Another great thing about Seattle is that people on the outside don't really know what it's like

They think they do, but they're mistaken, and that makes the city all that more valuable. I mean, when you think of it, how much do folks really know about Seattle? There was 'Sleepless in Seattle', the rise of the grunge scene in the early to mid '90s, and then the WTO protests and afterwards in '99 and '00, but that was anywhere from eleven to twenty years ago. Since then, Seattle has become uncharted territory. The public mojo in the Northwest has moved to Portland, which lately seems to be burning itself out, particularly since the release of Portlandia, leaving Seattle to do its own thing with not a lot of scrutiny. Sure, there are articles here and there about the progressive culture and innovative things happening, but none of it appears to really capture the vibe that actually exists here.

Of course, I can't off the top of my head articulate it either. Perhaps some of it can be found in the lack of self referential understanding that exists here. In my experience, folks in Seattle don't think of themselves as living in a mental construct known as "Seattle", that may or may not correspond with the reality on the street. This applies to other cities in the greater Seattle area. I was bowled over when talking to an acquaintance in the Olympia area who was a native to find out that they really didn't have a notion of what the rest of the world thought about the city, and that they really didn't notice anything different about the grunge scene because they grew up with it. No attempt to spin living in and growing up in Olympia into a false virtue, although 'civic virtue' takes on very strange forms in Olympia sometimes.

Maybe at one point Seattle was bottled and trademarked, but there's not much of that here now outside of the tourist spots downtown, amazingly enough.

One of the good things about living in Seattle....

I went down to the Seattle Public Library to check out a book in collage format by Max Ernst, and found that it was already out. Hell, the fact that the public library has a book like that by Max Ernst is cause for celebration.

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?"