Cross post: God damn it, Dale Chihuly ®™ is really coming to the Seattle Center

Or at least lots of glass made by him is. Personally, I think that Chihuly is extremely over rated. The guy hasn't actually blown his own glass in years due to a car accident. Instead, he just designs pieces and has other people execute them. The thing one always hears is that Chihuly has been great for the promotion of artisanal glass in the Northwest, but that as an artist, well, he's not quite as revolutionary as he would like to you to believe. There's lots of wonderful glass in the northwest, but actually constructing a museum for Chihuly seems a little like creating a Thomas Kinkade museum in order to promote painting.

Snoose Junction, one of the best Pizzas in Seattle

Here. It's in Ballard on Market Street, hidden and inconspicuous, yet it has one of the best pizzas in town. A combination of hippy and traditional pizza, my experience with Snoose is that the quality of pizza is spectacular and sets it apart from the competition. Other places might be Vera certified, might try to be completely traditional, but with much less pretention Snoose delivers the goods. And it's also eco-friendly and has Jones soda on tap as its default soda option. And this is not a paid advertisement.

Another pizza place that's somewhat in the same vein but a cut below in quality is the Zeeks local chain, where you can get basically whatever exotic combinations of ingredients you want. More hippy than traditional.

I consider there to be three basic kinds of pizza out here: hippy, traditional, and California, with the rare example of Chicago deep dish and related styles breaking the trend. Hippy is fun non-traditional combinations while California pizza is non-traditional combinations that try to be sophisticated. Sometimes it works and is spectacular, sometimes it doesn't, which is true of much California nuevo cuisine. Traditional in this sense means both east coast and Italian.

Señor Moose in Seattle: good, less Europeanized, Mexican food

Señor Moose is quickly becoming one of my favorites around here. A decently priced small place in a corner of Ballard, it serves the sort of Mexican food that you'll never find in one of the more commercial mainstream Mexican restaurants. Instead, what you get are regional specialties where the indigenous influence is high and the Spanish and general European influence is much less, varying of course dish by dish. Because of this, there are lots of tasty items on the menu that don't fit any recognizable categories, such as the Machaca Beef with Eggs, that's a stir fry of shredded stewed beef with scrambled eggs and spices that you'd never think would actually have egg in it if you weren't told. Other dishes include salads that are creations into themselves that don't resemble European salads so much as bowls of beans, shredded lettuce, miscellaneous vegetables, and a choice of meat. On one occasion I had a soup like dish that consisted of potatoes and chicken and spices boiled in a heavy cream sauce with cheese added, that looked and tasted more like something you'd find at a Thai restaurant than something you'd find in a Mexican restaurant. That's a compliment, especially in an area of the country that has been served by cheap knock offs of Mexican food for a long while, like the abysmal fast food restaurant "Taco Time", that puts thing in wraps, adds salsa to it, and calls it Mexican. Their "Mexican Fries", for instance, are Tater Tots with salsa on the side.

Into this mix Senõr Moose comes, providing real Mexican food without boutique prices--another rarity.

Check it out.

A picture of a conspiracists worst nightmare:

Here are two books I own, pictured together: the first is a stodgy, post-war manual about the "Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninsm", printed in the Soviet Union for use by Communist cadres in other countries. The second is a complete record of the rituals of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. Interesting stuff.

"Fundamentals" is very, very, dry, and devotes an inordinate amount of time talking about 'materialist philosophy', which you could summarize in about fifteen pages. Yet, this is the revision made after Stalin's death, that was described by one of the authors (who later became involved in the reforms of Glasnost and Perestroika) as being something along the lines of corrected so as not to be an embarrassment. So as not to be complete trash, then.

It's always strange realizing that there are normal people in the alternative place that you've moved

A lot of my experience out here in the Pacific Northwest has involved unlearning some of the hype and self created illusions that I brought with me when I moved here. I had no idea, but through the four years of completely alternative living, off the board, in Florida that I'd gone through I was already further along on the path to weirdness than many of the folks who already lived in the Pacific Northwest. Strange. My idea was that Washington was going to be the next level, the next stage of strangeness and mind bending radicalism....and in many ways it has been that, but not in the same intense, all encompassing, way that I imagined. Like any other place there's a lot of variation, with many folks being not as hippyish and crazy as others.

Along the way this has lead to some confusion between myself and others. I can picture myself as a kind of castaway from a far off land, going to the Northwest after wandering through the deserts of Texas and the Southwest, on and on, encountering people and being met with kind of blank stares."Umm....that's great and all...hey George, how are the Sounders doing?"

Another Seattle favorite: El Diablo Coffee in upper Queen Anne

El Diablo Coffee is a Cuban/Caribbean style cafe that serves traditional coffee drinks and sandwiches...and that is very reminiscent of cafes and coffee shops back in the good 'old Florida Keys. The same pastel coloring on everything, the same sort of whimsical folk art patterns, even the fact that it opens up onto a wooden deck/walkway that it shares with other businesses reminds me of the Keys. It's a place I often go to get away from things and relax, sort of a secret hideout. Decoration wise, the big inauthentic thing about it is that many of the images, including the Devil images, actually come from Mexican folk art and things like the Loteria game, that has lots of iconic images. The Virgin of Guadelupe, for example, isn't venerated in Cuba or in the Caribbean. But, Mexican folk art is great for me as well, and reminds me of another past place that was a love of my life: Austin Texas. In any case, the combination works well.

The coffee is good, the food is good.

Upper Queen Anne is a place that tourists in town should check out. Queen Anne itself is interesting enough, but up the hill you'll find a more laid back, less aggressively urban environment with small shops and residential streets that's sophisticated, and upscale, but that's still approachable and enjoyable as a regular person. This isn't Bellevue, just a nice little neighborhood.

On a side note, while it's not nice to celebrate a restaurant going out of business, in general, I have to say that I'm not sad to see that the Florida Keys themed restaurant in upper Queen Anne has closed down. Completely inauthentic.

If you are looking for Mexican folk art in Seattle, Milagros in Pike Place Market is the place to go. Totally authentic, good selection, nice products. Reasonably priced as well.

If you're looking for Mexican folk art in Austin, for that matter, or want to be able to order lots of it online, Tesoros Trading Company is the way to go.

I'll miss Borders--they did some good

They did some good in an area that's usually MIA in American culture--the cultivation of higher sensibility and that of the mind. Although they became one of the two big box book stores in the U.S., the mere presence of one often improved life for people by giving them broad access to lots of books that they otherwise would not be aware of or see. I know this first hand through growing up in a mid size town on the edges of the Detroit area. When a Borders opened up near Lakeside Mall in Sterling Heights, it changed my outlook. Sure, I couldn't go there all the time because it was roughly twenty five minutes away, but it did enough. Before that the major bookstore was substantially farther, the Barnes & Noble in Rochester, which has since moved across the street into a new building.

I know Borders improved my life, and even though it became a place to avoid in order to support independent book sellers, still, I can imagine there being lots of people for whom Borders was the independent bookseller, or as close as they could get to it in their area. The only alternative to me for a while, besides the long trek to Rochester and Barnes & Noble facilitated by grumpy parents, was Waldenbooks in Lakeside Mall, since closed down and hardly comparable in any way to a Borders.

So Borders, I'll miss you.....but...looking on line it seems that the Redmond branch will still be open, which is good. If only underserved communities like Lynnwood could have retained there's.