The End endeth here.

Hi, welcome to the end of this blog.

If you find yourself here by chance then go to the introduction to see what it is all about.

Me i'm back on www.bitsnbobsshowntell.blogspot.com

All's well that ends well"

And suddenly it’s too late; all things will have to wait or remain missed.

It’s too late to get a burger on Queen Anne Hill, to sit outside the coffee shop again in their recycled milk carton, Poly-Wood loungers. No time to have breakfast, lunch, dinner or cocktails at the black and white tiled 5 Spot Regional American Diner. No longer enough time to stroll down to Highland drive and stand on the terrace that looks out over the central city night-lights and West Seattle sea clouds, nor time to stand ankle deep in the chilling pacific and look west to the islands and dream.

I’m sitting on the plane, Lufthansa flight number 491 en route to Frankfurt, Germany and an eventual connection to home. Evening meal has been served, digested and I’ve watched one movie with my daughter – Horton Hears a Who, an animated version of the Dr Seuss story, surprisingly well done.

On the cabin screen now there is a map of our approximate position, just slightly east of the southern tip of Greenland. The map is pleasingly graphic, textbook greens and blues and of course, for Greenland - white. It seems almost to be in 3-D. In front of the symbolised airplane that trails a red line across the surface of the map is the empty blue of the Atlantic Ocean; somewhere in the distance I can see the outline of Britain.

Later we will pass over the Lockerbie memorial where my friend Bill Mack remains, but now we are approaching an area known as the strait of Denmark. Soon we will pass Iceland where my father-in-law died whilst on his own travels aboard a cruise ship tracing its own red line across his un-chartered blue.

We are flying at a height of 35000 feet the distance to destination is 1772 miles and our ground speed is 532 mph. Most of the passengers are asleep; the hostesses are resting my children dreaming. Just now I went to the rear of the plane and opened the shade to look out at the ice passing below but it is night time over the pole; we arrive tomorrow morning.

Everything, the map (which reminds me of school days, explorers and Tin-Tin cartoons of the sixties), the statistics, Frankfurt marked within a diamond, equidistant between Nice and Oslo and the red trace, the stark colours, the names all combine to incite within me a desire to travel.

And yet this is an end, a going home and a parting from friends, family and a place that has been home for two months.
It is also the end of this blog; the challenge laid down by a distant friend has been met, albeit with some degree of interpretation.

Unlike last year’s blog from San Francisco when the alphabet was the substructure there is no X to give me problems.

Yes, Shakespeare and his Titles seemed an impossible thing when it was first proposed but the relief of not having to answer to X outweighed the worry about Anthony and Cleopatra. Although I do not love Seattle in the way I do San Francisco, and find it harder to write inspirationally about, there is a at least a cinema here called The Egyptian.

It was there that a summer of multiple film attendance came to a fitting climax. Juno was the film of the moment, discovered at the first visit to the open-air screenings, seen again at the last and twice on video in-between, a sort of token of our time here. The Dark Knight, the latest Batman was the most impressive, firstly for the actor Heath Ledger’s promiscuously talented portrayal of the Joker and secondly for its resonance in the psyche of the American audience that surrounded me and cheered the end.

The Egyptian would not have been the climax to this celluloid feast if the final film I chose had not been a thriller depicting grisly murder in a French forest; the setting was too close to home and I didn’t want that atmosphere to be something I carried away from a summer in the northwest. As it was the cinema left us with the tale of Philippe Petite’s audacious tight ropewalk across the top of the former Twin Towers of the world trade centre. The film included the same animated “plane across atlas’ graphic that I am enjoying on the cabin screen as I write.

So summer, August, holidays and trip all come to an end. September starts as I land, maybe already has as I write. Krissie remains the other side of the ocean that now separates me and the continent that is her home for another six weeks.

Goodbyes are so hard, so much harder each time.

When I walk through the door at home, I will phone her, she will be about to wake up on a day that will not have almost finished for me and tell her we are home, safe and sound.

As Bill said, “All is well, that ends well.”

Especially when there is no X to worry about.
The End.

Henry (part 2)

From Seattle international airport you have little choice about the way you travel to the city. The train/monorail link is still under construction and not expected to be operational until next year so you are left with a choice of taxi or other wheeled vehicle which will by default deliver you to the city by travelling down Interstate Highway number 5.

As you approach the city, unless you are very attentive you will not notice the water of Elliott Bay – there are only two glimpses accorded and but your attention is distracted by the cranes of the container terminal, the two sports stadiums and then the skyscrapers of downtown.

I was lucky this morning in taking the taxi for the return journey when the driver chose to start the trip on route 99 and approach the airport from the west. We drove out along side the water, close up to the cruise ship terminal downtown and up over the container waterway.

Elliott Bay is the best part of this city, though it doesn’t dominate perception in the way the bay does in San Francisco, It remains glimpsed unless you go out on one of the ferries or across the bridge to West Seattle and Alki Beach.
Or go down the hill, past the Space Needle through the outdoor sculpture park that lies on the hill overlooking the waters of Elliott Bay to Peer 70.

The sculptures are functional, colourful and large – I did not find them emotional, but the seats and benches of the park are unparalleled for contemplating life, all its meanings and the distant peaks of the Olympic Range.

Down at Pier 70 a gushing fountain and some giant concrete eyeballs mark the start of Elliott Bay Park – a “Public Shoreline Access” A footpath and cycleway lead off alongside the water towards the distant Grain Silo. When the weather is clear, as it has been for most of the last two months the space between sea and sky is uplifting and the fresh ocean smell permeates the noise of the city.

Out on the bay a cargo ship or two wait for access to unload grain, the ferries silently glide across to the islands, someone kite surfs and a sailing boat might pass. One morning swimmers were gathered on one of the small beaches engaged in a competitive venture that entailed entering the icy shallows, submerging enough to fill blue plastic funnel attached to their heads and return to fill white plastic tubs on the sand. A small crowd of dogs and their walkers watched in puzzlement.
Further along, past the pier where the grain is unloaded, you will come to the fishing jetty – a series of shelters on a deck above the Salmon runs. Gulls call, if you are on a bike swallows will dart alongside and at one end the Canadian Geese gather on an open field. But the best thing about the park, apart from the space, solitude and air are the benches.

This is the best place In Seattle to sit.

It has been difficult for me to find someone in Seattle called Henry, something I thought would have been easy. It seems that Henry is a very old fashioned name, people today get names like Precious, or Madison, Loui made a friend called Summer, and one of the children backstage, two years old and learning a mixture of German (parental) English, Russian and Chinese is named August. So Loui started by meeting August and ended up kissing summer.

My dad’s name was Henry, Herbert Henry but as far as I know he never made it to Seattle. He spent some time in Miami or nearby, training with the US air force prior to World War 2 but I can’t find anything that connects him to this city.

But what would a challenge like this be if it weren’t challenging?

I came to Elliott Bay Park often; daily sometimes as its freedom was a literal breath of fresh air. I spent time sitting and meditating, reading and writing. I checked out each of the benches for the best view. I met people here, some completely mad but I always tried to find a Henry.

I cycled past the fishing jetty, The Happy Hooker bait shop, along side the railway tracks and even out as far as the marina at the end of the trail. And I read every sign, dedication and notice; some of the benches have dedications to departed loved ones. I even asked owners their dogs’ names. Was there a Henry among them? No.

Somewhere near the Grain Silo, an immense concrete bastion that dominates the shore view from see in a way that the revolving illuminated retro globe doesn’t (although apparently it is the fluorescent & of the sculpture park that is used by shipping) there is a plaque that commemorates the founding of the park. There are five names on the list and the fourth is Henry L. Kotkins and we should thank him for his sterling achievement.

However, it is the fifth name on the list that should remain immortal.

The Fifth

Macbeth

So, let’s recap.

The Merchant of Venice is all about a merchant, possibly one that sells coffee, Henry V is about a guy called Henry and The Twelfth Night is the one just after the eleventh. Love’s Labour’s Lost is about love and Juno (sort of), The star of The Tempest is Caliban and Hamlet is a bit about ghosts and a lot about castles with drawbridges.

We have also learnt that Romeo and Juliet is all about hanging around in graveyards and getting killed and The Taming of The Shrew features a beggar in the opening act. The Comedy of Errors was simply short and The Midsummer’s Night Dream should be confusing and sometime in the summer.

Shakespeare gave everyone the good advice that you should have your salad dressing As You Like It and that when you compare things like shoes you should do so inch by inch and Measure for Measure, and in King Lear he clearly foresaw the madness in everything that can even lead to the death and destruction of loved ones.

In the Bard’s original version of Much Ado About Nothing people talk a lot, as they often do sometimes about, well…. nothing much, in Two Gentlemen of Verona just two men did a whole lot of stuff that meant quite a big deal and in Othello a lot of people end up disappointed with each other.

And in a good production of The Winter’s Tale there ought to be at least a bit of snow.

Which brings us, neatly I think to Macbeth…………, which is all about trees.

Act 4 scene 1
“Be lion-mettled, proud; and take no care 
Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are: Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill 
Shall come against him.”

It’s the trees see, everything is going well until they end up at the castle door and then it’s curtains for Macbeth.

When the settlers arrived in the area that was to become Seattle all they could see were trees, mighty and majestic trees, the cedars of the Pacific Northwest. Some were big enough to drive through, and so they did. They also started to cut them down, fortunes were made, and hillsides were cleared. And then they were gone.

If you drive north from Seattle for about an hour and a half you can come to the town of Anacortes. Among other things it is the ferry gateway to The San Juan Islands. Washington is nicknamed the Evergreen State, Seattle the Emerald City but these are the Jewels. We traveled out there for three days of camping intent on seeing Killer Whales from the shoreline of Lime Kiln State Park. There is no guarantee of a sighting, in fact when we arrived on Monday morning the notice board by the small light house informed us that the last sighting had been Friday. The visiting scientific observer told us the resident pods had gone out to the ocean in order to feed, could be gone for three or four days and that only the itinerant seal eaters were around and unlikely to come past.

We stayed two days wandering the barnacle encrusted rocks, watching the changing sea, drifting seaweed and enflamed sky, the sunsets were outrageous, the smell of the sea intoxicating and there was even a 300 year old cedar tree.

But this is a mere juvenile. In the Quinault rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula you can even find the oldest tree in the world!! It’s the Quinault Big Cedar that claims (through human channels) to be 2000 years old.

The campus of Washington University also used to be full of trees like that; and empty of university. Today, lying on the shore of Lake Washington and just a books throw from lake Union, it is an area of open parkland, manicured lawns and academic buildings, some old some new. And ornamental fountains where Canadian Geese paddle. The atmosphere is genteel, Sunday afternoon, Oxbridge, or at least it is at the weekend when I went looking for trees.

You see the trees are coming back, gathering at the gates. The sculptor Brian Tolle’s new installation, as yet untitled, can be found near the bioengineering Dept. It is an homage to the massive cedar trees that used to grace the Pacific Northwest, and which played such a big part in native live and then later the settler’s; the sculpture’s diameter is the same as the Quinault Big Cedar. From a distance it looks like a giant stump.

Finding it was not easy, the Edinburgh born academic reading in the Herb Garden had not heard of it, the cyclist I stopped had not seen it, and the Pakistani Professor on his way to the library could only point me vaguely to the bioengineering block.

But Macbeth didn’t notice the trees at first either.



A Winter's Tale

If you were going to choose a symbol for a pacific northwest American city, what would it be and where would you put it? How about a statue of Chief Seattle, the person after whom the city is named?

There are in fact five native North American tribes that consider parts of Seattle to be in their traditional territory, the Duwamish, the Suquamish, the Snoqualmie, Tulalip and Muckleshoot. Personally I think the Muckleshoot win the award for funkiest name but it was the chief of the Suquamish people who is thus “honoured”.

Apparently there were a few problems associated with this as his tribe didn’t really have a “chief” in the accepted sense of the word and their beliefs about someone’s name continuing after they had passed on usually forbade such a thing. In fact rumour has it that there are only three statues to the man in the whole of the city, though I have only seen two, one of which is only a bust. So how about a totem pole?

One of the first things you notice in Pioneer Square, a mere smoke ring away from the bust of Chief Seattle, is a totem pole. Which is weird as none of the five tribes particularly have a culture of totem carving, something that belonged to the native tribes further north and into Canada.

The totem pole was first placed here, accompanied by cheers, in 1899. It was later damaged by fire, deliberately, and replaced with a copy in 1940. With a certain irony the replacement was carved by direct descendents of the Alaskan tribe that had seen the original one stolen from their village.

Some accounts say that the native village was abandoned and thus the pillage of a pole was justified, others say that it was a negotiated removal. Either way the Tinglit Tribe demanded twenty thousand dollars for the stolen pole before finally accepting five hundred, paid by a Seattle Newspaper. All in all probably not the best symbol to represent the city.

The Space Needle, a thoroughly modern pole that towers above the Seattle Centre and one of the first things you see as you approach Seattle from the ocean, is almost an iconic symbol for the city; omnipresent, worshipped by visitors and locals alike and appearing on the sides of buildings, t-shirts and key-rings. It is ingrained in the subconscious mind but as the design was originally inspired by a German radio mast it lacks a certain “indiginality.”

So, if I had to choose an iconic, indigenous, omnipresent and awe inspiring symbol for the city what would it be? Mount Rainier, or better still Mount Tahoma to give it its aboriginal name.

Japan’s Tokyo has its Mount Fiji, a mythical summit etched in our collective minds and Mount Tahoma is just as good. Only about fifty miles south of the city, the first thing you see as the airplane approaches Tacoma International airport (Tacoma is a linguistic corruption of Tahoma), the first thing you notice as you leave the airport, the first thing you see from the top of the space needle, from the ferries as you approach the city on water.

Ok, some days the clouds or haze completely hide it and for a while you forget that it exists, dominated as you are by the urban environment, but then suddenly the air clears and the shock of its presence is breath taking. Two years ago I was wandering Pike Street Market and my attention was all at street level, the football world cup was nearing a fantastic climax and my mind was elsewhere. I fell into conversation with an American journalist who opinioned that the US would be much more interested in the game if F.i.F.A. removed the offside rule and the teams played with no goalkeepers.

I turned my head away in shock and was stunned by the unexpected view of the mountain towering over the cranes of the container port in the distance, its majesty no way diminished by the plastic glass I was viewing it through. I didn’t get to visit closer on that trip and I promised myself I would this time. I haven’t, even though it is possible as a day trip from the city centre as well as a camping or hotel visit. There is still time.

“With 26 major glaciers, Mount Rainier is the most heavily glaciated peak in the lower 48 states with 35 square miles of permanent snowfields and glaciers. The summit is topped by two volcanic craters, each over 1,000 feet in diameter. Geothermal heat from the volcano keeps areas of both craters free of snow and ice, and has formed an extensive network of glacier caves and ice-filled craters”.

Snow-covered the whole year round. It’s winter up there.

Othello

In 1852 the early settlers out on Alki beach realised that they were in the wrong place if they wanted to create modern day Seattle so they pulled up there log cabins and sailed across the bay, told the natives to find somewhere else to live and set about cutting trees down and building a city.

In 1981 Jess Winfield collaborated with Adam Long and Daniel Singer in the founding of the Reduced Shakespeare Company thus inadvertently joining Bill Mack (see King Lear) in successfully creating entertainment and memorable titles from the acronym RSC. I momentarily crossed paths with Mr Singer and Mr Long during a break from my own show at the Vancouver World’s Fair of 1986, when I was lucky to see their sword fighting version of one Romeo and Juliette, at least I think it was them.

These two dates, more than a hundred years apart are linked, somewhat tenuously, by Jess Winfield, Othello and the city of Seattle.

The area that the settlers chose is now known as Pioneer Square and it was here that the fledging city began to take root. Timber was cut, timber was shipped and the city was wooden. Unfortunately the Great Seattle fire of 1889 reduced most of this to ash but the city was rebuilt in brick and because of drainage problems the new Seattle that rose was one story higher and small, damp and smelly remnants of the first attempt can be visited on the underground Tour that is organised from Pioneer square.

Pioneer Square is downtown of downtown Seattle, if you follow me. It seems that the action, the energy is uptown, not here in what is the original centre. This gives the area a calmer, slightly lost, on the fringe feel. It’s an uncomfortable mix of ‘trend’ and ‘down and out.’ The Utility Kilt Company, that aggressively markets dresses for men is located here, so is Skid Row.

The term Skid Row possibly originated here in Seattle where its original meaning referred to the practice of sliding logs down from the hills to the waiting ships anchored in Elliott Bay. The ships have been replaced by ferries going to the islands in Puget Sound or north to Vancouver Island in Canada, the logs by people down on their luck. There is a feeling of disappointment in the area, mixed with initiative, some of it historical.

Seattle’s first skyscraper is here, the Art Deco-esque Smith Tower opened on Independence Day 1914 and for a while the tallest building west of the Mississippi. Today it marks the southern limit of the modern downtown skyscrapers and although dwarfed by them it outclasses them and because of its position literally stands apart. An operator-serviced elevator takes you up to the observation balcony but not to the private apartment that now occupies the roof space formally occupied by the water system.

Although the Utility Kilt Company is an interesting if all-be-it unnecessarily macho experience, complete with world map that shows the location of each purchaser and a very pleasing “Marilyn Monroe” air jet experience that the salesman insists that you experience, the gem of pioneer square, the treasure worth travelling thousands of miles for is the Elliott Bay Book Company.

Do you remember what it sounded like in the library when you were a kid? How the floor creaked as you moved around the stacks, the only sound in a cathedral of silence? The Elliott Bay Bookstore is like that with its wooden floors that seem to date from the days the first explorers moored their boats a few hundred yard west in the bay itself.

It’s a cavernous shop, three floors, but you will only find them if you explore all the nooks and crannies; or follow your nose to the cafe in the basement. If you find the Travel Loft listen to the sound your feet make on the wooden stairs as you descend; there is an echo of boatyard.

Jess Winfield and I paths there at the end of July as part of the regular author readings that the store organises. They take place in the basement, in yet another hidden part beyond the café, are free and eclectic as the stock they sell. It’s a wonderful place; you can loose hours browsing amongst the mix of both new and used but don’t leave your children unattended in the kid’s section whilst you do this though as the shop threatens to give them a cappuccino AND a puppy if you do!

Jess Winfield was reading from his new book – My Name Is Will, a novel of sex, drugs and Shakespeare and I rushed across town to hear his thoughts on Othello; if he didn’t offer them spontaneously then I would elicit them through persistent questioning.

Unfortunately traffic, and my kid’s hip hop class conspired against me and I was too late to hear his educated opinions and his humoristic stories, as I entered he was signing the last few copies that remained unsold as the stragglers straggled. I decided not to press him on the subject preferring to carry away a sense of disappointment.

A sense of disappointment that could mingle with the disappointment that underlies the jealousy at the heart of Othello itself, and the disappointment with life that shows in the faces of the pan-handlers and drunks of Pioneer Square and the disappointment that the trees the first settlers saw are all gone; but also that the low red bricked buildings that replaced them are not more widespread in the city centre.

http://www.utilikilts.com

Alki Beach sunset August 2008

Two Gentleman of Verona

Many people, even some university academics, fail to see the connection between a cracked peppermill turkey breast, pepper jack cheese, crispy bacon, red and green pepper, plum tomato, garlic pesto sough dough sandwich and the playwright William Shakespeare.

Also known as a Space Needle Special this delicacy is available from the hands of the Korean manager of the Alki Urban Market; a small and easily missed grocery store, itself sandwiched between residential property and the All The Best pet care centre.

It’s an almost perfect American deli in miniature; a central aisle of wines from around the world with plenty from the U.S.A, a wall of glass fronted cooling units stocked with beers Alaskan to Mexican, fruit juices and smoothies, a rack of assorted useful items ranging from playing cards to nail files, a candy and chocolate section, a freezer of gourmet ice cream flavours (including peanut butter) and a coffee station that also offers brownies.

There is even stool seating at the window that allows you to gorge yourself as you watch the unfolding sunset and they sell homemade Ginger Lemonade!

Now, The Two Gentlemen of Verona is not only Shakespeare’s shortest play but also one that has a part for a dog.

It would be perfect if the dog’s name were Sam as this morning, like most mornings here in Seattle, I was woken by the neighbour’s mutt - Sam- who starts the day early with a yelp in the communal yard.

It would also have been perfect if the writer had managed to reduce the cast to two in keeping with the title. However, the play’s theme is FRIENDSHIP and INFIDELITY and although there is neither room in today’s tale for the fact that it was the first of his plays to include a cross-dressing woman nor canine irritation (despite All The Best), we should see two guys, friendship and some sort of betrayal in here somewhere.

A hundred yards at most, west of the Alki Deli, just across the road from the Cactus Restaurant – that serves excellent “flavours of Mexico and the Southwest” – you will find a plaque on the wall honouring two men, most probably friends, who built a log cabin at Alki Point two and a half hundred years after Shakespeare’s play first came to light.

Of course it wasn’t Alki Point at the time, the local Duwamish tribe knew it as Prairie Point, though this of course is a translation from the language that they used – Lusthootseed. The two “gentlemen” were David Denny and his friend (at least I suppose that they liked each other) Lee Terry.

David stopped hammering long enough to send a letter to his brother Arthur A. Denny, later to become Seattle’s first postmaster, who was kicking his heels down the coast in Portland having been enticed west by the Donation Claim Act of 1850 that offered 320 acres to any man prepared to settle (twice as much to a married couple).

The letter told his brother to hurry so with his wife and children and four other families booked passage on the good ship Exact, and on the 13th November 1851 the settlers disembarked.

Thus began modern day Seattle.

What the Duwamish and Suquamish tribes and their Chief – Seattle – thought about that is probably best left unsaid though according to the monument that marks the spot in this part of West Seattle (across the road from the aforementioned plaque) the local tribes helped them through the first year, though they were well betrayed later on for this aid. Not least by the unfulfilled promise of a substantial reservation and the naming of the city after the local Chief in return for abandoning their aboriginal rights to the land which eventually constituted the city of Seattle across the bay.

The settlers quickly realised that if their dream of a metropolis was to be achieved then they would have to relocate to the east side where the water was deep enough to park bigger boats and so they moved out six months later and joined settlers on the eastern shore.

Alki was a word the settlers had added to their original intended name, New York - in honour of the east coast city and the hope they held that one day their settlement would grow just as crazy. The word was Pacific Northwest trader jargon, itself based on a local dialect, that meant ‘eventually” or “by and by”.

Today Alki Beach is; houses and shops, a few cars, rollerblades and skateboards, pushchair joggers, pedestrians, sand and beach volley ball, washed up logs, dried seaweed-stones-feathers and bark, sand, stones, sand again, seaweed and sea - in that order.

It’s a place to sit and watch the sunset, walk at low tide looking for crabs, sit at the restaurant terrace, buy an ice cream, sit in a bar or swim in the icy water.

You can reserve a picnic table, light a barbeque, listen to a busker meditate and of course eat a cracked peppermill turkey breast, pepper jack cheese, crispy bacon, red and green pepper, plum tomato, garlic pesto sough dough sandwich.

All this is compressed in a half-mile strip and accessible from downtown by a car or bus ride across west seattle Bridge or better still by taking the water taxi from the downtown ferry terminal and then walking.

The original native inhabitants lived from Salmon they hunted in the Puget Sound, Clams and berries that they harvested. They built shelters out of Cattail and used the bark of cedar trees for just about everything. All that remains of this today are the clams for sale in one of the two fish restaurants, the Salmon that still thrive in the water and the fresh pressed blackberry juice on sale in the Alki Urban Market.

The oldest remaining structure dates from 1904, now a log cabin restaurant.

On the same side street you will find the Log Cabin Museum, dating from a similar time.

It is the smallest museum I have visited but has 100 labelled items pertaining to the history of the area, not least a copy of David Denny’s letter that seems to have set in motion an uncontrollable alteration of what was once a beautiful part of the world. They will also give you a printed guide to the Alki History Trail, a 7 mile tour of the area which even take you to the Spirit Boulder that the natives avoided looking at as it could twist their bodies into knots.

Though it was those two gentlemen - David and Lee - that really messed things up for them in the end.

Much Ado about Nothing

For two nights really it was suddenly very hot here in Seattle, temperatures staying high late into the night and forcing me to excessively linger alongside the freezer cabinets in the local supermarket. The cool air helped me to relax and think better but still I have had trouble finding a hook for Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing.

Of course the play, like the city, is set on the coast but I don’t think that this fact is the first thing that you associate with the work. I read that one of the motifs of the play is the play on words between Nothing and Noting which apparently were homophones in Shakespearean England and when I later learned that some of this centres on criticism of others, spying and eavesdropping and further that an o-thing was Elizabethan slang for the vagina, even though this also is not most people’s first thought, I was sure It would lead to something.

As it was it didn’t and my own inspiration was sadly lacking until this evening when I casually picked up a copy of Seattle that someone had left in the dressing room at the theatre where Krissie is working. Seattle claims on the cover to be “The Premier Seattle Monthly” so in the interests of research I started to flick through.

The first 24 pages were adverts but then I came to a section called “The Must List” the magazines “top to-dos” for the month. Unfortunately the month in question was July so I was too late, but you will be relieved to hear that number 3 was Shakespeare in the park that I have already mentioned and number 5 was the firework display for Independence Day that I have also covered; this blog is nothing if not Premier.

Number 2 on the list was to go out and pick your own blueberries on any of the numerous organic blueberry farms that surround the city, as July is the best month to do so. I wish I had found this out earlier as my grocery bill for the small purple berry has already reached frightening levels. They are apparently a powerful anti-oxidant and will allow me to live a healthier life as long as the income keeps coming in because I have been buying them in truckloads.

It seems that each time I come to the U.S.A, there is a new way to load up on anti-oxidants and while Wolfgang, a friend and colleague over here from Germany, pointed out that the anti-oxidant phenomena itself takes on exaggerated levels here in the States I always take the opportunity to find out what I should be eating; last year pomegranates were the thing but at least I knew what they were.

When I was a child I only ever saw them at Christmas time, they were something my father would mysteriously arrive home from work with just before the holiday. He worked up in Central London so either met merchants arriving from the orient that never ventured to the suburbs or had access to a more exotic grade of greengrocer.

This year in Seattle the shops are full of Açai – not the berry itself but drinks extracted from them. Açai grow in the Amazon rainforest, and although the carbon footprint I am leaving by purchasing them is sinful, they are apparently three times richer in anti-oxidants than blueberries so my grocery bill may go down. Actually the bottle that I have just finished claims that weight for weight the fresh fruit gives me 167 “something’s” to the blueberry’s 32 so maybe I offset a bit of the carbon footprint too.

There are no adverts for Açai berries in The Seattle, but almost immediately after the Puget Sound Condominium Guide that gives you the next 20 pages of publicity, right there on page 46 is ‘Spotlight” – local art that matters. The title of this month’s piece is -Much Ado About Nothing!

The article describes Luke Burbank who grew up in the city near Green Lake and now hosts a local radio talk show. Green lake is North of Lake Union and is the place to go if you are a jogger, there are so many runners you can imagine you are taking part in a marathon. It is also a great place to witness high level street basketball, learn windsurfing and is one of the easiest places to swim in the city during the summer. The waters of Elliott bay are shockingly cold and Lake Washington, being larger gets choppy as the millionaire’s boats pass; Lake Union has very little direct public access and you have to watch out for sea planes taking off and landing. His talk show, called Too Beautiful to Live is aired weekdays from 7 to 10 pm on KIRO-AM 710, Seattle’s highest rated AM news-talk station.

The magazine describes the show as ‘about, um, well, nothing and everything and anything in between.’ That should cover Açai berries then.

www.mynorthwest.com/?nid=140&cmsid=93

King Lear

The FIRST time I saw Bill Mack he was on stage in an Australian late night comedy theatre, trying to perform a puppet version of Shakespeare, from inside a booth that he wore like a tent, to a drunken audience, two of whom he had invited on stage.

He was not having a good time but the traditionalist in him insisted that the show had to go on and somehow he brought the performance painfully to a conclusion.

Bill, who was from New York and created The Royal Short Company - an intended reference to the Royal Shakespeare Company as he and his puppets performed very short versions of Shakespearean classics - was one of the kindest men I ever knew.

However, this didn’t help him the night in Melbourne when he broke two, and stupidly kept one, of the golden rules of show business.

1.Don’t invite a drunk up on to the stage.

2.Never work with a drunk when you are inside something you can only see out of in one direction.

3.The show must go on.

Unlike my friend Bill, not all of Shakespeare’s characters can be described as “being kind”.

Lady Macbeth is one who comes to mind though my vote for evil personified would be Lady Kaede in Kurosawsa’s version of the King Lear tragedy, Ran. Ok, it’s true that the Japanese director did not set out to make a version of King Lear but the parallels are strong, he admitted at least a subconscious link - and it was my first experience of the play.

It wasn’t my first experience of Shakespeare though; when I was at university I shared a house with Helen who was very knowledgeable about theatre and I asked her to take me to a play. She chose Shakespeare, possibly Richard the 2nd but I am not sure, I remember that the play began with an unjust banishment and my infantile, Hollywood addled mind assumed that the plot would centre on the banished’s rightful revenge.

Unbeknownst to me the actor who played this part was doubling up in another role and when he reappeared in a later scene my “goodies and baddies” assumption proved right. I didn’t understand why no one recognised him, a fact that falling asleep at some crucial point didn’t make any clearer and all in all I thought the whole thing a tad boring; something that I couldn’t say about Ran. Lady Kaede gave me erotic nightmares for weeks after.

My own experience with King Lear is limited to a week’s workshop I undertook with the French Clown teacher Philippe Gaullier. The work was centred on children’s games but we had to learn sections of dialogue in advance that he would ask us to use when, in a state of childish innocence and rapture, he deemed us to be open. After successfully recreating the feeling of an excited child calling his friends out of their house to play, he instructed me to deliver Lear’s lines –

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, an germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!”

Even though I had diligently prepared the text, only the first line would come as I was so caught up in the sudden feeling of being seven and in front of the house where Rosalind Wall, my neighbour had lived. So infectious was my summons that I succeeded in getting the whole workshop group on their feet to join me even though my tongue stubbornly refused to go any further. I felt sufficiently mad at that moment to warrant an Oscar.

You are probably wondering what al this has to do with Seattle. Is it the fact that Seattle is in King county, the thirteenth most populous in the nation? Or is it that last Saturday Rough Play Theatre opened auditions for their planned September production? Neither.

When I was seven a joke that used to go round the playground went like this – Why is a fire engine red? There are six men in a fire engine, two sixes are twelve, twelve inches make a ruler, Queen Elisabeth was a ruler, Queen Elisabeth ruled the seven seas. In the seas are fishes, fishes have fins, the Fins beat the Russians, the Russians are red and that’s why a fire engine is red!

King Lear was written by Shakespeare, my friend Bill performed Shakespeare with puppets, the puppets and Bill lived in New York, New York is on the East coast of America, on the West coast of America is Seattle and that’s why Seattle is King Lear.

The LAST time I saw Bill Mack was the morning that he left my flat after a week in London to catch the plane from Heathrow that was blown up by a terrorist bomb over the town of Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988.

He was one of the kindest men I have ever known.

Measure for Measure

Something that struck me on my visit to Pike Place Market was the difference between the street level and the lower levels. That and the absence of Will Shakespeare.

Pike market claims to be the oldest continually-operated public produce market in the whole of the U.S.A. - which means about 100 years old as either the native Indian population didn’t have produce markets or had their stalls burnt down long ago by cowboys. It also claims to be Seattle’s biggest tourist attraction which may, or may not, say something about the average tourist and their love for all things Broccoli.

The market is built on the slope that rises from the waters of Elliott Bay up to the streets that today make up the commercial downtown area of Seattle. As a result the market is spread out on different levels that are connected by stairways and ramps, originally built from timber and still so in many places. If you arrive from the downtown side noise, commotion, colour, fruit and vegetables immediately assail you; if you arrive from the bay you enter into the cathedral silence and wooden embrace of what feels like a subterranean grotto of boutiques, art and paraphernalia. Either way, somewhere, you will suddenly come face to face with a busker, probably musical.

The upper level has been rebuilt; the original timber floor replaced by tiles that were financed by individuals and thus each tile bears the name of its sponsor. Initially, in pursuit of my Shakespearean needs and particularly those of Henry V, I preceded head down reading every one, hoping to find a Henry or even Henrietta around whom I could hang this tale. After colliding several times with tourists gaping at piles of Cherries and Apricots I decided that this was an unwise cause of action. And so what, a Henry will turn up somewhere, sometime, soon, surely…..?

It is at one end of this tiled thoroughfare that the Salmon stall commands the biggest crowd. The Salmon, beached in mounds of shovelled ice look, as they should, good enough to eat, but the crowds are drawn by the antics of the sellers who accommodate the publics desire to see large silvery Salmon thrown precipitously from hand to hand across the ice mountains. Sometimes they miss.

I read somewhere that “if you can imagine it” you will find it being sold somewhere in the market. It’s probably true, certainly is for food and also true if you want to sit down and eat. In the back alleys there are food stalls that reminded me of the diversity I have only seen in Hong Kong, somewhere in the busiest part is an old fashioned diner that looks as if it was framed for an Edward Hopper print and in one obscure corner that I don’t think I could find again easily, there was a small café with beautiful views over the waters of the bay.

The market is like that, maze like, disorientating and soon you forget the corporate smugness of the down town area alongside with its chain stores, franchises and insurance offices. It is down in the silence of what could be a ships hold if the market was afloat that the unexpected treasures lie, though one man who would never have found it easy to go down the low passages that lead there was Robert Wadlow.

Despite the last part of his name Robert Wadlow was not; in fact he was very tall, the tallest man that ever lived and he is remembered and celebrated in Pike Market. If you go down the weathered wooden ramp that seems buckled by time and passage you will arrive at the magic shop that in itself is a treasure trove of original illusionist’s posters. Opposite is the Giant shoe Museum, a coin operated, 25cent peepshow museum dedicated to, well, giant shoes of course.

You see Robert Wadlow, born in 1918 with an overactive pituitary gland, grew to the astonishing height of eight feet eleven and a half inches, that’s almost 2.7 meters. And consequently he had BIG feet (otherwise he would topple over). It seems that Robert spent a part of his short life travelling the States as a representative for a shoe company and would leave a pair of his giant shoes behind for the store to display; fairly ironic it turns out as he died at the age of 22 from an infected foot blister.

Anyhow he left a pair in a shop in Seattle and for many years they were on display in the shop window. Somehow they got lost in the sixties when the shop moved location and now the “Peep Shoe” museum of Pike Place Market, which has a good collection of other very big shoe ware (viewable for just a quarter), is offering a reward of one thousand dollars for their return, something that would complete their collection and make me wealthy so I’m looking!

I don’t know how big his feet were but MEASURE for MEASURE they were a lot bigger than mine and everyone else who walks around this market every day.

As you Like It

Although overproduction is a word that fails to feature in any of Shakespeare’s opus, it is a word that is often used when American Culture or society is criticised. I was thinking about this when I attended the July 4th Independence Day celebrations.

To start with the city seemed to be hosting TWO firework shows, one over Elliott Bay and another over lake Union. Considering that at least half the resident population had already bought fireworks of their own to let off in their back yards this may already seem like one more than necessary.

I attended the Lake Union event in Gas Works Park and since Krissie is working at a theatre run by an organisation that helps to put on this event we benefited from V.I.P tickets and a sit down meal at the water’s edge. Interestingly Loui, who two years ago thought this was brilliant, choose this time to hang out with the general public that throng the Hill alongside the old disused gas works. With rock, rap and hot dogs on offer in contrast to the Jazz and Teriyaki Chicken of the enclosure there really was no contest.

As the lights of the city began to dominate the dusk across on the other shore, a Blues version of the Star Spangled Banner, delivered from The Hill, announced the flypast of the Chinook helicopter, a huge American flag raging from a pole attached underneath signalling the start of the fireworks.

There were a lot. 20 minutes or more. Yeah, yeah of course they were amazing and synchronised with a medley of music from great American recording artists of the last 60 years, but there wasn’t a note of Rap in there and honestly a third of what they gave us would still have been stunning.

There was no speech from the mayor as there was two years ago, when he movingly spoke about the citizen ceremony that had taken place that morning at city hall, but maybe that was just part of the work that went into making the event different this time. However the choice of Frank Sinatra singing “Fly Me to The moon” was a masterstroke and made up for the absence of Hendrix’s version of the national anthem that had dominated the event in 2006.

The wonder of modern day technology allows you to relive the event on your computer by following this link. http://www.king5.com/video/index.html?nvid=260646 and you can also listen to the full musical accompaniement. It’s weird, on the night the choice of Magical Mystery Tour seemed odd but on the video it works really well, though compression into a laptop’s screen and speakers gives the event an unwarranted crassness that was entirely absent in the vastness of the lake before the city.

As the ash started to rain down on us and the stars began to be obscured by firework smog I remembered the November 5th bonfire nights I enjoyed as a kid when just a packet of sparklers and some sticky toffee was something we talked about for days.

In the supermarket the following day I noticed a similar overabundance with the salad condiments. There was firstly the choice of dressing or vinaigrette. Among the vinaigrettes I could chose, Roasted Red Pepper; Raspberry; Shitake Mushroom and Sesame; Gingerly (probably some ginger in there); Balsamic; Cracked Pepper (could be different than red); Olive and Lemon; Fig and Port; French Tomato; Italian Herb; Greek Feta; Russian Garlic (nothing from England I notice); Honey Pear; Blackberry, Pepper and Zinfandel.

Then from the dressings I had a choice of; Green Garlic (where does that come from?); Tuscany Italian; French; Cowgirl Ranch; Caesar; Mango Fat Free; Ginger Soy; Miso Sesame; Wasabi; Rich Poppy Seed; Huckleberry Ginger; Apricot Dijon; Key Lime Kiwi and Tangerine; and my favourite; Goddess.

And if I was still unsure there was always Champagne Honey Mustard Splash.

I could go a whole month without eating the same flavoured salad twice, and could probably go to a different supermarket and have a completely different month!

It seems that with fireworks on Independence Day and salad coverings at least, in America you can have things pretty much As You Like It.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Lindsay Kemp, interesting man, worth looking up on Wikipedia, left England and made his name as in Spain, came back with a great version of Midsummer Night’s Dream in which he played Puck. I never saw a life performance but the film version was excellent.

Almost 20 years later, I’m in a park in Seattle watching it again, but this time no Lindsey Kemp but a version set in Los Angeles with a dog and hula-hoops. I am unaccustomed to hearing Shakespearean text delivered in a strong American accent so I found the event a trifle strange, plus I arrived in the middle, or possibly near the end so I was a little confused too. But then confusion is one of the themes of the piece I believe?

This afternoon’s performance was delivered by Wooden O Productions who interestingly enough won “ Best Shakespeare in the Parks, Seattle Metropolitan Magazine: best of the City 2007”. Naturally the question that this information raises is – exactly how many Shakespeare in the Parks are there? I have come across one other outfit so far just by wandering the green areas of the city, and a quick search on Google didn’t throw up any other contenders.

Then again we shouldn’t believe everything we read on the web, nor what we read in the papers. The director of tonight’s piece for example, Vanessa Miller has no mention on Wikipedia, which in comparison to Lindsay Kemp seems unfair as she is working in the park today and he is not. Intriguingly she is described in my copy of The Seattle Weekly as “actress/director/all-around badass”.

The Seattle Weekly is one of two (the other is The Stranger) free newspaper/magazines that are available from your local neighbourhood American style metal box newspaper dispenser. For this European it is a quintessential U.S.A. experience to open one of these and take out a newspaper, even if you have no intention of reading it. In fact you need to read both to get a fair idea of what is going on in the city, certainly in film and art though both, and this may be a fair reflection on Seattle, they are lop heavy with the music scene.

The Seattle Weekly is currently gathering votes for it’s own Best of Seattle of which it claims to be the originators and even uses a trade mark symbol in the same breath. The results will be published on Aug 8 in a bumper (and still free) issue that is every traveller’s essential aid. I am particularly looking forward to the results of the “Best in the category that we forgot to list” category. It should show us something interesting and unusual about the place.

Anyway, this afternoon Puck was spreading mayhem in an open-air production, viewable for free in The Seattle Centre. The S.C. is a downtown area of park and pavilions centred on the emblematic Space Needle Tower which remains from a former World’s fair and has a revolving restaurant at the top offering stunning, probably 360 degree views. But you have to pay to go up. An equally interesting, though free view is that of the rows of tourists lying in the grass at its base trying to capture a photo opportunity. In the daytime the Needle resembles a 1950's flying saucer on stilts, at night as dusk settles and its illuminated structure commences to glow it appears as a giant jelly fish floating through the early evening sea.

The Centre has something for everyone, though at times it can feel uncultured and tacky; there is a Science Centre (complete with butterfly house), more than one Sport’s arena, theatres, a Jimi Hendrix experience, fun fair, cinema and a fountain of polished stainless steel, big enough to enthral, that allows everyone to run through and under for impromptu bathing, the architecture is sometimes functional, sometimes inspired and an hour can cost you an arm and a leg or be free. Yesterday the Centre served as a marshaling area for the annual Seafarer parade that paralyses central Seattle and amongst the Chinese Acrobats, Pirates, Majorettes, Brass Bands and a myriad of different floats was one lady with a wheelbarrow and a spade.

It could have been one of Puck’s tricks.

A Comedy of Errors

I thought I should update you on the “desperately searching Henry” aspect of this blog.

If you have been following so far then you will know that I need a Henry to complete Henry v part two and the latest news is not good.

I did meet Harold again who was looking VERY dapper, dressed in what was either a 1920’s groom’s wedding suit or a silver, discarded penguin skin. Either way his tie was way too small to be fashionable but suited him impeccably; he looked fantastic.

A serious search of Wikipedia for “famous people in Seattle called Henry”, even when I widened the search to include people who had moved to the city and are now long dead, has thrown up only one – Henry Suzzallo who was president of Washington University from 1915 to 1926. Ok, he has an exotic name and the university district IS one of the most interesting in the city but I am stupidly optimistic that I will come up with something better.

It is amazing how many things have started here, or folk been born here, that have been influential; The Far Side cartoons first surfaced here though, to be fair it was San Francisco that spotted its genius; Hendrix was born here though he moved away; Microsoft, Starbucks and Boeing all belong to the city and most importantly Gypsy Rose Lee started life here in Seattle.
I had always thought she came from Blackpool, England.

But Henry? It seems as if The NW Washington metropolitan area has become the antitheist to all things Henry.

But I’ll keep searching.
Oh, by the way, The Comedy of Errors was Shakespeare’s shortest work and this post at only 288 words is my shortest entry.

The Taming of The Shrew

In 1967 Franco Zeffirelli directed Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in a Hollywood version of The Taming of The Shrew. I remember watching it at home with my mum but I don’t remember if Sly the tinker made it into the final cut. Bill Shakespeare, who wasn’t much of a filmmaker, started his version thus:


SCENE I. Before an alehouse on a heath.
Enter Hostess and SLY

SLY
I'll pheeze you, in faith.

Hostess
A pair of stocks, you rogue!

SLY
Ye are a baggage: the Slys are no rogues; look in
the chronicles; we came in with Richard Conqueror.
Therefore paucas pallabris; let the world slide: sessa!

Hostess
You will not pay for the glasses you have burst?

SLY
No, not a denier. Go by, Jeronimy: go to thy cold
bed, and warm thee.

Hostess
I know my remedy; I must go fetch the
third--borough.

Exit

It might just be the only time that William used a tinker, or beggar as his opening character.

I’m not sure that anyone is allowed to be poor in Seattle or in fact anywhere in the white corridor that runs northward from here to Vancouver Canada, but I have noticed that in comparison to two years ago there are a lot more people begging. Is this a result of Bush’s policies or simply a reflection of something that is happening everywhere around the world?

There is an underpass that leads downtown rush hour traffic very slowly to Highway 5 and almost-highway 99 and there is always someone at the lights asking for help but it would be difficult to imagine a place as far removed from an “alehouse on a heath” as this.

I did meet someone near an alehouse asking for money, well….. he was outside a burger bar…….. but his technique was certainly superior to Sly’s, who only seemed to anger the Hostess.

He had a large piece of cardboard on which he had written – “You will give me a dollar”. In the centre of this message he had pinned a circular piece of cardboard on which he had patterned a spiral that he was able to spin with a grimy finger for a suitable hypnotic effect.

I didn’t see a single passerby that didn’t laugh and give him a dollar. I even almost stopped the car as I drove past him the second time and gave him another. If he had hissed a drunken “I’ll pheeze you in faith” I would have given him 10.

“Ye are a baggage” would be a useful insult for anyone who failed to give, and is a term I think we should all strive to find more use for in our general conversation.

One Seattle tinker who would probably never need such a come back is the guy I met outside my favourite coffee shop. He stopped to talk to two people sitting at the next table, he was clearly intoxicated and wobbled as he waved two long leaves of a palm like plant that he had clearly decided to recycle from someone’s garden.

He offered to make them a rose in less than three minutes if they gave him a contribution. His client, also intoxicated, though in this case with caffeine, negotiated the exact nature of contribution and then watched as the man skilfully stretched, twisted, twined and knotted the two strands into a tight green rose bud.

It took a little longer than three minutes but the story he told of the Alaskan native that taught him the method was worth the contracted contribution on its own. If Zeffirelli had seen him it would have been in the film.

Romeo and Juliet

Whichever way you look at it, and however you try to say it “What time do you get off?” is clearly not a line from any of Shakespeare’s plays. Which is a shame as it figured fairly significantly last week in Seattle as part of the 48 hour Film Project.

The 48-hour film project was created by Mark Ruppert in 2001 and came to Seattle for the first time in 2004. The idea is simple, you have 48 hours to write, film and edit and if you submit a finished product before the deadline the film is screened in the 700 seat Neptune cinema which is currently showing the latest in the Batman series. At the start of the event teams draw out of a hat a random film genre and then everyone is instructed to include a given prop, character and line of dialogue (see above). Then you rush off and start work.

Since I had drawn the genre horror I decided to visit one of the two famous graves that are here in Seattle, Bruce Lee’s and Jimi Hendrix’s. I figured that a graveyard would give our film an appropriate look and one of the two graves might inspire a plot line. Jimi’s grave is some way out of the city across Lake Washington so I opted for a visit to Lake View Cemetery where Bruce lies and which is not far from the centre.

As you climb eastward from the downtown area you cross the dividing line of highway 5 that hurries aggressively across the city from the airport northward to Canada. It’s an evil road to drive along for someone used to country lanes; there are four, often six lanes of hurtling noisy steal and I always find I am in the wrong lane and therefore directly in the path of a huge truck that snarls as it swerves past. If you can escape this road you come to Capitol Hill that looks down onto Elliott Bay and views of the Olympic headland. The hill is an interesting mix of restaurants and music spilling onto the sidewalk, clothes shops and people asking for money on each corner. At the northern end the streets change and become residential and tree lined and then shaded parkland.

I arrived at about ten o’clock at night and of course the place was closed and locked up for the night. I started to wander Volunteer Park that borders the cemetery hoping to find a hole in the fence. I came across a troop of Shakespearean actors who had just finished an open air performance of Twelfth Night, which was a drag since I had just finished writing my post for that title, and I thought that the art deco façade of the Asian Art museum, also in the park, might make a wonderful backdrop for a travelling shot but it quickly became apparent that the small gap under the main entrance gate was the only way in and only big enough for my lead actress to crawl under, Minnie aged 13.

We returned the next night having written a loose story about the un-dead trying to find a final resting place and the script required a shot of the heroine mysteriously passing through the locked bars and disappearing into the darkness of the graveyard. We filmed the scene in the car headlights and one shot required Minnie to crawl under the gate and disappear into the darkness. She was absolutely terrified and needed fatherly coaxing rather than director’s insistence but the most terrifying part for her was when we had finished and she had to crawl back to the side of the living. The imagination of a 13 year old can be a powerful thing and the thought of a bone like arm grabbing her by the ankle and dragging her off almost paralysed her.

In the daytime the park is a very pleasant place, there is an unassuming tower at one end that could be easily missed as it is surrounded by trees. It is a circular brick tower that encases a wonderful wrought iron water tank; huge century old rivets holding everything together and 183 steps that lead up to a 360-degree observation deck. From here you can see a panoramic view of Seattle’s setting, the snow peaked Cascade mountain range to the East and the Olympic mountains across the bay to the West.

However, at night, down by the cemetery it feels like you are in Romeo And Juliet act v, scene 3.

PAGE (Aside) I am almost afraid to stand alone 
 Here in the churchyard; yet I will adventure.


www.nps.gov/history/nR/travel/seattle/s5.htm

Hamlet

The other day I said that Seattle is like Croydon in S.E. London. Actually it’s probably more like Hamburg Germany, only lighter and sunnier, at least at the moment (summer). Although Seattle has the envious international reputation as being always grey and under the rain my neighbour informs me this is in fact a deliberate lie put about by Seattleites to stop everyone coming here; though In fact everyone may already be here, this morning I met a man from Brighton though I am still no closer to finding a Henry.

So Hamburg? It’s the water you see, not the rain. The longer you are here the more you notice it, and the boats: not tankers so much but ferries and yachts. However the place is so crowded, firstly with places but also islands and even the boats in the marina are stacked in shelves. It becomes difficult to build a geographical concept of the place. There is Puget Sound firstly, with Seattle on the Western shore, but then west again are two lakes, Union and the much larger Washington. Communities on the far side of Washington seem so distant as to be separate but it’s probably a bit like Croydon and central London.

The Troll, from now on known as Caliban, lies underneath the bridge that carries the highway north, high above the area of Fremont situated at the north-western end of lake Union; it’s an area that has a reputation for being quirky. Certainly it’s a fun place with a cute Sunday arts market, a lot of bars and restaurants and a weekend crowd that howls, but it also has, this week at least, a man who is improbably balancing stones at the side of the road for small change. It also has a giant statue of Lenin AND a Cold War era Rocket fuselage on the end of a shoe shop.

The Lenin statue originally came from Czechoslovakia and after the fall of communism it was bought by a Washington resident, cut into three pieces and shipped back to Seattle; probably not in his hand luggage, as at 16 feet tall it must weigh tons. The first time you see it the effect of a striding Lenin in republican U.S.A is startling and when you think about the number of Lenin statues that were destroyed the thing seems almost ghostly. Don’t you think?

The best thing however, in my opinion, is the Fremont Bridge that crosses the canal dug at the start of the twentieth century to connect lake Union with the seawater of Puget Sound. Lying in the shadow of Caliban’s Highway Bridge, It’s a beautiful cantilever construction that can take four lanes of cars, and has extra space for pedestrians and cyclists. It was opened in 1917 and Wikipedia informs me that local residents chose the blue and orange colours in 1985. I don’t think it has been painted since as today there is a pleasing fadedness to it, and that coupled with the choice of blue, which is very metropolitan- police-box-Tardis, gives the whole thing a 1950’s feel. This is enhanced by the clangs and peels of the bells as it stops traffic, opens and lets a yacht pass, something that apparently happens at least 30 times a day and seemingly every time I am cycling over it. This makes it the official “most frequently opened drawbridge in the United States.”

Now this piece Hamlet is clearly all about ghosts and gravediggers isn’t it, but I am sure that in the original productions a drawbridge also figured frequently and if that was not enough for a link to Hamlet as the title for this post then I am sure the ghostly presence of Lenin is. And if not, by lucky coincidence tonight (July 19th) at the Fremont open air movies, one of best established in the city, they are showing Ghostbusters and I am off there now as it’s almost sunset; and I’ll cover graveyards next.

www.fremontoutdoormovies.com

The Tempest

There wasn’t a single person at my secondary school whose name was Henry, but there was this guy who wore red and green nail polish. His name was Tim and I remember that he alone among our year wanted to be an actor and intended to go to drama school as soon as A-levels were out of the way.

So when the English teacher decided that the sixth form would put on a production of The Tempest, Tim was chosen to play the lead role: It seemed fair as no-one else had a clue about acting, especially the English teacher. However, he did have a great idea for the staging, choosing the main assembly room and devising the play to be performed in the round using the balcony above for all of Arial’s interventions. His masterpiece however, was to cast the school’s outcasts as pirates and stage a spectacular storm and shipwreck in the courtyard outside that could be viewed through the glass windows that ran the length of the Hall at the start of the evening.

The storm effect was achieved with some audacious lighting and inspired performances from the school orchestra and a full size skeletal ship was sculptured by the woodwork department. As this was Ken and his gang’s only, albeit brilliant, appearance in the play, they were then free to go home and thus they avoided watching Tim’s masterful yet academic rendition of Prospero. In fact they avoided most things at school and became infamous for continued absence from all sport activity, never once doing anything but wandering the woods that boarded the playing fields and smoking during our six years at the school.

I myself was cast as Caliban and everyone, Shakespeare included, seemed to be unclear of my exact role. Monster was the closest direction I received but the makeup department provided me with a pot of instant tanning lotion, some sackcloth and repeated backcombing of my long hair. Even though I was unsure who or what I was playing, I think I looked brilliant and recall it as one of my finest theatrical achievements.

I developed a satisfying grunt to build the character and my finest moment came in the second performance in a one to one scene with Prospero. Tim, budding thespian, messed up his lines and gave me a cue for the line I had just delivered. He looked confused, as well he should have been, but I saved the day, his reputation and future career and that of the school’s by instantly improvising a series of method acting grunts and groans that continued until Tim realised his error, composed himself and returned to the script. Nobody, not even the English teacher was aware that anything had gone astray.

Shortly after the exams arrived, A-levels were obtained or failed and we went our separate ways to uncertain futures. I never saw Tim again, my last memory of him was during the maths exam when my worried reading of the questions was brutally interrupted by his swearing as he stood up and stomped out of the room. But Caliban is alive and well under a freeway bridge here in Seattle.

That's a real Volkswagen Beetle under his hand.

Love's Labours Lost

For someone (me) who grew up in the London suburbs, Seattle can feel a lot like Croydon, and Seattle in the summer can feel a lot like Croydon on a hot July afternoon: it’s kind of noisy, concrete, dusty, parochial.

The down town area is imprisoned between two seething highways, one next to the shoreline the other not so far away along the lakeside.

As it turns out Seattle is on the eastern shore of Puget Sound but what was probably once a beautiful freshwater lake nestled near a virgin shore is now a downtown "desirable residence" crowded, water-recreational area linked by a dug channel to the sea.

Sea planes take off and land heading for Vancouver and Canada to the north, yachts wait for the weekend to sail and joggers run on asphalt whilst the traffic pounds in and out of downtown all around.

There is a constant hum, even at four in the morning, that is never turned off, you just get used to it; it’s like living with a washing machine constantly running.

Sometimes something reminds me that I am no longer in Croydon - my linguistic non-comprehension of the locals for one.

Two weeks in and I still say “sorry” when I bump into them, when I know that it should be “excuse me’ and I am still baffled as to the correct response to the incessant greeting “howyadoing”: I try a ‘great and you!’ but I must be doing something wrong as the looks I get are strange.

Settling down on my picnic rug with a bag full of buttered popcorn at the "Movie on the Pedestal Night" (see previous post) it took me several minutes to understand the dialogue of the lead character, Juno a 16-year-old girl. I think I missed some of the best one-liners in the film because of my inability to fine-tune my ear to the nasal accent. But it was a great film and I had somehow, at the time, missed the news that it had won an Oscar for best screenplay.

From the film, or more precisely tracking down the soundtrack the next day, I discovered a music genre I was unaware of - anti folk. I think I always believed that Rock was in someway anti-folk, - isn’t that what Dylan did at Newport?

Seems though that it is a separate genre altogether, it even gets its own entry in Wikipedia.

Juno wasn’t my first open air cinema event this trip, that honour goes to my visit to the "Float In Movie" organised by Sidewalk Cinema that helps create open air film events in the Seattle area. This time they worked with the Wooden Boat festival held each year at the beginning of July on Union Lake, the aforementioned water play and live area.

To finish the event they invited boats to float in - and a few pedestrians to stroll up - and watch, first a Popeye cartoon and then African Queen, the film that gave Humphrey Bogart his only Oscar, I learnt this from the film trivia competition that obligatorily precedes an open air screening.

Anyway, what does this all have to do with Shakespeare?

Well, I discovered that there is an online search engine that will scour all of the Bard’s plays and sift out every reference of a particular word.

I didn’t try Queen or Africa but Juno, - probably because she is the Roman Goddess of Birth (the film is about an unplanned teenage pregnancy) - was used by Mr Bill no less than 21 times, and since the film begins and ends with a chair I would choose this quote.

“Let me sit down. O Juno! Antony and Cleopatra: III, xi

Unfortunately Anthony and Cleopatra is not included in the challenge set at the beginning of this blog so I am forced to settle for this.

Juno but an ethiope were; Love's Labours Lost: IV, iii

Twelfth Night

Some of these Shakespeare titles are going to be a doddle!

July 10th and it’s my Twelfth Night in Seattle, jet lag settled, new lap top computer purchased and I am installed in a coffee shop on University Ave drinking a double-shot soy cappuccino whilst the kids take an intermediate hip-hop class with the experimental college. How American can I get?

Well obviously not as American as the young Asian beauty in white summer frock, silver ear-rings and brown leather cow girl biker boots who just walked in who was probably born here, but I'm doing my best.
Hey, maybe she's really a male? That would fit the gender exchange that seems to be at the heart of the Twelfth Night, Viola becoming Cesario thus causing problems for Olivia etc, etc, etc; no, I think I’ll stick with the initial ruse, it's my eleventh plus one evening in the city.

And it's a magnificent evening, not a patch of cloud in the early evening blue sky: the sunset’s rays silhouette the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula and there is not a hint of the fabled Seattle rain (that even the guy in Safeway acknowledged to be of international renown - a shame that his name wasn't Henry). Everyone on the street is in shorts and t-shirt, so what better way to celebrate than to go to the open-air movies?

My first experience of American cities’ summer cinema, open air in any convenient public space with an appropriate blank piece of concrete wall, was here in Seattle two years ago. I had been cycling around the Freemont district when I came across a parking area backed by a massive concrete wall adorned with images of Bogart and Bacall. A discreet sign informed me that on Saturday evening they were screening Grease, one of my daughter’s favourite films so at the appointed hour toward sunset we turned up with blanket and chocolate.

The locals were much better prepared; the parked cars had all been cleared and in their place there were picnic tables and folding chairs, some had even carried their sitting room couch and were installed with red wine and hot food.
We took a seat in the centre, just in front of the DVD projector and waited for dusk to settle enough to allow projection to begin.

In retrospect I suppose I should have considered the presence of many people dressed as zombies as something more than just a local way to enjoy free movies. However when our host for the evening invited them down to the front for audience votes and prize distribution I became a little concerned that I had read the poster incorrectly. A hurried check with the guy handing out programmes confirmed that in fact the evenings bill was Shaun of The Dead, a romantic Zombie comedy that I was certain would be a disappointment to an 11 year old expecting John Travolta and Olivia Newton John.

We started to leave, but then asked; “is it really gory?”
“Well”, came the reply, “there’s a bit at the end…..”

We stayed, had a brilliant time and I only had to hide her eyes once.
Tonight however, I am better prepared. I’ve checked the schedule and with off to Films on the Pedestal in the heart of downtown to see Juno.

http://moviesonthepedestal.com/