EDITORS: I loved this essay on my freaky hometown ["Fractured Seattle," Trisha Ready, March 8]! Seattle has always seemed like a bubbling cauldron of something dark and poisonous, blowing the lid off to make national headlines with disturbing regularity. I am just old enough to remember Ted Bundy hunting down women here, and the Green River killings intensified my feelings of impending doom and catastrophe. I think we natives get a perverse satisfaction when the lid blows off, whether it be volcanoes, riots, earthquakes, serial killers, or just the ever-forecasted "snow of the century." It definitely makes the few sunny, warm days and beautiful surroundings seem that much sweeter. There are days when I wish Microsoft and Boeing would dry up and blow away so we could get back to our roots as a creepy little city reveling in existence between our dank skies and violent earth.

Joanna Bailey, Seattle

TO THE STRANGER: I hereby terminate my longtime relationship with The Stranger to protest your harmful and profoundly offensive cover graphic [Bride Undone, Amy Died, Feb 22]. This cover depicts a woman cowering in terror, trapped against a wall by an unseen attacker. In freeze-frame panels, we see the woman's clothes ripped from her body, until she finally huddles, completely naked, on the ground.

This cover is purely gratuitous, and unrelated to any substantive discussion in the text of the magazine. It goes beyond the simply crude zine-like comics on some past covers and enters the realm of misogynist pornography. By promoting and exploiting images of sexual assault on women, The Stranger contributes to a pervasive societal pathology of tolerating violence against women.

Jennifer Schubert, Seattle

JOE NEWTON, DESIGN DIRECTOR, RESPONDS: Thanks for your concern about the intent/content of Amy Died's Bride Undone cover. Art is, of course, open to interpretation. Unfortunately, you were wrong about its intended meaning: The piece is, in reality, about Ms. Died's recent divorce and the painful process of ending a long-term relationship. It is not about rape at all.

I do not perceive this piece to be pornographic; nudity does not automatically denote pornography. I agree the piece has a violent and raw emotional power, but the assault is on Ms. Died's emotions, not her body; there is no "unseen attacker." I regret that you would interpret her personal statement in such a negative manner.

EDITORS: Okay, you made an attempt ["Race Riots," Grant Cogswell and Charles Mudede, March 8]. You hit some thought-provoking truths. But you're still infected with the same PC paralysis that doses the rest of Seattle media. Be honest with yourselves: There was no over-arching agenda to the riots, no Zeitgeist--just poor behavior. We have a youth culture out of control, and in this Mardi Gras case, the worst perpetrators were black. But black "community" leaders waste no time with their spin control: Immediately and with righteous indignation, they accuse the media of racist video coverage of content that was ALREADY edited to show "white people are in on this, too." Where was that "community" when its kids were killing each other? If you let those kids believe the tired victim myth that you sell them ("it's the white man who did this to you") and provide them with miserable excuses ("your crimes are an expression of your social status"), they will START with you every time.

There is no black community. There is no "white community." There are no superior races nor inferior ones. There ARE political aspirations, corrupt cultures, myths, denial, hysteria, and commerce. Nice try, though.

Anonymous, via e-mail

EDITORS AND BRET FETZER: Regarding "Stages of Chaos," there is more to lose at the Seattle Fringe than meets the print here. I run the Cirque de Flambé--the crazy-clowns-with-fire show. I tried to place a new show in the Fringe this year as a "Bring Your Own Venue (BYOV)," but ran into new restrictive policies regarding compensation back to the BYOVs from the ticket sales.

The new Fringe BYOV policy restricted our income this year to 20 percent of last year's income. Last year's audience response to our circus show was greater than we expected, and we made over $10,000 after expenses, but [we asked] for a $10 donation at the door. This was enough to help pay our way to the Edmonton Fringe Festival last August.

This year, based on the new income restrictions, there is no way we could have afforded to put the big show in the Fringe. I set out the problems for the Fringe board in detail, but was told that they were sticking to the compensation policies. So we dropped that big show in favor of a smaller show, Verities of Fires.

After all is said and done, we will not be able to afford to perform in the Seattle Fringe anymore. Our flaming desire to perform in the Seattle Fringe has gone out.

Artfully Yours, Cirque de Flambé

EDITORS: Bret Fetzer's contribution to The Stranger's annual "The problem with the Seattle Fringe Festival..." article, while generally free from the uninformed invective of earlier authors' versions, is equally wrong-headed ["Stages of Chaos," March 8]. To suggest that the mythical "problem" with the festival is its financial structure is bizarrely naive.

The financial "problem" with the Seattle Fringe Festival is that it's funded at a pittance of what its Canadian and British versions receive, and so has to take a larger amount from ticket sales. There's no mention in Fetzer's article of other American fringe festivals, and with good reason: They're in a similar, and in some cases much worse financial situation. My alternative thesis is that the true overriding "problem" with the Seattle Fringe Festival is that it takes place in a city whose print media are at best indifferent and at worst hostile to it. In the last few years, there have been so many positive changes in the quality of the work of the Fringe. But yet again, The Stranger reveals itself to be caught in a cultural lag because an arts event is taking place in its town without its official approval. The festival will be doing very well for itself, thank you, in 10 years' time. We'll see about The Stranger.

John Longenbaugh, Artistic Director, Ursa Major Theatre Co.

BRET FETZER RESPONDS: The larger question I'm raising is, what is the Fringe Festival? It runs as if it were a producing theater, like Annex or the Seattle Rep, but it was not conceived as such--it was conceived as a forum for theater groups to present work, essentially as a service organization. Currently, it doesn't do that as well as it could, and some structural changes could improve that. Face it: The funding situation in the United States is not going to improve any time soon. If the Fringe Festival were better funded, it would most likely be at the expense of the larger fringe theater community in Seattle; there is only so much money that's given to low-budget theaters. Rather than funding an institution in such a way that makes it more difficult for artists to do their work, the Fringe Festival should examine ways to reduce its expenses and improve its service to artists. You're right, the other American festivals are in as difficult a financial situation as Seattle's, but that's hardly an argument for continuing to use a structure that depends on substantial government subsidy.

EDITORS: [The Stranger's] decision to print [the anti-homeless invective in I, Anonymous, March 8] is problematic. Our community has already directed a great deal of attention and positive social sanction toward the "hate the homeless" perspective. Mark Sidran, in fact, has parlayed a very successful career out of it. It hardly seems, then, to count as particularly incisive or characteristic of authentically independent thinking to print a piece such as this. We certainly don't need to hear this "other" view. But of course, this assumes that The Stranger is actually committed to presenting an "other" view, and this assumption is simply not tenable, in light of the ongoing journalistic practice at The Stranger. I don't have much faith that The Stranger has, as its journalistic objective, anything other than to provide our community with warmed-over, pseudo "radical," bourgeois, bought-off, bullshit drivel. In the end, The Stranger is a very useless passion.

Dick Burton, Ph.D., Seattle Central Community College

DEAR DR. MUDEDE: Via your Stranger articles, you've had an increasingly intense impact on my thinking and world views in the short year and a half that I've lived in Seattle. I've really come to admire the originality of your voice, the efficiency and effectiveness of your prose, and what strikes me as profound ethical and political sensitivity and insight. Before I leave a city (as I'm about to do), I like to thank those who've deepened my understanding of my own being-in-the-city and being-in-the-world (please forgive the slip into Heidegger-ese). So, thank you. My world isn't quite the same.

Jay W. Thomas, via e-mail