No Let's Yeah | irrelevantly irreverent

I went to see the Maldives (who were great) at the Tractor Tavern as part of their epic three-day CD release festival, featuring some of their favorite bands in town. One of those bands was SHIM, a serious 70s hard rock band that pulled no punches. For a rock and roll experience your ears won’t forget, you should see them. I snapped a few photos that nicely captured their light show on stage.

I love my city when the sun is beating down, making mostly everybody miserable. I hear all the complaints, but I love summers in Seattle, even if that means an occasional wave of extreme temps. The temps tipped 100 yesterday setting an all-time record, and I was cheering the sun on. I went straight to Golden Gardens after work and dove into the chilly Puget Sound. I was instantly cooled. I want this weather all year. Seattle is more beautiful with it.

In Basque country, they do crazy things, like put a T right next to an X and then expect you to know how it’s pronounced. The people in Seattle will take it at face value and say “Tixorry”.

I will save you the embarrassment: it’s pronounced “chor-ay”, and they serve delicious wines, cocktails, and tapas in Belltown. The environment is clean, modern, and friendly. My dining partner and I chose to sit at the bar, where we could see the chefs in action, preparing the small, beautiful plates for the Friday night crowd. They were helpful when deciding what drinks to try (recommended: the red wine/Coca-Coca sangria), and one chef even shared his knife-sharpening tip: 14 degrees.

We tore our way through a half-dozen dishes, ranging from chorizo sauteed in white wine, tender pork shoulder topped with peppers, tortilla Espanola, goat cheese and apple sticks, and much more. All the dishes are reasonably priced, from $2 for the smaller dishes, to $10+ for the more substantial plates.

While it’s no place to get a large, hearty meal, it’s a perfect spot for having drinks, trying a variety of tasty plates, and catching up with friends, old or new.

There are people who think that everything happens for a reason, and then there are people who only believe in meaningless coincidence.

I tend to err on the side of the former. Every day we make thousands of little tiny decisions that sculpt our day-to-day actions. Sometimes, the unexpected happens and we are forced to make on-the-fly decisions, leading us down a path that we never expected. These are the moments that I love, and this exact thing happened to me on Tuesday.

Rode my bike to work on Tuesday, and on the way home, as I was enjoying a sunny NW afternoon, I had to go out of my way to avoid hitting an older man walking on the path ahead of me. This caused me to ride over a rough road/train track combination that immediately deflated my rear tire.

Bike ride: OVER.

I started walking up Eighth Avenue in Ballard. I was a mile away from home, and when I paused at the nearest bus stop to see when the next 28 bus was going to cruise by, I calculated my options.

1. Walk home
2. Call Ellen, make her come get me
3. Wait for bus.

Before I could decide on any of these, the bus showed up. Problem solved. I loaded my bike on the front rack and climbed aboard.

Immediately I heard “JACE!”

It was a former coworker and friend, Bart. I haven’t chatted with Bart in a long time, and have been meaning to check out his band, but I keep missing the opportunities.

As we talked, I thought about how strange it was that the only reason I was sitting there talking to Bart was because I rode my bike to work, and chose to leave work at a particular time, to take a particular bus back across Lake Washington, and then ride down the Burke-Gilman trail in the sunshine, only to avoid a slow-moving man near the Ballard Fred Meyer, where I deflated my tire on a train track.

You may believe in coincidence, but I felt like some cosmic force wanted me to see Bart on that bus.

The same cosmic force cost me $15 for a new bike tube.

Dave Bazan made an appearance on Too Beautiful Too Live and talked about playing house shows, his faith, and even played a few songs.

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My exploration of irony vis a vis the Snuggie Pub Crawl sparked many comments on my Facebook page and even some real live face-to-face discussions between friends. Can you imagine that? Real interfacing?

It also received a mention on the radio.

Too Beautiful To Live, a three-hour radio show broadcasting from Seattle’s KIRO 97.3 (and online in podcast form), was where I first heard about the Snuggie Pub Crawl. I wrote about it and sent them my post. They picked up on it and used it on their Monday night show as a jumping-off point, where they decided that they were “officially over the ironic embrace of pirates, bacon, and roller-derby.”

The hosts, Luke and Jen, play well off each other. The show is funny, eclectic, and plays a healthy dose of indie rock. Last week they had a funny interview with Michael Ian Black about his Twitter fued with Levar Burton. I highly recommend.

Here’s the segment from Monday’s show where my blog was discussed. The discussion starts at 28:30.   

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Subscribe to Too Beautiful To Live on iTunes.

Madame Ks, that cheeky brothel-themed pizza place on Ballard Avenue, is closing.

Last year they shot to the top of my list when I learned they were serving gluten-free pizzas to poor saps like me who suffer from lame dietary restrictions.

I will miss them.

In a serendipitous twist, a new take-n-bake pizza place, Zaw, opened up no more than two blocks away. On their menu: a you-bake gluten-free crust that they’ll top with whatever you want.

UPDATE: Listen to the podcast that sparked this whole thing.

Have you heard of the Snuggie?

The Snuggie is a blanket with sleeves. If you own a TV and watch it somewhat regularly, you have probably seen the irritating commercials for this product. If you want to waste two minutes of your life, and do not value your time whatsoever, take a minute and watch it now.

Now we’re up to speed.

Get this: the Snuggie phenomenon has sparked a pub crawl, where people wear their Snuggies while hopping from bar to bar.

Okay. But why? Just because it would be ironic and kitschy?

Please. Stop the irony. This form of humor has saturated our jokes and reached a level of ubiquity where it is no longer fresh and original. It is the lingua franca of boring.

Case in point: I needed a calendar for my cubicle. I went to a store with thousands of calendar choices. The store was called The Calendar Store. No irony in that store name at all. It’s brilliant. As I browsed around, my first thought was to get something ironic, like a kitten calendar. It would make everyone at work have a good laugh… for a week. But then what? I’d be looking at kittens for the next 365 days. I bagged the idea and picked up a calendar featuring old photos of New York City. Classy.

I dislike irony. But the hate will stop there. I may be tired of irony, but I’m also tired of people spouting hate about things they dislike. I like to turn negatives into positives. Rather than continue with the hate, let me make a constructive suggestion to all Snuggie pub crawlers:

Please, for the sake of my TV viewing, do not support the company that makes Snuggies. TV has enough irritating commercials that interrupt my weekly LOST episodes. I do not want to see more Snuggie ads. I want you to understand that I am very pro-fun and very supportive of doing weird and harmless things in public, but for the love of Ron Popeil, do something else.

Suggestions for Public Acts of Weirdness:
1. Gather a large group of people and start a dance party at a busy street corner. Better yet, start with one person, and build that as your group walks by and notices what’s happening. See if you can get people outside of your group to join in.

2. Keep the pub crawl idea, but stagger the arrival time for each person. The first person goes in, orders a drink, sits down. Second person comes in, acts like he wasn’t expecting first person to be there, and is really excited that he randomly ran into an old friend. Second person joins first person. Third person walks in, repeats this process. You could do this all night, in many forms. Have fun with it. When everyone is there, you can decide which pub to try next. Really be sure that people around you are listening to these “chance” encounters.

3. Repeat #1 in a bar or inside another public establishment.

4. Glue quarters down to the floor of a busy store. Sit back and watch. This is one of my personal favorites.

5. Do something like these people.

If you get video of any of this stuff, I will be happy to post it right here. Go, and do good work. Leave the Snuggie at home.

Ballard, the little corner of Seattle I’ve called home for the last four years, made the news in the NY Times this weekend. Ballard is tucked on a gently sloping hill overlooking the Puget Sound, Ship Canal, and the upper tops of bulidings in downtown Seattle (another hill, Queen Anne, blocks the view).

An influx of new, large condo buildings have dominated the main commercial street, and new developments seem to be starting every year, changing the landscape of the neighborhood dramatically.

Last year, 86-year-old Edith Macefield refused to sell her house to condo developers, and rather than letting that stop them, the condo developers built the structure around her house. Although the story was reported quite extensively in the local press, I never thought it would escalate to a national story. Ballard was also featured in the NYT earlier in fall 2008, for entirely different reasons.

photo by Stuart Isett for the New York Times