For about $15 you can choose everything about your burger except the bread and temperature—there are seven different meats to choose from, including buffalo and the dork (a mix of duck and pork), and scores of sauces, cheeses and even a multitude of salts to go over three different kinds of fries. The specials change all the time according to the whims of Simpson and his staff, and are not to be missed. One week, rumors say, the menu even showcased a classic TV dinner. For the best time, get there on a weekday and feel like family.

It’s right across the street from the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co. Inside and out it’s a café that finds a perfect balance of sleepy and hip, busy and leisurely, with its baby blue interior fit with finished plywood cabinetry and rail station-style benches lining the back wall, complete with power strips every ten feet. Show posters cover the wall by the front door.

The mood at Neptune Coffee is pleasant and very workable: as I write this an enormous Mastiff named Oscar who came in with a young woman is making friends with a couple who are scratching his head asking, “Will you come home with us?” This is my kind of place.

It’s too early yet to say if this place is ideal, but it suggests the kind of mood I look for in my cafes. It’s a good balance. The music I’ve heard here—primarily rock and folk records (literally records) from the 60s—adds to the mood, does not diminish it.

And the coffee…

The coffee is good. Excellent, I’d say. For brewed coffee they do a press that’s appropriately creamy and robust. I haven’t yet had an espresso, but given the Synesso machine they have I expect it’s at least as good as the brew.

And to top it off, it’s the neighborhood. This part of Greenwood, close to 85^th, is rich and underrated in grand conceptions of Seattle defined slightly further south. Perhaps that’s an exaggeration. I get the sense this part of town’s underrated. I enjoy being in this part of town, taking my time down the sidewalk, peeking in restaurants and businesses my temperament won’t allow me to patronize (specialty chocolate and burgers are pretty much off the menu, but quite alluring all the same).

I feel a little sad it took me four years to first set foot inside this Neptune Coffee. I have time now to make up for it.

Driving by Seattle’s Town Hall a few minutes before the start of the debates between King County Executive candidates, I saw all the dramatics of a Seattle green event. There was the plastic bag guy and others in costume with flyers and imperatives to share. Men and women wearing posterboard with hastily-scrawled eco-messages front and back. Green issues today are reaching an interesting point–they are slipping from the fringes and coming to rest comfortably in the mainstream. Twenty years ago Earth Day was about all you could get for a mainstream environmental consciousness. Today politicians are finding it’s an easy and almost somewhat non-partisan way to earn votes from either side.

The meaning of this, of course, isn’t so clear-cut. For one, it’s supremely important that environmental issues–climate change in particular–are the kinds of issues that determine public policy. I can go on and on about the problems we’ve created for ourselves with this modern society that can be reversed over time with conscious public policy. However, with environmental issues framing so many public policy issues–transportation and urban development for starters–it’s much easier for politicians to use the rhetoric of environmental stewardship only to continue with business as usual. The only thing that keeps politicians in line is a strong base of committed individuals who force them to take action.

What I expected once I got inside a few minutes late–parking on First Hill is a challenge at times–I expected the sideshow. I expected a whole troop of plastic-bag guys, and people in costume and posterboards smeared with slogans an opportunistic politician might snatch up mid-steam. What I found instead was a nearly-packed hall of conscious citizens of literally all ages. Everybody was engaged, even if knitting in the back row, and nearly everybody stayed for the duration. This is what the environmental constituency looks like when it’s mainstreamed. And perhaps Seattle is an unfair standard for the rest of the nation, but with all four candidates present pandering with equal ferocity for this critical voting group, it’s a standard worth setting.

There’s a lot of great street photography out there, and many of the outstanding street photographers are photojournalists, like Seattle-based Joe Owens, who know how to find not only compelling compositions and people, but also the stories behind the moments they capture. Street portrait photography is along these same lines but different.

While street photography seems to be about candid human moments, street portraiture focuses on human individuality and an individual’s humanity. While street photography is about capturing people, far too often the people captured are simply frozen objects in a compelling composition. There are, of course, exceptions, and they are many.

Street portraits take this possibility for objectification completely out of the equation since the primary subject of the photo is an individual, the picture taken in a way that encapsulates his or her individual character. It’s not about cataloguing facial types or fleeting moments; it’s about documenting life.

Frequently street portrait photographers spend time getting to know their subjects before asking to take pictures. After all, as Canadian photographer John Reeves said, “Great portraits are given, not taken.”

As David Alan Harvey documents in Burn Magazine, taking pictures of complete strangers isn’t easy for your average shy photographer. However, seeing what some have done with it, the challenge of overcoming that shyness is well worth it. For a couple examples of the kind of outstanding work I’m talking about, see North Carolina-based Anthony Bellemare, and Berkeley-based Pete Pin to start. Meanwhile, I’m taking to the streets with my camera and candy for all.

by Alex Russell

About a third of the waste that goes into the local landfill is made up of paper or plastic. Every year people moving or cleaning out the garage discard used books, CDs and DVDs that eventually find their way into the trash. I’ve recently started as a Public Relations volunteer with Eco Encore, a Seattle-based non-profit that since 2002 has sold unwanted media online, keeping more paper and plastic out of landfills, and donated the proceeds to local environmental non-profits like Futurewise and the Washington Trails Association.

It’s a small non-profit, and its only paid staff in their SODO offices are the operations manager and assistant, both of which are on part-time. The organization thrives on its board and its volunteers, which means more money goes to the Eco Encore recipients rather than a receptionist and mail clerk and slick, high-powered PR guy.

Early on, they found people like the idea of their old junk translating to cash for local environmental groups, and that’s kind of how I see Seattleites—most will do good for the environment if given the option. Eco Encore has taken that to the bank, and since getting started has distributed over $32,000 among its 15 recipient organizations. And while they’ve gotten great press so far—Vanity Fair online and Grist Magazine included—hopefully there’s more to come. It is, after all, a novel idea that’s making real difference in the Northwest.

For the past couple weeks I’ve taken to the streets with my new digital SLR, trying to figure out a good way to do street photography. I’ve always been interested in photography, and I’ve always documented in words the people and world around me. Street photography seems like a perfect fit. But, of course there is some awkwardness to get over.

I found a video of Garry Winogrand and realize that the awkwardness never goes away when people see the camera and what matters is how you deal with it. Take a look at what he does:

It must be a strange scene to walk into. There’s a guy with a video camera, and then some dude with thick glasses snapping a Leica in your face. You can see the people Winogrand photographs are more confused than anything else. I understand the importance of close proximity, but this seems taken to the extreme. I’m surprised he can capture candidness with his method—waiting until people are close and then snapping away, only to turn and act unselfconsciously like nothing just happened.

But the guy is a master for good reason. For decades he took amazing pictures, and he didn’t do it with a telephoto lens and he didn’t do it by hiding his camera. He was there, right there with his subjects. He was part of the scene, and he had a great time. Really, though, how could you get angry if you saw a guy like Winogrand walking the streets flatfooted, snapping away? Most people probably didn’t take him seriously, and on the street it doesn’t matter. Look at the shots he sold for thousands of dollars and filled books with.

I’m concluding I’ll just have to jump in and get cozy. I just hope I can catch a few lucky shots until I get a sense of how to do this thing called photography. Fortunately, as with writing, there are plenty of masters who have left behind great work to learn from. And I’ve managed to meet a few people around town who are willing to help me get started. I’m having a great time.

by Irving Rothstein

Memory
Stories of a past
The spice of a life well lived
But at times that spice
dosen’t taste so nice.
Time to take wing
and dream your thing.
–anonymous

The aroma of fresh brewed coffee. The buzz of voices. The three small tables are full and five are sitting elbow to elbow at the pocket size counter. Fifteen people are shoehorned into a space where ten are a crowd.

“Cool Beans” is a funky little cafe on California Street in San Francisco. It is small, so small that everything and everybody are close and personal. Sam and Henry. the owners, have learned the magic of transforming customers into friends. Pictures of their Calabash are all over the wall side by side with postcards from everywhere on the planet. Sam, a short wiry, olive skinned guy with a “hi how are you” smile delights in telling fellow track fans, “122 straight hurdle victories, two time Olympic gold medal winner, and I didn’t recognize Edwin Moses when he came in for coffee. He sat right there talking to his cousin and I, I coulda got his autograph on the wall there.”

And there was Marv Boutet, a for-real Crime Scene Investigator in San Francisco. Marv worked long hours, mostly nights, and loved every second of it. His dark brown eyes were always glazed over and sitting on dark circles. Marv was a matter of fact guy, a Sergeant Friday, the kind that talks very little, and when he does talk it’s as if he’s reciting a memorized menu. Our paths crossed every morning—Marv came in after work, when I was on my way to work.

Today, Marv’s voice had real feeling, as if a dam had broken over night and words were pouring out. “Blood and flesh all over place, he put a gun in his mouth and blooey. Everything was in place, the chairs and instruments were neatly arranged, even kept the magazines in the rack alphabetically, by title.”

He stared at me over the his coffee cup. His eyes were hound-dog sad, a word away from tears.

“Why do people get to killing themselves? You’re the teacher, tell me!”

Marv was hitting close to home. In the sixties I had considered ending it. I had gone as far as the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge during an extended bout with my personal devils. Bourbon had teamed up with beer chasers that did nothing to dull the sciatic nerve pain which added to the oceans of loneliness that brought me to the railing over the bay. I stared down for what seemed forever, my intent was to end it, when…

“You’re playing the quitter, a loser, I thought you were better than that.”

Memory, a voice from my past, Nathan the ice-man, my grandfather who nourished me with stories.

“My Grandson a quitter? You’re the reason I came to America. If you quit, you change the story.”

I turned back, cleaned up my act and now I worked as a teacher. Booze and loneliness were things of my past. I had no answer to Marv’s question. This was a different Marv than I knew, one who went way beyond the usual boilerplate sports stuff like, “How about those Forty Niners? Did you catch the end of the game? No one like Montana.”

Today it was real. He was singing a different tune.

“Dude was my age, dentist, Harvard, had a fancy office on Union Street. I played football against him in high school. Hard runner. He ran over me when we played against one another. Good guy. He gave me a hand up, made sure I was OK.”

Marv vibed shellshock. I kept him talking. This was the first time he had ever said anything about his job. He was shaky. This one needed a talk out.

“What was his name?”

“John Thomas.”

“John Thomas!?”

It was like a baseball bat hit me on the head. “John Thomas! A suicide?”

I joined him in shellshock. Tears filled my eyes.

I had last seen John at a Woodrow Wilson reunion five years before. He was sitting at the bar when I walked into the banquet room. John looked relaxed, suit open, tie loose. After twenty years he recognized me from the get go, slid off the bar stool and held his hand out. The grip was firm.

“John?”

“Mr Rothstein, It’s so good to see you. Could you sit a second?” I slid into the bar seat next to him. He looked at me, a serious expression on his face.

“You know Mr. Rothstein,” he hesitated, “I never really thanked you for what you did for me.”

“Did for you?”

I tried to remember back to 1968, the year John graduated. 1968 has been labeled as a year that changed America. Anti-war sentiment forced LBJ not to seek re-election; Robert Kennedy announced for president; Martin Luther King was killed in April and Robert Kennedy in June. The only positive thing I remembered was Apollo 8 circling the moon.

“You remember, the day after Reverend King was killed.”

The memory flooded in. April fifth had been chaos at the school, chaos that carried over from the night before. The kids that came to school were either depressed or crazy angry. A great man was shot and the feeling was the universal “they”—the white guy, the honkey—had killed him. The classrooms were mostly empty; kids filled the halls, some crying, others breaking things and starting fights. When I wasn’t holding venting sessions I was mixing with the kids, breaking up a fight here and there. When it was noon I took a five minute breather. I sat in my room with a cold cup of coffee to pull my own self together.

I was sucking on the dregs from the cup bottom, when the door flew open and John stormed in. He stared at me and strode over to where I sat next to a window that looked out over the bay. He stood alongside me, his eyes bloodshot, his fists clenching and unclenching. A star student, a star athlete, John had a scholarship to Harvard waiting for him on graduation.

“Mr. Rothstein! You gotta help me! I’m angry, I’m crazy angry. I feel like killing someone. They killed Reverend King. He was hope, they killed hope. Some damn meaningless, cracker shot him!”

John was shaking. I could feel the anger and frustration choking him. I searched my mind for a response.
My anger and my frustration had added to a feeling of guilt. I was a “they”—a white man, a honky.

My mind was whirling but nothing came together, and then…

“What would Reverend King want you to do?”

That stopped him. He stood absolutely still staring down at me. Then the tears came, slowly at first but soon he began to sob and shake. I stood up and put my hand on his shoulder and led him to a desk. He sat and stared out a window. Finally he put his arms on the desk, bowed his head between them and cried. I could hear the clock ticking on the wall. Minutes later, John picked up his head, pulled out a handkerchief and dried his eyes, he stood up and walked over to where I was standing. He gave me a quick hug, turned and left.

John went on to Harvard and dentistry. And now he was dead.

I left the coffee shop feeling it was all a waste. What good had I done? Why didn’t I keep in touch with him? I felt empty and angry with myself. Could I have helped him get over whatever it was that pushed him over the edge?

“He should have never given up his horn. He was a better musician than me, but he traded it for pulling teeth. Pulling teeth wasn’t him.”

John’s cousin Ross laid it all out to me as we consoled one another over coffee a few weeks later. Ross had taken a different path.

“Irv, music is my life. It’s my wings. It takes me outta the everyday. I soar up there. I become sound.”

Ross had been with a Rhythm and Blues band that played all over the US and Europe while R&B was popular. Then, when R&B ran its time the band played local gigs in the Bay Area. Ross worked at what he could get—school bus driver, cement truck driver, bouncer, carpet cleaner, whatever he could get to, he said, “support my music habit.”

“He could’a done both,” said Ross. “Didn’t need to be the best in one thing. Dentistry, a black dentist on Union Street, digging in mouths all day. Nothin’ else to fill his life with. Everybody needs wings. He threw his away. He thought music was gonna interfere with his career. When it wasn’t enough he started doing drugs and look what happened.”

Ross and I didn’t do drugs—we did coffee and fought back tears.

–about Irving–

Copyright 2009 Irving Rothstein

by Alex Russell

In the doldrums of interview transcription, and still almost six hours of audio left to go.

It’s amazing how much time it takes to transcribe interviews. Audio transcription is a profession, I know, and even with great interviews and a very interesting subject, it’s a struggle for me, a non-pro, to get through it. After the first hour of audio took me almost three hours to transcribe—time evaporates while doing this kind of work—I looked at Craigslist to see how much the pros charge. Even at $60 an hour it’s tempting to hire it out, looking at the 6,000-word file I’ve got so far, knowing how much more there is to transcribe. But I’m a writer, and therefore would rather spend my money on other things, like coffee and pizza and books.

Being that we’re squarely in the future, a historical moment when we’ll soon have flying cars crashing all over the place, I figured there must be speech-to-text translating software that could do a fair job. There must be. And there kind of is.

I found at download.com Better Wave to Text, a free-trial software that can be used in conjunction with voice training to turn microphone dictation into text. It can also be used to convert audio files into text, but it requires voice training. That means I’d have to play the recording through the program and correct the text for a while before it starts to get the words right. But what about the parts of the interviews even I have trouble understanding what my subject is saying? What about the parts where I can’t understand my own words? That could turn out to be a lot of voice training, not to mention installing the software and trying to figure out how to use it—time wasted if it doesn’t work right after all.

One way or another, for this project I’ll have to go back through these interviews, and it won’t hurt me to do it in the transcription process. This whole dream of a way out of transcribing the interviews myself was just a break from the work, a small avoidance of sorts, which of course is exactly all this blog post was when I got started, and will be up to the moment I post. At that point, I think I have a couple phone calls to make. There must be somebody home with nothing else to do, or at least some transcription of their own.

by Alex Russell

I’m not sure if it was the coyotes or wolves, but it was a chorus a half-mile away behind glass and electric wire, first one dappled cry then another until a cascade of wailing echoed through the trees. This is why I don’t go camping. This is why the closest I’ll get to wild animals is a place like NW Trek, a wildlife park about 25 miles from Tacoma, WA.

The park itself is just over 700 acres full of black bears, grizzly bears, caribou, moose, mountain goats and even bison. While their zoo-like enclosures hold wolves, coyotes, gold and bald eagles, even cougars and bobcats, the centerpiece of the park is it’s free-roaming area where you can ride a tram to be out there with the wildlife. As we rode along our driver/guide told us stories about the animals, how there are only herbivores in the free-range area because if there were carnivores there would not be herbivores for very long. We passed 3,000-pound buffalo lounging in the grass licking their noses. We saw deer graze in the fields. Mountain goats in the road paced us as we passed them by.

The highlight of the ride came when our guide jolted the tram to a stop and jumped out of her seat, shouting with joy, “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, look!” Near the base of the hill was a fuzzy grey baby goat curled up next to its mother. Everybody in the tram rushed to the windows to get a look.

“Sorry about that,” said our guide, a little embarrassed. “It’s just I heard there were little goat babies and I haven’t got a chance to see them yet.” We all watched starry-eyed as mother and baby made their way up the hill away from us.

by Alex Russell

Turning 30 marks the end to early youth. It’s a moment to take a step back and think seriously about the future coming faster into focus. Turning 30 feels like a step away from the freedom of the 20s. It marks an earnest if unwilling entry into adulthood, a moment to look around, maybe for the first time, and see just where everyone else is at 30 and what they have accomplished—maybe see for the first time how far you are behind them. Or instead a chance to assert once more no ageing at all has happened since turning 21.

I don’t think people these days put very much stock in turning 30. It seems the 30s are a lot like the 20s, with all the same activity and fun, but with more money to spend—and no roommates. People in their 30s seem the same as they were in their 20s, just with designer clothes and mixed-drink doubles replacing PBR and Bud.

Not to get too personal—tomorrow is my 30th birthday, after all—but for me it’s not that big a deal. I’ve always been treated like I was older anyway. When I was 18, people mistook me for being in my mid-twenties. When I met my future wife’s mother at the ripe age of 20, my full beard and courtesy convinced her I was well into my 30s.

Healthwise, I’m in the best shape of my life because of habits I started well before I ever thought about turning 30. A few years ago I got my first grey hairs, an undeniable fact of getting older, but they’re the worst of age’s ravages and are taking their time in spreading. My career isn’t as established as I’d like, but I’ve seen and done enough interesting stuff over the past 10 years to make it worthwhile. I love my wife and my home. I’ve got solid relationships with good people, both family and friends. I’ve raised two well-adjusted dogs, and blindly hope raising kids will be just as easy. In many ways I’m ahead, and as I take stock of my life this last day in my 20s, I can smile both for where I’ve been and where I’m going.

So now I come to the giving of presents, essential in any discussion about turning 30. For convenience and simplicity I’ve listed some suggestions below in no particular order. These are all things I truly want, of course, but who will give them to me remains to be seen. My contact information is on my bio page if anyone is so inclined.

• Balloon Depot hot air balloon flight
• Tesla Model S
• Writing lessons from Philip Roth
• Dell XPS M1730 laptop
• HP Home Cinema Digital Projector EP7120
• All the lattes I can drink at Vivace
• Steinway D-274 concert grand piano
• Piano lessons from Bert Bacharach
• Riu Paradise Island Bahamas vacation package
• Nikon D300 Digital SLR
• Dwight Gooden autographed baseball
• Two tickets to a 49ers Superbowl game (for my cousin Chris and I)
• Boxing lessons from Oscar De La Hoya (since he’s retired and all)
• A damn good doctor
• Bottle of Le Billionaire Champagne (just to see if it lives up to the hype)
• A damn good doctor
• No snow this winter in Seattle (if not possible I will accept a winter home in Santa Cruz)