Seattle has always struck me as a suspiciously clean city, manifesting a tidiness that verges on the compulsive. It is the Singapore of the United States: spit-polished, glossy, and eerily beautiful. Indeed, there is, perhaps, no more scenic setting for a city set next to Elliot Bay on Puget Sound, with the serrated tips of the Olympic Mountains on the western skyline and hulking over it all the cool blue hump of Mt. Rainier.
Posts published in “Essays”
SEATTLE -- Tuesday evening, this city is under martial law. National Guard helicopters are hovering over downtown and sweeping the city with searchlights. There was a 7pm curfew flouted by thousands -- those same thousands…
After nearly a year of being bound and gagged by legal constraints arising from a multi-million dollar lawsuit filed against the City of Fort Bragg by Dominic Affinito
This morning in the supermarket parking lot, I was assaulted by a loud, unpleasant sound coming from the wide-open door of a shiny new sport utility vehicle. The sound was a commercial music recording played…
Goodbye, Georgia-Pacific. Or should we say ta-ta “The Timber Company”? — the pretentious name G-P gave its publicly traded timber division after spinning it off from the main group at the end of 1997. Last…
Not many people have hiked into Headwaters Forest, and not many people are likely to because the trek in is a grueler. The old logging road up (yes, I said “up”) to Headwaters western perimeter…
For years it seems I’ve written about the shadow government which as time goes by is exercising more and more power in our governing process. I’m speaking, of course, of government by consultancy. The consultant…
Fashion was never anything but the parody of the gaily decked-out corpse, the provocation of death through the woman. — Walter Benjamin Not to sound like a spent piece of used jet trash wallowing in…