Some time before Chrissymiss, we were babysitting our friend who in 2011 was one of those little girls who comes out of that lady’s giant dress during Act II of Tacoma City Ballet’s Nutcracker. Part of our babysitting gig was delivering her to Nutcracker practice. So we decided to make an evening of it by going to some local Downtown Tacoma businesses.

Stop 1: Füdie’s Open House

Although Füdie had been open for about a month already, this evening just happened to be their official open house. Füdie has a really nice selection of not-commonly-seen wines and beers. The graphic designer in me also really adores their logo. They were doing some beer and wine tasting and it was all festive and nice. I’d link to their website but they don’t have one. I know, right? Here’s their Facebook page, though.

Just last night Carrie & I stopped by Füdie again because they were doing a wine tasting of all South American wines. It was good! We got a nice inexpensive bottle of red.

Anyhoo, after we were done at Füdie we walked through a hole in their wall. Yes, that’s right: Füdie is right next door to and connected to Stink Cheese & Meat:

Stop 2: Stink Cheese & Meat

Füdie & Stink are two complimentary and associated businesses, which is why you can walk from one right into the other. Stink is one of those little tiny places that specializes yummy unusual cheeses and salumi. They have a weekly Macaroni & Cheese and a weekly Grilled Cheese Sandwich, as well as other, more-stable menu items.

The three of us had their Antipasti platter for dinner, which has all sorts of yummy pickled things and paper-thin meats and fragrant cheeses. Very good! Unlike Füdie, Stink DOES have a website.

From Stink we walked down to:

Stop 3: The Pantages Theater

Where we dropped off our little ballerina. Carrie helped her change into her costume while I awkwardly waited in the hallway and tried not to seem too much like some creepy guy trying to catch a glimpse of ballerinas in their dressing rooms.

The Pantages is also a notable Tacoma Landmark because that’s where Carrie & I got married.

Anyhoo, then we walked down the hill a couple of blocks to:

Stop 4: Dorky’s Bar Arcade

Dorky’s is one of the best places in Tacoma. A massive, seemingly ever-expanding cavern of classic arcade games and pinball machines. Plus foods and drinks.

Much to my delight I discovered that Dorky’s acquired a standup of Raiden Fighters:

Lemme explain: back many, many years ago when the post-Fools Play ritual included going to an Olympia Red Robin, there was a Raiden Fighters in the little arcade room in said Red Robin. Geoff & I used to drop many a quarter into that machine in 2-player simultaneous action! It’s a pretty crazy SHMUP, with crap flying all over the screen to the point that it often gets nigh-impossible to tell what the eff is going on. Fun! Dorky’s copy had a bit of a wonky joystick, though, and the screen was a li’l washed out. Still, nice to see.

Carrie & I also played quite a bit of the Evel Knievel pinball machine while we were there. 2-Player competitive action! Carrie is quite good at that machine.

Dorky’s is also where they filmed this T-Mobile commercial:

They also don’t have a website! Whatsupwitdat? They only gots da Facebookin’ page, yo.

Stop 5: The Pantages Theater

After Dorky’s we swung back by the Pantages and picked up our li’l ballerina and then headed back to our car to drive up 6th Avenue to:

Stop 6: Metronome Coffee

You might remember Metronome Coffee from an earlier post on this blog wherein it served as the venue for Julia Massey, the Jesus Rehab, and Neighbor Gary. This time it served as a meeting place where we handed off our li’l ballerina to her mother, and were purchased some hot cocoa for our troubles.

Metronome Coffee does have a website!

By the way, the graphic designer in me absolutely adores Metronome’s logo, too.

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Fortunately, the sky had its own colorful lights yesterday to make up for it:

Now that’s a sunset.

An example: Hempfest. Yeah. We didn’t really feel like we fit in there so much.

Last weekend was our 7th wedding anniversary, but there was way too much going on to do anything about it then. So the weekend before that we decided to celebrate. We learned that JM+FFD was going to be doing a little outdoor festival along with The Jesus Rehab and Terrapin Productions. So that sounded like fun. Only thing: it would be a camping trip.

I don’t camp. I’ve never enjoyed it. I worked hard for my amenities and my comfortable mattress, and I’ve never understood the appeal of roughing it. But Carrie loves it, and we gathered enough comforts (like a tent and a cushy air mattress and a sleeping bag) from camping-oriented friends that I thought I would give it a try.

So we set out for the mountains (with a stop at Scott’s Dairy Freeze in North Bend for lunch—yes, the North Bend where they filmed a bunch of Twin Peaks).

When we got to Roslyn (yes, the Roslyn where they filmed lots of that Northern Exposure TV show), we thought we might walk around for a bit. But it was so frikkin’ hot that we decided just to get back in the air-conditioned car and try to find the venue.

The “festival” was very vaguely organized; we didn’t even learn where it was until the night before. There was a guy at a gate who said that the person running this “festival” was supposed to have provided him with a list of guests, but never did. He just let us in and directed us to drive to another point farther into the forest with basically a “good luck.”

So when the pavement turned to dirt we had to back up a bit until we got cell phone reception and were able to call Julia to get directions the rest of the way. This involved driving past a shirtless man named “Troy” who asked us for our email addresses before giving us directions the rest of the way to an uneven clearing with a wooden stage (still under construction) at one end and an outhouse at the other.

This was about when Carrie & I had that “we’re too old for this” moment.

Fortunately it actually turned out to be quite a bit of fun hanging out with JM+FFD and Jared and Neighbor Gary, even though Carrie & I were practically the only people in attendance who weren’t a member of one of the bands… and a lot of the bands were much more metal \m/ than the bands we usually see. And the camping was actually pretty comfortable. Who knows; I might try it again some time.

The next morning we couldn’t wait to get outta there, though. We had breakfast at the Roslyn Café then headed back home.

Here are some very blurry pictures taken from my phone:

I took photos of the games that I played/enjoyed the most while I was there. Click on a photo for more info about that particular machine!

In a nutshell: You throw a party in the middle of January (it generally coincides with Twelfth Night/Epiphany, though in this case it was later — January 22nd or so). Whoever hosts that party bakes a cake — a King Cake: traditionally a ring-shaped cake similar to brioche, with green-and-purple frosting/sprinkles. Hidden somewhere in the cake is a small figurine, often a Baby Jesus. Whichever guest at the party gets the piece of cake containing the figurine is the “King” for that week and has to throw the next King Cake Party the following weekend. This continues every weekend until Mardi Gras!

I actually probably would not have become a part of this tradition (indeed, I missed the first party entirely) had it not been for the fact that Marvel’s X-Men’s female clone of Wolverine X-23 won the first King Cake Party and got to throw the second one at her place, just up the road from me.

It was a fascinating several weeks. Carrie & I got to meet a tonne of new people, as whoever hosted the party invited not only the people who had been at previous parties, but their own friends as well. We also got to go to some places we’d never been before, and experience fascinating things like wood-fired saunas and hot tubs, and all manner of cooking. Not even the King Cake itself was consistent; many of the participants put their own spin on the tradition by serving the figurine in other types of baked goods — even an Apple pie once.

Carrie & I had to miss the next-to-last King Cake Party, but we delegated our participation, and — guess what? — we won by proxy!

For our King Cake, Carrie decided to go old-school: a northern French Galette des Rois (French for “Cake of Kings”). She used a slightly-modified version of the recipe from Zen Can Cook:

For this recipe you will need:

• 1 puff pastry sheet
• 8 tablespoons soft butter
• 1 cup slivered almonds
• 2 eggs
• 3 tablespoons flour
• 1/2 cup sugar + 2 tablespoons
• 1 pinch of salt
• 1 teaspoon almond extract (optional)
• 1 egg yolk + 1 tablespoon milk for eggwash
• Powdered sugar for glazing

* Preheat oven to 425′F. Cut out two 9-inches circles of puff pastry. Prick one of them with a fork. Place on a tray lined with a silpat. Refrigerate.

For the frangipane (almond filling):

• In the bowl of a food processor combine the butter, 1 cup almonds, 2 eggs, 1/2 cup sugar, pinch of salt and almond extract if using. Process to obtain a smooth paste, add the flour and pulse to incorporate (Carrie & I don’t have a food processor, so we just used a Magic Bullet and made the frangipane in batches).

For the galette des rois:

1. Spread the almond frangipane in the center of the pricked puff pastry circle leaving a 1-inch border. Brush the border with eggwash and top with the second circle of puff pastry. Seal the edge with your fingers or the back of a spoon. Brush with the eggwash. Refrigerate for 15 minutes.
2. Bake at 425′F for 15 minutes then lower the temperature to 350′F and bake for an additional 30 minutes.
3. Dust with some powdered sugar. Cool. Serve at room temperature.

Photo by yuichi.sakabura: http://www.flickr.com/photos/skrb/

By all accounts of everyone who was at our party, it was quite delicious. Please, partake… and enjoy.

First off was Busdriver. I’ve talked about him before on my website, and seen him several times at Neumos. I went with Three Ninjas, Tangentbot, and HeartFeltRobots. Before the show Three Ninjas chatted a bit with Busdriver on account of having done a remix of an Open Mike Eagle & Busdriver song. My pal HeartFeltRobots even made Busdriver his very own felt Busdriver Bot!

Busdriver started his set with a very cool visual effect: all the lights were off, but he had a blacklight that also emitted lasers in such a way that they made a starfield on the background. Then he stood in front of the blacklight and starfield wearing all white. He made Tangentbot very happy by rapping over an Aphex Twin song for his encore.

Two of the opening acts were women hip-hop artists, Night Fox and Katie Kate. They were both very good, though I kinda liked Night Fox’s energy a little more. They were unlike many women hip-hop artists that I’m used to, in that they weren’t full of “even tougher than a man” bravado (even though there was a fair share of cussing). Night Fox’s voice periodically had an almost-Billie-Holliday warble in it, and at times sounded like an American Miho Hatori. Plus she was tiny and kinda adorable. Katie Kate was a much more polished performer and technical musician — I learned later that she’s a classically-trained pianist and graduated from Cornish with a music degree! Anyway, the point is they had a really fascinating style of hip-hop. I almost want to call it “Cutesy Hip-Hop” but that sound a little degrading. The point is, it was fun and inviting instead of angry and aggressive.

You can watch a Katie Kate music video here!

As for the Chop Suey show the next week, Threeni & T-Bo (as they will now be referred to in the rest of this post because it sounds awful) were the opening act for the Fake Four tour, which is the same tour that Open Mike Eagle opened for last year. Good company! And Carrie actually got to come with me because for once she didn’t have to teach on a night where there was an awesome music show!

They completely killed their set. The highlight of the whole night was when Threeni and T-Bo performed an absolutely epic cover of Jewel’s “Foolish Games.” For realsz! Ch-ch-check it out!

Like what you heard there? About to commit seppuku because you missed it? Stay your blade, I say! For Three Ninjas & Tangentbot will be performing a Mardi Gras party at the Skylark Café on Tuesday the 8th! THAT’S TOMORROW, HOMESLICE!

Carrie & I didn’t stay for the whole show because:

1. We live in Tacoma
2. I had to be at work at 8:00 the next morning
3. We’re old

But another excellent act that we got to see was Abadawn, a rapper with an extremely young countenance (he looked like he was 15) and a fascinating style. He had two vocalizations: a hip-hop voice that had inflections and flow that reminded me somewhat of Eminem, and a full-on death-metal screech/growl voice. He switched freely between them. Also, his songs were short, which I really appreciated (a couple were only like 45 seconds long, I swear). They were like a little nugget burst of energy, like a hip-hop haiku of rage.

So: February = good month for hip-hop shows.

In case you didn’t know: woodblock prints involve carving a block of wood for EACH color. So a ten-color print (including black but excluding white) takes ten separate woodblocks to print. And these prints are generally no larger than an 8.5″ × 11″ piece of paper. So the carving work is incredibly intricate. It’s also a fascinating process in that practically off of the prints are commissioned by a publisher who hires the artist to draw something. Once the publisher approves the drawing (and the colors), it’s handed over to the carvers who do the actual carving work. Then the prints are mass-produced and sold, sometimes bound in a volume, especially the “series” works (like the 100 Famous Views of Edo and Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series (which contains “The Great Wave off Kanagawa“) of prints). So it was really a commerce-driven industry, not artist-driven.

I got this swell postcard!

After leaving the museum, we swung by the Fulcrum Gallery in Hilltop to see their latest exhibition, “Seasonal Affective” by Sean Alexander. Mr. Alexander (who has a very sparse website) suffers from seasonal affective disorder (which is pretty common here in the Northwest), and allows it to inform his art. His artwork is intensively, minutely detailed with excruciating and teeny-tiny linework. Like this postcard I picked up at the gallery:

So if for some reason you find yourself in the area during Fulcrum’s business hours, you should definitely pop in and look at them up close. And then after that I came back home.

ASTEROIDS!!!

I went as the ship from Asteroids. It was fun! I went to Home Depot and bought one of those swivel joints that you’d use to make a lazy Susan. Then I made the ship out of black foam board. The outline of the ship is just a couple of layers of masking tape. I mounted the ship to the lazy Susan joint (with three layers of foam board padding to push it farther away from my body for easier swiveling) with some screws and hot glue. And I attached the other side of the lazy Susan joint to another three layers of foam board that I attached to my body with two belts (one above the joint and one below).

I also made an asteroid outta foam board and masking tape, with two smaller asteroids. I glued some velcro to the backs so that the little ones could attach to the big one out of sight. I also got a handful of ping-pong balls to use as the ship’s bullets! I had a friend slowly attack me with the larger asteroid while I threw ping-pong balls at it. When I hit it, he disengaged the smaller asteroids and dropped the big one. Just like in the game!

My punkins were carved to match:

And just for fun I also threw in the UFO:

Pretty much everybody agreed that it was the best of the Fools’ costumes at this year’s Fools Play Trick or Treat. But the competition wasn’t really that stiff…

That’s Jamie the Ginger Fool as “Batman,” me, Geoff the Yellow Fool as “Harry Potter” (really), and Mike the Blue Fool as Zordon from Power Rangers.

James won the best costume in the audience competition as a red knight from Castle Crashers. It was very good, though I didn’t get a picture of it. Tia went as a 1960s-style alien space babe, with a beehive hairdo and fantastic boots and silver ray guns and everything. Pretty awexome.

Hween night was spent in the traditional way: Wii Bowling and making a metric tonne of Reuben sammitches and eating my wife’s Russian potato soup with sauerkraut. But I don’t have to tell you about that myself. Our good friend the Unintentional Housewife was there, and she blogged all about it! So go read her posts about my Reuben process and about my wife’s dee-licious soup. Also, Marvel’s X-Men’s “X-23″ was there, and she brought some apple crisp, which was also delicious. Saves me the trouble of having to write about it myself!

Tacoma Art Museum

Carrie had to teach in the evening, but fortunately I did not have to go it alone. I picked up our friend Laura and we headed on down to the Tacoma Art Museum. Why? Well, for one thing it’s free on the third Thursday of every month (in the evening). For another—more important—reason, it was the opening celebration of the Mighty Tacoma exhibit, which involved an exhibit of a whole bunch of photos taken by local Tacoma artists, including our good buddy Neighbor Gary. He had six photos up—three black-and-white (silvered gel prints) and three rather large color prints. Gary was there schmoozing with all the people who came to gaze at his photos, and so, coincidentally, were my in-laws. They were on their way to their wedding dinner and had decided to stop at the museum.

One part of the exhibit was the opportunity to get your picture taken with a digital camera that then uploaded your image to Tacoma Art Museum’s Flickr stream. A slideshow of all the photos taken was transmitted to a big flat screen monitor mounted to a wall of the exhibit, so that you could be a part of the show! Carrie’s dad had absolutely no interest in being a part of this, so I posed instead with Carrie’s mum. She wanted me to do something “silly,” so I struck a pose that I think is rather indicative of our relationship:

She thought it was very funny.

Laura photo taken as well, and also participated in another interactive part of the exhibit where you wrote down your thoughts about Tacoma on a sticky note, then read your note out loud into a camera before sticking it on a wall of all the other sticky notes. I assume that the videos will all be edited together at some point.

Also, there were free cupcakes from Hello Cupcake.

Tollefson Plaza

At 6:00 our friend Katie was s’posed to be dancing across the street from TAM in Tollefson plaza, so Laura & I headed over there but nothing was yet happening. So we went back to TAM where there was a beer garden put on by the Harmon. They were showcasing a steamed beer, which was tasty but a little flat.

After the beer we went back to Tollefson and watched the dance, which was put on by a troupe called BQdanza, which unfortunately does NOT have anything to do with Tony Danza. Much dancing took place in the water in Tollefson, which must have been very cold by that time in the evening.

Dorky’s

The show was over by 6:30, which was a bit early to call it a night. So instead Laura & I hiked the nine blocks up Pacific to Dorky’s Bar Arcade, which right now is only Dorky’s Arcade because they haven’t gotten their liquor license yet. We played many a game of pinball, including Cyclone, Bride of Pinbot, Evel Knievel, Supersonic, and Space Riders. Culture at its finest.

After we ran outta coin we walked back down Pacific to my car and I proceeded to drive Laura back home… or so I thought. While en route, she got a text message and asked me, “Do you wanna go to an art gallery?” Seems a couple of her friends were going to go. And the gallery was two blocks from where we were.

Fulcrum Gallery

The gallery was the Fulcrum Gallery in Hilltop. They were showing the “Street Botany” series by Maria Jost. I’d love to give you a link to her blog or website or whatnot, but I just can’t seem to find anything. So here are a couple of images from them:

They’re these incredibly detailed illustrations of plants that grow in urban areas, but there’s usually something whimsical or odd about them. Like if you look closely at the dandelion one, you’ll notice that whole, tiny dandelion plants are actually growing on the little ball at the center of all the puffs. Another one was an illustration of various mosses arranged to look like clouds. In recent weeks posters had been made of the whole series and plastered up around town. I like them. They’re science and they’re fun.

After looking around the gallery for a while (and having a bite of cheese) we left before Laura’s friends ever showed up. I took her home then came home myself. The ey-end.