Saturday, Nov 21, 2009
Inside This Issue
The Gristle
Narrow victories, and landslides
NARROW VICTORIES, AND LANDSLIDES: It’s about landslides. Keep that in mind when you hear critics bellyache about a plan that would keep trees rooted on as many as 8,400 acres of loggable forests above Lake Whatcom, a plan they moan is far down on a list of programs that might benefit the water quality of Bellingham’s reservoir. Well—it’s not predominantly about water quality; it’s about landslides.
Once was a time the nation’s highway speeds were reduced to save fuel. Only later did we tumble to the knowledge that reduced speeds also saved lives. The one seems so much more noble a pursuit that today most discussion about highway speeds focuses almost exclusively on saving lives. But, the original goal was to save fuel.
In 1983, a slope above Smith Creek—crossed by abandoned and unmaintained logging roads, weakened by torrential rains and meltwater—failed, blowing 65 acres of timber and slash into…
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Music
Rooftops
Make way for the math rock
On November 17th, Bellingham will see the release of Rooftops’ debut album A Forest of Polarity. The record begins with guitar and percussion rewinding in a beautiful, kaleidoscopic sound collage before the listener is assaulted with air-tight drum hits and frenetic guitar tapping. The gravity eventually gives in to harmonious pop guitar interplay, while the drums go back and forth between hypnotic dirges and head-nodding grooves. All this in the first three tracks.
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Music
Hey Marseilles
Seven piece band plays the Undergound Coffeehouse
While being a seven-piece can often afford a band an enviable amount of musical dexterity, greater numbers can often bring their own unique set of problems. Such as the ever-present one of how to fit a big band on a small stage. With this, as so many other things, size does matter.
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Words
Lady on the Left
Amy Goodman breaks down barriers
There are the ladies on the right: Laura Ingraham, Anne Coulter. Then there are the ladies on the left: Rachel Maddow, Laura Flanders. Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica Network’s Democracy Now!, is just about as left as they come; she’s the kind of liberal Rush Limbaugh loves to hate.
Breaking the Sound Barrier, Goodman’s latest book, is a collection of her weekly syndicated columns for King Features from 2006 to 2009. She speaks out on nearly all of the hot button issues of the period—the war in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, immigration, illegal wiretapping.
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Film
The Road
Going nowhere fast
This Road leads nowhere. If you’re going to adapt a book like Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 bestseller, you’re pretty much obliged to make a terrific film or it’s not worth doing—first because expectations are high, and second, because the picture needs to make it worth people’s while to sit through something so grim. Except for the physical aspects of this bleak odyssey by a father and son through a post-apocalyptic landscape, this long-delayed production falls dispiritingly short on every front. Showing clear signs of being test-screened and futzed with to death, the movie may receive a measure of respect in some quarters but is very, very far from the film it should have been.
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Visual
Harvest
Painting from the ground up
Food can be beautiful. Provisions grown with your own two hands—that which you’ve planted deep in the soil, watered, weeded, tended and, finally, placed between your lips and tasted—are even more alluring. Just ask Ferndale painter Erica Epperson, whose new exhibit, “Harvest,” highlights the bounty of her own backyard.
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On Stage
Roll of the Dice
Gambling the Clay Way
“Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet
Eating her curds and whey.
Along came a spider,
Who sat down beside her
And said, ‘Hey, what’s in the bowl, bitch?’
—The Diceman
Andrew Dice Clay really knows how to push people’s buttons.
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Food
Eggs Benedict for everyone
A most important meal
While study after study might’ve proven that breakfast is indeed the most important meal of the day, you certainly wouldn’t have to try very hard to convince most ’Hamsters of that. In fact, it can often be easier to get into some of Bellingham’s most popular eateries during a weekend dinner rush than it is to score a seat at the table of any/all establishments serving up breakfast the next morning. We are, without a doubt, a town of breakfast eaters the likes of which I’ve never before encountered. And that’s perfectly all right with me.
Photo Feature
News
WTO @ 10
Anniversary of the Battle of Seattle
Before there were tea parties, there were sea turtles.
Ten years ago this month, on Nov. 30, 1999, tens of thousands of protestors took to the streets of Seattle and shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organization. The direct action took Seattle police and officials by surprise, in those months before the specter of international terrorism and homeland security came to define the security response to mass gatherings and protests. The engagement with police lasted for hours, invigorated by a stream of arriving scenesters, no agenda in mind, looking for action.
The activists were not against trade or globalization, despite the many misleading claims by media confused in the pandemonium. They were against a system of deregulated capitalism that was spreading around the world—a system-gone-wild that can be traced directly to the collapse of financial sectors last year.
In this, they were polar opposites of today’s tea partiers circling to protect their entitlements; but for a brief flickering moment, as costumed tree-huggers and loggers, anarchists and Teamsters alike fled tear gas in the streets and huddled together in restaurants and bars, came a dawning realization that their human concerns were beyond the standard axis of Left vs. Right. Theirs was a union of interests unplanned and unlikely to endure.
Perhaps the movement was ahead of its era, the height of the dot-com boom, the first of many bubbles to rise and burst, a time when few were interested in hearing about the downside of crony capitalism. Ten years later, perhaps the movement’s time has come ‘round at last.
Special thanks to Jacob Henifin, my photographer, and Alex McLean, my intern at the time, who phoned in their reports—and their amazement—at events unfolding in Seattle’s streets while we scrambled to fit it into our newspaper.
