EDITORS: So tell me like I'm a four-year-old, because I really don't understand why "Slayor-elect" Nickels just offed Jim Diers, the Director of the Department of Neighborhoods ["Meet Your Mayor," Josh Feit, Dec 20]. Have you ever visited a P-Patch? The Troll? A nicely landscaped roundabout, a street newly planted with trees, or a Neighborhood Service Center? Thank Jim Diers personally, because these are direct results of his leadership.
I work for the city (hence this is anonymous), and spend a ton of time at community meetings trying to efficiently deliver the "Seattle Style." If there is one person who even the city-hall bashers like, it's Jim Diers. Why? Because he and his staff are the ones who put a smiley face on city hall. Maybe Nickels is really about endless process and no substance, because he just fired the guy who invented a Seattle process that produced results--from tomatoes to parks. Behind the P-Patch program, Neighborhood Matching Fund, Historic Preservation, the Neighborhood Service Centers is not a faceless bureaucrat--it's thousands of citizens who have chosen to work with city hall to make Seattle a better place. Each staff person at the Department of Neighborhoods is fully committed to this community, in large part because of their boss.
So congratulations, Greg, and welcome to city hall. Hope you don't mind that every person you depend on to deliver glad tidings from city hall, to engage the community in your "Seattle Style," and to build civic pride during the forthcoming hard times is really pissed at you. I hope you don't mind appearing as a hypocrite when you start your tours of the communities and pose in front of a new P-Patch. Yep, I'm pissed.
Anonymous at Seattle City Hall, via e-mail
OH KATHLEEN: First, the praise. You're so witty, so charming, always fun to read.
Now the question: Were you (a) drunk, (b) stoned, (c) wearing earplugs, or (d) all of the above? Can you actually say that if the majority of the musicians in Pretty Girls Make Graves didn't work at either the Cha Cha or Linda's, and one of them wasn't an ex-Murder City Devil, that you would give that band the time of day? [Up & Coming, Kathleen Wilson, Dec 13.] If anyone had the cojones to speak her mind about bad bands, I thought it was you.
If you love them so, maybe you should take your Stranger paycheck and buy that chick some voice lessons before she hurts somebody.
Mark, via e-mail
HI FOLKS: I hope I'm not the only one to point this out, but please tell Mike McGonigal that although Barry Manilow did co-write "Copacabana," Barry Manilow did not write "Mandy." And yes, it's true--Barry Manilow did not write "I Write the Songs"! He also didn't write "Can't Smile Without You" or "Looks Like We Made It."
Ran, via e-mail
CHARLES MUDEDE: Save your ink--I am not in any way interested in the "Green River Killer." ["Negative Land," Charles Mudede, Nov 20.] "Serial killers" are a red herring. Yes, they exist, but they fascinate because of their rarity.
It's rather like trying to convince people that they're in more danger while flying than while driving on the ground: The simplest look at the numbers unveils the lie. If a person is murdered, the killer is more likely--by orders of magnitude--to be a family member or someone the victim knows intimately. Yet we find it easier to fear strangers and "mad killers."
Sound familiar? That's how we run most of our lives. Why let ugly little facts (or complex, multifaceted big facts) destroy our beautiful, neatly packaged myths?
Val, via e-mail
DEAR CHARLES: Your piece is poignant.
You seem to indicate your status as a newcomer to Seattle, [arriving here] between 1980 and 1999. I was born in Tacoma and grew up in Seattle. Listen to what I have to say here. SeaTac is not a place. You know this. It is not on the popular radar screen; it is a fictional municipality, partly born out of anti-growth initiatives to keep you and the others away, partly an excuse to access federal funding. Sea means Seattle, Tac means Tacoma. Green River is a soft drink; the name of the river in question is Duwamish, or Duwabsh. None of which matters much to your writing, but it should.
Your writing touches on the real evil lurking around the area, the "greater Puget Sound area" or the "I-5 corridor." I wrote of the same evil several years back in the Evergreen Free Press out of Olympia. My co-author Karl Riech and I investigated the "strip" from the B&I Circus store on South Tacoma Way down to 32nd Avenue or so, [near] the infamous, anachronistic Java Jive. I feel we captured for posterity a certain slice of the evil that is Tacoma.
SeaTac is another cultural space. It shares certain aspects with northern Tacoma, but is really a patchwork administrative division at best. Southcenter is Seattle's southern gate, Northgate its northern. When I think of SeaTac, I always remember those terraced hillsides to the right of the freeway, just north of the Southcenter temple complex--those hillsides that Seattle Asian refugees once painted red with opium-poppy production. Green River has entered the world's cultural space as Twin Peaks, albeit removed to the mountain heights just to the east of REDMOND.
REDMOND--where the gray bars are called Windows and NINTENDO churns out GAMEBOYS. Remember those old Donkey Kong arcade machines? Remember the Crazy Kong knock-off just two blocks north of B&I in Tacoma? Where Ivan the gorilla spent long years in solitary, painting for the jailers? Ah, Donkey Ape in the gasoline asscrack of pseudo-history. Essential ape climbing the WTC, warding off those who would jail you. Adapted Ape, ascending phosphor ladders without snakes to 100 meters, the apex, which must surely fall to human ingenuity. Void and pain, swamp of police folios and polio fleece, by the ancient river of green the Emerald City signaled the end of a mighty empire that was, and is and yet is not, and will be.
Charles, the mercy of Lovecraft's is not that we are kindly saved from knowing too much of the absurdity of OUTSIDE; it is that we are thankfully shielded from knowing the inner void, the void at the center of the American soul. Push the structure and see how it rebounds, thump it and test whether it stands. It crumbles like castles made of sand into the writhing sea, like steel and glass skyscrapers made to stand for eternity.
The end of the eschaton began in the gray parking garage of the World Trade Center. I saw it and I know the structure of the false world, made of intermeshing grids of iron, gray bars and concrete graves. I saw it and this, this drives me to rant. Beware. The wind whispers nuclear war.
