nostalgia: fascinated by the shabby and cheezy

by Art Chantry ( art@artchantry.com):

since i was chattering recently about my early days in tacoma, i might as well show off this little item. tacoma in the 1960′s was a dark place. a city of decay and abandoned buildings and sleazy ‘adult’ entertainment (why do we call it ‘adult’? it’s the most childish entertainment imaginable). whenever movies were made in the northwest (especially seattle) and they needed some real sleaze for background, they would shoot the sleazy street scenes in tacoma. the movie ‘cinderella liberty’ was shot in seattle on first avenue (according to local legend). but, if you look at it, you quickly realize that almost all of the scenery was tacoma’s pacific avenue street life. much sleazier.

AC:i just remembered another great parkland story. this one ends with, "two weeks later his head showed up in a paper bag on his friend's doorstep." or, how about this one: "when the scouts finished searching the woods, they found 16 bodies, six of which were linked to the killer." tacoma has the weirdest stories. it's classic david lynch turf.

tacoma has an ‘o. henry’ quality to life. i grew up in parkland (a suburb south of tacoma and an even darker place) and have for decades casually collected ‘parkland stories’ in my scrap files. they rate as really excellent examples of what i’m talking about when i say that tacoma is full of sleazy ‘o. henry’ stories.

stories by o. henry are characterized by the ‘twist’ ending. the stories all have clever ironic finishes that turn the meaning around into the ozone. tacoma (and especially parkland) stories all have that quality. the best ones are those little filler type of story that shows up in the back pages of the newspaper, little articles of a couple of paragraphs in length about a vicious bizarre domestic violence attack, then concludes with the kicker, “two weeks later they were remarried”. that sort of thing.

one favorite is a story about a jailed inmate who attempted suicide by (bizarrely) trying to eat his glasses (wire frames, too!). he was hospitalized and was going to probably pull through. then the little article ended with, “this was the jailed inmate’s third attempt at suicide by eating his glasses.” (rimshot, please.) i love those stories.


i grew up in tacoma being warned specifically about the notorious TIKI restaurant (and lounge) situated in the very back isolated corner of the villa plaza shopping center in lakewood (another tacoma suburb). it was a ramshackle wooden affair with (as i sort of remember) two stories of balconies and torches and palm trees. my mother used to drive by it very quickly and tell about what a dangerous horrible place it was and that we should never go there. so, i grew up afraid of the joint.

by the time i was curious and old enough to attempt a visit, it had burned down. i seem to remember arson, either by the community (a time-honored tradition here in tacoma, a way of solving community problems) or mob action (another time-honored tradition in tacoma). i dunno. ancient history now.

i found this menu somewhere. the other side lists a few sundried food items. (so cheap that it seems free). this front side has a few snaps of some flabby exotic dancers (“mom? izzat you?”) placed in an ‘x’ layout. the word “tiki’ is place in the open areas (‘filling holes’ as a design option) using a typeface usually saved for cheezy chinese restaurants (i think it’s called ‘chop suey’), then completely obliterated by a bad ‘native’ texture. it’s printed on cheap brown paper.

the thing that i’m fascinated by is how shabby and cheezy the whole presentation is. for a place whose memory fills me with such forbidding and dread and awe, it’s remarkably crappy stuff. strangely, it seems that all of that mystery and imagination given to the legendary notorious tiki, it’s just a crummy strip


t. big deal.

memory is a funny thing, an unreliable thing. we send people to the gas chamber regularly based on memories of ‘eye witnesses’, and they prove to be completely mistaken more times than we care to imagine. memories are about feelings, not reality. the 1950′s looked and acted NOTHING like “happy days”.

it makes you wonder how we’re going to look back on these years we’re experiencing right now. sentimental nostalgia?

ADDENDUM:

AC:i used to live in belltown – that purple and puke green building with the jello molds? i live there. i had my studio down the block in the compton lumber building.

i remember, as the neighborhood “developed”, gangs of slumming suburban kids would walk down the street and try to ‘fight’ the locals. i think they thought it was sport. the local ‘fern bar’ yuppie restaurants wouldn’t seat us (our own neighborhood).

for a while, somebody would take pot shots at our building. we tracked one of the bullets (it hit a jello mold and left a skid mark) and it pointed straight at one of the high-rise condos (we called them ‘cocaine condos” cuz the yuppies were all coke heads.)

living in belltown during the beginning of the gentrification shift was ugly. when we called the cops on the shootings, they wouldn’t come out, they figgered it was “the street winos”. hell, it was probably their own children who came down on weekends to drunkenly rape each other in the parking lot outside my window. the suburban yuppie larvae were like some sort of animals on weekends. and they used our neighborhood to “play” in.

in retrospect, even the winos and the junkies were more community oriented than the yuppies moving in with their awful little larval children. it was their home, too, ya know. the yuppies just slept there in their bunkered condos and thought they were so cool and ‘urban’. really awful phony selfish people.

man, no wonder everybody left seattle.

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