Books: Seattle Time Capsules

 Seattleness: A Cultural Atlas, by Terra Hatfield, Jenny Kempson, and Natalie Ross, Sasquatch Press (at that time part of Penguin Random House), 2018

Filmlandia! by David Schmader, Sasquatch Books (at the time part of Penguin Random House, but soon to be sold toe Blue Star Press and given its freedom), 2023 

Art In Seattle's Public Spaces by James Rupp and Miguel Edwards, University of Washington Press, 2018

Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle's Topography by David B Williams, University of Washington Press 2015

The Mushroom Hunters by Langdon Cook, Ballantine Books, 2013 (paperback 2023)

Seattle Noir edited by Curt Colbert, Akashic Books, 2009

Provenance: Various. I believe Seattleness and Art in Seattle's Public Spaces were gifts from the Lovely Bride (Seattleness has a Half-Price Books sticker on it). I found Too High and Too Steep at the Elliot Bay Bookstore when it was in Pioneer Square, The Mushroom Hunters was recommended by colleague Wolfgang Baur, and when I couldn't find it locally, ordered it from Amazon. Seattle Noir was a whim purchase at Barnes & Nobles when I was looking for something else, but it was shelved face-outward and caught my eye. I have no memory of where I found Filmlandia! - it just showed up one day and refused to leave until I read it. 

The Reviews: Books are times capsules. They can't help it. As soon as the last word is written, the final change is made, and the switch thrown and the electricity pumped into the presses, they are frozen in amber. They can be revised, they can be rewritten, but the sheer physicality of the book gives it permanence that no computer file can match. Historical books are trapped not only by their subject matter, but also that they represent the thinking of their times. Even those that want to be current (in PARTICULAR those that want to be current) are stopped at the point when they are finished. 

Anyway,

I've lived in Seattle (OK, a suburb of Seattle) for longer than I've lived anywhere else. I've got my 25-year chip, which allows me to complain about new people moving into the state. But I still have that newcomer's vibe of interest in the area, and picking up what I may have missed before I got here. So I've been accumulating books about Seattle, not out of a passion, but just finding them along the way.

So here are some books about my current home town:

Seattleness: A Cultural Atlas is an infographic book, in that it takes stuff about Seattle and its history and presents it in a variety of graphics - charts, maps, and tables. Some of them are cool. Some of them are obscure, some of them are historical, some of them are time capsules in that they are no longer applicable (listing of pinball parlors in Seattle, most of which are gone).

The infographics are good-looking, but are often more graphic than informative, and you have to do a little digging to understand what they are saying. But, it is immensely browsable, and worth keeping around, even as it slowly moves into the past. 

(They do hit on one subject that always irritated me - they talk for several pages about Shadowrun's Seattle. In the Shadowrun future, a virus transformed a large part of the population into orcs, elves, and dwarves. The orcs took over the Underground. The problem is, the REAL Underground (and Seattle has one), is located beneath Pioneer Square (created when they raised the streets), and FASA put a corporate pyramid on top of it. That's a nit, but in its defense I will point out that FASA, Shadowrun's publisher, was based in Chicago at the time.)

Filmlandia! A Movie Lover's Guide to the Films and Television of Seattle, Portland, and the Great Northwest. has a subtitle that pretty much describes it in full. It is a collection of short bits about productions filmed and/or set in Seattle area and the greater PNW.  Twin Peaks. Northern Exposure. Frasier (though only for one episode), Grey's Anatomy, An Officer and a Gentleman, 10 Things I Hate About You. Even the risible McQ in which John Wayne gets in a car chase up I-5 to South Lake Union, and there's no traffic. David Schmader was a columnist for The Stranger back in the day and does a good job. Yep, with all that old movie lore, it's a time capsule.

Art In Seattle's Public Spaces. Seattle is a land of public art. You're walking along, minding your own business, turn a corner, and BOOM! there's a mural or a statue or an installation right in your line of sight. In part that's because Seattle and King County have a 1 Percent for the Arts ordinance, where 1% of the budget for capital project improvement funds go to art. Nice plan, and it often means you get some monumental artwork (one my favorites is parked outside of Safeco Field, a Tsutakawa piece of a baseball glove with a hole in it. For many years, this was appropriate for the Mariners outfield). 

The book deals with public art in Seattle from SoDo (SOuth of DOwntown) to South Lake Union (now called Amazonia). Lots of pictures, ranging from the big orange Calder stabile in the Olympic Sculpture Garden to the Hammering Man outside the SAM to the Ken Griffey Jr statue outside Safeco. It includes plaques, large installations, and internal pieces within the city's buildings. The presentation is broken up by zones, south to north, and while massive, leaves out a lot of public works not in the city center - like Totten's Changing Form on Queen Anne Hill, Noguchi's Black Sun in Volunteer Park, or Beyer's Waiting for the Interurban in Fremont. 

What makes it a time capsule is that, despite the size of some of these art pieces, they do tend to move around. Pieces are sold, moved, reinstalled. The cover displays Typewriter Eraser, Scale X, which is, well, a gigantic typewriter eraser. Owned by the Paul Allen family, the sculpture was at one time near the Sculpture Park, but moved to Seattle Center, outside the MoPop (Museum of Popular Culture), and was then sold at auction after Allen's death. I cannot find out who bought it or where it went from there. There are similar/duplicate pieces in Washington DC and Las Vegas, but that one was Seattle's.

(Should I ever win the lottery (fat chance), I'd like to create a web site listing all of the publicly-viewable art in Greater Seattle, because I think it deserves it).

Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle's Topography. Denizens of the Pacific Northwest have a reputation for being love-the-land tree-hugging environmentalists. But we've engaged in a lot of terraforming over the years, making low places higher and high places lower. This books hits the major ones - filling in the tidal flats south of the city, the Montlake Cut which dropped the level of Lake Washington 8 feet, and in particular the Denny Hill Regrade. 

Back at the turn of the previous century, the area north of Seattle's downtown was a large hill, which blocked future expansion and required too many horses to pull wagons up it. The answer from the city fathers was to use sluicing equipment from the gold rush to wash away the hill, load the dirt into barges, and take it out into the sound to dump it. By the time they finished, trucks had replaced horses as transport, and the area became a site of warehouses and used car lots for many decades until Amazon moved into the neighborhood (my first office at Amazon was on the 5th floor of a building on 6th Avenue, and I figure I was still under the original ground level). Williams, who writes a lot about nature in the Northwest, covers a lot of ground (heh) in describing the monumental early efforts that made Seattle what it is today. 

Seattle Noir is one of a series of local mystery novels offered by Akashic set in various cities, ranging from Baghdad to Baltimore and from Lagos to Las Vegas. It is collection of shorts set in the Seattle area, and it cool from the local angle - you've been in that neighborhood, you know what they're talking about, yeah, that feels like Seattle. And Seattle gives itself over to a lot of noir tropes - its power centers moving behind the scenes, its rain-spattered streets and continual gloom (mostly in October and November) creating a continual twilight broken by the neon of business and late-night lights of office workers. It sometimes feels like a city filmed in black and white. Noir town.

For me, though, noir is defined by people making ethical choices and being punished for it. Bogart loses the girl. MacMurray takes the rap. Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown. What is the morally right choice often goes up against the societal rules. And some of the stories fit that mode. Others, not so much.

Similarly, a lot of good stories are here that are "pure Seattle" - Duwamish tribal rites and Chinatown in the1900s and roadhouses at the city limits. Stories that embrace both our history and our outlook. But there are a few that, while good, you have to to fill in the locational blanks without losing too much of the tale. They're still worth reading, but don't hit the mark as Seattle tales. 

There are a lot of good stories here "The Wrong End of the Gun", "The Taskmasters" and "Blue Sunday" all have that hard-boiled edge. The protagonists are strugglers, the challenges down to earth. Some of the stories could slot in anywhere with a change of street names, but a lot of them feel very Seattlish. Best of that group was "Blood Tide" and "Center of the Universe".

So this is a time capsule in that a lot of the stories take place in that mythical ancient Seattle, But also the way the city has changed from the more recent dotcom boom and conflict between New Seattle and Old, in the evolving conflict since the book was published. It's worth looking at, but not too deeply.

The Mushroom Hunters: A Hidden World of Food, Money and (Mostly Legal) Adventures was written about ten years back, and reflects a Seattle of that age, with a rising food culture situated at the borders of a wilderness. Ten years later, the food culture is more established, and the wilderness pushed back a few more miles. 

The book is about the people in the wild mushroom business - those who go out and harvest them and those who sell them to the restaurants that feature them. These are no white buttons grown in a controlled atmosphere of a former coal mine. These are wilderness mushrooms - morrels and lobsters and chanterelles and white truffles, found in the more undisturbed parts of the PNW, sprouting up at rare times and only under certain conditions. It requires a lot of hiking, watching, getting up at ungodly hours and driving deep into the hinters. It also requires a flexible regard to local laws and trespassing signs. Langdon Cook weaves a tales of the mushrooms and the various people who hunt them out, from bus-loaded tourists on a spree to Vietnamese expats setting up their own claims.

Its only ten years ago, and I can feel the ground has changed. A lot of the restaurants mentioned on the receiving end of the mushroom train are no more, while others remain but have changed ownership. And likely the basics of the mushroom trade have remained, but are buried by more exurban and suburban sprawl. Its a good snapshot of an age and a business out here in Seattle.

And that's it - a whole collection of Seattle books that have popped up. More may show up over time, whether they are our history or are trapped in the amber of the moment that fingers strike the keys and the files are sent to the publishers. All in all, a good collection.

More later, 

The Political Desk: Results

 I often use the term "hanging fire" in reporting these results. The term means a delay between an action and the results of that action. It comes from firearms, in that there is sometimes a delay between pulling the trigger and fully igniting the combustible gunpowder in the bullet itself. The delay in modern firearms may be a second or two, which is enough to cause the barrel to move off target and the shot to miss. In earlier muzzle-loading firearms, the gunpowder behind the cotton wad and solid bullet may not ignite immediately, with the same effect. In even earlier firearms like flintlocks, the gunpowder is on a pan external to the gun, and the powder may ignite with a bright flash but do nothing to fire the weapon. That's where we get the term "flash in a pan". 

And this is how the term applies to voting in Washington State. Ballots here need to be turned in at ballot boxes by 8 PM, or postmarked by midnight of election day in order to be counted. Older and more conservative voters tend to vote early in the process, while younger and more liberal voters tend to vote later. So if the race is close, it may be several days before the smoke clears (hey, another firearms allusion) and we get to see what happened. 

Case in point - Seattle Mayor. Progressive candidate Katie Wilson versus more centrist Bruce Harrell. On election night and the first drop of ballots, Harrell is up 54-46 percent, which in most terms would mean victory. But, late voters tend to skew further to the left. BUT this is an off-year election, and participation is often less than the big-ticket elections. AND there is a greater chance that last-minute mail-ins will not be postmarked in time because they've been gutting the post office (and announced laying off another 30k staffers because, you know, Christmas is such a slow season for the post office). In any event, I think that it will tighten up, and may even be a squeaker, but incumbent Harrell will stay mayor. [Edit - I wrote that paragraph on Wednesday after the election. A week later Katie Wilson not only caught up but passed Bruce Harrell (50-49.5). It may STILL require a machine recount (within 0.5% of total vote) and ultimately depend on verifying challenged ballots and counting late overseas-but-still-postmarked ballots, but it looks like Wilson made up an 8-point early debit to win.]

(And lest we think it that such a comeback was the result of mail-in voting, when I lived in Kenosha County, the initial election results (from Kenosha and Racine) showed huge margins for the Democratic candidates, from the urban vote, and the networks would declare it a win for the more conservative Republicans accounting for when the expected larger rural vote that would show up later. And they would be right.)

But let's look at the ballot at Grubb Street. This is as of Tuesday night, a week after the election.

Proposed Constitutional Amendment: Senate Joint Resolution No. 8201 (Amend the state constitution to let elderly care funding play the stock market as opposed to just investing in bonds): Approved 56-42 statewide. In King County the margin was 71-29.

King County Proposition No. 1 Medic One - Emergency Medical Services Replacement of Existing Levy: Yes 81-19

King County Public Hospital District No. 1 Proposition No. 1 Levy Lid Lift for Health Care Services: Approved 58-42

King County Executive: Girmay Zahilay 54-45.  The first night's count had it closer (50-48), but this was a choice between two good, similar candidates. 

Metropolitan King County Council District No. 5: Stephanie Fain 55-44 (This blog gave Fain the most tepid of recommendations, then her opponent pretty much flamed out with misleading claims and conservative backing.)

City of Kent Council Position No. 2: Satwinder Kaur  62-37.

City of Kent Council Position No. 6: Sharn Shoker 50-49 This blog endorsed her opponent in the primary but switched to Shoker in the general election, Then didn't mention it in the final summary. The management regrets the error. This is another close one, where Andy Song led the first night, then Shoker caught up and passed. So this one was Hanging Fire (see above). Unlikely that this content will come down to a recount, but this was another case of two good candidates.

Kent School District No. 415 Director District No. 4: Teresa Gregory 58-40

Kent School District No. 415 Director District No. 5: Laura Williams 65-34

Total voting in King County ran about 45% of registered voters, with a large percentage being turned in at ballot drops. 

OK, that's it. I'm going back to theatre reviews and talking about games, but I will pop back should anything change.

More later,

Game: All's Well

 The Well by Peter Schaefer, Shoeless Pete Games, 122-page softbound, 2021, Kickstarter

So folks by now know that I regularly post recent game arrivals here at Grubb Street. I buy most of them, either in Brick-and-Mortars or Kickstarter. I read most of them, though some more diligently than others. But I don't consider those mentions as real reviews because I haven't played them, and to give a game a review you really need to see or experience them in play. 

In any event, The Well. I kickstarted this way back, as well as a number of my colleagues on the Saturday Night group. One of my colleagues has done so to the tune that they rated a in-person gaming session with the designer, Peter Schaefer, who is local. So Peter came down from Mercer Island and ran us in a few sessions. And it was really good, and I actually had a personal epiphany involving it.

The Well is a nice, tight little RPG. Its world and purpose are extremely focused. Its mechanics are relatively simple and adaptable. The mechanics exist primarily to serve the world, and the world is an expression of those mechanics. Yeah, that sound pretentious, but that's the best way to explain it.

The world consists of Bastion, a single city, moving eternally down a bottomless shaft. What else is there? Doesn't matter. The city moves ever-downward, digging out new rooms and storehouses on the sides of the shaft, eventually exhausting their resources, and continuing downward into new territory, abandoning the older city behind it/above it. Think of a slug leaving a slime trail, where that trail is the earlier civilizations. They use the previous cityscapes as dumping grounds for trash and burial places for the dead.

OK, but the dead don't stay quiet, as the dead tend to not do. There are humanoid skeletons and zombies roaming the upper reaches, but also spiders which are constructed of boney bits, skull-shaped bats with wings of rotted meat, and piles of ropey, semi-liquified flesh prowling the halls. So adventurers known are gravediggers (that's you guys) pass up through the locked doors to find lost stuff. It's an inversion of the traditional going down into the dungeon to loot ancient civilizations - instead you're going up to loot your own recent past.

Completing a task is simple - roll a d6 against a target number set by the moderator (GM). If you roll a "6", roll again and add that number as well. There are no character stats in the traditional sense, but you can get additional dice to roll for proper tools (Axes, for example, add a +1 die when the action is murder) or specific skills (Mechanics, First Aid, and magic (involving painting runes)). In addition, you can propose a gambit, which is an potential situational penalty you come up with it (I get an extra die to hit my target with an arrow, but I risk running out of arrows would get you an additional dice). Depending the severity of what you offer, you can gain up to three dice. The downside is that if any of the dice you roll show a "1", the bad thing you propose happens. 

Your history and contacts provide springboards for the adventures themselves. There are a lot of factions in Bastion, and at start you have good relations with one of them and less-than-good relations with another. The ones that don't like you can give you grief, but the ones that DO like you can lean on you for jobs, which carry their own perils. 

Peter Schaefer, the designer, led our little group of gravediggers through two adventures over several Saturday nights. The first was to take a group of tourists (well, sensible upper-class citizens) above the city to find an old fountain from a previous age. The fountain had a particularly nasty mass of animated dead tissue called a tangle, and we beat a hasty retreat (I don't think we lost anyone, which was to our credit). The next time we heading up, it was to track down an escaped criminal. Everyone else had contacts to bring her back alive for trial. My group of criminals wanted her dead, and my orders were to bump her off. And I made a hash of it - blowing a couple straightforward opportunities and not taking any gambits in order to improve my odds. In the end she escaped and I was treated as an incompetent by my criminal gang. 

Did I say it had cool art? It has cool
art, by Kurt Komoda

  And my personal epiphany? I don't like playing a bad guy. As a GM, I have little trouble tormenting the players and having NPCs lie or betray them. But as a character, I tend towards the good, and will self-sabotage to get a more accommodating solution. I've done the bad guy thing before in betraying other players, but never really liked it.

 Anyway, the play of the game fits well within short timeframes, like convention games or an evening session or two, but has the potential to spread out into larger campaigns and issues. You can guide your character through the pitfalls of life as a gravedigger and retire, or end up source material for the undeadlies prowling the upper galleries. It is an excellent melding of traditional dungeoning and gritty urban roleplaying. Wilderness need not apply. Good times.

The book itself is very stylish, showing you can do stuff in black and white and still have it come off neat and professional. The interior art is evocative, in particular the monster illustrations.  The cover gets a nod for not being the traditional three people looking heroic on the cover. All-in-all, its an excellent presentation of an excellent game. 

You can get the pdf of the game at Peter's Itchio site, and get a gander at some of the cool art. Worth checking out.

More later,