|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
---
---
High resolutionBelltown images on our Flickr page! Find the Belltown Messenger at these fine establishments: Zeitgeist Coffee, Elliott Bay Books, Uptown Espresso @ Olympic Sculpture Park, Uptown Espresso @ 4th and Cedar, Buffalo Deli, Austin Bell Building Starbucks, Marco's Supper Club, Seattle Cellars, News box @ Cinerama, Rendezvous, Golden Singha, Five Point Laundromat, Mama's, Lava Lounge, Shorty's, Cafe Casbah, Dan's Belltown Grocery, Moore Hotel, US Bank, Bauhaus, Wall of Sound, Hot Mama's Pizza - The Messenger is distributed on the first of every month to over 88 Seattle locations, including most Belltown condos. |
misc
But What if We're Not Doomed? by Clark Humphrey 
Rite Aid - all sales final. DESPITE WHAT YOU MAY HEAR in certain paid political announcements, we know who the true original Mavericks are—James Garner and Jack Kelly. OUR PAL DAVID NEIWERT has done his own Sarah Palin research, direct from Alaska. You can read it all at his site, Orcinus (dneiwert.blogspot.com). It confirms just about the worst you’ve heard about her. (If you’d like a more philosophical stance, ex-Seattle cultural theorist Steven Shaviro muses on Palin’s “paradoxical essence” as a far-right foot soldier in June Cleaver guise, at shaviro.com/Blog/?p=669.) A FOOD DELIVERY TRUCK tipped over on a Tacoma highway in mid-October, spilling what the P-I reported as “45,000 pounds of chocolate, ice cream, deli meats, and hot dogs.” Mmm, the four great tastes that taste great together. WITH THE BIG NEWS of Washington Mutual Bank’s sale to JPMorgan Chase, another local end-of-an-era moment has received less attention. It’s the closure of the Rite Aid Pharmacy at Fourth and Pike in downtown Seattle, on the ground floor of the Joshua Green Building.  The store first opened in 1947 as the original location of Pay ‘n Save Drugs, founded by local businessman/philanthropist Monte Bean. Pay ‘n Save eventually grew to some 150 stores in five states; while the Bean family’s “Family of Stores” grew to encompass Ernst Hardware, Lamonts Apparel, Schuck’s Auto Supply, and more.Pay ‘n Save Corp. was taken over by New York investors in 1984. Nine years and two buyouts later, the remaining Pay ‘n Save locations became Payless Drug branches. Five years after that, Rite Aid acquired them. Through all these changes, and while downtown’s fortunes ebbed and flowed, the Fourth and Pike store survived and thrived. This past summer, the Green Building’s owners announced a massive remodeling. The changes included the displacement of its other street-level tenant, Carroll’s Jewelers. Rite Aid management still hoped to get a lease renewal. The store received its requisite stock of Halloween candy and costumes. But the building’s owners decided in mid-September to divide the space into several smaller storefronts. Rite Aid’s pharmacy counter immediately closed Sept. 16; prescriptions were transferred to its Belltown store. The store’s other merchandise was liquidated through October. H’WEEN COSTUMES I’D LIKE TO SEE: I write this item most years. This year, my first impulse was to simply call for anything but Palin (or Joe the Plumber). But there are other alternate suggestions: Mad Men’s retro-swank dudes and dudettes. Keith and Rachel. Rachel and Pat. Darcy Burner’s “</WAR>” T-shirt. Wall-E. A ruined stockbroker. The young Kirk and Spock. The geezer Indiana Jones. And kind reader Eric Scharf suggests, “You gotta give props to anyone industrious enough to fabricate a giant acorn costume.” ELECTION SPECIAL: Due to the vagaries of newsprint periodical publishing (a threatened but still noble industry), this is being written before the big humungous election, but most of you will read it afterwards. Thus, I cannot exhort you all to get out and exercise your citizenship (or, thanks to vote-by-mail, stay inside and exercise your citizenship). Nor can I offer up expert analysis of what will surely be the fantastic and history-making results. What I can give you are some verbal snapshots of the tense pre-election weeks: - The sprawling beehive of activity that is King County Elections, in an otherwise quiet strip-mall and car-lot district just east of the former Longacres site, where I’ve worked as a temp this past month. The place was especially exciting on the last day of in-person voter registration, when the line snaked outside the lobby and deep into the parking lot. - The reduction of the once-mighty right-wing propaganda machine into ever increasingly-shrill and decreasingly-sane appeals to naked fear and bigotry. - The satire industry’s ease at mocking the McCain campaign’s crash and burn, combined with its collective inability to find anything to mock about Barack Obama. (That infamous New Yorker cover spoofed the right’s fictionalized Obama, which had already become absurd.) Bill Maher said it best when he pleaded with Obama to reveal at least one slight aspect of imperfection. (Fret not, Bill: His flaws will appear soon enough.) - A tearful late-night phone call I took from a disillusioned Obama supporter. She was fearful that her year of activism and fundraising was all for naught, just because Obama had supported the Wall Street bailout. I tried to console her that bigtime politics has always been a realm of compromise and deals, but it’s far better to have a politician who sometimes betrays his higher ideals than one who doesn’t have any. - The various fearful “we’re doomed” cries and sobs in the last weeks, with decreasing relation to the polling trends or the early-voting statistics. These desperate progressives absolutely know the Bushies will steal another election, no matter how improbable. Apocalyptic dread has been part of the American psyche, particularly the left-O-center American psyche, since before I was born. The Bomb was gonna doom us all; then it was the energy crisis; then it was inflation; then it was the Nixon junta. Since then we’ve feared nuclear meltdown, expensive oil, cheap oil, peak oil, the New World Order, Y2K, and the end of the Mayan calendar. But what if we’re not doomed? What if every Bush-junta attempt to destroy democracy from within proves futile? What if we win? In the immortal words of Robert Redford in The Candidate, “What do we do now?” |
Thanks to our print edition advertisers this month: Thornton Place, Spa Hop, Moira Holley, Belltown Barber, Rico McPherson, Exeter House, Mark K. Plunkett, Bayview, belltown.org, OptimEyes, ACT Theatre, Shuttle Express, Museum of Flight, Oh Chocolate, Spur, Lucky Palate, Shallots, Antioch, Cedar Spa, Belltown Physical Therapy, Second and Vine Dental, Belltown Spine & Wellness, Gray Line Seattle, Fat City German Car Belltown Links Belltown.org - Belltown Business Directory Belltowner.com | DowntownDispatch.com Belltown Business Association | Bus Routes Olympic Sculpture Park | Belltown Restaurants Belltown Messenger RSS FEED | 
(subscribe here)
|
|
|
|
|
|
© 2008 Belltown Messenger