The Subversive Yardwork of Ruth Bell-Thomaz

Jacob Covey reports on the FLOG that Seattle's greatest living artist Ruth Bell-Thomaz is being forced (presumably by those meddling hoopleheads in Yankton) to dismantle Seattle's greatest art installation, a sprawling, profound mess of genius located next door to the Fantagraphics corporate offices at the southern most end of Lake City Way (near 75th and Roosevelt).

No sooner has our own Matt Silvie posted Flickr photos of Ruth Bellthomaz's house than the city has won out on forcing her to beautify her property. Anyone who's ever visited the Fantagraphics Books, Inc., headquarters surely remembers her house, brimming with chaotic art and a constantly evolving landscape.

My desk here at the office looks out on Ruth's property. I've frequently seen her out there securing the wall of window frames that she has nailed to her house. The squirrels and stray cats love climbing on the scaffolding-like structure, but Matt tells me that she has all those seemingly useless windows there to keep the FBI from monitoring inside her home. Which is at least a little less crazy sounding when you realize that those are the initials for our company and I AM staring at her.

But everyone knows that Jacob Covey is also in an insane liar so his FLOG post might in fact be a huge lie. However, if by some unlikely chance he is actually telling the truth in this instance, then this is sad news indeed.

A beautiful photo of Ruth's ingenious, ever changing yard work made the cover of the Seattle PI a few years ago, illustrating an article on hoarding. The article doesn't go in to Ruth's long history of agitating against The Man. For instance, a long time ago Seattlest found Ruth's name on a website detailing a 1996 trip to Iraq to protest UN sanctions, but we can't find that site now. Anyway, losing Ruth's yard work represents Seattle's final collective step over the precipice of city identity in to a douchey yuppified whitebread parody of its former glory.