Back in March, the Verge reported that the Beastie Boys had settled their lawsuit against educational toy company GoldieBlox. That suit alleged copyright infringement, trademark infringement, false advertising, false endorsement, and unfair competition, stemming from GoldieBlox’s unauthorized use of the band’s song “Girls” in the company’s popular Internet promotional video.[no_toc]
Photo by Masao Nakagami
According to the Verge, “[a]s part of the settlement, GoldieBlox will no longer be able to use its parody of the Beastie Boys song “Girls” and will publish an apology to the band…The toy maker will also make a donation based on a percentage of its revenues to a charity selected by the Beastie Boys that supports science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education for girls — the very subjects that GoldieBlox’s toy lines try to promote.”
Until recently, the specific amount of GoldieBlox’s donation was unknown. But on May 12, 2014, Digital Music News reported that the amount of the donation had recently been detailed in court filings from the Beastie Boys’ copyright infringement lawsuit against Monster Energy drink: To compensate for its unauthorized use of “Girls,” Goldieblox will donate 1 percent of its gross revenue to the Beastie Boys’ specified charity until it has paid a total of $1 million.
With this final piece of the puzzle in hand, now seems like a good time to offer a little recap commentary on the GoldieBlox drama, highlighting a couple of the important story lines and the lessons they offer for content users and content owners.
Lots of discussion and some confusion about the mayor’s recently announced minimum wage proposal (actually it’s the work of a committee of business, labor leaders, and politicians that he convened).
To me, the most useful quick and dirty metric for thinking about the proposal is to look at the proposed minimum wage increase in 2014 dollars and then ask how it relates to the current minimum wage.
That’s the number you get when you do this equation:
Proposed Seattle Minimum Wage in 2014 dollars/Current Washington Minimum Wage
If the final minimum wage increase ends up being $13.25/hr in 2014 dollars as Goldie has argued on his Horse’s Ass blog, that is a little more than 1.4 times what the current state minimum wage is now (and 1.7 times the current federal minimum).
Fifteen dollars an hour in current dollars would be around 1.6 times the current state minimum and almost twice as high as the current federal minimum.
Some people didn’t want to raise the minimum wage at all. Some people wanted it to immediately be 1.6 times greater than it is now. Those are the two polar extremes.
But everybody who supports raising Seattle’s minimum wage didn’t necessarily support immediately making it 1.6 times higher than it is now. Indeed, I suspect as more people have drilled down on the details, they’ve come to understand that this is an issue with a lot of moving parts and dependencies.
One poll showed that 68% of Seattle voters favored raising the minimum to $15 an hour, but I doubt those people are a monolith. What that poll shows is that Seattle voters want substantive action on this issue. That’s why business can’t just put its head in the sand and stonewall. Nevertheless, the poll doesn’t say that every single member of that 68% would oppose a reasonable compromise.
That seems to be what Murray’s commission has delivered: a compromise proposal that gets us to a minimum wage around 1.4 times greater than it is now, which is about where I thought things would end up. It’s a big enough increase to show meaningful substantive action on the issue and no bigger.
If this plan passes the Council, I can see why some of the more hardline folks on the left will be disappointed. They haven’t had this much wind in their sails on an economic justice issue since the early 1970s. But I can also see why organized labor is going to walk away feeling pretty good about the outcome.
This is precedent they can use moving forward, and it’s probably closer to a number that can play in less liberal and affluent cities than Seattle. So it doesn’t seem like some crazy anomaly.
I hope the hardline folks will eventually put things in perspective, follow suit, and feel good about it too. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
If you had told most left-of-center folks in 2012 that Seattle business leaders in 2014 would sign off on raising the city’s minimum wage to 1.4 times the state minimum (already among the highest in the nation), I think most people would have seen that as something to be psyched about.
It may not be a perfect win, like the Seahawks blowing out the Broncos in the Super Bowl back in January. But it’s a win nevertheless
Back in 1977, I was starting 9th grade in Champaign, Illinois. One day, a kid in my class told me that if you wrote a letter to a pro sports team and told them you were a fan, they would send you free stuff.
The Seattle Seahawks were a brand new NFL franchise back then. Unlike the other expansion team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who were one of the worst teams in NFL history, the Hawks had been reasonably competitive in their first season.
I thought the Seahawks helmets were super cool. They also had a left-handed quarterback: Jim Zorn. I thought that was cool too, as I was left-handed.
With the help of my mom, I wrote the Seahawks a letter saying that I was a big fan of their team. A few weeks later, I got an envelope back from them. Inside, was a decal that looked a lot like the picture above. I put that decal on the window in my bedroom.
Fast forward to 1992. My brother and I are driving across the country from Boston to Seattle, where he had lived since 1989. I am in the process of moving out there too.
We drive through Champaign on the way there and spend the night hanging out with my old friend Larry Crotser, who happens to be in town from Chicago that weekend visiting his parents.
The next day, Ben and I drive by our old house to take a look at it. There’s a guy out in front of the house next door, and we strike up a conversation with him. He indicates that if we knock on the door at our old house, the teenage son of the owner is there and he suspects that the son will let us see the inside of the house.
We go over and knock on the door. Sure enough, the son is home and after we explain who we are, he invites us into the house for a tour. They’ve done a lot of nice renovations on the inside. But while some things are definitely different, a lot of it is just as we remembered it.
When we head upstairs, we walk into my old bedroom. That’s when I see it: The Seahawks decal is still on the window there.
Later that day, after driving around town some more, we got in the car and continued the trip west to Seattle, where I’ve lived ever since.
In 2005, my parents moved to Seattle too. Now, the whole family is living here.
But long before any of us got to Seattle, the universe apparently knew that we would all end up here one day rooting for the Seahawks.
***
A year ago next Sunday (Jan 26), my dad passed away here in Seattle. Since my folks moved out here, Sunday football has been one of our family rituals.
I’m really happy I got to watch so many games with my dad in the years before he passed. Parkinsons took a lot of stuff away from him. But it never took away watching football, which was one of the last things he had left, and something he enjoyed to the very end.
I watched the NFC championship game with him last Jan 20, six days before he died. If he’d held on another week or two, we undoubtedly would have watched the Super Bowl together as well.
In a little while, Antonia and I will be heading up north to get my mom. Then, we’re going to my brother’s to watch today’s game with Ben and his family. Although my dad won’t be there, I know he’ll be with us in spirit for sure.
UPDATE 1:
Well, the Hawks played hard, got a few home team breaks, and managed to pull out a 23-17 victory. So we live to play another day.
Early in the season, my nephew developed a special celebration he’d do when something good happened for the Seahawks (a score, interception, sack, etc). It was also a tribute to my dad. He called it the “Conductor” (among other things, my dad was an orchestral conductor).
First, Max would tap the an imaginary podium with his imaginary baton. Then, he’d raise his hands up in the air and start conducting his imaginary orchestra. In my mind, they’re always playing a beautiful celebration song.
Let’s just say we were all doing the Conductor today at the end of the game after Richard Sherman tipped Colin Kaepernick’s pass in the end zone and Malcolm Smith grabbed it for an interception.
Next stop: Super Bowl. No sleep till Jersey!
Here’s hoping our imaginary orchestra is playing another celebratory song on Feb 2.
[no_toc]As I’ve mentioned before on this weblog, there wasn’t much Judeo-Christian worship in our family growing up. Nevertheless, there was always plenty of religion in our home. Through the years, my brother and I absorbed large helpings of an eclectic gospel authored by our father, Edwin London, the founder and sole rabbi of the Church of Dissonance.
When we were growing up, our church didn’t yet have a name. It was more of a free flowing set of ideas and attitudes–a way of being, or an outlook, if you will. The name came much later, courtesy of our buddy Pete Sheehy.
At a summer barbecue around 1999 or 2000, I was describing to Pete the childhood experience of attending my father’s atonal, contemporary music concerts, and how hard my brother and I found it to sit still through music so difficult to absorb that 10 minutes of it often felt more like an hour.
“That sounds a lot like it was for me going to church when I was a kid,” Pete interjected.
“You’re right,” I responded, “I guess we were raised in the Church of Dissonance.”
Since that day, I’ve intended to record the most important lessons of our church for posterity. And now, on Father’s Day, in the year of Edwin London’s passing, I think the time is finally right.
So I give you 17 lessons learned in the Church of Dissonance (“COD”):
1. Avoid cheap beer, rot-gut whiskey, and sweet mixed-drinks.
When I was in high school, my mom cut a cartoon out of the New Yorker and put it on the wall in the breakfast nook of our kitchen. There was a guy sitting at a bar talking to the bartender. The caption read “The good Scotch James. My body is my temple.”
Drinking was not frowned upon in the COD. But drinking low-end alcoholic beverages was. On more than one occasion, I got advice along the following lines from my dad:
“If you don’t like the taste of an alcoholic beverage on its own, don’t drink it mixed with other stuff to hide its flavor. Very little good ever comes from doing that. If you can’t afford to drink the quality, good tasting stuff, save your money until you can.”
As I enter my 35th year of drinking on a semi-regular basis, I’ve found my dad’s advice on these matters to be solid. I don’t always follow it (I do enjoy a limeade Shandy; sometimes, I make it with cheap beer), but when spirits are involved, dad was right: If one anticipates a long night of drinking, it’s best to avoid the Well and confine the mixer to an H20 derivative (e.g., ice, water, or club soda).
Please Note: An earlier version of this post attributed the blog post discussed below to David Lowery. Subsequently, I have learned that Lowery is not the author of this post. I have revised this piece to remove references to David Lowery, and I sincerely apologize to Mr. Lowery for any misunderstanding.
A recent post on the Trichordist quoted data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) indicating that the number of working musicians has decreased by 45% since 2002. It included the following graphic to illustrate this point:
The Trichordist’s statistics seemed shocking. Could they really be right?
An employment drop of 45% in a ten year period is pretty extreme, even given the current state of the music business. Therefore, I thought it might be worth a visit to the BLS website, to dig a little deeper into the Trichordist’s numbers. Fortunately, the Trichordist was kind enough to cite its sources in the image above. Unfortunately, it did not include hot links to these sources in its blog post, and I’m kind of lazy. So rather than hand-typing those links into the brower, I first did a web search on “BLS musicians” to see if that would take me to the right place. I ended up at a page titled “Occupational Outlook Handbook” (http://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and-sports/musicians-and-singers.htm).
This page did not contain the data that the Trichordist used to make the chart above, but it did indicate the following:
that there were 176,200 jobs for musicians and singers in 2010.
that the number of musician and singer jobs was expected to grow 10% by the year 2020.
At this, point, I was getting confused. Why were these numbers different than the Trichordist’s?
Not only were the numbers from the “Occupational Outlook Handbook” completely different (and significantly larger) than the Trichordist’s numbers, they also indicated job growth over the next 10 years, not job shrinkage (which is what the Trichordist had asserted was happening). So I bit the bullet and hand-typed in the links from the Trichordist’s chart above, which are as follows:
When I got to those pages, the numbers were the same as those cited by the Trichordist above. But I was still left wondering why the BLS website had more than one set of musician employment numbers.
It turns out that the Trichordist’s numbers and the Occupational Handbook numbers were drawn from different surveys that used different methodologies.
The 176,200 figure comes from the Industry-Occupation Matrix Data, by occupation (the “Matrix”). You can find that here. The Matrix data is further broken down by industry, and you can download the raw data for an industry in .xls spreadsheet format. (The raw data for musicians and singers is available here: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ep/ind-occ.matrix/occxls/occ27-2041.xls.)
The BLS has this to say about where the Matrix numbers came from. The methodology of the Matrix is explained here. This paragraph from that discussion seems particularly instructive (especially the last sentence):
Base-year employment data for wage and salary workers, self-employed workers, and unpaid family workers come from a variety of sources, and measure total employment as a count of jobs, not a count of individual workers. This concept is different from that used by another measure familiar to many readers, the Current Population Survey’s total employment as a count of the number of workers. The Matrix’s total employment concept is also different from the BLS Current Employment Statistics (CES) total employment measure. Although the CES measure is also a count of jobs, it covers nonfarm payroll jobs, whereas the Matrix includes all jobs.
So where do the Trichordist’s Numbers come from and how do they relate to the numbers from the Matrix?
The numbers from the Trichordist’s chart were drawn from the Occupational Employment Statistics program (OES) (http://www.bls.gov/oes/), a data source that seems to share some methodological similarities with the CES (which was referenced in the paragraph above).
The OES FAQ explains the methodology underlying the OES. For our purposes, the most salient information is as follows:
“Employees” are all part-time and full-time workers who are paid a wage or salary. The survey does not cover the self-employed, owners and partners in unincorporated firms, household workers, or unpaid family workers.
It appears that the numbers used in the Trichordist’s chart exclude both self-employed workers and owners of unincorporated firms (i.e., the partners in a partnership or the members of an LLC).
It’s not trivial to omit self-employed workers and owners of incorporated firms. Of the total musician and singer jobs in 2010, the data from the spreadsheet I linked to above indicates that 75,000 (42%) of those jobs stemmed from self-employment. I don’t know about you, but it definitely makes intuitive sense to me that this percentage would be pretty high, as lots of musicians are self-employed/sole proprietors or operating in a partnership or LLC (i.e., an unincorporated association).
Update: In a Facebook comment thread on this blog post, I gave some more concrete examples about common situations for working musicians and how they are captured by the BLS data I looked at. One of the commenters suggested that it would be useful to have it in the main blog post as well. So I’m adding it here.
(a) Let’s say we have a band. They make their entire living from music. The core group is two people. They are organized as a member-managed, LLC with two members. The LLC is taxed as a partnership. They don’t receive a salary. They get their money in the form of distributions from the LLC. This money flows through to each of their 1040s on a k-1 and is treated as self-employment income.
Let’s say that two other musicians also regularly play in this band (perhaps they are the drummer and bass player), but they are not members of the LLC (i.e., they don’t hold equity in the company). These musicians may also pick up work playing gigs with other people when the main band isn’t active. Both in the context of their main band and on any other jobs they do, these musicians get paid as 1099 contractors. So all their income in a year is also from self-employment.
None of these musicians are counted in the OES data the Trichordist has cited, but these musicians are apparently counted in the Matrix data. The scenario above is a very real scenario, especially for the so-called middle class of musicians (i.e., people who are making enough money from playing music to subsist without another job). As the Matrix data shows, the median income of the musicians in their survey was around $22/hr. That works out to a yearly gross income of around $42k (40 hours a week for 48 weeks a year). So half the musicians in the Matrix data made more than that and half made less. I suspect that a lot of full-time musicians in the $20k-$40k range fit the scenario I’ve spelled out above (either co-owner of a partnership or LLC or a sole proprietor receiving living mostly from 1099 contractor income).
(b) Now, let’s think about a more successful band. I don’t know anything about the particulars of Wilco, but I get the sense that Jeff Tweedy is the only equity holder in Wilco, Inc. (or Wilco, LLC). So all the other guys are likely hired guns from a legal and financial standpoint.
In a situation like that, where a band is successful and has more predictable cash-flow, there’s a much better chance that these hired guns won’t be 1099 contractors anymore. Instead, they will be salaried employees of Wilco, Inc., benefits will be paid, exclusivity may be required, etc.
Musicians in the Wilco situation would likely be counted in the OES numbers that the Trichordist cited. And to the extent that the OES numbers say that these kinds of musician jobs have shrunk significantly since 2002, that’s no small thing. For those kinds of jobs are good jobs, and we should all probably be fighting for a world in which there are more jobs like that for musicians. But that’s a different issue than the one the Trichordist has put on the table (i.e., the changing character of musician jobs vs. a change in the absolute number of musician jobs).
Where does that leave us?
I’d love to get a more nuanced picture of things than I have now. Even with the additional info from the Matrix, a lot of important questions remain unanswered. But based on the info I found on the BLS website, I will say this: If the goal is to understand how many working musicians and singers there are over time, the job numbers used must include self-employed workers; otherwise, they aren’t suitable to that task. If we had, say, Matrix data from 2000 that could be compared to the 2010 Matrix data, maybe we would find that the trends in that data are the same as the trends in the OES data that the Trichordist used for its chart.
But absent that sort of data, it seems like the broadest claim one can make based on the OES data is that payroll-based jobs for musicians have shrunk since 2002. However, once we narrow things down to that claim, it significantly muddies the causal link that the Trichordist is trying to make between the rise of digitial music and fall of musician jobs.
The loss of a payroll job doesn’t necessarily mean that the person in question was unable to find a nonpayroll job as a musician. Indeed, a lost payroll job might well be replaced by a new non-payroll job in the economy. Therefore, the absolute number of musician jobs may not have shrunk at all. Instead, it may be that the character of musician jobs has shifted.
Having said that, the loss of payroll-based musician jobs may still be significant. As in other industries, the loss of such a job can mean that a musician is exchanging a job with benefits, etc. for an independent contractor situation, where pay and benefits are not as good. So there may well be economic losses involved. But it seems highly speculative to draw conclusions about the nature or cause of these sorts of economic losses from the BLS data cited in the Trichordist’s blog post.
Perhaps the Trichordist will dig further into this question, find more data, and then share what it has learned with the rest of us.
Update: Unless something significant changes as the late returns are counted, it looks like Mayor McGinn will be facing off against Ed Murray in the general election this fall. This promises to be as bare-knuckle a political fight as we’ve seen in Seattle in quite some time.
For many people, I expect it will be a difficult choice. And if you are here reading this post right now, I’m guessing you’re in the process of trying to figure out what decision to make.
As you do that, I suggest you consider the following: University of Washington professors Robert Plotnick and Sandeep Krishnamurthy recently noted that a mayor’s biggest impact is typically on the long-term economic development of a city.
While in office, there are many immediate issues a mayor has very little control over. But a mayor can significantly affect things like zoning, infrastructure policy, and education policy. These, in turn, create the blueprint for a city’s future.
Remember, it isn’t just about what the mayor will do in the next few years. It’s about how the mayor’s long-term vision affects what the city becomes 10, 15, or 25 years from now.
Too often, as a voter, it’s easy to focus on the last few years or the next few years. People sometimes don’t consider how much time it takes for certain plans to be put in place and executed. They just see all those condos going up around town the last few years and they become “McGinn’s condos,” even though many of these projects were initiated before he took office.
So whoever you choose in the general election, try to avoid being short-sighted like that. Look at the big picture and the long-arc of neighborhood development.
That’s what I tried to do as I wrote up this long blog post. And if you take the time to read the remainder of it, you’ll see that many of my reasons for sticking with Mayor McGinn relate to his long-term vision.
Simply put, it’s a vision of Seattle’s future that makes sense to me.
***
Big news. Tim Burgess has dropped out of the Seattle Mayor’s race. That leaves three front-running candidates: Mayor Mike McGinn; former Seattle City Council President Peter Steinbrueck; and current Washington State Senator (and sort of Majority Leader) Ed Murray.
I’ve voted for all of these guys at one time or another. Murray and Steinbrueck are icons of liberal Seattle politics. McGinn was more of dark horse when he won the last mayor’s race. But he is arguably even more progressive than the other two. So it’s a tough call for sure. And there probably isn’t a truly a bad choice in the bunch. That being said, at this point I remain all in for McGinn. In fact, I’m probably more all in for McGinn right now than I was the day I voted for him in the last election.
I know, McGinn’s Don Quixote windmill act on the Seattle Viaduct Tunnel got very tiresome. It stretched my patience to the breaking point, and it definitely didn’t make a great first impression on a lot of other voters either, digging McGinn into a hole he’s been digging himself out of ever since. Along the same lines, I’ve heard that McGinn has not always been well-liked by insiders down at City Hall.
But observing things from afar, I like what I’ve seen from McGinn since the Viaduct issue was put to bed. He seems to have learned from that experience (see e.g., his work on the Sonics arena deal). On a lot of issues that are important to me, I’ve liked his approach. So I’d like to see what happens if he’s given another four years to implement his long-term vision for Seattle.
With that in mind, here are seven reasons why I currently support McGinn for re-election.
1. If you believe that bringing the Sonics back to Seattle and building a new arena in SODO is about way more than basketball, then you should support McGinn.
It’s easy to see McGinn’s involvement in the Sonics deal as pure political opportunism. I mean, why has he jumped on this bandwagon when he was so against the Tunnel? It has to be a plea for the hearts and minds of over-emotional Sonics fans, right? Sure, that’s got to be part of it. There have definitely been political benefits for McGinn in aligning himself with this cause. But if you look more closely, you start to understand why this deal fits into McGinn’s vision of Seattle in a way that the Tunnel does not.
It isn’t just about getting the team back, although that would mean a lot to plenty of people. It’s the proposed location of the new arena that places this deal squarely in the wheel-house of the McGinn vision for Seattle. From a long-term urban planning standpoint, the proposed site in SODO is a no-brainer, because it intersects perfectly with all of the major transportation modalities in our city (including the forthcoming East Side Link Light Rail). This sort of public transit connectivity is exactly what McGinn wants for our city.
Team McGinn/Constantine did a miraculous job making the new arena a possibility (with a nice assist from Tim Burgess). Losing this site would be a tragic missed opportunity for our city. Now that it’s clear we are not getting the Sacramento Kings, we’re going to have to play the waiting game and hope for an expansion franchise. But if the political winds shift, allowing the current arena plan to unravel, it could undermine the entire deal for the current investor group.
To my mind, the best way to preserve and protect the current plan is to maintain the status quo at the city and county level. McGinn and Constantine apparently have a good working relationship with the Hansen/Ballmer Group. They already understand the ins and outs of the deal. They are a known commodity to the NBA, and they have a vested interest in making sure the deal survives.
Conversely, Steinbrueck was a member of the Seattle City Council in the years leading up to the departure of the Sonics from Seattle. And while it may not be fair to say that Steinbrueck was a part of the problem in that era, he definitely wasn’t a part of any solution then (and lately he has definitely been a part of the problem). The same goes for Murray. He was down in Olympia when the legislature gave the Heisman to David Stern and the NBA. So irrespective of the role he may or may not have played in that interaction, he’s still going to be that guy from Olympia in the eyes of the NBA.
If the current Sonics/arena deal dies and the Hansen/Ballmer Group disbands, we may still eventually get an NBA team in our region, but I suspect the arena will not be in SODO. Instead, it will be out in the suburbs. As a South Seattle native, Christopher Hansen seems to be a person with a real personal investment in keeping the team inside the Seattle city limits (in their way, the Nordstroms are also south of I-90 guys). Hansen has shown great creativity and resourcefulness, formulating a plan that addresses all of the many constraints imposed by I-91. He and his partners are also apparently willing to spend the money to get it done in the SODO location, even if it could be done more cheaply in the suburbs. I have my doubts that another ownership group is going to be willing to go the extra mile to keep the team inside Seattle.
This to me would be a great shame. At its best, an urban area is like a circle. A circle needs (and can only have) one center. In our region, Seattle is that center. I believe very passionately that it should remain that center. For better or worse, professional sports is something that can help to define the center of a place. Moving the Cleveland Cavaliers from the ex-urbs back to the City Center was an important step towards making the City Center of Cleveland relevant again (especially in the winter months). If you look at most American cities that have a strong, vibrant City Center, their sports teams play downtown.
I understand that a lot of my progressive brothers and sisters don’t give a shit about professional sports. The most ideologically pure among them believe that until every poor person has been fed and every homeless person housed, no public money, financing, or other support should be spent on anything else. And that’s a noble position to take. But in my experience, a lot of average people start to get social justice fatigue after a while. They look around and say, “what are my tax dollars getting me?” Rightly (or more probably) wrongly, they start to question the efficacy of contributing money to the public coffers.
For many people, professional sports is a community touchstone. It’s one of their little life pleasures. It makes living in an urban area feel more worthwhile. It makes them more enthusiastic about paying city and county taxes. This is particularly true of people who live in the suburbs. Many of these folks don’t work in Seattle either. The only time they come to Seattle is for a ballgame. If they don’t have to leave the East Side to do that, then they’re rarely if ever coming into the Center City at all.
I don’t see that scenario as a win for our city. The day those people don’t ever feel the need to come into Seattle is a very bad day for our city. Long-term, it’s probably even worse than the potential loss of jobs at the Port of Seattle.
As much respect as I have for Peter Steinbrueck, I think he made a misguided decision to align himself with the Port of Seattle against the Hansen/Ballmer SODO arena plan. It would be one thing if I thought the Port was really going to work hard to preserve shipping jobs in SODO long-term. But I don’t.
To me, SODO is a lot like South Lake Union was 20 years ago. At the time of the Seattle Commons vote, I heard a lot of talk about how we needed to vote “no” on the Commons to protect the light-industrial and warehouse space in SLU (“the soul of working Seattle”). I have a soft spot for that kind of space and that kind of soul. So I had a lot of sympathy for that position. Ultimately, I voted against the Seattle Commons.
But in the end, my architect friends (and Dan Savage) were right. They said that voting “no” wasn’t going to save the historical usage profile of that space. Re-development was going to happen in SLU, no matter what. The question was whether we wanted a nice new park to be part of it. Twenty years later, we’ve got the re-development. We just have no park. Mistake made by me. Lesson learned.
SODO seems like a similar deal. We have two good ports in our Metroplex: Seattle and Tacoma. Over the long haul, there’s a good chance that our economy won’t need both of them. Provided the Seattle economy continues to grow and prosper, the value of the land in SODO is going to appreciate at a faster rate than the land in Tacoma, because it is already worth considerably more right now. Eventually, it will become so valuable that it will not make practical or economic sense to use it for shipping anymore.
When this happens, it will make more sense for the shipping traffic to go to Tacoma. And moving forward from there, the Port’s long-term play in SODO isn’t going to look that different than a lot of other players down there (i.e., more about real estate development than cranes and cargo containers). In this regard, the history of the Port of San Francisco should be instructive. Under the headers “Modern Developments” and “Future Developments, the following projects are listed in Wikipedia article I linked to above:
Fisherman’s Wharf (tourist attraction)
Pier 39 (shopping center and popular tourist attraction)
Ferry Building (an upscale gourmet marketplace)
F Line Historic Streetcar (tourist attraction/transit)
Exploratorium (Museum/tourist attraction)
Cruise Terminal (Point of entry and exit for tourists)
AT&T Park (baseball field)
Warriors Arena (Basketball arena)
E Line Historic Streetcar (tourist attraction/transit)
Pier 70 (a site filled with historic buildings that is slated for re-development)
To my eye, none of the items above have anything to do with maintaining a working port in San Francisco. Similar to our region, the Bay Area also had two port locations. But over time, as real estate prices rose, San Francisco ceased to be a working port and the land was re-purposed for other uses. The port in Oakland has apparently picked up the slack.
Long-term, I expect that things will play out similarly in Seattle. So the question isn’t whether real estate development down in SODO is a good idea. It’s who is going to have a place at the table to decide what sort of development happens down there and when it’s going to happen. Which brings us to #2 below.
2. If you believe that economic development south of James Street is important, you should vote for McGinn.
The re-development of South Lake Union is at the front of everyone’s mind right now. It’s exploding, and it seems like that’s the future frontier. But from a planning and policy standpoint, it’s more in the past than in the future. The last 20 years have been leading up to the present moment in SLU (i.e., from the proposal of the Seattle Commons plan until now). And while there are still ground wars going on about zoning, building heights, and stuff like that, the really big decisions have already been made.
The new re-development frontier is in South Seattle. The next 20 years are going to be about the area from James Street down to Spokane Street (or maybe even Michigan Street). That’s where the action will be, because it’s the only central place in Seattle that hasn’t really been developed much.
Twenty or thirty years from now, the area I’ve described is going to look really different. The planned re-development of Yesler Terrace is going to transform southern First Hill/Capitol Hill into a very different (and presumably more upscale) neighborhood. This will undoubtedly flow down into the International District, which is fast becoming a major transit hub for the entire region.
The new tunnel under the Viaduct will open up lots of development opportunities along the waterfont (which was the whole point, yes?). This will spill west into Pioneer Square, which will rise again as a popular live/work neighborhood, particularly after the East Link starts service in 2023. At that point, people will be able to easily commute by rail out to the suburbs for work, while living in the city (or live in the suburbs while commuting into the city for work).
Most of the development described above seems to be driven either by old-school establishment players (e.g., the waterfront and Pioneer Square) or Paul Allen/Vulcan development (e.g., Yesler Terrace).
But potential re-development in SODO seems like more of a wildcard. That’s where the new arena comes in. It is the catalyst for development south of Atlantic Avenue and east of 1st Avenue. Basketball and hockey turn that area into a year-round affair. That’s a huge thing for people who are interested in opening bars, clubs, restaurants, etc. It means there won’t be a three-month dead zone between January and April each year, when there aren’t a lot of events happening. I don’t know whether it will make sense to put housing in this area too. But I do know this: It’s not likely to make sense to put housing down there without more business development happening first.
While there are certainly credible arguments about the value of professional sports to the overall economy of a city or region, it seems indisputable that sports can be a significant economic driver for particular neighborhoods within a city. Just today, there was an article in the New York Times about the current efforts by the Chicago Cubs to renovate Wrigley Field, the hundred-year-old baseball park on Chicago’s North Side, and an acknowledged economic driver within this neighborhood. (I can attest to this fact, as I used to live 3 blocks away from Wrigley back in the late 1980s.) Apparently, there are some 80 bars and restaurants within a mile of Wrigley Field, plus a bunch of other businesses that depend of baseball for their survival. In many respects, one might even say that this neighborhood has grown and prospered in concert with the baseball park.
I believe that the Port of Seattle has been pushing back so hard on the proposed SODO arena, because of the economic development possibilties I’ve sketched out above. The Port would prefer a scenario where they (and their buddies) control development both along the waterfront and in SODO. The last thing they want is competition. If over the course of the next five to ten years, Hansen and his people get lots of cool stuff happening east of 1st Ave S, it potentially dilutes whatever the Port may try to do along the waterfront (think about how light rail proponents worked to kill the monorail).
Personally, I think more competition down there is a good idea, especially to the extent that it brings new voices and new ideas into the system. I think McGinn will do a better job fostering that sort of competition and dialog than Murray or Steinbrueck (after all, his wagon is pretty seriously hitched to Hansen’s wagon at this point, and his opposition to the Tunnel shows that he’s not afraid to lock horns with the Port). I also like the idea of Hansen, a South End guy, being involved in the re-development of SODO (and I have to think he will be if the arena happens). That’s probably one of the real potential payouts for Hansen on the arena and the teams: ancillary development in the neighborhood.
Development around a new arena also seems more likely to benefit residents of South Seattle than will the waterfront development (which does very little to connect South Seattle to downtown). The more stuff that’s happening proximate to the SODO and Stadium light rail stations, the more attractive it becomes to live in the neighborhoods south of those stations along the light rail.
If a vibrant entertainment area is happening year-round, and it’s easily accessible via rail from Beacon Hill, Columbia City, Othello, and Rainier Beach, more people will view those neighborhoods as desirable places to live. This will undoubtedly lead to more small business development in those neighborhoods as well. (The area around the Othello station in particular feels loaded with possibilities.)
Moreover, as development creeps south from Pioneer Square towards Spokane Street, it will start to connect up with the Georgetown neighborhood, which means that Georgetown will probably benefit in much the same way as the above referenced neighborhoods. It’s also easy to see how South Park, White Center, Skyway/Renton, and Burien could benefit from a more active and vibrant SODO, because if a neighborhood or municipality feels closer to a vibrant center, it is typically more attractive to people (especially younger people).
3. If you think that Seattle would be a better city with more streetcar-based transit to places like Ballard, Fremont, and the U-District, you should vote for McGinn.
As McGinn’s commitment to the SODO arena plan underscores, improved public rail connectivity is an area of emphasis for McGinn. He’s fast-tracked planning on more streetcars, and I think the best way to keep that ball rolling is to give him another four years to develop his vision. Murray, on the other hand, has taken heat from transit advocates for his position on things like sub-area equity. These advocates worry that the policy positions of a Mayor Murray might cost the city of Seattle another grade-separated train line in the near term. For me, that’s a significant concern, because I’ll soon be 50 years old, and I’d love to take a train from Beacon Hill to Ballard before I die.
4. If you think that it’s important to make Seattle more Bicycle-Friendly, you should vote for McGinn.
This is pretty much a no-brainer. I’m not a huge bicycle activist guy myself. But I think making Seattle more bike friendly is a good idea (even if I don’t always agree with every action McGinn has taken on this issue). I can’t imagine that any other candidate will make this issue more of a priority than McGinn, who is a huge bike guy.
5. If you want reform of the Seattle Police Department to be completed expeditiously, you should vote for McGinn.
I know McGinn has mixed reviews on police reform, especially his handling of the negotiations with the Department of Justice. But I’m also not sure that anyone else would be doing a better job. By any objective measure, it’s a huge mess. Did Steinbrueck make any kind of meaningful contribution on this issue during his tenure on the City Council?
Perhaps McGinn could have done more. Perhaps he could have made some different choices. Perhaps he could have worked on having a more cordial working relationship with City Attorney Pete Holmes too. But let’s be real. Holmes would also like to be mayor, and he’d be running right now if he thought he could win. At this point, his best play long-term towards that goal is to win another term as city attorney and help make police reform a reality.
Let’s also be fair to McGinn. He didn’t make all these problems. But they did finally come home to roost during his administration. In the wake of the Viaduct fight and the damage that it did to his popularity right out of the gate, he also wasn’t sitting in the strongest position to deal with this issue. So I’m guessing McGinn had to tread extra carefully with the police department. As a result, I suspect the police department figured that they could rope-a-dope until the end of McGinn’s term and hope that a new mayor (e.g., Burgess) would be more friendly to their interests. Mostly, it seems like that is what has happened.
Now, Burgess is off the table. If McGinn is elected again, he won’t have the Viaduct fight dragging him down. Re-election will also give him more of a mandate, demonstrating that the voters of the Seattle share his vision of the future (including police reform). This will give him more leverage on that issue.
Continuity in both the city attorney’s office the mayor’s office would also likely benefit implementation of the DOJ Settlement. Indeed, even though he has had a tempestuous relationship with the mayor, I hope Holmes is re-elected too. Nobody knows the terms of the DOJ settlement any better than McGinn and Holmes, and they won’t have the excuse that the terms of the settlement didn’t happen on their watch. Therefore, it will be easier to hold them accountable if the reform process stalls.
If we bring a whole new team in now, the first year of the next term will likely be spent getting the new team up to speed, rather than taking concrete actions on reform. Undoubtedly, a new administration will also be tempted to try and re-engineer the reform plan. (I know we’re dealing with a court oversight situation, etc., but that doesn’t mean there won’t be any room for a new administration to try and play new games around these issues. Those who would rather not see reform in this area are no doubt salivating at the thought of a leadership change right now, because that is probably the most effective path to mucking up the reform process.)
6. If you think it is important for the mayor to support the local music community, you should vote for McGinn
This is more of a toss-up for me than some of the other issues. In their elected capacities, neither Steinbrueck nor Murray has a bad reputation vis a vis the music community. (Indeed, Murray has taken a leading role inled the successful effort to eliminate the “Opportunity to Dance Tax” in Olympia, which is a big deal for club owners.) But neither Steinbrueck nor Murray has been the mayor. That’s a whole different deal than being on the city council or in the state legislature. People have been known to change their tune once they sit in that chair, because they have to answer to a lot more constituencies. McGinn is the mayor. The music community helped elect him. It seems like he has had a good track record of repaying that loyalty with support and attention to concerns of the music/club community (e.g., extended bar hours). Absent more compelling evidence than what I’m seeing now, I say that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
7. If you think effective snow removal is important, you should vote for McGinn.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve lived on top a hill my entire 21 years in Seattle. I spent a number of snow storms on top of Capitol Hill. I spent most of the 2008 Christmas blizzard on top of Beacon Hill (and I’ve been through a few more snow storms up on Beacon Hill since then). In addition to allowing the Sonics to skip town without a fight, we all know that Greg Nickels did a thoroughly mediocre job handling snow removal during that 2008 blizzard. Remember the rubber-edged plows he authorized that simply packed the snow down and let in freeze into a thick sheet of ice? That was a good time up on Beacon Hill.
For people who live on a hill (which is what, half of Seattle?), poor snow removal is a big deal, because it is very hard to get into and out of a neighborhood like Beacon Hill if the city has done a poor job plowing. I know, it doesn’t snow that often. But when it does, things get very chaotic in Seattle, even when snow removal is good. When snow removal is bad, things can be downright dangerous and scary.
Snow removal is a basic thing that city government just needs to get right. When it’s done wrong, it says something about a mayor’s ability to lead and execute on small details. That’s probably why Nickels failure on snow removal contribued to his loss in the last mayorial primary. It’s a hot button issue for many voters.
Against this backdrop, we should give McGinn his due. Despite his reputation for being an abstract, macro-level, idealist guy with his head in the clouds, the city’s response on snow removal has been significantly better since he entered office. Who knows? Maybe his East Coast upbringing gave him a better understanding of what good snow removal looks like (my own Midwest upbringing certainly colors my sense of what it looks like to get the job doen right). All I know is that his administration got it right on this most basic city service (and a lot of other ones too).
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell examines “success” and the societal factors that go into determining it. He deconstructs concepts like innate intelligence and natural ability. He examines how the year of your birth affects your life prospects, whether math skills are teachable, and how people born in certain months typically end up doing better in school and certain athletic endeavors. He also discusses the theory that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill.
Outliers isn’t Gladwell’s best book, but I still enjoyed it. So when I had an opportunity to see him discuss it at Town Hall in Seattle a while back, I jumped at the chance. I’d heard a few recordings of Gladwell giving talks, and he seemed like such a natural speaker—articulate, funny, and fluid. But evidently, this is not an inborn gift. It’s the product of intense preparation: Gladwell writes out each presentation, revises it, and then practices until he has it completely memorized.
All of Gladwell’s hard work was certainly in full effect during his talk at Town Hall. He effortlessly worked through a series of stories from Outliers, adding commentary and jokes to keep things rolling along smoothly. Towards the end of his talk, he turned to the subject of personal motivation, asserting that while society’s exceptional performers certainly possess natural ability, the thing that separates them from the pack is their willingness to “do the things that other people won’t do.”
To illustrate this point, Gladwell related an anecdote contrasting two pro golfers: Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. It seems to have been drawn from an on-line exchange between Gladwell and ESPN’s Bill Simmons. Here’s the salient portion of their exchange:
Gladwell:
I was watching golf, before Christmas, and the announcer said of Phil Mickelson that the tournament was the first time he’d picked up a golf club in five weeks. Assuming that’s true, isn’t that profoundly weird? How can you be one of the top two or three golfers of your generation and go five weeks without doing the thing you love? Did Mickelson also not have sex with his wife for five weeks? Did he give up chocolate for five weeks? Is this some weird golfer’s version of Lent that I’m unaware of? They say that Wayne Gretzky, as a 2-year-old, would cry when the Saturday night hockey game on TV was over, because it seemed to him at that age unbearably sad that something he loved so much had to come to end, and I’ve always thought that was the simplest explanation for why Gretzky was Gretzky. And surely it’s the explanation as well for why Mickelson will never be Tiger Woods.
Simmons:
On Mickelson and Sports Lent, I remember watching one of those 20/20-Dateline-type pieces about him once, and he was adamant about remaining a family man, taking breaks from golf and never letting the sport consume him … and I remember thinking to myself, “Right now Tiger is watching this and thinking, ’I got him. Cross Phil off the list. This guy will never pass me.” The great ones aren’t just great, they enjoy what they’re doing – that’s why MJ’s first retirement always seemed genuine to me. He had pretty much mastered his craft, and the media was wearing him down, and then his father was murdered, and for the first time in his life, basketball was looming as a chore for him. And he was smart enough to get away and recharge his batteries. I always respected him for that. Well, unless the real reason he “retired” was because of his gambling problems and an ominous “You screwed up, you’re gonna walk away for 18 months, and we’re gonna pretend this entire discussion never happened” ultimatum from commissioner Stern.
But I think there’s a certain amount of professionalism that needs to be there, as well, because there will always be days when you don’t feel like doing your job, and those are always the true tests. Halberstam has a great quote about this: “Being a professional is doing your job on the days you don’t feel like doing it.” I love that quote and mutter it to myself every time I don’t feel like writing because my allergies are bothering me, or my back hurts, or my head hurts, or there’s some random dog barking, or any of the other excuses I use when I’m procrastinating from pumping out something…..
I’ve thought a lot about this exchange since Gladwell’s talk at Town Hall (which happened before all of Woods’ marital issues hit the tabloids). At that point, Tiger’s image was untarnished. He was the 21st century, American, corporate ideal writ large in the sporting context—the guy with the entire world in the palm of his hand, the consummate competitor, the guy with the surgical focus, the guy who always puts winning first and eats guys like Phil Mickelson for lunch. In short, the guy who elicits a powerful man crush in the likes of Gladwell and Simmons: The guy who is willing to do what other people won’t do.
But back to Town Hall. As Gladwell was discussing Woods and Nickelson that night, I felt a powerful ambivalence welling up inside of me. Part of me is no less prone than Gladwell or Simmons to forming hero worshipping man crushes on high achieving dudes like Tiger Woods. So I get that impulse and its appeal.
Another part of me could barely hold myself back from standing up in the auditorium and shouting “No, that’s Bullshit!” Why do we venerate people like Tiger Woods, when it’s so obvious how unbalanced he is? Sure, he works hard. Sure, he’s good at what he does. Sure, he’s a winner, a champion. But what makes that inherently virtuous? What does his approach cost him and the others around him?
Isn’t there a shadow side to approaching life the way he does, particularly when the facade of Tiger can’t possibly be real? Hasn’t this story played out the same way enough times already? Whether it’s Tiger, Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez, the Paterno/Sandusky Penn State scandal, or the recent Lance Armstrong revelations, I always wonder, “Does it really have to play out this way again?”
Is encouraging people to be more like Tiger, or JoePa, or Lance really the best thing for our culture and the health of the world at large? Can’t you smell that Schadenfreude laying in the grass, just waiting for its moment in the sun? Isn’t Phil Mickelson the one we should venerate, even if he isn’t quite the competitor that Tiger is? Isn’t he the one who is actually doing it the right way, who has a healthier perspective, the one who hasn’t sacrificed all of his humanity to the alter of achievement?” Or does none of that matter?
I don’t think I’m alone in this reaction. Indeed, as a society, we seem deeply ambivalent about this stuff. On the one hand, we have a tendency to treat people like Tiger Woods as if they were modern-day gods of Greek Mythology, with their outsized personalities, grand exploits, and superpowers. Many of us long to be like them. We fancy ourselves kindred spirits, working hard towards the moment when we’ll get our turn to claim our place in the sun and be recognized for our greatness. On the other hand, many of us also secretly enjoy it when people like Tiger fail, for somehow it validates that even if we never match Tiger’s worldly fame and glory, we’ll always have him dead to rights on matters of rectitude.
And in that moment of cognitive dissonance, whether implicitly or explicitly, we question the dominant success narrative of our culture. We remind ourselves that there are a lot of different kinds of success in this world, and the sort of success that Gladwell discusses in Outliers is of a very particular sort: success in the classroom, success on the athletic field, success on the big stage, success in the public sphere. Success at things with a clear, easy to measure metric attached to them. The sort of stuff that Corporate America is obsessed with, which probably explains why Gladwell has become such a popular speaker in those settings. (The day before his Town Hall talk, Gladwell gave the same talk on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond.)
Most of us righteously agree, at least for a minute, that maybe it’s not such a good idea to elevate this sort of success over all the other kinds. For venerating the “people who will do what other people won’t do” is saying that the end result is always more important than the process used to achieve it, and the main thing that gives any of us value is what we produce, irrespective of how it affects other people or makes us feel.
There’s very little room for friendships, familial bonds[1], empathy, or open-ended intellectual curiosity. It’s all about the bottom line, including the children we conceive and raise. If they don’t achieve in these terms, then the parent has to feel bad about that process too, even if the kid ends up having a relatively happy life, filled with loving relationships, cool experiences, etc.
But even at our most righteous, we can’t quite shake another discomfiting thought: Maybe this is just the ugly truth of how things really are, and most of us just don’t want to see it. Maybe all that stuff about work-life balance, caring about your fellow man or woman, and doing things the “right way” is just lip service, or bourgeois ethics designed mostly to maintain the status quo and keep the have-nots from catching up with the haves.
Or maybe these principles are a luxury that incumbent elites can afford, because the original sins of their forbearers, the ones that brought them to their current elevated station and continue to benefit them, have been erased by the passage of time.
In the three installments of the Godfather, Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone longs for legitimacy, to be clean, unsullied by the past sins of his father, like Kay (Diane Keaton), his WASP wife, and the WASPs he presumably went to college with. But of course their cleanliness is probably just an illusion too. Their power and privilege, so seamless and clean, is simply a function of more time and distance from the sin. Each progressive generation gets more abstracted from it. The provisional antecedents of the power become more obscured, the existence of the power more reified, until it is simply the default setting.
Everyone who lacks the benefits of incumbency faces the same dilemma faced by Michael’s father, Vito Corleone (Robert Dinero), in Godfather II. They don’t necessarily have the luxury of principle if they want to get ahead. All Vito wanted was to feed his family and make a good life for them in the new world. He didn’t set out to be an organized crime boss. He begins his time in America as a casualty of the Sicilian Mafia wars. But eventually he sees the situation for what it is: a no-win Kobayashi Maru scenario. And like Captain Kirk, he transgresses established ethics and societal norms, choosing “to do the things that others wouldn’t do,” break the existing rules, and “win” the game (“It’s not personal. It’s just business”).
From the looks of it, Vito is in good company. Whether it’s Mark McGuire, Barry Bonds, Lance Armstrong, and their buddies taking performance enhancing drugs in the world of sports, or rock bands using performance enhancing drugs like speed and Cocaine on the stage, there’s a lot of transgression going on. John Calipari keeps taking teams to the Final Four. He may not be honest. He pushes the envelope on the rules. But he’s a winner. His players make it to the NBA, and winners write the history.
Besides, aren’t the sanctimonious rules of the NCAA just so much hypocrisy anyway. Aren’t they just empty piety covering up the way college athletes are exploited by a system that pays them very little and profits greatly on the back of their talent and effort? Or are all apprenticeships like that, inherently exploitative? If you work in a lab as a post-doc fellow, you’re probably not getting compensated the true worth of your knowledge and talent either. But perhaps that is part of the learning process. Perhaps the deprivation and uneven power dynamic is part of what creates an environment in which people are more likely to respond to coaching and instruction. Hard to say.
Undoubtedly, Gladwell might respond to my criticisms by asserting that he’s not advocating that people behave like Tiger Woods or Lance Armstrong. He’s just reporting that successful people like Tiger Woods “do the things that other people won’t do.”
That’s a fair point, and Gladwell is certainly not alone in making it. Indeed, David Sedaris’s “Four Burners Theory” covers similar ground.[2] `But even if Gladwell isn’t explicitly advocating that people behave in this way, the message is clear. Hell, it’s clear from Gladwell’s own conduct. He’s one of those guys too. He writes and then re-writes the presentation. He memorizes and rehearses it until it’s seamless.
Most people don’t do that. The people who do aren’t like the rest of us. They’re rare. And because they do the things that other people won’t do, they also tend to play by a different set of rules than the rest of us (even when they pretend this isn’t so). Probably, like the gods of Greek Mythology, they always have.
Perhaps this is just more obvious in today’s media environment than it used to be. For nothing remains a secret very easily anymore and the media rarely protects celebrities today like it sometimes did in the past.[3] Particularly since the Vietnam War and Watergate, a lot of us have become cynical to the core. We’re just waiting for some dark shadow revelations to emerge from a story that seems too good to be true. And we’re always primed to tear the veil off of everything, because we can’t believe that anything, no matter how good it seems on the surface, couldn’t have something rotten lurking inside it.
Case in point: Here in Seattle, rookie sensation, Russell Wilson, burst onto the scene this past NFL season, quarterbacking the Seahawks to their best season in years. Like Tiger and Lance before him, he seems too good to be true. He always says the right sports clichés and does the right things (e.g., “the separation is in the preparation”). But as much as you want to feel good and embrace the Russell Wilson story all the way, it’s gotten hard to do that, because your heart has been broken so many times. So you’re just waiting for an unimaginably heinous story to break about a domestic violence situation between Wilson and his wife or allegations that he has been molesting 8-year-old boys at the local Children’s Hospital he visits every week.
Makes me sad to think about it. But how can you not think about it when things like this seem to happen almost every few weeks? I started writing this piece not long after the Tiger Woods scandal broke. Then it got stalled. The Lance Armstrong revelations inspired me to pick it back up and work on it more. In between those two events, we had the Penn State scandal and the Suzy Favor Hamilton scandal. Since then, there have been more allegations about Alex Rodriguez using PEDs. Who knows what will be next?
Maybe Gladwell’s next book should be a look at the psychology of high achievers such as himself. Perhaps then we could better appreciate how the tendencies that allow a person to “achieve” in one area of life increase the likelihood that they will transgress societal norms in other areas.[4] And with this knowledge, maybe we’d get clear once and for all that Charles Barkley had it right about not being a role model. Then, we’d be less inclined to elevate these people so unrealistically in the first place.
At the same time, perhaps it would also allow us to focus more attention on those areas of achievement that Gladwell has excluded from Outliers. For most people don’t get 10,000 hours of training when they begin the process of rearing children. Yet, some people manage to be better than other people anyway. Some people build and nurture a wide community of friends and associates (“Connectors” to use a term from another Gladwell book). Some people are always there in a crisis when a friend needs an understanding ear or help up off the carpet after they’ve fallen down. But only in rare circumstances are the accomplishments of these people foregrounded.
As former NFL coach Tony Dungy apparently has said, “Integrity is what you do when no one is watching; it’s doing the right thing all the time, even when it may work to your disadvantage.” Those words have got a pretty good ring to them. They definitely don’t describe the Captain Kirk, Kobayashi Maru scenario from the Starfleet Academy. But they do describe the Mr. Spock Kobayashi Maru scenario from the Wrath of Kahn.
There, faced with a no-win situation, Spock can’t just reprogram the computer simulation, change the background constraints, and prevail. Instead, he must sacrifice himself, so that others may survive. That’s a mighty high bar. Most of us don’t ever reach it. But it’s something to strive for.
Indeed, while I’m not a religious person, it seems like our faith (wherever we may find it) is what inspires and supports us in striving to act with integrity—even when nobody is watching, even when we never get a gold star, and even when so many messages in the culture make us feel foolish for doing so.
It’s a good thing that a lot of people still seem to have this sort of faith or we’d be really screwed. But sometimes it still feels like an endangered species that is being asked to carry too much of the load. And I worry about what may happen if we don’t collectively work harder to re-factor our priorities and foreground the values that support this sort of faith. For living these values doesn’t just ask us to do what other people won’t do. It also asks us to do things that many people don’t do.
They’re not necessarily the same things that Gladwell is talking about in Outliers. But they definitely pose their own challenges. Often, they are even harder than doing the things that people like Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong do to excel in their respective endeavors (i.e., deferring short-term gratification to achieve something bigger in the long-term). For at least in this life on earth, there isn’t much glory attached to doing the difficult integrity things that a lot of other folks don’t do. And that’s kind of a shame, because these seem like the things that actually deserve the most glory and attention.
So maybe one of these days, if we’re lucky, somebody will write a contemporary, best-selling book venerating people who have managed to do well these less sexy, but no less important, things.
Maybe they’ll write out a great speech based on the book and revise it until it shines. Maybe they’ll memorize their speech. Maybe they’ll be booked to give it at places like Town Hall and Microsoft. Maybe it will become a sensation and inspire a more public conversation about how the rest of us can better emulate the people described in the book.
In the mean time, I guess the best we can do is have that sort of conversation ourselves with the people we know, however imperfect or unpolished it may seem, and try to live those ideas everyday, even when nobody is watching. From small things (big things one day come).
In the wake of the Lance Armstrong mea culpa, it was heartbreaking to hear the story about Armstrong telling his son, who defended his honor, that he had lied to him about his PED use. ↩
The “Four Burner Theory” encourages us to look at our lives as a stove with four burners. Burner one represents family. Burner two represents Friends. Burner three represents health. Burner four represents career. According to Sedaris, to be good at one of these areas of life, you must turn down the flame on one of the other burners (e.g., to be really good at career, either friends, family, or your health needs to be mostly ignored). To be great at one of these areas of life, you must turn down the flame on two burners. So it might be possible to be great at career and keep the burner of family on. But you’ll probably need to turn off the burners of health and friendship. In my experience, many people do end up turning down one burner to focus on the other three. But only a select few, the “people who will do what other people won’t do,” can stomach losing two of the four burners. ↩
It’s a little crazy that former Olympian (and fellow UW-Madison Badger) Suzy Favor Hamilton, could embark on a secret career as a high-priced escort and believe that if she shared her real identity with clients it would nevertheless remain a secret. But on another level, while perhaps a bit naive, maybe it wasn’t completely crazy to think that people would keep it in confidence (or at least mostly in confidence). Probably, the story didn’t leak out because one mean dude called TMZ. It was more like somebody used her services, bragged about it to a buddy and told him not to tell anyone else. Of course, that buddy had to tell at least one other person. Eventually, along that chain, the message of discretion was lost. The rumor got into the hands of somebody with a monetary interest in determining whether it was true. With a little digging, they determined it was true. The rest is history. ↩
More Suzy Favor Hamilton, because her story is so rich and, well, she’s a fellow UW-Madison Badger. In addition to being a world class middle distance runner, she apparently also became a top-ranked escort. Undoubtedly, her decision to get into the escorting business was driven by a lot of different things. Other than noting that this isn’t something that most upper-middle class professional women do, I’m not here to judge her actions or motivations. But one thing seems clear from the news accounts. ↩Once she committed to being an escort, she was in it to win it. She wasn’t going to be a mediocre escort. And I wonder if the competitive aspect of that business was one of the draws for her. For while she could no longer use her body to strive to be the best middle-distance runner in the world. being the top-ranked escort in Vegas was apparently still a realistic possibility. As dude pushing 50 myself, I can tell you that best “beer gut” is about the only body-related competition where I’d have any realistic shot of being top-ranked. So however weird it might seem to a lot of people, attaining top-ranked escort status in Vegas as person over 40 is something that most people could never do even if they wanted to. Therefore, whatever one thinks about the propriety of her actions, I don’t find it that hard to understand how they filled a psychological need for Favor-Hamilton.
(Poster above by Ed Fotheringham. Printing by the Vera Project. There are still a limited number of posters for sale. Proceeds go to Music for Marriage Equality. Starting on August 27, 2012, you should be able to buy one at www.music4marriage.org. Nice, professional, B&W photos below by Niffer Calderwood. Video by Chris Swenson. Blurry color photo of Ed Fotherginham’s feet by me and my Droid Incredible.)
I saw an impromptu reunion of the band Flop last Saturday night in the living room at my buddy Whiting’s house. For those who don’t know them, Flop was a band from the era of the Seattle grunge explosion, but never quite of the Seattle grunge explosion. They made three great full-length records, filled with melodic pop/punk. Then they disbanded around 1995.
In a alternate universe, destiny might well have delivered to Flop the fame that Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden received in ours. Meanwhile, Kurt Cobain, after years spent touring and trying to make it in the music business, might have put his art skills to use and stumbled into a successful career in web design, all the while continuing to play music shows and release records of great quality.
But in our universe, that fate belongs to Rusty Willoughby: art director by day, musician and songwriter 24/7/365. Whether with Pure Joy, Flop, Llama, or his most recent project, Cobirds Unite, few Seattle musicians have matched Rusty for longevity and consistent quality of output. Indeed, the Cobirds Unite album is easily one of my favorite records of the last 5 years.
Rusty may have never amassed a fan base comparable to that of the icons of grunge, but his audience remains passionate and loyal, a fact that was plainly evident last Saturday night. People were in high spirits, and Rusty, Bill, Paul, Nate, and Dave did not leave them disappointed.
The show somehow managed this amazing trick of being filled with wonderful nostalgia while simultaneously remaining absolutely rooted in the now. Maybe it was having everyone packed into such a small space (a great call on Flop’s part). Maybe, because Rusty’s current songs are still so great, nobody had to feel secretly sad that all the good stuff was in the past. Whatever the reasons, Whiting’s living room felt refreshingly devoid of ironic self-consciousness.
This, in and of itself, was notable. For few in the annals of history have wielded the protective shield of cynical, self-aware, irony more proudly and completely than the people of my generation. Boomer hippies have their free love, patchouli, tie dye, consciousness raising protest marches, and self-righteousness. We have our irony.
If I had any doubt about just how much our ironic outlook marks us as creatures of a particular time and place, a recent weekend spent amongst the sincerely earnest young songsters at the Doe Bay Music Festival made it plain for me again.
But last Saturday there was no one foot in the water and one foot on the shore. Everyone in the room seemed to want to be there all the way. And they looked like they belonged there too. Scanning the proceedings, I had an odd sensation, as if somebody had taken a picture of a house party from 1992, put it in Photoshop, and applied the “middle-aged” filter.
I know that probably doesn’t sound very attractive in the abstract. But it was really quite awesome in the flesh. The years had not transformed anyone into a sad, unrecognizable caricature of their younger self, and Flop was still great too. Yes, there were some bald heads and grey hair. But cosmetics could not obscure the unbroken thread running from Whiting’s living room all the way back to where it all started for Flop years ago in a shared U-District house.
Video by Chris Swenson
There was no bittersweet paradise lost vibe. There was only a joyful feeling of renewal, as we reconnected at the most basic and visceral level to what for many of us is the formative, shared-cultural experience of our generation, our storefront church, our Festival Express: the small-scale rock show–band and audience crammed together, wall between them destroyed, pulsing and undulating as one, senses completely immersed in the moment.
I’m not sure how the night could have been any more right. For my people have always been mostly about little cultural moments like this, shared with our immediate community, in places like basements and living rooms. We might not have invented doing it yourself, but our most significant cultural contribution has probably been making it something that everyone throughout the world immediately understands when they see the letters “DIY”.
The ethos of DIY is a modest one. Rarely, does its reach exceed its grasp. To a large extent, it exists in opposition to the grandiose. Indeed, it was probably observing the very public foibles of the Greatest Generation and the early Baby Boomers that led many of us to cling so tightly to the more modest goal of keeping things real enough that they don’t get too overblown and polluted.
Perhaps, it’s fair to criticize our lack of grand, widescreen audacity and ambition. But on the other hand, our DIY ethos seems to have aged better than tie dye and patchouli.
And that’s no accident. It was by design. For metaphorically speaking, DIY isn’t one particular suit of clothes or a specific fashion trend. It’s whatever you happen to be wearing at the moment you decide you’re going to get off your ass and do something, however small or personal it may seem in the grander scheme of things. In this regard, DIY is a timeless outfit that’s always in style.
Over the last 30 years, we’ve helped grow a lot of cool stuff out of the DIY soil. Even if it wasn’t a stated goal to begin with, some of it has changed the world. In the process, we’ve acquired power. Many among us are now the Man or the Woman.
So it’s both foolish and impossible to pretend that we are still part of some sort of underdog insurgency. Our sensibility is everywhere, in all kinds of improbable places, like State Farm Insurance commercials and sports talk radio.
Indeed, it increasingly feels like the entire mainstream is populated with people like us, cultural omnivores, making sly references to things like Gilligan’s Island; John Cage; Rush; Miles Davis; the Three Stooges; Apocalypse Now; and Tony Orlando and Dawn. It’s not just for margin dwelling hipsters anymore.
That can be pretty weird to contemplate sometimes. But still, even in middle age, a different thread also remains, one running slightly under the surface, but nevertheless hardwired into our collective identity. We don’t seem to know any other way than to keep going back to the DIY soil, wherever we may find it.
When in doubt, go to the basement, the living room, the practice space, the workshop, the drawing board, the word processor, or wherever else you do your thing. Make something.
Why? Because you want to. Because you have to. Because the act of doing it feels good in and of itself, even if the process ends up being more important than the outcome in the grand scheme of things. Express yourself. Remind yourself that you are still alive. In doing so, maybe help remind your friends and family that they are alive too.
That’s what Flop invited us to do with them so joyfully last Saturday night, put our hands in that dirt, rub it on our sweaty, beer-soaked faces, and remember something that has shaped so much of what we’ve done to date: No matter how much our worlds may change, with careers, kids, and lots of other cool (and not so cool) distractions and responsibilities, that soil remains ours to work in. We don’t need anyone’s permission to sow our seeds there. All we need is a little inspiration, the tools at hand, and the will to follow through.
Once again, his post engendered a bunch of comments. At #84 in the comment thread, Brendan posted the following:
Again: I *do not advocate* any of this stuff. But I do not believe that vandalism and violence are the same thing. Smashing a person and smashing a window are both scary, but they are not moral equivalents and should not be regarded as such. I’m surprised by how difficult that idea seems to be for some of you.
I agree with Brendan. Vandalism does not always imply violence. But as I said yesterday, vandalism and violence are both acts of aggression.
Along the continuum of aggression, violence is morally worse than vandalism. An act of violence always intends violence as its outcome. An act of vandalism, on the other hand, does not necessarily have this intent.
Nevertheless, the possibility of violence is almost always imbedded within acts of vandalism, and the two have often walked hand in hand throughout human history.
That’s why people commonly lump vandalism and violence together. And that’s why many people believe that the moral distance separating these two categories of action isn’t wide enough to be conceptually meaningful most of the time.
One of my problems with vandalism is that too often its perpetrators don’t consciously appreciate the possibility of violence embedded in their act of vandalism.
Instead, their vandalism has an aura of being mildly transgressive but mostly harmless, as when high school students drive around the suburbs kicking down people’s mailboxes.
The risk of getting caught is part of what makes it exciting for the vandal. But embedded in the fear of "getting caught" is also the unconscious knowledge/fear that "getting caught" might also mean "getting hurt," if the wrong person happens to do the "catching."
How many people have heard a story about about some kid who was out throwing snowballs at cars, hit a car with a snowball, the car stopped, a dude got out, chased the kid down, and put a whipping on him. It wasn’t an everyday thing. But these stories underscored the riskiness (and enhanced the thrill ) of partaking in this activity.
(So the violence embedded in the vandal’s act might not be violence on someone else. It might be violent retribution visited upon the person doing the vandalism.)
There’s a lack of empathy at the root of most vandalism. Perhaps the people who put the rocks through Mayor Mike McGinn’s window did not intend to do violence to McGinn and his family. But they also didn’t really show much empathy for what the experience of receiving those rocks might mean to them. In that moment, McGinn and his family weren’t people. They were just abstract symbols.
Sure, it’s different when the window is at Niketown. A multi-national corporation doesn’t have feelings. As someone else in the comments thread on Brendan’s post said: “Corporations are made of capital; people are made of carbon.” But there are carbon life forms who work and shop at Niketown. These people do have feelings. One of them could have been hurt. Somebody will have to clean up the damage. Somebody could be hurt in the process of doing that too.
There was similar property damage in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood a couple of days ago. Every storefront involved was not a Niketown. Some shops were small businesses made of both capital and carbon, capital they may not be able to replace. But as with the Seattle property damage, at the point of impact, those people with those businesses were just symbols. In the process of making their statements, the political vandals stripped these people of their humanity.
People doing politically motivated property damage tend to be justify themselves by using the following logic:
"My vandalism is a high-minded symbolic statement. It’s no immature thrill seeking stunt. Besides, it’s minor small potatoes compared to the atrocities promulgated by the people and groups that I am protesting against. What about Mitt Romney, Bank of America, the IMF, and the US Army in the Middle East? These people and groups are hurting people. These are desperate times. People need to know we are serious."
And that’s all true. There are many cold, empathy-challenged, border-line (and actual) psychopaths who hold power in our world. They hurt a lot of people. But when we stoop to their level of non-empathy, we become them.
So while violence and vandalism are not morally equivalent, they are morally linked by the lack of empathy that is at the root of both them.
People who appreciate this linkage tend not to perpetrate vandalism. Conversely, people who perpetrate vandalism often don’t seem to understand (a) the real harm it can do to other people, even if these people don’t get whacked upside the head; and (b) just how easily it can slide into something violent, where somebody does get whacked upside the head (or worse).
Few people ever signed up for a revolution the goal of which was to liberate other people to run amok on the streets and lay waste to anything that might catch their fancy (including other people’s stuff).
Most people are motivated by a desire for security and some semblance of order. This is what frees them to think about and do other stuff besides protect themselves, their families, and their stuff 24/7/365.
Maybe sometimes violence and vandalism are the only way to get to that place. But to my mind, usually they aren’t. More often than not, this sort of approach and response just continues a cycle of aggression and violence.
So like Brendan, I don’t condone either vandalism or violence. But unlike Brendan, I’m not sure that trying to highlight the moral distinction between the two in this context is particularly useful either. Even if they’re not equally bad, they’re both bad enough that they should be avoided.
In that piece, Brendan draws a distinction between “violence” and “vandalism,” suggesting that the news media too often lumps these two things together under the singular heading of “violence.”
While I agree that Brendan’s distinction may well be worth considering, particularly at the level of theory, I’m not surprised that people typically link the term “vandalism” with the term “violence.”
Here’s why: Both vandalism and violence are forms of aggression. Yes, they take place along a moral continuum. Violence is worse. But when people, animals, etc. are nearby, the distance between vandalism and violence can be very short indeed.
Most people are cognizant of this reality. They know that once you let out the genie of aggression for whatever purpose, righteous intentions may not be enough to prevent a situation from careening into violence.
When I was in school in Madison, Wisconsin back in the mid to late 1980s, there was a fruit smoothie stand on the Library Mall called “Loose Juice.” It was owned by a guy named Karleton Armstrong. On August 24, 1970, Karleton, his brother and two other dudes blew up the Army Math Research Building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
It was intended as an act of vandalism or targeted property destruction to use Brendan’s terminology. Karleton and his cohorts tried to make sure that nobody was inside.
But a post-doctoral fellow named Robert Fassnacht apparently didn’t get the memo. He was in the basement doing research that night, trying to wrap some stuff up before starting his family vacation. When the building blew up, he was killed.
Karleton and some of his cohorts went to jail (one of the four dudes is apparently still at large). When he got out, he opened the smoothie stand.
Karleton made a good smoothie called the Dick Gregory with strawberries and bananas. He seemed like a humble, soft spoken dude. I’m sure his intentions were good back in 1970. But his act of targeted property destruction killed somebody. That was real. That was violence. That he intended something different didn’t change the outcome.
This reality was hammered home for me years later here in Seattle. A distant cousin of mine came to visit and pinged about having lunch with my brother and me. We met him and his wife at the Saigon Bistro above the Viet Wah in the I.D..
My cousin was older than us, and we didn’t know him really at all. As we talked, it turned out that he had attended grad school in Madison during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
I made a comment about that era being crazy times. I think I must have referenced the Math Research Building blowing up and how Karelton had the smoothie stand on the Library Mall while I was in Madison.
When I said that, my cousin tensed up a little. “The guy who was killed in that bombing was a friend and colleague of mine. He had a wife and young kids.”
That put a razor sharp edge on things. Maybe Karleton had had a weird life he didn’t expect, blowing up a building, going to jail, selling smoothies, and later owning a deli called the Radical Rye on State Street in Madison. But he was still alive. My cousin’s friend was dead, and his kids never got to know their father.
My take away: Any time you move into aggressive destruction mode, you create a risk of hurting somebody. In an urban environment like downtown, where there are a lot of people around, that risk goes up.
Probably, the most brutalizing aspect of modern capitalism is the way that it turns people into abstractions on a spreadsheet. Philosopher Kings of the market make decisions that don’t take the human costs into account and a lot of people suffer. Generals and government officials do the same thing on the battlefield.
But when “anarchists” do targeted property damage vandalism, they’re kind of just fighting one immoral approach with another one. They replace the spreadsheet with some sort of theoretical revolutionary framework. But they’re still trying to play the role of Philosopher King, taking their cues from a place of abstraction, where the human costs of their actions don’t seem any more well considered than the actions of the people they are protesting against.
Sure, the wine in their glass may be different, but the glass itself is the same. It’s the same pattern of thought. It’s the same psychological impulse. It’s two wrongs don’t make a right.
To me, this is the power of non-violence. It mostly avoids this mirror imaging problem. It’s a different kind of vessel entirely. Yes, it is slow. Yes, it requires lots of discipline. No, it is often not emotionally satisfying. But like interest compounding, if people can stick with it long enough, it’s been known to add up.
