Help Murray Stenson

If you drink cocktails in Seattle, you know Murray Stenson. Murray has tended this city’s bars for thirty-plus years, spending over a decade behind the stick at Il Bistro, another ten years at the landmark Zig Zag Café, and lately working at Canon. He’s almost single-handedly responsible for bringing the classic cocktail movement to this part of the world, and countless Pacific Northwest bartenders have learned from and been inspired by him. Even if you’ve never set foot here, you may have felt Murray’s influence. He rediscovered the Last Word, which now appears on menus around the globe and was dubbed “the Official Drink of the Classic Cocktail Renaissance” by the Washington Post’s Jason Wilson.

Murray is not just a crafter of perfect cocktails. More importantly, he is a master of hospitality. Wherever he’s working, you can count on finding a convivial atmosphere in addition to splendid drinks. His peers paid him the highest compliment at the 2010 Tales of the Cocktail, where he was named “Best Bartender in America.” Look him up and you’ll find the same two words used to describe him: beloved and legendary.

Much of what little I know about cocktails I’ve learned from Murray. I’m also proud to say that over those years he’s become a friend. Murray’s a serious film buff and a crime fiction fan; I still remember my amazement when he asked me one day, “Ever hear of a writer named Jim Crumley?,” then revealed that the author of The Last Good Kiss would regularly drive in from Montana and do his drinking at Il Bistro.

And now, Murray needs our help.

He was recently diagnosed with a heart ailment that may require surgery. Worse, he is currently unable to work, meaning he can’t do what he was put here to do, make outstanding drinks and strangers feel welcome. Like many an accomplished tradesman, he doesn’t have health insurance.

One of Murray’s longtime friends has set up MurrayAid, where you can make donations to help defray his medical expenses. The Zig Zag Café will be hosting a benefit for Murray on Sunday, November 4 from 5pm to close, where you can literally drink to Murray’s health. Other events will be announced in the coming weeks. I’ll be at as many as possible.

Over at the Cocktail Chronicles, Paul Clarke writes a lovely tribute to Murray. If Murray has ever poured you a cocktail, give a few dollars. If you’ve ever found a home away from home at a cocktail bar, chip in as well. Help out a good man in need.

Cocktail of the Week: The Union Club

Posted a day early this week ...

Life could be difficult for the turn-of-the-last-century head of a local gambling combine. Your stock in trade has been declared illegal, but thanks to steep fines and rampant graft you’re able to eke out a modest living. Then one morning you wake up to discover you have a competitor. One who flat out refuses to pay off law enforcement the way you do. Who also happens to be one of the most famous lawmen of the American West.

Such was the fate of Seattle’s John Considine. A sober man in a shady profession, he used his three gambling clubs to establish himself as a force to be reckoned with in the city. Then, in November 1899, Wyatt Earp rode into town and announced that with partner Thomas Urquhart he’d be opening the Union Club on Second Avenue South near Yesler Way. Earp was no longer wearing a badge; he’d already run a saloon in the Klondike, and his reputation had been tarnished thanks to his role as referee in an 1896 prizefight in which he was accused of fraud. The public skirmish between various Seattle sporting factions affected the mayoral election and led to a brief crackdown on vice. By the time it ended Earp had long since left, his stay in the Emerald City a footnote. (As for Considine, he ended up killing the former police chief who accused him of paying for his 17-year-old contortionist mistress’s abortion and then became a theater impresario and vaudeville pioneer. But as the man said, that’s another story.)

It’s only appropriate that a Seattle-based bartender honor Wyatt Earp’s contribution to the city’s history. That bartender is Jamie Boudreau, once of Vessel and now proprietor of Canon. His Union Club cocktail is part of the noble tradition of whiskey/Campari drinks. But instead of finishing with, say, a vermouth, Jamie blends maraschino with a tart blast of orange juice for a nuanced and wholly satisfying flavor. He’s currently pouring these at Canon with rye. I enjoyed mine so much I prepared one at home with bourbon. Either way, the result will likely have you making some contortions of your own.

The Union Club

Jamie Boudreau, Seattle

2 oz. bourbon (or rye)
1.5 oz. orange juice
.5 oz maraschino
.5 oz Campari

Shake. Strain. No garnish.

Book: Truth Like The Sun, by Jim Lynch (2012)

In 1962, Roger Morgan is the boy wonder restaurateur spearheading the Seattle World’s Fair known as the Century 21 Exhibition, the event that gave rise to the Space Needle. In 2001, Roger decides to cash in on the decades of good will he’s built up as the city’s primary booster by launching a surprise campaign for mayor. In 1962, he tries to comprehend and contain municipal corruption that threatens to tarnish the Fair’s image. In 2001, he strains to convince himself and the electorate that he has no skeletons in his closet. In ’62, he has only his own demons for company. In the new millennium, he’s dogged by an ambitious but not unsympathetic reporter.

This fleet, engaging book by Jim Lynch paints a vivid portrait of Seattle in two eras, beautifully nailing the things that change – and the things that don’t. The sequences at the Fair are filled with cameos from the likes of LBJ and Elvis (who shot a movie at the Expo), and detail the grinding toll on an individual and a community of having to put on a happy face every single day. The chapters set after the dot-com boom illustrate the ways Seattle both fulfilled and fell short of the Fair’s vision of tomorrow. Lynch adroitly sketches Morgan’s insurgent campaign and gives him a worthy foil in Helen Gulanos, the journalist and Seattle newcomer who doesn’t buy into the city’s myths but sees Morgan as a good if compromised man. (Adding to the book’s wistful tone: the fact that Helen’s newspaper, the Post-Intelligencer, is essentially no more.)

Truth Like The Sun is steeped in Seattle history, but it’s also the story of any city struggling to define itself. I’m tempted to call it an upbeat version of The Wire or a West Coast Bonfire of the Vanities, but I know Seattle chafes at being compared to other places. And Lynch has succeeded on his own terms, writing a terrific novel of urban life.

Noir City Northwest: Your Belated Wrap-Up

It was a strange Noir City film festival for yours truly this year, evidenced by the fact that this post comes almost a week after the last screening. For the first time in five years I skipped movies in order to partake in the week’s more social aspects. Someone had to show Eddie Muller and local filmmakers and crime writers like the fabulous Skye Moody around Seattle’s best cocktail bars. (Did someone say Seattle’s best cocktail bars? See below.) Herewith, some parting thoughts as I try to resume my regular schedule.

Last Tuesday was Comedy Noir night. An oxymoron? Not with Unfaithfully Yours (1948) on the bill. Preston Sturges’s gleeful send-up of the form is my favorite of his films. As Muller said, it’s only fitting that the most vicious, mean-spirited movie in the lineup is played for laughs. Rex Harrison is the orchestra conductor who doesn’t want to believe the worst about wife Linda Darnell, but word of her indiscretions keeps reaching him anyway. By the time he takes up his baton his imagination is running riot, and he constructs elaborate revenge fantasies set to and informed by the music of Rossini, Wagner and Tchaikovsky. For some reason the second of these sequences, with Harrison at his fatuous, self-sacrificing best, reduced me to tears this go-round. Seeing the movie on the big screen was a revelation, highlighting Sturges’s glorious long takes as Harrison disastrously tries to implement his plan in the real world. The packed house was howling for the entire second half.

Another advertisement for seeing films in the theater: the audible gasp that greeted the opening frames of Samuel Fuller’s Deluxe Color and Cinemascope House of Bamboo (1955) during Wednesday’s Fuller tribute.

Even though I saw the two titles on the closing night’s Bad Girls bill in San Francisco only a month before, I stuck around to watch Pickup again. Because you can never have enough Beverly Michaels.

I got my marching orders for the next several issues of Noir City, the magazine. Some interesting articles in the pipeline. Stay tuned. In the meantime, swing by the Film Noir Foundation page and make a donation to keep the Noir City caravan rolling along.

Cocktails: The Seattle Circuit

The latest issue of Class Magazine highlights a dozen Seattle cocktail bars, with my home away from home The Zig Zag Café and Canon, the new digs of bartender supreme Murray Stenson, taking top grades. I vouch for many of the others on this list, too.

Book: The Terror of Living, by Urban Waite (2011)

AMC’s The Killing aside, Washington State seems to get short shrift in the popular imagination. But this neck of the deep woods is front, center and fully alive in this strong debut thriller from Urban Waite.

Phil Hunt killed a man during a botched robbery when he was younger. Now in his 50s, he lives just south of Seattle raising horses, supplementing his meager income by bringing in the occasional load of drugs. Deputy Bobby Drake prevents the delivery of one of those shipments, and the tentative grip Hunt had on stability gives way. Soon he’s on the run, hounded by a killer in the employ of his bosses, and his only hope out of trouble is the man who put him there.

Waite’s novel owes a debt to the work of Cormac McCarthy, as indicated by the ponderous title and his implacable hit man. But there’s nothing metaphorical about Grady, an assassin who enjoys his work but is no fearless killing machine. Waite creates a lovely tension between Drake, the lawman struggling to emerge from his father’s crooked shadow, and Hunt, “sure of himself in all the wrong situations. A good man, made up of all the bad things in the world.” Each man also has a spouse supportive in her own way. Muscular prose, relentless pacing, and a true sense of place make this a rock-solid thriller.

Local Tourist: Queen of Seattle

After a summer of hearing the mighty whistle of the Queen of Seattle from her office, Rosemarie insisted that we go aboard. The Queen is the largest steam-powered paddlewheel boat west of the Mississippi. It offers a two-hour cruise of Lake Union and the Lake Washington Ship Canal. Berthed next door is the Arthur Foss, featured in the 1933 film Tugboat Annie. Rosemarie, a Marie Dressler fan, was pleased by this no end.

Seattle history is covered throughout the cruise, with special emphasis on the Klondike gold rush era. My two favorite stories: then-mayor William F. Wood resigned as soon as he heard about the strike and went north to Alaska. Then there’s the one about the unscrupulous outfitters who’d sell sled dogs to a would-be prospector, only to blow a high-pitched whistle as the sap’s ship left the pier. The animals would jump overboard and swim home to be foisted off on the next poor sucker.

As we tooled around the lakefront, a piano player plinked out period tunes. On the return leg he climbed to the top deck and went to work on one of the world’s few remaining steam-powered calliopes. Then came the Klondike Cabaret, which really ought to be spelled with a K. Our tour guide, kitted out in appropriate attire, sang a few turn of the last century songs and followed up with a stirring rendition of Robert Service’s The Cremation of Sam McGee. Rosemarie, whose father would recite the poem regularly, was ready to step in if the need arose.

It’s all a little hokey, yes, but exactly the right kind of hokey. Rosemarie bought our tickets through a deal-of-the-day website, and kept reminding me about the voucher for what she called “the awesome boat ride.” The thing about Rosemarie is that she meant this. She genuinely believed that this boat ride was going to be awesome. And she was right. The cruise was a splendid way to spend an afternoon. It was nice to be the reason why the Fremont and Ballard drawbridges were going up for a change.

More photos at my Flickr page.

Report: Seattle Bookfest

Seattle loves to read. Every year it takes a position near the top of the list of America’s most literate cities. Name me another major burg that turned its chief librarian into an action figure.

But for some reason – ornery regional independence, I suppose – it has trouble sustaining an annual book festival. Northwest Bookfest went belly-up in 2003. Some enterprising locals rebooted it as Seattle Bookfest. The new version is more low-key, focusing on local authors and independent booksellers. It was held in Columbia City, one of Seattle’s funkier neighborhoods. (Most sections of town aspire to be San Francisco. Columbia City aims to be Portland.)

I wanted to support Bookfest 2.0. Recent Bouchercon coverage by Christa Faust and Donna Moore had me jonesing for some literary action of my own. And Columbia City is also a stop on Seattle’s new light rail line. The Bookfest provided the perfect excuse for my inaugural trip on Saturday afternoon. I’m a destination-not-the-journey kind of guy.

The venue was a former school, with the best panels held in a portable classroom. I swore when I graduated that I would never set foot in such structures again, so thanks for making a liar out of me, Bookfest! We missed some of the panel on graphic novels moderated by Fantagraphics co-founder Gary Groth, but what we did catch was interesting. What I remember:

- The use of space is essentially a writing tool in comics.

- Every comic should be read twice, once for the story and once for the composition.

- If you doubt that we have become a culture that processes information visually, just look at your interaction with your phone.

Next came the crime fiction panel. The session’s title – The Difference Between Mystery & Thriller – seemed a bit obvious, which raised concerns. As did the I’m-gonna-say indifferent moderating. I’m not going to embarrass the woman by name because she never bothered to provide hers. She sat down, asked the authors to introduce themselves, then turned to the audience and said, “OK. Any questions?” Fortunately the panelists – Robert Ferrigno, Michael Gruber and Kevin O’Brien – were pros and sustained a lively if general discussion about thrillers.

We wrapped things up with a reading by National Book Award winner Pete Dexter. Only it wasn’t a reading, more of an alphabetical presentation of his semi-autobiographical novel Spooner. Dexter went from A to Z, offering glimpses of what’s in the book. (“A is for anthill.”) Sometimes he’d read a paragraph or two to illustrate, sometimes he’d describe the material off the cuff, sometimes he’d veer into digressions about current events or words he had trouble pronouncing. The approach worked. Whenever Dexter did quote from Spooner the crowd wanted more, and I’ll be reading the book post haste.

Bumps and glitches aside, it was a promising start for the new iteration of Bookfest. As for light rail: smooth ride, frequent trains, decent fares. I’ll give that another shot, too.

UPDATE: The Stranger’s postmortem of the event is far more dire - and cites this very post in a vaguely disparaging way, which I consider a moral victory. For the record, their assessment jibes with what I saw.

Sort-Of Related: McQ (1974)/Harry In Your Pocket (1973)

At The Rap Sheet recently, J. Kingston Pierce linked to this clip, an annotated car chase from the shot-in-Seattle cop movie McQ.



I found it fascinating, particularly because the sequence ends on the exact spot where Rosemarie’s office now stands. It got me thinking how infrequently the Emerald City turns up in movies. Sure, there’s Sleepless in Seattle, which depicts a romantic comedy burg I don’t recognize. And Singles, capturing the city during the decade it would define. But the truth is Seattle, especially the downtown core that I seldom stray from, has an innate seediness due to its hardscrabble roots and the weather. And if you want seediness on film, you’ve got to turn back the clock to the 1970s.

McQ seems to have been spawned in a fit of municipal jealousy. It’s as if Seattle’s city fathers said, “San Francisco had Bullitt and Dirty Harry. We need a movie that showcases us a crime-infested West Coast hellhole made for tough guys, too!” John Wayne is in Eastwood mode as SPD lieutenant Lon McQ. We never learn what that’s short for, but I’m guessing McQuestionable Police Practices.

You’ve seen McQ even if you haven’t seen McQ, and I don’t mean that as a knock. You’ve got a heroic cop kicking against the suits, police corruption, lots of talk about drugs as “junk,” a flashy pimp informant. It’s the ur-cop movie, the collective unconscious as Quinn Martin Production. Director John Sturges allows us one fleeting glimpse of the Space Needle as the Duke wakes up on his boat – of course he lives on a boat – determined not to show Seattle as a forward thinking bastion but a working-class town dealing with real-world problems. Colleen Dewhurst is great as an aging junkie waitress, managing a regal grandeur as she observes that she doesn’t do skag.

Rosemarie’s Review: “This movie has some of the worst small talk I’ve ever heard.”

McQ whetted my appetite for ‘70s Seattle sleaze. Harry in Your Pocket filmed here the previous year. By all accounts the production was a big deal locally; then-mayor Wes Uhlman has a cameo as one of the many people whose wallets are lifted by ace cannon James Coburn. Coburn and his partner Walter Pidgeon, dapper and addicted to cocaine, train a pair of kids (Michael Sarrazin and Trish van Devere) to become stalls, providing the distraction that allows Coburn’s Harry to work his magic. The youngsters have an extended practice session in King Street Station, currently being restored to the let’s say glory seen in the film.

Harry is the sole feature directed by Mission: Impossible creator Bruce Geller, and it’s essentially a photo negative of that series: a team of perfectly trained individuals functions in perfect sync, not to hoodwink a Latin American dictator but relieve innocent folks of their cash. The movie presents its characters as criminals in their native habitat, and that lack of judgment is its greatest asset. Harry ultimately feels a bit insubstantial, but it possesses a breezy charm. It’s not available on DVD, but you can watch the entire film on Fancast.

Rosemarie’s Review: “This movie also stars a woman who was married to George C. Scott?”

I’ve lived in Seattle more than fifteen years, and my personal jury is still out about the place. Several reasons why are enumerated in this article, particularly #3.