Two reviews for the price of one...

Hold on, its going to be a surprise tonight. I know that I usually wax rhapsodic about airplanes or elegant cipher systems, but not this time. Tonight I am going to talk about music -- and about a mostly excellent concert that my family and I took in last night. Also about the venue, the absolutely excellent Triple Door down in Seattle.


Rather randomly for a Monday night, we met up with some friends and went to see our friend Kristen Ward play. The music in due time -- first the Triple Door. Apparently it was once and old burlesque theater -- and if this origin is true, then the burlesque theaters of old were a far classier kind of place than when I was in college. Obviously a contemporary remodel had completely remade the pace into tiered seating with sumptuous leather booths, smaller tables on the sides, and snippets of bar. All faced the stage and managed a feeling of intimacy despite seating 270.

The service was fantastic and the food was every bit what we expect from The Wild Ginger. Which is to say fantastic. Though let me tell you there's a lot of salt in their stuff -- this morning I'm puffed up like a balloon enough that I was tempted to blog about Zeppelins rather than music as I'd planned... The only culinary failing was that Erica ordered a vodka gimlet rickey. "Rickey" is barspeak for taking any true cocktail and serving it in a tall glass, over ice, with club soda. The server was baffled by this but put the drink order in ("Vodka Gimlet Rickey") just fine. What arrived was a regular vodka gimlet served in a cocktail glass. They were happy to take it back and pour us one correct -- which was very good in the end -- but it was a little sad to see the bartending team either mix by routine or else just have no clue what we were talking about. At least they made the thing with fresh lime, and not that true form of evil, Rose's Lime Juice.

If any of you behind the bar at the Wild Ginger are reading this, make note of that one...

Now on to Kristen's music. She was asked to play an "mellow" set, which was fine and worked pretty good for the first half of her show. In fact, having gotten used to Kristen in front of a full band, it was fun to see how her sound and performance has gotten much more solid even when just in front of her guitarist and pedal steel player. "Good Time Man" was rather magical as the venue lit up a "starry night" backdrop that could have been cheesy but instead worked really nicely.

The drawback to the mellow set was that it prevented her show from having the zip that her 2nd album has, that little bit of extra pizzas and energy that comes from percussion and the rest of the rhythm section driving the music along. It was fun, though, to hear a few songs that I'm used to hearing with the full band stripped down to their core. Listening to guitarist Gary Westlake (resplendent in an outfit which I can best describe as "satanic Colonel Sanders") play his solos over this relatively naked format was great, and really showcased his work.

From our seats, I had an unusual opportunity to watch Kevin Suggs, Kristen's pedal steel player. I don't mean to sound weird, but I kept staring at his legs. And all I could think of was flying helicopters (you knew aviation would end up here, didn't you?). Between what I counted as ten pedals and some odd knee levers, he was always in subtle motion, that kind of amazing "my hands are doing things entirely unrelated to what my feet are doing" skill that I always associated with, well, helicopter pilots and really good drummers. Now add steel players -- and they have extra things to do with their knees! Add that to the "things that Nick must understand before he dies" list...

I Wanna' Go Home, a song that I keep thinking has the potential to become sort of classic icon of our times (Obama campaign, are you listening? Kristen would probably license the song to you if you ask, and it would give my friend some great exposure!), was missing from the set, which left me a little disappointed as well. It kept the show down to the core of Kristen's music, though, stories of love gone a-little-bit-right, not-so-right, and not-right-at-all.

Her voice was in good form and the mini-band sounded great. Gary was energetic as always and Kevin was able to put out a wall of sound that managed to fill up the space even with just three instruments playing. But more than anything I enjoyed the chance to have a Friday-on-Monday. Some cocktails, a nice dinner, and time with our friends.

The performance wrapped up all too soon -- I'm not used to the brevity of these opening act gigs! I was enjoying the show and while it was nice to have a break and a chance to chat, the next act would make wish Kristen's set had continued all the stronger!

Fences took the stage and we left soon thereafter. I have never seen a performance as presumably deliberate in their mockery of the audience's position as this interesting duo of drum and guitar/vocal. The singer, looking rather like he wandered in off the street in cutoff shorts with a set of keys dangling from a belt loop via carabiner, faced away from the audience the entire time. The music could have been interesting -- if only I'd felt at all welcome in my intrusion on their time. I'm sure it was a deliberate act -- a statement about insisting on being taken seriously solely for one's music or such. But in either case it rubbed the wrong way and, with a sleepy kid in a noisy room, we knew it was out time to go.

It was a good time -- and I'll be back to the Triple Door for sure on a night when we know all the music will be as good as Kristen's and we've got a sitter. I'll certainly be back out to see the next of Kristen's shows as well.

A Moment of Silence

There's a pun here, of course:

Wither

Whither

Or both?

So the sad reality of the death of recreational bowling hit me the other day, as I was driving through Downtown Ballard for the first time in a year or so. Usually I sneak in the back way, but this time I was going straight into the yuppifying core of once Norwegian Ballard. And I saw, with tear filled eyes, that the Sunset Bowl was closed. Not merely closed, but surrounded by chain link fence, much in the way that corpses are covered in tasteful white sheets. She was dead, and soon to be disposed of.

A little research confirmed what I already knew -- bowling alleys are dying. First Leilani Lanes, then Ballard Bowl, and who is next? Just a few blocks from home, there is Edmonds' homey Robin Hood Lanes (complete with the Friar Tuck Inn cafe and bar!). Is it next? Will the new PCC market draw crowds to the bowling alley, or squish its stalwart regulars out? Will the new younger audience in Edmonds cease to find a trip to Moonlight Bowling or a regular league to their taste?

But more even than mourning the loss of a bowling alley, I have to ask, what do kids do these days? I grew up in a college town with few fun things to do in those heady pre-car days. We could ride our bikes down to the park (in summer) or the pool (in summer). We could go to the library (I hung with a nerdy crowd). Or we could go to the bowling alley and bowl and play pinball and video games. It was underneath the student union (the "MU") at U.C. Davis. A glorious space reached through a wide descending stairway of glitter flecked concrete. It smelled vaguely of wax and phenolic plastics, resonated with the clatter of crashing pins, the ringing of tilted pinball machines, and the sharp snap of a billiard break.

That was the late 1970's and early 1980's for you. Pac Man was still exciting. The Concorde had a future. The Space Shuttle and the Macintosh were anywhere between nonexistent and novel. Reagan was controversial.

Now I'll admit I may well have been there for the beginning of the end. Probably half of our trips to the bowling alley were sparked by a parent adminishing us to get outside, for crying out loud. So we'd pack up our Dungeons & Dragons books, put our character sheets back in their Trapper Keepers , and hop on our bannana seat Schwinns and ride down to the lanes to bowl a few frames.

Cranky college students (we didn't yet realize that they were hungover) would rent us our shoes and break our five dollar bills for quarters to pump into the video games.

Later, it was Stanford and a sign of the times. My freshman year marked the first time in decades that the university had not had a bowling alley on campus. Shortly before I arrived, the apparently miniscule and crappy bowling alley had been closed to make room for a student computer lab. I'm not sure if the student computer lab ever inhabited that space, but it never did while I was there. Instead there was a vague, empty place about which the administration and various student groups bickered in a desultory attempt to find a sufficiently politically correct fast food vendor who would accept the university's stringent lease terms.

So we bowled at a place known not by its own name, but for the large and shockingly red facade of a Thai restaurant behind which the bowling alley was located. There was no relationship, it was just one of those things. "Thai Bowl" offered a wonderful source of relaxation: Thirsty Thursdays. $5.00 admission (later raised to $10.00), after which shoe rentals, games, beers, hot dogs, and nachos were each only 25 cents. Believe me, I drank a lot of Keystone Light (really -- that's what they served for 25 cents!) and bowled a lot of frames there. Come to find out, my second game is my best. I'm tense during the first one. By the second, the beer's loosened me up. By the third, I'm getting sloppy.

This trend continued in Seattle, where I left the Sunset Bowl over the legal limit more than a few times (don't worry -- I lived in Ballard and it was a long, sobering but walkable trip back to my apartment). We'd end up there, a bunch of us from Amazon, having such important events as departmental offsites. Really. If you knew how much of that company's early growth was fueled not by venture capitol and Bezos' charisma but rather by vast amounts of alcohol, you'd probably rethink that whole "Man of the Year" thing...

But now Sunset is gone. I miss it -- though I wasn't frequenting it these past few years. But I spent my 35th birthday at Robin Hood Lanes. Drinking whiskies and eating burgers from the Friar Tuck Inn (I'm not kidding about that name) and having an odd retro-bowling experience with a few of my friends. A few weeks ago I was at The Garage up on Capitol Hill. Billiards, drinks, and a scene. And, it turns out, bowling. Yes, drunken bowling is no longer ghetto but now cool. It is part of a scene. So part of me has relaxed, knowing that a part of my life will continue. I can bowl again. Twenty (and occasionally thirty) somethings still do this!

Fine, but very 21-and-over. Which raises a new question. What do the kids do these days? We played Dungeons and Dragons and swam and bowled. So when today's youth is done playing Dungeons and Dragons, what do they do? Ok, for starters, I think that D&D is much more of a niche market these days. But really? Do they hang out at the mall (we had no mall)? Do they play X-Box (we had Ataris!)? What the hell do they do? No wonder there is an epidemic of various youthful bad things, they've lost bowling!