Ed note: This cheery review pretty much ignores the downtown situation, crime, drugs and the homeless–but perhaps seeing the glass half full is agood reminder of the strengths of our city.
In the NYT by By David Laskin
The Space Needle in downtown Seattle. With the removal of the elevated highway known as the Alaskan Way Viaduct, the city’s waterfront is undergoing a renewal. Credit…Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
On Feb. 9, 2020, the Seattle Asian Art Museum reopened after a three-year, $56 million renovation and expansion that transformed the look, feel and reach of the venerable institution. Five weeks later, the first round of statewide Covid lockdowns shuttered the place. “It was heartbreaking for me and my colleagues,” said Foong Ping, the Foster Foundation Curator of Chinese Art at the museum. “It was shoulder to shoulder in the newly imagined galleries — then silence.”
This July, the museum, which reopened in May 2021, launched a new exhibition curated by Ms. Foong called “Beyond the Mountain,” which showcases contemporary Chinese artists, including Zhang Huan, Yang Yongliang and Lam Tung Pang. It’s a knockout show, with bold, tech-enhanced, multimedia works playing off traditional images and themes. And it’s also a fitting symbol of Seattle in the aftermath of the pandemic. Ink Media #4, by Chen Shaoxiong, with its full-wall projections of drawings based on photos of political protests, is one of the most exhilarating works currently on view in the city, but museum hours remain limited to three days a week and the number of visitors has yet to reach prepandemic levels.
In short, Seattle is back, but not all the way. The pandemic left gaps and tears in the urban fabric, especially downtown, and locals still mourn favorite restaurants that did not make it through: Boat Street Kitchen and Dahlia Lounge downtown, Il Corvo in Pioneer Square, the Paragon on Queen Anne Hill. But the city’s defining cultural institutions remain healthy, new restaurants and coffee places are popping up all over town, and the communities ringing the center are more vibrant than ever.
Capitol Hill makes a comeback
Capitol Hill — the neighborhood where the Asian Art Museum stands on the crest of the Olmsted-Brothers-designed Volunteer Park — is a good example of the city’s recovery.
At the start of June 2020, less than a mile and a half south of the museum, the so-called CHOP (Capitol Hill Occupied Protest) transformed the neighborhood’s commercial heart into a zone of fierce protest ignited by the murder of George Floyd. Protesters filled a local park with tents and murals, did their own policing after the local precinct was abandoned, and distributed free food, though by the end of the month a series of shootings in the area precipitated the clearing of the CHOP protesters. “At first it was beautiful,” says Pietro Borghesi of the action swirling around the Capitol Hill restaurant, Osteria La Spiga, which he, and his wife, Sabrina Tinsley, own. “Then it became like the Wild West.”
n the last few months, Dr Jeannina Smith has seen organ transplant recipients who have been very careful throughout the pandemic venture out for one activity, contract Covid-19 and lose their transplant.
“I have been at the bedside of a transplant recipient” who “was very ill and in the hospital, and she got Covid the second time in a healthcare setting”, said Smith, medical director of the infectious disease program at University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics. “She was sobbing because she said, ‘It’s so hard for me to see that people care so little about my life that wearing a mask is too much for them.’”
While much of US society has breathed a collective sigh of relief at no longer having to wear a mask in public, that freedom has placed people who are immunocompromised at risk, such as Smith’s patients. Nor are they the only ones. Older adults, the very young and those with long Covid are at greater risk too. So while for many Americans the pandemic increasingly feels over, for others – often the most vulnerable – it rages on.
As Smith puts it, “What troubles me as an infectious disease specialist with an interest in public health is the abandonment of the idea that public health exists to protect the most vulnerable.”
We are at a point where this pandemic should not keep older people from socializing
My high-school classmates wanted to make an impact with our 1957 senior-class gift to Shawnee-Mission High School, in the Kansas City suburbs.[1] The Senior Gift Committee had the bright idea of buying a painting, which would hang in the entrance lobby where a few thousand students would pass it every day.
Thomas Hart Benton was famous, especially for his murals, and he lived in Kansas City. The $750 budget, raised from pass-the-hat contributions from 524 of us seniors, was only half the asking price, but Mr. Benton accepted our offer, probably because Gail Goodman, who chaired the gift committee, was so persuasive.
For a senior-class gift, it certainly set a new standard. Then, in the following decades, the value of Thomas Hart Benton paintings went through the roof. By the time of our 50th class reunion in 2007, this painting we had acquired, Utah Highlands, was valued at $750,000.
A thousand-fold increase. That’s likely better than any investment made by a member of the Class of 1957, unless one of us was an early investor in Apple or Microsoft. Utah Highlands is now probably worth over a million.
Success, surely. But the trouble it caused….
The rear of the school library. In 2007, my 67-year-old classmates were allowed into the locked room, as close as the previous level of security allowed –that Plexiglas box (below).
Utah Highlands is about two by three feet, not exactly mural size, but all we could afford. In 2008, other Benton paintings of similar size were going for a million.
Vulnerable as it was, hanging unprotected in the busy school hallway, it was later relocated to the back wall of the school library, where librarians could keep an eye on it.
Decades passed. By the time our 50th Reunion visited it in 2007, a locked room had been built around it. The room had a plate-glass window that kept viewers further away than the protections of world-famous paintings in museums. The school district was surely paying a lot for insurance and trying not to publicize its jewel.
My 67-year-old classmates were allowed into the locked room, as close as the previous level of security allowed –that Plexiglas box.
But the next year, 2008, the painting disappeared. A color photograph was substituted for it, but the Plexiglas protector was left in place. Inquiries from my classmates led the school district to say that the painting was not lost, merely hidden somewhere they would not name. They did not want to talk about it. That sounds like the insurance company was setting conditions for a cheaper premium.
One suspects the district could no longer afford the insurance premiums for public display, only those for secure storage. The district tried to get the big Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City—the one with the giant Claes Oldenburg shuttlecocks scattered around the lawn— to take it as a permanent loan. By 2015, they finally succeeded. I hate to think of how many lawyer-hours were wasted over this.
So, back in 1957, if we had asked ourselves about the potential side effects of our gift, I doubt that anyone would have guessed that we were creating a burden for future school administrators. But, since we were teenagers, I doubt that we would have cared—we might have even treated it as a bonus. I would have. I was still annoyed with the autocratic principal who told me to take off the beret I was wearing. (“I’m not going to allow any clothing fads in my high school,” he said, with his best stern stare.)
The beret initiative was created one morning in my 1956 carpool. Here they are in 2007, with a few extras. I treasure them all as some of the best friends I’ve ever had.
From the left: Richard Schott*, Ginger Stromsted*, unidentified, Mary Margaret McCoy, Bart Everett, Karen Robb*, me*, and Carol Sundell. The * are the carpool.
[1] In 1958, when a second high school opened, the first and only was renamed Shawnee-Mission North. It is located in what is now known to the post office as Overland Park, Kansas, a southwestern suburb of Kansas City.
Your monthly update of news and events from the UW Memory and Brain Wellness Center and the UW Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC)
Have you visited the nearby Memory Hub yet and learned about all their resources to support both research and care for those affected by memory loss. Click here for the latest Newsletter which shows their extensive outreach into the community–caring, supporting and coordinating.
Heather Cox Richardson is a Professor at Boston College who teaches nineteenth-century American history at both the undergraduate and the graduate level. Her PhD is from Harvard where she studied under David Herbert Donald and William Gienapp. Her early work focused on the transformation of political ideology from the Civil War to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. It examined issues of race, economics, westward expansion, and the construction of the concept of an American middle class. Her history of the Republican Party, To Make Men Free (2014) examines the fundamental tensions in American politics from the time of the Northwest Ordinance to the present. She is currently working on an intellectual history of American politics and a graphic treatment of the Reconstruction Era.
Click here for her web page and please note that you can subscribe to her newsletter for free. It’s fortunate to have historical perspective given the current turmoil in American politics.
Posted inHistory|Comments Off on A remarkable historian comments on the present
This conference is open to the public and has some wonderful outside speakers from Harvard and Tufts, as well as the head chef at Canlis giving cooking demonstrations. The cost is $25 to watch online. Sadly it is all just online this year.
PITTSBURGH (The Borowitz Report)—Eating classified documents was “an essential part of President Donald Trump’s super-healthy diet,” Dr. Mehmet Oz has claimed.
Oz, the longtime television host and, more recently, Pennsylvania’s G.O.P. nominee for the U.S. Senate, said that “classified documents, including the nuclear codes, provided the roughage necessary to keep President Trump’s digestive system humming along at the highest possible level.”
Posted inHealth, Humor|Comments Off on Dr. Oz Claims That Eating Classified Documents Was Essential to Trump’s Healthy Diet
The needs of homeowners and businesses and those of people who are unsheltered often conflict. Community leaders, faced with increasing crime and disorder, frequently see police sweeps as the only answer, while advocates for homeless people argue that this response is merely a stopgap that does more damage than good.
But what if there was a way to stop shifting people from encampments to jails to shelters to hospitals and back again? In Seattle a unique collaboration among businesses, neighborhood groups, the police, advocates and nonprofits is fighting cynics and misperceptions driven by politics to cut homelessness.
Santa Clara University’s Bioinnovation and Design Lab is partnering with Maude’s Ventures to address the challenges of caregiving for patients and family members with dementia. They are gathering perspectives from individuals who have first-hand experience caring for people with dementia. They will use this anonymous data to identify major areas of concern for caregivers and to generate ideas on how to help caregivers. This research will lead to the design of a new service or product for caregivers.
We invite you to complete the survey at your convenience by September 15, 2022. Please use the following link to reach the survey.
Any questions may be directed to Julia Scott, Senior Research Associate for the Bioinnovation and Design Lab at jscott1@scu.edu.”
Many theories on Trump’s secret files, but not yet one to rule them all
David Horsey is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for The Seattle Times. His latest book is “Drawing Apart: Political Cartoons from a Polarized America.”
Posted inMental Health|Comments Off on They’re MINE!
18th Asian Hall of Fame celebrates Pacific Northwest Inductees at the landmark Sky View Observatory in Seattle, Washington. Concert performers are Artist Ambassadors Danny Seraphine (Chicago), Robby Krieger (The Doors), Krist Novoselic (Krist Novoselic), Hiro Yamamoto (Soundgarden) featuring Tony Grant (The Temptations) with Musical Director Ed Roth (Annie Lenox).
Dolly Parton during a 2018 celebration of Imagination Library’s 100 millionth donated book. Photo: Shannon Finney/Getty Images
Dolly Parton never imagined her book giveaway program would amount to much more than helping children in her native Sevier County, Tennessee, learn to read.
But over the past 27 years, millions of young children across the globe have enjoyed a free “Dolly book” every month.
Driving the news: The entertainment icon visited Columbus yesterday to promote her Imagination Library program and thank county sponsors from all over the state.
Her appearance alongside Gov. Mike DeWine and First Lady Fran DeWine also served as a celebration — Ohio now has the most enrollees of any U.S. state.
Why it matters: Few government programs are as universally praised as the Imagination Library, which mails free books to Ohio children ages 0-5.
And few celebrities are as universally beloved as Dolly, a self-described lover of reading who takes pride in being known by younger generations not as a country music icon, but as “The Book Lady.”
Between the lines: The Imagination Library is an unmitigated success for the DeWines, whose statewide travel promoting new sign-ups coincides with the governor’s reelection efforts.
For Gov. DeWine — pummeled by Republicans for his pandemic response and later by Democrats for his stances on abortion, redistricting and gun rights — the program offers a much-welcomed and apolitical diversion on the campaign trail.
By the numbers: 48% of eligible Ohio children receive books, or more than 343,000 kids in total, though Franklin County’s participation rate is considerably lower.
Fran DeWine’s goal is for the state to reach 50% by the end of the year.
Zoom out: A total of 186 million books have been mailed out since Parton launched the program in 1995, around 3 million of which have gone to Ohio families.
What she said: Dolly has earned countless honors in her life, but hopes this program will be her true legacy.
“I’ll be as proud of this as anything I’ve ever done. When they lay me down, I’ll be thinking of the Imagination Library.”
She also admitted to wanting people in 100 years to say about her, “Golly, she looks good for her age.”
Words of inspiration: Dolly performed two songs to close out her visit, including “Try” — a theme song for the reading program about making an effort to better yourself and the world.
It’s a lesson she’s learned since mailing out her first book in eastern Tennessee.
“I’m always doin’ something. It’s just one dream after another.”
Dolly’s quote du jour: “The DeWines. I love that name, don’t you? Please pass DeWine.”
Dolly Parton singing at Tuesday’s charity luncheon promoting the Imagination Library. Photo: Tyler Buchanan/Axios
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