Just did my monthly pilgrimage to The City. Sounder from Kent to King Station. Then walked 2nd Avenue all the way up to Vine in Belltown for the best calzones in the universe at Bambino's.
I have to say, that for all the urbist talk, it seems like you people don't actually live in the city you write about, because from the standpoint of a squirrel, it looks nothing like the dynamic abstraction you make it out to be.
At 5:30pm there is a lot of activity in the street. But that consists entirely of people in their cars cramming to get the heck out of there and back to the house in Issaquah! Once those guys leave the wide avenues become empty canyons! And the side streets...sheesh...they might as well be dark alleys. By 6:30pm there are many with zero people on them. No one. Not a single person walking between 2nd and 3rd on some of them.
Ok, so when I get to Bambino's its this little oasis. The one place where someone knows how to make a pizza with a real oven and make the crust soft but with nice crust on it, and just the right amount of burn charred on it for flavor.
But that's like this one island of light as the whole outside goes dark. No partygoers. No cosmopolitan nitecappers wandering out. Just an empty city with little islands of people clustering together. It's more like a college campus at night. Empty pathways, but then you find the one late night cafeteria where everyone is and "ahh...there's still people".
So yeah. The City.
And the concert was fantastic, but that would take like two comments to tell you about it.
True story: When I was in art school in the late '90s, I was in my first semester of Performance Art class. There was this girl, larger but sturdy build, short dark hair and dark eyes, like Liza Minnelli in Cabaret. Her attendence was spotty, to say the least. One day, she came in for one of our midterm performances, and unveiled her latest. She sat atop a speaker, with a cassette of audio playing, fuzzy, slight moaning sounds. She wore a white shirt, surrounded by fruit, which during the short performance, she smashed against her passionately, until her white shirt was covered in pale fruit juice.
That was the last we saw of her. That was her legacy. That, and though I looked nothing like her, my teacher calling me by her name on occasion.
Comments (15) RSS