We welcome John Sundsten and his eye for fine lines.  The emeritus associate professor in the U.W. Department of Biological Structure took the “snaps” below while on a walk around Green Lake on Monday last – Oct. 26, 2009 – after dropping his daughter off at Garfield High School.   John is a neuroanatomist who’s interests extend well beyond grey matter. He is also a carver, an oyster harvester (on Hood Canal shoreline  that has long been in the Sundsten family) and a contrabass flute player.  He lives in Wallingford and we sometimes walk the ‘hood together.  It occurs to me now that John’s Green Lake recordings may also serve as a challenge to Jean Sherrard, of this blog, to again go down to the lake with his Nikon, and for you readers an encouragement to walk the lake this fall.

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You see above the “young hero” of CINEMA PENITENTIARY grown a bit older but still dashing.  Below him is Georgianna Carter, an early influence on White who appears in the excerpt below.  I took Bill White’s portrait at last year’s University District Fair, but he was not new to me.  I’ve known Bill since he was a teenager in the late 60s, but I did not know then about his enthusiasm for film.  Recently a movie and music reviewer for the Post-Intelligencer, this energetic “young” critic, poet, novelist and singer-songwriter has some time to give to reminiscing about his life with film since the P-I failed, and CINEMA PENITENTIARY is one issue of his new-found “idleness” that is still issuing.   Bill White knows whereof he writes.  His memory of the thousands of movies he has watched and studied since he first slipped milk money through the windows of box offices is extraordinary.  Many of his stories connected with Seattle theatres and the movies they show will flip readers, even those who did not spend the greater part of their summer vacations from primary school watching films first in Renton and then in downtown Seattle theatres.   Here follows an early issue from Bill White’s CINEMA PENITENTIARY.  For those who have not yet found it, a sample of Bill White’s reviewing appears below with the blog insertion that precedes this one.  There Bill reviews Forever Amber, which in 1949 appeared at the Colonial Theatre on 4th Avenue between Pike and Pine Streets.  Our critic also winds up in and out of the Colonial at the conclusion of this excerpt from . . .

Bill White’s CINEMA PENITENTIARY.

In 1958, I was seven years old and lived in Bryn Mawr,  a small community outside of Renton, Washington. My street  was originally named  after John Keats, but  after a year got the number 85. Somebody must have thought it  easier for a kid to find his way home  through numbered streets than named ones. In Renton, on Third Street, there were three movie theatres. On one side  The Roxy catered to adults but sometimes showed movies for the whole family.  The Renton, which was right across the street, had movies for normal teenagers, while The Rainier, at the end of the block, offered unsavory fare for the budding delinquents who passed weekend nights there. The Rainier was my favorite of the three theaters.

Since I went to the movies all the time, a kid in my class at school tried to impress me with the boast that he got to see movies on Saturday afternoons at the downtown YMCA for two cents. I convinced my mom to get me a membership and let me make the twelve-mile trip into downtown Seattle every Saturday with my new friend. For a while, I enjoyed the trampoline, the swimming pool, the wrestling matches and the pool table as much as the two cent movies.  Then I met a kid about three years older than myself who convinced me to forego the athletics and follow him to a real movie theater that was  five blocks away.

The Embassy showed a different kind of movie on each day of the week, and Saturday it was science fiction and horror.  That first Saturday, I saw “Invasion of the Saucer Men,”   pygmies with giant heads and long fingernails who stabbed lethal doses of alcohol into  the bloodstreams of teenagers, “The Devil Girl From Mars,” an alien bombshell who walked along deserted mountain roads in a sexy black costume on her way to destroy the human race, and “Night of the Blood Beast,” who  impregnated an astronaut with a litter of alien parasites and then stopped the male mother’s heart without destabilizing his blood pressure.

The Embassy was a masterpiece of spatial disorientation, due to its having two entrances, one on the corner of Third Avenue, next to the G.O.Guy drug store, and the other around the corner on Union, across from a pool hall that I did not discover until some years later.  The floor plan of the theater seemed to vary in accordance with the angle through which it was entered.  Finding one’s way out was even more difficult, and I was never sure from which exit I would emerge.

When I left that theater, having seen those movies, while Russian satellites spied on us from Earth’s outer orbit, in a year in which we practiced the duck and cover techniques of surviving a nuclear attack, at a time when our drunken fathers were beating our promiscuous mothers, when schoolmates would tell you the toilets were broken just to see if you would try to hold it in after lunch and shit your pants in class, in those times the titles of these  movies were poetry that I rolled over my tongue like the soft drool of melted salt-water taffy.

Had the movies existed only in the spatial time of their unreeling, they might have been forgotten.  They lived, however, in my lingering isolation from the real world.  I had searched the ordered and disordered faces on the screen for some familiar human expression, but found only odd approximations. And the oddest face belonged to Georgianna Carter, who posed throughout “Night of the Blood Beast” like a burlesque dancer on an archeological dig. Four years later, at the same theater, I would see her again, recognizing her right away, in a Jack Nicholson biker movie that was the only other thing in her life she ever did.

On this first Saturday, coming out of the Third Avenue doors while Miss Carter wondered if humanity had been right in killing the  blood beast, I spied the marquee, two blocks up the street, of  another theater. From the outside The Garden  seemed fancier than The Embassy, if only because of its larger marquee.  Admission to The Garden was also a quarter, but you only got two movies instead of three.  And they changed twice a week instead of daily.  Since I didn’t want to worry my mother by arriving home four hours late, I waited until the next weekend to see the theater’s interior.

The Garden was like the Roxy in that it combined adult and family fare.  But instead of getting a preview of “Butterfield 8” before a Jerry Lewis movie, the kids at the Garden got to see the whole movie.  It was like trespassing on the Roxy on Parent’s Night Out.   After a double feature of “Peyton Place” and “Love in the Afternoon,” I walked up Pine Street to 4th Avenue and discovered The Colonial. It was smaller that the Garden, and also offered bi-weekly double features for a quarter.

Since “Peyton Place” had been over twice the length of two horror movies, it was already getting close to the time my bus was scheduled to leave Second and Madison, so I shouldn’t have gone in, but I paid my quarter anyway, figuring that if I just watched one movie, I would be able to catch the next bus, and wouldn’t get into much trouble.

When I went inside, “Battle Hymn” was on the screen. One of the things about going to these theaters was that you never got there at the beginning of a movie. You just went in, sat down, and started watching the movie at whatever point you walked in on it.  Then, after watching the other features, you stayed and watched the beginning of the one you walked in on the middle of.  I didn’t even stay until the end of the first one, it being a pretty boring thing with Rock Hudson as an ex-bomber who built an orphanage for Korean kids who lost their parents in the aerial attacks for which he felt guilty.

The first thing that struck me about The Colonial was the absence of a concession stand.  Even the popcorn came out of a vending machine.  No concessions also meant no authority figures in the lobby, and that gave a feeling of freedom to do whatever I wanted.

Unfortunately, it gave everybody else that same right, and four years later, during the summer I lived with my mother and sisters on Queen Anne Hill, the  summer I turned eleven years old and spent virtually every day in one or the other of these three theatres, a man changed seats several times before slipping into the seat next to mine, where he  made  a quick and clumsy  grab for my dick.

I ran out of the theater and up the street into a department store where I jumped on the escalator and rode eight floors to the restroom where I hid and panted and waited for the  fear to subside. Then I ran all the way home, not even slowing to look at the posters of future movie releases that filled the windows of a reprographics shop on Second Avenue in the near deserted area between downtown and Queen Anne Hill that came to be known as Belltown.

I never returned to The Colonial, but continued to patronize the Embassy until it started showing porno movies in the early seventies. It wasn’t that I had anything against porno; I was just afraid to go in there. I kept going to The Garden even during the porno era because they kept the place clean and ran advertisements in the daily newspapers. Sometimes the critics would even review them, which helped me pretend they were real movies, and not just smut.

Film and Music critic Bill White has kindly responded to our request that he write a review of the film showing at the Colonial Theatre in 1949, as revealed in the Kodachrome night slide feature Westlake Night Lights in the Seattle Now and Then published just below this insertion.

An historical romance set during the reign of Charles II,  “Forever Amber,”  directed by Otto Preminger in 1947, is as  dark and claustrophobic a look at society in collapse as any of the underworld-themed B-movies released during the same time. Two years later, Anthony Mann would accomplish something similar with “Reign of Terror,” although his film of the French revolution was a modest black and white production running less than 90 minutes, while “Forever Amber” was shot in Technicolor and ran nearly 2 ½ hours.

It wasn’t until Francis Coppola’s “The Godfather” that the interiors on a major studio film were underlit to such infernal effect.  Cinematographer Leon Shamroy, who took the opposite approach the year before in “Leave Her to Heaven,” in which he contrasted the dark story with a brilliantly vibrant visual palette, makes the royal court of Charles II as ghoulishly oppressive as the decaying chambers of Roderick Usher.  Although Shamroy won four Oscars for his cinematography, including one for “Leave Her to Heaven,” and was nominated for another eleven, he is largely forgotten today.

The story of Amber begins in 1644, during Cromwell’s rebellion against King Charles I, when the baby girl is discovered and taken in by one of the Puritans who later stands against the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, when Amber resists her foster father’s decision to marry her off to a neighboring farmer.   He responds to her refusal by telling her that “vanity is Satan at work in the female soul.”   Paradoxically, it is the vanity of the male sex that makes Amber’s tale such a miserable one.

As Bruce Carlton, the callous privateer whose love Amber is obsessed with securing, Cornell Wilde walks atilt with surety of his superiority to every other living thing, including King Charles, who banishes him to the sea when threatened by his sexual rivalry.

George Sanders is suitably disdainful as the  king who can stop the performance of a play by his appearance in the royal box,  but relies on a revolving cast of compliant female subjects to maintain the  illusion of being  loved. In the end, when he leaves Amber’s quarters after her final rejection of him as a man, he calls “come, my children,” to a pack of faithful dogs.

It is Linda Darnell’s voluptuously cheap incarnation of Amber that gives the film its poverty row atmosphere.   She lowers the bar, just as Jennifer Jones did the previous year for David O. Selznick  in “Duel in the Sun,” on any grand aspirations producer Darryl Zanuck might have had for a prestige film.  It is because she drags the story into the gutter that gives “Forever Amber” its scent of damnation, and lifts it above the conventional drivel of those romantic melodramas commandeered by the crippling competence of a Bette Davis, Vivian Leigh, or Katherine Hepburn. The screen would not again be endowed with such a fleshy heroine until Elizabeth Taylor embodied Cleopatra in 1963, a film that was also produced at 20^th Century Fox by Darryl Zanuck,

“Forever Amber” was one of the few films director Preminger didn’t produce himself, and evidence of Zanuck’s interference is all over it.  This is one of the factors that make the film such a fascinating artifact.  Although Preminger remained under contract to Fox for another five years, the name of Zanuck never again appeared on one of his films.

In helpful response to the “stubbed toe” picaresque printed yesterday (and just below) Ron Edge – more often known here for his “Edge Clippings” –  sends along the above with this note.  “This 1937 aerial has a few of the landmarks you mention on your blog posting, including a good view of the golf course.”   Surely.  Where once little white balls were hit about now gallbladders are removed.  The new addition to University Hospital was snapped by me over the hedge on monday last at the lower-right corner.  15th Avenue is far left and the next avenue to the right of it is what was in 1937 still an open section of the campus’ Stevens Way.  It passes under a Seattle Lake Shore and Easter RR (Northern Pacific) viaduct (Burke Gilman Trail) that is still there.  100 years ago that extended avenue was the promenade for the 1909 Alaska Yukon and Pacific Exposition’s carnival side, The Pay Streak.  (The Sunday after next we will feature here a lot of AYP pictures in a “wrap-up” – a film term I think –  of the summer-long centennial.)  The big and long south campus buildings that I did not name in “stubbed toe” are the Stronghold and William H. Foege Genome Sciences buildings – if I have read the U.W. Map I have now consulted correctly.  These new health sciences buildings are east of a 15th Avenue that was freshly redirected to the southwest to make room for them.  Only a wee bit of the old residential neighborhood west of 15th shows in the aerial, but one can find that northwest corner of 41st and 15th shown in “stubbed toe”, and discover a five story apartment there in 1937.  Again, I don’t remember it.  And notice how in 1937 forty-first ave. continued directly on to the campus.  One block north the big and white Wesley student center is easily spotted at the northwest corner of 15th and 42rd, with the Methodist church just beyond it at 43th.   Two blocks more (there is no 44th St. in this section) is the old Presby church, the brick block at the southeast corner of 47th and 15th.  (It is hard to make out but it is there.) The new red brick Gothic structure that took its place and more dates from the early 50s.  Turning west on 47th and continuing on to Wallingford there is no Baptist church to be seen.  It is hidden behind the Meany Hotel and General Insurance Co. (Safeco) buildings. The aerial looks as far north as the reservoirs around 75th.  The green belt of the Ravenna and Cowen Parks ravine intercedes.  Calvary Cemetery is upper right and below it are the nursery fields in the rich soil of what is now the concrete spread of University Village.  Below that at the curve where Montlake Blvd NE turns into NE 45th Street one can glimpse a tiny (very) early example of the fill work on the old Lake bottom (dropped 9 feet in 1916 for the opening of the ship canal) that will eventually turn those acres to driving more golf balls, parking, and playing games of many kinds.  Thanks Ron.

In our “Seattle Now and Then” feature in Pacific Northwest, Jean ordinarily takes the “repeat” or “now” photographs for historical views I find and we discuss, but this week was different. Because of a stubbed toe Jean was lying flat with his foot elevated for relief. I took the opportunity of Jean’s suffering toe to go off on my own and see if I still remembered how to “repeat.” The subject is the Arboretum viaduct. In about a month that feature will be printed in The Times and here as well. I have driven under this bridge many times in the last 45 years but never have I stopped to either study it from below or walk over this brick adorned reinforced concrete span of six arches. Listed on the National Register of Historic Place, it is appreciated. W. R. B. Willcock, a Seattle architect who later led the University of Oregon’s department of architecture, designed the viaduct. His task was to build a picturesque span that would complement the park and be used for both pedestrians and sewerage. The former walk on top of the latter. Below the paving runs a pipeline, a connector in the North Trunk Sewer line, which was built early in the 20^th Century to move wastewater from the western shore of Lake Washington to Puget Sound where it could be released into, it was still thought, the eternal flushing of the tides.

The viaduct crosses the Lake Washington Boulevard east-west in line with Lynn Street, and on Lynn is how I approached it from the West. After completing my contemplative stroll across the 180-foot long span, I turned around and took the above view looking back at it to the West. Then I did another about face to look east again and into the arboretum for the forest view below where two paths lead away, but I took neither. You may remember that Monday Oct. 6 was an exhilarating example of an Indian Summer day. Depending upon whether you stood in the sun or shade, the temperature swayed between warm and crisp, and out of a cloudless sky sunlight scattered through the first leaves of fall.

I next found the proper place to make a faithful repeat of the historical view of the viaduct I carried with me and, as noted above, both the “then and now” will appear here in about one month. While standing beside the boulevard I photographed this charming detail of the span’s lighting standard and the moss that is a rustic cosmetic for its decorative brickwork. Such make-up takes time and is hard to convincingly copy or fabricate in a factory. By now enjoying my little camera I continued snapping through the open driver’s window at mostly familiar subjects as I drove home from the arboretum to Wallingford. I will next print a few of them here with brief comments.

I first visited Seattle from Spokane in the early 1950s to attend my oldest brother Ted’s graduation from the University’s then nearly new Medical School. The health sciences campus was then routinely modern but dull. Here over a hedge on the north approach to the Montlake Bridge I glimpsed a recent addition to the hospital, one that plays “boxes and balls” with its masses.

Most of the University’s “south campus” that is east of 15^th Avenue has been in the caring hands of the health sciences so long that it is difficult to remember what was or might have been there earlier. I know, although I don’t remember it, that before WW2 much of it, including the original hospital location, was a golf course where the school’s faculty could escape students, except those with clubs. But west of 15^th, along the north shore of Portage Bay and extending from there north into the commercial heart of “Univercity” – once a proposed name for the University District – was a neighborhood of small homes and maritime enterprises of many sorts. The latter, of course, kept close to the bay. Some readers may remember how the movement to save this community from University expansion began in the late 1960s but was soon overwhelmed by a University District version of “manifest destiny.” The growing university overwhelmed all protests for it had no growth alternatives so attractive as this “Lower Ave” neighborhood, and the U.W. was our gorilla. The buildings snapped above are examples of the sometimes tasteful and oversize constructions that now dapple the blocks that were once nicely stuffed with modest homes, often vine-covered and sometimes rotting.

The gorilla, we know, also moved west across 15^th Avenue and into the University District when opportunities allowed. I no longer remember what was once on the northwest corner of 41^st Street and 15^th Avenue, but the school-related structure that now holds that corner is, like the latest additions to the hospital, another example of recent architectural style. Here the mixing of angles and curves is for me at least both satisfying and comical. The structure appears something like an allusion to a cathedral – in miniature – but also a homage to Katzenjamer Kastle where masses of different shapes and materials are hinged together.

My next going home snap was a block north at 42nd and 15^th – again the northwest corner. For nearly 35 years – up until this past spring – this point of view looked across a parking lot to the Café Allegro in the alley north of 42nd. The Allegro considers itself the oldest surviving espresso bar in Seattle. Sitting inside or on the benches that line the alley or even on the traffic dividers of the parking lot has been the habit of many regulars – myself included in the 80s. (Here I get out of the car to print a snapshot at the Allegro counter from 1987 of barista Mary Anne Schroeder on the right, and I. H. F. Hername on the left. Well Hername really has her name, but I Have Forgotten it.)

For 34 years of espresso ingestion when one lifted their eyes above the asphalt lot, the view across 15^th to the tall trees on campus was a calming antidote for caffeine and the stresses of study and/or the discomforts of carping roommates. About 1969 (The actual date is in old notes somewhere.) the parking lot, which was built mostly for overflow University Book Store use, took the place of the stately white frame Wesley House, the big student center for the adjoining Methodist Church. The church tower is seen two photographs above on the right. Then followed the parking and the Allegro’s 35 years of anxiety about loosing to some other big thing the mostly clear view to the green campus. And now they have it. The 6-story George F. Russell Jr. Hall is another Wesley Foundation production, so that in some part the renters of the new halls will be help the church’s student ministry. Seen here and “now leasing” the new hall includes near the top of its promotions some unintended ironies.  “You’ll love the views and abundant light from the large office windows . . . You can see downtown Seattle, Lake Union, Portage Bay, University Campus, and the U. District.” Nathaniel Jackson, an old friend and Café Allegro’s owner, has learned to put the best construction on this construction. “The Turner Company made a huge effort and I respect them for reaching out to us and doing everything that they could to make the pill go down with a little sugar. I even got a hard hat out of it with ‘honorary superintendent’ written on it. Allow me to wax eloquent through my tears of joy. This is a new beginning for Cafe Allegro. And think of it. (And her Nathanial cannot help laughing.) They have cut down the trees!” Well not all the trees but noticeably three or four on what was known for a while as “Hippy Hill,” the just on campus safe retreat for both town and gown to avoid the local constabulary and indulge in their own tears of joy and calming antidotes. Nathanial adds, “They did a fine job on the alley. Because of the fight we made, they made an effort to improve it.” The two imperfectly merged snapshots below of the Allegro interior shows through the plate glass some of the alley work when it was still a work in progress earlier this year.

Less then two blocks north of corner mates Café Allegro and George Russell Jr. is University Presbyterian. On the east side of 15^th I photographed it through the windshield while on the move. This century-old congregation is easily the biggest congregation in the University District, and more. It is one of the largest on the West Coast. With several ministers, scores of staff, a big organ, a professional choir, and a power list of political parishioners, University Presbyterian is always being tested by the biblical epigram, “He that is last shall be first.”

Only three blocks west of the Presbyterians and yet polar to it is a kind of tentative “last” – the latest District church to publicly wonder how to keep going, here in its now 70 year old sanctuary on the southeast corner of 47^th Street and 12^th Avenue N.E. Again I have snapped it from the driver’s window. Some will remember this congregation from the 1980s when it was the second church in the U.S.A. to declare “sanctuary” for Central Americans in flight from the American supplied violence there. Since then it has also become a “sanctuary” for gays who still cherish the church. Here’s a quote from the church’s description of itself. “Sanctuary has echoed in many commitments here: welcome to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people; support for conscientious objectors; a kitchen for hungry folks; a haven for women in transition from shelters to permanent housing; and safe and affordable childcare for children from a diversity of families and ethnicities. It all sounds like ‘sanctuary’ after awhile. Sanctuary is, in that sense, a place – this whole place – filled with a commitment to welcome and witness. Don’t be surprised if you are confused by the word when it is used here. It reverberates all over the place.”

Midway between the triumphant Presbyterians and the humble Baptists is University Seafood and Poultry at 1317 NE 47^th Street. This wonderfully gleaming specialty retailer is like an import from a Paris sidewalk except that University Seafood may have fresher salmon than any Parisian fishmonger. Perhaps. The truth is the only thing I know about fish sales is Ivar’s antics of long ago. University Seafood is a survivor and must have a long list of customers that cherish the place. It has been around the corner from The Ave as long as I can remember.

Two blocks west on 47^th from the Baptists, a left turn on Roosevelt Way and a long half block south, on the right is the entrance to Trader Joe’s parking lot. It is a wonder of the collective driving skills of its mostly liberal clientele. It may be that college graduates also drive better. Here they need to. The slots for cars in this lot are absurdly tight, the corners sharp, and the place is almost always packed. Although the deepest parts of this covered garage are dark indeed, muggers are not a threat for they prefer the large open parking lots surrounding suburban malls. Also if someone yells “Help!” in this lot it is likely that a dozen heroes will appear in an instant.  At Northgate they may run for the mall.  The above photo was snapped at the entrance. It is a both a fine example of how creeping ivy and a few low bushes can soften a concrete wall and a contrast to the hard responsibilities of parking at Trader Joe’s that will soon follow.

Back home in time to walk about the neighborhood I snapped first this natural demonstration of the “solitary effect,” a principle of aesthetics that I remember from the 1940 Magnus opus “The Arts and the Art of Criticism” by Theodore Meyer Greene. Greene might have written his chapter on the “solitary effect” about that red flower. His big book had staying power. It was still read in the late 50s when I was in college and I have my copy yet. But what would Greene make of the below, an example of what I refer to as my UFOs, or unidentified flattened objects. This UFO was photographed again on Monday last, off the curb and lying in the street at the southwest corner of Sunnyside Avenue and 42^nd Street. Fallen needles decorate I don’t know what, except that the traffic has flattened it. And yet it still has “depth.” I checked in passing. It was still there today. For identification of the location only, on the lawn behind this UFO is the red maple at the bottom of this post.