Kyle MacLachlan and Carrie Brownstein at Seattle Art Fair LIVE!
Posted by The Stranger on Saturday, August 6, 2016

On Saturday afternoon, Seattle Art Fair hosted Carrie Brownstein and Kyle MacLachlan, two Pacific Northwest artists who've continued to make work in this region even after they attained international fame. The Portlandia co-stars sat down to chat about "cultural investment and place-making in the Pacific Northwest."

The conversation ranged from Kyle MacLachlan's days hanging out with Dennis Hopper on the set of Twin Peaks to Carrie Brownstein's assessment of her alma mater Evergreen College's mascot, the Geoduck: "They cannot shoot a basketball or play tennis. But they’re really good at Ultimate Frisbee and Hacky Sack."

You can watch the entire video above, but we want to point you toward one bit from Brownstein about the humility of the Pacific Northwest, and how that often conflicts with the naked ambition of the tech world:

"I find that kind of humility, that sort of humbleness, that kind of aw shucks thing to be endemic, to be very particular to the Pacific Northwest. Not necessarily a lack of ambition, but just a sense that it’s not necessarily appropriate to be braggadocious.

[...]

I think about people who have you know risen, whether it’s Nirvana…it always seems like it sort of was haphazard or accidental or that they were kind of fighting with the very notion of celebrity.

To me it almost seems like the very first real, like, stake in the ground ambition came from tech in Seattle, which perhaps is why it sometimes seems antithetical and can feel sometimes odds with sort of the cultural, like, ethos and pathos here. And I wonder if that’s not why that sometimes that feels…that there’s tension.

Because it is so unabashedly ambitions and the idea of it is so grandiose. And that is definitely not the kind of Pacific Northwest that I came up in.

Or, as MacLachlan put it: "Keep it low, keep it humble, keep it easy."