Francis. Pope Francis. Oh, isn’t Pope Francis just great? I hear he rides the bus, like a hobo or a child! And he cares about poor people! What a decent fellow! Let’s all gather around and celebrate Pope Francis! Tra-la-la!
I understand that you Americans call it sour grapes. Well, these two grapes of mine are sour. They are very sour indeed. The whole world was begging for Cardinal Peter Turkson to be pope. “Let the black guy be the pope,” Americans were crying. “The Catholic Church needs its own Obama,” Italians were chanting in the streets of Vatican City. I also understand that you Americans warn about taking account of your eggs before they hatch into adorable little baby chicks, and we have a similar term in Ghana involving goats and shame. But I still had a name all picked out for my selection: Pope Dionysius II, after the pope who rebuilt the church from Goth attacks and brokered a peace with Emperor Gallienus. Could there be a more appropriate name for a pope during a time when the church is under assault from people angry about the purity of their precious children rather than the state of their immortal souls, and when homosexuality is invading every corner of the globe, as the Goths before them? Everything seemed to be falling into place, and then… well, you know. Francis. Francis the bus-rider. Francis the poor-lover. Francis the beloved. Let me tell you something: When the man in the job before you was a Nazi at one time in his life, you do not have to try very hard to be beloved. I would have been just as beloved as Francis the Jesuit. More, even, for I would have been the Catholic Church’s Obama, only instead of being born in Kenya, I am from Ghana, which makes me clearly superior in every way to those motherloving Kenyans.
But that was not God’s will, apparently. And now I see that even this apostate homosexualist pamphlet has published a glowing profile of Our Beloved Francis. The author—a woman!—tut-tuts at Francis for declaring the homosexuals to be Satan’s work, just as you’d expect, but the remainder of the article consists of the same adoration that every paper has tossed Francis’s way, and it is unbearable. Where is the anti-Catholic slander we have all come to expect? Look at what surrounds this article—praise of a mural that glorifies whores, a new column written in a state of drunkenness, an interview with two youths about their pro-literacy festival—and you see why I am so surprised that even Hell’s house organ has so many kind words for Francis. Does Francis, after all, work miracles with his dirty hands that stink from holding the phlegm-coated rails on city buses? How I hate that man. Lord forgive me, but I pray that he will be playing canasta soon enough with the Nazi at the Old Popes’ Home. The Catholic Obama will have his day in the sun, and then all you homosexuals had better sing my praises, too.
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LAST DAYS
The Week in Review BY
DAVID SCHMADER
MONDAY, MARCH 11 This week of convicted would-be cannibals, suicidal shoppers, and another feces-festooned cruise ship kicks off in South Seattle, where police say a nonprofit club used for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings doubled as a hub for illegal drug deals. Details come from KOMO, which identifies the club as the Nomadian Community Resource Center, and its owner as 64-yearold Michael Shepard. “Court documents say Shepard sold the pills in between [AA] meetings,” reports KOMO, adding that Shepard allegedly sold oxycodone “only to people who became members of the club in order to avoid law-enforcement detection.” After repeatedly selling drugs to undercover officers, Shepard was today arrested, with investigators finding prescription narcotics and two guns inside the Nomadian Community Resource Center. It is what it is, man.
TUESDAY, MARCH 12 In somewhat better news, the week continues in New York City, where today Gilberto Valle—the suspended NYPD officer who rocketed to notoriety after federal investigators revealed his extensive plans to kidnap, torture, kill, cook, and eat women—was found guilty of conspiracy, for which he could face life in prison. “At the crux of the case was whether prosecutors could prove that Mr. Valle was not simply role-playing, but laying the groundwork for actually kidnapping, torturing and killing the women he had singled out,” writes the New York Times. “The jury unanimously found that Mr. Valle’s ‘detailed and specific plans to abduct women for the purpose of committing grotesque crimes were very real.’” Among Valle’s incriminating actions: researching potential victims by illegally accessing a law-enforcement database, for which he faces an additional year in prison.
THANKS FOR THE UNWARRANTED, UNASKED-FOR MALE POWER
Yo, cunt. Cunt isn’t that bad a word. You made it bad. It wasn’t equivalent to the n-word a few years ago. You and a bunch of feminist gashes made that happen. Some asshole called you a cunt, and it made you sad. Probably not as hard as slavery. Wanting to banish the word cunt is not riot grrrl. Sounds like Communism. Censorship is the worst, blahh! If cunt is a word that silences you, you’re weak, ’cause words don’t mean shit, and if they do, cheers! Thanks for the unwarranted, unaskedfor male power, you weak-ass cunt. —Anonymous
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13 In worse news, the week continues in Shanghai, where authorities are striving to reassure citizens that their drinking water is safe despite the discovery of 6,000 dead pigs in the river that supplies the city’s water. As ABC reports, the pig corpses were found in the Huangpu River about 40 miles north of Shanghai, with the cause of death found to be porcine circovirus, which Shanghai authorities claim poses no risk to humans. “Last year, the Jiaxing government started a major crackdown on black market sales of pork from pigs that had died of disease,” reports ABC. “One farmer told Shanghai’s Xinmin News Net that some farmers now just toss the tainted meat into the river since they have nowhere to sell it. ‘So it’s normal that there are so many dead pigs in the river,’ he said.” Condolences to all.
THURSDAY, MARCH 14 Speaking of watery filth, the week continues in the eastern Caribbean, where one month after the Carnival Triumph schooled the universe on the cruel fecal facts of disabled cruise ships, another Carnival cruise ship sits stranded, packed with 4,300 grumpy customers and the occasional slosh from an overflowing toilet.
“In a written statement, Carnival said the ship’s emergency diesel generator failed,” reports CNN. “When power went off, some toilets stopped working, and no one was allowed to get off the vessel even though the ship was docked at Philipsburg, St. Maarten.” Today, Carnival announced it will fly all of the ship’s passengers back to Florida, where they’ll be offered a three-day refund and a half-price cruise in the future.
FRIDAY, MARCH 15 In much better news, the week continues with the enlightening hubbub that greeted yesterday’s proclamation by Senator Rob Portman, the habitually antigay Ohio Republican who came out in support of marriage equality after his 21-year-old son Will came out to him as gay. While many welcomed Senator Portman’s change of heart as evidence of progress, many others blasted Portman for his narcissism and failures of empathy. As Matthew Yglesias writes at Slate, “If Portman can turn around on one issue once he realizes how it touches his family personally, shouldn’t he take some time to think about how he might feel about other issues that don’t happen to touch him personally? Obviously the answers to complicated public policy questions don’t just directly fall out of the emotion of compassion. But what Portman is telling us here is that on this one issue, his previous position was driven by a lack of compassion and empathy.” Paul Krugman joins in at the New York Times: “Political virtue consists in standing for what’s right, even—or indeed especially—when it doesn’t
Wedding Crasher!
Onceuponatime,therewasParty Crasher—the World’s Best Column™, in which various Strangerwriterswroteaboutpartieswecrashed(exceptthatwewereactuallyinvitedbyyou lovelypeople).Therewasthegayorgy.TherewasLindyWestlooking forawizard.TherewasRageroftheLostArk.TherewastheDrunk OscarswithAnnaMinard.TherewasaVerySpecialFistmas.Andwho couldforgettheRobotValentine’sDayMassacre? equality,Nowit’s2013,andWashingtonStateisahotbedofmarriage andwe’re in love with weddings—gay,straight,manand goat,whatever.SopleasejoinusinwelcomingtheWorld’sNewBest Column™—Wedding Crasher, in which TheStranger comes to your wedding,drinks(onlyourfairshareof)yourbooze,dancestoyour music(whateveritmaybe),andcelebratesyourlove(ditto)!
Our pledge to you: Whichever Strangerwriterhasthepleasureof attending*willbringagift(maybehers-and-hersStrangerT-shirts, but agift).Wewilldressup.Wewillbenice(thisisLOVE,afterall!),both whilewearethereandinthewriting-upafterward.We will dance. AndyourweddingwillbememorializedforeverinthepagesofThe Strangerandthetimelesspixelsoftheinternet.**
The fine print:Whilewearehonoredifyouchoosetoinviteus, andwesincerelyofferyouthewarmestbestwishesonyourimpendingnuptials,weregretthatwecannotattendeverywedding,sowe willgivepreferencetotheespecially weird- and/or wonderfulsounding weddings.Wefurtherregretwecannotattendweddings outsideSeattle(unlessyouwouldliketoflyustowhereveritishappening,preferablyPuertoVallarta,andputusupinahotel).
redound to your own benefit. Someone should ask Portman why he didn’t take a stand for, you know, other people’s children.” A final bit of wisdom comes from The Stranger’s own Dan Savage: “It’s a shame that it took his own son coming out to him to open Rob Portman’s eyes—the suffering of other people’s children didn’t register—but his eyes are open now and we have Will to thank. It can’t have been easy for Will to come out to his famously homophobic father. So thanks for doing the right thing, Will.” Agreed to all of the above, with a special nod to the senator and suddenly protective father, who deserves credit and empathy. (If we don’t make room for people to improve, they won’t.)
SATURDAY, MARCH 16 Nothing happened today, unless you count the man who walked into a Dick’s Sporting Goods in eastern Pennsylvania and asked to see a shotgun and some ammunition. “Once the clerk handed those over, the man pulled out a handgun and ordered the worker to undo the shotgun’s
gun lock,” reports the Associated Press, after which the man barricaded himself in the bathroom and killed himself. (To all those wondering why the man didn’t just stay home and kill himself with the handgun, your guess is as good as ours.)
SUNDAY, MARCH 17 The week ends with some grim good news out of Steubenville, Ohio, where today two high-school football players accused of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl were found guilty. “Prosecutors accused [17-year-old Trent] Mays and [16-year-old Ma’lik] Richmond of using their fingers to vaginally penetrate the girl at an alcohol-fueled party in Steubenville on the night of August 11, 2012, as other teenagers watched,” reports ABC. “Mays was also accused of later sending text messages that included photographs of the girl with her clothing removed and charged with distributing nude images of a minor.” Today a judge declared both boys delinquent (the juvenile court version of guilty) beyond a reasonable doubt, and sentenced both to at least a year in juvenile jail. “Mays was sentenced to an additional year for a charge related to distributing nude images of a minor,” reports ABC. “Both teens were told to avoid contact with the victim at least until they are 21.”
Send hot tips to lastdays@thestranger.com and follow me on Twitter @davidschmader.
WHAT AM I, CHOPPED
SCAT LOVERS SPECIAL!
McGinn Sticks It in Burgess’s Hole
Political Skirmish Over Potholes Promises a Helluva Fun Mayoral Race
BY GOLDY
Seattle City Council member and mayoral challenger Tim Burgess’s new transportation proposal has Mayor Mike McGinn feeling nostalgic. “Really, it’s a great transportation
plan,” insists McGinn, “for 1975.” Ouch.
“There’s no rail transit in it,” McGinn complains about a “Plan for the Future” that apparently sees little future in rail. The topic of rail did come up at Burgess’s March 12 press conference—specifically the question of extending rapid transit to Ballard—but Burgess claimed to be mode-agnostic. “Rubber or rail,” said Burgess, whatever the studies recommend.
Promising to “fix what we have and finish what we started,” Burgess unveiled his proposal while standing in front of a Boylston Avenue pothole. But McGinn describes Burgess’s focus on pothole repair as both sudden and unworkable.
SOURCES SAY
• The Space Needle Corporation has been running a surprisingly robust campaign to prevent the proposed rezone of South Lake Union (think 400-foot high-rise towers!) from blocking views of the Needle. In response, a thoughtful coalition of Seattleites has come up with an even better plan. A Facebook group called Build Additional Space Needles sprang up last week, explaining: “We all know that the only thing
in practice, if not in name. It was on McGinn’s watch that the city reinstituted “crack seal” and “chip seal” programs in an effort to prevent potholes before they appear. “We’ve invested $28 million over the past two years in spot repairs,” claims McGinn.
As for the only transit proposal in Burgess’s plan—a call to negotiate with Metro to assure that savings from city-financed transit improvements flow back to Seattle residents in the form of better service—McGinn is equally dismissive. “His plan is to ask for $6 million more from Metro at a time they’re headed over a fiscal cliff,” scoffs McGinn.
Who you think won this first policy skirmish of the mayoral campaign probably depends on where your loyalties lie. But if they can muster such feistiness over mere potholes, it promises to be one helluva fun race.
A Weak Drone Law?
Not
Everyone Is Satisfied with the Council’s New Restrictions
BY CIENNA MADRID
On March 18, the Seattle City Council unanimously approved legislation governing how and when the city can use and operate surveillance equipment or aerial unmanned drones. But despite council assurances that the legislation would promote transparency and public awareness of new surveillance systems, the bill’s vote was accompanied by angry chanting from the crowd.
The ACLU of Washington urged the council to delay the vote until an auditing process was written into the legislation—specifically, that the city auditor oversee and report on all drone and surveillance use. “In order for the proposed ordinance to be effective, it must have teeth,” said ACLU-WA deputy director Jennifer Shaw in a statement. Instead, the council agreed to revisit the legislation in a year and decide whether the auditor component was necessary.
Eyman Campaign Under Investigation
State Investigates Campaign for Flagrantly Violating Disclosure Laws
BY GOLDY
After months of who knows what, the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission has finally launched an investigation into allegations that initiative profiteer Tim Eyman and his associates illegally financed their Initiative 517 signature drive with funds raised to gather signatures for Initiative 1185, the two-thirds vote requirement for tax increases.
“The first time Tim Burgess showed any interest in potholes was when he found one outside his campaign office,” quips McGinn.
Burgess proposes abandoning the city’s current complaint-based pothole-repair system for a grid-based system modeled on Seattle City Light’s successful program of fixing streetlamps one neighborhood at a time. But McGinn worries that this could leave the worst potholes unfilled while crews are busy patching less severely damaged streets. “It’s a public-safety issue,” emphasizes McGinn. Burgess also points to the City of Olympia’s “Least-Cost Strategy to Pavement Management” as a model, but McGinn counters that these strategies are already in place
that gives our lives meaning in Seattle is being able to view a Space Needle. Unfortunately, views of the original building are increasingly blocked by such impediments as the existence of the city of Seattle. We believe the solution is to build additional Space Needles.” Bravo, citizens!
• Pastor Tim Gaydos unexpectedly announced last week that he and his wife are quitting Mars Hill Church, the youthful, conservative, and notoriously cultish band of Jesus freaks that frowns on members leaving. The timing is seriously odd: Gaydos was tripping over himself with delight in January when his downtown congregation took over a historic building at Fifth Avenue and Marion Street, in particular celebrating
“This isn’t perfect legislation, but it’s far ahead of the game of any other place in the country right now,” explained the measure’s sponsor, Nick Licata. It requires any drone-hungry city agency—e.g., the Seattle Police Department— to get council approval before purchasing new surveillance equipment. It also requires departments to adopt written protocols detailing how they will retain, access, and store data obtained through surveillance.
Critics say we need a drone auditor.
Earlier this year, council members were surprised to learn that the SPD had acquired several aerial drones through a federal grant, and Seattle residents discovered 30 surveillance cameras being erected along Seattle’s waterways—most notably, along Alki Beach.
how close his flock would be to a neighborhood stuffed end-to-end with AIDS. “Being closer to Capitol Hill is a blessing as we are serving and ministering to those who are
The group is called Build Additional Space Needles.
infected with AIDS on the Hill,” he said at the time. (The congregation bans gay members.) With that behind him, Gaydos—his actual name, we’re not making it up—wrote on Facebook, “God is… moving us along from Mars Hill Church… This was a hard
As The Stranger first detailed back in August 2012, Eyman’s signature-gathering contractors are accused of running a complicated scheme that attempted to force subcontractors to collect I-517 signatures for “free” as a condition of employment for collecting signatures on the more lucrative Initiative 1185. The complaint includes affidavits, emails, invoices, and other documentation that suggest canvassers were ultimately paid for I-517 signatures during a time period in which the I-517 campaign had reported raising little or no funds. I-1185’s funders claim that they were unaware that their money may have subsidized the I-517 campaign.
Ironically, I-517 would make it easier to run such signature drives in the future.
Eyman has been charged with flagrant violations of our state’s campaign finance and disclosure laws before. In 2002, Eyman was fined $50,000 and barred for life from serving as a campaign treasurer after he was found to have diverted $233,000 from his initiative campaigns.
decision for us but God is calling Brittany and I to walk by faith and not by sight.” Gaydos and Mars Hill didn’t comment.
• On Monday, March 18, City Attorney Pete Holmes’s office filed a motion seeking to bump a lawsuit filed by Seattle’s two police unions—a lawsuit that would stymie Seattle’s efforts at police reform—from superior court to federal district court. Here’s why the motion is sneaky-smart: Last week, US District Court judge James Robart called the cop lawsuit “a further distraction” from police-reform talks and insisted that his word trumps that of the superior court. So punting the lawsuit from superior court to Robart’s domain is Holmes’s cleanest shot at killing it right out of the gate.
KELLY O
GOD HATES NEWS BY MICHELLE SHOCKED
Pot Entrepreneurs Rush to Washington State
Don’t Call Them “Okies,” Call Them “Tokies”
BY BEN LIVINGSTON
Some cannabis believers are so devout that they’re packing for a pilgrimage to one of two new legal-pot meccas: Colorado and Washington States. Similar to (though betterheeled than) the dust-bowl desperates of the 1930s, these legal-pot Okies—marijuana Tokies—long to eke out new lives in the land of legal cannabis, the land of their dreams.
Nazareth Victoria, 48, runs three assistedliving homes in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, suburbs with his wife. In 1999, he was arrested after nearly 20 years in the pot trade, and he spent two and a half years in the Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex. At that point, he says, “I vowed to my wife and family that I wouldn’t do anything illegal.”
But now that marijuana is legal in Washington, Victoria is planning to move here. Washington’s rule-making body plans to accept applications for cannabis-producer licenses in June, with processor and retailer applications
coming in September. By the year’s end, the recreational ganja game will be in full play.
Six months before Election Day, with news of legalization initiatives in three states, Victoria started planning his move and, having family in Washington, the Evergreen State seemed a natural choice. “I thought they’d be the first to implement,” he says, adding, “I think Washington’s gonna be the leader.”
Others are similarly passionate. “Folks are looking to Washington and Colorado as this laboratory, this brave new frontier,” says San Francisco business attorney Khurshid Khoja. Khoja is one of about 40 accredited investors who make up the ArcView Group, which meets quarterly to consider pot-related business pitches. “You’re gonna see a lot of interest, not only from Californians, but other folks across the country.”
Victoria hopes to secure a processor license and act as middleman between small producers and retailers—helping pot growers package, track, and guarantee outlets for their product. He worries that a pot conviction may disqualify him from a license, and is buoyed by comments at the state’s Initiative 502 hearings demanding such convictions not be a factor in legal-pot licensing. “Once it becomes legal, I believe I have a lot to contribute. I feel very excited at the opportunity to be able to finally market a product that I truly believe in.”
Percentage of 10th graders who use pot and who believe pot is r isky
more students
The
Kids Are…
Just
Fine
Is Legalization Actually Driving More Kids to Use Pot?
BY DOMINIC HOLDEN
Anews article that went national last week sensationally spun the results of a drug-use survey to imply that Washington State students may be smoking more pot due to the state’s new legalization law. But it turns out that pot use isn’t up. It’s steady, even down a little bit.
The Healthy Youth Survey, released last Thursday by state officials, is a biennial trove of data used as the gold standard for gauging risky behavior by students, including smoking, drinking, and using drugs. An Associated Press story blared that pot is twice as popular as cigarettes, while adding that “the number of high school students who believe using marijuana is risky is also at a low point.” It went on to quote Washington health secretary Mary Selecky, who said, “As the perception of harm goes down, use goes up.” As a result, the article explained, officials “expressed concern that marijuana prevention efforts aren’t ready to ramp up in response to the new state law.”
In other words: Pot is really popular, kids
think it’s less harmful, and that leads to higher pot use.
So I pressed state officials for data on pot use among 10th graders—the same grade used to compare pot and tobacco consumption—because the article never cited those figures. If the declining perception of harm causes use to rise, the numbers should bear that out. Once I got the data, though, the numbers showed that while perception of harm has dropped significantly over the last decade, pot consumption among 10th graders remained basically flat. Regular use actually declined slightly, from 20 percent to 19 percent, in the last two years.
So despite the sensational contrast with cigarettes and the warnings of state officials, pot use isn’t spiking among teens.
Why is pot twice as popular as cigarettes (which are actually riskier than marijuana)?
Largely because society invests a lot of money in antismoking education campaigns. “Smoking has dropped tremendously in the last 10 years,” says health department spokesman Tim Church. And while Selecky warns that legal pot will send a bad message to kids, Initiative 502 is designed to do the opposite. The tax revenues we start collecting this December will raise an estimated $110 million for drug-abuse prevention and education each year. That’s money we don’t currently have, and it’s dedicated to discussing the actual risks of marijuana—not hyping fear.
THE MESSAGE ON AURORA
disgusting and terrifying fucker’s desperation and vile hatred of women. Once you’ve seen that side of intent on more than one occasion, you wouldn’t even stomach the thought of getting into the car.”
• “…The more recent one was funnier, because my reply to his request mentioned my husband, causing the dude to cartoonishly freak out and zoom off, laughing. It felt like the astonishment was mutual.”
• “Yeah, I dropped the car off to be repaired at Aurora and 120th around 11 a.m. and walked five blocks to the bus stop. Twice a guy in a car stopped and talked to me… ‘Hey baby’…short hair, glasses, almost 50, and mom jeans. But at least I can tell myself I still got it.”
Grrrl Army’s Latest Mural Kicks Open a Conversation on Prostitution By Jen Graves
You can’t miss it: a hot-pink mural jumping out from the limitless grimness of Aurora Avenue like an orchid in Dickens. Its bubble letters say “DO WHAT YOU WANNA DO JUST KNOW THAT YOU’RE NOT ALONE,” and this message is apparently for prostitutes, because the names of three prostitute support organizations are scribble-sprayed below it.
I’m there in the parking lot at 41st and Aurora writing all this down—between two boarded-up cheap motels, in the epitome of dilapidation in Seattle, a psychic world away from being home safe and warm—when a shiny black Passat pulls up. There’s no business around. Unless I’m in business. He waits.
The mural first lists the Organization for Prostitution Survivors (OPS). Its goal, the internet later tells me, is to “stop the violence of prostitution.” Listed second is Children of the Night: “Rescuing America’s children from prostitution.” Lastly, Genesis Project: “Offer hope for a new life to young women and girls involved in domestic minor sex trafficking.”
The color scheme is a giveaway: The mural’s makers are Grrrl Army, a fact confirmed by OPS cofounder Noel Gomez (Grrrl Army didn’t respond to an e-mail about it). Grrrl Army is the anonymous crew that relentlessly hotpinked the corner of 11th Avenue and Pine Street last year with furious messages aimed at the misogynistic undercurrent of the mainstream.
“DO WHAT YOU WANNA DO,” by comparison, is astoundingly nonjudgmental rhetoric. This time, Grrrl Army is not fighting but rather throwing up a triage tent in the middle of what Seattle police spokesman Sergeant Sean Whitcomb calls Seattle’s “iconic” place for prostitution. The word “iconic” is important. Aurora is the bleakest place in the city, and also the place where you imagine sex for hire—“It’s just always been that way,” Whitcomb said. (The hot spots for prostitution arrests are between 120th and 135th Streets, according to a map of arrests, but the entire stretch from Denny Way up to 145th is an enforced no-go zone for repeat offenders.) The parking lot at 41st
Street has returned to a frightening version of human nature, all decay and no promise. The word “pollution” is sprayed on the motel. It’s the perfect demonstration of what journalist and former prostitute Melissa Gira Grant said in an interview in last month’s Guernica magazine: “I think sex work has become isolated from the social.”
It’s not necessarily uncommon to be mistaken for a prostitute and solicited for sex when you’re just going about your day, within the social fabric—which is why it’s so jarring. I consider walking over to the black Passat. Maybe getting in. Then what? Would I tell him sure, yes, whatever, and try on what I’ve been raised to (but can’t ever quite) see as the “other” female identity? Or would I say, “I am working. I’m a journalist”?
The funniest time it ever happened to me—being propositioned by a stranger—was when a James Brown impersonator offered to take me for a week to his Alaska home (“Nothing fancy, just a nice place, comfortable”) and to match my day-job salary. Instead, I sang karaoke backup for him with two other women in the bar who probably also got the Alaska pitch. He was old and seemed like a feeble gentleman. Last week on Slog, The Stranger’s blog, I asked people if they had similar stories. Here are four:
Ialso contacted the businesses near the Aurora mural. J. J. Jones, a woman who’s worked at Blue Video across the street for five years and who used to hand out needles at a downtown exchange, told me she loves the mural: “Prostitutes and people on drugs don’t get enough outreach as it is.”
Todd Welter of Wave Hounds surf shop said of the mural, “It was calling for rights for sex workers. If they want rights, they’ve gotta quit falling into the hands of pimps that give them drugs. If you have a pimp, you can’t have rights. Society’s a mess.”
Welter remembers telling a working woman that, actually, he was working that part of the street—meaning Wave Hounds was open—and “don’t make me have to call somebody with a badge to remove you.” For him, it’s not the sex that’s the problem—“There were cathouses up and down the West Coast— the OK Hotel used to be a brothel”—it’s the drugs and unhealthiness that go with street prostitution. Then he says, “If you had an illegal food truck that had salmonella probably, would you want that parked outside of your business? Probably not. Same point of view.”
Prostitution is the kind of topic where you can be chatting with someone and totally following along and then—bam—they’re comparing a human to infested food. And you know how they got there, but…
Tim Ley, the wonderfully named owner of nearby Seattle Natural Mattress, sounds sadder and more resigned than Welter. “They’re just tired,” is how he describes the women who solicit him regularly. “I just wish something better for them over and over and over again.”
“If you have a pimp, you can’t have rights. Society’s a mess.”
• “I’m not proud of this, but I picked up a one-night stand one evening because I was horny, and afterwards he left me money on the nightstand. Which I obviously didn’t take, and then there were complications. I’m a fat middle-aged woman and I was dressed very conservatively—midcalf-length suit, low heels, no makeup. It must have been the part of town.”
• “…I always wondered why they did it. I didn’t dress provocatively, I was just a petite woman. Anyway, being objectified by strangers in such a callous way was pretty upsetting. Yet it wasn’t the initial come-on that got to me. It was the constant threat of anger, hostility, or twisted persistence that might ignite following my refusal or avoidance. It’s in that response where you would see the
So is there room for “DO WHAT YOU WANNA DO”? If you meet a prostitute who says she’s doing what she wants, who are you to be sad-faced and judgy? All three of the mural neighbors I interviewed, despite their differences, say they’re for legalization and regulation, but… “regulation” can sound eerily like another form of control of (mostly women’s) sinful, sinful bodies—taking power out of the hands of pimps (yay!) and putting it into the hands of politicians (yay?). Prostitution talk is all about “but…” In 1999, Sweden changed its focus so that the purchase of sex is illegal there, but the selling is legal. In that system, Welter wouldn’t shoo away the woman at his door, he’d shoo off her customers—or call in a badge to deal with them, not her. It’s an intriguing premise, shifting accountability onto the demand side of the supply chain. Would it change anything here on Aurora?
On election night in November, I was proud that Seattle voted to end the insidiously destructive criminalization of marijuana and government punishment of gay commitment—two other tangled issues that have been hostage to nonsense debates while real people suffer. I wrote on Twitter: “So are we legalizing prostitution next, folks? I’m utterly not joking. I’ll sponsor that myself.”
That was an offhand opinion thrown out in passion and before I started talking to people, and the more people I talk to, the more complicated it gets. But I’m going to keep talking to people. And I open it up to you, too. What are we doing? How are we talking about prostitution now? What do you wanna do?
Reporting contributed by Jen Kagan.
Comment on this story at THESTRANGER.COM
THE STRANGER
MyforHope the Pope
A Super-Feminist, Gay, Lefty Catholic’s Cautious Optimism About Pope Francis
BY REBECCA BROWN
When I first heard the new pope was a Jesuit, I was thrilled. Jesuits are supposed to be smart: They teach a lot, and start universities (Georgetown, Loyola, Seattle University), and do a lot of social justice work. They build houses for people and feed people, they protest against war and violence and corporate greed. Some of them are almost as cool as nuns. Jesuits include guys (and they are all guys, unfortunately) like Father Daniel Berrigan, who was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list during the Vietnam years for destruction of public property. Berrigan went to prison, got out of prison, protested more, went back to prison, and wrote books. In the early 1980s, when most mainstream Americans were still ignorant, terrified, harmful, bigoted jerks about HIV/AIDS and thought most people who had contracted the virus (gay men, IV drug users, people who had sex with those people) deserved to die, Berrigan did not think so. I saw him give a talk back then, and when he was asked whether Catholics should care for people who had HIV/AIDS, he said, “Of course.” He was like (I paraphrase), “Don’t be a bigoted jerk.” Father Berrigan was not a jerk, and mostly Jesuits aren’t, so I was really hopeful about this pope.
But I’m dumb about hope. I hope too fast, too often for things I shouldn’t. I fall in hope. Then something happens that I didn’t expect, and my hope gets smashed, and I get torn up, pissed off, and gnarled and feel stupid.
I felt stupid a lot when I was thinking about converting to Catholicism. How on earth would I—a super-feminist, female, gay lefty—join a group that’s done such stupid, horrible things to gays and females and said the stupidest things about sex? Especially under the archconservative reign of Ratzinger? But I had always loved—and needed—the Christian story of light after dark, life after death, and mercy and forgiveness. I loved the idea of coming to a sacred table with human beings and getting nourishment; I loved and needed the Mystery. It took a long time to realize that I could have the latter—the point of the church—and not take all the crap. Like being an American and believing
RETHINK PLASTICS AT THE BURKE “PLASTICS UNWRAPPED” THROUGH
in the country’s possibilities while not supporting imperialism, genocide, war, racism, and greed. It took me a long time to get over the church’s, like the government’s, attack on gays. One of my friends, when I was struggling with my draw toward the church, asked, “What kind of Catholic do you want to be?” and I realized there were different kinds of Catholics. There were, as there are in most large groups of people, clueless, terrified fundamentalists, but there are also struggling, hopeful, trying-to-be-decent slobs like me. So last year I converted. I took Julian (as in Saint Julian the Hospitaller, about whom Flaubert wrote an awesome story, but also as in Blessed Juliana of Norwich and Vita Sackville-West’s drag name) as my confirmation name.
When Jorge Bergoglio, former archbishop of Buenos Aires, was elected pope last week, he took Francis for his pope name. Saint Francis of Assisi, as fans of Franco Zeffirelli’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon can tell you, was a spoiled rich boy who had a vision in which Jesus asked him to rebuild the church. Francis renounced his power and money to devote himself to service of the church. At first he rebuilt—literally—a rundown chapel outside Assisi with bricks, wood, and mud. He wore a raggedy robe and slept outside; most people thought he was nuts. But some people thought he was onto something good—kind of like Jesus was—and joined him. His band of little bros (the Latin name of the Franciscans, Ordo Fratrum Minorum, more or less translates to that) were poor and humble and they worked hard. Their example helped rebuild the whole church. Most Franciscans back then were not members of the clergy. Francis himself was never ordained as a priest, and he only agreed to be a deacon under pressure. By taking the name Francis, Bergoglio signaled that his papacy might be more about repair and reform than reentrenchment, more caring for the poor than for the rich.
Another thing that gave me hope: Bergoglio wasn’t from Italy, or even Europe, so he hadn’t been part of the political and financial intrigues of the Vatican. He might be able to clean things up a bit.
He’d set some good examples in Argentina. When he was archbishop, he didn’t get into the obscenely wealthy lifestyle some of his predecessors had. He rode the bus to work, cooked his own meals, and went out into the world to talk with people. He visited people who had AIDS and washed their feet and kissed them.
When he made his first address in Rome, he led the people in prayer. Then—and this is the amazing thing—he asked the people he’s been asked to lead to pray for him.
I’m not really sure what praying is. Maybe it’s trying to make yourself stop, for a moment or two, your own noise. Maybe it’s sitting with other people and trying to understand what they are going through, or even coming up with something you could do or say to comfort them. Maybe it’s saying someone’s name. Or maybe it’s saying thanks. Maybe it’s saying at last, inside your head, or even out loud to someone who won’t crap on you, that you could use some help. Maybe it’s saying love.
So maybe the fact that Francis began his popedom not by pontificating, but rather by asking for people’s prayers, means he wants to be a pope who’s not a monarch but a leader and servant who can listen.
By the time he asked for our prayers, I
needed hope again. I’d already lost the hope I’d had before.
But some of what I learned about Bergoglio smashed my hope.
In 2010, when Argentina was debating marriage equality, Archbishop Bergoglio led the fight against it, calling the vote “a scheme to destroy God’s plan.” He also said that adoption of kids by gays and lesbians “discriminated against children.”
Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I thought (I was not swearing, I was praying). Him, too? The church has yet to fully confess to the full extent of the sex-abuse scandal or its systematic, gender-exclusive, secretive, and institutionally supported cover-up; it has never fully recompensed its victims; it has not made the moves necessary to dismantle the institutional structures that allowed it—and here’s another bishop moralizing about sexuality? If this were not so harmful, so criminal, it would be funny. But it is not.
A Jesuit has never been a pope; they’re rarely bishops. This is another good thing about them—they don’t go after power. But sometimes they are appointed and accept, and I thank God they do. One of the few Jesuit bishops, Carlo Maria Martini was archbishop of Milan. Shortly after his death last year, Corriere della Sera printed an interview in which Martini said: “The Church must admit its mistakes and begin a radical change, starting from the Pope and the bishops. The pedophilia scandals oblige us to take a journey of transformation.” I hope Pope Francis is capable of the change of heart he’ll need to lead the church toward such transformation. He might have it in him.
In 2012, two years after he campaigned against gay marriage, Bergoglio rebuked Argentinean priests who had refused to baptize the children of unwed moms. Bergoglio accused the priests of hypocrisy. He also told them: “Jesus teaches us another way: Go out. Go out and share your testimony, go out and interact with your brothers, go out and share, go out and ask” (emphasis mine).
I love the idea of a pope, or any bishop, archbishop, deacon, priest, senator, president, director of operations, chair of the board, or person given authority asking the people he (it’s usually a he) has been asked to serve who they are and what they need and how he, the servant-leader, can both serve and lead the people.
Jesus didn’t come here to condemn us human lumps; he came to show us mercy and forgiveness and the goodness of the just and loving heart. He came to show there can be life even after you feel like you’ve been dead, and that even after someone’s been horrible or had horrible things done to them, they can have another chance.
This morning when I sat down to revise this essay, I read an article about Rob Portman, a Republican senator from Ohio, who in 1996 voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, and in 1999 voted to bar gay couples in DC from adopting kids, but has now decided to support same-sex marriage. This happened because his son had come out to him as gay; a personal encounter changed this father. If a Republican can make that change, then maybe the pope, called by us Catholics the Holy Father, who has already shown such compassion for the poor, and has already changed some of the culture of the Vatican, can have a similar change of heart.
This is what I’m trying to hope for now.
theSTRANGER SUGGESTS
Ark Lodge Cinemas
The quality of the moviegoing experience at Columbia City’s new Ark Lodge Cinemas blows me away every time. The picture is crystal clear, and the sound system is amazing. A lot of chain theaters simply amp up the bass so you feel explosions in your gut and pretend that’s good enough. But Ark Lodge’s sound system surrounds you with large and small noises—it’s like sitting in the middle of the action, in the best way possible. Bonus: It’s less than five minutes to walk from the light rail. If you love the movies, you owe it to yourself to go. (Ark Lodge Cinemas, 4816 Rainier Ave S, arklodgecinemas.com) PAUL CONSTANT
Cheap Beer & Prose
BOOKS/BEER With bargain-basement beer prices ($1 cans of PBR) and all the readers vetted for maximum entertainment value, Cheap Beer & Prose is always a safe bet for a good time. But tonight’s is an especially exciting lineup of fresh new faces in Seattle fiction, including Corinne Manning, Anca Szilágyi, and Kristen Millares Young. And the headliner is someone you’ll be hearing a lot about this year: Nicole Hardy, the local poet whose memoir about Mormonism and sex, Confessions of a Latter-Day Virgin, is bound to make a splash when it’s released in August. (Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, hugohouse.org, 7 pm, free, all ages) PAUL CONSTANT
Kingdom Crumbs
MUSIC
The opinion held by this paper’s leading hiphop critic, Larry Mizell Jr., about Kingdom Crumbs’ position in the 206 is also held by me: This quartet of rappers and producers (Mikey Nice, Jerm D, Jarv Dee, and Tay Sean) is one of the best things happening right now in “the town.” A part of the productive Cloud Nice collective, Kingdom Crumbs released a self-titled album last year that contains not only solid electronic beats and postunderground raps, but a kind of sensibility that makes it clear to any listener that Seattle really is a center for some of the most advanced thinking and creativity in hiphop today. Kingdom Crumbs will open for THEESatisfaction. (Neumos, 925 E Pike St, neumos.com, 8 pm, $12, 21+) CHARLES MUDEDE
Chelsea Light Moving MUSIC
Some Sonic Youth fans are still reeling from Thurston Moore’s split from Kim Gordon. But maybe the breakup spurred Moore to kick out the jams with the vengeance of ’80s SY milestones like Sister and EVOL in his latest project, Chelsea Light Moving. The new eponymous album erases the blahs left by SY’s last few albums with songs that blowtorch rock into gnarly shapes. At 54, Moore has rejuvenated his radical vocabulary of odd guitar tunings and rediscovered the exhilarations of high-velocity songwriting. (Neumos, 925 E Pike St, neumos.com, 8 pm, $15, 21+) DAVE SEGAL
King-Snohomish Regional Spelling Bee
Park Public House
BOOZE/FOOD
The only thing that’s more fun than watching a spelling bee is winning a spelling bee—an experience one smart and precise young person from King or Snohomish County will know firsthand today. Meanwhile, the rest of us can bask in the tightwire thrills of watching people spell words with their mouths. Not only will it be riveting, it is free. (Confidential to competitors: Be ready for the classic bee killers rhythm, oeuvre, and restaurant.) (Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, townhallseattle.org, 1–3 pm, free) DAVID SCHMADER
‘Cemetery Man’
FILM Based on a popular Italian series of comics, the morbidly funny Cemetery Man is probably the best comic-book movie you’ve never seen, and it’s a perfect pairing with beer and burgers on King’s Hardware’s back patio. Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) works at a graveyard. During the day, he buries the dead. By night, he shoots the zombies who climb back up. After a series of befuddling encounters with an impossibly beautiful woman, Dellamorte blurs the line between the living and the dead. That is to say, he just might be a mass murderer. (King’s Hardware, 5225 Ballard Ave NW, 782-0027, sundown, free, 21+) PAUL CONSTANT
Perched on the top of Phinney Ridge, Park Public House (it used to be Park Pub, and let’s still call it that) is a low-key, friendly neighborhood hangout. It has a pool table, an expanse of different seating, and a great beer selection—you can fill growlers at the bar—and on a sunny day, the light streams in the wall of windows. On the periphery, historical photographs of the hood invite inspection. Come on Sunday for all-day happy hour, with cheap beer and burgers, and play cards till close. (Park Public House, 6114 Phinney Ave N, theparkpub.com, 3 pm–2 am) ANNA MINARD
‘Chamber Music’ ART
Scott Lawrimore’s first exhibit as the Frye’s curator is a series of translations with an archive in the middle. It’s 36 Seattle artists, each responding to one of the poems in James Joyce’s first published work, Chamber Music, which was put out in 1907—the year Charles and Emma Frye began collecting art. (Lawrimore wins the Most Attenuated Connections Award.) In the center of the exhibition is a piece of furniture with benches and cubbyholes, where each artist can house a changing display of whatever’s most important to them. (Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave, fryemuseum.org, 11 am–5 pm, through May 5) JEN GRAVES
ARTS
BOOKS
Rite of Spring With APRIL, Seattle Gets the Quality Book Festival It Deserves
BY PAUL CONSTANT
Ever since Northwest Bookfest hacked up a Target-branded lung and died back in 2004, hundreds of people have tried to bring a book festival back to Seattle. One notable attempt to revive the literary festival at the Columbia City Event Center in 2009 was ill-conceived and awkwardly produced, costing local booksellers and publishers a lot of money for little return. Now there’s a Northwest Bookfest in Kirkland (tagline: “It’s Raining Books!”) that sounds as exciting as chili night at a nursing home. And as we approach 10 years without a literary festival in Seattle, the publishing industry doesn’t appear to be healthy enough to sustain a festival the size of the old Bookfest.
tiny selection of titles from bookstores we can visit any day of the week?
That’s why last year’s APRIL (the acronym stands for “Authors, Publishers, and Readers of Independent Literature”) was such a shock. With not much other than a Kickstarter and a vision, local authors Tara Atkinson and Willie Fitzgerald founded a weeklong celebration of everything that’s great and irreplaceable about Seattle’s literature. It took place in venues around Capitol Hill and First Hill, from the Sorrento Hotel to Porchlight Coffee to Piecora’s Pizza to the Crescent Lounge to the Hedreen Gallery to a dingy parking garage—where Ed Skoog was surrounded by a bunch of cheap-beer-swilling young poetry lovers, Fight Club–style, and read a brilliant occasional poem that he vowed never to share again.
bookworms.” From the outset, the demand for APRIL was high: Last year’s wildly successful Kickstarter campaign funded the 2012 festival and much of this year’s too, and Atkinson marvels that most of the donations came “from people we don’t know.” Armed with the kind of knowledge you can’t learn without putting on an eclectic festival—apparently, it’s very hard to get in touch with drag queens—they’ve put together a formidable second year.
The first thing that you’ll probably notice when comparing APRIL 2013 with 2012 is that there’s no lit crawl. “In many ways, the lit crawl made APRIL” last year, Fitzgerald says, but the formula was picked up by every other arts organization since APRIL brought it to town; if they reprised a lit crawl, it “would have been the sixth in this calendar year.”
Instead of packing all the events into one crawl, APRIL (aprilfestival. com/#schedule) spreads the boozy events into a series of free “Happy Hour Readings” at venues including the Quarter Lounge, the Comet, and Vermillion Art Gallery and Bar.
Other events include an opening night benediction with Matthew Dickman and Rebecca Brown with a special musical guest (Mon March 25, Chop Suey, 8 pm, free); a selection of local talent including Eroyn Franklin, Jamey Braden, and Maggie Carson Romano sharing new work based on Heather Christie’s outstanding poetry collection The Trees, The Trees (Tues March 26, Vignettes, 7 pm, free); a “competitive storytelling event” with the salacious title “A Poet, a Playwright, a Novelist, and a Drag Queen” (Wed March 27, Sorrento Hotel, 8 pm, $7); and a “showcase” reading featuring Matthew Rohrer, Heather Christie, and Rauan Klassnik (Thurs March 28, Hugo House, 8 pm, $7). It all culminates in the APRIL Small Press Expo
LOOSE LIPS
• Nyan cat mural! A perfect mural of a nyan cat—an internet meme that’s a pixelated cat with a Pop-Tart for a body, trailing a rainbow as it rides endlessly through space to super-chipper tunes—has appeared above Ding Ho Cleaners on the Trader Joe’s building on Madison. If you don’t know what the hell this means, look up nyan cat on the webs and have joy.
• Sunday’s performance/party by Saint Genet at Jensen Studios was like an esoteric footnote to a book we haven’t read yet. The details were exercises in contradiction: The live organ and guitar music sounded, at times, like a joyful dirge; a bed made of small gold pyramids that undulated softly was both attractive and sinister; the sight of a dancer who swayed for long minutes in an unbuttoned union suit, with a golden helmet that looked like a well-populated pincushion, was both boring and magnetic. Even the prices at the upstairs bar were strange: $5 for a whiskey, $5 for a beer, $5 for a whiskey and a beer. “Are you enjoying yourself?” one audience member whispered to another. “No,” the second answered, “but I don’t think that’s the point.”
With APRIL, a new, young crop of writers seemed to find their voice all in one week. PREVIEW APRIL Festival March 25–30 aprilfestival.com
This is an issue that’s close to my heart. At least five organizations have contacted me to sit on planning boards for prospective Seattle-area Bookfest revivals in the last five years. Those meetings were off-the-record, so there’s not much I can reveal about them, but they all had one thing in common that doomed them from the beginning: None of them had any real reason to exist. Seattle is a city that’s blessed with an abundance of readings—almost every single day of the year, usually with multiple events happening all around town—and dozens of beautiful, well-stocked libraries and bookstores. Quite simply, every day in Seattle is a Bookfest, and just shipping in Dave Barry to “headline” a weekend of readings from local authors we can see all year round isn’t that compelling a reason to put on a show. Why should we go to a convention center to browse booths with a
APRIL was the kind of festival that causes you to reassess a whole scene—a new, young crop of writers seemed to find their voice all in one week. Between the twin poles of APRIL and the Short Run smallpress convention in the fall—the third iteration of which is coming on November 30 of this year at Washington Hall—Seattle’s literary map has been redrawn and repopulated with new names, with plenty of land left for discovery.
Over coffee at Elliott Bay Cafe, Fitzgerald and Atkinson explain that they didn’t know each other when they were recruited by Pilot Books owner Summer Robinson to organize the store’s second annual Small Press Festival three years ago. Like many Seattle-area writers and readers, they were devastated when Pilot Books closed and wanted to keep the festival going somehow; they both say the store’s dedication to noncorporate literature and inclusive, clubhouse vibe are the primary inspiration for APRIL.
The slightly misleading name—no part of the festival has ever taken place in the month of April—was Fitzgerald’s idea. And he initially hated it. “He made us promise we wouldn’t put flowers on” promotional materials, Atkinson says. Fitzgerald elaborates on all the clichés he nixed before he would agree to the name: “No flowers, no owls, no
with tables of small presses, literary magazines, and beautiful, handmade books, along with performances from Housefire, SPLAB, the Furnace, the Bushwick Book Club, and Breadline (Sat March 30, Hugo House, 11 am–4 pm, free). And the Friday night event is a special edition of Verse Chapter Verse, The Stranger’s books-and-music series, featuring hiphop duo Fly Moon Royalty and Sherman Alexie—who has had such a successful career that it’s easy to forget he’s only published one book with a corporate press, easily making him the most popular independent author in town—and, uh, me (Fri March 29, Neumos, 6–8 pm, $7 adv/$10 DOS).
Fitzgerald and Atkinson are already working on plans for the 2014 APRIL Festival, and they have applied for grants with a few local arts organizations. They have ideas for what they could do with a bigger budget— flying in out-of-town talent is an appealing proposition—but “I don’t know how to ask rich people for money,” Atkinson shrugs. Still, poverty is not getting in their way as they present exciting young voices in fun
• Three years ago this May, Howard House, one of Seattle’s best contemporary art galleries, shut down. It had spent its peak years at 604 Second Avenue, a long, narrow place where the owner, Billy Howard, sat at a desk located between two concrete-floored, high-ceilinged rooms. (Cracks in those floors were made into icons in a monumental drawing by Amanda Manitach.) Now, opening May 2, James Harris Gallery—another leading contemporary gallery—is moving into 604 Second Avenue, three blocks north of Harris’s current location, where rent was rising out of his range. Will it feel like Harris is at Howard’s desk for a while? Maybe. But “I’m redesigning it,” Harris says. He’s signed a five-year lease.
• Pamela Belyea, the world’s most likable generalissima, is stepping down as executive director at Gage Academy of Art Along with her husband, the painter Gary Faigin, Belyea (“belly-YAY”) cofounded the classical art school in 1990 in Santa Fe, moving it to Seattle the following year. Gage now is a sophisticated operation on north Capitol Hill, with thousands of alums and high-functioning ateliers, classes, and a talks and exhibitions program. “I want to be part of the budding charter-school movement in Seattle,” Belyea says of her plans for a new career. A national search for her successor starts soon; she leaves Gage on July 1.
• The selection committee of the Prize Formerly Known as the Orange Prize, which is now the Women’s Prize for Fiction, announced their long list last week. This list features two novels by Seattle authors who were praised by The Stranger last year: Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson and Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple. Either book is worthy of the notOrange Prize.
IF IT’S MARCH, IT MUST BE APRIL Tara Atkinson and Willie Fitzgerald.
KELLY O
be, with all the bullshit trimmed away.
Interlocking Objects
BY JEN GRAVES
Five women lie in a row like hills. They’re on their sides, on a benchlike white pedestal. The exhibition is called Ground The unseen side of the sleeping women that’s touching the ground of the pedestal must be iron-flat in contrast to the wafting, rising, curling, flowing, billowing rest. Akio Takamori’s ceramic people are always very, very round, like their heads are bellies and each foot and hand is a belly and their butts are bellies, with belly hairdos. Matisse’s name always comes up with Takamori’s. The belly people are colorful, with dry surfaces that would be rough to the touch but visually betray the wet swooshes of paintbrushes. Actually, they’re paintings almost as much as sculptures. Sculptures are usually about cutting away or building up or suturing things together, but ceramics and painting are both about caressing. The bellies beg for caressing. They make only being able to look a punishment. If you could just spoon them, hold them. Or reverse the embrace: climb inside them, curl up.
What do a row of sleeping women and a heap of kittens have in common? Edward Wicklander made the heap of kittens. He carved them out of English walnut wood. Their painted eyes are half open, and they’ve slung and wrapped their bodies over and around each other to the point where it’s no longer clear whose part is whose. In an art gallery, these folksy, kitsch-ish kittens are funny, but their curved and interlocking forms are also a way to demonstrate compositional mastery without bluster—humbly, coolly. They are the height of charisma. They have nothing to do with painting or touching and everything to do with looking.
of the grid, there’s a spine of casings that are marked with white x’s and o’s. These contain 21 wishes that she’s written, to be shot out during a 21-gun salute Howard will arrange for her memorial.
Lying on the floor is an effigy of Howard. Based on a plaster casting, it’s his measurements exactly, stiff arms crossed over the chest in burial position. The cast is unseen, encased in a shroud Lorraine knitted in babyalpaca wool. A line, or spine, runs down its front: “xoxoxoxo” from head to toe. On the back, Howard says, there is an opening where his body will be inserted after his death, then the shroud will be tied closed. Ideally, Lorraine’s hands would be the ones tying the shroud and Howard’s hands would be the ones loading the gun, but in real life, somebody will have to go first. The other body will be left behind with just the bodies of objects.
Takamori is at James Harris Gallery, Wicklander is at Greg Kucera Gallery, and the Barlows are at Punch Gallery, all through March 30.
DANCE
Approaching Heaven
Four Modern Masterpieces at Pacific Northwest Ballet
BY MELODY DATZ
IREVIEW Modern Masterpieces Pacific Northwest Ballet at McCaw Hall Through March 24
The kittens are at Greg Kucera Gallery. Takamori’s sleeping women are at James Harris Gallery two blocks away. Both artists are Seattle-based. Wicklander was born in Puyallup, land on the edge of a million woodcarvers, in 1952. Takamori was born in 1950 in Japan, the son of a gynecologist. I wonder what Takamori would make of a comment Wicklander made at his gallery talk earlier this month. “Back in Chicago, where I went to school, they really get objects,” Wicklander said. “When I show there, they appreciate it.” I also wonder what Lorraine and Howard Barlow would make of that.
t’s easy to tell when dancers love the work they’re performing, and you can see the love in Ulysses Dove’s Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven, one of four pieces in Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Modern Masterpieces Commissioned in 1993 to make a work for the Swedish National Ballet, Dove approached Heaven as a way to work through a year in which he lost a parent and 12 of his closest friends, many to the AIDS epidemic. This batch of personal loss would leave most of us drooling on the kitchen floor, but Dove wove his grief into a piece so tight with emotional intensity that most of McCaw Hall’s somewhat stodgy Saturday-afternoon audience was left holding its breath. The pas de deux between Andrew Bartee and Jerome Tisserand, Dove’s reflection on the depth of love and loss between two friends, was the most powerful piece of dancing I’ve seen in years. An audible sigh issued from the audience as Bartee and Tisserand finished their pas, separated, briefly came back into body and eye contact, and slowly moved apart into the darkness.
The Barlows—based in rural Thorp, Washington, where he teaches sculpture and she got her graduate degree at Central Washington University—are showing their own objects in spitting distance from the kittens and the women. The Barlows are a married couple in their 30s with small children, all their parents still alive and healthy. They’re “in the prime of life,” as Howard put it. To mark it, they’ve made objects for their deaths.
The art would be unbearably romantic if it weren’t also morbid. He made her a wall “quilt” of emptied red bullet casings he filled with handwritten memories about her and bits of her wedding dress. Down the middle
It’s not just the dancing that achieves this effect, but a multimedia punch to the gut: mournful tolling of bells in the music of Arvo Part, and lighting by PNB’s Randall Chiarelli that falls over low-hung metal bars onto the dancers’ stark white costumes, casting shadows under their eyes, their muscles, and their feet. It’s creepy as hell—and combined with the seemingly effortless movements and powerfully expressive dancing of the six cast members, the total highlight of the evening. Twyla Tharp’s piece, In the Upper Room, is set to a minimalist composition by Philip Glass of the same name and performed on a stage thick with white smoke. Developed when Tharp joined Mikhail Baryshnikov as co–artistic director of American Ballet Theater in 1981, In the Upper Room is a blatant endorsement of mixing classical and
dance, with cast members separated into “stompers” (in sneakers) and “ballet dancers” (in pointe shoes). I’d trade my firstborn to have been at early ABT rehearsals for this—Tharp foisting her looser anti-danceestablishment style onto the bodies of rigidly trained ballet dancers must have made some heads explode. Additionally, Glass’s music is frantic and unpredictable, very different from most ballet scores. Some pull off the crossover while some look stiff and annoyed. (It’s got to be a rough piece to learn, and it’s long.)
Carrie Imler excels as an energetic “stomper,” obviously having a blast as she dances with astounding and seemingly effortless accuracy through five of the nine sections, and Kaori Nakamura glides deftly through the more classical movements. Reliable, strong soloist Kiyon Gaines grins his way through the sweat, smoke, and sometimes schizoid score—he is a slightly stocky dancer, but extraordinarily light and graceful, and he moves between the “stomper”/“dancer” transitions with more grace than some of the classical-looking, lemon-sucking ballerinas.
PNB’s Paul Gibson presents his fifth world premiere for the company with Mozart Pieces. Originally developed as an all-male piece for a school graduation concert, it was reworked for the company to include two female dancers, showing off PNB’s signature strength: classical yet innovative technique, a wide repertoire of styles, and strong, beautiful bodies. It’s especially engaging to watch works choreographed by someone who knows the dancers—the steps and moods just seem to fit. While Gibson’s piece is nicely tailored for these dancers, they seem to lack the deep passion exemplified in the Dove and Tharp pieces. (Perhaps because Mozart Pieces doesn’t take advantage of their full
THE DOWSING: DICKEYS AND FABERGÉ
In the upcoming fashion performance The Dowsing this Friday, March 22, at University of Washington’s Red Square, designer Anna Telcs will gradually layer male models in her garments that “are more like sculptures,” designed to build the silhouette’s volume. “It’ll feel ritualized as the bodies are walking. I’ll be anointing them with clothing,” she says. (The affiliated display runs at the Henry Art Gallery through May 5.)
Watch for voluminous sleeve caps fastened on with buttons, pleated neckwear “like an ecclesiastical dickey,” quilted thigh pads, a chest plate of swollen knots made from batting-stuffed tubes, cocoon-shaped outerwear resembling “a Fabergé egg that you can peer into and see all the smocking inside,” and another form that “started as a jacket-y situation but then became a ball.” The apparel of The Dowsing manages to seem both pure and timeworn. The shapes are basic and flowing and embellished with details like darning-stitched knees to suggest use and repairs, and a palette of deliberately
potential—it feels like something’s missing.) Nevertheless, the way in which Gibson plays the music off his dancers—or maybe it’s the other way around—is fetching, and the always-lovely Nakamura exemplifies the playfulness between the two, as if she’s mingling at a classical-themed cocktail hour.
George Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, set to Bach, is the oldest piece of the evening. Originally presented in Rio de Janeiro at a 1941 US State Department–funded tour of South America, Concerto is a well-chosen introduction to Balanchine, whose rigid classical style and preference for stick-thin ballerinas defined ballet for generations. Balanchine is stark, serious, and monochromatic, and although Concerto may seem run-of-themill to some, it is one of the most technically demanding pieces a dancer can perform. Belying the dancers’ almost blank expressions (my sister calls it “stewardess face”) are their heaving chests and sweaty backs.
As is common with Balanchine works, there is nothing to distract the eye from the dancers’ technique. No smoke, no eyecatching set, no elaborate costuming—just bodies in thin white leotards. And if PNB has one thing down, it’s exceptional physiques, of many shapes and sizes, matched by creativity. Many classically trained dancers in world-class companies have the technique to make a statement onstage, but the dancers of PNB have an extra bit of expressive edge. Maybe it’s PNB’s tendency to reach beyond the classical comfort zone, pushing dancers to break some rules. Or because PNB doesn’t starve its dancers into Olive Oyl clones. For whatever reason, it has some of the finest, strongest bodies in classical ballet, and Modern Masterpieces is a fun way to see those bodies move in ways that most of us can only dream of.
washed-out colors: “It’s what happens when you wear a garment again and again and again. Black becomes bleach black or black or blood black.” To make an actual rust-tone trim, Anna soaked bias tape in a salve made of water, vinegar, and steel wool. And she transformed silk from beige to an ash brown by singeing the fabric: “It sort of melts. It doesn’t really catch fire. Well, it does every once in a while.”
Anna’s work in The Dowsing on the industrialization of the apparel industry, which has resulted in our current cycle of trends and cheapness and throwaways. Other influences stem from fashion history’s assortment of and gorgeous oddities—city grant funding enabled Anna to meticulously wade through the squillions of antique garments in the Henry’s Reed Collection Study Center. She was compelled by 1920s-era silk panties, and their pairing of simple wide legs with delicate geometric embroidery. Worth noting: their split-crotch design imparts a delightfully tawdry effect, but at the time this construction was totally customary.
Anna also studied 19th-century bustle gowns, with their ballooning piles and freakishly complicated underlayers, and structures involving pulley-equipped corsets, flexible metal tapes, collapsible cages, hinges, tiered ruffles, or hoops embedded in seams. Though The Dowsing integrate swollen proportions ic reasons Anna avoided using mechanical components. By contrast, the original looks so encased their wearers that in the era of flame lamps, “underpinnings would catch fire, and women burned to death in their own dress because they couldn’t get out of it in time,” she says.
ITAI ERDAL | THE CHOP
ART
LA FESTA DEL ARTE: ARTS CORPS BENEFIT
their exact purpose and function is usually unspecified. This is an exhibition of her pieces, with free and public performances in UW’s Red Square on Friday, March 22, at 3, 4:30, and 6 that feature them on warm human bodies. $10 suggested. WedSun. Through May 5. 4100 15th Ave NE, 543-2280.
Gallery
Openings
ARTXCHANGE
Indigo: by HiiH Lights : Lâm Quang and Kestrel Gates’s incredibly delicate and elegant light sculptures from wire and handmade paper. Free. TuesSat. Through April 27. 512 First Ave S, 839-0377.
JACK STRAW NEW
MEDIA GALLERY
Lost Long means something like being far away from a rural home. Ruth Marie Tomlinson explores the horizontalness of rural space and geographical distance. Free. Reception Fri Mar 22, 7 pm. Mon-Fri. Through May 17. 4261 Roosevelt Way NE, 634-0919.
Continuing Exhibitions
FORM/SPACE ATELIER
The Posters: Guerrilla Girls on Tour: Guerrilla Girls formed in the 1980s as a crew of anonymous women artists in gorilla suits who fight for equity for women in the art world. “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” asks one of their most famous posters. Wonder what they would ask about the occasion for this exhibition, which opens on International Women’s Day (“Do women have to have a day to…”). This chance to consider what they’ve been able to accomplish, and what they haven’t, is a treat. Free. Wed-Sat. Through May 4. 2407 First Ave, 349-2509.
HEDREEN GALLERY, SEATTLE UNIVERSITY Green Gothic: Local luminaries Gretchen Bennett, Frank Correa, Charles Mudede, Lisa Radon, Serrah Russell, and Rodrigo Valenzuela respond to an essay with this title by painter Matt Offenbacher, about “concepts...intertwined with contemporary Northwest identity: landscape, industry, the romanticism of Ruskin, decay, regrowth, monsters lurking in the shadows, and the sublime.” Free. Wed-Sat. Through April 24. 901 12th Ave 296-2244.
Events
DEEP ROOTS: 15TH ANNUAL NATURE CONSORTIUM BENEFIT
Support the great crossover arts-and-nature org that began as a block party 15 years ago. This is a good cause if you’ve got benefit dollars that want a home this year. Sodo Park 3200 First Ave S. $75. Thurs Mar 21, 6 pm.
DISCUSSION: VISIONS OF INDIGENOUS LAND AND SEA Coast Salish artist Al Charles Jr. carved a 36-foot canoe out of a single cedar tree when he was 20. He and three other panelists—Norwegian-Aleut multidisciplinary artist Anna Hoover, Colville weaver Randy Lewis, and Haida weaver Lisa Telford—discuss the intersections of medium, ritual, and tradition in their work. Olympic Sculpture Park , 2901 Western Ave, 654-3100. Free. Thurs Mar 21, 7-8:30 pm.
D.I.Y.—THE SHAPE OF PUNK TO COME
Get inspired at this amazing event that benefits Arts Corps, the largest nonprofit arts education organization in Seattle. Arts Corps youth and working artists are performing, as is Mary Lambert, who was featured on Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ “Same Love.” Museum of History and Industry , 2700 24th Ave E, 324-1126. artscorps.org. $125. Fri Mar 22, 6:30-11 pm.
MIRROR BY DOUG AITKEN: PERMANENT INSTALLATION LAUNCH
See story, page 29. International fancypants artist Doug Aitken has installed a giant permanent video projection on the facade of SAM, and its opening celebration includes conversations about “the dynamic of change in contemporary culture” and a Seattle Symphony Orchestra performance of a piece by the famous minimalist Terry Riley— who’ll be in attendance. Seattle Art Museum 1300 First Ave, 625-8900. seattleartmuseum. org. Free, but tickets are required. Sun Mar 24, 6:30 pm.
READING FROM MORRIS GRAVES: SELECTED LETTERS
“I have continued to wrestle with the problem of the aestheticspiritual inappropriateness of a furnace at the lake,” begins one of Morris Graves’s letters. He was a mystic and an expressionist painter of the Northwest School, along with Guy Anderson, Mark Tobey, and others. Co-editors Vicki Halper and Lawrence Fong read selections from the collection of letters they recently compiled. Seattle Public Library, 1000 Fourth Ave. Free. Sun Mar 24, 2 pm. visualart@thestranger.com
READINGS
Wed 3/20
HUGH HOWEY
Howey is the author of an exciting post-apocalyptic novel called Wool. It’s a very popular serial novel online, and it’s about to be a very popular book in meatspace, too. Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030. Free. 7 pm.
Thurs 3/21
LIT FIX
A brand-new reading series comes to town with local authors: Jami Attenberg, Peter Mountford, Sean Beaudoin, and Suzanne Morrison. The musical guests are Jess and Chad Lambert. Comet, 922 E Pike St, 322-9272. $5. 6 pm. CHEAP BEER & PROSE See Stranger Suggests, page 19. Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030. Free. 7 pm. TAIYE SELASI Selasi’s book Ghana Must Go is a novel that is being praised everywhere. It has a hell of a pedigree; it was edited by the person who edited The God of Small Things and White Teeth, and Selasi has been praised by Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie. Northwest African American Museum, 2300 S Massachusetts St, 624-6600. Free. 7 pm.
Fri 3/22
MAGED ZAHER
Zaher is one of Seattle’s very best poets. Thank You for the Window Office calls on his relationship with his birth nation of Egypt and his day job as a software engineer. That background might be why his poems are fingerprint-unique. Open Books, 2414 N 45th St, 633-0811. Free. 7:30 pm.
NATALIE GOLDBERG
The author of Writing Down the Bones reads from her newest book, The True Secret of Writing Seattle Public Library, 1000 Fourth Avenue, 386-4636. Free. 7 pm.
APRIL BENEDICTION
OPENING PARTY
This is the opening celebration for APRIL (Authors, Publishers, and Readers of Independent Literature), the weeklong festival celebrating small presses in Seattle. Readers include Matthew Dickman, Rebecca Brown, and Summer Robinson, as well as a few other surprises and a special musical guest. Chop Suey, 1325 E Madison St, 324-8005. Free. 8 pm.
Tues 3/26
FRENCH BOOK SALE
The Alliance Francaise de Seattle is selling “dozens of boxes of books” ranging from fiction to classics to kids’ books. All the books are in French. Prices start at a nickel and go up from there. Trés adorable! Alliance Francaise de Seattle, 4649 Sunnyside Ave N #205, 632-5433. Free. 9 am.
APRIL HAPPY HOUR READING Here is
GOOD PEOPLE “
Good People is David LindsayAbaire’s recent comedy (with a few sharp teeth) about class in Boston that got two Tony nominations. Ellen McLaughlin plays Margie, a hard-luck lady from Southie who, in the play’s first scene, gets fired from her job at the dollar store because she’s been late too many times because she’s got an adult daughter with serious developmental disabilities. But Margie’s no hero—she can be a pain in the ass, she can be lazy—and Good People revels in reversing our expectations about its characters. When Margie looks up a childhood friend, who has become a doctor, to ask him for a job, Lindsay-Abaire can play up and down the scales of class in America. (There are some race elements too, but I don’t want to spoil any plot points.) Good People is good, not great, and sometimes treads dangerously close to the territory of Yasmina Reza ( Art God of Carnage ): jokes about class and culture that are really meant only for the rich. For example, on the night attended, when the doctor’s wife asked Margie what kind of cheese she would like and Margie answered, ‘Which one is Cracker Barrel?’ the crowd went
Longtime Seattle art fixtures Anne Focke, Norie Sato, and Ries Niemi discuss the “golden age” of indie collaboration in Seattle in the 1970s and 1980s. Frye Art Museum 704 Terry Ave, 622-9250. $15. Thurs Mar 21, 6:30 pm.
Mon 3/25
EAMON ESPEY
Cartoonist Espey presents a shadow puppet show adapting a chapter of his newest book, Songs of the Abyss, which is “based on the true story of a man that has often been referred to as ‘the last wild Indian’” and features Egyptian gods, biblical figures, and reveals Santa Claus’s true job: agent of Satan. Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030. $5. 7 pm.
BEHIND THE LEGEND OF JT LEROY Rebecca Brown, Sean Beaudoin, and Nicole Hardy will read work from Laura Albert, who is perhaps better known as the novelist JT Leroy, and Stranger editor Christopher Frizzelle will interview Albert onstage. Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030. $25/$20 for Hugo House members. 7:30 pm.
readings@thestranger.com
THEATER
Opening and Current Runs
ACROSS A LITTLE RED MARKER
“Set along the WashingtonCanada border in the 1980s, this taut little thriller by Jim Moran has a cinematic quality—tight lighting to illuminate one corner of the stage at a time, sharp blackouts to punctuate a joke or a threat, and eccentric small-town characters that wouldn’t be out of place in movies by the Coen brothers or David Lynch. Lisa Carswell plays an earnest and dutiful border patrol agent with a drinking problem whose husband disappeared in the jungles of Vietnam. The play opens with her inspecting a wooden statuette that her new life-insurance agent (David Foubert) is bringing back from Canada. The insurance man’s constant tic of a laugh tells us there’s trouble ahead. Directed by Jane Ryan, Across a Little Red Marker has its amateurish elements (a few too many surrealistic monologues by a madwoman who carries around a cage of grasshoppers, some uncomfortable and hesitant acting in a few of the latter scenes), but this world premiere is a frisky and entertaining play. If there is justice in the theater world, it will be worked on and picked up by bigger companies in other cities.” (Brendan Kiley) Eclectic Theater, 1214 10th Ave, 6793271. $12-$25. Thurs-Sat at 8 pm. Sun at 2 pm. Through April 7.
poor. The play is middling on its own merits, but could also use a redistribution of mockery.” (Brendan Kiley) Seattle Repertory Theater 155 Mercer St, Seattle Center, 443-2222. $12-$80. Wed-Fri at 7:30 pm, Sat-Sun at 2 and 7:30 pm. Through March 31. GREY GARDENS Directed by Kurt Beattie, this co-production with 5th Avenue Theater tracks the decline of the Beales (relatives of Jackie O) from polished socialites to eccentric recluses. Starring Patti Cohenour, Suzy Hunt, and Jessica Skerritt as the Beales. ACT Theater 700 E Union St, www.acttheatre.org. $55-$77. Tues-Wed at 7:30 pm, Thurs-Fri at 8 pm, Sat at 2 and 8 pm, Sun at 2 and 7 pm. Through May 26.
Dance
MODERN MASTERPIECES
See review, page 22. Pacific Northwest Ballet at McCaw Hall , 321 Mercer St, www. pnb.org. $28-$173. Thurs-Sat at 7:30 pm, Sun at 1 pm. Through March 24.
PROJECT SIX
A retrospective of work by choreographer-in-residence Jason Ohlberg: “Trinity,” based on Sartre’s No Exit ; “Gloria,” centered on Vivaldi’s choral work; and “Departure From 5th,” an expansion of a confessional piece Ohlberg began last season. ACT Theater, 700 E Union St, www.acttheatre.org. $15$25. Fri-Sat at 8 pm. Through March 30.
Special Events
CITIZEN UNIVERSITY PRESE NTS STANDING TALL: THE LESSONS OF LINCOLN Citizen University presents a panel on Lincoln and citizenship featuring playwright Tony Kushner (who also wrote the screenplay for Lincoln ), Constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar, writer Karl Weber, and Citizen University founder Eric Liu. This is part of a full day of events centered around the idea of citizenship with “the country’s most creative leaders, change makers and culture shapers.” See website for more details. SIFF Cinema at the Uptown 511 Queen Anne Ave N, citizenuniversity.us. Free with reservation. Sat March 23 at 7:30 pm.
theater@thestranger.com
Portrait of the Artist t
Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: The Treasures of Kenwood House, London
CHOW
Sweet and
Sour
Unmet Expectations at Fremont’s New Agrodolce
BY BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT
Whether or not Fremont needed an upscale Italian restaurant is an argument for a Marxist and a free-marketeer to enjoy, but Maria Hines’s new Agrodolce is going gangbusters. Try
to make a weekend reservation only a few days in advance, and you’ll end up eating at 9:15 p.m., an hour so late for Seattle that it’s surprising to find the place still packed, with everyone having a good time, albeit sedately so. The clientele runs to larger parties of older people with architect-emeritus eyeglasses (including, one night, not one but two Tom Skerritt look-alikes), younger people dining with their parents, and couples at last enjoying a proper upscale Italian Fremont date.
Agrodolce
709 N 35th St, 547-9707
agrodolcerestaurant.net
The room is a good one for all these occasions, as attested to by the persistence of former tenant 35th Street Bistro through a number of culinary ups and downs, and, before that, the long existence of the beloved Still Life Cafe. (Those still mourning the loss of the Still Life should note that lunch and brunch are available at Agrodolce, in case you want to bring a newspaper and pretend.) The updated decor is mercifully understated; neither neo-slick nor rustic/reclaimed, it is comfortable and well-lit, hitting that sweet spot of feeling appropriate for gazing into someone’s eyes but still lively overall. The pretty potted tree, aglow with white lights, remains at the room’s center (and effectively attracts attention away from a wallful of splotchy paintings, progressing through rainbow colors, which are so actively inoffensive that they almost achieve the opposite). In the back is a small bar and
cauliflower soup ($6) was creamy and hot and smooth, with fried chickpeas functioning admirably as a croutonlike crunch, but a combo of black olive vinaigrette and preserved lemon pushed it to the unrelenting sour-tart side. Like the soup, less would’ve been more with a plate of cured pork loin ($7): Nicely spiced with Aleppo pepper, it was doused in olive oil and covered with a fennel salad that would’ve been better placed on the side. The balance of the restaurant’s name—“agrodolce” means sour-and-sweet,
You may be underwhelmed by some of the housemade pastas.
traditionally achieved in Italian cooking with vinegar and sugar—was found in a bitter green salad ($7), with the nominal bitterness and a sour vinaigrette matched with sweet, fresh orange segments, further mitigated by the oozing of a soft-boiled egg so good, you could sense the happiness of the chicken that laid it.
DRINKIING WITH CHARLSE MUDEDE
BY CHARLES MUDEDE
LOUD LAUGHTER
THAT HURTS THE EARS
a tiny, charming lounge where you’ll wish you could have your dinner (it looks just right for happy hour, however, which Agrodolce has). It’s not just memories and geographic desirability drawing diners into Agrodolce; the very talented Maria Hines could open a restaurant anywhere, and crowds would come. Tilth, with its lush, comforting New American cuisine served in a Wallingford Craftsman bungalow, has been certified delicious pretty much unanimously, including by a James Beard Award. Her newer Golden Beetle in Ballard started what we may hope is a wave of Eastern Mediterranean food made with gorgeous ingredients, treated with care and subtlety (like, more recently, Mamnoon). And all three of Hines’s restaurants are certified organic, a length to which very few other local (or, for that matter, national) restaurateurs are willing to go.
All that being said, the food I’ve had so far at Agrodolce is by and large just fine, and for the work of Maria Hines, just fine is a little disappointing. The housemade focaccia ($3) seemed stiff one night, sitting all dinner long instead of getting eaten up like good focaccia should. The simple, great fried rice-ball snack arancini ($8) had a hard carapace, and its Skagit River Ranch beef Bolognese filling was on the sweet side, though a parsley pesto was a tasty, grassy touch. A
If you love the delicacy, the improbable lightness of homemade pasta, then you may be underwhelmed by some of Agrodolce’s offerings in the primi category. They are milling their own durum flour in-house, and both the tagliarini ($13/$19) and the cavatelli ($14/$19) had a sturdiness, even heaviness, to them—the former with a very subtly oceanic cream sauce made with uni; the latter with the winning combination of ground duck, wild mushrooms, and bacon, but also with a sweetish marsala sauce that was one-note and not very compelling. These both were met listlessly by the biggest fan of fresh pasta on the planet (that would be me). However, big, pillowy ricotta ravioli ($13/$19), made with different flour, were tender and cloudlike, with nettle filling and a green garlic–butter sauce that also almost floated on air: just great.
Another very good thing: A half of a chicken ($24), deboned except for the leg and roasted perfectly, had blackened lemon slices and that especially chickeny flavor that, again, makes you think about hen happiness. It came with semolina “pudding” that served as a buttery base for a sweet-tart mix of brussels sprouts, currants, capers, and pine nuts: a balance of flavors and textures that made those who were supposed to be sharing it fight over it instead. Lamb-and-pork crepinette ($26)—the meat not too finely ground, encased in the thinnest layer of melting fat— was unobtrusively spiced, exactingly savory, and possessed of a weightlessness that meat seldom achieves. This greatness was, unfortunately, accompanied by bitter artichokes, tough and sandy green lentils, and a sour vinegar taste that a bland, white puree did little to allay. A third main dish, rabbit cacciatore ($22), seemed like it should’ve been classed with the pastas, having lots of fregola and not so much rabbit, including zero larger pieces but several shards of bone.
It does not feel altogether right to take food like this—scrupulously sourced, carefully crafted, and, knowing Maria Hines, made with genuine love—and pick it apart, when, in fact, there’s nothing wrong with it. But right now, only a handful of things at Agrodolce seem to reflect her expertise in making food that you just never want to stop eating.
The Oak 3019 Beacon Ave S, 535-7070
I want to first begin by making it clear that I’m not a booze expert. Nor am I a wine connoisseur. This column, therefore, will not provide you with facts that can make you sound impressive and learned. No, there will be none of that. What I want to do instead is use this space to discuss what fascinates me more than anything else: human beings. Dogs bark, cats search for the most perfect spot to do nothing, squirrels dig and dig, crows look at you funny, seagulls swallow funny—in short, all the other animals bore me to tears.
But humans are endlessly entertaining and fascinating. They have big brains and all kinds of unexpected things come out of their mouths, especially when they are drinking. And this is the point: I don’t go to bars for the booze but for the people. One can drink alone at home, but that is always sad and even unproductive. You don’t learn anything from being by yourself. Drinking is always best when it’s social. In a word, I want the reader to consider this column as my small contribution to anthropology, the study of humans and their behavior.
With the remaining space of this column, let me tell you about my recent visit to a relatively new and lovely bar on Beacon Hill called the Oak—it’s run by the people
behind Redwood on Capitol Hill. I had drinks during this visit: a glass of white wine by Corfini Cellars ($6), a Seattle-based wine distribution company, and a cocktail called Booch Smooch ($7), which contains kombucha tea, cranberry juice, and vodka made by Sun Liquor.
What were these drinks like? I can’t really tell you, because each time I tried to think about the badness or goodness of the wine or to determine if the exotic cocktail was a success or not, a woman sitting with her friends at a table behind me would burst into the loudest and sharpest peals of laughter. Her laughter shattered any thought in my head into a thousand pieces and made me painfully aware of the fragility of my eardrums. When she wasn’t laughing, the eardrums were doing their business out of my mind’s sight; when she laughed, I could almost see them vibrating violently in the depths of my ear. Here is my question: Is there anything in life that’s really that funny? It’s just not possible. Humans are funny for sure, but not that funny. In any case, loud laughter is not good for the mind, ears, and soul. It also makes you sound crazy.
Comment on Drinkiing with Charlse Mudede at THESTRANGER.COM/CHOW
Chow Events
Sat 3/23
FRIENDLY GOATS
Excellent cheese shop the Calf & Kid takes a field trip to Yarmuth Farms, where you can meet one of the farmers and some of the udders responsible for making Seattle a cheesier place. The farm is promised to be breathtaking, the goats friendly. Afterward: lunch. Reservations required. The Calf & Kid , 1531 Melrose Ave, Suite C2, 467-5447. calfandkid.com. $65. 10 am-4 pm (plus Sat April 13, 10 am-4 pm).
Sun 3/24
FRENCH FEST French Education Northwest fills a “local void” with this daylong event celebrating
French-speaking communities the world over, instead of just those in-France French. Bon temps! Seattle Center House , 305 Harrison St, Seattle Center. fenpnw.org. 11 am-6 pm.
PLATE OF NATIONS A United Nations’ worth of restaurants all up and down MLK Way—all locally/independently owned, including Olympic Express, the Original Philly’s, Thai Palms, Karama, and St. Dames—offer $15 to $25 shareable meal specials. Our friend Jill Lightner, editor of Edible Seattle, exclaims: “Halal Vietnamese! Cheesesteaks! Laotian! Somali (yes, with unnecessary bananas!)! Vegetarian with *awesome* cocktails! Etc. as only Rainier Valley’s ‘etc.’ can be!” Various locations. plateofnations. com. March 24-April 6.
MEANS WE RECOMMEND IT. SEND EVENT INFO TO: chow@thestranger.com
The Tin Lizzie Lounge is a newish component to the MarQueen Hotel, the thoroughly lovely brick building in Lower Queen Anne that’s been around for 100 years. To replicate a historic mood, there are floral still-life paintings, granite countertops, and tinpaneled ceilings, and an ornate armoire is spotlighted behind the bar, bringing a shrinelike presence. Plenty of modern flourishes are mixed in, too: zebra-print tuffets, tabletops of sturdy bluish glass with tiny suspended bubbles. The scene feels generally richer and more grownup, so leave your hat crocheted from Old Milwaukee beer cans at home.
Saturday evening happenings: It’s a full bar, and people are calmly tossing around sentences coded with delightfully horrifying information: “The bride had alcohol poisoning during the wedding, her sister kept flipping off the cameras.” “My lips are tattooed, my eyeliner is tattooed.” “I bought a Jagerator earlier this week, it’s sitting in my living room.”
Happy hours: Daily 4–7 pm, Sun–Thurs 10 pm–close.
Happy-hour drink specials: $2 off wine; $1 off wells and beer, which means $3.66 drafts (Manny’s, Roger’s) and $2.65–$4.25 bottles (Blue Moon, Strongbow Cider, BridgePort IPA, more).
Bonus: Varying weekday discounts! On Thursdays, ladies get specialty cocktails for half the price—the $5 Mary Pickford has white rum, pineapple juice, and grenadine.
Happy-hour food specials: A nice menu with many fancy choices—$5 prosciutto-wrapped melon and fresh greens; $5 crostini with black olive tapenade; $7 Italian salami panini with roasted red pepper, mozzarella, pesto mayo. MARTI JONJAK
MUSIC
Invisible Rhythms
Talking with Doug Aitken, Creator of MIRROR
BY TRENT MOORMAN
On Sunday, March 24, Seattle Art Museum will unveil MIRROR, a new permanent installation created by Los Angeles–based conceptual artist Doug Aitken. The main component
of MIRROR is a horizontal LED display that wraps around the northwest corner of SAM, projecting images that dissolve and flow into narrow columns of light running up and down the building’s face. The images come from an archive of video footage Aitken shot in Seattle and around the Pacific Northwest. Once the installation is up and running, the visual sequences will vary constantly due to sensors that detect changes in the building’s surroundings, such as weather, traffic, and light.
MIRROR Unveiling Sun March 24, Seattle Art Museum, 6:30–7:30 pm, free
MIRROR was commissioned by Bagley Wright before his death last year. Wright and his wife, Jinny, collaborated with Aitken, aiming to transform the museum’s facade into an urban earthworking mirror that reflects the changing rhythms of the city. For MIRROR’s unveiling, First Avenue downtown will be blocked off and lined with food trucks, and there will be performances of pieces by minimalist composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley (the 77-year-old Riley will be on hand, conducting), which will be synchronized to the installation. Aitken spoke over lunch at the Athenian in Pike Place, overlooking Elliott Bay and the peristalsis of the Great Wheel.
What was the very first thing you did for this project? The initial idea was unorthodox. How do we create this thing that can change? That’s when I realized there wasn’t a lot of visual art that I could use as a stepping-off point—I couldn’t look at a Bruce Nauman
move through a script, and it’s finished. With this, the project was never finished; there’s no protagonist, the landscape has to be the language. I used editing to create this invisible rhythm—how often shots are replaced by other ones, how often a shot repeats. It lets the work have its own internal time code or pulse.
Because it doesn’t need to be cinematic, you can slow down and let your eye really look at something. There might be a shot lasting 30 minutes or an hour, and that’s okay—that could never exist in other areas of moving image. But here, maybe you walk by SAM, go have lunch, then walk by again after, and the image has changed just a little bit. Then there are other moments where it becomes really abstract and staccato [hits table, mimicking staccato] like a Stan Brakhage film. Moving, smeared light and colors creating their own tempo and rhythm.
“The art is living on its own—it’s never really consumable.”
[Pause. My eggs Benedict looks like a face. The yolk-eyes stare out blankly. I pepper them. Aitken eats a French dip and talks, never chewing with his mouth open.] The strange thing is that the piece is going to exist in such a way that I don’t think anyone will be able to see the entire work. And that’s what I’m after. I like that challenge [laughs].
Will there be cameras faced out from SAM? Will people walking by be able to see themselves on the screen? No, I wanted to remove that. I don’t want it to be technology, where it’s cause and effect. I want it to be much more abstract. A person looking at it might not know why a certain image is being used, but the images are sensing things around you. The building is able to sense its environment—maybe it’s the temperature of the wind, or atmospheric fluctuations.
sculpture, for instance, or a Mondrian painting and say, “This relates to what we’re trying to do here.” So I wound up looking at the structure of minimalist music, and that became the framework I used to create this. When I looked at reductive music like La Monte Young, or Terry Riley, or Steve Reich— pieces that are continuously reduced down to modal structures and repetitious patterns—I realized that’s the way we needed to design this work. We needed to create an invisible system that could relate to and mirror what’s happening around it, like a living composition.
Where were some of the places you shot footage for MIRROR? The footage covers a wide spectrum of landscapes and approaches, from complete abstraction to representational images. I ended up filming everything myself—I started at SAM and made five radial rings outward, all the way out to the Olympic Peninsula and the Pacific Ocean. The rings mapped out different areas of the landscape—some very natural with few signs of human habitation, others where you find you’re completely inside the concrete grid.
What did you think of the Washington Coast? I really liked it out there. I had to reconsider how I shot it, because it wasn’t the sort of thing you could film like cinema. In cinema, you’re often following a character—you’re shooting transitions. You
What were some of your initial ideas that went into making MIRROR? I became really interested in this idea because it goes against the way a lot of people view art: “It’s art when it’s hanging on a museum wall, and it’s frozen.” Then you calibrate whether you like it or dislike it, if you relate to that work. You’re in flux and the object is frozen. This idea challenges that. The art is living on its own—it’s never really consumable. I wanted to see if aspects of this frozen, formal building could reflect and refract that which is around it.
Some artists use a brush and canvas, some use a chisel, or a chain saw with ice sculpture, but you use communication. How do put your ideas out there so other people can latch onto them? I do like ice [laughs]. Communication is, like you say, another version of the paintbrush or an instrument to me—something I do to actualize the ideas. I think that just comes out of necessity. You have to find a way to bring certain things into form—to take them from your head and put them into existence, so they can be shared. You believe in things, we’re not going to be here that long. I want to make them happen.
So when will the Doug Aitken Chainsaw Ice Sculpture Happening occur? Clearly, that’s next. What would you sculpt out of ice?
A margarita…
Read the rest of this interview at THESTRANGER.COM/MUSIC
WHAT'S CRAPPENING?
• Eugenie Jones sounded like old-fashioned jazz magic at Columbia City’s Royal Room last Friday night, except for the less-magic moment when she explained what Kickstarter is from the stage. Her new recording, Black Lace Blue Tears, is available online (along with her Kickstarter).
• On Saint Patrick’s Day on Sunday, we couldn’t help but notice there was only a SINGLE green-and-white Cat in the Hat hat spotted in all of Belltown, and only two instances of shamrock-shaped glasses in all three stories of the downtown Target. Step it up, Seattle, step it up.
• The second annual Balkan Night Northwest started off on Friday night at the Russian Community Center. Revelers of all ages celebrated the food, music, and culture of Southeast Europe—a swelling circle of dancers rotated to the music pumped out by several live bands, including the bass-anddrum ensemble Orkestar Zirkonium. The highlight of the evening was when the jubilant cook sprang from the kitchen and performed a mock striptease with his apron.
• The Catheters played the Stranger’s Penumbra bash on Saturday at King’s Hall, and they killed it—proving that sometimes you can take an eightor nine-year break and start right back up, as long as there’s enough beer present.
• If you’re in London on March 27, you may want to check out Mirroring, the duo of Seattle’s Tiny Vipers (aka Jesy Fortino) and Portland’s Grouper (aka Liz Harris); they are playing the Yard club there. In case you missed it, Mirroring’s beautiful ambientfolk album Foreign Body was one of last year’s highlights.
• Up-and-coming Seattle septet Rose Windows had to cancel their SXSW shows due to the illness of vocalist Rabia Qazi. Guitarist Chris Cheveyo elaborates: “We will continue home as a six-piece filling the souls of whoever will listen for the remainder of our Southern tour. If you were looking forward to seeing us, please come show your support. We will return once again full in May to kill you with kindness.”
• Snoop Lion (previously Snoop Dogg, previously previously Snoop Doggy Dogg) debuted his new reggae-centric self at SXSW over the weekend. We were hoping his spiritual awakening meant interesting stage duds and wildly varied new material, but from what we heard and saw, he dressed in regular Snoop attire and dipped into past hits from The Chronic (ha-ha, HITS) and other classics, vaguely dubbing them up for the occasion.
• Gossip’s Beth Ditto was arrested in Portland and charged with disorderly conduct after reportedly being denied service at the Bungalo Bar. A source told Willamette Weekly that after Ditto was ejected from the bar, she allegedly “walked out in the middle of the street, threw off her shoes and purse, and screamed ‘Obama! Obama!’” FYI: Ditto’s mug shot shows the ravishing leading lady nearperfect eyeliner. How is that possible?
DOUG AITKEN Checks out his competition over at the Giant Shoe Museum.
TRENT MOORMAN
EMILY NOKES
Shock Value Iceage’s Alarming Imagery
BY MIKE RAMOS
I’m an avid listener of rap and hiphop in both my personal life and in a “professional” (ha-ha, right?) capacity, not only as a contributor to this fine newspaper’s music section, but as a regular programming assistant and sometimes full-blown DJ/host for KEXP’s Street Sounds. And, just like any fan of the genre, I place a special value on finding a great, forward-thinking, explicitly non-rap album to enjoy every once in a while. I thought I had found my very first of 2013 when a friend forwarded me You’re Nothing, Copenhagen quartet Iceage’s second record.
Hard and sharp but still youthfully chaotic, the experimental punk sound grabbed me from the start. The quartet’s new album shows clear progress from their 2011 debut, New Brigade—taking more risks by venturing into no-wavy major-key progressions (see the driving opener, “Ecstasy”), hints of pop melodies (the Thin Lizzy–esque “Rodfæstet”), and even a light power ballad (“Morals”),
who took it further than Iceage with their (at that time) ultraviolent, homophobic, and misogynistic lyrical content (group “leader” Tyler, the Creator even frequently equated them with “black Nazis”). Though the genres (and races) of the accused are different, the discourse is almost identical from both sides, even defenders’ go-to cop-outs. “Iceage can’t be racists, their drummer is Jewish” is the new “Odd Future can’t be woman-hating homophobes, they have a gay female DJ!”
I personally have listened to, “supported” (through buying music or attending shows), and even publicly defended Odd Future in comments on Line Out, The Stranger’s music blog. So why does white-supremacist imagery used by young Danish kids scare me, when I “gave a pass” to artists with actual lyrics about raping women and degrading homosexuals?
while remaining firmly grounded in their fast and loud musical roots. I thought I had found a new favorite rock band, and planned on attending their March 21 show at Barboza. That is, until I was alerted to some serious allegations leveled against them, when all the band’s alleged racist, fascist, and white-supremacist glory was brought up on music criticism website/think tank Collapse Board.
A Collapse Board contributor displayed a collection of the band’s questionable imagery, pointing to the “New Brigade” music video (which shows the band members in pointed, hooded masks, carrying torches), singer Elias Ronnenfelt’s zine illustrations (of an apparent white versus Muslim “race riot” and hooded figures—one even sporting a huge Iron Cross symbol—brandishing knives around an intimidated victim), guitarist Johan Wieth’s Death in June logo tattoo (known Nazi sympathizer Douglas Pearce’s band), and the list goes on. Even Iceage’s own logo—used on flags, shirts, and the signature knives the band sold as merchandise on their last tour—takes elements from a life rune, a well-known hate symbol (one the Nazis used for the Lebensborn Project, a bizarre breeding program aimed at creating a future generation of perfect Aryan children). This certainly isn’t the first time a European rock band has used a shock aesthetic, and after a more intensive listen to their lyrics (typical angst-ridden ramblings), these eyebrow-raising decisions seem to be just that—an aesthetic. When put forth as a vague “artistic choice” with no context or known intent, it becomes just an allegation that can be denied in interviews a thousand times over.
Not exactly the kind of stuff a multiracial Seattle resident wants to align his views with.
But then what had my views been in the past? One of the most notable recent media discussions about shock value involved Los Angeles skate-rap collective Odd Future,
The answer has everything to do with privilege. Being a straight male and longdesensitized rap fan, I was only lightly disturbed by, and had no real problem with, Earl Sweatshirt saying, “Truck-smack a faggot in his Shirley Temple” or Tyler, the Creator chanting, “Swag, swag, punch a bitch.”
While my inner moral compass still pointed to “wrong,” there was no emotional connection firing off synapses in my brain, telling me I was truly offended. But something about the evidence mounting against Iceage disturbed my left-wing, racial-minority frame of thought. The idea of potentially white-supremacist European youths gaining a dedicated following of like-minded fans actually alarmed me—probably in the same way that most decent people were alarmed by the potential of homophobic, misogynist rappers basically doing the same thing (though I’m sure neither of these even comes close to how alarming the potential reality of getting raped or randomly bullied/victimized while walking home late at night might be to a woman or gay man).
Maybe, as Iceage has suggested in multiple interviews, “it’s only about music and, you know, feelings.” This might all be bullshit, the product of bored people typing on the internet. They could just be a group of young dudes making hard-ass, modern punk rock, complete with an edgy aesthetic reflecting both the good and bad influences of their surrounding environment (this is the excuse I used for Odd Future, after all).
But regardless of specific intent, violent or hateful ideas—especially ones directed against minority populations—can seep into other elements of culture, reabsorbing into the collective consciousness. Odd Future’s popularity spawned plenty of copycats and wannabes using their same shock content, but without a trace of “artistic irony” that somehow “artistically” justifies it.
So while Iceage may not intend to be directly racist, fascist, supremacist, or any other kind of -ist, proliferating these negative ideas in the world, with little to no reason for it other than it just looks cool, potentially hinders much-needed understanding and progress on one of the realest issues in this corner of this country, if not the entire world.
Iceage
Thu Mar 21
Fri Mar 22
Fri Mar 22
HARD ROCK RISING BATTLE 3
W/ FRACTAL NATIVE | DICE | SEVENS REVENGE | SLEEPYPILOT AND TSAVO ROCK | 8PM FREE | ALL AGES!
Sat Apr 6 OPUS W/ J. CHARLES NEO SOUL | 9PM $10 ADVANCE | $15 DOORS
Thu Apr 11 HARD ROCK RISING FINALS
(ALL AGES/BAR W/ID) OFF WITH THEIR HEADS
SATURDAY MARCH 23RD (21 & OVER) LOUNGE SHOW APE MACHINE BEEN OBSCENE, BITCHES CRYSTAL, SHROUDED IN VEILS, PLUS GUESTS
&
MY PHILOSOPHY
HOODIE ALLEN, THEESATISFACTION, FRENCH MONTANA
The last few weeks, I’ve been tortured by the rise of frattish white-guy good-time rap (what’s a better time than that, after all)—not because such a perspective or such a person isn’t valid, but because I fear it will become the dominant paradigm in rap. (Not that the current dominating paradigm of mercenary materialism and degradation is any better!) They just don’t stop, it seems. Instead of Wax and G-Eazy successively selling out the Crocodile, we have your boy Hoodie Allen selling out the Showbox on Wednesday, March 20 (along with Aer, Jared Evan, and Seattle’s Shelton Harris). If you ever wanted to see Eli Roth doing Drake-aroke, then STOP: HOODIE TIME. Wikipedia tells me that he called his 2012 EP All American “because he credits his success to America.” Yep, PRETTY MUCH. This shit is not just a lane, it is daily growing into a 12-lane highway—everybody else better get some good-ass tires (and spares) for the dirt roads they’re going to be relegated to. Not sure what I’m talking about, dumb-head rapper? You will be.
Ah, I’m just trippin’, right? I mean, maybe you’re right. Oh, hey, teenage-Claire’semployee-ternt-rapper Kitty Pryde! You’re playing at the Crocodile on Thursday the 21st with Lisa Dank? That’s wassup…
The real money this week, in my opinion, is—and you might’ve already guessed—the THEESatisfaction, Kingdom Crumbs, Sax G, and OCnotes show at Neumos on Friday, March 22. This potent lineup, curated by our homegrown “DIY demigods” Cloud Nice, gets a good portion of Seattle’s freest makers of hiphop (or whatever) together in one room. Catch up if need be—spin through the browser of your choice checking THEESatisfaction’s latest release, THEESatisfaction Loves Erykah Badu, listen to Kingdom Crumbs’ self-titled album (if you’re like me, for the millionth time, and it ain’t tired yet). I just told y’all about Sax G’s fly Tu Me Manques, and OCnotes has so much dope music online, it’s (going to be) a (federal) crime (someday). This show represents the antidote to the “all American” that lives here. What city do you live in?
French Montana is certainly going to be at the Crocodile the next night, he certainly is. I’ve never been able to take French terribly serious, but taking people serious isn’t always necessary at all. If you like fur hats, leather T-shirts, and estate-sale princess jewelry (I’MA TAKE YOUR GRANDMA’S STYLE, I’MA TAKE YOUR GRANDMA’S STYLE), this is the show for you! Will he have 9-year-old ass-slapping Lil Poopy on deck, exemplifying how a generation failed its children? I DON’T KNOW. Also, one-woman band and MC/producer K. Flay (from the Bay) will be at the Croc on Monday the 25th, with WD4D, and she’s good, but she’s never worn an animal head as far as I know, so advantage: French. So whatcha gonna do this week? Stay your ass home? Make your own music that you’d rather see out in the world? Tweet? Make your next move your best move, or just do your best if you’re being gentrified out of your neighborhood or culture or whatever.
TIMBERLAKE
HIPHOP YA DON'T STOP BY LARRY MIZELL JR.
French Montana
UP&COMING
Seven-minute songs about mummies every night this week!
For the full music calendar, see page 39 or visit thestranger.com/music
For ticket on-sale announcements, follow twitter.com/seashows
Wednesday 3/20
La Luz, Heatwarmer, Mega Bog (Heartland) UGH. This lineup is filled with music that is so wonderful, it will make your heart ache. La Luz’s ’60s-inspired girl-group surf rock is impeccably executed, and it’s delivered with the same stoic indifference infamously pasted on the faces of mod go-go dancers. The songs themselves, though, are so catchy that you won’t mind the so-pristineit’s-almost-robotic performance. Plus, you’ll need the rest after working up a sweat during Heatwarmer’s set. Their video for the song “Rejoice” is literally a dance party. The song is part Who guitar explosions, part Weezer power pop, part eight-bit geek-out, and part yacht rock, and I love it so much that while writing this blurb, I’ve listened to it three times, and I can’t bring myself to check out the rest of their songs. I’m good with this, really. It literally has all I need from a song crammed into five great minutes.
MEGAN SELING
Document Swell, Yolke, Rainbow Wolves, Big Yawn (High Dive) This Australian label Fallopian Tunes is fab. Producer Document Swell (Simon Cotter) creates a special strain of 21st-century exotica, but with beat science influenced by J. Dilla. Go to Document Swell’s Soundcloud page and check out “Rainforestation” and “Dust Infauna” for a strange hit of the Other. It’ll put a fresh bounce in your head-nod game. From the small sampling of Yolke songs I could find, they sound like a less grandiose Tame Impala, a less virtuosic Tortoise, and a warmer To Rococo Rot. Big Yawn—who could use a name change—combine big, quasi-danceable beats with
ominous industrial-rock atmospheres. Show these excellent Oz musicians some atypical Emerald City hospitality. DAVE SEGAL
Thursday 3/21
Iceage, King Dude, GAG (Barboza) See preview, page 31.
French Horn Rebellion, Japanther, the Kitchen (Chop Suey) It turns out that French Horn Rebellion are the product of two (zany!) brothers who literally rebelled against playing the French horn (they were once members of the Chicago Civic Orchestra) in favor of making dance beats. And boy, are those dance beats dance-y! Robert and David PerlickMolinari create endlessly giddy, girl-crazy escalator disco for neon party people. Also playing: our old friends Japanther! Everyone’s favorite Pratt brats (a Brooklyn duo who’ve been making arty and infectious noise rock/punk for more than a decade) will spill their catchy and sweaty jams all over Chop Suey until your legs can’t dance anymore. EMILY NOKES
Friday 3/22
THEESatisfaction, Kingdom Crumbs, Sax G, OCnotes (Neumos) See Stranger Suggests, page 19, and My Philosophy, page 33.
Magma Fest: Lié, Koban, Black Hat, Bardo:Basho, Daniel Shuman (Heartland) See Underage, page 44.
Jeff Samuel, Centrikal, Manos, Nora Posch (Electric Tea Garden) See Data Breaker, page 41.
Thee Samedi, Elch, Seth Engle/ John White, Superprojection, That’s Cashed (Sallal Grange Hall, North Bend) See Underage, page 44.
Ted Leo, Deathfix (Vera) Okay, okay, there’s a pretty obvious conflict of interest here that I might as well get out of the way: Ted Leo is my boyfriend. Kidding, of course! I’m married! To Ted Leo. When Ted Leo is not busy making me vegan waffles in our tree-fort mansion, he’s out touring the land (as he’s been doing for the last twentysome years strong), keeping it real with his indie-punk hits that ring sincere without being cheesy, political without being annoying, and upbeat without being… I don’t know… Julie Andrews? Viva la Leo! As for Deathfix, writer Megan Seling tells me: “They have this song about celebrity houses that’s like seven minutes long—it grew on me.”
White Lung, Monogamy Party, Tacocat, DJ Nik C (Chop Suey) Vancouver’s White Lung play some of the no-bullshittiest of no-bullshit punk in recent years. Their 2012 album, Sorry, ramalamas with lethal linearity, caustically topped by Mish Way’s piercing, Poly Styrene–esque vocals. Kenneth William’s guitar works as a trebly ice pick to your noggin, and the beats tick over at a breathless pace. White Lung briskly get to the point (longest song on Sorry: 2:14), and you feel it immediately and intensely.
DAVE SEGAL
Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Foxygen, Wampire (Crocodile) Sam France and Jonathan Rado grew up in the Los Angeles suburb of Westlake Village and learned how to play a truckload of instruments before parting ways for college (France to Olympia). They reunited as Foxygen, and boy is that a good thing. Foxygen traverse sounds of classic-rock greats and a host of other genres with respect and perspicacity. They make what the Kinks, Bowie, and the Stones do seem easy, at times imitating them with impressive acumen; it always comes off as homage
rather than derivative. It doesn’t hurt that Foxygen inject healthy doses of their own invention into the proceedings or that they possess keen skill at writing nonchalant gems. Keep your ear on Foxygen, as they seem bound for greatness. GRANT BRISSEY
Nile, Theories, Funeral Age, Phalgeron, Bloodhunger, Those Who Lie Beneath (El Corazón) After they’ve spent 20 years grinding out uncompromising, skull-crushing, Egyptianthemed death metal (though they call North Carolina home), it’s safe to say we know what to expect from a Nile show: blast beats, double-necked guitars, skullets, seven-minute songs about mummies, pharaohs, kings, sweatpants, and last but not least, a whole lot of brutality. This time around, there are no touring openers, leaving four empty slots for some of the best local metal bands to showcase the rage—tech-death metallers Bloodhunger, blackened death-dealers Funeral Age, power/thrash metal trio Phalgeron, and Portland’s Those Who Lie Beneath. Rip thy bong. Bang thy head. Repeat. KEVIN DIERS
Saturday 3/23
Thrones, Midlife Vacation, Mutant Video, Total Life (Heartland) See Underage, page 44.
Magma Fest: Rafael Anton Irisarri, Marielle Jakobsons, Logic Probe, XUA, Chrisman/Svenson (Hollow Earth Radio) See Data Breaker, page 41.
Chelsea Light Moving, Grass Widow (Neumos) Could Chelsea Light Moving be Thurston Moore’s midlife-crisis hot rod after his breakup with longtime wife and Sonic Youth bandmate Kim Gordon? Possibly. But whatever the cause, the clangorously rocking self-titled album by Moore’s new, younger outfit bears the hallmarks of a man bristling with renewed vitality after more than a decade of relatively sluggish Sonic Youth efforts—check the molten “Alighted” for one example among many. Grass Widow’s nonchalantly pretty, lo-fi rock is a pure, understated joy. No current band does a better
FRIDAY MARCH 22 | 7:30 PM TED LEO, DEATHFIX
$11 ($10 W. CLUB CARD)
MARCH
WEDNESDAY APRIL 10 | 7:30 PM AN EVENING WITH TORI KELLY $11 ($10 W. CLUB CARD)
FRIDAY APRIL 12 | 7:30 PM
JAYMAY, KYE ALFRED HILLIG, KAYOKO
$11 ($10 W. CLUB CARD)
SATURDAY APRIL 13 | 7:30 PM SAM LACHOW, RAZ SIMONE, GIFT UH GAB, DAVE B $16 ($15 W. CLUB CARD)
FRIDAY APRIL 19 | 7:30 PM TIFFANY ALVORD, JASON CHEN
$13 ($12 W. CLUB CARD) VIP TICKETS ALSO AVAILABLE.
SATURDAY APRIL 20 | 7:30 PM THE MEN, DUDE YORK
$11 ($10 W. CLUB CARD) ADVANCE
job of nailing mellifluous, multipart vocal harmonies to shaggy, hooky post-punk than this San Francisco trio. It makes total sense that Grass Widow opened for Raincoats when those British legends did their US reunion tour. Check out Grass Widow’s coolly melodious 2012 release, Internal Logic, for nonstop chills. DAVE SEGAL See also Stranger Suggests, page 19.
Iris DeMent
(Triple Door) In 1992, I was living in Seattle and working at a bookstore owned and primarily staffed by lesbians, nearly all of whom loved good contemporary folk music. So when Nanci Griffith brought her ’92 tour to the Paramount, nearly all my coworkers went, and every single one of them came back raving about the opening act, a woman who stood alone onstage with just a guitar and a humongous voice and the most beautiful songs you’d ever heard. The performer, of course, was Iris DeMent, who’d just released her debut album and was winning fans everywhere she opened her mouth. Two decades later, DeMent is back in Seattle, touring in support of Sing the Delta, her first album of all-new material in 16 years. No one who appreciates good old-fashioned country-folk should miss it. DAVID SCHMADER
Federation X, the Valley, Tacos!
(Sunset) Of course a band called Tacos! would end their name with an exclamation point, because tacos are great! Exclamation point! But if you’re going to have the guts to name your band after one of the greatest foods ever created, then you better do ’em some justice. Thankfully, Tacos! do. The local duo, featuring former members of Sugar Sugar Sugar and Migas (these dudes like food), punish your ears in the same way as other badass, hard-banging bands—like Think Big Business and the Melvins. Hear it for yourself at tacosband.bandcamp.com—“The Eclipse” and “Cobra” are especially good for blasting that midafternoon haze out of your brain. MEGAN SELING
Sunday 3/24
Joey Bada$$, Pro Era, Flatbush Zombies, the Underachievers (Neumos) Even if ’90s boom-bap revivalist Joey
Bada$$ hadn’t tried to start an online beef with Lil B “the BasedGod” that involved the Brooklyn teen recording a “dis track” in which he rhymed “lyrical missiles” with “rip through your tissue” (which I think about 85 percent of people that have ever freestyled have used some form of) and getting harassed by the BasedGod’s #TASKFORCE online contingent to the point of deleting his Twitter account (which I’m informed is the 2013 equivalent of getting killed in a drive-by shooting), there would still be his last Seattle show. From having zero stage or mic presence, to trying to get a Neumos crowd to chant along with calls of “Brooklyn” and “East Coast,” and even awkwardly botching handshakes with fans in the front row and having a joint passed onstage to his hype man fizzle out when he tried to hit it, it was probably the worst live rap set I have ever witnessed. But hey, REAL HIPHOP, right? MIKE RAMOS
Monday 3/25
SISU, Wooden Burial Ground, the Heligoats
(Chop Suey) The Heligoats lured me into listening to their Back to the Ache CD with a spot-on parody of the cover art for Wings’ Back to the Egg, a 1979 album that’s freighted with an inordinate amount of nostalgia for me, although I haven’t listened to it in decades. Would this be an homage to that quirky, back-to-rock-basics record by Paul McCartney during one of his awkward phases? Um, not really. Instead, Back to the Ache sounds like the sort of earnest, jangly, folky pop that most people listening to indie music in the ’80s called “college rock.” Think ponderous Trouser Press Guide footnotes like Guadalcanal Diary and Miracle Legion (you remember them, right?), and shake your head over the nefarious presence of red-herring album art. DAVE SEGAL
hypertalented 23-year-old high-school dropout named Seth Sutton. Based in Nashville, Sutton writes, produces, sings, and plays most every instrument on the Useless Eaters’ new LP, Hypertension People open to 23-year-olds starting garage-punk bands—after clearly being influenced by artists on the UK label Rough Trade circa the late ’70s—will be able to appreciate the Eaters’ dark, angsty leanings. Garage-rock purists might pee-shaw Hypertension, finding no use for it at all. I say it’s worth at least taking a bite. KELLY O
Major Lazer, Angel Haze, Lunice (Showbox Sodo) Diplo and his Mad Decent label have been wildly increasing their influence in the EDM scene—Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” for example, came out on Mad Decent subsidiary Jeffrees popularizing dancehall, dub, reggae, and other bass-centric styles. For their new Free the Universe full-length, Major Lazer have reeled in an eclectic cast of guest musicians like Dirty Projectors’ Amber Coffman, Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, Peaches, Bruno Mars, Wyclef Jean, Santigold, Flux Pavilion, and Busy Signal. This is still primarily hyperanimated, alpha-human party music—an unabashed soundtrack for your next Caribbean-themed bash.
DAVE SEGAL
Doldrums, Sean Nicholas Savage (Barboza) Doldrums is 23-year-old Canadian Airick Woodhead, who just dropped the album Lesser Evil on Arbutus Records. The songs here skew toward the cute and hazy end of the electronic-pop spectrum. Sometimes Doldrums dips into bass music’s trunk-rattling low-end pummel; sometimes he tilts into Mouse on Mars’s wonderfully wobbly songcraft embellished with animalistic gurgles, birdsong twittering, and insectoid chittering; sometimes he achieves a weird keyboard drone that hovers between those made famous by Soft Machine and This Heat. Vocally, dude sounds like a lady, but he can sing better and with more sweet emotion than most one-man electro projects. Woodhead reportedly sometimes has two drummers accompanying him live; let’s hope they appear tonight to augment Doldrums’ intricately wonky beat programming.
DAVE SEGAL
Suey)
THURSDAY MARCH 21ST ICEAGE
KING DUDE + GAG
SUDAY MARCH 24TH FOL CHEN ROYAL CANOE
• 4/27 Marble 14 Year ft. Darth & Vader • 4/28 Aesop Rock • 4/30 Killing Joke • 5/1 New Build • 5/3 Jimpster • 5/4 METZ • 5/7 Alice Russell • 5/10 Cody Beebe & The Crooks
WEDNESDAY MARCH 27TH DUCKTAILS MARK MCGUIRE + MONOPOLY CHILD STAR SEARCHERS
THURSDAY MARCH 28TH THE FLAVR BLUE JUS MONI + WD4D + DJ BLUEYEDSOUL
SATURDAY MARCH 30TH MERCHANDISE WET HAIR + NAOMI PUNK
TUESDAY MARCH 26TH DOLDRUMS SEAN NICHOLAS SAVAGE COMING UP 3/20 Davidson Hart Kingsbery • 3/31 Poeina Suddarth• 4/2 Love and Light • 4/5 Lucy Rose • 4/4 JK Pop! • 4/6 Sky Ferreira + How To Dress Well • 4/9 EPROM • 4/10 Xperience • 4/11 The Quiet Ones • 4/16 GladKill • 4/17 A Tribe Called Red •
COPPER GATE Ron Weinstein Trio, 8 pm, $5 a CROCODILE Colt Kraft, Sibling Rivalry, SuperProjection, 8 pm, $5
a EL CORAZON The Story So Far, Man Overboard, Tonight Alive, Citizen. the American Scene, Harvest States, 7 pm, $13/$15
a HEARTLAND La Luz, Heatwarmer, Mega Bog, 8 pm
HIGH DIVE Document Swell, Yolke, Rainbow Wolves, Big Yawn, 8 pm, $6
HIGHWAY 99 Dirty Rice, 8 pm, $6
JAZZ ALLEY Kyle Eastwood Band, 7:30 pm, $22.50 NEW ORLEANS Legacy Band, Clarence Acox
PINK DOOR Casey MacGill
& the Blue 4 Trio, 8 pm
THE ROYAL ROOM Elnah Jordan, 7:30 pm, free
a SHOWBOX AT THE MARKET Hoodie Allen, Aer, Jared Evan, 7 pm, $20/$25 SHOWBOX SODO Beausoleil Avec Michael Doucet, 7 pm, $21.50/$26.50
SUNSET TAVERN Service Animal , Conduct Party, Animals in Cars, $6
TRIPLE DOOR Anais Mitchell, Jefferson Hammer, 7:30 pm, $15; Musicquarium: Afrocop , 8:30 pm, free TULA’S Thomas Marriott’s Flexicon, 7 pm, $10
VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE The Brad Gibson Trio
DJ
BALTIC ROOM Reverb: DJ Rome, Rozzville, Zooty B, Antartic
a CENTURY BALLROOM DJ Alison
CONTOUR Rotation Tryouts: Guests THE EAGLE VJDJ Andy J ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN Passage: Jayms Nylon, Joey Webb, guests FOUNDATION Big Chocolate, Just One, PressHa, Iris, Headie, free HAVANA SoulShift: Peter Evans, Devlin Jenkins, Richard Everhard, $1 LAST SUPPER CLUB Vibe Wednesday: Jame$Ervin, DT, Contagious
LAVA LOUNGE Mod Fuck Explosion: DJ Deutscher
Meister MOE BAR The Hump: DJ Darwin, DJ Swervewon, guests, 10:30 pm, free NEIGHBOURS Undergrad: Guest DJs, 18+, $5/$8
PONY Body 2 Body, 10 pm
SEE SOUND LOUNGE Fade: DJ Chinkyeye, DJ Christyle, 10 pm
THURS 3/21
LIVE
2 BIT SALOON Cottonwood
Cutups, Adam! France, Jason Kay BARBOZA Iceage, King Dude, GAG, 7 pm, $12 BARÇA Clark Gibson Trio, free BLUE MOON TAVERN Prefunk, Bastard Sons of Norway, Caleb & Walter CAFE RACER Earl Brooks CAN CAN Vince Mira CHOP SUEY French Horn Rebellion, Japanther, Kitchen, guests, $10 COLUMBIA CITY THEATER The Spinning Whips , Mystery Ships. the Valley , $8
COMET Nuke IG, Loyalty Is Blue, Whitney Lyman, guests, $7
CONOR BYRNE Phosphenes. the Faradays , City Bear, $7 COPPER GATE Fu Kun Wu
IT’S PADDY, NOT PATTY!
Three things I learned this weekend: (1) The Dubliner Irish Pub in Fremont makes a mean Reuben sandwich, and you should get tater tots on the side. (2) Hardly anyone who’s out drinking on Saint Patrick’s Day is Irish, and no one in Ireland would EVER call Patrick a “Patty.” (3) Irish Car Bombs? Rename ’em. A real Irish car bomb is not a cocktail or a cupcake—it’s something that blew a 25-year-old police officer named Ronan Kerr to bloody bits just two years ago in Northern Ireland. Till next year… sláinte! KELLY O’NEIL
Celebra: DJ Polo, Efren Q NIGHTCLUB Darshan Jesrani, Nordic Soul , Recess, DJ Trouble, $7 after 10 pm
RE-BAR TRIBAL!: Rob Noble, Michael Manahan, Guest DJs, 10 pm, $10
SCARLET TREE Oh So Fresh Fridays: Deejay Tone, DJ Buttnaked, guests
SEE SOUND LOUNGE Guests, free
TRINITY Tyler, DJ Phase, Jerry Wang, Mikey McClarron, Kippy, $10
THE WOODS Deep/Funky/ Disco/House: Guest DJs SAT
3/23
LIVE
2 BIT SALOON the Badlands , My New Vice, West Coast Improvement Company
BLUE MOON TAVERN Charms , So Pitted. the Lindseys. the Echo Echo Echoes
BY ADRIAN RYAN
I love the Eagle. It’s true! And so, of course, do you. But let’s face hard facts: The Eagle is getting old. SO damn old. (SO old!) Like, gumming your Jell-O, whoops-I-crapped-my-pants old. Not as old as Neighbours, perhaps (nobody even knows how old that dank cave is anymore—it was open before the printing press, and there are no survivors), or R Place, maybe (I really have no clue how old it is, but, baby, it’s ooooold). But 32 is pretty old for dogs and gay bars, and that’s how old this old dawg of a gay bar is. It began life, of course, as a leathery leather bar of the most goodly and proper sort: crammed full of trussed-up daddies looking to lube-wrestle on the pool table. (Does the infamous blowjob chair on the top floor even still exist? Meet me there later and find out!) In recent years, it has become the dizzy, drunken go-to bar for just about every queer on the block—the grizzled and beary, the fresh and twinky, the creative and quirky, the sloshed and slutty (even, oh my goodness, real biological girls!), and everything betwixt and between. Tonight is her birthday, and at 32, she doesn’t look a day over 2,000. Let’s celebrate! DJ Nark is putting it all together, of course, which is perfectly fitting, since his parties practically saved the place from sure extinction a while back. He’s bringing us the famous JD Samson, who is famous for electrofeminist-punk band Le Tigre and leading the band MEN. Let us slosh a few
a CENTURY BALLROOM
The Careless Lovers
CHOP SUEY River Giant BellaMaine. the Comettes, $7
COMET Deception Pass, Legendary Oaks , guests, $8
CONOR BYRNE Day
Laborers & Petty Intellectuals, Mts & Tunnels, Jon Pontrello, $7
COPPER GATE The Resets , 8 pm, $5
a CROCODILE French Montana, guests, 8 pm
DARRELL’S TAVERN
Ancient Warlocks , Stereo Creeps , Power Skeleton , PukeSnake, $6
EGAN’S JAM HOUSE Ter Gallagher, 7 pm, $15, Manny Golez & Charles Crowley, 9 pm, $15
a EL CORAZON Off with their Heads, Roll the Tanks, Kids on Fire, guests, 8 pm, $10/$12; Ape Machine, Been Obscene, Bitches Crystal, guests, 9 pm, $6/$8
a ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN
Antje Duvekot, 8 pm
FUEL Evolution Trio. the Vonvettas
HARD ROCK CAFE States and Minds, Entwine by Design, Fringe Shift, Good Men and Thorough, Life Afterlife, $12/$15
a HEARTLAND Thrones, Midlife Vacation, Mutant Video, Total Life, 8 pm
HIGHWAY 99 The Randy Oxford Band, 8 pm, $15
a HOLLOW EARTH
RADIO Magma Fest: Rafael Anton Irisarri, Marielle Jakobsons, Logic Probe , XUA, guests
JAZZ ALLEY Arturo Sandoval, 9:30 pm, $28.50
LITTLE RED HEN Buckaroo Blues, $5
NEPTUNE THEATER Josh
Ritter & the Royal City Band
NEUMOS Chelsea Light Moving, Grass Widow, 8 pm, $15
THE OULD TRIANGLE Kuli Loach, free
QUEEN CITY GRILL Faith Beattie, Bayly, Totusek, Guity, free
Samson
drops of beer on the floor for Biggie and wish a happy birthday to Seattle’s favorite pervy old hole! The Seattle Eagle, 9 pm–3 am, $5–$7, 21+.
SATURDAY 3/23
BACON BITS WELCOME PARTY
Just what is going on with Bacon Strip, anyhow? The monthly dragstravaganza we have all grown to depend so much upon to get our monthly fill of pork, seminudity, and drag queens with beards has been bouncing around like an indecisive tranny suffering an ADD fit—from Re-bar to a (suspiciously short) stint at Chop Suey to… the Grill on Broadway? Yes. The Grill on Broadway. So much moving around is sure to raise a few plucked eyebrows, for sure, but I’m willing and eager to give the new Broadway Grill–ish incarnation a chance to dazzle me. How ’bout you? The Grill on Broadway, 10 pm, $5, 21+.
JD
WED/MARCH 20 • 7:30PM
91.3 KBCS WELCOMES anais mitchell and jefferson hamer w/ frank fairfield
WED/MARCH 27 • 8PM kings: a boylesque extravaganza
WED/MARCH 28 • 7:30PM cahalen and eli w/ brittany haas
next • 3/29 gimme shelter: the dusty 45s, star anna, shane tutmarc • 3/30 the english beat • 3/31 mycle wastman w/ nyoka • 4/2 battlefield band • 4/4 my goodness w/ the comettes • 4/5 steep canyon rangers • 4/6 janis ian w/ diana jones • 4/7 crystal bowersox acoustic duo • 4/12 super jam plays squeeze • 4/13 massy ferguson w/ the bgp • 4/14 portland cello project • 4/16 zach fleury w/ courtney marie andrews • 4/17 trace bundy • 4/18 simone dinnerstein and tift merritt in night
• 3/20 the bayous / afrocop • 3/21 mozo / letters from traffic • 3/22 vaudeville etiquette / spoonshine • 3/23 the roy kay trio • 3/24 kasata sound • 3/25 free funk union w/ rotating hosts: d’vonne lewis and adam kessler • 3/26 singer-songwriter showcase with abi anderson, eric miller and zach gore (bright lines) • 3/27 the true romans / fawcett symons and fogg
6 pm
SEAMONSTER Porkchop Express, 10 pm, free
SERAFINA Alex Guilbert
SHOWBOX AT THE MARKET George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic, 7 pm, $25/$30
SLIM’S LAST CHANCE
Camping in a Cadillac. the Pornadoes a STUDIO SEVEN The Jasmine Parker Band, Galaxy, Black Plastic Clouds . the Stravinsky Riots , Topless, Female Friends, Sin Circus, 4 pm, $7/$9
SUNSET TAVERN Federation X. the Valley Tacos!, 10 pm, $8
TIM’S TAVERN Gorilla Muff, guests, $5
a TOWN HALL Seattle Baroque Orchestra: Haydn Sonatas and Trios, 8 pm, $15-$40
TRACTOR TAVERN the Last Bison, St. Paul de Vence, guests, 9:30 pm, $12/$15
TRIPLE DOOR Iris Dement, 7:30 pm, $35; Musicquarium: Roy Kay Trio, 9 pm, free
TRINITY ((SUB)): Guy, VSOP, Jason Lemaitre, guests, $15/free before 10 pm
THE WOODS Hiphop/R&B/ Funk/Soul/Disco: Guest DJs
SUN 3/24
LIVE
2 BIT SALOON Dreadful Children. the Loss, Savage Henrys, We Were Heroes
BARBOZA Fol Chen, Royal Canoe, 8 pm, $10
CAFE RACER The Racer Sessions
a CENTURY BALLROOM Glenn Crytzer & His Syncopators
a CHOP SUEY IANA, District, guests, 6 pm, $10/$14
COMET Ceremonial Castings. the Vatican, Sacrament Ov Impurity, Chronic Tomb, $6
a CROCODILE Lianne Las Havas, Jamie N Commons, 8 pm, $17.50
a EL CORAZON Czar, Sisyphean Conscience, Gladiators Eat Fire , Onset the Shore, Lb!, 7:30 pm, $8/$10; Stolas, These Colors, guests, 8 pm, $8/$10
a HEARTLAND Pony Time , Stickers, Universe People, 8 pm
HIGH DIVE The Turdles, Roger Fisher, Pat Cashman, guests, 7 pm, $20
JAZZ ALLEY Arturo Sandoval, 7:30 pm, $28.50
KELL’S Liam Gallagher a KIRKLAND PERFORMANCE CENTER Washington Wind Symphony, 3 pm, $13-$18
LITTLE RED HEN Jessica Lynne, $3
a NEUMOS Joe Bada$$, Pro Era, Flatbush Zombies. the Underachievers, $15
PIES & PINTS Sunday Night Folk Review: Guests, free a PONCHO CONCERT HALL The Seattle Chinese Orchestra, 7 pm, $10/$20
SERAFINA Danny Ward, 11 am, Ann Reynolds and Burt Boice, 6:30 pm
a SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB El Mago, Los Gentlemen, 3 pm; Holly Figueroa, 8 pm, free SNOQUALMIE CASINO Tony Orlando, 7 pm, $30-$65 a STUDIO SEVEN Fifteen Northwest, Nimbus Vin, Romaro Franceswa, Mickey Slapp, 6:45 pm
BY DAVE SEGAL
FRIDAY
3/22
BERLIN TECHNO STAR JEFF SAMUEL RETURNS TO SEATTLE (ONE NIGHT ONLY)
Jeff Samuel moved from Seattle to Berlin about seven years ago, because that’s what 97 percent of all smart, talented American techno artists do. You can make a damn fine living there while playing and spinning tracks that would draw only fringe crowds in the United States. Samuel’s productions acutely balance subtly warped textures, smooth, funky rhythms, and suspenseful melodies. He’s a master of understatement with an incredibly high hit-to-miss ratio. Pitchfork recently named Samuel’s remix of Rhye’s “Open” as track of the week, so if you’ve been wavering about going, now you have no excuse. Seattle electronic-musicscene mainstay Nora Posch (aka DJ/producer Aron Schoppert) runs the excellent Peloton Musique label and possesses two of the keenest ears for left-field techno in the region. Right-field techno? Not so much. With Centrikal and Manos Electric Tea Garden, 9 pm, free before 11 pm/$10 after, 21+.
DARSHAN JESRANI’S TWISTED DISCO ECLECTICISM
You know Darshan Jesrani as half of Metro Area, the brainy and body-moving dons of East Coast disco and house with partner with Morgan Geist, right? Together they did a fabulously fun and diverse DJ mix for the renowned Fabric label in 2008 in which cuts by Heaven 17, Ministry, Jean-Luc Ponty, and Devo thrived amid several twisted disco classics (I have utmost respect for anyone who introduces me to Disco Four’s “Move to the Groove [Instrumental]”). Let’s hope Jesrani— who’s also a deft remixer, revamping tracks by Tracey Thorn, Mock & Toof, and
TRIPLE DOOR
Musicquarium: Kasata Sound, 8 pm, free
TULA’S Easy Street Band, 3 pm, $5, Jim Cutler Jazz Orchestra, 8 pm, $8
VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Ruby Bishop, 6 pm. the Ron Weinstein Trio, 9:30 pm
DJ
BALTIC ROOM Mass:
Guest DJs
CAPITOL CLUB Island Style:
DJ Bookem, DJ Fentar
CONTOUR Broken Grooves:
DJ Venus, Rob Cravens, guests, free
THE EAGLE T-Bar/T-Dance:
Up Above, Fistfight, free a FULL TILT ICE CREAM
Vinyl Appreciation Night:
Guest DJs, 7 pm
LAVA LOUNGE No Come Down: Jimi Crash
MOE BAR Chocolate Sundays: Sosa, MarsONE, Phosho, free
NEIGHBOURS Noche Latina:
Guest DJs
PONY TeaDance: DJ El Toro, Freddy King of Pants, 4 pm
Q NIGHTCLUB Revival:
Riz Rollins, Chris Tower, 3 pm, free
RE-BAR Flammable: DJ
Wesley Holmes, 9 pm
SEE SOUND LOUNGE Salsa:
DJ Nick
THE STEPPING STONE PUB
Vinyl Night: You bring your records, they play them
MON 3/25
LIVE
2 BIT SALOON Metal
Monday: Last Bastion, Beast of the Sky, Lb!, $5
Darshan Jesrani
others—conjures similar eclectic magic tonight at Q. (This is a joint Flash and Trouble production.) With Nordic Soul, Recess, and DJ Trouble Q Nightclub, 8 pm, $7 adv/$10 DOS, 21+.
SATURDAY 3/23
MAGMA FEST’S “ELECTRONIC(ISH)” SHOWCASE
The gutsy DIY music fest known as Magma reaches out to the electronic-music community with open arms and ears this year thanks to the savvy efforts of Christopher Bradbury. He’s assembled a strong bill headed by Oakland violinst Marielle V. Jakobsons (of the sublime raga-drone savants Date Palms) and Rafael Anton Irisarri (aka techno minimalist the Sight Below and a deft creator of impressionist ambient music under his own name). Jakobsons’s Glass Canyon album on Students of Decay was one of 2012’s most enveloping and engrossing drone-based works. The rest of the lineup—featuring Logic Probe, XUA, and Chrisman/ Svenson—encompasses granular abstract techno à la Autechre, fascinating musique concrète, and expansive drone tapestries, respectively. Hollow Earth Radio, 7 pm, $10–$20 donation, all ages.
4/7 THE ATOM AGE @ 2BIT SALOON, 4/27 TRANSIT @ VERA PROJECT, 5/17 THE SHEDS @ VERA PROJECT
Comic in Kansas City, and having his debut album go all the way to #8 on the iTunes US comedy charts, Mike Baldwin has proven that he just might become the next big thing! HIGH. QUALITY. COMEDY
Q NIGHTCLUB Electric
BLUE MOON TAVERN Andy
Coe Band, free
CHOP SUEY Wooden
Indian Burial Ground, the Heliogoats, guests, $8
COMET The Big Small, Thrust Fund, Mugatu, $6
a CROCODILE K.Flay, guests, 8 pm
a EL CORAZON Har Mar Superstar. the Virgins, C.O.L.O.R., 7:30 pm, $10/$12
KELL’S Liam Gallagher
NEUMOS Citizens!, Grayshot, $12
NEW ORLEANS The New Orleans Quintet, 6:30 pm
PONY Fruit: DJ Toast, DJ Logic Vortex
THE ROYAL ROOM Frankly Monday: Guests, 8 pm, free a STUDIO SEVEN Ionia. the Nearly Deads, Lakeview Drive, Truth Under Attack, guests, 7 pm, $8/$10
NEW ORLEANS Holotradband, 7 pm OUTWEST Wine and Jazz Night: Tutu Jazz Quartet, free OWL N’ THISTLE Jazz Improv Night: Guests THE ROYAL ROOM Chris Stover’s Book of Sand, 8 pm, $8/$10
SEAMONSTER McTuff Trio, 10 pm, free a SHOWBOX AT THE MARKET Andrew McMahon, Barcelona, Erland Wanberg, 7 pm, $25/$30 a SHOWBOX SODO Major Lazer, Angel Haze, Lunice, 8 pm, $25/$30
SUNSET TAVERN Amor de Dias, guests, $10 TRACTOR TAVERN Tom Russell, 8 pm, $25/$30
TRIPLE DOOR
The next time you pass this poster (by Kingdom Crumbs’ Tay Sean) on the street, take a look at the art in the “THEESatisfaction” text. I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s a clever use of an unexpected image. AARON HUFFMAN
THEESatisfaction
w/Kingdom Crumbs, Sax G, OCnotes Fri March 22, Neumos
BY BRITTNIE FULLER
FRIDAY 3/22
MAGMA FEST: LIÉ, KOBAN, BLACK HAT, BARDO:BASHO, DANIEL SHUMAN Vancouver, BC, is having a bit of a musical outbreak, and tonight’s show features two bands from our prolific neighbors to the north. Lié are making some solid post-punk stompers, staying danceable while taking cues from their ’80s gothic brethren. Time to riot ecstatic to these jams! Similarly, Canadian act Koban also stems from the post-punk family tree, adding a touch of coldwave electro-ice to the night. While the music generally hits its mark, referring to oneself as † † † K¯oban† † † also bridges into the territory of the lamentably trendy upside-down-cross-core/witchhaus/whatever craze presently embarrassing darker music. Daniel Shuman (Sabbath Assembly) will also be performing a solo set, and he’ll be joined by local experimental electronic acts Black Hat and Bardo:Basho, whose dronedout, world-music-injected beats may inspire some inadvertent plane-shifting. Heartland, 8 pm.
THEE SAMEDI, ELCH, SETH ENGLE/ JOHN WHITE, SUPERPROJECTION, THAT’S CASHED Eastside newcomers Thee Samedi froth out ramshackle, gristly proto-punk with tendons showing and livers writhing on the floor. And lucky you, bored Eastside teens—tonight is the release party for their first tape! Judging from their bone-trashing two-track demo, Thee Samedi may just fulfill the promise of their Cramps-ian primitive garage punk. With Elch, Seth Engle/John White Superprojection, and the decidedly 420-friendly That’s Cashed Sallal Grange Hall, North Bend, 7 pm, $6–$8.
SATURDAY 3/23
THRONES, MIDLIFE VACATION, MUTANT VIDEO, TOTAL LIFE
In Thrones, Joe Preston (formerly of the Melvins and Earth) disrupts devastatingly bass-centric sludge metal with abrasively weird sound collage, and then coils programmed drums beneath. The result is an exercise in ruin, with lumbering riffs rooted only to be chainsawed abruptly by this would-be lumberjack. But it’s the sort of ruin one wants to experience, and at very high volumes. There’s even more doom and gloom where that came from: Seattle duo Midlife Vacation’s brooding synth-grunge pairs lingering riffs with keyboard sweeps and gurgles, while Mutant Video will similarly inspire the freaks with their drone-sludge. Tonight also marks the release show for Total Life’s new LP on Debacle Records, Bender/Drifter, which is 32 minutes of catatonic drones for staring at the ceiling, or perhaps at a sky that isn’t punishing us all with gray mist. Heartland, 8 pm.
FILM
Film Review Revue
The Best Teen Film Since Kids, a Pervy Fantasia, and a Damning Doc
The We and the I dir. Michel Gondry Wide release
First, let’s compare the title of Michel Gondry’s new and absolutely wonderful film The We and the I to the title of Terrence Malick’s last film, The Tree of Life. The first title tells us that the movie is going to be about something substantial: human sociality, which is structured exactly by the dialectic between the one and the many, the singular and the multiple. The second title tells us we are in for a bunch of mumbo jumbo—meaning, we know what we are going to see is not a work of sociology, but the kind of mysticism that Nietzsche once described as muddying the pond so that it looks deep and mysterious. The We and the I—which is set entirely on a Bronx public bus that’s mostly occupied by teenagers who have just completed their last day of school—has only one moment of magic. It happens in the second half of the film, like this: From the bus, the teenagers see a beautiful woman in a flowery dress cycling down a Bronx sidewalk. Her hair is flowing in the wind. She has the air of an angel on a cloud. The rude and usually loud students are mesmerized by her. But then one young man stands, walks to the window, opens it, and screams something like “I like your big tits!” The spell is broken. And the teenager is admonished for being vulgar at the wrong time. “Why did you do that, man? I was connecting with her,” one teenager complains.
The We and the I is not so much about a group of teenagers but the constantly shifting bonds between these teenagers. Some bonds are strong, others are weak; some are ending, others are becoming; some are sexually charged, others are all about power; some are not what they seem to be, others are exactly what they seem to be; and so on. As the bus moves through the Bronx, as the teens interact with each other and adults who board the bus,
we get a sense of the creative, ethnically mixed energy of the city itself. There’s lots of mixing going on in this movie. The racially mixed kids mix with other races, all of them connected by a mix of pictures that have been taken by and shared on smartphones and actual memories that look like they’ve been taken by and shared on smartphones—memories of angry parents, drunken parties, private moments in the bedroom. What comes out of all this mixing is a mode and way of being that is utterly urban.
The We and the I is the best film Michel Gondry has made since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the most important film about teens since Kids. CHARLES MUDEDE
Spring Breakers
dir. Harmony Korine Wide release
Here are some of the problems you may have with director Harmony Korine’s already-infamous Spring Breakers: (1) The young college gals depicted in the film invite degradation upon themselves with voracious, proud abandon. (2) Plotwise, there’s probably less here than meets the eye. And (3) perhaps most importantly, Spring Breakers may make you come to the sudden, surprising realization that you have a big stick up your ass. Korine is well-known for pushing viewers’ buttons—whether in his nihilistic screenplay for Kids, or by directing the glue-sniffing Gummo and the sociopathic, trash-humping Trash Humpers—but in Spring Breakers, he takes on a topic much closer to home, or at least our imaginations. Spring Breakers is a stark, dreamy, and horrifically hilarious tip o’ the hat to Girls Gone Wild—where the girls go one step wilder.
Former Disney princesses Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens (along with Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine) are bored students at a boring unnamed college, trapped by their
There’s a chance you’ll see and despise Spring Breakers—but there’s also a very good chance that your reaction will reflect less on the film and more on you. WM. STEVEN HUMPHREY
The Waiting Room
dir. Peter Nicks Varsity
The camera begins by following the coolest head in the room. Cynthia Y. Johnson wears red retro glasses and mint scrubs as she leads triage in the emergency room of Highland Hospital, a public hospital in Oakland, California, that is located precisely at the vanguard of hell.
You can read essays about America’s dysfunctional health-care system, hear stories about patients rejected by hospitals because they lack insurance, and then pore over stats about how we flush away money in emergency rooms instead of investing in maintenance care. You can do all that—you probably have before—and your brain will understand that America’s medical system is inefficient. But it’s so much worse than that.
It’s criminal.
surroundings and future—so of course they’re going to rob a chicken restaurant to fund their spring-break trip to Florida. Upon arrival at their destination, they happily succumb to the riptide of unbridled bacchanalia, where an endless parade of tits are exposed (whether requested or not) and dead-eyed boys mime urinating into the mouths of random girls with endless pours of beer. Coke is snorted off bellies and nipples, and the possibility of gang rape is never very far away.
So is it a surprise when things go wrong? Umm, no. But an unlikely savior, in the form of local rapper/drug dealer Alien (James Franco), provides momentary rescue—that leads the foursome into (if you can imagine it) even more menacing territory.
This is one hell of a polarizing film, and I’ll say right now that, as someone who’s sick of stale, predictable Hollywood product, I loved Spring Breakers. I loved the lack of judgment it placed upon its characters. I loved the constant twists, turns, and dead ends. I loved the dreamy, looping snippets and dialogue that fuck with the film’s timeline. I loved former High School Musical star Hudgens’s balls-out performance, as well as Franco, whose ridiculous, menacing drug dealer is one of the funniest, saddest, and (yep) deepest portrayals of such a character I’ve seen so far. But most of all? I loved the dearth of easy answers.
If that sounds sensational, you must—and this will be painful—strap yourself into a movie-theater chair and watch The Waiting Room, which is a mostly unsensationalized, matter-of-fact exhibit of 24 hours in the ER. As a documentary film, it conveys what no essay can. There’s no narration. There’s no politics. There’s no mention of Republicans who spit words about the impoverished—the people who rely on social assistance for survival—like they’re cussing. GOP insults about how these people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps are never addressed. Instead, you just see the poor and infirm being, well, tortured for lack of proper medical care. Even the wealthy are tortured, stuck in the waiting room without a bed, because the ER is backlogged with patients who should NEVER BE IN THE ER IN THE FIRST PLACE.
The Waiting Room is located precisely at the vanguard of hell.
A woman waiting 12 hours for pain medication, a drug addict with no home to go to, a man who has to come in for dialysis, an unemployed dad and his daughter with strep throat, a man with a tumor in his balls that no one will operate on at the for-profit hospital. The Waiting Room does what writing can never do: just let you peer into society’s last string-bare safety net.
If there’s any joy here, it’s the superheroes in scrubs. Johnson runs the gates of hell like an angel—even putting people in their place. “I’m tired of hearing you cussin’,” she tells a belligerent patient. “You can’t tell nobody to shut up. You are making yourself angry. You are not going to get people to do things in the manner you are. You get a grip.”
Christ, send her to Congress. DOMINIC HOLDEN
THE WE AND THE I Get on the bus! (And stay there for 103 amazing minutes.)
SPRING BREAKERS “Seriously, your honor—who has the best rack?”
TINA FEY PAUL RUDD
FILM SHORTS
More reviews and movie times: thestranger.com/film
LIMITED RUN
BASIC INSTINCT
Paul Verhoeven’s craptastic 1992 sex thriller, featuring Sharon Stone in a star-making, vag-flashing role. Central Cinema, Fri-Mon 9:45 pm.
CEMETERY MAN
“Zombies, guns, and sex, OH MY!!!” King’s Hardware, Mon March 25 at dusk.
GOSFORD PARK
The Downton Abbey scene as envisioned by the great Robert Altman, starring Helen Mirren and Maggie Smith. Seattle Art Museum, Fri March 22 at 7:30 pm.
IRAQ: THE WAR WE LEFT BEHIND
Observe the 10th anniversary of our invasion of Iraq with this documentary about how stupid and awful the whole thing has been. Keystone Church, Fri March 22 at 7 pm.
THE KISS
Greta Garbo’s last silent film, shown here with live organ accompaniment. Paramount, Mon March 25 at 7 pm.
LA REBELLION
A monthlong celebration of the black American filmmakers who came out of the UCLA film school. Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Sun. For complete schedule and showtimes, see nwfilmforum.org.
THE MEN OF DODGE CITY
See Art House, page 49. Northwest Film Forum, FriTues 7, 9 pm.
MONEY AND LIFE
The world premiere of Katie Teague’s documentary about “communities, small businesses, and individuals that are making the ongoing economic crisis an opportunity to redesign their relationship with money, at the personal, community, and global level.” SIFF Cinema Uptown, Wed March 20 at 7 pm.
MOVIE CAT TRIVIA
The beloved movie trivia night returns. Central Cinema, Tues March 26 at 7 pm.
ORNETTE COLEMAN’S PRIME TIME
A live recording of Coleman and his Prime Time gang performing in Montreal in ‘88. Northwest Film Forum, Thurs March 21 at 8 pm.
SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN
Malik Bendjelloul’s documentary gives us a vivid idea of Rodriguez’s enigmatic personality and riveting art—then we learn of his bigger-than-Elvis status in South Africa, which allegedly grew from a single passed-around cassette. With poignancy, Sugar Man portrays a bafflingly overlooked musician. (DAVE SEGAL) SIFF Cinema Uptown, Fri 8:30 pm, Sat 2:15, 9 pm, Sun 2:15, 8:30 pm, Tues 8:30 pm.
THE THING
The John Carpenter horror flick about the worst dog ever. Egyptian, Fri-Sat midnight
TURNING
An acclaimed new documentary following the European tour of Antony Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons, and exploring femininity in all its forms. SIFF Film Center, Fri-Sat 7:30 pm, Sun 5:30, 7:30 pm.
War Witch has violent child soldiers who take drugs and live in the jungle. It has human-chopping machetes. It has lots and lots of Africans shooting machine guns. Despite all of this, the film is brilliantly executed. The director is clearly a talented filmmaker, but enough of these kinds of films. Africa has so many other stories to tell. (CHARLES MUDEDE) SIFF Cinema Uptown, Fri 4:30, 6:30 pm, Sat 2:30, 4:30 pm, Sun 4:30, 6:30 pm, Mon 4:30 pm, Tues 4:30, 6:30 pm.
I LOVE COMMIES™
You’ve heard of the “Cold War,” right? Well, I’m currently having a “Hot War”— inside my PANTS. Now, I’ll admit I’ve said some disparaging things about Communists in the past. For example, here’s what I wrote back in 2009 about how we should probably panic because commies could be the first humans to bone in space:
“The Russkies already have a leg up on us in sexual exploration (i.e., their brilliantly conceived mail-order-bride program)—so it’s just a matter of time before they’re circling Earth and making hot commie love… right over our heads! Word of advice, my friends: If the Bolsheviks beat us into space? WEAR A HAT. (Preferably one with a wide brim.)”
Even four years later, that’s pretty good advice. HOWEVER! Since then, I’ve broadened my horizons quite a bit, and I no longer want to burn Bolsheviks—I want to bang and/or bone them! What changed my mind? Naturally, it was my new favorite show, The Americans (FX, Wednesdays, 10 pm).
Set in the early 1980s, when then-prez Ronald Reagan had everyone spooked into thinking a nuclear war with the “evil empire” was imminent, The Americans is about a Soviet sleeper-agent program in which KGB agents pose as normal American suburbanites—who, in between barbecuing and taking the kids to soccer, steal classified government secrets. Keri Russell (Felicity! SQUEEEEEEEE!!) and Matthew Rhys (super-annoying in Brothers & Sisters—really awesome here!!) star as Elizabeth and Philip Jennings: commie spies who are so deep undercover, even their own kids don’t know their secret!
During the day, Philip and Elizabeth play the perfect suburban parents—packing lunches, getting the kids off to school, and going to their day jobs at a travel agency. At night, the pair sneaks off to steal from, sleep with, or assassinate the enemy without getting caught and charged with (dunh, dunh, duuuunnnh!) TREASON.
But don’t worry! The tone never veers toward the campy action of Alias or Chuck—there’s a gritty realism here, where moral choices are never easy, and their alliances (to Mother Russia or the far more livable America) are constantly being questioned. It also creates an interesting dynamic for viewers who suddenly find themselves rooting for “the bad guys.”
Perhaps most interesting of all is Philip and Elizabeth’s… ummm… “complicated” relationship. While their lives depend on successfully portraying a happily married couple, they were forced into their marital roles at a young age by the KGB—which means their partnership veers wildly between love, loathing, commitment, and deadly betrayal. (Or, in other words, very similar to my marriage with Mrs. Wm.™
Steven Humphrey #2.)
YES, it has action! YES, it has plenty of sex! And YES, it has comedy (mostly involving hilarious ’80s-style technology like fax machines, ham radios, and “mini” tape recorders the size of Thin Mints boxes). But mostly it has plenty of SMARTS. You’ll be hard-pressed to find any other current series that so perfectly combines history, suspense, romance, pathos, and most importantly, STINKING COMMIES in one entertaining show.
So watch or download The Americans (also available on Hulu or iTunes)—and do it for the good of THE PARTY! (And by party, I mean “sex orgy party”… with hot naked sex commies. Wear a hat!)
WEST OF MEMPHIS
The case of the West Memphis Three—wherein three teenage outcasts in Arkansas were convicted of child murders they had nothing to do with—has already inspired three amazing films: Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost trilogy, one of the great documentary works of American cinema. Amy J. Berg’s West of Memphis elegantly summarizes these previous films before breaking new ground, following the men of the West Memphis Three through their grossly imperfect plea deals and reentry into a world they were taken out of as kids. It’s a beautiful, infuriating film. (DAVID SCHMADER)
WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?
Liz Taylor, Richard Burton, and a boatload of booze star in this vitriolic drama. Central Cinema, Fri-Mon 7 pm. NOW PLAYING
THE GATEKEEPERS
The Gatekeepers is about the nature of national security and the costs of keeping it. Focusing on Israel—a place our own country is starting to resemble—the film consists mostly of interviews with the last six heads of Shin Bet, the men who made some of the toughest calls in their country’s “war on terror.” All of us resent platitudes when it comes to the application of deadly force, but candidness can be just as unsettling. These men execute national policy, and there is no better way of explaining how they do so than in their own words. (BEN COLEMAN)
GINGER & ROSA
There’s a short, fast, terrifying ride with boys in the middle of the movie Ginger & Rosa. Ginger and Rosa are late teenagers: These are their very last moments as girls. They’re hitchhiking—it’s England in 1962, when nuclear war is threatening and feminism and existentialism and jazz are rising—and the
ART HOUSE
BY CHARLES MUDEDE
THE MEN OF DODGE CITY
Not long ago, it was reported that a group of investors wanted to transform the poorly maintained Belle Isle Park, a 982-acre island in Detroit, into a neoliberal paradise. The island would become a semi-independent commonwealth that had no personal or corporate income tax. It would take $300,000 to be a part of this utopia. To make this happen, private investors would pay the cash-strapped city $1 billion for the island. Clearly, Detroit is now a city with all of its glory closed in the past and its future as open and as blank as a white screen. Onto this screen, all manner of fantasies are being projected. One such fantasy can been seen in the slow but beautifully photographed The Men of Dodge City, a film shot and directed by the same person, Nandan Rao. The story: Three men from the Northwest move into an abandoned Detroit cathedral with the dream of transforming it into an arts center/ paradise. The men are young, the space is huge, and there are so many possibilities, so many ideas, so many rooms and things to do, that ultimately nothing happens. The young men—one of whom is played by Zach Weintraub, director of the excellent film The International Sign for Choking—roam the ruins of the cathedral and the city. (Sophia Takal, the star of Choking, is also in Dodge playing pretty much the same role—a woman Weintraub is somewhat romantically attached to.) Occasionally, the young men encounter ghosts: a middle-class white woman, a working-class black man, a German executive staying in a postmodern hotel. They also try to start an art project that involves laptops. At one point, they raise a chandelier made of colorful school chairs to the ceiling. But all of this activity ends up nowhere. The impression we get from the film as a whole is that the city is cold and decaying majestically. Northwest Film Forum, March 22–28.
Tons more reviews online! thestranger.com/film
two girls pile without a word into the car of two older boys. The driver is recklessly show-offy, then a little maniacal. Nobody speaks. The ride lasts not even a minute on this isolated road, the car going faster and faster until the girls finally have to get loose, holding hands as they manage to escape and run off. We never see these boys again in this movie. But for that minute, the danger feels almost unbearably great for these painfully young women. This intensity is when Ginger & Rosa is at its best, at its most Sally Potter–esque. Potter directed Ginger & Rosa but made her reputation with the wild, gorgeous Orlando in 1992, based on the writings of Virginia Woolf and introducing an actress named Tilda Swinton to the wider world. Ginger & Rosa is no Orlando It’s inordinately handsome, essentially flawless in its acting, cinematography, casting, and design, but ultimately it’s a melodrama that telegraphs its plot in the first frames. Still, if you wanted to create a demonstration of the heartbreakingly many ways in which women turn against each other while forgiving even the worst behavior of the men in their lives, this is it in a beautiful nutshell. (JEN GRAVES)
GREEDY LYING BASTARDS
Greedy Lying Bastards, a thoroughly researched, clearly presented agit-doc by Craig Scott Rosebraugh, outlines the way petroleum and coal interests, by spending lots of money and saying the same thing over and over again, have manipulated Americans into thinking there’s some “debate” on the science of climate change. There isn’t. On one side, we have science. On the other side, we have money. The money goes to politicians who make decisions favorable to the oil and coal industries. But politicians need plausible cover to get away with that (otherwise, voters would be outraged), and the denial industry is born. Greedy Lying Bastards demonstrates that if you say something often enough, and say it while wearing a suit, some people will start to believe it. (B RENDAN KI LEY)
OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN
Olympus Has Fallen’s high concept is too ridiculous to be taken seriously: An American president (Aaron Eckhart) is taken hostage in the White House, with only one rogue decommissioned Secret Service agent (Gerard Butler) to save him? Sounds like grade-A action movie cheese! Unfortunately, there are too many problems to make this anything better than a guilty pleasure. Butler, for one thing, lacks the grace of a proper action star. He can’t smirk like Willis, he can’t pun like Schwarzenegger, and he doesn’t have the self-awareness of the Expendables crowd. For another thing, much of the action is lost in a dim murk, as the copious nighttime scenes look like they’re shot underwater. After a draggy half-hour preamble, basically as soon as the Korean terrorist attack on the White House begins, Olympus Has Fallen becomes pretty enjoyable, if watching scene after scene of carnage is the sort of thing you consider to be enjoyable. Terrorists strafe innocents with machine guns, bombs go off everywhere, and landmarks are destroyed, 9/11-style. The body count is noteworthy; there are more head shots, torture scenes, and silent, neck-snapping assassinations than in just about any video game franchise. Nobody involved in Olympus Has Fallen should be especially proud of their work, but if you go for brainless hard-R action scenes, you’ll come away happy. (PAUL CONSTANT)
ON THE ROAD
Though the Kerouac purist might dismiss it for being too conventional and polished, and there’s no denying that it’s a Hollywood creation from top to bottom, it’s not hard to imagine things being much worse for the first cinematic adaptation of this major American novel. It’s sentimental, easy on the eyes (director Walter Salles previously worked with this cinematographer on The Motorcycle Diaries, and this film looks beautiful in the same sort of way), and approachable. Casting, too, is devoid of any catastrophes. Kristen Stewart pouts her way through a supporting part as a tag-along girlfriend (these Beat types wrote only supporting parts for women, as far as I can see), unsurprisingly outshined by the lesser-known actors in the Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Cassady roles, while Viggo Mortensen does his best but is ultimately less than convincing as Burroughs. One thing that viewers may find is that this film reads a bit more like a criticism of the book than an adaptation. Granted, the hedonism and blatant misogyny of the novel are easy targets for disapproval, but by making a responsible adaptation of an irresponsible book, a lot of the freedom and joy that Kerouac was so inspired by seems to have been omitted. (KRISHANU RAY)
Commute
For the last three years, while walking to work, I’ve passed the Greyhound station, where a disheveled elderly man mutters to himself as he paces the sidewalk.
“Waiting, waiting, waiting,” he chants.
I don’t know if he’s homeless and/or mentally ill—I try not to live by assumption—but he certainly has poor hygiene and eccentric obsessions.
My curiosity about his biography has grown over the years, but I’d resisted the urge to engage with him.
Until yesterday. “Waiting, waiting, waiting,” he chanted. “What are you waiting for?” I asked. “My wife died,” he said. “But she’s going to be on the next bus. She died of cancer.
“We were married 40 years. She’s dead. But she’s on the next bus.” I don’t know if his wife and marriage were real, but his eyes were blue hurricanes—destructive and devoted. “Next bus, next bus, next bus,” he chanted.
I have never loved anyone like that. I don’t think I could survive it. But I want it. I want to be ferociously waiting and pacing and chanting for somebody who may or may not be arriving.
Don’t you want to love like that? Of course you do. Everybody’s madness is the same madness.
FREE WILL ASTROLOGY
BY ROB BREZSNY
For the Week of March 20
ARIES (March 21–April 19): “Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings,” says poet Muriel Rukeyser in her poem “Elegy in Joy.” “Not all things are blest,” she continues, “but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.” I urge you to adopt this perspective in the coming weeks, Aries. Be extra sweet and tender and reverent toward anything that is just sprouting, toward anything that is awakening, toward anything that invokes the sacredness of right now. “This moment,” sings Rukeyser, “this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.”
receptive people with transformative tales from your past.
LEO (July 23–Aug 22): “Dear Rob: I’m spreading the word about Beer Week in your town, and I’d love to see you and your beer-loving readers at some of the events. Any chance you can include some coverage of Beer Week celebrations in your upcoming column? Cheers, Patricia.”
Dear Patricia: I don’t do product placement or other forms of secret advertising in my horoscopes. To allow it would violate the sacred trust I have with my readers, who rely on me to translate the meaning of the cosmic signs without injecting any hidden agendas. It is true that Leos might be prone to imbibing great quantities of beer in the coming week, simply because they’d benefit from lowering their inhibitions, getting in touch with their buried feelings, and expanding their consciousness. But to be frank, I’d rather see them do that without the aid of drugs and alcohol.
in the coming weeks, Scorpio: a generous curiosity that makes you eager to learn something new about stuff you thought you had all figured out.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22–Dec 21): On the one hand, menopausal women are no longer able to bear children. On the other hand, they often overflow with fresh possibilities and creative ideas. More time is available to them because their children have moved out of the house or don’t require as much care. They can begin new careers, focus on their own development, and devote more attention to their personal needs. So in one way their fertility dries up, in another way it may awaken and expand. I suspect that whether or not you are menopausal, you are on the cusp of a comparable shift in your fecundity: one door closing, another door swinging open.
VIRGO (Aug 23–Sept 22): Hoping to stir up some fun trouble, I posted the following message on my Facebook page: “Don’t judge someone just because they sin differently than you.” A torrent of readers left comments in response. My favorite was from Sue Sims, who said, “Yeah, they might be better at your kind of sin and you might learn something!” That advice is just the kind of healing mischief you need right now, Virgo. It’s a bit ironic, true, but still: Take it and run with it. Study the people who have mad skills at pulling off the rousing adventures and daring pleasures and interesting “sins” that you’d like to call your own.
TAURUS (April 20–May 20): As you seek more insight on your current situation, consider the possibility that the bad guys may not be as bad as they seem. They might simply be so deeply under the spell of their own pain that they can’t see straight. And as for the good guys: I wonder if they are as purely good as they would like you to imagine. It might be the case that they are at least partially serving their own self-interest, while pretending to be utterly altruistic. If there’s any truth to these speculations, Taurus, you’d be wise to stay uncommitted and undecided for now. Don’t get emotionally riled up, don’t get embroiled in conflict, and don’t burn any bridges.
GEMINI (May 21–June 20): Here’s your mantra: “I get fresher under pressure.” Say it 10 times right now, and then repeat it in 10-repetition bursts whenever you need a tune-up. What it means is that you stay cool when the contradictions mount and the ambiguities multiply. And more than that: You actually thrive on the commotion. You get smarter amid the agitation. You become more perceptive and more creative as the shifts swirl faster and harder. Tattoo these words of power on your imagination: “I get fresher under pressure.”
CANCER (June 21–July 22): “Stories happen to those who tell them,” said the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. Modern radio journalist Ira Glass goes even further. “Great stories happen to those who can tell them,” he has said. Let’s make this strategy a centerpiece of your life plan in the weeks ahead, Cancerian. I have a suspicion that you will need firsthand experience of novel, interesting stories. They will provide the precise nourishment necessary to inspire the blooming of your most soulful ambitions. One way to help ensure that the best stories will flow your way is to regale
LIBRA (Sept 23–Oct 22): The French verb renverser can be translated as “to turn upside down” or “to reverse the flow.” The adjectival form is renversant, which means “stunning” or “astonishing.” I think you may soon have experiences that could be described by those words. There’s a good chance that a dry, impoverished part of your life will get a juicy, fertile infusion. A deficiency you have worried about might get at least half-filled. An inadequacy that makes you feel sad may be bolstered by reinforcements. Alas, there could also be a slight reversal that’s not so gratifying. One of your assets may temporarily become irrelevant. But the trade-off is worth it, Libra. Your gains will outstrip your loss.
SCORPIO (Oct 23–Nov 21): Professor Martyn Poliakoff creates short YouTube videos to help teach the public about chemistry. In one video, he explains why an explanation he gave in a previous video was completely mistaken. “It’s always good for a scientist to be proved wrong,” he confesses cheerfully. Then he moves on to speculate about what the right answer might be. I love humility like that! It’s admirable. It’s also the best way to find out the truth about reality. I hope you will summon a similar attitude
CAPRICORN (Dec 22–Jan 19): The TV reality show Freaky Eaters profiled a woman named Kelly who had eaten nothing but cheesy potatoes for 30 years. Her average intake: eight potatoes and four cups of cheese per day. “I love cheesy potatoes,” she testified. “They’re stewy, gooey, and just yum-yum-yummy. They’re like crack to me.” I’m a bit concerned that you’re flirting with behavior comparable to hers. Not in regards to cheesy potatoes, of course, but to some other fetish. I will ask you to make sure that you’re not starting to overspecialize. It would be wise to avoid obsessing on a single type of anything.
AQUARIUS (Jan 20–Feb 18): In the 17th century, polite people referred to mountains as “warts” and “boils on the earth’s complexion.” So says Robert Macfarlane in his book Mountains of the Mind. Annie Dillard describes the peculiar behavior of educated European tourists in the 18th century. When they visited the Alps, she writes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, “they deliberately blindfolded their eyes to shield themselves from the evidence of the earth’s horrid irregularity.” Don’t be anything like those dumb sophisticates, Aquarius. When you spy irregularities in the coming weeks, consider the possibility that they are natural and healthy. This will allow you to perceive their useful beauty.
PISCES (Feb 19–March 20): You are not for sale. Remember? Your scruples and ideals and talents cannot be bought off for any amount of money. You will not be cheated out of your birthright and you will not allow your dreams to be stolen. Although it’s true that you may have to temporarily rent your soul from time to time, you will never auction it off for good. I’m sure you know these things, Pisces, but I suspect it’s time to renew your fiery commitment to them.
Homework: Describe what you’d be like if you were the opposite of yourself. Write freewillastrology.com.
ARE
The
outdoors * Goal oriented and success driven a must! * Works with the highest level of integrity and excellence If you feel that you are the “Best of the Best”, please apply online TODAY at www.evergreentlc.com or submit your resume to recruiting@evergreentlc.com. For more details call 800-684-8733 Ext. 3434 or 3321
TREE CLIMBERS NEEDED for Tree Removal/ Pruning Looking for Experienced Tree Climbers with minimum 1-2 year’s Professional Experience. Been in business since 1986 who can offer steady Full Time/ Year round Work! Requirements: Must have own Gear (Saddle, Spurs, Ropes & Climb Saw), Valid DL & Reliable Transportation/Vehicle Required. Ability to Climb with or w/out Spurs. Ability to Repel out of the tree. NO bucket work here! Experience in Trimming/ Pruning & Removals. $140-$200/ day + OT To Apply: Email Work experience or Resume to jasminer@evergreentlc.com or submit application to www.evergreentlc.com Questions: Call 800-684-8733 ext. 3434
CUSTOMER SERVICE
CRUISE SHIP PIER/ AIRPORT
Intercruises will hold job interviews for Pier and SeaTac Representatives for cruise ship calls, May through September 2013. Outgoing, well groomed individuals with strong background in customer service and a commitment to Fridays and/or Saturdays and Sundays throughout the summer.
Pay is $9.25/hr. AM shifts are 5-8 hours per day. Must be 18 years old.
Interviews will be held at Pier 66 (2225
Alaskan Way) on March: 5th, 7th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 19th, 20th, 21st, 26th and 28th from 1PM to 3PM on Tuesdays, 9AM to 11AM on Wednesdays and 10AM to Noon on Thursdays. Please bring completed application (www.gatewayops.com), resume and proof of eligibility to work in the US (Passport or Driver’s License with Social Security Card) to the interview. No e-mails or calls please.
EMPLOYMENT WANTED
WANTED WORK: SEMI-RETIRED
carpenter - needs work. Repair or rebuild almost anything. Interior/exterior, painting, plaster, roofing, glass or tile. Have tools. $12/hr. Call Andrews Whales 206-784-7967 N. Seattle preferred.
PAID RESEARCH
MARRAKESH MOROCCAN RESTAURANT in Belltown now hiring exp. Servers and kitchen helper. Evening/ weekends. For more info call (206)9560500, or apply at 2334 2nd Ave.
MCMENAMINS QUEEN ANNE is now hiring LINE COOKS and PUB STAFF! Qualified apps must have an open & flex sched including, days, eves, wknds and holidays. We are looking for applicants who have prev exp and enjoy working in a busy customer service-oriented enviro. Please apply online 24/7 at www.mcmenamins. com or pick up a paper app at any McMenamins location. Mail to 430 N. Killingsworth, Portland OR, 97217 or fax: 503-221-8749. Call 503-952-0598 for info on other ways to apply. Please no phone calls or emails to individ locs! E.O.E.
RESTAURANT OPEN CALL!
Cinebarre is HIRING all positions, must be 21+ to apply in person. 6009 244th Street Mountlake Terrace, WA 98043
VOLUNTEERS
USE YOU TECHNOLOGY and planning skills to help a nonprofit succeed. Join 501 Commons Deep Dive program. For more information email vistatech@501commons.org
BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES
APARTMENTS
CAPITOL HILL
$950
Cap Hill/SU Studio coming up in pristine botique bldg. med sized, great colors,walk in closet, wood floors, clawfoot tub. coming up 4/1. laundry and coin changer, some storage. 600.00 deposit. great colors. homey unit and bldg.. GREENWOOD
$825 Greenlake/Greenwood 1929 English Tudor Whole 2nd fl flat-type apt. 1BR w/LR or use as 2BR w/kit-family rm combo. $825 for 1 person. $95 for all utl incl cable & wifi. NS or NP. No background problems. 206-229-8853 11am-7pm.
QUEEN ANNE $1,000 Large 1 & 2BD’s. 1BD w/balcony, 2BD with views! Great location, DW, w/s/g included. $1000-$1600/mo. 1000 1st Ave. W. Call (206)286-9488
ART STUDIO/CREATIVE
I AM LOOKING for someone that would be interested in sub-leasing this room. This is
thevocaliststudio.com.
REAL ESTATE FOR SALE
Properties, www.NataliasHomes.com
ROOMMATES
ALL AREAS - ROOMMATES.COM.
COUNSELING
ANGER MANA GEMENT
Is your life out of balance? Perhaps your anger is creating problems. Find Balance Between Body + Soul. Call (206) 427-9796 or Visit www.NutriPsychTherapy.com
MASSAGE
$45HR FOR MEN 1.5-$65/2hr-$85. 18yrs experienced masseur. Focused attention for tightness, tension and problem areas. Or simply relax into an excellent, enjoyable, unhurried massage. John Runyan (LMP#MA8718) 206.324.0682. 10am-9pm. Cash/ Incalls only. Last Minute Encouraged.
EXCELLENT THERAPEUTIC MASSAGE, since 1994 www.eptribe.com/irene
INTEGRATIVE BODYWORK BY Integrative Bodywork By Sam Garcia JR., NLMP Tranformational Neuromuscular Therapy, Shamanic Bodywork & Practice, Trauma work,Deep Tissue, Cranial Sacral, Swedish, Hot Stone, Reflexology, Reiki, Chair Massage Events. Call 206.697.1357 for an appointment Check out my website www.seattlemassagenow.com
LAURIE’S MASSAGE (206)919-2180
RELAXATION, SPORTS, DEEP Tissue and Hot Stone Massage on Capitol hill. 10:00 a.m.-9:00 p.m. 7 days a week. www.broadwaymassage. com Last minute appointments encouraged. 14 years experience. $50.00 an hour. Outcalls available for add’l charge. broadwaymassage08@comcast.net Jeff LMP 206-650-0542 GENERAL
WE WANT YOU to join our Marketing Team! We are the Northwest’s Largest Residential Tree Care Company. We have been in business since 1986 and we are A+ rated with the BBB. Work Outdoors in High-End Residential NeighborhoodÕs Offering Free Estimates for Tree & Shrub Trimming, Pruning & Removal Work. Flexible Schedule. Travel, Cell Phone & Medical Allowance Avail. Average Reps earn $575/ week working 25 hours/ week or more. Top Reps earn $1200/ week working 25 hours/ week Apply online today at http://www. evergreentlc.com or send resume to recruiting@evergreentlc.com Call 800684-8733 Ext. 3434 or 3321
ADULT PARTICIPANTS NEEDED for hearing research. Must be 18-30 years old. No history of hearing loss, no musicians, no more than two years of music lessons or experience. $15/ hour. Call (206)685-1689 or E-mail ihl@uw.edu
ARE YOU SUICIDAL, but resisting harming yourself? We want to hear from you! The UW is recruiting participants for a study on suicide. Call 206-543-2505.
AIRLINE CAREERS Ð Become an Aviation Maintenance Tech. FAA approved training. Financial aid if qualified Ð Housing available. Job placement assistance. CALL Aviation Institute of Maintenance 877-492-3059 (AAN CAN)
ATTEND COLLEGE ONLINE from Home. *Medical, *Business, *Criminal Justice,*Hospitality. Job placement assistance. Computer available. Financial Aid if qualified. SCHEV authorized. Call 800-481-9472 www.CenturaOnline.com (AAN CAN)
DISCOVER THE “SUCCESS and Moneymaking Secrets” THEY don’t want you to know about. To get your FREE “Money Making Secrets” CD, please call 1 (800) 470-7545. (AAN CAN)
Browse hundreds of online listings with photos and maps. Find your roommate with a click of the mouse! Visit: www.Roommates.com. (AAN CAN)
LOOKING FOR A room or roommate in the greater seattle area? Call us at 800=488=8050 or www.rme1.com.
SINCE 1989 WE have helped 1000’s of people find rooms or roommates in the greater seattle area. Call us today at 800=488=8050 or go to www.roommateexpress.com
LIKE A JAPANESE Hot Springs - At The Gated Sanctuary you can soak naked outside amoung soaring cedar trees in jetted hot pools, dip in a cold plunge, and relax with therapeutic massage. Unwind in our eucalyptus steamroom. (425)334-6277 www. TheGatedSanctuary.com
DRUMMER AVAILABLE. OVER Drummer available. Over 45 yrs exp. w/ vocals. good equipment. Experienced in all types of music. Appearances with many bands in the PNW. Seeking established band in the Snohomish county/ North Seattle area. Contact: Wild Bill 425-265-7103
PIANIST AVAILABLE
I’m Richard Peterson, 64 year old composer, arranger, and pianist. I’m available to play parties, weddings, clubs, shows, etc. $200/gig. Covers and originals. Please call 206-3255271, Thank You! CD available.
VOCALIST AVAILABLE, LOOKING for pro rock cover band. Full PA, lights and rehearsal space. Influences Zeplin to Alice in Chains. Pros only. 253845-3954
BANDS WANTED
SEATTLE HEMPFEST 2013 is accepting music submissions from performers. go to http://www.hempfest.org and click on get-involved/performers. Rock, urban, reggae, punk, metal, pop, jazz, soul, Americana and other genres accepted.
MUSICIANS WANTED
AMATEUR GUITARIST AND drummer (age 30’s/40’s) seeking female vocal willing to play bass for new project with post-punk 80’s sound. Rehearse weekends in the Northgate area. Have studio space with bass equipment ready to go.
AUXILIARY PERCUSSIONIST NEEDED to round and augment the percussive element of experimental rock band. Polyrhythms, metal percussion, timbales, bottles and knives will be used, along with other implements. Black Flag, Swans, Savage Republic. No drugs. 206.547.2615/omaritaylor@ hotmail.com/www.soundclick.com/ rendingsinsinew
AVANT-ROCK BAND SEEKING cellist to complete personnel. Drums/Bass/Guitar/Voice. Swans, Glenn Branca, Godspeed You!Black Emperor, Zero 7, Jarboe, Live Skull, Saint Vitus, Black Sabbath, Black Flag. No drugs. We have a rehearsal space. 206.547.2615/omaritaylor@gmail.com www.myspace.com/branavinix
DJS/ABLETON TEACHERS WANTED! Ableton/Machine Teacher needed $35/hour in Redmond Teaching 3 children. Seeking someone proficient in Ableton and machines/electronic music. Need someone to teach a weekly class. Call 206-727-9999.
EXPERIENCED VOCALIST/ SONGWRITER. I HAVE YEARS OF EXPERIENCE SINGING AND PLAYING SYNTH. CONTACT ME AT 206-8603534. LIVE IN SEATTLE: LET ME KNOW YOUR BACKGROUND AND WHERE YOU REHEARSE. CALL TOM AT 206-860-3534
EXPERIMENTAL ROCK BAND seeking keyboardist/soundscape artist. Swans, Big Black, Neurosis, Black Flag, Killing Joke, Throbbing Gristle, Laibach, SPK, Coil, Godflesh, Savage Republic, Pigface, Jarboe, Diamanda Galas, Head of David. No drugs. Bass/drums/guitar. 206.547.2615/ omaritaylor@hotmail.com/ www.soundclick.com/rendingsinew
FEMALE VOCALIST WANTED for electronic project. Search “Machine Red” or “Session View” on google and check out the tracks under “Band Profile.” If you like em, email Tyson at rksta23@gmail.com. Cheers.
KEYBOARDIST WANTED FOR an avant-rock band. Swans, Black Flag, Masada, John Zorn, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Zero 7, Of Cabbages and Kings, Suicide. No drugs. We have a rehearsal space. Bass/Drums/Cello/ Violin/Guitar/Voice. 206.547.2615/ omaritaylor@hotmail.com www.myspace.com/branavinix
AVAILABLE: I’M LOOKING FOR OTHERS WITH SIMILAR ABILITIES. CALL THOMAS AT 2068603534.
STRING PLAYERS WANTED! The Rainbow City Orchestra invites adult string players of all levels to join our non-audition chamber orchestra! We rehearse on Thursday evenings in Seattle. Requirements: players are 18+ & able to read music. orchestra@ rainbowcityband.com / www.rainbowcityband.com
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RECORDING/REHEARSAL
BAND REHEARSAL SPACE 1
Shared Room @$210/month Incl. 36hrs/month & Private closet and Private Rooms @ $500/mo. Call 425445-9165 or Visit wildersoundstudios. com Located in SODO Seattle
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TACOMA AREA REHEARSAL
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WOMEN SEEKING MEN
HERE FOR THE SAME REASON...
This is a little torturous so here goes. I would like to meet people outside my work and friend circles. I’m low maintenance and enjoy getting some fresh air when I can but don’t underestimate a Saturday on the couch. egw01, 35
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FUN, SARCASTIC, ADVENTUROUS, THOUGHTFUL, CURIOUS
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TAILESS, LONG-HAIRED, AND PEDIGREED
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GEMINI COFFEE SNOB TRAVELER PHOTOGRAPHER
MEAT LOVER
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LAZY MODEL LOOKING FOR ADVENTURE
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LOOKING FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL FRIENDSHIP
MEN SEEKING WOMEN
OPEN MIND. OPEN HEART. QUESTIONS?
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FUN TO BE HAD
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PROFILE OF THE WEEK
LOVING IT IN WEST SEATTLE
West Seattle Dad looking for fun folks to hang with around my hood. Something serious happens, great! If not, I just moved back here and would love some new peeps to hang with! westseattledad, 39
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I DREAM OF BORDEAUX HAPPINESS
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WOMEN SEEKING WOMEN
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MEN SEEKING MEN
ALL THE FAMILIAR PLACES
Music is my passion, movies are my love, friends keep me alive. I’m missing a companion. Had my share of the crazies, now I’m looking for someone only slightly crazy. Inspire me to read more books and take more hikes. tpayne, 33 BI MAN SEEKING MAN seeking male partner for simultaneous, long term, honest, loving relationship. NO DISCRETION NEEDED. bearded, bottom to GENTLE top you: REAL, preferably stocky/strong, similiar age (27-47), short or tall makes no difference, it’s soul in bulk i’m interested in. taarblazel, 43 FASHIONISTO, ADVENTUROUS, HILARIOUS
Fun and friendly person. Can humor peo-
SAVAGE
SAVAGE
DEAR READERS: I’m off this week. To tide all of your hot and/or kinky and/or sore asses over, here’s a column I wrote 15 years ago. Some of you who were still in grade school, diapers, or amniotic sacs back in 1998 might have missed this, so I’m rerunning it now because I still get questions about “gerbiling” on a daily basis. —Dan
We were having a little office debate about “gerbiling.” How does it work? Do all gay men do this? Does Richard Gere? Does the animal get shoved up the anus with a toilet-paper roll only to suffocate seconds later? Is it the scratching or the act of killing an animal that gets people off? Why? Can’t this cause serious damage? What gives?
Curious Coworkers
Every day, my mail contains at least three questions about “gerbiling.” I have never addressed the gerbil issue, but now, this week and this week only, I am breaking my silence. Clip and save this column, for I will never discuss gerbils again. Ahem. To begin, I would like to make a controversial statement: I have never had a gerbil in my ass.
also believes we’re capable of holding a struggling rodent in one hand while ripping its lower jaw off with the other, and then tearing its legs off (think of the mess!) and stuffing it up our butts—hardly a prim pastime. This is known as cognitive dissonance: the holding of mutually exclusive beliefs.
This statement is not controversial for the reasons one would hope: It isn’t controversial in the “Hey! That’s uncalled for!” sense, like, say, a woman at a dinner party announcing that she doesn’t have a hedgehog in her vagina. That would be uncalled for, because no one would suspect her of concealing a hedgehog. But being a gay man or Richard Gere in America means always having to reassure people that you don’t have a gerbil in your ass—at dinner parties, during family reunions, at funerals, on CNN, at passport control, wherever! For while gay men and, I assume, Richard Gere don’t put gerbils in their asses, not a day goes by that someone—usually a straight 13-year-old boy—doesn’t try to shove one in, figuratively speaking.
Hundreds of thousands of men and women in this country, my fellow Americans, leave high school convinced that gay men put gerbils in their asses on a semiregular basis. Unlike our hypothetical dinner-party guest, my denial of stuffing gerbils is necessitated by the accusation. If it were widely believed that women stuffed hedgehogs into their vaginas, then women would have to deny “hedgehogging.”
Some background: Gerbil-stuffing is a sexual practice that straight teenage boys in general, and Howard Stern in particular, suspect gay men in general, and Richard Gere (who is not gay) in particular, of engaging in. It works like this: Hold a gerbil in your left hand. Using pliers with your right hand, rip off the gerbil’s lower jaw. With the blunt side of the pliers, knock out the teeth in its upper jaw. Pull all four of its legs off. Leave the tail. Set aside. Take a cardboard paper-towel roll, grease it up, and insert it into your rectum. Tie a string to the gerbil’s tail. Nudge the gerbil into the outside end of the paper-towel roll. If for no other reason than to get away from the person who knocked its teeth out, the gerbil leglessly scampers up the wet paper towel roll.
When the gerbil drops into the anal cavity, remove the wet paper-towel roll, leaving the string you’ve tied to the gerbil’s tail hanging out of your ass. The gerbil, now trapped inside your anal cavity, thrashes around, desperate for air. It is this thrashing that provides pleasurable sensations. Once the gerbil is dead, remove it by pulling on the string. Repeat. Okay, three things:
1. The type of straight person who believes that gay men engage in “gerbiling” is likely to believe other gay stereotypes: We’re all prissy little swishes, for instance, with clean apartments and extensive collections of original Broadway cast recordings. Yet the same person
2. There is nothing intrinsically “gay” about gerbil-stuffing. You don’t need two penises— you don’t actually need penises at all—or an original Broadway cast recording. All you need is one doomed gerbil and one willing butthole (and pliers, lube, tubes, and string). Some straight people have a peculiar need to believe certain sex acts—usually disgusting ones—are practiced only by gay men, despite evidence to the contrary. Fisting, for instance. Straight people can and do fist. I have a file of heterosexual fisting photos, anal and vaginal, that I’ve pulled off the internet; I keep them on my desktop to prove to family and friends that, yes indeed, straight people fist. This curious impulse to credit gay men with sex acts that anyone can perform extends to sex acts straight people themselves are the primary practitioners of. Child rape, for instance.
3. Inserting a wet paper-towel roll into your ass is simply not possible, as anyone who’s ever put anything in their ass can tell you.
Now I feel I can write with some authority that no one has ever actually stuffed a gerbil up their butt, perhaps with more authority than I can write that God and angels do not exist.
I’ve had conversations with hundreds of outrageously kinky people, gay and straight, who’ve told me the craziest shit: I once chatted for an hour with a guy who married his horse. (He was deeply offended when I asked if his horse was a he horse or a she horse. “I am not a homosexual,” the hetero horse-fucker informed me.)
Both in my professional and personal life, thousands of guys have freely admitted to doing the most out-there, dangerous, risky, stupid, kinky stuff. But not once in all these years has anyone ever told me that he, or anyone he knows, or anyone anyone he knows knows, has ever put a gerbil in his ass. Like the doomed gerbils themselves, this story has no legs. It is an urban legend.
But you don’t have to take my word for it:
I have proof. If gay men and Richard Gere stuffed gerbils in their butts, well, then the pet stores that serve the gay and Richard Gere communities would stock gerbils, right? I mean, everything else that a perverse gay man needs is available in your average gay neighborhood, from poppers to butt plugs to bullwhips to sofa sectionals. So if we stuff gerbils up our butts, then pet stores in, say, California must do a bang-up gerbil business.
But guess what? In San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, gay ground zero, the pet store Petpourri, “where professionals answer your every question,” sells only pet supplies—no gerbils—and they don’t stock cardboard papertowel tubes or pliers, either. Animal Farm in West Hollywood, also a very gay place, sells only dogs and cats (which wouldn’t fit up anyone’s butt, not even Richard Gere’s). And guess what? Not only do pet stores in California not sell gerbils, but it’s actually illegal for them to do so. According to Marshall Meyers, an attorney at the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council in Washington, DC: “California law prohibits the sale of gerbils because of desert conditions in that state. Gerbils were once a desert mammal, and the state was concerned that gerbils could escape and establish themselves in the wild. It is a form of animal control.” It’s not because gay men stick them in their asses? “No, it’s strictly an ecosystem issue.”
mail@savagelove.net @fakedansavage on Twitter
JOE NEWTON
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Donate Your Car, Truck or Motorcycle
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Female Social Drinkers
interested in dating men wanted for a study on alcohol and dating experiences. Single women of all ethnic backgrounds aged 21-30 can earn up to $54. Please call Project FRESH at (206) 543-5536 or see www.fresh.edu for more information & to determine eligibility. Part of a research project at the UW.
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Lakeside School
*Mini* Spring Rummage Sale Sat, 3-23, 9am - 4pm & Sun, 3-24, 9am - 12 noon - BARGAIN DAY
Wright Community Center (follow the signs)
Lakeside Upper School Campus NE 145th & 1st Ave NE (near I-5, exit #175)Seattle, WA 98125
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Membership Centers near
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