Rainier: Two Years Ago Today

Two years ago I reached the top of Mt. Rainier with Bob Kackman and John Dunn. It was effing amazing.

Lux Interior, Rest in Peace

The copyright image above is borrowed with the good graces of photographer Mike Leach, who retains all the rights he want to retain and who has a fabulous collection of rock show awesomeness covering the last 30 years at: http://www.bestrockphotos.com/

Go there. Spend money. Put some rock history on your wall.

This week I learned from the novelist Colson Whitehead (who should probably be working on his next novel instead of confirming such things) that Lux Interior died last year.

Lux Interior, of course, was the frontman for the crazed psychobilly band The Cramps.

I saw them in 1984 at a little low-ceilinged place in Seattle called The Golden Crown (actual shot from that show appropriated above). Influential proto-grungers U-Men opened. Man, it was one of my most memorable shows.

At the time, Seattle was a post-Here-Come-the-Brides backwater; nothing like the self-satisfied metropolis it became in the late 90's. I was just out of college, and naive as hell. This show blew me away. I stood on a chair at the back of the room as Poison Ivy did her slinky ice queen thing and Lux Interior howled and perspired and crowd surfed and (literally) kicked a fan off the stage. I don't think I had ever seen someone stage dive before, and certainly I'd never seen crowd surfing. I remember standing on that chair, ceiling within reach, while the audience passed Lux toward the back of the room, surfing on their outstretched hands, looking (I thought) at me with a menacing look on his face. Like, This is life or death here, asshole. But I've never had such a wide grin on my face. It was glorious.

See also "Lux Interior's Astral Ascension" in the LA Weekly. The guy was something else.

Homage to 69 Love Songs

"The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary."

-Ferdinand de Saussure

There was a time in the mid-90's when I could at least feebly banter about the significance of Ferdinand de Saussure to literary theory and modern thought. But I have long since dropped out of grad school, and if I dare say, Ferdinand de Saussure signifies something quite different to me these days.

In late 1999, back when my wife was pregnant with our first kid, I bought "69 Love Songs" by Magnetic Fields.

I listened to it a lot.

We lived in Seattle. The WTO riots spread to our neighborhood. Our baby was born. We moved to Vermont. And now that baby has turned ten.

Amazing.

In the last decade, no record has been on my turntable more often than "69 Love Songs." I return to it again and again. So cheers to Magnetic Fields, and cheers to evil genius Stephin Merritt, seen here in clay trying to kill de Saussure as Holland Dozier Holland look on (claymation apparently by Mr. Merritt himself):

Do You Belong Anywhere?

Bob Murray's Dog House parking lot, Seattle, January 14, 1994

"What does it mean to belong? If your town is changing beyond all recognition, and the things that you used--not only as a sort of physical landscape but as a moral landscape--are disappearing, are crumbling, are being passed-by by the new people who have come to the town, then what does it mean to belong? Do you belong there anymore? Do you belong somewhere else? Or do you belong anywhere? Do you belong in the past? What's in the future for you?"

--Billy Bragg, discussing England's white middle class and the upcoming theater performance "Pressure Drop".

More than anything this excerpt makes me think of Seattle in the late 1990's. Where do I belong? Not there; not anymore.

Dat or Dis

This time I choose Dis:

Not Dat:

(We returned from Seattle just in time)

Tidepool Watcher (Lopez Island, WA)

Lopez Island

Seattle Dispatch

Dis or Dat

Dis:


Or Dat:

Mail From the Peep Fairy!

Mail From the Peep Fairy!
Originally uploaded by baseballpajamas

Today we got surprise mail from the Peep Fairy! Does she deliver to you too? Somehow she find me every year. Thank you Peep Fairy!

...And I too am concerned about the new Peep colors.....

Tale of Two Cities

Quite Cold = 33?

In Seattle, they call this Winter Storm 2008. City shut down. Sledding in the streets. Well over an inch on the ground.



Meanwhile, in Vermont, it's Just Another Day.



...And Dancing Bob writes from Seattle:

"In their infinite paranoid wisdom the Public School officials closed the schools on Wednesday for fear of The Storm. Turned out to be above freezing and relatively sunny all day. It didn't snow in the city 'til after midnight. Compacted snow on the roads on Thursday and Friday no school then either."

The Best Holiday Party I Can't Attend

One of my favorite Seattle traditions was playing Loteria (a kind of Mexican bingo) with friends on christmas eve at The Canterbury (a tudor-motif dive bar and restaurant on Capitol Hill).

If I still lived there, though, I'd be hard pressed not to bump it up a notch and do the Burning Elf instead.

Tuesday, DEC. 23rd, 2008

at 6:30PM

@

(address) Ave SW

Seattle WA 98106

Jim and Laurie's

annual Christmas Eve Eve Chili feed, Sing-along

and questionably legal immolation of an 8 foot tall wooden elf!

We'd like YOU and your family to attend.

Hearty meat-laden and delicious (not whimpy) vegetarian Chilies will be served.

Traditional xmas carols will be sung accompanied by the freshly tuned 104 year old piano.

Nothing says "Happy Holidays" like burning the effigy of a cute imaginary toy-making imp!

One More For the Mate

One more Bragg moment and then I'll leave it be:

Live in Seattle, 2006, "Waiting for the Great Leap Forward".

Open Letter to Starbugs

(sent to Starbucks earlier today)

Hello kindly Starbucks Quality Control Masters and Mistresses.

Longtime Starbucks fan (broadway store, seattle, 1985-ish), first time complainer.

So look, here's my story: I was traveling from Vermont to Seattle (my home for 20 years, thank you very much), in September, when I had to change planes in the under-appreciated Detroit airport (which, by the way, has one of the coolest fountains anywhere). Realizing that meals are no longer served on airplanes, my wife and I rushed to the nearest Starbucks to buy a couple fine beverages and to grab some food for the trip to Seatac. After some hems and haws (and some furtive gawking at a woman with freakishly artificial looking breasts who was nearby) (sorry, but it's true), we settled (foodwise) on a couple of fancy ham and cheese sandwiches sold by your fine company, the kind that come on foccaccia bread or whatever.

To cut to the chase, we ate the first sandwich as we lifted off from Detroit, and it was tasty (albeit with kind of dry bread). A couple hours later we prepared to eat the second sandwich when lo and behold, before my wife could open the seal on the package, what should she discover but an insect running around there, INSIDE THE PACKAGING. It was not a cockroach (though it moved quickly), and not a fruit fly (though it had wings), and it seemed pretty desperate to get the heck out of there. We, on the other hand, were suddenly quite desperate not to eat our lovely sandwich. Have a look:





It should be clear that this bugger was inside the packaging (otherwise it would have flown away--into First Class or something).

I must say, bugs in my food is the last thing I expect from The Starbucks Experience, yes? (and just yesterday I heard that you have stopped selling molasses cookies??? The horror!). Are these truly such tough times for Starbucks that we must expect to see the closing of stores, the discontinuing of your finest cookie, and (gasp) the insectifying of your fine comestibles?

What say ye, oh Quality Merchants of Yesteryear? Is it time to refocus on food quality and insect eradication and maybe not so much on lifestyle branding and your own line of audio CDs? One wonders.

***

The response, from "Jessica F., Starbucks Customer Relations:

Hello Rob,

Thank you for contacting Starbucks Coffee Company. We appreciate you taking the time to share with us your concerns regarding the sandwich that you purchased.

Starbucks is committed to providing our customers with the highest quality beverages and food, so we take any concerns about product quality very seriously. I would like to share your comments with the management team responsible for the store, as well as our Quality Assurance team, in order to address the issue properly, however I was unable to locate the store that you visited.

As a customer service gesture, I would like to send you a Starbucks Card with my apologies for your experience....

All in all, this is a fairly lackluster response to the concerns I had regarding my sandwich.

Red (Seattle Central Library)