Urban poetry

I love these manhole covers.

The bathrooms are also fun

Inside EMP

Here are two not great shots of the interior. I didn't actually visit the exhibits; that will have to wait for a return visit when I have more time. Instead I had a nutritious lunch of garlic parmesan fries at the restaurant while I waited for the hop on trolley to take me back to downtown.

Paul Allen does seem to have more fun being a billionaire than anyone else I can think of.

"How about a museum dedicated to music?"

"And how about if we also cover fantasy and sci-fi?" 

"And let's hire Frank Gehry to design it!"

"Cool. Here's a couple hundred million. Make it so."

Grass Blades

I don't like the EMP building that much -- its "in your face" quality, especially in the front, is wildly appropriate as a structure to honor pop culture, but it's exhausting to look at.

This public art installation across the street, on the other hand, I love. It's called Grass Blades, designed by John Fleming, and consists of strands of steel painted to resemble bamboo. It complements the steel curves of the less ostentatious side view of EMP perfectly.

More Space Needle

Here are two very different looks at the Needle: peering out from behind the busyness of the EMP front facade, and reflected twice on the hood and back window of a parked car.

Seattle, take two

I was not myself yesterday.

I was tired, my foot ached from the stupid hills in this stupid city, and I was very upset about one of my co-workers, one of the sweetest people I know, who was badly beaten in a mugging and is in the hospital. (Prayers for a quick recovery, Tom.)

I spent more time looking at my phone to see if there were any updates or if his father had called me back than I did looking around me. Which is absolutely the right reaction, I know -- Tom being okay is much more important than whether I get a good photo of the Seattle skyline. But I also felt that I wasted the entire day yesterday because I didn't really look at the things around me.

So today, I retraced my steps, and went back to most of the places I went to yesterday. This time I actually saw them, and I liked the city so much more. And no surprise, paying attention meant that the pictures I took were better as well.

Here's the space needle again, this time rising behind the unmistakably Frank Gehry-ian curves of Paul Allen's EMP Museum.

This also cracked me up

The mechanical billboard with an appropriately hokey ad for Jersey Mike's subs -- which I'm sure are as good for you as the name suggests -- flipped over to reveal the ad below, for what is apparently one of the offerings in the medical marijuana market. I love how it suggests healthy living and that outdoors Northwest lifestyle; I honestly thought it was an ad for yogurt at first because the yellow "cannabis" was so hard to read.

Utilikilts

This cracked me up. I just don't see the utilikilt catching on as a widely worn article of clothing for men, even in Seattle, but somehow there is an entire store -- with actual customers! -- in the business of selling them.

I think the football jersey is an unfortunate choice for a coordinating separate though -- I would stick with the t-shirt and flannel top.

The bluest skies you've ever seen are in Seattle

Not true, actually -- it's warm and sunny here but also hazy, and I had to tweak this photo of the skyline to make it more than "Obscure bluish lumps behind the Space Needle". But one of the sad results of having grown up in the late twentieth-century United States is that I can always count on a soundtrack supplied by something I wish my memory wouldn't waste precious space saving. In this case, it's the theme song to Here Come the Brides, a short-lived television show that was cancelled more than forty years ago, which my brain has been helpfully playing nonstop in all its gruesomeness ever since I got here:

The bluest skies you've ever seen are in Seattle
And the hills the greenest green in Seattle
Like a beautiful child growing up free and wild
Full of hopes and full of fears
Full of laughter, full of tears
Full of dreams to last the years, in Seattle.
In Seattle!

It's hard to appreciate this lovely city when I am always mentally shouting, "Shut up!"

Saturday reflections

There will be many more pictures tomorrow, but for now here is a fun window display with a Seattle street reflected over it.

My hotel room wasn't ready when I got here, so I went down the hill in search of a cup of coffee. Which, in Seattle, you would expect to be as readily available as, say, marijuana. But I passed at least one medical marijuana dispensary long before I found a coffee shop.

And it was a Starbucks, which of course is a Seattle institution and not at all like the McDonald's of caffeine but at that point I no longer cared. I'll be adventurous tomorrow.

Sky view

Photos from airplanes are rarely worth the trouble. Okay, those thick, scratchy pressurized windows may be necessary to keep us separated from the freezing near-vacuum on the other side, but will no one think of the photographers?

But I loved these mountains on the approach to Seattle earlier today and the photo isn't too awful so here it is.

Urban poetry

A woman in a red headscarf considering the tomatoes at a produce stand on Ninth Avenue.