TO EMILY HALL: The color red certainly elicited a strong response from you ["Bloody Hell," Feb 26]. I believe you totally missed the point of the show, and yet with your own written words you proved my point!
I don't like it when you tell me what I think. I never said the color red was subtle. Quite the opposite. Red was chosen for its strong connotations (by the way: "subtextual" does not mean subtle, but relates to underlying connotations!). And when would I ever think the public would be surprised by the results of red reinterpretations? Bloody hell, I do not know!
Rosso was an experiment around the perception of meaning in a work of art, around the interplay between narrative/compositional language and color (the subtext indeed). You write that in Rich Lehl's work, "A lovely little bit of paranoia... is only given a kind of meaningless, lurid glare"--well, thank you! This is exactly the shift that color can generate. And you do it again, with the work of Ana Lois-Borzi, Thomas Sacco, and Doug Smithenry! Should I go on?
Instead of trying to understand why a curator and 13 artists work together for three months around an idea, you offer your readers arrogance and gratuitousness. Your anger reminded me of the vindictive rage of a priest preaching from a pulpit, telling the congregation what is good and what is bad; what to think. You also imply that I control the artists, an extremely poor estimation of their creative strength and integrity.
Looking forward to an open discussion with the public and you.
Stefano Catalani
Curatorial Director
Atelier 31 Gallery
HIGH AND DENSE
TO THE EDITOR: In The Stranger's relentless drive to push increased height and density for its own sake, you continue to miss a few basic facts of local real estate economics. First, increasing building heights in downtown Seattle beyond the level currently allowed will not result in much new housing. Instead, taller office buildings will result. These buildings will largely contain workers from outside of Seattle or (at best) other parts of the city, increasing the number of auto commuters. It is wishful thinking to assume that all of these people will live downtown, or that they will use public transit.
Those parts of Seattle (or Manhattan, for that matter) that are the most vibrant and pedestrian-friendly at night aren't in high-rise clusters, which go dark at 6:00 p.m., they are in neighborhoods like Capitol Hill and the University District (or Chelsea and Greenwich Village) that contain older, ground-oriented, mixed-use buildings.
Your writers evidently weren't around during the 1980s and early 1990s when the push to increase downtown office space displaced literally thousands of single-room occupancy units and other truly affordable downtown housing. Granting developers exemptions to height limits and open-space and parking requirements in a built environment such as Seattle will not result in new units that are affordable to a typical Stranger reader. However, more than a few of your readers may well find themselves looking for new housing when the affordable old building they live in is slated for demolition because the city has made it more profitable to do so.
Matt Fox
IN OTHER DEVELOPMENTS
TO THE EDITOR: Don't believe the critics of Greg Smith's proposal to open Occidental Avenue to cars. The pedestrian mall is the main reason real street life in Pioneer Square doesn't extend east of First Avenue. In the '70s, towns all over the country killed their ailing main corridors by closing them to traffic. The surviving examples of this are often the main feature of towns which have not been revived in the past decade. Everyone I've talked to in Pioneer Square disparages Occidental as a wind-swept black hole in the neighborhood, populated exclusively by public inebriates. I hate cars, and the car life. But the kind of "European" street Smith proposes would, as on Pike Place, open the street to cars without giving them absolute dominion. The great urban theorist Jane Jacobs said that a living urban space emerges from diverse users: transit riders, pedestrians, cyclists, drivers. Closing an area to any of these groups restricts its use and viability, ultimately to the detriment of pedestrian life there. The parking lots east of Occidental should be developed. We want housing down here! But no investor will build apartments whose front door opens onto a romper room for drunks.
Grant Cogswell
PICTURE PERFECT BASH
THANKS, STRANGER: When the Lord sayeth, "Revenge is Mine," He neglected to mention that, just like Satan, He too has His agents. Because, of course, revenge is sweet. And nobody knows this better than Dan Savage, whom I suggest for canonization after attending the inspired Pre-Valentine's Day Bash hosted by this selfless paragon of sarcasm, cynicism, and recognition of reality. So I raise a glass of gratitude to Saint Savage, who showed me, via the conflagration of my portrait sketched by a now-insignificant other, that blowtorches can be my friend. The completely unexplained copy of the sketch that appeared on the cover of the next Stranger [Feb 29] was the icing on my cake. I smiled at the mental picture of that Legend in His Own Mind snorting a 210-degree latte out of his nose at finding his own artwork in print.
Many thanks to Mr. Savage and his avenging angels. You rock. (And torch, hammer, shred.) It was a blast.
