Hello, citizens of the Slog. Please forgive my lazy Slog habits both this week and next as I'm on vacation, visiting my dude in NYC, Amtraking to Virginia to see my family for Xmas, and determined to bask in experiences I am not compelled to immediately summarize with hypertext.

Nevertheless, I'll toss up virtual postcards when I see noteworthy shit—like the musical of Grey Gardens, based on the cult-classic Maysles brothers' documentary, now running on Broadway. As anyone who's seen the movie can tell you, the idea of a Grey Gardens musical is spooky but far from hopeless. When your source material is 90 minutes of film following a pair of delusional shut-ins with fascinating and tragic backstories as they babble at each other and the camera, your musical better damn well be weird, and Grey Gardens: The Musical isn't weird enough.

Continue reading "Grey Gardens: The Good, the Bad, and the Courtney" »

Overheard outside our offices:

Two twentysomething hipsters were walking by to the Value Village next door. The woman saw our news box and said: "The new Stranger? Shit. it's Wednesday already? I was supposed to call Jason today."

The bagels? Chewier. The Jews? Jewier.

Perhaps it's too soon after the whole Airport Menorah vs. Airport Christmas Trees smackdown for this post—or the Inclusion vs. Exclusion Smackdown, as I should probably call it—but the sentiment is sincere. Growing up in an Irish/Jewish neighborhood in Chicago (rapidly transitioning at the time to Mexican/Jewish/Irish), one of the things I enjoy about getting away from pasty-white Seattle—besides rapid transit, of course—is the religious and ethnic diversity you encounter in other big cities. Mmm... diversity... good. We give it a lot of lip service in Seattle because we have so little of it. And then when we're asked to walk the talk, as the Port was, we somehow manage to screw it up royally.

And, yes, I know that not all of New York's Jews are as Jewtastic as this guy and his traveling companions, thanks, just as I know that not all fags are screaming fairies. But I dig this guy and his hat—just like I dig screaming fairies.

Look at that—gridlock! At 3 pm, in New York City. All those brake lights! Cars, taxis, buses, trucks—and no one's moving, no one's going anywhere fast. But what's missing from this picture?

Spineless politicians. Specifically the kind of spineless politician inclined to tell drivers that Something Must Be Done about their predicament. We do that in Seattle—and other cities with crappy public transit, cities that Seattle should be ashamed to associate with, cities like Dallas and Phoenix and Los Angeles. No politician in New York would promise new roads (they can't—no where to put 'em), or timed lights (they're already timed), or any other angry-motorist-mollifying lie. If you don't want to sit in traffic in New York, politicians tell you to take the subway. Or commuter rail. Or walk (don't laugh—it's how most people get around here). The message? You have options. No one has to sit in traffic—in fact, you're pretty much regarded as a borderline retard if you choose to sit in traffic.

But if you must drive, well, that's your choice. But no one is going to listen to you complain, no one is going to have any sympathy for your dumbfuckass. Take the subway, dope, it's faster.

In Seattle we don't have options. Politicians can't brush off drivers and tell them to take, oh, the subway (that we never built) or the monorail (that we could really have used during the years we'll be without a viaduct, regardless of what we build in its place). Hell, they can't even tell people to walk—not in a city with neighborhoods that still lack sidewalks.

Yes, we're building light rail. We're going to need lots more of it—like they're doing in Denver—and we're going to need to make sure that any additional light-rail lines are grade-seperated, like a subway or a monorail, so that light-rail trains aren't stuck in traffic behind cars and buses and taxis and trucks. People here take the subway for two reasons: the stick that is stuck-in-traffic gridlock and the carrot that is on-the-subway speed.