Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

Fremont Solstice Parade 2004

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2005 Update: In case you’ve come here from a Google search looking for more recent pics, all my shots from the 2005 Solstice Parade can be found right here.

Read on for my original post about the 2004 Solstice Parade…

I got back a while ago from spending the day at the Fremont Solstice Parade and Festival. I had a wonderful time — the weather was incredible, and the parade was a blast. I’m hot, tired, and a bit sunburnt (next time I head out I’ll need to remember to bring the sunblock with me, rather than just putting some on before I leave), but it was very worth it.

Fremont Solstice Parade, Seattle, WAThe Fremont parade has quite a few things going for it that put it a step above most other parades I’ve been to. Specifically, three things: no corporate sponsorship, no motorized vehicles (human powered contraptions only), and lastly, apparently all it takes to be part of the parade is deciding you want to and showing up with whatever costume, show, or gimmick you want. It’s wonderful.

Fremont Solstice Parade, Seattle, WAOf course, one of the most notorious aspects of the Fremont Solstice parade is the annual kickoff group of naked cyclists. They were certainly out in full force this year, most wearing nothing more than body paint, and a few eschewing even that minimal level of coloring. The bodypaint work was often incredibly well done, to the point where some of the cyclists looked far more like they were wearing full-body skintight bodysuits than actually naked. Bold splashes of color, racing stripes, flowers, animal prints, or just full-body solid colors abounded.

Of course, the most amusing side effect of wearing naught but body paint was obvious anytime one of the cyclists stood on the pedals. They’d raise up off their seat, and suddenly you’d get a quick flash of bare skin as the bodypaint stuck to the seat of the bike and left their suddenly unpainted rump standing out in the midst of the rest of the paint.

Fremont Solstice Parade, Seattle, WAMembers of the Utiliklan were part of the parade, too. A group of seven men in kilts strode down the parade route to the whistles and admiring cheers of the crowds lining the road. Every so often they’d pause for a moment to work the crowd, egging on the cheers and yells, until finally, when they deemed the time was right, they’d line up facing one side of the road or the other, bend down…

Fremont Solstice Parade, Seattle, WA…and with a quick flip of the wrist, they quite handily answered the age-old question of just what a real man wears underneath his kilt.

Of course, when I got up this morning and saw the weather, I’d donned my kilt for the day’s festivities. Not long after I’d arrived in Fremont I’d shucked off my shirt as well, just wearing a light vest and my kilt. When the Utiliklan made it down to where I was standing, it didn’t take long at all for them to notice me standing there — and the next thing I knew, I had all of them plus a few of the people around me on the sidelines declaring that I was to join them in the street.

Fremont Solstice Parade, Seattle, WAI had to do it. Obviously, I couldn’t get any pictures of my impromptu foray into mooning a few hundred total strangers — probably a good thing, too — but given the number of cameras around that day, I may have some ‘splaining to do should any pictures surface during my eventual presidential candidacy! ;)

Fremont Solstice Parade, Seattle, WAAs the parade went on, the revelry, music, and general weirdness continued unabated. A troupe of bellydancers came by, with four dancers preceding them dancing with some long red scarves. Suddenly I realized that one of the first dancers I’d seen before — she’s friends with Don and Chad, and had done a private interpretive dance at last Halloween’s party at Don and Chad’s house. I don’t believe she saw me, and she may not have remembered me even if she did notice me in the crowd, but it was fun to realize that I actually recognized her.

Fremont Solstice Parade, Seattle, WAI’m not sure at all what the deal with the dancing bananas was, but there they were, complete with gorilla bounding around from one side of the street to the other. Does there really need to be a coherent reason?

Fremont Solstice Parade, Seattle, WASome of the floats that appear in the parade are just incredible to see. As there are no motorized vehicles allowed in the parade, everything has to be either foot- or pedal-powered, and more than a few contraptions used a combination of the two.

Fremont Solstice Parade, Seattle, WAAnd eventually, after about an hour or so, the parade came to an end. Or, really, the official parade came to an end, as it ended up picking up a huge crowd of former parade watchers tacking themselves on to the end of the line as it proceeded down the street and into Gas Works park. I spent the next couple hours wandering around a good five square blocks (I think, I didn’t explore the entire area) of Fremont had been closed off and turned into a street festival area, then proceeded back down the parade route down to Gas Works Park.

Eventually I decided that I’d had enough sun, and found my way back to a bus route and came back home. Now that I’m showered, slathered down with Aloe lotion, and have tossed this post up, I’m off to grab a nap for a couple hours, as I’ve got a concert to go to tonight: Sister Machine Gun at the Fenix!

The rest of the parade photos are right here (some are NSFW).

iTunes: “Destillat (VNV Nation)” by Das Ich from the album Re_Laborat (2001, 6:08).

Of Course It’s Creepy!

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(Note: the following was originally a reply to some of the questions raised in the comments discussing an upcoming Tim Burton/Johnny Depp version of Roald Dahl‘s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. My response became long enough that I decided to give it a post of its own rather than “bl-hog” my own blog.)

I have to comment on this one : What is it with this movie [Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory] that people love it so much? It’s one of the creepiest films I’ve ever seen in my life.

Obviously I can’t speak for everyone, but as for myself, I think the creepiness is one of the major factors in just why I enjoy it.

I’ve always had a fascination for the dark, creepy, and bizarre — I count H.R. Giger as one of my favorite artists, and William S. Burroughs as one of my favorite authors, for instance — and Roald Dahl’s writing is right up my alley. It’s amusing really. So many people have this image of Dahl writing “children’s” books, born of hazy memories of the film version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the stop-motion animation version of James and the Giant Peach, the Jim Henson version of The Witches, and so on. And to be sure, they are children’s books, however, they’re children’s books far closer in spirit to the original Grimm Brothers fairy tales than the pablum that passes for children’s literature today.

For some reason, our society seems to have decided that children need to be coddled, pandered to, and generally sheltered at any cost from the darker areas of life (while at the same time using the television as a babysitter without bothering to supervise what the children are watching…but that’s a rant for another time). Playgrounds are torn down and rebuilt to try to prevent the merest hint of the possibility of injury, classic fairy tales are “Disney-fied” to remove elements that are deemed inappropriate (no matter that they survived unaltered for tens and sometimes hundreds of years before that without our culture spontaneously imploding), toys are re-engineered from good solid long-lasting metal to flimsy plastic that doesn’t have any sharp corners but that breaks in months rather than years, and so on.

Children aren’t stupid, though. They know that life isn’t all sunshine and roses. From the first time they fall and skin a knee, or find their goldfish floating upside down in its bowl, or any number of any other day to day minor tragedies, children are no strangers to the darker side of life. They don’t approach these events in the same way that older people do, though — more often then not, after the initial trauma wears off, they’re curious and want to know the “why’s” behind what just happened — and this simple acceptance is so alien to our over-analytical “adult” minds that we fool ourselves into thinking that the children don’t understand. They do, though. They may not have the finer details and the subtleties down, they may not see it the same way adults do, but they understand.

The Grimm brothers understood this when they wrote their classic stories. Their tales were dark and disturbing, full of violence, abusive situations, scary moments, and everything that we seem to try to shield our children from in this overly “PC” day and age. But the stories had messages and morals to them that were passed onto the children that read them or heard them from their parents, and those messages and morals were probably all the more effective because they used the imaginations of the children, and the innate ability of the child’s mind to accept dragons, beasties, ghoulies, and things that go bump in the night just as easily as they accept rainbows, fairies, unicorns, and cute little gnomes living under toadstools.

Dahl also understands this in his children’s stories. His characters are flawed, rarely ever entirely good or entirely bad. They find themselves in fantastical situations that can be as wonderously exciting as they are chilling. His heroes learn the lessons that they should, but it’s never an easy course. No triumph is ever as sweet as that which carries a real risk of dismal failure, and if that simple truth is neglected, then the audience — whether an audience of one turning the pages of a book, or an theater audience watching an adventure unfurl on the screen — is cheated.

Some of the best “children’s” literature is that which doesn’t pander to the age group that the story is aimed at (and because of this, can often be enjoyed long past childhood and into adulthood). Along with Dahl and the Brothers Grimm, L. Frank Baum’s Oz books often took very dark turns, I’ve heard good things about Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (though I’ve yet to read it myself), J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books keep getting darker and darker (and better, and more popular) as the series progresses…I’m sure there are many, many other authors and examples that could be added to this list.

Yes, both the book and the movie of Charlie and the Chocolate factory are creepy — but that’s exactly as it should be, and that’s one of the reasons I think that the Burton/Depp collaboration could do an incredible job of re-creating the story (assuming, that is, that Burton doesn’t pull another Planet of the Apes out of his hat). I, for one, am hoping for the best.

Rights

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The rich have the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more gizmos than anyone else, more clothes and vacations than anyone else. But they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else.

— Bill Moyers, “The Fight of our Lives”

iTunes: “Satellite” by Pigface from the album Preaching to the Perverted (1992, 4:11).

Metroblogging

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A potentially interesting and useful new regional groupblog project: Metroblogging.

event listings to general rants, photos to reviews – metblogs are a hyper-local look at what’s going on in the city. a group of regional bloggers give each site a new perspective on daily life. less calendar listing, more friendly advice.

Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco are live; Atlanta, Boston, DC, Miami, Orange County, Seattle, Dublin, London, Tokyo and Toronto are currently on the ‘coming soon’ list; and they’re looking for local writers.

Could be good, could be little more than a regional LiveJournal community with a set list of contributors (though I hope it grows beyond that). We’ll just have to see as they grow and evolve.

Back when I lived in Anchorage and was webmaster for the Gig’s Music Theatre site, I toyed for a while with creating a similar site for Anchorage, keeping track of events, venues, bands, hangouts, and the like (in fact, there’s actually some slight evidence of the project, in a request for a photo of Anchorage to use for a header graphic in the Schedule/News section of the Gig’s site). Unfortunately, at the time my technical skills weren’t up to what I had in mind, and the project ended up falling by the wayside. Metroblogging looks to be fairly similar to what I had in mind at the time, so I’m definitely interested in keeping an eye out on this one.

Years ahead of everybody else, and nobody will ever know. That’s me! ;)

(via Boing Boing)

iTunes: “Higher State of Consciousness (Original Tweekin’ Acid Funk)” by Wink from the album Higher State of Consciousness (’96 Remixes) (1996, 6:16).

On keeping promises

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Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m impressed.

According to Google I am the # 7 most important Matt in the world. When I reach the top of that list I’m going to take my website down.

And would you look at that — he actually did it.

iTunes: “Zoo Station” by U2 from the album Achtung Baby (1991, 4:36).

Could be brilliant or horrible

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Coming in 2005 — a new film version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Directed by Tim Burton.

Starring Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka.

Hmmmmmmm…

It’s hard for me to see anyone surpassing the inspired lunacy of Gene Wilder as Wonka, but I do tend to like Burton/Depp collaborations. Reserving judgement for now, but it could be worth keeping an eye on.

(via Ryan)

iTunes: “Peter Bazooka” by Dead Milkmen, The from the album Death Rides a Pale Cow (1995, 3:07).

Jay and Silent Bob want you to vote

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Kevin Smith is directing a series of short commercials where various stars urge people to go out and vote. According to Smith, one of the shorts will feature “a pair of stoners who’re coming out of semi-retirement for the cause.”

Okay, folks. If Jay and Silent Bob are going to be voting, you’ve got no excuse not to. ;)

iTunes: “Moodswings” by Purple Nine from the album Essential Chillout (1999, 5:05).

Incoming!

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Tonight on my way home from work, I noticed (but, unfortunately, wasn’t able to get a picture of) an absolutely stunningly beautiful sunset. Off to the west, there was an immense cloud bank hanging in the sky, a little puffy on the bottom, but with a huge wall of cloud reaching straight up into the sky catching the light from the setting sun, making the entire cloud glow rosy against the pale blue of the evening sky.

The real significance of that cloud formation didn’t dawn on me until later in the evening, though, after the sun finished setting. I was feeling a little cooped up here at the apartment, so I took a quick run through the shower and headed up the hill to Neighbours to check out their 80’s night, which I hadn’t been to in a good couple of years or so. On the way up I thought I caught some odd flashes of light, but I wasn’t entirely sure, and figured it was just headlights reflecting off of windows.

A few hours later, though, on the way home — no more doubts. While locally the weather is still quite warm and dry, with just a slight breeze to cool things off, flash after flash after flash has been lighting up the night sky as what appears to be a fairly major thunderstorm rumbles along somewhere off to the southwest of Seattle. I counted at least twelve to fifteen flashes bright enough to light up the entire sky, and a few more smaller ones higher in the banks of clouds. I only occasionally caught any thunder rolling past, though, so either the strikes are pretty far away or quite high in the clouds, or both. Still, every so often I’d be treated to that deep bass rumble.

I spent the entire walk home with a huge grin on my face, too. Neither southern Alaska nor western Washington are exactly renowned for their thunderstorms, so when the odd one comes through, I revel in it.

iTunes: “Dreaming (Libra)” by BT from the album Dreaming (2000, 9:18).

Pest control

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Rick came over to hang out for a bit last night, and brought along Once Upon a Time in Mexico, the latest in Robert Rodriguez’ Mariachi series. Very violent and very entertaining, but after a single watching, I’m not entirely sure I’ve really got the faintest clue quite what happened, as much of the movie consists of every character double- and triple-crossing every other character. Rick assures me that it all works out consistently — for now, I’ll just have to take his word for it. Even without total comprehension, though, it was at least good brainless fun to watch Antonio Banderas and Johnny Depp wreak havoc for a couple hours.

I’ve got a mouse in my apartment. I’m not really terribly concerned about this, as it’s kind of cute, and not a bother at all, I just occasionally catch it skittering around the corners of my room out of the corner of my eye. As Rick and I were talking last night, though, Rick started to pull a cigarette out of his pack and accidentally dropped one on the floor.

“Have a smoke — or two,” I said.

Rick laughed as he bent down to pick up the one he dropped. “That one was for the mouse.”

“Oh, I see,” I said. “Tricky. No need to buy traps or anything inhumane like that. We’ll just give the little shit cancer and wait. We’re patient.”

This mouse has met his match.

iTunes: “Switchblade 327” by Brian Setzer Orchestra, The from the album Dirty Boogie, The (1998, 3:30).