The Stranger

Hello to All That

Sarah Galvin — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 11:00:00 -0800

The day after Didion passed, I realized something about "Goodbye to All That" that I'd never realized before. by Sarah Galvin The day after Didion passed, I realized something about "Goodbye to All That" that I'd never realized before. Kelly O
I’m leaving Seattle for New York City this fall, Joan Didion died two days before Christmas, and local curator Deborah Woodard invited me to contribute to a celebratory remote reading (that starts at 7 pm tonight) in honor of the late literary giant. When you really think about it, did I have any choice but to read “Goodbye to All That” obsessively for the last three weeks?

I do not believe I exaggerate when I say that essay added five years to my life. As we all did, I first read “Goodbye” moments after declaring poetry as my major in college. At that point, I’d also recently discovered the word “denouement” was not pronounced “dee-now-mint.” I didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground. Then I read the essay and my life began to expand — once I actually started to understand it.

“Goodbye to All That” chronicles Didion’s twenties in 1960s New York City, where she wrote copy and did layout for a magazine, embarked on her first romances, and attended an endless series of parties with an endless series of friends who read as both crucial and oddly interchangeable. She falls madly in love with the city the moment she steps off the train, and, though she meets a man who would later become her husband, Didion’s romance with New York overshadows or undergirds every human love story in the essay. She falls in love with NYC as a symbol of infinite possibilities, a city she compares to Xanadu, whose mythical nature contributes exponentially to the feeling one has at 20 of being immune to the passage of time.

Seattle was youth to me as much as NY was youth to Didion. Jemal Countess / GETTY
In my reading, Didion’s relationship with that city of cities declines because time catches up with her. But I didn’t really understand that at the time. At the time, I was still glancing back and forth between my ass and a hole in the ground with furrowed brows. But I knew I felt deeply bad for the author of that essay. I even stood up in my college literature class when we discussed it and said, “How the hell did she feel any moment of her life was a waste? How could she be sad at all? She’s JOAN DIDION!”

It took two years of regularly trying to write poetry for the essay’s message to really sink in. What I eventually came to understand was this: Everything counts. People often frame youth (or your twenties) as bridge to some final destination of adulthood, but that framing can rob you of everything lovely about your youth. As soon as I understood that, I knew I could never think of a moment of my youth as a square on a board game. I had to savor my life, such as it was.

That’s when the years really started adding up.

This phenomenon began with giant, unprecedented feelings of gratitude for satisfying moments in my writing life. For instance, I vividly remember a crippling depression I fell into for about six months when I was 24. I had taken a second job writing copy for Amazon to help my mom pay for an expensive dental procedure. I felt like tying my lanyard into a noose after one damn week of imagining scenarios where people would actually use the stuff I was writing about: A pewter charm shaped like a woman bathing a baby, or a pair of “NO SMOKING” sign earrings. Seriously, who the fuck are these people?

One morning, after barely eating or sleeping for months, I forced myself to go up on the roof of my apartment and write a poem. I levitated out of that depression the moment that poem came together. Even though no one but me had seen the poem, I thought of “Goodbye to All That” and clung to the discovery that writing can save you as tidal waves of gratitude blasted over me.

Whenever a small journal published one of my poems, or whenever I published a food review for half a month’s rent at best, I’d think of the essay and feel secure in being exactly where I was supposed to be in life. I’d think: On a bridge from one shore to another, does a person stop existing? Hell, some of the most beautiful views I’ve seen have been from bridges!

Some months sucked, of course. I would run out of money when I didn’t write enough freelance, or a romance wouldn’t work out as I’d hoped. And yet still I’d view a month writing freelance at 25-years-old as a blessing, not to mention any time at all spent falling in love. Whenever I felt a little lost, I’d just think of Didion and remember: Everything counts.

Frequently I’d be coming home at dawn from a party, and I’d just stand motionless as the sun rose, remembering Didion’s words and steeping in my own life until I was real, like the Velveteen Rabbit.

The essay lived inside of me all that time, but when I actually reread it the day after Didion passed, I noticed something I’d never noticed before, something that deepened my understanding of the work: She begins and ends the essay with the same concept.

She introduces the essay by describing New York as Xanadu, and she concludes it by saying, “There were years when I called Los Angeles ‘the Coast,’ but they seem a long time ago.” In those two moments, Didion is admitting her tendency to mistake a place as a symbol as a way to making herself forget that she's living in time. With this rhetorical device, Didion is trying to remind herself and her reader that we’re susceptible to the dangers of the false escape at any age, that the act of savoring life is a process, not a goal to be reached and moved on from.

I feel, I don’t know, superstitious admitting it, but I have this sense that I noticed this echo when I did for the same reason the essay’s central message hit me like a pile-driver at just the right moment when I was young.

Seattle was youth to me as much as NY was youth to Didion, but the reasons I’m now preparing to move to NY have far more to do with external forces, such as the destructive behavior of real estate investors, than the spiritual exhaustion that motivated Didion’s move to LA. I’m leaving the city of my youth because of what I believe I can gain rather than some need to escape or a feeling of failure. But that’s all because of Didion’s essay. Didion is more responsible for the obscene level of lust for life I feel packing my bags than she could have ever known in life. As I shower and fix my tie in preparation to embrace my own New York — as I say goodbye to the Seattle of my own lucky, joyful, awful, wonderful youth — my new reading of that old essay sets my course and keeps me grounded. For now, at least, I hope.

I’ll have more to say at “A Night of Magical Thinking: Celebrating Joan Didion,” a virtual reading that starts streaming tonight at 7 pm on Margin Shift’s Facebook page. I’ll be joined by my betters: Thomas Ahneesan, Gina Tron, Jill Bergantz, Cara Diaconoff, and Robert Lashley.

Now That Seattle Has Reopened, What Should We Be Wearing?

Sarah Galvin — Mon, 19 Jul 2021 12:06:31 -0700

Six locals on how the pandemic impacted their style and their feelings about returning to a social realm. by Sarah Galvin Singer, model, and local style icon Adé A Cônnére looking magnifique STANTON STEPHENS
Like it or not, as mammals whose fur grows only in small, oddly-positioned clumps, we all need clothing. For some, getting dressed is a delightful exercise in composition. For others, it's a tedious and meaningless daily shuffling of materials to regulate body heat and to cover their junk.

The pandemic has had a remarkable influence on the way we dress. Inspiration for a person's unique manner of dress comes from social life, and we've now spent 15 months without the people, places, and events that inspire us. In isolation, the skills that allow a person to put together their genitalia-hiding, heat-regulating mosaic can feel like fluency in a dead language. For those who never felt fluent in this language, quarantine has been a vacation from the necessity to speak.

Now, with the Seattle economy reopened, some people are alive with the anticipation of showing off all the treasures they acquired during the plague. Others are dreading wearing pants again. To celebrate and record this tenuous, much-longed-for coming-together, I've interviewed six locals. They shared their thoughts about how the pandemic impacted their style and their feelings about returning to a social realm in which speaking the language of clothing is unavoidable.

Here's who's who:

TARA THOMAS: Multimedia artist, performer, and experimental interior decorator. Sarah Galvin
NAA AKUA: Writer, activist, and expert coordinator of hats and shoes. Courtesy Naa
CESAR CUEVAS: Musician, pyrotechnics expert, and owner of two dump trucks. Courtesy Cesar
JACKIE HELL: Chanteuse, mistress of the stage, and corn dog-diva. Courtesy Jackie
ADÉ A CÔNNÉRE: Singer, model, and local style icon. Courtesy Ade
TOMO NAKAYAMA: Musician and star of the silver screen. Courtesy Tomo
The interviews:

What did a day's outfit look like for you during the darkest depths of quarantine?

TARA: I'd only say “the darkest depths of quarantine” because my basement apartment gets no natural sunlight. Every day it's a given that I have something covered in paint on. My most flattering favorites manage to get a droplet or handprint of acrylic paint. Spatter pattern is my new signature.

ADÉ: I wore a lot of relaxed clothes, usually a really soft black maxi skirt with a tank top and a long cardigan sweater if it was cold.

JACKIE: Well, a lot of the time I would be dreaming of one of my Dior or Chanel gowns, but I was mostly just wrapped up in the blanket off my bed, and nude underneath that.

CESAR: Mainly a dirty white t-shirt with food stains on it. I wore these gray sweatpants that have a mustard stain on the crotch from dropping a corn dog on them, and some blue Nike slippers. For a while I had a mullet and then I had the classic “Edgar” haircut, which is very popular among Hispanic people—especially in Arizona and Texas.

TOMO: I had my outdoor pants and my indoor pants and would change as soon as I walked in the door, so as not to track the day's virus into my living space. I found myself wearing the same gray hoodie I got in Sweden day after day.

NAA: My day’s outfit during the darkest days of quarantine felt like it was soap and hot water. However, I did manage to wear mainly sweats and hoodies and a large amount of black socks.

Was there anything you incorporated into your daily repertoire that either was never meant to be worn as clothing or was once part of a costume?

TARA: Binder clips/o-rings.

ADÉ: When I did my mask series I used a lot of household items and costume pieces.

JACKIE: I prefer to be nude, but I did put together some great outfits. It was during the time I had The Sound of Music stuck in my VCR. I watched that movie over and over for weeks. The part of the movie where they make clothes from the curtains really inspired me. I don't have curtains though, so I cut up my venetian blinds instead. They made the cutest outfits! I looked just like little Gretl Von Trapp.

CESAR: I had a moment during Covid where I had decided it was about time I learned to sew, so for Halloween I made this red lamé mask because I’d just watched the Watchmen TV show on HBO and was very impressed with how the Looking Glass character's mask looked and was like, "I can do that." It ended up looking more like a metallic red gimp mask, and I wear it around that house from time to time. It's particularly good for frying things, to keep your face safe from hot oil splatter.

TOMO: I have a pair of hiking boots that I ended up wearing pretty much every day because I did so much walking with my dog.

NAA: Surprisingly, I was never a big costume fan, but I did wear a baseball cap that was worn for a show as part of my everyday look.

What event are you most excited to dress up for when we return to society? And what is your dream outfit for this event?

TARA: I wore [the pantsuit and pearls ensemble pictured above] once for Pride at this group art show on June 10th, but it still needs a debut.

JACKIE: I am really excited to return to the Georgetown Trailer park shows. I miss them so much. I've been working on one of my denim muumuus, getting it all bedazzled & ready!

CESAR: As a musician, the easiest answer is to perform for a live audience. I have always wanted to dress up for shows but never did pre-Covid days, so hopefully I can return with a bang and dress up for shows. I’ve always thought Sigourney Weaver as Gozer in Ghostbusters was so Bowie-if-he-was-possessed-by-a-demon-while-also-just-having-stepped-out-of-a-bubble-bath, so I’d like to channel that.

TOMO: I'm looking forward to my first show with my full band. I just got a mint green suit with matching tie and shoes to fully live out my K-pop idol fantasy.

Courtesy Tomo
NAA: I would love to visit a play or a small intimate concert in a tailored suit created out of kente cloth with adinkra symbols stitched in with intention.

What item of clothing or ensemble are you most excited to show the world?

ADÉ: A black fishtail evening gown with floor-length cape sleeves. Paired with a big statement necklace and statement belt!

A little something like this. Courtesy Ade
JACKIE: I've been going around nude so much, I haven't given it much thought. Speaking of nude, I was on the E Line bus & this dirty old man was undressing me with his eyes! At first I was disgusted, but then I thought about all the exotic places he would take me. Tunisia, Tahiti, Tukwila, E Marginal way S. I became wild with passion.

CESAR: I really like bolo ties and have so many that I underutilized in the Before Times that I think I’m going to use more often. That and wearing more crop tops this summer.

NAA: My brown dress shoes. I feel they force me to be as versatile as I can.

If you went out in “costume” every day, what would you dress as?

TARA: Well my friend, Max, he got me this fantastic outfit— it's a flamingo costume. That’s going out on the town. Also I'm just going to mention here that I'm so excited that Trendy Wendy has opened back up on Broadway.

The suit. Sarah Galvin
CESAR: I’ve always wanted to wear an outfit that pop stars wear at big concerts.

TOMO: A fully functioning adult.

NAA: I would wear the black Green Lantern costume.

Who do you imagine as an audience when you're trying on something you just got that you love?

TARA: My audience is pretty much anyone who comes over. If there's ever an awkward silence for like a minute, I put on that flamingo costume!

ADÉ: I don’t think about who’s going to see it. I just want to wear it!

JACKIE: People with tons of cold, hard cash! Ready to hand over those tips! Oh, and I really like Hawaiian cops.

CESAR: I like to imagine walking down a busy city street and turning heads as I walk down the middle of the road while everyone around me sings Andy Gibb’s song "I Just Want to Be Your Everything," but instead of them saying "I, I, I, I just want to be your everything," they are saying, "Ce-sar I just want to be your everything," in that classic Bee Gees falsetto.

TOMO: A million Zoom meetings.

NAA: It’s a step-by-step process: I am my first audience member, then my wife, and then I hope I’ve done right by my fashionable ancestors who have come before me when I step outside.

Who is your personal style idol?

TARA: Peggy Nolan, Andre 3000, my friend Michael McKinney, and Lil Kim.

ADÉ: My grandmother.

JACKIE: That crazy lady on Broadway with teased-up hair, wearing sweats & high heels.

CESAR: I don’t know, I guess I’ve always liked how Tom Waits dressed in Down By Law. Those black leather boots with the metal tips are just something else!

TOMO: The Master from Midnight Diner

NAA: My personal style idols are various people, so I’d say the pictures I’ve seen of my mother’s father (sharp and classic), traditional clothing in West Africa, and 1990’s hip hop looks.

Where do you look for inspiration?

ADÉ: Everywhere. Old Hollywood, fashion through the ages, music, visual art, photography, Pinterest.

JACKIE: I look in the alleys, taverns, Aurora Avenue...

CESAR: The new Tik Tok teen, obviously.

TOMO: Japanese dramas.

NAA: I look for inspiration in comfort, color, and design.

If you listen to music while getting dressed to go out, what do you most often choose?

TARA: I never tire of “Brand New Key” by Melanie, “My Time” by Ann Steel and Roberto Cacciapaglia, or “Walk On” by Dionne Warwick.

ADÉ: Brazilian jazz or disco!

JACKIE: "Hell Awaits" by Slayer.

CESAR: ABBA or Bee Gees these days. Can you tell that I just watched that new Bee Gees documentary?? Though that probably doesn’t represent how I end up looking. Also 1970s pop.

TOMO: Robyn.

NAA: I usually listen to afrobeat music to hype me up.

What article of clothing or aesthetic element seen as a necessity by our culture at large do you wish would just die?

ADÉ: Baseball caps and sports jerseys.

JACKIE: Undergarments! I wore my daughter's underpants as a face mask by accident one day. So embarrassing! Do away with it all!

CESAR: I don’t have much of an opinion on that, but I do wish plaid shorts that hang lower than your knees and flip-flops as a combo would die.

TOMO: Self-consciousness.

NAA: I’m not sure what article of clothing or aesthetic element should die, but I hope whatever we are led to believe is a necessity for us to look good should be obsolete.

Do you think people should be able to go naked in public?

ADÉ: Absolutely!

JACKIE: Absolutely! It's time to bring out the nude you!

CESAR: Sure, I wouldn’t mind as long as they’re mindful of other people’s space.

TOMO: Sure, if they're vaccinated.

NAA: I think there should be more places that allow folks to be free physically.

The Time I Caught a Garter Snake and Brought It Home

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 11 Apr 2018 04:00:00 -0700

Reptiles are the John Waters movie of pets. by Sarah Galvin

I spent most of my free time as a kid at the Evergreen Washelli cemetery. There weren't many parks in the Aurora neighborhood in the 1990s.

With our two dogs, Jack and Pirate, my dad, my brother, and I would play tag and hide-and-seek among the blackberry bushes and swampy duck ponds. I loved the dogs, but my dad was really the mammal guy. I adored reptiles. I had anole lizards and turtles. I raised an African tortoise from golf-ball-size to hula-hoop-size. My thing for reptiles is not surprising—they are the John Waters movie of pets.

My favorite activities in the cemetery were picking blackberries and catching garter snakes. The snakes bit hard enough to draw blood, and made a terrible smell in defense when I grabbed them, but their teeth were tiny and venom-less and didn't scare me one bit. I had a terrarium furnished with sand, driftwood, warm lights, and store-bought crickets and mealworms. It was basically a snake hotel. I knew the snakes loved freedom, so I kept the ones I caught only a month or so.

One day, out with the dogs, I caught an enormous garter snake, at least two feet long. It was uncharacteristically lethargic, lying on a warm rock near an empty grave. The snake was also noticeably lumpy, and when I showed my prize to my mom, she urged me to let it go immediately. She didn't tell me until much later that she'd worried it had cancer. She knew how attached I became to my pets.

After I pleaded, she let me keep it. One night a few weeks later, a rustling sound in the terrarium woke me up. The snake was wiggling in a way I had never seen a snake move. A tiny snake, the size of an earthworm, slid onto the sand. It broke through what looked like the yolk of an egg, except it was clear, to find a comfortable spot under the heat lamp.

The snake I'd caught was giving birth. One glossy, sparkly-eyed baby slid out after another. The babies gathered under the lamp to dry off. It was so exciting, it felt like Christmas morning, but it was too late to wake anyone up.

The next day, I brought the babies tiny crickets and water. I looked around the terrarium for eggshells, but as it turns out, garter snakes do live birth. It was one of the coolest things I've ever seen. I felt like some kind of snake uncle.

The following week, I went on vacation. When we got home, four of the baby snakes, along with the mother, had escaped into the house. We didn't know where they were. I looked everywhere, imagining them in the walls—but hoping, if I didn't find them, that they had at least made it outside.

A few days after that, I woke up to shrieking.

The snakes had climbed into an empty suitcase, and when my mother opened it, they burst out like some Indiana Jones scenario.

We let them go after that, setting them out in the yard, except the mother snake, which I released in the cemetery where I found her. I did hold on to one baby snake, which I kept in a tiny cricket-furnished terrarium in my tree house. I was pretty sure it wouldn't be allowed in the house after the suitcase incident.

Garter snakes live up to 20 years. You might have seen my guests in your garden.

My First Time Proposing and Being Proposed To

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 21 Jun 2017 04:00:00 -0700

The night my girlfriend proposed to me was also my first time doing poppers by Sarah Galvin

When I first visited the Double Header four years ago, I immediately noticed the logging equipment and yellowed photos decorating the walls, but I was a couple beers in before I noticed something familiar about the logging-town-era women in the photos, something I associate with a sense of belonging, and catharsis, and waking up during Pride weekend in an unfamiliar apartment wearing only a mink stole and Sharpie drawings of cocks. These women of yore were drag queens, from an era when drag queens were called "female impersonators," and I had wandered into the oldest continuously operating gay bar on the West Coast.

That night, the clientele seemed mainly to be residents of the Mission shelter across the street, either not in drag or passing very well, but the second time I stopped by it was full of bears. The place's level and flavor of queerness seemed to vary greatly. The night I met Mary Anne, I have no idea who was there besides her. I'd experienced immediate attraction before, usually inspired by asses that appear to be violently dominating whatever hopeless garment tries to contain them, but never had that been mixed with awe. I had been actively avoiding dating, and even actively avoiding perfect asses, but this was like a hit-and-run by Venus fleeing a DUI.

In a cape and gold-embroidered pillbox hat, she looked like goth Audrey Hepburn in a John Waters movie. It felt like I was seeing the work of my favorite artist for the first time—which I was; Mary Anne is, among many things, a clothing designer. One after another, she put my favorite songs on the jukebox. When she and her friends got up to leave, I knew I had to approach her, but not what I could possibly say to such a person. The friend I was out with suggested I write her a note, so I wrote, "You have great style and your taste in music is impeccable," on a coaster with my number.

I still think that night we encountered a distillation of the Double Header's decades of queer romance, as if its final drag show suddenly manifested itself as a relationship. To my surprise, Mary Anne texted me later that night saying that she had a partner but that she would like to come to my reading at City Hall the next day. We quickly discovered everything she does for fun I do for work and vice versa—I write books of poetry, she designed poetry book covers for Ugly Duckling; I explore abandoned buildings, she's the marketing and outreach director of a salvage yard. Both of us consider throwing parties an art form. I posted on Facebook, "I think I just met the girl version of me," and two weeks later she had keys to my apartment.

Gem and Sterling (THEIR REAL NAMES, AAAAH) are a couple of guys who had been happily married for 51 years when they gave me some advice: Don't go out looking for the love of your life, and pay close attention to the way you feel when you first meet anyone. Five or even three years ago I'd have told you love at first sight is a lie fabricated by Hugh Grant's teeth—but I knew when I saw Mary Anne that if she loved me, I would marry her.

About a year into our relationship, "Will you marry me?" became a question we exchanged at least once a day, and when it was clear both of us really meant it, sometimes also, "Was that the real time?" We decided roughly when we wanted "the real time" to be, and that we both wanted to propose (my favorite improvement queers have made to the American wedding tradition).

Both of us love elaborate dates—in the first weeks of our romance, I took her to a rooftop overlooking downtown where we drank Sofia Coppola (the canned pink champagne that comes with a bendy straw) and listened to Roy Orbison through a shared pair of headphones. She took me on a "Haunted/Holy Date," which involved a Catholic mass, a surprise picnic on the waterfront, a cocktail in a glass skull at the Hideout, and bottle rockets in a tiny park overlooking Lake Washington. That was the best date I've ever been on. Absolutely anything was possible. I wanted my proposal to celebrate that feeling and my hope for its indefinite continuation.

The Double Header shut down about a year after we met. Though it had become one of our favorite bars, we sensed the end approaching. There were rarely more than five other patrons, it often closed at 10 p.m., and the floor-rattling bass from the dance club below drew attention to how quiet the place was. This of course was sad, but the fact that there are places in the world where queer spaces are no longer necessitated by persecution is one of the very few things these days that suggest to me humans are still evolving.

As middle-school teachers, Gem and Sterling didn't even go out to bars when they were young because if they were outed they'd lose their jobs. Mary Anne and I could sit in an Olive Garden squeezing each other's boobs and everyone would just keep eating breadsticks. But that's exactly why we need places like the Double Header and the Eagle—they're places to celebrate our heritage and the people who made our freedom possible.

My excitement when I found out the Double Header had been bought by the owners of another queer drinking hole, Re-bar (the Double Header will soon reopen as a joint called Night Jar), was surpassed only when they agreed to let a bunch of my friends in during the remodel, for my proposal. On the anniversary of the day we met, I took Mary Anne for drinks at the Smith Tower while my friends hid in the dark bar behind the newspapers covering the windows. I was so nervous as we approached that I got a nosebleed. When I tried to get on one knee, I lost control of my legs and flopped onto the ground. As she put on my ring, our friends poured out of the bar throwing flowers and googly eyes and pregnancy tests. My friend Bree distributed witch hats, and somebody passed around a vial of poppers. A guy who'd frequented the Double Header during its heyday said, "This makes me so happy—I haven't smelled poppers outside this place in years." I inhaled a big face-warming hit, taking communion in the church of Jean Genet and John Rechy and Eileen Myles, all the brave outlaws and the moldy corners their love set fire to. We drank champagne and shot off bottle rockets and Mary Anne's great-aunt mistook the poppers for flower essences (don't worry, she was fine).

Considering Mary Anne dressed up like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and sprayed me with a Super Soaker of whiskey on my birthday when we'd only known each other a month, I had absolutely no idea what form her proposal would take or when it would happen. Though I thought about it all the time, she still managed to blindside me.

I thought I was going to a Twin Peaks viewing party, but when I arrived no one was there but our friends Kevin and Jasmine, who told me Mary Anne went out to get snacks. After a few minutes we heard a roaring sound mixed with faint music. It sounded like a parade going by. "What is that?" said Kevin. "Is it coming from outside?" I'd been to Kevin's many times, but when we got up to investigate the noise I noticed a room of the apartment I had never seen before. I thought it might be a door to the hallway. Was there a party across the hall? All I could see inside were candles and balloon animals. I became convinced that this was either a stroke or the onset of my first ocular migraine. I stepped through the door to find Mary Anne, a hot-pink eight-foot-tall inflatable tube man of the kind often found in used car lots flailing behind her, and a radio playing a kids' brass band rendition of "Mambo Number 5." A Roomba circled the heart-shaped rug that said "Will you marry me too?" where she stood. We alternated between kissing and shrieking for the rest of the evening.

I'm thankful every day to live in a time and place where I don't have to hide in a special bar to dance with the woman I love, but I still wish I could go to the Double Header circa 1960, and there's nowhere I'd rather our romance have begun. When a place has enough stories associated with it, it becomes mythological. Each new story made in such a place inherits the power of the ones that preceded it. I think love is all about the creation of mythology: I had no doubt, kissing Mary Anne under that flailing tube man, that we are supposed to be in the same story. When I was panicking one night because even when you marry someone the story ends sometime, Mary Anne said, "This is forever. We're in forever right now," and it was the first time just existing had ever been enough for me.

Happy Hours for People Who Are a Little Old Man on the Inside

Sarah Galvin — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 04:00:00 -0700

Three of My Favorite Dives in Seattle—with Happy Hours by Sarah Galvin

The Streamline Tavern

174 Roy St, 206-283-0519

While I've enjoyed trying Seattle's new array of kale-infused tequilas, I will always be a beer and shot guy. That's why it delights me when an old favorite like the Streamline perseveres and flourishes amidst polished, soulless condo construction. I first visited the Streamline in its original home at 121 West Mercer Street, where it had been in operation since the 1950s. A red-and-yellow sign of that vintage, lightly streaked with rust, announced the motes of cheap beer and sweat and the crowds of good company to be found within. The place was unassuming, with vinyl seats and six decades of stories.

When I stopped by one night to find the Streamline's windows covered with newspaper, I was quickly relieved to hear it had just moved a few blocks east to 174 Roy Street. That night, the bar seemed lifeless in comparison to what I remembered, but when I returned to the Streamline recently for "Tallboy Tuesday," when tall cans of Rainier are $2 all night, I was happy to see the spirit of the bar had totally recovered from the move. Happy hour is every day from 4–7 p.m., with $3.50 well drinks and $4 drafts.

A lot of work went into the Streamline's preservation. Owners Mike Lewis and Mary McIntyre actually carried the original central bar island and wood paneling down the street to its new home. The tapestry of dogs playing poker I remembered from the old location was back, and pinball machines glowed in every corner. Above the pinball: a mural of the Kalakala blasting through space. During happy hour, a beer and shot are $6 and a basket of veggie sliders and fries from the downstairs kitchen are the same price. Cardboard-and-Sharpie signs halo the kitchen window, displaying a menu of classics—chicken strips, hot dogs, carnitas, and wings, among others—along with the words "Cash only, punks," and "Amazon go home."

The Streamline passed the one really meaningful test of a bar's worth: Within an hour, my girlfriend and I had met someone as weird as us. We approached each other without any real effort and talked for the rest of the night.

Bernard's on Seneca

315 Seneca St, 206-623-5110

The Hotel Seattle could be another Sorrento if it were maintained a little better. The Hotel Seattle experience is foreshadowed by the description on the website: "Hotel Seattle has 85 smartly appointed guest rooms, some of which are newly renovated... Many of our rooms also contain mini refrigerators." "Some." "Many." But just as it's more exciting to find a priceless work of art in a grandparent's basement than in a museum, encountering such an unkempt piece of old, old Seattle is a unique thrill. When the Hotel Seattle was built, Seattle was the Wild West, and it still feels that way at the doorstep of the hotel's bar, Bernard's.

Stepping into Bernard's, you immediately feel free of a supervision you weren't even aware of prior to parting its heavy wooden doors. Is it the carpet? What bar is carpeted these days? It's a little gross but mostly liberating, hearkening back to Sir Mix-A-Lot's Seattle. "I have seen two middle-aged people furiously making out at 5 p.m. in a very well-lit booth," says friend and Bernard's aficionado Willie Fitzgerald. "Groping, lip-smacking, full-blown middle-school makeout. At least one of the bartenders has a stare so withering that once she fixed it on me, I don't think I was capable of sexual arousal for two days." Wild West.

Drinks are always delightfully cheap and strong, but at happy hour, 4:30–7 p.m. on weekdays, wells are $2.50, drafts are $4, and a rotating selection of happy hour snacks, like pretzels, onion rings, and garlic bread, are free. (The kitchen makes a tray of such snacks when happy hour begins, and when the tray is eaten, that's the end of that. First come, first served.) Oddly, Bernard's is closed on weekends except for Saturday brunch. When I called to confirm hours, the person on the phone said they open at "6 every weekday."

"PM?" I asked.

"No, AM."

So there's that.

Everything is brass, dark wood, and leather, and the bartenders call you "hon" without a trace of irony. Presiding over the dining/drinking area is a medieval mural of mythological beasts and royalty in ornately patterned tunics. It's a place that feels best when you're dressed to the nines in tweed and silk, with a nice cigar in your coat pocket. You'll see one or two others dressed the same, as if after work at some office job 40 years ago, they decided never to go home again and have been wandering from bar to bar looking amazing ever since.

The Waterwheel

7034 15th Ave NW, 206-784-5701

"Better than you'd expect" is the slogan of the Waterwheel, a place that appears to have been constructed by pioneers and decorated by the set designer of Barbarella. It's built out of enormous hardwood beams, shower curtains, and Astroturf. On one occasion, many years ago, I stopped into the Waterwheel to find an antiquated vacuum cleaner hanging out of a hole in the bathroom ceiling.

"Better than you'd expect" was exactly what I thought when I had dinner there during 4–7 p.m. happy hour the other night. Wells are $3, drafts are $3, and cheap beers are $2—nothing to sneeze at, but what was really better than I expected was the food. It was better than a variety of places I've been that served only food. A $9 quesadilla was stuffed with noticeably fresh zucchini, corn, and peppers immersed in melted cheese, and served with a paper ramekin of equally fresh salsa. When I saw/smelled $2 elotes cooking in a cast-iron pan—tender corn slathered in crema, cotija cheese, and paprika—I had to add one to my order.

It just so happens there are two happy hours on Sunday, one standard 4–7 p.m. and one 10 p.m.–close. This is also a renowned karaoke spot, starting at 9 p.m. every night. The Waterwheel is dwarfed by the condo under construction next door, but its large Astroturf patio is hard to miss, dotted with games and clusters of neighborhood friends talking and drinking. "What day is it?" asked a guy reclining near a pool table. "Who cares?" his friend replied.

Queer Issue: My Girlfriend and I Just Visited North Carolina, and We Did Not Get Beat Up

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 04:00:00 -0700

My Girlfriend and I Just Visited North Carolina, and We Did Not Get Beat Up—We Even Got to Go to the Bathroom! by Sarah Galvin

When my girlfriend, Mary Anne, suggested I accompany her to Charlotte, North Carolina, to meet her family and help move her childhood things out of her dad's garage, I somehow wasn't listening to the "North Carolina" part.

The only place in the South I'd been was New Orleans, where I had sex with a woman in a pool five feet away from a hot tub where two men were having sex, surrounded by people lying around naked on lawn chairs who didn't care enough to lift their sunglasses. I figured my experience in North Carolina would differ from this scenario, but honestly I hadn't been watching the news. Mary Anne told me Charlotte was like Bellevue, so I imagined it as sort of a fancy strip mall featuring narration by William Faulkner.

Then, of course, I started reading about House Bill 2, a piece of legislation signed by Governor Pat McCrory that went into effect earlier this year and that prevents local municipalities in North Carolina from passing LGBTQ antidiscrimination laws. It also infamously requires trans people to use the bathroom corresponding to the gender assigned to them at birth.

The imaginary strip mall in my mind became populated by heavily armed bigots. "Will we get shot if we hold hands?" I asked Mary Anne.

"We'll be fine," she said. But she also said, "You never see out queer people there."

I was scared. Growing up in Seattle, I've never had to be careful. My biggest fear when I came out at 14 was that I would have to wear clogs. I imagined absentmindedly kissing Mary Anne in a Charlotte Olive Garden parking lot and getting beaten and raped by some investment banker in a Confederate flag–draped Hummer. (My apologies to the good investment bankers of the world—bear in mind, this scenario in my imagination also involved commentary by a long-dead author who never even lived in North Carolina.)

As a mostly male person in a woman's body, the big issue for me was bathrooms. I usually use men's rooms—I figure if I'm going to get stared at anyway, I'll use the pisser whose decor looks best with my shoes. I pass well enough that my presence in women's rooms alarms some women, but not well enough to completely avoid the same alarm from cis men when I use men's rooms.

I didn't know where I would be able to excrete anything in North Carolina. What if I used the women's room but (given how I dress) ended up scaring a conservative woman and had to show my cunt to a security guard just to get myself out of a legal cesspool and his own rapey power trip? What if I used the men's room and some cis guy tried to "put me in my place," desperately bolstering masculinity he defined by one fragile body part?

My one idea: What if we just tried to pass as a straight couple the whole time?

I wondered what my grandpa would do. Having never known the guy as an adult, it's easy for me to think of him—a man who held hands with Martin Luther King Jr. in a civil rights march and who, as a psychiatrist, was not afraid to hug gay AIDS patients when even their families wouldn't go near them—as an ideal male role model. Realistic me knows he adhered to fragile American gender roles as much as any Hummer driver, and that he was a fucking maniac. If someone outside a bathroom demanded he drop his pants, he'd have pulled a .45 and blown their brains out. That is not the kind of American I want America to consist of—but in his spirit of fierce individualism, I decided to be myself completely on this trip unless my life or someone else's depended on hiding. As I got on a plane with the love of my life at 3 a.m., I thought of him playing pirates with me at an age when most people wanted to know why I wasn't wearing a dress. I resolved to be brave.

At the Common Market, a bar, cafe, and grocery store in a Charlotte neighborhood called Plaza Midway (which seemed to be an appealingly catch-all subculture gathering place), the signs on the bathroom doors were labeled "whichever," their emblems each a stick person wearing half a dress. Someone had drawn Prince symbols on both, and glued Bernie Sanders's face over one of them. I was stunned. Metal kids smoked with the local yoga crowd out front, and the back patio had an impressive wooden canopy decorated with tapestries and crocheted potholders. A sculpture of steel flames rose over the back gate, above a flower garden. Graffiti included a green mandala and the word "wanker" splashed in drippy purple.

After a stop at a pirate-themed bar called Snug Harbor, we drove through Mary Anne's old neighborhood, full of McMansions. I had a powerful urge to pee on the lawns of these ugly wastes of resources. Mary Anne thought this was funny, but was too surrounded by former neighbors to encourage it.

I thought Mary Anne and I would be afraid to express physical affection in public, but nothing happened that even made us think twice. We kissed and held hands in the aisles of Belk, a department store whose slogan is "modern southern style." I bought a perfectly fitting boys' seersucker suit for $50. The cashier called me "sir/ma'am," and the casual and consistent way the words ran together suggested she actually gave less of a fuck about whether I was either or both than some employees in Seattle department stores. We exchanged retail horror stories with another clerk, laughing about people pissing in dressing rooms and littering floors with king-sized boxes of Goobers with all the chocolate sucked off.

One night, we went looking for gay bars. A supposed lesbian bar called L4, whose website advertised a '90s faux-futuristic aesthetic comparable to Man Ray (RIP), was closed at 10 p.m., if it was ever open. A bar called the Station was also closed. Next door was the Plaza Midwood Country Club, with a sign that said "members only," though they were happy to serve us. Inside, people played pool and watched sports on enormous flat-screen TVs. We were told the Station used to be a gay bar, but is no longer.

In the parking lot, we met a young woman who was really into being Wiccan, a tall black guy in jogging gear, and an elderly plaid-wearing white guy who loved birds and reminded me of my dad. When I told him my dad shared his interest in bird-watching, he actually ran into the bar to tell his wife he wasn't the only one. I mentioned that I planned to write that North Carolina appeared to be populated by friendly people, no more bigoted than Seattleites, whose local government was failing them, and they agreed with that. When my plans to move in with Mary Anne came up, all three congratulated us.

We heard a drag night was going on at Snug Harbor, so we had to go back. The place was packed. I was surprised that the drag queens were exclusively cis women, but femme drag is awesome, and it was definitely a queer party. It was more intersectional than any queer party I've seen in Seattle. Young danced with old; people of every ethnicity crowding the stage when Peaches' "Fuck the Pain Away" came on. One woman was there with her mom. A guy approached me and Mary Anne just to tell us we're a beautiful couple. I noticed less kissing and hand-holding and people in leather dog masks exchanging blowjobs on pool tables than one sees at Seattle parties, which caused me to wonder if Mary Anne and I had been less cautious in public than we should have been.

At one point, the DJ stopped the music to talk about the recent changes in Charlotte. The gist of his speech was that the new and old residents should be good to each other, and that, after all, they had gathered to have a fun party. There was a roaring toast and the dancing resumed. Though moved by his words, it was clear no one present needed encouragement.

From there we hurried to our first official gay bar, which oddly would be closing at 11 p.m. It had magenta curtains and I think a disco ball, though as I'd been going hard for several hours, it may just have been a really sparkly shot glass. We drank with a guy in dramatic lavender makeup and a floor-length mink coat. He complained of being eighty-sixed from a gay bar for using the women's room while in drag, which no one present could make sense of. We made our way to a nearby metal bar where we closed out the evening getting pool lessons from a group of guys who were dressed like bros but acted like they'd known us forever. It struck me that the language of style is different in every city—every outfit a subtle description of identity conveyed by combinations of garments. As I'm reminded of the music of language by the sound of languages I don't know, in Charlotte I was reminded of the benefits of not reading too much into appearances.

We saw bros again later at a place called Angry Ales, but this heavily-tattooed-linebacker variety of bros made Seattle bros look like crystal swan figurines in backward baseball caps. These North Carolina bros were much quieter, but the stares seemed meaner. "These are, like, bankers," said Mary Anne's friend from high school. "They just graduated from college and are making a lot of money. This is a high-end place." I dared not use the men's room. There were two women's rooms, "divas" and "dames." Deciding that a diva is basically an extra-feminine dandy, I used that one.

A gas station outside Raleigh was the first place I used a men's bathroom. Men stared, nothing happened, Mary Anne and I drank Red Bulls and continued on our way. We saw a dude in a truck with a Confederate flag license plate and a guy on a motorcycle wearing a Nazi military helmet. We passed ancient, decrepit tin-roofed farmhouses (which brought Faulkner to mind again). I wanted to meet Civil War soldiers, or at least buy a switchblade from one of the pawnshops emblazoned with silhouettes of rifles. The hypermasculinity of the place appealed to my own gender identity in a confusing way, though I knew my identification as a man would be seen as a threat here.

I was simultaneously disgusted by the obvious bigotry and celebration of violence I saw (gun shops abounded) and excited by Wild West danger and adventure. I hated the idea of hurting anyone, yet recalled with great fondness my grandpa's shooting lessons, which seemed a celebration of life and its brevity. I wanted to hold the scary guy on the motorcycle and the old guys having a Bootsy Collins dance party in a parking lot and the man in the pickup with the Confederate flag plate—I wanted us all to love each other and revel in our similarities, and tears slid down my face at the impossibility of that childish wish. I hoped at least that none of them would kill each other as my girlfriend and I sped by beneath the pines.

The next gas station bathroom I used deserves mention—there were signs all around the women's room saying "WOMEN ONLY, NO EXCEPTIONS." No such signs surrounded the men's room, so I peed in the men's room. Perhaps they don't know transmasculine people exist? I thought.

After dinner in Raleigh with Mary Anne's dad and her brother at a vegetarian restaurant, the first place I'd seen openly queer people since Snug Harbor, Mary Anne and I went for a nightcap at Hooters, out of a combination of morbid curiosity and both being dirty old men. Tables of guys shared wings, couples watched TV, and one woman sat there looking distinctly stood up. I wanted to buy her a conciliatory drink but worried the gesture would be misinterpreted. In the parking lot, I asked to buy a cigarette from a young couple. "We'll just give one to you," said the woman.

"Those things are expensive," I said. "Are you sure?"

"Don't be black," she replied, handing me a Newport menthol.

"I was being equitable?" I said. Mutual stares ensued. We left.

The next morning was a Mother's Day celebration for Mary Anne's grandma, Grandmerrie, whose first words to me over the phone at Christmas had been "I love you." I expected tension from a certain Mother's Day guest, a relative of Mary Anne's we'll call Cotton. Sure enough, Cotton brought up HB2 before we even sat down to brunch. "I just don't want any little girls getting molested," he said.

"What's to stop that from happening now?" said Mary Anne. "A door?"

"A door and a cop," said Cotton.

"Cotton," I said, "imagine you, just as you are right now, in a woman's body. You'd feel uncomfortable using the women's room, wouldn't you?"

"Yeah," he said.

"This is my life," I said. "I don't feel any more comfortable being forced into a traditionally feminine role than you would."

He seemed to consider that. I wanted to get into how the binary is a crock of shit anyway, and had I really wanted to play hardball, I'd have mentioned little boys were no less likely to be molested than girls, but this day was about Grandmerrie, so I abandoned the conversation and devoted my attention to her, whose enduring beauty is a testament to the cosmetic powers of love and gentleness.

Later, Grandmerrie took Mary Anne, Aunt Emma, and me to mother-daughter tea at the spiritual center she frequents. There was a queer priest, a real witch with a coven (one of the coolest surprises about NC was the apparently large population of witches), and a wide variety of ideologies, ages, and professions. I was touched that Grandmerrie included me, and by her unconditional value of Mary Anne's happiness. She had recently learned to text and, touchingly, often included the women holding hands emoji in her messages to Mary Anne. This women-only space didn't make me uncomfortable—the part of me that is female felt celebrated. So many spaces designed "for" women are a thinly veiled means of controlling them. This event, designed by women, made me feel comfortable with my binary-smashing gender identity and closer to my new family.

Later, we returned to the small Raleigh arts district, on Person Street, where Emma runs a hair salon. Mary Anne and I talked about the way Mother's Day had gone. She explained that in the South, your options are either to abandon the culture you are raised in or to create your own culture by starting a liberal business like Emma (who surrounds herself with like-minded people and answers to no one but herself) or moving to Seattle and becoming an artist like Mary Anne.

It must be terrifying, I thought, being from a place like North Carolina—you conform regardless of your identity, personality, and desires, or essentially face exile from your loved ones, community, everything you came out of. I felt an uncomfortable pang of sympathy for bigots who have spent their lives in fear, struggling to conform, often aware they are something entirely different than who they are forced to present to the world.

The funniest (and hottest) part of the trip was when Mary Anne and I re-created the iconic photo of the sailor home from war, dipping a beautiful girl for a kiss, in front of North Carolina's state capitol. No one was around except for a young couple with a baby who looked like they'd just come from church. We were half-drunk and wearing mostly clothing we bought from a goth taxidermist. We thought the whole scenario was hilarious. Despite the cameras and the cars going by, we couldn't resist taking topless photos in front of Governor Pat McCrory's mansion. I would have expected this to be a scary endeavor—we were in Mordor—but we'd just come from a bar full of North Carolina citizens who felt the same way about McCrory that we did, and I was certain if my grandpa had tits, he would have done exactly the same thing (probably while waving an AK-47 over his head).

Engrossed in conversation on the way back to Charlotte, we didn't notice we were nearly out of gas. We figured out there was a gas station three miles away, only to discover an empty parking lot where the gas station should be. It was very dark by now. Fat bugs slapped loudly against the windshield. About every 10 blocks was an old farmhouse or a double-wide. There was something profoundly creepy about the place, which was called "Jonesville," too close in both of our minds to Jonestown and its massacre. There were more churches than houses. A billboard looming over the two-lane arterial read "Marriage = one man + one woman."

On the way to what we desperately hoped was a functional gas station, we discussed what to do if we got stuck out here. Normally it would be safer to knock on a door together, but having no way to know whether the residents of that area shared the billboard's sentiment, we decided it would be safest for femme Mary Anne to do the talking while I watched, ready to call 911.

When we saw the lights of a Shell station ahead, we embraced. It was open. We were going to be fine. The building the gas station was in also housed a church, a law office, and a live bait shop. We couldn't get out of there fast enough.

On the plane home, we talked about how weird it was that the scariest moment of our trip was essentially in our heads. Had I been alone, I might have thought, "Well, there are billboards with delusional right-wing messages on them in Seattle; who's to say I have more to fear here?" But I was with someone who grew up in North Carolina, whose intuition told her something really bad might happen if the car broke down.

My overall impression of North Carolina was that few people seemed to have what they actually wanted, or even to be aware that they could want something. There are people living a "traditional" lifestyle, which seems to involve the inclusion of big corporations in every aspect of life, and striving for "normalcy" based on biblical values. Then there are people like the DJ at Snug Harbor, or my girlfriend who, after 13 years of Catholic school, moved to Seattle, started making art, and now plans to marry a genderqueer person at a ceremony officiated by a vacuum wearing a gold wig and googly eyes.

I suspect the bigots, the Pat McCrorys of the world, have lived lives grotesquely contorted by this iron maiden of "normalcy" and by the fear of losing every comfort and relationship if they fail to squeeze into it. They lash out, trying to punish those who have had the courage to escape, or people like me who have had the unbelievable luck of being born free in a place like Seattle.

These hateful people do not represent the average citizen of North Carolina. No one I spoke to could figure out how McCrory and the other politicians in favor of HB2 even got into office, though "gerrymandering" was a word I heard a lot. The way people behaved to me and Mary Anne, even those who encountered us drunkenly squeezing each other's boobs through shirts covered in hush-puppy crumbles, reflected the desires of every human—for connection, friendship, and love.

While I was in Raleigh, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch officially condemned HB2 and announced the federal government would sue the state of North Carolina. "None of us can stand by when a state enters the business of legislating identity and insists that a person pretend to be something they are not," said Lynch. "No matter how isolated or scared you may feel today, the Department of Justice and the entire Obama administration wants you to know that we see you, we stand with you, and we will do everything we can to protect you moving forward."

Doesn't that fill you with pride for our country? I was shocked at the directness and moral correctness of this address to the trans community. The good news is that the forces of bigotry and fear are rapidly weakening. Mary Anne speculates that HB2 was a panicked response to widespread positive change—in the South, gender roles are a big deal, she explained, and it would make sense that a threat to something so crucial to a large number of people's validation would incite a backlash. Emma told us that an article has been circulating in Raleigh that explains the idea of gender as a spectrum in a way that people are receptive to. If I'd spent my life stifling my desires and denying my own identity for an ideology now crumbling before my eyes, I'd be panicking too. All over the United States—all over the world—it's sinking in that people no longer have to be isolated and scared. They can be who they really are, and be loved.

Moonlight Cafe's Vegetarian Sesame "Beef" Has a Magnetic Pull on Me

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 04:00:00 -0700

Moonlight Cafe's Vegetarian Sesame "Beef" Has a Magnetic Pull on Me by Sarah Galvin

I've eaten Moonlight Cafe's vegetarian sesame beef with varying frequency for a decade. When I lived for $300 a month in a punk house with a few DIY bands, I was taken on a date to Moonlight, where I discovered its vegetable-protein alchemy. Even Burger King now has "vegetarian options," but nearly every item on the menu at Moonlight is available vegetarian (including lobster!). At the time of my first visit, I was so poor that I subsisted on premade burritos found in the dumpster, but Moonlight Cafe soon became my weekly treat to myself. Lunch specials there were (and are) affordable even on movie-theater wages. Now that I live in the International District, Moonlight Cafe is only a few blocks from my apartment. My bike lists in the direction of Moonlight as I ride by; I think it's the magnetic pull of that perfectly seasoned gluten.

Moonlight Cafe is a Vietnamese restaurant on Jackson and 20th, bearing a delightful resemblance to the geometrical designs on kids' notebooks from the early 1990s. More than one of its neon signs advertise karaoke, but if you ask anyone there when karaoke happens, they stare at you like you're insane. Still, the raised floor on one side of the dining area was clearly once a stage. It wouldn't matter what kind of entertainment they offered—I go for the sesame beef.

I tend to get obsessed with certain foods. My first food obsession was peanut butter and jelly on toast. I ate that (with a rotating selection of chips and fruit snacks) every day for lunch from second grade until sixth. I recently ate the same banh mi every day for two weeks. Even when one of these special items falls out of my normal rotation, it joins an index of things I am ready to eat at any time for any reason. Oddly, I'm not picky. I'll try anything—jackfruit, fried crickets—but for me, some things are just perfect, sliding into place like culinary puzzle pieces. Moonlight Cafe's sesame "beef" is one of those things.

It could probably be seductive to anyone, but it's particularly seductive to vegetarians. Any vegetarian who's suffered through weird burned vegetable skewers at every barbecue forever, pining for the source of that barbecue smell but grossed out by meat's gristle and fat lumps, should try it.

The dark, juicy pile of "beef," with a reddish tint that screams "eat me" to the core of the reptile brain, is served on a bed of crisp shredded lettuce, green onions, cucumber slices, and steamed broccoli. Mushy broccoli is nauseating, undercooked broccoli forces the jaw to work like a goat's, but somehow this broccoli is always exactly the right texture. Each tender, slightly chewy bite of beef is bedazzled with sesame seeds as visually appealing as the stripes of sauce that zigzag across plates in fancy restaurants. The way they feel on my tongue makes me want another bite immediately, even after 10 years of them.

As addictive as the sesame beef may be, I knew that if I liked one thing that much, I'd be stupid not to explore the rest of the menu. I've since tried Moonlight's fried rice with egg rolls and grilled "pork," their Mongolian "beef," and their soups. The pho dac biet chay should not be neglected. It's superior to average veggie pho because rather than just a few tofu strips, it contains a parade of veggie meats including veggie mini chicken ham. This is the protein in all of the dishes labeled "chicken," and in my opinion, it is the crown jewel of glutens, the vegetarian equivalent of the prize goose in A Christmas Carol. It soaks up flavor like tofu and tastes like both chicken and ham—the same way cold cuts do, without any of the concerns raised by cold cuts, such as "How many animal anuses am I eating right now?" When I ate at Moonlight Cafe with my uncle, he swore he had accidentally ordered real pork—but he hadn't.

This brings me to the only Moonlight Cafe caveat I'm aware of. If you are a meat eater, you may be underwhelmed. I've heard this from a few carnivores who've dined with me there. It isn't because the meat dishes are inferior to the "meat" dishes in any way, it's just that meat eaters are used to the variety of proteins that make Moonlight so particularly special for vegetarians.

Besides on a first date (the food is hearty but mostly shaped in such a way it won't get all over your face), the best way to eat at Moonlight Cafe is high out of your mind. I used to hallucinate every time I smoked cannabis, so I feared stoned restaurant outings would be unpleasant, if not impossible. When I began having the hungry/horny/relaxed/uncontrollable-laughter response most people do to weed, I made going out to eat high a goal. Fortunately, my cousin, a favorite fellow drug astronaut, lives across the street from Moonlight, so rather than a potentially stressful planned meal, the first one happened simply because we were high and fucking starving and Moonlight was the closest food source. We levitated across the street with a friend who hadn't smoked in a very long while and made a charming running commentary about how wonderful everything was.

On that trip, I had stir-fried "beef" with cashews and vegetables. It was one of the best dinners of my life. I remember how everything on the plate looked, the steaming fresh broccoli, the fluffy mound of brown rice, the cashews glistening with sauce and oil. I'm not usually able to eat a full Moonlight Cafe entrée with rice in one sitting, but I finished mine and sampled my dining companions' dinners. I could feel my body absorbing the food like a houseplant so thirsty that its leaves visibly unwrinkle the moment water touches the cracked potting soil.

The neon and '90s geometry were surreal, but not in a threatening way—it was like watching Blade Runner or Liquid Sky inside a fleece blanket inside a giant martini. We floated back across the street, at peace with the world.

Inside the Publix Hotel, a Former Single-Room-Occupancy Building in the International District That's Reopening Soon

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 04:00:00 -0800

Inside the Publix Hotel, a Former Single-Room-Occupancy Building in the International District That's Reopening Soon by Sarah Galvin

The six-story Publix Hotel, across the street from Uwajimaya, has stood vacant for years, with a haunted-castle grandeur.

I first noticed it while exploring the International District in high school. It was stained and apparently disintegrating, and pigeons had nested in its ornate metal awning, the etched word "Publix" coated in dirty feathers. Angular Tudor-Gothic ornaments topped a roof that could easily have sheltered a wizard. I'd sometimes get off my bike on the corner of King Street and Fifth Avenue South and look up at its empty windows like you look in someone's eyes when you can't tell what they're thinking about.

Dozens of buildings like the Publix, called single room occupancies (SRO), went up in Seattle in the late 1800s and early 1900s, providing modest accommodations for "workingmen and transient laborers." The Publix was designed by John L. McCauley, architect of a variety of local buildings, most of which no longer exist, according to a report compiled by the National Park Service's Register of Historic Places. Built in 1928, the Publix was owned by Rainier Heat and Power, which operated a steam plant in what is now Uwajimaya's parking lot. Rainier Heat and Power was initially financed by owner William Chappell's Klondike gold-rush spoils. Many SROs are vacant today (ever notice those boarded-up windows above the Comet?), as they are difficult and expensive to renovate, and it's unfashionable in the United States to live in a space the size of a Fisher-Price Playhouse. But they provide affordable urban housing for working-class people—a kind of housing rapidly disappearing in Seattle. I live in an SRO two blocks away.

The original rooms in the Publix were modest, to say the least. "I think the smallest room size I ever saw was in the Publix Hotel," Dr. Marie Wong, an associate professor at Seattle University's Institute of Public Service, said in a recent interview with HistoryLink. "The rooms in that [place] were literally no wider than you could expect to see for a single bed."

Sarah Galvin descends into its basement. Jenny Riffle

Those rooms were priced accordingly, making it possible for low-income people to live in the city without, say, having to rely on designated low-income housing (which didn't exist then). Many vacant SROs are still standing in the International District—easy to overlook because of the busy shops and restaurants at street level. But one of the historically fascinating features of the neighborhood is the number of SROs that are still in use, like the one I've lived in since 2013.

SROs were built for profit. Nonetheless, their existence acknowledged the value—the necessity—of working-class people and their contribution to the economy and culture of Seattle.

Dr. Wong, who is writing a book about SROs, went on to say: "If you look at the history of Seattle—and I'm specifically talking about the residential hotels that were south of the line (and the line was Yesler Way)—that if you look at those hotels, people who lived in them understood diversity in a much broader—and I'm going to say a more holistic—fashion than we understand the word today. They knew the one thing they all had in common—they were poor, they were financially strapped... it was the Chinese and Japanese and Filipino Americans. But the whole area was populated by pockets of Italians, Scandinavians, Germans... prostitutes lived [in] the residential hotels."

As Dr. Wong tells it, the function of SROs changed over time. "Over the years, you start to see less with respect to the hotels being used just for transients and more that the hotels start providing long-term living for very, very low-income individuals. And you also see that the population of those people that were part of a very active labor force, they're all getting older, and so they're not engaging in this kind of work—not just to the canneries but also to agricultural opportunities in Walla Walla. That they're staying now in Seattle because this becomes their home."

That was still the function of the Publix in 2004 when it closed: long-term housing for low-income individuals. It is also the function of the SRO where I currently live, home to veterans, disabled people, artists, and students of diverse ethnicities.

A longtime resident of my building told me that around the time the Publix closed, it was inhabited by "the kind of guys who hang out at Joe's." Joe's is a bar across the street from the Publix. The first thing I heard about Joe's when I moved into the neighborhood was that it was known as the bar people go to fresh out of prison. I like Joe's because of the exceptionally friendly bartenders and because a "beer back" there is a schooner. Owner Jim Davison told me that in the 1920s, Joe's was called Helen's, and then some time in the 1960s, Helen's became the beer-and-wine-only Red Front. To get liquor, you'd go to the greasy spoon on the ground floor of the Publix, which was legally allowed to include a cocktail bar because it served food. He also confirmed the rumor I'd heard that for many years the Publix was men-only, and he remembered watching girlfriends and sex workers climb the fire escapes. When I suggested that was why the fire escapes have little wrought-iron hearts on them, he said, "They had different fire escapes back then."

After being obsessed with the vacant Publix for years, I got to venture inside in 2012, when some friends were filming a movie about purgatory there. It had been closed about seven years.

As soon as the padlocked door creaked open, I was struck by the beauty and attention to detail in the design of a place made to be a low-rent residence for transient workers. The Publix was the (far more affordable) Apodment of its time, yet its lobby was ornate, all marble and carved hardwood, with a wide staircase ascending to a honeycomb of tiny rooms.

The filmmakers and I first walked up to the room they had turned into an office. The second floor was like being inside a giant decrepit egg carton—paint peeling from rows of rooms each about the size of a large residential bathroom, furnished with sinks and mirrored cabinets. There were no private kitchens or bathrooms, and shared bathrooms could be found on each floor.

After only 10 minutes in the building, I was flooded with excitement, something between falling in love and handling human remains. Was I a ghoul? This was a place where people living in a kind of poverty I had never experienced rested after work far beyond comparison to my dreariest dish-washing job.

Danger was certainly part of the thrill. My friends' tour of the building included a room where a pedophile died some time in the 1990s (or so a former Publix employee had told them), the walls brown from cigarette smoke in the corner where his bed had been. My friends told me sometimes the door to that room closed by itself. They showed me where they'd found an ancient cigar in the insulation (which, regrettably, I later smoked) and a room with all of the signs of the zodiac painted on the ceiling. One of the rooms was a gym, with a few very antiquated—possibly pre-1960—pieces of exercise equipment, including a homemade punching bag. Around every corner there seemed to be something I had never seen—hand-operated elevators and pay phones built into the wall at regular intervals.

The basement was lined with filing cabinets of yellowed financial records and clothing left by former occupants. I was especially delighted by names and dates scratched into the paint on one wall—"Timothy was here, 1939," etc. It made me incredibly happy that no one had painted over them.

The Publix provided a glimpse of history I could see and smell and touch, though I was hesitant to touch anything, feeling the sort of awe one experiences in museums. I thought about the way historical objects die in the venerated, regulated museum environment, despite my adoration of museums, the best venues we have for their physical preservation. Rather than the museum experience of witnessing a beautiful memorial for something no longer part of life, I saw (and used) the Publix's antiquated mechanisms, many of which were still functional. This seems like a dumb, obvious thought, that history is still happening and we're part of it, but I felt it in my body at that moment, like the way you feel that life is finite when you slice your hand while cooking.

I've always hated being in new structures that are ugly, like cell-phone stores. It was in the Publix that I realized this is partly because they provide no intimacy with the past, no sense of historical context. They make it seem as if everything humans make has always been ugly and always will be.

In a brand-new building, outdated styles and outdated consumer goods are out of view. In such an aesthetic vacuum, one may forget how, in the grand scheme of things, it's useless to buy a bunch of shit. The Publix reminded me of traditional Japanese landscape painting, in which humans are often tiny dots, a few brush strokes against dramatic forested mountains. When I saw "Timothy was here, 1939," I felt small in the best way possible. I was glad just to exist.

In the basement, a 20-foot-high window with metal shutters looked out on a brick wall retaining some of the massive quantity of dirt relocated during the Denny regrade. The window was probably once at street level. Things got more interesting the deeper below ground we ventured. A spindly plywood catwalk strung with metal lamps spiraled into the black subbasement. I'm not sure how far below the street we actually went. White mushrooms sprouted on the boards at the base of the catwalk, next to a greenish sump and the skeleton of a cat. The air felt cool and wet, and the only sounds were cave-like dripping and traffic far above.

Rows of rotting wooden theater seats were stacked against a wall, the remnants of a speakeasy from Prohibition, I was told. A narrow staircase led up to street level, beside a sort of stone booth with a tiny barred window where the owners of the speakeasy could safely survey potential customers. (Another anecdote from the filmmakers: Once, during Prohibition, there was a natural-gas leak in the subbasement. The following day, the space was littered with people who had collapsed mid-party, spilled drinks lying beside their lifeless hands. Granted, this anecdote sounds too cinematic to be true, and I couldn't confirm it from any other source.) At the far end of the room was a cement tunnel. It seemed designed to be looked at, its shape similar to the ornaments on the roof of the building.

My tour guides told me this tunnel was part of a network of tunnels (the Seattle Underground) that once connected the storefronts of Pioneer Square and the International District after the Denny regrade raised the street level 12 to 30 feet. After the city closed the underground in 1907 to prevent bubonic plague, many of the uninhabited spaces on the waterfront became dens of vice conveniently linked by the warren of tunnels. My friends had been told the tunnel under the Publix was probably built by the famous bootlegger Roy Olmstead. Of course, I went in.

I won't deny that the idea of a subterranean network of bars, brothels, and drug dens is romantic to me, or that that romance is stupid—I know the reality of such a life in the early 1900s was probably mostly awful. I'm also certain if I had been alive when this network was functional, I would have visited, just to see, on legs shaking as hard as they did in that tunnel under the Publix in 2012.

Twenty feet in, the tunnel was obstructed by a metal wall. It startled me—it looked like a spaceship crashed into a medieval castle. My friends speculated it was part of the bus tunnel. Miye Moriguchi, development manager of Uwajimaya (who graciously supplied me with historical information about the Publix, and who is part of the family that bought the Publix and the land its on in 1974), confirmed that the passage once connected to the bus tunnel, which opened in 1990, but that she didn't know its original purpose.

When I emerged from the tunnel, my friends were poking around the subbasement, discussing old cans and possible explanations for some of the place's stranger architectural features. There was nowhere I would rather have been than there with those four people, and later I wondered if part of my happiness that day resulted from the weird plausibility of "meeting" like-minded people from the past. The Publix tenants and speakeasy patrons were still there in some capacity, like background radiation. My elation from visiting the Publix lingered for weeks—anything seemed possible.

In 2013, I moved to my current home, an SRO similar to the Publix, just up the street. I love my apartment, but it's a studio the size of a kitchen and I resent the idea of being priced out of it. I'm getting priced out of the city where I was born and have lived my entire life, and I don't really want to live anywhere else, but there's nowhere else in town I can afford. I worry my moving to the International District might perpetuate the cycle of gentrification that drove me out of my previous neighborhood—poor, white, queer, media weirdos of various kinds move into a neighborhood historically inhabited by people of color, displacing them, and then affluent people notice the neighborhood is "funky," buy all the real estate, rename it something like "The West Edge," raise the rent until no one but other affluent people can live there, and then presumably salt the earth and move on.

While this certainly still happens, and is still a huge problem I worry I'm part of, it seems the type of gentrification going on in Seattle these days has more to do with global capitalism. Overseas developers track the activities of big corporations and build the cheapest housing possible wherever they can profit the most from it. It's easy to loathe the tech bro yelling "faggot" outside some brand-new restaurant, but he was brought there by much more powerful, complicated, and poisonous forces than his own ignorance.

In 2015, when I first saw the "proposed land use" signs outside the Publix, I assumed the worst. Later that week, I noticed a box under construction on the rooftop—an elevator shaft. Soon a Graham Baba sign appeared on the fence, architects of the Melrose Market, the current incarnation of the Seattle Center Armory, Ballard's Revel & Quoin, and many other popular local businesses. I learned Graham Baba will assist an overhaul of the Publix led by the Clark Design Group.

The remodeled Publix will contain 125 market-rate apartments, studios and one-bedrooms inside its original facade, and two- and three-bedroom apartments in a new wing. Opening this summer. Its more luxurious amenities include an off-leash dog area, a community party room, and bike repair stations. Restaurants will open on the ground floor. Uwajimaya board chair Tomio Moriguchi told the Seattle Times, "Like the 1930s, we have thousands of workers moving to Seattle, and we want them to have the opportunity not only to visit but live in the Chinatown/International District... I think the district needs more people with income."

He added that the Moriguchi family "doesn't feel that adding more people with low income is healthy for the whole district."

On the one hand, the claim that the Publix is being used for its original purpose doesn't exactly hold up. Yes, the thousands of Amazon employees expected to move to Seattle over the next decade are "workers," but they're not like the "workingmen and transient laborers" employed by Rainier Heat and Power. Their equivalent today are people in the service industry and in retail, and people like my dad, a carpenter, who are being told by developers to "go to Shoreline," where he has in fact had to go.

On the other hand, I completely agree with Moriguchi that it isn't healthy for one neighborhood to contain all or most of a city's low-income housing. Ideally, each neighborhood should accommodate as much diversity of income levels, professions, ethnicities, sexual and gender identities, etc., as possible. That's how people learn from each other. I certainly don't want affluent people to get out of town—I just want to live here too.

I look forward to seeing the Publix's elegant lobby restored (my favorite detail of the renovation plans). I hope that although the subbasement has been filled in, the tunnel to nowhere, deep, deep below the building and all of its new tenants, remains completely untouched. When I'm walking west of the transit tunnel, I often wonder if the side I couldn't reach is right below my feet.

How David Bowie Became Real (and How Hunky Dory Revealed His Magic)

Sarah Galvin — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 16:20:00 -0800

"Weird" is such a teenage concept. Listening to David Bowie made it bearable. by Sarah Galvin

"I'd like to be a gallery/put you all inside my show."

I was 14, listening to “Andy Warhol” from Hunky Dory when I realized I was gay.

It was in spring, around 7pm, and I was in my bedroom in the house where I grew up, listening to this record I’d heard twice. By the end of the evening I’d played it something like 15 times. I remember the neon glow of the new leaves disappearing into blue-black as it got dark outside and I sat on my bed thinking of the girl who loaned me Hunky Dory. Something ancient was working on me, for the first time. I thought of her face, asking myself this question, hoping the answer would be no, but it was always yes. I was as scared as I’ve ever been in my life, but I decided the possessor of such magic had to be worth it.

One of my favorite things in the flood of social media mourning today was local cartoonist Mark Campos’s Facebook post: “He was the flare that let us know it was all right to be weird now.” “Weird” is such a teenage concept—I’d say that night listening to Hunky Dory was one of the last times I really felt weird, and David Bowie made it bearable. The music and Bowie’s androgynous image on the album cover seemed implicitly sympathetic to the experience I was having, and I was comforted by the thought that its creator was still out there somewhere. He’s definitely still out there, in some sense, but the physical existence of that exemplary human was a special comfort that’s gone now.

Since Hunky Dory I’ve put at least one Bowie song on every mix tape I’ve made a lover, stolen countless points of style from Bowie album covers, and attended a yearly party called “Bowiemas,” held on his birthday, that filled a warehouse with glitter-and-silk drenched weirdos and demonstrated to me how religions begin. Perhaps the reason why there is grand annual Bowie party rather than a religion is that there is no written message from Bowie to be corroded by devotees into dogma. His lyrics are too fantastical and performative to be interpreted that way—they are clearly meant, like every part of his persona, to say things that can’t be said with words.

David Bowie manifested exactly what was inside him, without apology. Sometimes this was derivative, but all art is derivative. His endless self-reinvention, which we all do whether we like it or not, (“Rest in change,” read another favorite mourning post) preserved the honesty of his work. He was proof that the magic each person has inside them—the power to make art, the power to love—is best manifested by giving zero fucks. That is, you can’t worry that you’re weird, you can’t worry how you appear to other people—because it’s all performance anyway, and you need your whole self to put on that show. That’s what makes it your show, the only show you get.

The worst thing about Bowie’s death is that he’s so much like a hero in a myth or fable.

According to these culturally ingrained stories, he fulfilled his role as a hero. He should have earned immortality, or happily ever after. We think, at least fucking David Bowie should get a free pass. But nobody does. I think the belief in shamans and saints is related to evolution—when enough people venerate someone, or consider them to have “done it right,” their genes become magic, kind of like the Velveteen Rabbit. It’s hard, the way our brains are set up, to just be happy that a really good person existed. I still put Hunky Dory on when I have to do something that scares me, and I probably always will.

Burgermaster on Aurora Is Less Than a Block Away from a Recreational Pot Store

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 04:00:00 -0700

Burgermaster on Aurora Is Less Than a Block Away from a Recreational Pot StoreTags: weed by Sarah Galvin

The Aurora Burgermaster's western-font signage, topped by a huge glowing bull skull, was morbidly fascinating to me as a child who became vegetarian for the same reason I imagine anyone does at 7: I realized on a ranch that beef cattle are cute, like big dogs.

I grew up a few blocks from Burgermaster, and as far as I can recall, the place has never changed. Like the nearby cement elephant and Twin Teepees diner (RIP), the eye-catching sign is quite at home on a strip where business is dependent on inspiring enough curiosity to make people pull off the highway. I didn't fully understand until a trip to the Dancing Bare strip club in grad school that what fascinates me about Aurora is its multitude of advertisements for sex, booze, and every other mysterious and alluring pleasure of adulthood. Ocean Greens, one of the first recreational pot stores to open in Seattle, couldn't have picked a better location than being close to the Aurora Burgermaster.

Ocean Greens is at 9724 Aurora Avenue North. Burgermaster is at 9820 Aurora Avenue North.

Also, Burgermaster has veggie burgers, making it an ideal stoner-food destination for me. "I'm so hungry, but I don't think the food I want exists," I told my girlfriend, Mary Anne, one night when I became so hungry while stoned that it woke me up.

"I'm sure we can figure something out," she said. "What is it?"

"It's like corned beef," I said, "but as a cereal."

As I mentioned, I don't even eat meat. So making a corned-beef cereal sans meat wasn't exactly going to be easy. I ended up constructing a food of some kind out of a savory scone, peanut butter, and chocolate chips. It was glorious. This is the way I get hungry when I'm high—craving the most improbable things and then energetically devouring something only semi-edible (or not edible, like papier–mâché) that magically tastes like it should be featured in Food & Wine.

I would love to go out to eat stoned—there would be far less danger of eating something just because it looks like food—but I'm not yet comfortable enough with weed to be high in large groups of people I don't know. Also, there is the matter of getting to and from a restaurant; it is illegal to drive while stoned. A visit to Aurora pot shop Ocean Greens followed by dinner at Burgermaster with my non-stoned girlfriend behind the wheel felt like a potential step toward being comfortably stoned in restaurants. Also, weed and nostalgia seemed like at least as good a combination as corned beef and cereal.

At Ocean Greens, the old hardwood bar that functions as a counter (the place appears to have formerly been a house, and then a tavern) was full to the ceiling with drawers of weed—more varieties than I'd ever seen in one place. Cabinets of pipes, lighters, grinders, rolling papers, and stoner knickknacks lined the walls. I asked one of the weed salespeople for something to make me hungry and relaxed. He offered me a bag of Suspended Brands' "Platinum Girl Scout Cookies" weed—24.27 percent THC and 0.07 percent CBD—for $15.

The little silver package was decorated with the silhouette of a woman holding a surfboard. It looked like a bag of wasabi peas and felt about as innocuous to buy. It reminded me of my first-ever weed-buying experience, in middle school, minus the danger and the glamour. And yet there was something luxurious-feeling about acquiring a bag of weed as easily as a candy bar and pulling into the Burgermaster half a block away.

Burgermaster is a drive-in burger place. You park and roll down your window, and then someone comes to take your order—and when it's ready, they come back with all your food on a tray that attaches easily to your partly rolled down window. The fries and onion rings are actually served in paper cups with the word "munchies" printed on them, festooned by colorful geometric shapes. Parked next to us was an older guy in well-worn Carhartts who had a very long, thin beard that he wiped his hands on after pushing his napkins into the recycling. He reminded me of my dad's friends from work at the shipyard. In Seattle in the 1990s, that was what everyone's dad looked like.

We got three veggie burgers with cheese ($5.89 each), fries ($2.39), onion rings ($3.49), and a peanut-butter milkshake ($3.09.) I was alarmed by the presence of the words "grilled crab" on the menu (upon further study, it's a grilled cheese sandwich with crab) and confused by something called a Tom and Jerry milkshake (it was hard not to picture blended-together cats and mice).

And I was nervous to smoke in front of our servers, friendly as they were, probably because I associate drive-in uniforms and paper hats with a sort of 1950s Norman Rockwell conservatism. And because it's literally against the law to smoke in your car or even have marijuana in an open container. Also, the most portable pipe I could find was one Mary Anne discovered in a 102-year-old friend's headboard after he died. The carved stone pipe was beautiful, but I wondered how functional it was, and how haunted. I sank as low in my seat as possible. The weed had a bitter, almost metallic aftertaste.

Ten minutes later when our food came, I was incredibly hungry, though I couldn't tell yet if this was because of the weed. Food at Burgermaster is simple but reliably good, especially for anything that incorporates iceberg lettuce. The highlight was the milkshake, whose only detectable flavors were vanilla ice cream and peanut butter—nothing that called to mind a plastic vat with a pump marked "peanut-butter shake."

Back at Mary Anne's place, I took another giant hit of Platinum Girl Scout Cookies from my miniature bong that for obvious reasons wouldn't have fared well in the car. This answered my questions about the functionality of the stone pipe, because I was immediately three times as high as I'd been in the Burgermaster parking lot. I couldn't stop laughing. I thought I would never stop laughing. I rolled all over the bed and then dashed into the kitchen.

"What did you eat?" Mary Anne asked after.

"A little bit of this and a little bit of that," I said.

I had eaten the few remaining Burgermaster fries and now-hours-old warm milkshake, both of which were overwhelmingly good.

"The milkshake," I said, my voice trailing off as I tried to find the words. "It was like peanut butter climbing regular butter into a Christmas tree."

My Whole Life I've Been Asked If I'm a Girl or a Boy

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 24 Jun 2015 04:00:00 -0700

My Whole Life I've Been Asked if I'm a Girl or a Boy by Sarah Galvin

When I was 5, my family moved to a new house off Aurora on 115th. My dad invented a game in which the house was a ship, I was a sailor, and he was the captain. The purpose of the game was to distract me from my fear of the house and to persuade me to follow rules. I preferred a version of the game I invented in which I was also a captain—the captain of a pirate ship. At first I was Captain Hook from Peter Pan, but through ongoing make-believe, my pirate persona developed. I wore an increasingly filthy felt tricorn hat and eye patch, and every morning drew a mustache on myself with a black-licorice-scented Magic Marker.

When a relative made me a plaid dress with a matching eye patch, my mom was thrilled, but when she put the dress on me so she could take a picture, I started crying. I remember her saying how pretty I was, which made it worse. I felt humiliated—pirate captains don't wear dresses, I thought. Fortunately, my mom realized something was seriously wrong and never made me wear that dress again, or any other. Within two years, I asked to cut my hair short. In any picture of me from childhood past the age of 5, my wardrobe isn't much different than it is now, except I am now less likely to a wear a poison-dart-frog-print baseball cap, and the substances my clothing is stained with have changed. There are few things I'm more thankful to my parents for than not forcing me to dress and behave "appropriately" for a person with my external sexual characteristics.

"Are you a boy or a girl?" is a question I first heard in elementary school, and fairly regularly since, though the wording has changed. To kids at school I said "girl," though my favorite game was one in which my tree house was a castle, I was king, and a girl who lived down the street was queen. My manner of dress was bizarre, and my family was so poor that we pawned stuff for groceries, but I always had friends and was never picked on. The other kids liked my make-believe games, but I honestly think my popularity had more to do with the confidence my parents cultivated in me—as long as I did well in school and was healthy, they didn't give a shit how I looked.

At 14, I tried wearing dresses and dating a delicate, beautiful boy who shared my interest in clothing design and Marilyn Manson. When he tipped his top hat to me in the hall at school, my legs shook. My first kiss was with him while watching a band called the Cunt Rags at an underage venue in Ballard. He had drunk about a pint of vodka. When he said, "Wanna make out?" I kissed him sloppily and enthusiastically. Seconds later, he fell out of his chair unconscious, as the band hurled a barrage of eggs and dog shit into the audience. That night I listened to "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" on my parents' duct-tape-patched record player late into the night, reveling in what I thought was love and probably the coolest moment of my life. I was confused when later, in his room, he touched my tits through my psychedelic vintage dress (gently and respectfully, though awkwardly, having asked permission) and all I felt was ticklish.

Not long afterward, I lost a staring contest with a friend because I noticed the halos of white around the pupils of her blue eyes. Something about how I felt in that moment made me run out of the room. I'd never had that feeling before, though I knew immediately what it was.

That girl came out as trans later that year, confusing me further—the first girl I had a crush on was a boy. Was I a gay girl? Was I a trans boy? Both? Neither?

All I knew is that I was afraid. So afraid. Part of the fear was a deep-down awareness that the culture assumed things about me because I have a cunt. But it was hard to know who assumed what, and what their assumptions had to do with me. I believe what I told my mom was: "I'm scared that I'm gay." My mom told me most people experience sexual confusion at some point, and that it would probably pass.

But that staring contest was like water leaking through cracks in a dam. Within about a year, girls were all I could think about. I'd never had any interest in shopping or bras or makeup or Hello Kitty phone cases or any of the other things girls talked about in the bathroom in high school. All that talk made me uncomfortable and bored. My friend Tim was the first person whose style I envied or even noticed. A talented painter, Tim was elegant and charming. I admired these qualities, his consistent sexual success, and his perfectly fitting Diesel jeans. I felt entirely comfortable doing things I considered feminine, like styling my hair, even wearing makeup, if I did them the way a man does them.

Tim and our friend Stella and I would get together in one of our bedrooms, dye each other's hair, listen to Gravy Train and Klaus Nomi, and watch John Waters movies. I was obsessed with John Waters—his films were full of bizarre, hilarious people of indeterminate gender unapologetically doing whatever they wanted. After watching Pink Flamingos or Mondo Trasho, I felt like absolutely anything could happen.

At a house show with Tim and Stella, I met Will and witnessed his Casio-based one-man musical act, Sexually Active Corpse. It sounded like a deranged cartoon clown singing along to '90s Nintendo games. Will appeared in the living room wearing a French maid's dress and a wig that looked like he had untangled it from a mass of Ace bandages and mole traps in the darkest corner of the Goodwill bins. "What would your gynecologist think if your penis began to shrink," he sang, circling the living room. The performance involved some Garfield comics whose captions and speech bubbles he had pornographically altered. At one point, Will and several audience members smoked his pubes out of a pipe made from a tin can. Something was happening to everyone in the room. It was like the masking ceremonies popular in many cultures in which costumes relieve participants of their human identities and responsibilities, rendering them briefly supernatural.

Four people who had been lazily grinding against each other throughout the evening slid onto the floor and started fucking. One of them, who I initially assumed was a drag queen, proved not to be when her period blood spread all over her three friends and the floor at my feet. I watched them, my eyes so wide I feared they'd never close again, moving only to look up when Will crowd-surfed over my head, his balls covered in clothespins.

The only way I can adequately specify what "gender" I am is with a full description of that event. Will was clearly a man, even when his cock and balls were inside a magenta children's glove (an "outfit" he wore to multiple parties), yet he implicitly resisted the gender binary as much as he resisted the idea of reality as we know it. Will was a man, and a woman, and an octopus, and a gasoline-soaked bra, and your dead grandmother. He was legitimately frightening and piss-your-pants funny. One criticism I have heard of comedy, particularly comedy relying on irony, is that it deflates what exists without offering anything in its place; Sexually Active Corpse seemed to offer endless pansexual orgasms, among other things. He was like a cross-faded Walt Whitman in drag with his dick hanging out.

My parents' first explanation of sex, wisely, focused on emotion, but the description of the physical act was limited to heterosexual penetration. For some reason, I thought penetration only happened once, and then the two people involved lay motionless. I remember lying awake when I was very young thinking how awkward that must be. Mostly gay, and far from vanilla, I didn't realize until I was a teenager that the things that turned me on had anything to do with sex. I believed sexual thoughts and feelings were actually dreams leaking into reality. John Waters and Sexually Active Corpse gave me my first glimpse of what I now believe is true—sex is anything and everything. It is less an act than a force that can manifest itself any way.

It seems odd to me now that until my mid 20s, I never noticed the fact that 90 percent of the people I considered role models were male. This may be because I don't consider the qualities I admire most—integrity, kindness, courage, creativity—gendered at all. Sometimes, to me, "gender" seems like an aesthetic response to chemical and neurological features.

I became Captain Hook as a child because Captain Hook was powerful—he could do things I had no evidence little girls could. I think the amount of time and energy my relative invested in putting me back in my little-girl costume frightened me. Captain Hook was also violent. This is where things get complicated—one popular theory about why little boys are more aggressive than girls is hormonal differences. I was just as aggressive as any little boy, and I liked games and movies that involved fighting. Did I envy the culturally specific power of a male character (the captain of a ship!) or was I born with actual physical differences—like in my brain and the chemistry of my body—that made me behave more male than female?

The beginning of my passion for clothing and personal style coincided with the realization that I love women. In high school, I made a conscious effort to dress and behave like the guys I knew who dated the women I was attracted to. I hadn't consciously thought, "I'm a man," but I didn't feel like a lesbian. I realized at some point that no matter what I wore, I didn't look like the other guys, and became terrified no one would go out with me. I also felt so different from the girls, I was convinced I couldn't possibly look like them, either. This left me in a bizarre state of having no idea how I physically looked. I felt this way for a couple of years. Paralyzed by self-consciousness, I worried I would never get laid.

When I finally did get laid, it happened in the most glorious way possible. Some alumni on vacation from Sarah Lawrence threw a party at a cabin built by one of their dads, who was an architect. It looked like an object from Tron. There was a lot of vodka and very grown-up Truth or Dare, which eventually inspired everyone in attendance to take their clothes off. The party was women only. I couldn't believe how beautiful everyone was. I hadn't seen a naked woman in person since the pool locker room when I was a kid. I was prepared to wince at my reflection in the house's many mirrors, and shocked to see I looked like everyone else in the room. Oddly, the realization I had the body of a teenage girl didn't make me feel any less masculine. Women's bathing suits did, and still do—they make me feel like I'm a poorly made spandex Betty Boop doll.

Things happened that night I had longed for for years, though oddly, until I touched another person in a sexual way, I was unable to see people as sexual objects. Eventually, dating women, especially very feminine women, felt as natural to me as wearing exclusively men's clothing—I didn't really think about why I loved either. I just did. I was absorbed in figuring out what sorts of personalities are attractive to me and how to have a healthy relationship.

Until I was about 24, I assumed I was just a 100 percent gay woman who happened to like men's clothing. I had several friends who identified as FTM or MTF, people who had known their entire lives the gender they had been assigned at birth based on the type of junk they have was incorrect. But that wasn't my situation. Even though I'm perfectly happy being masculine, I also love having a woman's body. More than anything, I wanted to be David Bowie, but I felt that if David Bowie woke up with the body of a 24-year-old woman, he would rock it.

I mentioned that as a kid, people used to ask if I was a boy or a girl, and that these days the wording has changed. Usually today the question is more often "Are you trans?" Even though my attitude has changed about this, now if someone asks me that I say yes—as a female-bodied person far on the masculine end of the gender spectrum, the term completely fits me; after all, trans refers to a whole complicated spectrum rather than a binary. But this is often a tricky conversation—the moment I say "trans" to someone, they assume I'm planning for hormones and surgery. Actually, I'm happy just the way I am. I usually enjoy these exchanges. I suspect it's impossible to understand any individual's gender identity without a real conversation, so I try to encourage respectful conversation as much as possible.

Finding men's clothing that fits my five-foot-four-inch, 105-pound body is hard enough, but finding clothing that communicates exactly the kind of man I am is a real challenge. It delights me when people call me dapper, or a dandy. When I first began to think about personal style, I understood it no more than I understood why it felt good to dress as Captain Hook when I was five.

For instance, I can't stand women's blouses (on me). When I was 20, I felt nothing more than a vague aversion to them. For some reason, it took years to realize it's the cut of the fabric—the seams on the back and front designed to accentuate the curves of a woman's body—that I dislike. If I had a man's body, I would probably buy some shirts with this cut. A '70s women's blouse might give me sort of a glam look. Many of my physically male friends wear shirts like this, and they look like Bowie or Johnny Thunders. Because I actually have tits, wearing such a shirt would tip the gender-presentation scale and make me look more feminine than I feel is accurate (though I like my tits as much as anyone does). Having good personal style means understanding one's own body as part of a composition.

I've never had the urge to alter my body with surgery or hormones to appear more masculine, and I think this is partly because the slender, angular body I was born with is no obstacle to me as a compositional element. My shoulders are broader than my hips, and my tits are a nice shape when I'm naked, but not very noticeable with clothes on, especially if I'm wearing a distractingly well-designed tie.

I have heard the argument that no trans people would want hormone treatment or surgery if societal views of gender were healthier—if, for instance, people were more willing to accept someone's correct gender just because that person fucking tells them that is how they identify. While I absolutely think practicing this kind of acceptance is the right way for people to conduct themselves, I would no more tell someone they don't need surgery to express their true gender than I would tell a child they should wear a dress because they have a vagina. I believe every person has a deep need to manifest their identity in a way perceptible to others, and I would not question their means of doing so unless they were harming someone.

I was having a conversation about gender and trans issues with a straight, cisgender male friend recently, and he said something along the lines of "Thinking about this stuff makes my head hurt." He said it in a way that implied he felt a certain kind of conversation is exclusively the territory of queer people. It made me wonder how many straight people feel this way—like there is "queer" and "straight," and queer people are the only ones whose gender and sexuality are on a spectrum. My reply to my friend was that no one on earth is a man in exactly the same way he is a man, and we eventually agreed that what "man" entails for him is unique and worth thinking about.

It's worthwhile for everyone to consider where they fall on the spectrum. You may not be where you assume you are, and while that discovery can be frightening, it is always enriching. One night when I was 24, I was having drinks with my best friend when I noticed his blue eyes were deep purple in the dim light of the bar. It was the high-school staring contest all over again, complete with my sudden departure from the room, except this time my fear came from the realization of a gradually deepening love I had been oblivious to for almost eight years because I had assumed I was 100 percent lesbian. I fled the room even more abruptly this time.

I had no idea what to do. Since we met, he and I had a rapport unlike anything I had ever experienced. I was afraid of damaging our friendship, but I was equally afraid of missing out on possibly the most significant romantic relationship of my life. I was also worried I was so gay that the sex might be the physical equivalent of a sad slide whistle. I spent two years imagining the most romantic and meaningful way I could express my affection, then naturally mauled him one night when we were both fucked up to a Hunter Thompson degree on whiskey and pills.

The sex was actually great, though since the only cock I had touched prior to that was airborne and covered in clothespins, it was kind of like a benevolent encounter with a deep-sea fish. There is a facet of every person that is fully visible only during sex, and his sexual side was the closest thing I had ever encountered to a force of pure good.

"You fuck like a boy," he said the next morning (he had slept with a few). And it had felt like the gayest experience I'd ever had. I am sure we are the same gender. That was when, finally, I knew—I'm far closer to "man" on the gender spectrum than "woman."

It wasn't too horrible when it ended, after only a few months, since I knew we would be friends forever. There was just one crushing moment—I noticed an electrical meter against the lace of cracked gray paint on a cement wall, and realized I would see it totally differently if I hadn't met him. Over a decade, our visions of beauty had grown together.

I had wondered if when I slept with a man, a veil would be lifted as it had after that party at the cabin with all those women when I was 18. Would I now be checking out guys' asses on the street? No. That didn't happen. I did feel a new warmth toward cis male people, because my experience of male sexuality had been so positive, and because I felt like I finally knew what I was. I was someone who was unafraid to explore. I wasn't a pirate, I was an explorer. I am an explorer. That is my true nature. I'm a mostly straight guy who's also a woman. As a teenager, I had been tortured by an inability to relate to either gender (not yet familiar with the idea of a gender continuum), but after that romance, I could clearly see that I'm basically female outside and male inside.

And in a very glam-rock way, I enjoy being both simultaneously.

Thankfully these days, because of the company I keep, I'm asked whether I'm a man or a woman much less frequently than which pronouns I prefer, or whether I've ever thought about choosing a man's name. You can use whatever pronoun you like. I respond to both. My favorite Johnny Cash song is "A Boy Named Sue." I, personally, like being a man named Sarah. I also like being a woman strangers think is a guy. In the supernatural spirit of John Waters and Sexually Active Corpse, it thrills me to embody what most would consider a state of flux, and hopefully to remind people that we all exist on continuums and that absolutely anything can happen.

The City Was Taking a Deep Breath Before It Screamed for 20 Years

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 10 Jun 2015 04:00:00 -0700

"The City Was Taking a Deep Breath Before It Screamed for 20 Years." Author Jason Schmidt on Seattle's Transformations by Sarah Galvin

Jason Schmidt's first triumph as a writer was at Garfield High School, when another kid offered him five bucks for a scenario he made up in debate class. He wrote sci-fi and other genre fiction in college, first at Western Washington University and later at the University of Washington. Rosina Lippi, a creative writing professor at Western, encouraged him and became his mentor. When he finished the manuscript of his first novel, about Seattle in the 1980s, Lippi introduced him to her agent. Publishers reacted positively to the manuscript, but several of them were more interested in the one-page bio attached to it.

Schmidt, born in 1972, was raised by a single father he describes as an impoverished hippie redneck, who was busted for dealing coke when Schmidt was 3. The news that his father had contracted HIV aggravated preexisting psychological conditions, making both of their lives a deranged nightmare. Schmidt and his father were on the move between Oregon, California, and Washington, taking odd jobs and living on government assistance with an eclectic, often dangerous assortment of people and animals until his father's death from AIDS at the age of 40.

Joy Peskin at Farrar, Straus and Giroux was particularly adamant that Schmidt should write a memoir. "She had a vision of what she wanted to do with the book, and I was exactly angry enough after our conversation to pick up the project," said Schmidt. "There are kids out there who have had experiences like mine, but there's no one talking about this outsider life. There was one show on TV about a single dad when I was a kid, The Courtship of Eddie's Father, and my life was nothing like that. There was nothing I could relate to. I came out of that conversation with Joy ready to go."

Schmidt's father was severely physically abusive and addicted to a variety of drugs. He also spent three-quarters of his short life in the closet. Yet, Schmidt says, his dad provided him with indispensable moral lessons that helped forge his outsider perspective. Writing the memoir was partly an attempt to comprehend his dad and his childhood's many contradictions. "The people who died during the AIDS crisis were human," he said. "They were complicated. My dad shouldn't have had to be a good person to get social justice, for people to care he was dying of this horrible wasting illness. We can only care about the fact people are fucked over by turning them into saints. We should care because fucking people over is wrong."

The 400-page narrative progresses (with you in tow, I devoured it in three days) at a seemingly impossible speed, somewhere between a fireworks display and a school bus plunging over a bridge. While immersed in his often-painful memories—every location glazed by a patina of desperation and dread—Schmidt offers countless reminders of how reductive history and memory can be: the extreme difficulty of accurately remembering any event, the subjectivity of truth. In addition to being a literary delight, List functions as a historical document, providing a plausible account of the clusterfuck of societal problems that led to the AIDS epidemic in 1980s Seattle. "Nearly everyone I knew at 13 was gone by the time I was 21," Schmidt told me.

The prosperity narrative of early-'90s Seattle is ripe for romanticizing. Buildings empty since the Boeing layoffs suddenly contained music venues, bars and cafes, and artists drawn by the city's beauty and affordability. List describes the city as it was—the crime, the poverty, the population of gay men wiped out by AIDS—and contextualizes the progress by foregrounding the struggles of people like Schmidt's dad. "He just could not catch a fucking break," said Schmidt. "He would get up, take two steps, and something heavy would land on him."

Last week, I met Schmidt at the Capitol Hill Bauhaus to talk about his book. I asked for his thoughts about Seattle's transformation over the past 30 years.

"I can get bitter about tech money and how it's homogenizing the culture here," said Schmidt, "but if it's not tech money, then there's no money, and then we're what, Detroit? It's not that tech people make too much money, it's that other people don't get paid enough. If people in a larger variety of professions—cooks, maintenance staff—could afford to live in the city, that would increase cultural diversity.

"The lament about gentrification dates people. For example, this neighborhood—in the late '80s and early '90s, Pike/Pine was car dealerships, bars, low-income housing. There were no coffee shops, public bathrooms, nothing here. The objection to the bro-dudes coming in, I get it—but most of what we're losing is '90s stuff that came in at the beginning of dot-com money. When I was in high school, you didn't go to this end of the hill much. It was weird when it became a destination. When Bauhaus opened, I thought, 'Finally, a place to have a coffee in this neighborhood!'

"My dream in high school was to buy one of these crappy old Craftsman houses on the hill and fill it with used books. There would be lots of crime, but I'd meet interesting people, and it would be just the way it was when I was a kid. It was after white flight, but before gentrification. Everything was just kind of frozen. When you're a kid, you think that's how things are. Looking back on it now, I see the city was just taking a deep breath before it screamed for 20 years.

"In '92, this friend of mine and I went to Mount St. Helens and stood on a ridge overlooking Spirit Lake. There are signs all over the place telling you not to go down there. Nothing was growing there. It was just pumice and ash as far as you could see. This thing happened that I had read about but had never experienced before, which was: I had no perspective on scale. It was like four fucking miles to the lake. The trees floating on the lake, which we thought were telephone-pole-size, were old growth. Huge. You never realize how big the city is, how fast it's going."

Seattle Writer Doug Nufer's Lifeline Rule Is a Dazzling, Disorienting Experiment

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 20 May 2015 04:00:00 -0700

Seattle Writer Doug Nufer's Lifeline Rule Is a Dazzling, Disorienting Experiment by Sarah Galvin

I first saw Doug Nufer when I was in college, at a reading series for a class on poetry and opera. It was a slimy gray night, and a woman in the front row of the auditorium, who appeared to be wrapped in a tarp, snored like a garbage disposal through every reader. No one could wake her. Doug, unfazed, walked onstage and proceeded to read a series of lively, surreal poems, each accompanied by its own dance. The reading's awkwardness dissolved, the snoring now just another element of delightful weirdness.

The class's most recent lecture had been about Oulipo, short for "Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle," or "Workshop of Potential Literature," a group of French writers and mathematicians founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnias. Oulipo-associated writers practiced a variety of constraint-based writing techniques. Georges Perec, for instance, wrote an entire novel (A Void) without using the letter E. Other constraints were generated by mathematical equations, or involved the use of palindromes. I didn't care for the constraint-based writing I had sampled at that point, as I felt that putting such emphasis on the way a poem is constructed detracts from its emotional qualities. Constraint-based writing seemed more like a puzzle than an art form worth venerating.

As it turned out, I just hadn't met the right constraint-based writing yet. Or I should say I had and didn't realize it—after all, what are sonnets and villanelles if not formal constraints? But the first Oulipo texts I read seemed to lack self-awareness. Nufer's work, in which pulp, noir, and pop function like clippings from familiar magazines in an elaborate collage, changed all that. His first book of poetry, We Were Werewolves, contained "Poem Noir," a series he wrote by rearranging and otherwise manipulating lines from classic film noir. The humor in these pieces provided a handrail to guide me to the pleasures of Oulipo—the thrill and beauty of hearing the music of your own language as a nonspeaker does, of seeing language used in a way it's possible that it never has been before. At its best, constraint-based writing creates a feeling something like learning an entire language in the time it takes to read one text.

Nufer began writing with constraints in 1987, after meeting Oulipo writers Harry Matthews and Jacques Roubaud. His first constraint-based novel was Negativeland (Autonomedia, 2004), in which each sentence has a negative and the narrative progresses backward and forward simultaneously. In his novel Never Again (Black Square, 2004), the story of a gambler's struggle to avoid repeating his mistakes, no word is used more than once.

His new novel, Lifeline Rule (Spuyten Duyvil), employs an even more severe constraint: the conovowel. At no point in the text do two vowels or two consonants appear in a row. The hero is a military code specialist. The book consists of his transliteration of his own story into this form. The results render conventional scenes—like this familiar bar pickup scene—dazzling and disorienting:

One kamikaze was an ace. His amore line was a lazy, care-liberated I-got-it. If a lady gave her evasive rebuke to his inane polo poke, he faked a soporific, "Aloha," to mimic a jet of enema hosed ah, or a catatonic, "Oh, a loser." On average, no line was a surefire lure. Was a zany rap a ceremony to make women adore moronic apes or, as I came to deduce, were my men of a tame type, solely busy in a rite to deify men?

The constraint necessitates gymnastics that will have you googling a word per page, but it also results in a unique narrative structure and perfect sentences like this: "Civility paraded in every tic on a face beveled in age lines."

Nufer's poetry and prose succeed the way his buoyant, bizarre stage presence does, even when someone is snoring. Both will be on display when he reads from Lifeline Rule at Phinney Books on Tuesday, June 2, and at a yet-unscheduled event with Paolo Pergola, a member of Oplepo (the Italian answer to Oulipo), at which there will actually be a chance to taste the constraint—only wines with conovowel names will be served.

Saturday, May 2, Is Independent Bookstore Day

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 29 Apr 2015 04:00:00 -0700

Saturday, May 2, Is Independent Bookstore Day, Because Literature Deserves a Party, Too by Sarah Galvin

"California Bookstore Day's logo is a super-cute little bear," said Independent Bookstore Day cofounder Pete Mulvihill. "My favorite thing that happened on the first Bookstore Day was someone hand-sewed a bear, decorated it, and took it to every bookstore that was participating in the event. We had reached the real, true, hardcore book nerds. It's just a giant, fun party."

Mulvihill and his wife, Samantha Schoech, spearheaded the organization of the first California Bookstore Day in 2014, inspired by the phenomenal success of the annual Record Store Day project.

Mulvihill is one of the co-owners of Green Apple Books & Music's two stores in San Francisco. Having witnessed what Record Store Day does for sales in Green Apple's music department, and its ability to draw crowds in an increasingly digital media marketplace, Mulvihill thought, why not throw a similar celebration for books? Schoech, a writer and editor, volunteered to produce the event.

"I thought, 'Literature deserves the kind of party record stores get,'" said Mulvihill, "adapted to bookstore culture."

San Francisco's California Bookstore Day, funded by the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, was a tremendous hit. There were lines down the street, with sales rivaling the week before Christmas. As with Record Store Day, bookstores and presses designed unique items for sale only during the event. "We had some towels made with literary quotes on them," said Mulvihill. "For advertisement, we made a Don DeLillo graffiti stencil that said, 'California deserves whatever it gets.'" Mulvihill's favorite: a literary map of the world's oceans, illustrating the settings of famous seafaring novels like Moby-Dick.

This year, Independent Bookstore Day is going national. More than 400 stores are participating—Mulvihill isn't sure how many states will be involved, but was amused to learn Kentucky chose its own date for the event, as the national date (May 2) conflicts with Derby Week.

An array of Seattle-area independent bookstores are eagerly preparing to participate. The beloved Elliott Bay will provide a relationship-advice booth with "mystery guests," Island Books will host a scavenger hunt and collective short-story writing on vintage typewriters, and several stores, including Fantagraphics and Open Books, will offer free books or two-for-one deals. Many stores will host trivia and literary Mad Libs and serve food and drinks (in the IBD press release, "cake" was the only word followed by an exclamation point).

The main event, however, is the "Indie Bookstore Challenge," wherein anyone who visits and has their "passport" stamped at every store gets a chance to win a 25 percent discount at all of them for one year. "I love what Seattle is doing," said Mulvihill. "Stores that would normally be competing with each other are cooperating. I can't think of anything else like it. I don't think, for example, coffee shops get together and share their best techniques." (He noted the irony of Amazon being headquartered in a city with so many independent bookstores.)

One of the benefits of the project is the sense of solidarity among the participants. "We feel a bond with other indies," said Open Books co-owner John Marshall. "Heck, Amazon has even made Barnes & Noble seem like a relative—what dark magic does that? We are pleased to celebrate shared DNA with our sibling stores."

In recent years, Record Store Day has been criticized for the increasing involvement of big corporations. While plenty of good music has been put out as Record Store Day–exclusive releases, many believers have lamented the event's turn away from celebrating the mysterious thing that makes records and record stores bewitching.

The owners of participating bookstores seem wary of these pitfalls. "I hope Independent Bookstore Day can avoid the unfortunate 'treasure hunt' mentality that has tainted Record Store Day—an effort that began as an appreciation of stores whose very existence became tenuous because of new technology," said Fantagraphics manager Larry Reid. "It quickly became dominated by large corporate interests that have no interest in the economic well-being of record stores (or musicians, for that matter). Independent bookstores face many of the same challenges as record stores with the rise of electronic platforms and online retailers, which suck the soul out of the literary experience."

Mulvihill isn't as worried. "I don't know what the future will bring," he said. "But I don't think [IBD] will become some empty vessel for what publishing companies want to do."

Why I Gave Up Booze in Favor of Weed

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 08 Apr 2015 04:00:00 -0700

Why I Gave Up Booze in Favor of Weed by Sarah Galvin

For a tiny person, I can really drink. I've drunk large men under the table multiple times, no problem. It's not something I set out to do—I'm just not a one- or two-drink person. I like to get hammered. My grandpa did, too. I wouldn't have been able to recognize him without a glass of brown liquor on the rocks. He was a psychiatrist, and after downing a fifth of brandy every night, he got up at 6 a.m. to see patients. He lived to 86. Legend has it, he was immune to hangovers.

I, however, am not. I get them bad. I've hallucinated from hangovers—I remember walking past a purely imaginary man in a trash can one morning, so fried from drinking I thought nothing of it. I don't puke, I don't have headaches, I simply lose my mind. I'm overwhelmed with anxiety. I get hangovers like Krusty the Clown on The Simpsons when he sees a poster of himself on Bart's wall and thinks it's a mirror: "Hang on, kid, I've got a tack in my head."

Many members of my family, myself included, have generalized anxiety disorder, meaning basically we're scared shitless every minute of the day. People sometimes say things like "Why don't you try yoga?" These well-meaning people do not know what they're talking about. I do every nonchemical thing possible for my anxiety—an hour of exercise a day, therapy every two weeks. It's not an emotional problem, though; it's the wiring in my brain. It fascinates me that many people don't seem to realize there is as much structural variation in human brains as human bodies. For me, and several others who share my genes, it's like some knob is cranked up too high. Everyday life is a flood, equal parts staggering beauty and horror. Makes you want a brandy or five, extra ice.

I'm happy to say I most often drink because it's fun, but I'm definitely an anxious person and booze has always helped me there. At one point, I went to a doctor because I thought I had some kind of abdominal cancer, which turned out to be stomach cramps from stress. I was prescribed Xanax, which is glorious, but which you're not supposed to mix with booze. And according to Harvard Medical School, benzodiazepine use may raise my risk of getting Alzheimer's.

I would never have expected weed to prove the third-best remedy for my anxiety (after sex and frequent exercise). The first time I smoked weed, I was 13, and the weed was laced with something awful—or perhaps we laced it ourselves by smoking it out of a pipe made from duct tape. While my friends watched, I walked 50 feet without moving my legs and turned into a floating tongue and eyeballs. My field of vision became carpeted with Chinese dragons and sinister versions of that flying glove from Yellow Submarine. I threw up on a merry-go-round in front of a busload of elementary-school children, apparently. I was tormented by unsettling questions about perception for weeks afterward, and for some reason couldn't listen to Nine Inch Nails anymore. I resolved never to touch marijuana again.

The cure for my pot-phobia came in the form of a brilliant, beautiful girlfriend, who also instilled in me the ability to curse in Ukrainian and make a poached egg. She turned me on to marijuana and the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva. After three hits, I was scared—I thought the heater was blowing cold air on me (the window was open) and I thought her roommate had discovered a conspiracy involving the FDA and synthetic fish oil in vitamins. I awkwardly whispered that I was way too high, and I hid in her room under blankets.

I began to hallucinate, which I realize is not a very common response to marijuana, but don't forget I used to hallucinate from hangovers. Somehow, in this particular girlfriend's company, the hallucinations were hilarious. She appeared to have muttonchops (those extra-long, walrus-style sideburns) that continuously changed color and shape like the blobs in a lava lamp. She didn't know what muttonchops were—I'm not even sure if there's a Ukrainian word specifically for muttonchops—and when I tried to explain them, I laughed uncontrollably. I tried to kiss her over and over, but as soon as I closed my eyes, I saw undulating blobs of multicolored hair and burst out laughing. You try saying "muttonchops" when you're high without laughing.

My sideburns hallucinations that night prevented me from experiencing the biggest selling point of marijuana: stoned sex. Somehow I'd heard a lot about weed's art- and food-enhancing properties, but what it does for sex was perhaps my favorite surprise ever, on par even with the Jolly Roger cake my mom made for my 6th birthday when I was obsessed with pirates.

Weed slows down time, intensifies sensation—especially pleasant sensations—and makes me, at least, hyperaware of my feelings toward the people around me. You can imagine what it did for my feelings toward someone I adore enough to risk a junior-high duct-tape-fumes flashback. Our bodies seemed completely permeable, suspended in time, and when I came, I thought it would never end. I was reminded of a Joe Wenderoth poem describing the pleasure a log feels as it burns.

She smoked exclusively spliffs, this girlfriend, and I came to associate the sight of her mixing weed and tobacco on top of a book with the end of the workday and peaceful Sunday mornings. We often smoked carefully in the shower, ashing the spliff in a film canister. The hallucinations subsided.

I can't write any better when I'm stoned than I can when I'm drunk, so weed is reserved for the times alcohol used to occupy. I am a complete lightweight—one big hit and I'm done for the evening. I like to work until at least midnight, take one hit, have the world's most relaxing shower, and then read until bedtime. My sleep is uninterrupted, and there are, of course, no hangovers.

One side effect of my nightly ritual is that if there are any descriptions of food in whatever I'm reading, I have to stop and eat something. A couple of times, I have literally eaten all the food in my apartment. Once, after reading a description of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I was unable to sleep. I had already showered and brushed my teeth, but I just couldn't take the visions of peanut butter and jelly beckoning like Playboy centerfolds. I finally got up, made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, ate it, made another peanut butter and jelly sandwich, ate it, made a third peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and ate that. I was in a trance. Their flavor seemed to inhabit my entire body. I put peanut butter on one finger and jelly on another and licked it off, in complete rapture. "Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches have possessed me" is one of the hundreds of ridiculously stupid thoughts I have restrained myself from posting on Facebook or texting to friends while high. One night, I was convinced my idea for an assortment of fruit-flavored body bags would make me rich. The reasoning behind this was something like "Why are body bags always so black, sad, and inedible?"

The last time I went in for a physical, I was proud to answer all the drinking-related questions on the questionnaire. I drink maybe once a week these days, in moderation, and usually top-shelf. I was alarmed to learn I weighed only 98 pounds (my normal weight is about 110). This was especially shocking considering my possession by sandwiches. I attributed the weight loss to a mixture of working too much and the absence of beer calories. I did not refill my Xanax prescription—I don't need it now, amazingly—but I happily accepted my doctor's prescription to eat more cheese.

I Quit My Job at the Harvard Exit Three Weeks Ago After Working There For Seven Years. I Just Learned It’s Closing. I Will Miss It.

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 12:08:02 -0800

by Sarah Galvin

Kelly O

I remember my first night at the Harvard Exit seven years ago, standing among the century-old projector, grand piano, ottomans and other furnishings with clawed feet and thinking, “I will like this job and be happy here.” It was the first time I’d ever felt that way about a job. The high ceilings and ornate woodwork made every room feel like a church, especially the auditoriums. The first time I cleaned the upstairs auditorium after a show (the film was Control, about Joy Division), I stopped sweeping garbage for a moment to listen to the between-shows baroque music and felt the weird energy of a ritual place, a place people go to be transported.

The place, designed by architect Pierce A. Horrocks, was built in 1925 as a clubhouse for the Woman’s Century Club. The club was equal parts social and political, its founding related to the women’s suffrage movement. It became a movie theater in 1968, but the Woman’s Century Club still held its monthly meetings in the lobby the entire time I worked there—we had to stow away all the plastic cup lids, straws and movie flyers, (I hoped) so that the members could pretend it was the 1920s…

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I Quit My Job at the Harvard Exit Three Weeks Ago After Working There for Seven Years. I Just Learned It’s Closing. I Will Miss It.

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 04:00:00 -0800

A Eulogy for the Harvard Exit by Someone Who Worked There for Seven Years by Sarah Galvin

I remember my first night at the Harvard Exit seven years ago, standing among the century-old projector, grand piano, ottomans, and other furnishings with clawed feet and thinking, “I will like this job and be happy here.” It was the first time I’d ever felt that way about a job. The high ceilings and ornate woodwork made every room feel like a church, especially the auditoriums. The first time I cleaned the upstairs auditorium after a show (the film was Control, about Joy Division), I stopped sweeping garbage for a moment to listen to the between-shows baroque music and felt the weird energy of a ritual place, a place people go to be transported.

The place, designed by architect Pierce A. Horrocks, was built in 1925 as a clubhouse for the Woman’s Century Club. The club was equal parts social and political, its founding related to the women’s suffrage movement. It became a movie theater in 1969, but the Woman’s Century Club still held its monthly meetings in the lobby the entire time I worked there—we had to stow away all the plastic cup lids, straws and movie flyers (I hoped) so that the members could pretend it was the 1920s.

In its early years, the Harvard Exit was famous for its owner’s above-par taste in foreign and independent films, which the posters that lined the staircase attested to. It was one of the first “art” theaters in town.

In the building’s early days, a Century Club member supposedly hanged herself in the upstairs lounge and now haunts the place. Many people came in looking for ghosts, including a woman who tried to dig in the wall of the basement for a skeleton she believed was down there. I talked at length with one guy who came to see a movie about ghosts, and later in the week he brought me a photo he’d taken of one, with a note on the back addressed to “the girl who wouldn’t tell me her name” (which was funny, since I and all the other employees had name tags). I don’t know if the thing standing in the window of the farm house in the photo is a ghost, but photographers tell me the photo is freakish—under- and over-exposed at the same time. The Museum of the Mysteries Capitol Hill ghost tour stopped at the Harvard Exit weekly, and the tour guide always asked if we’d “seen any activity.” I never saw a ghost there, though I had some funny experiences with electronic devices and I never liked the upstairs lounge.

I was most fascinated by the building’s structural mysteries, like the subbasement, far below the main basement where ice cream and soda were kept, which contained a nonfunctioning furnace the size of a pipe organ. The rumor was that during Prohibition, the ice-cream parlor in the building next door that now houses the Deluxe was a front for a speakeasy. When the authorities came by, patrons would flee into the Harvard Exit’s basement through a tunnel.

There was a shower on the second floor that had a urinal in it, which we called “The Shurinal.” My favorite mystery: a room that had been covered by a staircase when the building was brought up to fire code. There was a little hole in the drywall on that staircase, and if you peered into it during the day, a small window illuminated the room, now inaccessible, that still had furniture inside.

Every type of person came to the Harvard Exit. There was a guy who jerked off on Christmas to a movie about the Holocaust, and someone who sucked the chocolate off every peanut in two boxes of Goobers and spit them on the floor. My favorite regular spent her evenings recording experimental songs she composed on the piano at St. Mark's Cathedral then brought us the tapes. Before each movie, she went into the bathroom and opened a can. It could have been beer, but for some reason I’m almost sure it was soda. A delightful elderly woman from New York came in a few times a year because the Harvard Exit, she said, was “a real theatah.” I agree completely. The Harvard Exit is grand and decorative and designed for celebration. When they’re experienced socially, movies, like the balls held by the Woman’s Century Club in that building, are magic. They should be seen somewhere celebratory.

At one point I thought about joining the projectionist’s union, but I was told it was a dying trade. Most of the guys in the union were old and got their start in the many porn theaters that once lined the waterfront. When I heard that, I wanted to go to one of those theaters. I wondered what they were like. I was lucky enough to visit the Lusty Lady a few times before it closed, and besides being hot it was kind of magical—all these people gathering to see something that we now experience alone on our computers. I quit my job at the Harvard Exit three weeks ago, after working there seven years, and today I learned it’s closing.

I like to think the hair-raising feeling I got when I stood alone in the auditorium upstairs was from being somewhere people have gathered for decades to have a particular experience. The collective excitement as the lights go down, thousands of good dates and bad dates and people watching movies alone because they feel like shit or they have something to celebrate, and friends in their 50s discreetly popping open beers together in the same theater they’ve been going to since they were teenagers. Harvard Exit, I don’t mind the thousands of pounds of garbage I swept from your floors, I will miss you.

The Crazy Things That Happen Inside Orient Express

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 04:00:00 -0800

The Crazy Things That Happen Inside Orient Express by Sarah Galvin

The first time I went to Orient Express—then known as Andy's Diner—it felt as if I had passed through some sort of energy field. It was the first bar I had ever set foot in. I was 16 at the time, and was attending a party I discovered through a mailing list called Party Volcano that required wearing a wig. I bought a neon-green used one from Value Village for the occasion.

Outside the bar—which is composed of seven antique train cars, one of which was once Franklin D. Roosevelt's personal transport—flashing neon lights and a Candy Land color scheme reminded me of the dives near the house I grew up in. I'd stop in their parking lots on my way home from school and try to imagine who or what was inside.

Andy's lobby was cast in a deep-red glow. Someone in a silver wig that looked like a glittery pile of whipped mousse took a Polaroid of me and pasted it into a fake passport. In the photo, my wig is falling over my eyes and my braces are exposed by a huge grin—the smile of someone who has discovered magic. That night, I lay in bed awake for hours, a residual tingling in my hands. How could such places exist?

Andy Nagy and his nephew Andy Yurkanin opened Andy's Diner in 1949. It was originally housed in one railcar, but over the years expanded with cars salvaged from Seattle City Light. The inspiration was likely Frank's Diner in Spokane, a railcar diner whose construction predated Andy's by 10 years. Andy's was a lunch-hour destination for Sodo workers and an oddity that drew patrons from all over town. There were frequently lines out the door. Steaks and martinis were the specialties. Around 1991, Nagy died and Yurkanin retired, bequeathing the place to his son until it was sold to a developer. As it turned out, the family owned the diner, but not the land it was on. Its next incarnation was, more or less, its current one—Orient Express, which serves Thai and Chinese food and, carrying on Andy's tradition, stiff drinks. An angry ghost is rumored to haunt the place, making lightbulbs explode above the owner when she expressed her disbelief in the supernatural.

There were no wigs on my most recent trip to the Orient Express, but my dining companion pointed out that all of the upholstery tacks in the car's tall, luxurious leather booths are topped with huge fake diamonds. The burgundy light in the lobby has been replaced by the fluorescent glow of a huge fish tank where orange, football-sized fish swim in slow circles. There seem to be entrances to 10 different rooms in the lobby—a woman at the front desk directed me to the bar car. Old photos lining the walls give the place a museum quality.

Our bartender was a cheerful blur, popping in and out of the train cars with Budweisers and whiskey gingers. She cheered when I ordered her favorite of the specialty cocktails, the Orient Mai Tai ($8.50). It was a huge globe of rum and fruit juice whose layers of hot pink and transparent green reminded me of a blowtorch's flame. It was almost certainly flammable. Sex on Alki Beach ($9) tasted deceptively like pure peach juice—halfway in, I realized no further drinks would be necessary.

I'd always assumed FDR's railcar was only open on special occasions, but I decided to ask our waitress if we could have a look inside. To my delight, she invited us to have dinner there. It's an ornate hardwood room with light fixtures that have become slightly softened with age, like the metalwork on a sunken ship. The overhead lights have the same clinical effect as a spotlight illuminating the seafloor. It didn't feel right being there. An object on the table brushed my menu and I jumped, convinced it had moved by itself.

The pot stickers ($5.95) were fried to a golden brown, with a dense, lightly salty pork filling. The accompanying soy sauce was mixed with something sweet. All the elements of a successful snack—fried, salty, sweet—were present. The cabbage in the equally crispy, golden spring rolls ($4.25) was a little tough, but not enough to make them regrettable.

Fluffy bits of egg and fried tofu topped a huge bundle of soft, wide noodles in my pad kee mao ($9.25). The plate it was served on was more of a platter. For such prices, the entrées, like the drinks, were not fucking around. Only the eggplant in garlic sauce ($8.95) was disappointing. The sauce tasted more like maple syrup, and the eggplant was the texture of liquefying pumpkin.

The pad thai ($9.25) was as good as any I've had and wasn't overly sweet. The eggs, as in the other dishes, were cloud-like. I was wary of the peas topping the egg foo young ($9.95)—they looked like the frozen kind—but they were good, and the cushion of eggs and tender onions was excellent.

Things were picking up in the bar, and the voices in the karaoke cars (yes, they exist, and are rumored to contain lasers) were audible through the layers of polished wood and photos of FDR chomping cigars and waving from the rails. All of the voices sounded happy. No matter how many times I go to Orient Express, I'll have no better guess what's happening inside than I had as a kid.

Shortly After 4:20 Yesterday, Ocean Greens on Aurora Got Its First Weed Delivery

Sarah Galvin — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 07:07:00 -0700

by Sarah Galvin

SG
The first flower delivery. They're in those boxes.

Nestled between Burgermaster and Quiring Monuments Custom Headstones is Seattle's third legal weed shop, Ocean Greens. I stopped by 9724 Aurora Avenue North yesterday at 4:20 p.m. to watch them make their first sales. It wasn't a prohibition-style street party or anything; the grand opening isn't until October 18. The first Ocean Greens customers I encountered were an elderly couple with paper cups of gas station coffee making their way to their car.

Ocean Greens owner Oltion Hyseni on the left.

I was ID'd at the door by a guy who looked like security jobs weren’t hard for him to get. The owner, Oltion Hyseni, introduced himself. The pronunciation of “Oltion” is almost the same as “Ocean.” When asked if there were any products for sale he would consider favorites, he replied, with a laugh, “The ones containing marijuana.” I was a little early. The only THC-containing items for sale were Juju Joints, which are cigarette-sized disposable weed vaporizers. These were going quickly.

The gas fireplace and the employees chatting with a small, unhurried handful of customers gave the opening the atmosphere of a party in a living room—the living room of someone who happens to like paintings of naked ladies made of pot plants. Ocean Greens is in a former Thai restaurant, and there's a hardwood bar that's belonged to the space since the '60s. There were a variety of vintage lighters, including one shaped like a passenger plane. Hyseni is from Armenia, and before acquiring Ocean Greens, he worked primarily in real estate. He circulated the room, striking up conversations.

When a cheerful employee at the bar (bathed in neon green light) told me there would be flowers within an hour, I decided to stick around. I was in the parking lot when the car bearing weed arrived. A guy in Seahawks gear popped the trunk and the entire parking lot was awash in pot fragrance. I was surprised I didn’t get high from standing there. It took four people to carry the packed boxes into the store.

I met a guy who had just moved to Seattle from New England. I initially assumed he was really high or possibly just bored, until a brief interaction revealed he was in awe. A guy wearing Marvel superhero-print pajama pants and a Superman T-shirt was perusing the bongs with a woman in Hulk sneakers. When I told them I'd love to take their picture, the guy said, “I'd love that, too, but because of my job I'd better not.” I overheard more than one person murmur, “This is awesome.”

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 04:00:00 -0700

Waffles and Apparitions at Mae James Coffee by Sarah Galvin

You won't find Mae James at South Park's Mae James Coffee, because she's invisible. Owner Jessie Blount describes her as "an apparition of power, adventure, and boldness. She's this woman who comes from faraway lands to the west to roast coffee." Blount and Max Leinbach collaborated with Kelly Thompson, the head graphic designer at Theo Chocolate, to start Mae James and Burdick Brewery. The brewery and the roastery share a building; its industrial aesthetic, in a neighborhood of old craftsman houses, makes it look like it fell from space. (The brewery is currently expanding; they'll be making beer again in November.) Mae James works with a nonprofit that instructs coffee farmers how to grow beans desirable to specialty roasters, allowing them to make more money. Blount's degree in anthropology, focusing on global agriculture, drew her to this aspect of the job.

Blount has also worked at Parfait Ice Cream—where she earned the nickname "Colonel Custard"—but what really qualifies her to run Mae James's monthly waffle breakfast is a centuries-old Blount family waffle recipe. The waffles are thick, delicately crispy outside and almost melty inside. The "simple" waffle is served with maple syrup (the real stuff) and a globe of whipped butter. More exotic options: the "s'more," with Nutella and house-made marshmallows, and the "South Park," with bacon and apple. The one I tried was the best waffle I've ever had, hands down. The next waffle breakfast is on Saturday, October 4.

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 04:00:00 -0700

The Craziest Thing at Cafe Barjot by Sarah Galvin

Capitol Hill's new Cafe Barjot is where Chico Madrid used to be, and the sleek little space looks much the same—which is a good thing (think movie-set-in-Paris sleek, not douche-new-condo sleek). "Barjot" is French slang for "crazy," and it's pronounced like "Joe Bar," but backward; the popular cafe by that name just a few blocks away is run by the same owner, Wylie Bush. Asked where Barjot falls on a scale of cafe to bar—they're open until 4 p.m. most days, but will have longer hours soon—chef Maegan Rasmussen says, "We'll have specialty cocktails. Any cafe in Europe provides the option of liquor. [Barjot] allows people to make adult decisions, but to be zany kids, too. Zany kids with drinks!" But the craziest thing at Barjot, Maegan says, is "my and Wylie's matching bunions" (not on the menu).

Maegan was 14 when she first worked in a restaurant in Jersey—one where the staff abruptly sold all the cooking equipment and left town—but it was cooking in Paris that made Maegan a career chef. She designed Barjot's entire menu, including house-made pastries now also available at Joe Bar, where Maegan has cooked for years. I opted for baked eggs with spinach in béchamel and Gruyère, two tender eggs on a bed of buttery spinach beneath a layer of melted Gruyère that adds a light saltiness. Cold brew from True North Coffee roasters was a smooth and potently caffeinated accompaniment.

How I Supported Myself While Getting a Graduate Degree in Poetry

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 04:00:00 -0700

The Odd Jobs I Had While Getting an MFA in Poetry by Sarah Galvin

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a pirate, an entomologist, or a writer. I don't remember when I lost interest in the first two (either of which would probably have been more practical), but I remember when I realized if I don't write I'm not happy. I especially like writing poetry, which currently, in America, is about the least lucrative form of writing there is. Very, very few people can support themselves doing it. You're told as a kid how important it is to have passions, but not usually about the difficult passage you must make in order for these passions to be seen as a worthwhile use of time in adulthood (if they don't generate money). But I realized I'd never had any money anyway, nothing else made me nearly as happy as writing, and I was willing to do unpleasant things to make money if I had to. I'd seen my best friends, a treasure hunter and a filmmaker, happily dig through garbage and risk getting crushed by giant sculptures to finance these vices. I decided I wanted to know the thing I love most as well as I possibly could.

It was a man wearing rainbow suspenders and reading from his unpublished science-fiction manuscript in a fake Scottish accent at an open mic that finally motivated me to apply to grad schools. It had been about a year since I got a BA in poetry. I sat down to work on a poem the way I did every day, thought of suspenders guy, and started to cry. I thought in grad school I could at least find out whether or not I sucked.

The day of my admittance to UW's poetry MFA program, with its champagne and delighted relatives, was followed by a week of anxiety. There were only two TA positions (which provide a tuition waiver and stipend), and despite deferring the previous year in hopes an improved portfolio would land me one of the jobs, I didn't get one. I was working at a movie theater, making about $12,000 a year. Knowing how reckless it is to take out loans for basically any fine arts degree, that summer I took every additional job I could find.

Briefly, I wrote jewelry ad copy for Amazon. They sent me 50 images a week of necklaces, earrings, and charms (those ornamental things that hang from bracelets), and I wrote a paragraph describing each item and a scenario where it might be worn. If the jewelry seemed fancy, I wrote about going to the opera. If it seemed low-end, cafes and movie nights. If I didn't know, my go-to scenario was a garden party. There were a few baffling things, like earrings made to look like a pair of "no smoking" signs and a pewter charm shaped like a woman bathing a baby. Once I got 50 images of chromium-plated hat-shaped charms. I had no idea there was such a big market for jewelry shaped like other articles of clothing. Fortunately, the editors realized I know nothing about women's jewelry (my ears aren't even pierced) and also that I can be sarcastic. I was fired.

At the time, I lived in one of the few apartments in South Lake Union that hadn't been bulldozed to make way for some shit-colored sheet-metal condo. It was a 100-year-old former boarding house, rumored to have once been a gay brothel and to be haunted by a friendly, red-wine-drinking hippie ghost. I learned of a company that delivered food from downtown restaurants by bicycle. They had an office in Belltown conveniently near my apartment, but seemed to be based out of the Lava Lounge. The delivery range was from Queen Anne to the I.D. When I wasn't working at the movie theater, I hung out at home writing one freelance article or another until I was summoned to make a delivery. I used a friend's messenger bag, big enough that I could fit inside it (I did once!), embroidered with the word "Fingers," Homer Simpson exposing his ass, and about a dozen holes from an enraged girlfriend's hunting knife. The manager texted me the restaurant and the delivery location and off I went. Sometimes I was tipped $20 for a $30 order, and sometimes 50 cents. Once I was tipped a very intoxicated, lazy boob flash. I almost threw up one day delivering $300 worth of Thai food to Virginia Mason with a terrible hangover. When a pretty surgeon in the elevator complimented my ass, I felt better.

I began sporadically picking up shifts with a traveling catering company. I loved it. The food was great, the uniforms looked sharp, and most of the work was done on the immaculately maintained grounds of mansions. I saw miniature horses and a dance party of elderly drunk people wearing Hawaiian shirts and dreadlock wigs, and I ate a slice of $25,000 cake.

Shortly before moving in with my dad, I shed the catering and delivery jobs. I had never quit after such brief employment, so I worried about it for the entire month before it had to be done. Of course, no one was mad. It made me feel free, but also like I might disappear. My friend Riley (the treasure hunter) summed up the feeling well when he said, "I used to deliver pizzas, but they don't call me a pizza boy anymore. And I went to beauty school, but no one calls me a beautician. So then I went out and I fucked a sheep."

I moved in with my dad and his girlfriend on 85th and Aurora, very near the house I grew up in. It was interesting to see that neighborhood as an adult. Our closest neighbors were an abandoned pancake house, a cemetery, a strip club called the Dancing Bare, and a psychic palm-reading place. The man who lived across the street emerged from his house periodically to yell, "Yee haw, I'm Mike fucking Tyson!" On Halloween, he came to my dad's and stood on the doorstep smiling, un-costumed, and held out his hands for candy.

The Dancing Bare fascinated me as a child, so the week I moved in I got drunk in the cemetery with Riley and went to the Dancing Bare alone. The doorman, who leaned against a case of dildos, strumming an acoustic guitar, said, "No cover for ladies... are you one?" I got a plastic champagne flute of seltzer water and took a seat on a vinyl couch in front of the stage. It was a regular strip club, if one that appeared to have originally functioned as a toolshed. Actually being in it dispelled and intensified its mystique at the same time. When school started, I went there occasionally after evening workshops.

The first quarter of grad school was hellish. My relationship fell apart, the bike commute to Aurora from the movie theater where I worked on Capitol Hill was long (obviously I couldn't afford a car), and my mom was hit by a car in a crosswalk and needed new teeth. The first time I was workshopped, I had a panic attack, because I was afraid the admissions committee had made some mistake—that I was actually an idiot and something I said or wrote would reveal it. I wonder if anyone in that room knew I was so close to fainting. My hands went numb, so I sat on them. I must have looked ridiculous. I called Riley afterwards, who told me to drink a 40 and sit outside with my head between my knees. One day after a particularly scary class, I saw my girlfriend at the time walk across campus with the classmate she was fucking. I went to the university's free counselor (I had no insurance), who essentially told me I was too crazy for short-term counseling to do any good. That night, I drank whiskey with another MFA student who has since become a dear friend. He gave me a copy of Ovid's Amores, and then I went to the Dancing Bare alone.

Then my dad and his girlfriend bought a house in Lynnwood, and the bike commute became impractical. I was waiting at the 358 stop when I saw the freezing wind blow the bandage off a woman's tracheotomy and knew I had to find other housing. I inquired on Facebook about spare rooms in exchange for cleaning. I found two potential squats, a condemned house by Lake Union and an abandoned apartment building in the International District. I was enticed by a houseboat that appeared to have suffered fire damage. I half-jokingly approached an architect friend about constructing a giant birdhouse to affix to a tree or telephone pole. We decided I would be less likely to be disturbed by police or curious pedestrians if the tiny house looked like a hornets' nest. I would of course have to wear a black-and-yellow-striped sweater at all times.

A poet who also does performances invited me to live in her basement for a couple of months. This was a happy time. I sometimes came home from work to find her and her collaborator rehearsing for their performances, doing aerobics to Robyn in suits made to look like balls of moss. The house had a trampoline and an endless supply of delicious homemade pozole.

A friend of this poet's—a robot sculptor—needed a dog sitter while she was in Spain, so my next home was a place near Volunteer Park. It looked like a palatial gingerbread house. Its owner and I talked about synesthesia while she showed me her basement workshop full of hairy robotic sculptures. The house had a library big enough to require monthly visits from a private librarian. After she left, I microwaved green beans, brown rice, and chicken for the dog twice a day. The house was a little spooky. At exactly 1 a.m. every night, the dog stood in the living room and growled at nothing.

After the robot sculptor's vacation ended, I went to the MFA program's annual Friday Harbor poetry intensive, which was started years ago by the poet Richard Kenney. It was an idyllic two weeks of poetry, critical theory, and lectures in the Friday Harbor marine laboratory. When the other students and I weren't writing, we had barbecues and swam in the ocean. The MFA program gave me a scholarship for the intensive, and when I was back in Seattle I discovered I had gotten a couple of internships that paid enough for me to rent an apartment. I sat for a long time on the floor of my apartment after I signed the lease. I'm pretty sure I know which professor recommended me for the internships, and if I ever have the chance to do her a favor, I will. One of the internships mainly consisted of sending a lot of e-mails and getting permission to use a Theodore Roethke quote on a shot glass, and in the other I got to teach a bit. I met a woman I love and waking up in her arms in my own goddamn apartment that wasn't a burnt-out houseboat or giant papier-mâché hornets' nest, and then going to teach English, felt like something a normal adult might do.

I spent so much time thinking about grad school, and patching together a life that worked while in grad school, that it's weird that I've already graduated. Now that it's over I feel disoriented, and happy. I'm still broke, but I've got a book of poems coming out this fall. Since I'd essentially been working on the book since I was 18, I expected, when I sent the manuscript to the editors, not to feel anything—I thought it was something too big to register emotionally. In fact, sitting alone in a dark living room afterward, I was completely euphoric. It lasted for days. Also, I was recently solicited to write a book having nothing to do with poetry (I'm keeping the topic a secret right now, for luck). I have no idea what will happen. I think tuition is too high, and that in general writers are woefully underpaid, but given the opportunity to choose a different life, I would live the same one. I had some experiences in grad school I wouldn't change for the world, and I'll never kick myself for not following my heart. Sure, I worry about things like rent and my teeth, but now I'm getting paid to do my art while living in a city full of amazing artists. Someone I didn't know hit me up on Facebook recently, saying I "came up in conversation." A few nights later, I was drinking wine on top of a building inside a giant lightbulb.

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 04:00:00 -0700

Cassis Is Back, and Owner Jef Fike Is Still Awesome by Sarah Galvin

Jef Fike was 16 when he first worked in a restaurant, one owned by a couple with two parrots that would occasionally yell "Fuck you!" during dinner. It was a trip to the French town of Cassis that inspired him to open his own restaurant (you guessed it: Cassis) on north Capitol Hill in 1997. The place was so popular, he briefly opened another restaurant, Bandol, in the Smith Tower, which apparently is haunted. "We saw ghosts there all the time," Jef told me. Cassis closed in 2004 (for non-ghost-related reasons), then former regulars invited Jef to reopen in their beachside building on Alki this past spring. The view is much, much better at the new location, especially at sundown.

The third week of every month, Jef and Cassis's pastry chef come up with new seasonal dishes. They have to be seasonal—Cassis's freezer is only big enough for ice cream and sorbet. The stuffed figs with thyme crème frâiche tasted just-picked, and went well with the Beach Bramble, a rye-based cocktail with Dolin Rouge and Scrappy's Bitters that balances gracefully between sweet and astringent. When asked the oddest thing he can recall a customer doing, he said, "When the sun sets here, it kind of streams into the restaurant. A woman came up and said, 'Can you do something about the sun, please?' I said, 'Ma'am, I wish I were that powerful—I wouldn't be working 70 hours a week.'"

Tamara Murphy Loves Corn Dogs

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 04:00:00 -0700

The Surprising Way Tamara Murphy Got Her Start by Sarah Galvin

Tamara Murphy is the owner and head chef of Terra Plata, a restaurant on Capitol Hill with what has to be the city's most beautiful rooftop patio and garden, and also its pointiest, perched in the very tip of the triangular Melrose Market building. In the past, you may have tasted Tamara's James Beard and Food & Wine award-winning cooking at Campagne or Brasa. She's also the founder of Burning Beast, an annual summertime cookout ("the world's meatiest") benefit for Smoke Farm with some of the best chefs in town, culminating in the incineration of a gigantic wooden beast. In the fall, she orchestrates the Incredible Feast, which brings 20 great Seattle chefs plus 20 great local farmers together under one enormous tent, complete with chandeliers, for, yes, an incredible feast—this year, it's October 5, and it's a benefit for Seattle farmers markets, and you should go. (Get your tickets soon—it always sells out—seattlefarmersmarkets.org/programs-events/incredible-feast.) Oh, and she also runs the cafe at Elliott Bay Book Company. She's pretty busy.

Tell me about your first cooking job. It was in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was living on my own at 15. There was an Italian restaurant a couple blocks from where I lived called Mangione's. One day, I jumped into their delivery truck and took a couple of turkey breasts. The owner, Roberto Mangione, was watching from the window—he came running out and tackled me to the ground. His wife came running, yelling things in Italian. She slapped him around a bit. He was quite red-faced and angry. She dragged me into the kitchen, asked me a bunch of questions, then she brought me a bowl of pasta and asked if I wanted to bus tables. I said yes. One night the cook didn't show up, and she dragged me into the kitchen. That was 37 years ago, and I never left!

You ran a little bar called Ing on Bellevue about a decade ago. What was that place like? What are the most striking changes you've noticed in the neighborhood since then? That was a lifetime ago! My partner Brian Hill and I were managing Ing. It was fun. It was a dark, dingy little bar with homespun food. The area has grown and morphed into this amazing little food neighborhood. I've seen it go from a handful of independently run restaurants to what it is today.

What are your favorite places to eat and drink in town? There are too many! I'm a Gemini, so I need lots of different types of stimulation... Sushi Kappo Tamura for sushi. I've been enjoying the Whale Wins for lunch... I don't really go out and drink at bars—I feel so boring when I say that. But I really enjoy Le Caviste, that's a great little spot... I go to this little Mexican market near my house for tacos—La Conasupo. They make all kinds of great Mexican food.

Which cooking ingredient are you currently fascinated with? Currently fascinated with? I don't think there's anything new under the sun. I'm really into fresh garbanzo beans in the pod.

I don't even know what the pods look like. They look a bit like edamame. We're used to them brown, in hummus; these are green and fresh. I'm fascinated with food in general. I have so much appreciation for great ingredients. Like our beautiful shellfish, and geoducks! Geoducks are god's sense of humor [laughs].

Yes, they are. What's your favorite condiment? My favorite condiment is our chimichurri. It's like our ketchup. It's chili-based—chili, olive oil, and cumin.

Do you eat anything you consider a guilty pleasure or anything people would be surprised to know you enjoy? For instance, I once ate a whole container of Play-Doh. You ate a container of Play-Doh?

I was a kid, but yes. [Laughs] I love hand-dipped corn dogs. There's a little corn-dog place in the Market I love. At Burning Beast this summer, the guy who won Best of Beast made a hand-dipped rabbit corn dog, fried in duck fat.

God, I love corn dogs. What was the most novel meat-preparation method you witnessed at Burning Beast? The whole experience was novel. The chefs do an amazing job with their installations—I have a hard time picking just one. I really liked Miles James's little stone smoker. Last year we had Aaron Matson from the Copper Hog—he had bison on a bicycle. It turned because of the bicycle.

Like a bicycle spit? Yes! There's so much ingenuity.

Can you list every food-industry job you've had? Mangione's, a place in North Carolina called Moxie's, Cornelia Street Cafe in New York, Extra Extra in the Daily News building in midtown Manhattan. I worked at Triplets in New York, and Margaritas in New York, and Dominique's Place in Seattle. My first chef job was at Campagne. Of course, there was Ing, and Brasa, and Terra Plata. Oh, and Elliott Bay Cafe.

What was your worst kitchen disaster ever? It's actually in a book called Don't Try This at Home. My first restaurant in Seattle was Dominique's Place. We had a wedding party that wanted pheasant for their main course. It was early in my career, I was a sous chef, and I burnt the pheasants to a crisp. I went to Thierry at Rover's, but he didn't have pheasants, he had chickens. So I took the chickens, and the guests said it was the best pheasant they'd ever had. That's the mark of a chef up and coming—you have to think on your feet.

This is part of a series of interviews with great Seattle chefs.

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 04:00:00 -0700

Squirrel Party at the Cozy Nut Tavern by Sarah Galvin

In the entrance to Greenwood's Cozy Nut Tavern is a terrarium of plastic plants and taxidermied squirrels sipping bottles of airline liquor around a Barbie-sized campfire. When asked if the squirrels were found dead that way, co-owner Taryn Roy says, "I'd like to think so." The bar's adorable interior is cedar from a barn in Duvall, where she and her husband, Sam Weyer, live and raise geese. Taryn, Sam, Sam's brother Jacob, and their friend Andrew Mitchell all own the Cozy Nut together, and Jacob and Andrew built almost everything in the place from scratch. Truly, almost everything: They even hand-made the brass lamps, after first making their own small brass foundry and collecting scrap metal. The bar is topped with slices of lacquered telephone pole—which was found "by the side of the road" but not in use holding up wires, Taryn says.

"The Cozy Nut" refers to edible nuts, but also friendly, eccentric regulars. Taryn hopes to accumulate a few such nuts. Of the menu, Taryn said, "Not to sound hobbity, but in the 18th century, you might find the same things in a pub—cheese and meat. Not that there's anything wrong with hobbits." Less 18th century: the tequila-based "Oso's Paradise," which is pleasantly fizzy and fruit-sweet instead of corn-syrup saccharine, and the tasty vegan meatloaf sandwich ($5) with tangy German coleslaw, a sweet, smoky sauce made by Jacob, and the soft white bun of backyard barbecues.

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 04:00:00 -0700

Porn Etymology at Miyabi 45th by Sarah Galvin

Mutsuko Soma is chef and co-owner of Miyabi 45th, a Japanese restaurant in Wallingford specializing in dishes that could have come from a pleasant culinary fever dream—such as sea-urchin-and-quail-egg shots—and soba, a type of thin buckwheat noodle. Vegetarians, beware of Soma's creation foie gras tofu, which is foie gras prepared like tofu, not vice versa: It's all goose and no soybean.

Soma's impressive Seattle résumé lists Chez Shea, Saito's, and Harvest Vine. She counts former Harvest Vine chef/owner Joseph Jimenez de Jimenez as an important mentor, but her hero, she told me without hesitation, is Eric Cartman from South Park because he's "smart and brave." At Miyabi 45th, Soma makes hundreds and hundreds of pounds of soba noodles, and never gets sick of it. "I moved to Japan to study cooking. Tokyo is a very foodie place. I fell in love with soba noodles—there are so many things to learn about them," she says. "The buckwheat we were using to make the noodles in Tokyo was from Washington. I thought, how come there are no soba noodles in Washington? Why not open a soba place in Seattle?" The names of Miyabi 45th's soba dishes refer to the way they're served: Seiro is cold, with dipping sauce; nanban is hot, in hot broth; and bukkake is cold, in cold broth. The section of the menu labeled "Seattle's best Bukkake style" notes that "bukkake" in this context isn't a reference to adult movies. The word "bukkake" means "to splash," and the soba dish is topped with, um, a thick sauce. When asked if customers are confused when they order bukkake and get a bowl of delicious cold soup rather than a barrage of hot come, Soma says, "Less now than before! The noodle dish came first."

Soma's favorite places to drink and eat in Seattle are (divey, great) Pacific Inn, where they give bacon to her dog, and (tiny, excellent) Gastropod, the brewpub adjunct to Epic Ales. One thing she does not like to eat, any place, any time: cupcakes. "I don't like cupcakes—I think muffins are way better," she says. "Cupcakes' tops are too small."

Meet Mutsuko Soma at the U-District Farmers Market on Saturday, August 9, when she squares off against Good Fish author/chef Becky Selengut in an Iron Chef–style cook-off from 10 a.m. to noon.

Seattle Pops' Popsicles Will Haunt Your Dreams

Sarah Galvin — Sun, 03 Aug 2014 14:42:00 -0700

by Sarah Galvin

The Stranger
THE JANES FAMILY Dave, Megan, and Lindsey—so cute.

Megan Janes worked at a toy store called 99 Monkeys until a fateful trip to Birmingham, Alabama, where a shop selling exclusively popsicles inspired her to start Seattle Pops. Because the name "popsicle" is trademarked, she can't use it, though the Brazilian device she uses to make them is called a popsicle machine. Her "pops" are modeled after Mexican paletas, their shapes more boxy than suggestive. She's currently adapting a traditional Mexican recipe, arroz con leche, a frozen mixture of spiced cream and rice.

Megan's sister Lindsey and dad Dave (a barista and a project manager at Reality Homes, respectively) helped to launch the business, making and tasting countless experimental pops...

KEEP READING > > >

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 04:00:00 -0700

Seattle Pops: Popsicles That Will Haunt Your Dreams by Sarah Galvin

Megan's sister Lindsey and dad Dave (a barista and a project manager at Reality Homes, respectively) helped to launch the business, making and tasting countless experimental pops. Dave had some experience in the mobile frozen desserts field, having spent a summer selling popsicles from a tricycle as a kid. Seattle Pops are made almost entirely with ingredients from the local farmers markets where the Janes family sells their wares. Grandma Janes mails Kona coffee from her home in Hawaii for their Kona coffee pops, which are basically impeccable frozen lattes on sticks. The chocolate banana pops, darker and richer than any gas station fudgesicle, will haunt my dreams. Seasonal flavors like beet and pumpkin are in the works. For summer: More than one customer recommends Zesty Lime pops in margaritas.

A Brand-New Beer Bar from Two Boeing Engineers

Sarah Galvin — Sat, 26 Jul 2014 16:09:00 -0700

by Sarah Galvin

THIS IS GREG ANDERSON He spits out Budweiser.

Boeing engineers Greg and Lena Anderson run the brand-new Ballard Beer Company, a taproom and beer shop serving almost exclusively local—in fact, almost exclusively Ballard—beers. As of very recently, Ballard is among the country's most brewery-filled neighborhoods, hence, the idea for a bar specializing in the neighborhood's work. BBC even has a beer made especially for them by nearby Maritime Pacific Brewing: Dead Reckoning Pale Ale. At the bar's opening party, I opted for the Imperial Session Ale from Stoup Brewing, which was like the beer equivalent of a cheerful grandma's flower garden. (Presumably the grandma is cheerful because she's wasted)...

KEEP READING > > >

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 04:00:00 -0700

A Brand-New Beer Bar from Two Boeing Engineers by Sarah Galvin

Boeing engineers Greg and Lena Anderson run the brand-new Ballard Beer Company, a taproom and beer shop serving almost exclusively local—in fact, almost exclusively Ballard—beers. As of very recently, Ballard is among the country's most brewery-filled neighborhoods, hence, the idea for a bar specializing in the neighborhood's work. BBC even has a beer made especially for them by nearby Maritime Pacific Brewing: Dead Reckoning Pale Ale. At the bar's opening party, I opted for the Imperial Session Ale from Stoup Brewing, which was like the beer equivalent of a cheerful grandma's flower garden. (Presumably the grandma is cheerful because she's wasted.)

BBC's spacious main room is furnished with heavy-duty wooden tables of a kind that Vikings or well-mannered dinosaurs might appreciate, designed by Heather Earnhardt of Wandering Goose and her partner, Zac Young. (The BBC doesn't have a kitchen, but you can order in from nearby restaurants.) On the walls hang watercolors and drawings by Lena's grandfather, who owned Ballard's patriotic-looking Spirit gas station for decades. A loft will soon contain couches. Greg reports that he tried his first beer at the age of 7: "It was in my grandpa's bedroom. He was drinking a Budweiser. I said, 'What's that?' He said, 'Here, try it.' I spit it out all over his bed. I think my course in life was predetermined at that point." Asked if he'd ever tried Sparks or Four Loko, Greg says, "That stuff scares me! But I've seen people drinking it at nine in the morning, so maybe it's an alternative to a latte."

This article has been updated since its original publication.

Remember the Gravity Bar on Broadway?

Sarah Galvin — Sun, 20 Jul 2014 08:01:00 -0700

by Sarah Galvin

Kelly O
KEELY FETTERS Her name is great.

Before opening HummingBird, Ballard's new juice bar and restaurant, Keely Fetters was an acupuncturist, an interior decorator, and an employee at Gravity Bar (a long-ago, much-beloved juice and vegetarian food spot on Broadway). Keely's time at Gravity Bar left her with an urge to start her own juice bar, plus fond memories both juice- and non-juice-related. "I'd never been starstuck before," she said, "but the Beastie Boys came in, and I had to hide in the walk-in..."

KEEP READING > > >

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 04:00:00 -0700

Seattle Juice History at HummingBird by Sarah Galvin

Before opening HummingBird, Ballard's new juice bar and restaurant, Keely Fetters was an acupuncturist, an interior decorator, and an employee at Gravity Bar (a long-ago, much-beloved juice and vegetarian food spot on Broadway). Keely's time at Gravity Bar left her with an urge to start her own juice bar, plus fond memories both juice- and non-juice-related. "I'd never been starstuck before," she said, "but the Beastie Boys came in, and I had to hide in the walk-in."

Keely's favorite juice drink changes daily, but HummingBird's top seller is the refreshing, Kermit-green Sweet Hydration, with ginger, lemon, coconut water, kale, spinach, and pear. When asked if there is anything that should never be juiced, Keely said, "I think you shouldn't juice eggs—the shell's probably not so good for you. I still have a problem with wheatgrass—it makes me feel a little high." Of course, I had to get a wheatgrass shot. It tasted like a field of wildflowers (minus the bugs and moles). I noticed a slight energy boost. HummingBird also offers salads, sandwiches, and wraps. The Take a Dip! trio included a cashew and red pepper dip I'd have submerged myself in completely if it was served in a deeper bowl. Keely will have probably added Bellinis and mimosas to the menu by the time you read this.

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 04:00:00 -0700

A Bar with a Backstory at Brunswick & Hunt by Sarah Galvin

"Every bar should start with a good story," said Barry Rogel when I stepped into his and his brother Scott's new Ballard restaurant/bar, Brunswick & Hunt. B&H's ornate saloon-style bar was made by the Brunswick Company, the largest furniture manufacturer in the United States before WWI, and on its wall is a huge painting of a pastoral scene in which a hunter stands over a deer entitled The Hunt. Both were purchased in Winlock, Washington. "We bought the safe, too. We just have to get it out of there somehow!" said Scott Rogel. "And guess what the name of this building my brother bought is?" he said. "The W.E. Hunt Building."

Barry runs the DeLuxe Bar and Grill, and Scott runs the Athenian, but their vision for pricier Brunswick & Hunt is unlike either. Local farms will supply game, fish, and, as Barry said, "a cavalcade of vegetables" for a seasonal menu. Items you won't find elsewhere: a meat-and-vegetable Brunswick stew, which Barry describes as "a stew you can hang your hat on," and a cocktail called the Hunter, the only ingredient of which he will disclose is whiskey. Barry himself doesn't hunt, though his awesomely named chef Race Jones (formerly of the Matador chain) does, and neither has ever encountered a meat (or vegetable) they didn't like.

Two Incredibly Nice Guys Making Great Coffee—ON WHEELS!

Sarah Galvin — Tue, 01 Jul 2014 07:37:00 -0700

by Sarah Galvin

Kelly O
ALEX JOHNSTONE AND DAVID ROTHSTEIN Owners, the Pedal-Powered Coffee Carts Formerly Known as Handlebar Coffee

Alex Johnstone and David Rothstein have biked together since high school. Alex actually uses the first bike he ever bought, a Bianchi Brava, to tow one of their new venture's twin coffee carts. Originally known as Handlebar Coffee, Alex and David's carts just received a cease-and-desist notice from a Southern California coffee company going by the Handlebar name (meanies!). Alex and David are still out there making coffee—we'll call them Formerly Handlebar here—and they'll be riding under a new name soon. Onward!

David studied environmental science at UCSC; Alex formerly worked as an arborist (tree doctor/stylist) and has a degree in urban forestry. The two of them began researching human-powered food carts a year ago. "I heard of this awesome guy in Morocco who makes potato chips off the back of this human-powered cart," David says...

KEEP READING > > >

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 04:00:00 -0700

Two Incredibly Nice Guys Making Great Coffee—ON WHEELS! by Sarah Galvin

Alex Johnstone and David Rothstein have biked together since high school. Alex actually uses the first bike he ever bought, a Bianchi Brava, to tow one of their new venture's twin coffee carts. Originally known as Handlebar Coffee, Alex and David's carts just received a cease-and-desist notice from a Southern California coffee company going by the Handlebar name (meanies!). Alex and David are still out there making coffee—we'll call them Formerly Handlebar here—and they'll be riding under a new name soon. Onward!

David studied environmental science at UCSC; Alex formerly worked as an arborist (tree doctor/stylist) and has a degree in urban forestry. The two of them began researching human-powered food carts a year ago. "I heard of this awesome guy in Morocco who makes potato chips off the back of this human-powered cart," David says.

Formerly Handlebar specializes in unwashed, single-origin coffees—that means they're from one farm, and the beans are dried inside the fruit. Formerly Handlebar's brewing methods are French press, pour-over, and AeroPress. The latter is the most dramatic of the processes—imagine if a Hoover attachment made coffee. The Kuma Ethiopia Borboya AeroPress was so black, it was opaque, and it smelled deliciously of curry and flowers. Their roasters are local—Conduit, Kuma, and Velton's—and Conduit delivers beans by bike, so they were natural partners.

When asked about their dream bikes, Alex says, "Ones with disc brakes. Or... rocket bikes!" Their commissary is in a mirrored Wallingford basement where Julia's drag performers rehearse. Recently they did a pop-up event with Conduit and Peddler Brewing ("A sexy trifecta," as David describes it). To find them today—and you should, since they're incredibly nice guys making great coffee—check out their Facebook (which is still facebook.com/handlebarcoffee... for now).

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 04:00:00 -0700

Gangnam Style at BRGR Bar by Sarah Galvin

Judy Lee, owner of Pioneer Square's BRGR Bar, grew up in Korea, where she worked, as she describes it, every imaginable food-industry job. When she moved to Bellevue with her son Daniel (who works at BRGR Bar and acted as a translator during our interview), she opened restaurants in Lynnwood and Sammamish. She bought Dome Burger when its original owner retired after 20 years; the transformation of the popular dive into cozy, wood-paneled BRGR Bar was a response to customer requests. Judy's husband built all the furnishings, from the booths to the carved banisters, for an aesthetic resembling older Pioneer Square taverns.

Judy wanted a name that advertises they serve beer and wine (Dome Burger didn't), and that they still have burgers. She omitted the vowels from "burger" because she thought it was exciting—the burgers themselves have no holes in them. Development of the menu involved extensive research (read: burger-eating) and experimentation. Judy enjoys this process so much, she's doing a rotating Brgr of the Month. Her favorite topping: the Korean-style coleslaw on BRGR Bar's Gangnam Brgr (referencing the Psy song and a glamorous district in Seoul). Her least favorite topping: the absence of toppings. I tried a Meatless Heaven Brgr towering with avocado. The sweet, creamy Bavarian aioli with BRGR Bar's IPA-battered fries could make rebar edible.

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 04:00:00 -0700

Welcome to the Thunder Dome at Meeples Games by Sarah Galvin

After explaining that a "meeple" is a human-shaped game piece from a German board game called Carcassonne (rather than what I imagined, which was more like a puppet from Labyrinth), Laura Schneider showed me around her new West Seattle shop, Meeples Games. The tour included a puffy leather "spouse chair" for waiting while a significant other peruses the retail area—the eclectic selection of games includes Bowling Zombies, Salmon Run, and Lewis & Clark—and the "Thunder Dome," where tournaments are held for games like Magic: The Gathering. Laura, a longtime software tester, relishes low-tech entertainment in her free time; this is why Meeples is all-analog.

Laura hopes for Meeples to be a community gathering place and plans to organize a weekly mah-jongg game with a nearby senior center. Laura is especially excited to create a space for young people—middle and high school students can be found in the Thunder Dome daily. Many games are available for in-store checkout. Her own 22-year-old son is an employee. The Meeples cafe serves local beers, sandwiches, and snacks, and my Brie, pesto, and apple panini with chips was simple, tasty, and satisfying, fit for a grown-up's lunch box. And Laura, who is originally from Texas, recommends the Texan-style chile con queso.

Adorable Caffe Delia in White Center Gets Its Own Digs

Sarah Galvin — Tue, 20 May 2014 10:59:39 -0700

by Sarah Galvin

The Stranger
I LOVE COFFEE Delia MacFadden and Matt Weiner.

White Center's Caffe Delia originally ran out of a corner of Proletariat Pizza during the restaurant's off-hours. The Proletariat owners suggested the arrangement when they learned of Delia MacFadden's long-standing desire to run her own cafe. "I was working in the coffee shop in the morning and the pizza place in the evening," says Delia, who honed her barista skills at Bird on a Wire Espresso. "I was way too old to be doing that. I would wash the last dish and then start folding napkins to open the pizza place." She reports that the pizza that pairs best with coffee is chard, goat cheese, and roasted garlic.

The quasi-pop-up was very popular, so about a month ago, she and Matt Weiner reopened in their own space next door...

KEEP READING > > >

Out of the Pizza Place

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 14 May 2014 04:00:00 -0700

Caffe Delia in White Center Gets Its Own Digs by Sarah Galvin

White Center's Caffe Delia originally ran out of a corner of Proletariat Pizza during the restaurant's off-hours. The Proletariat owners suggested the arrangement when they learned of Delia MacFadden's long-standing desire to run her own cafe. "I was working in the coffee shop in the morning and the pizza place in the evening," says Delia, who honed her barista skills at Bird on a Wire Espresso. "I was way too old to be doing that. I would wash the last dish and then start folding napkins to open the pizza place." She reports that the pizza that pairs best with coffee is chard, goat cheese, and roasted garlic.

The quasi-pop-up was very popular, so about a month ago, she and Matt Weiner reopened in their own space next door. It looks simple and elegant: high ceilings, big windows, and walls painted an inviting robin's-egg blue. Also simple and elegant: the cafe's furniture, which Matt says was shockingly expensive. He learned it's easy to underestimate the cost of tables and chairs for a business if you're just used to furnishing your own apartment.

Delia chose the Italian spelling of the word "cafe" as an homage to her beloved uncle Folger, who moved to Italy 30 years ago. Not referenced by the shop's name: Delia's grandfather Hamilton MacFadden, who directed the first Shirley Temple movie and the first three Charlie Chan movies before being mysteriously blacklisted from Hollywood. He was so reviled that when the up-and-coming actress Ruth Channing married him, GM buried her contract. The reasons for all this remain unknown.

Matt is a professional musician who plays double bass for a few local bands, including the Bric-a-Brac Trio, which you can see on Thursday nights at the Pink Door. He also played on and produced the last Barton Carroll record. Matt describes Carroll as "an excellent local singer-songwriter and an excellent plumber."

When I read that Caffe Delia is part of the Rat City Business Association, I became curious about how White Center came to be known as Rat City. In the 10 years that Matt and Delia have lived in the neighborhood, they've heard many inconclusive theories. "There's so many different stories, and I hesitate to repeat any of them," Matt says. "People say it's related to some kind of military rehabilitation center in the area, that it was a low-alcohol area in the '20s, and also that the sailors who came down here were called rats. No one really knows."

I have rarely seen smiles as hard to interpret as Matt and Delia's when asked for good stories about regulars. Two customers bought $1,000 worth of coffee to help Caffe Delia get off the ground in its new location. Conversely, a man once emerged from the bathroom after 40 minutes with a trash bag full of "something liquidy," as Matt describes it. The man then said, "Don't worry, I cleaned up." It took Matt a good 15 minutes to work up the courage to look, but the bathroom was actually spotless. "But we spend most of our time making really good coffee here," Matt assures me. "It's not just puke stories!" Indeed, Delia's mochas are raved about online. When asked why they're so good, she says, "I don't know... I love chocolate, I love coffee. I'm pretty self-effacing, so I have trouble talking about myself or things I do." "She makes them really pretty," Matt says, smiling affectionately. (He supplied the anecdote about Delia's infamous grandfather as well.)

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 07 May 2014 04:00:00 -0700

Seafaring Adventure at Polar Cafe by Sarah Galvin

When I first visited Polar Cafe, its owner, Maeve Keogh, was on a mission to free two ships trapped in antarctic ice aboard the Polar Star, the world's most powerful non-nuclear icebreaker. Maeve was a regular at Frank, the cafe that formerly inhabited Polar's small space on north Capitol Hill. Happily, its closure coincided with her retirement from the Coast Guard. She redecorated with photos of arctic wildlife, life preservers, and her collection of sports memorabilia. Maeve's husky Maddy, who goes well with the polar decor, lounged in the sun by a case of Le Fournil pastries while she recounted her adventures. The Polar Star's rescue mission ended—after the ship weathered a storm with 20-foot waves and 60-mile-an-hour winds—when the ice blew away from the trapped ships.

On a previous mission, Keogh rescued drug runners whose boat was so packed with cocaine that it capsized. "Ninety 50-pound bales of cocaine just floating in the water," she said. She described with excitement the whales, penguins, and seals that followed the Polar Star as it bored its way through the ice, and of one expedition when she saw several pilot whales kill a marlin. When asked which skills from life at sea are most useful as a cafe owner, she replied, "You learn how to tell good tall tales."

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 04:00:00 -0700

Gin Cider and Sea Chanteys at Admiral Bird by Sarah Galvin

"Swell is the heart that drinks till it floats," reads the sign at Admiral Bird, Heidi Herr and Corina Luckenbach's newish West Seattle cafe. Corina, who also works at Circa alehouse, says it's an homage to booze-themed sea chanteys. Admiral Bird has several local beers on tap, as well as Raven's Brew coffee, and while the landlocked cafe would more likely inspire street-parking chanteys, all of its benches are upholstered with a boat's sail. Corina and Heidi, who also owns Bird on a Wire Espresso, are both longtime West Seattle residents. "One of my first jobs was flipping burgers at Pepperdock on Alki," Corina said.

Admiral Bird shares a space with a flower shop called Flower Lab, which creates the atmosphere of a lovely indoor garden, making other so-called beer gardens look like beer morgues. The cafe is outfitted with a digital projector, and Corina hopes to host a regular movie night/pajama party. Pesto aioli takes Admiral Bird's arugula, cheese, and egg croissant sandwich to a higher plane of breakfast sandwiches. The sandwich goes well with Seattle Cider Company's Gin Botanical cider, infused with the same plants used in the production of gin. It's crisp and dry, a bit like kombucha but, as the bartender told me, "Much more fun."

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 04:00:00 -0700

The Thunderbird Tavern Is Back (with Secret Sauce!) by Sarah Galvin

The Thunderbird Tavern, a favorite Ballard dive for more than 60 years, reopened in February under the ownership of Madison Eckendorf and Ian Smith. Ian runs a hot-dog cart called Secret Sausage, all of whose secrets are now available at the Thunderbird. Ian's background as a bouncer at the Owl N' Thistle and a semi-pro wrestler is unsurprising—he's friendly, easygoing, and the size of a backhoe. The building housing the Thunderbird and the Sands strip club has been owned by the Danilchik family for generations. Madison says the family's decision to lease them the space may have been related to their fondness for her and Ian's 1-year-old daughter.

On a Saturday afternoon, the bar was packed with NASCAR enthusiasts (and one adorable dog that looked like a feather duster) who have met there weekly for years. Both Ian and Madison's dads helped with the remodel, including the installation of a metal door handle shaped like a thunderbird from local Native American mythology. The Thunderbird's popular longtime bartender Fran (rehired when Ian and Madison took ownership) now serves Stoup and Two Beers in addition to the traditional Bud Light. I had a tasty "Meatless Secret," Field Roast chipotle sausage and cream cheese on a bolillo roll with house-made "Fir-Lander" hot sauce, which Madison says is Secret Sausage's best secret, and which I say makes Tabasco taste like sand.

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 02 Apr 2014 04:00:00 -0700

Watercress Vietnamese Is Half Bistro, Half Pool Hall by Sarah Galvin

Loan Hua, an environmental chemist by day, opened a pool hall in Columbia City earlier this year. She didn't hesitate to turn half the space into Watercress Vietnamese Bistro when she realized there was room. The pool-hall half was packed at 2 p.m. when I stopped by. In the restaurant, a woman who had clearly eaten there before chatted with the staff and a family sharing plates of appetizers. The music playing sounded like Vietnamese Kate Bush. A revolving gold lamp made of coins on the bar was a gift from a friend of Loan's, to bring luck and prosperity. Mirrors and vases of ornamental grass surround the bar and its array of wines.

Watercress's chef, who recently moved from Vietnam, developed the menu based on dishes Loan and her family eat at home. Several incorporate the restaurant's leafy namesake, like watercress beef salad, but I opted for the vegetarian sizzling crepe. The tofu, mushroom, and bean sprout stuffed crepe was fried to a golden crisp and wreathed in fresh lettuce, basil, and mint. The way to eat this crepe is by breaking it into pieces, wrapping them in lettuce and herbs, and then dipping these bundles in a lightly salty soy-sauce concoction. "It is photo-worthy!" said the talkative customer when she noticed me snapping its picture.

Napkin Friends Makes Panini with Two Latkes as the Bread

Sarah Galvin — Sat, 29 Mar 2014 11:00:00 -0700

by Sarah Galvin

The Stranger

Jonny Silverberg, owner of Napkin Friends food truck, claims the most exciting thing he's ever done with a potato is fire one out of a cannon, but as he invented the latke press sandwich, this is debatable. Jonny learned to make latkes from his grandma Sylvia (the truck's logo is an adorable drawing of them together). One day while working as a chef at Pomegranate Bistro in Redmond, he made a panino with two latkes as the bread. The first sandwich this yielded was "the OG," with house-made pastrami. When I told him I'd never tried pastrami, Jonny's face looked as if I'd insisted I could shoot lasers out of my eyes...

KEEP READING > > >

And guess what? Napkin Friends is at Hugo House on Capitol Hill for the APRIL Independent Publishing Expo from RIGHT NOW until 5 p.m.!

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 26 Mar 2014 04:00:00 -0700

Napkin Friends Makes Panini with Two Latkes as the Bread by Sarah Galvin

Jonny Silverberg, owner of Napkin Friends food truck, claims the most exciting thing he's ever done with a potato is fire one out of a cannon, but as he invented the latke press sandwich, this is debatable. Jonny learned to make latkes from his grandma Sylvia (the truck's logo is an adorable drawing of them together). One day while working as a chef at Pomegranate Bistro in Redmond, he made a panino with two latkes as the bread. The first sandwich this yielded was "the OG," with house-made pastrami. When I told him I'd never tried pastrami, Jonny's face looked as if I'd insisted I could shoot lasers out of my eyes.

I can count on two hands the number of times I've ever eaten meat, but I couldn't resist the BLTGA, a latke BLT with Gouda and aioli. The thinnest, crispiest ribbons of bacon were cushioned between thick, soft avocado wedges. The latkes were rich, but not greasy—the panini press cooks out excess oil. I may have shot lasers or something. Sides include matzo ball soup ("aka Jewish penicillin" on the menu), Britt's pickles, and, of course, latkes with applesauce and sour cream. A sticker on the truck's dashboard reading "Don't drop, don't throw" is not meant to discourage food fights—it is an artifact from its former employer, FedEx.

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 04:00:00 -0700

The Fuse Box Is Seattle's Tiniest Biker Bar by Sarah Galvin

Next to Seattle Used Bikes on Aurora, a former garage houses the Fuse Box, Seattle's littlest biker bar. Lights hang on motorcycle chains above the pinup photos and rare beer cans that line the walls. A 1966 Gilera leans next to a table topped with a Honda alternator cover. Sean Westlake, one of the founders of the Cretins Motorcycle Club, opened the bar with Jeremiah Robinson, envisioning a place to "sit and have a beer, work on your bike, talk to people." Said beers include a selection from Odin Brewing, Hilliard's, and Two Beers, in addition to standard PBR. The bar currently serves nothing more extravagant than chips and peanuts (though I did find a coveted three-nut-peanut), but they bring in a by-donation Crock-Pot for "Scooter Trash Tuesdays" and plan to enlist food trucks.

A turntable and records are available to those who can use them. (Sean was amused and horrified when some newly- 21 patrons didn't know what they were.) Sean got into scooters when they were cheap and could often be found rusting in backyards. He now favors a 1973 Honda CL350. Asked what he would most like to jump over on a motorcycle, he said, "A pit of zombies... a shark, because I was listening to Fonzie on the radio, acid, fire... a pool of piranhas."

The First Sports-Themed Food Truck in Seattle: Street Hawk!

Sarah Galvin — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 10:00:00 -0700

by Sarah Galvin

The Stranger
BRIAN AND CASSIE POWELL: Owners,  Street Hawk

Find Street Hawk today from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. in South Lake Union in Re:Public's parking lot.

"We were at Hilliard's for the Super Bowl," said Brian Powell, co-owner of Street Hawk, the first sports-themed food truck in Seattle. "They brought stadium bleachers into the brewery. They were at capacity. On the way home, we were honking at everybody. One guy ran up at a stop sign and gave me Skittles." Fortuitously, he and Cassie Powell started their business right as the Seahawks' parade of wins began...

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Shawn O'Donnell's Puts Some Irish in the Smith Tower

Sarah Galvin — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 13:46:00 -0700

by Sarah Galvin

The Stranger
SHAWN O’DONNELL JR. Co-owner

Shawn O'Donnell Jr. was only a day old when his dad brought him to the original Shawn O'Donnell's in Everett. He began greeting and seating guests while he was still tiny enough to inspire confused stares when he introduced himself as Shawn O'Donnell. Now with a second location on the ground floor of the historic Smith Tower (or in its balls, for those who refer to it as the Penis Building), the pub's specialty is slow-cooked corned beef and cabbage. Additionally, the O'Donnells may have invented "Irish nachos" (potato chips with corned beef, cheese, and jalapeños)...

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Also at Shawn O'Donnell's today: a soda-bread baking contest and more festivities.

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 04:00:00 -0700

Ascona Chocolate Suisse Bedazzles Madison Valley by Sarah Galvin

The case of Läderach chocolates in Madison Valley's Ascona Chocolat Suisse blazes against the shop's simple, all-white interior like a well-matted painting or a bedazzled sweater. "I'm Hans," said owner Hans Riechsteiner when I walked in, "Hans Christian Andersen. Ha-ha, not really." Hans ran the popular Arosa waffle cafes for 20 years before opening Ascona six months ago. When asked why he switched from waffles to chocolate, he said, having made more than 750,000 waffles, he and his wife were tired. A woman who came in to buy chocolate for her husband noticed my laptop and said, "This will be a hard story to write. 'Everyone looked miserable. One woman left crying.'"

Hans waxed confectionary about the chocolate shops he ran in the '70s and about selling something that makes everyone happy. He mentioned the same woman bought chocolate for Valentine's Day and was already back. His sales tend to decline after Valentine's, but business is back to normal in about a week. It was hard to choose from the chocolate case's jewel-like contents. Hans's favorite flavor: "All 34 of them." The Milk Coconut's toasty exterior and translucent, creamy middle dissolved instantly on my tongue. Aptly named, the Divine Red Calvados's flavor of fresh McIntosh apples made me realize the problem with regular apples is that they're not made of butter and liqueur.

Chow Bio

Sarah Galvin — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 04:00:00 -0800

Getting Fried at Street Hawk by Sarah Galvin

"We were at Hilliard's for the Super Bowl," said Brian Powell, co-owner of Street Hawk, the first sports-themed food truck in Seattle. "They brought stadium bleachers into the brewery. They were at capacity. On the way home, we were honking at everybody. One guy ran up at a stop sign and gave me Skittles." Fortuitously, he and Cassie Powell started their business right as the Seahawks' parade of wins began. The two previously ran a food booth, roving to music festivals all over California and Nevada. Their mutual passion for sports and mobile eateries inspired Street Hawk, which serves "a gourmet twist on game-day favorites."

As someone less interested in sports than watching half-naked, paint-covered fans bounce on the hoods of cars after games, I was ambivalent about the theme. The food was a different story. The Nerf-football-size black-bean veggie burger was perfectly balanced in both texture and flavor—the bean patty's crunchy char with the creamy aioli, the sharp cheese with the sweet caramelized onion chutney. Street Hawk's "secret" side dish, beer-battered fried avocados with honey-chipotle aioli, may actually stop time. My eyes rolled back. They're not on the menu, as they are too time-consuming to make during rushes, but may be available upon request when it's slower. There is also a rumor of beer-battered fried bacon. You'll find Street Hawk's current "perch" on their website (streethawktruck.com).