0.19 Sodom and tomorrow  (Page 2/17)

I came all the way to Seattle to have an alternative-coffee experience, dad gummit, and I’m damned well going to have one!

I found what he was looking for in the opposite corner of Pioneer Square, at Second and Jackson—across the street from my new workplace. Called Zeitgeist Art  Coffee, it was, according to its promotional material, an “out of the box” coffee house exhorting addicts to “support the spirit of Seattle’s independent coffee houses.” The first time I walked into the place—unfinished brick walls, the kind of massive wood beams that characterize so many of Pioneer Square’s original buildings, that classic Seattle preservation-as-revolution ambience, an art exhibit hanging on the walls, deliberately disenfranchised youngsters working behind the counter—I felt instantly at home. I also noticed that the Zeitgeist was crowded—far more so than both the Starbucks down the block and the one across Maynardtown, where I’d encountered the disgruntled tourist.

How bad can things be in post-Starbucks/Microsoft/Tiffany’s Seattle if the thirst for alternative Art  Coffee can still be slaked?

A few months later, I encountered an exhibition mounted at Zeitgeist of 40-by-50-inch “C-prints”—they look like color photographs printed on canvas—composed by Chad States. I was particularly taken with the print “Wrapping Up”—a self-portrait of States, down on one knee in the dirt at the base of a tree. It is after dark. He has dug a small hole in front of him—the discarded shovel is lying in the foreground, as if flung down in haste—and he is furtively putting a small, red-beribboned, bright red gift box in it. He is looking a little off to one side. Surrounded by drabness—dusk, brown tree trunks, dirt, States’s black clothing—the box is vivid, spectacular, tacky and splendid. States, his face mournful, reflective, intends to bury it and flee before anyone can catch him in the act.

I see the picture as a depiction of precisely what Seattle is doing now, in the wake of its ill-advised embracing of the boom: trying to hide its gifts again, return to obscurity, find a way back to that peaceful cultural isolation, the Golden Age of Ivar. Back when clams were clams. It was a time when people knew what an amazing treasure we had here, and strived to keep the ambitious at bay so as to preserve as much of the surrounding natural and spiritual splendor as possible, for as long as possible.

There were days in my new job when I felt like I was undergoing a reverse Rip van Winkle experience, waking up in the distant past rather than the distant future. I would walk through Pioneer Square, through a Seattle I had thought long dead, and go to work among Seattleites of a sort I had presumed long gone. My sojourn among the tech-boomers—which, I was beginning to realize, had effectively been 20 years long—was a self-imposed jail sentence, a wallowing in ambition and acquisitiveness, most of the people I spent my time with having alien values and social skills. For every person I met with aspirations beyond personal wealth and glory—and I was surprised to note that I now ranked Bill Gates first among them—there were hundreds scheming to get theirs while the getting was good. That certainly had become my ethic at the end: Give me my options, get me to cash conversion as quickly as possible, cut me a big check and cut me loose. At the height of the boom, that was the city’s defining ethic.