The Battle For Seattle

On November 30, 1999, the World Trade Organization began its annual Ministerial Conference in Seattle, Washington. The subsequent anti-WTO protests and police riot in Seattle made headlines around the world. The implications seemed epochal. There was a feeling in New York, where I was living at the time, that a new progressive and post-cold war politics was in development. There was a great deal of community organizing. Some of this contributed to the excitement in Nader’s 2000 Green campaign. If Clinton was pro-free trade, then screw the Democrats. Then Nader did just little too well, but not well enough, and the independent political development got squashed.

It has to be said that protests for the next few years were very well attended, until the really massive protests in the runup to the Iraq War were totally ignored. So now, to me, Seattle seems like history we are living with, rather than a current event.

This year, first time writer/director/producer Stuart Townsend made Seattle into a movie.

Outlaw Vern aka “Vern” is a movie reviewer and frequent contributor to nutjob fanboy sites like aintitcool.com. He’s just written a book on Steven Segal and is usually reviewing stoopid DTV opuses, but he’s a good writer in the Hunter S. Thompson vein. He’s on the Left, more or less. Not an activist.

He also lives in Seattle, witnessed part of the protests and now he’s reviewed the film. I haven’t seen it yet, so I’ll reserve judgement, but I usually trust Mr. Vern’s aesthetic assessments.

And his assement here is that the limited budget fails to suggest the true scope of the events, that the stilted dialogue undermines the politics and that the filmakers resort to awkward movie moments when the real thing would have done, but you still get the feeling that something important happened. Oddly, that is something like what filtered through the media at the time. The events in Seattle were simply too unexpected to be brushed aside.

The movie won’t help us recover exactly what it was, but its a part of moving on. Between Seattle in 1999 and the February 15, 2003 anti-war rallies in New York and around the country the government learned to control the protest more effectively (starting wars in March for one thing) and the media learned to compartmentalize protest activity with things like petition gathering.

If nothing else, the presence of this movie shows that Seattle is still with us. Corporate globalization hasn’t stopped. The biggest independent political campaign of this year is a pro-business Libertarian ticket. We are in this for the long haul.

Vern’s long review of “Battle in Seattle”: http://www.geocities.com/outlawvern/ReviewsB.html#battle_in_seattle

As referenced by Vern, please see the REPORT OF THE WTO ACCOUNTABILITY REVIEW COMMITTEE SEATTLE CITY COUNCIL [pdf]: http://depts.washington.edu/wtohist/documents/arcfinal.pdf

Scenes from documentary “Showdown In Seattle” produced by Deep Dish TV:

The Woman In Black

British Broadcasting Corporation is repeating the four part 1993 radio adaptation of Susan Hill’s The Woman In Black.

The segments will only be available on BBC7’s website for one week from broadcast. It is worth hearing.

It is a traditional ghost story, set sometime in the last century and relying on suggestive disturbances in banal reality to construct a very personal malevolent spirit.

Hill explains on her website what elements she felt were needed to recapture a proper ghost story:

In 1982, I decided I wanted to try and write a full length ghost story in the traditional English style. I made a list of ‘ingredients’ – I don`t often write in this very conscious way but it was necessary here.

Ingredients included
1. A ghost… not a monster or a thing from outer space but the ghost of a human who was once alive and is known to have died but whose recognisable form re-appears – or occasionally is not seen but heard, or possibly even smelled.
2. The haunted house… usually isolated.
3. Weather… atmospheric weather conditions – fog, mist, snow, and of course moonlit darkness on clear nights.
4. A sceptic. A narrator or central character who begins as a sceptic or plain disbeliever and scoffer but who is gradually converted by what he or she sees and experiences of ghostly presences.

This will make you more appreciative of crafted genre writing and curious about predecessors like Daphne Du Maurier and M. R. James.

Lucky*

Came back from NYC – found this on the porch.