EDITOR: The monorail won! This victory is due in no small part to The Stranger's early, consistent, and strong support. The Stranger put to shame the Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Seattle Weekly, which offered up the most vacuous, inane, and dismissive reporting they possibly could on the monorail. Even the P-I's endorsement was limp. But The Stranger, week after week, offered intelligent, insightful, and in-depth, serious articles about the why's and wherefore's of the monorail.
The victory of the monorail and I-776, and the defeat of R-51, are three strikes by the people against the establishment. The Stranger called them all. Good job!
Janice Van Cleve, via e-mail
EDITOR: Emily Hall got it so right in her articulate description of the Allied Arts meeting with Michael Killoren about the Seattle Arts Commission's proposed reorganization and budget cuts ["Out of Commission," Nov 14]. I agree with her assessment that the music industry's Dave Meinert is one of the only people in the city talking about arts funding who makes sense, and I REALLY agree that the arts community is simply not organized and politically astute enough to figure out how to deal with this latest political move from the mayor's office to weaken, NOT strengthen, the arts commission.
I worked for SAC to develop a long-term vision called the Arts Resource Network (headed by Linda Knudsen-McAusland, another long-time SAC employee whose job is being eliminated for no good reason). What is most astonishing to me is that all that work (and public money!!) that went into rethinking and reorganizing SAC over the past six-plus years, based on many focus groups and much input from the community, was completely ignored by the mayor and new director. This is the real crime being committed here--there is no respect in the mayor's office for what SAC has been doing, either right or wrong, and no attempt to even consider it. The amount of public money and time that has been wasted (and is about to be wasted again with a 2003 reorg in a vacuum) is criminal. This is what the arts community and citizens of Seattle should be upset about.
The arts community needs to seize this moment and do what the mayor has unwittingly pushed us to do--get very political and form a broad political action coalition with the music and film industries and figure out amongst ourselves a vision for how the city should support the arts. As filmmakers and musicians and artists of all stripes, we are, after all, our city's visionaries--the creators of the stories and images and songs and words. We know how to make and use television and radio and be seen and heard. That's where our strength is, and Mayor Nickels will definitely have to listen to us when we actually rise up as the Creative Class he embraces with his empty rhetoric about cultural tourism. Taking Emily's cue, no more "obfuscation, rationalization, and leftovers"!
Robin Oppenheimer, via e-mail
JOSH: Once again your James Ujaama coverage is outstanding ["Let's Go to the Videotape," Josh Feit, Nov 21]. KIRO 7 should be ashamed of [itself]. I haven't yelled at my TV that loud in a long time.
If Mr. Ujaama is guilty of an actual terrorist act that would have resulted in harming innocent people, then by all means he's where he belongs. But, without righteous reporters like yourself, we might never know the actual truth.
Keep up the good work, Josh. Please.
DJX13, via e-mail
EDITOR: Poetry is a touchy subject because it is easier to knock than comment upon constructively ["From Hippieshit to Slam," Nov 14]. Articles like the one written, obviously in self-advertisement, by Meg van Huygen are constructive for being a hoot, but if she really thinks Slam is a cutting-edge place where poetry appreciators weed out the slackers, then she's a congenital Micropublican; for just as Real Change newspaper is a capitalist prank being played on the homeless, so too is Slam an outrage against the muse.
What van Huygen doesn't fathom about open mics, whose pacing and merits she derides, is that people turn out even on gray days with nothing to say, because they love poetry. It is the love of poetry, for all its faults, in evidence at open mics that van Huygen cannot comprehend. The readings didn't titillate her enough, therefore they were awful. It should hardly surprise anyone that she applauds poetry being turned into a gladiator contest, arbitrarily judged by fools.
Van Huygen turned her educated pen and non-comprehending eye on us to demoralize us. We defy her. Just try and break our hearts, Meg van Whoeveryouare. Just try it!
Mac Crary, via e-mail
DEAR STRANGER: If that babbling deer head is giving your staff too much trouble, or harassing your poor advice-seeking letter-writers to an intolerable degree, we could give it a good home here ["Ask the Stuffed Deer Head Lying on the Floor in The Stranger's Office," Nov 14]. There is plenty of room on the walls of Fishing & Hunting News for more trophy mounts.
Andy Walgamott, Associate Editor, Fishing & Hunting News magazine
THE STRANGER RESPONDS: Thanks for your inquiry. Unfortunately, if we parted with the deer head, who would write our column?
ANDY WALGAMOTT RESPONDS: Tell you what, we've got a couple bottles of some pretty saucy Praline Honey Ham Injectable Marinade (with free injector!) that would make a good columnist for you guys. Swap it straight across for the deer head.
EDITOR: I e-mailed that you should clear anything with me that might be libelous, but you failed to do this. It's so nice to see myself being called "psychotic" in a tabloid full of ads for hookers and people begging to be shit on, edited by an admitted virus-spreading bio-terrorist ["Insane Determination," Phil Campbell, Nov 21]. See how this criticism thing works?
You open your piece on me by claiming my view is that Courtney Love, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl collaborated "to kill [Kurt] Cobain." Actually, I have not said that, but instead have focused on the deal to split profits that the three partners made upon the occasion of the death, which held firm until Love recently filed suit in an attempt to renege.
You also write that I wrote a letter "to" Novoselic's mother, which is not correct. As even his attorney described at the anti-harassment trial, my exhibit was addressed in "care of" Novoselic's mother, at her well-publicized retail-business address. This was back in 1994, before Novoselic had emerged with a high profile (and a business address) as a lobbyist, to lavish tons of cash on people like Greg Nickels. In response to my brief, businesslike letter, Novoselic wrote back a rambling, apparently disturbed, and rather threatening page to me. A "Mr. G" then followed with an elaborate ransom-note-style paste-up directly threatening to "beat" me "to death." Maybe you could call these the "crumbs of evidence" that you claim are missing from my efforts.
It sounded like your guy Campbell had some juicy info about my 1994 split from Seattle Weekly over the Cobain affair. Too bad it didn't make it into print. Perhaps you wanted to avoid anything that would make me look too principled. That wouldn't be Stranger material, right?
Richard Lee, via e-mail
STRANGER: Hey, did you notice militant Muslims have killed dozens of people over remarks in a LEFT-WING newspaper? Do you blubbering degenerates get it yet? Oh boooooo hoooo, why do they hate us, it's all because we're bad Americans.
Maybe if you jam a dildo up your ass till it reaches your cranial cavity, it might dislodge those pieces of rotten meat you call brains!
But being anti-American shitheads sure sells piercings and trendy garbage, doesn't it? I bet the owner of The Stranger is up to his smelly ass in consumer goods while he publishes this cynical slop.
They hate you too, you nihilistic, elitist, degenerate crybabies--so maybe you're right, they aren't all bad!
Anonymous, via e-mail
