Every day it does not rain, and many days when it does, this man walks three miles to the Pike Street public market in Seattle to play long alien notes on his Chinese instrument.
You walk by him on your way to the Athenian Cafe in the market. He's got a couple of bucks and change in his begging cup so you toss in a couple more. When you come out of the restaurant an hour or so later, he's got what he had, what you gave him, and a couple of quarters more. Almost everyone is ignoring him. He plays on.
Seattle is a second-level city mostly famous in popular culture for a second-rate rock band who did not so much invent "grunge" as simply show up on stage playing and wearing it. The band and its lead singer have been in different stages of dead for decades now, but their style lives on in Seattle like the galvanic twitches in the corpse of a frog long after it has been pithed. Seattle's left with a zombie pop culture whose only hope for survival is feeding on the brains of the bovine young. That's thin gruel for a zombie, but Seattle's "cultural scene" is eking out an undead living with inspirational shows such as this:
Lest you misunderstand, the names on the portable outhouse door are band names. If you attend this venue of "cutting-edgy" and oh-so-transgressive "creativity" you can hear hymns to little monsters, excrement, liquid excrement, maimed animals, and vague apocalyptic rumors. If you are fortunate your ears will not bleed as part of the "fun." Make no mistake about it, the names of the bands will be the best thing about them. In fact, the poster itself tells you so in no uncertain terms.
I don't think the old Chinese musician in the market will get into this club, unless it is to make five bucks for scraping the roaches, rubbers, and lost drugs works off the floor, and to mop out the toilets. It's pretty much how "youth culture" rolls in this second-level city. Postmortem effects. The twitching of the pithed.
But of course that's just "pop" culture and it's pretty much drained of the new, the beautiful and the true everywhere. There's always "haute" culture to turn to, isn't there?
Let us go then, you and I.... to the acclaimed and recently redone Seattle Museum of Art. It's just a couple of blocks from the old Chinese musician in the market. It's recently undergone one of its relentless expansions under the watchful gaze of Bill Gates mom. The entrance is vaulting. Vaulting enough to have room for an extremely awful sculpture of five or six bad cars hanging from the ceiling with sticks of lights spurting from them in a vague pattern. What does it all mean? Well, in the words of R. Crumb's Mr. Natural, "It don't mean shit."
But wait, surely with the Gates family doing the heavy fund-raising lifting, this cathedral to high art in the 21st century is light years beyond the grunge and excrement of the pop culture music scene? It just has to be, doesn't it.
Of course not. Here's what you see enshrined in the dead center of the main exhibit floor of the Seattle Art Museum:
Yes, that's a museum quality ceramic toilet by one of my old art teachers, the late Robert Arneson. I studied under him for a couple of terms at the University, and he was an amazing man, and not a bad sculptor, but still second-level when confined to his era. He'll be virtually unknown in another 50 years and this particular piece will be part of the reason. Even though it gets pride of place in the Seattle Art Museum, it is -- to say the least -- one of the worst Arneson's around and he has many. Still, a third rate collection in a second level city has to take what it can get.
On the wall to the right is, as it happens, another third rate work by another of my instructors, the painter William Wiley. Wiley can be an interesting and amusing, if obtuse, painter, but the one seen here gives you no more close-up than it does as a smudge in this photograph. It fits right to the collection of SAM though. It's a museum where many artists are represented but none well. The museum seems to buy the names but not the quality. Deep down, it's shallow.
The single area in which the museum excels is the one area, of course, that is given short schrift; the totem poles, lodge carvings, masks, and ceremonial costumes of the Native American tribes of the Northwest Coast of North America. The collection, so I am told, is vast and world-class. Hence SAM hides most of it away so that more toilets of clay can be exhibited.
It's to be expected since in culture high and low these days, we are it seems a country half in love with easeful death and half in love with excrement.
Long ago, the natives of Seattle wore clothes like this:
Today, the descendants of those same tribes wear clothes like this:
Just the gear for a great night out at The Funhouse listening to "Shit Gets Smashed" and "The Hershey Squirts."
When I went back to the market to catch the bus I passed by the Chinese musician again. He'd made another couple of bucks from putting the music of a thousand years ago into the streets of the second level city of Seattle. When the bus finally came, I was encouraged to see that there was even more haute culture coming our way:
Your essay nicely summarizes the source of my on-going struggle with depression: it is not for myself that I am unsettled but for the lost and forgotten, the ways that were, and the missed opportunities for excellence. I used to be angry at the waste of time and effort, the intentional regression to infantile rebellion, but lately all that just makes me unspeakably sad. Why are so many pieces of our lives intentionally inferior and second-rate, and devoid of beauty, reason and logic? Self-loathing? No self-respect? The standards that marked the exceptional from the mundane have long faded, replaced by non-competitive and non-judgemental praise of all that is expressed and none that is worthy.
If you come across a phantom such as the old Chinese man you will learn a great deal about yourself by how you listen. And if you aren't paying attention the Hershey Squirts are ready to belittle and insult you for a modest cover charge.
Dan Patterson
Posted by: Dan Patterson at May 4, 2009 5:13 AMThis is my favorite work you do best. Feel like I was there yesterday afternoon. When you back again and listen to the old Chinese man, please put a dollar or two in his cup for me...
Posted by: Webutante at May 4, 2009 5:24 AMHome sweet home. Dookie town. Poop Culture.
Posted by: Andy at May 4, 2009 8:52 AMThanks for this Gerard style, expose of the unseemly slouch toward Gomorrah, If I ever visit Seattle I will know the levels of banality to avoid.
Thanks Dan. Nice response. And thank you too, Web.
Posted by: vanderleun at May 4, 2009 10:59 AMAh, the youtes that go to hear the Poop Players. If they think it all they think that they and the band are putting one over on the rest of the people, that they see clearly when they say everything is shit.
They are the gulled. They are accepting shit when it is offered to them when they do not have to.
So strange.
Posted by: Mikey NTH at May 4, 2009 11:13 AMHurrah! Hurrah! /clap clap
Posted by: ninme at May 4, 2009 11:27 AMHurrah! Hurrah! /clap clap
Posted by: ninme at May 4, 2009 11:27 AMOUR Arhoo player (Washington, DC) gets bucketfulls of dollar bills. Sad that the black hole at the center of the American Galaxy would be more generous than Seattle, but my motivation is that I have this idea that "giving the Arhoo player a buck brings me good luck." I don't know, but my reasoning makes some kind of ancient Chinese sense, doesn't it? Besides the preceding phrase rhymes.
I guess in Seattle they don't even believe in luck, or much else.
Posted by: Roderick Reilly at May 4, 2009 12:13 PMThat second tier grunge band wasn't really from Seattle, you know. They were actually from Aberdeen.
I tell the story this way:
"[Name of lead singer goes here] was from Seattle. Until he committed suicide - then he was from Aberdeen."
A better description of Seattle culture will be found nowhere else. Great post.
Posted by: KCK at May 4, 2009 3:38 PMThe Enlightenment lurches toward its logical conclusion.
Posted by: kkollwitz at May 4, 2009 5:40 PMMr. Patterson, you do not yet realize that there is no difference between beauty and ugliness. Just ask any tenured professor of literature or art.
Posted by: Bleepless at May 4, 2009 6:59 PMI read the name of the one band on the flier you posted as:
"The Heresy Squirts"
That would be my band: We'd strive to play melodiously and not offend the senses. Then we'd wipe our asses with pages of the Holy Q'uran.
And then people would throw bottles at us, we'd get booed off the stage and we'd get death threats. Soon, the brave, open-minded Seattlites would be afraid to come to our shows. Now that is cool!
Posted by: Gray at May 4, 2009 8:22 PMWait! Wait! I've got the best Seattle story.
I was on leave from training at Ft Lewis in 1989. A few buddies and I were walking up Yessler (near the triangular parking structure thingey). Some dopey white guy was walking towards us and he suddenly got a deer-inna-headlights look; started crossing the street; thought better; steeled himself to walk towards us and said with a clenched fist:
"I wish it had happened for you guys!"
We gave him the 'International WTF Look' and continued on our way.
Reading the paper the next day I suddendly realized he was talking about the rained-out, so-called "Aryan-Woodstock" of 1989. He thought we were skinheads! He was trying to ingratiate himself so we didn't pound him! Hahahaha!
Posted by: Gray at May 4, 2009 8:39 PMIf the young and hip think life is s**t and enematic now, they have a big surprise coming. It could get genuinely and truly worse, to the point where sellers of ersatz crap will find themselves hip deep in the real thing.
Posted by: Boots at May 4, 2009 10:29 PMDespite all the posing and the sham...I still love Seattle.
A question about art from a non-schooled "peasant"...Jackson Pollock...genius or just a guy who framed his dropcloths and sold them to chumps who desperately wanted to appear "not square"?
Posted by: Mumblix Grumph at May 5, 2009 4:50 AMJackson Pollock? Both. Plus a Drunk.
Posted by: vanderleun at May 5, 2009 10:41 AMOnce again.
I love it when your posts inspire a worthy comment section.
Dan's comment made me want to cry, but let me say this: I live in fly-over country, in the suburbs of Toledo, Ohio. Take heart. A new crop of families have moved into our old development as former owners retire or move up into now affordable McMansions. These new owners are young, hard-working, decent people raising good kids who know how to work and care for their younger sibs. Four kids on our north side. Five on our left. Maybe my little microcosm census doesn't make a trend . . . but, still - it's heartening to hear America working next door.
Posted by: Cathy at May 5, 2009 3:31 PMSo I'm reading through this again, 'cuz it bears re-reading, and my 2 1/2 year-old little guy sees the picture and yells:
"Daddy! Potty! Potty! Daddy!"
I told him he has a career as an effete po-mo art critic.
Posted by: Gray at May 6, 2009 9:05 PMThe instrument being played is an ERHU.
One of the weirdest experiences of my life occurred in Hong Kong when I got off of the MTR (Mass Transit Railway = Subway in U.S. terminlogy). You can walk for blocks underground before ascending up to street level.
I heard some music, faint and in the distance. I continued walking to find a little old man playing the erhu as well as a harmonica that was in a bamboo harness in the manner of Dylan.
Here I am, halfway around the world, and he's playing not only folk music from the American southeast, but *archaic* folk music- "Oh, Susannah".
At that point, I fully expected to hear Rod Serling start expounding upon the scenario...and yes, having been a busker in my past, I tipped the musician.
Posted by: Yanni.Znaio at May 7, 2009 10:31 AM
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