Stumptown

Crocodile

Last Days of Disco

Block Party

Fear of Music

Percentage of top 40 songs from the 1960s that were written in a major key: 85 

Percentage from the 2000s that were: 43

OK!

Just realized that when I originally posted this it wasn't downloadable. It is now fully downloadable, so go ahead and download it or whatever.

Wednesday - 7pm - Cinerama

New Painting in Progress - Phase 1

Free Advice

Pioneer Square (In One Act)

Defiance defines Pioneer Square.  Seattle's disjointed grid pattern of streets is perhaps most evident at Yesler Way, in Pioneer Square, and results from a hundred-year-dead-and-gone feud among Doc Maynard, Arthur Denny and Carson Boren as to which way the streets should be aligned.  They couldn't agree and - as a result - our streets veer inexplicably just south of Cherry to this day.

Today Pioneer Square's defiance is evident mostly in the form of its refusal to gentrify as it should, given its historic character, wide-sidewalked boulevards and charming loft apartments.  Instead, its most visible residents are bridge-and-tunnel-folk clubgoers, summer cruise shippers and homeless men.

But Seattle's ongoing housing shortage has led us to look past the relatively staid neighborhoods of Belltown and the Central Business District.

On Monday we're alerted by our agent that a great listing is about to drop in Pioneer Square and we will need to be ready to act if we want it.  In order to ensure we can make a timely decision, we feel we need to spend some evening time down there, as pedestrians, to see what the life of a resident might be like.  So on Tuesday we drive down to Pioneer Square to walk the weeknight streets.

We park and walk around the building that contains the soon-to-be listed 2BR, 1,300 square foot loft with exposed brick and high wood-beamed ceilings.   That description repeats in my head, mantra-like.  On the corner there's a bum eating a quarter of watermelon and we immediately dub him the "Watermelon Man" in a flippant dis-homage to Herbie Hancock.  The bum ignores us and walks down the street and sits down by my car to enjoy the fruit in the shade.

The building is charming, brick, with a fountain and an interior courtyard.  There is an up-market Italian restaurant in the ground floor.  There is an onsite guard and good security cameras.  All is calm.  The sun shines.

We walk down First.  I'm eager for the neighborhood to impress Jaime.  She comments on some of the places she's never been in.  I take in how clean and historic the cafes look on a summer afternoon.  Daylight is indeed the best disinfectant.

We turn up Yesler, near one of our favorite sandwich shops.  We turn on Occidental.  I can see as we turn the corner there are a couple of derelicts along this street.  One standing near the street, smoking.  The other sort of hunched, with his back to the wall.  There is some food waste in the middle of the sidewalk ahead - some lettuce, maybe.  A tortilla.  It seems nothing is out of the ordinary.  There are homeless in Belltown too and, for the most part, they mix fine with the propertied and keep to themselves, aside from the occasional appeal for a spare shekel.

As we grow nearer to the wall-leaning bum, he pushes off from the wall, still hunched, and starts sort of shuffling toward a point where he will intersect our path.  We start to bow our path toward the street, as one does, to give him a good berth.  Yet now something seems not right.  My eyes adjust to the shady side of the street and, though his skin is dark and not far from the color of his pants, I now notice his pants aren't where they ought to be - instead they are down the thigh a bit.

What is he doing?  Where is he going?  What is that hanging there?  Are those his....?  Oh, no.  No, no.  Not now.  But he is reaching for something.  It's too late to turn.   We are committed to this street, to this vector.  We have allowed ourselves a wide berth, but nothing short of an airlift can save us from this carnival of degradation.  He reaches for the tortilla and before I can think "how can he be hungry" I realize, with abject terror, that to the right sort of man (the sort inclined toward defecatory acts in public rights of way) a tortilla is simply another flat fibrous material, diabolically suited for bath tissue. 

And I realize that for all time this will be Jaime's synecdoche for why we didn't move to Pioneer Square.  My date with Pioneer Square is over.  Things have not worked out.

We keep walking.   The bum remains where he stopped, defiantly finishing his business in due course and doing to the sidewalk what the universe and the Seattle real estate market have long been doing to my dreams.

Madison

Frisky Dingo

The Swinery

Finally...

Pork Belly: Book Bindery

Amerika