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First I dithered, and then I stopped by the urgent-care clinic on 99 since everyone made it known to me that having a cold come with an unknown rash was odd enough to make it worthwhile. I think the place subsists on captive referrals for on-the-job injuries, but the M.D. seemed pretty good. She concluded that it was not worrisome unless it lingered or worsened, and happily it seems to be going away.
I headed up I-5 in the sun, playing Jimi Hendrix and Love & Rockets.
our little lives get complicated --
it's a simple thing.
as simple as a flower
and that's a complicated thing
Yes, I am in fact fond of a song which rhymes "thing" with "thing". Maybe you have to hear it.
Before I got to WA-20 I had entered under cloud, and it was a dark late afternoon by the time I made it to Deception Pass.1 I wandered down to West Beach, facing the ocean. A gale-force wind tore north, never stopping but rising in gusts that blasted the gulls awry, occasioning keening indignation. I walked up into the wind for a good ways, examining some of the colorful round pebbles -- purple, rust-riddled, olivine green -- then let the wind hurry me back to my car. I sealed myself inside, in the quiet, and ate a sandwich. Ordinarily high wind is exhilarating, but this wind was in the wrong mood, coming at me the wrong way, and I was glad for the shell.
Still, I went out again -- in the heavier coat, the duffle coat -- for a walk the other way, towards the bridge. In the woods the wind was only a soft bowing of the treetops. The stone underlying the soil humped up into small knolls, with ferns. Out on the north beach, the lee side, I watched the waves break in the hollows of the rocks. As I came west around the point, the setting sun dipped under the cloud layer, and blazed across as I came back into the wind. It lit the waves and the hazy spray ("the heavy streaming windbeaten waves consubstantial with glint and gold-dazzle flashed from glassy crests") and cast a long island-shadow. Shadows drew all sorts of interesting lines onto the sand from driftwood and boulders.
I was mostly by the water, and did not find where park management has put the rumored old-growth forests. Next time.
On the way up to Anacortes I stopped by the bridge to walk out on it before the sun quite set, and to look down at the water. Then I saw a sign for Goose Knob(?) nearby, and took a quick walk up that way. The woods in the half-light had a familiar fey stillness that has never been susceptible to photography. I spooked a group coming down -- well, I'd heard them clearly. The little summit was bare knobs of rock, up in the tearing wind again so that in my big coat I felt like a kite. I watched the last of the sunset, and enjoyed the wind.
Anacortes, yes. I stopped for dinner at a Thai place, Nuang Mai?, I saw on the Commercial strip. Basil chicken was good, though "hot" wasn't very hot. I may have sounded imperfectly sure about it. The cook and her co-restauranteur / acting waitress said they were both from Hilo, had rented an apartment in Anacortes six months ago, scouted around, and gone ahead with a restaurant; said it had started up great.
The show was in the Department of Safety. After the police and fire department moved out, it sat abandoned for a while until some people somehow talked Anacortes into letting them turn it into a youth hostel + art gallery + all-ages venue. A wall of computer keyboards, ironic '50s kitch, an odd-shaped room full of half-wired fluorescent tubes sticking diagonally into the space, exuberant bathroom graffiti.
The music was in the old garage, now fitted out with couches, chairs, a pool table, a herd of school desks roped in around a microfilm reader, a heap of bread on a table at the back -- I didn't get the story with the bread. The crowd was all-ages and no joke, one to eighty, lots of mid-teens and their parents. I thought I had it figured out when The Good Which stepped up onto the stage, I'm guessing eight through thirteen themselves, and their fans crowded up around. As they were setting up, the eight-year-old drummer stepped up to the mike and asked "Does anyone here like jokes?" He worked the crowd with a knock-knock joke that went like this:
Drummer: Knock knock!
Crowd: Who's there?
Drummer: Interruption cow.
Crowd: Interruption cow--
Drummer: --MOO!
They were quite fun. Not instrumental virtuosos, but plenty competent enough, and the lead singer had real vocal talent and snotty rock'n'roll mannerisms, and when you think of it, who better for it than a thirteen-year-old?
Most of the audience stayed on after The Good Which, so happily I guess this is where everyone goes to listen to everything. It did thin out by the time Veda came on (what, are these people insane? but I guess it was late for many).
Second act was Wyatt Winston, who was a guitar virtuoso but also sang. Wavery, weak, on weak lyrics -- tasteful and insanely intricate picking and fretting. He could even do both at once, but usually didn't, sadly.
Third act, Binary Dolls. Rock or post-rock, some nice tape work but otherwise kind of plodding and not in a good way. Or maybe I just needed an intermission -- I picked my way around those fluorescent tubes, and read the spines on the bookshelf in that room.
Finally, Veda Hille. She's great. She's one of the good ones we have. She was here alone, playing piano and organ, and doing the first set of songs alongside a short film a friend made from footage taken in the Yukon.
The film was hit-and-miss, but I could always not pay attention when it wasn't doing anything for me. During "6 feet of silence" the film was loose snow snaking over snowfield, up against a cabin; to that song ("it's not the cold, it's the weight of the snow") it was well fit.
"One thing I learned this last time I was in the Yukon was that apparently there's a big tourist industry where people come in, from Japan I think they said, so they can conceive children under the Northern Lights; it's thought to be very auspicious. They have special tents."
It turns out to look very fine if you graze a disco ball with a movie projector's beam. The projector apparently serves as a sharp point source, casting sharp quadrangles. It would be interesting to hit the ball full-on, and anamorphically code the image for that full 360° field cast.
At the end, they asked people to take away bread from the heap of bread. They had too much bread. The bread went pretty quick.
I really should have planned to stay over in a hostel bunk, for the full experience. Or the Lacan room, I don't know which; both.
1 isn't a "pass" conventionally over a mountain ridge, and a "passage" is between bodies of land?
[EDIT: now with photo links.]
I headed up I-5 in the sun, playing Jimi Hendrix and Love & Rockets.
our little lives get complicated --
it's a simple thing.
as simple as a flower
and that's a complicated thing
Yes, I am in fact fond of a song which rhymes "thing" with "thing". Maybe you have to hear it.
Before I got to WA-20 I had entered under cloud, and it was a dark late afternoon by the time I made it to Deception Pass.1 I wandered down to West Beach, facing the ocean. A gale-force wind tore north, never stopping but rising in gusts that blasted the gulls awry, occasioning keening indignation. I walked up into the wind for a good ways, examining some of the colorful round pebbles -- purple, rust-riddled, olivine green -- then let the wind hurry me back to my car. I sealed myself inside, in the quiet, and ate a sandwich. Ordinarily high wind is exhilarating, but this wind was in the wrong mood, coming at me the wrong way, and I was glad for the shell.
Still, I went out again -- in the heavier coat, the duffle coat -- for a walk the other way, towards the bridge. In the woods the wind was only a soft bowing of the treetops. The stone underlying the soil humped up into small knolls, with ferns. Out on the north beach, the lee side, I watched the waves break in the hollows of the rocks. As I came west around the point, the setting sun dipped under the cloud layer, and blazed across as I came back into the wind. It lit the waves and the hazy spray ("the heavy streaming windbeaten waves consubstantial with glint and gold-dazzle flashed from glassy crests") and cast a long island-shadow. Shadows drew all sorts of interesting lines onto the sand from driftwood and boulders.
I was mostly by the water, and did not find where park management has put the rumored old-growth forests. Next time.
On the way up to Anacortes I stopped by the bridge to walk out on it before the sun quite set, and to look down at the water. Then I saw a sign for Goose Knob(?) nearby, and took a quick walk up that way. The woods in the half-light had a familiar fey stillness that has never been susceptible to photography. I spooked a group coming down -- well, I'd heard them clearly. The little summit was bare knobs of rock, up in the tearing wind again so that in my big coat I felt like a kite. I watched the last of the sunset, and enjoyed the wind.
Anacortes, yes. I stopped for dinner at a Thai place, Nuang Mai?, I saw on the Commercial strip. Basil chicken was good, though "hot" wasn't very hot. I may have sounded imperfectly sure about it. The cook and her co-restauranteur / acting waitress said they were both from Hilo, had rented an apartment in Anacortes six months ago, scouted around, and gone ahead with a restaurant; said it had started up great.
The show was in the Department of Safety. After the police and fire department moved out, it sat abandoned for a while until some people somehow talked Anacortes into letting them turn it into a youth hostel + art gallery + all-ages venue. A wall of computer keyboards, ironic '50s kitch, an odd-shaped room full of half-wired fluorescent tubes sticking diagonally into the space, exuberant bathroom graffiti.
The music was in the old garage, now fitted out with couches, chairs, a pool table, a herd of school desks roped in around a microfilm reader, a heap of bread on a table at the back -- I didn't get the story with the bread. The crowd was all-ages and no joke, one to eighty, lots of mid-teens and their parents. I thought I had it figured out when The Good Which stepped up onto the stage, I'm guessing eight through thirteen themselves, and their fans crowded up around. As they were setting up, the eight-year-old drummer stepped up to the mike and asked "Does anyone here like jokes?" He worked the crowd with a knock-knock joke that went like this:
Drummer: Knock knock!
Crowd: Who's there?
Drummer: Interruption cow.
Crowd: Interruption cow--
Drummer: --MOO!
They were quite fun. Not instrumental virtuosos, but plenty competent enough, and the lead singer had real vocal talent and snotty rock'n'roll mannerisms, and when you think of it, who better for it than a thirteen-year-old?
Most of the audience stayed on after The Good Which, so happily I guess this is where everyone goes to listen to everything. It did thin out by the time Veda came on (what, are these people insane? but I guess it was late for many).
Second act was Wyatt Winston, who was a guitar virtuoso but also sang. Wavery, weak, on weak lyrics -- tasteful and insanely intricate picking and fretting. He could even do both at once, but usually didn't, sadly.
Third act, Binary Dolls. Rock or post-rock, some nice tape work but otherwise kind of plodding and not in a good way. Or maybe I just needed an intermission -- I picked my way around those fluorescent tubes, and read the spines on the bookshelf in that room.
Finally, Veda Hille. She's great. She's one of the good ones we have. She was here alone, playing piano and organ, and doing the first set of songs alongside a short film a friend made from footage taken in the Yukon.
The film was hit-and-miss, but I could always not pay attention when it wasn't doing anything for me. During "6 feet of silence" the film was loose snow snaking over snowfield, up against a cabin; to that song ("it's not the cold, it's the weight of the snow") it was well fit.
"One thing I learned this last time I was in the Yukon was that apparently there's a big tourist industry where people come in, from Japan I think they said, so they can conceive children under the Northern Lights; it's thought to be very auspicious. They have special tents."
It turns out to look very fine if you graze a disco ball with a movie projector's beam. The projector apparently serves as a sharp point source, casting sharp quadrangles. It would be interesting to hit the ball full-on, and anamorphically code the image for that full 360° field cast.
At the end, they asked people to take away bread from the heap of bread. They had too much bread. The bread went pretty quick.
I really should have planned to stay over in a hostel bunk, for the full experience. Or the Lacan room, I don't know which; both.
1 isn't a "pass" conventionally over a mountain ridge, and a "passage" is between bodies of land?
[EDIT: now with photo links.]
