The Temple Bar

Temple Bar - Bellingham, WA

Absinthe at the Temple Bar

If you're looking for a place to have a good conversation, well made cocktail or excellent glass of wine and delicious meal, the Temple Bar is the place you want to go. Nothing else quite like it in Bellingham. With its high ceilings and old world decor, there is a kind of European atmosphere where you feel comfortable taking time to savor and appreciate your drinks and food. Table service is friendly, familiar and patient.

The roasted cauliflower wedge with spicy aioli is an excellent starter. Salads are all super fresh, locally sourced and prepared with care. Their cheese and charcuterie plates are delicious works of art.
You can't go wrong with any of the daily specials. And the happy hour deal for a bottle of wine plus small cheese plate (before 7) is a great way to start an evening.

It's one of the most popular bars in town, so expect a happy crowd during peak hours.

Roasted Shishito Pepper at the Temple Bar

11 Questions for What’s Up Magazine - July 2017

Photo by Jessica Garr

11 Questions for What’s Up Magazine - July 2017

Interview by Brent Cole

In all the years we've been doing an 11 questions piece, I think we're at over a decade now, we've never doubled up on an interviewee. Until now. Many moons ago we covered Scot Casey, he'd probably only lived in town a couple of years but I already thought the world of the guy. Creative, funny and incredibly kind and sincere, I first met Scot through the Black Drop, which he was part owner of at the time and he soon began writing for the magazine. Scot always covered music that others weren't talking about, but that desperately deserved the attention... and he covered it with the honesty and love that made Scot SO incredibly well liked in town.

Welp, after seven years, Scot is leaving our fair city and I am crushed. He has been one of those people in town that MAKE Bellingham what it is - he'd become part of the fabric of this town’s music, art and culture scene and someone who I enjoyed talking to every chance I got. In all the years I've lived in town, Scot Casey is truly one of the most special people. He will be very much missed.

And with that, Scot was kind enough to answer 11 questions on why he's leaving, if he'll come back and his thoughts on the town he loves.

***

• Who are you and where did you come from (tell us about yourself, for those who don’t already know)?

My name is Scot Casey. Currently, I work at Honey Moon Mead & Ciders, handling sales and marketing, hosting Open Mic, booking shows. I also book Old World Deli. And probably met most everyone I now know from when I was a barista / part-owner of the Black Drop Coffeehouse. I’ve been fortunate and am extremely grateful to have been associated with three of the best businesses in town. I’ve often joked that they pretty much reflect my basic appetites: coffee, sandwiches and alcohol. I also write on occasion, engage in a strange graphic design and perform sporadic episodes of music. I’ve been in Bellingham now for about 6 years, having moved up here from Austin, Texas.

• You are moving away from Bellingham after years within the art and music community. What’s prompting the move away?


Well, it’s difficult. Of all the places I’ve been, Bellingham is one of most beautiful. I’ve never found anywhere else like it. A community like no other, with some of the nicest, most generous, engaged and insanely talented people I’ve ever met. I have a great place to live, a great job, a loving extended family, wonderful friends, everything anyone could ever hope for. But… some odd splinter in my being compels me towards solitude and isolation, makes my suspicious of any contentment and interrogates my happiness. I am haunted by the Buddhistic parable about how the house is on fire and we are are all just sitting around in the living room discussing the metaphysics of fire. To extend and probably corrupt this lovely analogy, I guess you could say I am leaving Bellingham to find a dark place out there in the Desert to walk out of the House of Scot Casey and watch it burn to the ground. I say this with laughter and take solace in William Burroughs’ mantra: “It’s ain’t no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones.”


• What one thing do you think you’ll miss the most about Bellingham?


There’s no way to narrow it to one thing. And if there is one thing, it is Bellingham itself. It often seems to me like a sanctuary, a last hold-out for poets, musicians and dreamers, for a vital and active community, more of a town than a city, where you seem to know everyone, where people still greet you with a smile on the street, where small businesses not only can thrive but are celebrated. I came from Austin, which I still dearly love, but I watched in dismay as all of these simple, almost undefinable, qualities that make up the unique personality of a place faded away. I’ll miss the vital Pulse of this place. I’ll miss the music and the poetry of the city itself in all of its amazing, weird, sublime, ridiculous, quixotic, poignant, proud, sad, funny and absolutely enchanting manifestations.


• So where are you moving too? What are your plans when you get there?


Nowhere - if it’s still out there. I’m trying hard to have no particular destination in mind. I’d like to “wander aimlessly” in the manner of Chuang Tzu, following the fractal paths in the landscape as they appear in the moment. My loose sense of it is to head down along the Sierras, into Death Valley, the Mojave and then pass the winter in the Sonoran Desert, perhaps Northern Mexico. I’d like to find a place of extreme isolation where I can experience the full of weight of solitude. My plan, as it might be simply expressed, is to live as close to the bone as possible, life at degree zero. In more poetic and idiosyncratic terms, I’d like to find the bones and skull of the dead god that haunts my world, cover them with honey and set it all on fire.


• What will you be doing your last night in town? What is your last meal going to be?


That’d be the last Sunday in July. I imagine I’ll probably take a slow evening walk around Lake Padden, share a good conversation and bottle of wine at Temple Bar, wander around downtown getting intoxicated with nostalgia, stop into Cap’s for a shot of Hussong, sit on the curb along State Street and hope I can always see the stars from those gutters, then end up where all good nights end up: at the Redlight in the Red Room sharing a last drink with all the beautiful ghosts. 


• Who is your all time favorite Bellingham musician? What about artist?


There cannot be just one! I’m really fortunate to know so many talented musicians. My heart is always with the Honey Moon and all the performers that play there. It’s a loosely held secret that at every Open Mic, we like to end the night with the Saddest Songs in the World. Tad Kroening and Pete Irving have so sweetly broken my heart on so many of these nights, I always be grateful just for the melancholy echo. And like most everyone, I believe Sarah Goodin hung the moon and sang the stars into shining. Meghan Yates and the Reverie Machine have restored my ragged soul so many times. Jan Peters and the Irish Crew. Louis Ledford. I could go on and on. Bellingham is blessed with an exaltation of great musicians - or whatever you call a great gathering of musical wonderment.

As far as artists, there is only one for me: Michelle Schutte. Her sublime and stark expressions of bonelike beauty just stop me in my tracks with wonder and laughter. It’s my sense that she sees into the radiant skeletal nature of the world and celebrates that in everything from the contagious terror of horses to the worried wisdom of a bunny rabbit.


• Do you have a favorite artistic moment in Bellingham, whether it’s something you created or experienced?


As far as any of my shows go, I’m really proud of The Last Meal of Calouste Gulbenkian at the Honey Moon. An “authentic” Armenian 8-course dinner that Linda Melim helped to conjure up, with each course reflecting the various stages in the Gulbenkian’s life. With all the usual suspects-musicians performing “authentic” Armenian songs. It was beautiful! Armenian professors from Western, an Armenian family, grandmother and all, were all there having a wonderful time. I presented it as an exact recreation of the millionaire’s last meal. And the thing I’ve never revealed publicly is that it was a complete fabrication, a beautiful, enchanting lie! Calouste Gulbenkian was the only real thing about it. The rest, myself and Linda and all of the musicians, made-up. And it was great! All art is a lie in one form or another. And if it’s beautiful and it’s entertaining, that’s truth enough for me.


• Thinking back to your first moments arriving to town – was there a “I love this town, I’m going to stay here” moment that made you fall in love with Bellingham?


My sister, Shannon, took me first thing to the Black Drop Coffeehouse, where I had a double latte that seemed a work of art. Then we walked over to Henderson’s where I found a good copy of Olson’s Call Me Ishmael. Went up to the corner to Everyday and Avalon. Then back around to Film Is Truth. Amazing coffee, bookstores, record stores, celebrations of film. As we sat at Temple drinking a bottle of wine while the sky was evening over the bay, I had that thought: yes, I do believe I could live here for a long time.


• What would it take for you to come back?

Well there’s that Bellingham Curse, right? Everyone who ever says they’re gone for good, always comes back. I’ll be back. Family and friends hold my heart here. But I’ve a rare window it seems: I’m not in love and I’ve got no kids, no pets, no plants, no house, no debts. I do have freedom and health. And I know how fragile each of those are. So before my mind or body or heart gives way, I want to do this thing that won’t leave me alone. But I’ll be back, in one form or another, bones in a box or still dancing around in this flesh.


• If you could wave a magic wand an change one thing about Bellingham, what would it be?

It’d have to be a big magic wand, but I’d want to change the conditions of the homeless and all who are lost and suffering out there on the streets. I imagine every city in the world would like that particular magic wand to solve these difficult problems. And the weight of responsibility and irony is not lost on me as someone who has the privilege to choose a life of nomadic homelessness.


• Any last thoughts?

I would just like to thank everyone - and there are many - who has offered me a hand up, provided opportunities, opened doors, supported me and stood by me as friends and co-workers and Bellingham family. I am deeply grateful. Thank you all. Y’all are all golden - down to the bone.

Photo by Ed Viladevall

Mike McGee, Robert Lashley and Cynthia French at the Green Frog - April 7th - The Green Frog

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Mike McGee, Robert Lashley and Cynthia French at the Green Frog - April 7th - The Green Frog


It’s always a joy when Mike McGee returns to town. McGee is one of the finest poets in the country, the only poet to have ever won the National and World Poetry Slams, the originating influence of the popular Kitchen Sessions and the nicest person you will ever have the pleasure to meet. Based now in his hometown of San Jose, California, Mike lived in Bellingham not too long ago and there is always a lot of love waiting for him here.

All of this was present at the Green Frog when McGee took the stage. As a working poet, he has a deceptive ease of delivery. He calls what he does “stand-up poetry”. Often, he catches you off-guard as you realize his conversational comedic  “stand-up” set-up has suddenly morphed into a poem of luminous beauty. After the alliteratively aural acrobatics of “Love Life”, he begins a piece called “Mycrophone” with the question “Is this thing turned on?” The piece unfolds as a heartfelt confession of how comfortable he is in front of a microphone. Then he seems to fight the rhyme for a moment until it bursts forth in a paroxysm of pure poetic ebullience. It’s a virtuoso performance, stopping you in your tracks and fixing you in the high-beams of language. He follows this with “Geez, Us!”, a brilliant hallucinogenic-comedic piece about him hanging out with Jesus, dreaming of the “Four Midgets of the Apocalypse” who “burned down miniature golf courses”, shaving Jesus’ head and the receiving a “Holy Burrito”.

Even though McGee is up on the stage separated from the crowd, he is actively engaged with the audience, listening to laughter and silence, watching the faces for reaction. With each new piece, you feel it is being pulled out of his bag of poems just for you. He calls Jake Werrion up to the stage to perform beautifully sparse musical echoes on guitar during the spoken monologue of “Take No Shit! (A Zoo Story)” which probably made the sorrowful ghost of Spalding Grey smile. He follows this with the powerful and poignant “Dirty Dimes” which details with a harrowing fluorescence a graveyard shift at a Walgreen’s Drugstore, describing a Dantean procession of characters who pass through in quietly desperate caricatures until the tenth customer, a woman dying of cancer or AIDS who pays with a handful of dirty dimes. It’s a powerful piece that takes all the breath away, a sublime synecdoche of the American Dream un-waking. Poetry that rings your bones like a bell.

Robert Lashley rises to the stage, his body language incarnating the Jeremiad, the mournful tenor and meter of his poetry. He tells us this day is the anniversary of the death of a woman he loved. His reading is uncompromising, the language shivering and shaking, a fist raised up in barren rage against time. The death of the loved one weighing down the words, adding black hole gravity to the lost center: “Through light and glass, the world is her laurel. / Her holly seeds filtered all light and shadow. / Sorrow is an invisible city of fabrics / from her, and the world outside.” An unrelenting obsequey performed with an almost violent rawness and fragility.

Cynthia French follows with a wonderful poetic rant about how Jane Fonda ruins everything from drive-in theaters and how one looks in spandex to not being able to set it up for your dying father to win an Academy Award. Her delivery is electric and engaging, laced with a penetrating and self-deprecating humor: “I am a fluorescent sock caught in the rusty chicken-wire fence around the drive-in movie parking lot.” She ends with a humorous story about her move across the country to Bellingham without a physical map that took her far off course of a scheduled poetry reading, which she then drove many miles back to attend. And Cynthia French is that sort of supremely talented poet who would go drive hundreds of miles for poem.

McGee returns with a selection from his most recent chapbook, Romantic Electric Camouflage, which is a “loop of poems” describing the development, denouement and dissolution of a relationship. This new work, while accented with his incisive comedy, is rooted deeper down in poetry. “I Meant to Say” as the first meeting, first impression, is one comedic riff after another, followed by what he meant to say. Imagine a Red Skelton clown trying to tell a woman he meets how he’s not kidding. This is followed by “The Winners”, full of the first bloom of love, a sublime poetic solemnity silencing the laughter: “I am the words in the night / You are the ears I exist for”. McGee takes the audience out into deeper waters with “Knightswimming” - about mid-point in the cycle where he asks the unravelling question: “Did we think we were rescuing each other? / Two anchors at sea?” He tells us the cycle is meant to be looped, when you get to the final poem, it guides you back to the beginning, Finnegan’s Wake, beginning again at the end. This is fine poetry, arcing white hot from page to performance, an absolute pleasure and privilege to bear witness to.

Mike McGee: http://www.mikemcgee.net/
Robert Lashley: https://robertlashley.wordpress.com/
Cynthia French: https://cynthiafrench.com/

This review originally appeared in What's Up! Magazine

EP Review: The Living Arrows - Set You Free

The three pieces (transcending the idea of “songs”) on The Living Arrows EP, Set You Free, resonate like the separate lines of a haiku: each is a world unto themselves but realizing a greater poetic dimensionality as a whole. On the first track, “Set You Free”, Alexandra Doumas’ warm voice, beauty laced with an unidentifiable melancholy, sings you into a poetic, almost mythic, narrative. There are elements of Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark and also something entirely its own. Traesti Luther comes in on the refrain, the perfect tonal counterpoint to Alexandra. The next piece, “Every Day I Wake”, features the rich sincere vocals of Traesti singing “Every day I wake, I try to lose my mind” over Christian’s Casolary’s captivating drum track and Loren Shaumberg’s engaging knife-like guitar riffs. Their shared vocal dynamics, the lyrical metaphysics, unfold and unfold the song over a sweet jazz-folk musical landscape. The last track, “King, Spring and Stone”, could have easily been born out of the Child Ballads, the vocal interplay between Alexandra and Traesti evoking comparison to Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer - the elegant and sparse instrumentation serves as a perfect frame. While there is obvious lyrical talent and accomplished musicianship, what is most engaging is a sense of the unexpected joy that emerges out of The Living Arrows’ music. Whistles, odd vocalizations, giggles, conversation and laughter are all essential elements. This music is the soundtrack for the beauty of waking up on a Summer’s morning, of not wanting the night’s dreams to fade; the prelude to a perfect day.

http://thelivingarrows.com/

This review originally appeared in What's Up! Magazine.

CD Review: Corwin Bolt and the Wingnuts: Screwloose

CD Review: Corwin Bolt and the Wingnuts: Screwloose

Listening to Corwin Bolt and the Wingnuts latest release, Screwloose, is like tuning-in to a haunting AM radio station on a summer night where the grass is blue and you are happy lost on the backroads of a 1930s Appalachian Dream. Bob Wills, Hank Williams and Stephen Foster are conjured forth. Bolt’s voice aches and moans with his resonating steel guitar like a strange attractor, owl-wing flutter towards a Blood Moon, at once comfortable and unsettling in its authenticity and rawness. Josh Britton’s slapping bass and Tim Long’s percussive tapping raising up the ghosts of Johhny Cash’s Tennessee Two: somewhere Marshall Grant is smiling. Dancing over it all, like musical lightning melting is Jeremy Sher’s sweet sweet fiddle playing. Every track on the album is fine, a cauldron of inventive original themes such as Made of Metal and Mile After Mile mixed with traditionals that reach out from the depths of the the collective American unconscious. The Gillian Welch song, Winters Come and Gone is given a new and remarkable reading as the involuted elements of the song are turned outwards into the willful convictions of the traditional John Henry. Likewise, the Stephen Foster tune, Angeline the Baker is fused with the dark energy of the fiddle reel, Soldier’s Joy. Corwin Bolt and the Wingnuts perform a New-Time Music, dressing the bones of Old-Time Music in a fresh and mysterious skin; creating a thing of beauty, harmony and sorrowful joy.

https://corwinbolt.bandcamp.com/

EP Review: Spider Ferns: Safety

The Spider Ferns new EP Safety unfolds seductively in your mind, laying down layer after layer of resonate musical reference, from trance to surf, jazz to dreampop - music simultaneously bright and shining new and yet as ancient as a fireside dream lullaby. The marriage of music between Kelly and Alton Fleek as The Spider Ferns has created a series of epiphanic sonic landscapes filled with poetic fragments and evocative musical atmospheres. The first track, Stronger Still, sets out with Alton’s fused-out tribal rhythms, icy guitar riffs, and Kelly’s voice like that of deep memory, reverberated and reminding: “When you turn the key.” The next track, Safety, has an elegant clock-like complexity, jazz-inflected guitar over a series of vocal questions that answer themselves in the beauty of Kelly’s asking. The hypnotic and seductive, Worlds Without Fail, with it’s Bauhaus meets Angelo Badalamenti echoes, an opium dream of a surf guitar, is one of the strongest tracks on the EP - entrancing as a ghost. The final track, In Violet Bloom (featuring Audiosapian), has intricate rhythms alchemized with sparse musical phrases and luminous vocals. The five songs on this EP are all beauties, as solid and multi-faceted as diamonds. The Spider Ferns music is music you fall into like a dream, where time and your presence dissolve into a transcendent beauty.

http://www.thespiderferns.com/

This review original appeared in What's Up! Magazine

Joseph: Music Rooted in Kith and Kin

Deep in the heart of the band Joseph's music is an eerie and beautiful spirituality, reminiscent of the haunting backwoods harmonies of the Carter Family and resonate with the echoes of ancient English and Irish folk song. Joseph is a band of three sisters from eastern Oregon celebrating kinship through music and song. The name Joseph is derived from three sources: their Grandpa Jo honoring family, the small town in Oregon representing home and the Biblical patriarch, whose ability to interpret dreams guided his life. There is bewitching mountain mystery in the music the three sisters, Natalie, Allison and Meegan Closner. Joseph sings the listener back into the essential elements of music, the lyrics as spells, the melodies as enchantment, the rhythms as the primal beatings of the heart that unites kith and kin in the shared experience of what it is to be human.

I asked Natalie about the world she and her sisters grew up in. She tells me, "we grew up in this Christian culture where is this very strange thing happens where you are not supposed to ask any questions or wonder or be curious. And that is so lifeless. Recently, after playing so many shows, we have been trying to make it as an occasion for people to pause and reflect upon what it is to be spiritual, to engage that part of themselves through the music."

On their new album, Native Dreamer Kin, the title representing the fundamental axes that define the band, Joseph has gathered in a solid collection of songs that showcase their poetic and musical sensibilities. What is most striking about the music is the harmonizing between the sisters. There is a natural tendency to associate them with other sisterly musical pairings such as the Dixie Chicks or Heart - and they do share some of the best qualities with them - but they are much closer the otherworldly Sirens trio (Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch) from O Brother Where Art Thou? In standout songs such as "Cloudline",  "Come In Close" and "Eyes to the Sky" the three sisters perform a harmonic alchemical transmutation of word and music into shimmering epiphanies of transcendent meaning.

There is an atmospheric and evocative video online of the first song of the album, "Cloudline", which places the sisters in the deeps of the Edenic Northwest woods. Chiming piano and tribal drum, incense and fog drifting through the evergreen and fern, the sisters as archetypal angelic figures stepped out of the major arcana of a Pacific Northwest tarot, chanting soul choir repetition of: "Take me to your water and lay me on your shore, I want to come in deeper but the water is so cold". As in the presence of all great music, there is a simultaneous sense of wonder and hair-standing-on-end spookiness.

Natalie tells me that "something happened in the room as we were making Cloudline that was gripping and powerful.  Through the process of recording and listening, we realized that Cloudline was the story of us taking a risk in the music. That is is our journey. And we want to reach up into the clouds to achieve the success this risk is going to take me to."

One of the more refreshing aspects about the construction of many of the songs is the lack of obvious refrain. Instead, the poetic narrative flows without break, finding resolution in single repeated, increasingly gnomic phrases. The plaintive death meditation "Come in Close" circles around the line, "What do we have but this?". The Cohen-esque gospel affirmation of "Lifted Away" returns again and again to simple statement: "It's here". "Not Mine" seductively repeats the question: "Who will stay?" answering with "You're not mine" over and over, turning the word's semantic meaning into a pure musical sound. And the sublime prayer-like musical mantra of "Eyes To The Sky" explores the repeated dynamic between the light of "I will lift up my eyes to the sky, to the sky" and the dark of "Burn up the despair that's been sinking me". At the heart of every song is the tightly woven fabric of the sister's incantatory harmonies whose ever shifting patterns shade richer meanings with each new listening.

The three sisters in Joseph perform music that is achingly beautiful and yet wonderfully strange, rooted in kith and kin, a poetic dream language and an abiding sense of home and place. Their music has that unusual quality of sounding new and also as if it has been sung for a thousand years, hearkening back to a rich tradition of home spun spirituality. The hope is that they always remain true to the strangeness and idiosyncratic beauty of the family: the private jokes, inside stories, the rich red blood stronger than any water, the sweet birthing songs and the hymns sung over the graves and dying beds. But there is no real doubt here: the music of Joseph is a beautiful musical celebration of these luminous elements of lives centered in the goodness of the family, harmony of place and beauty of dreams.


http://thebandjoseph.com/


The band Joseph will perform on Saturday, January 10 at the Green Frog.


This article originally appeared in What's Up.