The Stranger Fall Arts 2025

OOPS! AOULRLFALLAARRTST! SEPTEMBER

Drag Kings! p.48 Free!

Books?

2025 • THESTRANGER.COM

Visual Art? OBVIOUSLY!

ROUND-UP

Fantasy A Gets a Crystal Ball p.17

Film?

WE LOVE IT!

WE STILL READ THEM!

Body Horror! p.51

Music?

DUH!

Jazz! p.57 FreeRange Neon! p.32

Theater?

WE HAVE THAT TOO! A Dazzling Chanteuse! p.23

Late-Summer Eats! p.69

+ Our Finest Arts Calendar Yet, Probably!

2 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

SEPTEMBER 2025

KIRKLAND.WA KIRKLAND.WA

OCT 3-5 OCT 3-5 2025 2025

WWW.KIRKLANDARTSCENTER.ORG WWW.KIRKLANDARTSCENTER.ORG

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4 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

SEPTEMBER 2025

TABLE OF CONTENTS I Saw U . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Holding a Corn Snake, Getting Cut Off in Traffic, and Whirling in the Pit at Lambrini Girls

Last Month This Month . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 All the Anti-Masturbation Fences, Progressive Candidate Victories, and Potato Chip Bags Full of Money You May Have Missed in August

Anatomy of a Sculpture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Peek Inside Erika Rier’s World of Mischievous, Mythical Monsters

CRYSTAL BALL!, Not Coming to a Theater Near You Anytime Soon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 The Team That Made the Cult Hit Fantasy A Gets a Mattress Learns About the Virtue and Danger of Whimsy

This Ain’t Vancouver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Local Sightings Film Festival Celebrates Real PNW Filmmakers

Tales From a Broad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23 Seattle’s Sparkliest Chanteuse Finally Writes Her Own Story

The Sound of Silence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Jeannie Vanasco’s New Memoir Grapples with an Arduous Mother-Daughter Relationship

Lit Review Revue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 It’s Raining Great, Local Books (and Book Events) This Fall!

Field of Beams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32 Kelsey Fernkopf’s Awe-Inspiring Big Neon

Collecting Lust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Robert E. Jackson Turns Other People’s Old Snapshots into Timeless Art

Beyond the Galleries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .45 Art Is Waiting for You in an Industrial Cathedral and Your Neighbor’s Backyard

Drag Kings Ascend the Throne! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .48 Emerald City Kings Ball Is a Crowning Achievement

She’s All That . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 See Two Sides of Playwright Keiko Green at Seattle Theaters in September

The Purpose of Playing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 The 2025–2026 Performance Seasons According to the People Planning Them

Welcome to Seattle’s New and Young Jazz Age . . . . . . 57 Pioneer Square Joins Forces with Seattle Jazz Fellowship to Make Things Happen

Album Review Revue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Eight Local Releases (and Then Some) to Put on Your Radar!

Concha Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .65 Mayra Sibrian of Pan de La Selva Bakes for the Latin American Diaspora

Do Not Go Gently into That Pumpkin Spice . . . . . . . . . .69 There’s Still Time to Taste Summer in Seattle

Shelf Help . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Sokha Danh’s Bookstore Makes Room for More Than Just Books

Things to Do . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Music! Art! Film! Literature! Food! Performance! All the Things!

Fun Page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .90 Comics and Crosswords

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6 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

SEPTEMBER 2025

Editorial

Business

EDITOR IN CHIEF

COMPTROLLER

MANAGING EDITOR

AP/AR COORDINATOR

Katie Lake

Hannah Murphy Winter

Surprise Paradiso

Megan Seling ARTS EDITOR

Art & Production

Emily Nokes NEWS EDITOR

ART DIRECTOR

Vivian McCall

Corianton Hale

SENIOR STAFF WRITER

ASST. ART DIRECTOR

Anthony Keo

Charles Mudede

PRODUCTION MANAGER

STAFF WRITERS

Char Harris

Julianne Bell Nathalie Graham Audrey Vann

PRODUCTION

David Caplan, Feedback Graphics

PHOTO DIRECTOR

Marketing & Digital Media

Billie Winter COPY EDITORS

Fox Allison Dave Segal

MARKETING DIRECTOR

EverOut

Christian Parroco

EVEROUT MANAGER

VIDEO PRODUCTION DIRECTOR

MANAGING EDITOR

EMAIL MARKETING SPECIALIST

Caroline Dodge

SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR

Shane Wahlund

Katya Schexnaydre

DATA MANAGER & STAFF WRITER

Shannon Lubetich

Events

STAFF WRITERS

DIRECTOR OF EVENTS

Advertising

Technology & Development

Bri Brey Langston Thomas

Tim Neill

REGIONAL SALES DIRECTOR

VP OF PRODUCT

James Deeley

Anthony Hecht

ADVERTISING OPERATIONS MANAGER

LEAD DEVELOPERS

Evanne Hall

ADVERTISING COORDINATOR

Michael Crowl Nick Nelson

SENIOR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES

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DEVELOPER

Ben Demar Katie Phoenix

IT MANAGER

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Bold Type Tickets

Administrative

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PUBLISHER

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CLIENT SOLUTIONS MANAGER

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Diana Schwartz

CHIEF OF STAFF

PROJECT MANAGEMENT CLIENT & CUSTOMER SOLUTIONS REPRESENTATIVE

FOUNDER & CHAIRMAN

CUSTOMER SOLUTIONS REPRESENTATIVE

Toby Crittenden Brady Walkinshaw

Get a Good To Go! pass and save $2 on every toll.

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Tolling begins soon on the SR 509 Expressway.

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THE STRANGER 1122 E Pike Suite 1224, Seattle, WA 98122 VOICE 206-323-7101 Mon–Fri, 9 am–5:30 pm; editor@thestranger.com

Tolling begins soon on the first stage of the SR 509 Expressway between I-5 and 24th Avenue South near SeaTac. You can save $2 on every toll statewide with a Good To Go! pass.

It’s free to sign up and you can get a free sticker pass now while supplies last.

For drivers with a Good To Go! pass, tolls will vary between $1.20 and $2.40 depending on time of day.

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8 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

SEPTEMBER 2025

Hello and welcome to

HEAD TO

Fall Arts Issue!

I

your community in Chinatown (pg. 71), and art is cultivating a fresh jazz scene in Pioneer Square (pg. 57). Art is freestanding neon glowing in unexpected landscapes (pg. 32), films starring homegrown legends (pg. 17), and drag kings finally getting their crown (pg. 48).

Art is baking for the Latin American diaspora (pg. 65). Art is writing memoirs from within heavy circumstances (pg. 27). And if a fabulous local diva living in a loft behind a stage isn’t the embodiment of art (pg. 23), then I don’t know what is.

We also have guides to help you choose your own art adventure when it comes to: NWFF’s Local Sightings film fest (pg. 21), all the neat things local theaters have in store for fall (pg. 55), the best visual art happening outside of galleries (pg. 45), local record releases that rip (pg. 61), upcoming local(ish) books we’re excited about (pg. 31), and the very best late-summer-in-Seattle eats on pg. 69 because don’t forget, summer ain’t over until the strike of September 22. And even then, I say the line between summer and fall is also whatever you make it to be, rebel.

I don’t want to break the fourth wall too much or reveal how the paper sausage is made, but on a personal note, this issue was difficult to put together. Pieces morph and change and fall through, decisions must be made quickly, deadlines are finite, perfectionism is not an option, and personal lives have lives of their own.

But making a newspaper is an art form, too. Huge thanks to our production team, to our writers, and to you, dear reader, for giving this work meaning.

Okay, get out of here. You’ve got a lot of arts reading to do.

t’s my first Fall Arts Issue as Arts Editor, and I could not be more thrilled to show you what we’ve done with the place.

When trying to plan this paper, I couldn’t help but wonder: What makes an Arts Issue an Arts Issue, when every issue we make has a big, fantastic Arts Section in it already (if I do say so myself )?

For one: It’s all art, baby. We gave our lovely news team a break. (Just kidding, we politely made them write about art, plus the funniest Last Month This Month to date, on pg. 13.) And of course if you need it, our website is still never not news-ing; the news just won’t quit!

But back to THE ARTS. We say it a lot, and we say it because it’s true: Seattle struggles with rising rents and vanishing funding. We suffer, like many cities (and eras throughout history), from the people with the most money often having the wackest taste; some of our best buildings lie vacant for years while some of our best artists (or those wishing to even be able to begin that journey, to take that chance) don’t have space to work, experiment, or thrive.

But there is still so much art in this stupid wonderful city. Artists here keep building, keep inventing whole worlds outside those constraints.

There is a quote from the late, great D. Boon of the Minutemen: “Punk is whatever we made it to be.” I think of that line often because it’s less about a genre than it is about permission—the freedom (inspiration?) to build something on your own terms.

Not that anyone is asking me to define art (yikes), but I think art, too, is like that. Art is whatever we make it to be: not a set of rules or boundaries, but a practice of claiming, shaping, and expanding what matters to us.

With whatever we can, however we can.

Art is creating a meaningful space for

Love Actually, Emily Nokes

This Issue Brought to You By….

Crying Bruce Harrell’s Primary Election Cake Mistake TS12 Butches Emergency vets who don’t lecture or scold you after your dog accidentally ingested weed (he’s fine) Petting piglets Being marooned in Lake Union Having a Spindrift at exactly 4:00 p.m.

Every government worker’s out-of-office email reply Bad arch support Imagining two sloths telecommunicating The bunion on my left foot BLTs Having a tiki bar at home “We got a wee machine that be’s cleaning our dishes” These fucking sunsets Missing Mike McGinn In loving memory of sweet Vangelis Evangelista

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Unabashedly singing Matchbox Twenty songs at the top of your lungs while tipsy with a bestie Pocket kazoos A wedding ring at the bottom of Lake Washington Raw sewage Finding God in REI All of the cats I see in windows on my daily walk Aunt Gladys from Weapons Watching Buffy from the beginning for the first time

#mercurywingweek portlandmercury.com/wingweek

9

10 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

Your Local Everyday Gift Shop In the heart of the Wallingford neighborhood

PNW gifts & complimentary gift wrap

SEPTEMBER 2025

I Saw U…

Holding a Corn Snake, Getting Cut Off in Traffic, and Whirling in the Pit at Lambrini Girls ILLUSTRATIONS BY ANNA TONO

D

id you recently share a ~*moment*~ with someone while riding the bus, dancing at the club, or standing in line at the supermarket? Do you want to try to reconnect? Submit your own I Saw U at thestranger.com/ isawu, and maybe we’ll include it in the next round-up! Look for a new batch of I Saw U messages every week on thestranger.com.

you got cutoff by gold sedan on Broadway 7/31 AM tatted, tall cyclist blocked from merging on an otherwise perfect Thursday morning. life is so unfair to you. let my ford focus be your white knight.

Seahawks Friday on the 1 Line You were in a UW hat, I was the tall pastel nerd on a train full of football fans. I don’t know anything about you, but I’d love to learn! Drinks?

Long Red Skirt on Light Rail Taking the light rail down to the art fair on the 19th, we locked eyes and I smiled, bobbing my foot with joy; You got off at ID, wish I’d said HI

The Psychedelic Farmers Market I approached your stall, decorated with pheasant feathers & medicinal sprays. I quickly noticed Mapacho -jungle tobacco. You were lovely.DMT & Chill?

Girl with snake at Vivace Vivace, Monday: you + corn snake. Me: doing an art project about corn snakes. Can I meet you + snake for research?

You are a blessing!

Malia(sp?) Aug 1, Roosevelt Station, you helped me negotiate the down escalators without a panic attack, and I just need to say, you are a blessing!

Rainbow pin on the ferry bow You, in all black w/rainbow pin, chatted adorably about my shirt. My wife accidentally scared you off! We’re poly, and I’d love to see you again.

James @ QFC Everytime I get my pasta salad and see you, I want to play with your mostaccioli. Grab a coffee sometime in the village?

Lake Union 10k wave-by You: blond in blue leggings. Me: waving back at you from my balcony. Hope you crushed your PR. Let’s run the next lap together?

Top Shelf Vegan Eggs a few saturdays ago at west seattle WholeFoods. i should’ve taken the chance to talk to you more about how i wanna make you vegan eggs from scratch Pool table cue-tie Saw you at Hillside late on a Sunday night.

You called me beautiful but I was coming off a bad day, teach me to play sometime? Your smile was killer.

Caffeinated buzz-cut U: SO cute, buzz-cut/w headphones @Vivace 7-26-25 2pm, contemplating. Me: long hair, BK shorts & shirt outside. Same time next Sun? I wanna say hello

Lambrini Girls Tornado You: tall babe whirling around the pit. Later you called me pretty before disappearing into the rainy night. Help me find clothes as cool as yours?

Pike Place Market Donut Line “Faded” by Alan Walker, “Wings” by Birdy.

A bright light flashed when I saw you. I gasped; I could barely breathe. I felt your presence when I returned. I felt you when I sang. DM me.

Is it a match? Follow The Stranger on Instagram and leave a comment on our weekly I Saw U posts to connect!

11

12 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

SEPTEMBER 2025

LAST MONTH THIS MONTH

BY THE STRANGER’S SLOG AM™ SPECIALISTS

All the Anti-Masturbation Fences, Progressive Candidate Victories, and Potato Chip Bags Full of Money You May Have Missed in August

Last Month This Month is a recap of all the previous month’s news, featuring headlines from Slog AM. Find it in every issue of The Stranger!

N

otable attorney (O.J. Simpson, DJT, Jeffrey Epstein) and living raisin Alan Dershowitz planned to sue a farmers market on Martha’s Vineyard after a nonbinary, anti-Zionist vendor refused to sell him pierogi. They fought. He misgendered the vendor. A third party corrected him. The police corrected him. “That’s a matter between me and my grammarian,” Dershowitz said. He went back to apologize. He started another fight. The shortest, saddest story ever told: two pierogi, never sold. *** We now know the price of an American soul. Trump is ICE-ing down those student loans by offering a new forgiveness program for anyone who wants to become one of his favorite Gestapos—ICE agents—on top of the $50,000 bonus they’re already goose-stepping to the bank. ***

City Hall’s first busker.

BILLIE WINTER

Oh, what a Seattle primary election that was. Katie Wilson handed Mayor Bruce Harrell his own cloven ass. Former federal prosecutor Erika Evans demolished the Trump-y incumbent Ann Davison.

Through years of terrible leadership, Sara Nelson constructed her own pillory, and her challenger, Dionne Foster, has the key. Well, well, well, Seattle politics have a chance to not suck (as much) shit anymore.

As long as you vote in the general election this November! *** The Army Corps of Engineers raised the water level on Ohio’s Little Miami River (stupid name for a river) so Vice President JD Vance (stupid name for a man) could “support safe navigation” for his family’s kayaking adventure to celebrate Vance’s 41st birthday, instead of going to Ashley Furniture like he wanted to.

*** Oh, the dildos. Since late July, men have lobbed three neon green dildos onto WNBA courts. Players laughed it off the first time. By the third time, they were done with the sexism. One guy’s dildo hit a little girl in the leg, and he became one of three men to alley-oop their way into a pair of handcuffs for sex-toy-tossing in the paint. Nobody laughed when eight federal agents destroyed a pro-immigrant banner in a public park in Washington, DC, and, like Indiana Jones swapping a sandbag for a golden idol, left behind a dildo.

*** This trans panic is really paying off, though. An 18-year-old cis woman in Minnesota sued Buffalo Wild Wings after a server, who thought she was trans, allegedly harassed her in the women’s restroom until she unzipped her hoodie to display her breasts, “proving” her gender.

*** Scientists have uncovered a species of ancient whale with big eyes and a mouthful of slicing teeth. They say they were deceptively cute.

Anywhere but the court.

We think they were probably not very good at GETTY IMAGES *** head. Whales fuck crazy.

Armed National Guard troops and a flurry of federal agents spent half the month in *** Washington, DC, spreading the bedlam and Tech start-up Nectome wants to preserve terror this “crackdown” on crime is supposed people’s brains and back up their minds so to stop. This occupation supports the presi- scientists of the future can upload them into dent’s preoccupation with dick-swinging and computer simulations. Sounds great until arresting immigrants. Sure, cracking down you find out the procedure is 100 percent on a city with a falling crime rate is ridicu- fatal. It only costs $10,000 to join the waitlous. But not anywhere near as ridiculous as list. For hell? the real reason this is happening—a teenage *** DOGE staffer nicknamed “Big Balls” getting Spanish bullfighting is seeing a complicated beat up by youths in a rich area. Trump & renaissance thanks to two popular, recently Miserable Sons have threatened other cities gored matadors who fucking hate each with the same treatment. Look out, Seattle, other as much as they love killing the bulls we’re one of the “crap holes” that could be and dragging their dead bodies around the arena via horse. It’s a man’s sport, and stigstuffed full of Feds next! matized, too. Forbidden fruit and all that. Or *** Israel killed four Al Jazeera journalists in society’s deepening thirst for blood. an airstrike outside al-Shifa hospital in Gaza *** City, including the prolific reporter Anas The first-of-its-kind World Humanoid Al-Sharif, 28, who was previously threat- Robot Games booted up in Beijing: 500 ened by Israel. Israel claimed Al-Sharif, a humanoid robots, 280 teams, 16 countries, young man with a young family, was a Hamas showcasing national prowess in robotics. The leader, a claim with absolutely no credible opening ceremony included a robot soccer match. It looked like shit. evidence, raising more suspicion that Israel is committing war *** To abide by a court order, Seattle crimes. Israel has slain 237 installed a four-foot-high chainjournalists since October 7. link and tarpaulin anti-mas*** turbation fence at Denny US Attorney General Pam Blaine. “Nooooo!” screamed Bondi sent letters to 32 the public masturbators mayors and seven goverwhen they discovered a nors of “sanctuary” cities fence they could hide behind. and states telling them to cut that woke shit out *** Bandits stole $7,000 worth right this instant or of Labubu dolls from an LA Mommy is going to take store. We hesitate to bash away your toys (essential Labubus in print, lest you think funding for unspecified us old and out of touch, but that programs). Washington seems like an investment that Governor Bob Ferguson won’t pay off. said Fuck You Mom, See You in Court. Unfortu*** ANTHONY KEO Trump is attacking mail-in nately, the Trump administration is not big on the law, Today’s Beanie Baby, voting, even though it helped him tomorrow’s Beanie win in 2024. And in 2020, of course. just order.

Baby.

13

*** Winnie Greco, a now-disgraced former longtime adviser to New York City Mayor Eric Adams, pressed a potato chip bag full of money into the hands of a local reporter in New York City. Greco’s attorney said that the bag of cash “was not a bag of cash,” and definitely wasn’t a bribe. It was a “gesture of friendship and gratitude.” *** There’s a new eight-foot, 650-pound statue of WNBA superstar Sue Bird posed in a forever ponytail-swishing layup outside Climate Pledge Area that, like all statues, will become a sort of Honey Bucket for birds.

Sue Bird Poop

BILLIE WINTER

*** NASA found a new moon for Uranus. The big ball of ice that’s 1.5 billion miles away from us now has 29 moons. The new one is pretty small—six miles wide. But it’s still a moon, and we should welcome it to the family that is our solar system. *** Tacoma paid $600,000 to one of the cops who killed Manuel Ellis, a Black man walking to a convenience store, in 2020. He and his wife say the trial and media attention caused “severe emotional distress.” He could breathe, though. *** A grand jury in DC did not indict folk hero Sean Dunn, aka sandwich guy, for losing his absolute shit and hurling his hero at a federal officer. Subversive stuff. *** During a routine inspection, the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies found Pueblo County’s coroner Brian Cotter hid bodies in a secret room of his private funeral home. Upon arrival, inspectors noted a “strong smell of decomposition.”

Then, they spotted a door obscured by a cardboard display. When they went to open it, Cotter asked them not to go in there. They did. Inside they found 24 bodies “in various states of decomposition.” Some had been there for as long as 15 years. Cotter said they were awaiting cremation. *** Washington finally got an In-N-Out. Honestly, the newsroom is split on this one. ■

14 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

Public Opening Celebration FRI, OCT 3, 6–9 PM

henryart.org free admission

SEPTEMBER 2025

15

Anatomy of a Sculpture

Peek Inside Erika Rier’s World of Mischievous, Mythical Monsters

BY MEGAN SELING

E

ach one of Erika Rier’s ceramic creatures has its own story, and most of them are at least a little unsettling.

Just look into the several sets of eyes on her vampire-ish little girl or the crowned and horned woman clenching what looks like a not-very-alive bunny, and it’s clear there’s something menacing lurking within. But something Rier didn’t anticipate when she first began sculpting these vibrant friends years ago was the new lives they’d take on once they left her studio.

“People can accumulate these, and then they can make stories that I’ve never even thought of by just putting them together,” she says. “That appeals to the storyteller part of me. I feel like I’m always trying to put things in there, little archetypal bits that people can pull to make stories for themselves with.”

Rier’s characters are inspired by a love of mythology and storytelling—“I’m obsessed with Athena,” she says—and that fiction is balanced with the very real experience of

being a woman and, often, a commentary on the toxic misogyny people face every day. The result has proven to be off-putting to some. (Jerks, mostly.) “[My sculptures] are people and animals and creatures who have full lives, full experiences, and full personalities,” she says. “There are parts of ourselves, as feminine people, where we are beautiful and joyous and pleasant, and there are parts of us that are ugly and mean and not great. And we’re all like that. Unfortunately, my work is still really sidelined because it

is over-the-top feminine in a world that, at best, ignores the feminine, and at worst, is absolutely hostile towards it.”

Here, Rier gives us a closer look at her sculpture And Chain and shows us that there’s nothing to be afraid of. Unless you’re one of the misogynists. In which case, run.

See more of Rier’s work—and start your own collection of little monsters—at Punk Rock Flea Market at the Quality Flea Center on Capitol Hill, September 19–21.

of Rier’s ceramic friends start out as miniatures and 1 Some take different shapes over the course of several years. “In

And Chain, there’s the bird-beaked woman. I call her the Bird Witch,” says Rier. “She’s an evolving character. A lot of the time, I’ll just have a piece of scrap clay and I’ll be like, ‘I’ll just see where this clay takes me.’ In doing so, I start to get ideas for larger pieces. Usually I’ll make a little monster and I’ll be like ‘Oh, I love that,’ and I’ll sketch a bigger or more complicated version.”

work table 3 Rier’s is covered with

phrases that she wants to remember for future sculptures. The conversation in And Chain is based on something she overheard in real life. “The married couple that owned the studio that I rented had the most absurd banter—they actually said this to each other.”

original ceramic chain Rier made for And Chain 4 The fused up in the kiln. “I actually broke it trying to fix it, and

cut my hand horribly,” she says. “It was terrible!” But a friend with a 3D printer came to the rescue. “I was pretty excited to incorporate a different [technique], and it took a few times to get the chain just the right vibe—that was a cool process.”

laughs when 2 Rier asked about the origin

stories of her figurines.

“Where do they come from? I always am stuck on certain stories. There are a bunch of Sumerian myths that I’m really obsessed with, but also just the basic story of Eve eating the apple preoccupies me constantly. I’m decidedly agnostic, but it’s such a weird story! And it’s so the basis of Western misogyny, I’m obsessed with it.”

of Rier’s characters have stereotypical “pretty” 5 Most features—long eyelashes, shapely lips, bows or flowers in

their hair—but there’s always a darker side: shifty eyes, sharp teeth, and horns and bones and snakes. “I love that tension, right? It’s a little sinister, but then it’s got a cutesy little outfit on,” says Rier. “Evil doesn’t always look evil.”

16 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

SEPTEMBER 2025

17

HARRISON FREEMAN

CRYSTAL BALL!, Not Coming to a Theater Near You Anytime Soon

The Team That Made the Cult Hit Fantasy A Gets a Mattress Learns About the Virtue and Danger of Whimsy

BY VIVIAN McCALL

A

pproximately eight minutes before my interview with Fantasy A—the autistic rapper, the implacable self-promoter, and the star of the low-budget cult flick Fantasy A Gets a Mattress—I got the following text.

“Can we meet by Seattle center next to the Vera project instead of Gasworks Park?” The park was closed for an event, he wrote, apologetically.

I had just pulled into a parking spot. The park was definitely open. People were biking and walking their dogs. The closest thing I saw to an “event” were the four geese gathered around a plywood board spray-painted with the word “hole.”

The gates must have been taken down, he told me. He’d leave work and bus over now.

But he’d have to stop at the post office first, so he wouldn’t be there until about 5:30 p.m.

It was 3:42. We rescheduled. Five hours later, I saw Fantasy A had posted a photo of Gas Works Park on Instagram. He’d shown up.

I wished I’d thrown out my evening plans— Vivian McCall Gets an Interview.

Fantasy A is a Seattle icon whose face has decorated lampposts and phone poles for a decade. You might recognize him from his flyers promoting his music everywhere and anywhere he could. It’s brought him friends, admirers, and a crew of hip-shooting, low-low-budget independent filmmakers whose synergistic bliss is the stuff of truly original, and important, art. And that small, scrappy crew is making their next project, capturing Seattle before it disappears.

It’s a Team Effort I met two of Fantasy A’s friends and collaborators in the lobby of the Hotel Sorrento, the writers/directors/coproducers of Fantasy A Gets a Mattress, Noah Zoltan Sofian and David Norman Lewis. I told them about missing Fantasy A at Gas Works. Lewis, who has written for The Stranger, chuckled.

That’s just Fantasy A, he told me, and I’d been “Fantasy A’d,” which is when you get a very strange excuse for why Fantasy A isn’t somewhere or isn’t doing something. Where he is “depends on the bikini barista schedule,” Lewis said.

“He says they’re better out of the city,” he said. “He’ll take a bus out to Everett, go talk to a bikini barista about, like, zoning law, and then he comes back.”

Lewis sees Fantasy A, aka Alex Hubbard, as a man in total control of his life, who does what he wants and knows what he wants. If he can’t get it, he pursues it anyway, Lewis says. Fantasy A lives like “Charlie Sheen,” he says, regaling me with Hubbard’s exploits: He landscapes all over the city and brings his Weedwacker and mower on the bus. He sells bikinis with his face on the cups and the crotch. He brought strippers to a screening of Fantasy A Gets a Mattress at the Egyptian on Capitol Hill (former strippers, Hubbard said later). He doesn’t sleep much, but naps often. Lewis’s admiration was as clear as the smile on his face.

Before our second attempt to talk, Hubbard told me to call while he was on vacation in New York. He answered the

18 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

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phone outside Citi Field before the Mariners played the Mets. I could not make him out over the garbled cacophony of the crowd.

I’d been Fantasy A’d again, but this time I was smiling. Baseball is loud. We agreed to meet when he got home.

A few days later, I arrived at the public library in Lake City to meet Fantasy A. He texted me that “we” were waiting in the meeting room. “We” turned out to be Hubbard and Matt, a budgeting specialist who helps people with disabilities manage their finances. Matt offered to wait in the other room.

Zoltan Sofian and Lewis told me they never had to make Hubbard a star, that he just was one. I understood what they meant. I don’t ever feel “starstruck,” but when I shook his hand, gravity shifted.

Whatever “it” is, he’s got it. Everyone at his two jobs—one in a mailroom, another at the stadium—knows his persona, he said with a wide smile. He didn’t used to like it, but notoriety has grown on him.

“As a local celebrity, I get really happy,” he said.

Star Power Zoltan Sofian and Lewis met Fantasy A at their artsy alternative Seattle high school, the Center School.

“He was so captivating, instantaneously,” says Zoltan Sofian.

Hubbard gifted girls he liked new shoes in empty Lucky Charms boxes. He sold plastic bead jewelry (Alex’s Famous Jewelry) on a balcony above the food court for $40 a pop (Hubbard says $4). Hubbard still gives shoes to his friends.

They didn’t start working with Hubbard until 2015, when he started covering Seattle with his Fantasy A posters. Lewis had a podcast at the time. Hubbard asked to be on it “to promote his stuff.” Lewis, enraptured, knew he “had to make a movie with this guy.”

He thought he could be a movie star.

Zoltan Sofian and Lewis attract, and are attracted to, people who are different.

Their first movie together (“you can tell 18-year-olds made it,” Lewis says) was a documentary about a local named Saab Lofton, a communist activist and former Las Vegas CityLife contributor adjusting to life in Seattle after the paper let him go. (The film bug clearly runs in the family—Lewis’s brother is former City Councilmember Andrew Lewis, who helped secure the public funds to help the Seattle International Film Festival buy Cinerama.)

Fantasy A was a bigger success. Zoltan

Sofian and Lewis have made two films with Hubbard, the short film Fantasy A Gets Jacked, and a feature, Fantasy A Gets a Mattress, which they shot on a threadbare $3,800 budget. Loosely based on Hubbard’s 2012 self-published autobiography, Life in the Eyes of an Autistic Person, the film follows a fictionalized version of Hubbard living in an authoritarian, dilapidated group home and getting a mattress so he doesn’t have to share one with his roommate Grady.

It’s an affectionate critique of an expensive city rocked by a tech boom that’s forcing out vibrant people on the margins.

It’s innately political because it’s a movie about a city “that values itself for being a home to outsiders while at the same time being no home to outsiders” in the midst of the mid-2010s “hustle culture.”

They just followed the trajectory of Hubbard’s life, the stuff that made Hubbard an artist. “I’ve been through family problems,” he says.

Like, “tough times?” I ask.

“Yeah, tough times make me an artist.

Tough times” Hubbard says he was almost kicked out of his controlling group home and could have ended up homeless. The group home itself wasn’t run down, but his parents’ place had a hole in the ceiling. It’s the reason he started putting up fliers. It was somewhere to go and something to do. Hubbard is living on his own now, he says, but is still shuffling from place to place. They haven’t “worked out,” he says. He’s moving from Capitol Hill to First Hill soon. He invited me to stop by.

Fantasy A Gets a Mattress premiered to rave reviews at the Seattle Black Film Festival in 2023, catching the attention of Beacon Cinema owner Tommy Swenson, who wanted to screen the film. Swenson had recognized Fantasy A from his years of flyer-ing. The film showed a side of the city that was never shown, in an authentic way. It connected, selling out the theater 20 times, a Beacon record only beaten by Spirit Award winner Uncut Gems. Even Sir Mix-a-Lot got into it. He held a private screening at the Beacon.

The film took them on a journey across America. At the TASH disability advocacy convention in Baltimore, where they met Chris Burke, an actor with Down syndrome who played Charles “Corky” Thatcher on the ’80s TV show Life Goes On (he wore a Fantasy A button). They sold out a weeklong run at Spectacle Theater in Williamsburg, where they met a huge influence on the film: Charlie Ahearn, the director of the first

SEPTEMBER 2025

hip-hop movie, Wild Style. Hubbard goes to almost every screening (if he can’t make it, he’ll tape a video message for the audience).

The success made clear the film wasn’t just for locals who knew all the local landmarks. “It hasn’t appealed to [just] one type of person,” Zoltan Sofian says. “The disability community likes it. Hipsters like it, trans people like it, all sorts of people like it.”

I’d tell you, too, to drop everything and watch this film now, but you can’t. Fantasy A Gets a Mattress still has no film distributor.

It’s not streaming on any service.

Hubbard finds the lack of a distributor frustrating, but Zoltan Sofian and Lewis are in no rush to find one. They’re willing to wait for the right person who wants to take a risk on a movie that’s not just unconventional, it’s nearly uncategorizable. Besides, they’re gazing into the future. They’ve already crowdfunded and started shooting their next project: CRYSTAL BALL! This Film Does Not Exist Zoltan Sofian slid a purple magazine across the table. It’s a promotion for his company Dr. Clean Productions. Hubbard is on the cover, mean-mugging me. A woman is embracing him. Wait a second. It was my friend’s partner, Khamiyra James. She’s hilarious, but I didn’t know she acted. Turns out she didn’t—she was a fan who turned out to be, like Hubbard, another natural actor.

Lewis co-wrote the first draft of the script, but Zoltan Sofian’s main collaborator is director/writer/producer Safiye Şentürk. She met Zoltan Sofian and Lewis in Mr. Fung’s math class at the Center School, she says. Şentürk says any non-actor is a non-professional actor, it’s just that nobody has approached them. James produced real tears on the first night she filmed, Şentürk and Zoltan Sofian tell me separately.

I peeled open the magazine, which was full of essays, and flipped to an article about CRYSTAL BALL! “The images you see here are for a film that does not yet exist,” it read. I ask Zoltan Sofian what it’s about. He says it’s hard to explain, and reached over the table to turn to an alphabetical taxonomy of the film on page 67.

A: Alcohol, America, Acrylic Nails, Aurora Avenue, Authority. C: Cults, Community Centers, Crying, Crystals. F: Fantasies, Ferris Wheels, Fish Tanks, Fireworks. J: Jackal Gods. Q: Questions, the Quran. X: Xenon. Z: Zebra Stripes, Zero Introspection. Somehow, all these nouns fit on one street, Aurora Avenue, on one night, New Year’s Eve. This time, Hubbard isn’t playing Fantasy A. He’s Ernie, a building super with an alcoholic father. Lewis and Zoltan Sofian say they’re exploring the darker side of Fantasy A. I asked Hubbard about this. He says he’s exploring facial expressions that nobody has ever seen before. He demonstrates one in the library, squinting one eye and grimacing.

It’s his “grungier side” that no one has seen before, he says.

Like a supremely bizarre Love Actually that started as a romantic comedy but became something different each time they filmed (ad libs and random interactions on the street changed the plot in major ways), CRYSTAL BALL!’s interweaving plotlines follow an expanding cast of characters—a white-haired ex-cult-leader named Bruce,

a lovesick psychic named Krystal, a dog-obsessed tow-truck driver, a horny pizza delivery boy, and a guy trying to open up a mocktail bar. All of these characters are “groping for answers” to resolve intractable personal problems before the clock strikes midnight, Zoltan Sofian says. They’re people in flux, in a city that’s speeding past them, walking a street that’s disappearing.

Even as they film it, Aurora Avenue is vanishing. “We’ve missed some spots that are just gone,” Zoltan Sofian says. “I wish I had gotten the 125th Street Grill before it was taken down.” He shot the last freestanding brick wall before it was demolished. “Or there was the Miller Paint company that had this incredible flashing sign [that was on the fritz]. That went away. I mean, all the old motels are gone, also, for the most part—it’s like Fantasy A Gets a Mattress—95 percent of those locations are completely gone.”

Seattle’s economic shifts, rising inequality, and the City Council–enacted anti-drug and -prostitution zones are doing the heavy lifting on Aurora. In the mirrorworld of CRYSTAL BALL!, Egyptology has made a huge comeback. People are looking to godlike figures like the Eye of Ra, the ancient Egyptian god of the sun, to save them and guide their decisions. The city is set to raze 105th Avenue to 145th Avenue to erect a humongous, 45-story pyramid.

Zoltan Sofian pulled out his phone and showed still images I couldn’t show anyone else: a man with intense eyes behind stacks and stacks of VHS tapes, fireworks

“He’ll take a bus out to Everett, go talk to a bikini barista about, like, zoning law, and then he comes back.” screaming behind the silhouette of a bridge, Hubbard standing, broom in hand, in front of a wall of graffiti. The photography, like the taxonomy, didn’t teach me a thing about the plot. It was gorgeous, though, and interesting.

I can tell you the final scene involves the ferris wheel at VanKarma, a car dealership on Aurora Avenue. It’s broken. The motor died, and someone lifted its special power cord. I asked if they had a backup plan. They don’t, but they’ve found a couple companies they hope can fix it.

“It’s the danger of whimsy, as I’ve discovered,” Zoltan Sofian says.

CRYSTAL BALL! may be the last project they wrap in Seattle (though that’s still at least a few months away). Zoltan Sofian says all he sees is glass and steel. It’s “Vancouver-izing.”

“Where would you want to go?” I ask.

“Diyarbakır,” Zoltan Sofian says.

It’s considered the Kurdish capital of the world. It’s one of the most electric places he’s ever been, he says. He scouted the city on foot in late 2022, after they finished the edit of Mattress.

“Are you going to take Fantasy A with you?”

“He’d love it there,” Lewis says.

“He might like Istanbul,” Zoltan Sofian says. ■

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21

This Ain’t Vancouver

Local Sightings Film Festival Celebrates Real PNW Filmmakers

BY CHASE HUTCHINSON

F

orget having to try not to roll your eyes at all the films that dubiously pretend Vancouver, Canada, is the Pacific Northwest. The Northwest Film Forum’s annual Local Sightings Film Festival is here to provide another year’s worth of films made right here in our damp, moss-covered region by the artists who call it home. It’s a place to discover not just exciting new artists who boldly challenge the medium—with the experimental shorts proving to be especially strong this year—but an opportunity to see the PNW through other people’s eyes, as you rarely get to on screen.

Now in its 28th year, Local Sightings has shown a commitment to the region that makes it a special festival worth supporting. In a world where it can feel like art is being lost in the movie industry—how many Spider-Man reboots have there been now?—Local Sightings stands out as a champion of local films, and a vital resource for the filmmakers who make them.

Here are five picks to see at the festival, which runs September 19–28 at Northwest Film Forum. (Another film-forward organization deserving of your ongoing support.)

Police Beat

(2005, 80 min., Dir. Robinson Devor) Kicking things off is a special screening of Robinson Devor’s enduring Seattle film Police Beat, which was cowritten by The Stranger’s own senior staff writer Charles Mudede! If you somehow weren’t aware of it, here’s what you need to know: Based on reallife police reports from Mudede’s since-retired column of the same name, Police Beat follows Senegalese bike cop Z (Pape Sidy Niang) through the city while he ponders the state of his relationship. With each new encounter and reflection, we are taken further into a truly original film. Captured with a sharp eye for the vibrant colors of the city, an attention to detail in the writing that makes it all come alive, and an utterly captivating performance from the late, great Niang, it’s a genuine Seattle classic. Whether you’ve already rented this unstreamable gem from Scarecrow Video or have yet to watch it, it’s forever a must-see on the big screen.

(Friday, Sept. 19, 7 pm)

Not One Drop of Blood

(2024, 103 min., Dir. Jackson Devereux & Lachlan Hinton) There are many great documentaries that capture a moment in time or a specific incident. Then there is the magnificent Not One Drop of Blood, a gentle yet haunting film that captures an entire region as few others have. Directed by Jackson Devereux and Lachlan Hinton, it examines real incidents of mysterious cattle mutilations that

See Not One Drop of Blood at Northwest Film Forum Saturday, September 20. have been happening for decades in Oregon.

What is causing them? No one knows. It’s a striking film that feels as if the documentary master Frederick Wiseman set his sights on the breathtaking rural landscapes of the PNW while also remaining distinctly its own work. With every seemingly small tableau of people that Devereux and Hinton capture, the film accumulates into something expansively existential that isn’t afraid to look deeper into how the bizarre horrors are impacting the communities most affected.

(Saturday, Sept. 20, 3:30 pm)

Trash Baby

(2025, 90 min., Dir. Jacy Mairs) A film that’s far from trash, Jacy Mairs’s Trash Baby tells a messy story that still manages to break through all the noise it creates for itself to find something quietly moving. Following the young Stevie (played by an excellent Esther Harrison) as she navigates the summer in a trailer park full of eccentric and troubled characters, she soon struggles with deciding on what it is that she wants for her life. Does she really want to fit in with her peers by any means necessary?

This is a deeply personal question that draws from Mairs’s own life, and the way the film explores Stevie’s journey makes for a reflective work of autofiction that finds slivers of humble beauty in its specificity. It’s a film that doesn’t shy away from pain, just as it stumbles into some gently poetic observations about life, with one critical closing

conversation near the end perfectly tying it all together. (Saturday, Sept. 20, 6:30 pm)

Wolf Land

(2025, 72 min., Dir. Sarah Hoffman) This documentary would make for a fascinating double feature with Not One Drop of Blood, as it, too, examines the relationship between humankind and the natural world that surrounds us. However, what Sarah Hoffman’s Wolf Land is most interested in is whether there is another way to protect livestock while coexisting with wolves. Specifically, it creates a compelling portrait of the compassionate “wolf-protecting cowboy” Daniel Curry and his partner, the kindly fourth-generation rancher Jerry Francis, as they work to find a new way forward. It’s simple yet effective, eschewing the typical conventions of documentaries that rely on talking-head interviews to immerse us in an urgent, unique story of one man fighting to create harmony in a world that seems hell-bent on mayhem. At one point, when he howls at the wolves and they howl back, you realize this maniac might be onto something. (Friday, Sept. 26, 6:30 pm)

Firebreak

(2024, 72 min., Dir. Kenzie Bruce) Last but not least is Firebreak, which, while more conventional, is willing to complicate what could be an overly tidy exploration of its subject matter. Kenzie Bruce’s documentary focuses on incarcerated firefighters and

how two men, Brandon and Royal, go from serving time to starting a nonprofit that helps other prisoners turn their work into a career. Rather than just become shallow “inspiration porn” designed for people to feel good about themselves without looking any deeper into these men’s realities, this documentary spotlights the ways in which the system is broken—and the people working to fix it. It’s overflowing with care for its subjects, and clear-eyed in showing why so much still needs to change. (Sunday, Sept. 28, 3:30 pm)

Shorts to See at Local Sightings SEPTEMBER 21 Playing in the Homelands shorts program: There Have Always Been Horizons Diana Emily de Leyssac SEPTEMBER 27 Playing in the All in My Head shorts program: Rash Lyssa Samuel SEPTEMBER 28 Playing in the Afterimages: Experimental Shorts program: Hyperborea Dan Sokolowski

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22 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

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23

Tales From a Broad

Seattle’s Sparkliest Chanteuse Finally Writes Her Own Story

BY AUDREY VANN PHOTOS BY MADISON KIRKMAN

H

“

ello!” I heard the greeting echo through the empty performance space and looked up to see Julie Cascioppo waving to me from a balcony above the stage like a princess atop a castle. We had arranged via email to meet at the stage inside the historic Seattle building where she resides. I, however, was not expecting her to literally live backstage.

I first became aware of Julie Cascioppo when I was just 4 years old, scavenging for hors d’oeuvres at my mother’s holiday work party. Cascioppo, who was hired to perform at the event, towered over me in red stilettos and a festive

ensemble that reminded me of the 1997 Happy Holidays Barbie I had at home. A generous coat of Revlon’s Fire & Ice lipstick framed her infectious grin. Having been too young to spell, I thought that surely her name was “Jewel-y” because she was so dazzling and her outfit was encrusted with jewels. With the theatrical flair of a neighbor on Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Cascioppo confidently belted a jazz tune for the crowd of hairdressers and estheticians. I blushed, thinking, “Wow, that is the most glamorous woman I have ever seen.”

This feeling came back when I entered her apartment 25 years later.

She led me up a staircase behind the stage to her cozy abode, which was adorned with wigs, altars, artwork, and mementos she’s collected from her travels. The loft’s massive windows revealed a (probably) 10-million-dollar view of the Seattle skyline. “People probably think I’m so lucky for this apartment, and I am,” she admitted. “But it wasn’t quick and easy—it took a lot of dreaming, manifesting, and planning.”

The chanteuse has given most of her career to ephemeral performances for intimate crowds at Pike Place Market’s Pink Door since the early ’80s. Cascioppo herself will tell

24 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE you that her performance style is hard to pin down—a blend of jazz, cabaret, improv, drag, and performance art. An audience member once told her, “Watching you is like watching a movie.”

“Have you seen the movie All About Eve?” she asked me from across a large table filled with scraps of paper, folders, and sticky notes. I nodded. “I need an assistant like that,” she said with a straight face. It was difficult to know if she was joking or not, which is part of her magic.

Over the past several years, the local legend has taken a break from the stage to focus on writing a memoir titled I Love Being Abroad (yes, it is a double entendre).

The book chronicles an ambitious young jazz vocalist as she navigates 1980s Paris in polka-dot pumps in search of singing jobs. And, like The Wizard of Oz, the book is woven together by the friends (and enemies) she picks up along the way. Cascioppo’s embrace of adventure, naïvety, curiosity, and just plain luck led her everywhere from a short-lived disco career to an offer from the FBI to be a secret spy to a flirtatious evening with renowned dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov (or, as I know him, Aleksandr Petrovsky from Sex and the City). Not to mention, her résumé also includes singing on cruise ships, substitute teaching, starring in her own public access TV show, and competing on the Norwegian reality show Alt for Norge. After she spent nearly a decade in Paris and extensive stays in Istanbul, India, Hong Kong, and Norway, I asked her what kept bringing her back home to Seattle.

“I’ve never found a place where I wanted to live forever,” she said. “I guess I like being a big fish in a small pond.”

Cascioppo grew up in Ballard with her brothers, Norman and Tony, and their parents, whom she described as “a Sicilian meat cutter and a cool blonde Norwegian beauty.” Her older brother Norman, a serious classical pianist, introduced her to Seattle’s early gay clubs like Shelly’s Leg and the Golden Crown, where she developed a love for cabaret and drag. “Norman wasn’t a drag queen, so he groomed me to be a drag queen.” The siblings would put on shows in the basement of their childhood home. “We had a lot of fun because he loved my humor and really encouraged me.” She told me that her mother wasn’t exactly glamorous, but that young Julie got her fix by playing dress-up in her friend’s mother’s closet, and later by shopping for eccentric clothing at thrift stores.

For a large chunk of her career, Cascioppo was known for her characters, including country singer Starbaby, housewife-turnednew-age-healer Saffron Johnson, and postal worker by day/go-go dancer by night Tony Topaz, but these have long been cut from her act. “I’ve integrated,” she told me. “I used to have all these characters that were different facets of my personality, and most of them were based on failed jobs I had.” However, this integration doesn’t mean that she doesn’t still love to play dress-up. “That’s why I love

“If you want to know what’s going on with the singer, look at her repertoire.”

Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and add 10 more accessories.

SEPTEMBER 2025

Julie enjoying the 10-million-dollar view from her backstage apartment. wigs,” she explained, “they bring out different aspects of my personality.” I asked which wig is her current favorite, to which she pulled out a voluminous blonde monstrosity in the style of Marie Antoinette or Marge Simpson. “My friend made this by sewing all of my Marilyn Monroe wigs together.”

While showing me around her apartment, Cascioppo pulled out a magazine clipping from a small drawer. It was a painting of the Hollywood Savoy, a swanky club in Paris where she used to work as a singing waitress. She broke out into song (something that happened at least three times during our interview), belting “Battle Hymn of the Republic” while reenacting the tasks of the job. Later, she sang “The Windmills of Your Mind” after I asked if there were any new songs she was learning. “If you want to know what’s going on with the singer, look at her repertoire, because she will be singing about her life.”

She doesn’t know exactly what’s next for her career, but she sees her memoir expanding into a screenplay or a touring cabaret show. “I don’t just want my story in bookstores, I want it in the movies!” she exclaimed with sincerity, in a voice that reminded me of an old Hollywood star.

Cascioppo has a vision, and it’s for Lady Gaga to play her in a big-budget movie adaptation of her memoir. “Sometimes I think, how do people make fantastic things

happen?” she told me, starry-eyed. “It starts with an idea or a dream, and then you, you know, you just start seeing it, and you make it happen, right?”

However, Cascioppo amends that even if nothing happens with the book, she’s just proud that she finished it. “I wrote this for my 94-year-old self,” she explained. “I don’t know what she’s going to be like, but she might enjoy having a book to read.” She told me that despite writing the book, she doesn’t consider herself a writer. “Being a writer is a very glamorous job!” she said, pointing at me. “Being a singer is a very glamorous job!”

I retorted.

As our meeting came to an end, I expressed that reading her book made me want to go to Paris. She lit up, saying, “I am going to Paris next month—maybe you should come with me!” I actually considered this for a moment, even though it’s far beyond my means. Julie Cascioppo’s spontaneity is dangerously infectious. I can’t go to Paris next month, I thought while driving away, but I can stop at Walgreens and buy some Revlon Fire & Ice lipstick, bringing me a tiny bit closer to her glamorous life.

Julie Cascioppo will perform at the Chapel Performance Space on Sept. 11 at 7 pm, for the release of her memoir, I Love Being Abroad: Memoirs of an American Chanteuse in Paris.

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27

The Sound of Silence

Jeannie Vanasco’s New Memoir Grapples With an Arduous Mother-Daughter Relationship

BY KATIE LEE ELLISON

J

eannie Vanasco has unintentionally built a reputation for an unusual degree of grace and forgiveness than your average human (me). Most notably, her second book, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, is one in which she investigates her rape and interviews her rapist. Over the course of the book, which she wrote in eight months (perhaps no coincidence that she moved through it quickly—can you imagine such an assignment?), she develops a working relationship with this man in search of understanding of what happened.

Vanasco’s third book, A Silent Treatment—a memoir about her mother’s chronic silence toward Jeannie while living in the basement apartment of the home she shares with Jeannie and her husband—is, again, an interrogation of her own anger, resentment, and handling of a very different but painful trauma.

When I interviewed Vanasco, she spoke about the core feelings behind the book. “I’m very anxious, and the silent treatment ratchets that way up,” Vanasco said. “I didn’t know what the rules were in the relationship. I wanted to make my mom happy, and I didn’t know how I could always do that. If she was unhappy, I would feel deeply unhappy. A friend recently asked, ‘Have you heard the term codependent?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I know.

I know.’” Not sure what she’s being punished for, over and over again, Vanasco is sent into spins of obsessive reflection, seeking a reason, seeking freedom from the seeking, and trying to apply the rules of healing from codependency while utterly unable.

She sought advice via ongoing conversations with her Google mini smart speaker, therapists, colleagues, and dear friends about how to handle her mother’s many months-long silences waiting for her when she got home, active directly under her feet in the very room while she wrote this book. Her relentless search for a solution rings as true and as cyclical as any tumultuous relationship I’ve ever had. “I would read all these psychology studies and these rules about how to deal with someone who uses the silent treatment, especially somebody who inflicts it repeatedly,” Vanasco said. “How you’re not

DENNIS DRENNER

supposed to apologize or try to break it. But [I thought] maybe this advice wasn’t going to work for every person.”

We watch her hide in her car, reluctant to go inside her own home, struggling with every detail of how to approach or not approach. “At the beginning of the book when [my husband] Chris says, ‘Why don’t

you just go down there?’” Vanasco said, “I make up all these excuses. From a craft perspective, I think it’s interesting. From a life perspective, it’s awful. But from a craft perspective, my inability to go down there to have a disagreement with her, confront her, that was interesting. Had I been able to do it, the story might have just ended, we’d have a different narrative arc. In storytelling, there’s often a tragic flaw for a character, and that tragic flaw is if they would just do or say this one thing, the whole story would end.”

A Silent Treatment is constructed in fragments surrounded by lots of white space, and

an undiscerning reader might assume that this book is a journal, written in real time.

That couldn’t be further from the truth, and she breaks that fourth wall over and over again to make it known. “I include the meta elements because it allows me to acknowledge that this is really hard. It wasn’t effortless, even though it may read that way. I want it to read like it unfolded in real time, but it definitely did not.

“It does matter to me a great deal how something reads. I wanted there to be a lyricism that didn’t necessarily come from each sentence on its own, but from how the book moved and how it enacted thinking. I wanted it to read as spontaneous.

We watch her hide in her car, reluctant to go inside her own home.

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After I had a coherent draft, I went through and circled the nouns, objects that might come back, so the lyricism didn’t come from the individual sentence, but from the movement. I’m really interested in how to reproduce the mind. The parentheticals that enter almost as intrusive thoughts: I thought the repetition of those [and those particular objects] could provide some cohesiveness, because I would hear her words in different ways when they would repeat.”

Repetitive quotes from her mother and, as Vanasco mentioned, specific objects, do indeed create a movement inside the space of the house and in the book, but also a claustrophobia. The frequent white space allows us, the readers, to breathe.

Vanasco is kind this way. I considered the rules she set for herself about repetition in this book because it so colored the structure for the story.

“My rules [for writing this book] kept changing. I figured out that I was going to contain it within a single silence. Of my mom’s silences, I’d count the days, though I wasn’t always quite sure when it started.

The longer it went on, I’d lose track of time and just stop counting. I wanted the form and rules to reflect the experience, so the [recurring] parenthetical interrupts allowed me to move around in time. One

who simply couldn’t have given the room or grace to my particular mother that Vanasco afforded hers.

It should be clear by now that Vanasco paints herself as much as the antagonist in this memoir as she does her mother.

At the same time, the scenario begs the question: How much is too much grace?

Or, more accurately, when does grace cross over into doormatting yourself ?

Where do our responsibilities, our kindnesses, our mutual obligations to each other begin and end? How do we care for each other, and how do we know when we have to stop or destroy ourselves? When it’s costing too much? In her relationship with her mother, Vanasco did eventually find a stopping point.

“I was angry. It was really hard for me to acknowledge that. I feel bad being angry at my mom because she was in pain, circumstances were tough for her, and she was living in the basement. I could see why she was behaving the way she was. So it took me a while to acknowledge, ‘Okay, this is not fair. She can be upset, but she doesn’t have to treat me this way.’”

And yet, she confessed that guilt and shame are inspiration for her. These terrible feelings drive her. “Guilt and shame give me momentum. Each of my books has been for someone, even if it’s

“I would read all these psychology studies and these rules about how to deal with someone who uses the silent treatment, especially somebody who inflicts it repeatedly.” rule was, how do I break out of time while still having [the story] seemingly unfold in [chronological] time? Some of what [my mother] said breaks out of the parentheticals and becomes an organizing device, because her words would get stuck in my head, and pretty soon they’d be dictating how I see myself.”

While she and her mother share a mailbox, furniture, even a name, we witness Vanasco’s squirming to either make peace with her once and for all, or try to ignore and remain unaffected by her silence.

What makes Vanasco unable to do either seems to be her commitment to giving others grace, and offering herself some understanding, same as she sought in her first two books. In this book, she’s upped the ante because she’s attempting all that from inside the pain, writing as it’s happening. If you have or have had an alcoholic or mentally ill parent, this agony will not be unfamiliar to you. And yet, she paints her mother generously.

She tells us again and again of how her mother wants her to write this tale on her own terms. Her mother takes a very Anne Lammot stance: “If I didn’t want it written about me, I shouldn’t have done it.” The agony of mother-daughter love is the diva of this book—an agony that is inevitable and somewhat self-imposed. I’m a reader

not portraying somebody in the best light.

But it’s really hard for a book to be for and about someone. If you’re being honest and you’re portraying somebody in all their complexity, you’re including their flaws.

I wanted to do this for [my mother]. But I felt guilty. I’m aware that I need to show and acknowledge flaws. Even though my mom says, ‘Nobody’s perfect, you have to include the bad stuff.’”

The way we get no tidy, perfect growth or ending in this book had me wondering what was next for Vanasco. “The next book deals with mental health. It’s under contract with Tin House. It was something that I realized I’d never written about. I’ve written about mental health, of course, but I’d never written about being on social security disability for more than a year. And living through this time, when so many people are losing access to care, losing access to insurance, getting kicked off Medicaid: that’s all very much on my mind. I don’t know what I would have done without it. It was an extremely hard time, being in and out of the hospital. I needed that time away from having to work multiple jobs so that I could find doctors and figure out the medication. I’ve never written about that.”

Jeannie Vanasco’s A Silent Treatment is out Sept. 9 through Tin House.

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30 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

SEPTEMBER 2025

31

Lit Review Revue

It’s Raining Great, Local Books (and Book Events) This Fall!

BY KATIE LEE ELLISON

ment with her mother, her family; through creation of her own record of experience, including multimedia collage by her own hand, Peñaloza constructs her own archive of identity, denying erasures, confronting violences faced in the body/family/nation, and defining Filipinx mother-daughter love and tensions and pains. Her language, rhythm, and narrative tension will keep you rapt, and her wisdom will satiate you. Don’t miss her Seattle release party at Common Area Maintenance on September 17 with Bill Carty, Jane Wong, Quenton Baker, Paul Hlava Ceballos, Tessa Hulls, Matthew Schnirman, and Angela Garbes.

Max Delsohn

Crawl (Graywolf Press, Oct. 21) I met Max Delsohn when they watched the door at Hugo House. But it was the original Hugo House. The filthy, perfect, tiny old house with a stage and a bar and offices upstairs and disgusting carpet and books and people who read and wrote them, in and out, always. This is the Seattle of Delsohn’s Crawl, a dare I say perfect, albeit unsuspecting, series of stories about trans, queer Seattle in the 2010s. In these tales, we go on a sad and lonely trek through Seattle’s gay bar scene with a trans narrator exploring his new interest in men. We watch straights nearly ruin Pride Sunday by showing up at Dykiki (Denny Blaine’s most queer beach), and we spend a day at Cal Anderson with a narrator who wanders in and out of queer dramas, LSD highs, and Fireball lows. It’s been a long time since we received such a glorious, accurate, gay, grimy, hilarious, embarrassing celebration of our city. This book is a gift.

Michelle Peñaloza

All the Words I Can Remember Are Poems (Persea Books, Sept. 16) Another poet and great Seattleite (currently living in California), Peñaloza rises again with a collection that takes on colonization in the US from a new angle, and presents a personal and historical Filipinx narrative in her distinctive and resonant voice. Through words remembered from childhood—ganda, lungkot, kahirapan, puso, buhay, ginto— with English definitions, or conjured in a US context; through stories of dis/align-

abuse, and I swear, we have lols all along the way. Myriam Gurba is an artist in the purest sense, and this offering will show you a new way to see the world and your relationship to it.

Catherine Corbett Bresner

Can We Anything We See (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, Aug. 26) Catherine Corbett Bresner may live in a small town in Vermont these days, but we celebrate them as if they were still in Seattle with us. Some poet words used to describe this 86-page poem: a new mode of ekphrasis; lines as captions or ciphers; caesuras of breath and contemplation. I’m not a poet, nor any expert in poetry, but this poem brought me immediate relief. It’s one I’ll return to again and again as we sink deeper into the muck of AI and all its intentional and unintentional confusion and surrealities. Can We Anything We See was technically published in February, but Bresner is touring it this fall, so don’t miss the Seattle release at Elliott Bay Books on September 6 with fellow poets Patrick Milian, Sarah Mangold, and Joshua Marie Wilkinson.

Myriam Gurba

Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings (Timber Press, Oct. 21) Cuyama. Erythea. Azquiles. Huitlacoche.

Bull clover. Every page or two of Poppy State, Myriam Gurba will offer you a word that portals into a world you’ve never met before. I read this book on a camping trip in which twin teens kept asking me, What’s that book about? I kept saying: California, coming into yourself, ecology. But they were right, that doesn’t cover it. It’s about getting lost. It’s about this narrator’s experience with patriarchal gender violence, domestic and otherwise, and how that terror scares the soul right out of her, makes of her bitter fruit. This book allows the reader to become lost in her many histories, but especially her personal and Indigenous histories, and to learn a relationship with plants you have surely not encountered before. In these new relationships, we’re shown a way to reclaim ourselves after unfathomable injustice and

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Terry Dactyl (Coffee House Press, Nov. 11) We have an icon in our midst, and her name is Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, walking the parks and streets of Capitol Hill like a goddess among us, imparting humor and stories at a prolific pace. Terry Dactyl is her latest, a novel named for its protagonist, who is raised by lesbian mothers in Seattle in the 1980s before moving to New York City as the AIDS crisis quiets and slows. We watch

her come of age as a trans woman, tackle the prestigious art world of New York, then return to her home city in the midst of the pandemic in 2020, where she seeks community and connection in a Seattle claimed by tech and greed. How does she find her way through? Sycamore gives us a story of resilience and resistance unique to this place we call home. Read this one, along with her entire oeuvre.

Ally Ang

Let the Moon Wobble (Alice James Books, Nov. 11) This year is a big one for our local writer heroes. Ally Ang is another queer, trans heavy hitter with an NEA grant and a MacDowell fellowship in their back pocket.

Bolstered by this training and recognition, Ang swung big with this debut. Let the Moon Wobble, with cover art from Katherine Bradford—inspired by the exhibit Ang caught at the Frye—is filled with poems that, like Sycamore’s Terry Dactyl, traverse the COVID-19 pandemic, but also tackle the climate crisis and the rise of fascism. This debut does not begin this writer’s career modestly, or on a small scale. Like their Seattle contemporaries, Ang blends humor and absurdity with grief and rage, and as a writer of color, tells on the systems and institutions functioning to repress and kill queer people of color. Ang seeks hope and freedom in these pages and, also like Sycamore’s novel, reaches into their community for the fuel they need to keep going.

Look for full interviews with many of these authors in The Stranger in print and online, coming soon.

32 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

BILLIE WINTER

Kelsey Fernkopf, glass whisperer.

Field of Beams

Kelsey Fernkopf’s Awe-Inspiring Big Neon

BY AMANDA MANITACH

O

n a quiet evening in November 2020, Kelsey Fernkopf carted a very large piece of neon—32 feet long—into the middle of an empty alley in Ballard. It was mid-pandemic, the city on pause.

The sign shop where he worked was on pause, too. To fill the hours, Fernkopf began piecing together the most ambitious neon projects he’d ever attempted, working with lengths that would typically snap in the slightest breeze. Over the past year, he’d been gradually scaling up; in late 2019, he exhibited a show titled Big Neon at Steve Gilbert Studio on Capitol Hill. Those pieces were large, but they were still contained in the traditional way: strapped down and installed on a wall. He was thinking bigger. He posted mockups and photoshopped pictures of the hypothetical neon on Instagram, images that depicted neon surrounded by nature, or small human figures bathed in supersize glow. The posts

included hashtags like #impossible and #ornot. Now it was time to fuck around and finally find out if neon could go this big and stay intact long enough to work.

The fragile tube survived its journey across the street, and when the neon flick-

Fernkopf realized two crucial things: that he could make exceptionally large neon, and that he could handle it without it breaking. ered on, everything shifted. Argon-tinted vapor charged the air lilac and blue. The asphalt glowed. Even manholes were

drenched in aura. Fernkopf pulled out his phone and snapped some pictures. Even on camera, the atmosphere was electric.

Five years and a lot of broken glass later, Big Neon has only gotten bigger.

On a hot afternoon in August, Fernkopf is at work in Noble Neon, a large neon shop in South Park, where long tables are piled with old signs awaiting repair and new signs waiting to be gassed up. Another table is covered in hand-drawn schematics tracing out the exact curvature of right angles, U-bends, and sweeping 360-degree arcs.

There’s also a dollhouse-size scale model of Foster/White Gallery filled with teeny glass tubes bent into miniature versions of the Big Neon pieces, placeholders to map out where everything will go in the exhibit that opens next month.

Mercifully, the air inside Noble Neon is cool. Fernkopf is dressed in his usual uniform, a Van Halen tee with cut-off sleeves. As he talks about his work, he’s quick

to break into a smile or crack a quip. There’s a salt-of-the-earth Kansas boy beneath the gritty PNW veneer, which means he’s humble, but also no-nonsense.

Why make this kind of art?

“Because I can. Not many people can do what I do.”

Pester him enough, and he’ll admit to some superpowers. When Fernkopf started letting loose during 2020, he realized two crucial things: that he could make exceptionally large neon (most Big Neon pieces measure around 30 linear feet, some even more), and that he could handle it without it breaking. And that’s the really special part—some glass whisperer stuff.

Fernkopf makes it all look easy.

Pulling a 4-foot length of clear glass tube from a box, he flips a switch that instantly ignites a trio of torches. It’s a different kind of fire than a hot shop glory hole: a controlled, concise indigo flame. As he lowers the tube over a crossfire burner, he twirls it between

SEPTEMBER 2025

fingers and thumbs until it heats to a magical temperature around 1000° Fahrenheit and suddenly turns to translucent taffy. The tube is kept from collapsing in on itself by a steady stream of air that Fernkopf is simultaneously blowing into one end of the glass rod through a rubber tube gripped between his lips. He quickly bends the limpid glass into a right angle. Just as quickly, it begins to crystallize. To make a neon sign, you repeat this process over and over with each bend in each letter (and pray the glass doesn’t break).

Fernkopf breaks a lot of things.

“There’s no limit, really. I break some rules—I break some sign industry rules about what a good tube is. The sign industry is very focused on how long a tube will last.

If everything’s done absolutely correctly, it could burn constantly for 70 years. I’m not concerned about that. It’s going to break in about five hours.”

Thanks to entities like Dale Chihuly and Pilchuck Glass School, Seattle is known for glass art; we’ve come to rival the legendary island of Murano, Italy, for leading the world in fine art glass production and innovation.

But where does neon fit in? Does neon even fall within the purview of glass art?

“I don’t want to say it’s light art,” Fernkopf says when posed the question. “I’m not going to deny the fact that it’s glass. Because it is

A portal beckons at Gas Works Park.

glass. But the fact that it’s light… if it was all off, it’d be glass art.”

He’s definitely been asked this question before, and there definitely is not a definite answer. The existential contradictions inherent to neon don’t end there. At barely a century old, the medium is already antiquated, and while neon teeters on the

Neon art has never gotten really interesting or weird— it’s too delicate, tricky, and expensive a material to play with if you don’t know what you’re doing. perpetual cusp of extinction on account of declining trade schools and students, the possibilities—as far as contemporary art is concerned—have barely been tapped.

But Fernkopf was never making glass art, nor light art, nor neon art—until five years ago, that is.

As a student at the University of Kansas,

Fernkopf studied painting and sculpture, working with materials like steel, rubber, and bronze (“sculpture with a capital S,” as he puts it). Like much of the art world in the early ’80s, he was enthralled with minimalism. He was especially intrigued by its predecessor, Suprematism, a Russian avantgarde movement that featured strippeddown geometry—circles, squares, rectangles—and a severely limited color palette.

So severe that Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, painted in 1915, became a textbook example of one of the first monochrome paintings in Western art history.

When Fernkopf graduated, he bounced around Kansas for a while with his girlfriend, finally landing in Salina, where he was making sculpture part-time and pastries full-time at Carol Lee Donuts. Like many chapters in art history, this one ends (or begins) with a breakup, and Fernkopf suddenly found himself in the middle of nowhere with no reason to be there. Until one fateful evening when a teacher from the local neon trade school (called Neon Stuff ) plied Fernkopf with beer and convinced him to enroll in a five-week class.

“Since I was stuck there making donuts, I said, okay, I’ll do it,” Fernkopf says with a laugh.

It turned out he was good at neon. Really

33

good. Six weeks after that beer, Fernkopf was working at a neon shop in Kansas City.

A year after that, in 1987, he packed up for Seattle to work at National Sign Corporation, a renowned shop still in operation down the road in South Park.

Fernkopf wasn’t making capital-N “Neon Art,” though. Neon was just the day job.

He was, however, making sculpture. By the late ’90s, Fernkopf was known in Seattle as “The Horse Guy” for his pop-art-flavored, maximalist assemblages (represented by the now-defunct Howard House) made from deconstructed Breyer Horses, which he cut up and stuffed with miniature dollhouse trinkets and other curios. While he was playing with plastic, neon was gradually gaining traction in the art world. Artists like Bruce Nauman, Tracey Emin, and Glenn Ligon are famous for lighting up museums with neon, primarily using it to render text (or in Nauman’s case, an occasional orgy).

Recently, Nicholas Galanin’s Neon American Anthem put neon on display at Seattle Art Museum. Yet the majority of artists never touch the neon itself; fabrication is shopped out to the sign studios.

It’s one reason why neon art has never gotten really interesting or weird. It’s too delicate, tricky, and expensive a material to play with if you don’t know what you’re doing.

STEVE GILBERT

34 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

SEPTEMBER 2025

35

BILLIE WINTER

At barely a century old, neon is already antiquated. But the possibilities—as far as contemporary art is concerned—have barely been tapped.

Fernkopf hoped to bridge that accessibility and education gap when he cofounded, along with neon artist Dylan Neuwirth, Western Neon School of Art in 2018.

Offering classes for beginner students, the school was slowly gaining momentum when COVID hit. After numerous fits and starts, the school finally shuttered. But when one door closes, a big neon portal opens.

Since snapping his first photos in the alley, Fernkopf has forged ahead, mounting numerous installations of Big Neon both indoors and en plein air. In 2022, Pilchuck Glass School invited Fernkopf to embed a series of oversize neon pieces across the school’s bucolic, sprawling campus for the year’s iteration of Light the Forest, their annual self-guided walking tour of neon art installations. As daylight turned to dusk and drained to dark, the luminous shapes slowly seemed to wake, color coming to life by the minute: a bright red wave perched atop a hill, a rectilinear blue box framing the setting sun, a blue door hovering over still water, reflecting its own portal form. The experience of Big Neon in person is nothing short of otherworldly. Its physical—and spiritual—intensity recalls the Light and Space experiments of the artists Dan Flavin and James Turrell, who used light and structure to conjure the ecstatic and sublime.

The ghost of Suprematism lingers in his primary palette, but Fernkopf insists the colors and forms write their own narratives—he isn’t suggesting anything. The blue doors, though… those get people every time.

But there’s a problem with using neon in situ like this (beyond the risk of breakage, including the occasional visitor, child, or drunk falling onto a fragile tube). Whether sited in woods or under a bridge, the light only lasts as long as there are batteries to power a high-voltage transformer to ignite the inert gas into life. For that reason, the ethereal experience is ephemeral, too.

Fortunately (as Fernkopf discovered the first time he powered on his big neon), cameras can capture some of the aura. Since 2022, he has been collaborating with close friend and photographer Steve Gilbert to document his installations. Gilbert, a high school friend of Fernkopf back in Kansas, also studied art at the University of Kansas.

They both separately made their way to Seattle in time for the ’90s, when Gilbert captured some of the most photogenic moments of the exploding music scene.

For the past four years, the pair have been collaborating to make photographs, documenting sites across Washington and beyond. Like the time in 2023 when Fernkopf drove a U-Haul across four states, filled with 14 delicate pieces of neon (only two broke), to the Jentel Artist Residency in Banner, Wyoming, where Gilbert joined him to photograph the work amid rugged rock formations and backdrops of undiluted stardust. Two months after that, they installed Vanishing Point: A Neon Constellation for a one-night display on the grounds of Seattle Airport. Sited in a field adjacent to the airport’s cell phone lot, the lights were visible from ground, aircraft, and light rail.

STEVE GILBERT

The photographs are stunning works of art in themselves, but to experience the luminous pieces firsthand is worth the effort.

In September, Outside: In opens at Foster/ White, bringing both Gilbert’s photographs and some very large neon works into the gallery. Two of Fernkopf’s blue doors are part of the group exhibition Haunted, which opens in October at the Tacoma Art Museum.

While it’s not quite the same as coming across a phosphorescent portal in the midst

of the woods, or stumbling on Gilbert and Fernkopf as they set a trail aglow, there is something inexplicably electrifying about being bathed in the light of noble gas this big and bright—baptism by neon.

Outside: In opens Sept. 23 at Foster/White Gallery; opening reception Sept. 26 features a musical performance by Tekla Cunningham.

Haunted opens Oct. 11 at Tacoma Art Museum.

36 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

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37

Collecting Lust

Robert E. Jackson Turns Other People’s Old Snapshots into Timeless Art

BY JON FEINSTEIN PHOTOS BY BILLIE WINTER

Robert E. Jackson showing off some of his snapshot collection in his Capitol Hill home.

W

e’ve all experienced flipping through a bin of old photos at a garage sale, vintage store, or flea market. Full of curiosity, we peek into the past lives of people we’ll never meet. And sometimes we hit gold—an awkward family photo, an image of a place we once loved that no longer exists, or a striking and confusing shot of a human head montaged over a dog’s body— and we become enamored with the stories behind them that we’ll likely never know. For Seattle collector Robert E. Jackson, snapshots are less about nostalgia or strangeness-for-strangeness’ sake. They’re about the magic of happenstance and photographs as physical, tactile, IRL objects.

Jackson’s growing collection is approximately 20,000 vintage photos, 15,000 of which are funny, strange, and uncanny snapshots that span the 20th century, from photography’s early days (he estimates that the oldest photograph in his collection is from the 1860s) to early 2000s 4x6” drug-

store prints. Jackson is attracted to images that have a unique punch that he calls “pure photography”—snapshots full of perfect, mysterious accidents that elevate them to fine art, where context is often irrelevant.

Over the years, his unique and discerning eye and rapidly growing collection—which started in the late 1990s while he was working as a financial analyst at Washington Mutual—have been the subject of several acclaimed exhibitions at 1 Pace Gallery, the National Gallery, the Amon Carter Museum, the Bellevue Arts Museum, and Seattle’s Photographic Center Northwest. He has also published several books and catalogs and has received wide press and acclaim, most notably in an essay

by John Updike for the New Yorker.

Some images even inspired characters for Hollywood films.

Jackson graciously invited me to his Capitol Hill apartment to explore his collection’s most curious gems, and

the scene isn’t what you might imagine. He isn’t some hoarder swimming in a mess of thousands of old photos. His apartment is immaculate, yet welcoming—walls adorned with a mix of snapshots and art he’s collected over the years. Some of my favorites include collages by Seattle artist Joe Rudko and embroidery by Warren Munzel. Jackson keeps most of his photographs organized

in small photo albums on shelves in a closet adjacent to his bedroom, some organized by genre or period and others with some ambiguity. And while he generally knows where everything is, there’s often a feeling of magical discovery, as we stumble upon an image that feels fresh for the first time.

Let’s go way back to your early days of collecting. Can you remember the first photo that you collected or came across?

I started collecting in 1997. I can’t exactly remember the first photo I bought, and it probably wasn’t that interesting, but the earliest ones I can find are these two, which I bought around 1998 or 1999.

They’re still good enough to stay in my collection after 25 years. And the reason is that this is very odd.

This photo of the man jumping off the rooftop 1 is an earlier image from my collection, which continues to be

38 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

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one of my favorites. I realize I am a formalist when it comes to images I am drawn to. I like strong, simple compositions which emotionally and visually hit me in the gut. There is a starkness and a narrative mystery to it that really speaks to me.

This is an early acquisition 2 related to a theme which I didn’t know much about at the time. It deals with the photographer’s shadow being found in the photo. I love this photo as you can see the head of the photographer at the bottom of the photo in his bowler hat. I liked the simplicity and starkness of the composition with the marvelous curve of the lamp post and the straight line on the ground which divides the photographer from the actual subject of the photo.

most wonderful thing. So I started with a formal approach—the strength of the visual power of the photo, finding that hook.

For me, it’s not the subject, it’s the weird, beautifully damaged object itself. I just love it. I gravitate towards things that reflect what our life is like. I want moldy photos and fire-damaged photos—things that have stretched what a photograph is.

2

You’ve joked about how your collection is sometimes at 15,000 “more or less” because you’re buying and selling all the time.

Having a collection is like having a garden.

You have to weed and cull it, because it’s never just about the number of photographs.

It’s about the quality. It’s meaningless to say that I have 15,000. What’s important is whether those 15,000 are good. Do they work? If they don’t, they shouldn’t be in it.

And sometimes it’ll be hard for me to take something out, but I find that the collection is richer and more cohesive if it’s smaller.

Do you remember where you found these photos?

I bought these at some store, because I wasn’t on eBay yet. I was only buying from people in person, and then I started to go to shows, where they would have [photos] on a table or bins, and you could go through them. I [also] went to antique stores—there were some in the city that sold vernacular photography, so I would go there and look every week.

How do you decide it’s time to part with an image?

I decide it’s not strong enough. It has to hit me that I don’t like it as much.

When you are ready to part with an image, how do you decide what it’s worth?

I’ll often buy a group of photos just for a few that stand out. I might sell them for $5, $10, or $15. But stuff that’s already in my collection is more. If I don’t want to sell a photo, but someone expresses interest, I set a high price and will sell it if they say yes. I can’t be buried with this material.

Did you search with anything in mind?

I didn’t search by theme—just wanted small photos. And I didn’t want anything that dealt with specific historical subjects. I’ve never really been interested in the narrative aspect of the photo or where and when it was taken.

I was just looking for interesting things.

As your collection grew, when did you start thinking about showing it to others or exhibiting it?

In 1998, SFMOMA had a snapshot exhibition, and I flew there to see it. I had about 1,000 to 2,000 in my collection, and I wanted to understand what was considered “good enough” to go on the walls of a museum.

I was gratified to find that what I was collecting seemed to be in line with what a “good” snapshot was.

Do you have any all-time favorites or images you’d never part with?

Probably this one. 3 It’s a mounted photo.

The photo is maybe 5x7” on a 10x8” cardboard mount. And it’s a mistake. Somehow, when it was printed, the chemicals reacted with the photos. It’s probably from the 1910s or the 1920s, and it got muddied. It’s magical, and there’s nothing else like it.

I also like things sometimes with unusual captions. Captions are always fun. [I like] this one 4 , not because the photo’s so good, but because of what it says. Just Polaroids of toilets. The words make it so enigmatic and strange.

3

This must have been validating!

I was going at it alone—it was before social media. There weren’t many widely published snapshot books, exhibitions, or lectures at the time. So I was buying in a vacuum. Going to the show validated my interest, my eye, and what I was doing.

What do you think makes a “good” snapshot— one that’s worthy of the walls?

It’s all very subjective because I’m not looking for photos based on subject matter.

For example, something military or from a specific historical period, even though many collectors are, and would consider it a “good photograph.” I’m looking for something aesthetically oriented—snapshots from everyday people that remind me of art photography.

What art photographers come to mind most?

Diane Arbus, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand—they were all affected by the snapshot aesthetic. So, many collectors are looking for things that remind us of a famous photograph and the quality and that kind of image. What we’re looking for is often something mysterious,

39

4

like a hidden face. Anything that’s odd and unsettling.

Do you feel like what you’re looking for has changed over the years?

Today, I’m more interested in uncommon things rather than just amazing images.

When I had the Art of the American Snapshot show at the National Gallery in 2007, we were trying to show some of the best of

the best of the kinds of snapshots that would be like “masterpieces.” Things that were so defining, wonderful, beautiful, artistic, and odd that they would transcend being a snapshot and become something else altogether.

I’ve become more interested in damaged photos. Also, photos that are strange, sometimes in bad taste—photos that stretch the limit of what one can find in the snapshot, and then the stuff that’s just purely like the

I’ve always been curious, do you look at Instagram snapshots as “vernacular” photography? Could there be a place for them in your collection?

I’m not interested, because I really want to collect photographs as objects. But I’m older

40 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

Big Art Energy

Anila Quayyum Agha: Geometry of Light Through Apr 19 Seattle Asian Art Museum A Beautiful Despair (Blue), 2021, Anila Quayyum Agha, Pakistani-American, b. 1965, lacquered steel and halogen bulb, 60 x 60 x 60 inches, Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery, NYC, the artist, © Anila Quayyum Agha, photo: Steve Watson/Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX.

We’re going monumental this fall.

Don’t miss out on the hundreds of exhibitions, events, and programs happening at SAM. Find the full schedule on our website.

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Seattle Art Museum

Seattle Asian Art Museum

Olympic Sculpture Park

SEPTEMBER 2025

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and of a different mindset. A younger person might not be object-oriented in the same way, so they might actually start collecting what’s on the screen, make books of it, or just have their own digital file. But I’m not interested in doing that.

So, what era is the cutoff for you?

When vernacular photography stopped becoming a paper focus, around 2007, when the 4x6” drugstore prints slowed production.

The 4x6” has become a growing part of your collection. How did that come about?

It’s been undervalued, understudied, and underrepresented—it’s the last paper snapshot that existed. It was the largest format that a snapshot ever was commercially available for, for widespread consumption.

It was more democratic, and there are more people of color in these images than in any other era. I thought it’d be interesting to investigate it, to understand what it tells you about the eye of the public at that time in America. I’ve been able to get about 400 photos that fit. 5 This one, the dead snake! 6 Something is so curious about his hair and his beard. It all has an odd feel together.

I look for things that feel realistic, because it’s [the] straight line, it’s the white. If [the car] was a different color, it wouldn’t have shown up. It has to hit me. And there’s a mystery to that.

You’ve gotten a ton of press about your collection; it’s been widely featured, exhibited, and

published. And you just hit 11K followers on Instagram. You’ve shown at the National Gallery, Pace, Photographic Center Northwest, and the Bellevue Arts Museum. Has this changed how you think about your collection?

It’s nice to see the space around them—they seem more weighted and powerful. Then you start to think of how they relate to fine art photography because most art photography you see is framed. It’s wonderful.

Does the digital life they now have on Instagram and Facebook open up how you think about them, their lifespan, or their “object-ness”?

I’m surprised that certain images I like don’t get the response that others do. I’m often surprised when people find images on my Instagram and want to use them. One person wanted to use an image for college class projects.

A few of your images were featured in the 2011 Ransom Riggs book Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, right?

Some of those became actual people in the movie. I don’t know if the actual images were in the movie, but they were based on photos in my collection.

Do you still have those photos in your collection?

I own some from the book and sold the best ones to the author. This one is probably my weirdest, and is in the book 7 . It’s a real photo postcard of a dog lounging in a studio, with a boy’s face montaged onto it. This is in the book and might be mentioned in the movie. I won’t sell this photo because it’s

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42 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

Olympia Arts Walk

Fall 2025

Presenting hundreds of art events in a two-day celebration of community, culture and creativity.

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Downtown Celebration: Friday 5 P.M. - 10 P.M. Saturday 12 P.M. - 6 P.M.

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SEPTEMBER 2025

Aisha Harrison, Shameka, 2023, Clay and paint, Courtesy of the Artist.

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NOV. 22, 2025 – FEB. 22, 2026 probably the craziest image in my collection. It’s so wild, pre-digital manipulation.

It’s disturbing.

You’ve also inspired and collaborated with artists, right? Didn’t Justin Duffus use one of your images for painting?

He does these paintings from square photos.

8 I found a photo from my collection that I thought would make a great painting, tracked him down, and asked if he would do one. We quickly became friends.

It’s been fascinating to see the power and warmth of the community you’re part of— whether it’s through other collectors around the country or artists like Joe Rudko and Rafael Soldi in Seattle. The simple act of collecting a snapshot has opened up so many warm connections.

I like to joke about the people I call “my competition”—people who also have wonderful collections are my friends. I have stayed at their houses. We talk on the phone, and I see them at shows. And then there’s the international part, too. I know people in London, in Paris, all through collecting.

My strongest friends are people in the photo world. It’s also an area of being exposed to and becoming friends with people you might have no other commonality with.

Tell me about a recent purchase which you are excited about.

As I mentioned earlier, I love 4x6” color photos. I love them so much that I am hoping the next publication featuring my collection will be on such photos from my

collection. What drew me to this recent acquisition was that it shows two men kissing. 9 This is in fact surprisingly a rather rare subject in snapshot photography. There are actually more images which exist of women kissing than that of men exhibiting such love. The specialness of the photo is not really in the beauty of how the photo was composed, but subject.

I don’t really buy many photos simply for subject, but this celebration of emotion and male affection compelled me to purchase.

I love that! My final question, which might sound a bit cryptic, is: What do you see in the future?

For me, for collecting, or for you?

Ha! Collecting in general. What are you optimistic about?

Realistically, in 15 years, I might be gone.

In the time that I have left, I want to have an exhibition with a collector that’s from another country, because nobody’s ever done something, a book or show, where you have a collection in the United States with somebody from another country.

I’d like to be a mentor to new collectors.

Also, I want to branch out into other areas of collecting that aren’t even photographic.

A lot of collectors I know are older, so there’s going to be a huge [transfer] of stuff going to auction in the next 20 years, and there aren’t that many new people around.

So I don’t know what the world will be like for snapshots.

Follow Robert E. Jackson on Instagram at @robert_e._jackson.

Aisha Harrison (from Olympia) presents work from the past four years in clay, bronze, paper collage, and mixed media. Porous Body, Harrison’s first solo museum exhibition, speaks to their focus on life cycles – both human and in nature, while experiencing the world through a mixed-race, queer, mothering lens. It is a confluence of a spiritual ancestral space and the land they inhabit, relate to, grow, and decay with.

Porous Body explores wonder and joy, grief, connection, and growth, and how to stay grounded in times of upheaval.

Artist Talk & Reception on January 10, 2026, 3 PM – 5 PM Details at www.biartmuseum.org

FREE MUSEUM ADMISSION & OPEN DAILY THANKS TO BIMA MEMBERS & DONATIONS

550 Winslow Way East, Bainbridge Island W W W. B I A RT M U S E U M .O R G

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44 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

SEPTEMBER 2025

45

Beyond the Galleries

Art Is Waiting for You in an Industrial Cathedral and Your Neighbor’s Backyard

BY AMANDA MANITACH

Refract | The Seattle Glass Experience

SPAM New Media Festival will fill the Georgetown Steam Plant with more than 30 installations.

Art + Culture Week

Sept. 20–27 Citywide It’s the second iteration of Seattle Art + Culture Week, the one week each September when a bunch of galleries and venues plan special events and performances. You can’t possibly see everything on the calendar, and that’s kind of the point: Seattle has a lot of art. Think of this week as an arts tasting menu where you can discover things not on your radar. Highlights include a night of “Ghost Stories” at Henry Art Gallery, with readings by local author Jane Wong (to accompany the Henry’s new Spirit House exhibition); an evening of sunset music on the Salish Steps at Waterfront Park presented by KEXP DJ Tory J, cohost of Sounds of Survivance; violinist Tekla Cunningham performing live at Foster/ White Gallery amid Kelsey Fernkopf ’s Big Neon (see page 32 for more on Fernkopf); and a performance by Pacific Northwest Ballet dancer Leah Terada, whose choreography responds to Cathy McClure’s toy-inspired bronzes and mechanical zoetropes on view at Traver Gallery. Heads up: PNB is offering a 20 percent discount on tickets to George Balanchine’s Jewels, which will be running this week, and admission to Seattle Art Museum and SAAM is half price the entire week.

WALK DONT RUN

Sept. 20, noon–6 p.m.

Pioneer Square, Downtown, Belltown As we hurtle toward the dim horizon of ever-flattening culture, it’s a great time to remember what’s lovely about being human, capable of drinking in sunlight and finding wonder in weird places.

WALK DONT RUN is here to help you touch grass (or asphalt, anyway). The art “marathon” is a one-day event that starts at Occidental Park at noon and winds through downtown parks, sidewalks, plazas, and storefronts to the finish line in Belltown. The route is lined with interactive art, music, and live performances by more than 100 artists, like the Fabulous Downey Brothers, 8-Bit Brass Band (performing video game tunes), inflatable dancing sculptures, Chimurenga Renaissance (Hussein Kalonji and ex-Shabazz Palaces member Tendai Maraire), and a Motivation Station vending machine that offers video messages of encouragement, creative prompts, and tough love. There will be something for everyone, from whimsical to conceptual, including stops along the way to explore 32 artist studios at both Base Camp Studio locations. Bring the whole family, or a coven of brunch buddies, or just wander solo for the year’s biggest outdoor art walk.

WILL AUSTIN

SPAM New Media Festival

Sept. 12–14 Georgetown Steam Plant Built in 1906 to power Seattle’s electric streetcars, the decommissioned Georgetown Steam Plant now exists as an “industrial cathedral” and stage for cultural events. While exploring the plant’s labyrinthine interior is a breathtaking experience on its own, the acoustics and architecture of the space provide a beyond-epic setting for dance, projection, and installation.

Upcoming events include the Super 8 Film Festival (Sept. 6), A Circus of Steam & Shadows (Oct. 17–19), and SPAM New Media Festival. Offering an opportunity to engage with tech while AFK, SPAM brings together over 30 installations by artists and technologists from around the world.

Ever been enchanted by robotic surveillance? Kate Bailey’s floating sculpture Is It Listening is made from a weather balloon and equipped with a mic that eavesdrops on snippets of conversation while it wanders the room, transcribing in realtime and printing reams of stream-of-consciousness ticker-tape poetry. Along with AI portals, audio soundscapes, VR, and digital ghosts lurking in the boiler room, it’s just one of the many moments that will warm your cockles as we plunge ever deeper into a postdigital reality.

Oct. 16–19 Citywide Unleash your inner glasshole! No, I’m not making that term up. Seattle is an emperor of the glass art industry, and the seventh iteration of Refract is your chance to become an expert on the subject, try your hand at a punty and glory hole (more glassblowing terms I am not making up), or just mingle with folks whose small talk involves devitrification. On the menu: a posh opening-night bash at Chihuly Garden and Glass, live demonstrations and the opportunity to blow at Glassybaby, a private tour of Dale Chihuly’s iconic Boathouse, a Glassblowing Film Festival in partnership with SIFF, and a bunch of open studios of local glass artists (Refract has partnered with Tours Northwest to provide shuttles from studio to studio). If you have time, plan a trip to the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, which boasts a unique Visiting Artist Residency Program that draws artists from around the world.

You can watch visiting artists (Åsa Sandlund will be on deck during Refract) and the MoG hot shop team in person as they whip up wildly experimental pieces before your eyes in an auditorium designed like a theater.

Walk the Block

Sept. 27, 1–7 p.m.

Central District Walk the Block is the annual one-day festival that takes place across the Central District and transforms yards, parks, porches, and side streets into one continuous stage for art. But it’s not just an art walk; it’s a celebration of ownership and stewardship by and for the Black community who built one of Seattle’s most culturally rich and robust neighborhoods.

Produced by Wa Na Wari, this year’s theme is gratitude, and the artists headlining the event include some big names: Musician/ poet/multi-hyphenate Saul Williams will be performing, along with work by visual artist Curry J. Hackett and a performance

by LA-based Autumn Breon. Artists from closer to home make up a rockstar roster, including 2018 Betty Bowen recipient Natalie Ball, videopoet (and personal forever art crush) Kamari Bright, and Dez’Mon Omega Fair, whose ultra-immersive installation-cum-performaces of late are nothing short of ensorcelling. This year also introduces a dedicated comedy stage curated by Nate Jackson’s Super Funny Comedy Club, featuring sets by Danny Meyerend, Frederick White, and Tyrik Woods. ■

46 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

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48 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

Drag Kings Ascend the Throne!

Emerald City Kings Ball Is a Crowning Achievement

BY NICO SWENSON PHOTOS BY KEITH JOHNSON

I

t’s time for the “No Kings But Drag Kings” sign-holders to put their dollar bills where the boys are: Seattle’s international Emerald City Kings Ball is coming back this month.

It started with a passing comment in a greenroom between drag kings Faberg’ee Greg and Sherwood Ryder. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we had something like a players ball but for drag kings and super safe?” Faberg’ee Greg recalls saying to Sherwood Ryder.

It seemed like a good idea. At the time, there was only one local king show. They’d put on a two-day showcase of kings and “beings,” a gender-neutral term for

performers, and “everybody’s feedback was that they wanted more of it.”

Now in its fourth year, the festival has expanded from its home at the Skylark Cafe into the much larger Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute.

“Each night we have close to 20 performers,” Ryder says. “It is going to be a show for the masses.” More than 160 people applied for this year’s ball. The festival also has a spectacular list of headliners and featured guests, including King Molasses (winner of King of Drag season 1), Throb Zombie (runner-up of The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula season 5), a number of local favor-

ites, and surprises to be announced on the Emerald City Kings Ball Instagram.

On Saturday night, performers will compete for the title of High King Supreme, currently held by the incomparable Velvet Ryder of Vancouver, Canada. An Imperial Duke and a Grand Marquis are crowned as well. Last year, those titles went to Seattle’s locally beloved Sid Seedy and Chance Hazard. Each of them will perform a stepdown, allowing you to see the talents that brought them their wins. Velvet Ryder has a perfect combination of sexy swagger, rhinestones, and camp that won him the big crown with a literal panty-dropping performance.

Seedy’s score of the Duke title came from a truly impressive and ferocious lip sync, and Hazard took the crown for his signature brand of absurd props and cheeky humor.

With escalating transphobia, the terror of ICE, local performers being doxxed by conservative media, and sweeping cuts to arts funding, it’s notable that an international drag king festival is succeeding at all.

“The world is very hard right now. I want us to understand that without each other, we wouldn’t really have anything,” says Ryder.

“It’s important that we see each other and support each other.”

Greg says they’ve “thankfully weathered

SEPTEMBER 2025

(Left) Justin Abit, pictured with a very sick sword and beat; (below) Willy Munster, feat. a bedazzled skull AND skull scepter; (right) Velvet Ryder wins the 2024 High King Supreme crown.

the storm” and that they are receiving “tons of support from the community and different sponsors.” He notes that “we all need a collective breath. I think the fantasy and the opulence of the Emerald City Kings Ball will make some things feel okay for a while.”

The team is committed to inspiring and collaborating with other producers, as well.

A recent success, Thrust Fest held its first year in Boston, produced by Krēme Inakuchi, Riley Poppyseed, and Throb Zombie. “They actually got the idea to produce together at our festival last year,” Ryder says. “Now there’s going to be another king festival happening in Charlotte, North Carolina.

We want to continue to build this platform and have this space for all of the kings throughout the country who aren’t in a safe space to be able to be who they are and to perform their art.”

“To be in an event where there’s 50 other kings all in one space, you get to see how diverse everybody’s talents are,” Harley Sayne says. “We try really hard to curate

our lineups every night to show the range of different types of performers.”

Sayne started as an audience member, then began assisting with the festival and formally became a coproducer in 2024. “Drag has been an impactful way for me to move through life more authentically to myself,” Sayne says. “I’ve had a hard time throughout

had never experienced before. It was like an instant friendship with everybody.”

These festivals address a significant need, as kings have had to advocate for respect, representation, and even equal pay within broader drag spaces. “I would love for there to be kings on the main stages everywhere,” says Ryder. “I would love for there to be no

“We want to continue to build this platform and have this space for all of the kings throughout the country who aren’t in a safe space to be able to be who they are…” my life finding a lot of meaningful connections with people, and I always felt like the odd person out. When I found drag, I found so many people who felt the same way I did.

Getting to be a part of the festival, getting to feel that atmosphere, was something that I

more ‘token king on a cast.’ I would love for there to be representation in which when there is a cast that is deemed diverse that it shows the diversity. I want to see equal pay— kings deserve more than getting half of what the queens are making.”

49

Greg says when they were initially developing the festival, “drag kings weren’t really taken seriously as drag artists. I felt like that wasn’t fair, because I know so many dynamic, amazing people that are drag kings, but because they’re drag kings they get ignored, or there’s that one or two in the community that fill a hole in a show so that it can say it’s inclusive.”

Sayne points out, “We’ve had Drag Race on TV for two decades now without having a drag king [competition]. It’s pretty normal for us to be the only king booked in a lineup of otherwise queens. This is the first year with the King of Drag that there’s ever been a drag king competition show on TV. So that’s been massive for representation.”

This year, King of Drag aired its first season and has become a partner of Emerald City Kings Ball. “When we got the email, we were like, ‘Is this happening? Do we need to pinch each other?’” Ryder says. “The partnership has been great. It’s unreal to have this platform that has started with Murray Hill, who has been fighting the good fight for us for a very long time. To see kings now on a platform, to be loved and respected, and for people internationally to witness the camaraderie and the brotherhood that exists in king spaces, makes my heart happy. The fact that we got to be part of the prize package, I couldn’t be more proud.”

Sayne expressed his appreciation that King of Drag also honors the work of existing king legends, such as the show’s host, Murray Hill. It’s important to note that drag kings are by no means a new phenomenon.

As part of the festival’s workshop portion, king icon Mo B. Dick will be giving his lecture on drag king history. Workshops are a new element of the Kings Ball and will be ticketed separately. They’ll include things like how to paint and clowning in drag, among other skill shares.

The festival does its own work to represent a strong spectrum of styles and talents.

Ryder uses the phrase “kings and beings” to be inclusive of the performers that they book.

“When people talk about drag kings, they’re often talking about masculine-identifying individuals, but there is so much more to drag and art, especially when it comes to nonbinary or gender-diverse people in how they define their art. Not all of them identify as a king, but some of them identify as a thing or a being or an entity or an alien. I feel that it’s important to include that representation.”

“I would love to see people forget about what’s under the makeup and what’s under the art and who is wearing the art,” Greg says.

“I would love to see people stop going, ‘Oh, well, how can you be this if you’re this?’ or ‘How can you be this if you’re that?’ There’s so much more to it, and if we allow ourselves to fall into those boxes, we’ll never get out.”

It all aligns with the mission statement of the Emerald City Kings Ball: “to celebrate and highlight Kings and Beings of Drag. We hope to inspire, offer representation, and shine a spotlight on the creativity and talent in this often-overlooked section of the drag community.”

The Emerald City Kings Ball is at Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute Sept.

25–27, 18+. It will be ASL interpreted and masks are encouraged.

50 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

Beau Dick: Insatiable Beings Oct 25, 2025–Jan 18, 2026

Beau Dick. Atlakim (set of 3, detail), 1990. Red cedar, acrylic, cedar bark. 19 x 12 in. each. Gochman Family Collection. Courtesy of Fazakas Gallery, Vancouver, BC. Photo: Anthony Sam Generous support provided by the Raynier Institute & Foundation, ArtsFund, and Frye Members. Media sponsorship provided by The Seattle Times and Cascade PBS. Seasonal support provided by 4Culture.

SEPTEMBER 2025

51

She’s All That

See Two Sides of Playwright Keiko Green at Seattle Theaters in September

BY JULIANNE BELL

P

things are so inherent in the art form! So I wanted to test out some of those theories.

laywright, screenwriter, and performer Keiko Green, who splits her time between Seattle and Los Angeles, is booked and busy. In September alone, two different local companies are coincidentally producing two of her plays. Pork Filled Productions and SIS Productions are co-presenting Exotic Deadly: Or the MSG Play, a comedy set in 1999 about a Japanese American teen, Ami, who learns to embrace her cultural identity after meeting a badass new girl from Japan named Exotic Deadly.

(Bonus: It also includes a scene in which Ben Affleck and Matt Damon overdose on MSG.) And Washington Ensemble Theatre is producing Green’s horror-thriller Hells Canyon, in which seven-months-pregnant Ariel Lim and her friends are haunted by a mysterious presence in a cabin in the Eastern Oregon woods.

Green also recently wrote for the 2024 Hulu series adaptation of Charles Yu’s novel, Interior Chinatown, and the forthcoming Apple TV series based on Rufi Thorpe’s novel, Margo’s Got Money Troubles, starring Elle Fanning and Nicole Kidman. And right now, she’s working on Young Dragon, a play about the early life of Bruce Lee, which will premiere at Seattle Children’s Theatre in 2026. Thankfully, she wasn’t too busy to hop on a call with The Stranger to talk about her favorite ’90s films, how she honed her sense of humor, and her basset hound named Gus.

Exotic Deadly and Hells Canyon are two very different plays. Do they share any similarities?

Yeah, these shows are so wildly different in genre. I’m really excited to show two different parts of my brain to people. Exotic Deadly is a coming-of-age, time-traveling, wacky comedy that changes locations sometimes three times in a page, [while] Hells Canyon sits in one location for the entire play, so even structurally, they’re really different. I do think there is definitely a perspective in both that comes from the Asian American female leads. In Exotic Deadly, we see someone who is really dealing with some internalized selfloathing of her identity. And then in Hells Canyon, it’s a lot more about the inherited trauma that turns scary. But both shows are also really, really funny. With Exotic Deadly, that should be unsurprising, but I think people will be really surprised by how funny Hells Canyon is.

Comedy seems to be a through line in your work, even when you’re dealing with some really thorny themes. What draws you to humor?

What horror media did you have in mind while writing Hells Canyon?

Definitely Get Out—not just the fact that there’s a racial element to it, but also the comedy of it. Hereditary and The Babadook—there’s something interesting about a mother who is losing it. I love watching someone turn into a monster they don’t want to be. I’m curious about whether, in this show, people are going to be rooting for Ariel or scared of her. And Rosemary’s Baby, there’s definitely some pregnancy-related body horror in there, too.

Keiko Green (not pictured, her beloved basset hound named Gus).

I’m a big supporter of the fact that we earn our dramatic moments rather than earning our comedic moments, and comedy is a great way to get people on board. My number-one goal is to entertain, and if I can get someone to start laughing, it makes it a lot easier to deal with a heavy theme. One thing with horror is that you need a release. It’s one of the reasons why there are so many comedians who are making great horror films right now, like Jordan Peele and the director of Weapons [Zach Cregger]. You can get people to release from a moment of tension by giving them something to scream about or giving them something to laugh about.

And both things are, timing-wise and musically, kind of the same. They work in similar ways, which is surprising, but it’s been really interesting to learn.

JOHN ULMAN

Hells Canyon is your first horror play. What motivated you to write something in that genre?

I love horror. There’s not a lot of good horror plays, and I really wanted to see if I could write something that worked [onstage].

Instead of trying to make a horror play that felt like a movie, I thought, what is it inherently about theater that lends itself to making an even better horror experience?

In film and TV, we are constantly moving action forward, almost at breakneck speed, and in theater, we get to sit in that tension a little bit longer. Things happen, and then we live in the consequences and see how people are reacting and handling things poorly. I think that if we’re not shying away from discomfort, theater should actually be doing horror even better, because those

Hells Canyon draws from the real-life history of the Snake River Massacre in Hells Canyon, Oregon, in which 34 Chinese gold miners were attacked and murdered by seven white horse thieves. What inspired you to write a play about that incident?

I traveled through [Hells Canyon], and it was so beautiful, and there were kids playing in the river. There was something about that that made me realize we have no idea about what happened on the land that we have a great time on. We don’t really think about what came before us. That felt really strange to me. And also, this was a piece of history I had never heard of before, and most people have never heard of before. The massacre happened in the late 1800s, and they just put up the first real memorial a few years ago. Even still, they know all the names of the murderers, but they don’t even know all the names of the people who were killed.

There’s an injustice there that I couldn’t quite shake from my brain. It made me think: What does it feel like to go into these spaces where culturally, you’re tethered to it in some way? What effect does that have, as a Chinese American person, to go to this space and hear about this history, and then everyone’s like, “Let’s get wasted”?

Like Ami, the protagonist of Exotic Deadly, you learned as a teen that your grandfather worked as a food scientist at the Japanese corporation Ajinomoto, which invented MSG. What were your initial feelings about that at the time?

I think at first it felt like, of course. One more thing that I hate about myself, you know what I mean? I grew up in Georgia, in a super white area. I went to Japanese school until fifth grade, and then I transferred to this American school down the street. All I wanted was for my mom to give me a turkey

SEP 28

52 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

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Expect to see some pregnancy-related body horror in Hells Canyon. sandwich, and instead, she would make me these delicious, smelly bentos that were so nutritious. I would’ve murdered to just be able to buy chicken fingers, because I thought that was the coolest thing in the world. It was already in our brains that MSG was bad for you, so it was that deep, internalized kind of shame that makes you want to disappear. That’s really the heart of the play.

How have your views changed since then?

My brothers didn’t go [to Japanese school]; they went to American school the whole time, and I was so jealous of them that they just got

“You can get people to release tension by giving them something to scream about or something to laugh about.” to go to a regular school down the street. Now it’s like, what a gift my mom gave me. I have such a closeness to Japanese culture that my brothers don’t get to have, just based on language. They couldn’t have the same kinds of conversations with our grandmother that I could have. So it gave me access to a whole new world, and it was definitely a huge gift.

Exotic Deadly is set in the year 1999. What are some of your favorite pop-culture references from that time period?

Wayne’s World, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. There’s a lot of fourth-wall-breaking [in Exotic Deadly], like in Saved by the Bell. A lot of times, I give the leads of the show a little bit of guidance by mentioning Lizzie McGuire. She’s All That is a perfect 1999 motion picture—I’m sure there’s a lot of influence from that without

RICH RYAN

me even realizing. And then there’s the Japanese side of it. It’ll be fun to see how the fights work in this production—we’ve done some Sailor Moon homages and some Dragon Ball homages in the past.

What do you hope audiences will take away from these performances?

I hope people watch both and they’re reminded they’re allowed to show as many different flavors of themselves as they’ll see from me on these two very, very different plays. I think from Exotic Deadly, I want people to laugh really hard, and I want them to feel like we need to do a little more investigating about the information we’re given. We’re living in such a time of misinformation right now, and unfortunately, even though it’s set in 1999, the play feels more relevant than ever, because of the way things get thrown around and misconstrued and spread. For both plays, I hope people walk away considering what the lasting effects of these microaggressions can be on the communities around you. For Hells Canyon, I really hope people can think about [who they are] when they’re letting their rage consume them.

Can you tell me about your dog Gus? He’s perfect. He’s a basset hound. He howls when he’s left alone. When he was a puppy, he tripped over his ears. We got him when he was nine weeks old. We actually got him in February 2020, one month before the pandemic hit. We had moved down to San Diego. My husband had always wanted a basset hound, and we ended up picking him up. He was the runt of the litter, and now he runs our entire life.

Exotic Deadly: Or the MSG Play runs at Theatre Off Jackson Sept. 5–20. Hells Canyon runs at 12th Avenue Arts Sept. 5–21; livestream tickets are available.

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The Purpose of Playing The 2025–2026 Performance Seasons According to the People Planning Them

BY NATHALIE GRAHAM

W

eathering the last five years of pandemic, political horror, and economic woes has been hard, especially for live theater.

COVID shutdowns sent audiences online, and they still haven’t come back. The current administration full of hateful philistines gutted National Endowment for the Arts funding, especially for institutions promoting art about diversity and gender identity.

If all the world’s a stage, then our world must be in a bad way.

Despite it all, the Seattle theater scene is still kicking and still recovering. The stages across town are striving for a 2025–2026 season full of life— and one chock-full of productions that can’t help reflecting the times, either directly or through an escapist respite. The purpose of playing, after all, is to hold up a mirror to nature. Or whatever it was Hamlet said.

performance crafted around interviews with archivists who discovered family photos from the Nazis living outside Auschwitz.

5th Avenue Theatre September 13, 2025–May 17, 2026 Finally, after years of trying to get the rights, the 5th Avenue Theatre is putting on Jesus Christ Superstar. It’s one of the two shows the 5th is producing this year. Normally, they aim to produce more shows in-house, but it’s expensive and the economics aren’t allowing it right now.

Before the pandemic hit, the 5th Ave had 22,000 subscribers, executive director

Union Arts Center September 20, 2025–June 28, 2016 ACT Contemporary Theatre and Seattle Shakespeare Company have merged, and they’re birthing a brand-new joint venture.

This upcoming season is the first they’re doing together.

All the shows this season have to do with transformation. The season blends contemporary plays and Shakespeare favorites. It starts September 20 with Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. It’s about a doctor who exposes the truth about a contamination in his town, much to the chagrin of the local leaders and community. Prescient.

touring Broadway productions to the Paramount Theatre’s stage, like the Tony-winning play Stereophonic about a band in a recording studio making an album in the 1970s.

“It’s something quite different, something that doesn’t normally show up on tour,” says Josh LaBelle, executive director of Seattle Theatre Group.

LaBelle is especially excited for The Lion King, since STG will be hosting a sensory-friendly performance to enable people, especially families with neurodivergent kids, to see performances together when they otherwise wouldn’t be able to. “ We turn the Paramount Theatre into a living room,” LaBelle says. If people need to stand up and walk around during the show, that’s fine. If kids need to have a tablet out, sure, go for it. “We encourage it all.”

On the Boards September 11, 2025– Seattle Rep June 6, 2026 August 28, 2025– Nobody is doing it like Seattle’s May 10, 2026 home for experimental and The Rep’s season starts and contemporary performance, ends earlier this year due to On the Boards. And that’s part next summer’s World Cup. To of their ethos: What could only get people to “want to leave the come to Seattle if it were at barbecue” when their season On the Boards? opens Labor Day weekend, The 2025–2026 season the Rep is putting on The Play includes Inebria Me, a queer That Goes Wrong, says artistic telenovela-inspired opera by director Dámaso Rodríguez. The San Cha, and The Nosebleed, a play follows a theater company piece of experimental theater putting on a murder mystery, about failure and intergenerand, just like the title says, things ational communication, espefall apart. “There is something COURTESY OF ON THE BOARDS cially around gender identity. about laughing together in the This is how local theaters feel when you don’t see their plays. (Go see The Nosebleed at On the Boards.)

“The piece is really tender, face of things going wrong and “The adaptation is so swift and smart,” but also really funny,” On the Boards when chaos reigns,” Rodríguez says. “Some- Bill Berry says. At the lows of COVID, they times that’s what the world feels like, right?” had around 7,500 subscribers. Now, they’re Elisabeth Farwell-Moreland, interim executive director Megan Kiskaddon says.

But the show everyone must see, Though it’s not an official theme, Rodrí- gaining back subscribers, but not as quickly producing artistic director, says.

They ’ll tackle Shakespeare’s The according to Kiskaddon, is Major, a guez says all the picks for this season as they’d like. They’re currently at about embody a kind of resilience. The other 9,500. To draw those audiences into seats Taming of the Shrew in the theater’s contemporary performance by Ogemdi big tentpole show is Come from Away, the again, Berry has crafted a year full of fun own spin with Shrew and bring back A Ude, a dancer fixated on majorette dancing.

Midsummer Night’s Dream, but with “It’s one of those pieces that anyone hit musical about the planes that were programming and escapism.

“In order to survive the world we live in, spookier fairies. Another must-see is The would get something out of, because it’s grounded in Gander, Newfoundland, after so exuberant,” Kiskaddon says.

9/11, which originated as a co-produc- it’s important to have spaces where you can Aves by Jiehae Park.

Lastly, John Jarboe’s show Rose: You Are “It’s nothing like you’ve ever seen,” tion with the Rep a decade ago. “It’s a play laugh and be free,’” Berry says. That’s why about people finding unexpected light in Monty Python’s Spamalot is playing this year. Farwell-Moreland says of The Aves. The Who You Eat is a deeply autobiographical, Chicago should draw a crowd. And play is poetic and sparse, but imbued with tongue-in-cheek trans story, which got its the darkness,” Rodríguez says. The theater is putting a new spin on Come From Away who doesn’t want to see Elf: The Musical magical realism. “It’s just a totally different name because Jarboe’s relative told her she ate her sister in the womb. Her perforduring the holidays? That’s the other 5th way of telling stories.” during the holiday season this year. mance, though weird and funny, is mostly Other standouts include Fancy Dancer, an Ave–produced show this year. But it’s about acceptance. “It’s important to put Paramount Theatre autobiographical play about a half-Lakota not all levity. SUFFS, a musical about positive trans stories out into the world September 16, 2025–July 26, 2026 half-white woman becoming a professional the women’s suffrage movement, kicks off The Seattle Theatre Group is bringing right now,” Kiskaddon says. ■ dancer, and Here There Are Blueberries, a the season.

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Welcome to Seattle’s New and Young Jazz Age

Pioneer Square Joins Forces with Seattle Jazz Fellowship to Make Things Happen

BY CHARLES MUDEDE PHOTOS BY CHRISTIAN PARROCO

The crowd at a recent Monday night Jam Session at Seattle Jazz Fellowship’s new Pioneer Square club.

I

have a friend. I will not say his name. But he is to me what Charles Swann was to Marcel, the main character in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. My friend, who is a man about town, will often, by text, tell me to meet him somewhere that’s really happening, and count on my appearance, which is almost always a sure thing.

This time around—on the afternoon of July 30—we are to meet at the Long Brothers Fine and Rare Books in Pioneer Square. Why there? Because it’s a part of July’s Jazz Night in Pioneer Square. I’m a bit surprised at the kind of weight he places on this night. It is, after all, jazz—a musical form I love (and even made a movie about), but is hardly, in

our day, “all the rage.” My friend is under the impression that, out of all the places to be in Seattle that evening, this is the one.

I walk into Long Brothers Fine and Rare Books at around 6 p.m., and it’s mostly empty.

able. The pizza arrives: It does the job admirably. I wait for my friend, who arrives at around 6:30 p.m., orders a drink, consumes the remainder of the pie, and, between bites, continues to make big claims about Jazz

This is the moment. This is the music.

This is a gathering of focused souls.

The white stools at the bar are free. I take one, order a glass of wine and a pepperoni pizza pie, not because I’m hungry, but I’m peckish. My white wine arrives: It’s respect-

Night in Pioneer Square. It’s organized by the Seattle Jazz Fellowship (SJF), a group of local and established jazz musicians that, until 2023, programmed shows at the

Vermillion Gallery and Bar. In 2024, SJF moved to this part of town, and the results have been nothing short of spectacular.

I will not lie. I thought my friend was overdoing the hype-man shtick for this occasion.

To begin with, the words “spectacular” and “jazz” are rarely said in the same breath.

What the hell was he on?

But at 6:45 p.m., something strange happens: Young people quickly fill the empty seats around the bar. At 7:00, young and old people start filling the space in front of a group of musicians preparing for the show.

By 7:15, the house is totally packed. By 7:30, a line runs out the door. I can’t believe my own eyes. The leader of the band is a local pro,

58 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

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trombonist Beserat Tafesse. He is supported by other pros: Geoff Harper on bass, Chris Icasiano on the drums, and Matt Williams on piano. Their music is just superb and has an ease that matches the summer light streaming through the bookstore’s windows. And the audience is not in any way distracted. The performance has their full attention. This is the moment. This is the music. This is a gathering of focused souls.

During the session’s break, I leave the bookstore to visit other venues. I go to Zeitgeist Coffee—a line. I go to Asylum Collective—yet another line. I go to the Underbelly bar—the same as the others. What’s going on here? All of these young people are waiting and waiting to hear America’s classical music.

“The same thing happens every Monday with our Jam Sessions [at the Seattle Jazz Fellowship’s new location in Pioneer Square]—line out the door and down the block…” says jazz trumpeter Thomas Marriott during a recent interview.

Marriott (along with Trevor Ford, D’Vonne Lewis, and Tim Kennedy) is a key member of the Fellowship and the main talent organizer for Jazz Night. “It’s been incredible, and it’s a beautiful crowd of people, a really diverse crowd, but many are young.

So, I mean, it’s great to play for that kind of audience… You know, they cheer and give it up for the players.”

When I ask how all of this success came about, Marriott answers: “You know, 20- to 30-year-olds, and really any person living in Seattle in this particular time, where everything is outrageously expensive, will be attracted to quality events that are affordable. Our shows are free. And we are doing our best to make jazz music accessible by making it easy to get to. So, Jazz Night in Pioneer Square, both of those events that happened this year [one was in February], were 100 percent free and unticketed. All you had to do was show up.

There was no barrier to access the music, and we do that in our own venue, as well.

So, Monday night is free.” The Fellowship, which is a nonprofit, does, however, suggest a donation or entry with a membership. At the end of the day, musicians must get paid.

“We’re well aware that in our age, nobody can sell a record anymore,” explains Marriott. “Everything is streamed, and so our revenue streams have come down to live music, and so we don’t want the music to be just for free, we need support.” Finally, Marriott credits Jazz Night’s success to the location, Pioneer Square, which has lots of bars and restaurants and is easily accessed by two Link light rail stations, one at its heart and the other in nearby Chinatown.

Altogether, the Jazz Nights have been great for business. Jen Moses, who does PR for Alliance for Pioneer Square, an organization that’s “funded in part by the 4Culture Lodging Tax and Historic South Downtown,” provided these hard facts about July’s Jazz Night: “Foot traffic was up 27 percent over an average Tuesday this summer, and more than 40–55 percent higher than the same date in 2024 and 2023. Participating venues reported major spikes in sales, with one business noting revenues were 500 percent higher than a typical Tuesday. Many of those surveyed want to see Jazz Night become a quarterly or biannual tradition.”

From top: Jazz is cool again; trumpeter Thomas Marriott; bassist Trevor Ford.

I will go further and recommend it be a monthly event, like Pioneer Square’s First Thursday, which, by the way, is also doing very well and is attended by a growing number of young people. For now, sadly, there are no more Jazz Nights scheduled this year, though Marriott is eyeing a return in February. “Jazz music is fun,” he says.

“That’s the music. It is alive, it is inventive, it’s accessible. That’s not something that just happened; it’s something that’s always happening.”

Fellowship Jam Session is every Monday at 103 S Main St, 7:30 pm, free, all ages.

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61

Album Review Revue

Eight Local Releases (and Then Some) to Put on Your Radar!

ACAPULCO LIPS

Now (Killroom Records) July 14 On their 2016 self-titled debut album, Seattle trio Acapulco Lips nailed the reverb-heavy surf-/garage-rock moves that have fired so many imaginations over the last 60 years. Their special talent is not sounding like tedious museum docents for these vintagte styles. That’s down to the songwriting and instrumental chops of bassist/vocalist MariaElena Herrell and guitarist Christopher Garland, both consummate pros. Now, AL’s first album in nine years, finds them going for a more straightforward modern rock approach (Jordan T Adams joins on drums and Stefan Rubicz adds keyboards for this release). Everything sounds bigger, brighter, and more danceable, thanks partially to Killroom Records cofounders Ben Jenkins and Troy Nelson’s production (which perfectly captures Acapulco Lips’ manifold charms), and Kurt Bloch’s mastering. Album-opener “Welcome to the Other Side” sets the tone in the form of danceable rock with expertly layered vocal interplay. And it’s been ages since I’ve heard Phil Spector–esque rock that’s as majestic and beautiful as “Fuzzy Sunshine.” The lone instrumental, “Pas

d’echappatoire,” is a roaring surf-rock opus that goes way harder than expected.

“See You on the Other Side” overflows with optimism... then fades out and—shocker!—a (faux?) tamboura drone enters the frame and heavenly bliss is attained. What a brilliant way to end the album. Over the last 25 years or so, conventional rock has rarely impressed me, but Acapulco Lips’ songwriting is so tight and well-contoured, it would be foolish to resist. DAVE SEGAL

tity as a queer, female-bodied person, and feelings about objectification.” While I am somewhat hesitant to compare the album to vogue-inspired pop queen Madonna, there are some undeniable similarities to Madge’s 1994 Bedtime Stories, particularly the Björk-written title track. Madonna and Smith’s approaches are different, but their goal is the same: to make your body move.

KAITLYN AURELIA SMITH

Shoot the Point (Happy Happy Birthday to Me Records) Aug. 22 The seminal twee band Tullycraft is extremely near and dear to my heart—I discovered them as a high-schooler who pored obsessively over the Three Imaginary Girls blog and instantly fell in love with their sugary, sparkling melodies. So when I listened to Shoot the Point, their first new album in six years, it felt like unwrapping a gift to my inner teen, and I couldn’t stop smiling. This is classic Tullycraft, packed full of cheeky references, rhinestones, sweet “sha-la-la-la” harmonies, evocative storytelling, and, of course, tambourines. The album recalls the band’s 2007 indie-pop vampire concept album, Every Scene Needs a Center—the lyrics conjure a vivid picture of the goth, punk, and New Wave

Gush (Nettwerk Music Group) Aug. 22 Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s new album, GUSH, could simultaneously soundtrack a euphoric night at a dance club and a meditative afternoon at the lake. The album is lush and free-flowing with an undercurrent of tense ballroom beats that bubble beneath the surface. Smith’s expertly layered vocals shimmer and bounce off the electronic bleep-bloops like the sun reflecting on a body of water, or like her glitter-cloaked skin on the cover of her 2017 album, The Kid. While composing GUSH, Smith, who is a longtime yogi and acrobat, expanded her movement practice to voguing and ballroom culture. She told Fest Magazine, “It was really helping me untangle my own iden-

AUDREY VANN

TULLYCRAFT

world, with songs like “Jeanie’s Up Again and Blaring Faith by the Cure” (an ode to a morose, born-too-late Robert Smith fangirl) and “Love on the Left Bank” (the story of a tumultuous fling that begins at a Libertines show). The Stranger’s own Art Director and Renaissance man, Corianton Hale, has been a member of the band since 2005, a fact I somehow remained oblivious to until now— he designed the cover and contributed guitar, vocals, tambourine, melodica, ukulele, and accordion! JULIANNE BELL

(BEN) VON WILDENHAUS

Dark Von Universe (Globos) Sept. 2 Tacoma guitarist/vocalist Ben Von Wildenhaus is a debonair director of nocturnal melodic splendor, a patient explorer of deep emotions in song. His music sounds best in the wee morning hours, while you’re alone, contemplating your most regrettable decisions. Sophisticatedly tuneful and lyrically poetic, (Ben) Von Wildenhaus’s releases are kilometers away from the agitated, bluecollar rock of his old group, Federation X. You can call that “maturity,” but it’s not the staid kind; rather, he and his bandmates enjoy going on exploratory jaunts in myriad styles. Having a singer the caliber of Billie Bloom elevates these meticulously crafted

62 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

X I A N Z H A N G | M U S I C D I R E C TOR

S E P TE M B E R 1 0

FLOW IN CONCERT

WITH THE SEATTLE SYMPHONY Prepare to be transported by the breathtaking animated film Flow in its world premiere concert presentation at Benaroya Hall.

S E P TE M B E R 27 & 2 8

DANNY ELFMAN’S MUSIC FROM THE FILMS OF TIM BURTON WITH THE SEATTLE SYMPHONY

This live concert features Danny Elfman’s famous Tim Burton film scores brought to life on stage by the Seattle Symphony and enhanced by visuals on the big screen of original sketches, drawings and storyboards.

JA N UA RY 2

Morgan Freeman’s Symphonic Blues Experience

IN CONCERT WITH THE SEATTLE SYMPHONY Morgan Freeman lands at Benaroya Hall to narrate this immersive production, which fuses the soulful sounds of Mississippi Delta blues by artists from his Ground Zero Blues Club with cinematic storytelling and the grandeur of a symphony orchestra.

J U N E 2 6 –2 8

INDIANA JONES AND THE RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARKTM

LIVE IN CONCERT WITH THE SEATTLE SYMPHONY

O C TO B E R 3 0 & 31

Experience Stephen Spielberg’s iconic 1981 film on the big screen as the Seattle Symphony performs John Williams’ GRAMMY-winning score live.

WITH THE SEATTLE SYMPHONY

J U LY 1 0 – 12

CORALINE IN CONCERT

Watch the acclaimed stop-motion animated film Coraline as the whimsical film score is performed live by the Seattle Symphony!

D E C E M B E R 5 –7

Disney’s The Muppet Christmas Carol

IN CONCERT LIVE TO FILM WITH THE SEATTLE SYMPHONY A holiday classic comes to Benaroya Hall this season as The Muppet Christmas Carol hits the big screen, accompanied live by the Seattle Symphony! This beloved adaptation of Dickens’ timeless tale features Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit and Michael Caine as Scrooge.

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON

IN CONCERT WITH THE SEATTLE SYMPHONY This beloved DreamWorks animated feature soars into Benaroya Hall this summer! The Seattle Symphony performs the epic film score as the film plays on the big screen.

HEAD TO THE MOVIES AT BENAROYA HALL!

206.215.4747 | seattlesymphony.org/movies

SEPTEMBER 2025

songs to sublime levels. Bloom’s perfectly poised, jazz-tinged delivery would melt David Lynch’s heart. Von Wildenhaus’s new album, Dark Von Universe, collects nine tracks from the band’s extended play singles. There are plenty of deviations from the norm. “Mice Helium” is undulating, Middle Eastern–inflected electro-pop with warped vocals that bring to mind the title. The lighthearted, dulcet pop of “Spishal” possesses the buoyant bonhomie of McCartney II’s quirkier selections. The spangly melancholy drift on“Garbage Day” is as poignant as the best Yo La Tengo brooder. The spacey “How to Draw a Galaxy” has the slightly disorienting, valedictory air of a Grandaddy anthem. DAVE SEGAL

FAN CLUB

Stimulation EP (Feel It Records) Sept. 5 I happened to catch Fan Club for the second time at Linda’s Fest while I was taking a break from editing the newspaper you’re reading right now. I was on a walk and heard the racket from two full blocks away. Fan Club (formerly known as Lysol) shows are notoriously incendiary and punk as fuck, so I had to stop in. Each band member—guitarist Chad Ringo Bucklew, bassist Ken Maddy, drummer Anthony Gaviria, and singer Noah Earl Fowler—is a total ripper with the chops to play fast and loud while exuding maximum charisma and flair; Fowler is especially compelling, strutting and stalking the stage, climbing the speakers, whipping the mic around before nearly swallowing it. Their Stimulation EP (the first under this band name) keeps it very real with five blistering hardcore songs, the entire thing clocking in at under six minutes. Right on.

EMILY NOKES

NEKO CASE

Neon Grey Midnight Green (ANTI-) Sept. 26 Good things come to those who wait, and for me, that good thing is Neko Case’s first album in seven years, Neon Grey Midnight Green. She has only released two singles from the album so far, but, between the breezy, Virginia Astley–esque “Winchester Mansion of Sound,” which is an ode to her dearly departed friend/collaborator Dexter Romweber, and the cinematic love song “Wreck,” it’s already in the running to be my favorite album of the year. Before I had even heard the singles, I was immediately drawn to the album’s cover, which features Case swathed in green fur beside a fallen chandelier with a puff of smoke in her hand, evoking the 20th-century surrealist artists Leonor Fini and Leonora Carrington. The album was recorded at her home studio in Vermont, Carnassial Sound, and is her first produced by her alone. Case, who identifies as gender fluid, writes: “People don’t think of us as an option. I’m proud to say I produced this record. It is my vision. It is my veto power. It is my taste.” AUDREY VANN

ALBUMEN

Albumen (Eiderdown Records) Oct. 3 Trumpeter Greg Kelley spent much of the 2010s weirding up Seattle’s underground-music scene with his extreme techniques and improvisational wit. His discography’s loaded with collabs featuring giants in the field such as Chris Corsano, Kim Gordon bandmate Bill Nace, Lori Goldston, and the late Wally Shoup. Albumen—a long-distance summit meeting with ex-Minutemen bassist Mike Watt, violist Noel Kennon, and Seattle avant-fusion trio

Hound Dog Taylor’s Hand—stands as one of Kelley’s most exciting releases. On the gorgeous chamber-jazz reverie “Rose of Shannon,” Kennon channels Velvets-era John Cale as the track gradually builds to an agitated climax that recalls Seattle psychonauts Hovercraft. “No Wine Before Its Time” sloshes in subterranean mystique as Kelley’s ring-modulated trumpet sounds like a wounded wildebeest moaning in a cave and Jeffery Taylor’s guitar squeals in tongues. The hit single, nightmarish rocker “Be That as It May,” menacingly stalks a blasted wasteland, marked by Taylor’s ferocious wah-wah guitar and anchored

by Watt’s mesmerizingly cyclical bass line.

Although most of the parts on Albumen were recorded remotely, there’s a combustible chemistry here that makes me want to witness these musicians do their highstrung, inspirational thing live. DAVE SEGAL

EMI POP

63

No Te Voy a Extrañar (Fink City Records) Fall 2025 Local pop-punk artist Emi Pop grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the birthplace of Latin-influenced underground punk. She cut her teeth playing in Puerto Rican bands like Mely y Los Poppers as well as Seattle acts like On the Make, Famous Lizards, and 38 Coffin.

Her debut album, No Te Voy a Extrañar, which is entirely in Spanish, goes down like a cold, crisp cherry cola, full of hard-hitting drums, crunchy guitars, and addictive hooks.

“Amor de Verano” and “Lo Sé” capture the wistful, bittersweet sentiments of a shortlived summer romance, while “Psicópata” shows off her dark side. “Quiero bailar rock ’n’ roll,” Emi sings on the bouncy track of the same name, and you’ll definitely find yourself wanting to do the same. JULIANNE BELL

EVEN MORE ALBUMS TO LOOK OUT FOR! JULY 17: Gabriella Assante Marie, Joan of Arc Page-Fort 7-inch (Hex Enduction) AUG. 26: Faerie Born, Morally Grey (self-released) SEPT. 5: Scott Yoder, Lover, Let Me In (self-released) SEPT. 7: Low Hums, Sub Mission / Sugarcube 7-inch (Baby Lemonade) SEPT. 26: Smokey Brights, Dashboard Heat (Share It Music) OCT. 4: Stargazr, Unheard Stories (self-released) OCT. 10: Glass Egg, visions & ecstasies (Den Tapes) OCT. 18: Leandrul, Choose (self-released) Fall 2025: Trash Panda Go Kart, RACCOON GODS (self-released) NOV. 7: *Pansy, Skin Graft EP (Earth Libraries) *Everyone who works at The Stranger is a multifaceted diamond glittering with talent, which means we often have rich artistic lives outside of our roles at the paper.

Vivian McCall, our News Editor, is also a musician, and this is her project! Like Tullycraft, we would not include it if we didn’t genuinely recommend it. ■

64 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

DJ’s Larry Mizell Jr, Stas THEE Boss & JusMoni

SCREENPRINTING with Ink Knife Press

MUSICAL FORTUNE TELLING with Corey J Brewer REMARKS

by SYA’s Amelia Bonow

September 6, 2025 • 7-11 PM Washington Hall • ALL AGES $15 (NO ONE TURNED AWAY FOR LACK OF FUNDS!)

FASHION

by Prairie Underground + the Free Witch Quarterly TAROT with Bree McKenna & Lisa Prank TATTOOS! DANCING! CAKE!

SEPTEMBER 2025

65

Concha Culture

I

n the small-batch panadería Pan de La Selva’s new location inside City Hall, a bevy of pan dulce treats—pillowy pastel conchas, chubby pig-shaped puerquitos, laminated pastries— beckon from a gleaming pastry case. The oasis is filled with squishy, terracotta-colored couches, cobalt-blue wallpaper, vibrant paintings, and plants donated by customers during the soft opening. Sunlight filters through the windows in a greenhouse-like alcove, and Latin music ranging from pop to punk to psychedelic rock plays in the background.

“I definitely want someone to come here and just be like, whoa, what is this place?!” owner and baker Mayra Sibrian says. During her first week of business, a visitor expressed joy at hearing Shakira being played in the shop.

Sibrian recently moved into the vacant space as part of an activation for Seattle Restored—a program run by the Seattle Office of Economic Development in collaboration with Seattle Good Business Network, which helps artists and small business owners take over empty storefronts. Pan de La Selva soft opened inside the location, formerly home to an Einstein Bros. Bagels, in August and will occupy it until December.

When Sibrian found out she was approved for the space, she only had two weeks to move in. “I knew that I wanted color and comfort to be the main thing,” she says.

“Sometimes when I go into coffee shops or bakeries, I feel kind of cold. I lean toward maximalism, and I very much like the coziness of a cafe, so those were the feelings and vibes I was going for.”

Sibrian grew up in San Diego with a Mexican mother and Salvadoran father and attended culinary school after high school due to her love of food. “For me, it wasn’t even so much about the indulgence of it, even though that was part of it,” she says. “It was more so the creativity and fun of it and just creating something with your hands, sending it off to someone and seeing the reaction.” Initially, she pursued savory cooking, even though “a little voice” in the back of her head told her it wasn’t what she really wanted. She was “shy and timid” at the time and struggled with the rigorous, militaristic nature of her classes, but willed herself to graduate.

After culinary school, she took a job as a prep cook in a cafeteria. “I actually fucked up the bread. I overproofed it,” she says.

“That chef yelled at me. She was like, I can’t believe someone with a bachelor’s degree in culinary [arts] would do this!” The negative experience was enough to put her off baking and cooking altogether for a while. Shortly before moving to Seattle, however, she ate a life-changingly good concha at a panadería, and something clicked. “A light bulb

Mayra Sibrian of Pan de La Selva Bakes for the Latin American Diaspora

BY JULIANNE BELL PHOTOS BY BILLIE WINTER

went off in my head. I was just like, damn, this is where it’s at,” she says. “It started the journey of me connecting to my roots. It just lit a flame inside me.”

Sibrian moved to Seattle and found a job at a bakery in Kent, which acquainted her with the ins and outs of managing a small business. In 2020, she started Pan de La Selva (formerly Selva Central Goods), baking pan dulce inspired by Mexican and Central American traditions out of her apartment and delivering them to customers’ homes. From there, she began

Shortly before moving to Seattle, she ate a lifechangingly good concha at a panadería, and something clicked.

Pan de La Selva owner and baker Mayra Sibrian just wants you to feel something when you try her pan dulce. to sell her pastries at pop-ups and farmers markets across the city.

The name Pan de La Selva means “bread of the jungle” and is a reference to the rainforest landscapes of Mexico and Central America, as well as the lush abundance of the Pacific Northwest. Sibrian maintains a close relationship with the farmers markets as a longtime vendor and employs local ingredients, including flours from

66 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

“It is rewarding when something just comes together correctly, how I envisioned it in my head, and how I want it to taste and feel,” Sibrian (left) says.

Cairnspring Mills and Shepherd’s Grain, fruit from Collins Family Orchards and Hayton Farms, and corn nixtamalized

by Milpa Masa. “I still incorporate local ingredients to tie my product to this land,” she says. “Even though it’s not a selva, it’s still the traditional way of using what the land has to offer.”

She chooses her flavor profiles by a “process of elimination,” thinking about ingredients traditionally used in Latin America, then pairing them with what-

ever is locally available and in season and considering the taste, texture, and visuals.

This results in combinations like passion fruit with blackberries, or apricot with papaya. “One customer was telling me how they really like my flavors because their kid, who is of Salvadoran descent, hasn’t grown up with Salvadoran pastries,” she says. “Their kid can see themself reflected in the baked good, because even though they’re a descendant of Latin American culture, they grew up here. It’s kind of a

SEPTEMBER 2025

blend, wrapped up in one pastry, tying you to your family’s culture and the culture you grew up a part of.”

Though her mix of Latin American and Pacific Northwest flavors resonates with many fans, Sibrian has occasionally encountered resistance from within her own community due to her modern take on pan dulce. “There was a little bit of a pushback, because people wanted to hold on to tradition and roots, which I totally get. But at the same time, we’re allowed to be creative.

We’re allowed to be inventive,” she says. “If you don’t like my pan or where I’m taking it, then yeah, go and support the mom-and-pop shop [with] traditional conchas! They’re there, but there are also different ways of exploring our connection and [the] culture that comes with food.”

Currently, she’s offering a chocolate oreja (a palmier-shaped pastry) made with yaupon from Georgetown-based Diaspora Cafe, who sources the ingredient from an Indigenous woman in Texas.

Yaupon, which lends a subtly earthy taste to the flaky pastry, is a species of holly that has historically been brewed as tea by Indigenous people for ceremonial purposes and is the only caffeinated plant native to North America.

She also serves a breakfast sandwich with refried beans, a baked egg patty, avocado crema, fried plantains, and salsa macha on a house-made bolillo, inspired by her nostalgia for the simplicity of a classic Salvadoran breakfast with eggs, refried beans, plantains, and avocado. “I’ve said that would probably be my last meal, a Central American breakfast,” she says.

While she hopes to make her baked goods accessible to everyone, Sibrian says she prioritizes “catering to the Latinx diaspora” above all else. Her space showcases handmade wares from Latinx vendors for sale and art from Latinx artists, including a stunning piece called The Portal by artist and muralist Esmeralda Vasquez. The painting shows a hand reaching through a threshold, making contact with another hand, and represents curiosity and the search for a sense of belonging and identity in one’s own culture as a second-generation immigrant—“a portal into that place of wonder,” Vasquez says.

Sibrian was wary, at first, to move into

City Hall, given her politics and the city’s relationship with ICE, but says that things have gone smoothly so far and that she has received a warm reception. “It was the opportunity that Seattle Restored had, so I was like, okay, let’s try it,” she says.

“I feel like I’m still able to be myself. I don’t take being in this space lightly.” She recently met Mayor Bruce Harrell as part of the Seattle Restored program and intentionally wore a “Chinga La Migra” T-shirt for the occasion.

“I think I just want to make this space more inviting, because it can be intimidating to come into a government building,” she says. “The way I view it is, I just happen to be at City Hall. I’m not City Hall, and I still want to express myself and my views.”

Pan de La Selva is only a team of three, including Sibrian, so the effort of running the business takes up most of her time and energy, and it can be a challenge to nourish her creative side and stay true to her original vision.

She’s taking things day by day, but someday, she’d like to offer an educational component where chefs of different backgrounds could teach workshops and help feed the community. “I think having a kitchen or a hub where we could share that knowledge would be really cool,” she says.

The most fulfilling part of Sibrian’s work is the accomplishment she feels when she finally nails a tough recipe.

Often, her favorite things to bake are the recipes she wasn’t happy with at first, such as the chocolate oreja and the panela cardamom buns she made at the request of Day Made Kaffe Bar owner Ash Day. “It is rewarding when something just comes together correctly, how I envisioned it in my head, and how I want it to taste and feel,” she says. “There are all these little factors that you have to pay attention to, [so] when they land, it’s like, fuck yeah! It’s just satisfying.”

At the end of the day, Sibrian wants her baked goods to evoke “emotion, curiosity, and connection” in the person eating them, reawakening memories and sparking reflection.

“I’m just trying to make you feel something,” she says. “That’s what it comes down to.” ■

She recently met Mayor Bruce Harrell and wore a “Chinga La Migra” T-shirt for the occasion.

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68 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

SEPTEMBER 2025

69

Do Not Go Gently Into That Pumpkin Spice

There’s Still Time to Taste Summer in Seattle

BY MEG VAN HUYGEN

I

know this is the Fall Arts issue, but fun fact: Summer—the season we Seattleites long for all year—is not over yet. Stop saying this. I don’t know who taught us all that summer is restricted to June, July, and August (elementary school, I guess?), but the autumnal equinox isn’t until September 22. And as a visit to Pike Place will reveal, all the seafood, fruit, and veggie stalls are still popping off right now. Let us locally rebrand September as a culinary transitional period, where you can have your pristine PNW produce alongside your PSL. Best-of lists can be problematic for a couple reasons, so here instead is a cheerful reminder about some of the summeriest Seattle foods that you still have full weeks left to eat. They’re not just summery, they’re Seattle-summery!

And the key here, of course, is that elite combo of light and luxurious. The Big Dark is mostly in your head. Don’t let it affect your meals before you have to.

Salda: Very French salade niçoise, Mirabelle by Orphée Folks are out there calling anything a salade niçoise these days. While potatoes and olives are optional and the veggies can be seasonal, the salad must have both tuna and anchovies, tomatoes are mandatory, you gotta learn how to boil an egg properly, and you can’t fuck up the vinaigrette. And why would you use American mustard in the world’s Frenchest salad?

No truer, more quintessential salade niçoise exists in this city than the one at

Sandwich: Burrata sandwich, Café Hitchcock Seattle’s a sandwich city— specifically a bánh mì city, as Stranger columnist Michael Wong recently explained—but a late-summer sandwich is not Fudgie the Whale could never. a pairwise comparison to a winter sandwich. An all-season sandwich is Mirabelle by Orphée. I’ve been searching for a distinct concept, too. When it’s pushing 80 this consummate paradigmatic version of degrees, you want a cold sando full of vege- Nice’s nicest salad for my whole life, et voilà, tables, but you still want all that richness. enfin. There are mesclun greens, roasted You want delicacy. Briskness. Thoughtful cherry tomatoes, tuna AND anchovies, and sandwich engineering. It’s a tricky balance. sliced boiled eggs with sunny yolks, and the This time of year, it’s gotta be the burrata dressing is simple and correct. At a restausandwich at Café Hitchcock. We’ve already rant where the owner imports his flour and spoken about Hitchcock’s flawless focaccia, butter directly from France, you know that at once light and hypersaturated with mustard is from Dijon. Combined with the bright fruity olive oil, while somehow still zing from the salty anchovies, the top-shelf retaining its integral form and structure. albacore, the fresh herbs, the cracked black In the spring and summer, they stack it up pepper… man, it just gives you the feeling. with a big creamy ball of cold burrata, which To say nothing of eating it alfresco in actual bursts apart and then soaks into the fluffy, Pioneer Square, pergola-side, among the golden-crisped bread. It’s flanked by roasted leafy maples. I wanna do it every weekend, zucchini, arugula, and pesto; they add tender even once it starts to rain again. little asparaguses when they’re in season.

Cocktail: Persian Love cocktail, One bite and it all goes sploosh, in the most Oliver’s Twist opulent and Babylonian way. Plus they make ’em ready to go in a little paper envelope, He may be new to neighborhoody cocktail lounge Oliver’s Twist, but Benjamin Wright handy for waterfront stroll-chomping.

has spent years building a rep for putting weird shit in cocktails—like shrimp-infused gin, barley tea, and acid-adjusted turnip juice. So, to see his current cocktail special up on the chalkboard was underwhelming, honestly. Pistachio, gin, rose, lemon, cardamom? Well, that’s not very weird at all.

Until Wright explained that he recently befriended a pastry chef, “and we’ve been influencing each other heavily.” Based on the fragrant Persian love cake, the Persian Love cocktail arrives ungarnished, straight up, the palest shade of green with

a smooth, milky body. It’s a heavenly little masterwork. Wright bases the drink around Woodinville-based BroVo gin that he accents with cardamom bitters, lemon, rose liqueur, and orgeat—made in-house with toasted pistachios and damask rosewater. The addition of Combier Liqueur de Rose doubles up the rosiness you’d find in the cake, and all the commingling scents of rose, cardamom, and pistachio create a dreamy floral breeze that evokes Seattle’s summertime flower explosion. Clever and delicious, Benjamin, as usual.

Dessert: Bourbon-caramel semifreddo, Carrello At Broadway and Roy, Altura’s equally fancy little brother, Carrello, is concealing an obscenely fantastical ice cream sculpture at the very tail end of their menu.

Don’t get strung out by the way it looks, because it looks like a Claim Jumper–ass

Kahlúa mudslide—but there is some real architecture happening within, beginning with a stratum of gorgeous, tan bourbon-caramel ice cream. The cream slab has been paved in chocolate, then drowned in luscious banana caramel sauce, which elicits a Filipino turon. On the summit are jagged meringue shards, scorched marshmallows infused with burnt bay leaves, and lightweight cacao-nib toffee brittle. There’s a choco-shortbread crust on the bottom, crunched pistachios are scattered, and it’s all dashed with roasted chicory powder.

This dessert is so many things. It’s got some Baked Alaska heritage and takes inspiration from the humble s’more, while halfheartedly LARPing a tiramisu. Its great-grandmother was a Viennetta. That sauce will send you on a tropical ayahuasca mind journey to expand the way you think about dessert and bananas for life. Plus the cacao brittle and the herbal toasted marshmallows! The whole thing just goes fucking crazy, and it’s surprising that there isn’t a person dancing around on the sidewalk in a banana costume to broadcast to the public that this voluptuary tour de force is inside.

Snack: Ahi tuna tostada, La Marea Marisquería This is easily one of the best BILLIE WINTER things I’ve eaten all year. Liz Dones and Bo Tarantine recently moved here from LA, and after hitting the ground running as Tacos Extranjeros with a giant labor-intensive trompo, they’ve revamped as La Marea (inside Fair Isle Brewing), serving Mexican-style mariscos with a touch of Michelin-y flair. Their ahi tuna tostada is deceptively simple: a crisp tortilla spread with salsa macha—that’s spicy Mexican chile oil—then heaped with ruby-red ahi tuna and drizzled with fishy XO sauce. The tostada’s piled to the edges with luminous ingots of ahi, as vivid and red as a Mormon Jell-O salad, and then anointed by all the shiny sauces. The gleaming ahi is immaculate all by itself, and all the umamescence and textures and nubbly fried-out bits of chile elevate everything to the point where you’re experiencing something like heartbreak with each bite. It’s confusing, this rush of emotions. This is just tuna and sauce on a tortilla? So why am I crying? ■

70 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

SEPTEMBER 2025

71

Shelf Help

Sokha Danh’s Bookstore Makes Room for More Than Just Books

BY MICHAEL WONG

L

og on to Facebook for 10 seconds and you’ll agree: It’s a good time for people to pick up an actual book.

Which may explain why Mam’s Books, a small Asian American bookstore in the center of Chinatown, feels less like retail and more like a revolution. That it presents like a neighborhood living room is by design, the kind with family photos atop shelves, a couch that’s seen better days, and smiling elders eating noodles in front of the window. Each piece of the shop a little story of its own.

By the time Sokha Danh wrestles the rolling gate open and pops the heavy locks, the neighborhood’s already moving. Buses sigh at the curb, cleavers thump somewhere down the block. He drags the Mam’s Books sandwich board to the sidewalk to signal the start of a new day, door propped open behind him, letting in sunlight and scents from nearby shops. Some mornings there’s music: Blue Scholars, J. Cole. Sometimes Wong Fu vids. Other days, just silence. He’ll tell you he’s setting the pace, establishing certainties in an uncertain world, but his passion for building consistent community ignited long before Mam’s opened, back when the White Center Library gave him and his siblings a seat, a stack of books, and a space no one hurried them out of.

In many ways, he’s been trying to return the favor ever since.

COURTESY OF SOKHA DANH

It’s not unusual for customers to spend hours at Mam’s, reading and browsing without pressure to buy anything.

G

I

AS

D

IE

M

The First Page In the ’80s and ’90s, White Center was not name and saved books for them, and when Sokha needed to call home for a pickup, known for much good. But for Sokha’s they slid the phone across the desk family, it was where their story ERI V like it was nothing. began. His parents, both refuF AN That mix of access, freedom, gees from Cambodia, brought and trust that libraries provide their four daughters (Linda, their communities is the Vesna, Sopha, and Vira) and blueprint for the bookstore. three sons (Vana, Ratcha, It’s why Sokha never flinches and Sokha, the youngest) to IC HAEL WON when people spend hours Seattle to begin a new life. reading without buying, or when an For two parents with not enough event takes over the shop without ringing money, and possibly too many kids for what they did have, community resources the register. The shelves are for anyone to were a godsend. Like the White Center peruse, the chairs are for anyone who needs Food Bank, which helped Kim, the mother, to sit, and the front desk—if he had one— keep the troops fed, and the White Center would be just as quick to slide over a phone.

Library, which helped Mam, the father, keep Good Looking Out his children curious, educated, and safe.

Almost daily, Kim and Mam would drop On weekday mornings, it’s not unusual to off their clan at the library, sometimes find two grandmas holding court on Mam’s for hours, while the pair looked for work orange couch, grocery bags at their feet, and opportunities. Sokha and his siblings gossiping in Cantonese between bouts of would fan out through the aisles, on the laughter. Sokha is in no hurry for them to hunt for something that would transport leave—their presence is part of the point.

Almost a decade before opening Mam’s, them: Magic Tree House books, Garfield comics, thick cookbooks with glossy photos. Sokha worked for SCIDpda (Seattle ChinaThe librarians understood the assignment. town International District Preservation They knew each of the Danh children by and Development Authority), heading up

a Block Watch that facilitated escorting the sidewalks, the tiny apartments above.

That’s what he learned from the late groups of elders on evening walks so they could feel more comfortable leaving their Donnie Chin, the Chinatown International apartments after dark. It was a crash course District’s unofficial first responder who spent on the quiet math people do about whether decades patrolling the streets on his own it’s safe to step outside: calculating who’s terms. From Jamie Lee, his boss at SCIDpda, around, who’s watching, and whether he learned how to turn that watchfulness anyone would notice if they didn’t make it into organizing power. From Ron Chew, home. “They all wanted to walk outside safely, like we all do,” he told me later. “Walking together made them feel seen.” In a time where Chinatowns vanish by neglect as much as by politics, that visibility is its own armor.

But in Sokha’s mind, visibility and safety must go beyond Mam’s. “If the bookstore is the best thing I’ve ever done for the community, I’ve failed,” he tells me. This style of “major-league activism,” as he calls it, has to spill COURTESY OF SOKHA DANH into the rest of Chinatown Author Ron Chew (center) has inspired owner Sokha and beyond: into the shops, Danh (left) to celebrate the neighborhood’s history.

72 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

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COURTESY OF SOKHA DANH

Mam’s regulars Eric (left) and Tony hold the shop sign that has become a social media staple. another waymaker in the CID, he learned how to preserve it in story and history. All of it shaped his idea of belonging: feeling both safe enough to step outside, and welcome enough to stay.

The Calling Major-league activism, though, can take its toll. By the time Sokha opened Mam’s, he had carried years of Chinatown community work on his shoulders. It was good work, but also the kind that leaks into your bones. Eventu-

This style of “major-league activism” has to spill into the rest of Chinatown and beyond. ally, it all came to a head—every crisis blurred into his identity until there was no room for anything else. The burnout had been building for months. He journaled nightly, asking higher powers to give him a sign.

Then, one late summer evening in 2020, Sokha was driving down Alki Beach when his calling came to him: an Asian American bookstore serving Chinatown and its community. A way to continue to be a

positive force in the neighborhood—the one that showed him the power of participating in society—without sacrificing so much of his well-being to do so.

In September 2023, Mam’s Books opened, ushering in a new era in Chinatown. On the last Sunday of the month, the Chinatown Book Club packs the store.

The next day, the same couch is a stage for the Orange Couch Open Mic. In between, the store hosts touring Asian authors of all calibers. Each activation brings more new faces to Mam’s, and more importantly, more new faces to Chinatown.

The Heart of Chinatown When you visit Mam’s, you’ll feel you’re at the center of something important. That’s especially true when you look at a map, which shows that the store lives at the literal center of the neighborhood. Its heart. For Sokha, that centrality goes beyond geography.

It’s the reminder that belonging radiates outward, and that a single room, if tended to, can ripple through an entire community.

It brings to mind a Chinese parable his dad used to tell about a toad who knows only the world from the bottom of a well until a passing bird shows him the sky beyond. The toad is now the store’s logo—a reminder not only to look up and climb out, but also to bring others with you. “This bookstore really is a mosaic of everyone who has loved me.” ■

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74 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

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Housekeeping note: We have ceased to include pricing information, unless the event is free or sliding scale. (This is mostly due to third-party ticket vendors, like Ticketmaster, who have a monopoly on pricing that is not only unfair, but also confusing, due to varying fee structures. We hate them, and so should you.)

Black & Loud Fest: King Youngblood Sept 13, The Crocodile

CHRISTIAN PARROCO

MUSIC Marina SEPT 6

The year was 2015, I was a recent college graduate navigating the perils and pitfalls of my early 20s, and Marina Lambrini Diamandis, better known at the time by her stage name Marina and the Diamonds, was the reigning queen of Tumblr. The rainbow-tinged, disco-inspired cover of her album Froot was all over my dashboard, and I immediately became enamored with Marina’s husky, dramatic pop diva vocals and sugary synths. I’ve been a fan—excuse me, a “Diamond”—ever since. Diamandis, who goes mononymously by Marina these days, has released delightfully campy, danceable singles like “Butterfly” and “Cuntissimo” in the last year. She’ll be joined on her Princess of Power tour by the irresistible

alt-hip-hop duo Coco & Clair Clair. (Showbox SoDo, 7:30 pm, all ages) JULIANNE BELL

my wife, well earning them a headlining set down the street. (The Crocodile, 6 pm, all ages) TODD HAMM

TOPS

W.I.T.C.H., Sonny & the Sunsets

SEPT 6

TOPS are back, and praise be. Their 2020 album, I Feel Alive, feels like a pandemic lifetime ago, and the recently dropped Bury the Key feels appropriately resurrective. But as zombie-friendly as the ’70s horrorchic album artwork is, TOPS can’t brood for long. Lead single “Annihilation” may sound bleak in title, but babe, the sexed-up synth chords say otherwise. Album centerpiece “Falling on My Sword,” on the other hand, is an epic rocking counterpoint to their previous nostalgia-heavy, low-distortion, bendy-string guitar jams that made you want to dance with your cat on a sunny day (also a good thing!). TOPS were last seen in Seattle opening for Soccer Mommy at the Moore, a show that found the Québécois quartet dancing in the balcony after their set and making a lifelong fan of

SEPTEMBER 8

In the 1970s, W.I.T.C.H. were something like Zambia’s Beatles, though their leader, Emmanuel Chanda, sang like Mick Jagger’s African brother. With their name initialized from We Intend To Cause Havoc, the band spearheaded the Zamrock movement, which reimagined Anglo-American garage-rock and psychedelia to intriguing African specs. (The Now-Again label has led the 21st-century revival with loads of key reissues and comps featuring Zambia’s major rock artists.) Boasting a deep catalog of hooky, mood-elevating rock with occasional funk and Afrobeat undertones, W.I.T.C.H still bring the heat, as their vibrant 2022 set at the Crocodile proved. Their current lineup’s filled out with long-running keyboardist Patrick Mwondela and some

superb European acolytes who channel that magical Zamrock feel. They’ll be supporting the band’s new album, Sogolo, which reveals a shocking burst of creative energy, reflected in the songs’ more muscular, funky rhythms and heavier and freakier guitar riffs, while also embracing more traditional native styles and adding women vocalists. (Tractor Tavern, 8 pm, 21+) DAVE SEGAL

Orcutt Shelley Miller, Diminished Men SEPTEMBER 10

Well, this sure feels like a supergroup. Hairy Pussy guitarist Bill Orcutt, Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, and Comets on Fire/Howlin Rain guitarist-vocalist Ethan Miller have carved a potent legacy of avant-rock and smart noise sculpting over the last 40 years. (Miller plays bass here.) But even this late in their respective careers, the trio still has the instrumental juice to keep you wired. The opener from

76 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

LaRussell SEPT 14

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their forthcoming self-titled debut album, “A Star Is Born,” is a molten, methodical jam that encompasses war and peace in perfect harmony. Throughout the record’s five tracks, Shelley creates deep pockets as Orcutt unspools his repertoire of cranky and serene leads and Miller finesses the low end with krautrockin’ pizzazz. “Unsafe at Any Speed” recalls the swarming complexity of peak Amon Düül II, which is not something you hear every decade. Miller’s helical bass line on the psychedelic zenith “Four-Door Charger” will make your eyes roll around their sockets in ecstasy. “A Long Island Wedding” goes even harder.

Damn. It kills me that I’ll be out of town for this show.

(Tractor Tavern, 7:30 pm, 21+) DAVE SEGAL

Black & Loud Fest SEPT 13

RESONATION MUSIC & ARTS FESTIVAL 9/19 | LALALAND LOPEZ ISLAND, WA

THE EMERALD CITY KINGS BALL 2025 9/25 - 9/27 | LANGSTON HUGHES PERFORMING ARTS INSTITUTE SEATTLE, WA

Anika, Lauren Early, Coral Grief SEPTEMBER 23

British/German singer-guitarist Anika’s entry into the music biz came when Geoff Barrow was looking for a “weird singer” for his then-new band Beak>. He hit the jackpot with Anika, who wields one of the starkest deadpan deliveries in today’s scene. (Her timbre resembles Nico’s and Ari Up’s, but Anika has better pitch control.) With Barrow producing, Anika cut her self-titled debut in 2010, a wonderfully skewed set of dubby post-punk charmers, including perhaps the most interesting Yoko Ono and Bob Dylan covers ever (“Yang Yang” and “Masters of War,” respectively).

Anika’s love of horror films has colored her compositions, as have the grim science and educational issues she’s covered as a journalist under her real name, Annika Henderson. The new album, Abyss, is Anika’s most rock-oriented record yet, inspired shockingly by gr*nge and Hole’s Celebrity Skin. Formerly rife with tension, Anika’s music—fleshed out by her Exploded View bandmate Martin Thulin—here feels cathartic, as she elegantly rages against what her LP title portends.

(Vera Project, 7 pm, all ages) DAVE SEGAL

Magdalena Bay SEPT 29

Los Angeles–based couple Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin, who first met in high school, are better known as the dreamy, synthy alt-pop duo Magdalena Bay. They’ve built a cult following with

Anika

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NORTHWEST CHOCOLATE FESTIVAL

10/3-10/4 | ELYSIAN BREWING CAPITOL HILL SEATTLE, WA

10/4 - 10/5 | MEYDENBAUER CENTER BELLEVUE, WA

UNCLE BASEMENT’S ATTIC OF HORRORS

2025 HOPS ON THE ROCK, ORCAS ISLAND’S ANNUAL BEER FEST!

10/23 - 10/25 | THEATRE OFF JACKSON SEATTLE, WA

Black & Loud Fest emerged from the minds of Seattle frontmen Cameron Lavi-Jones (of King Youngblood) and Anthony Briscoe (of Down North), who noticed a lack of Black-fronted bands on music festival bills.

Even though the festival has grown year after year, its mission has remained the same: to highlight alternative Black artists and showcase their contributions to American music and culture throughout history. This year, trailblazing hard-rock band Living Colour will headline the festival with throwback jams like “Cult of Personality,” “Love Rears Its Ugly Head,” and my personal favorite, “Glamour Boys.” Other highlights from the lineup include Cyril Neville (of the Neville Brothers), local post-punk outfit Black Ends, and R&B singer-songwriter Parisalexa, who, I’m shocked to say, hasn’t broken into the mainstream yet. (The Crocodile, 7 pm, 21+) AUDREY VANN

LaRussell is as much a community movement as he is a 30-year-old rap power cell from Vallejo, CA. His posi-hustle flow and tireless studio/tour/ repeat work ethic built his brand, and his numerous collectivist initiatives to give platforms (through his Good Compenny business) to fellow artists have endeared him to millions now beyond the Bay. Most importantly, though, in LR’s case: skill matches grind.

His ridiculously prolific catalogue of solo releases (this summer’s Good Ethika was his seventh full-length of 2025 already) is a rap sheet of punchy brag-rhymes and street wisdom, and whether it’s on record with Wiz Khalifa, Lil Jon, Snoop Dogg, or fellow North Bay legend E-40, his features always seems to pop. In typical community-first fashion, pay-what-you-can LaRussell shows have become daytime bastions (doors at 1 p.m.) for the whole family to cut loose, this time with a full band and choir. Bring Grandma, let the kids run wild and cuss on stage (he’ll let them), and, as the man says, “Make hip-hop fun again.” (Nectar Lounge, 1 pm, all ages) TODD HAMM

Sept 23, Vera Project

11/8 | MARKET STREET EASTSOUND, WA

HAVE AN EVENT? CONTACT US! (888)377-4510 • STRANGERTICKETS.COM LAURA MARTINOVA

SEPTEMBER 2025

Judy Collins

COURTESY OF JUDY COLLINS

SEPT 27

After deep-diving into the catalogs of legendary songstresses like Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and Carole King, I finally found my way to the discography of Judy Collins. I was already aware of her iconic voice, but I didn’t realize she explored so many different genres. Her music isn’t straightforward vocal pop, but swims around trad-folk, country, disco, and jazz, incorporating the occasional experimental flourish (such as the ethereal ocean sounds in “Farewell to Tarwathie.”)

Collins has released and collaborated on over 50 albums in her lifetime, with additional career successes as an author, filmmaker, social activist, guitar designer, and record label founder. She’s also been gigging for over 50 years, so show up and make this stop in Edmonds a memorable one for her.

(Edmonds Center for the Arts, 7:30 pm) AUDREY VANN their surreal Y2K aesthetic, addictive hooks, and otherworldly vocals, and their 2024 sophomore studio album, Imaginal Disk, achieved widespread critical acclaim. The record tells the fictional story of a character named True who has a CD-shaped object implanted in her forehead by an alien doctor in order to become an upgraded version of herself, unintentionally creating a doppelgänger named Ghost in the process—you know, normal, everyday stuff! Catch them on their Imaginal Mystery Tour, with an opening set by oceanic electronica artist Oxis. (Showbox SoDo, 8 pm, all ages) JULIANNE BELL

More

Osees Sept 5–6, Neumos, times and age ranges vary BADBADNOTGOOD Sept 5, Showbox, 7:30 pm, 21+ Jon Batiste Plays America: The Big Money Tour Sept 10–11, Chateau Ste. Michelle, 7 pm, all ages Sabbath Worship: Celebrating the Music of Black Sabbath Sept 12, Clock-Out Lounge, 8:30 pm, 21+ Gimme Gimme Disco Fest Sept 13, Pier 62, 6 pm, 21+ Jackson Browne Sept 12–13, Chateau Ste. Michelle, 5 pm, all ages Viagra Boys Sept 12–13, Showbox SoDo, 8:30 pm, all ages The Psychedelic Furs, Gary Numan Sept 13, Showbox, 8 pm, 21+

Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts: Love Earth Tour Sept 4, Chateau Ste. Michelle, 7 pm, all ages

Modest Mouse Presents: Psychic Salamander Festival Sept 13–14, Remlinger Farms, 12:30 pm, all ages

Scott Yoder, Mt Fog, Erica Rose & the Ragged School Sept 5, Clock-Out Lounge, 9 pm, 21+

Aminé: Tour De Dance Sept 16, WAMU Theater, 8 pm, all ages

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SEPTEMBER 2025

Band of Horses with Iron & Wine Sept 18, Marymoor Park, 7 pm, all ages

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pagne reception on Sept 6, from 3 to 5 p.m. (Patricia Rovzar Gallery, free) AUDREY VANN

HAIM, Dora Jar Sept 18, WAMU Theater, 7:30 pm, all ages

Woven in Wool: Resilience in Coast Salish Weaving

Grandaddy Sept 18, Neptune Theatre, 7 pm, all ages CocteauFest Sept 20, Chop Suey, 7 pm, 21+ Billy Idol with Joan Jett & The Blackhearts Sept 20, Climate Pledge Arena, 7:30 pm, all ages

SEPT 13, 2025 – AUGUST 30, 2026

In collaboration with the Coast Salish Wool Weaving Center, the Burke will display both contemporary and historical woven wool creations, including blankets, tunics, hoods, and skirts. This exhibit is a must for any fiber arts enthusiast who wants to see the seasonal cycle of weaving, from the gathering of materials to the natural dyeing process and the weaving of intricate designs. The collection’s emphasis on “resilience” not only points to the physical longevity of the materials, but also to the historical perseverance of the Coast Salish weaving traditions. (Burke Museum) AUDREY VANN

Mac DeMarco Sept 23, Paramount Theatre, 7:30 pm, all ages Sparks: Mad! Tour Sept 24, Moore Theatre, 8 pm, all ages Princess Nokia & Big Freedia Sept 27, Pier 62, 6:30 pm, all ages

Early Warnings

Loudon Wainwright III Oct 1, Vashon Center for the Arts, 7:30 pm, all ages Tate McRae: Miss Possessive Tour Oct 2–3, Climate Pledge Arena, 7:30 pm, all ages

More

Laufey: A Matter of Time Oct 4, Climate Pledge Arena, 7:30 pm, all ages

Outside: In Sept. 26–Oct.25, Foster/White Gallery, free (See feature, pg. 32)

Pup, Jeff Rosenstock, Ekko Astral Oct 7, Showbox SoDo, 7:30 pm, all ages

Carmen Winant: Passing On Through Sept 28, Henry Art Gallery, free

Turnstile: The Never Enough Tour Oct 7, WaMu Theater, 7 pm, all ages

Chronoform, Curated by Daniel Tovar Through Sept 27, SOIL, free

Acid Mothers Temple, the Macks, Kinski Oct 10, Clock-Out Lounge, 8:30 pm, 21+

Fancy Pants Through Sept 27, Base Camp Studios, free

Dua Lipa: Radical Optimism Tour Oct 15–16, Climate Pledge Arena, 7:30 pm, all ages

John Behr: Shades and Shapes, Dynamics and Dimensions Through Sept 27, Vermillion, free

Garbage, Starcrawler Oct 15, Paramount Theatre, 8 pm, all ages

Por Primera Vez (For the First Time) Through Sept 28, Base Camp Studios, free

King Princess: The Girl Violence Tour Nov 16, Showbox SoDo, 8 pm, all ages

Karey Kessler | the Where Through Sept 27, Shift Gallery, free

Frankie Cosmos Oct 17, The Crocodile, 6 pm, all ages

Hugh Hayden: American Vernacular Through Sept 28, Frye Art Museum, free

Stereolab, Bitchin Bajas Oct 18, Neptune Theatre, 7 pm, all ages Hand Habits Oct 21, Tractor Tavern, 8 pm, 21+ Lorde: Ultrasound Tour Oct 22, Climate Pledge Arena, 7 pm, all ages Destroyer: Dan’s Boogie Tour Oct 25, The Crocodile, 6 pm, 21+ Shonen Knife, the Pack A.D. Oct 25, Tractor Tavern, 8:30 pm, 21+ Freakout Festival: Melt-Banana, Liz Cooper, Wine Lips, and more Nov 6–9, various locations, 21+ Soul Nite Weekender Presents: Bernadette Bascom Nov 7, Black Lodge, 9 pm, 21+ Belly: 30th Anniversary of King Nov 9, The Crocodile, 6 pm, 21+ Patti Smith: Horses 50th Anniversary Tour Nov 10, Paramount Theatre, 8 pm, all ages David Byrne Nov 11–13, Paramount Theatre, 6:30 pm, all ages Doechii Nov 10, WaMu Theater, 8 pm, all ages Neko Case Nov 14, Paramount Theatre, 7 pm, all ages Heart Nov 23, Climate Pledge Arena, 7 pm, all ages Lola Young Dec 2, WAMU Theater, 7 pm, all ages The Mountain Goats Dec 3–4, Neptune Theatre, all ages

VISUAL ART

See pg. 45 for more Vis Art recommendations.

Gillian Theobald: Fold & Folding THROUGH OCT 6

Born in Southern California, Seattle-based multimedia artist Gillian Theobald has been showcasing her art on the West Coast since the early 1980s. Although her style ranges from vibrant nature paintings to black-and-white line drawings to abstract collage, a constant in her work is the influence of mysticism and abstract expressionism. This solo exhibition

FACS, Vulture Feather

ALEX CARRE

SEPTEMBER 19

Chicago fosters smart, wiry post-punk bands like Ivy League colleges breed corrupt lawmakers. Another case in point: FACS, who’ve been grinding since 2017. Formed from the remains of the solid Kranky Records group Disappears, FACS—drummer Noah Leger, guitarist Brian Case, and bassist Jonathan van Herik—converted me into a fan with a devastating set at 2018’s Capitol Hill Block Party. In a Slog review of that performance, I wrote, “Their brutal, rustbelt rock songs are stripped down and ready for conflict, chronically on the verge of exploding; that they don’t just adds to the music’s potency.” Seven years later, FACS are touring behind the new Wish Defense LP (the last record engineered by the late Steve Albini), which finds the band burrowing deeper into their dub roots and writing songs that are more vertical and vortical than linear and driving. The sound will still ripple your veins, though, and these dudes are merciless onstage, so come on and feel the klang. (Baba Yaga, 8 pm, 21+) DAVE SEGAL at Georgetown’s studio e gallery will showcase Theobald’s collage works that turn found paper and cardboard packaging into richly colored and strangely textured sculptural works that I really wish I could touch. (Don’t touch the artwork, people!) (studio e gallery, free) AUDREY VANN

from a fever dream. The Beijing-born artist paints

Z.Z. Wei

grandparents, with the wobble of a rain-soaked car

seemingly mundane landscapes like country roads, train stations, factories, and farms, but adds a subtle, dreamlike warp. To me, Wei’s paintings evoke the Eastern Washington landscape that I remember seeing out the window as a child while visiting my window. Whatever their associations with the desert

SEPT 4–27

dirt and expansive skies are, everyone can see some

Z.Z. Wei’s oil paintings kind of look like a Grant Wood painting with the lights turned down, a Dalí painting with the removal of surrealist figures, or a snapshot

of their memories in Wei’s unique interpretations of American landscapes. He will showcase new works at the Patricia Rovzar Gallery this month with a cham-

Boren Banner Series: Tarrah Krajnak Through Sept 28, Frye Art Museum, free Hib Sabin’s Cast of Characters Through Sept 30, Stonington Gallery, free The True Butterfly Effect Through Oct 4, Slip Gallery, free Mary Finlayson: Orange, Violet Through Oct 11, Winston Wächter Fine Art Brad Winchester “RAVELING” Through Oct 18, James Harris Gallery, free Nina Katchadourian: Origin Stories Through Oct 26, National Nordic Museum Whiting Tennis Through Nov 1, Greg Kucera Gallery, free Small Works Exhibition Through Nov 7, Gage Academy of Art, free Asian Comics: Evolution of an Art Form Through Jan 4, 2026, MoPOP Tariqa Waters: Venus Is Missing Through Jan 4, 2026, Seattle Art Museum, Wed–Sun Ash-Glazed Ceramics from Korea and Japan Through July 12, 2027, Seattle Art Museum Ai Weiwei: Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (Bronze) Through Oct 2027, Olympic Sculpture Park, free

Woven in Wool Burke Museum

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SEPTEMBER 2025

Ten Thousand Things Through Spring 2027, Wing Luke Museum Gossip: Between Us Ongoing, Tacoma Art Museum Stefan Gonzales, Dual Solo Exhibitions Sept 13–Oct 18, The Vestibule, free “Making the World a Little Less Horrible” Art Gala Sept 19, Miller Community Center, 5:30 pm, all ages Pepper Pepper: Pink Moment Sept 22–Oct 31, M. Rosetta Hunter Gallery, free Walk the Block 2025 Sept 27, Wa Na Wari, 1 pm

Early Warnings

Rodney McMillian: Neighbors Opens Oct 4, Henry Art Gallery, free Telephone Opens Oct 10, Base Camp Studios, free Haunted Opens Oct 11, Tacoma Art Museum (See feature, pg. 32)

Mona Awad with Katie Campbell SEPT 29

Books that go viral on TikTok aren’t always worth the hype, but Mona Awad’s dark academia satire Bunny is a notable exception. Following in the footsteps of Heathers and The Secret History, the novel concerns scholarship student Samantha Mackey, who enters the MFA program at the prestigious Warren University and is equal parts repulsed and fascinated by a clique of four wealthy girls who call themselves “the Bunnies.” The gothic phantasmagoria was named the best book of 2019 by several publications, snatched up for a film adaptation by Bad Robot Productions, and declared “sooo genius” by Margaret Atwood, so it’s no surprise that Bunny is back for more. The

sequel, We Love You, Bunny, picks up where the previous book left off: Samantha has published a story about her experiences at Warren to great critical acclaim and is on her book tour when the Bunnies decide to kidnap her and tell their side of the story.

Reporter and KUOW Book Club founder Katie Campbell will discuss the new release with Awad, followed by an audience Q&A and signing. (Third Place Books Lake Forest Park, 7 pm) JULIANNE BELL

More

Chris La Tray Presents Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home Sept 4, Third Place Books Ravenna, 7 pm Diana Ma with Tanisha Brandon-Felder: Anti-Oppressive Universal Design for Teachers Sept 10, Third Place Books Lake Forest Park, 7 pm, free

Jill Lepore Sept 26, Town Hall, 7:30 pm Nilanjana Dasgupta with Paula Boggs: Change the Wallpaper: Transforming Cultural Patterns to Build More Just Communities Town Hall, Sept 29, 7 pm Rena Priest Presents ‘Positively Uncivilized’ Sept 29, Third Place Books Ravenna, 7 pm, free

Early Warnings

Writers in the Schools (WITS) Back-to-School Fundraiser Luncheon Oct 17 (register by Oct 3), Edgewater Hotel, 11 am–1 pm, free with registration

An Evening with Patti Smith Nov 9, Meany Hall, 7:30 pm Miranda July Nov 13, Moore Theatre, 8 pm David Sedaris Nov 16, Benaroya Hall, 7 pm A Conversation with Padma Lakshmi Nov 18, Benaroya Hall, 7:30 pm

Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism Opens Oct 23, Seattle Art Museum CAM 10th Anniversary Party Oct 31, Common Area Maintenance, 7 pm, donations accepted

PERFORMANCE

LITERATURE

See pg. 55 for more Theater recommendations.

Hells Canyon

See pg. 31 for more Books recommendations.

SEPT 5–21

A Conversation with R. F. Kuang SEPT 12

For much of my life, I, perhaps like you, did not “get” Bruce Springsteen. Then one day I ate an edible and watched a video of him running around the stage in his little jeans, and everything changed. Suddenly, I heard the Tom Waits growl in his voice, the Ronettes influence in his hooks, and the unabashed vulnerability in his songwriting. Now I’m the type of person who is genuinely excited to read an entire book about the making of his 1975 album, Born to Run. Music journalist and biographer Peter Ames Carlin will be joined by essayist Claire Dederer (maybe you’ve read her book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma?) to discuss his new book, Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run. The book chronicles the making of the saxophone-filled classic album through a treasure trove of untold stories. (Elliott Bay Book Company, 7 pm, free, all ages) AUDREY VANN

A Conversation with Arundhati Roy Sept 18, Meany Hall, 7:30 pm

Li-Young Lee Nov 3, Rainier Arts Center, 7:30 pm

Priscilla Dobler Dzul: Water Carries the Stories of Our Stars Opens Oct 18, Frye Art Museum, free

SEPT 15

Molly Hashimoto Presents Wildflowers of the West: An Artist’s Guide Sept 17, Third Place Books Lake Forest Park, 7 pm, free

Timothy Snyder Oct 26, Benaroya Hall, 7:30 pm

Cultured Commodities: Photographs from the Henry Collection Opens Oct 18, Henry Art Gallery, free

Peter Ames Carlin with Claire Dederer

Bill McKibben Sept 16, Town Hall, 7:30 pm

A Conversation with Elizabeth Gilbert Oct 20, Town Hall, 7:30 pm

Boren Banner Series: Camille Trautman Opens Oct 15, Frye Art Museum, free

Bestselling novelist R. F. Kuang has earned countless accolades for her political Chinese fantasy trilogy “The Poppy War,” her alternate-history Oxford epic Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence, and most recently, 2023’s biting, unputdownable satire Yellowface. The latter skewered the racial politics of the publishing industry and has been optioned for a TV miniseries with horror icon Karyn Kusama (Jennifer’s Body, Yellowjackets) attached to direct. Now, Kuang is returning to the academic themes of her earlier works with her highly anticipated sixth novel Katabasis, an Inferno-esque fantasy about two rival grad students who must team up to rescue the soul of their advisor from the depths of literal Hell (so he can write them letters of recommendation, of course!). (Town Hall, 7:30 pm) JULIANNE BELL

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Molly Olguín with Amber Flame

@TWINKLEDONTBLINK

SEPT 19

There’s little I love more than weird, fantastical, queer horror, so I was thrilled to learn about local author and educator Molly Olguín’s debut short story collection, The Sea Gives Up the Dead, which has garnered comparisons to Angela Carter and Shirley Jackson. In fact, my literary queen Carmen Maria Machado selected it as the 2023 winner for the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. Olguín’s genre-bending work explores themes like grief, desire, death, gender, and race through the lens of fairy tale tropes, resulting in stories about things like a Little Mermaid retelling, a lovelorn nanny who slays a dragon, and an ominous Dear Abby letter. Writer, artist, and educator Amber Flame will join Olguín for a conversation about her haunting fiction. (Elliott Bay Book Company, 7 pm, free, all ages) JULIANNE BELL

In award-winning actor, playwright, and screenwriter Keiko Green’s comedic horror-thriller Hells Canyon, five friends, including the seven-months-pregnant protagonist Ariel Lim, gather in a remote cabin in the woods in Eastern Oregon. What could possibly go wrong? A lot, it turns out: long-simmering resentments bubbling to the surface, tensions ratcheting up in the close quarters, and a sinister force that’s attempting to break through the front door to swallow them all. The play references the real-life history of 1887’s tragic “Snake River Massacre,” in which 34 Chinese gold miners were murdered by a gang of seven white men in Hells Canyon, Oregon. Its themes of racism, trauma, and the exploitation of non-white bodies prompted Minnesota Public Radio to liken its world premiere in Minneapolis last year to “the films of Jordan Peele, especially Get Out,” so don’t miss its West Coast debut produced by Washington Ensemble Theatre and directed by Amber Tanaka. (12th Avenue Arts, times vary) JULIANNE BELL (See pg. 51 for more.)

Sheng Wang SEPTEMBER 12

Taiwanese-American comic Sheng Wang’s career has been a long, slow build, as you might expect from a gentle nerd who emanates chill-bro vibes. He was funny as hell as a clean-shaven upstart who dropped an all-killer comedy album in 2015 titled Cornucopias Are Actually Horrible Containers. Sheng then parlayed his skewed wit and inclination for subverting Asian stereotypes into a writing gig for the ABC sitcom Fresh Off the Boat. But he really excels at stand-up. Better than most in the game, Sheng finds unique hilarity in the mundane, e.g., the meaning of buying trousers from Costco, the benefits of slouching, and the idiocy of the phrase “grow a pair.” Lately rocking a hippiestyle mane and wispy facial hair, Sheng has honed the low-key absurdity approach into surprisingly moving and relatable jokes. Though he was born in Taiwan’s capital, the laid-back Sheng certainly doesn’t have a Taipei personality. [Editor’s Note: lol Dave when does YOUR comedy album drop.] (Pantages Theater, 7 pm, all ages) DAVE SEGAL

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ART EXHIBIT

2025-2026 LEC TU R E S E AS O N

EVERYONE IS WELCOME! Smart ideas, served fresh — bringing research within reach. Join us at Town Hall Seattle! uw.edu/lectures S C AN TO L E ARN MORE

Creations by

Northwest Designer Craftartists

Now through December 12, 2025 at the Lynnwood Event Center Presented by

SEPTEMBER 2025

2025 2026

SEASON

X I A N Z H A N G | M U S I C D I R E C TOR

Conducts THIS FALL SEPTEMBER 13

GRIEG PIANO CONCERTO PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION RACHMANINOV SEPTEMBER 18 & 20

SAVANNAH LAUREN

Charlene Kaye: ‘Tiger Daughter’ SEPT 19

Tiger Daughter is the one-woman show of singer-songwriter and comedian Charlene Kaye, who tells the story of how she disappointed her immigrant Chinese mother. While her mother expected her to play Carnegie Hall by the age of 12, Kaye boldly defied her wishes by applying her musical skills to shred guitar in a slutty all-girl cover band called Guns N’ Hoses. While the show is undeniably hilarious, Kaye also adds nuance and heart, dealing with inherited baggage, culture clashes, and the fight to be herself. As if you need any more convincing to attend this show, know that national treasure Margaret Cho has given it her seal of approval, asking Kaye to open her Vanguard Artist-in-Residence series in New York City this fall. I predict a snazzy comedy special is in her future! (Here-After, 7 & 9 pm, 21+) AUDREY VANN

Inebria Me

It promises to be an opulent, cathartic experience that you won’t soon forget. (On the Boards, 8 pm)

SEPT 12–14

JULIANNE BELL

In 2019, Los Angeles-based composer, musician, and performance artist San Cha released her concept album La Luz de la Esperanza, which draws inspiration from traditional Mexican ranchera folk songs and the lush, larger-than-life melodrama of telenovelas to tell the story of Dolores, a beautiful, impoverished girl who weds the aristocratic Salvador, only to realize she has become ensnared in an abusive marriage. The genderless ghost Esperanza, who represents hope and empowerment, grants Dolores the strength to escape her toxic circumstances. Luckily for us, San Cha has adapted her album into a full-fledged experimental opera, which will feature a live score melding “ranchera, cumbia, mariachi, punk, classical, and electro” and dazzling drag-influenced performances.

OCTOBER 2, 4 & 5

Sasha Colby SEPT 16

Where were you when Sasha Colby lip-synced to the Cranberries’ “Zombie” at the RuPaul’s Drag Race season 15 talent show? I was sitting on my couch, eating cheesy popcorn with tears in my eyes. The powerful performance combines the drag superstar’s knack for infusing the art of drag with activism and personal storytelling (in this case, Colby was paying tribute to her Irish heritage and the trauma of seeing the Warrington bombings as a child). Since winning her season of Drag Race, the international icon has toured the world with her Stripped tour, become

Music Director Xian Zhang is generously sponsored by Dr. and Mrs. Charles and Lisa Simonyi and an anonymous donor. | Xian Zhang’s position is generously underwritten as the Harriet Overton Stimson Music Director. | Performances of Xian Conducts Pictures at an Exhibition are generously sponsored by Lyn and Jerry Grinstein. | Performances of Xian Conducts Rachmaninov are generously sponsored by Yuka Shimizu.

seattlesymphony.org

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ARTIST RESIDENCIES

1501 5TH AVE

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THE SHUNPIKE STOREFRONTS & ARTIST RESIDENCIES PROGRAM TRANSFORMS EMPTY COMMERCIAL SPACES INTO VIBRANT HUBS FOR CREATIVITY AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT.

DISCOVER ALL OF OUR STOREFRONTS LOCATIONS AT

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Earn points at these locations!

SEPTEMBER 2025

Sasha Colby Sept 16, Moore Theatre

Will Rawls: [siccer] Sept 28–30, On the Boards, various times Hokus Pokus Live! with Ginger Minj, Jujubee, and Sapphira Cristál Sept 29, Neptune Theatre, 8 pm, all ages

Early Warnings

Demetri Martin Oct 4, Moore Theatre, 6:30 pm, all ages Stereophonic Oct 7–12, Paramount Theatre, various times, all ages Eiko Otake & Wen Hui: What Is War Oct 9–11, On the Boards, 8 pm Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes Oct 15–Nov 2, Erickson Theatre, various times, 21+ This Is Halloween: The Live Music and Dance Multimedia Spooktacular Oct 16–Nov 1, Triple Door, various times, age restrictions vary

MATT WINKELMEYER/GETTY IMAGES

GRINDHAUS: Bosco, Alaska 5000, Irene The Alien, and Mistress Isabelle Brooks Oct 17–18, The Crocodile, 10:30 pm, 21+

the drag mother of Chappell Roan, and performed with JLo at the iHeartRadio Music Awards. Now, Sasha Colby will bring part two of her Stripped tour to Seattle. “It is not the same Stripped show as last year,” she told Out magazine. “I want to tell different stories about trans experiences and queer experiences that are more general and universal.” (Moore Theatre, 8 pm) AUDREY VANN

Shrew Oct 18–Nov 2, ACT, various times, all ages

More

BUTT TOOT KING: Lydia Kollins, Suzie Toot, and Kori King Oct 30, Showbox, 8 pm, 21+

Taylor Tomlinson: The Save Me Tour Sept 5–7, McCaw Hall, various times, Exotic Deadly: Or the MSG Play Sept 5–20, Theatre Off Jackson, various times SketchFest Seattle 2025 Sept 11–14, Market Theater, various times Nikki Glaser Sept 12–13, McCaw Hall, 7 pm, all ages SUFFS Sept 13–27, 5th Avenue Theatre, various times, all ages Some Like It Hot Sept 16–21, Paramount Theatre, all ages The Vanishing Seattle Variety Show Sept 17, Here-After, 7 pm, 21+ Fancy Dancer Sept 18–Nov 2, Seattle Rep, various times, all ages GENERATOR 2025, hosted by Irene the Alien Sept 20, Vera Project, 6 pm, 21+ Jagaatbhari by Sarang Sathaye Sept 20, Benaroya Hall, 5 pm An Enemy of the People Sept 20–Oct 5, ACT, various times, all ages The Roommate Sept 25–Oct 19, ArtsWest, various times, all ages Pacific Northwest Ballet Presents: Jewels Sept 26–Oct 5, McCaw Hall, various times

Vampyr Sept 4, Frye Art Museum

The Pirates of Penzance Oct 18–Nov 1, McCaw Hall, various times Chicago Oct 22–Nov 2, 5th Avenue Theatre, various times, all ages Adam Sandler: You’re My Best Friend Oct 29, Climate Pledge Arena, 7:30 pm International Ballet Theatre: Dracula Oct 29, Paramount Theatre, 7:30 pm, all ages

Shea Couleé Presents: Creepy.Sexy.Cool. Oct 31, Showbox, 9 pm, 21+ Nate Bargatze Nov 6–7, Climate Pledge Arena, 7 pm Aya Ogawa: The Nosebleed Nov 13–15, On the Boards, 8 pm In Tandem: A Trio of Duets Dec 18–20, On the Boards, 8 pm

FILM

See pg. 21 for more Film recommendations.

‘Vampyr’ (1932) with Live Score by Lori Goldston SEPT 4

This event combines three of my favorite things: early horror movies, solo cello, and unsettling contemporary art. Local experimental cellist Lori Goldston—known for her solo ambient work, as well as her collaborations with PNW rock bands like Earth and Nirvana—will perform a live original score to Carl

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‘The Florida Project’ SEPT 3

The September installment of the SIFF Movie Club brings a screening of the 2017 indie cut The Florida Project. Sean Baker’s affecting humanist depiction of central Florida strip mall heartland has become a bit of a cult classic, and for good reason; those who found Baker’s award-sweeping Anora lacking in subtlety and resolve will find the opposite here.

The film follows Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), a joy-seeking 6-year-old, as she befriends a rotating cast of long-term motel residents, the only constants being her exotic dancer mom (Bria Vinaite) and hotel manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe), the latter of whose goal of being taken seriously is often undercut by a paternalist affection for his tenants. As a character, the neon purple motel stands out as a glaring metaphor for an unmoored life at the hands of economic uncertainty. It’s up to Bobby to hold things together, his unwashed traits not able to shine elsewhere, but in a chaotic environment that swallows others, he is allowed to emerge, while flawed, as a protector of virtue. (SIFF Cinema Uptown, 6 pm, all ages) TODD HAMM Dreyer’s eerie 1932 masterwork Vampyr. The silent film is a classic vampire tale that follows a young occult enthusiast as he gets entangled in dark forces and forbidding living shadows. This screening will accompany the Frye’s current exhibit, Jamie Wyeth’s Unsettled, and I predict that Goldston’s tense strings will echo beautifully through the gallery walls. Plus, the hauntedness of the whole thing is a great way to get in the mood for dark and rainy autumn. (Frye Art Museum, 6 pm) AUDREY VANN

mariachi divas | sep 20

nrityagram | oct 11

explore the 25-26 season

kanekoa | oct 2

L.A. Noir SEPT 10–NOV 12

In my opinion, noir films are meant to be watched in fall. I think SIFF must agree with me, because they’ve programmed Los Angeles–set noir films throughout September, October, and November. The film series kicks off with the sci-fi-tinged 1955 classic Kiss Me Deadly, starring the always captivating Maxine Cooper (of Autumn Leaves and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?). I am also excited to see Robert Altman’s adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye and the prequel to Chinatown, The Two Jakes, directed by and starring Jack Nicholson. The moodiness of these films will suit your fall blues. The gorgeous LA sets will remind you that the sun exists.

(SIFF Cinema Uptown, various times) AUDREY VANN

‘Death Becomes Her’ SEPT 16

okee dokee brothers | oct 4

colin hay | oct 17

L.A. Noir: L.A. Confidential Oct 22, SIFF Cinema Uptown

Sabrina Carpenter’s “Taste” music video, in which she and Jenna Ortega attempt to murder each other over a mostly inconsequential man before deciding to ditch him and make out instead, owes its kitschy, catty theatrics to the 1992 cult classic Death Becomes Her. Director Robert Zemeckis’s campy dark comedy follows the shallow actress Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep) and jilted writer Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn), who compete for the plastic surgeon

SEPTEMBER 2025

Ernest Menville (Bruce Willis) and become obsessed with attaining eternal youth. The film has enjoyed a resurgence as of late, thanks in part to the “Taste” video and a Tony Award–winning musical adaptation.

Keep your eyes peeled for Isabella Rossellini, looking the hottest anyone has ever looked in her scenestealing role as the immortal socialite Lisle Von Rhuman. (Here-After, 7:30 pm, 21+) JULIANNE BELL

Aran Goyaga Sept 23, Fremont Abbey

More

Jaws: 50th Anniversary (New 4K Restoration) Through Sept 4, SIFF Downtown, various times SEA-Nordic Film Festival Sept 5–7, Majestic Bay Theatre, various times Star Wars: The Ultimate Cinematic Marathon Sept 5–18, SIFF Downtown, various times Flow in Concert with the Seattle Symphony Sept 10, Benaroya Hall, 7:30 pm, all ages Twilight in Concert Sept 13, Paramount Theatre, 2 pm and 7:30 pm, all ages 2025 SIFF Marquee Gala Sept 18, Fremont Studios, 6:30 pm Local Sightings Film Festival Sept 19–28, Northwest Film Forum, various times Silent Movie Mondays: The Last Laugh Sept 29, Paramount Theatre, 7 pm, all ages Re-Animator 40th Anniversary Screening Sept 30, Neptune Theatre, 8 pm, all ages

Early Warnings

Airplane! Unreleased Director’s Cut Screening and Q&A Oct 3, Paramount Theatre, 8 pm, all ages 20th Tasveer Film Festival & Market Oct 8–12, Tasveer Film Center, various times Seattle Latino Film Festival Oct 10–18, various locations, various times Ghost Almanac with a Live Score by Montopolis Oct 12, Here-After, 7:30 pm, 21+ SIFF DocFest Oct 16–23, SIFF Uptown & Downtown, various times

DOROTHEE BRAND

Twin Peaks: A Conversation with the Stars Oct 19, Neptune Theatre, 7 pm, all ages The Rocky Horror Picture Show: 50th Anniversary Oct 28, Paramount Theatre, 7:30 pm

FOOD

See pg. 69 for more Food recommendations.

A Conversation with Dan Pelosi: Let’s Party SEPT 9

Self-described “Italian meatball” and “gay male Pinterest mom” Dan Pelosi, aka GrossyPelosi, has attracted hordes of fans on social media with his cheerful, funny take on hospitality and comfort food. He’s now following up his New York Times–bestselling debut cookbook, Let’s Eat with his new cookbook, Let’s Party, which contains celebration-worthy recipes for everything from

Dan Pelosi Sept 9, SIFF Cinema Uptown

JOHNNY MILLER

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like grunge heroes Mudhoney, psychedelic surf trio La Luz, and Latin punk favorites Tres Leches. KEXP DJ Jewel will keep the party going between sets.

(Georgetown, 4 pm, free, 21+) AUDREY VANN

Washington State Parks Free Day Sept 27

Shout Your Abortion’s 10th Birthday Bash SEPT 6

EDMUND LOWE PHOTOGRAPHY/GETTYIMAGES

raisin-walnut-baked French toast to lamb chops with tangy apricot sauce. You’ll also learn how to replicate his annual holiday cookie party and glean bits of Italian American slang from his dad. Dan will drop by SIFF Uptown for a conversation with his husband, Gus Heagerty, plus a Q&A and signing. (SIFF Cinema Uptown, 7–8:30 pm) JULIANNE BELL

Aran Goyoaga in Conversation with J. Kenji López-Alt: ‘The Art of Gluten-Free Bread’ SEPT 23

Local author, photographer, recipe developer, food stylist, and three-time James Beard Award finalist Aran Goyoaga has earned scores of fans from all over the world for her gorgeous images of food and simple, elegant cooking. Her latest book, The Art of Gluten-Free Bread, delves into the fundamentals of creating luxurious loaves sans wheat, just in time for peak baking season. Transform your home kitchen into a cozy boulangerie with three alternative-grain-based sourdough starters and recipes for olive pesto pull-apart bread, buttery brioche, naan, challah, and panettone. Goyoaga will visit Fremont Abbey for a talk with local author and chef J. Kenji López-Alt, a Q&A, and a book signing. (Fremont Abbey Arts Center, 7–8:30 pm) JULIANNE BELL

C-ID Night Market SEPT 27

Chinatown-International District’s free annual festival has been around for nearly 20 years and takes its cues from China’s open-air night markets, which provide a place to stroll, shop, socialize, and snack on street food. Upwards of 25,000 visitors of all ages flock to the historic Chinatown gate in the International District to enjoy the festivities. This year, the lineup will include over 90 vendors: some hawking food and handmade arts and crafts, others representing local businesses and nonprofits. Plus, don’t miss lion dances, taiko (Japanese drum) performances, K-pop dances, martial arts demonstrations, yo-yoing, and more. (Chinatown-International District, 1–9 pm, free, all ages) JULIANNE BELL

More

Ballard Farmers Market Every Sunday, Ballard Ave, 9 am–noon, free Capitol Hill Farmers Market Every Sunday, E Denny Way and Nagle Pl, 11 am–3 pm, free Capitol Hill Farmers Market Every Tuesday through Sept 30, E Denny Way and Nagle Pl, 3–7 pm, free West Seattle Farmers Market Every Sunday, Alaska Junction, 10 am–2 pm, free Fremont Sunday Market Every Sunday, Evanston Ave N and N 34th St, 10 am–4 pm, free

COURTESY OF JYOTI AND AUYON MUKHARJI

Author Talk + Demo with Jyoti and Auyon Mukharji: ‘Heartland Masala’ SEPT 16

Midwestern mother and son Jyoti and Auyon Mukharji are a powerhouse culinary duo: Chef, teacher, and retired physician Jyoti has led cooking classes in her Kansas City kitchen for the last 15 years, while Auyon is a musician, writer, and culinary historian. Their new cookbook, Heartland Masala, features 99 of Jyoti’s most tried-and-true recipes, such as dal makhani and vindaloo, paired with thoughtful essays from Auyon and playful illustrations from artist Olivier Kugler.

Jyoti and Auyon will bring their unique brand of gastronomic synergy to Book Larder for a cooking demo, author talk, Q&A, and book signing. (Book Larder, 6:30–8 pm) JULIANNE BELL

CW: This entire blurb is a giant conflict of interest.

But if you trust me, I think this event and this cause are relevant (and fun!) enough to legitimately put in these pages. If you don’t trust me, then move those eyeballs along. All right, before I returned to The Stranger, I was Shout Your Abortion’s Creative Director. SYA founder Amelia Bonow has been a close friend and neighbor since before she got pregnant and had the abortion heard ’round the World Wide Web (via viral tweet), sparking a grassroots movement that has been helping people find “thoughtful, impactful ways to normalize abortion and support access” for the last 10 years. To celebrate the milestone, this party will feature music (DJs Larry Mizell Jr., Stas THEE Boss, and JusMoni), fashion (SYA x Prairie Underground x Free Witch Quarterly), screen printing (Ink Knife Press), musical fortune-telling (Corey J. Brewer), tarot (Lisa Prank and Bree McKenna), tattoos, cake, and more. Yes, I am in community with all of these people, if not in bands with them. A final reveal: I just illustrated a beautiful children’s book called Abortion Is Everything (written by Bonow and Rachel Kessler) that will be debuting at the party. All proceeds support the work of SYA. (Washington Hall, 7–11 pm, sliding scale, all ages) EMILY NOKES

More

Bicycle Weekends 2025 Saturdays & Sundays through Sept 21, Seward Park, free Sound Bath with Semi Woo Wednesdays through Sept 24, Pier 62, 7:15 pm, free Washington State Fair 2025 Through Sept 21, Washington State Fair Event Center, all ages Seattle Mariners 2025 Home Games Through Sept 28, T-Mobile Park Seattle Reign FC 2025 Home Games Through Oct 17, Lumen Field Faith in the Time of Monsters: An Evening with Dr. Cornel West Sept 6, Great Hall, 6 pm Waterfront Park Grand Opening Celebration Sept 6, Waterfront Park, 11 am, free MEXAM NW Festival Sept 15–Oct 15, various locations, various times Monster Jam Sept 19–21, Tacoma Dome, various times, all ages Bainbridge Record Show Sept 20, Bainbridge Island Rowing Club, 9 am–4 pm (8 am early admission) Seattle Got Sole Sept 20, Seattle Center Exhibition Hall, noon, all ages

Seattle Coffee Festival Oct 25, Magnuson Park Hangar 30, 9 am

Washington State Parks Free Day Sept 27, various locations, free

Author Talk: Miyoko Schinner, The Vegan Creamery Sept 18, Book Larder, 6:30 pm

THIS&THAT

Early Warnings

Northwest Tea Festival Sept 27–28, Seattle Center Exhibition Hall

R-Day

Cider Summit Sept 12–13, South Lake Union Discovery Center, various times, 21+ Bite of PhinneyWood Sept 14, various locations, 1 pm, all ages Author Talk: John Birdsall, What Is Queer Food?

Sept 17, Book Larder, 6:30 pm

SEPT 6

Early Warnings

21st Annual Great Pumpkin Beer Festival Oct 3–4, Elysian Brewing Company, 4 pm, 21+ Leavenworth Oktoberfest Oct 3–18, Leavenworth, WA Samin Nosrat Oct 14, Benaroya Hall, 7:30 pm

R-Day is quintessential Seattle: It’s fun, it’s free, it’s outdoors, there’s live music, and of course, there’s Rainier. (Is it just PBR in sheep’s clothing? Maybe, but we love it anyway.) In addition to the wacky one-of-akind Rainier merchandise, eclectic art, mini-golf, and grub from Dubsea Fish Sticks, there will be live music from truly incredible bands. Check out local legends

The Italian Festival Sept 27–28, Seattle Center, free

Collections Spotlight: Bicycles Opens Oct 18, Museum of History & Industry Diwali: Lights of India Oct 18, Seattle Center, time TBD, all ages, free BOO Seattle Oct 21–Nov 1, WaMu Theater, 5 pm, 18+ Daft Disko: Halloween Oct 31, The Crocodile, 10 pm, 21+ The Official Halloween Bar Crawl Oct 31–Nov 1, various locations, 5 pm, 21+ Día de Muertos Festival Nov 1–2, Seattle Center, all ages, free Kickstands Up! 125 Years of Motorcycling in the PNW Opens Nov 28, Museum of History & Industry

90 THE STRANGER’S FALL ARTS ISSUE

Ode To Co_y BY NATE CARDIN

14. Operatic solo 15. 2 + 2 or 2 x 2

6. Ping-___ 10. Laser pointer-chasing pet

1. Brings in, as a salary

ACROSS

13. Tasty reward for a pet

41. Skin pigment 43. Tries to get away 44. Whichever 46. Store window sign

DOWN 1. List-ending letters 2. Experiencing little to no romantic attraction, for short 3. Belltown’s Giant ___ Twin Popsicle

26. Making a call 29. Brazilian soccer legend 31. Small songbird 33. Birkenstock or sneaker 34. Garment edges 36. Edible ice cream holder at Lil’ Tiger or Molly Moon’s 39. Office owie

47. “Thick sliced bacon or veggie bacon on sourdough with lettuce, tomato & mayo” sandwich at The 5 Point Cafe

4. Votes against

40. Ctrl-___-Del

5. Flashing lights

42. Passed-down tales

48. Yearn for

6. Like Wiccans and Druids

43. Without hesitation

18. Until

50. Fancy fundraising bash

7. Surgery sites, for short

44. Subreddit moderators

19. Jones ___ Nuka Grape Cola

52. ___ & Jerry’s ice cream

8. Pen point

45. Kind of biological network

20. Utterance of recognition

55. Speak under one’s breath

22. “Grey’s Anatomy” network

56. Secret headquarters for Bruce Wayne

9. Jinkx Monsoon and Judy Garland, for two

49. “The ___-B___ Spider”

10. Command-C + Command-V

51. Deep chasm

58. Ticks off

11. Prefix for “biography”

52. Works at Coyle’s or Rosellini’s

59. Current US Senator for New Jersey and former mayor of Newark

12. Drop ___ (lower one’s pants)

53. Happening

15. “No muss, no ___”

54. “White & ___” (2006 Weird Al parody song)

62. ___ a soul (nobody)

21. Melody

25. Oregon golfing mecca 27. Brink 28. CCed, with “in”

32. Residue from Mount Rainier, perhaps

36. Chile con ___

35. Seeps 37. ___ /her pronouns

Find the crossword solution at www.thestranger.com/puzzlesolution

40. Molecule building block

67. Short-tempered (about an exam, perhaps)

16. Viral Peloton trainer with a book subtitled “An Opinionated Homosexual’s Guide to SelfLove, Relationships, and Tactful Pettiness”

30. Victorious cry

39. Skiing equipment needed at Crystal Mountain Resort

38. Texting farewell

63. Coffee dispensers 64. Flip on its head 65. Sneaky, like a fox 66. Oolong and pekoe

17. Carded at a club 22. Tons 23. Steel-toe item 24. Whodunit genre that avoids direct descriptions of gore or graphic violence

47. Spill the beans

57. “Deal with it,” in terse modern slang 60. Mined resource 61. Single-stranded genetic messenger