white with foam

Attentive readers (thanks Mom!) may remember I mentioned a while back the possibility of a photo show going up in a local business. Over the weekend, thanks to Karyn’s discursive problem-solving skillz, we got the last kink ironed out, so the show is up. I’m very pleased with how these photos look; the metallic paper complements some of the designs very well, and others benefit from some happy accidents in Photoshop.

Two frames from “Very Becoming.”

ABOUT THE SHOW
Very Becoming is a look at physical beauty, the act of looking, and the processes of transformation, not merely to gawk or elicit hallelujahs, but to locate and delight in their common trajectories, be they spontaneous, rehearsed, or both.

By ancient fractals does the artichoke, cultivated since Roman times, raise its tender, well-guarded head to the sun. The big, trusting eyes of a baby trigger hindbrain responses which we transfer to inanimate objects to imbue them with that baby’s tenderness. The powders and dyes we apply to approach our most beautiful selves have earthbound roots and ancient application rituals that come from the same subcortical urges.

These photos are printed on Endura metallic paper in a full color gamut, even the black and white ones. Like the subjects, Endura metallic has laminate layers embedded in its core for added depth. It’s the correct substrate for a world to jump off the page, one that wants to be beautiful — or, in a word my mom uses, becoming.

If you’re in Seattle’s International District, stop in at Adore Hair Salon on 8th & Dearborn, in the International Village, across the plaza from ICHS and across 8th from the library and Crawfish King — not only to drink it in, but because co-owners Ai and Yuko deserve a lot of the credit for making this happen — and they deserve the increased traffic, too. Indeed, one aspect of this show is that it’s sort of a test case for expanding on work similar to what’s happening with Storefronts Seattle (they of sleek logo); to wit, it shows how to bring artists and small business owners together in a single community. Why should coffee shops get all the action?

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Ed Schultz, in color commentator capacity at MSNBC, stumbled onto a large truth on election night. He says this new batch of evangelicals wanted the jobs for the power. Not to govern, not to craft and deliberate on legislation that improves the lives of their fellow citizens, not to sacrifice for the greater good, but to consolidate and wield power. If they intend to govern as they’ve campaigned, expect to see a lot more public punishment: hearings on impeaching the president, demonizing brown people and stealing from people on fixed incomes.

My hope is that they get exactly what they seek: drunk on attitude, the House retains the pageantry of governance — the Robert’s Rules, the gavel banging, the hearings and cocktail hours — and abdicates proposing any real legislation, or flails around with a tacit understanding that proposing new laws and voting on them are public demonstrations of party fealty only — you know, the incumbent gridlock they so loudly despise. That way they’ll regain the reputation they earned in the late nineties of a poorly supervised middle school playground, and the grownups go back to leaning heavily on the Senate for sober deliberation and thanking aqua buddha for two new Supreme Court justices. It’s the audacity of coping.

Desaparecidos: The Happiest Place on Earth

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Just a quick note to let everyone know I’m going on vacation. Until November 3rd, you can find me in a little lake house in the state of perpetual doubt. And Karl Rove is discreetly footing the bill. I know this sounds disingenuous coming from an ad guy, but it’s happened before.

I need the time off to figure out what it means that Sharron Angle, whose stances range from paranoid to flat-out wrong, can run neck and neck with the seasoned Harry Reid. Or that we take seriously, for even one second, a candidate who can’t grok basic Constitutional protections. Hell, even this guy thinks he deserves your vote.

Is it a measure of the disconnect between Reid’s public image and his voting record? Is it the fine-tuned craft of dumbing down the public dialogue, the purveyors of which got such a huge bonus earlier this year with the ruling in Citizens United? Or was my dad right when he used to say we need a better man on the street? (Not sure if Dad was familiar with Will Rogers’ aphorism: “a fool and his money are soon elected.”)

I worry we’ll never get to vital, substantive public policies until the screaming stops. Maybe this is why Virginia Thomas’ anonymous donors don’t want the screaming to stop. And now the devil on my shoulder is reminding me that framing every fight as a social issue is an excellent way to encourage people to march down to the polls with a firm grip on the beliefs they already hold. Shut up, Devil!

The trouble is not that we’ve been pandered to so much that we’re incapable of expecting anything but. The trouble is that a constant crisis forces long-term, nuanced ship-of-state decisions underground. It’s as if ending active combat in Iraq or successfully bailing out two major industries or addressing infrastructure needs are subversive acts, when in fact the only thing they subvert is this bass-ackwards What’s-The-Matter-With-Kansas narrative.

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“There is no hiatus between instinct and reason … a rational action is simply an instinctive response which has survived in a struggle with other instinctive responses aroused by a situation; ‘deliberation’ is merely the internecine strife of rival impulses. At bottom, reason and instinct, and life, are one.”
— Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology, 1910

I’ll remember September 2010 for two things. The first is a bizarre cluster of skirmishes I got mixed up in. At Bumbershoot, my friend Tim and I were walking through the crowd, single file, me in front, when I saw a guy in this shirt coming towards us. As we passed, I leaned slightly right, just enough to catch his shoulder with mine. The hit was harder than I expected, but I was ready for it, and he wasn’t. Tim, a few paces back, reported a stunned look on the guy’s face, but everybody kept going, and Bumbershoot crowds being what they are, we simply folded in.

I know the privilege of anonymity for what it is, and I’m neither ashamed nor proud of this behavior. I just did it. My friend Stan said it was utterly out of character of me, and he’s right — not that that matters to the dumbass in the t-shirt.

Seattle Municipal Archives

Then, about a year prior, I made a comment on this picture from the Seattle Municipal Archives’ Flickr stream. I said the girl looked like she’ll have the same face when she’s seventy-four. Sometime last week, that comment — and an even more benign one from another member — were seized upon by a shadowy Flickr member named DustyRoads42. Not content to merely call us out specifically, Dusty took our comments as evidence of society’s very decay. It’s probably because of this that straight out of the gate, before it was even a real flame war, he threatened violence: “A pleasure to lay into these two louts with ‘words,’ but knuckles would be more satisfying, and probably the only real thing that would knock some unused brain cells into activity…”

Now, testify, netiquette advice columnists: is it not appropriate to police things like that aggressively? Yes, there are authorities to turn to, but not without attempting to resolve things within the community first, right? These were my thoughts, coming from an understanding that one says online only what one would say in person, just like the Samurai. So I slashed at him, surgically, using well-placed words, one of which was ‘douchebag:’ precisely the slab of red meat DustyRoads42 was hungry for. I would have done no less had he said that stuff to me in person. (Later, I’d refer to him as a ‘bitter, fragile little coward’ and a ‘stuttering troll.’)

Oh, the bile flowed hard and fast from this guy! Rife with anxiety over traditional yardsticks of status, petrified by the possibility that there could be others, DustyRoads became a regular T. Herman Zweibel, always barely this side of falling to pieces, which led him to such gems as this: “The only action befitting your kind is, you being stuffed in plastic bag and tossed into some landfill to desecrate its cleanliness, (in comparison), with your worthless carcass. Now you can go back to wherever it is you reside, probably Uranus !” Or this, which manages to come full circle and end up complimentary: “In the briefest of words I’d describe your kinky-art appreciations best befitting a carnival side-show at the least, and equally suited for a gay-fest parade of gaudy defiant spectacle, a collection of societal mis-fits, raising hell, ruining an otherwise peaceful day, and visually destroying all references in their surroundings to sanity and civility.”

I know this is a tempest in a teapot. I know I should just thank him and move on. But the whole exchange hurt a little, and I’m struggling to understand it — not to steel up for next time, but to harvest the good and cleanse myself of the bad.

Karma isn’t up to the task of harvesting and cleansing, because in the trenches a self-leveling justice system, as it’s reduced to in these parts, neither creates nor fulfills. It offends agency and perpetuates violence. By such rules, my avenging acts are, to another person, acts that require vengeance. Similarly, sucking it up in a Cold-War MAD model for social interaction assures, mutually, that no one will become their best selves.

I prefer to see these encounters as discreet examples of a working social ecosystem, a network of intricately related personalities in fora that bring disparate voices together. Basically, the waves I make fan out locally, weakening as they go. Dusty similarly makes waves from a lifetime of hurt feelings, and I was right there to catch the brunt of ’em.

There’s a scene towards the climax of Season 2 of “True Blood” where Jason, convinced he’s humanity’s last chance, gets all “Army of Darkness” and goes into Merlott’s shirtless with a chainsaw. He fires it up (on the third try, IIRC) to try to command attention, but nobody cares because they’ve all become hollow, soulless vessels. Like with Dusty, you feel bad for his impotence, but it’s also hilarious.

The most useful lesson, the beam in my eye, is easier to dish out than to take: don’t swing at everything that crosses the plate, but don’t be a pushover, either.

Bumbershoot, by the way, was terrific. I had very few appointments, and lots of time to dilettante around, which I left open for Tim’s sake. I bought a silly book from the McSweeney’s booth. I shook hands with one of my idols. But far and away, the best moment was the Columbian band Aterciopelados. I have one ten-year-old album of theirs, but that day’s performance was great: complex percussion, great melodies and the dynamic, flamboyant Andrea Echeverri up front.

The Vienna Teng Trio was nice, too, but not as the quiet, pretty piano music I thought it would be. The three of them built up hypnotic rhythm loops with guitar, bass, percussion toys, and piano. Late in the set, she allowed someone — longtime fan, I assume — to take the mike and propose to his girlfriend, right there in front of god and everybody. I confess to moistening up a little.

And Bob? Well, sigh, I’m glad I saw him. Here’s the deal, though: the folk-song structure of, for example, “Simple Twist of Fate” doesn’t translate to a full band. It sounds dull and compulsory. He alternated between guitar and Hammond organ, and only rarely sucked a harp; even then, it was just a few carefully placed notes. But my god, that voice. Even the dullest songs sounded great when he started croaking the lyrics. I was hanging on his every phrase.

Oh, and the second thing I’ll remember from this month is that it’s when Joyce Pisnanont, my tireless PR department, introduced me to Ai and Yuko at Adore Hair Salon, who expressed an interest in having me hang some photographs there. It’ll be my biggest splash-out since Café Besalu in 2008, but with a more farsighted, less documentary feel. God willing and the creek don’t rise, it should be up be early November.

Tags:   Bumbershoot · modern maturity · Seattle Municipal ArchivesNo Comments.

Katie Kadwell speaks to the Doveworld people much more kindly than I did. Even if her heartfelt post changes no minds, she still makes a point that bears repeating: that anger and acts born from anger are nothing but destructive. And it turns out they don’t even feel good.

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