Day 30: Spokane, WA
Nau mai
Yesterday we played at The Knitting Factory in the eastern reaches of the state of Washington.
We awoke to a pleasant day in Spokane, the moderate temperatures of the Pacific Northwest providing a welcome escape from searing days in the southwestern states. It was breakfast time and I was ready to give the most important meal of the day the respect it deserved. I picked up my paintbrush and began to create, drawing from the rather limited palette in the buses storage cupboards but still finding richness and depth in every element.
I began with a trio of berries, handpicked out of their punnets to select only those with beautiful forms. I toasted two slices of bread to a perfect auburn, adding slabs of butter and allowing them to soften before spreading. The salty breakfast tar was added next, smeared amongst the chaos sewn by this melting dairy fat. A refrigerated fragment of chocolate was the final stroke I added, its perfect temper retained within the chilled substance right up until the moment it was bitten.
Gabe’s birthday celebration continued. We were setting up the stage when Annie arrived with a gift, the best shrimp meal she could find in Spokane - a full 90-degree sector of this extremely uniform crustacean
We were back at The Knitting Factory. It must have been our third or fourth time inside this venue. It is a classic mid sized room, the only quirk being that you need to ride an elevator to get to the green room and this can create a logistical bottleneck when you need to get to the stage in a hurry.
Gabe and I both called upon Liz to carry out her duties as the chief hair cutter of The Beths touring party. While she carried out most of her training as a self-fringe-cutter these skills translate quite effectively as long as you communicate your instructions in the right way. “Just an inch off my neck fringe please”, or “I would like my side fringes extremely short and curved around the ears”.
We had a delightful golden hour walk through the streets of Spokane as we travelled to a dinner spot. Feats of architectural greatness spoke to us with their shape and line. The City Ramp Garage was the first structure to grab our attention, and it is without a doubt the most beautiful multistorey parking garage in existence. Built in 1928, it was the first building in Spokane constructed in the Art Deco style. The six stories and 350 parking spaces of this staggered-floor, ramp type parking garage were intended to solve an emerging problem in the city: the lack of roadside space for the storage of private automobiles. Did the City Ramp Garage save Spokane? We will never know, but its handsome brick and concrete façade will live on as a reminder of the great human quest for extra car parking.
The Ridpath Skyway caught our eye next with Jonathan particularly taken by the cellular blotches on the window glass left behind as the UV protection gradually lost its battle with the elements. Another very striking element of this skybridge is the lack of a connected building at the southern end, the Ridpath Motor Inn having been partially demolished in 2014. The Ridpath Skyway carries some weight in its role as the first pedestrian elevated walkway built in Spokane, dating back to 1963. A network of sixteen skywalks would eventually spread throughout the downtown’s core but sadly the Ridpath would never be a part of this system.
My personal favourite (and also greatly impressing Jonathan’s refined architectural tastes) was the NAI Black/ Greater Spokane Beam, a signpost and a gateway to the rear entrance of the downtown headquarters of the NAI Black commercial real estate brokerage firm and the Greater Spokane Region’s business development organisation. Passing beneath a fourteen-metre length of reinforced concrete finished with a timeless exposed aggregate is a very fine way to enter your underground parking garage.
Although engineers will tell you that the lack of intermediate lateral bracing could cause dangerous axial loading on this beam, it surely at least provides visual strength in preventing the collapse of the two adjoining brick buildings. Two large, corbelled supports have been constructed to support the NAI Black/ Greater Spokane Beam and I find the way that they reference the smaller corbelled external lighting housings to be extremely charming.
Wishy opening the show at The Knitting Factory.
Tristan found one of the best vintage stores of his career yesterday. As we sat in the bus lounge after the show we were treated to a unique fashion show as he peeled off layer after layer revealing a strong haul of graphic print tees.
The points are:
Liz gains a +1 for excellence in hair cutting.
