I've never heard of these guys, but I'm told that they're Mexicans who live in Dublin. Their bio does a really poor job of describing their music (most bios are like that), but from what I understand they're a combination of flamenco and butt rock. Wow, that sounds like a fairly horrible collision. Don't get me wrong, both of those genres are completely viable and enjoyable, but when you mix the two, don't expect the results to be pretty. It's like this old Tadd Dameron tune called "Casbah" that tried to merge bebop and opera. Please don't call it "bebopera." Yeah, it's every bit as bad as you'd think. I hope that Rodrigo and Gabriela achieve better results.
Like I said, those Croc guys don't mess around. In fact, they had that ugly tag painted over yesterday. Will it discourage dumbass taggers in the future? Probably not, but I do admire the Crocodile's swift and terrible reaction to such visual assaults.
Yes, the Crocodile will get tagged again. And when it is, I'll keep track of how long it takes them to eradicate the offending scrawl. No pressure, guys. None at all.
This is the look you get when you don't make with the peanut and quick. Although squirrels' main food source is those little helicopter-things on maple trees, they like peanuts a lot more. So naturally, being quick and twitchy, they get impatient when you don't produce an immediate peanut. And since they don't understand photography, they don't care about some giant human aiming a silver box at them. They just want that peanut. Well, this fellow got several. I see him often around the park. He recognizes me now, but still has not learned the art of patience.
Here's the story. Wow, he really showed them - by standing in the middle of 1st Avenue and firing off a whole clip, reloading, firing off another clip, then pretending like the gun wasn't his when the cops show up, then running away. Great going. There once was a time when the only thing you had to worry about when going to Amber (or any of its previous incarnations, Axis or Casa U Betcha) was scoring an STD. Now you have to contend with armed drunken dumbasses. What is this world coming to?
Operation Enduring Pavement may be over, but there are still a few remnants along 2nd Avenue: Except for these four pieces of equipment, everything else is gone. There are no other metal monsters along 2nd. They've all gone back to Monsterland, where they spend their days fighting with each other for dominance. And peace really has returned to Belltown. Last night's influx of drunk people was nothing compared to the two solid weeks of persecution by the paving authorities. But now that it's over, we can all forget about it. In fact, I already have. What was I just talking about?
It's still there, but I have faith the powers at the Crocodile will eradicate it once they notice it's there and find the key to the paint locker. I firmly believe this.
Ah yes, the Pet Shop Boys... I have nothing against them. In fact, I kind of like "Opportunities." You know, that's the "I've got the brains, you've got the looks; let's make lots of money" song. Other than that, they produced a slew of minor-key disco hits that served as a partial soundtrack to my time living in London. Yeah, the PSBs and Big Audio Dynamite - those were the big two.
Apparently for this tour, the Boys have hired a stage designer and everything. Did somebody tell them they'd be playing the Moore? Their stage isn't large enough for any design! I think that watching Neil and Chris play (which is pretty boring; there are only two of them and neither moves around much) at the Moore will be no more interesting than it normally is.
This is a segment from the brief TV series The Sound of Jazz. It was a show that aired in the late fifties after somebody discovered that jazz was a home-grown American art form. This caused all kinds of guys in the early fifties to dash around with microphones asking the star players of the day exactly what jazz was. Many answers were given, but by far, the best one came from Louis Armstrong. When somebody asked him that exact question, he replied, "If you gotta ask, you'll never know." So much for that approach! Later in the fifties, it became preferable to just throw a bunch of jazz musicians together and have them play or watch others play. Here we have Monk, with Malik and Johnson on bass and drums, being watched by Count Basie, Jimmy Rushing, the host-guy and Coleman Hawkins. Basie looks slightly bemused, Rushing looks confused, the host-guy looks about ready to call the police and Hawkins is totally into it. The thing about Monk was that he was crazy. No doubt about it. If you've ever seen Straight, No Chaser, you'll come to the same conclusion. He wrote some very cool, very odd music through his mid-functioning craziness. And this is one of those tunes. Oh, and the bamboo shades probably sent Middle America reaching for its tranquilizers. Monk wasn't an entertainer, he was an artist, albeit a crazy one. I'm sure that many in this country had never seen a guy like him, let alone a black guy like him.
Incidentally, believe it or not, this is my 500th post on Hideous Belltown. To be honest, I never thought I'd get through the first 20 posts. Lucky for me, Belltown is the source of a lot of ugliness. The more ugly, the more posts. See how that works? Anyhow, I guarantee nothing, but I'll try to be around for a few hundred more posts. It all depends on how much my prose stylings continue to suck. But hey, thanks for reading.
One of the differences between the old Crocodile and the new Crocodile has been the attitude towards tagging. Under the old regime, the building would accumulate tags like drunken tattoos until it began to look genuinely derelict and abandoned. It was only then that they'd remove all (or most) of the visual crap and start the process again. The new Croc has a much more swift and decisive way of dealing with such nonsense. Tags are quickly painted over and forgotten about. Just to illustrate my point, let's see how long it takes them to get rid of a recent addition. Some tagger deemed it very important to scrawl his mark on the club's Blanchard side sometime early this morning like so: Just for yucks, let's see how long it takes them to get rid of it. Today is Day Zero. Get going, guys!
I'm tellin' ya, sweet people, 1st & Lenora is suffering. Three months ago, Waterworks goes out of business. Now it's Shoefly's turn. They sold some very unattractive shoes and now they're leaving us. Take a look (apologies for the cell phone photography; my regular camera is on the blink): Their departure means that there's no more retail in that poor, sad, squat three-story building on the northeast corner. When they're clothed in rags and running barefoot through the streets, what will we tell the children? That we allowed this place to close simply because it sold ugly shoes? Is that what we're going to tell them?? It is...? OK, just so we can get our stories straight.
Well, a fond goodbye to Shoefly. In business heaven, all shoes are beautiful.
Seattle is quite a beautiful city, no doubt about that. The Belltown neighborhood doesn’t swing that way. Much of it is downright hideously ugly. If not for all that ugliness, there’d be nothing to see. I’ve lived here for 20 years and I’ve only just started taking notice. Please join me on this odyssey of unsightliness as we try to figure out why poor Belltown looks so bad.
