Even though Pike Place Market is one of the hundred places to go before you die, I rarely go. Mostly because everyone wants to go there before they die, so it’s generally really crowded. And that wouldn’t be so bad, except that I go to shop for vegetables, and everyone else goes to look at things and take pictures. It’s difficult to pick out some good avocadoes, when, for instance, a guy is yelling at you to move because you’re in his shot. And then the relaxing pleasant day just becomes annoying.

But P. and I went yesterday, and I remembered that I really do like it, as long as I’m not in a hurry and remember a few basic guidelines.

We went to the market to see if anyone had any quince (they did) and to get a cheese board from Beecher’s Handmade Cheese. We also stumbled into La Buona Tavola, which is a shop with lots of flavored olive oils, truffle oil, and specialty Italian wine. We tasted their potato leek soup with white truffle oil, and ended up getting some white truffle cream, flavored olive oil, and a pinot grigio.

We stopped at Kell’s Irish Pub for lunch and then after that, stopped by The Tasting Room. I’ve been wanting to check it out for a while. I wasn’t missing much. There was absolutely no one there. I have never visited a tasting room that was completely empty before. There we stood, in a huge, completely empty room, with the one lone wine pourer guy (do you still call him a bartender? he does tend the bar, I guess) who ignored us. And the sterile, hollow feeling was magnified by the really cold air. I guess they were going for the wine cellar/our wines are so great they really need protecting aura, but I have been to many tasting rooms at many wineries that had a lot of wine stored there, and I’ve never felt as though I needed to don my snowboarding gear to feel comfortable.

Also, tastings were a minimum of $2 each (more for more expensive wine). Now, I have mixed feelings on the idea of charging for wine tasting. On the one hand, you don’t want to pour away all your profits. On the other hand, wine is very personal thing. You really have no way of knowing if you’re going to like it until you taste it. It doesn’t matter how expensive it is or how many points Wine Spectator gave it. So, wine tasting is a great marketing tool for wineries. People might shy away from trying new wine since they have to buy the bottle on faith and luck. But, when they try wine at a tasting and they like it, they might buy up several bottles as to avoid the overwhelming and confusing trip to the grocery store wine aisle. And they will file away the winery name for later use.

The Tasting Room could be a great marketing tool for the six wineries whose wines are featured. Tourists can be introduced to Washington wine; locals can make new discoveries. But at $2 a taste for a $13 bottle, not many people are going to experiment all that much. With a free tasting, or even five tastes for $5, you’re likely to try a few things that are different. There are approximately 25 ounces in a bottle of wine. This means that The Tasting Room is getting over $50 for that $13 bottle of wine. And while yes, I realize that they have to pay for the building and the inventory and the wine pourer guy, they’re also a wine store. They supposedly make their money on selling bottles of wine. The tasting is an extra benefit to help you choose what to buy. And it’s not as though they charge $2 per taste to average out their costs. More expensive bottles of wine cost more to taste. So, I’m not really surprised that the place was completely empty.

La Buona Tavola gave us an impromptu wine tasting with four Italian wines, and we ended up buying one. And because we had a good experience, and the er, wine pourer guy gave us a lot of information about the wineries and the wines, we’ll definitely go back. This place? Not so much. Generally, when you do a tasting, you get information about the wine, the winery, maybe even the vinyard and the wine maker. At The Tasting Room, for our $2 each, we got a grumpy old guy who we had to wave down to get tastes in the first place. And then we got silence. Not a word about the wines available to taste or about the wines we chose.

P. chose a 2000 dry riesling from Apex that doesn’t appear to even be listed on their site, so I can only assume someone found it in the back room gathering dust. (Actually, it could just be that their Web site sucks, because I was able to find a dry riesling under the awards section, but the link took me to a description of a late harvest riesling and the link to the late harvest riesling took me to a 404 error.) In any case, here was our assessment:

Me (swirling and sniffing): “Huh. It smells like leather. And not in a good way.”

Me (tasting and quickly handing back): “Ew. It tastes like leather.” (Imagine here not the new car leather smell, but more belt of a rodeo cowboy, with the big belt buckle and his name engraved on the back, after a long night of riding a bucking bronco.)

P: “I’ve heard wine described as leathery before, but I’ve never had wine that tasted like actual leather. Did you see that wine over there that was described as ‘tasting of leather and fur’?”

Me: “I’m not trying that one.”

The Tasting Room Web site describes it like this: “A bright golden hue leads to a generous aroma of classic Riesling character, with apple blossoms, white peaches and lime. On the palate the mouth-watering acidity is balanced by melon and pear fruit flavors. This is truly a wine that calls for food.”

It’s like a real estate ad. You have to read between the lines. It calls for food means that you need something to mask the terrible taste.

I tried the Camaraderie Cellars Lake Crescent White, which the Tasting Room site describes as , well, “description unavailable”. And it has no vintage, which I guess should have been my first clue. Also, the Camaraderie Cellars site seems to have absolutely no mention of it. They do mention that the reason they haven’t won many awards is that they don’t submit their wine for many awards, because of submission fees and all. This wine was, however, better than the riesling in that it did not smell and taste like old leather. That’s about the best I can say for it.

We chose not to spend another $4 on wine that were clearly cast-offs. And besides, I was freezing.

We then went to the cheese shop and got a few cheese accoutrements, as well as some basil chevre. In a freshing contrast to the grumpy wine guy, the cheese guy told us about the different chevres and which ones he liked best, and I bet he would have given us a taste for free had we asked. And then we found our quince and went home.

I realized that one reason I didn’t have a stressful hectic time is that we avoided the throwing-the-fish guys. When people think of Pike Place Market, they think of the guys throwing the fish. And every TV show or movie that features Seattle perpetuates this image. So, everyone comes to the market, and they stand at the entrance, a huge mass of people blocking the entrance, waiting for the fish.

But here’s the thing, this huge crowd of people are not really in the market to buy fish, and the throwing occurs when someone points out a big ugly fish, stuck in the ice with its little frozen eyes staring blankly, and then the fish guy takes the fish and throws it to the guy who rings it up or wraps it in something or does whatever you do to fish when you sell it. I wouldn’t really know as I think fish is slimy and icky so I never really buy it. And neither does anyone standing in the crowd. And this is the problem. So the crowd gets bigger as everyone waits and waits and the fish guys are cranky with the “who’s going to buy a fish already, stop just standing around! you want to see me throw a fish? BUY A DAMN FISH.” And the crowd is cranky with the “we’re here to see you throw a fish. We’re tourists and we’ve read about the fish and we’ve seen the fish on TV so we know you throw them so just do it already! We have to catch the early bird special at Denny’s and it’s almost 5:00!”

It doesn’t make for a very relaxing atmosphere.

My advice, if you’re coming to Seattle for the first time, and you want to see fish thrown at the market, just walk on up and buy a fish. They’ll ship it right to your house with that dry ice stuff. Or, if maybe there’s someone you don’t like, a big ugly fish with those scary eyes arriving on their doorstep would be just the thing.

Or, if you want to see the market but don’t care so much about the fish, just go in a side entrance. There are side entrances about every ten feet. You bypass the big crowd and the fish guy attitude and you’re instantly in the market. And surrounded by many other fish counters where you probably pay less, although you may not get as much showmanship. If you feel like you missed out, you can always watch the fish flying online.

If you don’t need the touristy kitchy shops, you can bypass the main market building completely. You can just walk down the sidewalk on the other side of the cobblestone street and see just as many fish and produce dealers. It’s still crowded, but you’re outside, and there are fewer crowds standing around gawking, more crowds wandering around buying. And it’s that side of the street where you’ll find the place with the great Italian wine and the truffle oil and the handmade cheese. The side where I remembered that Pike Place Market can be fun.

I was reading this entry in Robert Scoble’s blog the other day. He was talking about the next big thing, and how it’s about content creation, and sharing with friends and family: “We want to share our lives with our video camcorders and our digital cameras.”

And I think he really pinpointed the problem with the current methods of buying music online. Of course, he wasn’t actually talking about music, or buying that or anything else online. But when you talk about sharing content online, you can’t ignore music sharing, and I think he’s gotten to the heart of why music sharing was what caused your little sister and my mother to become criminals and, more amazingly, figure out the technology, once that technology was available.

Sure, one part of it was that people want something for nothing, and another part of it was that people liked the idea of getting music online, one song at a time, and no one had stepped up and offered an easy way for people to purchase music that way, but I think there was a lot more to it than that.

And I think that other reason is why people are so disgruntled with the current legal methods for buying music online. I’ve tried it; my friends have tried it; strangers I read on the Internet have tried it; hell, even slashdotters have tried it. But most people I’ve talked to and read are unsatisfied. I can’t buy a song at work and then move that song to my home computer if I buy the song through Music Now. I can’t convert a song to .mp3 if I buy it through Music Match. Also, I can only burn songs I bought there though their program. I can’t find any songs I like on emusic, but that’s a whole other problem. What if I have to reinstall Windows? What if I buy a new computer? What if my portable music player only plays mp3s? What if I want to burn my music using a different program that I like better?

I understand that the record labels are selling a product, and they want to be compensated for it. I’m not advocating theft. But what the record companies don’t seem to understand is that they’re not just selling a disposable item. They’re selling art, culture, an experience. If not for those things, people wouldn’t buy music at all. After all, songs only stay on the charts for a few weeks. No one (well, OK, maybe Paris Hilton and that trendy girl at the mall) would buy jeans that they knew would be going out of style next month. And anyway, you can listen to music for free on the radio, on your cable TV, and on radio AOL (or one of the much cooler Internet stations out there). Why buy?

Music has always been about more than just a song. Before we had the technology available to record music, it was an experience among a group of people: people sang in church, around campfires, at barnyard dances. Stories were passed down through song. Songs evoked memories of times and places gone by.

In the 60’s and 70’s, people had record parties. They sat around in someone’s basement and listened to a record together. OK, they also might have got a little high, but mostly, it was about the music: about sharing the music. Maybe people also sat around by themselves and listened to records, but it wasn’t the same. Those people were nerds.

I did the same in high school. Well, not the nerd thing, the sharing music thing. I remember going to church my sophomore year. My friends and I sat in the back and then snuck out and listened to Def Leppard’s Hysteria in my friend’s truck. Then we’d sneak back in before the service was over and our parents never knew we were gone. Even now, when I hear songs from that album, I think about sitting in that truck, heater cranked up, talking about our lives.

My senior year, if we’d get to school early in the winter, we’d pile into someone’s car and listen to music until the bell rang. Even before that, in junior high, we would take our boombox out into the soccer field at lunch and eat while we listened to the top five at noon on the local radio station. We’d make guesses on what would be number one.

Songs evoke memories of days gone by. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ first two albums bring me back to mud bogging in the woods, yelling as loud as I could, holding on to a boy. Billy Joel’s Glass Houses album reminds me of road trips to LA with my cute and charming, but unfaithful boyfriend my senior year. And inexplicably, Cher’s “Just Like Jesse James” makes me think of driving past the prison on the way to Paso Robles with my college boyfriend.

Not many songs remind me of things I’ve done alone.

Concerts are a shared musical experience as well. It’s just not the same to go to a concert alone. And when you’re there, part of the joy is experiencing the music with everyone around you.

But what about file sharing?

The wide availability of cassette tapes brought copying music to the masses. Not only were they a lot easier to lug around than those huge eight-tracks, but we could record onto them! And we did. “The consumer’s demand for blank tape used for personal music-recording was unanticipated by Philips.” Not to get out of paying for music, but to share the experience of music. I was introduced to music I would have never heard of had it not been for mix tapes.

I was fairly sheltered musically when I was growing up, so I knew about John Denver, the Carpenters, the Bee Gees, and 80’s pop. That was about the extent of my musical knowledge until college. Except that I also had a Shirley Temple record, so I knew all the words to “The Good Ship Lollypop.” Also, in 9th grade, my parents owned an antique store and once bought a box of records at an auction. I found a record by Aretha Franklin and smuggled it home. When I was home by myself, I discovered “Respect” and “Natural Woman.”

The summer after my first year at college, I interned at a theatre company. Everyone there liked to exchange mix tapes. I discovered a whole new world: “Revolution”, “American Pie”. What were these songs? The more mix tapes I received, the more I learned about music. The more I wanted to buy music.

Mix tapes weren’t about copying whole albums and distributing them around so we could all get out of paying. They were about creating something new and sharing it. Which goes back to Robert Scoble’s blog entry (I know, you thought I completely lost my train of thought, didn’t you?): “Humans want to create things. We want to send them to our friends and family… The impulse to create is strong. The impulse to share is strong. The impulse to consume is strong.” That’s what music means to people. It’s not just a disposable item we buy, use, and discard. It’s a building block for creating our own experiences and sharing them.

This isn’t an apologistic attempt to justify illegal file swapping. It’s an attempt to explain why we buy music in the first place. People originally downloaded music online illegally, not because it was free, but because it was easy. And it enabled us to use the new cassette tape (the writable CD) to continue creating mixes to share. And if the record labels really want to be able to sell their music online, they’ll sell not just the song, but the ability to do what we’ve always owned music for: sharing with others. People want to create unique and different mixes and play them on their work computer, and their home computer, and their iPod. They want to burn CDs and play them in the car. They want to swap mixes with their friends. They want to create a poem, a mood, an experience, and they want to share it. And they want to be introduced to what they’ve never heard of from their friends. When I listen to a mix CD from a friend, it’s just like when I was sitting cross-legged on the floor, listening to that Aretha Franklin record for the first time. Why have I never heard these songs? Where can I get more?

And yes, I’ll go to the record store and buy a CD by that artist I never knew before. But I probably won’t download the songs for 99 cents each because then I won’t really own them. Because you don’t really own the music when you buy it that way, you just own the ability to hear the song. Which you can do for free by listening to the radio.

I read this quote from some guy talking about honey: “Honey is a lot like wine: the more you learn, the less you know.” OK, maybe that wasn’t his exact quote, but I’m way too lazy to dig out the magazine and it’s not like he’s coming to correct me, because I also don’t remember his name or why it is he was talking about honey. But anyway, he’s right. The more I learn about wine, the stupider I become about wine.

Illustrative scene #1:

I was making a dish that called for white wine. A person less stupid that I am would have gone to the store and picked out a white wine in an acceptable price range. But that’s not what I did. What I did was wander aimlessly through the wine aisle at the grocery store for at least 15 minutes until I couldn’t take the confusion and feeling that I looked like a dumbass and randomly grabbed a bottle from the shelf. Which may appear to be the same actions a less stupid person would take, but on closer inspection was more like this:

White wine… white wine… I want it to have a nice flavor for the sauce, but also be good to drink with the dish.

Not a chardonnay. That would overpower the dish.

Pinot grigio? Best not to blindly pick a Pinot grigio, as you run the risk of drinking rain water. An Italian pinot gris is generally a good bet though… oh right. This is safeway. Their selection is seriously limited.

Not a reisling; that might be too sweet for the dish.

A gewurztraminer? Could be too spicy. Or too sweet.

Viogner? Oh right. Safeway probably doesn’t have any.

Pinot blanc? I know nothing about pinot blanc. Other than it’s blanc.

Oh wait… what’s this? White table wine! A little chardonnay, a bunch of sauvignon blanc and some sémillon. Viognier and muscat! I don’t have to choose! And it has a cool name! Conundrum. How can I go wrong with that? Also, I’m beginning to risk spending more time looking for a wine than cooking the dish. Conundrum it is.

It was pretty good, but probably not worth 15 minutes of agonizing in the Safeway aisle.

After going up a spectacular $300, my IRA is back down to a measily $87 gain. That just seems wrong somehow.

And P. made me buy a kitchen fire extinguisher. We also got one for his kitchen, since I cook there a lot. He got home moments after I had gotten his smoke detectors to quiet down last night. Only from smoke though. I’m learning to cook more carefully. Sort of.

Hmm… I think I’ll make beef stew. Let me just heat some oil in this pot, brown some meat that I’ve dredged in flour. OK, I’ll take out that batch of meat and add some more. Oh wait, looks like I need more oil. I’ll just add some and put in the –

Fuck! Fuck! Fire! Big fire! Big fire filling the entire pot and flames rising to the ceiling and smoke alarms going off and thank you very much I can SEE the fire I don’t need your incessant beeping in my ear that is making it really hard for me to concentrate on what I should do here.

OK. Fire. I need to put this fire out before it burns down my entire kitchen. How do I put out a fire? Water? I put water on– No. Water’s bad for grease fires. No water. Ack! Fire! Flames! Concentrate, dammit. What puts out a fire other than water?

I could cover the fire. With what? A towel? No, those flames are really fucking high and I think the towel would become ash in about two seconds. Wait! I put something powdery on the fire, right? Damn it you stupid smoke detectors, I GET IT. Shut the hell up.

What do I have that’s powdery? Salt? Should I put salt on it? Should I check the Internet? No, by the time I check the Internet the fire will have spread to my bedroom and then my neighbors will be really annoyed with me, and they thought my bird feeders were annoying. Ha, this’ll show them.

OK, I’m going for the salt before the flames entirely melt my microwave. Ack, I don’t want to get too close and burned to death. There. It did nothing. Crap. Let me try some more. OK, I think that helped a little. I’ll just keep throwing salt on it.

More salt.

More.

Salt.

OK. fire’s gone… another flame. Fuck. More salt.

Ok, I’m going to put the pot into the sink. Don’t turn on the water. Don’t turn on the water. Have more salt. Damn smoke detectors. It’s out, OK? Open windows. Open door. Jump up and down trying to wave the smoke away from the smoke detectors. Not tall enough. Damn, why am I so short.

Finally, quiet. The kitchen is covered with soot. I don’t think the pan is salvageable.