SHBD in Seattle….
While it’s awesome to go to new cities and share your work with crowds consisting entirely of strangers, there’s also something nice about going to a home base, which Seattle definitely is for me. Sterling Hallard Bright Drake’s screening at the 2012 Seattle True Independent Film Festival on Friday night went really well! We played with James Allen’s Smith’s fantastic feature doc My Name is Smith (so raw and personal), and it was about as good a pairing as we could have hoped for as the films were thematically perfectly matched. The Q & A was awesome as the audience was super enthused and asked great questions. The only downside of the event was that because of conflicts with my day job I asked to be scheduled on the festival’s final weekend so I could attend (thanks to Festival Director Tim Vernor and the rest of the STIFF staff for accommodating SHBD!). But that meant we arrived on the next to the last day and there were only two more screenings on Saturday, which meant that I didn’t get to see near the number of films that I normally do at a festival, but that’s just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes. But still, thank you to STIFF for allowing us the chance to screen there! Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that at the awards ceremony on Saturday night my friend Catya Plate’s The Reading won Best Animated Film, an accolade she most certainly deserved and I’m super happy for her!
Because the screenings weren’t until the late afternoons and early evenings, I had some time to do some of my favorite Seattle things, and so I did. It didn’t hurt that the temps were in 80s the whole time I was there. Seattle on a warm sunny day has to be the most beautiful city in America!
The STIFF logo onscreen at the Grand Illusion Cinema:
I went to breakfast at Glo’s three mornings in a row. If I could only eat one dish for the rest of my life, their Eggs Benedict might just be it:
Just because it’s been done to death doesn’t mean the Space Needle isn’t still cool to see:
“A New American Gothic,” as painted by Kurt Cobain during his senior year of high school in 1985. I snapped this shot at the Experience Music Project, where I took in the Nirvana and AC/DC exhibits, both of which are great. The Nirvana exhibit has a bunch of great Polaroids that capture the band in ways I hadn’t seen before, and the best part of the AC/DC exhibit was reading Bon Scott’s hand written letters to his ex-wife Irene:
A Cafe Gennera from Uptown Espresso. My favorite coffee drink:
The Space Needle as seen from the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park:
The Olympic Mountain Range as seen from the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park:
Safeco Park and Qwest Field with Mount Ranier in the background:
Seattle skyline:
Sometimes you gotta break down and just order a whole Dungeness crab for lunch:
I stayed in Queen Anne, my favorite Seattle neighborhood:
Mount Rainier, as seen from the plane on the flight back to Bedford Falls:
