Denime 66xx World Tour

[chicote]

Haven't heard or seen anything yet, or perceived anything from any of my other three senses either, for that matter... I sent rightyow a message yesterday as I hadn't heard from him in about a week, but looking at his profile he's barely been on Sufu at all this month. Hopefully he's doing okay.

Anyway, I'm sorry to everyone who's been following the tour--we've been delayed for more than a month now. Admittedly, my life is not terribly interesting at this point but I will try and stir up something scandalous (or at least start taking pictures of my food) if that's still the case whenever the jeans do come in.

[louisbosco]

oh whatever comes around during your time with them is welcomed. food is most definitely welcomed 

[chicote]

Alas! I "took delivery", in Volvo's words, of the jeans around noon this morning, actually literally as I was on my way into the city. I hastily made my way back inside to put 'em on and barely made my bus anyway!

 

Here's the fit:

 

I have been horribly neglecting an article that I started late last week, following an alleged case of employee discrimination in a local political campaign. Given the nature of the case I'd like to get it out as quickly as possible, but first, I'll do a quick write-up of my walk to the cafe, where I am chugging espresso and typing madly, eyes bulging, in a cold sweat! (Not really.)

 

The neighborhood in the first picture is the International District, which some folks are apt to call "Chinatown" as of late. Why? I'm not sure—there is a great deal of international diversity in this small neighborhood, and the most famous locale in the whole area is a Japanese grocer called Uwajimaya, which I'll make sure to return to at some point (to immediately pique some folks' interest, they offer single-issues and discounted subscriptions to both Lightning and Clutch magazines!)

 

From that first photo, I turned left and continued down towards the water, into a neighborhood called Pioneer Square. This is basically "old Seattle" and in the past few years has taken to advertising itself as such. Brick buildings, statues and plazas—for what else better exemplifies North American history—await us!

 

 

We'll start with the old fire station. BORING! you might say. Well, yes, it is, but these firefighters also saved our asses during the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, which destroyed this entire neighborhood (and practically the whole city!) in that antiquated time. During the city's reconstruction, builders—perhaps still blinded by smoke—decided to rebuild Pioneer Square on top of the old Pioneer Square... yes, you read that right... so this neighborhood now sits on top of an entire abandoned underground city! This underground city has a multiplicity of uses, none of which are being examined, because a fucking tour company owns exclusive rights to the exploration of the entire Seattle underground. (The tour, though, is pretty cool, and a required part of the Seattle Public School District's public elementary school curriculum).

 

 

Entering a plaza, now. This area, formerly a bustling centre of commerce, is now relegated to a holding place for strange statues and recreational activities... Actually, I watched these folks play for a while, they were pretty good!

 

 

The site of the old Rainier Beer brewery sat right behind our ping-pong-playing pair; if you stare long enough, you might be able to see the outline of the old advertisement painted on the side of the building... whoever is responsible for preserving this building I hope has had a talking-to... Behind the advertisement we see the entrance to "Comedy Underground", which is apparently one of the more famous clubs in the city, and an important stop on most famous comedians' US tours. I'm not into comedy much, so take my layman's explanation for what you will.

 

 

Turning right now, we cross the street and enter an alley. What strange treasures might await us here?

 

 

Hey, this is actually kind of pretty. This alley is probably bolstering the entire city's hanging-plant-holder industry on its own!

 

 

On one side is this cool mural. There is actually a lot of really great street art in this part of town, which I'll make sure to get to on my next trip into this part of town.

 

 

I was wondering when we'd see something scandalous in this alley, and at the end we finally come across our culprit... a seagull, stuffing an ENTIRE ROLL into its mouth at once!! It didn't even wipe its mouth afterwards! That seagull knew it was caught as soon as it saw me pull out my camera, and waddled ahead of me without making eye contact until we were both out of the alley. Goodness knows how it was able to breathe with all that in its mouth!

 

 

Across the street we come across another ode to old firefighters, how nice. There are plaques all over the place saying different things about them, but I can't read any of them, so make up whatever you'd like about these guys. In the back you'll see another recreational plaza—this one seems to be made for a huge game of musical chairs.

 

(continued)

[chicote]

The last statue on our journey is a bust of Chief Seattle, who, as I've heard someone once say, died so that we could found this city on his grave. Seattle, or Si'ahl, was a Duwamish chief who strove to accomodate the white settlers who arrived here in the mid-1800s. He was eventually culled into a position of relative powerlessness when the settlers created a single reservation for both the Duwamish and neighboring Snohomish tribes, who had been at somewhat violent odds with each other for centuries. Though the Duwamish, Snohomish, Suquamish, and other surrounding tribes eventually combined forces against the more pressing danger of European settlers in the newly formed Washington territory, none could defeat the newcomers, whose artillery staved off a number of indigenous-led sieges. The settlers eventually changed the name of their well-defended city from Duwamps to Seattle in honor of the chief's kind acquiescence to their desires, a decade or so before his death.







Finally, the kilt shop, which i visited once on a whim. The owner knows a lot about fabrics, and even has a kilt model made from selvedge denim from Kaihara mills. Unfortunately, the leg opening on all his offerings was a bit wide for my liking.







And the coffee shop... Unoriginal, I know—there are lots of these in Seattle—but at least this is the original one, which makes it doubly unoriginal and thus original once again.



Cool, well maybe I'll write some quick thoughts about these jeans too. The rise is quite low compared to practically every other pair of jeans I own, which is going to take some getting used to. The color coming through on the thighs is a shockingly bright blue. They're creasing a bit differently on my legs as they apparently have on others, whoops! But hey, they fit pretty well, and the fabric still has plenty of "wool feather" as the Japanese Yahoo listings call it. Here's a quick photo (don't mind me, other cafe customers, just gonna stand up and take a picture of my pants...)







Great, I'm excited for the upcoming month! See y'all soon!

[Maynard Friedman]

Great start chicote, kicking this tour back into life with a bang. Wunderbar!

[volvo240thebest]

Superb post Chicote! great to see that

a you "took delivery" of the tour pants, haha!

b Seattle! didn't realize you were from there. I spent a couple days off during a Canada tour in your city back in 2004 (or maybe 2005). cool place! Baby Gramps is still around?

c your mullet is as wild as ever!!! keep it up!

[chicote]

hahah, cheers both of you!

 

yes, I grew up from age 10 to 18 in Seattle; most of my formative years, so to speak. But my heart is in Canada! I can't deal with the bad driving and football fanaticism here, and the influx of tech employees isn't great either. But, as you kindly pointed out, there are plenty of charming bits of this city, Baby Gramps only being one. I actually haven't seen him for a few years, but he used to busk quite often at the Folklife festival that happens downtown each August. Perhaps I'll run into him on my way around the city this month!

[garden gnomes in space]

nice.  I grew up in Seattle, always like seeing updates.  I used to go to Uwajimaya for these dope Japanese stickers

[Sugar Mountain]

Bonus points if you can include photos of any grunge survivors. I still love a number of those Seattle bands!

[louisbosco]

nice. never been to seattle. good to see it from your leg. keep it up!

[oomslokop]

agree with @sm, some thick-reading on grunge sites/artefacts would smell like jeans spirit. take us to seattle's superunknowns @chicote!  

[chicote]

Hi everyone!

 

 

This morning I got up real early to bike into the city. This is just at the start of the "Portal to the Pacific", which is a very official-sounding name for the underground bike tunnel that goes above I-90:

 

 

Nice and patriotic. Anyway, I was in a big rush to get breakfast (and to capture some grungy places before work, of course!) So much that I clearly risked life and limb getting this moving picture going a whopping 21 miles per hour! I feel lucky to be alive, honestly.

 

 

All that danger eventually paid off, as I arrived at my first sort-of grungy destination: the Lost Lake diner on Capitol Hill. I didn't feel comfortable enough to take a photo of the inside of the place, as anyone who saw me would probably spit in my food, and I forgot to take one afterwards, so here's a dark photo of the sign from the sidewalk where I locked my bike:

 

 

I had a scrambled-up thing of vegetables and toast and coffee. (Only the vegetables were scrambled; the toast and coffee came on their own.)

 

Then I sauntered over to the park for a bit! Sorry, totally neglecting my duties, but it was like 7:30 and I felt as though I had time to spare.

 

http://s32.postimg.org/mh5c1x18l/image.jpg (ran out of images in this post)

 

Here we are at Cal Anderson park. This field is usually full of drunk people and street kids, and occasionally there's a rec baseball team or pickup frisbee game, but apparently all those folks wanted to sleep in. Actually, the only people around were some people filming a skate video on the basketball court to my left. I wanted to take a photo but thought better of it; whatever their video ends up being will probably go onto the internet at some point anyway.

 

Right now I'm reading a book called Imperial, by William T. Vollman, for my undergrad thesis. The book is a 1,200 page history of Imperial County, the southeasternmost county in California, bordering Arizona to the east and Mexico to the south. I'm reading it because Vollman admits the book has a couple of premises that fit with my thesis. He states openly that he wants to "not only delineate an arbitrary, semi-imaginary area called Imperial, but also investigate how and why delineations are made" in the broader scheme of things. His is an exhausting study of the area's natural and human history, every bit of its land and water, its people—both legal and illegal (the first 50 pages are a fascinating ethnography of US Border patrol staff and the "bodies" [undocumented Latin American immigrants] they try to stop from entering the country, with all sorts of different dynamics at play all the while: bribes and passes, "coyotes" [professional traffickers], and the admittance that illegal labor makes up, by some estimates, more than 50% of the agricultural labor in California) and as much else as Vollman can seem to scrape together. Through this, he attempts to reach a second conclusion: that through conducting exhaustive-enough research of a particular topic, one can get closer to the "truth" of that topic, and by extension, get close to "truth" at all, which is quite an undertaking. Anyway, I'll stop writing about this and move on. But here's the book:

 

 

And here's when I got distracted and took a picture of the Denimes:

 

 

Such great fabric!

 

Okay, better get back to it now:

 

Wait, first—

 

 

I caught my foot on an uneven bit of sidewalk on my way up the hill from the highway and have pretty much spelled my poor knockoff Vans' end... They cost me $3 in Ecuador, lasted me a year or so, and probably will last me a few more days before really cutting loose. I was meaning to post this in the Shoes that look better with age thread, but didn't want to steal all the rep from the other folks, so I'll just tuck this little obituary in here instead.

 

Leaving the park now:

 

 

Crossing the rainbow sidewalk, which is practically every sidewalk now on this part of Capitol Hill. This is historically the LGBTQ stomping ground, so to speak, of the city, in a similar vein to Castro in San Francisco. Oh, speaking of which, Cal Anderson, who was a state legislator in the 40s, and who is the namesake of the park I was just at, was Washington State's first openly gay legislator. Perhaps Garden Gnomes has some more insight on the history of the neighborhood? I grew up here in the 2000s, shit was tired already. Oh, speaking of which, Capitol Hill is one of the two battlegrounds of gentrification in the city nowadays, the other being South Lake Union. Except Capitol Hill actually has a significant amount of history, as well as a large proportion of artists, musicians, and other things important to the culture of a city, while South Lake Union is mostly abandoned warehouses. I've probably talked about this before on this forum, so I'll cut it here unless anyone wants to hear more...

 

And here we find some GRUNGE! Finally! No more of my drivel, here's what you've all been waiting for!

 

 

Yes, here it is!

 

 

The Comet Tavern, in all its glory! This is one of the few surviving relics of this neighborhood's grungy glory days. The beer is cheap and nobody takes any of your shit, as evidenced by the sign. But, they weren't open this early, so I'll have to pursue my 90s day-drinking fantasies for you all some other day.

 

(continued)

Edited May 18, 2016 by chicote

[chicote]

Instead, I went to get a coffee across the street:



Caffe Vita is one of the OG's of the pretentious coffee movement in Seattle, a movement which I may make fun of at times but am still wholeheartedly a part of, seeing as I pay more than $3 for an Americano. But it's supposedly going to a good cause, as Caffe Vita was an early proponent for developing direct relationships with coffee farmers, and bypassing the fair trade of coffee, pioneering the Farm Direct movement, sourcing coffee while developing long-term, mutually fruitful relationships with coffee growers in more than 11 countries. (most of that sentence was directly quoted from Wikipedia)

So, I had my coffee at breakfast, and now my mid-morning coffee; made some more progress on this godforsaken article; and now it's time to hit the road again!



Wait—first, here's the local paper. No idea what this front cover is about, but I do like this paper a lot and have written for them a couple of times. If y'all ever want to get a fix of snarky Seattle news, find a phone-sex hotline, buy cheap weed, or get your horoscope delivered in flowery prose, here's where you can do it!

Alright, well, here we go, to the big city! Yee-haw!



Wow, this city is big! This is the downtown area with Nordstrom and Starbucks and, if you go down far enough, Pike Place Market; it's also the site of one of the most important protests in US history: the 1999 WTO protests, which I've linked to if anybody wants to learn about. Crazy stuff—these protests directly led to a change in nature among US police departments, a shift in the importance of independent media, a renewed faith in the efficacy of mass protest and a second wave of furor that was eventually channeled into the world's anti-globalization movement. But, nowadays it's business as usual in downtown: horns are honkin', pedestrians are walkin' and shops are open as scheduled!



On the way down the hill we pass the Paramount, which is an old theater that's now used as a venue for musical and theatrical performances. Not really grunge, but nice place!



All the way down now, into the bowels of the city: Westlake Station. A giant mall sits on top of this station, and you can even take an elevator directly up to Nordstrom from the bus stop! Modern convenience at its finest!



The station's pretty spacious, and saved me a long trip on the bike. I took the subway from Westlake...



...all the way to Beacon Hill, which, as its name implies, is a freakin' massive hill! From there, I biked down and through Sodo (stands for South of Downtown), where there are lots of cool murals. Some choice ones:





...and eventually I got to work.

I work at a place in West Seattle called the [redacted for my privacy], which is a café by day and a bar by night. Pretty uneventful day, I'd say, except that one of my friends got back from a trip and stopped in, and the owner brought in a projector and showed Beyonce's Lemonade video-album while I mixed sake and lemon mojitos. As far as pop culture goes, it was very cool. And as soon as it was over, I got to leave!



Here's me on the way out. Perhaps it's the biking, but these Denimes are starting to get really comfortable—even the rise is nice now. I'll be hard-pressed to send these on in 29 days...

 

(there was a nice picture of Uwajimaya here but I don't have any more space in this post)

Finally, I went to the climbing gym for a bit, but forgot my phone, and then sautéed some mushrooms and other things for a burrito, which was good but probably not photo-worthy. I feel like these are sounding like diary entries.

Okay, that's all! Thanks! Any other requests, please fax or post in this thread and I'll try and get around to them (haven't forgotten the grunge one either). Bye!

Edited May 18, 2016 by chicote

[spitfiredealer]

Great Post!! Look forward to the next one

[Sugar Mountain]

Strong work Chicote. And Alice in Chains are playing at the Paramount - that's as grunge as it gets!

[oomslokop]

great chicote. i love vollmann, his butterfly stories is still the only book i've read where a white western male author can describe asia (thailand) with anything resembling the truth. maybe thanks to all the exhaustingive research he's done. 

[mandel9000]

Great updates, chicote! And thanks for the book tip too, I'll read it before my (road)trip to California in October. 

 

Also, a current upper thigh measurement would be most welcome. I'm a bit worried about my leg (in all senses) of the tour. 

[redragon]

Solid entry Chicote!

Maybe a trip to Filson flagship store or Heller's Cafe would be really dope.

[chicote]

Thanks everyone!

You're right, SM- totally missed that. That'll probably be a cool show!

Mandel, the upper thigh is just under 28cm by my measurements:

(I measured both thighs, this one just looked better for a photo)

I've got actually a decent amount of room in the thighs now that I've worn them for a couple of days, so they could hypothetically stretch a bit more if need be.

Redragon, I had no idea there was a heller's cafe here! I'll go check it out, heading that direction today anyway.

Edited May 18, 2016 by chicote

[garden gnomes in space]

haha, I grew up in West Seattle.  shit has changed so much from when i was there tho.  I lived in seattle from 1980 to 2004-ish and then i moved to San Francisco so I cant really offer any insight other than I miss the Comet.  and taco time

[mandel9000]

Thanks, chicote! Phew, should be alright then.

[Rightyow77]

glad to see these get some proper wear. I apologize to everyone for my absence it was a tough couple weeks for me dealing with some personal stuff. I am not one to flake, but alas I apologize for my uncharacteristic absence. All the best and big thanks to Ian for being such a homie.

Edited May 20, 2016 by Rightyow77

[greathoudini]

I hope all is allright Rightyow

[chicote]

Hi everyone!

 

My dearest apologies for being out of commission the last few days. I got called into work suddenly on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then worked double shifts from Thursday on. Sorry, this probably isn't interesting at all. But one interesting development has been... dun-dun-dun... I washed the grease trap at work last night... which means I also washed the Denimes!!! They spent today hanging dry outside, so the following photos were taken WITHOUT THEM ON!! I apologize in advance and admit to any accusations of sacrilege; just know that they were on my mind the entire day. These really are my favorite jeans right now! And I will make sure to take some photos of them tomorrow morning, 'cause they are lookin' fi-i-ine in the sunlight! But, I digress, on to my Denimeless (and thus Deni-meaningless, ha!) day:

 

 

Well, it all started when I went to the record store to pick up this great album! This is actually well into the afternoon, but I spent the morning doing boring stuff, like laundry, that isn't worth documenting (though some pants-washers here might disagree). Some thoughts on this album: it's great, great band, great to see in concert (they played in Vancouver a few nights before I returned to Seattle from Canada), great artwork, great lyrics, yada yada. It's one of the only CDs I had in my car a while back, so I've listened to it a billion times, and they just released a new album, but it was too expensive so I got this one instead. This is starting to be an eventful Sunday, as I'm sure you all can tell...

 

As I walked back to my car in the faraway free parking zone, I passed many things emblematic of "new Seattle":

 

 

A giant mural painted on the side of what used to be the sketchy old liquor store (I think some of their shaping-up has to do with a police station coming up across the street from it...)

 

 

The Scratch Deli, the spot of my first-ever poetry slam performance! Even though my local slam has had its differences with this place, it's still close to my heart, as there used to be a great community of poets who would come out here every week to listen to and support one another, and it's where I first developed confidence as a poet, speaker and writer in general. My friend told me tonight that nostalgia is a poison so I'm going to cut it here.

 

 

Oh, just kidding! I got my first "real" job (aka not selling clothes on eBay) off of a poster like this, although it wasn't for this exact organization. Mostly disenfranchised teenagers and street kids make up the working population of these sorts of positions, which include canvassing (I did, for Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union), putting up posters, working phone banks... name a means of spreading political propaganda, and you'll probably find a lightpost in Seattle looking to pay someone to do it for them.

 

I actually ran into the poster that I got my old job from a few blocks further down:

 

 

Side note: Propaganda is a loaded term, but I'm not sure what other word to use for this sort of thing. It's not always the most effective or efficient way of raising awareness of or money for an issue, and certain canvassing organizations are pretty inefficient with their money (meaning they "scrape a little off the top" a little too often), but I sincerely think it's an important way to politicize people who might otherwise be apathetic about their ability to generate change, or at least serve as the catalyst for some greater form of political engagement. I think folks who take these jobs have good intentions, of course, and many of them work their asses off—I know I did—for shit pay, no benefits, and a lot of harassment on the street. People shout things from their cars, dump their drinks on you (someone once poured a latte on me on a 95-degree day and I had to spend hours scrubbing congealed milk out of my clothes and hair), stand near and shout at and sometimes physically threaten you; and I know the women, people of color, and queer and trans folks that worked with me had a much harder time than I did even being able to last the day out there sometimes. Anyway, this is all just me saying that there's often a lot more going on behind the frantic streetside sales pitch you'll get from canvassers, and that acknowledgement and respect, at the very least, makes such a huge difference in these folks' lives. Okay, thanks for reading that whole thing...

 

 

Oh, here's a cool new Seattle thing! Check out these two buildings. Seattle used to be full of buildings like this one on the right, and now they are slowly all being taken down and replaced with buildings that look—for some indescribable reason—like this one on the left. To any architects on this forum: why do modern apartment buildings always look like this? Has the optimal potential for aesthetic deliverance and quality-of-life been achieved within these weirdly-colored sheet-metal cubes? Is it, like, a cost-cutting thing? Do these buildings come in pieces and with little hieroglyphic instructions as if they're from IKEA? Gosh, i'm sorry to be so snarky today, I'm not sure what's come over me.

 

I'm going to skip the rest of the tour of Capitol Hill because it's probably not interesting to read and makes me a bit sad.

 

Later in the afternoon I went climbing. Here's a quick photo I took of the bouldering gym—quick, meaning as-fast-as-possible; I still haven't gotten over my fear of photographing strangers.

 

 

Note the nearly-ubiquitous beard gracing the faces of so many of the men in the above photo—another puzzling Seattle trend. I, whose facial fuzz is patchy at best, am instantly an outsider.

[chicote]

Okay, Garden Gnomes (and everyone else), get ready... I'm going to West Seattle!!!!

 

I went to West Seattle to meet some friends, and totally forgot to take photos of practically everything, so I'll make sure to do that next time I'm over there. In the meantime:

 

 

I drove over with this rad song playing in the car, had a great urge to smoke a cigarette, but then realized I ran out! Ah! Perhaps it's good. A few days ago, I was diagnosed, on the bus, by an off-duty doctor, with emphysema, which, sketchy as that diagnosis might be, still frightened me a great deal, and made me quite sad. (I love writing comma-filled sentences like that.) I'm still waiting on an actual diagnosis, but I've since stopped smoking, and have mostly stayed inside, which is another reason for my absence the last few days. Anyway, wow, what a segue. West Seattle!

 

 

West Seattle, via my dirty-ass windshield.

 

 

Seattle Seattle, via a viewpoint in West Seattle. The Space Needle is over to the left, to make this somewhat interesting.

 

 

A very cool totem pole at the side of this lookout (which is right on the side of Admiral Way, one of the main streets in this part of town). I was going to list off some interesting things about it, but I actually just took a picture of the plaque, so here's that:

 

 

I don't know if it was the Cuban sandwich I'd recently eaten or what, but this beautiful old truck was parked just up the hill from my car when I got back from the lookout:

 

 

Below is the most superfluous speed-metre in the entire world, probably. I've never seen a single person go 30 miles an hour up this hill. (I pulled over to take this photo of the first person that drove by behind me... originally they were going too fast for the metre to even read, and then slowed down to a nice 42.)

 

 

Okay, sorry, I actually didn't take a SINGLE picture of West Seattle while I was here... but I'm here all the time, so I'll get around to it. What I DID take a picture of, though—and I dearly hope one particular forum member sees this—is:

 

 

 

Oh yeah!!!

 

Alright, well sorry for this pretty uninteresting post. I'll get out my actual camera and take some denim photos tomorrow morning! Thanks everyone!

[chicote]

A bit late, but I am following through!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some thoughts:

-this fabric is really dense and dry—it feels like my SDAs, almost.

-I love the intense blue coming through all around the top block.

-the fading pattern is pretty funny—it seems like the jeans are just choosing random places to lose indigo, almost. Perhaps that's common with world tour jeans.

-Very little roping or puckering anywhere.

-The fabric is so hairy! But I can't really capture it in this light or with my photo-taking skills. I will get around to it, though!

 

That's all, bye!

[louisbosco]

hahaha. where are the random places that you mentioned?? i have to say the rear beltloop is partly me because of the whole month of backpack carrying in japan.     

Edited May 25, 2016 by louisbosco

[Maynard Friedman]

They're losing indigo in random places like Tokyo, Queensland and Seattle.

[chicote]

^That's exactly what I meant

 

Thanks for explaining the belt loop thing Louis, that was one of the confusing bits. The other is the top of the coin pocket. And the whiskers are a bit strange, in that they're fading almost exclusively towards the outside of the legs. And there are horizontal stripes across the back yoke! Spooky stuff going on with these jeans...

Edited May 25, 2016 by chicote

[garden gnomes in space]

nice man.  that street with the weird speed meter is Admiral way, right?  That used to be a huge speed trap when i was in high school and at 6:30am and 17 years old it was easy to space out and end up going 55 down it haha