DAY 17: Wednesday, July 21, 2010

The first silent mosh pit I’ve seen congregates in front of the Re-Bar stage today, miming rocking out to Noah Harpster’s silent death metal performance. The purposeful omission of the music from this shoot evokes thoughts of our music supervisor, Dave Meinert, who also happens to be at the helm of Capitol Hill Block Party.

An article in the Seattle Times on him last Sunday reveals striking parallels between his life and that of Grant Cogswell, though their paths ultimately took much different directions.

Dave and Grant both straddle the line between provocateur and political activist, but Dave is cited in the article as a “power broker,” which Grant clearly was not.

Dave began as a grassroots politician when he fought to repeal the Teen Dance Ordinance but later realized the power of the music industry to elicit political change, first joining JAMPAC, touting numerous causes such as the election of City Attorney Pete Holmes, and now writing on Publicola.net about how the city of Seattle can continue to improve.

He hates the term “insider,” because it implies that he may no longer be on the “forward edge” and instead became part of the traditional political structure. A grassroots politician is always on the brink of change, working from the bottom up to further causes driven by the conditions of the community.

But the value of power brokering cannot be denied. According to the Seattle Times, “In 2008, Seattle’s music industry employed more than 11,000 people and generated $1.2 billion in revenues.” Grant Cogswell, an unemployed music critic, at the time he was running for office, built a robust campaign from the ground up without that sort of support. But who knows what he would have accomplished with it?

Thinking globally and acting locally is a prominent theme of this movie. A natural question underlying that process: How can grassroots politics and power brokering work together?