Well, lookee who braved the dark woods and made his way to Tacoma this week.
Screenwriter Charles Mudede, aka the columnist for Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger, was part of a movie crew hunkered down near Old City Hall to shoot a true story about a turn-of-the-century hobo outlaw.
Mudede claims the crew came here for the architecture. We think he came expecting a ready supply of hobo outlaws to cast as extras.
“Thank you, Tacoma!” he gushed in a blog post Wednesday, like we’re suddenly sweethearts and his past is forgiven and forgotten.
Not so fast, Mr. Hollywood bigshot.
Recognize the name? “Mudede” was once spoken around these parts with irritation – a one-word oath, like when Jerry hisses, “NEW-man!!” in “Seinfeld” reruns.
Mudede’s film, “You Can’t Win,” sounds like the title he’d choose if he made a movie about Tacoma.
It was August 2000 when he wrote: “By all accounts, Tacoma is a failure. Every day it lives failure, sleeps failure, eats failure; this is part of its charm.” He also called Lakewood a “working-class neighborhood in South Tacoma.”
Mu-DE-de!!
Usually his M.O. is to wait until sensational crime strikes the 253, then melodramatically kick us while we’re down.
Mudede was given his biggest stage in fall 2002, after the D.C. snipers were tied to T-Town. In a New York Times op-ed piece, he pulled out his purplest dark-and-stormy-night prose to describe our frontier ways: “The woods around Tacoma have not been and may never be tamed.”
Cue the banjo theme from “Deliverance.”
The next year, writing again for The Stranger, he dissed our city’s burgeoning museum scene: “Tacoma may be many things, Mayor Baarsma, but it’s not Athens.” He also wrote that the police chief murder-suicide scandal of 2003 “brought to a sudden halt all claims that Tacoma is a city ‘on the move.’”
Mudede was back in top form in 2005, after the Tacoma Mall shooting. He called the mall the ugliest in the Northwest, as if it deserved to be redecorated with bullets.
The evidence clearly shows Charles Mudede is guilty of violating columnist rule No. 1: Never pick on a place unless you live there, work there, pay taxes or bridge tolls there, or at least know its two biggest cities aren’t the same city.
Rule No. 2: Always disguise yourself as a cartoon body part.
We trust he enjoyed his time here. Did he notice he didn’t have to duck flying glass on May Day?
Perhaps he found time to visit one of our pretentious little museums.
We hope he met at least one of our overzealous parking enforcement officers. Maybe even a real-life Tacoma hobo.
Windows broken, but the swoosh lives on: You’d think Nike would be sore about having its Seattle Niketown store bashed in by rioters. Not so.
We hear the Oregon company pulled together a post May Day focus group and has unveiled its “Air Anarchist” line of all-black sports wear. Because the active protester demands a lightweight, breathable fabric, yet adequate padding to absorb baton blows.
How ‘bout the Weight Watchers Narrows Bridge? State Rep. Jan Angel of Port Orchard has the boffo idea to sell naming rights to hold down the rising cost of crossing the bridge. Potential sponsors?
Bridgestone Tires. Bridgeport Brewery. Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital. (Multicare is buying everything else, why not a bridge?)
In-N-Out Burger. (One bridge in, one bridge out.)
Galloping Gerties Bar & Grill.
Spic ’n Span. The Span Deli.
Nestle Toll House Cookies.
Buzz kill: Every manchild of the ’80s fantasizes about partying with Van Halen. It goes back to Jeff Spicoli, the “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” legend reputed to have hired the band for his birthday party with reward money he won saving Brooke Shields from drowning.
A Tacoma Dome roof-scrubbing crew had the same dream, and hoped that by finishing the job in time for Saturday’s Halen concert, it might be fulfilled.
Sorry, dudes. The band is lying low for Cinco de Mayo.
“Matter of fact, they have no clue that the roof was being cleaned,” the dome director told a TNT editor.
Our sympathies to the roof crew. A wise lyricist said it best: “I know, baby, just how you feel. You’ve got to roll-oll-oll with the punches, to get to what’s real.”
Got news for The Nose? Write to TheNose@thenewstribune.com. Twitter: @thenosetribune
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