After Hours

Les Excentriques. Aide-moi chérie

From beginning to end, there isn't a single thing about this clip that isn't retarded: the tune, the band, the surly-looking background dancers, the screaming audience and that "150" in the foreground. Especially the "150." I have no idea what it means, but it, too, is retarded. And yes, you're hearing correctly, that's "Help Me, Rhonda" by the Beach Boys translated into French and given to these mooks to perform for a gullible public. Sorry about the occasionally weird audio/video, but it fits in nicely with the whole surreal atmosphere. If you get all the way to the end of the tune, you're a stronger person than I am. I've tried about five times and can barely get past minute one. Still, it's initially really amusing until you realize that the entire song is exactly like that. That's when the experience turns into agony.

See You in Hell, Musicians' Union!

This is a bit of old news, but it's worth relating: the Musicians' Union at 3rd & Cedar has moved out of Belltown! Hooray! In their place is a real estate development company. Observe:


Ordinarily, I would decry this as "unfair" or "bogus," but honestly, I hate the union so much that I'm ecstatic that they're gone. Why do I hate them? I have my reasons. They're quite valid, but let's leave a full explanation for another time. Apparently, they occupied that crappy building (it looks like a portable classroom from a particularly impoverished school district) for around 50 years. Now they're somewhere on Eastlake. Well, Eastlake can have them. Good riddance! I believe the ultimate goal of the development company is to build something on that very lot. Although just about anything is an improvement over that building, I don't think any project is forthcoming. I wrote about it fairly recently as a dead project and I stand by that estimation. If 17 stories of apartments and/or condos is going up, it won't be for a couple of years. But the important thing is that the Musicians' Union is gone. Praise Allah for that!

McGuire Scaffold-Watch! Week: ???? + 31

Well, if the clamor of small tools in tiny hands is any indication, the dwarf army has returned to the McGuire. This means two things: 1. They were victorious against the mole people, and 2. They are back to curing the McGuire's myriad ills. If my tipster is to be believed, they've got a lot of work ahead of them, what with trying to keep all those balconies attached to the building and needing to reseal all the windows and whatnot. So the massive scaffold is serving a purpose again by keeping the dwarf army aloft. You know, with all the high winds around here lately, I was expecting at least a little bit of collapsing from the structure, but it appears to be better constructed than the building it surrounds. Is that ironic or just slightly strange?

Security House Scaffold-Watch: Week 6

It's still very much there. I'm trying to figure out what those guys are doing on the non-plastic side of the building. They seem to go up and down a lot. Your guess is as good as mine. Speaking of guesses, the gigantic puppet show doesn't appear to be happening - at least not yet. This is probably due to our inclement weather - it's tough to rehearsal in high winds - and there is currently a nationwide puppeteer strike in Belgium, the country from which all great puppeteers spring. If it isn't resolved soon, they'll be replaced by *heavy sigh* marionettes. But work continues beneath the super-attractive plastic sheet on the side of the building in preparation for the grand, possible performance.

After Hours

Johnny Farago. J'ai ta photo dans ma chambre

Here's French-Canadian Johnny Farago with a campy little gem. It think you'll agree that his wobbly vibrato is pleasing and that his hair is awesome. I haven't been able to find out anything about him except that he used to sing French translations of Elvis tunes and that he's dead. That's all I know. But tell me this, does it creep you out just a little bit that he has your photo in his room?

What Beautiful Artwork!

OK, I'm being sarcastic. It's a little tough to do in print unless you come right out and announce it like I just did. Anyhow, I finally got out of my hovel today after several days of pretty horrendous weather. To be honest, it's really cool watching all this storming and whatnot from the safety and relative comfort of my apartment, but when you're walking around out there amongst the storming and whatnot, it's not a pleasant experience. Anyway, coming back from Denny Park, I saw this on the side of Cafe Zoe right here at 2nd & Blanchard:

Yeah, now everybody knows this guy's name, whatever it is. But not for long. The Zoe crew is pretty quick about eradicating dumbass graffiti like this. The last time they got tagged, the offending scrawl was gone in two days. So now the clock is ticking. Let's see how long it takes to get rid of it. Hey, I've got all kinds of time. Stuff like this is fun for me.

Coming Soon to the Moore!

Well, at least they're honest about how little they're getting paid. OK, wait a minute. I get it now. They're trying to change things. That seems a lot less candidly bleak. What are they trying to change? Let's see... They want peace. And they're willing to sing about it. That's nice, but we tried that back in the nineties and it didn't work out so well once the new decade rolled around, what with that Bush cretin in the White House and all. But it's a good thing that people are at least trying to float the idea and sell tickets. I wish them luck. And if peace suddenly breaks out worldwide, we can give these guys all the credit.

After Hours

Fabrika. Ne vinovataya ya ("It's not my fault")

Ah, the joys of being a kept woman/escort! If you get tired of your date, you can just head off to the ladies' room and make fun of them. That's what the video tells us. Of course, the song is about something else; it merely has to do with the sad fact that out of eight daughters, she's the only one without a man. This is kind of weird since there are three babes in the group. How can three of them all be in the same predicament? Beats me, but I really like this tune. And Fabrika (Yeah, it means "factory." Why? I have no idea.) isn't quite as trashy as other Russian groups - for example Via Gra. Yeah, there's really a girl group called that. But all in good time. This is one of Fabrika's better tunes, a slick little twisting bossa nova. My favorite part is the sax player in the toilet stall. All sax guys sound much better playing in lavatories. It's all that tile. OK, so this isn't really bad Russian pop music. In fact, it's pretty good. For that I apologize. Just wait till next week, though.

Belltown Inside/Out: The Next Generation

Once upon a time many years ago, there was a little festival of sorts around these parts called Belltown Inside/Out. It took place usually on a summer weekend and featured a craft fair, a rummage sale and various other small-scale commerce. The most interesting part of it was that people living in some of the neighborhood's funkier spaces would open their doors and invite in the general public. I always thought this was a pretty brilliant idea and I really wanted to get my place in on the action. There was just one problem: my apartment was a decrepit mess that needed some serious renovation. The previous tenant (who lived here for years when half of the building's units were uninhabitable) had done a fair deal of faux-marble work, but the walls were peeling (there was 85 years of accumulated wallpaper and paint on them) and much of the floor was down to bare wood. It was a mess, but it had potential. I set to work in mid-1995 and didn't finish till early the following year. My place is just a bit over 400 square feet, but it was extremely demanding. I did everything backwards and wrong, but I finally beat it all into shape after months and months of toil. Yeah, it was a lot of work, but very much worth it. But funny thing, by the time I finished all my painting, Belltown Inside/Out was a thing of the past. I think its organizers moved away or something. It was a little bit disappointing, but all my labors yielded a pretty cool place to live, so I got over it quickly enough.

What I'd like to propose is for people to show off their cool places just like they did years ago, only in electronic form. There are only two rules:

1. You have to live in Belltown.
2. You have to have a cool place.

It doesn't even have to be your own handiwork. If you moved in and everything was already there, fine and dandy! If you'd like your place shown on this blog (and on the P-I blog), please email me at InsideOutTNG@hotmail.com with a few photos and a brief description, we'll talk. In case you don't know whether you have a cool place or not, here's some help: if you live in a building finished during the last 20 years, where any kind of modification is strenuously discouraged, if not outright forbidden, you probably just have an ordinary apartment. But hey, that guy who designed his entire place to look like the bridge of the Enterprise, he lived in a new building, so anything's possible. Like I said, send me some photos and we'll discuss.

To mark this first installment of Belltown Inside/Out: The Next Generation, I'm going to feature some familiar surroundings - to me at least - my apartment! On with the show!

1. The Hallway

This is the front door. It's made out of oak and weighs a ton - I know, I had to take it off its hinges to paint it.


Here's a sconce. It's one of many. I like strange faces coming out of the walls.


Here's some faux marbling. It took me a long time to get this right - and I'm still not totally satisfied with it.


This is faux-marble meets faux-brick.


He's the same section from a different angle. My hallway is all of three feet wide, so taking panoramic shots is pretty impossible.


This is the end of the hallway. Those pictures are prints of a bunch of French kings I picked up from an antique shop that was going out of business.


Here's the lower part of that same wall. Yeah, the hall's still three feet wide here.


This is the hall floor.

2. The Bedroom

This is another cool plaster sconce.


The walls in here were originally a weird blotchy aquamarine. I thought gold would make them a lot cheerier. The main problem was the wall themselves. They were peeling like nobody's business. There was all this old wallpaper that had cracked and bubbled. I took a putty knife to it and didn't stop until all the loose and flaky bits were off. This left the walls in pretty rough condition, but I resolved to hang lots of pictures to cover over some of the worst parts. It worked like a charm!


I think I mentioned that I did everything wrong. Case in point: I didn't prime before I started painting the walls. This gold color didn't cover over the blotchy aquamarine very well at all. I ended up putting 15 coats on the wall and using some three gallons of paint. Yeah, I made all the mistakes and then some.


More pictures...


Here's about the only section of the floor where you can catch a glimpse of the design. It's a compass motif. The bed covers almost all of it, but it's totally there.

3. The Main Room

Another nice sconce. This guy fell during the 2001 earthquake but was only slightly damaged. He did manage to take a pretty big chunk out of the floor, though.


This is the far side of the room with faux-marble, mirrors (they do make the room seem larger!) and photos.


More faux-marble and another sconce.


This is the basic grid pattern of the main room floor. It was super-difficult to measure off, because the dimensions of the space are irregular, plus the floor slants and it's also warped in places.


The is the design at the center of the room. This wasn't all that difficult to do, which means that I didn't make it complicated enough.

So there you have it, my place. I guess you can tell that it pretty cluttered. I've lived in this apartment since 1992 (and in the building since 1990) and I'll tell you something: life is an accumulation. I've tried to keep the level of stuff to a minimum, but it creeps back up after a fashion. Anyhow, just remember that if you want your place featured on this and the P-I's blog, email me at InsideOutTNG@hotmail.com.

By the way, my apartment does actually have both a kitchen and a bathroom, but those spaces are more functionally decorated. In other words, they're not ornate.

Igor's Excellent Victoria Adventure

It's been my first trip out of the country in like four years, so I was really quite excited. I took off early on Thursday morning.

Here's Belltown from the water. Not very impressive, is it? The journey on the Victoria Clipper was very smooth all the way. Me and Juan de Fuca go way back, so why wouldn't it be? Just in case, I popped a pair of Dramamine. That turned me into a zombie for the next few hours.


After arriving, I took a city tour that included a trip out to Butchart Gardens. The first and only time I've been to Victoria was when I was four years old. All I remember from that trip is double-decker buses and Butchart Gardens. I thought the buses were cool and the gardens were oppressively dull. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why all these dumb grownups would want to look at plants. I wanted to revisit it to see if I remembered anything. Here's what was going on there:

Yeah, not much. Here is part of the famous Rose Garden. It wasn't a total bust, though. There were cool totem poles:


And a bronze pig:

And that was it for Butchart Gardens. On the way back, I kept falling asleep due to that stupid Dramamine, so I only remember part of the city tour.


I stayed here, at the Empress, because I'm, y'know, all class. It was a really fab hotel. Their bar is the greatest. If you ever go, order a Clover Club. It will change your life. So I checked in, slept off the rest of my Dramamine and went out to explore. That evening, I caught my opera (The Rake's Progress) at the Royal Theater. I haven't reivewed it yet, but will shortly. For the moment, just suffice to say that it was 60% good, 40% not good. But it was still nice to see it with so many well-behaved, good-smelling Canadians.

By the next day, I was totally used to seeing Canadian flags, spending their colorful money and reading all their extra vowels. Speaking of money, Canada's gotten pretty expensive, what with the US dollar sinking and all. Back when the Canadian dollar was worth 60-75 cents, you could live, well, not like a king, but maybe like a prince. But alas, those times are gone. The US dollar is worth $1.01 Canadian. So anyhow, the next day, I went out to the BC Natural History Museum. This is what it was like:

Well, to be honest, it had some very good indian exhibits. They're called the First Nations up there, and, after a long period of oppression, the Canadian government is a lot nicer to their indigenous peoples than we are. But Canada's First Nations don't have magic casinos. None of that makes up for anybody's misdeeds, but at least that's a tiny bit of consolation for more than a century of bad behavior by the government.

Here's something different:

This the entrance to Victoria's minuscule Chinatown. Apparently, it's the oldest in all of Canada. This is called the Gate of Harmonious Interests. Harmonious Interests, eh? Something like this in the US would be called the Gate of Takin' Numbers and Kickin' Ass. Those Canadians and their peacefulness! How unlike us!

By now, one thing struck me as kind of strange: you know, for all the Socialism and whatnot that goes on in Canada, there sure are a lot of bums. You don't see many crazy people at all, but bums abound all over the place.

OK, by my last day there, I was on a mission. I heard a completely unconfirmed rumor that the University of Victoria campus was home to many bunny rabbits. I was told that they roam free. I had to see it with my own eyes - if it was indeed true. I took the bus out to campus and began my search. Yes, over there in the distance was a bunny rabbit. I approached. He was very friendly and let me pet his ears.

Then I saw more:

...and more:

...and more:

They were all over the place, just grazing and hanging out. So yes, it's absolutely true. The University of Victoria is a good place to see bunny rabbits.


Shortly after that, I left on the Clipper. It was rather rough, but no rougher than, say, a bus ride to Ballard. And then I arrived back in Belltown. The end.