Thursday night yacht races...

Seattle I love you.

Coach begins “urban camping” class in Belltown, sparks an exercise revolution.

The summer always gets people into the mood to get fit and go outside. Even now that Global Warming has done away with what our forefathers thought of as “summer” the innate desire lingers. Each year, Personal Trainer Jason Squatenhold sees enrollment in his outdoor “boot camp” classes soar early in May in anticipation of the legendary sun’s appearance and this year was no different. Except this year, Mr. Squatenhold had an idea that he says is catching on throughout the country now.

Urban Camp

Jason describes how the idea of “Urban Camp” came to him.
“The ideal of beauty in our society is to be tan and ripped, everyone is trying to get to that place where they look like they spend a lot of time outdoors. Staying thin is very important to the style conscious. I hold my boot camp classes in area parks. In Seattle the homeless are encouraged to occupy the parks as well as streets in front of Nordstrom. What I was seeing was that my clients were all chunky and pale, even more so in comparison to the homeless men leering at them. That’s when I came up with Urban Camping.
The Seattle motif is to be at one with the outdoors, recycling and roughing it, and no one does it quite like the homeless. They literally never go indoors. Harnessing this, Mr. Squatenhold’s clients go through the motions of typical homeless activities.
Client Marsha Mellow says she can feel her core burn when she does the “cigarette butt bends” a move where the class simulates picking up used cigarettes from the ground. Jason makes the class do hundreds of this exercise in a class.
Other exercises include “Spinning in a circle shouting at the sky” a move Coach Squatenhold says is a great way to prevent chin muscles from sagging and an excellent method for getting that sun kissed glow on your face.
"There are no lockers here, in the first class I send every one of my students back to their cars to collect the contents of their trunks, they have to carry everything, including the spare, the duration of the class.”
Naturally you can find a Groupon for “Urban Camp” classes so you can try it out yourself, but the savings don’t end there. “Thursday a German tourist gave me $5 out of nowhere,” stated die-hard Urban Camper Dave Flanders.

City Council to approve several initiatives aimed at helping Belltown homeless.

New data shows that Seattle's single family recycling rate is over 70%, Mayor McGinn now wants bars and restaurants to help the homeless help themselves by introducing a double header "Recycling Initiative"
In a move similar to the aggressive pro-panhandling support Mayor McGinn handed out to the homeless and Children International last Spring, the proposed "Trickle Down Recycling" bill has local restaurants, bars and fishmongers throwing more than fish. Part one of the new law would require Pike Place Market businesses use only Real Change newspapers to wrap fish, meat and poultry. No word as to if fruit vendors or hippies selling pottery would be subject to this legislation. Citing the weird guilt and awkward conversation one must have when refusing to buy the paper and his disappointment with his agent at not being cast in one of the explosion of shows like Deadliest Catch and Swords: Life on the Line that have decimated the number of actual fishermen willing to work at Pike Place. "Can we just buy a pile of them and then have the guy go away? asked Noord Jergensonsonson, "You know, its bad enough that I'm not on a fishing show, and now this?"
Bartenders have similar issues with the new initiative. Part two of the law requires that cans and bottles be separate. "If we can help the homeless by separating the cans from the bottles, they will no longer tear open every bag in the alley looking for cans," said Council member Jean Godden, " This will promote cleaner alleyways. A Belltown man who calls himself Cigs was urinating and smoking from an old bic pen between two recycle bins early Sunday morning when this reporter found him. I asked him what he thought of the new law. "Man, can you give me some spare change?"

Signs things are looking up

second and bell

I think this is probably the work of the talented group of designers and artists that frequent Bedlam. Lately I have been seeing a lot of "signs" not specifically authorized but certainly welcomed.

Black Plastic Bags

Did you know its illegal to drink on the street? Me either. At the risk of being banned from my favorite pizza bar and music venue I need to get something off my chest. I have, after all these years made a bad decision because of crack dealers. I have tried to drink on the street.

I’ve always surrendered my cup as I departed the bar for the next bar, usually because I was finished, and the door man presumably was in charge of keeping the glassware from walking out the door. But it was a plastic cup, full of Bulleit Rye. And the band was finished. And you can do meth at any KC metro bus stop. Plus no place I know adheres to that whole 25 feet from the door smoking thing, it's too cold for that to work.

And most obviously, all the crack dealers on my street drink on the sidewalks all day. I think the bike cops put the discarded tall boy cans in the their spokes so they can sound like motorcycles. It can’t be illegal. So maybe what I needed that night that the bouncer pulled the cups from my friend’s and my hand was a black plastic bag.

Black plastic bags. Beautifying our sidewalks, in the hands of all the cool guys on the corner. These bags are as much a part of the uniform of crack dealers as heavy quilted jackets.

It's important to point out that when you finish your beer, you should under no circumstances throw the can into the trash. Recycle: someone wants that can and looking through the trash for it is demeaning. And the bag? Throw that down too, for it is art and someone may want to clean up after his dog anyway.

As for me, I have found a place on the internet where I can purchase my own black plastic bags (Ok, I didn’t look I just got them from the ghetto-mart, the one that complains to the landlord about the nice restaurant it shares the building with while selling whole pallets of Genesee each week.) Anyway, I got all these black plastic bags.

I am thinking of selling them next to the hot dog cart this weekend. So stop by and get a bag, so you can drink on the street too! Just remember, throw it in the air when you’re done. Make it rain!

SMC 12A.24.025 Unlawful consuming of liquor, opening a
container of liquor, or possessing an open container of liquor, each in a
public place.

Rising Fuel Costs, Happy Hour Deals Keep News Crews in Belltown

Belltown, Seattle-The rising cost of fuel combined with Seattle traffic has local news crews scrambling to find news close to home. “Belltown is great for news, its only a few blocks from our office and its got some great backdrops," said cameraman from BIRO8, adding” I have a whole story on the crumbling inner city built entirely around some B-roll of the McGuire!” When asked about crime that takes place in other parts of the city, news organizations all agreed that reporting news outside of Belltown was challenging and not nearly as rewarding. There’s not a single sign or wall not covered completely in vandalism up in Capitol Hill, which is the point, it’s hard to see the forest for the trees, but down here close to home: “Broken windows! Look!” News like this, right by the studio is a no brainer. First Hill has a really bad problem with cars being broken into, I mentioned. “We know, and you can’t imagine how much expensive equipment we have in our van,” said engineer Rob Basil, “going up there could cost us significantly.”
“Belltown has some wicked happy hour specials, and we can walk to most of the best places,” said on air reporter Connie Shellhair. “We used to party down here when I was at UW and I know all the cool spots.” She said that sometime the news hits home for those in the news business, citing last year’s shooting in front of one of her favorite bars. The shooting eventually ended in the bar losing its liquor permit.
“Businesses everywhere are being told to Think Local, and be sustainable,” said news desk manager Duck Blame of KLAW4 holding up his fingers making air quotes, and we’re responding to that market segment. Mr. Blame said that reporting news, any news in the neighborhood was his way of being green.
But it’s not all wine and roses for these loca-repores. Parking rates in the neighborhood are steep, and can put a dent in bottom lines. “Try parking your news van for more than a couple of hours! Forget it!” Engineer Basil lamented. All news crews agreed that to avoid hefty parking fees they tried to cover stories in Belltown as superficially as possible.
“As news people we’re supposed to get footage of us talking to cops, but then we realized that in Belltown there aren’t a lot of cops, so we often get forced to interview the droves of parking enforcement officers and drawing attention to our vehicles. This was a bad strategy.”

dream fragment

Underneath the window of the shop a boy stood. He played with a coin that he continually and with a twist of his wrist used to assault the crumbling plaster of the wall at his feet. He stopped once in a while to look up at the window. The plaster flecked white on his otherwise dirty shoe.
The window of the shop above flickered with a deep light. The light of a betrayed woman’s eyes in winter. The boy displayed patience of a man four times his age. In time, the light faded and the boy looked down and then up the alley where he had stood for a hundred years or more. He stooped down and collected the coin from the grit of the alley. The white of the plaster and the red of the brick that lay underneath ran in curving lines into the creases of the asphalt at his feet, a vascular roadmap, science class diagram of a man with no skin, head turned in silent embarrassment at being found so stripped naked.
The boy looked once more at the shop window and pocketed the coin. He turned and began to walk, following the footsteps of a cat that had darted silent as thought from behind a derelict dumpster. He began to whistle. His hands found his pockets where the right hand idly turned the coin over and over. The alley met a street where astonishingly tall women sailed in pairs carrying parcels or pushing bicycles under trees draped with the precarious heads of late Spring blooms, each one like the face of a woman about to slide from the side of a listing, wailing ocean liner. Thinly they screamed, the air peeling fingers from limbs sending them descending to carpet the path of the cat and therefore the boy.
At the seawall. The scent of the sea sweeps the enormous coral stones of the battlement. Bracing against the angry darkness of the limitless aggression of the ocean which steals the whistle from his face. He throws the coin into the clamor and terror beneath him. The cold fiend immediately clutching the coin in its salty folds.
Turning he sees the skyline of the city. In the high street the shop light again bleeds its color into the ancient iron columns of cloud.