The two-percent-for-the-arts juggernaut moves on, passing out of city council committee after a long public hearing last week, and being trimmed as it progresses toward law. At the hearing, Jan Drago, not a committee member nor a big supporter of the arts, showed up to add an amendment exempting the huge Civic Center project from the increased public-art-funding requirement. Drago also tried to add a second amendment requiring the city to reimburse Seattle's city utilities for their resultant budget increases. This second amendment was tabled for further discussion. The first amendment has a big effect on the numbers: The existing 2001 budget at one percent, which includes the library, the new community centers, and the Civic Center project, equals $1,855,000 in spending on art -- while the extra percent, with all of those exempted, adds only about half again as much to the total ($982,000, to be exact). In 2002, the existing art budget is $1,752,000, with an increase of $896,000 if the two-percent ordinance passes.
There's a decent argument to be made for exempting the Civic Center, which is well into the design stages, but it seems odd that future in-city power stations in out-of-the-way neighborhoods will have a bigger chunk of their budgets devoted to public art than Seattle's own city hall. A vote of the full city council on the two-percent ordinance is scheduled for Tuesday, February 22.
* * *
Traci Vogel, this paper's books editor, points out an annoying tic in recent book titling: two-word titles combining "the" with 50-cent words ending in "ist." Among the perpetrators: Barbara Hodgson's The Sensualist, Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist, Ronan Bennett's The Catastrophist, Henry Carlisle and Olga Andreyev Carlisle's The Idealists, and Donald Antrim's The Verificationist, which I hoped was going to be a thriller about a fact-checker, but is in fact a novel about a psychoanalyst having dinner in a pancake restaurant. By more accurately describing the occupations of their titular characters, these novels would bear the less commercially attractive titles The Art Historian, The Elevator Operator, The Journalist, The Socialists, and The Psychoanalyst, respectively. But in the wake of the breakout success of Caleb Carr's The Alienist, a 1994 thriller about a late-19th-century psychologist on the trail of a serial killer in New York, incomprehensible "ist" titles are the order of the day.
Incidentally, I've become interested in killer Gary Gilmore after seeing artist Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2, a very oblique, I dare say mythopoetic, take on Gilmore. So I'm considering picking up Norman Mailer's book on the subject -- what's it called, The Song of the Executionist?
* * *
Joining several of my co-workers, I will go on record as saying that the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs is the best new record I heard last year. I was intrigued by a mention in a Village Voice cover story that the Fields' prime mover Stephin Merritt had originally conceived of the project as a musical revue, which would have included a full hundred songs on the most important subject in pop -- until he realized the Mahabharata- or Einstein on the Beach-like length that such a project would involve. He cut the number of songs by about a third, and the result is the current wondrous three-CD set. I'm still angling for a local revue-like production of the work, though -- Frank's Wild Years crossed with Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, as I see it.
Send gossip and complaints to eric@thestranger.com.
