Saturday I rode up to Seattle with the band. One thing I love about the Northwest is all of the funky little coffee joints along the road. The gig was at Neumo's, and there were many jokes about Old Mo's...there was a nice big backstage area with separate rooms and everything. The bar had a huge mermaid mural and blown glass that looked like flames. Bars back home in Los Angeles just don't try that hard.
Bob and I met my nephew Justin at a nearby Pho place that was no great shakes. I didn't really eat much of my soup. We went back to the club and waited around. Finally my best friend Anne and her husband Ed showed up.
The bar had an attached Pommes Frites place, called oddly enough, Pommes Frites, which only had french fries and sausages. They had at least 20 different dipping sauces, so we ordered fries all around, and, in clockwise order, starting in the upper right: Garlic mayonnaise, Ketchup, Horseradish mayonnaise, Chipotle mayonnaise, Pesto mayonnaise and Curry Ketchup.
This time I stood at the opposite side of the stage to take pics of Mudhoney, although the audience was pretty mellow. If anything they were in a kind of religious ecstacy. After the bands were over, it took what felt like forever to get out of there. I know it comes with the territory. The first thing you learn is you always gotta wait. I just didn't feel like talking to anyone anymore and felt kind of hanger-on-ish standing around stupidly backstage. Touring makes me cranky.
I had booked a "modern" hotel for us in Seattle called Hotel Max. It was the kind of place where Catherine O'Hara's character from Beetlejuice would have stayed. When we arrived, exhausted, we couldn't even figure out how to make the crazy red elevator work. It was like we had woken up in the future. The room was painted entirely grey, and was opressively tiny. The bathroom was like an airplane bathroom. The next morning Bob could barely take a shower. I asked to be moved to a bigger room, at my expense. In the next room the toilet was so close to the wall you had to sit on it sideways. There was also an 18-inch step going into the slippery, marble-tiled bathroom. Uncharacteristically quoting Star Trek, Bob said, "This hotel is illogical."
Sunday the boys came to pick Bob up at the super-moderne hotel. I saw the band off, showered, and headed straight into Tacoma to the Museum of Glass. I have always wanted to see Dale Chihuly's "home" space. I especially wanted to see his big glass floats, and I was disappointed that they had only been a temporary exhibit. I had rushed to the museum without bothering to eat breakfast, so I grabbed a ham and cheese panini at their cafe, which is run by the Dock Street Sandwich Company...it kicked ass over all paninis prior.
The other exhibits compensated for the missing floats. I was especially entranced by works of Anna Skibska, which reminded me of spun sugar, infinitely fine and delicate webs of glass. There was also a gorgeous red glass house, partially filled with glass apples. There was a workshop where you could watch sweaty college boys in leather aprons work with molten red glass. It sounds very grade school field trip, but the glassworking was much more interesting to watch than you would imagine.
Outside there were various installations; BREATHE, a fiber-optic exploration of light and movement, was not as impressive in the windless daytime. It was still beautiful, but it was more like BLUE STICKS IN WATER. TIDEWATER, a series of metal doorways, was so geometric it felt naturally very photograph-like, making for perfect and easy pictures. Finally, INCIDENCE, a series of glass triangles, takes advantage of the surrounding landscape and architecture, transforming its shape depending on the vantage point. This is probably the one installation I would want in my own backyard.
I walked over the much-lauded "Bridge of glass" and sadly, it was not made entirely out of glass. How thrilling and terrifying that would have been to stand on! Instead, there was a display wall with dozens of Chihuly's works, which look like giant urns and vases, some of which hold glass flowerseven . Overhead, encased in glass, are Chihuly's signature sea-creature-like displays. And then for no apparant reason at all, there are what appear to be two giant glass rock-candy sticks.
Grand Central Station, which had another huge (admittedly ubiquitous) Chihuly instillation, was locked up on Sunday. Since it was not yet closing time, I walked over to the Tacoma Museum of Art on a whim. What a happy accident! There was a display called Symphonic Poem. Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, a Columbus-area folk artist, creates books and sculptures out of fabric. Using leather, quilting, sewn-on-buttons and yarn, she stitches together artworks mostly resembling voodoo dolls.
Next I wandered into a room containing horns strung one upon another all over the room at varying heights, like something out of Dr Seuss. The bottoms of the horns had V-cut airholes like a flute, beneath which were connected flat pieces of wood, which in turn were connected at the bottom to tiny canisters of compressed air. In the center of the room stood a music stand equipped with a button and two dials. Not anticipating much, I nonchalantlly pressed the button. I was suddenly surrounded by music as the horns started sounding, above, below, and in every direction around me. To heck with surroundsound, this was three-dimensional music - music like I had never heard before, whimsical, charming and playful. It was like a special joke someone had engineered just for me. And I was delighted in a way I have not felt since I was a very small child. It was magical. It was pure enchantment. I began weeping. I wept because I had forgotten that it was ever even possible to feel that way. When the music stopped, I turned one of the dials. By manipulating the dials I could play anything I wanted, isolating each horn. The installation was called Conloninpurple. It is Trimpin's ode to the player piano music of Conlon Nancarrow. It is probably one of the most affective art works I have ever been lucky enough to experience. When they came to kick me out, I told the security guard that next time they would probably have to call the police to drag me away from those dials.
Anne picked me up in Tacoma, and we went down to Pike Place for fish and chips. We went to her favorite place, The Salmon Cooker, which is owned and operated by local indians. They alder-smoke all of their fish. The cod was smoky and flaky, and the chips were done perfectly all the way to the center even though they were humongous. The chowder was intense with the usual Italian herbs - rosemary, thyme, possibly marjoram, but there was one distinct taste I couldn't place. The helpful cook let me in on the secret - mustard seed! Anne loves their coleslaw and can eat 2 orders in one sitting.
Anne dropped me off at the hotel, and I relaxed for awhile before I met my nephew Justin for a late dinner. I had reservations at Chez Shea, which has a very good reputation. Plus they had foie gras, which I eat at every possible opportunity. The waitress seemed disappointed that we just wanted starters and iced tea. The foie gras was kind of charred at the edges, and was just not appetizing in spite of the creative sauces, including one made with quince. Loss of palate is the first harbinger of illness with me, so maybe something was going on. Justin was not too impressed with his mussels either. So we left there hungry.
It seems most of the restaurants around there close at 9pm, so we were kind of wandering around haplessly. We passed the closed Scone shop which was proudly diplaying its Roadfood review in the window. Finally a kindly cook steered us toward Cutters, which did not look promising. It is a waterfront office-party type place that also had a sushi bar. But it was open. It turned out it was "happy hour" from 9pm til closing, so all appetizers were half off.
3-dollar appetizers? We went wild - potstickers, coconut shrimp, hot wings crab cakes, and calamari. I expected them to be little plates. But this was a bar and they were big drunk guy portions. Everything was so good, especially the calamari. Who would have thought black beans and tortilla strips would work with fried calamari? I felt guilty leaving so much food on our plates, but the grease saturation would not have been worth it.
We hiked up the giant hill toward the hotel. The first one's a doozy. Half-way up someone had kindly bolted tractor seats to the side of their house so you could have a little rest. As we soldiered on, my throat ached and my head was pounding. I was definitely starting to feel unwell. As we passed the 60-foot tall Macy's Christmas tree, there was a hysterical chattering of birds, the likes of which I had never before heard. I looked into the tree, and every branch was dark with thousands of frenzied, shrieking birds zooming from branch to branch like it was the end of the world. The next day I told Anne about how all of the birds in the trees were screaming and screaming. She said, "Yup. Starlings'll do that."
Monday I met my nephew, Justin, at the EMP - Experience Music Project. The building is another strange Frank Geary design. I find his buildings disorienting. At some point in a Geary building I am usually surprised by an unexpected flight of stairs, like, "Where did those come from? I thought I was on the second floor".
The main draw for me was the huge collection of Jimi Hendrix memorabilia. I expected the usual - a few guitars, a few costumes, and maybe a guitar pick or two. It's more like someone just followed Hendrix around picking up everything he ever set down. There are intimate family letters (His family referred to him as "Buster"), early drawings (Hendrix was also a great visual artist), and anything else your mother might keep in a box in the attic. I was most affected by a letter Hendrix wrote from the air force, where he discusses a simulated jump, and how fellow recruits backed down. He disusses the thought process that made him choose to jump, and it reveals a deeper philosophy of life.
The museum displays his guitars, and pedals, and even the mixing board from the Electric Ladyland studio. But I was most amazed by the chunk of guitar that Hendrix set on fire at the Monterey Pop Festival. It is such an iconic relic, it's the only thing I would have been tempted to smash-and-grab, were I a smash-and-grab type of person. Of course, the fact that it occured to me at all possibly means that is exactly the kind of person I am.
There were letters, clothing, jewelry, handwritten lyrics, and homemade cassetes. When I saw that they even had his diary, it started to feel a little more like plunder than memorabilia. Later I asked my friend Anne if Paul Allen had taken advantage of the family, exploiting poverty to root through their heirlooms. She said it is just the family business, and they're pretty matter-of-fact about it.
The special exhibits sections Held an exhibit on Disney music and the early roots of hip-hop. Both are vaguely interesting, but I was too overwhelmed by the giant Hendrix display to take in any more. There is a sound lab where you can play instruments, a concert simulation, and Justin's holy grail, the Guitar Gallery. They have over 50 guitars, from as far back as 1770.
Afterwards we went down to Pike Place to try to eat our way from one end to the other. We did not get very far. World Class Chili was already closed by the time we got there just after 3pm. We split a killer pulled pork sandwich from the Soul Food Stop, and a Mac and Cheese from Beecher, where they make their own cheeses.
The donuts from the much-lauded Daily Dozen Donuts were disappointing; they are probably only good when they are fresh out of the fryer, as is true of most donuts. We watched the fishmongers throw fish across the building to eachother for awhile, and I bought some fantastic plump Rainier cherries and raspberries.
We met up with Anne, and Justin tagged out and headed back to the University. Anne and I sat in the bar at Lowell's and stared at the Sound. I was now fully sick and sat there nursing a cup of hot tea. Lowell's is a very Roadfood-y place that has been around forever. If you want to eat on the first or third floors, you order from a counter much like a cafeteria. The second-floor bar has table service, which continues later than counter service.
We ordered sandwiches - Anne got a Reuben that she liked a lot. I got a crab cake roll. The crab cakes were not very flavorful, but once I added the cayenne-rich mayonnaise and pickle chips that came with the sandwich, it was much better. Anne also tried the clam chowder and reported that it was much richer, but not as flavorful as the Salmon Cooker's. (The picture of my sandwich is kind of dark, but the place was so cool I wanted to show you their food.)
Back at the hotel I fell into a deep sleep around 6 o'clock. I woke up late at night and ordered room service and a movie. Hotels are a comfy place to be sick. The room service was provided by The Red Fin, which serves very hip chi-chi Asian fusion cuisine. I had mushroom dumplings, and a hamburger which was served on a ciabatta with pickled red onions and grilled pineapple. The condiments were wasabi-honey mustard and ginger ketchup. Not for everyone, but I sure enjoyed it (I did have to take out the pineapple)
The next day I took a train back to Portland so I could catch my plane the following day. The views from the train were spectacular, especially since we were running late and caught the sunset, turning the sky magenta and purple over the pines. I was also lucky enough to see the Mima Mounds, which I had almost rented a car to see (That and the world's biggest frying pan, which the train unfortunately did NOT pass). They served Ivar's clam chowder on the train, which I had been meaning to try. Same review as Lowell's - richer but less flavorful than the Salmon Cooker.
I checked into the Governor's Hotel, which was super-ritzy for the price. They informed me I had been upgraded to a suite and that their room service was provided by Jake's Grill, Jake's sister restaurant. Score! I had one last thing I wanted to do - visit Powell's, the gigantor bookstore. I wanted a quick bite before shopping, and against Mr Chip's better advice, I went to Henry's Tavern, original home of Henry Weinhardt's. Maybe it was being sick that turned me into Goldilocks, but the dumplings were too greasy and the cheese soup was too beer-y, so I headed off to the bookstore.
I decided to order my food to go from Jake's Grill instead of ordering room service. It was not just the hiked room service prices, but I've noticed room service usually has a very limited menu. Jake's Grill is much more upscale than Jake's Crawfish. Both the menu and ambiance are more like a fine steakhouse. Tucked back safely into my room, I found I was still whiny and finicky - the crab cocktail was too fishy, the pea soup was too thyme-y, but the macaroni and cheese was JUST RIGHT.
The next morning I had a nice soak in the jacuzzi tub before heading off for the airport. Although the Good Dog/Bad Dog downtown was closed, the one in the airport was still open. They had a variety of different sausages, including Italian, Bratwurst and Polska Kielbasa. The most intersting-looking one was the oregon smokie "seasoned with hickory smoke, garlic, molasses, cayenne pepper - spicy!" but I went for the basic dog with mustard (and yes, relish...at least it's not ketchup).
Neumo's 925 East Pike Street Seattle, Washington 98122 (206)709-9467
Dock Street Sandwich Company 1701 Dock Street Tacoma, WA 98402 (253) 627-5882
Salmon Cooker Pier 57 Alaskan Way, Seattle 98101 (206) 624-1890
Cutter's Bayhouse 2001 Western Avenue (Cross Street: Virginia Street)
Seattle, WA 98121 (206) 448-4884
Beecher's Handmade Cheese 1600 Pike Place, Seattle, WA 98101 (206) 956-1964
Lowell's 1519 Pike Pl (Cross Street: Pike Street)
Seattle, WA 98101 (206) 622-2036
Red Fin 612 Stewart St (Cross Street: Between 6th Avenue and 7th Avenue) Seattle, WA 98101 (206) 441-4340
Jake's Grill 611 SW 10th Ave PO OR (503)220-1850
Good Dog/Bad Dog Portland Airport between concourse B and C (503) 281-2344
