Seattle Wants to be Portland

And thus the duo struck a chord with Seattle, explaining in part the city’s fascination with “Portlandia.” The tongue-in-cheek look at Portland’s slacker culture and reputation for “keeping weird” resonates with Seattleites — possibly because we used to be a lot like that, too.

That was before everyone worked for Microsoft and Amazon, before Starbucks was a household name, before the so-called “Seattle Sound” went the way of Nirvana and Soundgarden.

Oh, the good old days. Remember when Seattle was the oddball of the West Coast? When we had Doc Martens and bad attitudes and served as the setting for counter-culture movies? Back when Kurt Cobain was a god and Eddie Vedder (more on him later) still went shirtless – remember all of that?

Not really. Many of the people at the Showbox Wednesday (including yours truly) were in elementary school when the movie “Singles” showcased Seattle’s own period of slacker culture.