Seattle News

Archive for October, 2009

Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, and that’s scary. Really, what’s spookier — along with all that undistributed candy hanging around the house — than the prospect of sexed-up, partying-down grown-ups with a whole day to plan their festivities and a whole day to recover before Monday morning calls?

It feels like the holiday slips a bit more every year from the fake-bloodied little fingers of grade-school trick-or-treaters. As the New York Times noted the other day, schools are increasingly banning “scary” Halloween outfits and encouraging “positive costumes” like delicious food items or historical figures. Man. We used to have a kid who wore a Richard Nixon mask every year, and that was fun-scary, but probably not the historical figure that Plainville, Ill., school leaders have in mind.

Of course adults can take part in Halloween parties without going all Elvira. The P-I’s Monica Guzman had an entertaining little feature last week on putting together clever costumes on a budget. With 20 bucks and a trip to the thrift store she came up with a believable ’80s rocker chick, a “Star Trek” character, and Princess Leia, among others.

For those who are going out this weekend, the Seattle Times offers a guide to the All Hallows club scene, from “the legitimately morbid (to) the generally debauched.” Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, anyone? The band, playing Saturday at The Josephine in Ballard, “sounds like the inside of a blast furnace,” the Times says.

Maybe, on second thought, a weekend Halloween isn’t such a bad thing. In addition to recovery time for those of us overgrown trick-or-treaters who want to hit the town, there’s the inviting possibility that we won’t have to suffer through the Halloween dress-up day at work. As workplace writer Michelle Goodman, author of The Anti 9-to-5 Guide, notes in her “Nine to Thrive” column this week:

One the plus side, any festivities your department has scheduled (haunted house, costume contest, orange-and-black cake, people bringing in their kids to treat or treat) can provide a nice distraction on an otherwise dull Friday.

On the minus side, if you’re trying to put a pressing project to bed before the weekend so the coming Monday isn’t quite so miserable, you may not appreciate gathering round the jack-o’-lantern with your coworkers in superhero garb, especially if attendance is mandatory.

Watching Michael Jackson’s This Is It was a bittersweet experience. On one hand the film gives a glimpse into what surely would have been one of the biggest concert spectacles in music history and it is one of the best concert films I have seen. On the other I found it difficult to watch rehearsals for what would have been such a spectacular concert knowing that no one will ever see the finished versions of this grand performance.

Culled from 100 hours of rehearsal footage for Jackson’s planned 50-night stand at London’s O2 Arena, This Is It shows MJ primed and ready to “take people places they’ve never been before,” as he states at one point during the film. The concerts were going to serve as both his triumphant comeback and his farewell to performing, and if he was going to end his days on the stage after the 50th night he would have gone out on top. The moment he starts singing “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” during the movie’s opening minutes it is clear his voice was in top shape and he could still execute his dynamite dance moves up until his dying day, which would have made the This Is It concerts well worth every penny paid for admission.

Concertgoers were going to be given 3-D glasses for “Thriller,” which was also set to include a giant mechanical spider that housed a zombified Jackson. During “Billie Jean” MJ was going to swoop over the crowd on a cherry-picker lift. More than 1,000 computer-generated soldiers would have marched along to “They Don’t Care About Us.” The production even included a short intro film for “Smooth Criminal,” where Jackson shoots a Tommy gun at Humphrey Bogart. Every song was going to be its own mini-epic with lavish production, amazing choreography and Jackson at its center. Unfortunately, you’re out of luck if you want to know the stories behind the concepts or learn more about Jackson’s music. You don’t get to hear MJ talk much during the film. His speaking roles are mostly relegated to his singing, although there are some parts of the movie when he talks with his band and dancers. This is the one major blemish on what is otherwise a fitting celluloid eulogy to one of the greatest pop stars of all time, who died June 25 at 50.

Overall, on a scale of Captain Eo to Moonwalker, MJ’s curtain call from the grave falls somewhere between the videos for “Remember The Time” and “Scream.” What does that mean? It means like the two aforementioned videos, This Is It isn’t a forgetful affair but it definitely won’t be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about Michael. There are no iconic moments and you get no insight into Michael Jackson as a person. Instead you get a good feel for Michael Jackson the performer, and millions of adoring fans across the world are left with a good idea of what might have been had The King of Pop been able to end his career with one final moonwalk into the sunset.

Here’s the film’s official trailer.

Michael Jackson’s This Is It opened Wednesday for a two-week run. It is showing at many theaters in the Seattle area.

Below is this week’s “Marketplace Minute,” from American Public Media radio host Bill Radke.

I was down there recently for a “Future of Journalism” conference sponsored by the Oregon chapter of Society for Professional Journalists and held at the Communications School at the University of Oregon.

I checked into a hotel within walking distance of campus the night before, and bumped into a fellow at the elevator who looked a bit like a bigger version of me: heavy and hairy. He asked if I was there for the “superhero” conference. I said no, what’s that? Turns out, the university was also hosting an academic symposium called “Understanding Superheroes,” featuring sessions like “Being and Super-Beings: Existentialism, Temporality, and Eschatology,” “My Best Enemy: The Signifying Super-Villain,” and “Queer Power: Superheroes and Sexualities.” I immediately wished I could switch conferences.

Perhaps that encounter skewed my sense of Eugene, which seems like a nice college town, mostly remembered in Seattle for its export of black-clad anarchists during WTO. But like many college towns, it feels insular. There’s wonderful college architecture and a campus filled with beautiful old trees, there’s the commercial strip filled with college coffeehouses, ethnic eateries, and the Duck Shop. But you get the sense that their concerns are highlighted with different Magic Marker colors.

Over a dinner of Indian food in a restaurant patronized mostly, it seemed, by Arab students, I read through the excellent local alternative newspaper, Eugene Weekly. I understand the skew here: I edited alternative papers myself for nearly 15 years. I also attended Evergreen. Still, driving in from a city talking about viaducts, tunnels, crime, schools, and economic development, Seattle suddenly seemed not so progressive, but rather old-school by comparison, judging by the letters to the editor.

In Seattle, green mayoral candidate Mike McGinn talks about remaking the waterfront and Joe Mallahan talks about his progressive values and being pragmatic, but in Eugene, one letter writer says, elected officials are just fiddling while the planet burns: “If environmentally leaning politicians aren’t provoking deafening shrieks of protest, recall referendums, and death threats, then they are not doing enough to prevent catastrophe.”

And you thought politicians should read polls. But no, it’s the death threats that let ‘em know they’re on track.

Another correspondent agreed that the world is run by “sociopaths.”

Yet another letter concerned an article critical of the Tasing of a protester who sprayed fake pesticide at motorists.

Just another week in ELF-land, perhaps.

Another letter concerned a logger whose truck was broken down, and he threw a fit when he couldn’t get help by cell phone, but apparently didn’t think to walk to nearby homes to look for help. Reminding readers of a world before iPhones, Blackberries, and cell phones, the letter writer advised that actual human interaction is an option, and that readers should “turn off, tune in, and drop in.”

A worthy message, not just for those who text while driving, but what about those Northwest pilots who missed Minneapolis by playing with their laptops?

Running right by Eugene is a major federal highway, I-5, built like the entire interstate system as part of an Eisenhower-era national defense project, packed with high-speed, fossil fuel-burning cars and trucks. It contrasts with Eugene’s quiet streets and bike lanes. On this weekend, many from the the University of Oregon had left the “Future of Journalism” and the “Understanding Superheros” conferences behind to drive north and watch their Ducks stomp on the University of Washington’s Huskies football team. Better to be beaten at football then have ELFers burn down UW buildings.

The freeway and football might have been a refreshing break from the cloistered progresso-anarchism of Eugene for some, but the greeting of the outside world wasn’t entirely friendly. Just north of the Nisqually Delta in Washington, a railroad overpass had been repainted in U of O colors. “Fuck the Ducks” is said in giant letters.

Could have been painted by Bill O’Reilly himself.

The Oct. 30, 1938, broadcast of “War of the Worlds” by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre On The Air caused panic around the country, as more than a million people believed they were hearing real news bulletins describing a Martian invasion, rather than a cleverly disguised radio play.

While the infamy of that broadcast lives on worldwide, many people around this area don’t remember that one of the most infamous episodes of public panic happened in the town of Concrete, 90 minutes north of Seattle on SR 20 in Skagit County.

Concrete is a fascinating city for so many reasons. It’s been a hard-luck place as long as I can remember — long before the eponymous concrete plant closed, and years before it was immortalized by the Tobias Wolf book This Boy’s Life and the subsequent film, much of which was shot in Concrete, creating a short-lived renaissance for the little town in the early 1990s.

My family used to camp every year at nearby Baker Lake in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, and no camping trip was complete without a visit to Concrete, to tour its depressed streets and stop at Albert’s Serve-U to buy comic books, candy bars, and other wilderness essentials. Our devotion to Concrete was so great, I remember one August in the early 1970s when my parents even bought me new Keds for first grade from the old Concrete Department Store. Growing older meant no longer camping with my folks, of course, but I still couldn’t stay away from the place. As a college student in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I took friends to Concrete and we poked around the many abandoned buildings, including the headquarters of the concrete plant. We pored over old employee records from the 1930s, and I plucked a calendar from the wall (it read “Morse Hardware Bellingham” and “April 1969”). It was as if a neutron bomb had vaporized all the people and left the whole place — right down to the calendar on the wall — intact.

It was like a bomb of a different sort that hit Concrete during the War of the Worlds broadcast 71 years ago today. On that dark autumn Sunday evening, an ill-timed thunderstorm, transformer explosion and power failure — taking place in the middle of the program as heard on KIRO and KVI — conspired to send Concrete residents running through the streets in panic in spite of a heavy downpour. Owing to the power failing just as listeners heard New York destroyed by aliens (via the facilities of the CBS Radio Network and its affiliated stations, as they used to say), the folks in Concrete can be forgiven for taking the panic a bit more seriously than most.

Just about every book ever written about the “War of the Worlds” broadcast mentions what happened in Concrete, so when I was producing a radio documentary for KBCS-FM back in 2003 for the 65th anniversary of the broadcast, I decided to see if I could find anyone in the little town who’d actually witnessed the tumult.

Several calls to the historical society and the senior center, among other places, led to a lot of dead ends — mainly folks too young to remember the show. I can’t remember how, exactly, but I finally was directed to Albert Frank (the Albert in Albert’s Serve-U, I was pleased to learn) who was then 89 years old. He was more than happy to talk with me.

“We were coming home from Everett,” driving back from an errand with a friend, Frank told me. “We hit into Concrete about the time of that lightning and thunderstorm, and people were kinda wandering around and yellin’ and screamin’ and we couldn’t figure out what was going on.“

Then, Frank said, they saw a woman who was obviously in a state of panic. “Here comes this woman out of the house there, yellin’ that the world was comin’ to an end. She was watchin’ Orson Welles’ movie [sic] in the house, it was on radio and it scared her.”

Frank and his friend tried to help the woman. “So, she come runnin’ out,” he said, “and it was rainin’ so hard she could hardly see where she was goin’. And we tried to stop her and grab her, and finally we got her into the Eagles [Club] and [there] was quite [a lot of] yellin’ and screamin’ yet.”

Beyond his “War of the Worlds” memories, Frank was nostalgic about what a going concern and sizable community Concrete had been in those days. He spoke proudly of the three-mile elevated tramline that brought stone from the quarry to the concrete plant; the hundreds of workers employed there; and the additional impact of the timber industry that was booming at that time. “Oh,” Frank said, “it was a big town.”

In an editorial following the broadcast (and after several days in the media spotlight), the weekly Concrete Herald said, “Our city is taking a lot of kidding this week because of the radio scare Sunday evening. Nationwide newspaper stories, radio comments, and even a dramatized playlet on the air depicted Concrete’s residents in panic when the combined horror of a realistic radio play and the coincidence of a power failure brought hysteria. If folks in other cities and towns also went wild, the local citizens who had to stand the sudden darkness, too, can’t be blamed for exhibiting alarm.”

Meanwhile, the big city Seattle Post-Intelligencer pounced on the chance to knock its ethereal rival medium down a few pegs, with an editorial headlined “Irresponsible Radio,” and boldly pressed into newsprint in black and white:

“If anything were needed to demonstrate both the irresponsibility that is so widespread in broadcasting, and the radio’s inherent shortcomings, the hysteria that followed Sunday’s dramatization of “The War of the Worlds” provided abundant evidence. Centuries ago the lawmakers of every civilized country recognized the lack of dependence that could be placed upon one man’s oral statement and another man’s understanding or misunderstanding and insisted upon the written or printed word for everything of importance. And the advent of radio is today bringing a deeper recognition of how unreliable and — on occasion — how dangerous, the spoken word can be.”

I was in Concrete earlier this year, escaping again from roughing it in the wilds of Baker Lake, this time with my nephews in tow (they wanted to see the “drive under” high school). We stopped by Albert’s Serve-U, of course, where a clerk I inquired of told me that Albert Frank had passed away a year or so ago.

We paid for our comics and candy bars, and then headed down the road to see what remained of downtown Concrete. “Oh,” I told my nephews as they stared out the car windows at the old concrete plant, “it was a big town.”