trochee

People sometimes ask me what I like about living in the Central Area. Here's today's events -- within a block of my house -- which is why I like this neighborhood.

While the hipsters of Seattle gather in Seattle Center under the Space Needle for Bumbershoot, the Central Area, this neighborhood, across town, has been having its own emergent street-festival. All events described are within one block of my house.

Note: I say this tongue-in-cheek; there is no organized festival here. We have instead, on today's daily roster:

10:00a: opening act. the Vietnamese Catholic Church, next block over, cranked up the amplifiers to 150 Db, outdoors, in the parking lot. They are audible at least four blocks away. The day's acts include preaching in Vietnamese and English, ritual music from Vietnam, dancing, and singing (mostly in Vietnamese)
12:30p: the VCC opens up the bingo game -- on the same amplifiers. Why do I need to hear "B-78" (in English and repeated in Vietnamese) from two blocks away? This goes on for hour after droning hour, broken up by the occasional Asia-pop interlude
2:00p: I walk down the block to my landlord's drop box to pay my rent. On the way there, I stop by the P-Patch, a public garden owned by the city, pick some of my tomatoes and water the eggplant. Along the way from there to the drop box, I listen to a sermon from the baptist church, complete with the crowd's "amen!", and with a background of another sermon, being given in Vietnamese. Over amplifiers. More than two blocks away.
8:00p: the techno-heads across the street from my house mount a counter-assault. My house is caught in the crossfire between them and the Vietnamese karaoke, as the neighbors crank up their second-story beats. Car alarms go off down the block.
8:30p: The VCC decide that since it's Saturday night, they need to let their parishioners cut loose -- and thus begins the roughly annual Vietnamese Karaoke Night, seguing smoothly out of classical and religious Vietnamese songs and Asia-pop, and into classic rock and Iggy-Pop.
9:00p: I comment to my houseguest how cool it is that the same community would have a party for so many different ages. "Much as I loathe the amplifiers, there's no way," I said, "no way that the crowd playing karaoke at this hour are the same people playing Bingo at noon earlier on." In some sort of cosmic revenge on me for generalizing-too-soon, the droning "B-32" (repeat in Vietnamese), "N-79", (repeat in Vietnamese) kicks in less than 30 seconds later. Late night Vietnamese Amplified Bingo has begun.
10:00p: The community center joins the fray. Long lines of white teenagers line up outside (again, visible from my apartment). The lines outside the place look like Club 54, complete with sneering bouncer, and the thumping bass from their raver hall rattles the windows. Someone has called the police, who drive up, stop traffic for three blocks, and walk into the rave. I see their flashlights. I imagine them laughing at the hapless white kids who are complaining about the (still continuing) 150 Db karaoke from their neighbors, the Vietnamese Catholic Church Eucharistic Youth.
10:15p: Janis Joplin. The VCC kids are singing Janis Joplin, What's Goin' On, and they're singing it well. This is a big change from last year, when nobody could carry a tune.
10:30p: Finally, the VCCEY has called it a night. Kids carry flowers and candy away from their event, oddly (and wonderfully) mixing with the raverboys and ravergirls who stand outside their (loud!) party, trying to figure out where all these Vietnamese kids came from.
11:00p: Raver children are playing some bizarre dub of Blinded By the Light (yes, Springsteen). One would almost think these kids remember who that is, but then one realizes they probably recognize the song from their parents' record collections.