Georgetown Old Skool Carnival and Artopia

Yesterday was the Georgetown Old Skool Carnival and Artopia. First we went and got some lunch at Muy Macho in South Park, another south-end neighborhood. Univision was showing La Muerte de un Gallero, a 1970s movie about Spanish cockfighters.



Then we stop at Crosscut Hardwoods to look at fancy wood before going to Home Depot to pick out 82 10-foot-long 1x2s of clear cedar for the screen we're building in front.



Another photo of Crosscut. You don't need to see a photo of Home Depot, do you?



OK, now off to the carnival. We often say that we're within "walking distance" of Georgetown, but we've never actually walked there... until now.



The carnival is full of weirdos, hurray!



We're here a little late, so I'm not sure what went on in these booths earlier in the day. (Longtime readers may recognize that fennel, which I've shot twice before.)



Performance art?



The previous night at a party we met a drummer who said he'd be performing music as accompaniment to some experimental films at Christoff Gallery. This is it.







No more performance art or experimental films until we get a beer. Jules Maes is packed.







OK, now we're ready for more art.





This is about the time I pass Kathy Nyland, leader of the anti-dump effort (and a million other Georgetown movements), and give her a high-five.





The old cranky-pants guy who runs this metal shop shoos me away as soon as I take this picture.

"Why?" I ask.

"Because I'm a weird old man," he said. "I don't go around taking pictures of your stuff, and I don't want you taking pictures of mine."

Fair enough. But here's the one photo.



Nice jacket, dude.



I start hoping I run into someone I know well enough to bum a ride back up the hill from. But the people we talk to -- a waitress who served us nachos the night before in Ravenna, a woman who hosted a party we went to a month ago -- are not ride-giving types, not like my brother-in-law (hi, C!) or my neighbor-friend-coworker.

Sabey has their work cut out for them in renovating the old Rainier Brewery to fancy condo/office/boutique space, or whatever their plans are.









These girls are singing and playing guitar outside the Georgetown Brewing space.



And these girls are collecting money for a squat in Berlin.







More art.







I like these cast-vinyl-on-PVC works by Mike Poetzel.





Here's a picture I took of that last scene a couple months ago.













The power tool races are packed all evening.







Throughout the carnival planes buzz past us. This was not taken with a zoom. And in real life, the plane seemed closer than this.



They were all headed for Boeing Field right next door.



Time to go home. I understand why people complained so much when I-5 went in, tearing neighborhoods apart. I hate walking over I-5. It's not a "let's go for a walk" walk, you know what I mean?





And here's the hard part.



Our next-door neighbor's son has spent the day taking down the laurel hedge. Oh, jeez.



Before, it was even taller than our hedge. (Here's a photo from a couple months ago.)Now it's nothing.



Not that I have any love for English laurel, but I didn't really want another house in the line of sight from our living room. Oh, well. Maybe this will put a fire under us to do something about the backyard.

Then we're off to Party 2 of 3 for the weekend. Kirsten and Phyllis are there.



Some people I don't know.



The host is enjoying his meticulously organized garage.



I get a beer and start talking to a couple I kind of know. I find out that he worked on the TV show Real People and she worked on the magazine Tiger Beat in the early 1980s.

I ask her if she met Rick Springfield, Ricky Schroeder, Leif Garrett, Scott Baio, and John Stamos.

Her answers were yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.

Mayor Says No to Dump in Georgetown

Oh, hurray.

Seattle announces ambitious recycling plan, scraps Georgetown trash-transfer station

After a trip to Vessel, we decide to celebrate at the Alibi Room.

Oh, look, there's our crazy friend Rob, who we last saw in Yakima.



He asks us if we're going to Head Like a Kite later. We say no. It's been a long day.



Then inside we see our friends Wendy and Kristian.



The wall outside the Alibi Room is full of gum.



I love Werner Herzog. And I love the title "Aguirre, the Wrath of God." That's an appositive, as in:

Grammar. a syntactic relation between expressions, usually consecutive, that have the same function and the same relation to other elements in the sentence, the second expression identifying or supplementing the first. In Washington, our first president, the phrase our first president is in apposition with Washington.

Pike Place Market.



Time to go home now.





South on I-5.



Pac-Med, the old VA Hospital. And I mean that in the appositive sense.



Tully's, the old Rainier Brewery. (But not the old old Rainier Brewery.)





Albro Swift is our exit.



Here we are.



This is the old old Rainier Brewery.



Corgiat Drive, the street that was just saved from the big dump!



It's still light out at 9:37 p.m.



Home.

Summertime

What are you going to do on the longest day of the year?

After work, I think I'm going to have a $12 cocktail at that fancy new bar Vessel. (I was about to mock their use of the Charles Eames quote "Take pleasure seriously" on their website until I noticed that they specified they do "generous three-ounce pours." OK, they earned the right to that quotation.)

Then I think I'll head to Fremont to see my friend Dave's band, Head Like a Kite. Last I heard, Anderson Cooper was using their music for the bumper for his CNN show, which impresses me. But I'm impressed by just about anything that results in a royalty check.

Here are some photos I took seven years ago -- June 21, 2000 -- at the start of the end of the dot-com boom, just days after I moved back to Seattle and was staying in corporate housing right at Seattle's waterfront, with this view of Elliott Bay. This would have been two days after I started working at the company that I'm still at and 11 days before I met the man I'm now married to.

Whoever's hand this is (and I'm not sure, because I tried to show that place off to basically everyone I had ever met) -- he probably helped me move the couch onto the balcony. In return, I probably offered him one of those disgusting Mike's Hard Lemonades, which I seem to remember being a staple in my fridge at the time.



And here's the view to the north.





And to the south.



Happy Solstice, everyone!

Georgetown Old Skool Carnival This Saturday

From the Georgetown mailing list:

June 23: Georgetown Old Skool Carnival, featuring dunk tank, cake walk, petting zoo, power-tool races and sideshows by Georgetown's Seattle School of Acrobatics & New Circus Arts, noon-11 p.m. at 12th Avenue South and Vale Street, between Airport Way and Bailey Street.

Sign up for a 15-minute time slot and be a part of the Georgetown Old Skool Carnival's Sideshow! Anyone can participate - just go to All City Coffee and claim your spot on the sign-up sheet.

Here are some examples of the kinds of performers found in modern day sideshows:
Burlesque Dancers
Magicians/Escape Artists
Ventriloquists
Sword Swallowers/Fire Eaters
Eating non-food items (worms, light bulbs, etc)
Fire performers
Jugglers
Clowns
Contortionists
Stilt Walkers
Balloon Animals

The sign-up sheet will be available starting tomorrow.

Update: The Paper Noose has posted a schedule of events here.

Acceptance

I get it. I get it!

Tony Soprano is dead. (So are Carmela and AJ.)

I've been denying his death all week. I've been telling myself that David Chase intended the ending to be ambiguous. But it's not.

As Bobby said in the final half-season's opener (a comment repeated in the penultimate episode), "You probably don't even hear it when it happens."

No, you don't hear anything. The episode ends in silence, a series first.

And yes, the onion rings were Eucharist wafers -- specifically, viaticum, the Communion given to a person dying or in danger of death. (By the way, "viaticum" is a Latin term meaning "provisions for a journey." Oh yeah.)

Too obvious? Compare Chase's visual onion-ring-on-the-tongue metaphor to this excerpt from Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage:

The youth turned, with sudden, livid rage, toward the battlefield. He shook his fist. He seemed about to deliver a philippic.

"Hell--"

The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.

Speaking of hell, that's where Tony is going, of course. Because even though he did take the last sacrament, he never repented or even confessed to his family the depth of his sins.

(And the final season foreshadowed Tony's trip to hell. In the 81st episode, "Chasing It," Carlo tells Tony about a Twilight Zone episode in which a dead gangster meets a guardian angel type figure, and finds himself unable to lose when gambling and able to seduce any woman or have anything else that he wants. Of course, he gets so bored that he begs the angel to send him to the "other place." The kicker: The angel tells him, "This is the other place!" Later, in the peyote episode, Tony bangs Christopher's lady friend and finds himself winning at roulette again and again -- essentially, Tony is doomed to succeed.)

So Tony, Carmela, and AJ die -- probably all shot by the Members Only -- i.e., Mafia -- guy coming out of the bathroom.

But Meadow, who did not take part in the Last Rites, lives. And we know from Carmela's comment about her changing birth control, she's carrying the Second Coming -- Tony's unborn grandchild.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?