From Queen Anne News reader STEVE DENNIS, who recently shared a couple of pictures with us:"I'm just kind of a history geek - I don't really take that many photos. I've worked as a firefighter at the Queen Anne station (No. 8) for about nine years, and I've been up on top of the old tower during drills maybe half a dozen times during drills using the ladder truck. It is the best view in the city, in my opinion; it's too bad that it might be torn down and not restored into a veiwpoint for the public like it was back in the old days. "I was on eBay a while ago and found this postcard and decided to try to match it with the modern view. I took about 10 shots standing in different positions on the tower, and one of them matched up pretty closely. I was thinking that I might frame the two shots and put them up in the fire station somewhere...."
With warm, unusually springlike days this past winter so soon bringing bloom and growth, it seems certain the blackberries will arrive early.I speak not of the big, seedy blackberries of late summer, luring pickers with their bountiful charms and easy picking, but rather the rare, small blackberries of early July, shyly hiding their treasures, stingily surrendering them as a precious gift to those courageous enough to seek them.This is the blackberry of my growing-up years on Magnolia Bluff.In those early days, Magnolia Boulevard was a potholed, asphalted, two-lane road winding its way from the new Garfield Street Bridge to Fort Lawton's southern border. A dirt path along its edge served walkers on the bluff side overlooking Puget Sound. Huge logs formed a guardrail, remnants of which can still be seen in places.Along the Boulevard, houses were here and there, along with numerous vacant lots. Native madrona, dogwood and big-leaf maple rose above shrubby ocean spray, mock orange, wild currant and hazelnut.The wild blackberry vines crept along the ground, half-hidden amongst the native grasses and weeds, scrambling over fallen branches and stumps. It was a landscape designed by nature.
The slow but steady drippings from the rain coupled with the constant booms of the neighborhood firework collections announced another Fourth of July weekend in the Northwest. The slugs and snails were ecstatic. The cats and dogs were severely annoyed. The rest of us were kept quite busy making daily contingency plans. Early in the weekend, the rains settled in all day. Later, especially Sunday morning, the sun shone with its beautiful summer intensity. Was it time to resurrect the picnic plans? And if they were resurrected, would that jinx us and bring back the rains? Such are the vagaries of the NW early summer season.
Suppose for a minute you wrote a book entitled "Women in the Garden" and are invited to sign copies at a garden show. Since that initial invitation, I've learned garden shows are as numer-ous as the charities they support. For two summers I've packed up my books, covered freeways from Seattle to Spokane, turning down only a few because I could see myself taking on more of these than I'm wired to handle. For it wasn't the gardens I found most intriguing, but the social climate entwining each, varied as the plant life.Completely naïve about garden shows, I thought the gardens would be vibrant, unpretentious flowering plots tucked in between houses, with gardeners eager to share enthusiasm with onlookers like me. Then I found myself on the Eastside of our emerald city. In Medina. Had I not been invited as an author, I am sure my life would not have intersected this show. Those of you not familiar with Medina need to know that Bill Gates' home was an estate away from the sheared-for-golf lawn I propped my book table on. When I drove up, foremost on the owner's mind was that my car was unfit to be parked on her tiled piazza. She was obviously suffering from some kind of garden-show performance anxiety.
I'm not terribly fond of the Eastside. Traffic is impossible, and I invariably get lost, especially in Bellevue. I don't even know what Bellevue is. It seems too large to be a suburb, and too close to Seattle to be a separate city. So I usually try to avoid it. But now, with the opening of the wonderful Bellevue Arts Museum, I'm going to have to go to Bellevue more often because this is a museum worth visiting again and again.The museum is a fortunate rebirth. Two years ago its predecessor closed its doors because of a lack of funds, wrangling in the inner circles and a muddled mission. The new institution has a clear vision: it celebrates the fine art of craft and design. It also has sufficient monies to cover its first year of operation, and a dynamic new director who seems to have rejuvenated and united the various constituencies just as he has the museum itself.
Three great modern films noirs are newly out or about to come out on DVD. I should put that fifth word in quotation marks because I'm violating my own stricture against calling anything post-"Kiss Me Deadly" (1955) and "Touch of Evil" (1958) a film noir. Still, these postnoirs or throwback noirs have worthy pedigrees, and an aesthetic and spiritual bite of their own that commands respect.
"Send some flowers to the cemetery," growls the head honcho of a zombie-killing expedition at the beginning of George Romero's bleak "Land of the Dead." Fireworks bloom in the night sky and every shambling corpse in what used to be a Smalltown, USA - complete with rotting park bandstand and picket fences - turns his/her/its milky eyes upward, mesmerized by ... what? Images that trigger a half-remembered Independence Day, when American history and holiday pleasures were surely celebrated in that very park? Or do those bursts of light simply mirror the random, involuntary firing of synapses that so mysteriously reanimate the dead in Romero's four cemetery movies (the others being "Night of the Living Dead," 1968; "Dawn of the Dead," 1978; "Day of the Dead," 1985)?Those movies have always operated as a kind of termite art, chewing away at the surface fictions that make it easy for us to coast happily through our July 4ths, secure in Fortress America, full of faith in family values and the belief that the disenfranchised can always be "rendered" harmless. Romero flays our pretty pictures to the bone, exposing nasty stuff like racism, class warfare, Darwinian appetite, unbridled materialism. And on the spiritual front, Romero's erasure of death as ending or transition undermines the promise of something more than solitary, eternal confinement in flesh driven by appetite.
Start your engines - or just polish your green-with-envy glasses - because the new Queen Anne Car Show is gearing up to set the neighborhood between Dexter and Lake Union a-hum on Aug. 6.More than 100 local and regional collector and classic cars will be rolling in for Seattle's only downtown car show. Fifteen "showcase" vehicles are set to be featured inside the core display area, with other vintage vehicles, muscle cars, hot rods, customs and exotics basking in (we can only hope) the sun along Valley Street and Eighth Avenue North. Those streets will be blocked off to facilitate un-disturbed ogling of the automotive beauties.
It's a lazy summer afternoon.Perhaps it's the heat. Perhaps it's the way the mid-afternoon light seems to permeate even the deepest of shadows. Regardless, this weather encourages the kind of quiet introspection that is the writer's bread and butter.Sitting on his back porch in west Magnolia, Larry Karp shifts in his plastic deck chair to adjust the cushion against his back. From inside the house come the sounds of his wife, Myra, finishing up with a group on a tour of their personally restored collection of antique music boxes.The former director of obstetrics and perinatal medicine at Swedish Hospital, Karp retired in 1995 from a 25-year-long career in medicine to pursue his childhood dream of writing novels. His first mystery, "The Music Box Murders," was published by Worldwide Library in 2000.
Plans are moving ahead for renovations to the Magnolia Library, and the public was asked to express its "hopes and dreams" about the project at a meeting last week where Seattle Public Library representatives far outnumbered neighborhood residents.The results of a feasibility study were also presented for the project, for which $875,727 has been budgeted from the $196.4 million "Libraries for All" bond measure passed in 1998. The funds are earmarked for capital costs in and around the existing 5,904-square-foot building.Designed by architect Paul Hayden Kirk and landscaped by Richard Haag, the building won national recognition for its design when it was completed in 1964. But the building is showing its age, noted Linda Larson, a Library Board steward.Renovations are needed for upgrading the technology, adding more computers, fixing up the air-conditioning system and "improving those windows without [using] duct tape," Larson said of a few examples.
Anyone happening to wander near the Magnolia Playfields on July 24 may have stumbled upon an unfamiliar, even an exotic sight: the championship match of the Seattle Hurling Club.Hurling is an ancient sport originally from Ireland requiring a combination of skill and bravery. It is Europe's oldest field game. But, to Rob Mullin, the club's team manager, hurling is really all about craic (pronounced crack), Gaelic for fun.
Here's what's happening at the Seattle Public Library's Capitol Hill branch in November.The leaves are changing, which is as good a reason as any to stop by the Capitol Hill branch Library.For preschoolers, we will offer special story times filled with stories, songs and fun at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 9, 16 and 30. There will be no story time the week of Thanksgiving.Also, back by popular demand, the Wednesday Night Film series! The theme for November is "RX for Survival - A Global Health Challenge." Given the ongoing battle with AIDS, and the appearance of other diseases such as the avian flu, this should be an interesting and timely program. Films start at 6:30 p.m. each Wednesday evening.
Sandra Locklear is one of those musicians who defiantly eludes classification.With a technical proficiency honed since she took her first piano lesson at age 7, the Seattle-area singer-pianist glides with ease between musical genres, including jazz, blues, folk and rock. On the evening of Sunday, Oct. 23, Locklear demonstrated her finesse as she finished a two-night tribute show at Thumpers restaurant and bar on Capitol Hill highlighting the music of Nina Simone, an African-American singer-pianist known as the High Priestess of Soul.
I don't know how people get addicted to some medicines when I can't even get the top off the bottle.I try - oh, how I try - but on more than one occasion, I decide I'll give up and live or die without the aid of modern medicine. Other times, when I'm less resigned to my fate, I examine the bottle closely and discover I must deal with cellophane that invisibly covers the top and neck of the bottle before I can figure out how the bottle cap works. I approach the cellophane with several tools, scissors, embroidery scissors, nail scissors, nail file, paring knife - until, finally, the cellophane gives way. It is then that I find the semi-perforated line running down the side of the bottle to ease the removal of the cellophane, should I be so lucky or my eyesight so good as to spot the perforation.Now, I assume, I can remove the lid. Oh, would that it were true.
MOSUL, Iraq - We walked into the polling site and the guards, both Iraqi army and police, waved us in. Ibon, a journalist with Reuters, asked in Arabic if we could hang out for the next hour. It was 7:45 a.m. and the polling site still wasn't open. The line outside was growing more restless.I was anxious to see this vote happen because a few months ago, during the Jan. 30 election, this was impossible for me to see up close. What would happen in the next few days would be even more important.The run-up to the referendum was plagued with calls from Sunni Arabs to boycott, calls from Shias and Kurds to vote and everyone saying Iraq's constitution would pass no matter what.Well, the constitution would pass, and the Sunnis did vote despite the threats against them from other Sunnis if they did.I dropped off my body armor and took my cameras outside to the long lines.