Not by a buzzer-beater long shot.
But the way to save pro basketball in Seattle won't be pretty. In fact, it'll be as ugly as this past Sonics season.
Essentially, we've gotta keep litigatin' to keep the team through the two more contracted seasons on its lease; while assembling the ingredients of a privately-financed, NHL-capable arena. Let's make it happen.
HAPPY 46TH BIRTHDAY to the Century 21 Exposition, better known as the 1962 Seattle World's Fair. Much has been written about the fair as the event that put the town on the proverbial map and kick-started its arts scene.
Less frequently mentioned is the fair's utopian attitude.
The fair occurred in the days before the '60s assassinations, during JFK's "Camelot" era. The Vietnam war was still a small-scale police action. The civil rights movement had started to make waves. The new science of contraception promised to eradicate overpopulation. Western Europe had recovered from WWII's aftermath. America had two spankin'-new states. Peace and prosperity seemed like true possibilities.
More important locally, it was the dawn of jet travel. The world had grown hours or even days closer. Beyond that, the whole of outer space awaited our exploration.
In this milieu, the fair's buildings and exhibitors promised a great big beautiful tomorrow.
It doesn't matter that the fair's specific predictions didn't come to pass. (Domed cities, nuclear-powered everything, etc.) For that matter, they didn't predict women in corporate management, or the Internet.
What matters is that, eight years into the century prophesied at the fair, we've lost that confident progressive spirit. Now, some of us are trying to bring it back. This includes those who've coalesced around a Presidential candidate who was still in diapers when the fair opened.
GOODBYE, DALAI!: It's been a few weeks now since the big Seeds of Compassion mega-conference; keynoted by the Dalai Lama show in the pro football stadium, where he talked about empathic coexistence for all people.
(I see absolutely no irony in that. American football is a game of confrontation, but it's also a game of cooperation.)
I'll just mention one lesson several speakers invoked-that empathy is deeper and more personal than mere sympathy.
Tim Harris's blog, Apesa's Lament (apesmaslament.blogspot.com), has been an outspoken critic of the city's current homelessness policy. Harris believes Mayor Nickels is doing too little to find homes for people, while doing too much to harass the homeless into invisibility.
Harris recently noted that, earlier this year, official city documents called Nickels's policy "consistent and compassionate." But more recent documents, issued after the Seeds of Compassion conference, now bill the city's homeless policy as "consistent and humane."
As Harris comments, "The word 'compassion' implies a certain amount of connectedness and having something at stake." Conversely, he describes the adjective "humane" as "more associated with children, animals, and other somewhat helpless creatures."
This distinction goes beyond the homeless and beyond our own town.
Do we treat other people (even the others we want to help or love) as The (capital-O) Other, as some exotic-but-lesser life form? Or do we acknowledge that we ARE they, they ARE we?
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Belltown Manifesto:59. The truth will set you free; but a bondage session with a good lie can still be fun. |
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