Belltown Messenger

It's been four months since the re-election of our fascist national government (yes, fascist, not Nazi - the Nazis colluded with corporations, in an already secular-leaning culture, against the restraints of a liberal church: original fascists like Mussolini and Franco as well as later ones like Pinochet led a coalition of corporate power with a conservative-religious stamp of approval, and a military culture infecting the populace with xenophobic hubris and bloody valor) and we've climbed out of our teary beers and are ready to fight. Gays, lesbians and their friends are marching on Olympia to ensure our state doesn't go for any of that 'defense of marriage' BS. Good-guy millionaire Jeff Reifman is starting a public dialogue about looking at what we can do to roll back the evil tide (sure, let's use that word - they do). The Eastside Transportation Coalition and other groups are leaning on Sound Transit to fairly evaluate monorail and other transit technologies to make sure we cross the lake with something sensible. Small potatoes? Not if you want to keep this region from being completely ruined by sprawl. Howard Dean, the man too real to be president, is in charge of the engine room of the Democratic Party, bout freakin' time. Voices are rising against the preposterous $4 billion, twelve-block tunnel replacement for the Viaduct, which will do absolutely nothing for Belltown but make noise and tie up traffic 24-hours-a-day for five years or so. Neighbors in Montlake went way out of the box on plans for a new 520 interchange and proposed a suspension bridge between I-5 and Lake Washington, that could reconnect a highway-scarred corner of the city. Now if we could only get the monorail agency and Sound Transit together to realize that while a Ballard-UW monorail and a Kirkland-Downtown light rail wouldn't draw justifiable ridership, a Redmond-UW-Ballard monorail absolutely would. I'm putting my shoulder to the wheel and helping release a salvo in the culture war, by producing a feature film I wrote with Portland director Daniel Gildark. Cthulhu is based on the works of the late H.P. Lovecraft, and is an apocalyptic, gothic, anti-Bush gay horror film the likes of which has not been seen: a movie with gay love at its core that is not a 'gay film', taking on the radical right for the very dimension-crossing, unspeakable creatures from the fetid reaches of deepest space they truly are, in the biggest arena, the cineplex. We have assembled a creative team (no contracts yet, so I can't name names) that includes some of the absolute best musical, visual, and acting talents to come out of here in the last two decades. We'll shoot this summer here and in Astoria, OR: the second Seattle explosion is here.

To get involved, ask about poetry, rant and rave, seek pleasure in the bottom of a crystal snifter or rub my neck, email me at belltownpoet@hugohouse.org.