Roosevelt Way, Movies and new posting methodology
With this entry I'm changing the layout slightly
and posting short paragraphic descriptions of the actual entries. You can click
the "read more" link to get the whole enchalada. This entry recounts a
five-mile hike Adam and I took this past Saturday from the Lake Union-Portage
Bay area up Roosevelt Way through the University District, through Roosevelt
neighborhood, and finally winding up in the Maple Leaf area before we dashed to
the transit stop at Northgate Mall and meandered back home via Ballard and a few
treats. This entry also contains reviews of "Team America - World Police," "The
Incredibles," and "A Very Long Engagement."
Saturday Adam and I set off for a long walk in
town. It was an unusual Fall day in that the sun was out, there were white
puffy clouds all about, the sky was blue and the wind wasn't that strong - only
a mere 5-10 knots. I'd suggested we take the bus to the U-District and hike up
Roosevelt Way. I'd previously hiked Roosevelt and had crossed it on a few cross
streets both on foot and on my bike. It's another one of Seattle's long,
straight, streets and connects the lower University District with the far North
End of the city. For about four-and-a-half miles it's as straight as a ruler
and goes north-south.
We got the local to downtown and walked up to 3rd Avenue to catch one of the U-District buses, making perfect time starting from home at 9:30 am. The U-District bus we wanted was the one which runs down Fairview Street to Eastlake and crosses over the University Bridge (Fairview turns into Eastlake). That line goes around the eastern edge of Lake Union and takes one through an existing interesting neighborhood and an evolving neighborhood. The whole lower Lake Union area is a former warehouse and light industrial area which is now going on its second decade of makeover. Some of the nascent biotechnology industry here is situated on the eastern shore of Lake Union (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center), as are a large number of architectural firms and new townhouses. Fairview and Eastlake are both evolving into rather interesting neighborhood service and support streets for the already large number of residents, numbers which are expected to grow significantly in the coming decade. This is the area where the city is also planning on adding another street trolley line, which would run around the eastern Lake Union area and connect to Westlake Center (where there would be light rail and monorail connections, too).
As we neared the end of Eastlake, right before the University Bridge, I mentioned to Adam that we could hop off and see if the French bakery in that part of town, La Fournil, had as good a croissant as I've read reviews of. We hopped off, imagining we'd use our transfer and get another bus across the lake - actually Portage Bay at that point. We enter the bakery, which is pretty darned crowded at this time on a Saturday - slightly after 10:00 am. We get three croissants and two cappuccinos and take over a couple of spots at the window-side stool bar which had just been vacated by departing customers. This place does have excellent pastries, the previous time we'd been here, last Fall, we didn't get to try their croissants as it was late in the day and they were all gone, but we did try their eclairs, which were scrumptious - just the right amount of butter creme inside the pate choux and just the right amount of chocolate glazing on top.
According to Adam, the croissants here were "okay." I thought they were pretty good but will defer to his palate, which ascribes the best croissant in Seattle to Caffe Ladro (all locations, as their bake shop is right here at the California Avenue West Seattle cafe in walking distance from our house). The croissant at Ladro are, indeed, darned good. We finished our brunch and decided that since Roosevelt Way was just on the other side of the University Bridge and we were less than a block from this side of the bridge that we would just skip the bus and begin our walk a little earlier. As we crossed the bridge I pointed out some of the overly engineered and even-more-overly architected houseboats moored on the south side of Portage Bay. Some of these are floating palaces, houses with everything an ordinary house has, sitting on a series of floating decks and attached to the rest of the city with pliable piping (water and sewer) and cable, electrical, and phone hookups. They're houseboats in the sense that a Rolls Royce or Bentley is a "horseless carriage." To be sure, there are cheaper digs along Lake Union, some which are hardly more than a cottage on a float. Why someone would relish living "on the water" stacked, as they are, two and three deep along the shoreline and immediately adjacent to each other escapes me. I suppose there might be some kind of unique community associated with this lifestyle. You certainly would know your neighbors because there's no yard, at all, and for most of them not much more than two or three feet of water between adjacent walls. Ah, yet one more of Seattle's contributions to the modern urban landscape. University Bridge itself is one of the older drawbridges and has its own charm, though Fremont and Montlake Bridges are somewhat more character-filled. From the middle of the University Bridge one can look out over the east end of Lake Union - Portage Bay - and see the Cascades and much of the University of Washington on the north, upward sloping, shore.
We exit the bridge and make a crossing using established footpaths from the bridge to Roosevelt Way. In the U-District, Roosevelt, along with University Way and 15th Avenue NE, are the major north-south arteries. Roosevelt Way is one-way southbound but is lined for the five or six blocks of downtown U-District with an array of offices, apartment and condominium buildings, and shops and restaurants, and a Trader Joe's, which we use as a bathroom stop. It takes us a few minutes to negotiate our way through the U-District's downtown, along about NE 50th Street we find ourselves in the residential area of the district. The U-District urban village runs from the shoreline at the north side of Lake Union - Portage Bay (which is the equivalent of NE 35th St.), through NE 50th Street, and from the Interstate 5 overpasses on the west to 15th Avenue NE on the east. That's about a mile north-south and a little over half-a-mile east-west. It's the second largest collection of office buildings and service organizations outside of downtown and was this way as long ago as the early sixties. In structures and density as well as collections of shops, restaurants, bars, clubs and movie theaters it's a larger "city" than Duluth, Sioux City, Minot, Madison, Roanoke, and a bunch of other "smaller" cities. The neighborhood, not counting the 35,000 students of the University of Washington, has about 23,000 residents and is incredibly well connected to the rest of the city - there are 35 bus lines which run through here and it will be one of the future stops on the Link light rail (phase II). It's also got a bunch-o movie theaters, so I find myself here a lot, almost as often as I find myself on Capitol Hill or in Ballard.
Starting at NE 50th, Roosevelt Way becomes a most interesting thoroughfare. There are block after block of hippy and nouveau-hippy style clothing, furnishing and eating establishments. There are two vegan restaurants within a two block distance of each other. There are also scads of ethnic restaurants favoring the Far and Near East as well as Russia and parts of the old East Europe. There are also a host of smaller, "mom and pop" styled businesses and the usual car fix-it and paint-it shops. The neighborhood houses are a variety of Craftsman and modified Victorian houses with a smattering of later-styled California Bungalow and faux split-levels thrown in. We parsed a few "for sale" signs and concluded that the average selling price for property along the Roosevelt Way spine was in the high-$300's to mid-$400's. That would make sense since this is a really pleasant neighborhood with a rich stock of both local and regional services and goods and a rich housing stock. It's also, as mentioned, an easy connect from here to other close-in parts of town. Buses from downtown to the U-district run every 20 minutes, vice the every 30 minutes from West Seattle and the every 12 minutes from Capitol Hill.
Roosevelt Way also crosses Ravenna Boulevard, a wonderful esplanaded parkway which runs from Green Lake on the west to just past the University on the east. One whole lane on each side of the esplanade is a dedicated bike lane - the width of a standard car lane. It's a shame that Ravenna is only about a mile-and-a-half in total distance, three if one did a round-trip between either the University end or the Green Lake end. The city definitely needs more of these kinds of boulevards. It's no surprise that Ravenna Boulevard was laid out the way it is and links parks at both ends because the Olmsted Brothers were involved.
Once past Ravenna, Roosevelt changes character yet again. Ravenna is about mid-way between the U-District urban village and the Roosevelt district urban village at NE 65th Street. Ravenna defines the two neighborhoods - below Ravenna is the U-District, above Ravenna is the Roosevelt district. The houses don't change character as much as the business establishments begin to focus more on the Roosevelt district and this is ascertained more by the names than anything else. From being a "University" barber shop or bookstore they change to being a "Roosevelt" barber shop or bookstore. Otherwise the two neighborhoods - at least the residential and local service components - are nearly indistinguishable. As one closes in on the Roosevelt urban village there's a stretch of Roosevelt Way which gives way to what I'm going to call the "hi-fi" district. At least one of the local hi-fi shops refers to this as "hi-fi row." The blocks between NE 62nd and NE 64th have five audio-video dealers and service shops, some smack-dab across the street from each other or on adjacent lots. Very convenient. Reminded me of the stretch of Stone Way which had three rare and high-end used book dealers in adjacent store fronts.
I did go into Magnolia Audio/Video, which recently expanded from Seattle to the LA area. They seem to be the local equivalent of Myer-Emco in the Washington, DC, area. I was trying to determine if they could order Infinity speaker drivers since one of my big boys has one driver down and two others which are on their last legs. The speaker works, the back-firing tweeter is out, though, and the surrounds on the two 12-inch bass drivers are deteriorated but not gone. Time to fix the system. Magnolia said they couldn't help since they're not an Infinity dealer nor could their repair department. I sent an email to Precision Audio to see if they can do this and they had replied that they prefer to install drivers themselves, so no luck there, either. Otherwise, Infinity sends me to a dealer of theirs in Boise and frankly I'd rather spend my middleman surcharge locally rather than in Idaho, so I'll keep researching. There's also a fantastic used equipment shop, Hawthorne Audio, which had a nearly endless array of top-notch and high and higher-end equipment for sale. I've had tremendous success in purchasing high end equipment on the used market so I'll probably stop in Hawthorne the next time I'm in the neighborhood. I had purchased a used Magnum Dynalab analog tuner from a shop which is no longer in business in Arlington a few years back and it's been a great FM tuner (FM only). The new price on that tuner was over a thousand bucks, I paid about $300. I've been able to get all the stations one could want, both back in DC and out here.
In our house, owing as much to the height of my antenna as to the qualities of the Magnum tuner, I've been able to get rather clear signals from two Victoria and three Vancouver stations as well as all the local college and high school transmissions. Of course, all the Clear Channel and that ilk station are so saturating their signal that a wire whisker could pull in their signals so that's not only not a problem, those are stations I'm not interested in. However, I get a super signal from KEXP's (90.3 FM and http://kexp.org) new South King County translator - KXOT (91.7). This is a great advantage because KEXP has local and regional bands of note in their studios pretty much every day of the week - performing live for at least 30 minutes. I could, with the great signal I've got, begin a series of KEXP live recordings. In the past two months they've been on the road in Philadelphia and New York and have had locals from those two Eastern megacities live in their "borrowed" studios as well.
So after spending a few long moments looking at toys in the various shops along hi-fi row, Adam and I continue through the 65th Street urban village area and continue our walk north along Roosevelt. This is a reasonably well-served neighborhood in addition to having the local lock on the high end audio market. We climb slightly as this section gives rise to about 400 feet eventually. When we get up near NE 70th Street we're high enough such that we're looking down at Green Lake on the west as we cross the number streets. We're heading up and out of the Roosevelt neighborhood and toward Maple Leaf. By the time we reach NE 90th Street we're in a section which we both deem to be "the north end of town." It's getting pretty sparse along Roosevelt Way so far as any commercial activity and the house lots have taken on a perceptible increase in size and a less-fancy nature for the structure. We get opposite a reservoir at NE 94th Street which looks east and down over the rest of the area north of Lake Washington and towards the Cascades. Pretty nice views - what they call "territorial" views out here. On the other side of the street from the reservoir is a furniture store which looks hard-over like a leftover movie palace. There's still the formerly bulb-lit outline of the word "Reservoir" on the top of the marquee, which now gives the name of the furniture store. The store is selling unfinished pine and other utilitarian stuff, probably fitting for the area. Sad, in a way. It would have been fun to transport ourselves back - probably 40 years in time - to when the Reservoir Theater was a neighborhood theater, back when "the city" was still a long ways off to the south and when this was probably the "settlement" in the north end of town. According to the King County history website, this area was called the Maple Leaf Addition to the Green Lake tract. It was outside the city limits until 1954, even though it was first developed as a real estate broker's dream in the late 1890's. The reservoir was built in 1912. After World War II, Lake City Way, to the east, became a major thoroughfare, which made access to this area much easier from both the south and the east. Following the opening of the area's first regional mall, Northgate Mall, in 1950, the area began to boom. Northgate Mall is a bit north and somewhat west of this section. Previously a streetcar ran up Roosevelt Way - alas, to think we used to have such great urban transit systems.
By the time we reached NE 95th Street we decided we'd better start heading west since we were looking for a crosstown bus and so far all the cross streets since NE 65th had been dry of bus stops, indicating there were no bus routes. We headed west on 95th and when we got to 5th Avenue NE headed north towards Northgate, which we could see at that point. At NE 103rd we headed west to the Northgate Transit mall to catch a 75 bus to Ballard. Our plan had been to walk Roosevelt and then catch a bus to Ballard, lay over long enough to get a cupcake and cappuccino at Verite Coffee, and then catch the 15 or 18 (which turn into the West Seattle-bound 21 or 22) home. When we got to the transit mall we checked with the realtime bus display - a great feature for a transit mall. This is a video screen which tracks the buses (the King County Metro and UW have an online live bus tracking system) and gives the latest arrival and/or delay times for all the buses which stop. Our bus was a mere four minutes away and so the wait is just long enough for us to use the transit mall's bathroom but not long enough for us to get a coffee at the transit stop's coffee shop. All told, the bus system here has a great number of really useful amenities. The only problem with the bus system is the same problem as any bus system - the buses get stuck in traffic. We hop on the 75 and a relatively short time later are winding our way through the Crown Hill area of Ballard. When we cross 15th Avenue NW, I remark that this is the northern terminus for the monorail and were the monorail running now we'd be home in about twenty minutes. Instead, we spend the next twenty minutes making our way west on Holman Road and then south on 24th Avenue NW to the downtown Ballard area, where the 75 quits and turns around.
We get off, cross Market Street and enter a very crowded Verite Coffee (and Cupcake Royale). Ever since this location has opened, they've outrun their next door competition - Tully's Coffee - by probably two-to-one. It helps that Verite's coffee is from Cafe Vita, a very very good local roaster, and that they have really awesome cupcakes and other sweets. I did notice that their street sign now says "Verite Coffee World Headquarters." I was thinking that it was somewhat ungracious of the two owners to have abandoned their Madrona roots. Their Madrona shop was the first, the Ballard shop is their second. The Madrona area has an urban village of about three blocks long and serves a neighborhood of about 5,000. The Ballard urban district is about eight blocks long on Market and another eight blocks on Ballard Avenue with side streets off both of them containing substantial numbers of shops. In addition, about a quarter-mile east of downtown Ballard (22nd Ave. NW and NW Market St.) is 15th Avenue NW, a major north-south thoroughfare through the city and the location of the planned Monorail Green Line through Ballard. Ballard's close-in population is more than 18,000, nearly four times that of Madrona. It's no wonder that Verite Coffee has selected their Ballard location as their new "world headquarters," they probably do at least four times the business. I've been there three times in the past two months since they opened and it's always been crowded. On the other hand, there should be some form of allegiance to the Madrona location if only because it's where the two women founders started. And, it was good enough to give them the capital to open another location. At any rate, the cupcake was delicious (Adam had the chocolate on white cake), the cinnamon roll was delicious (me), and the coffee was its usual excellent brew. We finished and went across the street to catch the bus home. Once again I remarked that if Monorail were running we'd be home in about fifteen minutes but since the 15/18 snake their way through Ballard, Interbay, Queen Anne-Uptown, and then meander all the way through Belltown, Pike Place and finally Pioneer Square along First Avenue, that we'd be lucky to get home in forty minutes. About 45 minutes later we walked the final block home. Pretty nifty day - we did two adjacent neighborhoods and explored the northern reaches of the Green Line's planned monorail route and stopped off in Ballard yet another time and got home by 3:00 pm with the sun still shining and the outside temps hovering around the low fifties. A fairly satisfactory way to get exercise, explore one's city, eat a few fancy treats, and get outside.
Movie Reviews
Team America - World Police
This is a marionette movie and it's great fun, brought to us by director Trey Parker, co-creator and producer of South Park. It's not a South Park clone, by any means, rather the same savage disregard for convention and probity hallmark Team America as they do South Park. This is about a team of special agents who have their headquarters inside Mt. Rushmore and who dash around the world in various James Bond-type devices to rescue "freedom" from the clutches of a multitude of terrorists. It's a play on everything, Right, Left, Civil Rights, Temperance, Nationalism, Internationalism, even itself. There are several scenes which one could say steal the show - Team America disarming a terrorist at the expense of all the monuments in Paris; Michael Moore with his large marionette body strapped full with explosives blowing up Mt. Rushmore's iconic faces; North Korea's Kim Jong II singing; but the one which really steals the show is the exposition of every conceivable sex position as performed by the hero and heroine marionettes. Unbelievable. Makes any fantasy you've ever had about Ken and Barbie completely pale by comparison. Adam and I saw it at a late night showing in the U-District and the both of us, along with pretty much the entire audience, laughed out loud for nearly the entire running time. Oh, the kick phrase of the flick is that whenever anyone says "Team America," the comeback is always "Fuck Yeah!" Team America - Fuck Yeah.
The Incredibles
Brad Bird directs this fourth in the series of Pixar-Disney collaborations - collaboration in the sense that Disney distributes what is otherwise a completely in-house Pixar production. When we headed out to see this flick Adam commented that Disney didn't make any good flicks - which is pretty much the case ever since Eisener took charge. Thank Goodness he's out and will be gone by the time the Disney-Pixar agreement is up for renewal in 2005. By then, assuming the Disney board puts someone human in charge, Pixar (Steve Jobs, actually) may agree to sign for a continuation of the collaboration. If not, who cares. It's a Pixar film, through and through, which means it has a real plot, real characters, a real story line with characters we actually care about, and is done with a superb level of attention to detail. Plus, it's got the absolutely latest and most fantastic computer generated imagery yet to be seen. These are "human" characters in the sense that they are not toys, they are not insects, they are not household fixtures and they are not fish or other aquamarine inhabitants. These characters are a man, his wife and their two children and one baby. The villains are also humans as are all the supporting CGI characters. And, their facial expressions, their clothes, their motions and body language are one-hundred-percent believable. You actually forget this is done entirely inside a software program and outputted to film. Well, almost, there aren't really people who can stretch their arms like the wife, nor are their kids who can run fast enough to stay on top of a lake, but they are believable as real people. Their emotions, their dialog, their characterization of themselves as they get into and out of trouble is what you would expect from actors. It's a fantastic compliment to Pixar that they have raised the bar again on CGI movies - not with wizardry and special effects, but with transforming human qualities into software characters. The plot is a combination X-Men, Batman, Spiderman thematic which - frankly - outdoes any of the aforementioned movies and their sequels. It's the best action movie I've seen in quite a long time, made more so because we actually wind up caring for the Incredible family - mom, pop, son, daughter, and baby. It's also a long flick with a running time of 115 minutes, not a second of which is superfluous or wasted and not a second of which caused me to squirm in my seat. That alone is a compliment.
Un long dimanche de fiancailles (A Very Long Engagement - French with subtitles)
This is a flick by director Jean-Pierre Jeunet who also directed Amelie, Alien Resurrection, City of Lost Children, Delicatessen, and a few previous French titles which were never translated or subtitled. I saw this gratis as a result of joining Cinema Seattle (the Film Festival folks) and responding to their email for the first 200 respondents who would get free passes to a preview showing at the Harvard Exit, another old-styled film house at the end of the Broadway strip on Capitol Hill. I stood in line for about 75 minutes to get inside since they overbook and found a free seat in the middle balcony. I've never seen a bad French flick and this was no different. The story is set both in the mind of the protagonist - the fiancee of a young man drafted by the French Army in 1917 - and on the actual battlefield of World War I with the French and Germans fighting on the western front. It's a movie filled with expectation - the fiance and his betrothed have great scenes of tenderness and shared future times; it's a movie filled with a great mystery - the fiancee tries the entire length of the movie to find out what happened to her fiance - hence the title; it's a movie filled with utter and absolute gore - the battlefield scenes are as graphic and viscerally-shocking as any you will have ever seen - truly. It's a movie which is also filled with great compassion and understanding of the human condition, be that condition hatred, love, wrath, comfort, sympathy, or yearning. It's also quite long, 134 minutes, but not a minute seems extraneous. There's a great story to portray - how the French government, under President Poincare, was ruthless in its conscription methods and even more ruthless with those conscripted who tried to mutilate themselves to escape their duty. Our hero is one such solder and it's his story and that of four others who were prisoners thrown into the demarcation zone to be killed by the Germans that we follow through direct observation and through the reconstruction of both our heroine and another betrothed (played by Jody Foster, no less, speaking French) as they try and understand what happened to their loves. It's quite a wide canvas which Jeunet paints. He captures the feel, the imagery, the dress and the language of the time as well as the evolution which followed the war, since part of the story is told in retrospect by our heroine after the war has been over for quite some time. It's also a love story and in that sense it doesn't disappoint. There is a believable and peaceful ending which reunites our hero and his heroine - but it is an ending which is as much a beginning and that is where the movie leaves us. Actually a perfect ending for such a long and complicated tale. It's also interesting as a period piece and as a slice of history since the era surrounding the First World War is now almost completely lost to most of us except through words in books. This movie takes us back a century and places us in a Europe which was much different, by at least two evolutions, from the Europe most of us grew up with.
All three are certainly worth the money and time if you get a chance to see any of them and if not, there's always Netflix. I paid $9.50 for both Team America and The Incredibles, and nothing for A Very Long Engagement, but would have willingly paid $9.50.
Chas
We got the local to downtown and walked up to 3rd Avenue to catch one of the U-District buses, making perfect time starting from home at 9:30 am. The U-District bus we wanted was the one which runs down Fairview Street to Eastlake and crosses over the University Bridge (Fairview turns into Eastlake). That line goes around the eastern edge of Lake Union and takes one through an existing interesting neighborhood and an evolving neighborhood. The whole lower Lake Union area is a former warehouse and light industrial area which is now going on its second decade of makeover. Some of the nascent biotechnology industry here is situated on the eastern shore of Lake Union (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center), as are a large number of architectural firms and new townhouses. Fairview and Eastlake are both evolving into rather interesting neighborhood service and support streets for the already large number of residents, numbers which are expected to grow significantly in the coming decade. This is the area where the city is also planning on adding another street trolley line, which would run around the eastern Lake Union area and connect to Westlake Center (where there would be light rail and monorail connections, too).
As we neared the end of Eastlake, right before the University Bridge, I mentioned to Adam that we could hop off and see if the French bakery in that part of town, La Fournil, had as good a croissant as I've read reviews of. We hopped off, imagining we'd use our transfer and get another bus across the lake - actually Portage Bay at that point. We enter the bakery, which is pretty darned crowded at this time on a Saturday - slightly after 10:00 am. We get three croissants and two cappuccinos and take over a couple of spots at the window-side stool bar which had just been vacated by departing customers. This place does have excellent pastries, the previous time we'd been here, last Fall, we didn't get to try their croissants as it was late in the day and they were all gone, but we did try their eclairs, which were scrumptious - just the right amount of butter creme inside the pate choux and just the right amount of chocolate glazing on top.
According to Adam, the croissants here were "okay." I thought they were pretty good but will defer to his palate, which ascribes the best croissant in Seattle to Caffe Ladro (all locations, as their bake shop is right here at the California Avenue West Seattle cafe in walking distance from our house). The croissant at Ladro are, indeed, darned good. We finished our brunch and decided that since Roosevelt Way was just on the other side of the University Bridge and we were less than a block from this side of the bridge that we would just skip the bus and begin our walk a little earlier. As we crossed the bridge I pointed out some of the overly engineered and even-more-overly architected houseboats moored on the south side of Portage Bay. Some of these are floating palaces, houses with everything an ordinary house has, sitting on a series of floating decks and attached to the rest of the city with pliable piping (water and sewer) and cable, electrical, and phone hookups. They're houseboats in the sense that a Rolls Royce or Bentley is a "horseless carriage." To be sure, there are cheaper digs along Lake Union, some which are hardly more than a cottage on a float. Why someone would relish living "on the water" stacked, as they are, two and three deep along the shoreline and immediately adjacent to each other escapes me. I suppose there might be some kind of unique community associated with this lifestyle. You certainly would know your neighbors because there's no yard, at all, and for most of them not much more than two or three feet of water between adjacent walls. Ah, yet one more of Seattle's contributions to the modern urban landscape. University Bridge itself is one of the older drawbridges and has its own charm, though Fremont and Montlake Bridges are somewhat more character-filled. From the middle of the University Bridge one can look out over the east end of Lake Union - Portage Bay - and see the Cascades and much of the University of Washington on the north, upward sloping, shore.
We exit the bridge and make a crossing using established footpaths from the bridge to Roosevelt Way. In the U-District, Roosevelt, along with University Way and 15th Avenue NE, are the major north-south arteries. Roosevelt Way is one-way southbound but is lined for the five or six blocks of downtown U-District with an array of offices, apartment and condominium buildings, and shops and restaurants, and a Trader Joe's, which we use as a bathroom stop. It takes us a few minutes to negotiate our way through the U-District's downtown, along about NE 50th Street we find ourselves in the residential area of the district. The U-District urban village runs from the shoreline at the north side of Lake Union - Portage Bay (which is the equivalent of NE 35th St.), through NE 50th Street, and from the Interstate 5 overpasses on the west to 15th Avenue NE on the east. That's about a mile north-south and a little over half-a-mile east-west. It's the second largest collection of office buildings and service organizations outside of downtown and was this way as long ago as the early sixties. In structures and density as well as collections of shops, restaurants, bars, clubs and movie theaters it's a larger "city" than Duluth, Sioux City, Minot, Madison, Roanoke, and a bunch of other "smaller" cities. The neighborhood, not counting the 35,000 students of the University of Washington, has about 23,000 residents and is incredibly well connected to the rest of the city - there are 35 bus lines which run through here and it will be one of the future stops on the Link light rail (phase II). It's also got a bunch-o movie theaters, so I find myself here a lot, almost as often as I find myself on Capitol Hill or in Ballard.
Starting at NE 50th, Roosevelt Way becomes a most interesting thoroughfare. There are block after block of hippy and nouveau-hippy style clothing, furnishing and eating establishments. There are two vegan restaurants within a two block distance of each other. There are also scads of ethnic restaurants favoring the Far and Near East as well as Russia and parts of the old East Europe. There are also a host of smaller, "mom and pop" styled businesses and the usual car fix-it and paint-it shops. The neighborhood houses are a variety of Craftsman and modified Victorian houses with a smattering of later-styled California Bungalow and faux split-levels thrown in. We parsed a few "for sale" signs and concluded that the average selling price for property along the Roosevelt Way spine was in the high-$300's to mid-$400's. That would make sense since this is a really pleasant neighborhood with a rich stock of both local and regional services and goods and a rich housing stock. It's also, as mentioned, an easy connect from here to other close-in parts of town. Buses from downtown to the U-district run every 20 minutes, vice the every 30 minutes from West Seattle and the every 12 minutes from Capitol Hill.
Roosevelt Way also crosses Ravenna Boulevard, a wonderful esplanaded parkway which runs from Green Lake on the west to just past the University on the east. One whole lane on each side of the esplanade is a dedicated bike lane - the width of a standard car lane. It's a shame that Ravenna is only about a mile-and-a-half in total distance, three if one did a round-trip between either the University end or the Green Lake end. The city definitely needs more of these kinds of boulevards. It's no surprise that Ravenna Boulevard was laid out the way it is and links parks at both ends because the Olmsted Brothers were involved.
Once past Ravenna, Roosevelt changes character yet again. Ravenna is about mid-way between the U-District urban village and the Roosevelt district urban village at NE 65th Street. Ravenna defines the two neighborhoods - below Ravenna is the U-District, above Ravenna is the Roosevelt district. The houses don't change character as much as the business establishments begin to focus more on the Roosevelt district and this is ascertained more by the names than anything else. From being a "University" barber shop or bookstore they change to being a "Roosevelt" barber shop or bookstore. Otherwise the two neighborhoods - at least the residential and local service components - are nearly indistinguishable. As one closes in on the Roosevelt urban village there's a stretch of Roosevelt Way which gives way to what I'm going to call the "hi-fi" district. At least one of the local hi-fi shops refers to this as "hi-fi row." The blocks between NE 62nd and NE 64th have five audio-video dealers and service shops, some smack-dab across the street from each other or on adjacent lots. Very convenient. Reminded me of the stretch of Stone Way which had three rare and high-end used book dealers in adjacent store fronts.
I did go into Magnolia Audio/Video, which recently expanded from Seattle to the LA area. They seem to be the local equivalent of Myer-Emco in the Washington, DC, area. I was trying to determine if they could order Infinity speaker drivers since one of my big boys has one driver down and two others which are on their last legs. The speaker works, the back-firing tweeter is out, though, and the surrounds on the two 12-inch bass drivers are deteriorated but not gone. Time to fix the system. Magnolia said they couldn't help since they're not an Infinity dealer nor could their repair department. I sent an email to Precision Audio to see if they can do this and they had replied that they prefer to install drivers themselves, so no luck there, either. Otherwise, Infinity sends me to a dealer of theirs in Boise and frankly I'd rather spend my middleman surcharge locally rather than in Idaho, so I'll keep researching. There's also a fantastic used equipment shop, Hawthorne Audio, which had a nearly endless array of top-notch and high and higher-end equipment for sale. I've had tremendous success in purchasing high end equipment on the used market so I'll probably stop in Hawthorne the next time I'm in the neighborhood. I had purchased a used Magnum Dynalab analog tuner from a shop which is no longer in business in Arlington a few years back and it's been a great FM tuner (FM only). The new price on that tuner was over a thousand bucks, I paid about $300. I've been able to get all the stations one could want, both back in DC and out here.
In our house, owing as much to the height of my antenna as to the qualities of the Magnum tuner, I've been able to get rather clear signals from two Victoria and three Vancouver stations as well as all the local college and high school transmissions. Of course, all the Clear Channel and that ilk station are so saturating their signal that a wire whisker could pull in their signals so that's not only not a problem, those are stations I'm not interested in. However, I get a super signal from KEXP's (90.3 FM and http://kexp.org) new South King County translator - KXOT (91.7). This is a great advantage because KEXP has local and regional bands of note in their studios pretty much every day of the week - performing live for at least 30 minutes. I could, with the great signal I've got, begin a series of KEXP live recordings. In the past two months they've been on the road in Philadelphia and New York and have had locals from those two Eastern megacities live in their "borrowed" studios as well.
So after spending a few long moments looking at toys in the various shops along hi-fi row, Adam and I continue through the 65th Street urban village area and continue our walk north along Roosevelt. This is a reasonably well-served neighborhood in addition to having the local lock on the high end audio market. We climb slightly as this section gives rise to about 400 feet eventually. When we get up near NE 70th Street we're high enough such that we're looking down at Green Lake on the west as we cross the number streets. We're heading up and out of the Roosevelt neighborhood and toward Maple Leaf. By the time we reach NE 90th Street we're in a section which we both deem to be "the north end of town." It's getting pretty sparse along Roosevelt Way so far as any commercial activity and the house lots have taken on a perceptible increase in size and a less-fancy nature for the structure. We get opposite a reservoir at NE 94th Street which looks east and down over the rest of the area north of Lake Washington and towards the Cascades. Pretty nice views - what they call "territorial" views out here. On the other side of the street from the reservoir is a furniture store which looks hard-over like a leftover movie palace. There's still the formerly bulb-lit outline of the word "Reservoir" on the top of the marquee, which now gives the name of the furniture store. The store is selling unfinished pine and other utilitarian stuff, probably fitting for the area. Sad, in a way. It would have been fun to transport ourselves back - probably 40 years in time - to when the Reservoir Theater was a neighborhood theater, back when "the city" was still a long ways off to the south and when this was probably the "settlement" in the north end of town. According to the King County history website, this area was called the Maple Leaf Addition to the Green Lake tract. It was outside the city limits until 1954, even though it was first developed as a real estate broker's dream in the late 1890's. The reservoir was built in 1912. After World War II, Lake City Way, to the east, became a major thoroughfare, which made access to this area much easier from both the south and the east. Following the opening of the area's first regional mall, Northgate Mall, in 1950, the area began to boom. Northgate Mall is a bit north and somewhat west of this section. Previously a streetcar ran up Roosevelt Way - alas, to think we used to have such great urban transit systems.
By the time we reached NE 95th Street we decided we'd better start heading west since we were looking for a crosstown bus and so far all the cross streets since NE 65th had been dry of bus stops, indicating there were no bus routes. We headed west on 95th and when we got to 5th Avenue NE headed north towards Northgate, which we could see at that point. At NE 103rd we headed west to the Northgate Transit mall to catch a 75 bus to Ballard. Our plan had been to walk Roosevelt and then catch a bus to Ballard, lay over long enough to get a cupcake and cappuccino at Verite Coffee, and then catch the 15 or 18 (which turn into the West Seattle-bound 21 or 22) home. When we got to the transit mall we checked with the realtime bus display - a great feature for a transit mall. This is a video screen which tracks the buses (the King County Metro and UW have an online live bus tracking system) and gives the latest arrival and/or delay times for all the buses which stop. Our bus was a mere four minutes away and so the wait is just long enough for us to use the transit mall's bathroom but not long enough for us to get a coffee at the transit stop's coffee shop. All told, the bus system here has a great number of really useful amenities. The only problem with the bus system is the same problem as any bus system - the buses get stuck in traffic. We hop on the 75 and a relatively short time later are winding our way through the Crown Hill area of Ballard. When we cross 15th Avenue NW, I remark that this is the northern terminus for the monorail and were the monorail running now we'd be home in about twenty minutes. Instead, we spend the next twenty minutes making our way west on Holman Road and then south on 24th Avenue NW to the downtown Ballard area, where the 75 quits and turns around.
We get off, cross Market Street and enter a very crowded Verite Coffee (and Cupcake Royale). Ever since this location has opened, they've outrun their next door competition - Tully's Coffee - by probably two-to-one. It helps that Verite's coffee is from Cafe Vita, a very very good local roaster, and that they have really awesome cupcakes and other sweets. I did notice that their street sign now says "Verite Coffee World Headquarters." I was thinking that it was somewhat ungracious of the two owners to have abandoned their Madrona roots. Their Madrona shop was the first, the Ballard shop is their second. The Madrona area has an urban village of about three blocks long and serves a neighborhood of about 5,000. The Ballard urban district is about eight blocks long on Market and another eight blocks on Ballard Avenue with side streets off both of them containing substantial numbers of shops. In addition, about a quarter-mile east of downtown Ballard (22nd Ave. NW and NW Market St.) is 15th Avenue NW, a major north-south thoroughfare through the city and the location of the planned Monorail Green Line through Ballard. Ballard's close-in population is more than 18,000, nearly four times that of Madrona. It's no wonder that Verite Coffee has selected their Ballard location as their new "world headquarters," they probably do at least four times the business. I've been there three times in the past two months since they opened and it's always been crowded. On the other hand, there should be some form of allegiance to the Madrona location if only because it's where the two women founders started. And, it was good enough to give them the capital to open another location. At any rate, the cupcake was delicious (Adam had the chocolate on white cake), the cinnamon roll was delicious (me), and the coffee was its usual excellent brew. We finished and went across the street to catch the bus home. Once again I remarked that if Monorail were running we'd be home in about fifteen minutes but since the 15/18 snake their way through Ballard, Interbay, Queen Anne-Uptown, and then meander all the way through Belltown, Pike Place and finally Pioneer Square along First Avenue, that we'd be lucky to get home in forty minutes. About 45 minutes later we walked the final block home. Pretty nifty day - we did two adjacent neighborhoods and explored the northern reaches of the Green Line's planned monorail route and stopped off in Ballard yet another time and got home by 3:00 pm with the sun still shining and the outside temps hovering around the low fifties. A fairly satisfactory way to get exercise, explore one's city, eat a few fancy treats, and get outside.
Movie Reviews
Team America - World Police
This is a marionette movie and it's great fun, brought to us by director Trey Parker, co-creator and producer of South Park. It's not a South Park clone, by any means, rather the same savage disregard for convention and probity hallmark Team America as they do South Park. This is about a team of special agents who have their headquarters inside Mt. Rushmore and who dash around the world in various James Bond-type devices to rescue "freedom" from the clutches of a multitude of terrorists. It's a play on everything, Right, Left, Civil Rights, Temperance, Nationalism, Internationalism, even itself. There are several scenes which one could say steal the show - Team America disarming a terrorist at the expense of all the monuments in Paris; Michael Moore with his large marionette body strapped full with explosives blowing up Mt. Rushmore's iconic faces; North Korea's Kim Jong II singing; but the one which really steals the show is the exposition of every conceivable sex position as performed by the hero and heroine marionettes. Unbelievable. Makes any fantasy you've ever had about Ken and Barbie completely pale by comparison. Adam and I saw it at a late night showing in the U-District and the both of us, along with pretty much the entire audience, laughed out loud for nearly the entire running time. Oh, the kick phrase of the flick is that whenever anyone says "Team America," the comeback is always "Fuck Yeah!" Team America - Fuck Yeah.
The Incredibles
Brad Bird directs this fourth in the series of Pixar-Disney collaborations - collaboration in the sense that Disney distributes what is otherwise a completely in-house Pixar production. When we headed out to see this flick Adam commented that Disney didn't make any good flicks - which is pretty much the case ever since Eisener took charge. Thank Goodness he's out and will be gone by the time the Disney-Pixar agreement is up for renewal in 2005. By then, assuming the Disney board puts someone human in charge, Pixar (Steve Jobs, actually) may agree to sign for a continuation of the collaboration. If not, who cares. It's a Pixar film, through and through, which means it has a real plot, real characters, a real story line with characters we actually care about, and is done with a superb level of attention to detail. Plus, it's got the absolutely latest and most fantastic computer generated imagery yet to be seen. These are "human" characters in the sense that they are not toys, they are not insects, they are not household fixtures and they are not fish or other aquamarine inhabitants. These characters are a man, his wife and their two children and one baby. The villains are also humans as are all the supporting CGI characters. And, their facial expressions, their clothes, their motions and body language are one-hundred-percent believable. You actually forget this is done entirely inside a software program and outputted to film. Well, almost, there aren't really people who can stretch their arms like the wife, nor are their kids who can run fast enough to stay on top of a lake, but they are believable as real people. Their emotions, their dialog, their characterization of themselves as they get into and out of trouble is what you would expect from actors. It's a fantastic compliment to Pixar that they have raised the bar again on CGI movies - not with wizardry and special effects, but with transforming human qualities into software characters. The plot is a combination X-Men, Batman, Spiderman thematic which - frankly - outdoes any of the aforementioned movies and their sequels. It's the best action movie I've seen in quite a long time, made more so because we actually wind up caring for the Incredible family - mom, pop, son, daughter, and baby. It's also a long flick with a running time of 115 minutes, not a second of which is superfluous or wasted and not a second of which caused me to squirm in my seat. That alone is a compliment.
Un long dimanche de fiancailles (A Very Long Engagement - French with subtitles)
This is a flick by director Jean-Pierre Jeunet who also directed Amelie, Alien Resurrection, City of Lost Children, Delicatessen, and a few previous French titles which were never translated or subtitled. I saw this gratis as a result of joining Cinema Seattle (the Film Festival folks) and responding to their email for the first 200 respondents who would get free passes to a preview showing at the Harvard Exit, another old-styled film house at the end of the Broadway strip on Capitol Hill. I stood in line for about 75 minutes to get inside since they overbook and found a free seat in the middle balcony. I've never seen a bad French flick and this was no different. The story is set both in the mind of the protagonist - the fiancee of a young man drafted by the French Army in 1917 - and on the actual battlefield of World War I with the French and Germans fighting on the western front. It's a movie filled with expectation - the fiance and his betrothed have great scenes of tenderness and shared future times; it's a movie filled with a great mystery - the fiancee tries the entire length of the movie to find out what happened to her fiance - hence the title; it's a movie filled with utter and absolute gore - the battlefield scenes are as graphic and viscerally-shocking as any you will have ever seen - truly. It's a movie which is also filled with great compassion and understanding of the human condition, be that condition hatred, love, wrath, comfort, sympathy, or yearning. It's also quite long, 134 minutes, but not a minute seems extraneous. There's a great story to portray - how the French government, under President Poincare, was ruthless in its conscription methods and even more ruthless with those conscripted who tried to mutilate themselves to escape their duty. Our hero is one such solder and it's his story and that of four others who were prisoners thrown into the demarcation zone to be killed by the Germans that we follow through direct observation and through the reconstruction of both our heroine and another betrothed (played by Jody Foster, no less, speaking French) as they try and understand what happened to their loves. It's quite a wide canvas which Jeunet paints. He captures the feel, the imagery, the dress and the language of the time as well as the evolution which followed the war, since part of the story is told in retrospect by our heroine after the war has been over for quite some time. It's also a love story and in that sense it doesn't disappoint. There is a believable and peaceful ending which reunites our hero and his heroine - but it is an ending which is as much a beginning and that is where the movie leaves us. Actually a perfect ending for such a long and complicated tale. It's also interesting as a period piece and as a slice of history since the era surrounding the First World War is now almost completely lost to most of us except through words in books. This movie takes us back a century and places us in a Europe which was much different, by at least two evolutions, from the Europe most of us grew up with.
All three are certainly worth the money and time if you get a chance to see any of them and if not, there's always Netflix. I paid $9.50 for both Team America and The Incredibles, and nothing for A Very Long Engagement, but would have willingly paid $9.50.
Chas
Posted: Mon - November 22, 2004 at 06:11 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM