This past weekend, Kaveri and I flew out to Seattle for the Rawstock Film Festival. The organizers promised to partially pay for the trip, so I said “why the hell not?”

I had never been to the Pacific Northwest before and so, when I had to venture a guess, I imagined Seattle to be town of earnest flannel-wearers, constantly hiking up mountains, high on coffee. I couldn’t really square this image with the show Frasier, so I always decided not to think of the show Frasier when thinking of Seattle. To a lesser extent, I also decided not to think of Sleepless in Seattle.

The Rawstock Festival is a fun, scrappy festival of film shorts that happens about 4 times a year. And for the past year—starting with the “Mister Glasses” series—they’ve been showing stuff I’ve made. And now they were showing stuff Dyna and I (and Bill Buckendorf) had made—three episodes of the “Welcome to my Study” series. What is it with “Welcome to my Study”? People really go apeshit over it. It’s become a minor internet hit. Seattle was full of “Study” fans.

But more on that later; what was Seattle like?

From the little I saw of it, Seattle felt like the city that would emerge if New York and Northhampton, Massachusetts had a baby and that baby decided to live by a bay. It was far more cosmopolitan than I would have figured. The people we met (and maybe this was not a representative sample) seemed to all be done up in black cocktail dresses and suits.

our new Seattle friends

And just like in New York, there is the trend for “pre-prohibition” cocktails in the fancier hipster Seattle bars. So, we got to enjoy drinks that had egg whites in them. Which was fun.

The city has a very walkable downtown area surrounded by a bunch cute neighborhoods that are nearly impossible to get to using public transportation. And so we found ourselves quixotically riding the bus to a neighborhood called Ballard. And then cabing it to Capitol Hill. People of Seattle: invest in modern trolleys!

Ballard

From what I gather, most of Seattle was destroyed in the late 19th century. You can take a tour of the old buildings now buried  underground. They sit (I think) below the downtown neighborhood of Pioneer Square which is composed of cute late-Victorian brick and stone buildings in that “American Downtown Vernacular” that you see in a lot of Eastern cities.

What else…there are a few of great, deco department stores and a lot of soulless postmodern office towers from the 80s. Also, there’s the very cool Public Library designed by Rem Koolhaus Koolhaas, which looks like a crystal spaceship descended to earth. Kaveri and I spent a lot of time in that library walking the slowing sloping spiral of stacks. The interior of that building is amazing.

Seattle Public Library

There is also a huge working port.

And a market with amazing floral bouquets and tons of fish.

The Ace (with Kaveri)

We stayed at the Ace Hotel. The Ace Hotel answers the question, “what does a hipster do when he’s too old to stay in a youth hostel and too poor to stay in a nice hotel?” The rooms were breathtakingly small but they were painted white and outfitted with a stainless steel sink and an Eames rocker and ironic landscape wallpaper so it all seemed pretty cool to me and Kaveri. Also, the bathroom was in the hall. Like a youth hostel. But we liked it.

And again, people went absolutely apeshit over “Study”—huge laughs. And lots of people came up to me after the show and told me how much they liked it. So I was really touched. It was great. I have to thank the organizer of the event, the extremely nice Justin Freet, whose mom may have been the most devoted of all the “Study” fans that night.

And the event was sponsored by Bulleit Bourbon which is tasty.