November 19, 2004

Guy who is not Martin Selig but who looks a little like him, if you subtract all hints of friendliness.

      It was the day after the election. "Is it still okay to wear my John Kerry button," asked a little girl, maybe seven or eight, outside my daughter's school. We had struck up a friendship after she noticed that I also wore a Kerry button everyday. What I should have answered but didn't was that she should feel good for having been part of a powerful movement of good people fighting for their country, that those people were not going to stop fighting, and she should continue to wear her button with pride.
      Ten minutes later, telling someone on the bus about the girl's question, I found I could not speak. When I arrived at work, I closed the door to my office and sobbed for ten minutes. Fuck that though. You can't wallow in misery. That's letting the thugs win. And there were a few positive things in our local and state elections, not least of which was the defeat of the effort to recall our monorail project.
      Voters had already passed two (or was it three?) initiatives in support of building a monorail in Seattle, but--to put it in cartoonishly simple yet essentially accurate terms--a lot of rich people were against it. Chief among them was developer Martin Selig, who put hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Recall the Monorail campaign.
      I used to wait on Martin Selig years ago at an upscale Japanese restaurant in his neighborhood. He would come in twenty minutes before we were actually open, seat himself at the sushi bar, and tell the cooks, who were still setting up, to make him something. They would, because he was Martin Selig, owner of the tallest building in town, and because the chef had moved up from LA where restaurants make their living catering to big shot dipshits like Martin Selig. But whatever. I don't want to make him out to be a monster--he was never over-the-top rude or anything. But he had a clear sense that the world revolved around the needs of him and people like him. His sense of entitlement was so strong it created a distorting energy field around him.

Basic pattern of most Martin Selig paintings: One color or pattern, with a rectangle of something totally unrelated layered on top.

      Martin Selig is also a painter, kind of. He shows his abstract oil paintings in buildings he owns. They are not good paintings, but they are effective in a crude way. He has his way with them. They single-mindedly create one clear effect. Good enough for some khaki fuck hurrying through a corporate lobby, I suppose.
      I suspect the real reason the Monorail Recall defeat was so lopsided was that it was confusing for people to vote "yes" to mean "no." The recall measure in effect asked people to say "we do want no monorail." In addition to the many people who were against the recall, I would bet you that there were a lot of voters who voted "no" to the recall when what they meant was "no" to the monorail.
      But the outcome was still a great thrill for me. Martin Selig, you cannot, in fact, have anything you want, you spoiled little shit.