"Seattle works best as a boutique city, smaller, more remote, quainter and cooler than the Megopolises to the south and east."

Seattle: Doomed

Thank you for Brian Miller's insightful article on the departure of AtomFilms from Seattle ["The last picture show," 3/22]. It was timely (especially with the departure of Boeing), but also just the latest wake-up call in a longer history that we are doomed to repeat if we don't change our short-sighted ways. Seattle will never have a thriving, sustainable media industry if we don't support the education and development of current and future media artists. We don't have a film school connected to a university, and we lack the collective vision to develop a world-class education system that supports media literacy and the arts (which are the building blocks of media production) from grade school on up.

As Miller points out, AtomFilms was just a distributor of media, not a production company or film studio, but it did, as Joel Bachar confirms, give Seattle a bigger buzz recently in the independent media scene internationally that will eventually fade with its departure. Seattle needs to grow its own educational and economic infrastructure that supports creative media talent, and not just hang its hopes every five years or so on commercially driven companies.

As a media arts consultant, I'm happy to report that I am seeing the beginnings of a new generation of regional media education initiatives and resources, mostly focused on teaching digital 2- and 3-D animation, at places as diverse as the University of Washington, Bellevue Community College, 911 Media Arts Center, and Clover Park Technical College in Tacoma. But it will take a concerted effort over time to bring those educators, artists, and students together to connect to the larger international creative media community, and to begin to communicate, cross-pollinate, and support the growth of a regional media industry. Let's hope this time Seattle will finally get it right.

ROBIN OPPENHEIMER
SEATTLE

Seattle: Obscure, drizzly

Seattle is not San Francisco. Seattle works best as a boutique city, smaller, more remote, quainter and cooler than the Megopolises to the south and east. The departure of Atomfilms ["The last picture show," 3/22] and the Boeing HQ [see "Bye-bye Boeing," p. 17], for example, serves Seattle well. Let Houston have the inflated property values and long commutes caused by salaries up in the egosphere. When Micro$oft finally pulls the plug and moves to Canada it will be the end of the beginning of Seattle's return to its true nature.

We are way up here in the corner of the country for a reason. WTO and Mardi Gras are examples of Seattle's discomfort with its new Big City Shoes. If we were still obscure, drizzly little Seattle, a place people went on their way up to Alaska to fish, no one would have packed their hooded sweatshirts and backpacks full of Anarchists Manifestos into their VW microbuses and driven all the way up here (from Portland?) to break the windows at Starbucks.

Having all the rich and famous among us get out of our hair so we can go back to enjoying our little secret life in the Northwest will be a great gift to Seattle. Now if we could only get rid of those pesky Seahawks before we have to deal with the whole stadium thing again. . . .

DAVID STEAD
PORT ORCHARD

Business: Good

Now that breast-beating free-trade booster Phil Condit has cut the corporate heart out of Seattle in the name of globalization [see "Bye-bye Boeing," p. 17], maybe you'll finally understand what 60,000 anti-WTO demonstrators were protesting two years ago. It's worth remembering that Condit was one of the two co-chairs (with Bill Gates) of the Seattle Host Organization that welcomed the WTO. But hey, what's good for business is good for us all, right?

DENNIS REA
SEATTLE

Reporting: How about it?

Your recent column about the Hutch's reaction to the Times' allegations of mal/misfeasance [News clips, "All the news that's fit to mint," 3/22] was good for a nice belly-laugh. But in all fairness to the Hutch—for which neither I nor anyone in my family works, and in which I have no interest, financial or otherwise—you should note that the hospital did take out a full-page or near-full-page ad responding in some detail to several specific points in the Times' allegations. So contrary to the implication of your column, the Hutch's reaction does not constitute a case of 'he says, she says'.

So now that we have all had our laugh, I would be interested in a rebuttal to the Hutch's response about the clinical trials that are at issue, in particular, a rebuttal of the points in the Hutch's ad.

In other words, now that we've all had our fun at the Hutch's expense, how about some honest-to-God reporting?

JAMES R. COWLES
KENT

Integrity: Let's get some

Geov Parrish rightly points out that the neighborhood "movement" (mini-movement?) has been co-opted [Geov Parrish, "HoodWinks," 3/22]. Let's just say that a sufficient number of citizen activists have been co-opted by the city to the point where any effective political counterbalance to big business is pinned firmly under the big foot of said corporate power. I would disagree, however, that Paul Schell is the "explanation," and that "there's not necessarily anything wrong with being co-opted—it means you're getting something for the hood."