I didn’t think I’d be blogging from Seattle, where my daughter lives. I didn’t even bring my laptop because I wanted to save weight on my wonky knee. So I started this post in pencil and I’m finishing it at home.
The year before Nancy Beth was born, I had been a summer camp counselor at the Camp Fire Girls camp on Vashon Island, a short ferry ride from Seattle. I’d made short forays into Seattle on weekends off, staying with my fellow counselor Shirley Starkenburg, but that first encounter with the state of Washington was mostly on the beach and in the woods of Vashon. When Shirley and I walked on the beach at night, our feet would disturb luminescent algae in the wet sand and it would sparkle. We said we were "walking on stars." The Girl Scouts came over once with oysters from the rocks at their camp and we made a fire on the beach and steamed them in their shells. I moved up from the ten-and-eleven-year-olds cabin to the twelve-and-thirteen-year-olds and got a bunch of seasoned campers who, when we went for a three-day camp-out in the woods, announced, “Miss Snoof, you just sit down, we will do everything,” and they did. The glade where we camped is still the place I go when someone leading a guided meditation says “Go in your mind to your favorite place.” Much later I found that my partner in Malvina concerts, Judy Fjell, had been a counselor at the same camp a different summer.
This time, the trip was all urban. Nancy Beth has moved from the suburbs to the Wallingford District, just west of the University of Washington. Now she has a good bakery cafe just four blocks from her apartment, a lakeside park in three, and, in the other direction, a shopping street with a lovely vegan Thai restaurant and a bookstore for poetry only! This is our kind of neighborhood.
Besides meeting my daughter's new (to me) neighborhood, I met her boyfriend of a year and a half, Tim. Here’s what I wrote (in pencil) as I sat in the Essential Bakery Cafe the next morning reporting on our adventure with Tim. He took us to dinner at Palomino downtown, but he had a detour planned first if it was OK with me. A friend of his had seen the Malvina memorial concert poster in a bike shop, found out the owner was a big fan, and said he had a friend who was dating Malvina’s granddaughter. “The guy went crazy,” Tim’s friend told him, so Tim was taking us to the 20/20 bicycle shop to meet the guy. Said guy wasn’t there, but when the guy who was there found out who we were, he said, “He lives two blocks from here. I’ll call him.” The owner, Alex Kostelnik, came right away, with his sister Nora from Albuquerque and a friend.
We sat on an old couch and some chairs in the bike-repair waiting area and started a high-speed conversation. Alex and Nora’s mom is a Malvina fan. She was also the person who bought Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s house in Seneca Falls and got it made into a state park (which I’d visited years ago with my Syracuse friend Pat Finley). Alex wanted to know about Malvina; his sister, a songwriter, kept trying to get in questions about my own creative process. It was like triangular ping-pong, and we all had fun. Nora uses songs in her workshops at a spa in Albuquerque. I gave her my Sun Sun Shine CD which I usually carry in my fanny pack on trips (biiiig advantage of CDs over LPs). Turns out Alex is also a storyteller—he burned a CD of his stories for me on the spot. Good stuff. Besides which he is a sound engineer, and would like to set up a Malvina concert with Judy and me. He does concerts in his bike shop but it only holds 75. We checked out the little movie theater around the corner. Nice space, holds 125, might work. Judy has proposed a date. We’ve been wanting to do a Seattle concert, and now it may happen. I’ll keep you posted.
I’d read about and seen pictures of Seattle’s striking new main library, and wanted to see for myself.
I took the bus down and walked in on the uphill side, the third floor, bought a card at the little Friends of the Library store, noted the coffee cart next to it, and walked straight ahead through the expansive and inviting reading room to the only visible librarian, at the teen desk. This is a problem. She fields everyone’s questions, and as the library is a little confusing to get around in, they aren’t easy questions. Consequently, she isn’t as available to the teens as she might be. I sometimes wonder if the folks in charge think being a children’s or teen librarian isn’t really work so they need to give us something extra to do. The views are spectacular, but I found having two music practice rooms next to the art and music stacks even more impressive.
My friend Mara was in town for a conference, and Nancy Beth and I met her for a merry lunch at the cafe at the Experience Music Project, housed in a building by Frank Gehry. I’ve been interested in his architecture for a long time, but had only seen his buildings from the outside. This one looks finished on the outside and somewhat raw on the inside, which seems right for its use, a Rock and Roll museum, a Science Fiction museum, and places for kids and grownups to experiment with sound and music. I was particularly taken with the iridescent titanium sheathing on part of the outside, which changes color with the angle of the light. We walked by it and then got the fast version when we rode right next to it on the monorail on the way home.
Nancy Beth is still creating virtual things for Second Life, and after I got back she sent an e-mail saying: “A real life architect made a building [in Second Life] inspired by the Frank Gehry style. He had a call for artists to show work in it and accepted a sculpture I submitted. Woohoo.”
Nancy Beth’s avatar and her wood-colored sculpture
As a fundraiser for something-or-other, people had set up a carousel in a downtown plaza. Here I am on it with Opie the bear and Snugglepuppy (who is named after the song by Sandra Boynton).
As you can see, it was a little chilly. Mara took the carousel picture and this one of the guardian of the string beans at Pike’s Place Market.
The day I got back to Berkeley I got an e-mail inviting me to an exhibit the next day of “tangible interfaces” done by students at the School for Information (called the Library School when I went there). I didn’t quite understand what it was, but I was scheduled to have breakfast with my friend Carole the library/internet maven that morning, so we just changed the date to exhibit and lunch. The best way to explain is to describe the part that attracted my eye first. It was a potty-computer interface that used heat sensors to know when the kid had had a successful potty experience and a trigger a voice congratulating the kid. It was more elaborate than that, with interaction to keep the kid amused long enough, but the idea is to have a computer sense heat or color or sound, rather than getting input from a keyboard or joystick or touch-screen. I played jug band hero (like guitar hero only blowing in jugs to projected cues). The one I wanted to take to school with me to try out on the kids was the gum-ball-programmed drum machine. A camera focussed on an array of gum balls read the different colors and translated each into a different percussion sound, so changing the location of gum balls changed the combination of sounds and you could see as well as hear the results because the colors were projected on a screen as the sounds were played back. You kind of have to have been there. Lunch at Cafe Muse in the University Art Museum was good too.
Last night I went to a hearing on yet another building projected for the part of the UC campus up in Strawberry Canyon where the cyclotron is, only instead of splitting atoms they will be splitting genes in this one. Lots of better informed people than I spoke in opposition and I put my two cents worth in too. I have been walking the fire trail in that canyon since I was a freshman at Cal in 1952 and living in a co-op near the stadium that blocks the canyon (the construction of which turned David Brower into a conservationist). I don't know that any of these well-reasoned objections (one being that it's too near the Hayward Fault, probably the next one to give us a big shake) will be taken into consideration, seeing that British Petroleum (to use its real name) is backing the building, but it felt good to hear the fine quality of voices coming from my fellow Berkeleyans—engineers, birders, students, citizens all.
©2007 by Nancy Schimmel
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
NEXT YEAR IN SEATTLE?
