Cherry Blossom Family Delivery at Cap Hansen's – Tuesday, September 27th

Cherry Blossom Family Delivery - Plan B Saloon

Cherry Blossom Family Delivery at Cap Hansen's

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Every other Tuesday at Cap Hansen’s (depending on the moon) the Cherry Blossom Family Delivery convenes to perform some of the finest music in town. This is one of those events that is so good you don’t want anyone else to know about it. I wandered in on accident about a year ago, homesick for nowhere and wanting to hear music that would go well with tequila. Spencer Willhoft and the rest of the Cherry Blossom Family Delivery were right on the beam song after song – singing like drunks in a midnight choir – ranging from Hank Williams through John Prine to Neil Young, Beck and a few diamond originals. It was slow and lonely and aching and perfect. The audience, mostly fellow musicians, sang along, danced and drank to every song. It was beautiful. I made it a point to go back when I could.

After what seemed like more than a month of Tuesdays, I made it back to Cap’s last week. This iteration of the Family (Spencer, Kevin, LP, Rich, Casey and Mike ) delivered the broke-down lonely music that I had been missing. I got there just after the beginning of the second set amidst a plaintive rendition of the Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” They followed not long after with a typically minimal version of the Stones’ “Angie,” owning it in their own way. A few songs later came John Prine’s “A Town This Size” – a signature song for the Cherry Blossoms – that will hereafter always be linked to Bellingham for me. “In a town this size, there's no place to hide / Everywhere you go you meet someone you know / You can't steal a kiss in a place like this / How the rumors do fly in a town this size.” Everyone in the bar singing happily along.

I am always reminded of Jimmie Dale Gilmore when I hear Spencer sing, of flat lonesome Western landscapes, ghost towns and the ache for meaning. Hank Williams, AM radio and long drives through the country at night haunt the music. All their songs are slowed down, lyrics sung on the back-beat, almost lazy but demonstrating a deep and familiar intimacy with each song. At times, it seems everything is going to fall apart into a musical chaos but then recovers with the grace of drunken clown on the high-wire. After a while, you realize the deliberation in the seeming stumbles, in the ease of approach, is the result of talented musicianship.

The evening ends, as if often does with the Blossoms, with an immaculate trio of songs: Hank Williams’ “Angel of Death,” Gram Parsons’ “Sin City” and Mike Davis’ “Cocaine.” Those three alone, performed in their inimitable style, should be enough to warrant anyone who has never seen them to make it a point to seek them out. Sitting there in the back of Cap’s with a bowl of stale popcorn, drinking Corona, shots of tequila, hearing the echoes of those last lines:

It seems like this whole town's insane

On the thirty-first floor your gold plated door

Won't keep out the Lord's burning rain

It is a beautiful night in Bellingham.

The Cherry Blossom Family Delivery will play this Thursday, October 6th at the Blue Horse with The Smoke Brothers, Stephen Ray Leslie, Country Messengers as part of the Ham Country Revival. And, of course, every other Tuesday at Cap’s.

Scumeating Tour Kick-off with Chambers, Thimble vs. Needle and Scumeating at Glow - Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Scumeating - Glow

Scumeating Tour Kick-off with Chambers, Thimble vs. Needle and Scumeating at Glow

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

What can you say about Glow? It’s a strange space, a cross between an airport lounge and a mid-80s disco. But this is the second time that I have seen Scumeating there. There is something to be said for that: schizophrenia meets irony in a soft leather chair overlooking the transient activities of Railroad and Holly. Maybe it’s perfect. I don’t know. There is always a bizarre cake around and someone ordering a grasshopper – which the bartender has to go online to figure out how to make. Meanwhile, the crowd is festooned with glowstick bracelets and ominously quiet. Church disco. Waiting for a plane. 

Chambers - Glow

Chambers, made up of the Sarah Jerns and Matt Curtis, breaks the quiet with two massive guitar hammers. Reminiscent of the Dirty Three. Stumbling slow noise. Waves of electric strings. Feedback music. Loud and relentless instrumentality. The two of them, each with guitars, standing on the dance floor like noise drunk gunfighters in a Sergio Leone dream of the agonies of echo. Beautiful. And in the strangest way, upsetting all expectation, getting into your skull with whips of lightning and ripping the tissues of your brain to pieces. If there was a heroin addict in the crowd, he’d be wanting to shoot up about now. Grace note: walked over the bartender at the end of the set to get a beer and he said to me: Jesus Christ, I was about to lose it with all of the fucking noise! Music to drive bartenders at the Glow insane to. Kudos, Chambers. 

https://www.youtube.com/user/SarahJerns

Thimble vs. Needle - Glow

Next up, a variation (minus Chris Stainback) on Thimble vs. Needle with the inimitable Kat Bula on guitar/vocals/violin, Anna Arvan on cello/vocals and Tim Leighton on drums/guitar/mandolin. After the beautiful noise comes exquisite harmonies as in  “The Only Girl You Are Not Allowed to Kiss.” These songs seem to epitomize something just underneath definition, perhaps it’s the mood of the 21^st century with a healthy sense of humor. The musicianship is outstanding but casual, not forcing itself through the performance. Just there and talented. With each time that I have heard Thimble vs. Needle, I am reminded how much they make me smile with their subtle self-conscious odes of self-consciousness. Near the end, Tim sings a song with the line “Hey Buddy, you’ve got puke on your shoes.” It is delivered flat, as a dirge, a lament. The others join in harmony. Beautiful. “Hey Buddy, you’ve got piss on your knees… blood on your hands.” Appalachian Bellingham. Reminded of the Band at Big Pink. 

http://thimblevsneedle.fourfour.com/

Scumeating begins to assemble. Jess Manley told me he has a migrane but believes it will help his performance. Undoubtedly. Fiona has just come in from K.D. Laing, wondering why no one seems to know who she is. And Robert, newly shaved pate shining, is in a “fine damned mood.” All of this seems auspicious. Chris Gusta is up there on guitar. Bill Anker on drums. A.J. Hawn on keyboards and Kat Bula is standing off to the side with her violin. It begins in media res, a wall of sound that was not there before is suddenly in front of the crowd. A wall of raw emotional, but sharp edged, music. Robert Lashley’s words sing out of a storm of intensity. Imagine back to a time of trying to tune into a distant radio station and all of a sudden all at once hearing pounding drums, infernal violin and guitar and keyboard, a fucking trombone, what? and the haunting voice of a preacher trying to save sinning souls from the hands of an angry god. Imagine Don Quixote on acid with a band tuned to his every Pulse. This is Lashley, the poet unleashed. Songs don’t seem to begin or end as much as take a breath before coming right back at your throat again. Jess Manley spins voices out of the ether. Kat Bula’s violin and Fiona’s trombone seems to be waging war against each other, trading musical salvos like punches. Ankers’ thunderous drumming holds everything into place. Gusta and Hawn setting the limits to the music. And the Voice of Lashley like a rusty knife over the strings of an ancient guitar, from the edges of time, rhapsode. It is like nothing else you are going to see. Here’s hoping their tour will offend, alienate and utterly shock the rest of the world into abject admiration.

http://scumeating.bandcamp.com/

The Mallard and Chris Con Carne at the Ridge Wine Bar - Thursday, August 4th, 2011

Chris Con Carne at The Ridge

The Mallard and Chris Con Carne at the Ridge Wine Bar

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

At it’s best moments, the Blues let’s you know that everything could be worse. By treading some sort of weird voodoo line, the singer lets the music take over and sing through his bones. The long history of possession, echoing with the thudding heart of darkness, and yet, still being sung out in a song. When it is good, it is like nothing else. There within the hardwood floored alterna-space of the Ridge, I heard Chris Con Carne sing and play the Blues in a way that I have not heard in a long time. There on the simple carpet stage: a chair, a guitar, and an amp. Stripped down slide string daemonic voodoo songs sending the dedicated crowd into a zoned-out trance of primal appreciation. This was conjuring music, the ghosts of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Mississippi Fred McDowell drifting in to sit quietly in the corner while “Wish I Was in Heaven Sittin’ Down” rang out. Each song developed upon complex rhythmic blues patterns creating a thing uncanny, weird and sadly beautiful. Chris’ voice singing out from underneath as an annotation on the human condition. At one point, he turned on an electronic tanpura on top of his amp which created an evocative drone under the songs. Echoes of Ry Cooder’s Paris, Texas soundtrack during the singing of “Going Down South” – fading in and out with a deep south swamp riff of “Baby Please Don’t Go.” There at the end, a plug was kicked or a circuit tripped, killing the mic and the amp, stripping the sound down to a raw purity. Chris played straight on through it, the slide raking now against the strings, clicking like locusts singing in the summer heat, summoning up the ancient spirits of the Blues.

The Mallard at The Ridge

The Mallard up next, consists of Greer McGettrick, vocals and guitar, and Dylan Tidyman-Jones, drums and vocals. There was sonic disturbance, low ambient feedback uncurling around the Ridge, before they even picked up their instruments. As soon as they kicked in, there were vestiges of The Cramps and Sonic Youth: the echo-drenched guitar noise amped way high. Simple snare sounding like gunshots. Coming on now like ironic Japanese Surf pop. Raw rock n roll noise music. Down in the primal Pulse of the thing. Makes you think about breaking something. The Mallard delivers her songs with harmonic hollers and yelps of being, defying you to find categorization. Imagine some sort of twisted 50s girl group filtered through the apocalyptic decades of the 80s and 90s, then warped from too many drugs and the all too natural cynicism that is endemic to the 21st century. Gives you an idea. The Mallard has the bones of music on display: a cranked-up amped-out guitar, a tribal drum pounding and an existential wail.  At the end, it was beautiful: they walked away and let the feedback swirl. Echoes of the machine.

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/chrisconcarne
https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/chris-con-carne/id275367294

Havilah Rand with Phil Sottile and Dave Vaughns at the Blue Horse Gallery - July 7, 2011

Havilah Rand with Phil Sottile and Dave Vaughns at the Blue Horse Gallery

Thursday, July 7, 2011

The Blue Horse Gallery under a beautiful Bellingham evening. Havilah Rand returned to town, standing on stage in red boots, singing Superstar. Phil Sottile providing perfect vocal counterpoint on guitar and Dave Vaughns tapping out subtle percussion on a cajon drum. What was most immediately striking was how seamlessly Phil and Dave wove sonic textures around Havilah’s vocals and guitar. Having recently been out on a mini-tour of the Pacific Northwest, their sense of the interior of the songs, of where and how the spaces opened inside the melody, was subtle and engaging to witness.

Havilah’s voice was full of ache and longing with hidden reserves of strength swelling into the high notes. Phil’s mournful and elemental guitar swells serving almost a form of musical annotation. And Dave’s tapping out a soft time sounded like the ebb and flow of a surf. There were several moments, during the performance of Petrified and Riding on a Train, where it seemed that the audience was collectively holding it’s breath in appreciation of the silence surrounding the song. 

Havilah’s music moves across genres with ease, glancing against various facets of jazz, country, folk, blues, to stand alone as a thing in itself. Her phrasing is remarkable, syllables stretched slowly with elegance and laid down against and over each other like braids. This was especially notable on her cover of Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love. Something familiar, yet strange, infusing such harrowing lines as "Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin" with new resonance. The song All Night, which is featured in the movie Leading Ladies, was another standout, one of those songs that immediately seems destined to become a standard.  

It was one of those nights were you feel privileged to experience such music in such an intimate setting. Exposed wood rafters and a big window opening to the darkening skies, an ancient drum slowing sounding, strumming guitars in strange tunings, and a beautiful voice full of the sweet and rich echoes of an unidentifiable nostalgia. 

Appreciation should be given to the Blue Horse Gallery for providing such a warm and welcoming space for performance. The low lighting and rustic ambiance bode well for many more nights of great music.

http://www.havilahmusic.com/

Footstompin Trio, The Cheeps and Chris Con Carne at the Shakedown - June 10, 2011

Footstompin Trio - Shakedown - source

Footstompin Trio, The Cheeps and Chris Con Carne at the Shakedown

Friday, June 10, 2011


Friday night show at the Shakedown. The ghosts of how many clubs rising up from their graves to moan in some sort of wicked benediction for the powerhouse bill of  Footstompin Trio, The Cheeps, Chris Con Carne. I am here mostly for Footstompin Trio because just about every third person that I know in Bellingham told me that I had to go check them out. Supposed to represent everything that Bellingham used to be. 3B and that Xeroxed flyers age represented. Pacific Northwest hard-core hillbilly soul. Had to hear it to believe it.

Walk in late, sadly missing Chris Lamb and Dan Lowinger’s Delta Blues slide steel thunder drum duopolis Chris Con Carne – which I hear puts the Black Keys to shame. What is going on is The Cheeps. Imagine early White Stripes garage punk with a more fuck ass drummer and Leather Pants, lead singer, ripping his throat raw while channeling Roky Erickson in the insane asylum and a Tommy James strung out on a bad speedball run. Just relentless. Whips of sweet noise cracking out over the capacity crowd during favorites “Anything New Please” and “Don’t Cry for Me.”

Next up on the block: local legends Footstompin Trio remaining true to perfect form. Conjuring up the ghosts of Buck Owens, Link Wray and Carl Perkins, the Trio possessed the stage in a manner that made you wonder if the the 3B had ever gone away. Dan Lowinger dominated on vocals and guitar managing to simultaneously evoke Hank Williams and Screamin Jay Hawkins. Stell Newsome spit blood next to him and would have made Dick Dale proud. This was balls-out hillbilly rockabilly that had everyone feeling like someone had spiked the Ranier with White Lightning LSD. Their cover of Jerry Reed's Mr. Wiz lit the place on fire and kept most wondering when Jeff Gray's slap bass was going to spontaneously combust. While Tom Forster’s back woods rhythm took the crowd into some weird voodoo rockabilly trance. At the end, the rousing encore of Wray's Run Chicken Run left no doubt as to who had ripped the bones out of the commodified corpse of modern day Rockabilly and made the skeleton dance.

Thank all the devils down in the belly of Bellingham for the Shakedown and their continuing efforts to reanimate the best of what was and electrify the best of what is. Although ever hopeful bone in your body shivers against it, this sort of show is what makes a great music town. You know every musician in the crowd – and there were more than a few - felt the resonance of that long snake moaning against the brick walls of that old building and thought: this is it is all about, this is worth living for, this is some good fucking music.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-footstompin-trio/id275061985

Originally written for What's Up! 

Three Vectors Concerning the Soul of a City

Thoreau's Grave

It is easy to be hard on a place when you first arrive. There is a subtle effect, not quite a "culture shock," but a bit more than "new kid in the class." It gives everything an odd and uncomfortable tone. You feel like you don't belong. You are the stranger.

Reminds me of when I was staying in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just off Harvard Square, on a wall facing the cafe that I frequented, there was this beautiful graffiti slogan: "Xenophobes Go Home!"

Personally, I thrive on this. I am always suspicious of anything that makes me feel more "comfortable." I figure it is when you start to relax, stop questioning, "go with the flow," that you start to die. Odysseus on Aiaa, Circe's Island, forgetting about Ithaca as his men degenerate into pigs. Or Dorothy and crew in the Poppy Fields. One minute you are all happy and dreamy, the next minute the sky is full of Flying Monkees.

I have been living in Bellingham now just over three months. I like the place a lot. Of course, it's has the problems of any 21st century city. But somehow these problems seem - and I hate to use this word in the context of Bellingham - but, yes, more subdued, low-key. There have been a few issues where I have expected glaring oversight or obvious neglect only to discover that there were people in Bellingham that "were on it." (Recent issues with the water quality in Lake Whatcom are a case in point.) I get the sense that there is a core group of concerned individuals and practical organizations that are looking out for the "Soul of the City." Coming from Austin where the prevailing attitude is that "someone is probably taking care of it," this is more than a little reassuring.

The three items below are old news to anyone who lives here, but I just recently stumbled upon them. Two of them I was aware of - they made national news - but did not register that they happened here in Bellingham. I'm hesitant to say it like this but they make me proud to live here.

• June 2004 - From Library Journal (emphasis mine): a patron of the Whatcom County Library System, Bellingham, WA, borrowed a copy of Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America (Prima, 2001) by Yossef Bodansky, a former senior consultant for the U.S. Departments of Defense and State. In the margins of the book, the patron saw a handwritten note stating, "If the things I'm doing is considered a crime, then let history be a witness that I am a criminal. Hostility toward America is a religious duty and we hope to be rewarded by God."
  
  The patron called the FBI. An FBI agent asked the library for further information on the borrowers of the book; library attorney Deborra Garrett said a subpoena was needed. The library then received a subpoena to appear before a grand jury.
  
  The quote, Garrett determined after an online search, came from Bin Laden himself. The subpoena asked the library to disclose the names and addresses of anyone who had borrowed the book since 2001, said library director Joan Airoldi. Resisting, the library filed a motion to quash the subpoena.
  
  The library argued that previous borrower information is retained for only 90 days (longer only if there's an unresolved fine); also, the library contracts with the Bellingham Public Library to maintain its database, and the Bellingham library was not served with a subpoena. Moreover, the library argued that there was no "substantial connection"—as required for such an investigation—between writing a quote from Bin Laden in a book and any act of terrorism.
  
  On July 15, the U.S. Attorney withdrew the subpoena, noting that the library did not have custody of the data sought. Is the case continuing? Emily Langlie, public affairs officer for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Seattle, said that Department of Justice policy "is not to comment on an ongoing investigation or completion of investigations." While the library was initially asked not to discuss the matter—there was no official gag order, since the case was not brought under the USA PATRIOT Act—Airoldi said both she and the library board believe the issue should be made public.
  
  "The person who read this thought possibly someone was plotting something," Airoldi said. And what might the writer have been doing? "Who's to say?" she mused. "They could've been writing a research paper. It seems that every copy [of that book] we get has writing in it." Borrower records are now kept only for a week.

• January 1995 - From the New York Times (emphasis mine): Two decades after Justice Potter Stewart of the United States Supreme Court defined obscenity by saying, simply, "I know it when I see it," a pair of Washington shopkeepers will stand trial for seeing satire where prosecutors saw smut.
  
  Ira Stohl, the owner of The Newsstand, a magazine shop and coffee bar here, and the shop's manager, Kristena Hjelsand, are scheduled for trial Jan. 22 in Whatcom County Superior Court, charged with selling an issue of the alternative magazine Answer Me, that graphically discussed rape. The shopkeepers say they were given an odd choice: either submit to arrest or promise to never sell Answer Me or anything like it in the future.
  
  After deciding they could not make that pledge, Mr. Stohl, 45, and Ms. Hjelsand, 25, were charged with one felony count each of promoting pornography, a violation of state obscenity laws. Both have pleaded not guilty, saying that their First Amendment rights have been violated and that The Newsstand carries too many publications to screen in advance. If convicted they face a maximum of five years in jail and a $10,000 fine.
  
  "How can I read all 5,000 magazines to make sure somebody, somewhere doesn't think something's obscene?" Mr. Stohl said one morning at the store, a gathering spot for this college town's intellectuals. "And how do I know what obscenity is anyway?"
  
  But the Whatcom County prosecutor, David S. McEachran, who brought the charges, said the rape issue of Answer Me, was unacceptable to the majority of Bellingham's 20,000 citizens. He cited the issue of Answer Me that features stories of a rape from the rapist's perspective, a fictional account of a man torturing a girl with Down syndrome, photographs of decapitated crime victims and a pull-out section called "The Rape Game."
  
  "I told them they couldn't sell it or anything like it," Mr. McEachran said in an interview. "Look at the publication. It's disgusting." As to the constitutionality of his action, he said only, "No comment."
  
  The arrests have been a hot topic for nearly a year in this town, nestled between Mount Baker and Puget Sound, while raising volatile issues of free speech and prior restraint. The case has also put feminist groups on the defensive and free speech activists in the spotlight.
  
  Katy Casey, the executive director of the Whatcom County Women's Crisis Center, said: "It's not just offensive, it's destructive. It relates a glorified violence to sex. This magazine normalizes something we don't think is normal."
  
  "I believe in the First Amendment," she added, "but this is dangerous."
  
  But First Amendment lawyers nationwide rendered a different verdict. Elizabeth Schneider, a professor of women's law at Brooklyn Law School, said, "There's a ton of case law saying what this prosecutor has done is simply wrong."
  
  Charles F. Hinkle, a constitutional lawyer in Portland, added: "As disgusting as the publication is, it's probably protected. You cannot suppress speech that might incite violence unless the danger is imminent. You can't ban the Bible just because it might be used to crucify a man."
  
  Jim and Debbie Goad of Portland, Ore., who publish Answer Me, say it is designed to shock. But rather than glorify violence, Mr. Goad said, the disputed issue of the magazine tried to offer as grisly a portrait of depravity as possible to underscore the horror of rape. "We present rape in all its ugliness," Mr. Goad said.
  
  The magazine is described by its owners as having "a National Lampoon-style sensibility fused with a snuff-film esthetic" that takes a satirical approach to a different topic in each issue. An upcoming issue will address race, Mr. Goad said.
  
  Arguing that the magazine is far from titillating but rather scathing political and social satire, Ms. Hjelsand said Answer Me "lays down in brutal detail how sick and violent the world is; I certainly don't feel it's a how-to magazine."
  
  Neither do the more than 3,000 Bellinghamites who signed a petition asking the prosecutor to drop the charges against The Newsstand.
  
  Those charges were born of an incident last January in which, Mr. Stohl said, an English major at Western Washington University here threatened a student boycott of The Newsstand unless its owners yanked the publication. The merchants did not budge. But when a criminal complaint was filed by the Women's Crisis Center -- to which the student had also complained -- and the case was referred to local prosecutors, the shop's owners stopped selling Answer Me. In its place, they erected a shrine, of sorts, to free speech: a copy of the magazine bound in chains and a padlock, with a sign that reads "not for sale." The shrine is still in place and includes newspaper articles reporting on the case.
  
  On Feb. 7, The Newsstand owners were ordered by Mr. McEachran to dismantle the shrine and to promise not to sell Answer Me or anything as salacious ever again. They refused, citing the First Amendment.
  
  "We have no political agenda," said Mr. Stohl, a Brooklyn native who opened the shop five years ago. "We just want to run our business," which comprises mostly specialized publications like Al-Ahram, an Egyptian weekly; On Our Backs, a lesbian magazine; Hothead Paisan, an alternative comic book; Bird Watcher's Digest; Svenska Dagblabet, a Swedish daily, and Women and Guns.
  
  On Feb. 14, The Newsstand's lawyer, Breean Beggs, filed a complaint in Federal court charging that Mr. McEachran had violated the civil rights of Mr. Stohl and Ms. Hjelsand. Two days later, Mr. Stohl and Ms. Hjelsand gave themselves up at the county jail.
  
  These days, as the case meanders through the court system, habitues of The Newsstand wonder if any of their favorite periodicals will come under attack next.
  
  "The Newsstand is the focal point of my daily life," said Ted Rosen, a television repairman who publishes his own magazine called Smelly Hamster, a left-leaning grab bag of political writings.
  
  "It gives me access to a world I can't get to otherwise from Bellingham," Mr. Rosen said.
  
  Bellingham residents can go elsewhere, however, for indisputable pornography. Great Northern Books, just two blocks away with its unabashedly hard-core trade, does not sell Answer Me. "It's sad," said Ross Rowell, the store's proprietor, musing about The Newsstand's woes. "But I guess I should just be thankful that the county's not after me."
  
  From The National Coalition Against Censorship: In a stunning rebuke to overzealous prosecutors, the owner and manager of Bellingham, Washington's Newstand store were awarded $1.3 million for prior restraint and for retaliatory prosecution by a U.S. District Court in Seattle. The judgment was awarded to Ira Stohl and Kristina Hjelsand, who had been charged with obscenity for selling a 'zine called Answer Me! and found not guilty by a jury. In awarding the judgment in the Newstand's counter-suit, the district court jury found that Whatcom County had violated Stohl and Hjelsand's First Amendment rights, caused emotional suffering, and damaged their business.

Rev. Martin Luther King's Grave

• May 1989 - From The Daily Gazette (emphasis mine): A recent case in point was Village Books in Bellingham, Wash., where feminist activist Nikki Craft has been campaigning to remove the current issue of Esquire, with its cover package on "The Secret Life of the American Wife," which includes such material as "Your Wife: An Owner's Manual."
  
  In late May, Village Books owner Chuck Robinson said, Craft entered the store and tore up four copies of the magazine. Village had her arrested, and Craft, now in jail, won't post bond until the bookstore capitulates and sends the offending issue back to Esquire.
  
  Robinson, who says he has since been visited be zealous Craft partisans, allowed as how Esquire might have "a few things that don't seem to be quite in tune with the '90s," but even though the ideas are offensive to many people, "they are nonetheless ideas." If suppressing objectionable material amounts to "civil disobedience," as Craft has claimed, Robinson said, "Mr. Thoreau, Mr. Gandhi and Dr. King ... are rolling over in their graves."

Village Books: A Safe, Clean and Well-Lit Place

 

Village Books

It has taken me a little while to come around to Village Books. An archetypal bookstore, for me, is something along the lines of Henderson's: shelves packed, floor to ceiling, with spined-in books, orderly piles on the floor. With certain primary subjects, say biographies of Lincoln, well represented and, surrounding, packed constellations of secondary, tertiary, quaternary related texts. Depth and breadth. It looks like this:

Henderson's Books

Village Books looks nothing like Henderson's. It is a safe, clean and well-lit place. There are plenty of places to sit. (Last time I was there, a sign in the windows encouraged people to come in sit, read and even sleep for a while.) It is staffed with knowledgeable, friendly and helpful people. They will happily look up anything you ask for on the computer. If they do not have it, they will order it for you. There is a cafe upstairs, access to a restaurant downstairs, just beyond: a congenial area reserved for author signings and readings. Down there also is the "revolutionary" Espresso Print-On-Demand Book Machine.

The Reading Room at VB | From author Alma Alexander's Tour Diary

Every section in the store has a representative selection of texts. But it is clear that what is there, is there to be sold. There is not much "dead weight" on their shelves. I should add that it is nice to see that they also sell a lot of used or marked down books mixed in with the new at reduced prices.

Many local authors are well represented. Local artists are displayed on the walls. They have book signings several times during the week. They are at the forefront of new technology. E-Book cards are scattered appropriately around the store, next to copies of the physical book. (One imagines that soon the books might disappear altogether.)

The Village Books website is state of the art. They are plugged into Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo and YouTube. There is a Village Books Blog, a Village Books Radio Show, and several active Village Books Reading Groups.

The admirable motto of Village Books is: "Building Community One Book at a Time." And they back that up with fundraisers and sponsoring charitable events. Village Books is not a "chain" or "corporate" bookstore. They are proudly independent, belonging to IndieBound, a national organization of independent booksellers started by the American Booksellers Association.

Village Books is not just a bookstore, it is an integrated aspect of the community around it, Fairhaven, and the larger city of Bellingham. Village Books is, without any doubt, one of the most upstanding and responsible bookstores in Washington.

❂

 

With all of that in mind, I should add that Village Books is not one of my favorite bookstores in the area. It seems too safe of a place to me, reflecting in many aspects these same admirable qualities of the surrounding community of Fairhaven.

On a recent afternoon in Seattle, I went to two bookstores, Left Bank Books and Elliott Bay Books. Each from different ends of the Aesthetics of Bookstores Spectrum, they vividly indicate what Village Books is missing: Edge. Like the edges of an original object that won't fit into any round or square hole. Again, these are my sensibilities, but I want a bookstore to challenge me, to get in my face sometimes, to provoke and irritate me, to surprise me, most of all... astonish me.

 Left Bank Books

Obviously, the anarchist collective bookstore, Left Bank Books, has a lot of edge. You do not walk in there for the latest New York Times bestseller or a book to read on the beach. Left Bank Books is the sort of bookstore that is going to confront you with radical ideas and practices that will, hopefully, disturb you enough to make you want to learn more about them. Small Press publishers, zines, pamphlets, broadsides, graffiti, notes on the wall, all offer radical perspectives that challenge everything from the existence of the U.S. government to the reasons you should not eat meat or you should not eat vegetables or maybe you should not even eat at all. It is certainly not for everyone. But it is a vital part of the social fabric of a progressive city that prides itself on the intelligence and tolerance of its citizens. It is one of the most well known and respected radical bookstores in the country.

"If you must steal books, steal from a richly stocked Corporate Bookstore."

A note in the Anarchist Section.

 Left Bank Books

When I walked into Elliott Bay Books, there was also an edge but not in the same sense as Left Bank. At Elliott Bay, looking at the books on display, the staff recommendations, the selection and layout, and that always ineffable "whole greater than the parts" quality of a great bookstore, I felt challenged to explore beyond the authors that I was familiar with, to read something new - in the sense that Ezra Pound once implored writers to "make it new." I was aware that Elliott Bay, being in the service of a large city, was required to have the usual suspects, New York Times Bestsellers, National Book Award and other prize winners, to have displays that reflected what the publishers were trying to "push." However, although these elements were there, they were not out in front, not obvious.

What was obvious was the character of the store, of the owners, of the buyers and employees that worked there. What was obvious was a passion for good, not just good, but for great books. The edge here was about honoring the essentials of world book culture, the canon, AND about promoting those books and authors that are redefining what the canon might be in the future.

Elliott Bay Books

I always know when I am in a great bookstore because I feel like the Burgess Meredith character in that Twilight Episode, Time Enough at Last. That feeling that there is just isn't enough time to read all of these great books. Books that I hadn't even known about until I walked into Elliott Bay. It was beautiful: it astonished me.

Elliott Bay Books 

The writing of books, especially those books that change the world, requires its authors to get down into the boiler room of the human soul. Even on the most mundane level, the creation of a book is a difficult act. If you have doubts about this, give it a go. Authors are often outsiders, standing apart, self-consciously observing the life that everybody is happily living. They spend much of their life alone, not in this world, but in the one that they are creating on the page. If "successful," they provide a mirror in which we can better see ourselves.

It is a profession that has notoriously taken its toll on its practitioners. Many of the greatest writers have been alcoholics, drug addicts, sociopaths, psychopaths, sexual deviants, gamblers, thieves, all of the above, other and most just certifiably insane. These are the people that have changed and will change our lives.

As I walked away from Left Bank and Elliott Bay, I wondered what Doestoevsky, Neitzsche, Melville, Poe, Salinger or Cormac McCarthy would think about these bookstores.

When I walk into a bookstore and feel that I am in a safe, sanitized and commodified space; where the books are treated like widget-tchotchkes, their presence on the shelves predicated by how quickly they will "turn," i.e. sell; where I notice that all the end-caps are pushing one publishing house; where the displays can be predicted by the New York Times Book Review; when I sense all of these aspects of the market, I feel like I am being treated as a tool. It doesn't matter that clerks remember my name and are courteous, kind and well-intentioned. What does matter is that I feel surrounded by the generic sameness that is endemic to every corporate bookstore in the country. I don't want to go to an independent bookstore to be insulted every way I turn by the insinuation that I do now know how to buy a book off the front page of Amazon.com.

In the end, I imagine that everything dirty or dangerous or challenging, if it can be sold, if money can be made from it, will be sanitized, bowdlerized and neutered into comfortable commodity, made safe and palatable for the greatest number of the buying public. This is the way of the world.

But also here at the end, I wonder about what makes the Spirit of a Place, of a Town. I wonder: if Daniel Jefferson "Dirty Dan" Harris, harpooner, smuggler, bootlegger, raucous drinker, teller of tall tales, infrequent bather and the founder of Fairhaven were alive today, where might he feel welcome to have a drink, grab a bite to eat or tell his stories? From the little I know, I imagine he might be amused at how his image has been co-opted to promote the town. But perhaps also a bit dismayed at how safe, clean and well-lit the place has become.

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