Maybe the other capital of the 00s are/were the ring suburbs growing like a bloat around the former capital cities. semper sprawl?

One thing that has been really interesting is all the talk about how different political seats will be shifted around here – lots of gossip here about who is going to get the seats of Obama and Rahm, who is going to get the seats of the people who take Obama and Rahm’s seats, etc.

here's the link:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/oukoe_uk_usa_corpses;_ylt=AkgUvrsPnoyI1ePkzutBiTTtiBIF

Ick!

You've never been more wrong, David Wright.

(and the proper term is "grungers")

All those things Seattle took for granted back then - Indie coffee houses, corporate coffee shops, microbrews, Windows, indie rock, online book selling, gay sex advice columnists - none of them ever caught on beyond the Puget Sound.

This accounts for many of its positive, and negative, features.

(Including the view it doesn't have any negative features and it's "being negative" to even think that way and if you argue about it gee, why don't you go back to where you came from if it's so much better there, huh pal?).

It's the capital of nature with a city.

It's the capital of nice neighborhoods and not having any ghetto.

It was the pesto of cities in the 1990s. I believe it will be the pesto of cities again. (Apol. to Jerry S.).

Butit's not a capital of anything.

Good God, it has an art museum with flying cars as the main piece in the entranceway!

http://superstructgame.net/SuperstructView/438

As usual, you've made this far more complicated than it need be. Paris was the capital of the 19th Century. New York was the capital of the 20th Century. Ultimately, Shanghai will be recognized as the capital of the 21st Century.

Ah, Chicago. Fucking love that nasty, brave, clever place.

BWAHAHAHAHA!!! Spoken like someone who's never been to Rainier Beach or Skyway or probably even ever south of I-90.

http://flickr.com/photos/talikf/2582558190/

So please, please, don't write about it.

Write about places that suck or have been abandoned. They're immune to the insult.

And let me add that Chicago was also the world capital in the greater 1910s (ie, @1914-1922). Chicago Renaissance writing got Modernism off to a jump-start, the skyscraper was perfected, and we invented modern organized crime (suck it, Mafioso of the East Coast). Every century or so, the place is the center of everything. About as often as the Cubs win.

Now, get back to work.

Paris was the capitol of the 18TH Century.

LONDON was the capitol of the 19th Century.

NEW YORK was the capitol of the 20th Century.

Chicago is a great, big Midwestern city. It's fun, and its association with Obama will give it a temporary adrenaline boost. Its inferiority complex is well-deserved, though. Chicago is no New York -- not by a long shot.

(1)A grungy blonde guitarist obviously designed to resemble a generic (albeit right-handed) Kurt Cobain
(2)An ostensible latte in a Starbucks-green mug
(3)A piece of "dot-com" stock
(4)An electronic device that appears to be some sort of PDA or giant cell phone.

I lived in Texas in the 1990s and I certainly remember thinking wow, Seattle's an important place all of a sudden. Obviously the 20th century belonged to New York overall, but much of what the world remembers as American 90s culture was brought to you by Seattle (and to an equal or lesser extent, Silicon Valley.)

Chicagoans will be the first to admit that. We're quite proud of that, actually. It's the reason most of us don't live in the NY-centric neighborhoods in the Loop, River North, or has-been Wicker Park.

When you consider all the companies providing the hardware and software and services and compare that to the handful of monolithic companies in the northwest that mostly provided software and services, it isn't even close.

Without Microsoft, the northwest wouldn't have an IT industry, just as without Dell, neither would Austin. You take away one company from SV and there are dozens more to point at.

What the fuck are you talking about? Ever been south of I-90. It's been ghettoized since the redlining of the 60s.

I'm sure you're right. But I was sort of talking about something different from weighing the actual economic contributions of Seattle vs. Silicon Valley, namely the mythology of Seattle within the American imagination (as codified by the admittedly anecdotal little plastic doo-dads manufactured for the Trivial Pursuit 90s edition.) The Bay Area has been important for a long time for lots of reasons, but Seattle didn't really emerge onto the national and international scene until the 1990s, and when it did, the software and "dot-com" businesses were a large component of its identity. It is that cultural momentum, more than the actual dollar-amount contributions, that I think made Seattle a "symbol" for many things that embodied the American mythos of the 1990s.

Oh, and the first sub-heading in Wikipedia's article on "culture of the 1990s" is "Grunge, Generation X, and the 'Alternative' Decade."

The predominant youth culture trends of the 1990s were overwhelmingly influenced by grunge and other music styles closely associated with Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. Like I said, I was a teenager in Texas at the time, and I remember getting the impression from the popular media that Seattle was all the rage.

Dig this

http://www.slate.com/id/2204287/

I think Seattle did play an important role in the 90s and acted as a sort of counter-balance to the "established" east coast. We wore jeans and t-shirts to the office, so our work was different. We were surrounded by nature, so our play was different. During the 90s, Microsoft created a windows and MS Office empire, but they also made IE the dominant browser (and still is to this day), not to mention created Expedia, Slate, and MSN. Google didn't even get it's start until the tail end of that decade and is much more associated with the turn of the century than the 90s. Then there are the dotcoms that were based out of here, including the very successful Amazon which moved far beyond just selling books.

In the 90s, Seattle was where the future lived.

You'd think people who lived on Capitol Hill, particularly those who read Marx, Benjamin, Althusser, and so forth, would know the difference between "capital" and "capitol." Pretty funny.

A capital is a city, typically a government seat, but in this case "capital" is being used in more of a cultural and economic context.