It’s the first question people ask. They expect I’ll answer that I’m running to be a tireless advocate for the arts. That’s my area of expertise, and we expect candidates for public office to run on the issues they know best. Why else would someone from outside the conventional, professional political class throw themselves into politics?
I’m a Democrat, an old-school one, and as corny as it might sound to a cynic I really do believe in the call to public service. The best way to improve our system of government is to join it. I love American democracy. I’ve argued about it my whole life, fretted and mused over it, reading and rereading books old and new trying to get at what makes it so unique in the history of the world. I think American democracy, for all its many faults and catastrophic missteps, has brought more good into the world than can possibly be measured! Still, the system needs constant refinement and improvement, and that job belongs to all of us.
Yes, I’m an artist. I absolutely intend to be a tireless advocate for the arts, not just in our schools but in our civic life. But I’m also a citizen of Seattle. I’m running for one of the new city-wide positions on the city council because I believe the work we have right in front of us—the work of building a city that truly reflects our progressive, urbanist values—requires someone from outside the insular culture of our professionalized political and activist class. We cede our government too often to the usual suspects, mostly because these people are willing to assert with confidence that they have a clear plan. But only fools think they know everything already; the more foolish they are, the more confident they appear. The real job of joining a city council isn’t to arrive with a plan, it’s to arrive ready to listen and learn, and to be prepared to choose between confusing options on behalf of the citizens of this city.
Every single candidate wants affordable housing, better transit, more humane police (who also reduce crime), and equitable prosperity for all without burdensome regulation. Every single candidate offers a plan, largely similar to all the other plans, differentiated only by degrees and particulars. While those degrees and particulars are important, too often we get mired in the weeds of our differences and fail to recognize our bigger goals are the same. Local politics thrives on pitting one group of concerned liberals against another group of concerned liberals, exaggerating differences of policy for short term gain. We need someone who can tell an earnest plea from a cynical ploy, someone who can parse the difficult language used for technical accuracy from the difficult language used for intellectual bullying and obfuscation. We need someone who can tell the plans that sound good on paper from the ones that make good in practice.
Why Me?
I’ve got a lot of ideas about how to make life in our city easier and better, but this city is full of smart people with good ideas. The city council has a poor history of uniting the citizens behind their ideas, preferring to just rule by decree. Too often the council enacts laws with an attitude that they have a spoonful of castor oil and they know what’s best for us. Seattle is on the cusp of taking a big leap forward, and that requires that everyone in the city feel invested in the change. The investments we need to make, the changes we need to embrace, require an enthusiastic consensus. Inspiring that fellow-feeling is something the council has failed over and over to do, and the legacy of missed opportunities and mega-projects laced with resentment is the result.
The job of city council involves listening to people, and to people’s plans, and understanding that every decision has multiple ramifications that affect real people’s lives. It requires a calibration of intellect and compassion that is, frankly, the purview of the artist. It’s easy to hire an expert to advise, a lawyer to consult, or a team to research. To synthesize that information is the harder job, and it’s crucial to achieving ACTION. There are legions of activists, policy wonks, non-profit groups and specialists for whom every minute detail represents a world of expertise, but to weigh the needs and the desires of everyone affected and find a course of action that produces real and lasting results is a unique set of skills. Balancing aspirations against obligations, refusing to succumb to prejudice, using the vested power of the office to advance progress in every instance, these require empathy along with reason. They are questions of language and feeling as much as of policy, realms where a degree in urban planning, or years working in the prosecutor’s office, are perhaps less applicable than the direct experience of a professional artist.
My Resume
I’ve lived in Seattle for 25 years and have had the good fortune to know people from every walk of life. My first job here was as a busboy at a gay nightclub. I watched, mesmerized, as the last exuberant flame of drag culture was transformed by the AIDS epidemic into the out and proud militant fire of the gay rights movement. I stood ankle deep in beer as that same club embraced the homegrown, sardonic punk scene, which immediately exploded into a worldwide Grunge movement, and just as quickly decayed into a self-loathing and sordid afterparty. Whew, what a way to be introduced to living in Seattle!
I worked the door at a hip-hop/jazz speakeasy in the old Trailways bus station and was a waiter at Kells Irish Pub in the Market. I trained to be an assistant manager at the check cashing place on First Avenue but quit when I saw how much that business preys on the financially vulnerable. I worked as a cashier at the investment bank Piper Jaffray and briefly considered a life in finance. By then I had my own band, and I felt like I owed it to my future kids that their father would have lived the life that felt best to him.
I took a part-time shift at Steve’s News on Broadway, which left my nights free to play music. In that job I met almost every single Seattleite at one time or another, and spent all day talking about news big and small. The internet was barely a twinkle then, and the newsstand was still a place for gritty civic exchange. We had newspapers and magazines from around the world; it was a heady place. I was threaded into Seattle during my newsstand days in a way that can never come unravelled. After my band became a success I felt a strong pull to move to New York, or LA, or Berlin, but in the end it was unthinkable. I lived HERE.
My Experience
My band, The Long Winters, enjoyed a decade of hard work up and down the rock and roll mountain. My years in the music business were a study in human nature, and my music took me to all fifty states and almost every country in Europe (except Finland). Every aspect of what makes people great, and terrible, is exaggerated to the extreme in the entertainment business. I was the singer, guitarist and songwriter, and acted as band manager too. We toured for six years straight with hardly a break except to record. When they say that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client, that should go doubly true for a musician who manages his own band. Almost everyone in that business has a conflicting interest with someone else, and every interest has a compelling case. Music excites people’s passions, and it generates lots of money too. It’s a very competitive environment full of scoundrels, but also full of some of the most idealistic and inspired people you’ll ever meet.
The music business taught me the power of collaboration, even though my instinct was to fight for my vision against all comers. It taught me that conventional wisdom is often wrong, and is almost always wrong when confronted with truly new ideas. It taught me that in music, as in government, there is a professional class that handles all the arrangements. Guitar players, and politicians, come and go, while the network of lawyers, managers, agents, wheelers and dealers, all form a kind of institution behind the scenes. That institution conducts A LOT of business back there, and flatters itself that it knows the ropes. They are experts at explaining why certain reforms are not possible, and why certain compromises are mandatory. They are always the most surprised when something truly new appears on the scene, but they are quick to adapt. They all truly love the music, and the political process, in their own way, but they are in the business of making money.
The Arts
I believe that art is a crucial pillar of civilization. Especially in a world where we keep a separation between religion and government, art becomes the voice of morality and ethics, the place where we can talk about beauty. Beauty should inform everything we build, every plan and project, and every scheme for the betterment of ourselves and our fellows. Sadly, in our national dialogue we have almost completely divorced art from politics. The radical fundamentalists and their opportunistic friends falsely claim that art subverts morals, when the opposite is true. Art confirms and enriches morals. In Europe, in Canada even, the arts are supported by the government. Art funding is sacrosanct, a public virtue. Here in the States we’ve lost that connection to the arts, and our culture has become debased as a result.
In Seattle we are lucky. We live in an enlightened place. We don’t have to debate whether the dinosaurs lived alongside Homo sapiens, or whether the polar ice caps are melting, or whether the universe is 6,000 years old. We can talk like adults here. Likewise, we can reestablish for ourselves the importance of art to our civic life. We can affirm that we want to support the making and sharing of art, that art is the soul of culture, and that we are not afraid of the fringes of art any more than we are afraid of the fringes of science.
People in the arts have asked me, “Why would you want to join that world of politics? You have a voice already! A voice of your own, which you needn’t compromise to please anyone. Why would you sacrifice it?” I’m not sacrificing my independent voice, I’m offering it in service to my community. I’m grateful for Seattle, for the rights and privileges I’ve been afforded here. My gratitude inspires me to serve my community, to offer my skills and experience in the hopes I can play a part in continuing our arc of improvement.
My Priorities
I’m an Urbanist, and an infrastructure nerd, and I care about shipping and trucking and public works and electricity to the point that I have to be careful not to bore people at parties. I love the sewers, the port, the various watersheds that power our city and give us water to drink, and the daily work of the city council inspires me. I recognize that people feel frustrated now, cynical about our chances for making real changes, but we’re actually on the cusp of a major leap forward. It always feels that progress is stalled right before the pendulum swings. Here are some of my thoughts on the major issues that all candidates in this election should be prepared to confront.
Transit
I want transit to connect our neighborhoods, to knit the fabric of our city closer. It shouldn’t be easier to get from Federal Way to Lynnwood than it is to get from West Seattle to Ballard. I believe in trains, in subways, in trolleys, in buses, ride-share, bike-share, trams, water-taxis, gondolas and zip-lines. Our transit agencies are all focused on balancing the needs of the city against the needs of the county and the region. Seattle needs to take charge of its own transit; it’s a crucial component of density. People who live in the city should be able to move around the city. There’s an infrastructure we need to build, we’re off to a good start, and now we need to plunge into connecting Seattle to herself.
Connectivity
The internet isn’t a luxury item anymore, it’s not some add-on to our cable service, it’s fast becoming where we work and live. It’s time to make broadband equally accessible to all. Seattle should stop dickering and just do it: build the internet as a public utility, like our power and water. It’s a social justice issue. You can’t have equal opportunity without equal access, and the internet will be a crucial component of urban life going forward.
Housing
The two sure-fire ways for rents to decrease are for the economy to crash or for developers to overbuild until supply dramatically outpaces demand. People are going to keep moving here because this is a great place to live and work, so neither of those options seems likely to happen. Rent control doesn’t lower rents, it just means that 20 years from now some people have cheap apartments and others don’t. There needs to be a comprehensive plan to make Seattle affordable for regular people. Part of that is making sure wages are high. Part of that involves loosening restrictions on mother-in-law apartments and cottages, to free up underused space we already have.
Micro apartments and pod apartments are great for some folks, but families need housing too. The city should start buying up old apartment buildings and derelict housing and converting them, building up a city-owned resource of affordable housing from housing stock and apartment buildings already here. It’s a complicated orchestration of hundreds of factors involving every aspect of civic life, but everyone agrees it’s a top priority. As an artist my whole community depends on affordable housing. We need to achieve consensus here. The NIMBY era needs to be a thing of the past.
Likewise, rampant homelessness is a condition we cannot afford. Housing First models are shown to work, and from a cost-benefit standpoint are simply a better investment of resources. Let’s start enjoying this era of great prosperity first by ensuring that we house every citizen and give them unfettered access to sanitation, food and medicine. It is a core value of civilization that the richest people take responsibility for the welfare of the poorest people.
Social Justice
There is still so much more work to do before we can say our society equally serves every citizen. Much of that work isn’t within the power of a city council, but the city government of Seattle can and should set the pace. This is where a clear expression of our values can help guide our public policy. Women should receive equal pay for equal work, parental leave should be generous, and companies doing business here should be encouraged to adhere to the same standard as the city. The police department should recruit from within the city and officers should be incentivized to live in the neighborhoods they police. The solution to youth crime is shown over and over again to be better schools. Invest in the schools and save money on building prisons.
Almost a third of the population of Seattle ISN’T white, and my own neighborhood of Rainier View is one of the most diverse zip codes in the entire country. To the utmost degree we should make sure our laws and the culture of our city government reflect the highest standard of inclusivity. Our growing Seattle should be a model to the rest of America of how a city embraces all of its citizens in a culture of mutual respect.
Why Now?
The voters decided they wanted to reform the city council, to tie seven of the nine seats to individual neighborhoods. This is a needed change, and will make the council more responsive to potholes and the actual business of running the city. Two of the council seats are at-large seats, elected city-wide. These aren’t some holdover from the old council, they’re an entirely new job. Two seats to represent the entire city. This is an incredible opportunity, and we cannot squander it by failing to recognize that now, more than ever, we can actually change the way we do business here. We’ve seen what happens when we neglect to challenge the entrenched powers-that-be: boondoggle mega projects, a crime rate increasing by 9% in just the last year, a neglectful approach to fair housing, transit and growth, all while being told that, tut tut, they’re doing what’s best for us. We need to assert our voice in building our city, and there will never be another opportunity like this one to set a lasting tone for how the city council operates.
You
I know you have ideas, and I’m anxious to hear them. My job will be to listen to you and spread the word. I’d love your support. I’ll be campaigning all over the city this spring and summer, attending events and hosting meet and greets. Please come say hello and share your thoughts. I’m also active on the internet and am accessible there. I look forward to working for the people of Seattle!
The primary is less than four months away, and my opponents have already collected over $100,000. If I’m going to challenge the political class of Seattle, I need your help. We’ll get three bucks of value for every dollar you donate, so click the button below and help me spread the word about the new day in Seattle.