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.