howzabout some nice Vancouver pix, eh?

a house, afloat.

Rock artist Kent Avery. His works.

In action: one, two, three, four.

I looked but found no web trace for this guy. Amazing stuff – perfomance art, sort of; sculpture, for real. The pix above took about as long to take as it takes you to look at them. on this stretch of the Stanley Park seawall walk, Avery had stacked and balanced literally hundreds of freestanding rocks, no glue or drilling involved. It was one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever seen.

The Goodyear Blimp. No, really, the Goodyear Blimp.

A sea turtle.

A picnic on the way home.

Viv and I just spent the sunny weekend of our fifth anniversary in beautiful Vancouver, B. C. We may venture out to see Jason Webley this evening but it was a long hot drive back south.

I was pleased to see that our good neighbors to the north have the good sense to guard the Molson brewery with an army emplacement. We didn’t do anything particularly strenuous or carefully researched – the trip sort of happened by accident and so Serendip was our destination.

The single most interesting aspect of the visit was the range of ethnic diversity I observed in workplaces and among the many walking people we joined in aimless strolls along the city’s waterfront. From the simple pleasure of hearing French literally everywhere (Vancover must have the highest headcount of French speakers in Canada outside of Quebec) – often in a blurred, overlapping, Franglais spoken in blended families of Anglo-French descent – to the Russian, Arabic, Spanish, Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, and Hindi overheard both in touristy locales and the corner drugstore, it was very different than the feel of streetlife here in Seattle.

Like Seattle, though, the city had a feeling of bursting at the seams, of having grown so rapidly that it was on the verge of gridlock. Also, despite the ployglot multiethnicity I noticed, the city felt of a piece with Seattle, San Francisco, and Portland. There’s an underrrealized potential for a distinct kind of Americanness – of Canadianness – that is common to these coastal cities.

It seems to me, however, that the engines that power the economic underpinnings of a discrete political power bloc based in the regional economy that tie these metropolises together also threaten that political identity from the inside. Unresolvable pressures from rapid growth within the urban economies themselves creates commuter suburbs that won’t vote to support effective and efficient urban services. This shifts the educated voter base out of the center of the city. As I’ve written here before, Seattle is looking more and more like a lost cause, with a political class that is paralyzed and unable to resolve critical, real-world political issues that create bottlenecks for industrial production (cough TRAFFIC cough).

The Mandolin Cafe has a plug up for No Hassle Hosting which has a plethora of hosting plans ranging from $3.95 to $29.95 a month.

$3.95 gets you 30mb with 1gb transfer while $29.95 gets you 1gb with 30gb transfer.

You read that right. Even better, this page lists the included services – which clearly appears to indicate mysql, php, and perl are all standard. Poking around very briefly, I didn’t find any per-database charges although the number under the high-end plan is restricted to 20, and backup is included.

Honestly, this sounds so good I have a hard time believing there’s no secret intellectual-property bomb or something. I also figure, might as well point it out now, as the more folks poke and peek the better chance there is of hearing of a problem.

Otherwise, this looks much like a way to resolve some hardware problems I’ve had from time to time, eh?

A friend recently expressed an uncharacteristic desire to go camping, and I found myself sagely offerring bits of advice and help, such as the camping checklist that Viv and I have been using and refining for the past couple of years.

This is odd, if natural, as two years ago we more or less just started from scratch. It’s interesting to me that the list really is well-developed enough to be helpful to another.

Viv and I don’t really fit the profile of the northwestern outdoor enthusiast, preferring campsites that include a parking spot to those that you have to walk your gear in to. I suppose that makes us part of the problem, but so be it.

We’ve lived in Seattle for 13 years, and until about three years ago I was more-or-less totally indifferent to living here amidst all the amazing scenery and national or state parkland. I camped a great deal with my parents growing up, and while I always enjoyed it, rock and roll, computers, books, women, and booze, in varying orders through the years, were always of greater interest to me.

Viv and I had been looking for shared interests – especially interests that we could develop together – when camping occurred as something we both enjoyed, but which we never had really pursued either before meeting one another or after. On one of our first trips (I believe to the Deer Creek campground on the lower elevations of Mt. Rainier) we happened upon an overlook viewpoint that I had childhood memories of.

The view was of the Carbon Glacier, I think. I was utterly apalled by what I saw. Half of the glacier was gone, in comparison to my unreliable childhood memory. I’m a full-blown subscriber to the idea that global warming is going to dramatically and uncontrollably change many things in our environment, and this tapped a sort of apocalyptic fear in my mind.

No, that’s not quite right.

It tapped a selfish desire to amass time in the wooded parklands of the Northwest before the increasing length and heat of the summer dramatically changes the appearance and sounds of these locations. Because I have a few childhood memories of backwoods experiences with my northwest-native parents and grandparents, somehow being in the woods connects me to those experiences.

Of course, I can’t tell in detail what the effect of the changes will be. If we do get more sun here in town over the course of a year, I can’t say I’m agin it. But it was frightening and sad to see the glacier’s retreat.

If not for that start, I rather doubt I would ever have had the experience of reading The Illiad aloud at night by a campfire, which, really, is pretty cool. That’s deep time, right there.

Our entertainment this fine Sunday was to take an urban hike from our home on Capitol Hill to Fremont and back, seeking the answer to the question, does Fremont Suck Now?

Formerly, Fremont was the center of a certain bohemian sensibility in Seattle, home to many’s the thrift emporium. Time was, of a weekend, Vivian and I were oft to be found, a-haint the precints of Fritzi Ritz or the Fremont Antique Mall. But then, the swift-shifting sands of time raised the rents and (literally) moved the buildings around, and cheap-rent-seeking proprietors of crucial goods such as the wax figurine of Vincent Price from The House of Wax exeunt, with speed. Swiftly on their heels we did follow.

And so, on our quest we ventured.

We strolled down the northern shoulder of Capitol Hill near noon. I was wearing black Levi’s and my head was full of work, work, work. By the time we’d reached the bottom of the hill, and were walking around the Portage Bay neighborhood, I sincerely sought a pair of shorts, but none were to be had. Instead, I found a battered, scarred Palm Pilot stylus, which I picked up and kept, brave in the face of spousal mockery.

Just prior to crossing under the I-5 bridge near the University District, we experienced the sublime thrill of watching a confused woman chauffeuring a mini-van of tots drive up and over a traffic island in pursuit of her entry to a wrong way street heading in what I fondly describe as “the fatal direction.”

Against my better, considered judgement, we called out to her and she stopped and turned around, saving her life and that of the kids (Actually, it was just instinct, only later did I realize the entertainment value I’d just passed up).

When at last we came to Stone Way above the Burke-Gilman Trail, we checked in at the Gypsy Trader, a surviving consignment shop, and thankfully found a Hawaiian-themed pair that both fit my mildly-cushioned waist and will be well-matched to evenings in the coffeehouse declaiming angst-ridden poesie from beneath a black beret of finest Basque wool, should it ever come to such a desperate pass.

Rounding down to 34th, we came upon the now-returned to the neighborhood Fritzi Ritz, which offered the usual assortment of fine vintage threads, including some lovely poly-cotton western duds featuring embroidered yokes, a clear bargain but not on my list for the day. Other than reversing the orientation of the shop from it’s lamented locale, it was the same shopping experience.

Leaving the shop we swung up to the former PCC location and were so stunned and distracted by the facades of the new construction, I completely forgot to see, first, if there was a new tenant in the old PCC building, and second, to take pictures of the new construction. I can only say that it was stunning, and I am uncertain if it was a good kind of stunning.

Turning away from the towering blue curiosity of the new building, we ducked in to Dusty Strings, where I endangered my fiduciary health by sampling the sound and feel of several multi-thousand-dollar instruments, notably a brand new Collings mando priced near 4k that played, sounded, and felt like a 150-year old master violin. It was amazing – I could smell the green of the wood, but the sustain was like no other mandolin I have ever played. Once I also demonstrated that a reasonable-quality acoustic guitar might prove a fair substitution for ten years’ satellite television service to my attentive and ever-supportive wife, we returned to the streets, headed for the newer construction.

I have visited Universal City Walk in Los Angeles, and it was a point of pride and celebration among the Angelenos that brought me there. The cartoony quality of the architecture, flashy, gigantic, silly, patently unserious and apolitical, was what drew my smog-breathing pals to the site. I found it rather like a mall grown amuck, disturbing, and sad.

Fremont reproduces the Universal City Walk experience for Seattle; yet, this being Seattle, it’s better than Universal’s Toontown for Grownups. The Sunday Market stretched along the side of the cartoonish new PCC building, as large as I recall the Fremont fair some ten years ago, host to about one hundred itinerant merchants. As the street intersected with the ship canal, I noticed that the Red Hook brewery was also decamped and vacant.

We paused by the ship canal and my dormant shutterbug impulse finally awoke. There are few better things than to linger by the side of the ship canal in Fremont of a summer afternoon, and no amount of absurd, artificial architecture can efface that truth. Aware of our hunger, we then headed for the sunny deck of El Camino, home to the best, if also most expensive, margaritas in Fremont. The deck now features a charming four-point view of eight-story condos newly built, replacing a view of the craft-and-flea market now ensconced between the new buildings.

After eating we walked back home. All together we walked for about 6 hours to and from Fremont.

And can I adjudicate the question? No, I can’t. Fremont’s physical locale and generous surviving older architecture could, in theory, overcome the giant in clown shoes that now occupies the block opposite the venerable Greek restaurant Costas. Sadly, that giant’s killed many of my old friends, such as Barlee’s up the street from Costas, so I hate and fear him, despite his red nose and absurd collar. Over time, if the neighborhood can make room for diners and regular-folks pit-stops like Barlee’s once was, Fremont won’t suck. Fritzi Ritz’s return bodes well. But Seattle has done a terrible job of protecting mixed-income-service economies and I can’t imagine that Fremont is where a new way of dealing with the issues of preserving moderate-income businesses will emerge.

Does Fremont Suck Now? I’ll check back in a year, and let you know.

P. S. Despite desultory forays (consisting of occasional vague glances) to locate a Wallingford-based domicile that once looked like this, I have no idea if I passed Jimfl in the street or not.

As threatened.

Spent much of today cleaning up. My folks will be out here later this month and it seems wiser to vacuum once now, when it’s been untended for a fairly long time, and once more a bit closer to the date of arrival when what looks lovely and clean now may turn out to be an unacceptable patch of dust and filth.

(Early visitors to this entry recieved a bizarrely squeezed version of the pic, a result of slight variances in UI when using Safari to post rather than IE.

No, wait!

It’s a bug! Hm, Paul, is this a well-known Safari-MT problem? The image upload widget did not recalculate the constrained size of the smaller image on upload, but rather applied the shorter value and the original value when creating the thumb.)

See you soon! As I recently signed an email at work:

Kissy-kissy to each and every one of you beautiful people!

It’s, I have to say, a complete shame not to be on the Hill this weekend: I think, in some ways, this year’s pride parade will partake of the nature of a victory celebration, even if the victory is not precisely what Lenin would embrace as politically meaningful.

Gay marriage in Canada, virtually guaranteeing legal recognition for gay domestic partnerships everywhere but the enlightened (not) precincts of my birthplace, Arizona. Yhe profoundly amazing Supreme Court decision of this week, essentially capitulating to the central demand of gay rights campaigners since the Stonewall riots that Pride Day commemorates.

I looked through the pictures of my visit to Ken in NYC in February, 2001, hoping I would find a pair f images that, apparently I did not take. Ken will confirm this, however.

We were walking around in the Village and passed by a low-slung dive featuring a fifties-style rusticated limestone front. As we walked by, I glanced at the bar’s facade, thinking of Indiana limestone, and realized that the stone front, the locale, and the pride-rainbow neon and pink triangle in the window – plus the sign saying “Stonewall” – pretty persuasively argued that we were standing in front of the gay community’s ground zero in the quest for political recognition.

I stopped and ranted for a moment to Ken about how important this place we’d just walked by was, how it represented a landmark of human struggle and in a way a new approach to thinking about political constituencies, and so on. I don’t recall that Ken had heard about the role of Stonewall in the history of the gay rights movement and I flatter myself that he was interested in my fractured and ignorant recounting.

We resumed our peregrinations, through the cold, snow dusted streets. I was really liking the Village, with the tiny streets and below-sidewalk entrances to ancient buildings still in use. Without having walked over a block, we came upon a particularly charming section of row houses, all apparently converted to serve the various needs of an entertainingly imperialist institution known as Marie’s Crisis.

As we walked by one of the sub-bars of the establishment (the Marie’s Crisis Piano Bar) a plaque on the wall caught my eye as the snow swirled down from the night above me.

“Thomas Paine

born 1737
died 1809
on this site

The world is my country
All mankind are my brethren
To do good is my religion
I believe in one God and no more”

it said.

I more-or-less freaked out on the spot. The red-headed prophet of American liberty, of the way that you and I, fellow Americans, conceptualize the boundaries and responsibilities of liberty in the person and in the state, had died about across the street (as I recall it – YMMV) from the site that would become Stonewall.

Although I can’t recall if you could turn around ad see the bar, I certainly see his spirit in the events of that night in 1969. Today, I choose to imagine him in pride parades across the nation, although personally I do not visualize him in buttcut leather chaps.

One of the interesting things about our apartment is that the building was landscaped when it was constructed with fruit trees. We have blueberries, strawberries, golden plums and Rainier cherries.

I’ve been watching the cherries ripen on the tree for the past few weeks, and today as the temperature neared 80, I decided it was time to harvest a few. I was concerned that the birds had beat me to all the good ones, but I need not have worried. The tree’s branches were weighed down with fruit.

At first I was pulling them off of their stems but quickly figured out that it was better to grasp them by the stem and twist away from the tree. As I did this, muscle memory took over. I’d completely forgotten, as I am wont to do, that as a child my grandfather had showed me how to harvest cherries. He had been, among other things, a fruit farmer in the Yakima Valley.

It was an unsettling experience, and also a moving one. I could feel his hand guiding mine.

It is I, I who am the stocker of the liquor stall!

Viv and I spent most of Saturday night celebrating the solstice at Gravelvoice audio wizard Scott Colburn and his lovely wife Jaye Barr’s new church home, on the deep fringe of Ballard.

I’ve known Scott since we were juvenile delinquent punk rockers back in the southern wilds of Indiana, and had the pleasure of working with Scott for several years at the Frank Doolittle Company, about ten years ago now.

I had a great time, caught up with the doins of all manner of folk, including the man that welded the Broadway’s Jimi Hendrix statue together, Jeff and Brad from Wall of Sound and Confounded Books (who was unaware that his website was down… ), and the always amusing and positively puzzlin’ likes of Rick and Alan of the Sun City Girls.

Their latest hijinks involve the potential tenancy of a former theater near Ballard formerly occupied by a local wildman who once tended bar at the Blue Moon, ran for Mayor, and generally was involved in all manner of crazy public surrealism.

It is good to know that SCG will be picking up that particular mystical torch. I’ve known the ladies since they arrived here in Wetsville and it’s always a pleasure to catch up with them. One fine day, about ten years ago, I journeyed to darkest Tacoma with Alan, Charlie, and my pal Chuck on an expedition which included a pit stop at the pride of Tacoma, Bob’s “World Famous” Java Jive.

The visit culminated in an escape by a monkey from a back room, whereupon the aged proprietress chased him about the appropriately named Jungle Room, wielding a furious broom while scolding him by name to “Get back in there!”

It was without a doubt the finest Pabst Blue Ribbon I have ever tasted.

This afternoon, I amused myself by paying a call on the Asian Art Museum, near my home, and taking in the sights and sounds of the new music quartet Sorelle. They played a piece that included flute transcriptions of whalesong, and damn if it didn’t work.

Later, there was glass-breakage, mirror busting, and violin smashing. Who says long-skirted classical players don’t know how to tear it up?

As I left, I saw the pleasantly ironic sight of a restored B-17 buzzing the Space Needle over the front-and-center view of Noguchi’s Black Hole Sun sculpture, which sits in front of the museum.

All that and a 12,000-word transcription of the Lasky-Stump interview. It’s been a round, firm, fully packed weekend.