CULTURE

Chris Cook in his Browne’s Addition home. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

WORDS Around the Block

In the Neighborhood is a public poetry project that honors the distinct charms of Spokane’s various districts

BY NATHAN WEINBENDER

At least once a week, Chris Cook uploads a photo to Facebook that features an unusual sight he encountered on one of his long walks through his Browne’s Addition neighborhood. Maybe it’s of a sleek vintage car parked near the curb, or of a witticism scrawled in chalk on the sidewalk, a striking piece of midcentury architecture or an admittedly phallic rock formation that the current poet laureate has playfully dubbed Bonehenge.

Each of the photos is captioned “I love my neighborhood” and tagged with “#onlyinbrownes,” and there are now more than a hundred individual posts. Cook, Spokane’s current poet laureate, says the ideal subject of an “I love my neighborhood” photo is a landmark or found object that’s unusual and maybe even confounding — something that’s distinctly Browne’s Addition. ...continued on page 16

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CULTURE | WORDS “AROUND THE BLOCK,” CONTINUED...

“Maybe I’ve passed it for years without stopping and reflecting, ‘I know exactly what that is, and how stupid of me for not noticing the first time,’” Cook says.

And once he started keeping his eyes peeled for odd sights, they seemed to pop up in every direction.

“I thought to myself, ‘This doesn’t exist anywhere else on the planet,’” Cook says. “And all you have to do is look down at your feet or above your head. Anywhere. It’s all around you.”

These walks and the resulting social media posts sparked the idea for Cook’s new poetry project, a series titled In the Neighborhood, which is funded through Spokane Arts and is encouraging others to explore their familiar surroundings in the same way and write a poem about it. Spokane Arts is accepting submissions through Feb. 12, and selected poems will eventually be included in a printed collection.

This is, of course, not a project without precedence. Cook points to several local poets who have highlighted specific regions of Spokane in their work, and who have influenced his own poetry — Thom Caraway’s poems about West Central, Dennis Held’s about Vinegar Flats, Tom I. Davis’ about Peaceful Valley. Anthony Brighton has also memorialized Browne’s Addition in his poems.

What’s different about In the Neighborhood, though, is its community angle, and its platform that will let other Spokane residents reflect on the specialness of the streets where they live.

“As poet laureate, you always have in your mind that you’d like to do a signature project,” Cook says. “And so I’ve been thinking about this probably since day one, when I wanted it to be something that was important to me, and show my pride in my city, and to allow others to show that same pride.”

“I think that Spokane thinks of itself as a smaller town than it is,” says Spokane Arts Program Manager Mika Maloney, who was enthusiastic about the project when Cook approached her with it. “We’re a city with these different neighborhoods and areas, and there are interesting things happening all over the city, things worth noticing and writing about and reading about.”

In a way, this is a distinctly COVID-era project, Maloney says, because so many of us have been confined to our neighborhoods for months at a time.

“You’re going on walks by yourself, [taking] a lot of the same routes and engaging less with the whole city like a lot of us normally do,” Maloney says. “So I think this project fits with where people are right now, but also we’ll end up with a collection of poetry that is interesting and fun and good to look back at later.”

Submissions for In the Neighborhood started coming in at the tail end of 2020, and Maloney says they’ve already received work from as many kids as elderly people who are writing about neighborhoods where they’ve spent most of their lives.

“We’re getting poems from published authors, and people that we know as poets and writers,” Maloney says. “We’re also getting poems from people that maybe haven’t submitted poems before, or haven’t written a poem before. Maybe they write a ton of poetry, but they don’t share it with anyone beyond their family or their close friends.”

“I love my neighborhood, part 86.” CHRIS COOK PHOTO

Cook hopes that those authors, whether they be veterans or neophytes, will find new ways of appreciating their own hangouts much like he stumbles upon the unique charms of Browne’s Addition — from its century-old mansions that have been repurposed into apartments, to the cobblestone side streets that recall a time before automobiles.

“I like the fact that long after we’re gone, a neighborhood identity can remain,” Cook says. “I also like that they can run the gamut from Mr. Rogers’ vision of a neighborhood to the one described in the Tom Waits song that gave me this project name. There’s love in both of them, it’s just expressed very differently.” n

HITTING THE HIGH NOTES

I knew the Bee Gees were more than a disco-fied punch line before watching the new HBO documentary about the Aussie stars, but The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart effectively makes the case the Gibb brothers deserve a lot more love. Instead of an utter hagiography, it delivers a concise band history, from Beatles-esque power-poppers to disco kingpins to elder statesman. It’s not a warts-and-all doc — there’s nary a mention of their disastrous Sgt. Pepper’s movie — but it doesn’t shy away from rivalries among the brothers, or the overindulgence that killed their youngest brother, Andy. Be forewarned: Viewing will plant their otherworldly harmonies in your head for days afterward. (DAN NAILEN)

THIS WEEK’S PLAYLIST

There’s noteworthy new music arriving in stores and online this week. To wit:

MATTHEW SWEET, Catspaw. If anyone can use power-pop to cut through the darkness, it’s this guy.

ACCEPT, Too Mean To Die. German old-school metal — perhaps the perfect soundtrack for these gloomy times?

BLOODY HAMMERS, Songs of Unspeakable Terror. Wait, no, these cartoonish goth-rockers are the perfect soundtrack of a discontented winter. (DAN NAILEN)

Good Bakes,

Bad Decisions BY DAN NAILEN

The turn of a new year always seems to give rise to bad decisions.

When I was a (much) younger man, that meant things like going to a “rave” under the influence of some mystery substance from a buddy’s stash and blowing a whistle all night on the dance floor. You thought Tambourine Man was annoying (if admittedly charming)? Hold my Zima.

As a (much) older man, most of my new year bad decisions come these days in the form of resolutions, those dastardly promises we make ourselves to Be Better than whatever we were on Dec. 31.

More often than not, resolutions involve taming my appetites for, well, basically anything delicious, and therefore unhealthy.

Drink less beer. Drink more water. You know the drill.

This year, my partner and I decided to put the clamp

THE BUZZ BIN

down on our refined sugar intake for at least a couple weeks. I’m not the instigator, but I’m supportive. There’s no question our December was ridiculously full of cookies and candies. The pandemic didn’t cramp our style, although it did cut down on sharing our goodies.

Writing this seven days into our newly sugar-free life I’m cranky, but it’s getting easier. And the information we’ve looked up on what sugar does to our bodies is certainly inspiring/scary enough to keep me going.

Quitting sugar isn’t this year’s new year bad decision, though. No, that would be our decision to start binging The Great British Baking Show at the same time.

Timing is everything, and it couldn’t be worse for delving into the cultural phenomenon built around amiable Brits creating towering testaments to all things sweet. Two weeks ago, we would have cuddled on the couch with some Christmas cookies, or a bowl of ice cream and breezed through a few Netflix episodes judged by lovable rogue Paul Hollywood and the austere Mary Berry. Now we’re churning through seasons with nary a treat in sight except on the screen.

I can admit I’ve probably drooled, and not just because I’ve fallen asleep during our viewing. (That’s no shot at the show, just at my inability to sit on my couch vertically for longer than five minutes). The show is unfailingly charming; its contestants all seeming extremely friendly and supportive of each other. It’s certainly not cutthroat enough to be a product of American television executives, and it’s all the better for it.

Has it inspired me to bake? No. Do I understand the apparent British obsession with meringue? Again, no. But it’s light, fluffy, predictable entertainment during trying times, and I can’t wait to keep watching in a couple weeks with a pint of Cherry Garcia at the ready. n

HANKS, BUT NO HANKS

On the audio series Dead Eyes, actor/comedian Connor Ratliff performs exhaustive forensic analysis on a crucial moment from his career: After being cast in the Tom Hanks-Steven Spielberg miniseries Band of Brothers, he was fired unceremoniously because Hanks thought Ratliff had — well, it’s right there in the podcast title. Although Ratliff sets out to clear up the circumstances behind his sacking, the Hanks angle is sort of a MacGuffin, because the true purpose of the show is to reflect on the rejection and humiliation that goes into being a working actor, and all of his guests (including A-listers Jon Hamm and Seth Rogen) have audition horror stories. (NATHAN WEINBENDER)

THE FIG TREE

In The Bell Jar, Slyvia Plath writes of a person who ponders all the many lives they could live, each represented by a different fig in a fig tree. Eventually, they starve rather than making a choice of which path to take. In The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, Nora finds herself between life and death, similarly experimenting with the many different lives she could have lived. A glaciologist, a rock star, an Olympic swimmer, a nobody. The more she dreams of the lives that could have been, the more evident it becomes that all we ever have are the choices that lie ahead. (SAMANTHA WOHLFEIL)

GIRL MEETS ALIEN

As a regular watcher of YouTube critic Lindsay Ellis’ essays, I was eager to settle in with her debut novel, Axiom’s End. The book follows Cora, estranged daughter of a Julian Assange-esque whistleblower, as the world experiences first contact with an alien species. While the government scrambles to keep it secret, Cora finds herself center stage as one of the ETs, a leader she calls Ampersand, picks her as his sole interpreter. Cora and Ampersand’s relationship deepens as they grapple to understand each other and the worlds each calls home. Axiom’s End is less an intergalactic romance than a thoughtful examination of the communication barriers that may arise when humans actually do make first contact. (CHEY SCOTT)