Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

I didn’t realize ‘Loonie’ was slang for ‘cash’ in Canada, though it makes more sense than ‘dough’.

Jeremy’s been going on about how ‘you rock’ is his most hated current expression and I think the decal on the side of this Shriner’s bus is the most painful embodiment of said expression.

“Portland is adding college-educated 25- to 34-year-olds at a rate five times the average for the 50 largest U.S. metro areas…” Gulp. From an article that came out today in the Willamette Weekly about the place nobody can stop talking about, the Doug Fir.

Check out Jason’s new blog and new kitchen (warning, will cause kitchen-envy).

Anyway, back to the trip up north. Jeremy and I checked into the Moore Hotel in Seattle and decided it’s the perfect place to be a world weary burnt-out jazz musician who likes to sit on his window sill and jam.

The place was seriously urban seedy and had a great Barton Fink hallway, where you could faintly hear a band that sounded like Crime and City Solution rehearsing nearbye.

All this glamour was wasted on me cause I sat in bed watching Seinfeld reruns and mused on Jami’s obsession about watching familiar reruns in different cities.
Eventually, we consulted my notes and headed out to a bar called The Jade Pagoda, which seemed walkable from the map. Our hotel was pretty centrally downtown, but once you walk a couple of blocks it quickly got desserted and scary. Whenever I feel iffy about a new town and wondering about the benefit of the doubt, I imagine what it would be like if I was having this issue in New Orleans. In which case, I panic and flee. So we got a taxi and gave the dude the exact address and cross street of where we were going, though he ended up dropping us off about two miles away (we later learned) in a front of a building labled ‘Gay City’ and the driver said ‘You’ll like it here.’ Gulp. We tried to walk the rest of the way, but it was really confusing. Seattle streets are all NW, SW, etc, with the exception that the city is this insane patchwork of streets, all severely uphill, all freeways. Some local toughs told me I looked like the Verizon can-you-hear-me-now guy (teased on the street! that never happened in Brooklyn! worst part is I think Jeremy kind of agreed with them and was all ‘hey, wait up, I want to join your gang’). At which point, we took another cab ride back to the hotel where Jeremy tried to pick a fight with the cabbie about how much he hated Seattle, though the guy was refusing to take the bait.
Ironically, everyone we talked to on this trip had disparaging things to say about Portland, which made me very homesick.

Anyway, I ended up eating dinner at this empty bar which was right next to
the hotel which seemed uber hipster and reminded me of Barmacy, but I guess it really was just a dive cause they had ‘Redneck Woman’ on the jukebox.

Last Friday, we hit Yoko’s sushi on Gladstone, the best I’ve ever had. I highly recommend the Tacas Tuna. I thought the tempura batter tasted exactly like donuts, which is why it’s my favorite. I also like their logo and tried to make Jami buy the t-shirt.

David Byrne has a streaming radio broadcast on his website. So jealous.

Everyone agrees the Jami visit came and went way too fast. And maybe not since the summer of 2002 has it been such a lazy visit. We really did nothing but watch movies and eat.

Finally ate the Doug Fir after many months of avoiding it since it’s only a few blocks away. This place gets packed on the weekends because the basement holds a venue that books the brightest lights of the indie rock world and it’s always too packed for brunch on the weekends.

When it opened, I didn’t think Portland had enough hipsters to keep a place like this open. But I’ve been really wrong on that front many times. Mainly, this is because a bar near my house is a total hipster meat market when I stumble in there like grandpa crashing the pool party to pick my to-go dinner (it’s really good and cheap).

Turns out if you go there on a weekday for breakfast it’s not half bad. The food was really good and it was kinda cheap. Sure, the Shins (it was definitely a band) was having breakfast/a pose-a-thon at a table near ours, but it was easy to tune them out since the place was empty.

Jami was freaked out/delighted that the waitresses’ t-shirt said ‘I love Fir Burgers’ but all was forgiven after trying out the really good biscuits and gravy.

In person, you can see how they really spent some time trying to get everything right, which is really delightful and rare. I wonder if this style is going to catch on nationally or if it already has.

Here’s the restaurant at the Edgewater hotel in Seattle.

It took a year to get to this point. Jami tried to buy this record, the soundtrack to an obscure Jon Cryer punk/western revenge drama, from a store downtown last year but they wouldn’t sell it to her because it wasn’t priced. Everybody I know has tried to buy this record for her and all were shunned. The reason she wanted it so bad (aside from her need to search out rare lost cause soundtracks) was because it featured Megadeath doing ‘These Boots Are Made For Walking’.
So we rented the tape from Movie Madness (and now, many years later, I feel like I can safely say Jon Cryer was the poor poor man’s Mathew Broderick, or the rich man’s Scrubs guy who starred in Garden State) and the damn song wasn’t in the movie. A trip to record store proved disheartening when they didn’t even have the record, a daring shift from the ritual of visiting it and not being allowed to buy it. This time though, the plan was to smash the record if they wouldn’t sell it. Today Jami stopped in Jackpot on Burnside, which has about six records for sale and of course they had it for four dollars.
World’s most drawn-out story. Scene.

Inside Rem Koolhaas’ public library in Seattle. I’ve been a big fan of his after I read Delirious New York, when I moved there in 2001 and I also really dug his Prada store.

It’s funny, cause the whole thing seemed like it escaped from a state college campus from the eighties, but it had lots of cool touches.

Jeremy hated it and thought the whole thing looked super shoddy. And it kinda did in places. Mainly, it looked seriously run down already, which is shocking since it’s only about two years old. Maybe they weren’t counting on all the homeless people wear and tear. But, I mean… duh.

These chairs were all over and made out of foam. They looked design-y and everything, but you can so easily envision the generations of bored teenagers carving their names into it with a butter knife or a fingernail.

This was on the fourth floor (I think, cause the place was seriously geometrically confusing) and it seemed like a set from a Dario Argento movie.

I didn’t tweak the colors at all. The elevators had this crazy glowing green lighting, which was pretty hillarious.

Not room for one more book.

Woke up at six a.m. because everybody went to bed so early.

At breakfast, everyone was very excited for another day of exploring.

Here’s Yaletown, Vancouver’s answer to ‘Soho’ (which is only the answer if the question was: What would be nothing at all like Soho?). They were supposed to have square watermelons for sale there, but we came up empty handed.

Kelly talked us into renting bikes and we rode around the big park.

It was bizarre to see Five Alive was still out in the world, trying to make a living. I didn’t remember it tasting so sickly sweet.

We got our act together a little better the second night and managed to stay out of scary parts of town or argue about where to go. I think this was due to total resignation that there was much hope left.
I award Vancouver the Worst City Ever award, making even Philadelphia or Milwaukee seem not so shabby in retrospect.

After what felt like an hour long car ride (it was just under six), Katherine and Jeremy and I arrived in Vancouver for our visit with Patrick and Kelly. Despite they’re being no freeways in the city, it was pretty easy to get to downtown, where all three of us were like ‘Whoah! That’s a lot of gray buildings’ It’s like when you see an illustration of the skyline of Manhattan and every building is basically the same, except for the Empire State and Chrystler buildings. And whoever sells green glass here must be a bazillionaire.

Really, like every building is nearly the same. Before we left I read Douglas Coupland’s book ‘City of Glass’, a collection of mini essays about this town. And I learned all this construction is from mainly Chinese investors who thought everybody from Hong Kong was going to move here in the 90’s when it reverted back to mainland control. And it kind of looks like pictures of Hong Kong a little bit.

But obviously, the chief architectural influence was the film Blade Runner, which is kinda cool in a nice-place-to-visit sort of way. What was weird was that despite all this verticle density, most of the town felt shockingly deserted, like midtown Manhattan on a Sunday. And Every Single Store was a chain. Not even a ‘good chain’ but like airport foodcourt chain. It was a more unifying principle than even the green glass buildings. I could kick myself for not taking pictures to show this, because otherwise, you get a really false notion of what their downtown looks like.

Despite this, it was great to see Patrick and Kelly, who had flown in the night before and hadn’t done much exploring yet. I think everybody had looked at the same tourist brochure because we were all salivating to go on this suspension bridge that looked super dramatic and scary. An overly helpful dude in the street came running up to us and told us how to get to the bridge, which entailed taking a seabus, which was kinda fun and felt very vacationy even though it was just regular old public transit.
On the bus, Katherine and I struck up a conversation with this nice old British lady who was like ‘that bridge is a straight up ripoff.’ (and she used the expression ‘donkey’s years’, which I’m going to try to work as much as possible) And Jeremy was mesmerized by these super strung out junkies sitting next to him who had wads of cash.
When we got let off in another food court mini-mall in North Vancouver, I made a call and found out the bridge was in fact $30 and two long bus rides away. Plan B was a gondola ride up the mountain (like the one over the Queensboro bridge) that was $50 (!!!) and even further away. We shoulda stuck with that old lady on the boat. We kinda wandered around the food court for a while in vain, saw the junkies eating ice cream and then look the ferry back to town.

The next thing on the list (and it was a few blocks away) was Chinatown, which I’d read (starting to hate Douglas Coupland) was this spectacular and enourmous Chinatown that would put all others to shame. I think I’ve been to most of the c-towns in the US and this one couldn’t have been more phoned in. Everything was closed and deserted.

I was kinda dying to see what Miss Rainy’s act entailed, but later that evening, nobody wanted to return, me included.

I bought a cheap old board game from the 70’s in Gastown, kinda touristy street with fake Irish pubs and souvenir shops (it is kind of culturally hillarious how they hawk Cuban cigars here). The guy in the store warned us about not walking further down the street cause it gets rough.

Of course we did and it was the one part of town that I really liked. It was all run down with great signage. In situations like this, I’m like Wylie Coyote walking straight off the cliff for a while and not realizing it until I look down and fall.

I saw this boarded up place and my heart started beating fast. I turned around to say ‘everybody, look at this, Gone With the Wig!!!’ but everybody had already high tailed it out of there because this street was literaly crawling with junkies. It was dawn of the dead junkies everywhere and I hadn’t noticed it until I’d stopped looking through my camera.

It’s so shocking to see people shooting up and buying drugs on the street. It kinda reminds me of the early 90s, but never in this kind of volume. Junky town was no fluke, though because no matter where we went we got pretty heavily harrassed by cracked out people.

We had dim sum on the big main street, Robson, where you can see Canadian bling at its finest. I thought everyone was going to be wearing fleece and down and have old eyeglasses, but was all juicy tracksuits and metrosexual and euro-trashed out. For some reason, everyone was wearing those ugly new sunglasses that Chyna Doll wears on Surreal Life.

These aren’t the right sunglasses, but a good example of how every single person looked.

Patrick and Kelly’s room outclassed ours quite a bit.

Their view.

Our view.

More walking around the empty streets, which are now making me think more of J.G. Ballard than Bladerunner, since there was a lot of hubbub in that movie.
We had dinner at this collegy bar near Gastown and then went to another place that was exactly the blues club they go to in Ghostworld. It became pretty apparent that we weren’t going to find a cool dive bar to have a drink and catch up with P&K so we decided to buy some beer and head back to their nice room.
But you can’t buy beer anywhere in this city. Back on the main ‘fun-kay’ shopping strip, you could only buy booze at one place. And it was $15 for a six pack. And since the dollar is in the toilet right now, that was just about $15. It all became very clear why everyone in this town was either a junkie or a metrosexual.
So we did what anyone would do and went to Shennanigans.

Every day is St. Patricks Day at Shennanigans!!! And every glass of beer is six dollars. This was the kind of place where every drink was called ‘Sex on the Beach’ or ‘Fort Lauderdale Rapist’ or ‘Choad’. It was mainly Asian businessmen drinking in large groups. I wonder if this seems cheap and festive if, say, you were coming from Shanghai or Taiwan.
By now we were starting to fizzle, literally, and calling it a night seemed like the only alternative…