Film director David Lynch recently spoke to a packed audience at the Universsity of Washingtton about his work, his ideas, and of all things - transcendental meditation. With his lecture, entitled "Consciousness, Creativity, and the Brain," Lynch is on a nationwide college tour which is being billed as an effort to help students increase their creativity and overcome stress through meditation. The tour is also promoting the launch of The David Lynch Foundation: For Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. The director, who humbly greeted an ecstatic audience of 700, sported a gray streaked pompadour and '50s-style suit and tie. Lynch, who answered questions for almost two hours, says his sister turned him on to meditation and that he has not missed a practice in 32 years.
Bed and breakfast inns are not the common sort of lodgings one would expect to find in the urban areas of North Seattle, but a few B&B;'s in local neighborhoods have thrived for years. Hidden in the Fremont and University District neighborhoods are the Chelsea Station on the Park and the Chambered Nautilus Bed and Breakfast Inn. The attraction is simple; Guests are looking for a more personal touch, a friendly atmosphere and the chance to stay in homes that are close to 100 years old.
With the traditional Apple Cup rivalry heating up again, don't blame members of local Seattle band Massy Ferguson for riding the fence. It just so happens that the group's allegiance is divided straight down the middle. The four-piece band with equal Husky and Cougar ties will play an after-Apple-Cup show at 9 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 19, at the All-American Sports Bar and Grill, 4333 University Way N.E.. Local groove-rockers The BGP will also be on the bill."In all reality, we just thrive on getting people together," guitarist Adam Monda, a Washington State graduate, laughs. "The fact that we are half Huskies and half Cougars, it's a friendly rivalry with us. A lot of people out there are really serious about it, though. Who knows what they'll think of us, they might turn over cars and fully riot."
On Friday, Nov. 11, 47 Nathan Hale football players assembled at Sand Point Country Club to partake of an all-you-can-eat buffet featuring, among other highlights, Carolina barbecued ribs.The event was just desserts for a season's worth of effort and inspiration that gave renewed meaning to the term "student athlete."It all started last August.
The basketballs don't bounce any differently at North Seattle Community College. The court looks much the same. Two 20-minute halves are still played. As similar as community college basketball may appear to that of a four-year school, these two worlds are just that - two vastly different worlds."I think the Huskies have a lot more leeway to what they can do," says Kyle Gray, 26, head coach of the men's basketball team at North Seattle (located west of I-5 near Northgate). "The coaches can only be here for so long, we have to work, make money. The doors aren't open as much to these guys as they are to a four-year school."Indeed.North Seattle doesn't give full-ride scholarships. The basketball team has eight to divvy among its 16 players and $200 a quarter is all they receive.
They're warm and fuzzy, and people just love to feed them. But the hundreds of rabbits living in and around Woodland Park have got to go, according to Seattle Parks and Recreation. For one thing, they're tearing up the landscape, explained Barb DeCaro, a resource coordinator with the Parks Department. However, unlike an overabundance of Canada geese that fouled the city's parks, the bunnies won't face euthanasia because their population isn't as large as the geese's and the impacts are not as big, she said. Instead, the rabbits are destined to live at the Rabbit Meadow Sanctuary in Redmond after they've been spayed and neutered, DeCaro said last week at a Board of Park Commissioners meeting.
Seattle playwright Steven Dietz's "Lonely Planet" is comedy-drama about fear and friendship in the era of AIDS that is so well crafted it snagged the Pen USA West Award in Drama. The play is the story of Jody, who refuses to leave the confines of the map store he runs, and his friend Carl, who hauls an ever-growing menagerie of chairs into the shop to remind Jody of the outside world.Such an intimate play, set within the claustrophobic walls of a modern-day map store, doesn't at first glance appear compatible with what Absurd Reality Productions bills as "a fresh and inventive approach" incorporating Kabuki, swashbuckling swordplay and contemporary dance. In fact, the combination sounds like an unholy trinity primed for disaster. Surprisingly, under the direction of Nathan Hicks, it isn't.
I've been working in Olympia the past few weeks.One of the people I work for down there is a news junkie, and so CNN is on their living-room television maybe eight hours a day.When CNN began 25 years ago, they literally covered the world, 24 hours a day. Now they run the same few stories over and over. They have personalities named Wolfen and Heidikins who analyze the few feet of video the network has somehow obtained - most of it taken in Washington, D.C. - ad infinitum.Soundbites of Bush, talking-head interviews with experts on what Pinhead just said, ad nauseam.I've read that all of the big American news outlets have cut down their foreign operations, reducing the number of those exotic foreign correspondents who once caused envy and desire in even the most pedestrian reporters' hearts. American news operations rely more and more on whoever is on the ground in foreign hotspots these days.Or they simply don't cover much of the news, past a one- or two-line report scrolling by on the bottom of your television screen, while they show Scooter Libby limping around D.C. on crutches for the 20th time. Even on crutches Scooter stops and opens the door for a hot young blond staffer; Scooter's either a gentleman or a hound, although I've seen no analysis of that part of his behavior so I can't say.
The Seattle Pride Committee announced last week that it will move the annual Seattle Pride Festival from Broadway and Volunteer Park, the event's setting for the past 30 years, to Seattle Center. Controversy has swirled around the idea since a move downtown was first suggested just before the two-day event last June. More than 60 people attended the Pride Committee's August meeting, most to protest moving the two-day festival and the Sunday march from Capitol Hill. "While recognizing the Hill as the traditionally 'queer center' of Seattle, crowd size and safety demand a move to a larger site," said Seattle Pride Board Member Dale Kershner in a Nov. 9 press release. "We would love to collaborate to stage an event on the Hill during the weekend of Pride to commemorate that history, but the bulk of the festival will happen at the [Seattle] Center." During the August meeting a petition opposing moving the Pride event from Capitol Hill, purporting to have more than 8,000 names, was ceremoniously dropped on the table in front of seven members of the Pride committee. It had the approximate heft of the combined Seattle white and yellow telephone directories. "Besides the neighborhood crazies, at that meeting there were valid reasons raised for keeping it up here," said Paul Dwoskin, owner of Broadway Video and chair of the Broadway Business Improvement Association. "I think it's a bad thing to move off Broadway."
After more than three years of construction, King County celebrated the Oct. 26 completion of its last major clean-water project to control overflows of untreated stormwater and sewage into Lake Washington with the Rainier Beach community. The $77 million "Henderson/Martin Luther King Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) Project" features a giant, 15-foot-diameter pipe that will hold millions of gallons of dirty water until it can be treated. It's creation promises to significantly reduce untreated discharges of combined stormwater and sewage.
Walking south on the Ave, a quick left on Northeast 42nd Street toward campus takes you past the venerable bookstore with the brick façade.Its old, wood paneled windows face south, soaking up the afternoon sun. The window display cases are mini-theaters of the moment: Around St. Patrick's Day classic volumes by Joyce and Yeats take center stage. Halloween might bring out Bram Stoker or the Marquis de Sade. These windows, like blackberry vines snatching at sleeves, have slowed and stopped generations of passersby. Clearly, someone is minding the store.Magus Books, 1408 N.E. 42nd St., with its cement floors and high, wooden shelves holding approximately 70,000 books, occupies 2,600 square feet and, in bookstore terms, hallowed ground. There's been a bookstore here since the Depression, though the names have changed. Puss 'n Books and Alley Cat are two, and so is The Id, which was run by poet, calligrapher and publisher Steve Herold, the last man arrested in Seattle for selling "Lady Chatterley's Lover."
Here's what's happening at The Seattle Public Library's Capitol Hill branch library in December.For preschoolers, we will offer a special story time filled with stories, songs and fun at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 7 and Dec. 14. We are limiting story times in December due to the busy holiday season.Also, the popular Wednesday Night Film series continues. "RX for Survival - A Global Health Challenge" finishes up with "Back to the Basics" on Wednesday, Dec. 7, and "How Safe Are We?" on Dec. 14. Films start at 6:30 p.m.For more information on these and other programs, visit the library's Web site, www.spl.org, or call us at 684-4715.Below are a few books to consider when you come up for air from all the holiday shopping.
Retailers know Christmas means the difference between finishing the year in the red or in the black. For a small classical music organization like the Tudor Choir, Christmas also means a bump up in ticket sales and increased recognition of their work."Last Christmas, we sold 850 tickets for two shows," said Tudor Choir artistic director Doug Fullington. Christmas concerts draw almost twice the number of people that come to Tudor Choir's regular concerts at St. Mark's Cathedral, where the Choir are artists-in-residence. "The holiday program is a great way to introduce ourselves to new people and for them to get to know us," said Fullington.This year's program, titled "Christmas in Olde England," features traditional carols as well as music composed during the first half of the 20th century. The program includes works from Peter Warlock, Gustav Holder, Richard Rodney, Bennett and Benjamin Britten.
To the editor:This letter is in response to your lead article, "Raising flags about light rail's impacts" in the Nov. 30 issue of the Capitol Hill Times. Well, it has been only a few weeks since the election and the same old naysayers are at it again!Your article mentions comments by a so-called expert on transportation. These days, I am especially cynical of experts. This expert mentions the impact of dirt. Well, when the freeway was built wasn't there a lot of dirt then? This is a non-issue. Of course, the fill should be removed in a way that has as little impact on the neighborhood as possible. But give me a break.The following comment was made: "If the funding to go to the University District isn't there - a big if - the Broadway station could serve as a temporary terminus." This comment is very misleading. Why would Sound Transit do this? It has a plan to build North Link from Downtown Seattle to the University District. I doubt Sound Transit would stop part way. Why would they even start North Link without full funding? By the way, from what I have read, Sound Transit basically has it almost sown up for further funding. Nothing is for sure until it occurs. But we have been given the highest ranking. Why do those NIMBY's forget to mention this? Do they have ulterior motives?
This week, all the bars on Capitol Hill, as well as elsewhere in the state, officially go smokeless. Some bar owners have predicted a fiscal disaster, as smoking customers would find fewer reasons to linger in their favorite watering holes.Between the gay bars, the hipster bars, the restaurants with lounges and a precious few un-reconstructed old dive bars, alcohol service is one of Capitol Hill's biggest employers and most prominent industries. It's an industry that's continued to thrive while the rest of the regional economies sputtered and faltered.Back in the dayOne reason it's continued to thrive has been its steady, piecemeal deregulation. A few oldtimers remember when hard liquor by the drink (a.k.a. cocktails) could only be served in Washington state at private clubs, such as the Elks. Later, from the 1950s on, the strong stuff could only be served in full-service restaurants. These restaurants had to offer full meals, devote more seating area to dining than to drinking, and earn a certain percentage of their revenues from food as opposed to liquor. In these places, as well as in beer-and-wine-only taverns, the taps officially shut down at 1 a.m. Monday through Friday, and at midnight on Saturday. Sundays were dry all day.