You Say Tomato

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

Troubled Diva, How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

No, wait, counting and list-making are thy things. Ach, but I do love thy site, even since thou demoted me to thy B-list blogroll (no hard feelings at all, in fact; thy explanation made perfect sense). OK, enough with the Quaker-talk, I’m starting to feel like Tricky Dick Nixon (whose Quaker mother still used thee and thou and all that jath with her sisters in his childhood).

His site’s a marvel, ain’t it? All those lovely words; the quizzes, stunts, and capers; the serializations. But you know which bit of it I like most of all these days? The very tasteful little “We listen …” section toward the bottom of the right column. It’s the Mike chart, with lovely little apercus in the hover-over text. I find myself checking it all the time to see if bands—some of whom I’ve never even heard of—have moved up or down the TD listings. And although I’m afraid I can’t give him the benefit of an Amazon Associates commission (with his links going to Amazon.co.uk and all), I’ve bought several CDs on the strength of his recommendations. They haven’t always zipped to the top of my personal charts—Lemon Jelly, for instance, was just a little bit too antic for my tastes, though I admit I do find myself singing “All the ducks are swimming in the water” from time to time—but they’ve always been like a friend’s voice whispering in my ear as I wandered the aisles of my local CD store, and I can’t say I’ve ever regretted a purchase that I made after reading about something in TD. (From the current listings, I already know I’m going to have to check out Zongamin, Hidden Camera, and maybe Bent.)

I suppose all that is my way of confessing—as if that were necessary—that the list(s) that follow(s) is directly inspired by the Mikester (except, of course, that since I am still coming off the most peculiar period without music—which seems inexplicable just a few months out of it—that I still have a lot of old music to catch up on, so several of the things that I’ve bought recently and have in heavy rotation are positively ancient. Oh, and because I know I’m going to have to post this in batches, it doesn’t make sense to do it in the form of a chart. (Or am I just critically timid? Discuss.) Don’t be asking me why I’ve started with jazz, because I have no idea.

I listen … Part 1, Jazz, More or Less (Sometimes Considerably More or Less)

Cinematic Orchestra: Every Day

Cinematic Orchestra: Remixes

Cinematic Orchestra: Motion

St. Germain: Tourist

Various: Formation 60: Modern Jazz from Eastern Germany, Amiga 1957-69

Note: A rare weekday post. I had some nasty dental work done last week that had some even nastier repercussions today, which drove me downtown to my endodontist this afternoon. The upside was a much earlier than usual end to my work day.

"I liked it when you did the tongue thing"

If there are chick flicks, is there also such a thing as chick restaurants? Last night R and I dined with some friends at the Agua Verde Paddle Club and Café down on the water overlooking Portage Bay. The ratio of women to men seemed to be around 4:1 or at least 3:1—and no, it doesn’t, erm, “cater to a special clientele” or anything like that. I guess chicks just did their excellent food, good margaritas and a fabulous view. Yesterday, we even had a live nature show when two drakes fought a land-and-air battle over a duck.

After dinner we went to hear Tuareg music played by the Ensemble Tartit, a group of six women and three men from Mali. Well, I guess the group formed in a refugee camp in Burkina Faso; one of them lives in Belgium, and since the Tuareg—or Kel Tamashek, as they call themselves—are a nomadic people who traveled all around the area that now corresponds with Algeria, Libya, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, it's hard to say where they "come from," but at one point they said their “homeland” was near Essakane, Mali, where they hold the Festival of the Desert.

It was an incredible concert, even though it was hard to shake off that air of “exoticism” that can get in the way of treating “world” music like any other kind of music. (To misquote the late, great Pat Parker: “The first thing you do is to forget that it’s music. Second, you must never forget that it’s music.”) Why? Certainly not because it was hard to get into it—the hard thing was not to get up and join in—but because, well, they were exotic. At the intermission and at the end of the show, members of the group went into the lobby to sell stuff (CDs at half time; leather goods afterward) and it was funny to see the audience—a protest march waiting to happen, full of hippies, lesbians, and academics, or people who were all three—trying ever so casually to get a good look at the musicians up close.

The reason I wanted to stare was that they were almost completely covered—apparently in the Tuareg society the men are veiled, though one did show some of his face—and although the women weren’t veiled per se, they wore ornate headdresses and were constantly putting their voluminous garments over their heads. And it was hard not to notice their varying skin colors—the women were relatively light-skinned, like North African Berbers, while the men seemed to be darker. (I read later that the two men who played the tehardant—which is one of only two traditional instruments played by men—are griots from the metalsmith caste, which is considered the lowest rung of Tuareg society because “they are feared for their power over the element of fire.”) So, there were two veiled men playing the tehardant, a three-stringed instrument somewhere between a guitar and a lute; one man singing and playing the electric guitar; two women singing and trading off on tinde, which is a sort of drum; one woman singing and playing the imzad, “a small one-stringed fiddle that is the symbol of Tuareg society,” and one woman singing. Actually, everyone except the tehardant players, who sort of spoke-sang—but not like Rex Harrison or William Shatner—sang, and almost everyone clapped, and most people also danced. Confused yet? Not to be.

The dancing was particularly interesting because it was so minimalist—or maybe it was just invisible. For a large part of the show they danced in a seated position—they were seated on a carpet on the floor for most of the evening—which was incredibly sexy even though the only parts of their bodies you could actually see were their hands. Even when they got up to dance toward the end of the show, their clothes were so voluminous, you could still just see their hands—and maybe a toe or two peeking out from under their robes from time to time.

Musically—and dance-move-wise—there were so many echoes of other styles of music. The hand movements looked like the South Pacific hula; the clapping was reminiscent of flamenco (of course there are obvious links with the gypsy diaspora); it wasn’t “Mali music” but you could hear bits of Issa Babayogo, and there were definitely a lot of Arab influences.

Apparently, Ensemble Tartit had been in Seattle for a week, doing residences in public schools, rotary clubs, and stuff. The fund-raising folks displayed thank-you notes that children had made for them, almost all of which said, “I liked it when you did the tongue thing,” which I imagine was a reference to their ululations. Can you imagine being a little kid in the Pacific Northwest and having some singing, dancing, and music-making nomads from the African desert come to your classroom? Incredible. The great evening definitely made me want to subscribe for next year’s UW world music series, which includes a Turkish percussionist, a “journey of the Roma” ensemble, and taiko drummers.

Bloody Sunday

I finally saw Bloody Sunday last night, albeit on video (the movie had an inexplicably short run in Seattle). JFC, what a powerful film! One of the reasons I don’t much like watching films on video or DVD is that I get distracted and flip through magazines or play with the cat while the thing is playing, whereas in a movie theater I’m all business—a bomb could go off in the next block and I probably wouldn’t notice. That was not true with Bloody Sunday, though. For all I know, the cat was flipping through magazines last night—I was too enraptured to notice.

James Nesbitt was incredible—in fact all the acting was excellent, even though a lot of the players were “amateurs” (I was surprised to read that the most despicable officer—Col. Wilford who ordered in the First Paras, without higher authority—was “the genuine article,” an Eton and Scots Guards man who served in Northern Ireland; no wonder he was so convincing)—but the story was the real star. It always shocks me how ignorant many Britons are about Ireland—I know I shouldn’t project too much from my own experience, but when I was growing up the folks around me were more likely to have visited just about anywhere in the world than they were to have been to Ireland. (Sure, not that many people from my home town went abroad in those days, and this was before Dublin was a hip destination, but even at university when some folks spent at least parts of their vacations in foreign parts, I still didn’t know anyone—other than actual Irish people—who’d visited Ireland, North or South.)

Even as a right-on youth, I didn’t really “follow” what was going on in Northern Ireland, except to vaguely keep up the news of the Troubles. I marched against apartheid (“Reagan, Botha, You Can’t Hide; We Charge You With Genocide”) or for abortion rights (“Corrie Withdraw, Like Your Father Should Have Done”), but I never, ever did a thing about Northern Ireland. I suppose part of it was that I grew up as a Protestant—not in the sense that I took sides or had animus against Northern Ireland’s Catholics—just that the Troubles weren’t on my personal radar in the way they might’ve been if I’d gone to Catholic school or hung out with folks who were active on the issue. (Of course, you didn’t have to be Catholic to care—I remember being shocked that a friend who had grown up in Iran knew all about Bobby Sands and the IRA hunger strikers and had been hugely inspired by them in her own formative political thinking!)

Also, there were bombs going off and people getting killed all over the place—by “all over the place” I of course mean mainland Britain; 3,500 people died in Northern Ireland, and that apparently didn’t make much of an impression on me—and it was hard to take a position that seemed to side with people who could perpetrate such violence, especially against working-class targets. And it did seem like you were either for the Brits (which meant being on the side of the army and the Tories—not a position I was comfortable with in my flaming youth) or for the IRA (who I associated with violence and Catholicism—and Catholicism meant anti-abortion and anti-gay, not Catholic charities and good works). So, I did what a lot of young people with an urge to take a stand for truth, justice, and all that good stuff do—I turned my attention to another struggle far away and left the injustice close at home to someone else.

So did Bloody Sunday turn me into a raging Fenian IRA symp? Hell, no! But it did remind me that a) what happened in Northern Ireland wasn’t a simple fight between Protestants, supported by the British Army and the RUC, versus Catholics, i.e., the IRA; and b) after Bloody Sunday, it’s no wonder things became so extreme so quickly. It’s easy to see why soldiers who’ve been abused and who’ve lost comrades in a war they can’t really understand would want to exact revenge (not justifiable but understandable); and it’s easy to see why people who’ve watched their friends and family be gunned down for no reason whatsoever would want to take up arms against the people responsible (or if not the actual people responsible, men wearing the same uniforms). If the Paras hadn’t gone in with live ammunition on Bloody Sunday, nonviolent civil rights activists like Ivan Cooper might well have had a chance.

The thing that struck me most was the class-war aspect. The citizens of Derry—even the supposedly middle-class Cooper (an MP and a factory manager) lived in crappy houses in trashed-out neighborhoods and were obviously struggling to get by. The officers who were responsible for the horrors of Bloody Sunday were upper-class English twits (did I type the right vowel there?) who were contemptuous of everyone not in their exclusive club. The Derry peeps really were a bit dirty (a nice touch of verisimilitude to have people walking around with lank, unwashed hair), while the Paras painted their faces black.

The Good Thief

I was at a bit of a movie loose end this weekend—you know me, I could fly to the moon, cure cancer, and win the award for outstanding achievement in the field of excellence all in the space of one weekend, but if I didn’t see a movie, I’d go to work the next day feeling vaguely dissatisfied. At the same time, I was feeling bone idle and couldn’t be arsed to schlep down to the U. District or downtown to see the film that most interests me—A Mighty Wind (even though I hear it blows). Fortunately, I hadn’t seen either of the movies playing at the Harvard Exit (that won’t last long—the folks at Landmark seem to like to keep films on Capitol Hill for at least three months), so this afternoon I went to see Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief.

My response: Bloody good. I guess when it comes down to it, all heist movies are the same—a cunning plan, a flawed security system, a sympathetic crook with a nemesis who seems halfway sympathetic himself, a team of idiosyncrasy-heavy specialists summoned for the “job”—but this one also had fabulous acting, a sneakily cerebral subtext, and fascinating casting. I didn’t hate Ocean’s Eleven when I saw it at the tail end of 2001—it struck me as a harmless enough bit of nonsense for a bunch of Hollywood faces who wanted to live out their rat pack fantasies—but The Good Thief shows just how hollow that movie was, and how lazy it was to settle for a cast list rather than a set of characters.

So, as everyone says, Nick Nolte’s a wreck, but it makes him perfect for the part of Bob Montagnet, the gallant “good thief” on what he hopes will be his last job. The scene where the pleasant policeman looks at photos of Bob/Nick as a handsome young man alongside his now-ruined face was shocking—Nolte’s been in a gradual slide for so long that it’s not the same “OHMIGOD” intake of breath that was heard in every theater in 1990 when Robert Redford showed off his saggy features in Havana, but it was a pretty effective way to show his dissolution. Talk about verisimilitude. He’s also lost his speaking voice—although Nolte and the Polish twins were the only native English speakers in the movie, it wasn’t any easier to understand Nolte’s dialogue than it was the Georgian female lead’s or any of the other non-native-speaking actors. (The Polishes, who made Twin Falls, Idaho in 1999, weren’t the only directors acting in this movie—the Russian security genius was played by Bosnian Emir Kusturica, who directed Black Cat, White Cat, among other films.)

It wasn’t until the closing credits that I realized the film was more or less a remake of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le flambeur (which I haven't seen). That made a reader comment on IMDB seem extraordinarily perspicacious, so I can’t resist repeating some of it here (be warned, though, it contains some potential spoilers):

This is a copy of a previous film. It is in fact all about copies: the paintings, the copy of Bob in Paulo, how he manipulates the idea that he will copy his past crimes, the copy of the vault in the Russian's warehouse, even the copy of the copies on its walls, the twins, the copy of Philip in Phillippa, the false copy of the plan planted in the snitch. Lots of copies, lots of similar references to repetition.

One last thing: I found it totally jarring to hear them talking about francs—even though the euro has been in use for only 16 months or so, the references to the old currency made the movie seem really dated.

Food for Thought

I recently ran into a former co-worker in a grocery store—someone I’ve seen only a couple of times since I left that job about seven years ago. She has two kids now, and when I told her we were on our way to get some pho, she told me it was her 3-year-old son’s favorite food. Obviously her boy’s growing up in a more cosmopolitan place than I did (not hard; there was a Scottish family, an Irish family, an Indian family, and the Afro-Caribbean doctor—everyone else in the village had been there for several generations, or so it seemed), but it still blows my mind. I had no “foreign” food until I went away to university—that includes Italian food, even pizza! (Well, I did go on school trips to France and Italy, so I suppose I must’ve had something non-English there.)

Of course, I suppose some of the Northern specialties we snacked on were pretty exotic: tripe (which I remember eating raw, but when I think about it, you buy it cooked, so it must just’ve been cold and served absolutely swimming in vinegar); faggots, aka “ducks,” a jolly tasty blended meat product that’s served with gravy; “Scotch scallops,” which has nothing to do with shellfish or Scotland—it’s bacon and potatoes cooked in the same pan with water (and a lot of Daddy’s sauce) added to make a sort of not very wet bacon soup (there was also a version using corned beef known, rather unappealingly, as "lobby"); black peas (peas cooked in a vinegary sauce—they were only available at the “wakes” or traveling fair); black pudding (and not that namby Southern version that you have for breafast either—the real bladder-stuffed version) served with lashings of piccalilli; and lots of other nosh that I don’t want to bring to mind right now lest I get such a craving that I’m forced to cajole someone into driving me to Ye Olde Britishe Pantrye. (Funnily enough, we never had Lancashire hot pot, even though, judging from Coronation Street, it’s the only food Northerners ever eat.)

Some Movies I've Seen in 2003, But Haven't Mentioned in YST

The 25th Hour: I can’t stand Ed Norton (no particular reason—except maybe the unforgivably smarmy commentary track on the Fight Club DVD), and I didn’t think the WTC bits worked exactly, but as is so often the case with me and Spike Lee movies, this one just got me on an emotional level. It doesn’t really matter what your head tells you, the heart is engaged. Terence Blanchard always does magnificent music for his buddy’s movies, but this time around the elegiac requiem of a score was as crucial as the actors (or the dog).

Quai des Orfèvres: I agree entirely with Anita that the detective from this 1947 noir was the prototype for Columbo—a smart, tic-ridden policeman whose unprepossessing appearance and stumbling manner causes suspects to treat him rather less seriously than they should. The scenes of Paris life just after the war, and the depiction of the burlesque theater of the time, were fascinating. The kind of film you could watch over and over, each time focusing on one background strand.

The Pianist: Absolutely brilliant. The fact that every person in the packed cinema stayed locked in their seats until the very end of the closing credits says more than I ever could. Deserved Oscars—is there anything more unusual?

Morvern Callar: Samantha Morton is unprecedentedly good at playing characters whose inner lives are far more important than their outward existence. The scenes of her stomping around, apparently acting on pure impulse, sometimes driven by the sounds provided by her dead boyfriend, were fabulous. The best case for the transformative powers of mix tapes ever made!

The Quiet American: An old-fashioned movie that proved Michael Caine’s still got the movie-acting juju, that Brendan Foster is losing his looks (though perhaps less than perfect-looking actors actually get to use their skills more than pretty faces), that war-corresponding ain’t what it used to be, and that the expatriate life is damned romantic.

Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary: A film that consists of a camera pointing, pretty uncertainly at times, at an 80-year-old woman as she recalls the events of almost 60 years before. Sometimes the camera watches her watching the playback, smoking nervously and mouthing along with the lines she spoke earlier. Mesmerizing.

Nowhere in Africa: A bit rambling at times (since it seemed to stick to the actual contours of the life of Stefanie Zweig, whose memoir was the basis for the film,* rather than to the kind of tight structure an original screenplay would no doubt have provided), this year’s Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar-winner is about leaving one home and finding another when a family of German Jews escape to rural Kenya shortly before Kristallnacht. A lot of unanswered questions (even though the Masai cook is undoubtedly a good and trustworthy man, is it really good parenting to let your pubescent daughter join him in bed whenever she feels like it?) and some clichéd characterizations (this isn’t the first or most obvious one that comes to mind, but am I crazy in thinking that the “Hey, the English hate me too—I’m a Scot” trope has been used in another biggish film this year?), but a thought-provoking movie, nevertheless. I was very surprised to read in the closing credits that the part of Walter, Regina’s father, was dubbed. I’m still not sure exactly why you’d hire someone for such a pivotal part if they were going to have trouble with the words—extra-important for a film with dialogue in German, Swahili, and English—but I now see that the actor, Merab Ninidze, is from Georgia (the former Soviet republic, not the Southern state) rather than Germany.

*Some reviews refer to the original book as a novel rather than a memoir—my response to the film changes a little if it’s fiction. The film’s “bagginess” seems excusable if it’s in the service of telling a story as it really happened; it’s just lack of discipline if it’s a matter of adaptation.

Not Today, I Have a Headache

A very annoying—and somewhat depressing—trend continued this morning when I woke up with a blinding headache. It’s not alcohol-induced (my life is way too dull for that—in the nicest possible way, you understand—these days); weirdly enough, I think it’s sleep-induced since almost inevitably I actually feel the pain coming on when I’m lying in bed on lazy mornings.

The causal conditions seem to be that I sleep more than seven hours—a non-work day in other words. The other day I had an extra hour in bed because I was working from home and didn’t have to get up for the vanpool, and sure enough the bastard thing hit me right between the eyes (literally). I suspect it has something to do with my eyes—a couple of years ago I had tiny holes burned into my irises with a laser to avoid/prevent “angle-closure glaucoma.” The holes were still there the last time I had my eyes checked, but I remember that one of the things that first made eye doctors investigate my problem was that my pupils are sometimes different sizes, which I guess is a sign of something nasty. The last couple of times this kind of headache hit, I ran to the bathroom to stare at my pupils, and sure enough they were unequally proportioned. Now I’ll have to get off my ass and call the condescending (but madly skilled) eye doctor.

Despite the eye-ache, R and I tromped down to Broadway for brunch at the magnificent El Greco with an old friend of mine from Spain, then zipped down to the Arboretum to check out the cherry blossoms. It seems really weird to me to see young (college age) people down there on dates—in my youth the only time I ever went to look at flora in anything approaching a date situation was when we’d drive out to the moors to look for mushrooms! Ah, but it was a perfect afternoon pastime for a headachy woman d’un certain âge and her blossom-loving pal.

Some reasons to be cheerful:

• I found some fabulous hot-cross buns, made by the good folks at Grand Central Baking Company, at Rainbow yesterday. Why Americans don’t recognize what to me seems to be the undeniable appeal of toasted teacakes, I’ll never understand, but at least they’re available for a week or so each year.


• The pal we brunched with is spending six months in Granada next year—which could be a solution to the vacation indecision we’ve been suffering from. (Of course, we still have to settle on the summer/fall holiday destination.)


• The Seattle International Film Festival is only five weeks away—which means the schedule will be out in three weeks or so. I heard a rumor there’ll be more Spanish films this year (more than last year wouldn’t be hard, mind you, it was an all-time low), which, needless to say, fills me with glee.

Rumours of a Hurricane

One of my many peculiar but harmless mental blocks is an inability to follow reading recommendations. I get close—I buy the book that everyone raves about, I take the copy they offer to lend me—but when it comes time to cracking the spines (something I would never intentionally do, of course), I just can’t. Once a certain critical mass of positive reviews has been reached, an author becomes dead to me. This means there are certain major—well, let’s at least say popular—authors that I’ve never read: Barbara Kingsolver is one, though I possess at least three of her books. (Actually, I have read her poetry, which Seal Press published when I worked there, but after we spent a few days with her around the pub date and I was impressed by what a warm human being she is—a veritable Meryl Streep of the literary world—I promised myself I’d finally read that copy of The Bean Trees that I’d hawked from home to home, but … it’s still unopened.) I suppose it’s something to do with expectations and coming at books fresh—oh, I don’t know why it is, but anyway it is.

A subset of this phenomenon is my failure to read books that I either schlep over from visits to Britain or order from Amazon.co.uk. Completely illogical this—why, after I spend literally hours making purchasing decisions in English bookstores or penny-pinchingly adding and subtracting items from my online shopping cart, can I not read the bloody things? No idea, but it always seems to happen.

This weekend, my iron will sapped by painful sinuses, I snapped and picked up a book I’d ordered from England a month or so ago: Rumours of a Hurricane, by Tim Lott. I first became aware of it in a tantalizing Swish Cottage entry back in early March, and it sounded like just my sort of thing.

One of the things that happens when you emigrate is that your mental picture of your homeland is frozen at the point when you left. Sure, you might visit and keep up, read the papers and even listen to the radio, but once you’re not living in a place, your experience of it is different. (Gurinder Chadha expressed this beautifully in Bhaji on the Beach, which makes me think it’s a universal experience.) The Thatcher era is where my mental movie camera stopped recording British scenes, so the book’s events seem very fresh to me. I could relate, as we used to say in the ‘70s. (Actually, I was out of the country for all but five or six years of the 1979-1991 period the book covers, but I hadn’t definitively decided to leave, so I was halfway there in my head at least for some of the time.)

I’m not sure that it’s great literature, but it’s a cracking read, even though you can see it all coming—not only because Lott shows his hand, but also because there’s a certain historical inevitability to it all. (Charlie’s a hot-metal compositor at the Times? Paging the Siege of Wapping.)

By a fluky coincidence, I bought a big pile of old Grantas when we were in Port Townsend last week. (Our apartment already has more books than it can hold—I sincerely fear for the floorboards—but they were less $1.50 each if you bought 10 or more, so who could resist.) One of the issues was organized around the theme of “valedictory realism,” essentially the act of saying goodbye to a lost way of life by documenting it faithfully. One of the pieces in that issue was an imagined journal by Anthony Blunt, the keeper of the queen’s pictures who was revealed to be a Soviet spy and stripped of all his honors. (It was written by John Banville, and it’s hard to see why he bothered to change the names when the real people—Blunt, Graham Greene, Tony Benn, etc.—were so easily identifiable, and when the layout crew so helpfully removed any doubt by putting a series of photographs of Blunt on the story’s title page.) It was fascinating to see how much the two sets of lives—the society spy and the working-class protagonists of Rumours of a Hurricane—had in common. Is every one us torn up by the same self-doubts and unending calculations and calibrations of risk?

(More good reading about situations that seemed so hopeful in the early 1980s: Doris Lessing’s New York Review of Books essay about Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe. Bloody good stuff.)

I'm Back!

Well, that was a longer break than I expected! Between Wednesday, April 2 and Sunday, April 6, R and I were away at art camp (actually it's called Artfest, but I like the half-assed summer camp ring of "art camp") in Port Townsend. Then work, once again at a wacked-out superpace (one day I started at 7 a.m. with an off-site meeting and wound down at 11 p.m.), a cameo appearance at a UW evening class about editing (they seemed to like me, but it was hard to tell if the students derived any benefit from the pearls of wisdom I laid out before them), and then at the end of the week my sinuses decided to confine me to bed and the simple things in life: magazines and crappy sitcoms.

Somehow, Artfest manages to combine a lot of getting away from it all (the easiest way to get to Port Townsend from Seattle involves a ferry ride, which always seems to suggest a clean break from "normal" life—and there’s no television or Internet access at Fort Worden) without a lot of rest. For one thing, there are classes eating up the day. You can always pick out a class where you’ll just learn techniques rather than work on a project, but since I rarely actually use the art supplies I can’t resist buying throughout the year, I usually opt for something that’ll have me leaving the class with something “finished” in hand. The downside of that is that finishing something you’re not going to be embarrassed to show to curious pals requires a bit of concentration and application—not necessarily traits that make for a relaxing break. In fact, R and I were fast asleep by 11 every night—and not only because the crappy lighting in the “officers’ houses” we were staying in made reading a bit of a challenge. Also, this year the organizers cut the lunch break to one hour—quite enough for the poor peeps trapped eating the terrible meal plan food (we only managed one mess-hall meal the first year—and this year the food was said to be even worse than before—but those out-of-towners without cars don’t have a choice in the matter), but a tight squeeze for those of us zipping down to town to eat at the excellent restaurants in PT.

It’s also hard not to notice that almost all the other attendees are acting as if they’ve just been released from prison. About 395 of the 400 or so attendees are women, and most of them seem to spend a lot of their "normal" lives doing stuff for their families. There’s this air of liberation at art camp—finally they can do what they want to do, not what their husband or kids or church or workplace or whatever/whoever need them to do. They stay up really late or all night working on projects—overjoyed, I suppose, to be able to focus just on their own stuff. They also talk really loudly and make a lot of noise—I guess they don’t have to modulate their voices or their lives when they’re free. Since R and I live selfish I-centered lives, it’s hard to relate. We just want a quiet, relaxing few days away from work, so we don’t always fit in exactly.

Anyhoo, I did two bookmaking classes (“bookmaking” always makes me think of my granddad with whom I hung out a lot when I was a kid—he was very concerned with bookmakers, but of the turf accountant variety) because a) I like books; and b) I love the teacher, Albie Smith. She gave me a door prize for taking the most Artfest classes with her (five over three years—I stupidly missed one at the first gathering), despite the fact that even after all those classes, I’m still the most remedial student. (I’m absolutely useless with my hands, so the sewing bit and even the cutting bits are a challenge.) I also took a class on making and using a pinhole camera—cool in practice—I’d never used a darkroom before, though I’ve seen so many photo-developing scenes in the movies it felt old hat—but the teacher was worse than useless, blathering on about his job and his hobbies and the price of houses in his home town. Stuff that would’ve made fine conversational topics over drinks, but sure felt like a waste of time when we were all keen to go out and point our converted Quaker Oats containers at stuff.

Port Townsend is a wonderful place to visit—it has everything you could want in a play town: great restaurants (one, Wild Coho, is particularly outstanding, though my favorite is the Stillwater Café, where everything tastes just a little bit better than you expect it to), good book stores (an OK new store and an excellent used store, William James Bookseller), card shops, art galleries, a very good record store, an awesome independent movie theater (unfortunately I’d seen both the films they were showing—one of them twice).

Saying goodbye to Seattle

Two classes, two books

Two of my signature covers—texture's big this year

My pinhole camera—it really worked

When I got home I found a Tastykake gift pack waiting on the porch. Fortunately, Jelly Krimpets have a long shelf life.