Seattle, je t’aime

August 24th, 2010

Every once in a while, someone asks me why I live in Seattle — and I refer them to this piece, which is reprinted here from Monkey Goggles. Proper Spellout posts will resume momentarily, so please remain seated.

Look, I love this town. I love Seattle in its every drippy molecule. Even during the gray months — which is half of them, pretty much — my love for Seattle abides and even flourishes. Just off the top of my head I can easily call off ten reasons why I’m crazy about Seattle and the people who live in it.

We dress funny, and we don’t much care. When I took a job at a local new media company a number of years back, I asked my supervisor if there was a dress code; she rolled her eyes and said, “Geoff, it’s Seattle.” And by Mudhoney, she was right. I haven’t tucked in my shirt for nearly eight years.

Our sense of civic irony is razor-sharp. I offer as proof of this fact the statue of Lenin that we decorate for Christmas.

We crowd-source our civic decisions, for good or ill. True, we’ve talked ourselves out of a major-league basketball team, put unnecessary restrictions on nightlife and stymied one public transit proposal after another, but we’ve also managed to support three other major-league sports franchises, to establish and maintain solid funding for local arts organizations, and actually agreed to back the creation of a light-rail system that only last week saved me a fifty-dollar cab ride from the airport. With one hand we fight to preserve old buildings, and with the other we smack down proposals to replace the dangerous elevated freeway that’s one ground tremor away from disaster. It’s a maddening push-and-pull, but somehow it works. Even as its population grows, Seattle continues to be a comfortable place to live because its residents fight to keep it that way.

You know, the coffee is pretty good. We ought to tell somebody about this stuff.

Our street grid is labyrinthine and needlessly confusing, and when you’ve learned it you really feel as if you’ve accomplished something. There are people who come to our town who fancy themselves adventurers; they’ve got their GPS-equipped smart phones and copies of several-year-old Seattle guidebooks and they think they’ve got Seattle all figured out. Next thing they know, they’re stuck heading north on Aurora after having made an innocuous right turn or navigating an endless loop of one-way streets trying trying to get back into the W’s parking garage. We are down with Daedalus.

Seattle has all the engineering marvels you build into a “Sim City” creation to make it more interesting. We’ve got four cool-looking drawbridges, including one that’s used solely by trains. We have a freshwater-to-saltwater locks system. We have a Frank Gehry museum, a Rem Koolhaas library and a former World’s Fair grounds with space-age observation tower. We have a dormant volcano. We win at Sim City: The Live-Action Role Playing Game.

I think the Food Network has a satellite production office here. Seriously, one or another of our restaurants is featured on the cable channel every time I flip by the damn thing.

We can ride our bikes to a winery, on a trail that seems to be expressly designed for that exact purpose.

Seattle accumulates artistic capital like savings accounts acquire interest. Case in point: Ours is the kinda town where the weekly alterntive newspaper can hold a yearly film festival made up of budget-free, homebrewed pornography (The Stranger’s “Hump”), and in so doing can inspire a non-pornographic independent feature film that’s good enough to win a jury prize at Sundance (Lynn Shelton’s “Humpday”). Here, good ideas defy nature by rolling uphill and getting bigger.

Finally: The town is flat-out beautiful. Anyone who’s every walked the trails of Discovery Park, watched a sunset from Alki or wandered the older parts of Queen Anne, Ballard and Capitol Hill has to have caught a whiff of it — that feeling that you’re somehow outside yourself, watching yourself swimming in that lush blue-green idyll. The only way to get that feeling is to live here; you can’t get it from visiting or watching movies about Seattle. And it helps to be able to actually find Capitol Hill, Queen Anne or Ballard without getting lost on this (expletive) street grid.

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