According to our friends at the famous Blue Moon Tavern in Seattle,
Hale's
Celebration Porter improves your dream life, a ringing endorsement that
has always made us smile. Hale's Celebration Porter was brewed to
celebrate our 100th brew. Today, thousands of brews later, we're still
celebrating. After all, good Porter is the stuff dreams are made of!
http://www.epinions.com/fddk-Beers-By_Name-All-Hale's_Celebration_Porter
Jim David sold his share to his brother
Jack in 1959. In turn, Jack sold the Blue
Moon to Stanford Poll and Dr. Paul
Chilton in 1966. They enlarged the tavern
to make room for the hordes of hippies and
New Leftists who began to supersede the
Moon's traditional clientele of beatniks
and Old Leftists. The Blue Moon became
famous (or infamous) as a clubhouse for
Seattle's emerging counterculture. Former
Communist Stan Iverson (1927-1985)
reigned as its unofficial maitre 'd.
The tavern was rescued from certain
eclipse in 1982 by "Three Fools, Inc.,"
comprising partners Gustav Hellthaler,
Robert Morrison, and John Caldbick. Two
years later, in 1984, the Blue Moon was
refurbished for its 50th anniversary and
won a new generation of customers.
See Walt Crowley's Forever Blue Moon, The Story
of
Seattle's Most (In)Famous Tavern
Blue Moon Tavern,
(Seattle: Blue Moon Tavern, 1992).
& online at HistoryLink,
Blue Moon Tavern, An Unofficial Cultural Landmark
http://www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=1001
"Some nights the wolves
are silent and the moon howls."
--- Bathroom graffiti in the Blue Moon Tavern, (Auntie Dave
believes he wrote it one dark eve; another version became
"Some nights the moon howls & the dogs
lay low" )
http://www.etext.org/Zines/planet/pm4/2werwolv.htm
Blue Moon Tavern
Hours: Opens at noon, closes late
Beer Selection: 12 taps, Northwest craft beers.
Source of information: Info from the Beer Travelers
Page
http://beertravelers.com/
http://www.beerexpedition.com/wa/wa_barrest.shtml
Uten eget mikrobryggeri men likevel verd et besøk for
de mer eventyrlystne er legendariske Blue Moon
Tavern (712 NE 45th Street), hvor Jimi Hendrix engang
var stamgjest. Fortsatt er det ingen som hever
øyenbrynet over en slåsskamp eller noen knuste ølglass.
Eksosryper passer baren, og et høyst blandet publikum
gir et spennende speilbilde av byen på godt og vondt.
Den spesielle Seattle-humoren fornekter seg heller ikke
her. Det er en humor som har fått en av av byens
strippe-klubber til å avertere med "50 beautiful women
& three ugly ones", mens et lokalt popband presterte en
sangtittel som "She won't get under me till I get over
you".
http://www.nsbr.no/guide/byer/seattle.htm
ALLEN GINSBERG
NATIONAL DAY OF REMEMBRANCE
Sunday, April 13, 1997
4:00 pm
EDT - 3:00 pm CDT - 2:00 pm MDT - 1:00 pm PDT
REMEMBRANCE BY MALCOLM LAWRENCE:
Well, for all intents and purposes
Seattle stiffed at the Sunday AG remembrance. I wasn't at either the Anne
Waldman remembrance on Friday in Auburn
nor at the Ted Joans reading in the U District on Saturday
[at Recollection
Used Books
http://www.recollectionbooks.com/],
but the Blue Moon was pretty much a ghost town on Sunday.
Just goes to show that no matter how much you can try and do
with the wonders of email and the
net/web with only a few days notice it doesn't guarantee ANYthing. I tried.
I arrived at noon to start setting
up and got a lot of very friendly, courteous help from the regular soundmen
who
take care of bands at the place, who
were very helpful considering they hadn't heard anything about what was
going to be happening until I got
there, not to mention didn't know me from Adam. We moved one of the pool
tables
out of the way and had a small PA
all set up as well as a perfect little makeshift stage with a microphone,
stool,
music easel, and movable lamp from
which to read from. A photographer and journalist from the Seattle Times
showed up, waiting for a story and
stayed for a good couple of hours. And even though we were all ready to
go at
1 PM there was no sign of a crowd
of AG admirers at all.
... show details
Only three patrons were overtly there for the
remembrance (not counting my two friends
who showed up) and no one was interested in actually reading anything
in front of the place, so I waited
until about 2 PM to see if anyone else was going to show up and there was
no
noticeable difference. Tom Robbins
didn't show up. Nor did Anne Waldman. So at 2 I took to the microphone
and
introduced myself and what the occasion
was and read Anne Waldman's deathbedside poem. Even though I'm a
writer I don't really consider myself
much of a reader and felt that Allen himself could do a lot better justice
with
his own material than little old me,
and luckily my friend Russell had brought with him the first disc of the
Holy
Soul Jelly Roll CD boxed set with
him, so I decided just to have the barkeep put it on the CD player and
start off
with track 5 which is, of course,
Howl.
The regulars were pretty confused as
to what was going on, specifically as to what was being recited over the
sound system. A few of the regulars,
upon learning that it was a poem called "Howl" actually started to howl
for
about a minute or two.
Actual overheard comments from the
regulars:
"Is this Winston Churchill?"
"It's War of the Worlds"
"Is this the tape of a radio show?"
About halfway through Howl the crowd
seemed to finally coalesce with it and I dare think that everybody seemed
to be enjoying it enough that I just
decided to let Allen continue, so I let the rest of the CD play, so we
all listened
to Footnote to Howl then America,
Sunflower Sutra, Green Valentines Blues, and Death to Van Gogh's Ear before
I decided not to push my luck and
let the barkeep reclaim the sound system as everyone started playing pool
again
and the eight Rolling Stones CDs that
the barkeep brought with him were returned to the CD carousel and put on
"shuffle" for the rest of the afternoon/evening.
Russell and Bryan and I helped the soundmen break down the stage
and put the PA away, then we just
decided to play a few rounds of cutthroat over pints before heading out.
I think
all told I spent about 8 hours at
the tavern. I was SO glad to finally get outside when we left. I never
spend THAT
long at a tavern even on a GOOD night.
:)
I think the best thing about the day
was as I was leaving I was introduced by one of the soundmen to one of
the
owners of the place who extended the
generosity of the place to me and any future ideas I may have for readings.
A few days ago I had a couple of personal
emails from two AG fans from the Seattle area who were both under 21
therefore couldn't make it to the
Blue Moon, and in retrospect I wish I had organized something at, say,
a Buddhist
temple where they could have joined
in rather than deciding that the Kerouac connection with the Blue Moon
was
enough of a reason to have that place
as the spot for the remembrance. Ah well. 20/20 hindsight, eh?
http://www.ginzy.com/Tributes/DayOfRem.html
|
|
Roethke
(RET-key; rymes with Teddy).
Patron of the Blue Moon Tavern, where he
& his students sucked suds & wrote poetry in Seattle.
|
Professor Joseph Butterworth
Butterworth's case was worse. In a specialized area like Old English, there
is no work outside
academia, and Butterworth seemed unsuited for other kinds of labor. After
he was fired, he could
not find any academic position even though he wrote letters to all 2,000
members of the Modern
Language Association. He eventually went on public assistance. Described
as a "broken man" who
haunted Seattle's Blue Moon Tavern in the '50s, he died in 1970.
http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/dec97/red5.html
Kizer is the second--James Wright came first in 1972--to win
the Pulitzer. Hugo, who died in 1982, won major awards and
became an influential teacher in his own right in the creative writing
program he directed at the University of Montana.
David Wagoner, who studied with Roethke earlier at Penn State and joined
him on the UW faculty, is among the most
prolific and prize-laden of American poets, a chancellor of the prestigious
Academy of American Poets.
All were part of what Kizer, in a 1956 article in The New Republic magazine,
declared to be a new school of poets
emerging in the Northwest. Roethke was there for inspiration,
painters Mark Tobey and Morris Graves influenced mood and
color, and art was created in an atmosphere of respect, criticism and
support, she wrote. Part of the milieu was the Blue
Moon tavern in 45th Street, "a grubby oasis just outside the university's
one-mile-limit Sahara," Kizer wrote, where "poets,
pedants, painters and other assorted wildlife make overtures to each
other."
http://depts.washington.edu/engl/kizer.html
It is, we suppose, a heartening story, but it is a sad one too.
Rader was
an earnest liberal in the 30's --- supporting such causes as Unionism,
anti-fascism, and the anti-Franco forces in Spain. He also detested
communism for its apparent need to infiltrate and destroy the
institutions of democracy. He was a good man faced with a slippery
bunch of people who saw him as the enemy, who told tales to prove that
he was indeed, a card-carrying "fellow-traveller." (Fellow traveller ---
along with "5th Amendment Communist" --- were phrases used to snag
people who had not joined the party, but seemed to agree with the
principles that the party espoused).
While I lived in Seattle, I was introduced to one of the professors who
did not fight back. He had been a respected teacher of English
literature, but was sacked by the University because someone claimed
that he was communist. He spent his last years drunk to insensibility in
the local university hangout, the Blue Moon Tavern --- a ragged,
shabby, friendless old drunk.
http://www.cts.com/sd/poo/newT.html
Anita's
Book of Days -- Sunday, July 5, 1998
...Gonzalez one night at the Blue Moon Tavern,
and Victor...
...though they were all part of the Seattle dance scene. Hal, whom
we know...
McDermott, Terry. “A
Collision of Sexual Eras at Blue Moon”, The Seattle Times, p B1 (April
4, 1996).
Abs: The subject at the Blue Moon Tavern last
night was sex, 30 years after it was let loose, and the
headliners were Dan Savage, the sex-advice columnist, and Tom Robbins,
the novelist. The Barnumesque
pairing of the man who made “Hey Faggot” a term of endearment and the man
who brought Jesus back from
the dead only to lose the body in the catacombs was guaranteed to bleed
the Blue Moon keg pumps dry.
Haines, Thomas W. “Author Autograph Tiff Ends In Settlement”
(Reports on the resolution of the court case
brought by Nicholas Palmer after T. R. signed the book Fuck Yes, see
Streiffield, 1994),
The Seattle Times, p B3 (May 2, 1996).
Bods vs. Beers: The
grand old Rainbow Tavern is now a no-booze
"showgirls" establishment.
It's nice that some guys are finding drug-free
entertainment, but
from a hetero-male standpoint it's disadvantageous
that we're getting
more places to look at women, but fewer places to
meet them. (Most of
the picketers outside it, claiming it demeans
women, were men, mainly
regulars from the nearby Blue Moon.
Imagine Blue
Moon people calling someplace else sleazy!)
Richard Hugo Letter to Kizer from Seattle:
... show details
Dear Condor: Much thanks for that telephonic support
from North Carolina when I suddenly went ape
in the Iowa tulips. Lord, but I'm ashamed.
I was afraid, it seemed, according to the doctor
of impending success, winning some poetry prizes
or getting a wet kiss. The more popular I got,
the softer the soft cry in my head: Don't believe them.
You were never good. Then I broke and proved it.
Ten successive days I alienated women
I liked best. I told a coed why her poems were bad
(they weren't) and didn't understand a word I said.
Really warped. The phrase "I'll be all right"
came out too many unsolicited times. I'm o.k. now.
I'm back at the primal source of poems: wind, sea
and rain, the market and the salmon. Speaking
of the market, they're having a vital election here.
Save the market? Tear it down? The forces of evil
maintain they're trying to save it too, obscuring,
of course, the issue. The forces of righteousness,
me and my friends, are praying for a storm, one
of those grim dark rolling southwest downpours
that will leave the electorate sane. I'm the last poet
to teach the Roethke chair under Heilman.
He's retiring after 23 years. Most of the old gang
is gone. Sol Katz is aging. Who isn't?
It's close now
to the end of summer and would you believe it
I've ignored
the Blue Moon. I did go to White Center,
you know, my home town, and the people there,
many are the same, but also aging, balking, remarkably
polite and calm. A man whose name escapes me
said he thinks he had known me, the boy who went alone
to Longfellow Creek and who laughed and cried
for no reason. The city is huge, maybe three quarters
of a million and lots of crime. They are indicting
the former chief of police. Sorry to be so rambling.
I eat lunch with J. Hillis Miller, brilliant and nice
as they come, in the faculty club, overlooking the lake,
much of it now filled in. And I tour old haunts,
been twice to Kapowsin. One trout. One perch. One poem.
Take care, oh wisest of condors. Love. Dick. Thanks again.
Ross Lavrov
