Being verily shagged out by the political bloggery of this past week, today I felt like doing something innocent, apolitical, ideologically-neutral, and dear to my heart, which is to talk about tea, and the various places you can find it in Seattle. Why tea, you ask, and not coffee? For is not Seattle famous as the espresso capital of America? Well, yes, it is. However, I feel that tea has many advantages over espresso: it tends to be substantially cheaper, for one thing, and also tea does not taste like roasted ferret's ass. So, without further ado, and in more or less descending order, except when they are not...
1. Victrola: Far and away the nicest place I've found in Seattle to sit and have a nice cup of tea and do some reading, or maths, or try to write 50,000-word novellas in the space of a month. Conveniently, it's also about three blocks from my apartment. For the punnishly-inclined, they serve loose-leaf Serendipitea, coming at a reasonable price in little two-cup pots, and including, besides the old favourites, lapsang souchong and a charming coconut-infused brew called Burroughs' Blend. The cafe's name refers to the Victor Talking Machine Company's line of Victrola phonographs, which revolutionised the industry in the early twentieth century, and the place likes to keep a sort of Twenties ambience going at times, with lots of boogie-woogie, swing, and jazz bands dropping in, for free, no less. Their sandwiches, however, are small, reminding one of the privations of the Great Depression brought on by laissez-faire capitalism. Comfy, relaxed, some cute staff, often some good art on the walls, and best of all, without a lot of attitude over its own hipness. (*cough* Java House in Iowa City *cough*) What more could a chap ask?
2. The Ugly Mug: Lurking up the University District, on 43rd Street, I only discovered this place comparatively recently, which is a pity, because it's the nicest cafe I've found in the University District. It looks a bit like the nicer sort of grandmother's living room, the sort of grandmother with old, but comfy, sofas, plush draperies, lots of light, a bit of clutter, and probably a deep appreciation for the great job Howard Dean has done as Governor of Vermont all these years, and for his actually rather centrist agenda that can appeal to voters of all stripes. They serve Blue Willow teas, a most excellent choice indeed, and the lapsang souchong flows freely. Excellent food, if you feel like lunching. I had the most fantastic soup there on Wednesday, pumpkin tomato: like the bourgeois, it was rich; like Marx's dialectic, it was spicy and flavoursome; and like the International Socialist Organisation, it was full of nuts. (Pistachios, if I'm any judge.) If you ask nicely, the staff may even make bad puns for you.
3. Still Life in Fremont: So much tea. So much. Can't remember the brand offhand, but there are shelves and shelves of glass jars of it, including the regrettably uncommon blackcurrant, which goes well with Still Life's custard. In addition to a well-stocked pastry shelf, Still Life does very nice soups, counterbalanced by good, heavy bread. There is even a Vegan chili, if you so desire. The staff tend towards friendliness and small beards, and may engage you in conversation when business is slow if they see you reading Kafka. While it is also popular with the monied classes, like the Fremont neighbourhood as a whole its commercialism, like its Bohemianism, is rather tongue-in-cheek; witness the sculpture of Lenin nearby, outside a burrito restaurant. It represents the fundamental conflict faced by a socialist in today's world: do we want to bring about an egalitarian society, or do we want to have nice things like Dell flat-screen monitors and expensive, European porn? Come here when feeling ideologically conflicted in that special way only soup can cure, and to be surrounded by wood.
4. Blue Willow Teahouse: You may think you've seen tea before. You haven't seen jack. This is a shrine to tea; this is where tea wants to go when it dies. Blue Willow imports teas of exotic and flavoursome sorts, and while each pot may cost a bit--and may bring you under surveillance by the FBI because of tea's proud history of consumption by Bolsheviks and Arabs--you get almost more than I can consume myself in one sitting. Almost. It is a well-appointed, glamourous sort of place, the sort of place one would take Howard Dean to listen to him espouse his views on universal health care, fiscal responsibility, and civil rights, before rushing out and convincing all your friends and relatives to vote for him, because he has all the positive features of Ralph Nader, and the potential to actually win.
5. Cafe Europa: This is a very quiet and out-of-the-way place, for when one is feeling the urge to get away from it all and possibly eat turkey where no-one who thinks you're a vegetarian can see, conveniently located only a few blocks from Volunteer Park, where one can take in a lovely view from the top of the brick water tower, or cruise for anonymous sex in the undergrowth. The tea is Tazo, bagged, but it comes in big, friendly mugs, and while Tazo seems to specialise in greens and herbals, there's always Earl Grey. The panini are costly, but not as costly as the Ugly Mug's, nor as costly as another four years of a Bush presidency would be. George Bush is likely to run his 2004 campaign on fear, by and large, painting the Iraq war as a blow for American security despite all the evidence to the contrary; the trouble with this strategy is that everything Bush is likely to say will be a great big lie, as most everything he's said for the past few years has been, and it'll be such a Big Lie that people will hardly dare to dispute it. How can truth compete with paranoia? The rhetoric of Bush is the sort of rhetoric I blasted in my critique of Andrew Sullivan, hysterical, no-questions-allowed fearmongering, which Bill Clinton, a truly canny and articulate political thinker of whom I think more fondly with each passing day, recently describedas follows:
"Our paradigm now seems to be: something terrible happened to us on September 11, and that gives us the right to interpret all future events in a way that everyone else in the world must agree with us," said Clinton, who spoke at a seminar of governance organized by Conference Board.
"And if they don't, they can go straight to hell."
6. Parnassus: This student-run cafe in the basement of the UW Art Building I would vote Most Likely to Be Staffed by Bolsheviks: there's a little art gallery on the walls, cheap hummus sandwiches, an air of studious privation and improvisation, and all the profits go to fund art students and heroic portraits of Trotsky. Best of all, it's located just off the beautiful and soothing Quadrangle, although, very unfortunately, being underground, you can see nothing from within. The people here understand all too well that the language we are being trained to use for our post-September 11 world--with words like 'homeland', 'Islamo-fascist'--is Orwellian doublespeak, specifically crafted to prevent us from even formulating an opposing view, let alone mobilising behind one. The worst is when someone on the Left, like Dan Savage, begins to adopt this same language, through fear, panic, or what-have-you, and lends it legitimacy. We cannot allow ourselves to think in these fear-laden, dualistic, charged terms, not if we hope to take back America from the 'upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs”' as Kurt Vonnegut describes them, who have corrupted our national identity. We cannot let them define the parameters of the debate.
7. Bauhaus: As Lincoln said, 'You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.' Unfortunately, you can come close, as the last few years have amply demonstrated; the Bush junta seems to have drawn inspiration less from Lincoln and more from W.C. Fields: 'Never give a sucker an even break.' Unless we want to spend four more years deep-throating Dick Cheney's withered and pustulent schlong, we have to actively work to change the language America uses to talk about terror and conflict. We have to stamp out these dualistic, hysterical and emotionally-charged terms.
Next time, don't say 'homeland'...Just say 'domestic'.
Oh, and there's tea, too.
Posted by aloysius at April 20, 2003 06:57 PM |