Belltown Messenger - Grant's Broiler

Summer is over again (so fast!) and we begin our slide back into that drugged, forgetful state we spend the next seven months of the year walking around in. Perhaps it's time to break out, try to approach things in a new, confrontational way, so as to better our real (summer) life when it comes back around.

Prospects are terrific for a Belltown renaissance centered on the P-Patch cottages with Bob Redmond as the next incoming Richard Hugo House homesteader. Bob has been politically and artistically active to an extent no one else in town has matched in the last decade. His involvement with Tent City, Bumbershoot, the Seattle Poetry Festival, Real Change, and other organizations promises a high return on whatever work he puts into his fellowship. All the complaints about campers and sketchy characters in the P-Patch would be solved simply by "activating" the community cottage every day and night. If that means a cafe, a convenience store, hell, a circus, I'd welcome it, and Bob seems like the guy who might pull it off. Plus, he's a terrific poet.

Speaking of Bumbershoot, I'll be making an appearance there at Phil Campbell's reading (4:30, Starbucks Literary Stage, Labor Day Monday, Sept. 5) from his forthcoming book about my 2001 Seattle City Council campaign, Zioncheck For President, to be published by Nation Books this October. The surreal quality of reading a book that has your own name two or three times on every page aside, no one else has examined our place and time in such detail, and it's well worth a read if only for that. Plus I'm funnier in it than I am in real life, and Marion Zioncheck's story is one of this city's more profound legends.

Speaking of my former political incarnation, the torch has been passed to 29-year-old ass-kicker Christian Gloddy, who, tired of all the stupid, selfish, hysterical monorail opponents, started an organization called Seattle 2045 (for people who will still be alive then) to fight for our monorail (again). The website is www.seattle2045.org; go there for buttons, action alerts, and "Seattle Monorail has a posse" stickers.

Yes, I'm busy making a motion picture, and we start shooting on Sept. 26. The latest addition to the Cthulhu team is SIFF Golden Space Needle Award-winning cinematographer Sean Kirby. I have no doubts now: This will be the best film this town has ever made. Get on board and call us at 324-6400 or if you get this in time, come by our party on the evening of Thursday, Sept. 1 at our studio, 1410 14th Avenue on Capitol Hill. If you missed that, swing by anytime and volunteer, invest, or get hired.

I'm hearing rumors that PCC is considering opening a Belltown store. Yeah, they're pricey, but we need this. If anyone has any sway with that company, please help make this happen. Belltown is a social disaster at this point. I'm relieved going to work every day on Capitol Hill just because I feel like I'm in a real neighborhood, not a holding unit, or a Disneyland for drunks, or a dystopian movie like The Time Machine or Land of The Dead where only the wealthy and their subjects survive. We need a middle class here, and we need children. Those people won't come unless there's somewhere to buy groceries, and we won't have a truly walkable neighborhood until all the amenities people need are close by. (And ten years of construction to replace the viaduct wouldn't help either.) It takes a long time to undo the damage done by pro-car, anti-people urban policy that has held sway for the last half-century (and may still; let's see how the monorail referendum goes). The thriving downtown of the first half of the 20th century was killed by the SPD forcing businesses to close early so they wouldn't have to police a nighttime streetlife; soon enough those businesses shut down completely, the SRO hotels (single-room occupancy) went down one by one, and a garden turned to jungle and then desert.

The pre-automotive city was a complex organism, and is hard to reproduce by design. Better to introduce the elements necessary for basic living, and free things up for human (not car-driving human) nature to take its way. Master-planned, sanitized density is going to suck. Music and planning critic Dave Hickey aptly points out that most planners would naturally prefer Mexico City over Madison, Wisconsin: What they end up building is Mexico City, Wisconsin.

Yeats was talking about Seattle, surely, when he said the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. I know how painful it is to engage in the solid life outside of art (that was me weeping loudly in the Union Garage when the SMP turned in their doomed finance plan) but Jesus, people, get off your asses! This is our town, our future, and for all the bitching I hear about gentrification, the starving arts, etc., I know that if that much wind was expelled in a forum rather than a barroom, an editorial page rather than a blog, something around here might start to shift. The monorail only got to where it did initially because we didn't know how powerless we were. Take note.

Start by calling the city council and asking why the hell there's so much beeping around here, and will they make it stop. Why does every construction truck and window-washing crane have to be audible for blocks when it backs up? This hood sounds like a pager-dealers' convention.

Books and Movies Dept.:I haven't even had the time to see any movies lately, because I'm making one, but when I can I've been dipping into Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. If you are one of the shockingly large number of people who have never read this poem, there is no book more influential to the good side of our national spirit. A man I met recently said Whitman was the greatest poet this continent has produced, but I think he doesn't count, because Song is a religious document, the American Bhagavad-Gita.

(BTW congrats to new Belltown Messenger editor Clark Humphrey. Clark has "gotten" this city better and longer than anybody. I was a MISC subscriber on the east coast back in '92 as I prepared my return to the homeland, just to keep a check on the reality here.)

(Want more of this? It's my job. belltownpoet@hugohouse.org.)