Street Art

Seattle's street art often takes me by surprise -- by its skill, its unexpectedness, and its subversive humor. Murals and graffiti can be found in most urban centers, but each city has its own vibe when it comes to the spray-painting of art or aggression in public places. Seattle's, I think, is particularly creative. Here's a showcase of some walls I like in the U-District, Fremont and Capitol Hill. [Note -- a couple details that are hard to see: in the first photo, the object at the center blasting out green noise is a stereo; in the final one, the posters read "Find the Unexpected", advertising the Seattle International Film Festival.]

The Necklace of Cranes

Just across the bridge from where I live there's a pocket-handkerchief of a park with a bronze statue of a girl holding an origami crane. Imagine my surprise when, one spring morning, I discovered that a necklace of rainbow-colored origami cranes had appeared, as if from nowhere, draped over the girl's outstretched arm. The next morning there was another, and then another, and by the end of the summer the statue could scarcely be seen for all the ribbons of cranes.

I didn't discover the story until the next year. When the cranes that had disappeared over the winter began silently to appear again in the spring, I looked up the park to find an explanation. It's called the Peace Park, and the girl is Sadako Sasaki, who died of leukemia aged 12, 10 years after the atomic bomb fell on her home town of Hiroshima.

The story goes that Sadako's best friend Chizuko was visiting her five months after she was hospitalized, and folded a crane for her out of a piece of gold paper, reminding her that if she folded one thousand cranes she would be granted a wish. Sadako was inspired, and began folding cranes, using anything from wrapping paper to medicine packages. Accounts differ as to whether she reached her thousand cranes, but when she died three months later her classmates decided that the story and the garlands of cranes would not end there.

They started a movement to raise money to build a monument for Sadako and the other children that had died from exposure to the atom bomb, and three years later a statue of her holding a golden crane was unveiled in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Japan. In 1990, 45 years after the bombing, this statue was dedicated in Seattle. Both memorials continue to this day to be covered with thousands of folded cranes, each one with a prayer for peace, and an end to nuclear warfare.

Post-Industrial Glamour

Seattle’s wealth of coffeeshops should come as no surprise to the casual visitor. But if you expect to find the slick styling of Starbucks at the independent cafes you will be taken aback. The predominant style is one of unfinished renovation from a recent industrial past: brickwork is exposed, metal joists and ducts crisscross the ceiling, large joints latch beams together at corners. Just as designs at the latest Christian Dior collection in Paris had their outer layers of fabric ripped away to reveal the cobweb structure of bodice or puffed skirt, so here interior walls are stripped back to show the structural gridwork that sustains them.

Solstice in the U-District, Zeitgeist at Pioneer Square and Espresso Vivace on Capitol Hill are among the many cafes that show this style. Clothing store Urban Outfitters takes a similar approach. Window displays have planks nailed across chipboard as a backdrop; lights are suspended from the system of bars underhanging the ceiling.

This inside-out architecture is tinkering with an idea that the Pompidou Center in Paris took full out in 1977. This building’s exoskeleton of steel bars, tubes and mechanical systems is given cartoon style by being brightly colorcoded in primary colors (red for safety devices, blue for temperature, yellow for electrical wires). The result is playful, a defamiliarizing postmodern joke that’s as tongue-in-cheek as it is disturbing.

The problem is that although superbly clever, the Pompidou Center is not an inviting or liveable kind of space. Seattle’s cafes do not try to deconstruct the fabric of reality, which makes them a lot more comfortable to frequent. Their aim, like that of the Dior collection, is an engagement with what’s behind a polished, apparently effortless show. A post-industrial structure may sound like the opposite of glamour, but this coffeeshop exposure of structure and mechanics is (again, like Dior) a very long way from being artless.

Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first World's Fair held in Seattle: the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. The fair was held just 12 years after the Klondike Gold Rush, which had set Seattle on the road to riches, and it billed the Pacific Northwest as the gateway both to the oriental splendors of China and Japan, and to the new-found gold fields of Alaska and the Yukon territory in Canada. It was a wild success: over the course of its four-and-a-half month duration this trade-show-cum-fairground attracted 3.7 million visitors.

Exhibits ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. Buildings were designed in the neoclassical style, with a stunning "white city" (pictured) at the heart of the fair. Meanwhile, the Agriculture Building proudly advertised the "first display of clams ever shown at an exposition," and The Seattle Daily Times praised the Hawaii Building for "a pine-apple 30 feet high composed of small pineapples cunningly arranged." Rather more impressively, the Alaska Building featured one million dollars-worth of gold, as dust, nuggets and ingots.

The must-see area for thrill-seekers was Pay Streak, where visitors could see loinclothed dancing Igorrotes from the Philippines, multi-tiered Asian teahouses, and a structure roughly resembling Shakespeare's Globe offering regular reenactments of the Battle of Gettysburg. In a similar vein, there was a reenactment of the Boston Tea Party on Lake Union, complete with dramatic shelling of a specially built replica of the Gaspee. The combination of patriotic fervor, Pacific Northwest pride and exotic voyeurism was a sure-fire hit.

What is surprising, given the solid and imposing nature of the buildings of the white city, is that they were built just as temporary structures. The soaring domes and intricate cornices comprised little more than plasterwork. The goal, after all, was not to beat the Old World at its own game, but simply to prove that Seattle could be as neoclassical as Bath, should it so wish. Having made this point, the buildings were promptly dismantled, and today there is no trace of their existence. The one World's Fair structure that does still hold pride of place in Seattle dates from 1962, and owes no debt whatsoever to the Greeks: this is, of course, the iconic Space Needle.

Seven Bottles of Light in a Stone Box

The chapel of St. Ignatius, on the campus of Seattle University, is an unexpectedly beautiful sanctuary and place of worship. It was designed by architect Steven Holl, using as its guiding concept the gathering of different lights together, in reference to St. Ignatius' understanding of the spiritual life as comprising many internal lights and darknesses. Holl described the design as "seven bottles of light in a stone box."

The bottles of light were a success: the chapel won an award from the American Institute of Architects in 1998, and a scale model of the chapel was chosen for inclusion in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. More importantly, the chapel is the perfect place for quiet reflection -- a key element in the layout of Seattle University, which is a Jesuit college.

Entering the chapel, you are greeted by a set of five icons, painted on commission by Dora Nikolova Bittau, an artist in Rome. Their glow is balanced on the opposite side of the entryway by four windows whose clear glass has been turned into semi-abstract narrative art. Glasswork is perhaps the Northwest's most lauded artistic work, but these windows take a more subtle approach than the swirling kaleidoscopes of color that regional superstar Dale Chihuly creates.

Color is provided, in this otherwise white interior, by colored glass lenses in the highest windows, and suspended baffles, painted just on the side that outside light will fall. The result is delicate, in keeping with effects such as the prayers embedded into the walls of the small room with the Madrona tree, in gold leaf on beeswax. The balance of Byzantine richness and modern simplicity is beguiling: sacred space was never calmer or more beautiful than this.

American Beauty

America has always had a different approach to progress than her progenitors across the Atlantic. While we in England in the 1920s were spending civilized weekends at the National Trust, Ezra Pound was shocking the world by proclaiming "Make it New." In the 1870s, Alfred Lord Tennyson was turning to medieval romances and the Classics for inspiration, while Walt Whitman was singing odes to progress and industry. In his Song of the Exposition he writes:

"Here shall you trace in flowing operation,
In every state of practical, busy movement, the rills of civilization...
You shall see the crude ores of California and Nevada passing on and on till they become bullion...
You shall mark in amazement the Hoe press whirling its cylinders, shedding the printed leaves steady and fast,
The photograph, model, watch, pin, nail, shall be created before you."

Whitman's love of the mechanical, the leaves of print as much as the leaves of grass, puts him in a position of sympathy with Thomas Eakins -- and in fact the two were friends. Eakins was trained in the clear-eyed accuracy of mechanical and anatomical drawing, and his 1871 painting of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, entitled Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, shows the influence of this realist approach. The architectural detail of the Girard Avenue Bridge and Connecting Railroad Bridge in the background is flawless, the reflections exact, the rowers neatly precise.

The result, despite being in stark contrast to the contemporaneous Impressionist movement, is beautiful: the sheer functionalism of the sculls and bridges gives them elegance. It's a particularly American aesthetic, and one that is just as applicable to Seattle's bridge-spanned waterways. Indeed, as Seattle author Bernice S. Moore wrote in 1947, at the height of the Northwest Arts and Crafts movement (with perhaps a very slight excess of enthusiasm), "One may get the same feeling of beauty from the smooth streamlines of an airplane or an electric iron that one may get from a beautiful piece of sculpture."

A Selection of Statues

Lenin
In Fremont, the time-honored practice of erecting a statue to commemorate a historical event or honorable person is turned upside down. The 16-foot-tall and seven-ton bronze statue of Lenin is a case in point: part accident, part experiment, part provocation. The sculptor was Emil Venkov, who labored over it for ten years, and the statue was installed in Poprad, in present-day Slovakia, in 1988.

After the Velvet Revolution of 1989 the statue was quietly taken down, and was due to be melted for its bronze when it was discovered by Lewis E. Carpenter, a Washington native who was teaching English in Poprad. Recognising its artistic value, he remortgaged his house and bought it, and shipped it back to the States -- much to the consternation of the Seattle community. There was then an unexpected twist: In the midst of all the uproar, Carpenter was killed in a car crash.

The statue was left lying in his backyard, and his family have been trying to get rid of it ever since. They got it off their property and set up in Fremont in 1995, and it is currently for sale for $250,000, proceeds to go to the Fremont Chamber of Commerce for community art projects. In the meantime, its controversy is a source of glee for the community, which alternates between promoting it as Art, and dressing it up as John Lennon.

Troll
Familiar to us all from Scandinavian folklore, the myth of the troll has been made quite literally concrete underneath the Aurora Bridge. The two-ton creature squats in the darkness, single hub-cap eye gleaming, and crushing a Volkswagon Beetle -- with a California license plate -- in its left hand. It was created by a team of four local artists in 1990, with the aim of rehabilitating the space. Today, instead of a dark corner for dumping tyres and dealing drugs, it is a tourist attraction. The moral, we must assume, is bring on the trolls.

Dinosaur
What more could Fremont want? Well, a true-to-scale topiary model of an apatosaurus was a notable absence until 2000, when the Pacific Science Center serendipitously decided to sell its pair of ivy-clad dinosaurs for the bargain price of $1. They were relocated to the edge of the Ship Canal, where they forage happily today just as they did 150 million years ago.

A Very Short Introduction to Fremont

"Welcome to FREMONT, Center of the Universe," reads the sign. Located at the north end of Lake Union by the Ship Canal, this neighborhood is also referred to as "The People's Republic of Fremont," a name whose ironic relevance is reinforced by a large and controversial statue of Lenin. Historically a bohemian and artistic gathering place, Fremont's recent gentrification has not dulled its embracing of the eccentric.

Retro-futurism reigns in Fremont. A fusion of 50s and 60s style with 23rd-century chic is what's in, with vintage clothing stores comfortably abutting rocket-fusillage glam. The supermarket is entirely organic, the Solstice Cyclists infamously nude, and the recording studio the site of Nirvana's first recorded demos. What's unexpected about this hippy vibe, though, is its quietly chortling self-consciousness.

The unprepared visitor is likely to feel that he or she has unwittingly stepped into a creation of Douglas Adams or Monty Python. Fremont is enthusiastically zany, highly entertained by its own slightly geeky jokes, and keen to deconstruct normality at every turn. Within three blocks of the center you will find a deluxe junk store; a subversively graffitied courtyard; a classy wisteria-clad boutique; and a Cold War rocket erected at the corner of a restaurant. The rocket itself bears the neighborhood's unofficial motto: De Libertas Quirkas, or, Freedom to be Peculiar.

Add to this description a line-up of outdoor summer movies that includes Shaun of the Dead, Edward Scissorhands and Mamma Mia, and I think we can safely say that the style we're looking at here is high camp, with all the "perversely sophisticated appeal" that Merriam-Webster allows. Irony is the tone du jour, and in case the bohemian surface has taken you in, I should add that Google, Adobe and the world headquarters of Getty Images are all located in Fremont. Indeed, in typical Fremont style, that area has been promptly dubbed the Silicon Canal.

George Pocock: Gold Standard

Portage Bay is a privileged location when it comes to rowing. On one side is the University of Washington, which has had an enviable reputation on the water since the 1920s. Earlier this month, for example, the UW team swept through the 107th American Intercollegiate Rowing Association's championship regatta, claiming gold for the men's varsity eight, the second varsity eight, the freshman eight and the open four, and silver for the varsity four. On the other side, just by the University Bridge, is the Pocock Rowing Center, named after Seattle-based boatbuilding legend George Pocock.

Pocock was born in England in 1891, son of Eton College's head boatbuilder. He began sculling when he was 12, won his first race at 15, and shortly thereafter signed on as an apprentice in his father's boatbuilding shop to learn the trade. He continued racing on the Thames, however, and won the prestigious London Bridge to Chelsea race in 1910. His prize was £50, and with this he and his brother headed west, booking passage on a cattle boat bound for Canada, and arriving in Vancouver in 1911 with $20 to their name, determined to make a career out of building racing shells.

It took a few years. Pocock's first break came when Hiram Conibear, the UW coach, rowed over to his workshop to commission an eight-man shell. Moving to Seattle to carry out the commission was the first step, but it was not enough to live on, and so Pocock began working for a Mr. William Boeing, building float-plane pontoons. It was not until 1922 that he returned to work for the university. The very next year, the as-yet-unknown UW racing team competed in the Intercollegiate Rowing Association's championship regatta, and won -- in a Pocock shell.

Over the next 50 years, Pocock built racing shells for almost every competing college in America, and several abroad, keeping his prices low even as his name grew, so that high schools and small colleges could continue to afford them. Olympic golds for eights were won in Pocock shells in 1924, '28, '32, '36, '48, '52 and '58. Pocock's son gradually took over the shop in the 1960s, moving from cedar shells towards fiberglass and carbon fiber, and managing a reputation that kept the shop overwhelmed with orders. Today, Pocock Racing Shells, Inc., is located in Everett, owned by the Pococks' long-time friend Bill Tytus. It is still the industry leader.

Pocock's story is as much about talent and craftsmanship as about the storied rewards of building a new life in the New World. Pocock grew up being told to aim for perfection, and worked his whole life on streamlining and improving racing-shell designs. Even today, the Pocock shell is considered the Gold Standard against which all others are measured.

In a recent (and excellent) Seattle Times article on the peculiar attractiveness of rowing as a sport, Steve Kelley quotes the current UW racing coach, Michael Callahan. Rather than deifying the secrets of rowing, or describing the search for the ideal split time, Callahan takes an angle that surely recalls Pocock's own. "I think our sport is a little like architecture," he says, "where it's art and it's also engineering."

The Smith Tower

The Smith Tower boasts the title of Oldest Skyscraper in Seattle. When it first opened, in 1914, it was also one of the tallest buildings in the country outside of New York. It was built with steel from Pennsylvania and white terracotta from California, with bronze window frames, and Alaskan marble and Mexican onyx in its high-speed elevators. If you want to impress your customers, the reasoning went, build an office building they won't forget.

This reasoning was par for the course in New York at the turn of the century. The Singer Sewing Machine skyscraper, finished in 1908, was 612 feet tall. The Metropolitan Life Insurance skyscraper, completed in 1909, reached 675 feet. The F.W. Woolworth skyscraper, which took until 1913, took first prize at 792 feet. Practically speaking, it wasn't necessary. But as an expression of sheer virility and commercial clout such height was priceless.

The story of the Smith Tower, which stands 462 feet high, is rather more endearing. Lyman Cornelius Smith, of Smith & Wesson firearms and Smith Corona typewriters, visited Seattle in 1909, returning to New York with sensible plans for a 14-story structure. On his return, however, he discovered that his son Burns Lyman Smith had been studying skyscrapers, and was determined they should stop at no less than a 21-story building topped with a 20-story tower.

The combined enthusiasm of wife and son was quite sufficient to convince Smith senior. Their architects, Gaggin & Gaggin, were in due course presented with plans for a 42-story skyscraper topped with a gothic pyramid modeled on the Metropolitan Life Insurance building in New York, itself modeled on the Campanile San Marco in Venice. The fact that neither Smiths nor Gaggins had ever built anything taller than five stories was no deterrence; on the contrary, Burns modestly vowed that it would be finished "as finely as money and brains know how."

When the Smith Tower eventually opened, two years behind schedule, it did not quite reach the soaring 522-foot height and 42 stories that Burns had promised. At 462 feet, it had 36 floors, 33 of which were rentable office space, plus a caretaker's apartment, oriental function room with observation deck, and pyramid. It was proudly compared to the 476-foot Great Pyramid of Giza, and its neoclassical styling and gleaming white terracotta made it a striking building - albeit slightly oddly proportioned, resembling a "long-necked giraffe" for Seattle design critic John Pastier. More enthusiastic than refined, perhaps; but undoubtedly charismatic.

Houseboats

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in.

This vision of water-haunted New Yorkers, standing in their thousands "like silent sentinels" around Manhattan, is from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. It picks up on a desire that seems apposite to Seattle: here, people don't just stand at the edge of the land, they build houses to float at the edge of the water.

And not just a few. Houseboats began to appear here in 1905, and by the Depression of the 1930s there were over 2000 on Lake Union and Portage Bay. These were floating shacks with wood stoves where you could live for next to nothing, homes for the down and out. As the decades passed they became fully fledged bohemian communities, then as moorage fees rose and city laws tightened they became more exclusive enclaves. Today, there are about 500 houseboats in Seattle, mostly owned by professionals.

It's not hard to see why houseboats have become desirable. Their beautiful views, urban location and characterful community would be enough. But nothing compares to the sheer delight of living at the "extremest limit of the land." Here, houseboats stretch out into the lake five or six deep, with narrow canals between them, or cluster around miniature harbors. Amerigo Vespucci was so taken by the profusion of houses on stilts on the shore of Lake Maracaibo in South America that he named the region Venezuela, or "little Venice." It's an apt description of this part of Seattle, too.

Ithaka

I was flabbergasted when I first found out that I was living near a rain forest.

The Olympic Peninsula, whose mountaintops can be seen from Seattle, is home to the Hoh, Queets and Quinault temperate rain forests. Larger than the state of Massachusetts, the peninsula is almost entirely a National Park and protected wilderness area. The combination of high rainfall and a mild climate produces trees wreathed in mosses and epiphytes. They are mainly conifers, photosynthesizing enthusiastically all year round, with a thriving green understory, and ferns and shrubs below that.

They are also old-growth forests. Not only have they grown untouched for hundreds of years, but trees of all ages exist side by side. Mature trees form a multi-layered canopy; when one dies, light reaches down to encourage younger understory trees; and the dead logs that fall provide nursing ground for seedlings.

Actor Alexandra Hedison, of L-Word fame, is also (you may be surprised to hear) a fine art photographer. She recently staged an exhibition of large-format photographs of these Olympic trees, which she showed in Los Angeles, New York and London. "What seemed so overwhelming to me was the continuous life of the forest, the constant, rain-watered regeneration," she told The New Yorker. "My life was the only finite presence."

She entitled the exhibit Ithaka, after the poem by C.P. Cavafy. Intrigued, I looked it up. It's a meditation on the importance of journey, not just destination, inspired by Odysseus's adventure-filled return from Troy. It's a famous poem, and it gives good advice, but is not particularly profound (Miley Cyrus's latest single makes the same point, minus the Greek mythology). Hedison is making a much more interesting statement than that. Her photographs of trees are imagined as portraits. She encourages you to read them as personalities, subject to the passage of time, interdependent and alive.

Old-growth forest is perpetually under threat from the logging industry, and her exhibition has come at an opportune moment, as environmental concerns move from the margin to the mainstream. She is not anthropomorphizing these trees - far from it. But she is presenting them as worthy of the comparison with us, and deserving of our attention. And that's surely a good start.

Et in Arcadia Ego

Located on an outcrop of land at the north end of Lake Union, Gasworks Park is famous for stunning views across the lake to downtown, pleasant grassy slopes, and an excellent kite-flying hill. Oh yes, and on one side, an ancient rusting retired gasworks.

The controversy over whether this area should become industrial heartland for the city or a green park and viewpoint began in 1903. But the Seattle Gas Light Company had already begun buying plots of land, and would not be dissuaded. The gasworks produced gas first from coal, and then, from 1937 onwards, from oil. The plant was in operation from 1906 until 1956, when Seattle converted to natural gas.

In 1962 the City of Seattle began purchasing the abandoned gasworks, rejecting development proposals in favor of creating a park. Richard Haag, who was hired as designer, was eager to preserve the ruins of the gasworks for their "historic, esthetic and utilitarian value."

I'm not convinced that this strange, fenced-off sculptural presence is utilitarian exactly, but in terms of historic preservation I think Haag made the right call. Of 1,400 gasworks that were once in operation in the United States, this is the only one still intact. Grimly rusty, it's both a monument to industrial progress and a cautionary tale of environmental ignorance: before the park could be opened to the public, extensive bioremediation was required to deal with the contaminated soil, groundwater and lake sediment.

And when it comes to aesthetics, I find myself again agreeing, because I'm intrigued by Haag's challenge to the conventional beauty of urban park spaces. When it was opened in 1973, Paul Goldberger wrote in the New York Times that "The complex array of towers, tanks and pipes of the gasworks forms a powerful industrial still life." If it is an industrial still life, it's one descended rather from the muckraker honesty of Thomas Anshutz or the Ash Can School than the soaring homages to progress of Modernist artists.

In Edmund Spencer's The Shepheardes Calendar, published in 1579, the pastoral idyll is powerful rather than cloying precisely because it is always being threatened. And a common trope of pastoral art is the memento mori, as in Nicolas Poussin's painting Et in Arcadia Ego.
Perhaps the unlikely aesthetic appeal of the rusting industrial hulk at Gasworks taps into this unease, the power of the skull in the pastoralist's Arcadian landscape.

Smashed Stratocasters

Paul Allen's multimillion-dollar homage to Jimi Hendrix, the Experience Music Project, is perched right next to the space needle. It was designed by Frank O. Gehry, architect of the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, and opened as a popular music museum in 2000. High-tech interactive exhibits inside tell the story of rock 'n' roll, from its roots to its legends to its influences on later genres. There's also an exhibit on the emergence of grunge in Seattle in the '90s. The problem is that although the building is beloved by tourists, everyone else finds it hideous.

"Frank Gehry has created some wonderful buildings," wrote Jonathan Raban in The Independent, "but his Seattle effort, the Experience Music Project, is not one of them."

New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp described the EMP as resembling "something that crawled out of the sea, rolled over, and died." Further comparisons have been made to an airplane wreck, open-heart surgery gone wrong, a dumped-over garbage can and "something found under the couch at a college fraternity house."

The comparison to a smashed Stratocaster, made by The Seattle Weekly, comes the closest to Gehry's intentions. He had in fact bought and smashed several in the name of inspiration while designing the building.

Unfortunately, the edgy rock 'n' roll stance Gehry attempted to emulate by inflicting violence on electric guitars has been somewhat undermined by the EMP's widely accepted status as blobitecture. This architectural movement favors bulging, organic, amoeba-like shapes. Another example of blobitecture is The Eden Project--which, unlike the EMP, does not suffer from the comparison to amoebae.

Judging, however, from the imaginative range of invectives launched at the EMP, I shall conclude with a positive surmise: that despised as it is, Seattleites actually quite enjoy the pastime of insulting it.

Urban Decay Chic, West Coast Style

I was struck by a photo in a friend's blog recently, depicting what he rather nicely terms urban decay chic. It's instantly recognizable, and prompted from me an affectionate sigh: Ah, Europe! Here, in response, is an example of artistic urban decay on the West Coast.

The quotation comes from poet and political activist John Trudell. He was chairman of the American Indian Movement for most of the 70s, and in the 80s began recording his poetry to Native music. These lyrics come from his 2002 album Bone Days, produced by none other than Angelina Jolie. The full excerpt runs as follows:

Crazy Horse
We hear what you say.
One earth, one mother.
One does not sell the earth
The people walk upon.
We are the land.
How do we sell our mother?
How do we sell the stars?
How do we sell the earth?

Crazy Horse was a respected Oglala Lakota war leader who fought against the U.S. in the Battle of Little Bighorn, 1876. His actions served as inspiration for Trudell, although these are not words Crazy Horse would have spoken - after all, he spoke Lakota. But Trudell was not alone in ventriloquising this viewpoint. Consider Ted Perry's famous reimagining of Chief Seattle's speech from 1854:

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us.
If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?
Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.

Ironically, although Perry wrote this for a film in 1972, it has been widely accepted as the 'original.' Since Seattle spoke in Lushootseed, and had his words translated first into Chinook and then into Victorian English from the notes of a Dr. Henry Smith who was present, the notion of 'original' is compromised to begin with. There are some pretty thorny problems of appropriation, mistranslation, and romanticization here, but what fascinates me is how this stance, however much of a construct it is, has entered the collective imagination. To the point where it's been graffitied on a street-side wall on Roosevelt Way.

I defy you to find graffiti in Europe that makes a guilt-ridden plea for environmental rights through the words - however apocryphal - of the displaced indigenous peoples. This is urban decay chic, west coast style.

On Staircases

It's not quite Montmartre, but this staircase on the south side of Queen Anne hill does a pretty good impression of those leaf-shadowed flights of steps in Paris. Moreover, this is not the only such stair on the hill: according to local architect-turned-cartographer Thomas Horton there are no less than 120 in this one neighborhood.

They are often a find, these steps: hidden from view until you stumble across them, they are shortcuts with breathtaking views of Puget Sound and the downtown skyscrapers. In the early 1900s there were cable cars to transport the young city's elite up to their mansions on the hill. Now you have no choice (if you have no car) but to get out of breath.

Queen Anne is not the only Seattle neighborhood on a hill. The fact that there are 550 public staircases should indicate that this is a very hilly place to live. It should also indicate that there are a lot more intriguing corners than the grid-system street layout would suggest.

Recently, descending a little-used staircase on the west side of Capitol Hill, I discovered a semi-wild public garden I had had no idea existed. Following what appeared to be a rabbit trail through the trees, I came across this:

Sometimes the unmapped, off-staircase, rabbit-trail discoveries are the best.

Googie Icon: The Space Needle

Welcome to 1962. The Space Race is on, futurism is in, and Seattle is preparing to host the World's Fair. The design of the tower that's going to wow 2.3 million visitors has finally been decided. It will be a compromise between Edward Carlson's sketch - on the back of a napkin - of a giant balloon tethered to the ground, and John Graham's architectural drawing of a flying saucer.

I kid you not.

Today, of course, it's the most iconic structure in Seattle. The Space Needle is 605 feet high, weighs 9,550 tons, and is built to withstand 200 mph winds and earthquakes registering 9.5 on the Richter scale. Part of the trick to this is that there's an awful lot of concrete and steel out of sight underneath it: the Needle's center of gravity is only five feet above the ground.

While it did not retain its proud title of Tallest Structure West of the Mississippi for long, as a sixties style icon it's as great as ever. It falls under the banner of Googie architecture, which peaked in the fifties in southern California - think motels and gas stations with space-age-y geometric or curvaceous designs. You can call it doo-wop, if you prefer. Either way, what was futuristic at the time is now... retro-futuristic.

Just don't ask me to explain the chronology of that.

Welcome!

Seattle: city of coffee and Kurt Cobain, famous for sleeplessness and a sixties space needle - oh, and a disproportionate degree of rain. Having lived here a while, I think it's high time to communicate a few further things about this city to my friends on the other side of the world, to give a better impression of what it's like here, and to prove that there's more to Seattle than Starbucks and Microsoft.

To give an idea of what I might touch on, and why I like it here, this is a place where the plight of the killer whale pods in Puget Sound makes front page news. Where people really care about what's happening to the spotted owl as old growth forest is destroyed. Where there's a troll under a bridge, a rocket erupting from a house, and an enormous statue of Lenin that someone bought on a whim and has been unable to get rid of, all within a few blocks. Where there's a sailing race called the Duck Dodge, a music museum in what appears to be a crash-landed psychedelically colored spaceship, and a vast number of bookshop-dwelling cats.

This is a city from which, on a clear day, you can see two mountain ranges and a volcano. The city curls between and around two large lakes, a bay, a canal and Puget Sound itself, making it kind of a large-scale west-coast American Venice, if you can imagine such a thing. Its population is famous for having more dogs than children, and for wearing fleece on a semi-constant basis (both facts do indeed seem to be true).

In short, it is wonderfully idiosyncratic, socially and environmentally conscientious and, in many and often unexpected ways, beautiful. I hope I can share some of this with you here.