Dreams of Cascadia

Tuesday required less walking than festive Monday. After a terrific continental breakfast of several stowable items, we shopped and then separated: my sister to do more shopping downtown at the first Nordstrom, and me to satisfy a history fix at the Wing Luke Asian Museum.

The Wing Luke has little to do with the Force and Rebel fighter ships. Actually, it's a small structure that houses multiple interesting exhibits about Asian adoptees, women's work against domestic violence, the timetable of Pacific American immigration, and most tellingly, a startling exhibit about the internment of Japanese-Americans that made me start to regard FDR similarly to how Sarah Vowell regards Andrew Jackson. (They had a casual postscript about xenophobic sentiment in the current era of the Patriot Act that especially hit home.)

We reconvened for dinner, accepting an invite to the Six Arms Brewpub from Julie, a friend who left Portland for Seattle about 7 years ago and admirably has stuck to it ever since. This brewpub was in the trendy Capitol Hill district of Seattle, where stores like Beyond the Closet abound. (I found it telling that alongside the graphic stuff on the magazine rack were Men's Health and Muscle and Fitness. I always wondered about those mags.)

Across the street from the hotel is the Neptune Theater, an indie venue that was participating in the Seattle International Film Festival. We decided to take in a low-budget film called November that starred Courteney Cox, and from its description sounded like a chick version of Memento. Ah, if only. The filmmakers decided to err on the side of ambiguity, which I'm sure seemed like a bold choice to them, but to us felt like a cop-out. The director, Greg Harrison, conducted a Q&A afterwards. After enduring a series of fawning queries about camera selection and musical scores, my sister spoke up for the rest of us by asking some pointed questions about the plot. To his credit, Mr. Harrison acknowledged that he was prepared to accept an audience backlash.

Sitting next to us during the movie was a pretty local who shared our frustration with the film. She talked with us briefly afterwards about her love for the Pacific Northwest, and how some of the lifelong natives wish that the urban centers of Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver could form their own state of Cascadia, set apart by culture and lifestyle from the surrounding areas. Though it challenges the defined borders of the United States and Canada, it sounds like a nice idea. And a Google search tells me that she's not alone in holding this belief.