Friday 27 February 2009: Brunch Brunch Brunch

Beast, PDX

Thursday 26 February 2009: Portland’s Beast Destroys Brooklyn!

Went to Portland this weekend, and while my trip ended with a bad case of influenza, I found a very bright spot Sunday over brunch at this little place north of downtown called Beast. Everything is local and lovely, in four courses served to two communal tables.

An article ran in the NYT yesterday called Brooklyn’s New Culinary Movement. I’ve eaten all over Portland and found one place better than the next, and every time I shop for the week I find more homegrown, artisanal goodness in Seattle. I’m proud to live in a part of the world that’s been producing a lot of the specialty foods mentioned in this article, with less fanfare.

They’ve got Prime Meats, we’ve had Salumi. Brooklyn’s Mast Bros. Chocolate roasts from cacao beans, Seattle’s Theo has been doing that for years.

But then again I have to ask myself, why the food fight? Truth is a lot of us are buying locally sourced blah blah, and the more the merrier. Plus, out east there’s a guy who owns a business called Cut Brooklyn. He spends more than an 8-hour work day making one knife, turning out a handful a week. Game point Brooklyn.

Wednesday 25 February 2009: Rocaterrania

I became interested in folk and outsider art after working on a couple of related books at my job, so this article from the Sunday New York Times caught my eye. It’s about Renaldo Kuhler, a Raleigh, N.C.-based artist who, like Henry Darger, has created an imaginary world called Rocaterrania. He’s cultivated the place for the past 60 years, inventing a love interest, a language and an alphabet. The 76-year-old Kuhler has dressed like a Rocaterranian (pictue Sherlock Holmes meets a very hip elf) since college because, “It’s better to be a minute entity than a nonentity.”

[Kuhler drawing, courtesy brettingram.org]

That’s what makes Kuhler such a bad-ass. He a brilliantly gifted illustrator, sure. But even better, he’s never stopped, or maybe didn’t know he started, living very certainly in a glassy-eyed reality. Which happens to sound pretty terrific, especially these days.

[Kuhler's map of Rocaterrania, courtesy brettingram.org]

Kuhler’s work will be featured in a group show at a American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore this October, and the documentary Rocaterrania starts the festival circuit this spring. Check out the trailer here.

Tuesday 24 February 2009

A few favorite blogs, two by friends, and two new finds suggested by my friend Sarah:

The Penn Forest Oracle, a visual blog inspired by life in Central PA by artist Sarah Noble.

Drifts and Scatters by Gala Bent, featuring her work and other fresh picks from people moving in creative spaces.

Anonymous Works, using folk and outsider art as a starting point to explore lovely visual things.

Accidental Mysteries “Finding magic in everyday things.”

Monday 23 February 2009

Who would guess that force-feeding birds through a metal tube could cause such an unspectacular spectacle in Seattle?

The woman inside the duck costume danced by the window, feet squeaking with every step, waving a sign at diners that read: “I need my liver.”

But they kept eating and laughing, and only occasionally glanced at the dancing duck — the elephant outside the room.

Friday 20 February 2009

My desk, Friday afternoon.

The sweetest decline.

Thursday 19 February 2009

Seattle’s favorite meteorologist Cliff Mass says spring is finally here. But for me, a walk through the Arboretum before work this morning sealed the deal. Things are really in bloom. The new season is a tiny anecdote to the bitter pill we swallow listening to the news these days, but a true healer all the same.

Mass predicts rain in a few days, but who cares? We’re at the start of a trend:

On Sunday our luck runs out and showers and clouds move back in. But after the warmth, it won’t seem the same. My grass is already growing.

Check out these surface temperature charts and take heart. We’re through the worst of it, love.

Wednesday 18 February 2009

How to share through a recession, in chicken scratch:

Tuesday 17 February 2009

I’ve been avoiding terms like “mini-me” “OMG” and “staycation” out of habit. But really, the only way to describe my President’s Day away from work is that it was indeed, well, a “staycation” in the very best sense of the term. I went to a spa in Capitol Hill yesterday, a mile from my place, called Hothouse. It was a clean, silent and really simple space run by women where you pay ten bucks and stay all day. I spent the afternoon in a circle–a hot tub to cold plunge to steam room to dry sauna rotation.

I imagined my that my pores were really blooming tea, held together by microscopic strings in the dry sauna that jumped apart in the cold plunge. This moving from hot to cold is supposed to improve circulation, scientifically speaking. But after an hour you’ll feel like a cowbell at the edge of a very open field, one dip of wind and what you thought were mechanics was really skin all along.

Friday 13 February 2009

Dear Facebookers,

Become a Weatherspoon fan! I finally started a little page. Find it here.

Talk to you again on Tuesday,

Sara, Chief Atmospherologist

Thursday 12 February 2009

If I decided to get a Master’s degree, I’d happy delve into any of the following:

1. Field Studies, using Audubon’s Birds of America as central text and the Arboretum as my classroom.

2. Fertility, so I could seriously consider mythology, with a dissertation explaining why babies and corn and the sea are sort of the same.

3. Spiritual Writing, so I could mix a. structure, b. solace, and c. Jesus up in my mind and set the thoughts out to dry on thousands of paper towels and napkins, watching tiny stories grow into trees, fiber, oats, and night.

4. Museology, to spend days in lit by light rooms, wide, clean spaces far away from my closet and the trunk of my car. I’d study inri, netsuke, and Outsider art.

5. On that note, Folk Art. I’d get the degree before moving to Athens, GA and meeting the ghost of Howard Finster in a filling station. Then I’d buy a wooden house and deck out a room with robin’s egg blue walls, a very red rug, a thick old desk, and lots of empty gold picture frames.

Wednesday 11 February 2009

A new book of old, becoming-too-familiar stories called First Person America reminds me of the haunting Depression-era recordings Studz Terkel produced for his Hard Times radio series. Ira Glass featured snippets of Terkel’s interviews on a recent TAL.

Ann Banks edited the collection after sifting through stories penned during the 30s-era Federal Writers’ Project, now stored in the Library of Congress:

The inhabitants of those file drawers told stories about how they got by using a mixture of ingenuity and guile. They hawked lucky charms and patent medicine made from “roots and barks and good raw whiskey.” They peddled cake flavoring and cased sausages, they auctioned tobacco, they fished and smuggled rum—and sometimes aliens—from Cuba to Key West

Read the full Newsweek article here.

Tuesday 10 February 2009

Meet me at the Doug Fir near Canada…

Monday 9 February 2009

Four cafes for Sunday morning in Seattle, if you’re the only one awake and you want to go someplace to write for an hour or two:

1. Lighthouse: Because you feel like you know everybody here, even though you actually don’t know anybody. You can be incredible productive, I’ve learned, being unfamiliar within familiarity.

2. Volunteer Park Café: Granola with dried cherries and flax, lavender honey and fresh pineapple and blueberries with yogurt. In the winter. On a particular morning, I arrived just after 8 and was the first customer of the morning. The three guys running the counter were warm and smiley, singing Simon and Garfunkel, which really only works on Sunday mornings.

3. Flying Apron: This place used to be Café Bouche, a crepe joint that hired an unfunny Russian magician who would wander the tables on Saturday nights. He’d do this card trick, somehow making a Queen of Hearts vanish. You’d look up and see all these playing cards like dangling knat wings sticking to a bloody red ceiling.

Flying Apron looks like it was there hiding through the Bouche phase the whole time—creaky, wooden with a communal table and little lamps and a pastry shelf that stretches the whole side of the space.

4. The back room at Café Prese: It’s cheap, they keep refilling the coffee, and nobody tells you to leave.

Friday 6 February 2009

Meet me in California.

Thursday 4 February 2009

I was in a yoga class a couple of years ago with an older man who would hack and rattle cough all over his mat, from Ojibway breaths straight through Namaste. During one of these classes, in an all-too-rare moment of silence, the instructor told us to stop and be present. To breathe and focus on the very moment.

I made myself try, fluffy as it sounded, to feel instead of think through what being present meant. My ass was sore from downward dogs, my mouth was dry, and I was very sure that coffee would only make it drier but I was craving a cup anyways. Then, out of nowhere, I started to record exactly where I was, like I used to as a kid.

Growing up, I would make myself really take note of random moments. I went cross-country skiing in middle school and memorized a particular pine tree I slid past. I put shoes in our front closet and breathed until I could remember how the house smelled, like a mix of toast and carpet and Mr. Clean. I told myself to remember what that one tree looked like, what it was like to live in the house I grew up in. And I sort of do.

Wednesday 4 February 2009

During my senior year of college I hiked for a week at the South Sister in central Oregon. After the trip, home in Indiana, I imagined returning to a certain part of the trail at that mountain so often that it might as well have been the moon, both familiar and inaccessible.

Last night, I fell asleep on the couch watching Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and woke up around midnight. I’m planning a trip to Bend in a month or two, which I reasoned is a 7 hour drive from Seattle. I checked Google maps and found out that where I’m staying is twenty miles from the South Sister.

I was wired, up forever then. I started wondering if you could see the South Sister at night from Bend. And maybe then on a really clear night from my inn I could look out and see the mountain across a big dry field. How mythical that would be, lying down on flannel sheets and looking at this mountain.

I love the part of Winesburg, Ohio, when the storyteller describes lying there in bed, stepping up into it, being old and looking out.

Then I thought about growing old and hiking to the top of the South Sister and dying there. Or maybe even spontaneously combusting, just bursting into flames but not really dying. I wondered what it would feel like to be Moses or Elijah on the mountain then, until it was too late to think.

Tuesday 3 February 2009

Drum roll, please. This Monday Google Earth meets Oceana, seabeds, the coast off of Galveston, and Cousteau films. From the New York Times today:

By choosing among 20 buttons holding archives of information, called “layers” by Google, a visitor can read logs of oceanographic expeditions, see old film clips from the heyday of Jacques-Yves Cousteau and check daily Navy maps of sea temperatures.

The replicated seas have detailed topography reflecting what is known about the abyss and continental shelves — and rougher areas where little is known.

Monday 2 February 2009

Second only to stories about rats in the walls, there’s nothing better than trading “where were you when the earthquake happened?” accounts at parties. Having spent only a fraction of my life on the West Coast I’ve never had a very good answer to this question.

I was in a small earthquake in 1998 in San Francisco. It tilted my bed towards the ceiling and back over a series of three broad waves. That was that. The mattress felt like a gigantic version of one of those Brookstone chairs at the mall with roving back rollers. 

Like most people, I kept sleeping right through the 4.5 magnitude earthquake that hit around 5:30 last Friday morning. I’ve lived I Seattle for five years without experiencing a tangible earthquake. Which I’m thankful for, especially since I can almost see the viaduct from my desk at work.

This seismograph shows just how many tiny earthquakes we have in the Puget Sound all the time. To be safe, I’m not ever keeping my wedding rings on the shelf about the toilet before anymore.