I was not the only one being hectored by the kids upstairs. On my infrequent days in the office, I shared a cubicle with Kathryn Robinson, an ebullient and brilliant young woman who was energetically chronicling Greater Seattle’s emerging upscale retail and restaurant scene.[56]
On her way in to work every morning, she would stop at an espresso stand in Raison d’Être, a hipper-than-thou restaurant on the ground floor of our building, and buy a latte. The youngsters working the stand would regale her with their visions of future glory. “We’re in a band that’s going to be huge….” She would pat them on the head indulgently and come upstairs. “That Jeff Ament,” she liked to say, “makes the best lattes…but does he have to talk about his band every single morning?”
The late 1980s and early 1990s were incredibly busy years for Robinson. Until then, Seattle had had so few restaurants to be taken seriously that Brewster and his new managing editor, Katherine Koberg, used to sit in meetings every week in a panic because there were no restaurants to review. “Then,” Koberg recalled years later, “there suddenly were ten new restaurants opening every week. It was like it changed overnight.” Robinson, who had grown accustomed to working at leisure for weeks at a time on an occasional story about a new restaurant, store, or trend, now found herself cranking out copy at an almost suicidal pace. She was covering the rapid transformation of downtown Seattle—once a moribund mix of slums, low-rent office buildings and out-of-scale new skyscrapers—into a Scene replete with national retailers (Anne Taylor, Abercrombie and Fitch, Barneys New York, Victoria’s Secret), high-end downtown shopping malls (Westlake Center, Pacific First Centre, that spelling of “Center” being symptomatic of the city’s grander turn toward pretension), and what came to be called “new downtown concept restaurants” (Palomino, Raison d’Être…).
In 1989, Robinson wrote a Weekly cover story highlighting the degree to which the forces of Greater Seattle were winning the battle for control of the city’s destiny. The story, about Starbucks as it was poised to leap from the regional to the national market, was filled with telling details—most of them supplied by a voluble Howard Schultz, who now is Starbucks’ CEO and at the time was the company’s marketing director—signaling the dramatic change both in Starbucks and the national definition of “Seattle.”
When Gordon Bowker moved on from the defunct Seattle Magazine in 1971 to co-found Starbucks with his friends Jerry Baldwin and Zev Siegl, Seattleites interested in good coffee were resigned to driving three hours north, to Vancouver, British Columbia, to buy coffee from Murchie’s, a gourmet coffee and tea shop that enjoyed legendary status in Seattle. Bowker and his partners wanted to build a homegrown Murchie’s. Their first store, on the edge of the Pike Place Market, sold tea, spices, catnip, and dark-roasted coffee beans that brewed a robust, black, thick beverage with a tremendous kick. They learned the technical arcana of roasting coffee—and a great deal of the marketing and mythology around it as well—from Alfred Peet, the Dutch-born Berkeley, California, founder and owner of Peet’s Coffee, where all three apprenticed. Customers entering that first Starbucks store were served by salespeople steeped in coffee lore. Starbucks was as much an evangelist for good coffee as it was a retail operation; customers during the 70s, whether buying beans or ground coffee, often were treated to lectures that made them feel like they should be paying tuition. I took to drinking Starbucks almost immediately—even having it shipped to Ann Arbor during our years in exile—and knew full well what Robinson meant in her piece when she quoted an observer of Starbucks devotees as saying, “They’re not just drinkers, they’re disciples.”
While Starbucks’ three founders were entrepreneurs, they also were Lesser Seattleites, and they had relatively modest aspirations. They wanted to build their business into a regional enterprise that produced something they could be proud of, that would make them a reasonable amount of money, and that would save people the long drive north to Murchie’s. It was a measure of their purity of heart that they named their company after one of Captain Ahab’s crew in Moby Dick, and adopted a company logo—a whimsical, Ivar-worthy drawing of a barebreasted mermaid/siren, done by Seattle designer Terry Heckler—that was more silly than savvy. Moreover, they exerted almost no effort in coddling their customers—they worked hard at making perfect coffee and teaching people how to store and brew it properly. “Starbucks’ whole angle,” one of Robinson’s interviewees said, “has always seemed to be, ‘Are you good enough to drink our coffee?’”
It was not until 1984—two years after they hired Schultz as marketing director—that Starbucks opened its first coffee-by-the-drink outlet, at Fourth and University in downtown Seattle. When the doors opened on its first morning, a line extending around the corner half a block away had already formed. Bowker, for one, was stunned when he heard that news—at that point, he realized, the big-business potential of his company was beyond the scope of his imagination, and certainly beyond the scope of his interest.
By then, the visions of Schultz and the company founders were diverging drastically. Not only was Bowker dubious about serving milk-based coffee beverages, as Schultz insisted on doing, but he and his cofounders had little interest in turning Starbucks into a massive business, as Schultz was obsessed with doing. Schultz had visited Italy in 1983 and been stunned by what he saw there: The country had 200,000 coffee bars—social centers where people gathered, read newspapers, talked, and drank copious amounts of excellent coffee. Milan alone, he noticed, had 1,500. Why not do that in the U.S.?
Starbucks bought Peet’s Coffee in 1984, and Schultz and the company founders went their separate ways two years later. Shultz founded a new company named Il Giornale (The Newspaper), a chain of upscale, high-concept, Italian-style coffee bars. The next year, Bowker left Starbucks to concentrate on a new venture, Redhook Ale,[57] which sought to duplicate the gourmet turn he’d executed in coffee, and Schultz bought Starbucks back with the idea that he would continue his Il Giornale vision under the already-established Starbucks name. He opened the company’s first store outside the Northwest that year, in Chicago, which had long been the city with the most mail-order Starbucks customers. By 1989, there were 38 Starbucks’ outlets—24 in the Puget Sound region, five in Vancouver, and nine in Chicago. And Schultz was on the verge of taking over the country. The specialty-coffee business had grown from $50 million per year in 1983 to $500 million in 1988, and it had barely gotten started. Schultz saw it as a multibillion-dollar business in which Starbucks had an insurmountable head start.
By then, Schultz had reworked the founders’ formula into…well, into as pure a Seattle play as you could get. Customers placed their orders at a counter with a menu board mounted on the wall behind it, then sat in stylish thematic splendor drinking coffee and eating pastries. The first time I walked into a post-Schultz Starbucks, I was so struck by the resemblance to Jose Pepper’s that I was visited with a vision of the meeting in which Schultz, making his case for reinventing Starbucks to the three company founders, was surely describing to them “the coffee position in the beverage-by-the-drink market” and insisting that “people in Seattle are willing to trade up from the traditional coffee experience.”
With his adult fast-coffee concept refined enough for national expansion, Schultz knew he also had a spiritual ace in the hole for marketing it: Seattle. He had seen how Nordstrom invoked the city’s name constantly in its recent, tremendously successful national expansion. The Nordstroms had made the Seattle of the country’s imagination synonymous with quality, integrity, authenticity. They understood that the city either was already viewed as an unspoiled paradise inhabited by the pre-corrupt or at the very least could be marketed as such to Americans who knew nothing about the place. In the eyes of the rest of the country, Seattleites were practically the next best thing to Native Americans. “There is name recognition with Seattle,” Schultz told Robinson. “People associate it with softness, sensitivity, honesty, good food, fresh products. The Nordstroms made sure when they went national that people knew they were from Seattle; that’s what we’re trying to do with Starbucks.”
It was an astonishing moment, reading that quote—almost the direct opposite sensation from that vertiginous moment I had experienced among the Hmong six years before. I executed a dizzying, sickening spiral spin down into a depressing rabbit hole, where Seattle looked like a theme park. The indefinable, near-infinite series of small and large accidents in Seattle that conspired by happenstance to create a psychological state equivalent to the surrounding water, mountains, and oyster light—perfect peace, perfect joy—had now been distilled by a marketing mind into a “concept.”
Schultz’s cynicism was depressing enough; more depressing was the implication that the raw material he used to refine his concept—the difference I had long felt defined Seattle and set it apart from the rest of the world—was a deluded notion, an adman’s fiction.
Most depressing of all was the way the rise and Rise of Starbucks made it so undeniably clear that Lesser Seattle could never keep the city from becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Greater Seattle. Anything Lesser Seattle did, Greater Seattle could do up grander. Even the very raison d’être of Lesser Seattle—preservation of the Northwest from the corruption that overtook older, more populated, ambition-poisoned American cities—had been turned by Greater Seattle into its most powerful, corrupting promotional weapon for an ever-Grosser Seattle.
As part of his Greater Seattle cooptation of Lesser Seattle’s Starbucks, Schultz made a tremendously symbolic strategic decision before launching his juggernaut: He moved the tresses on the company logo’s sea siren just enough to cover her breasts. It was as if he had moved Starbucks across Yesler Avenue, out of Maynardtown, and cleaned it up before opening its doors to the national public.
There was no question that Schultz was right in noting that Seattle was now viewed by the nation as an alternative to the American urban norm. National magazine stories invariably mentioned Seattle’s opera- and theatre-goers wearing blue jeans and parkas to performances, and stuffing their backpacks under their seats. This was mentioned so often in the press that it became a virtual defining image of Seattle. And it was beginning to seem that every local-business story was an alternative-business story. By 1989, Starbucks was competing with 11 Seattle-area specialty coffee roasters, some of whom were already being cited around town as hipper purveyors of a better product. Gordon Bowker, a board member of the alternative Weekly, had left his alternative-coffee company to concentrate on his alternative-beer company, Redhook. His new venture was very much like the old Starbucks, with the same old trappings of old-fashioned, pre-commercial authenticity: a whimsical, retrograde logo—this one a grandiosely mustachioed “trolley man” and the slogan, “Ya sure, ya betcha!”—and evocations in every way possible of a mythic, pre-commercial past, back when quality was a beverage purveyor’s sole concern. Just as Starbucks had first been headquartered in the storied Public Market, now Redhook was headquartered in the storied Fremont District. It operated out of a converted trolley barn—the name “Redhook” referred to the red hook used to pull trolleys into the barn for repairs—and adhered to time-honored “craft beer” production principles. Disdaining the swill that mass-market beer had become—a light, flavorless, bland, distasteful lager—edhook brought back the traditional full-flavored English ale, a robust, hoppy beverage carefully crafted according to time-honored traditions, etc., etc., etc…., served and distributed by salespeople steeped in etc., etc., etc….
Redhook was one of three craft beer companies to take off in the late-80s Northwest, the other two being Grant’s and Pyramid. All three produced beer as phenomenal (and as story-rich) as the original Starbucks coffees. Between Starbucks, its 11 competitors, and these three craft-beer companies, Seattle was a veritable alternative hothouse.[58]
This double-whammy was life-changing: Now, between my craft coffee days and my craft beer nights, I was alternately jabbering frantically and mumbling somnolently with incomprehensible joy. I was to spend the 90s largely avoiding the boring middle ground of coherence.
It was hard not to fear for the future, though, no matter how much coffee and beer I drank. The Starbucks bowdlerization had me wondering how long it would be before alternative statement after alternative statement surrendered its all to Greater Seattle and the mainstream market. The Sub Pop kids upstairs from the Weekly—who, unbeknownst to me, were madly crafting a powerful alternative to mainstream rock, which during the 1980s had devolved into a product utterly devoid of art, wit, or genuine emotion—would have looked, had I cared to notice, to be headed for a fate at least as bad as Starbucks’. In 1989, having already produced regionally successful records by Mudhoney, Tad, the Walkabouts, Cat Butt—all bands sustained by Seattle’s thriving new club scene—Sub Pop had come up with a national underground hit album that cost only $600 to produce. Called Bleach, by Nirvana, a band from Aberdeen—a hardscrabble town 100 miles south of Seattle—with a drummer, Chad Channing, from Bainbridge Island, the CD sold 35,000 copies in less than a year, its fame spreading by word of mouth and college-radio stations. Had I known what was going on up there, I couldn’t have helped but wonder what sort of devoured-by-the-mainstream fate awaited Sub Pop, Nirvana, and their purity of (he)art.
I spent 1990 absorbed in Seattle’s struggle over the worth of hosting the Goodwill Games—an alternative athletic extravaganza that, as far as I could tell, had been invented by Ted Turner, under the pretext of fostering world peace, in order to provide his cable superstation with the kind of content that would give him a better chance at competing head-to-head with the three established TV networks. Since the networks had all the mainstream big-ticket athletic events (Olympic Games, Super Bowl, World Series, and various other professional and college playoffs and tournaments) wrapped up, Turner was intent on creating an alternative for his enterprise.
Turner’s grander pretension—that the Games could grow into a means of breaking the Cold War impasse between the United States and the Soviet Union and lead the world into a new era of peace and love—was classic Ted Turner eccentricity. It was so preposterous that it was almost endearing. It was also the sort of notion that only a city with Seattle’s peculiar delusions of alternative grandeur could buy into. Greater Seattle’s rube-like eagerness to host the Games, which no other American city wanted to take on, was borne largely of the city’s starting to believe too much of its own hype. For at least the past 15 years, the image of Seattle—as Raban had described, and as Howard Schultz had pointed out—as a locus of softness, sensitivity and authenticity, a Shangri-La of civility, a city that had found an alternative way of life, had taken on the dimensions of self-delusion in Seattle itself. More and more, you read and heard Seattle commentators, editorialists, Chamber of Commerce flacks and politicians proclaiming Seattle as an exemplar of an alternative way of life—a place where consensus and decency rather than greed and competitive rage thrived, and where people had found a more peaceful way to advance as a civilization without fighting for advantage over one another. Inevitably, the notion grew to the point where you started hearing promoters advance the proposition that Seattle could show the rest of the world how to coexist in harmony, that all we had to do was export our civility and behavior along with our coffee, beer, customer service, and software.
Everyone, save for a few chronically disgruntled journalists and Lesser Seattleites who saw every bid for attention as another step toward civic self-destruction, got on the Goodwill bandwagon. Brewster and his friend Paul Schell—the Seattle 2000 vision guy and failed mayoral candidate—the Chamber of Commerce, the Sports and Events Council of Seattle/King County, downtown businesses, hotels and restaurants, and all the usual suspects hyped the Games as a combined second coming of the World’s Fair and opportunity for Seattle to lead the rest of the world to enlightenment.
Brewster, to his credit, gave me free editorial reign to lament and lambaste the event promoters, but the city unaccountably went ahead with its plans anyway, and the Games went off as scheduled. Out of a sense of duty, I attended a series of world-class track and field, basketball, and other sporting events, often staged before empty houses. And all through the weeks-long gala, the debate raged: Were the Games a success or a failure?
People covering the events and taking in the empty venues, people checking the Turner Network’s dismal ratings, and people keeping track of the Cold War knew full well that the Games were a flop. But the promoters both of the Games and of Greater Seattle faced the press day after day, night after night, proclaiming the Games a colossal success. By the time of the closing ceremonies, the relationship between reporters and the Games personnel forced to deal with them were frayed to the point where a hot war was about to break out. My most memorable Games experience—aside from watching the Brazilian women’s basketball team—was watching a confrontation between the Games’ Barbara Smith and two local reporters at the closing ceremonies, which were held in mid-downtown, at Westlake Center—an indoor mall with an outdoor town square attached to it—early one beautiful summer evening.
The crowd was sparse. Reporters, trying to get a crowd count from Smith, finally cornered her, with KIRO Radio’s Frank Abe asking repeatedly, “Barbara, can you give us a crowd count?”
“15,000,” Smith replied.
Abe was stunned. “Impossible!” he shrieked.
“15,000,” Smith repeated, her jawline hardening.
“Where’d you get that?” Abe asked.
“From the police major.”
At which point the Tacoma News Tribune’s Rob Carson[59] intervened. “I just talked with the police major,” he said, “and he said it was more like 6,000.”
I didn’t know at first whether to be heartened by the low attendance—proof that Seattleites in general had refused to buy into this meretricious event—or to be disheartened by the Establishment’s disingenuous power over the city. Standing there, I looked back over the 1980s and saw them as a decade of gradual conquest of Lesser Seattle by Greater Seattle, a relentless march toward the same civic misadventures that had eventually either ruined or signaled the ruin of pretty much every other American city. Increasing portions of Seattle’s money and energy were being invested in lavish and worthless displays of “prestige” that amounted to little more than Roman circuses. Why couldn’t Seattle be different? It was allowing itself to be turned into a cliché: the city intent on establishing that it has achieved “major-league” status, desperate to be perceived as the next “New-York-Pretty-Soon,” hosting Games that savvier cities didn’t want, and either trying to steal professional sports franchises from other cities or spending whatever it took to keep the ones it managed to get. Now Seattle, in hosting these Games, had spent millions on a lavish athletic extravaganza that the rest of the nation, if not the world, saw as silly. All three Seattle professional sports franchises—basketball’s Sonics, baseball’s Mariners, and football’s Seahawks—were demanding greater civic investment, either in the form of better stadium leases or taxpayer-financed new stadiums, if Seattle didn’t want to lose them to other cities. The Sonics were threatening to move across Lake Washington to Bellevue; new Seahawks owner Ken Behring was threatening to move his franchise to California; new Mariners owner Jeff Smulyan was insisting that his team could not survive in Seattle without more substantial taxpayer investment; and Seattle’s business community was overtly and covertly pressuring city and county politicians to give in to all of those demands.
Somehow, you just knew that the city ultimately would capitulate. Seattle, for all of its pretensions to alternativity, was shaping up as just another urban American wannabe, a Kansas City, a Cleveland, determined to be “major league” as defined by the kind of mind everyone in Seattle had moved here to avoid.[60]
As if I weren’t despondent enough, the closing ceremonies offered up this musical image of Seattle in the form of a Games theme song, sung over and over and over and over by children in Seattle and Moscow, linked by satellite:
It is better to light just one little candle
Than to stumble in the dark.
Better far that you light just one little candle,
All you need’s a tiny spark.
If we’d all say a prayer that the world would be free,
The wonderful dawn of a new day we’d see,
And if everyone lit just one little candle,
What a bright world this would be.
Then the ceremony finally closed with Seattle’s children, clustered just below center stage, waving ersatz phosphorescent “candles” under the glare of television lights so intense that they washed out the glow from the children’s little props.
Depressed, I walked back to the Weekly office to write and file my story. I got in the elevator with a kid from Sub Pop. He was wearing a plain white T-shirt with a single word printed on its chest, in big, bold, black type. I recognized the font as Helvetica. The word was “Loser.” I decided he was wearing the shirt solely for my benefit. He was rebuking me for spending my working life the way I did, chronicling the ridiculous exploits of Greater Seattle. The real Seattle story, he was trying to let me know (that part of his message was falling on blind eyes), was going on upstairs.
It came as a considerable shock in October 1991 when my New Yorker arrived one day with the first of a two-part series in it on James Acord, a Seattle sculptor who had left Seattle for Barre, Vermont, in 1979. The story, by Philip Schuyler, exhaustively detailed how Acord had begun work in Barre on a masterpiece entitled Monstrance for a Grey Horse, returned to Seattle in 1986, worked alternately on the sculpture and various other projects, and by 1991 had nearly finished Monstrance. In 1989, he moved to Richland, Washington, in the eastern part of the state, near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, because he wanted to work with live nuclear material in his sculpture. Monstrance, in fact, was supposed to have a canister of live nuclear material embedded in it—although Acord had run into some amusing trouble trying to acquire nuclear waste for that purpose.
Almost as amazed to see a Seattle artist in the New Yorker as I was by the story of the sculpture, I tracked Acord down over in the Fremont district and went out there to visit him. Now 50, and having worked at his craft for 33 years, almost entirely without recognition or remuneration, he looked the way Samuel Beckett would have looked had Becket been born an optimist. Acord sported pretty much the same face as Beckett, along with the same backswept, spiky plume of hair, the same round spectacles, and the same inward-directed look in his eyes. What distinguished him from Beckett was the utter lack of sobriety in his face, as if it was all he could do to keep himself from breaking out laughing—particularly when he talked about his career. Over his 33 years as a working sculptor, he had held, by his count, 46 jobs, among them logger, carpenter, monument carver, plater of high-voltage conductors, pipe welder, ship fitter, and forklift operator. He had sold virtually no work—largely because he never tried, but also because a great deal of it was tremendously odd. One of his pieces, for example, The Fiesta Home Reactor, was an aquarium-like contraption that, Acord insisted, produced radioactive material—right there on your kitchen table! He did not have an agent or gallery to represent him and he avoided publicity the way vampires avoid daylight. Whenever anyone wanted to interview him—particularly writers from art magazines—he would practically cringe in fear, and talk incessantly about how he wasn’t sure he could “handle” that kind of conversation. He consented to the New Yorker profile only because when he met the writer, by accident, they hit it off. Three months after it was published, he still had not read the piece—“because,” he said, “it freaks me out to read about myself.” And he consented to talk with me only because I was excited about seeing Monstrance for a Grey Horse.
We met at a Fremont tavern and chatted over beer before he walked with me over to the Fremont Fine Arts Foundry—a place where artists could rent studio space built around a large, factory-like floor for working on large pieces of sculpture—to see Monstrance, which was stored there so Acord could put the finishing touches on it.
Acord first began conceiving and making sketches for Monstrance in 1977. He had grown preoccupied with nuclear technology, which he regarded as the central and most alarmingly unexamined problem of our age, and as this sculpture took form in his imagination it turned both into a monument designed to last as long as nuclear waste did—so that earthlings 30,000 years or so from now, not understanding human language, would somehow be warned away from waste sites by these sculptures—and as an artistic examination of the meaning and impact on humans of nuclear technology. In a sense, Monstrance for a Grey Horse was to be a religious monument in the grand tradition of religious artwork from the Middle Ages. In the Catholic Church, the monstrance is the ornate, gold-and-glass, cruciform vessel in which the Eucharist is placed during the interim between the crucifixion on Good Friday and the resurrection on Easter Sunday. In this Monstrance, the Eucharist would be live nuclear material—the dubious “sacred substance” of our dubious age.
After two years of thinking and composing, Acord commenced a near-lifetime of obsessive and highly impractical career decisions when he decided the only way to make Monstrance properly was to move to Barre, Vermont, where he could “stand next to a 73-year-old toothless Italian carver who came up in Cabrera, and have the opportunity to listen to his approach to chisel work.” Barre has some of the best granite in the world, and is renowned for its stone-carvers—men who spend their working lives carving monuments, most of which adorn graves. Before Acord could begin hands-on work on his piece, he wanted to study stone-carving techniques from the masters, and he wanted to work with the best material possible. “Of the old, traditional materials for art sculpture in the stone family,” he told me, “only granite really is holding up well in today’s polluted, corrosive environment.” He had observed in the 1970s that most outdoor sculpture began deteriorating within a few short years of installation—the legacy, he believed, of an increasingly polluted environment and the budget-driven decisions of sculptors doing publicly funded art projects to use the least expensive materials possible, in order to turn a profit on their work. And since Acord wanted Monstrance to last for 30,000 years or so, he would need exceptionally durable material.
Arriving in Barre, Acord immediately rented a small, unheated studio-and-living space and took a job at a gravestone-manufacturing company, learning and working by day and working on Monstrance by night. He worked in this fashion from 1979 until 1986, then shipped himself and the half-finished Montrance back to Seattle, with the delivery address for the sculpture being a vacant lot. Acord was too broke to pay the C.O.D. cost and he knew that the shipping company, Burlington Northern, would impound the sculpture until he could raise enough money to “bail it out.” He felt that Monstrance could come to no harm sitting on a Burlington Northern loading dock, since there was little the shipper could do by way of disposing of a one-ton granite package. After spending the summer fishing in Alaska, he retrieved his masterpiece and got set up again in Fremont. By 1989, when the sculpture was finished save for a titanium mask, the embedding in it of its canister of live nuclear material, and its installation, the sculpture had cost Acord two fingers, innumerable relationships, half his career, $12,000 to $14,000 in “receipt costs” for stone and tools, with another $8,000 still to be spent casting and adding the titanium hood.[