All the Damn Hippies, Part I

Memorial Day weekend in Seattle every year is the occasion for the Folklife Festival, a four-day hippie picnic at the Seattle Center. I'd never been before, but in my resolution to get out more, I thought I ought to check it out this year. Four days of folk music, arts and crafts, ethnic food, and a multi-cultural everything-is-beautiful mindset of course brings all the hippies out of their winter habitats. Now, I'm ambivalent toward hippies: I enjoy the open-mindedness, but find the resulting self-absorption to be irritating. So, I turn out for this sort of venue, preparing myself for the inevitable annoyance.

Don't get me wrong: some of my best friends are hippies. I'm often mistaken for a hippie myself. I'm not, though. I'm a beatnik. The difference, for me, is significant: hippies, for the most part, were droupouts, whereas beatniks graduated. I graduated.

Anyway, I'm not sure if that informs any of the current hippie experience here in Seattle, but I don't consider myself a hippie. Nevertheless, they're everywhere, and something like this brings them out in force. And here are some pictures I got:

---

This was in the Centerhouse. The board said something about Slavic dance: though this photo doesn't really do it justice, this is a shot of several concentric circles of dancers, anyone from the crowd seemingly, that would get into the groove.

---

This was some Brazilian dance company, I think. Couldn't really tell, but they sounded OK.

---

And this was some square-dancing, bluegrass sort-of deal. I couldn't help but notice the older age of all the folks on the dance floor.

---

And then there's this bunch. If they look pretty ad-hoc, I can tell you that they certainly sounded that way, as well. They looked like they were having fun, though. You should have seen the bunch that I couldn't get a photo of, since my disk was full. Some kind of garage band, I'm thinking, of electric guitar, violin, kid's drum set, and toy piano. Just as I was going for my camera to get a shot, they launched into what I would eventually realize to be a version of The White Stripes' "Hotel Derba". At that point, I knew that a simple photo of the scene wouldn't do it justice.

---

And then there's the Peruvian combo. What Seattle festival would be complete without?...

Lucky To Be Alive

Here's an image I can't get out of my mind.
I was stopping in with my friend Eric one night a few months ago. He has two daughters, ages 7 and 4, as well as two identical black kittens, both of the same litter, about six months old.

As we sat talking in the living room late in the evening, after the kids had gone to sleep, the kittens were very active. They were revelling in all the things that the girls had left strewn across the floor for them to play with. One such item was a length of thick red thread, maybe once securing a balloon or something--only it was several feet long. One of the two cats--even Eric said he'd long given up on trying to tell the two apart--for some reason took a real hating to that thread. Jumped all over, wrestled a little bit, and started to eat it. I stood up, went over and grabbed the cat away from the thread, and held it forcefully for a minute or two, to get its attention away from trying to potentially choke itself on thread. Eventually, however, it got away, and immediately ran around the coffee table and resumed the melee with the offensive red thread. Eric reassured me that he didn't expect either cat to live long, since they're clearly not very bright. That wasn't exactly an invitation to leave the cat to its own devices, but I decided not to make an issue of it. Cats play with string and yarn and thread all the time. Right?

A few minutes later, after the conversation had drifted on to the topic of whom to trust in media, one of the cats--they'd both been running back and forth--walked past me, gagging on thread. It trailed a good length of it, as it tried to choke the rest of it down. Knowing that mammals don't digest cotton fiber very well, I didn't want the struggle to end that way. I got ahold of the end of the thread still outside of the kitten, and began to pull. I figured maybe it'd gotten a few inches' worth ingested.

The kitten leaned its head forward as it reluctantly gave up its conquest. I was surprised to get half a foot pulled out of its throat, as Eric made some observation about free press in Venezuela; but the kitten wasn't done yet. I was gently lifting my arm upward, not drawing too fast, for fear of maybe the thread cutting into its tongue, or maybe catching on a tooth. Soon, my hand was almost over my head, and yet the cat continued to dispense string. Like a furry little bobbin. Finally, after my arm was almost fully extended over my head, the last of it spilled out of the kitten's mouth. Fuckin' cat had swallowed over a yard of thread, and was working at consuming more. That's probably not a fatal quantity, but would be a hell of a way to go if it were.

I disposed of the thread in the kitchen trash. I can't stop thinking of the act of pulling on thread and having the cat extrude it. Like a tape dispenser, but it was alive.

At the Sculpture Park

I've been away too long. I'm going to make an effort to post more often, and work on my webpage. I'm starting to forget what HTML I picked up. I've been unemployed since early February, so you'd think with all the time I have on my hands I'd be updating more often.

Turns out I'm pretty indolent. But my friend Sean wanted me to set up a page for him, so that gives me a good opportunity to get off my cyber ass.

Maybe it's the changing of the seasons, what with the days getting longer and sunnier, I'm feeling more of a need to get out and enjoy things. Monday I went down to Anthony's Seaport down in the Shilshole Marina, sat out on the lounge with a Long Island Iced Tea and a bowl of chowder. Weather was great, the sun setting brilliantly over the water.

Clear, bright skies today, as well, so I went down to the Olympic Sculpture Park to take a look. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I was disappointed. Abstract sculpture just doesn't hold my interest, and there wasn't much here that was too thrilling. I was more taken with the signs they had up through the park.


The layout of the park is kind of strange, as it crosses Elliot Avenue and the train tracks, the walking paths cut back and forth diagonally. The park is mostly manicured grass, while the walking paths are thin gravel. Here's a sign I saw at the head of one path.


While I'm sure this is meant to be taken seriously, I have to wonder if they're serious. I mean, there's grass in all the other parks in the city, and the grass is doing just fine, I can tell you. Perhaps they're trying to come up with something catchier: I notice that several of the signs had been edited down with black tape to "Thank you for staying on the path." Too bad, I think this is the perfect sign for a Seattle park.

Here's another great sign.

I have a section of my webpage photo album set aside for odd signs I see around town. I've got about half a dozen remarks on this one, I'm going to have to settle on one.

Note how the grass looks like it's doing just fine.

This one is right next to a huge painted steel sculpture, which doesn't look like it'd get harmed much by touching.



Well, that's nice and abstract and everything. Just what I wanted from a sculpture in the park, I suppose.

Maybe I'm just callous, maybe I'm uncultured, but I have to be honest: there's nothing in this artwork that really moves me to want to touch it anyway.

No harm done.

Now here's a nice one. When me and Aeryk The Hippie visited New York back in '96, we stopped in at the Guggenheim, which was running an exhibit of an artist I'd never heard of, Claes Oldenburg. The main atrium featured a forty-foot tall badminton birdie. Really weird stuff. I could dig it, you know. Anyway, turns out they've got an Oldenburg original in this park.



So there you are, a big typewriter eraser, to be appreciated by anyone driving south on Elliot Avenue. Occurs to me that there's going to be plenty of the younger generation that grew up with computer printers, that won't know what this is. Actually, that's kind of cool, in and of itself. Art can be edifying. Anyway, there were only a dozen or so sculptures in the whole park, so there wasn't too much to see. But I can say I found one that I liked.