Tuesday, September 25, 2012

La Nozze Di Biddy

I'd known Mike was getting married since a March email letting me know as much, in which he also stated his plans to open a sandwich shop in Tacoma, where he lives now. I didn't know that he and his fiancée, Ann, were planning to make things, you know, material, so soon, until we got the invite last month. By our calculations we would only just have moved -- god willing -- into a new apartment by the date on the invite, and though I love Mike like a brother I was on the fence about whether we should commit. I am a coward; it is in my nature. But Nina, in the spirit of adventure, pushed me over to the side of, you know, doing it. And it was great! And that is why I picked her, after all.

When Eve found out we were gonna be visiting the site of her early-twenties rumspringa, she promptly typed up a book-length email that included recommendations for hotels, a layout of the central neighborhoods, and several detailed "walks," each of which would take us by multiple coffee shops, rare book stores, and bars. It was some for-real shit. Thus armed, we hopped an 8:00 AM flight, most of which we slept through, although a complimentary screening of The Hunger Games rounded out the fifth hour. Upon landing, we made our way from the gate-u (SeaTac's signage and intercom broadcasts are English-Japanese bilingual) to the light rail station and got the train to Pioneer Square. It took us past several miles of nautical-looking industrial park, then past the Seahawks stadium, past about a million Vietnamese restaurants, then gradually into the suburbs and the city center. Since we'd booked on such short notice, the big corporate hotels were the only ones with vacancies, and so we were staying at the Courtyard Marriott on Cherry St. They were nice enough to let us check in early, so we ditched our bags in our room and went looking for lunch.

I had a guilty inclination towards visiting the Pike Place Market: Oh man, the place they named the coffee at Starbucks after -- and I don't even like that shit. My theory of tourism is this, though: You're not going to really get a place the first time you go to it, cf. New York fucking City, right? So it's okay to relax about it and let your initial forays take you to a bunch of tourist-y attractions, so long as you make some kind of incremental effort to find the heart of wherever you are. But it was a dazzling place to shuffle through, fruit hawkers pushing sample slices of white peach on us, a stand selling "chocolate spaghetti." We settled on Michou for food. They made us some pretty okay paninis. And then we hit up this Russian bakery next door for a dessert we ended up being too stuffed to eat but which we bought because the smell of sweet bread was irresistible. And then we made a stop at Left Bank Books to scope the zines and gawk at the walking wounded types browsing the shelves. Nina found her childhood edition of Mirriam-Webster with a nightmare-fuel drawing of an epicanthus on page 611.

Seattle's pretty livable, by which I mean a pedestrian dude such as myself can navigate the map and grok the neighborhood geography. Eve'd given us bus suggestions along with her walking tour notes, but we'd kind of dismissed them because, you know, ugh, buses never come and they don't go where you want, etc. But Seattle's bus service (provided by the King County Department of Transportation) is pervasive, babies, and buses come every few minutes, even on the weekend. We took the 49 bus to Capitol Hill and got coffee at Caffé Vita, where we sat and leafed through a medical marijuana trade magazine. Going on vacay is all about eating, though (right?), So we struck out again to look for grub. We found this appealing-looking (to me, anyway) vegan restaurant that boasted four kinds of veggie burgers, but the lines were super long, and the hostess told us it'd be an hour plus for a table for two. For vegan food! So we went with Plan B, which was to bus it out to the university (U) district and get Thai food. Eve'd recommended a place called Thai Tom, which proved equally popular, relatively speaking: It was a tiny place -- a few tables but mostly seating at the bar -- but jammed so that the diminutive waitress had to weave her way through people entering, leaving, and homphing. The bar seating was actually the best option, on account of the action by the stove, which was manned by a thin, gristly-looking Thai guy in a sleeveless jersey who was doing the work of like three regular cooks. He had four or five medium-sized woks going on the stove, which he'd incrementally lade with meat (or tofu), vegetables, chilies, and sauce, his arms like octopus arms, each doing an entirely separate thing except for isolated moments when, say, they'd sync up for a scary-fast hand-off of an empty wok to the sous chef. And the food was great! After dinner, though, I was tired enough that I could have slept on my feet. The Stranger'd been relatively dry on activities, but we'd planned to head to The Funhouse, directly below the Space Needle (and described by its own web site as "the punkest place on earth") to see Nardwuar The Human Serviette's band, The Evaporators -- but I was too beat go on, and talked Nina into taking me hotelwards on my new friend, the 73 bus.


The wedding was on Vashon Island, and, for those of you who do not know: Vashon's about 15 miles long north to south; there are no bridges connecting it to the mainland, so you have to take a ferry to it, and the only Vashon ferry running from Seattle this time of year left from Fauntleroy in West Seattle, which is about an hour from downtown Seattle on the 54 bus. But we made it to the ferry and discovered to our (well, my) delight that it was a pretty swag accommodation: Even though the ride is only 20 minutes, they've got an actual cafeteria you can eat in, and the mezzanine deck has its own video arcade (Cruis'n USA!). I homphed waffle fries and a greasy egg sandwich. We'd chartered a shuttle van to get us from the top of the island to the bottom, and Danette, who operates the shuttle company, met us at the ferry terminal. Vashon's got a number of thriving local industries, many of them boutique-organic agricultural: We passed a winery, a chicken farm, a coffee roaster's. We found out that not only do blackberries grow everywhere on the island, girding the roads and winding around wooden handrails, say, that lead down from the houses to the rocky shore, but that they're considered a harmful weed, and the locals go out of their way to uproot them.

The wedding celebration was at Mike's parents' house, an open, unabashedly boxy-looking corrugated steel structure in the middle of a big, grassy field ringed by blackberry bushes. We arrived in time to see Mike and Ann receive and cut into their wedding cake at a tented wooden table in front of the house. Though I'd seen photos of her journey with Mike across the Chinese steppes, I'd never met Ann in person. She was, of course, very sweet, knew who we were, and had a charming, goofy laugh that made it abundantly clear that she was, you know, serious wife material. The wedding guests were a mix of suspenders hipsters, Lone Biker Of The Apocalypse dudes (likely from Mike's Apocalypse Street Bicycle Polo league), and disoriented out-of-towners like ourselves. I ran into Mike's college roommate Matt, also in from the east coast, where he is doing a PhD at the MIT Media Lab, and his wife Becky. We drank blackberry wine brewed by the groom: Fizzy, licorice-y, not much like blackberries but very good. Mike had cooked (almost) everything, losing a bit of his index finger in the process. An old-timey band, a washboard and geetar combo, played in a large shed behind the house. We didn't dance ourselves, but tapped our feet to the clicking of the washboard as Mike and Ann showed off their swing dancing moves. My favorite thing happened that night as we were about to leave: A number of other departing guests -- strangers to me -- cornered Mike in the kitchen and toasted him with a chorus of barks and yelps, his lovely characteristic sound. I gaped at Matt, who'd originated this form of communication their freshman year in Silliman and who returned my expression of shocked delight.


Matt and Becky drove us back to the rental house down the windy, pitch-dark Vashon coast road. It took us a few tries to find the address, but we did, and managed to avoid the crawly hordes of spiders to boot. We watched the end of a U. of Arizona football game before claiming our rooms for bed time. Nina and I chose the first floor "Captain's Quarters." Matt and Becky went downstairs, hoping for "Galley Slaves" but finding instead the "State Room." I did bathroom things in the bathroom looking at a black-and-white needlepoint commemorating the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens. Danette picked us up the next morning and drove us to the ferry and then from the ferry to SeaTac. She took the scenic route from West Seattle to the airport. "This is actually the roughest part of Seattle," she said. And for some reason she was reminded of a hotel in Queens that she'd wound up in via Priceline: "It was so dark. I had to walk under the highway, and the lights were all burnt out. You could hear the mice screaming in the darkness."

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Somery

Summer's pretty much over.

I didn't hit my target of seeing a movie at every outdoor film series, but I did manage to see: Slumdog Millionaire at Movies With A View; Exit Through The Gift Shop at Films In Tompkins; the oddly compelling Senna at Socrates Sculpture Park.

I saw three Celebrate Brooklyn shows at the Prospect Park bandshell: Jimmy Cliff and his band, an energetic performance which was the accompaniment to the twice-around-the-park run (my first ever!) that I did at the beginning of the summer; Ghostface Killah; Wild Flag with Mission of Burma, with Beau and a gaggle of anti-folk people on a too-hot Friday night. Carrie Brownstein sang a cover of Ask The Angels to rival Brody Dalle's. It's a good fit for the 'Flag, I think.

Nina and I went to the Afro-Punk festival at Commodore Barry Park on the 25th, where we saw Spank Rock and Das Racist, who are as good as I'd hoped they'd be. There were jaw-droppingly acrobatic BMX stunts performed by bicycle club dudes on a half-pipe right next to the stage. The sun set while we waited for Erykah Badu to take the stage in the grassy half of the Park. It was a warm, pleasant night.

We managed to score Shakespeare In The Park tickets to Into The Woods without waiting in line all night (a practice which seems unduly difficult to the adult me, although I guess that's why they also just let you donate a bunch of money to get tickets). I entered the random daily drawing on a Saturday morning and by noon had won tickets for the night's performance. We took a walk in the park beforehand and flirted with the turtles in the algae-choked pond below Belvedere Castle. I'd never seen Into The Woods before, but my impression since forever was that it was a particular hit with -- and likely catered to the specific taste of -- pre-teen girls that go to musical theater summer camp. (A demographic which, having been a pre-teen boy who took computer classes at a musical theater summer camp, I am not crapping on.) Having seen it, I think I had the right impression. The story and the emotions are entry-level stuff, especially in the first act before everyone starts dying. Which is not to say that I didn't like it. I did like it! The cast was quite good, especially Donna Murphy, who played the Witch. And I liked Denis O'Hare, who played the Baker. He had a prominent lateral lisp, kind of like Ken Freedman, and didn't strive to make the character likeable or even less prickly. And the set transformed itself in astonishing ways.

A large part of our August was devoted to apartment hunting. Our criteria: No biting insects; a spare half-bedroom to use as an office would be nice. Having this year become a strong convert to Canal Bar, I was not-so-secretly hoping to locate a place on 3rd Avenue, preferably in the desolate, not-quite-zoned-for-humans stretch north of 1st St.

You always sort of repress this knowledge, but, man, looking for an apartment really stinks. It's mostly just the insulting character of the market: They're asking how much for this piece of shit? There are the brokers who argue with a straight face that 4th Ave. and 19th St. is "about to see a real explosion in popularity, like Williamsburg in the early 2000s." There are the brokers who meet you on the street outside the apartment to give you their pitch because the actual apartment is laughably tiny. We met some useless but friendly brokers who fed us interesting information in lieu of liveable apartments: We found out that the weird graffiti building on 7th Ave. and 2nd St. is actually owned by a crazy family who've been holding onto it in the hopes of a seven million dollar sale; we got to see a funny little cave of a place above the Ehab Moustafa law firm on the stretch of Atlantic Ave. that is all Islamic beauty supply places. And we met the broker who rented us the apartment that we chose, which is, fortuitously enough, literally around the corner from Canal Bar. (It is also above a soon-to-be doggy day care facility, so we'll see how that turns out.) She (the broker) was out of her mind and lied about everything, but the apartment was big and airy and the couple that was moving out after six years (!) of occupancy made a compelling case for it.

The move was not easy, though not particularly harder than other moves. We threw out a ton of stuff and had the rest taken to a storage facility in Queens to get fumigated. The fumigation company was late bringing it back to us. Nina pulled some telephone heroics and stopped them from bringing it back even later. One of the movers was sick or hung over and threw up on behind the truck after carrying our furniture upstairs. "Jesus," he said, after puking up what looked like cereal. The whole thing cost an ungodly amount of money.

But when it was over, and we were sitting on a new Ikea couch amid a city of boxes holding our now-usable possessions in our apartment across the street from a casket company and down the block from another, luxuriating in the simple joy of a clean break; well, that was bliss.