The Stranger Vol. 22, No. 47 by Noisy Creek

CAPITOL HILL BLOCK PART Y

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Volume 22, Issue Number 47 July 24–30, 2013

STUDY GUIDE

Questions for The Stranger, Volume 22, Issue 47

1. Which part of the Capitol Hill Block Party is your least favorite?

a. The teeming crowds of sweaty people.

b. The way bands play basically right next to each other, muddling the sound for everyone.

c. The way a month’s worth of great shows are crammed into a single weekend, causing you to miss half of the bands you want to see.

d. The white people ironically wearing ugly ponchos.

2. How many clichés can you count in The Stranger’s Capitol Hill Block Party Guide? (Examples: praising a band’s “blistering punk rock”; exclaiming that the Flaming Lips are “elder statesmen,” as if being the Henry Kissinger of rock and roll is something to aspire to; stating that one band sounds like an older band’s “illegitimate child,” which is only one tiny step above saying Band Z sounds as if “Band X and Band Y met in a dark alley.”)

3a. BRENDAN KILEY has written a 4,000-plus-word feature about badminton. Pretend you are a freelance writer trying to pitch a feature to The Stranger: What could possibly be a more boring, upscale, Caucasian-skewing topic?

3b. Would a story of similar length about an underground croquet tournament be more or less embarrassing? Consider the use of words such as “rage,” “smuggling,” and “tigerlike leaping” in the badminton piece.

4. JEN GRAVES and NATHANIEL DEINES review the Future Beauty fashion show currently at Seattle Art Museum. Please demonstrate mathematically how futile it is to spotlight this show in a twopart article in The Stranger when SAM has spent approximately ﬁve billion dollars to saturate the city with ads for Future Beauty

5. The Stranger sent its only full-time African American staff writer, CHARLES MUDEDE, to review an Ethiopian restaurant. Is this racist? If yes, how racist is it?

6. Who or what is a “Festive”? Why?

COVER ART by FRANK CORREA frankcorrea.tumblr.com

Find podcasts, videos, blogs, MP3s, free classiﬁeds, personals, contests, sexy ads, and more on The Stranger’s website.

LAST DAYS

The Week in Review

DAVID SCHMADER

MONDAY, JULY 15 This week of terrible ﬁndings, heroic teens, and impressive presidential speeches kicks off in Seattle, where the Seattle Police Department Canine Unit enjoyed a night of triumph, helping nab not one but two criminal suspects. “The ﬁrst call, at about 10:30 p.m. Monday night, was a report of a man masturbating to an 11-year-old child… on Beacon Avenue South,” reports Seattlepi.com.

“When the 29-yearold suspect was confronted, he ran from the scene… A police dog team arrived and tracked down the wanted man in the 11800 block of 54th Avenue South. He was arrested and booked into King County Jail for investigation of child molestation.” Not two hours later, the canine cops were again called into service, this time to track a naked man who’d reportedly climbed through the window of a University District residence and asked for a woman who did not live there. “He then asked the occupants if he could ‘crash,’” reports Seattlepi.com. “When rebuffed, he left back out the window.” Cop dogs tracked the suspect

the innocent and guilty.

GROW UP, STONERS

Even though we voted to decriminalize ganja, and I often carry a pipe around so that I can puff on the street with friends, I’m still annoyed when people in the back of a Metro bus talk really loudly about getting high or, worse yet, smoke weed on the fucking bus. I want marijuana to become ofﬁcially, socially okay—normal, boring, and culturally accepted. I also want the youthful rebellion stoner kid thing to die, just fucking die. I hope that people realize how fucking tacky it is to loudly share stories whose only point is to proclaim I GOT SO FUCKING FADED, BRO. Especially on the bus, where your audience is captive and can’t get away from your boring ass. And can we treat a person hitting a joint on the bus like we would treat someone who smokes a cigarette on the bus? Forget those little bus windows, it’s an enclosed space, and other people don’t want to deal with your inconsiderate shit. Just wait until you’re on the sidewalk again, you impatient motherfuckers.

to the roof of a house, ﬁreﬁghters helped get him down, and the man was taken to a hospital for examination (“because drugs may have been involved in the incident”), after which he was booked into King County Jail.

TUESDAY, JULY 16 In worse news, the week continues with a day of terrible discoveries, starting in England, where a Derbyshire woman is making headlines after a trip to Peru left her with an ear canal full of flesh-eating maggots. Details come from the BBC, which identifies the news-making maggot host as 27-year-old Rochelle Harris, who returned home from a Peruvian vacation— during which she walked through a swarm of flies—with a severe headache, shooting pain in her face, and “scratching noises” in her head. “Doctors at Royal Derby Hospital found the New World Screwworm Fly larvae,” reports the BBC. “During a closer inspection using a microscope and speculum, [a surgeon] described a ‘writhing mass’ of maggots and found a family of eight large maggots. Ms. Harris has suffered no long-term effects of the encounter but says she is no longer squeamish about bugs.”

•• Meanwhile in Eastern Washington, police made a grisly discovery this morning when they found a 62-year-old man lying in the street next to his severed genitals

“Sheriff’s Capt. Dan Hally says a portion of the genitalia was recovered and sent to the hospital for possible reattachment,” reports the Associated Press. “Hally says the incident was not an accident, but there is no danger to the general public.”

INSTA-CRITIC RATING CARD

Praise or pan the musical acts of your choice at this year’s Capitol Hill Block Party! Share your reviews via Instagram with #strangerinstacritic or e-mail to music@thestranger.com, and (maybe) have them posted on Line Out!

BAND NAME: CRITIC NAME:

Fill in the number that best describes your feelings:

1. EXTREMELY DISAPPOINTED

2. DISAPPOINTED

3. MEH

4. SATISFIED

5. EXTREMELY SATISFIED

6. TOO DRUNK TO TELL

MUSICAL ABILITY:

BAND APPEARANCE (use only for female-fronted or girl band):

FILL IN THE BLANKS: “It’s____________ meets ____________ meets ____________.”

(Cheat sheet: Creedence / Stones / Blonde Redhead / Public Enemy / Cherry Poppin’ Daddies / Sun Ra / Wings / Lionel Ritchie / Pomplamoose / Pearl Jam / Indigo Girls / Hendrix / Joan Jett / Kraftwerk / Rush / Diana Ross / Bay City Rollers / Minor Threat / Phish / Grimes / Brian Eno / Brian Wilson / Brian Jones / Bryan Ferry / Bryan John Appleby / Peabo Bryson)

CIRCLE APPROPRIATE ADJECTIVES: ethereal / funky / passionate / orchestral / lo-ﬁ / gross / querulous / heartwarming / sticky / deep-fried / smoldering / deranged / “fun” / dark / sleepy / clunky / lilting / old-timey / hyphy / unimaginative / nasal / dexterous / fresh / majestic / mesmerizing / cloying / goofy / cataclysmic

GENRE-LIZATION (must choose one; adding “post-,” “-core,” or “-ish” is permitted): death metal / world beat / punk / Celtic / country / classical / children / grind / hardcore / hiphop / indie / jazz / emo / art-pop / twee / second-wave ska / krautrock / dark ambient / rock / bluegrass / noise / gamelan / acid house / dad / chant / soul / djent / folktronica / sea chantey / oi! / pop / gypsy jazz / minimal techno / footwork / dubstep / prog rock / math rock / douchetronica / night bus

WOULD YOU PAY TO SEE THIS BAND OR PERFORMER AGAIN? WHY?

HOW MANY OF THIS BAND’S MEMBERS WOULD YOU ENJOY FUCKING? WHAT TIPS WOULD YOU GIVE THIS BAND OR PERFORMER TO IMPROVE?

DRAW YOUR FEELINGS (no dicks):

WEDNESDAY, JULY 17 The week continues in West Seattle, where early this morning an alleged car thief became an alleged attempted murderer after running over a man with his own car. Details come from KOMO, which reports a 24-year-old man saw someone breaking into his car just after 6 a.m. When he stepped in front of the car to intercede, the female suspect stepped on the gas. “Stole his car, ran him over with his own car,” the victim’s stepmother, Kelly HorrorDeal, told KOMO, which reports that “the stolen Cadillac hit the man with such force that it knocked him right out of his Air Jordans.” As for the car-heisting woman: Police tracked her and the stolen car down in SeaTac, where she was arrested and subsequently booked into King County Jail. The victim remains in Harborview Medical Center, with “head trauma and other trauma to his body,” reports KOMO.

THURSDAY, JULY 18 In better news, the week continues at Seattle’s Green Lake, where tonight a 19-year-old man from France was saved from drowning by a couple of fearless Good Samaritans. As KIRO reports, the drama went down around 7:30 p.m., when the visiting Frenchman jumped off the dock into the water and immediately started struggling. Lacking both the ability to swim and the presence of an ofﬁcial lifeguard (who went off duty

30 minutes earlier), the unnamed man was left to be rescued by two heroic bystanders. Heroic bystander #1: 14-year-old Gidget Boe, who tried to pull the man to safety but wound up in jeopardy herself. “When he started drowning me, it was really scary,” Boe told KIRO. “I couldn’t get any breath.” So thank God for heroic bystander #2, a nameless person who pulled out both teens and began CPR on the original drowner , who paramedics estimated had been underwater for nearly four minutes. Nevertheless, the man’s pulse was found and he was rushed to Harborview, where he is expected to survive. Thank you, Good Samaritans.

FRIDAY, JULY 19 The week continues in Washington, DC, where today President Obama delivered a surprise address on the Trayvon Martin verdict and his experience as a black man in America, which we will now excerpt at length: “You know, when Trayvon Martin was ﬁrst shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago… There are very few African American men in this country who have not had the experience of being followed when they are shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are probably very few African American men who have not had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me—at least before I was a senator… Now, this isn’t to say that the African American community is naive about the fact that African American

young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system, that they’re disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence. It’s not to make excuses for that fact—although black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context. They understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difﬁcult history… And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these ‘stand your ground’ laws, I’d just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justiﬁed in shooting Mr. Zimmerman who had followed him in a car because he felt threatened? And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.”

SATURDAY, JULY 20 Nothing happened today (unless you count the death of 92-yearold White House correspondent/noted antiSemite Helen Thomas).

SUNDAY, JULY 21 The week ends.

Send hot tips to lastdays@thestranger.com and follow me on Twitter @davidschmader.

Be a Good Samaritan at THESTRANGER.COM/SLOG

Lady Problems

How Seattle’s Sexist Pay Gap Became a Top Priority in the Male-Dominated Mayor’s Race

BY ANNA MINARD

In a crowded mayor’s race with an all-male crew of frontrunners, an unlikely issue has shot to the front of the debate: equal pay for women, at city hall itself and in the city at large.

After a national study released in April found the pay gap between men and women in Seattle to be the worst of the country’s 50 largest metro areas, the city decided to look more closely at its own employees. Turns out, there’s a real problem: The city payroll is twothirds men, pays men on average 9.5 percent more than women, and has fewer women in higher-paid positions.

So the mayoral candidates—all primed to elbow each other out of the way to ﬁll the ﬁrst pothole—now routinely bring up the issue of gender pay.

Especially mayoral candidate and Seattle City Council member Bruce Harrell, who touts work on pay equity in his campaign ads. At the very top of a recent campaign ﬂyer’s list of promises—above all the blurbs on transit and education and police—Harrell says that as mayor, he’ll “institute legislation to improve women’s pay equity in the workplace,” and he claims to be the “ﬁrst local legislator to discuss [the] issue and take action.”

Harrell’s city council committee held a hearing on the matter July 3, and he’s promising to “present a resolution to afﬁrm the City’s support and ongoing work” on the pay gap, according to an e-mail from his staff. (Last year, Harrell also passed a bill protecting the right of mothers to breast-feed in public.)

Some other candidates have stumbled. At a candidate forum in May, long-shot contender Charlie Staadecker admitted he didn’t know about the city’s pay gap; shortly before he dropped out, Council Member Tim Burgess’s joke about the gap disappearing if everyone

Mayor’s Race News

This Week’s Roundup of Bullshit

• The largest chunk of voters—25 percent of them—are still undecided in Seattle’s nineway mayoral race, according to the latest poll, sponsored by KING 5 and conducted by SurveyUSA. Ed Murray and Mike McGinn were statistically tied at 22 percent and 21 percent respectively in the July 18 survey. Peter Steinbrueck had 14 percent, and Bruce Harrell had 11 percent. That said, at this point in the 2009 mayoral race, eventual primary winners McGinn and Joe Mallahan trailed with only 8 percent each, so there is hope for Doug McQuaid and Joey Gray yet!

• Washington State Democratic Party chair Dwight Pelz took an unusual leap into city politics last weekend when he sent an

had daughters like him landed poorly. And a recent editorial in the Seattle Times spanked Ed Murray and Peter Steinbrueck for blaming McGinn for the problem, saying the blame clearly falls on “a generation of city leadership” and “socio-economic, educational and cultural factors.”

Commissioned in early May by Mayor McGinn and separately by Burgess, the city’s report was released on July 16, by which time council members were foaming at the mouth trying to get hold of it. Given that the city employs more than 10,000 people and uses 600 job classiﬁcations, “getting a complete and accurate analysis of gender pay across

The

city payroll is two-thirds men and pays women 9.5 percent less.

those classiﬁcations took longer than we expected,” says mayoral spokesman Robert Cruickshank.

That long-awaited data shows more men reach higher-paid positions at the city— a good old-fashioned glass ceiling, if you will. Departments and job classiﬁcations that collect more women, like the parks department, tend to be paid less. And certain departments—police, City Light, planning and development—have larger pay gaps than others.

The fact that the city’s workforce is only one-third female shocked both Beth Hester,

e-mail blasting Peter Steinbrueck for being an outspoken Ralph Nader supporter during the ill-fated 2000 presidential election. “As you know, it was Nader’s candidacy that allowed Bush to win the White House,” Pelz prodded, “and the rest is history.” Nader focused his efforts in proGore states like Washington, forcing Gore to spend resources here that could’ve been spent in, you know, Florida.

• In a mansion on north Capitol Hill last week, former governor Chris Gregoire who is famously bitter at Mayor McGinn for saying she couldn’t be trusted—gave a keynote pep talk at a fundraiser for Ed Murray. As evidence that Murray can unite politicians, Gregoire claimed Murray could “not only stop the legislature from doing something stupid, he can get them to do the right thing.” (Apparently, “the right thing” includes the Democratic caucus fracturing when Murray became the senate’s party leader this year and Republicans took over.) After Gregoire’s speech, Murray took

the mayor’s public affairs director, and Julie Nelson, the director of the Ofﬁce for Civil Rights. “I’ve worked for the city for 23 years,” Nelson says. “My departments have always been more females than males.”

Hester says because the city’s departments are so different in scope and structure, the problems (and their solutions) are likely to be different in various departments. “The sound bite is 9.5,” she says—that’s the average pay gap. “But 9.5 does not begin to tell that story.”

Take, for example, the police department, whose gender pay gap is more dramatic: It’s 21 percent.

“If you look in our command structure, they’re mostly men,” explains Seattle Police Department spokeswoman Detective Reneé Witt. But promotion within SPD is voluntary and test-based, she says, without much room for obvious bias. “If I wanted to… study, and take the promotional exam, I have the opportunity to do that.” But, she continues, “I’ve been on 20 years, and I have zero interest in promoting.” And there’s a very clear reason: “I have a life outside of the department,” says Witt. “And when you start to promote—sergeant, lieutenant, captain, and above—you’re

a jab at McGinn’s advocacy for light rail and cycling by saying the city needs a plan that does not “divide us based on modes of transportation.” Apparently Murray, who sponsored the biggest freeway packages in state history and was the primary backer of a downtown tunnel that will have zero transit, thinks light-rail lines and bike lanes are divisive but freeways promote unity. Attendees were encouraged to donate the maximum $700; Murray leads in polls and money, with contributions totaling $338,264.

kind of at the department’s will.” (A Pew Research Center study found this spring that working moms still do 15 hours more housework and child care per week than working dads.)

Meanwhile, the fire department lacks women in higher-paid positions; only 9 percent of firefighters are female, while the department’s civilian workforce is 58 percent female, according to spokesman Kyle Moore. He adds that the fire department has begun to focus on hiring more diverse candidates and encouraging them to seek promotions.

A new task force, convened by Mayor McGinn, will soon begin to dig deeper into the wage gap data in order to start fashioning solutions—a set of recommendations on short-term solutions is due by September, long-term ones by the end of the year. In January, we should have the beginnings of a Gender Justice Initiative.

If the city can start to set its house in order, it’ll be the ﬁrst big step toward addressing the private sector pay gap. Says the cochair of the Seattle Women’s Commission, Bridgette Maryman: “The city needs to walk the walk and talk the talk before it can encourage businesses to do anything.”

establishment lobbies that include the chamber of commerce, the Washington Restaurant Association, and the Washington Beverage Association. Power to the people! But then UNITE HERE Local 8, the union representing hotel and restaurant workers, jumped into the fray with a proMcGinn political action committee funded by a $50,000 contribution from the union’s national organization.

Murray took a jab at McGinn for supporting light rail and cycling.

• Independent-expenditure campaigns are getting ready to drop some cash.

“People for Ed Murray” reports $80,000 in contributions from conservative-leaning

• The Stranger did not endorse Ed Murray for mayor, although you wouldn’t know it from Murray’s latest campaign mailer, which features a quote from The Stranger amid a ﬁeld of “key endorsements.” Kinda dishonest. Also, the quote he chose—“If anyone has the pedigree to be the ﬁrst gay man to top city hall, it’s obviously Murray”—was, um, a buttfucking joke. For the record, The Stranger has endorsed Mayor Mike McGinn.

Our obsessive mayor’s race coverage every day at THESTRANGER.COM/SLOG

DUDES’ MOODS Worried about women.

PHOTOS BY KELLY O

Fast-Food Workers Say Wage Theft Is Rampant

BY ANNA MINARD

At a recent city council “brown bag lunch,” the kind often reserved for dull PowerPoint presentations, a group of fast-food workers did something unusual. They sat down and told lawmakers what they wanted: for the city to enforce laws that ban employers from stealing wages.

“We were nearly every day forced to work off the clock,” alleged Caroline Durocher. Other fast-food workers, all of whom had participated in a fast-food strike in May, reported similar wage theft or other mistreatment on the job.

But even though the council unanimously passed an ordinance strengthening wage-theft protections in 2011, Council Member Tim Burgess pointed out that zero prosecutions have resulted. Said Burgess by e-mail, “I have not yet seen this become a priority for law enforcement, but it should be.” (Police spokesman Sean Whitcomb says it is “incorrect” to claim it’s not a priority and that detectives thoroughly investigate wage-theft claims.) One answer could be more proactively investigating wage theft instead of waiting for low-wage workers to put their livelihoods on the line by reporting their employers. But no one in city hall seems quite ready to call for that.

Whole Foods Fight

BY GOLDY

Mayor Mike McGinn got himself into a bit of a food fight with the developers of a proposed West Seattle Whole Foods Market when he recommended against sacrificing a city-owned alleyway to the grocer, citing a lack of public benefit.

“One of our core economic development goals is to provide fair and livable wages and beneﬁts for our residents,” McGinn wrote in a July 15 letter to Seattle Department of Transportation director Peter Hahn, implying that ceding a city right-of-way to the notoriously antiunion Whole Foods would not meet this standard in a neighborhood already served by six unionized supermarkets.

The developers, Lennar Multifamily and Weingarten Realty, dispute the mayor’s

assessment, citing a $2 million public-beneﬁts package that includes money for plazas, landscaping, and a bike lane in exchange for the city handing over a half-block-long alley. And Whole Foods vehemently defends its wages and beneﬁts as “fair,” “livable,” and “competitive.”

But all that misses the point. Whether or not Whole Foods ever breaks ground, McGinn has expanded the notion of “public beneﬁt” beyond the typical physicalinfrastructure improvements to include human infrastructure as well. It’s a new, higher standard that acknowledges the city’s obligation to promote living wage jobs and forces developers to do the same before asking the city to accommodate their projects.

Convicts in College?

BY ANSEL HERZ

For the ﬁrst time, the University of Washington will ask applicants if they have ever been charged with certain felony offenses. Those who answer yes can be denied admission, says UW provost Ana Mari Cauce.

But Sean Johnson, a sophomore from the group Huskies for Fairness, says the policy “can only serve to widen the gap in educational racial disparities.” More than 3,700 people have already signed a petition in protest of the new application change. Johnson adds that the application questions diverge from the rest of Seattle, which recently barred businesses from asking about criminal history in the ﬁrst stage of the hiring process.

For her part, Cauce says the UW’s move was prompted by a 2012 Seattle Times article about two sex offenders enrolled in classes, which led to complaints. But the two men “did well” and graduated without any incident, she says.

The new application will ask whether a prospective student has been convicted of or has charges pending in any violent felonies or is a registered sex offender, and if so, requests an explanation of why the student wouldn’t threaten campus safety. Applicants may appeal if they are rejected. Asked to respond to critics who say the questions force people to defend themselves without legal representation, Cauce says, “I’m not telling you there are no problems with it. If the negatives outweigh the positives, we’ll revisit.” KING

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The Pantry Raid

Making Pot a Priority

City Prosecutor Wants to Start Issuing Tickets for Smoking Pot in Public

BY DOMINIC HOLDEN

hen voters legalized pot possession last fall, they also made it a civil infraction to use pot in plain view (just like drinking beer on the sidewalk). But Seattle police decided to give verbal warnings instead of issuing tickets—even though they could have ﬁned violators.

As Fourth of July events approached this year, police warned they might issue a ticket under state law—if violators ignored warnings—as a “last resort for compliance,” Sergeant Sean Whitcomb explains. Still, they didn’t, and they haven’t issued a single pot ticket under state law.

But now City Attorney Pete Holmes, a sponsor of the legalization initiative, is drafting an ordinance that would create a citation for pot smoking in public under city law. If the city council approves it as part of a larger ordinance to make Seattle’s code reﬂect statewide pot rules, Sergeant Whitcomb says he can “almost guarantee” that cops will start issuing tickets, and interim police chief Jim Pugel, who says warnings will still be issued ﬁrst, adds, “There could be some tickets.”

That’s not inherently problematic on paper—people shouldn’t be a nuisance with their weed smoking, and tickets are a breeze compared to tossing potheads in jail—but adding the city penalty raises questions about who will be cited.

“I can understand why backers of Initiative 502 want to show they are serious about

State Scores Bunk Research

A $14,000 Report on the Pot Industry Contains Misleading Errors

BY BEN LIVINGSTON

The state’s pot consultant, a ﬁrm called BOTEC Analysis, takes its name from “back of the envelope calculation.” This is supposed to be academic humor, but in the case of a recent report produced by the California researchers, the acronym is all too ﬁtting.

The Washington State Liquor Control Board contracted with BOTEC to help review the environmental impacts of regulating the cannabis industry, paying $14,000 for the study. The resulting report focuses on energy use as the primary environmental concern, recommends the state allow outdoor growing—which the liquor board now plans to do, thankfully— and repeatedly singles out indoor cannabis cultivation for environmental criticism, going so far as to recommend a carbon tax on indoor pot amounting to about nine cents per gram.

But the report, released in early July, also makes dubious claims about indoor pot, saying it is water-intensive and employs pesticides while failing to mention that outdoor production has the same issues.

treating marijuana like alcohol, including not permitting obvious public use,” explains Lisa Daugaard, a member of the city’s Community Police Commission and deputy director of the Defender Association, a public defense ﬁrm.

“However, a citation strategy seems to contradict Seattle’s choice to make enforcement of pot prohibition the lowest enforcement priority with I-75,” a city measure passed by voters a decade ago. (Full disclosure: I ran the I-75 campaign.) Daugaard adds, “Every look at race and marijuana enforcement has shown that it is disproportionately black people who become the focus of such enforcement, even though white people are obviously the overwhelming majority of users.”

Holmes’s ofﬁce is vague about the need to create a city ticket but writes, “The world— not to mention the federal government—is also watching to see if we’re serious about both legalizing AND regulating marijuana.”

They add that a municipal ticket would allow Seattle to collect revenues instead of the county or the state (providing further conﬁrmation that Holmes expects tickets to be handed out).

Bruce Harrell, chair of the city council’s public safety committee, says he supports the council adopting language in the new law that says marijuana remains the city’s lowest enforcement priority and tracking the racial impacts of enforcement. “The council can give the ofﬁcers some policy guidance on this,” he says.

If the council does create a ticket, Pugel says that while he serves his term as interim chief, tickets will “only be used as a last resort after someone has refused to put it away. It takes time and money to write a citation. Let’s focus on the things that make the city safer.

“I hope you don’t feel that the SPD is beating down the door to get this done,” Pugel adds.

What stood out most to me was the report’s claim that mercury-containing lightbulbs used for indoor growing “are not recyclable.”

According to environmental ofﬁcials, that is not true. “They’re recyclable,” conﬁrms Department of Ecology spokeswoman Kathy Davis, who referred me to a Seattle recycler.

“We recycle 100 percent of it—the glass, the aluminum, the mercury,” says Mike O’Donnell with EcoLights Northwest. “It’s an erroneous statement, whoever made it.”

That erroneous statement seems to originate from activists who lobbied the liquor board to allow outdoor pot growing. In a PowerPoint presentation, the Okanogan Cannabis Association criticized indoor gardens.

BOTEC apparently took the bulb recycling information from this document.

“Probably one of my research assistants came up with that,” speculates UC Berkeley professor Michael O’Hare, the report’s lead author. “If that’s wrong, then we’ll ﬁx it and say they are recyclable.”

The BOTEC report also says that “in Northern California, water used for indoor cultivation contributes to pollution in local streams.” What’s the source of that information? A news article that’s actually about outdoor grow operations, not indoor.

Indoor pot growing certainly does have environmental consequences, but when paying thousands of taxpayer dollars for environmental research, let’s get our facts straight.

Shuttlecock The Rise of the

The Speed, the Smugglers, and the Sweat of the Sport

That’s Tougher Than Tennis | by Brendan Kiley

Jay is a small-time badminton smuggler. It’s not a serious means of income by any stretch of the imagination, and when I ask about it, he demurs: “Oh, if somebody needs something, I’ll get it for them.” But serious players around town say that if you’re looking for good badminton equipment—rackets, shuttlecocks, shoes—he’s probably got it in the trunk of his car. And that’s a good thing. It’s not easy to ﬁnd high-quality gear around here at a reasonable price.

Jay (not his real name) is standing with me on the sidelines of one of Seattle’s many community centers— from SeaTac to the Central District, Bellevue to Beacon Hill—where people gather to play badminton. Some of them rove across the city throughout the week, from community center to community center, so they can play almost every night. Their badminton is not the Roaring Twenties cliché of a lazy summer lawn game, cocktail glass in one hand and racket in the other, the ice in their drinks tinkling as they gently dink a birdie back and forth. On these badminton courts—converted from basketball courts, with metal posts in the ﬂoor and nets strung tightly between them—the dominant sounds are the thwap and whir of shuttlecocks, sneakers squeaking on the hardwood, and occasional grunts

This is not the lazy summer lawn game, cocktail glass in one hand and racket in the other.

of frustration over a botched shot.

Players, coaches, organizers, and ofﬁcials all agree that badminton is experiencing a boom, especially on the West Coast. But nobody is able quantify it, not even Paisan Rangsikitpho, a 12-year deputy president of the Badminton World Federation. “It would be good for somebody to try and count that,” he says, almost wist-

fully, when I call him. Clubs are popping up but not registering with any national or international federation. Community centers—like the ones Jay frequents— don’t report their numbers, if they even keep track. The gray market in badminton gear further obscures the situation. Rangsikitpho, who began playing badminton as a kid in Thailand but now lives in California, sees more ambitious and entrepreneurial versions of Jay selling gear out of their trunks. “Asians who coach here will go home and bring 400 to 500 rackets back with them to sell,” he says. “Markup and shipping costs in the US are very expensive. It could be that 30 to 40 percent of the rackets sold are not accounted for.”

The crowd in the community center where Jay and I are standing is mostly male, mostly middle-aged or older, and almost exclusively Asian. Judging by the number of people saying “ni hao” to each other, Chinese is the dominant language. But Seattle’s badminton players come from Korea, Hong Kong, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, and beyond.

Jay leads me over to talk to Ton That Quy, a Vietnamese man in his late 70s who’s resting between games. His English is limited, but he says he ﬁrst encountered badminton as a kid in Saigon and played for Vietnam in the 1965 and 1967 Olympics. (There were no Summer

JOAN LEE THOMAS

Olympic Games those years—he may have meant the Southeast Asian Games, which were supervised by the International Olympic Committee.) Why does he like badminton? “Good for the body!” Ton declares. “Heart,” he says and pauses, searching for the word. He points at his chest, says “no,” lets his hands and shoulders droop, and then rights himself and smiles. Translation: Badminton is good for your heart.

On the court, Ton and the others play with an elegant fury—age only seems to increase their power. They typically play doubles, one player serving from the front of the court (unlike tennis) diagonally across the net. If the shuttlecock just grazes the top of the net and drops, it forces the opposing team to pop it upward, leaving them open to a potentially devastating smash-shot return. Then the game is on, one teammate taking the net, the other taking the back of the court, everyone bursting with energy like coiled springs, the shuttlecock whizzing by so fast, it looks like a white smudge. Jumping is a way to control the angle—it’s harder to return the shuttlecock if it’s hurtling down toward you. So the good players are jumping through the air for powerful smashes while barely breaking a sweat.

Compared to their almost tigerlike leaping, novices like me look like panicked chickens, ﬂailing across the court and sweating copiously. The younger regulars tend to be gracious and patient, but some of the older players are scorn machines, rolling their eyes with exasperation and sometimes laughing— at me, not with me. When I play with them, and I’ve been playing off and on for almost a year now, I often have the sense they just want to get me out of the way so they can play with people who know what they’re doing.

Jay has no patience for players with that kind of attitude. “I had words with someone at SeaTac a few days ago,” he says. “I told him: ‘If you don’t play with them on their way up, they won’t play with you on your way down!’”

Rity! People think, ‘That’s a real sport because there was scandal’—no scandal, nobody writes about it… The media coverage from 2012 more than quadrupled from previous Olympic games. We have good players, yes, but a couple of scandals helps.”

If badminton has a nemesis, it’s tennis, which gets far more resources, attention, and respect—at least in the United States.

“When tennis broke, badminton died,” says Wendy Carter, a badminton champion from Canada who has coached Team USA and the Canadian National Team. We are standing on the sidelines in the Seattle Badminton Club in Kirkland, which she cofounded in 2010. Nearby, players in a weekend tournament are hammering away at each other.

How did tennis kill badminton?

“Money,” she says. “More money means more exposure, more sponsorships, more media coverage, more university scholarships. And the badminton court is so small, it doesn’t look as good on TV.” Then there’s the speed of the game, which she says makes it more difﬁcult to follow “the complexity and the ground the players are covering” on a screen.

Gonzales, who played badminton as a high-school student in the Philippines before moving to Seattle, says that in 2004, local badminton organizer Harvey Eng went to

Olympic gold medalist Lee Yong-dae smashed a shuttlecock so hard that it cracked open a watermelon on the other side of the court.

Vancouver to record Canadian broadcasts of badminton at that year’s Summer Olympics. “When he brought it back to the US, everyone said, ‘I want a copy! I want a copy!’” he says, laughing.

angsikitpho, the former world federation deputy president, partially attributes the rise of badminton to new waves of Asian immigrants to the West Coast—including students and tech workers. He says the real engine of the badminton revival is coming from the second generation. “The ﬁrst generation of immigrants were playing badminton, but it was limited,” he says. “They had to work more when they ﬁrst came to America, then played a little bit in their churches or in a public place. The second and third generations have been able to go to school, they don’t have to struggle as much as their parents or grandparents here, so they have more time and more places to play. Also, the publicity from the Olympics helped.”

This is a surprise, for two reasons. One, as Seattle coach Niño Gonzales points out: “You can’t see badminton broadcast from the Olympics.” Two, what coverage there was of badminton in the 2012 London Summer Olympics was dominated by scandal. Players from China, Indonesia, and South Korea were expelled after purposefully losing matches by serving the shuttlecock directly into the net and not even trying to keep rallies going. Because the tournament wasn’t single elimination (lose once and you’re out) but double elimination (losing once just bumps you to a lower bracket), the teams were throwing games to secure better positions in the next round. Spectators jeered them loudly from the stands.

So how did this help the popularity of badminton?

“Bad publicity is good publicity!” Rangsikitpho laughs. “Any publicity is good public-

“In the ’80s, Asia began to dominate badminton,” Gonzales adds. “But there were no international broadcasts—it stayed in Asia.” The arrival of YouTube, he and Carter believe, helped fuel the badminton renaissance. Serious players are eager to see world-class matches, and new players can watch the matches to learn technique and strategy. Even nonplayers circulate clips: A few years ago, a segment from the Korean TV show Infinite Challenge made the rounds on sites like Funny or Die and CollegeHumor, showing Olympic gold medalist Lee Yong-dae smashing a shuttlecock so hard that it flew through the air and cracked open a watermelon on the other side of the court. Shuttlecocks weigh approximately five grams, about as much as a teaspoon of baking powder.

Can Rafael Nadal do that?

Badminton defenders also like to point to statistical comparisons with tennis. The fastest recorded tennis shot during tournament play, for example, was a 162-miles-per-hour serve by Australian Sam Groth. The fastest tournament shot in badminton was a smash by Chinese player Fu Haifeng at 206 miles per hour. The current world record for fastest-ever badminton shot is held by Malay player Tan Boon Heong, who sent a shuttlecock through the air at 262 miles per hour during speed trials for a new racket design—100 miles per hour faster than Groth’s record-breaking tennis serve.

Or compare the 1985 Wimbledon ﬁnal between Boris Becker and Kevin Curren to the 1985 Badminton World Championships match between Han Jian and Morten Frost. The tennis match lasted three hours and

18 minutes with the ball in play for 18 minutes. The badminton match lasted one hour and 16 minutes (about one-third of the time) with the shuttlecock in play for 37 minutes. The tennis match had 299 rallies with 1,004 shots. The badminton match had 146 rallies but with almost twice as many shots: 1,972. The “match intensity” of the tennis game— that’s the time the ball was in ﬂight divided by the length of the match—was 9 percent. The match intensity of the badminton game was 48 percent. During the match, the tennis players ran about two miles, while the badminton players ran four miles.

In other words, the badminton players worked approximately twice as hard in onethird of the time.

W“hen I tell my tennis friends that badminton is tougher, they look down their noses at me,” says Joyce Jones, who has won more than 300 national, international, and Senior Olympics titles in badminton. “But c’mon! I’m a national champion in tennis, too—but it still doesn’t give me as big a workout!”

Now in her 80s, Jones has been written up in Sports Illustrated and is still playing competitively. She’s competing in the National Senior Games in Ohio this summer, and says she has to keep playing in younger age brackets because opponents her age have stopped showing up. “I usually have to play down a couple of divisions,” she says. “I go to the 70 to 74 division to get really good games, and I’ll play the 75 to 79 division to win.”

One of her favorite triumphs was at the Canadian Badminton Championships in 2005. That year, the CBC changed its rules and allowed older individuals to play in ﬁve events. Jones is an overachiever—she entered ﬁve and won all of them, playing both singles and doubles in several age brackets. “I have won more Canadian Championships than any other player,” she says (that’s 73 so far). “The next closest won 58, and she’ll never catch me because she died last year.” Jones says that some dedicated badminton player, now in her 30s, might eventually beat her record, “but if someone does, it won’t be for a long, long time, and I’ll be long dead!”

Jones’s most memorable match happened decades ago, when she was still in high school. Jones had met a young navy sailor at a roller rink with her skate-dance club. (“We called ourselves the Dragons,” she says. “We made him an honorary member because he could do most of the dance steps and everything.”) They got to talking about badminton, and

Jones was eager to trounce him on the court.

“I could beat anybody in my high school,” she says. “I thought I was hot stuff.”

The sailor won the coin toss, served ﬁrst, and skunked her, 15 to 0. (He’d been playing badminton since he was a small child with his parents’ church club.) “Not only did I not get a point, I never even got to serve,” she remembers. “I found out I wasn’t such hot stuff after all. But I decided I was going to marry him, so he didn’t stand a chance.” They’ve been married for 65 years.

When she was younger, Jones says, badminton had a more glamorous proﬁle. “In the 1950s and ’60s, all of the movie stars and everyone were playing badminton,” she says.

“It was the thing. Then it died out, and it was hard to ﬁnd anywhere to play or anyone to play with.” She agrees with Carter that tennis might have had something to do with it— she took up tennis herself when she was 46.

But about 10 years ago, Jones noticed a new inﬂux of Asian American players revitalizing the game. “Now I play at a club at the Korean church in Edmonds,” she says. “There are probably about 40 people who play there, and there are probably only a half-dozen of us who are Caucasian.”

Boris Poon, an ebullient adult badminton coach from China—he used to work as a grief counselor at cemeteries—agrees with Jones and Rangsikitpho that Asians are bringing the game back. “I think badminton is one of the most played sports in Asia, and maybe even the world—after soccer,” Poon says.

“At the Bellevue Badminton Club, there are around 200 students, and more than 80 percent of them are Asian.”

How come?

“Maybe Asian parents see it as a good sport,” he says. “It’s familiar to them and it’s no contact—not like hockey or football. The kids don’t get a concussion!” Poon believes badminton is continuing to pick up steam in China partly because people have more leisure time now and partly because the country has cultivated badminton stars such as Lin Dan, the hyperaggressive player who, by the age of 28, had won all the major titles in badminton: the Olympics (twice), the All England Open (ﬁve times), the World Cup, the World Championships, the Thomas Cup, the Sudirman Cup, the Asian Games, the Asian Championships, and the Super Series Masters Finals.

Chinese badminton has also been energized by its big haul of medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics—a fact pooh-poohed by some American reporters in their efforts to downplay the fact that China took more gold medals than the United States overall: 51

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to 36. For example, longtime sports reporter Tim Sullivan wrote in the San Diego Union-Tribune: “Many of the Chinese medals were earned in sports Americans don’t take seriously—badminton and table tennis, for example.”

I guess that depends on who you consider an American.

As a result of surging demand in Western Washington, Poon says, the Bellevue Badminton Club recently expanded from 5 courts to 10, the Seattle Badminton Club in Kirkland opened just a few years ago, public community centers and community college gyms are offering more time for badminton, and there is talk of more private clubs in the future. “Back in 2000, we had to rent a gym near the golf course two nights a week to play,” Poon says. “Now it’s at a peak of popularity.”

The romance of badminton is embodied by its shuttlecock: 16 feathers, preferably from a goose (though a duck will do), and preferably from the goose’s left wing, are threaded together and glued to a piece of cork. Why feathers from the left wing? “The goose’s left wing and right wing are curved differently,” says Rangsikitpho. “If you look with your eye, you may not see it, but it’s the way the feathers shape and ﬂow. When you hit it, it has to spin only one way.” A shuttlecock made from the feathers of the left wing will spin clockwise. One made from the feathers of the right wing will spin differently—an inconsistency that screws up the game. “Mix them up, right wing and left wing,” Rangsikitpho says, “and it will not spin but wobble. Mother Nature made the goose and the duck that way.” He adds that a few years ago, animalrights activists tried to make a stink about the use of goose feathers, but he explained to them that it was a by-product—the geese are bound for butcher shops or being plucked for down pillows and jackets. If the feathers of their left wings weren’t used for shuttlecocks, they’d be used for something else, or just thrown away.

Badminton rackets, of course, are subject to all the high-tech, high-money nerdiness of tennis rackets—a 2012 Wired article described how the Yonex company was developing an elite psychological-warfare racket with superﬁne materials in its frame to ﬁlter out high- and low-pitched sound waves to make each shot sound louder, sharper, and more intimidating. But the feathered shuttlecock

is what makes badminton so distinctive. “The shuttlecock has not changed for how many years?” asks Rangsikitpho. “Fifty? Seventyﬁve? One hundred years?”

Carter, of the Seattle Badminton Club, says that feathered shuttlecocks have a unique aerodynamic proﬁle, which is partly what gives badminton its character as a sport. Unlike the spherical and stable tennis ball, the shuttlecock can ﬂy off a racket at extraordinary speeds. When it’s hit, the feathers dramatically contract, giving it less drag. “It goes faster just after it’s hit,” Carter says. “Then the feathers expand, slowing it down—that’s why the shuttlecock goes fast, then slows.”

Nobody knows exactly when or where people ﬁrst started playing with shuttlecocks. Historians and archeologists have found evidence of them—pieces of cork, wood, or corn husks with feathers sticking out from behind—all over the world. According to Chinese historians, the ancient game of jianzi—a cross between badminton and

Animal-rights activists tried to make a stink about the use of goose feathers for shuttlecocks.

hacky sack, where players hit the shuttlecock with their feet—came from an old military training exercise. During the Han Dynasty, jianzi spread to Taiwan, Korea, and Vietnam. In 1508, Vietnamese poet Nguyen Gian Thanh described a lively street scene in Hanoi where “young men tuck up their tunics and play shirtless shuttlecock.” Badminton historian Jean-Yves Guillain describes coming across a similar game in Malaysia called chap-teh that used hibiscus ﬂowers instead of feathers.

People were playing shuttlecock games in North America, too—in 1903, anthropologist Matilda Coxe Stevenson described a Zuni game in New Mexico called po’kinanane, “so named,” she wrote, “because the sound produced by the shuttlecock coming in contact with the palm of the hand is similar to the noise of the tread of a jack rabbit upon frozen snow. The game is played as frequently by the younger boys as by their elders, and always for stakes. One bets that he can toss the shuttlecock a given number of times…

BATTLEDORE AND SHUTTLECOCK IN 1804 Entertaining children and rich people for centuries.

wagers are often made for twenty, ﬁfty, and sometimes a hundred throws.” The Zuni, she reported, claim to have invented the game.

One of the earliest documented uses of paddles to bat around a shuttlecock comes from the Muromachi period in Japan (1338–1573). The game, called hanetsuki, was a New Year’s ritual where players—especially young women—hit the shuttle back and forth, trying to keep it in the air as long as possible. According to tradition, the longer they could keep it aloft, the more protection they’d have from mosquitoes in the coming year.

In Europe, a similar game called “battledore and shuttlecock,” or jeu de volant, had been around at least since the 1600s and was popular among children and the rich, i.e., people with some leisure time.

But the birth of badminton as we know it comes from British-occupied India. Historians disagree on exactly how it happened. Some say guests at a party in the Pune region stuck feathers into a champagne cork, used the bottles as bats, and called the game “Poona,” after its birthplace. Others say the British adapted it from a local sport and brought it back home with them.

Either way, the game made its way to an aristocratic house called Badminton in England. Historian Sunil Kumar describes the transmission in his book Badminton Skills & Rules:

Badminton takes its name from the county residence Badminton of the Duke of Beaufort situated in the Southern part of the country of Gloucestershire, England. The game came about through the combination of two games, Poona and Battledore. English army officers, serving in India in [the] 1860s were very much taken by a game which was similar, and yet far superior to battledore and shuttlecock, known as Poona. They enjoyed it so much that they took it home, together with some of the Indian equipment, chiefly shuttlecocks. Some of the officers on leave were friends of the Duke of Beaufort, who invited them to play the game at Badminton. The army officers then took the sport to India where they played it first in Karachi.

The Badminton estate had been around for a long time—it is listed as “Madmintune” in the Domesday Book, the 1086 survey by William the Conqueror—and was a ﬁtting namesake for the new game, since various dukes of Beaufort have gone down in history as lovers of games and leisure. An account from the late 1600s describes the “pompous stables” of Badminton house and how “for the duke and duchess, and their friends, there was no time of day without diversion,” including “breakfast in her gallery that opened into the gardens; then, perhaps, a deer was to be killed.” At the time of badminton’s arrival at Badminton, the Eighth Duke of Beaufort had already begun publishing a series of books on sports and pastimes. His family clearly loved battledore and shuttlecock—in 1830, they supposedly broke a record with 2,117 hits in a single rally.

But badminton brought an innovation: competition. The object of battledore, like the picnic badminton we play today, is cooperative—to keep the shuttlecock in the air. But competitive badminton is all about getting the shuttlecock over the net and driving it into the ground.

By the standards of the day, the new game went viral. In 1875, a New York Times correspondent in Calcutta described preparations for a visit from the Prince of Wales:

In the afternoon there will be a large garden party at Belvedere, the residence of Sir Richard Temple, the present Lieu-

tenant Governor of Bengal. The Prince will be present and will, I suppose, play his first game of badminton—a resuscitation of the now obsolete battledore and shuttlecock of our nursery days, with sundry improvements which add greatly to the excitement of the contest. A net five feet high is stretched across a strip of smooth lawn marked out into courts like a miniature tennis ground, the players, generally three a side, range themselves on opposite sides of the net, the shuttlecock flies backward and forward, sometimes for minutes together, and these prolonged rallies are always exciting. Badminton has quite ousted croquet in India, and is a great favorite with the ladies.

By 1900, the Seattle Times was reporting on badminton tournaments held in Vancouver, BC, in its society pages. And on October 3, 1935, it reported: “The ﬁrst fraternity to construct a badminton court on the University of Washington campus last spring was treated more or less as outcast by the ‘he men’ of other fraternities. The game was looked on as a ‘sissy’ pastime. However, another fraternity joined the ﬁrst and then another, until now badminton ‘is the thing’ with the fraternity lads.”

The shuttlecock had arrived in Seattle, at least for the “fraternity lads.” This was just a few years after Seattle’s anti-Chinese riots, while the US Chinese Exclusion Act was still in full force. If Asian immigrants had been playing badminton or its ancestor jianzi in the early 1900s, I couldn’t ﬁnd any mention of it in the Seattle Times

Ihave my own theory about the recent rise of badminton, partly inspired by “Jumpin’ Jim” Beloff, one of the early evangelists of the current ukulele revival. In an interview last year, he told me the ukulele was becoming popular again because the barrier to entry is low—the average person can learn a basic ukulele song in just a few minutes—but the ceiling of possibility is so high. Players like Jake Shimabukuro, George Harrison, and Lyle Ritz have coaxed astoundingly complicated and jazzy music out of an instrument most people regard as a toy. But the ukulele is friendly that way. You can play it as casually or as seriously as you like.

Badminton, I would argue, is the ukulele of sports. Anyone can pick it up and dink around, but that’s a galaxy away from really playing. Until you’ve seen it played at its highest level, you have no idea how challenging, and how gorgeous, it can be.

That’s why I felt such a shock the ﬁrst time I blithely strolled into a Seattle community center for an evening of badminton. I had played the game, but I had never played the sport. And athletes like Ton That Quy (I’m pretty sure he was there that night) made sure I knew it by handing me my blithe ass repeatedly, sometimes rolling their eyes while they did it.

Every embarrassing ﬂub on my end of the court, every shuttlecock hurtling directly toward my face, rammed home a simple truth: I was playing badminton for the ﬁrst time in my life, and it was not a lazy summer lawn game. I had walked onto the court aimlessly, ignorantly, and I walked off it sweaty, worn out, and slightly humiliated. But my eyes had been opened. Biking home that night, I thought about the Seattle badminton world— an entire network and community spread across the city that had, until then, been invisible to me.

theSTRANGER SUGGESTS

Night of Genius: Music

MUSIC/GENIUS

Get to know Genius! Tonight is the first of The Stranger’s Five Nights of Genius, and it’s my very favorite category: MUSIC. Join me for an evening of listening, conversation, and drinking with Genius Award finalists Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang, Katie Kate, and Jherek Bischoff. There will be cocktails, smiling, and the exhilarating feeling of wandering through a museum after-hours! Plus an after-party at swank hideaway Vito’s and a secret drink special. (Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave, fryemuseum.org, 5:30 pm, $10/$40 all five nights, 21+) EMILY NOKES

Olympic Sculpture Park

ART

What’s new this summer is the roof, just set right down in the middle of a ﬁeld. Seattle-born artist Heather Hart made it, with help from her family, and you can traipse all over its shingled slopes and drum the animal-skin wall inside the attic while the ferries go by and the mountains look pretty. On this night, there’s also a party. Food trucks start serving at 5:30 p.m. The band is Pollens, a six-piece under the inﬂuence of African trance and contemporary choral music. Don’t just stand there—dance. If you fall off the roof, the ground is soft. (Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave, seattleartmuseum. org/getout, 6–8 pm, free) JEN GRAVES

Intiman Summer Festival THEATER

You know the Intiman story: an august regional theater with ﬁnancial and leadership dry rot that was ready to collapse, and then bounced back last year with a high-wire, scrambling-to-make-it-work summer festival. Their second summer festival has begun, and it comprises four plays: Lysistrata, about paciﬁst wives on a sex strike; We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay!, Dario Fo’s radical-left satire about grocery prices; Trouble in Mind, Alice Childress’s 1955 backstage drama about racism and integration on Broadway; and Stu for Silverton, a worldpremiere musical about the real-life trans mayor of a small Oregon town. Good or bad, people will be talking about them. (Cornish Playhouse, 201 Mercer St, details at intiman. org, $35, through Sept 15) BRENDAN KILEY

Capitol Hill Block Party

Yes, this year’s Capitol Hill Block Party lineup is impressive—the Flaming Lips (Sunday) will be a psychedelic sight to behold, and Girl Talk (tonight) will turn Pike and Broadway into a neon-colored dance pit. But while you’re at the festival this weekend, don’t forget to make time for the local talent. Add to your “must see” list: Constant Lovers, Monogamy Party, the Young Evils, Chromatics, and Fly Moon Royalty. And that’s just on Friday! It’s

MUSIC

possible the 206 (and the 425, 360, and even 503) kids will steal the show. (Capitol Hill Block Party, Broadway and Pike St, strangertickets. com, $40 per day, all ages, July 26–28) MEGAN SELING

‘Post Tenebras Lux’ FILM

The only thing better than Carlos Reygadas’s groundbreaking, otherworldly third feature, Silent Light, is the first 10 minutes of his new, 110-minute feature, Post Tenebras Lux. You have to picture this: a little girl, a huge field, lots of dogs, cows, horses, muddy puddles, dark trees, dark clouds, cracking thunder, a flash of lightning, the darkest night. The scene captures, like no other movie I can remember, the human animal’s precarious place in a vast and terribly indifferent universe. After those 10 minutes are done, you can leave, as the rest of the film is so-so and too long. (Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave, nwfilmforum.org, 7 and 9:15 pm, $10, July 26–Aug 1) CHARLES MUDEDE

Reza Aslan and Lesley Hazleton

Plenty of books have tried to piece together the historical existence of Jesus Christ, but Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth is worth your time for its author alone. Aslan has written a small library of religious books and discussed Islam and the “war on terror” on The Daily Show and The Rachel Maddow Show. He’s long been a vocal supporter of Stranger Literature Genius Lesley Hazleton’s religious biographies. Tonight, he’ll be in conversation with Hazleton for the ﬁrst time ever, which could make this the smartest religious event in Seattle this year. (Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave, elliottbaybook.com, 7 pm, free) PAUL CONSTANT

It’s surprising on two levels that hard-rock warhorses the Cult asked White Hills to open for them on this tour. For one, White Hills— who’ve been forging molten psychedelic rock for the low-proﬁle label Thrill Jockey—will probably alienate many of the Cult’s fans. For two, White Hills’ primal, throbbing epics will likely leave the headliners looking limp So You Are… So You’ll Be, White Hills’ forthcoming album, is their stormiest collection yet. Prepare for exultant elevation. (Showbox Sodo, 1700 First Ave S, showboxonline.com, 8 pm, $35 adv/$40 DOS, 21+) DAVE SEGAL

$2 Scoops at Cupcake Royale

DESSERT

July is National Ice Cream Month (who knew?), and to celebrate, Cupcake Royale is serving up $2 scoops of ice cream every Tuesday. This is your last chance to get in on the sweet action! You can choose whichever ice cream you’d like—including Whiskey Maple Bacon Crack, or Bananza with rum, caramel, and brownie chunks—but I highly recommend you go with the malted milk chocolate. Made with Theo milk chocolate, it’s so mind-blowingly creamy that it takes on an almost marshmallowy texture as it melts. SO GOOD. (Cupcake Royale: Ballard, Bellevue, Capitol Hill, and downtown locations, cupcakeroyale.com) MEGAN SELING

Reza Aslan Jherek

Photo by Mark Kitaoka

ARTS

Two elderly dogs…below The Scientiﬁc Feeding of Chickens…22 An inchoate mass…23

ART

The Flat and the Bumpy Un-American Fashion

BY NATHANIEL DEINES

The show starts out normal enough. Dresses. They look fancy. Academy Awards fancy. But there are also dresses that could have appeared in Blade Runner and dresses that might be seen in someone’s Coachella Instagram dump. This is the ﬁrst gallery of Future Beauty, the high-proﬁle fashion exhibition featuring 30 years of clothes by 31 Japanese designers at Seattle Art Museum.

REVIEW

Future Beauty:

30 Years of Japanese Fashion Seattle Art Museum Through Sept 8

Immediately upon entering the second room, you see that the clothes have been flattened. The flattened versions of certain items appear next to the real-life, embodied versions on mannequins. There’s a completely different, independently satisfying architecture in their 2-D forms, and it can be endlessly puzzling figuring out how someone would get into or out of the clothing.

But to back up to what this is really about: Flatness is introduced by way of the Japanese aesthetic ma, which has a range of meanings but most succinctly means “gap.” Marshall McLuhan writes about it as “the Japanese word for space,” but a speciﬁc kind of space: “between people and objects.” People and objects have relationships.

This is the starting point for a completely un-American relationship to the shape of the lady body.

(It should be noted at this point that a consideration of the shape of ladies in the US and Europe versus that of Japanese ladies, while tempting, invites certain phenotypebased generalizations that are probably largely accurate and even entirely honoriﬁc but pretty dicey nonetheless. Especially when the person doing the considering is a white American male. Probably better to just skip all that.)

Then, after establishing this baseline of ﬂatness, the lumps begin to appear. The ﬁrst indications that something is amiss are the cartoonishly big labial/testicular bulges built into designs by Keisuke Nagami. The lumps are tastefully turned away from the museum’s younger viewers, who would confront them at eye level.

clothing is composed of the same pattern, as is the head covering, as is the ground on which the mannequin stands and a large portion of wall behind it. It’s like seeing the Matrix for what it is, but with plaid instead of ASCII. The whole body is a lump. A space articulated by the clothing. There’s no “inside” in there to be expressed. It’s a stand-alone expression. There’s a whole room of that, and once you make it through that totalized aesthetic, you’re spit out into some very lumpy items from Rei Kawakubo. Fluffy stuff like what you’d ﬁnd inside your comforter is jammed into the clothing. One mannequin looks horribly hunchbacked. Another looks to have received several gallons of collagen injections in her outer thighs and lower back, to the point that her ass has become a small depression in a giant horseshoe of body mass. It is a gorgeous, lumpy “fuck off” to the fascistic tendency to compress women’s bodies into one particular shape— a shape that plays out again and again on a series of screens at the exhibit’s midpoint.

Those screens are a small alternative exhibition that demonstrates how different this Japanese fashion is from what was coming out of Western houses at the same time.

After that, lumps start emerging elsewhere. The clothing does not accentuate the body so much as obfuscate it. Even the face becomes a lump, tightly wrapped in fabric. This begins in Tamae Hirokawa’s Skin Series and reaches its zenith with Jun Takahashi’s single-pattern pieces, wherein each article of

their noses and mouths tightly covered in fabric appear to be breathing easier.

Deformed

The Night a Lumpy Jacket Came Over

BY JEN GRAVES

When you start at Hiroshima, deformity blooms. In the black-and-white opening room of the Japanese fashion show, wall labels instruct you to think about a 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics called “In Praise of Shadows,” but the dresses are postwar, making me also recall bomb survivors’ stories of people instantly reduced to shadows on walls and steps.

Of all the incredible clothes worn by pearly mannequins at Seattle Art Museum this summer—they’re here in an abridged version of a traveling exhibition from the esteemed Kyoto Costume Institute’s collection—the only piece I’ve seen in real life, in action, also happens to be the most deformed. It stems from a series, represented by a trio of dresses at the museum, that was dubbed “Quasimodo” when it ﬁrst appeared in 1997. Its designer is Rei Kawakubo, a fashion demigod whose breakthrough work “gave comfort to the wearer and discomfort to the beholder,” according to Judith Thurman in a 2005 New Yorker proﬁle.

While in other realms, as Thurman wrote, “legions of newly minted executives… wore block-and-tackle power suits to the ofﬁce and stirrup pants to the gym,” representing “a giddy and truculent materialism,” Kawakubo’s “bleak and ragged” 1982 collection was dubbed “Hiroshima’s revenge.” She “ennobled poor materials and humbled rich ones… crumpled her silks like paper and baked them in the sun; boiled her woolens so that they looked nappy; faded and scrubbed her cottons; bled her dyes; and picked at her threadwork.” It sounds as much like the dismantling of the symbols of wealth as the stage directions for a nervous wreck. But Kawakubo has

It’s like seeing the Matrix for what it is, but with plaid instead of ASCII.

always come off cool. She rarely talks. She has said, simply, that her career has had “one objective: to be free as a woman,” and that her clothes are for a woman “who is not swayed by what her husband thinks.”

anywhere. Was it protective? Metastatic? The basic standard for assessing a piece of clothing is simple: flattering or not. But that never came up, because we weren’t talking about appearance. We were talking about what this alien thing was. It scrambled the system. I know a dog who is missing both her eyes, named Bump. Bump and another elderly dog, Chloe, were once overheard having a growly altercation in the kitchen. When their owners walked in to see what had happened, there was a bloody lump on the floor, and Chloe had a wound on her neck. The vet later confirmed what the owners agreed was unbelievable news: Bump bit a tumor off of Chloe. Eventually, it grew back. But I find this act as curious, aggressive, and temporarily healing as a Kawakubo lump dress.

BOOKS

We Can Do This Ryan

Boudinot Wants UNESCO to Recognize Seattle as a City of Literature

BY PAUL CONSTANT

At a reading to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Elliott Bay Book Company, local author Ryan Boudinot made a proposal “for the beneﬁt of not just Elliott Bay Book Company, but the whole city.” His pitch: “Let’s seek formal recognition for Seattle as a UNESCO City of Literature.” Boudinot explained that, as part of their Creative Cities program, the United Nations Education, Scientiﬁc and Cultural Organization launched the City of Literature designation to “recognize cities around the world that honor the literary arts through public and private means.”

A few Cities of Literature that have been named since the project’s inception in 2004 include Reykjavik, Dublin, Melbourne, and Iowa City. In his speech, Boudinot shared UNESCO’s criteria for the program:

Quality, quantity and diversity of publishing and editorial initiatives

Quality and quantity of educational programmes

Urban environment in which literature plays an integral part

Experience hosting literary events and festivals, promoting foreign and domestic texts

Runway-show footage from Chanel, Gaultier, Alaïa, and others shows seemingly endless iterations of wide-shouldered, narrow-waisted models marching up and down catwalks-cumparade-grounds like haute dictators. This is uniform in all senses of the word. There is only one way lady lumps can be conﬁgured in these images, only the claustrophobia of the mechanical, hourglass-stamped bodies of the West. After that, even the mannequins with

The long black jacket by Kawakubo— whose fashion house name is Comme des Garçons—was worn to my Capitol Hill apartment one night two years ago. About a dozen women had gathered over drinks. Its wearer arrived late, and all the seats were already taken, so she edged herself onto the green velvety arm of a couch, and this stance exaggerated what appeared to be a strange extra padding at her right hip bone.

The jacket immediately inspired fascination—sustained fascination, not passing compliment. Its wearer pulled a small, rounded pillow out of that hip area and ﬂashed it so we could see. She then reached around her body and stuffed the pillow into another part of the jacket, to demonstrate that she could choose which part of her body to pad; there were various pouches. A growth might appear

Libraries, bookstores and cultural centres

Active effort to translate literary works from diverse languages

Use of new media to promote and strengthen the literary market

The only real question after reading that list is why Seattle isn’t a City of Literature already. Our publishers range from a certain global behemoth located out of South Lake Union to small quality publishers like Dark Coast and Chin Music. From the UW to Hugo House to Jack Straw Productions and Clarion West, we have prestigious educational programs galore. Our bookstores and libraries are plentiful and robust. We bring international writers and translators to town on a weekly basis.

Which is all well and good. But what’s

REI KAWAKUBO / COLLECTION OF THE KYOTO COSTUME INSTITUTE LUMPS Deformity blooms in the work of Rei Kawakubo.

in this City of Literature thing for us? In an interview, Boudinot clariﬁes, “The ﬁrst thing that it does is it kind of formalizes your obligation to literary arts,” he explains. You agree as a city to commit to your role as a world hub of literature. Secondly, the program “introduces you to a network of other cities. There’s an annual [Creative Cities] conference that happens in cities around the world,” which means Seattle would be invited to (and perhaps one day could host) an international cultural exchange celebrating the best of the world’s visual art, literature, and music. We’d see “a greater diversity of writers visiting Seattle,” and local organizations would see more “opportunities for collaboration around a shared goal or status” with other cities in the program.

Since his speech, Boudinot says, the response has been “overwhelmingly positive.” He was approached that night by somebody from Mayor McGinn’s ofﬁce expressing support for the program. Arts organizations have already committed to assisting with the application process. Boudinot is in conversation with people who helped coordinate Reykjavik’s appointment. He’s applied for a grant for the application process and is hammering out a strategy for the days ahead. What can you do to help? “We’re going to have an informational meeting,” Boudinot explains, “where I’m going to present what the Cities of Literature program is in greater depth and how we can put the application together.” He wants to make sure that everyone can be included in the process. (We’ll publish the particulars of the planning meeting when Boudinot announces them, on Slog and in The Stranger.) One of the most important beneﬁts of the Cities of Literature program, Boudinot says, is that it would inspire “the world to look at Seattle in a different way.” They’ll see Seattle as we already know it: a worldly, vibrant, enthusiastic home for literature.

BOOKS

MARIA SEMPLE

Where’d You Go, Bernadette

(Little Brown)

Monday, July 29 at 7pm

Shoreline and Richmond Beach have joined with Lake Forest Park READS again this year, marking the ninth year of this community literary event. In Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Maria Semple expertly skewers Seattle’s newly rich and our local culture.

Third Place Books offers 20% off on this title June 1 - August 31.

Books Will Bring Us Together

Movable Type Is a Simple, Fun Idea for a Literary Mixer

BY PAUL CONSTANT

years, and she believes books are the one topic that can pump all the awkwardness out of a stiff social situation. She’s got a contagious laugh, and she hosts the mixers with admirable ease, introducing strangers and launching conversations fearlessly. Levenson got the idea for Movable Type when she happened upon a Parisian bar that hosted a monthly book-club night. “Book clubs are usually small and private,” she explains, but “the idea of expanding one to anybody who wanted to come makes it completely unpredictable.” When she moved to town, she realized that “Seattle has such a great literary community” that her idea “seemed like a perfect fit. And less pretentious than Paris.” She decided to use the events to promote her favorite literary nonprofit, a local adult literacy foundation called Literacy Source, but her mid-mixer pitches for Literacy Source are short and lowpressure. Levenson says it was “shockingly simple” to establish and promote the event. Her favorite Movable Type conversation so far was over a 1950s text titled The Scientific Feeding of Chickens, and she’s now in the middle of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves thanks to a series of recommendations from the last mixer. But what about the dreaded Seattle Freeze? How does Movable Type make Seattleites feel comfortable talking to each other? “Even if people can’t look at your face, they’ll look at your book and talk about it,” she says. “It’s the most un-Seattle event you’ll go to.”

THEATER

The Forbidden Review

Intiman’s New and Not-Quite-Ready Musical

BY BRENDAN KILEY

You shouldn’t be reading this review right now—according to the folks at Intiman Theater, reviews of its world-premiere musical last weekend aren’t even supposed to exist. “We have a strict no-review policy,” wrote Intiman’s communications director when I inquired about tickets. “Can you send me a written no-review agreement for Stu for Silverton?”

Sometimes an idea is so simple, it’s hard to explain. For about a year now, the Movable Type Mixer has been happening on a quarterly basis at Vermillion. There’s no cover charge. There’s no public speaking, or trust exercises, or speed dating. There’s only one requirement: Bring the book you’re reading and be ready to talk about it. That’s it. You almost want there to be an extra hook, but there isn’t one. Simple.

And fun, too: Past Movable Types have spawned conversations between obsessive ﬁve-book-a-week readers, poets, novelists, academics, and folks who manage to get through one book a year. I’ve talked with nice people about Kafka and Stephen King and a memoir about a peculiar cat and urban planning, and I felt a wave of euphoria when I saw a woman carrying a beautiful new edition of Jim Dodge’s bighearted, bizarre novella Fup. It’s practically impossible to have a bad time.

Movable Type founder Amy Levenson has worked in international publishing for nine

Stu for Silverton Intiman Theater Festival at Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center Through Sept 15

This was strange. Artistic director Andrew Russell had been talking up the project—a collaboration between himself and New York–based artists Peter Duchan and Breedlove—for almost a year. Stu is scheduled for a full run as one-quarter of Intiman’s four-play summer festival. Tickets are full price. Was there a compelling reason for this shyness? The communications director explained that the show is still “in development.” She did not say, but it is reasonable to assume, that the show’s creators would like to avoid any adverse press sullying its name before they shop it around New York. But that has been a concern of many world-premiere musicals, including several at the 5th Avenue, in recent years. The only musical with a similar critical embargo I could think of was the disastrous Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Stu for Silverton couldn’t be that bad, could it? So I declined to agree to anything and bought a ticket like everybody else.

After seeing it, Intiman’s desire to keep the show in the quasi-dark makes sense—it’s just not ready yet, like a ﬂedgling that fell out of

the nest too soon. But people deserve to know that before buying tickets, so here we are.

Stu Rasmussen is the real-life transgender mayor—and movie-theater proprietor—of a small Oregon town that made national news by drawing the ire of those evangelical, attention-lusting bigots in Fred Phelps’s Westboro Baptist Church. In 2008, Westboro congregants traveled from Kansas to protest the election of America’s ﬁrst openly trans mayor, but the townspeople fought back. A broad coalition of Silverton residents staged an overwhelming counterprotest—media reports noted men wearing “skirts and boots”—and chased the evangelicals away.

Stu for Silverton spends its first act charting Rasmussen’s transformation from a likable, small-town doormat (he generously fixes people’s cars and microwaves but doesn’t get invited to many parties) into an individual on a gender odyssey. The heteronormative scales fall from his eyes after attending a screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in Portland, where he realizes gender can be more complicated than he thought—and that’s okay. That pivotal number, with its catchy chorus of “I felt I was alive for the first time at The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” is one of Stu’s strongest moments. The song’s enthusiastic homage to Richard O’Brien’s original Rocky Horror score sneaks in little jabs of Americana that feel both loving and satirical, like Randy Newman’s masterfully anthropological (and critical) albums about the American South in the 1970s. Watching Rasmussen’s thrill of sudden self-awareness also inspires a little envy: Why can’t everyone have a similarly crystallizing moment when the meaning of our lives is revealed to us in song and dance?

But after that pleasurable jolt, Stu begins its long stumble to the curtain call, spending far too much time on its title character’s growing consciousness (and breasts—the show’s creators seem as transﬁxed by Rasmussen’s tits as any gawking, smalltown boys) and not enough on the world that surrounds him. The rest of Silverton is an inchoate mass that is uncomfortable with Rasmussen’s outward transformation, sometimes violently, but not quite ready to chuck him out of town. He even gets elected mayor by a tiny margin on an anticorporate, pro-local platform.

But Stu’s climax, when the haters from Westboro show up, is a mystery. The musical wants to turn Stu into a folk hero, but the real hero of its big moment is the folk—the people who put aside their differences and their transphobia to protect their native son. But why? Has Stu’s transformation also transformed Silverton? Or is their counterprotest just an exercise in altruistic provincialism? It’s an important question, one worthy of a musical, but Stu hasn’t gotten its arms around that yet.

Stu still has its charms: Mark Anders plays Rasmussen with a combination of stubbornness and vulnerability that’s rare in any actor and makes his character deeply endearing. Bobbi Kotula as Rasmussen’s smart-mouthed, fearless girlfriend has the singing voice and vibrant stage personality to save even the most confused scenes from themselves. Adam Standley brings his meticulous physicality to Lovely Lady, one of the ﬁrst openly trans people Rasmussen meets, who invites him to a weekly supportgroup meeting in Portland. And Charles Leggett toys with his role as the narrator, modulating the tired Our Town conceit with a knowingness that undermines it and keeps things fresh. But the overall structure, and some of the big numbers, are still a jumble. Stu for Silverton might be worth seeing by the time it closes in September. But walk, don’t run.

FILM GENIUS SHOWCASE AT

THE FRYE ART MUSEUM

Genius Award film finalists show off their shorts and clips, with audience Q&A led by Stranger film editor David Schmader. The program follows a cocktail party and private museum exploration. Come see why we love these local filmmakers!

WHAT DOES ZACH WEINTRAUB LOVE ABOUT THE LIGHT IN BATHROOMS? HOW DID SCOTT BLAKE REINVENT THE WESTERN WITH HIS FIRST SHORT FILM? WHICH DIRECTOR DOES BENJAMIN KASULKE’S HAIR WANT TO WORK WITH NEXT?

This

FRYE

tive for Simpson, detailing

contribution to public art and good citizenship. Free. Tues-Sun. Through Oct 6. Horizon: A huge projection of a video by acclaimed media vivisectionist Paul Pfeiffer is juxtaposed with a row of 14 cherished paintings from the Founding Collection pushed close together and aligned by their horizon lines. Neat! Free. Tues-Sun. Through Sept 8. 704 Terry Ave, 622-9250.

HENRY ART GALLERY

The Ghost of Architecture : Selections from the permanent collection that reference architecture and/or architectural dimension. $10 suggested. Wed-Sun. Through Sept 29. 4100 15th Ave NE, 543-2280.

NORTHWEST AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSEUM book of the bound is Carletta Carrington Wilson’s latest series of collages, which meld text and image to create narratives that touch on silence and language, on freedom and oppression.

$6. Wed-Sun. Through Jul 28. 2300 S Massachusetts St 518-6000.

OLYMPIC

SCULPTURE PARK

The Western Oracle: We Will Tear the Roof Off the Mother: Usually you can’t walk on the sculptures but NOT SO with Heather Hart’s large-scale installation. You can climb on it and go inside its attic. There, true to its oracle designation, it will grant you a wish if you spend a little time drumming on its reverberant walls facing Elliott Bay. You just have to pick which wish you want. Free. Ongoing. 2901 Western Ave 654-3100.

SEATTLE ART MUSEUM Future Beauty . See review, page 21. $17. Wed-Sun. Through Sept 8. 1300 First Ave 625-8900.

Gallery Openings

JACK STRAW NEW MEDIA GALLERY

Robert Blatt: Elements : An intensely philosophical sound installation, this work features an “architectural environment” built from loudspeakers, transducers, a pair of headphones, and a “resonant glass object.” Free. Reception Fri July 26, 7 pm. Mon-Fri. Through Sept 6. 4261 Roosevelt Way NE 634-0919.

Continuing Exhibitions

G. GIBSON GALLERY Undertow : New work from Julie Blackmon, who returns to Seattle with her immaculately composed photographs of domestic life undergirded by sexuality, violence, and chaotic potential. Insert gushing here. Free. Tues-Sat. Through Jul 27. 300 S Washington St 587-4033.

JAMES HARRIS GALLERY

Steve Davis: Back to the Garden: Following his portrait series on incarcerated youth and institutionalized mentally ill people, Davis turns his camera on self-identified “modern ‘hippies.’” Draw whatever conclusions from this progression you like. Free. Wed-Sat. Through Aug 3. 604 Second Ave 903-6220.

JOE BAR

Deborah Lawrence: All Tomorrow’s Parties : Culture critique in collage form. Free. Through Aug 6. 810 E Roy St, 324-0407.

PLATFORM GALLERY

How to Stay Alive in the Woods : Naturalist painting, dioramas, and science projects collide and erupt in sculptures

and paintings by Patte Loper. Free. Tues-Sat. Through Jul 27. 114 Third Ave S 323-2808.

ROOM 104

David C. Kane: Investigations Regarding the Narrative, Psychological and Expressive Implications of Geometric Abstractions of the Human Physiognomy in Painting, or Scoubidou. : Well, there you have it. Free. Wed-Sat. Through Jul 29. 306 S Washington St, #104, 953-8104.

VICTOR

STEINBRU ECK PARK

MONUMAS : Seth David Friedman has carved a 5-foot piece of 10-million-year-old Persian travertine marble that aims to “put a stick in the wheel of modern time,” and he’s installing it in Seattle’s tourist haven/ open-air drug market/seagull habitat. Free. Through Aug 10. 2001 Western Ave, 684-4075.

Events

CULLOM’S FINAL PARTY

Say goodbye to the old space and get excited about new events to come. Cullom Gallery, 603 S Main St, 9198278. Free. Sat July 27, 2-8 pm. GET OUT!

SAM offers a series of free and outdoorish events all summer long. Today, they’ve got yoga, a sketching class with a local artist, Zumba, and public tours. Consult the website for specific times. Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave, 6543100. seattleartmuseum.org/ getout/. Free. Sat Jul 27. visualart@thestranger.com

READINGS

Wed 7/24

ADAM FITZGERALD, TOM HEALY, ANTHONY MADRID, AND LEAH UMANSKY

Fitzgerald is the author, most recently, of The Late Parade He is joined by fellow poets who have authored collections with better titles than that: Healy’s What the Right Hand Knows, Madrid’s I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say, and Umansky’s Domestic Uncertainties Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 3227030. Free. 7 pm.

VALERIE TRUEBLOOD

Trueblood is the local author of a collection titled Search Party: Stories of Rescue Publishers Weekly says these “diamond-sharp stories...dazzle.”

Apparently, Publishers Weekly is just hiring cliche-making machines to review books these days. Elliott Bay Book Company , 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600. Free. 7 pm.

Thurs 7/25

TIMOTHY JAY SMITH

A Vision of Angels is about four lives that become intertwined after an Easter bombing in Jerusalem. Seattle Mystery Bookshop 117 Cherry St, 587-5737. Free. noon.

DAVE HUNSAKER, CHRISTOPHER SLY

The North End of the World is a comic book (or graphic novel, if you prefer) about Edward Curtis, the man who found his fame by photographing Native American people. Elliott Bay Book Company 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600. Free. 7 pm.

MOVABLE TYPE

See preview, page 22. Vermillion, 1508 11th Ave, 709-9797. Free. 7 pm.

OLD GROWTH

NORTHWEST AUTHORS

Ginn Hale, Astrid Amara, Angela Benedetti, and Laylah Hunter will read from their books as a celebration of the upcoming Gay Romance Northwest Meet-Up at the Seattle Central Library. They are authors of genres including steampunk, urban fantasy, and pandemic erotica. (Just kidding about that last one, but it does sound like a genre that should exist, doesn’t it?) University Book Store, 4326 University Way NE, 6343400. Free. 7 pm. SEATTLE MYSTERY WRITERS

Here is a list of the mystery authors who will be on this panel: Bernadatte Pajer, Mike

Lawson, Charles Philipp Martin, Waverly Fitzgerald, Judy Dailey, and Leslie Budewitz. They’ll talk about writing mysteries. Central Library 1000 Fourth Ave, 6246600. Free. 7 pm.

Fri 7/26

LEVI GREENACRES

Mr. Greenacres, who has the kind of name that makes him sound like a character in an overwritten novel about a group of eccentric friends from Brooklyn, reads from his book Mommy’s New Tattoo, which is billed as “A Bedtime Story for People.” He’s a tattoo artist from Oregon, and the book is about tattoos for children. University Book Store 4326 University Way NE, 634-3400. Free. 7 pm.

Sat 7/27

THE CREW OF PIKE PLACE FISH

Tourists love these people for throwing fish around, but do they ever give credit to Lew Zealand, the Muppet who perfected the art of fish-throwing in the late 1970s? Not that I’ve ever seen. Maybe the fishmongers correct this grevious error in their cookbook In the Kitchen with the Pike Place Fish Guys: 100 Recipes and Tips from the World-Famous Crew of Pike Place Fish. University Book Store, 4326 University Way NE, 634-3400. Free. 1 pm.

Mon 7/29

REZA ASLAN, LESLEY HAZLETON

Two of the smartest writers about religion in the world today engage in a conversation. You’ll want to come to this one. Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave, 624-6600. Free. 7 pm.

SCIENCE ON TAP

The monthly science-and-beer discussion group features a presentation by Alan Diercks of the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute titled “Pandemic and Potentially Pandemic Influenza Viruses.” Remember to wash your hands! Ravenna Third Place, 6504 20th Ave NE, 5252347. Free. 7 pm.

Tues 7/30

ÉIRANN LORSUNG, JANE WONG

Both authors are poets. Lorsung’s book is titled Her Book while Wong has written chapbooks called Dendrochronology and Kudzu Does Not Stop Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600. Free. 7 pm.

ELLEN DATLOW

Datlow has won just about every sci-fi award that there is for her work editing science fiction and fantasy stories. She’s also the editor of the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series. If you think that editing is unnecessary, you should come to this event and learn why your error-riddled selfpublished novel isn’t a real book. University Book Store, 4326 University Way NE, 634-3400. Free. 7 pm. readings@thestranger.com

THEATER

Opening and Current Runs

THE ACROBATIC CONUNDRUM

A circus-theater hybrid company called the Acrobatic Conundrum performs The Way Out about eight strangers trapped in a world with no exit. Youngstown Cultural Arts Center 4408 Delridge Way SW, 686-3729. strangertickets. com. $20. Thurs-Sat at 8 pm. Through July 27. THE CLOCKWORK PROFESSOR

Pork Filled Productions presents a new steam-punk adventure play by Maggie Lee (Kindred Spirits), directed by Amy Poisson (These Streets). Professor Pemberton, a resident of New Providence, must confront his past as political unrest sweeps through his town. Theater Off Jackson , 409 Seventh Ave S, www.brownpapertickets.com. $10-$15. ThursSat at 8 pm. Through Aug. 3.

GRUESOME PLAYGROUND INJURIES

“Rajiv Joseph’s small but piercing play chronicles an extended friendship (that occasionally looks like it will tumble into true love) through the lens of physical injuries each character sustains while racking up emotional scars as well. It begins in an elementary-school nurse’s office where eight year-old Doug (Richard Nguyen Slonkier, boyishly charming at whatever age he’s playing) announces he’s busted his face after riding his bicycle off the school roof. Eight year-old Kayleen (a darker but intriguing Amanda Zarr) is having anxiety-induced nausea. Each ailment is typical for each character and those respective traits (excessive fearlessness and excessive fear) will come to dominate their lives. Artfully directed by Desdemona Chiang, we see Doug and Kayleen in minutes-long slices: After he’s got pink eye and she’s just endured a date rape, after he’s in a coma and she’s on the verge of a breakdown, after he’s shot his eye out with a firecracker and she’s preparing to bury her father. The warmth between them, contrasted with the cold indifference of the world around them, makes Gruesome Playground Injuries a surprisingly deft piece of work that plays with your emotions and expectations like an expert fencer.” (Brendan Kiley)

Azeotrope at Little Theater 608 19th Ave E, 675-2055. www.brownpapertickets.com.

$25. Fri at 7:30 pm, Sat-Sun at 2 and 7:30 pm, Mon at 7:30 pm. Through Aug 11.

INTIMAN SUMMER THEATER FESTIVAL

See page 22. Intiman Theater’s second summer festival includes four plays: Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress, directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton; Stu for Silverton , a worldpremiere musical directed by Andrew Russell; Aristophanes, directed by Sheila Daniels; and We Won’t Pay! directed by Jane Nichols. This summer’s acting company— which will perform in all four plays—includes Charles Leggett, Adam Standley, Tracy Michelle Hughes, Marty Mukhalian, and others.

Seattle Center St. intiman.org. $20-$50 for single tickets, $70-$250 for festival passes. Tues-Sun at various times. See website for details. Through Sept 15.

THE MAGIC PUDDING

A summer park performance of a “relatively unknown Australian classic” about three vagabond friends and their magic pud ding who are pitted against judges, politicians, and police officers in this satirical chil dren’s play. Theater Schmeater at Ave, 684-4555. schmeater.org. Free. Sat-Sun at 5 pm. Through July 27.

RAPTURE, BLISTER, BURN

“Set in backyards and living rooms in a small college town, Rapture caricatures, the Career Woman and the Stay-at-Home Mom, fighting over the mom’s bor ing husband, Charming Stoner Dad in Sandals. (They do have real names, but you can picture these cut-outs already, right?)

Catherine, the Career Woman (played by Kirsten Potter) slowly unravels—as she falls apart, Potter’s taut limbs loosen and swing—while Kathryn Van Meter plays the happy-on-the-surface mom, Gwen, as the blinkingest woman of all time. You know, dinner plate eyes, puppyish smile, blink. Blink. Blink. You can almost see metaphorical cracks appearing for real on her face, like she’s a porcelain dish with hot coals inside. The fun really comes from Mariel Neto’s Avery, a 21-year-old student who’s there to repeatedly point out that this mortal combat between the only two kinds of woman you’re ever allowed to be is bullshit. It’s just being a person—she still thinks she’s a person.” (Anna Minard) Union St, 292-7676. $20-$57. Tues-Thurs at 7:30 pm, Fri at 8 pm, Sat at 2 and 8 pm, Sun at 2 and 7 pm. Through Aug 11. theater@thestranger.com

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST

Cider Summit

September 6th & 7th! This two day event features 80+ elegantly crafted hard ciders from Northwest favorites, around the country, and around the world. This year’s event will also feature food pairings from Whole Foods Market, a dog lounge, and a bottles-to-go store. Passes include tasting glasses and sampling tickets.

Two Single Day Passes to Seattle’s Cider Summit ($60 Value). Your Price: $30.

Lot No. 3 combines comfort food, classic cocktails, and craft brews in a vintage-industrial inspired space. Don’t forget about the cocktails - their list of the good stuff will blow your mind. Try them today!

Cantina & the

Cha

At some point in their residency, every Seattle resident will ﬁnd themselves at Bimbo’s Cantina and at the Cha Cha Lounge. With StrangerPerks, it just got a little easier to get there.

Two $10 Vouchers to Bimbo’s Cantina & the Cha Cha Lounge. Your Price: $10.

CHOW

Food for the Urban Human

Abay Prepares the Lightest Ethiopian Dishes in Town

BY CHARLES MUDEDE

Let’s begin this review with some commentary about the food at Abay Ethiopian Cuisine. Readers familiar with my work will know that I almost never start a review in this way,

preferring instead to spend the ﬁrst few paragraphs discussing some aspect of a restaurant’s architecture, or some piece of cultural history related to the cuisine in question, or pointing out once again the social, political, and environmental disaster that is neoliberalism (a marketoriented ideology). But this time around, I have to get down to the food right away, because it’s that good.

Abay Ethiopian Cuisine 2359 10th Ave E, 257-4778

The dish to order at Abay is the veggie combo ($13, and it easily feeds two people). It has eight offerings on a giant plate, the stars of which are: spinach shaped like an upsidedown bowl; the diced tomatoes, red onions, jalapeños, and injera sheened by lemon juice; carrots and string beans sautéed to the perfect state of no longer being crunchy, but not ﬂoppy, either; and spicy cabbage and carrots that are, again, in the state of being neither crunchy nor soft.

The meat plate ($16) is also excellent (I will always love the whole hard-boiled egg in the chicken stew—the center of a meat plate’s universe), but it is not as outstanding as the veggie plate, which strives for something that seems almost impossible to achieve with Ethiopian dishes: a certain lightness. This is my theory (which has not been tested): The thick stews and brown folds of injera that dominate

the Ethiopian cuisine were essentially foods for farmers, foods to ﬁll a starved tummy after a long day in the sun with the plows and the cows. But when the heavy foods of the country moved to the city, they encountered a different kind of human, a human whose life was much, much lighter: She/he sat at a desk all day, traveled by car or bus or minibus to and from work, and at home spent a good amount of time in front of the telly. There was no sweat, no massive animals to whip, and no stomachs totally emptied by toil. The food at Abay is for this urban human.

python and collapsed into a food coma.

The owner of Abay, Tesfaye Haile Selassie, told me that his wife, Blen Teklu, who is the restaurant’s cook, is very health conscious. She tries to use the freshest and best vegetables (red onions over white ones, for example), and cooks with olive oil (the hero of the heartfriendly Mediterranean diet). When I tried to press him for information about how she prepares the injera rolls with the layers of lean ground beef (an appetizer, $6.50), or the wonderfully precise string beans (“Everyone loves those,” he said, “it’s called ‘fasolia’”), Selassie told me straight that he has to keep the doings of his kitchen a secret. Apparently, the competition in the local Ethiopian restaurant market has become so ﬁerce that survival depends on distinction from the rest. Selassie wants Abay to be recognized as innovative (“We offer single plates for those who do not want to share a big plate—no other Ethiopian restaurant in Seattle offers that”) and sophisticated (“We don’t just buy things because they are cheap, but because they taste good”).

Owner Tesfaye

And what is it exactly that distinguishes an urban stomach from a rural one? The urban one doesn’t like to be stuffed silly. It wants breathing room and a relaxed (and if possible, unnoticed) digestion process. The nightmare picture for the urban stomach is the python digesting some huge mammal. The snake just sits there doing nothing but slowly digesting/ grinding its catch. The whole snake becomes its stomach. There are times when I have eaten Ethiopian food and felt just like that

Haile Selassie told me straight that he has to keep the doings of his kitchen a secret.

The restaurant itself, which was once occupied by Skelly and the Bean, matches the mode of the food: urban and elegantly furnished, but not without its African touch—the unusually colorful (red, yellow, green, blue) shelves behind the bar. The best place to sit in Abay is at the table by the huge windows that view the sidewalk, the pedestrians, the pizza place, the trafﬁc heading up and down 10th, the quiet road heading up to Seattle Prep, the trees, the gardens, the apartment buildings. Indeed, on the day I dined at Abay, I saw a young woman leave her apartment in her pajamas, cross the street, place a letter in the mailbox, and return to her apartment: the light life of a city being.

Comment on this review at THESTRANGER.COM/CHOW

ONLY THE FRESHEST AND THE BEST Blen Teklu and Tesfaye Haile Selassie.

MOLLY BAUER

Senor Moose Cafe ~ ´

Date Night

A three-hour whirlwind of cirque, comedy and cabaret served with a

Chow Events

vous

formateur

cours,

çais

tous

niveaux sont invités à nous joindre. Songez à tous les beaux gens que vous y rencontrerez! Chouette! Et: C’est gratuit. Cafe Presse , 1117 12th Ave, 709-7674. cafepresseseattle.com. Free. Every other Wednesday, 4-6 pm.

SPANISH WINE DINNER

for beer-and-board/cardgame goodness, starting at 5 p.m. and on into the night. (Originally, they said 5 to 9, but it has yet to end that early because GAMES.) Bring a game to share, or borrow from Raygun’s collection. The Raygun Lounge , 501 E Pine St. gammaraygamestore.com. No cover. 5 pm.

Saturday 7/27

HOEDOWN FOR HUNGER

Featuring live music, a “rodeo posse,” antique tractors, line dancing, and barbecue from the Lake Forest Park Rotary Club, it’s a country-style fundraiser for North Helpline. Magnuson Park , 7400 Sand Point Way NE, 684-4946. hoedownforhunger. 11 am-4 pm.

It’s a fancy dinner with Spanish wine pairings from importer Classical Wines, hosted by Spanish wine experts Steve Metzler and Almundena de Llaguno. Crush, 2319 E Madison St, 302-7874. $150 plus tax and gratuity. 6 pm.

Thursday 7/25

FEAST ON THE FARM

SCOTCH AND OYSTER SIP AND SLURP Scotch and raw oysters. Yum? Ballard Annex Oyster House , 5410 Ballard Ave NW, 7835410. $25. 4-6 pm.

Sunday 7/28

SIX-DOLLAR SUNDAYS

On the last Sunday of every month, everything on Tini Bigs’ regular food menu is only $6 from 4 to 10 p.m., which will help cushion the martinis you’ll have more money for. Tini Bigs Lounge, 100 Denny Way, 284-0931. 4-10 pm.

SNOUTS & STOUTS

The annual Feast on the Farm, presented by Stewardship Partners, Salmon-Safe, and Oxbow Farm, features Washington wine, a bucolic setting, and food by chef Brendan McGill (Hitchcock). It also “promotes awareness of local farms that grow healthy food and actively participate in environmental stewardship” (though that sounds a bit like preaching to the choir here). Oxbow Farm , 10819 Carnation-Duvall Rd NE, Carnation, 2929875. stewardshippartners.org. $150-$250. 4:30 pm.

POST ALLEY WINE HOP

Slosh down Post Alley for the Thursday Wine Hop, where $4 glasses of unspecified wine are served from 5 to 7 pm at Kells, Post, the Tasting Room, and the White Horse Trading Co. Post Alley, Pike Place Market. 5-7 pm.

Every last Sunday of the month, Little Water Cantina roasts a couple whole hog’s worth of localbeer-brined pork tacos: You get a plate of those, a matching beer, and live music, too. Weather permitting, the party’s on the patio with its awesome Lake Union view. Little Water Cantina , 2865 Eastlake Ave E, 3974940. littlewatercantina. com. $17.

Monday 7/29

GUEST CHEF NIGHT AT FARESTART

Every Thursday, FareStart hosts Guest Chef Night, featuring dinners from various great Seattle chefs for just $24.95. All proceeds support FareStart, whose mission is to provide “a community that transforms lives by empowering homeless and disadvantaged men, women, and families to achieve selfsufficiency through life skills, job training and employment in the food service industry.” FareStart is a great thing, and you should go to this often. FareStart , 700 Virginia St, 267-6210. farestart. org. $24.95. Every Thurs 6-8 pm.

Friday 7/26

SLOG NERD HAPPY HOUR

On the last Friday of every month, the Stranger Testing Department (aka the STD, aka Paul Hughes and Rob Lightner, along with Queen Nerd Mary Traverse, and sometimes special guests!) takes over the Raygun Lounge

$10 PIZZA MONDAYS On Monday nights this summer, the lovely Cafe Lago is serving $10 pizzas, $4 pints of Pike Pale Ale, and $5 glasses of Chianti. We would star this twice if we could. Cafe Lago , 2305 24th Ave E, 329-8005.

BIG BOTTLE MONDAYS Throughout the summer, Quinn’s offers all of their large-format bottles of beer for half price on Monday nights. Starred (and very much so) for beer lovers! Quinn’s , 1001 E Pike St, 325-7711. quinnspubseattle.com.

YES ON 522 AT MARJORIE

Marjorie owner Donna Moodie and chef Dustin Calery invite you to a fundraising dinner for Yes on 522, the IMPORTANT campaign to label genetically modified food in Washington state. Marjorie, 1412 E Union, 441-9842. yeson522.com. $100. 6-8 pm.

PAELLA PARTY!

The latest installment of Madison Park Conservatory’s Sustainability in Seafood dinner series promises what will likely be really, really good paella, as well as Spanish wines, sangria,

and a speaker from Penn Cove Shellfish. Madison Park Conservatory , 1927 43rd Ave E, 3249701. $40, plus drinks/ tax/gratuity. 6:30 pm.

Tuesday 7/30

TWO-DOLLAR

TUESDAYS

In observance of National Ice Cream Month, Cupcake Royale offers single scoops of their ice cream for just $2 every Tuesday in July, at last making a National [thing] Month meaningful. Ballard, Bellevue, Capitol Hill, and downtown Cupcake Royale locations. cupcakeroyale. com. $2!

10-BUCK BOTTLE NIGHT

Every Tuesday at the BottleNeck Lounge, a

bottle of a featured red or white wine costs only $10. BottleNeck Lounge 2328 E Madison St, 3231098. bottlenecklounge. com.

Ongoing

DELUXE BAR & GRILL 50TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION

The DeLuxe has been serving burgers and beers on Broadway for five decades. Celebrate with an anniversary menu including the $1.99 Old School Burger ($2.19 with cheese) and pints of Redhook ESB, Widmer Hefeweizen, and Hale’s Pale Ale for $3 through August 15. Deluxe Bar & Grill, 625 Broadway E, 324-9697. Jul 16-Aug 15. MEANS WE RECOMMEND IT. SEND EVENT INFO TO: chow@thestranger.com

Find the full calendar online.

SODA BREAD AND HOLY WATER AT KELLS

The beloved Kells in Pike Place Market recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. The pub hosts live Irish music nightly and an enormous annual St. Patrick’s Day festival. “I sure the heck don’t drink green beer,” says owner Ethna McAleese.

Ethna McAleese Owner, Kells Irish Restaurant & Pub 1916 Post Alley, 728-1916

“That’s crazy! We have Irish dancers and pipers for our St. Patrick’s celebration.” Ethna grew up in Belfast, where she worked in a tobacco factory and ran a women’s clothing store.

When she and her sons opened Kells in Post Alley, she’d never even had a drink—she still hasn’t—but she made the traditional Irish stews and soda bread still served there today. The dense bread is perfect for soaking up Kells’ cream of potato soup. There are savory pasties whose heartiness (impressive for their size) is probably due to a drizzling of Mornay cheese sauce so good, I’d take shots of it.

The building Kells inhabits was originally the Butterworth & Sons mortuary, and it still contained vaults for bodies when Ethna began remodeling. She says the bar is haunted by several ghosts, possibly including a man she eighty-sixed for shooting a hole in the wall. To ward off the ghosts, the bar is stocked with holy water, which sadly is not available as a cocktail ingredient. SARAH GALVIN

JENNINGS

MUSIC

BLOCK PARTY!

know positivity is all the rage, but it’s just not them.

Nonstop Competition

Tacoma’s ILLFIGHTYOU Fuck Shit Up

BY ANDREW MATSON

I’m in the closet of an unfurnished condo in Tacoma, witnessing the best rap performance I’ve seen in forever. The song is called “Oracle,” the beat is coming from an iPhone plugged into

ILLFIGHTYOU

Sun July 28, Capitol Hill Block Party, Barboza Stage, 4:45 pm, 21+

speakers, and the rapper—23-year-old Ugly Frank of ILLFIGHTYOU—is, as they say, going in “Honestly, it’s intimidating, hearing somebody rap like that,” Frank’s 27-yearold bandmate EvergreenOne says of the super-rhythmic and apparently effortless verse. It’s a rare compliment among ILLFIGHTYOU, a Tacoma rap trio comprising Ugly Frank, EvergreenOne, and 22-year-old producer/rapper Khris P.—the guys crack on each other constantly in nonstop competition.

ILLFIGHTYOU’s Capitol Hill Block Party show will only be their fourth ever, but they don’t sound like amateurs. And they don’t sound like what Khris refers to as “Washington music.” (Meaning hiphop with jazzy beats and socially conscious lyrics—there is none of that here.) But if you have a taste for willful ignorance and badman boasts, their self-titled album is a fuckin’ party. The songs aren’t necessarily about much (doing drugs, having sex, the all-American pastime “fucking shit up”), but they’re full of raw style. The beats have a ’90s, East Coast underground rap feel with a computery twist. Vocally, it sounds like the guys are a few beers into the night and just letting it rip, which is not to downplay their rapper’s-rapper tendencies: alliteration, breath control, wordplay.

The best tracks on ILLFIGHTYOU are the boom-bap brawler “Gertrude” and the ultimate ﬁght anthem of 2013, “Threats”— tracks you might like if you’re into Nas and Waka Flocka Flame, which is to say, if you’re open-minded enough to enjoy both highly lyrical rapping AND cathartic “I

ain’t got no lyrics” music. ILLFIGHTYOU know smoothness is the Northwest’s sonic history (rap-wise, anyway) and positivity is all the rage, but it’s just not them. The record ﬁts into a natural upswing of punk-type rap in this region, but it’s also a reaction to the softness we’ve produced for years.

The guys are at home in Tacoma, though. Actually, the group owes its life to the city.

Frank ﬂed here from Utah when he was 16, after he saw a kid savagely beaten with a baseball bat by a bunch of Bloods for a bag of candy. His mom put him on a Greyhound bus on the spur of the moment—no good-bye to

“He walks into the middle of the crowd, just sits on the floor, and starts killing it— lays down, still rapping.”

friends or teachers. Khris moved to Tacoma from Missouri, after watching a man get shot ﬁve times in front of his house. “I like it here,” says Khris. “I feel like I can relax.” Neither had ever tried making music before coming to the Paciﬁc Northwest, but surrounded by our trees, mountains, and shade, they started rapping two years ago and thrived creatively.

With one album out and another on the way (featuring “Oracle”), Frank and Khris are also prepping a joint album called Mike Tyson Khris taught himself how to program beats on the FruityLoops software, and he also produces for another active crew called the Sandlot. Frank and Khris warmed up to Tacoma native EvergreenOne after they saw him rapping on the ground at Nectar Lounge in Seattle. “He walks into the middle of the crowd, just sits on

the ﬂoor,” says Frank, “and starts killing it— lays down, still rapping—I was like, Oh, that’s EvergreenOne, he’s a badass.”

Right now, the only thing ILLFIGHTYOU don’t have is a large fan base—at least not in real life. On Tumblr, buzz is building. Elsewhere on the internet, there are many likes, many reblogs. The famous UK electronic music producer Zomby tweeted about them, and they had their album reviewed on the revamped version of MySpace. The skateboard shoe brand Supra used “Gertrude” in a video. Perhaps from this online activity, a foothold in “the industry” will materialize in some other city. Maybe, like the Federal Way producer/rapper Keyboard Kid, they’ll get a record released by a British record label, or start booking shows in New York City. Something needs to happen for them to start building their name, and it’s not going to come from appealing to the tradition of “Washington music.”

The funny thing is, this is Washington music, it just pulls from multiple geographies. Which is one thing the internet has done—allowed artists to more easily mix native and nonnative cultures. And maybe that’s good for the young generation. Maybe around here, they don’t necessarily want softness in their music—at least the ones who aren’t listening to Macklemore (no shots). Maybe kids around here will grow up with a bigger picture of the world and their place in it, and maybe they won’t deride Tacoma. Maybe they’ll be big ILLFIGHTYOU fans. One can dream. However it shakes out for ILLFIGHTYOU in the long term, the present is looking and sounding good. Clear some hard-drive space and grab the album (freely downloadable at Illfightyou.com), and remember, you heard it here first: When that song “Oracle” finally drops, that shit is gonna be the song of the year. Comment on that shit at

ILLFIGHTYOU (From left) Ugly Frank, Khris P., and EvergreenOne

BETH CROOK

BLOCK PARTY!

Hey, Ladies!

Mashup King Gregg Gillis Talks About Girls

BY DAVE SEGAL

Your (scattered) attention, please. Girl Talk is going to talk a bit about girls (and women, too). His music would be half as entertaining at best without the presence of XX-chromosome humans in the mix. But before we get to that important topic, a brief introduction.

Girl Talk (Pennsylvania-based Gregg Gillis) graduated from Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University with a biomedical engineering degree in 2004. When he began playing out, he came off like a Midwestern Kid606—all manic, glitched-out IDM blurts with julienned pop and rap samples ricocheting at great velocity. Beginning with 2006’s Night Ripper, Girl Talk became the mashup king, lacing dissimilar songs in brief conjugations to create a ceaseless stream of nostalgia triggers and shocks of the new—all at once. He honed this attention-deﬁcit-disorder MO on subsequent full-lengths Feed the Animals and All Day, using his engineer’s scientiﬁc rigor to manifest ultimate party mixes that put decades’ worth of radio fodder into a smart blender. One of Girl Talk’s greatest talents is layering raps over unlikely musical foundations, typically soft-rock passages, punk tunes, or metal riffs. (Check out Biggie rapping “Juicy” verses over Quincy Jones’s “Summer in the City” and Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” in “Smash Your Head.”) Consequently, dozens of people mob the stage every time he performs live.

When you select a track by a female artist, what qualities are you looking for? Is it different from what you’re seeking from male artists?

It’s hard to pinpoint any speciﬁc qualities—just a very vague sense. The ﬁrst thing with all of this is it has to be music I like. I happen to be a fan of a lot of music made by women or fronted by women. I’m a big fan of a lot of female rap and grew up listening to a lot of female-focused rock music, a lot of stuff from the ’90s.

Girl Talk Fri July 26, Capitol Hill Block Party, Main Stage, 10:45 pm, all ages

As far as rap music goes, oftentimes the female vocalists I’ve sampled are very precise and their flow is very technical. That’s something that’s needed sometimes, ranging from Nicki Minaj to Dominique Young Unique to more underground people. But even going back to Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown and people like that, I feel like they have a very technical, precise style that really works with what I’m going for. I like the vocals to work off the rhythm, first and foremost, with the rap vocals finding a connection between the flow and the rhythm of another song. So

“I’ve always been a fan of Bikini Kill, and it may be uncool to say in Seattle, but I’ve always liked Hole.”

When you’re creating tracks, do you think in terms of trying to strike a balance between male and female artists?

I deﬁnitely think of a balance of diversity in general. With the shows and the albums, that’s a big thing—jumping around as much as possible while trying to keep it cohesive. It’s nice to put them in calculated spots throughout the album to keep it moving. If I’m gonna sample Kelly Clarkson on a record singing, then I probably wouldn’t sample another female pop vocalist back-to-back, if possible. The records are extremely calculated, but I like to keep the ﬂow seeming unpredictable, in a way that will seem logical after you kind of digest it. Getting a certain amount of female content is a high priority, to a degree.

when people are spitting hard or being technical, that is more exciting and engaging. It gives me more to work with. That’s deﬁnitely apparent on my last record [All Day], with vocals from Rihanna—people who are spitting pretty hard and combining it with a lot of different styles of music.

You seem to have a predilection for R&B divas and female rappers whose lyrics skew toward raunchy. Is this part of your overall strategy?

Yeah. When I put together the albums, I’m not thinking about how they’d function in the club, but I do think about it being fun and potentially something you could celebrate or party to. Sometimes, lyrics that are more party-related can lead to the raunchier side. I

think that’s a big component. The last record ended on UGK’s “One Day,” so at times there are very heartfelt bars on the record. There are deﬁnitely no rules, but yeah, in the shows, stuff that’s a little more lighthearted can work into it, and that ties into the more vulgar lyrics.

A common tactic you use is to pitch up male singers’ voices so they sound like women. What is the rationale behind that? Is it because you’re pitching up everything to give the track more oomph, so the vocals naturally go up, too?

That is part of it. I perform on a program called AudioMulch, and when you’re putting loops in there, it pitches it depending on the tempo. When putting together the music, I do like some level of dissonance to it—where it doesn’t sound exactly like it could be on the radio. I mean, there’s so much pitch-shifting on the radio, but I like the quirkiness of that, both with vocals dropped down and screwed and chopped, as well as things that are pitched up. Even on my earlier records, oftentimes I was going after a more technical sound inﬂuenced by what was going on in IDM. The pitchedup vocals and increasing the tempo allowed it to sound more technical. Just changing the cadence and pitch a little bit allows me to put my own stamp on it and take it a little further away from the original context.

Who are your favorite female musicians, both from a sampling standpoint and just for pure listening?

Sampling standpoint, I always love working with Lil’ Kim vocals. She’s also one of my favorite all-time female musicians. One of the more underrated female rappers is Diamond—who used to be in Crime Mob—that’s someone I’ve sampled a lot over the years. Outside of that, there are a lot of rock musicians that I haven’t sampled that I really like. I’ve always been a fan of Bikini Kill, and it may be uncool to say in Seattle, but I’ve always liked Hole. I really like Pretty on the Inside and Live Through This. Sorry if that’s sacrilegious in Seattle.

We’ll try to forgive you, Gregg.

GIRL TALK Half man, half lawn.

PAUL SOBOTA

MUSIC GENIUS SHOWCASE

AT THE FRYE ART MUSEUM

Hear what all the fuss is about during the MUSIC NIGHT of our 5-part series, featuring this year’s hottest Seattle musicians and hosted by Emily Nokes!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 24 | 5:30-8 PM | 21+

704 Terry Ave. $10 tickets include one cocktail.

HOW DOES KATIE KATE POP OUT SUCH SICK BEATS?

{ Illustration 1 } Map of regions of Genius.

WHICH ADORABLE BOWTIE WILL JHEREK BISCHOFF BE SPORTING?

WHAT DOES EYVIND KANG MEAN ABOUT NOT BECOMING A “FETISH OF YOURSELF”? (AND DOES JESSIKA KENNEY LIKE WHEN HE SAYS “FETISH”?)

Tickets at strangertickets.com

Azz’most Famous!

Big Freedia Just Wants to See You Bounce

BY KELLY O

I caught up with Freddie Ross, aka Big Freedia (pronounced “FREE-da”) the Queen Diva, by calling her at home in New Orleans, Louisiana—the ofﬁcial birthplace of jazz, and more recently of bounce music. If you’re not yet familiar with bounce—a style of New Orleans hiphop that absolutely requires you to move that booty—it’s best to watch and learn. Get thyself to the internet and watch Freedia’s videos for “Azz Everywhere,” “Y’all Get Back Now,” and “Excuse,” then learn to pop it, twerk it, and bounce it. Practice makes perfect, and don’t you go being shy—you must be one with your booty! It’s YOUR booty—love it, own it, whatever its size, Big Freedia style.

Your “azz” really is everywhere! You’re about to head out on tour again, of the United States? Yes ma’am, I sure am!

What’s the best thing about performing in your hometown of New Orleans? Ooh, it’s FUN—mostly because everyone is so familiar with the music and all the dance moves. Everybody’s really in tune to it.

Who are your favorite NOLA musicians? Of course, Lil Wayne, he’s steady killin’ it. And Luke James, he’s been the opening act for Beyoncé—he’s amazing and awesome. I listen to a lot of different things—I love Quintron and Miss Pussycat, brass bands, Sissy Nobby, Katey Red.

Tell me about the new reality show I keep reading about! Well, it premieres on September 18 on Fuse TV. The production company is World of Wonder. It’s very exciting and also a little overwhelming at the moment. You’ll get a peek into my life, on a personal level, and also on a business level. There’s deﬁnitely some really emotional moments, and some funny ones, too—all different sides of Team Freedia, which is all of my staff.

afraid to dance—sometimes too shy? Baby, you just got to let go and release yourself. Get into your moment.

Did you hear about those 33 high-school students who got suspended for twerking in San Diego? I did. I thought the video was cute. The instructors and staff over there took it too far, though—you know, people just want to have fun. And sometimes they want to express themselves, no matter where they are. I really don’t see any harm in twerking for a YouTube video.

Do you have new dance moves for this tour? Oh yeah, deﬁnitely. We’re gonna bring out some new stuff, change it up a little bit, bring out some new people.

“I really don’t see any harm in twerking for a YouTube video.”

What are the names of some of these dance moves? Well, we definitely twerk! And P-pop. Then there’s the “wobble,” the “wiggle-wobble,” and the “mixer.” The mixer is like mixing bowl—you make your ass go around and around in a circle.

What do you look for in backup dancers? They have to know what they’re doin’ on a dance level, but they also have to be positive—they have to have a good spirit. I don’t want anything or anyone who’s negative.

How about the Almost Famous documentary about you? It’s almost ﬁnished—we’re still working on it. It’s such a work in progress. There’s so much to include, we’re just steady ﬁlming all the time.

And are you working on a dance instruction DVD, too? Yeah, that’s deﬁnitely in the works, too! The Big Freedia Workout DVD.

Any advice for people like me who are

Your music makes people really happy. What makes YOU happy? Seeing people dance makes me happy. Getting people out of their normal zone and bringing all different walks of life together on a dance ﬂoor, that’s what really makes me happy. Straight, gay, black, white—and ALL different colors, shapes, and sizes! I love my audiences, and I love them to just be a big ol’ mix of people. And most of the time, it is.

Big Freedia Sat July 30, Capitol Hill Block Party, Main Stage, 3:30 pm, all ages

PHIL WILLIAMS

The Mixer

Original Twerk MIKE

Big Freedia BLOCK PARTY!

ISKA DHAAF’S EIGHT LIMBS AND FOUR LOBES

For more than two years, Benjamin Verdoes and Nate Quiroga have been formulating their band Iska Dhaaf. Until recently, they weren’t ready; they’ve been in no rush to let the melodic, ’60s-tinted, psychic baroque rock out if its cage. Iska Dhaaf sees Verdoes and Quiroga in roles they’ve never been in before. Quiroga (aka Buffalo Madonna from Mad Rad) learned guitar, bass, and keys; his opal singing voice is now a candelabra centerpiece. Verdoes (singing-songwriting frontman of Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band) learned to play drums and keys simultaneously while singing and triggering foot pedals, also completing a master’s degree in teaching English along the way. This August, they’ll put out a 7-inch on upstart Brick Lane Records (out now in digital form), and have releases scheduled for fall and winter.

I met the two at their Chophouse rehearsal space to hear the live set. Verdoes—ﬂanked by drums, a Farﬁsa organ, a Korg, a mixer, and a Roland Octopad—clicks off a four-count into “All the Kids,” and

Iska Dhaaf fire into the song. The duo is syncopated and tight. Quiroga’s eyes are closed: He’s fully given to playing, singing, and being the song. He puts down his bass, picks up a guitar, and screams, “Where are we going?” Verdoes drums and, with a stick tucked under his right arm, switches fingers from reverbed Korg to the Farfisa, picking up the bass line. They’re both singing. You wonder who’s playing what. If they weren’t ready before, Iska Dhaaf are ready now.

Y’all have been patient. You probably could’ve started playing shows a year ago. Why the wait? Q: Well, technically, I didn’t know how to play any instruments. So I had to learn how to play, and that took a while. It’s still taking a while. Then we had to ﬁgure out how we were going to play with just two people, because originally we thought there was going to be a third person. We wrote music for three people. We couldn’t ﬁgure out who the third person was. Then we found out that there wasn’t a third person [laughs]. We also wanted to have the recordings to where we wanted them before playing out.

If the listener closes their eyes, Iska Dhaaf are a four-piece. V: This isn’t a minimalist project at all. We’re not sacriﬁcing sound or tones; we want it to have all the sounds that we hear in our heads.

How often do you rehearse? Q: Every day, sometimes multiple times a day.

You’re both songwriters. Talk about

BLOCK PARTY!

the lyrical side of Iska Dhaaf. The song “Happiness” doesn’t seem so happy. Q: It’s reaching for happiness. [Speaks the lyrics] Taste it, I want to taste it ’til I’m wasted/’Til I fall on my face, ’til I fall in my place/Emptiness is all that fulﬁlls me/I want to drain me of each memory… It’s about trying to obtain happiness in this world. And I’m trying to drain myself of memories of things that I’m not too happy about and start over. You can look around, on Capitol Hill, and see people getting fucked up and seeming happy, laughing and cackling, but they’re almost more deranged—trying to obtain some sort of joy, looking so twisted.

Ben’s a guitar player and teacher. How much teaching went on as Nate was learning the guitar? V: I’d show him little things here and there, but he’s selftaught. And obsessive. He has this natural, crazy capacity for melody. When I was ﬁnishing my degree, I didn’t have that much extra time. We’d rehearse for a couple hours, and then I’d have to leave. I’d make him a loop, come back hours later, and he’d still be there playing to it.

Q: Crosspicking technique was something Ben helped me with. I’d be like, “So, was this really fucking hard to learn? ’Cause I’m wanting to punch something right now.” [Laughs]

Ben, coming from Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band, what’s different about Iska Dhaaf? V: Everything is different. I didn’t anticipate any of this happening. Everything about this project works—it’s very difﬁcult, but it works. It’s this combination of ethics, ideas, and collaboration.

Nate, coming from Mad Rad, do you miss rapping? Will there be an Iska Dhaaf version of “Crack da Blunt”?

Q: I don’t particularly miss rapping. No plans for “Crack da Blunt,” but we do actually want to make something later where I’m rapping in ﬁve or seven. We want to experiment with different signatures and be experimental. I don’t think of it as rapping, I just want to communicate in a different form. At the moment, I’m in love with what’s happening, so I’m not missing anything.

How did y’all decide on Iska Dhaaf as your name? V: I’ve been learning Somali, and the kids I was working with began teaching me words. It’s a beautiful language.

A phrase Somalis use is “iska dhaaf,” which means “let it roll off, let it fall.” Or, “don’t think about it, let it go.” There are many interpretations. With the band, when we were beginning, there were frustrating moments when we were super overwhelmed with learning instruments and ﬁguring out how to ﬁt it all in. You can hear us on our recordings going, “Fuck! Shit!” I’d say, “Iska dhaaf—let it roll off.” Then it became this thing we’d say to each other. Our mantra.

What’s coming up after Block Party, besides your releases? Q: We’ll be playing and curating a series of gallery and warehouse shows with acts that we really like. We feel supported and connected to the hiphop community in Seattle. I think fantastic, proliﬁc things are happening there. I’m excited to bring some diversity to shows that aren’t necessarily in a music venue or bar.

V: It’s exactly what a publicist told me years ago not to do. We just want to connect with people who care, and do shit that’s meaningful…

TRENT MOORMAN

Iska Dhaaf

Fri July 26, Capitol Hill Bock Party, Cha Cha Stage, 6:45 pm, 21+

MOSHE KASHER

NEVER HEARD OF ’EM

BY ANNA MINARD

Anna Minard claims to “know nothing about music.” For this column, we force her to listen to random records by artists considered to be important by music nerds.

THE

FLAMING LIPS

In a Priest Driven Ambulance (Restless Records)

Let’s get the copyediting out of the way: Guys, we’ve got to get a hyphen in there! Seriously, it should be “Priest-Driven,” and it keeps bugging me, but now I’ve said it and we can move on. Oh, hey, can you tell by the weaksauce intro about hyphens that I maybe didn’t love this one?

Well, me listening to In a Priest Driven Ambulance was the result of a hard-fought battle by half the music department and the internet over which album to choose—ﬁrst a Facebook post, then a poll on Line Out, our music blog. Everyone got all attitudey about it in a way that was so emblematic of how we all think about music so differently, we can barely hear each other over our own assumptions. The Line Out poll swung in favor of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, which was then immediately decreed unac-

OUTRAGE

“Black man kill a black man, it’s cool, they lovin’ that/Black man kill a white man and they sentencing him to death/White man kill a black man then scream about self defense…” —Soulja Slim (RIP)

“What that loss gave us/‘Fucking with the people, it’s always gon’ come back around’/ It’s ’bout to be big movements from below/ The golden age lies ahead/Struggles, proceed/You can’t lie to yourself/You can’t lie how it felt/No surprise how the cards getting’ dealt/That’s why—I won’t be back for a long time.” —Shabazz Palaces

Were you surprised? Me neither. Did that help? No, of fucking course not. Are you the person who insists race had no bearing in the case of Trayvon Martin and the coward George Zimmerman? Do you think the body of a white teenager mouth slack, eyes staring—gunned down by a black civilian, would be plastered on TV or blogs? That this kid, slain by a stranger, would be slandered by adults who never knew him? You don’t, I know you don’t, because you’re not crazy. If it wasn’t enlightening in the least, or at least sickeningly consistent with your unfortunate expectations—about how little worth is given to black lives in this country if it seemed perfectly reasonable, maybe a little extreme, but understandable, I mean… Shut the fuck up, sit on a campﬁre, you stupid-ass shitsack of a waste of a human being. May you be

ceptable by commenters. Then other people yelled, “Whatastupidhipster,” and then other people cursed, and generally, shit got feisty. One comment, from longball, I’d like to respond to: “The only good point raised against Yoshimi is that Anna must be familiar with at least 3 of the tracks if she has left her house any time in the last decade.” To which I say: NOPE! I just heard my ﬁrst Flaming Lips song a couple months ago, when a friend put “Do You Realize?” on a mix, because you can totally still surprise me with songs like that.

The poll stayed with Yoshimi at number one and Soft Bulletin a close second, and then I guess they just threw democracy in the garbage to give me Ambulance, an album that’s sufﬁciently nerdy.

The ﬁrst track starts with a couple seconds of carnival organ, then goes straight into distorted guitar, then some off-key singing about Jesus, which is occasionally accompanied by a demon voice underneath it. It doesn’t change that much over the album—distortion, yell-singing, some weird bits added here and there. Somehow it all sounds undeniably American, way more so than a lot of seemingly similar rock I’ve heard. I have no idea why I feel that way, but it popped into my head and stayed there the whole way through. Song after song, I see American ﬂag patches and desert sunsets. It swoops and shouts like moving water, but always has a running thread of unease.

There’s a very straightforward cover of “What a Wonderful World”; you expect it to go somewhere else, but it stays right there. A lot of the guitar sounds like it’s played by a man made of tinfoil. The internet says this is a concept album about religion. Like I said, I didn’t really love it. I did, however, want to hear more, to ﬁgure it out. We’ll see. I give this a “turn it down, it’s past my bedtime” out of 10.

the last of your family, you no-empathyhaving sociopath. I hope your mama steps on a Lego every time she hears your name. I hope the fear you carry for black bodies reaches out and chokes your lie-swallowing throat raw and bloody from the inside.

I just feel like it’s been so many times now that I’ve sat down to write my next column—or program my next radio show— with a heart full of hurt and outrage, trying to process it all and spin it into something useful, constructive. Right now, though? I just feel tired, so beyond tired. Tired of getting my intelligence insulted, tired of getting my humanity denied, and worse yet, tired of getting my hopes up for justice being served, for the right thing being done.

Fuck hope, though, when there are shows. One-half of alleged supergroup Slaughterhouse—Joe Budden and Crooked I—will be at El Corazón on Wednesday, July 24, with Feez the Germ, Aquino, Jkey, Cool Nutz & Krazy, DJ Gerze & DJ Swervewon, and your host Neema Spac3man, Louis V, and ILLCHRIS (aka AyeLogics aka Logics) all pack into the Crocodile the following evening— apparently Spac3 will be cutting his dreads off that night. Not bad, but it kinda lacks the cultural high-water mark set with 2009’s Beard-Off, the OG of hiphop hair-loss. Capitol Hill Block Party is this weekend, as you no doubt already know, so feel free to lose your shoes to the robust sounds of hiphop ranging from Latyrx to Danny Brown. Just remember that you live in a country that “has no functioning democracy,” according to one of its best-regarded former presidents. Is it just me, or does it feel like in some respects, in some states, America is determined

backward?

The Can Can is a unique phenomenon in Seattle, and maybe in the country - Brendan Kiley, The Stranger

THIS FRIDAY JULY 26TH @ VERA PROJECT TALLHART / FROM INDIAN LAKES

MAKESHIFT PRODIGY, AFTERWORDS, THE BARD AND THE LIAR ALL AGES - 7:00 PM TICKETS @ WWW.TICKETFLY.COM

THIS SATURDAY JULY 27TH @ EL CORAZON ALEX GOOT

SAM TSUI FEAT. KURT HUGO SCHNEIDER, LUKE CONARD & LANDON AUSTIN, KING THE KID, MATT BACNIS

ALL AGES (BAR W/ ID) - 7:00 PM TICKETS @ WWW.TICKETFLY.COM

FRI AUG 9TH @ THE MIX *LATE SHOW* FREE SALAMANDER EXHIBIT (MEMBERS OF SLEEPYTIME GORILLA MUSEUM) FAUN FABLES 21+ ONLY - 10:30 PM TICKETS @ WWW.TICKETFLY.COM

FRI AUG 16TH @ SHOWBOX MARKET MONETA

(NEW SINGLE / MUSIC VIDEO RELEASE) VAN EPS, ORISON, SKY PILOT, ALABASTER

ALL AGES (BAR W/ ID) - 7:00 PM TICKETS @ WWW.SHOWBOXONLINE.COM

@ VERA PROJECT, 8/26 RIVERBOAT GAMBLERS @ EL CORAZON, 9/7 CRUSHED OUT @ THE SUNSET, 9/14 PARACHUTE @ VERA PROJECT, 9/26 TEENAGE BOTTLEROCKET / THE QUEERS @ EL CORAZON, 9/29 CANCER BATS @ EL CORAZON, 10/20 STREETLIGHT MANIFESTO @ NEPTUNE THEATER

take some very

UP&COMING

Lose your well-timed Jolly Rancher every night this week! For the full music calendar, see page 41 or visit thestranger.com/music For ticket on-sale announcements, follow twitter.com/seashows

Wednesday 7/24

Night of Genius, Music Edition: Eyvind Kang and Jessika Kenney, Katie Kate, Jherek Bischoff (Frye Art Museum) See Stranger Suggests, page 19.

Joe Budden, Crooked I (El Corazón) See My Philosophy, page 37.

Sandy City, Places We Slept, L’ile Pica (Heartland) See Underage, page 44.

Ookay, Tony Goods, Kozmo, Jameson Just (Foundation) See Data Breaker, page 42.

Randy Newman

(Woodland Park Zoo) My ﬁrst Randy Newman experiences took place in his Pixar era, and his ham-voiced “humor” never really appealed to me. I thought I’d be a good sport and rummage through his discography for something good—or at least one single song that didn’t remind me of a burned-out, triple-divorced whiskey dad whose “kinda-racist” jokes are not now and were never “satire”—but I came up empty-handed. Then a trusted friend told me to check out Nilsson Sings Newman, and you know what? It’s pretty good! Harry Nilsson’s easy voice and lighter touch deﬁnitely make Newman come off as the songwriter I assume Newman fans are hearing. So listen to that, watch Toy Story, and get pumped—after all, it’s a show at THE ZOO, and that surely equals fun! (And the giraffes will no doubt go nuts for “Short People.”) EMILY NOKES

Piano Starts Here:

The Music of Fats Waller (Royal Room) This is a scene I would love to ﬁlm: the

year, 1926; the city, Chicago; the time, 11:56 p.m.

A portly but young black man leaves a club. This is Fats Waller, the great jazz pianist who in three years will hit the heights of American fame with the song “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” A moment later, three gangsters approach Waller, stick a gun in his back, and order him into a car. Waller takes a seat, the doors are shut, and the car speeds off. Cut to Waller and the gangsters approaching a huge door in the Hawthorne Inn. Waller is nervous, looking from side to side, and all the time wondering if these are the last moments of life. The huge and noble door opens and slowly reveals a massive and dazzling party. Gangster One pockets the gun and tells Waller to play for his boss, Al Capone. Waller is more than happy to do this and gets right to it. The great pianist will not meet his end tonight. CHARLES MUDEDE

Naam, Wizard Riﬂe, Terminal Fuzz Terror

(Highline) Brooklyn four-piece Naam dwell menacingly in that zone where doom metal and psych rock collide and exchange stoic glances. Archetypal touchstones like Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd loom large in Naam’s sound, but their iconic traits are swirled with enough panache and steely gravity that their music never comes off as pastiche. Portland’s Wizard Riﬂe ﬂare out of the gate with more reckless abandon, spazzing noisily like a slightly more subdued, Northwestern Lightning Bolt while occasionally stomping with Brontosaurus-like rhythmic girth. Bonus: This show’s at the Highline. Support your local vegan bistro/bar/heavy-music hangout. DAVE SEGAL

Wayﬁnders, Brain Drain, Great Spiders

(Comet) Maybe you’re not trying to ﬁnd your way into the future—maybe you’re not one to zip around the city in a Car2Go, with an aggressive dubstep re-

mix cranked up to 10. Maybe you’d rather walk, with some old Blue Cheer or Monster Magnet playing on headphones that are so retro-looking, someone just asked you if you were a helicopter pilot. Maybe you like to look at old photos of 1970s biker couples from California on that weird Canadian website acidsweatlodge.com. Maybe you still take acid. Or maybe you wish you could still take acid, but you just smoke a little pot instead. Maybe you wear a crystal around your neck in a little leather medicine bag you bought at the United Tribes powwow at Discovery Park. There were some excellent things about the ’70s. Let Wayﬁnders show you the path back there. KELLY O

Thursday 7/25

Zachary Cale, Le Sang Song, Case Studies (Heartland) See Underage, page 44.

Groundislava, Beat Connection DJs (Barboza) See Data Breaker, page 42.

MOTOR: Airport, Patternmaster, Chris Davis (Pony) See Data Breaker, page 42.

Grayskul, Afrocop, JusMoni & WD4D, Sax G (Sunset) Grayskul—Onry Ozzborn, JFK, and bassist Rob Castro, originally of the deep Seattle collective Oldominion (if you haven’t heard their 2002 classic One, get ye to the record store)—busted the champagne bottle across the bow of 2005’s excellent Deadlivers and didn’t stop until 2009’s Graymaker Deadlivers amped up the gothic and supernatural in Oldominion’s already dark sound, and proved one of the cornerstones in the relationship between Rhymesayers and the 206. Though it’s been four years since Graymaker, it’s not for inaction. Aside from other projects, Grayskul’s forthcoming Zenith features Raekwon the Chef, Aesop Rock, Terra Lopez of Sister Crayon, and more. Look for it September 17 on Fake Four Inc. For tonight’s show, Ozzborn says they’ll be performing new material and “old goodies.” Here’s hoping the latter

includes “Prom Date.” Somebody give whoever’s booking the Sunset these days a gold star. [That’d be Nathan Chambers. —Ed.] GRANT BRISSEY

Kevin Greenspon, Sun Hammer, Secret Colors, Chrisman + Moore (Gallery 1412) Just how much paciﬁc beauty can you stand? Los Angeles musician Kevin Greenspon will test your mettle with a surfeit of verging-on-newage keyboard and guitar opuses that will lower your heart rate and oxygenate your soul. (There is some great new-age music out there, so don’t knee-jerkily think new age implies wackness.) Portland’s Sun Hammer make deeply atmospheric, abstract electronic music that sounds like it could’ve been issued by the late Pete Namlook’s FAX label (compliment!). Secret Colors (Seattle’s Matt Lawson) just released his Days Off album on the Group Tightener label. He blue-skies your mind with non-cloyingly jaunty and sprightly electronic pop played on a Yamaha synth instead of his usual guitar. It’s a fresh smiley-smile record. Chrisman + Moore = the guy behind ambient producer Widesky and the drummer for Brain Fruit and Midday Veil. Better believe they’re going to blast off into some heady territory. DAVE SEGAL

Friday 7/26

Capitol Hill Block Party: Girl Talk, STRFKR, Dillon Francis, Chromatics, Danny Brown, Telekinesis, Glass Candy, Daughn Gibson, Bleached, White Lung, and many more (Various venues) See pullout, page 33, and Stranger Suggests, page 19.

Iska Dhaaf (Cha Cha) See Sound Check, page 35.

Timber! Music Festival: Helio Sequence, Fruit Bats, Lemolo, Bryan John Appleby, Kithkin, River Giant, Ten-Speed Music (Tolt-MacDonald Park) Despite the Northwest’s summers already being highly saturated with music festivals, Artist Home Presents (the same folks who bring

you Doe Bay Music Fest) are throwing one more fest on the pile—Timber! Outdoor Music Festival is a new, two-day event happening in Carnation, Washington, at the 574-acre Tolt-MacDonald Park. There’s camping, hiking, and a 500-foot suspension bridge, should you want to pretend you’re Indiana Jones. And, of course, there will be music—lots and lots of music. Friday’s highlights include Bellingham’s Baltic Cousins, Hobosexual, and S (aka Jenn Ghetto) performing with the Passenger String Quartet (swoon). And Saturday is even better, with the dreamy Lemolo, the wildly entertaining Kithkin, and a Helio Sequence, Fruit Bats, and Quasi sandwich. Tickets are cheap, too—just $45 for both days. It’s a great, woodsy alternative to the Capitol Hill Block Party, should you want to get out of the city while still soothing your craving for live music. MEGAN SELING

Saturday 7/27

Capitol Hill Block Party: Pickwick, Purity Ring, A-Trak, El-P, Star Slinger, Killer Mike, Big Freedia, Rose Windows, Radiation City, Wild Cub, La Luz, Pure Bathing Culture, and many more (Various venues) See pullout and page 34.

Timber! Music Festival: Helio Sequence, Fruit Bats, Lemolo, Bryan John Appleby, Kithkin, River Giant, Ten-Speed Music (Tolt-MacDonald Park) See Friday.

Qui, Helms Alee, Rabbits, the Great Goddamn (Black Lodge) It’s been 10 years since LA avantpunks Qui released their debut, Baby Kisses, but the duo (since stand-in vocalist David Yow left the band for recent Jesus Lizard and Scratch Acid reunions) is back in the studio working on their third album, Life Water Living. One listen to the title track is enough to pick up on the new elements they employ—two-part vocal harmonies, an actual keyboard melody—but hear that their heavy, unconventional approach is still very much intact.

Two of

Northwest

welcome refuge from that bridge-and-tunnel Block Party crowd just up the hill. MIKE RAMOS

Sunday 7/28

Capitol Hill Block Party: The Flaming Lips, Frightened Rabbit, Cults, Hey Marseilles, Latyrx, Odesza, Ravenna Woods with Seattle Rock Orchestra, ILLFIGHTYOU, and many more (Various venues) See pullout and pages 31 and 37.

Around the Block Party: Haunted Horses, Hot Victory, MTNS, Wimps, Dude York (Chop Suey) Don’t have the cash to get into Block Party? Don’t fret! Chop Suey is hosting a totally free party with stellar lineup of local talent—Dude York play reckless and restless punk rock, Haunted

BUSINESS HOURS:12:00PM - 2:00AM (365 DAYS)

(EVERYDAY)

MON-THU 9PM-2AM FRI-SUN 7PM-2AM

(EVERY TUESDAY) 7PM - 9PM

Horses appropriately describe themselves as “satanic-space-jams,” and MTNS stole the show at last year’s Block Party without even ofﬁcially being on the bill. The weirdo drum/guitar duo set up right outside one of the fest’s exits and blasted through a spastic set of instrumental noise (in underpants and a luchador mask, no less). The best part? It’s free! ZERO DOLLARS! And come hungry—there will be free burgers and hotdogs, too. MEGAN SELING

One Direction

(KeyArena) On the subject of made-to-order adolescent male bands, I just now came to appreciate the hiphoppin’, harmonizin’ R&Bin’ of the BackSyncs of my generation when faced with the watery “power”-pop boy bland that is One Direction. I’m fully aware that my taste in this case is being skewed by my denim-coated nostalgia, but YIKES—despite their attempts at serious “WE’RE PARTYING!” songs, no matter how high you turn up the volume, their music can never be loud. They do have every romantic base covered, though—“she’ll never be with me,” “sorry I dumped you, but it’ll be okay,” and “we’re young, let’s be IN LOVE even if it’s CRAZY.” They even have a song where they drop the American accents to croon in their less abrasive UK ones! Maybe they should do that. In fact, if One Direction are sick of Simon Cowell, I have some ideas for them (three words: baggy denim overalls). EMILY NOKES

Monday 7/29

Oh, my aching Block Party hangover…

Tuesday 7/30

The Cult, White Hills (Showbox Sodo) See Stranger Suggests, page 19.

The Uncluded (Aesop Rock and Kimya Dawson) (Neumos) The Uncluded is the new band made up of acclaimed indie rapper Aesop Rock and acclaimed indie singer-songwriter Kimya Dawson, and their music sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard—except the

LOUNGE

respective oeuvres of Rock and Dawson, whose divergent musical styles and harmonious worldviews blend here into something new and beautiful. Swapping verses while she strums and he deploys beats, taking mutual aim at such topics as fear of ﬂying, organ donation, and the reparative power of a well-timed Jolly Rancher, the Uncluded might be a one-off. But they’re brilliant. DAVID SCHMADER

7.25 Thursday (Afrobeat) AFRICAN SHOWBOYZ Cascadia 10, Thione Diop’s Afro Groove

$6 adv, $8 Doors, 8pm, 21+

7.26 Friday (Reggae / World) ETANA Picoso, DJ Rankin Mark

$15 adv / $20 dos, 7pm doors, 21+

7.27 Saturday (DJ / Dance) From the producers of The Prince and Michael Experience SLIVER- with DJ Dave Paul Spinning your favorite Indie rock, Dance, Electro and Dubstep.

$6 adv. $8 Door, 9pm, 21+

7.30 Tuesday (Electronic) FERAL FAUNA

Children of Kids, Karmedic, Kyrstyn Pixton

$5adv. $7 Doors, 8pm, 21+

8.1 Thursday (Hip Hop) BIGTIME

OC Notes, Jesus Chris, Wizdumb, Vaughnilla, Betes, Hokuspoch Hosted by 3rdegree

$5 adv. 8pm, 21+

8.2 Friday (Blues / Soul / Americana) ANDY FRASCO and the U.N. Heels To The Hardwood, The Blue Tracks

$5 adv/ $8 dos, 7pm doors. 21+

8/3 THEE Satisfaction & Yo! Majesty 8/6

Megadeth, Black Label Society, Device, Hellyeah, Newsted (Comcast Arena) Sometimes bad people make interesting records. No one can defend the actions of GG Allin, Varg Vikernes, or Charles Manson, but that doesn’t mean Always Was Is and Always Shall Be Filosofem, and LIE aren’t worth investigating. The work of mentally unstable sociopaths can be fascinating; it’s just not to be taken seriously. Then you have artists like Megadeth. The controversial statements made by vocalist/guitarist Dave Mustaine are mild compared to the actions of the aforementioned artists. Yet his derogatory comments toward Mexican immigrants and homosexuals, combined with his suggestion that Obama orchestrated the Aurora shooting, make it difﬁcult to enjoy Megadeth in 2013. Listening to a Murder Junkies or Burzum album is like listening to an evil Wesley Willis. Listening to Megadeth, however, feels like voting for the Tea Party.

BRIAN COOK

Strangers Family Band, Ephrata, Hotel

Vignette, Tramp Kings

(Comet) If nothing else, Strangers Family Band claim some impressive inﬂuences: Pretty Things, West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, United States of America, Syd Barrett, and the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request. As it stands now, though, SFB aren’t quite in that exalted league of high-altitude tunesmiths. However, they are competent crafters of fairly trippy rock that’s worth its weight in paisley shirts. YouTube their song “Strange Transmission” for a representative sample of SFB’s Wayback Machine tinkering. From what little I’ve heard of Seattle’s Ephrata (featuring Scrapper director Brady Hall on guitar and vocals), they sound like Lush in their sedate mode. There’s an ornate, glazed, 4ADlike prettiness here that has the potential to enchant thousands. DAVE SEGAL

locals Helms Alee and Portland’s Rabbits round out this bill into one awesome noisefuck that should be

NONSUCKY SONGWRITERS

WED 7/24

LIVE 2 BIT SALOON Stabbed in the Back, guests CHOP SUEY Angie and the Car Wrecks , Sean K. Preston, JD Hobson , 8 pm, $5/$6 COMET Song Sparrow Research , Powerdove, Whitney Ballen , & Yet, $6 EL CORAZON Joe Budden, Crooked I, 8:30 pm, $17.50/$23

FRYE ART MUSEUM A Night of Genius: Eyvind Kang and Jessika Kenney, Katie Kate, Jherek Bischoff, 5:30 pm, $10/$40 a HEARTLAND Sandy City, Places We Slept, Gossimer, guests, 8:30 pm

HIGHLINE Naam, Wizard Rifle, Terminal Fuzz Terror, $10

HIGHWAY 99 Little Ray & the Uppercuts, 8 pm, $5

NECTAR Troy’s Bucket, guests, 8:30 pm, $6 a NEPTUNE THEATER Son Volt, $18.50/$20

NEUMOS Dwele, Zach Bruce, guests, 8 pm, $20

PINK DOOR Casey MacGill & the Blue 4 Trio, 8 pm

THE ROYAL ROOM The

Music of Fats Waller: Guests, 8 pm, $7/$10

SEAMONSTER LOUNGE Rippin Chicken, 10 pm, free STUDIO SEVEN Adestria, to the Wind, guests, 7 pm, $10/$12

TRACTOR TAVERN Kobo Town, $15/$18

TRIPLE DOOR Fanfare Ciocarlia, Orkestar Zirkonium, 7:30 pm, $20/$25 a VERA PROJECT Raven Zoe, Todd Williams, This Winter, guests, 7:30 pm, $15

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE The Brad Gibson Trio, free a WOODLAND PARK ZOO NORTH MEADOW Randy Newman, 6 pm, $28

BALTIC ROOM Reverb: DJ Rome, Rozzville, Zooty B, Antartic

CAPITOL CLUB Roll

Bounce: OCNotes, Spirit Fingaz, EverGrimeState, free CONTOUR Rotation: Guests, 10 pm, $5

THE EAGLE VJDJ Andy J

ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN Passage: Jayms Nylon, Joey Webb, guests

FOUNDATION OOKAY, Tony Goods, Kozmo, Jameson Just HAVANA Peter Evans, Devlin

Jenkins, Richard Everhard, $1 LAST SUPPER CLUB

Jame$Ervin, DT, Contagious MOE BAR DJ Darwin, DJ Swervewon, guests

NEIGHBOURS Undergrad: Guest DJs, 18+, $5/$8 SEE SOUND LOUNGE DJ Chinkyeye, DJ Christyle

THURS

7/25

LIVE

2 BIT SALOON The Dirty Deals, the Buffalo Stagecoach, the Vaudeville Etiquette, 7 pm

BARBOZA Groundislava, Beat Connection DJs, 8 pm, $12

BLUE MOON TAVERN Bottlenose Koffins, Snake Island, the Apollos, $5 CAFE RACER Mason Reed, free CAN CAN Vince Mira CENTRAL SALOON The Red Stone Sinners a CHOP SUEY Bad Rabbits, Air Dubai, $13.50

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER Benefit for Rain City Rock Camp for Girls: Whitney Monge, Katie Costello, Naomi Wachira, 8 pm, $12/$15

CONOR BYRNE Vaudeville Etiquette, Rebekah Pulley,

EVAN, BRIDE-TO-BE

Have you ever been outside drinking on a sunny summer afternoon, without a care in the world? Have you ever been out day-drinking, then suddenly you’re inside a dark Irish pub, wearing a fuzzy “Bride-to-Be” tiara, and doing shots? Has someone ever randomly handed you a spicy chicken wing, which, after you eat it, makes you realize you better call a cab for a ride home? Have you ever tried to call a taxi on your zucchini-phone, but all you got was a busy signal? Something like this happened to me once, but it involved an extremely warm, individually wrapped slice of American cheese that I found in the back pocket of my jeans. KELLY O

Janglewagon, $8

a CROCODILE Spac3man, ILLCHRIS, Louis V, 8 pm, $3

DARRELL’S TAVERN The 350’s, free

DISTRICT LOUNGE Cassia DeMayo Quintet, 8 pm, free EL CORAZON Shooter Jennings, Scott H. Biram, 8 pm, $22/$25

a GALLERY 1412 Kevin Greenspon, Sun Hammer, Secret Colors, Chrisman + Moore, 8 pm, $5 - $15

a HEARTLAND Zachary Cale, Le Sang Song, Case Studies, 8 pm

HIGHLINE Lovers and Lunatics, 9:30 pm, $6

HIGHWAY 99 Jeffery Broussard & the Creole Cowboys, 8 pm, $20

NECTAR African Showboyz, guests, 8 pm, $6

NEUMOS Caravan Palace, guests, 8 pm, $22

PINK DOOR Bric-a-Brac, 8 pm

RENDEZVOUS The Torn ACLs, Old Age, the Hunting Club, 10 pm, $5

THE ROYAL ROOM The Yada Yada Blues Band, 8 pm, free

SCARLET TREE How Now Brown Cow , 9:30 pm, free

SEAMONSTER LOUNGE The Suffering Fuckheads 10 pm, free

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB

Cailtlin Jemma, 8 pm, $5

a STUDIO SEVEN Beneath the Spin Light, guests, 7 pm, $10/$12

SUNSET TAVERN Grayskul, Afrocop , JusMoni & WD4D, Sax G, $8

TRACTOR TAVERN Jim Lauderdale, Town Mountain, $18/$20

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Casey MacGill, 5:30 pm, free; Sunga Rose & Her Rhythm Percolators, 8 pm free

THE WHITE RABBIT Marmalade, $6

BALLROOM DJ Rob, free

CAPITOL CLUB Citrus: DJ Skiddle

THE EAGLE Nasty: DJ King of Pants, Nark

HAVANA Sophisticated

Mama: DJ Sad Bastard, DJ Nitty Gritty

LAST SUPPER CLUB Open

House: Guests

MOE BAR Saucy: DJ Rad’em, DJ 100 Proof, free

NEIGHBOURS Jet Set Thursdays: Guest DJs

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND The Lowdown: DJ Lightray, $3

PONY Motor: Airport, Patternmaster, Chris Davis

SEE SOUND LOUNGE

Damn Son: DJ Flave, Sativa Sound System, Jameson Just, Tony Goods, $5 after 10:30 pm

THERAPY LOUNGE

DUH.: DJ Omar, guests

TRINITY Space Thursdays: Rise Over Run, DJ Christyle, Johnny Fever, DJ Nicon, Sean Majors, B Geezy, guests, free

FRI 7/26

LIVE

2 BIT SALOON Neon Nights, the Valkyries , the Shallows

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BLUE MOON TAVERN

Michael Wohl, the Dirty Church Ladies, Luke Brown, 9:30 pm, $6

CAFE RACER Mike Refuzor, the Snap, DJ El Hefe, 8 pm, free

a CAPITOL HILL Capitol Hill Block Party: Girl Talk, STRFKR, Dillon Francis, Danny Brown, and many

Bimbo’s Cantina and at the Cha Cha Lounge. With StrangerPerks, it just got a little easier to get there.

$10 Vouchers to Bimbo’s Cantina & the Cha Cha Lounge. Your Price: $10.

KELLY O

FRIDAY, AUGUST 2ND THE TRACTOR PRESENTS

DALE WATSON

$15 / 8:30PM DOORS / 21+

NOW AVAILABLE ON

HAZMAT MODINE

TUE, JUL 23 - WED, JUL 24

A New York septet that delivers rustic and joyful reggae, klezmer, rockabilly and gypsy-tinged music.

DIANE SCHUUR

THU, JUL 25

Grammy Award-winning vocalist and pianist Diane Schuur inspires rave reviews across the globe as the ﬁrst lady of jazz.

BILL EVANS’ SOULGRASS

Feat. special geusts

STEVE KIMOCK and JEFF PEVAR

TUE, JUL 30 - THU, AUG 1

Multiple Grammy-Award Winning saxophonist blending soul, jazz and Americana joined by guitar Masters

JOHN PIZZARELLI QUARTET with BUCKY PIZZARELLI

FRI, AUG 2 - SUN, AUG 4

Guitar legends blend pop, jazz, and swing, setting the standard for stylish modern jazz

NICHOLAS PAYTON XXX

TUE, AUG 6 - WED, AUG 7

Payton’s clarion trumpet, as well as his genredefying solos, stood at the center of the music making... No descriptive label or category could be afﬁxed to Payton’s solos, which were as brashly original as they were technically imposing. –Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune

2033 6th Ave. | 206.441.9729 all ages | free parking full schedule at jazzalley.com

more, $40/$95

CENTRAL SALOON Halcion

Halo March At Dawn, Quadro’s Peak, free

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER

Mason Reed, Betsy Olson, Deception Past, 8 pm, $8/$10

COMET Cock Block: Murmurs, Sailor Mouth, 11 pm, free

CONOR BYRNE Bakelite 78, Professor Gall , Hernandez Hideaway, $8

CROCODILE Windowpane, Black Diamond, the People Now , guests, 8 pm, $10

DARRELL’S TAVERN

The Pythons, Lights From Space , Summer Babes, $7

EL CORAZON Trapt, the Cringe and Darling Parade, Stoic F.B., 8 pm, $16/$18

a GOOD SHEPHERD

CENTER Girma Yifrashewa, Amy Rubin, 8 pm, $5-$15

a GORGE AMPHITHEATRE

Phish, 7:30 pm, $60

HARD ROCK CAFE The Adarna , $8/$12

HIGH DIVE The New Futures, guests, 9:30 pm, $8

HIGHLINE Sok & the Faggots, guests, 6 pm, $8

HIGHWAY 99 Junkyard Jane, Billy D & the Hoodoos, 8 pm, $15

a HOLLOW EARTH RADIO

Walle, Elch, Apparitions, 8:30 pm

a JAZZ ALLEY Boney James, 9:30 pm, $40

THE MIX Clearly Beloved , Noctooa, guests, $8

NECTAR Etana, Raw Soul Rebels, Picoso, 8 pm, $15

OWL N’ THISTLE Hennessy Brothers

PARAGON Levi Said, free a THE ROYAL ROOM Zony Mash, 10 pm, free SEAMONSTER Funky 2 Death, 10 pm, free SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB

The Molasses Theory, Jacob Acosta, Tae Phoenix, 8 pm, $7

SLIM’S LAST CHANCE Bigfoot Accelerator, the Hook Ups, Bitch School a STUDIO SEVEN

Gravenloch , guests, 7 pm, $8/$10

SUNSET TAVERN Kissing Potion , Thaddillac, Gravity Kings, 10 pm, $8 a TOLT-MCDONALD

PARK Timber! Music Festival: Helio Sequence, Fruit Bats, Lemolo, Bryan John Appleby, Kithkin, guests, $45

TRACTOR TAVERN Chris Friel Orchestra, 9:30 pm, $8

a VERA PROJECT Tallhart, From Indian Lakes, Makeshift Prodigy, 7 pm, $11/$13

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Lushy , free THE WHITE RABBIT Prat Attack , Kota, the Social Fantastic, Rebel Mart, $6 a WOODLAND PARK ZOO NORTH MEADOW LeAnn Rimes, 6 pm, $32.50

95 SLIDE DJ Fever One

BALLROOM DJ Tamm

BALMAR DJ Ben Meadow

BALTIC ROOM Bump Fridays: Guest DJs

CAPITOL CLUB Neoplastic: Marcus G, Jay Battle, DJ Shorthand, free CUFF C&W Dancing: DJ Harmonix, DJ Stacey, 7 pm; TGIF: Guest DJs, 11 pm, $5 FOUNDATION 12th Planet FUEL DJ Headache, guests HAVANA Rotating DJs: DV One, Soul One, Curtis, Nostalgia B, Sean Cee, $5 LAST SUPPER CLUB Madness: Guests

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND Caliente Celebra: DJ Polo, Efren 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 Crush:

Guest DJs, free TRINITY Tyler, DJ Phase, DJ Nug, guests, $10

THE WOODS Deep/Funky/ Disco/House: Guest DJs

SAT

7/27

LIVE 2 BIT SALOON The Rockefellers, High Freq , Two Headed Crow

a BLACK LODGE Helms

Alee, Rabbits, Qui, the Great Goddamn, 9 pm BLUE MOON TAVERN Zebra Hunt guests, 9:30 pm, $6

CAFE RACER Fox Colton, free a CAPITOL HILL Capitol Hill Block Party: Pickwick, Purity Ring, A-Trak, El-P, Star Slinger, Killer Mike, Big Freedia, Rose Windows, and many more, $40/$95

CHATEAU STE. MICHELLE

Festival of Jazz: Rick Braun, Kirk Whalum, Norman Brown, guests, 4 pm, $40/$60

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER Justin Ferren, Joseph Giant, A Mountain Cat, Gregory Rawlins, $8/$10

CROCODILE Nite Wave, For the Masses, This Charming Band, 8 pm, $12

DARRELL’S TAVERN Empire of Sleep, Jeff Fielder, Low Land High, $7

a EL CORAZON Alex Goot, 7:30 pm, $15/$18; A_Rival, Electric Children, guests, 8 pm, $8/$10

a GORGE AMPHITHEATRE Phish, 7:30 pm, $60

HARD ROCK CAFE Mayors of Liberty, $7/$10

HIGH DIVE The Blind Pets, Whiskey Syndicate, Forrest Van Tuyl, 9:30 pm, $8

HIGHWAY 99 Brian Lee & the Orbiters, Boneyard Preachers, 8 pm, $15

a JAZZ ALLEY Boney James, 9:30 pm, $40

BY DAVE SEGAL

WEDNESDAY 7/24

OOKAY’S LOW-END HIGH JINKS Damn Son’s Substance weekly enlists Ookay to see if he can do some structural damage to Foundation’s foundation. Hailing from Jupiter, USA (so it says on his Soundcloud page; can’t ﬁnd it on this confounded map), Ookay makes that extroverted, pumped-up bass music that toggles between sinister and silly. He’s part of dubstep’s migration to outsize, arena-ﬁlling sounds, but the way this young producer works the high and low frequencies is more than Ookay. With Tony Goods, Jameson Just, and Kozmo Foundation, 9 pm, free before 10:30 pm/$10 after, 21+.

THURSDAY 7/25

GROUNDISLAVA’S SIGH-HEAVY HIPHOP

Remember PM Dawn? Groundislava probably does. The Los Angeles beatmaker (aka Jasper Patterson) creates tracks that have a similar paciﬁc vibe as those ’90s hiphop bohos did. (By the way, you should read The Stranger’s special feature on PM Dawn from 2011 on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of their gamechanging debut album, a work whose import rivals that of Nirvana’s Nevermind.) Where were we? Right, Groundislava. His productions evoke a pastel wonderland of mellow, glossy synth pads and gentle, head-nodding beats. Try ’em on for sighs. With Beat Connection DJs Barboza, 9 pm, $12, 21+.

AVANT-ELECTRONIC NIGHT MOTOR

RIDES AT PONY

Oh, these guys again? I’m not complaining. The absurdly active Airport

PARAGON Solbird, free

QUEEN CITY GRILL Faith Beattie, Bayly, Totusek, Guity, free

SEAMONSTER Porkchop Express, 10 pm, free

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB

Heart of a Bullet, the Rush Project, Deroxs, 8 pm, $7

SLIM’S LAST CHANCE Dusty 45’s, Davidson Hart Kingsbery, the Swearengens, guests, 6 pm SUNSET TAVERN Lush Tones , Ever So Android , 10 pm, $8

TIM’S TAVERN Vague Precision, free a TOLT-MCDONALD

PARK Timber! Music Festival: Helio Sequence, Fruit Bats, Lemolo, guests, $45 TRACTOR TAVERN Zoe Muth & the Lost High Rollers, 9:30 pm, $12 VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE The

is once more playing Motor, the everyother-monthly event thrown by Debacle Records/Fest’s Sam Melancon, now in its sixth edition and ﬁrst at gay-bar mecca Pony. Airport—Midday Veil bassist Jayson Kochan—is one of our region’s most compelling disco producers, as his darkly, starkly ecstatic 12-inch for Debacle, Sweat/Pleasure, proves. I just don’t know what more I can say about him. Get down to “Business” (on the Soundcloud) and go see for yourself; live a little. Motor regular Patternmaster (Brain Fruit’s Jonathan Carr) also returns, with his brainy, brutal, off-the-grid techno mantras. When he gets his analog synths buzzing and gurgling and pummeling in militaristic 4/4 time, you can’t help punching the air with a vengeance. Jumping on the bill late is Carr’s cosmically minded Brain Fruit mate Chris Davis, another master manipulator of the synthesizer whose setup will give you rig envy. With DJ Fistﬁght Pony, 9 pm, free, 21+.

Groundislava

THIS CHARMING BAND 21+

8/5 KEYBOARD KID, BLKHRTS 8/6 PRIVATE PARTY 8/9 THE GOOD HURT 8/15 GOOD MEN AND THOROUGH 8/16 SMITH WESTERNS 8/17 ONE DROP 8/18 PIANO PIANO, SLOW BIRD 8/23 SOULS OF MISCHIEF 8/24 STONES THROW SOUL TOUR W/ DAM-FUNK, THE STEPKIDS, MYRON & E 8/25 ALYSE BLACK 8/29 GREGORY ALAN ISAKOV 9/3 MURDER BY DEATH 9/5 POOLSIDE 9/7 PREFUSE 73 9/8 THE RED EYE TOUR FEAT. YOUNG RODDY, CORNER BOY P & FIEND 9/10 TYPHOON 9/12 SOUND REMEDY 9/13 CAMPFIRE OK 9/14 EARLY SCHOOL OF ROCK 9/15 TRAVIS GARLAND 9/26 DB FEST: RESIDENT ADVISOR SHOWCASE FEAT ACTRESS 9/27 DB FEST: GHOSTLY INTERNATIONAL SHOWCASE FEAT SHIGETO 10/5 TOM ODELL 10/16 LEGENDARY PINK DOTS 10/17 CARBON LEAF 10/22 BOY

NOW AVAILABLE ON

EPHRATA, HOTEL VIGNETTE, TRAMP KINGS $7 TENDER HIPS

WILD LUNGS, PLATH SPINNING WHIPS WE SAY BANG, OLD BOTTLE BLACK $7

BY BRITTNIE FULLER

7/24

One of the most successful club comics in recent years, Matt’s act has been described as “incredibly quick-witted” with a stage presence “second to none.” An impressive showing in The Funniest Person in Texas Contest and The San Francisco Comedy Competition spring boarded Matt. His talents have taken him world-wide to entertain our troops in Korea, Japan, and the Middle East. Come see a self-proclaimed square, who just happens to be hilarious.

SANDY CITY, PLACES WE SLEPT, L’ILE PICA

Find yourself in indie pop’s big, sappy arms tonight, because Westport surf band Sandy City are playing their ﬁrst show in a year. Sandy City’s lo-ﬁ surf punk is almost an advertisement for summer, with fun, ramshackle, turbofueled tunes about things like a “merrygo-round on the beachside.” Omaha, Nebraska, tweemo act Places We Slept have a song called “Rocketship,” and while it holds twee-subject merit on its own, a reference to the legendary Slumberland Records band of the same name is also unavoidable. That said, fans of Slumberland’s boundlessly cute output will have much to revel in here. Places We Slept’s fuzz-driven bedroom pop possesses a featherlight whimsy, but often broods with the #sadboy pop-punk feels, which may give you a certain smile or a certain sadness. Diversifying an otherwise pop-/sad-oriented lineup, L’ile Pica’s experimental beats may also involve a rainbow-esque jump rope and something that looks like it doubles as a bubble machine. Time to break out those friendship bracelets! Heartland, 8:30 pm.

THURSDAY 7/25

ZACHARY CALE, LE SANG SONG, CASE STUDIES

This excellently curated, loner-powered show kicks off with singer-songwriter Jesse Lortz (of Dutchess and the Duke sorta-fame) and a rotating cast of musicians known as Case Studies. Their latest LP, This Is Another Life (out in June on Sacred Bones), is a sweet ’n’ dour treat leaving behind the uniquely turpentine aftertaste of drippy slide guitar and love lost. Although the generally morose vocal delivery/subject matter is indebted to the dark-poet flavor of Leonard Cohen, given the high propensity of overworked and flaccid Mumfords-y pop infiltrating folk these days, I’m not complaining. Seattle band Le Sang Song’s scrappy, stripped-down garage is headed by Craig Chambers (also of LoVe TaN and Dreamsalon), whose deadpan delivery ghoulishly plods over a bare-boned punk shuffle. Brooklyn-by-way-of-Louisiana troubadour Zachary Cale headlines with his husked and dusty alt-country: the kind of soulful guitar picking designed to set deserts on fire. His ragged and bittersweet blues should make Cale unmissable for aspiring non-sucky songwriters. Heartland, 8 pm.

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE 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,

SEAMONSTER LOUNGE Tim Kennedy Presents: Guests, 10 pm, free

STUDIO SEVEN In Dying Arms, Kingdom of Giants, guests, 7 pm, $10/$12

SUNSET TAVERN Holy Ghost Revival , 8:30 pm, $6

TRACTOR TAVERN Mingo Fishtrap, $15

THE WHITE RABBIT Michael Shrieve’s Spellbinder, $6

BALTIC ROOM Jam Jam: Zion’s Gate Sound, $5

BARBOZA Icon Mondays: DJ Swervewon, 100proof, Sean Cee, Blueyedsoul, free

CAPITOL CLUB The Jet Set: DJ Swervewon, 100 Proof

COMPANY BAR Rock and Roll Chess Night: DJ Plantkiller, 8 pm, free

CONOR BYRNE Get the Spins: Guest DJs, free HAVANA Manic Mondays: DJ Jay Battle, free

THE HIDEOUT Introcut, guests, free

LO-FI Jam Jam: Zion’s Gate, Sound Selecta, Element, Mista Chatman , $5

MOE BAR Minted Mondays: DJ Swervewon, 100proof, Sean Cee, Blueyedsoul, free

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND SIN: DJ Keanu, 18+, free

PONY Dirty Deeds: Fruit: DJ Toast, DJ Logic Vortex, Guest DJs

Q NIGHTCLUB Reflect, 8 pm, free

TUES 7/30

LIVE

a CHOP SUEY The Cellar

Door, Adventure Galley, Stacey Unck, 8 pm, $5/$7 a COMCAST ARENA Megadeth, Black Label Society, Device, Hellyeah, Newsted, 4:30 pm, $25-$45

2 BIT SALOON Parasitic Ejaculation, Logistic Slaughter, Vaginal Defecation BLUE MOON TAVERN Andy Coe Band, free, Robert Sarazine Blake, 8 pm, free CHOP SUEY Northern Bastard, Cutthroat Shamrock, Brain Scraper, the Bangers, $5

COASTAL KITCHEN Pork Chop Trio, 9:30 pm, free EL CORAZON Jake Orvis & The Broken Band, $10/$12 HIGHLINE Xanthochroid, UN, Crimson Field, 9:30 pm, $5 THE ROYAL ROOM Only Trio, Hashem Assadullahi Quintet, 8 pm, free

COMET The Strangers Family Band, Ephrata, Hotel Vignette, Tramp Kings

CONOR BYRNE Ol’ Time

Social: The Tallboys , 9 pm a EL CORAZON The All Stars Tour 2013: Guests, 2:15 pm, $22.50/$25

ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN

Monktail Creative Music Concern, DJ Shonuph, free HIGH DIVE The Heavy Guilt, guests, 8 pm, $6

HIGHLINE Dark Features, Blyss, Skullbot , guests, 9:30 pm, $5

JAZZ ALLEY Bill Evans, 7:30 pm, $10

NECTAR Feral Fauna, guests, 8 pm, $5

FRIDAY 7/26

This poster by McKenna Haley caught my eye because of (A) its interesting textures and stark black-andwhiteness, and (B) the fact that it’s one of the few things in my neighborhood that doesn’t say Block Party on it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

AARON HUFFMAN

NEUMOS Aesop Rock, Kimya Dawson, 8 pm, $16

THE ROYAL ROOM Honey Ear Trio, 8 pm, $12/$15

SEAMONSTER McTuff Trio, 10 pm, free a SHOWBOX SODO The Cult, White Hills, 8 pm, $35/$40

SUNSET TAVERN Detective Agency, Week of Wonders, Jeans Wilder, Ubu Roi, 8 pm, $6

TRACTOR TAVERN Wayne Hancock, $15

TRIPLE DOOR Shye Ben Tzur, 7:30 pm, $15/$18

THE WHITE RABBIT Certain Inertia , guests, $6 a WOODLAND PARK ZOO NORTH MEADOW Indigo Girls, 6 pm, $28

DJ 95 SLIDE Chicken & Waffles: Supreme La Rock, DJ Rev, free

BY ADRIAN RYAN

THE BEST OF BOYS IN LADYSUITS

Tuck is the most geigh fun you are ever going to have in your whole big geigh ﬂaming faggot life—just pack it in now, there’s no point continuing on, it’s over. Swallow the whole damn bottle. It’s all straight downhill from here. (Kidding! Kidding. Drop the bottle. Or share, at least. Jesus.)

If you haven’t noticed by now, your eyes are clearly suffering brain damage. However! Allow me to remind you and your brain-damaged eyes: Fucking drag queens, burlesque artists, and cabaret stars have invaded every compass point of our gay lives, and now THEY RULE EVERYTHING. (Go-go boys are pushing up from behind, too. Sexy, sexy go-go boys.) Every severe queer event worth going to is bursting, basted, bathed, and broiled in a fabulous army of colorful characters, who are themselves bursting, basted, bathed, and broiling with talent, charisma, and charm—names that are

BLUE MOON TAVERN

DJ Country Mike, A.D.M., guests, 8 pm, free

CONTOUR Electric Groove: Guests

THE EAGLE Pitstop: DJ Nark

HAVANA Word Is Bond: Hoot and Howl, $3 after 11 pm

MERCURY Die: Black Maru, Major Tom, $5

MOE BAR Cool.: DJ Cory Alfano, DJ Cody Votolato, free

NECTAR Top Rankin’ Reggae: DJ Element, Chukki, free

NEIGHBOURS

UNDERGROUND Vicious Dolls: DJ Rachael, 9 pm, $5

WILDROSE Taco Tuesday: Guest DJs

becoming more common on the lips of Seattle ’mos than the lips of PBR tallboys. Names like Ben DeLaCreme, whom we’ve discussed at length here before. This Tuck celebrates Ben’s homecoming, as, um, she’s been off and away. Sick aunt. (Ahem.) And of course we want to welcome her back, as what would our nightlife be without darling Ben? Right.

A great big pile of Jinkx Monsoon is the answer to that question, and although Jinkxy is usually involved with Tuck (which happens once a month now, don’tcha know), don’t expect her this time around; she’s still running with The Vaudevillians in New York City.

But don’t despair! EVERYONE ELSE GOOD will be performing their little hearts out: Jackie Hell, Aleksa Manila, Ade—the entire crew from soup to betucked nuts. Live performances, dancing, a photo booth that’s somehow magical (I’m so pretty!), and, most crucially, YOUR CHANCE TO SHINE, girlyman. The theme is “Surf’s Up.” So. TUCK IT! Chop Suey, 9 pm, $10/$8 in drag, 21+.

Fri - Mon: (1:15)*, (4:10), 7:00, 9:45

Tue: (1:15)*, (4:10), 7:00^, 9:45

Wed & Thu: (1:15)*, (4:10), 7:00,

THE CONJURING (R)

Fri - Mon: (4:35)*, 7:10*, 9:35*

Tue: (4:35)*, 7:10*^, 9:35*

Wed & Thu: (4:35)*, 7:10*, 9:35* TURBO (PG)

Fri - Mon: (2:10)*, (4:25)*, 7:15* Tue: (2:10)*, (4:25)*, 7:15*^

Wed & Thu: (2:10)*, (4:25)*, 7:15* DESPICABLE ME 2 (PG) Fri - Thu: (1:35), 9:25*

FILM

Brilliant and Infuriating

BY JEN GRAVES

there’s been dehumanization, that opposite work we’ve ascribed to the divine: judgment, categorizing certain people as good and others as evil. To rehumanize means bringing the downed up or the risen down, and in the movie Fruitvale Station, Oscar Grant is the downed man brought back up. The movie is brilliant. It also leaves you with the perfectly appropriate feeling of being furious that it exists at all.

Oscar Grant was the unarmed 22-year-old black man who was shot to death by a transit cop in an Oakland train station—Fruitvale Station—on January 1, 2009. At trial, the ofﬁcer convinced the jury that he mistook his gun for a Taser. Convicted of involuntary manslaughter, he served 11 months and was home before the year was out.

Some people get the benefit of the doubt. Every piece of research data there is—and I’m sure counter-arguers are already lining up in the wings, but the data will destroy them in a hot minute—will tell you that these people, those who get the benefit of every doubt, are not young black men in America in 2013. In a TV interview after the Trayvon Martin case was closed earlier this month, Florida juror B37 twice said she was absolutely positive that George Zimmerman’s “heart was in the right place,” referring to the man who, when all is said and done, racially profiled, then without cause and against warnings approached, then shot and killed a black teenager—in his words from when he first saw the young man, just a “punk”—for being there in his gated community. There was no legal reason for juror B37 to speculate on what was in Zimmerman’s heart. But she went much further than acquitting him. She said he was a good man, a good man. It was crucially important to her to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The night the verdict came down on Zimmerman, New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb was

in a movie theater watching an early preview of Fruitvale Station. When he left, he wrote, “Much of the audience sat quietly sobbing as the closing credits rolled, moved by the narrative of a young black man, unarmed and senselessly gone.” They were about to get possibly worse news, when a few minutes later, word emerged from Florida that Zimmerman had, legally, done nothing wrong. Cobb wrote: “The most damning element here is not that George Zimmerman was found not guilty: it’s the bitter knowledge that Trayvon Martin was found guilty.”

Is Oscar Grant on trial in Fruitvale Station? Yeah, he is. That’s not what the ﬁlmmakers and actors say they were trying to do—they want to humanize him, they’ve explained in interviews. But it was inevitable in some ways that Grant gets re-prosecuted here in an alternative realm, by a jury of his actual peers. This is a movie with a nearly all-black cast, made by a young black male director, and it probably isn’t going to be seen by George Zimmerman (though if it is, I’d like to hear what he thinks of it).

The young ﬁlmmaker, Ryan Coogler, also of the Bay Area, has stressed his life’s similarities to Grant’s. Coogler followed the story and the protests before he decided to make the movie. He worked with Grant’s family to get the feeling and substance of Grant’s character right. He got permission from BART to shoot the murder scene on the very platform where it happened. But he also comes from a worldview that knows that the white world and the black world are not the same. It’s kind of a throwaway joke in the movie when the sister jokingly warns Grant not to get their mom one of those crazy-white birthday cards, but it’s also a reminder that there are all sorts of

things, big and small, that white people think aren’t race-related, but that only aren’t racerelated for white people. That backdrop is as important as anything else in this movie, more important even than the horrible drama of the killing itself.

The actors leading Fruitvale Station Michael B. Jordan (The Wire), Octavia Spencer (The Help), and Melonie Diaz (Lords of Dogtown)—are among the best alive, and at the top of their game. It’s hard not to imagine that if these actors and characters were white, this movie would be a shoo-in both as critical darling and commercial hit, and best picture—some Tom Hanks–level shit. As it is, it’s a Sundance-sweeping indie with a limited release.

“How accurate is Fruitvale Station?” writes Aisha Harris on Slate. Everybody’s gonna ask. Harris discovered that Coogler sought as much truth as he could find, doing interviews and reading transcripts (and using, at the movie’s start, one of the multiple eyewitness videos of the shooting), and then he filled in the rest. In the end, Coogler chose to make a fine-boned movie that follows a single day in Grant’s life, his final day. So he used a wealth of details to make mundanity sing.

The movie isn’t perfect: One wrong note is an invented scene involving a pit bull at a gas station. But Coogler does end that scene with a far quieter and less manipulative visual symbol, the camera lingering for a second, after Grant passes out of its sight, on the larger environment of an eerily empty gas station in a forgotten part of an otherwise busy city.

A more important scene happens in the grocery store where Grant is picking up fish for his mother’s birthday (his last day, December 31, 2008, was her birthday). Grant does a good deed for one person, and then jarringly issues a threat to another. You see Coogler plainly tangling with the most profound ethical conflicts, fighting against not only the bigotry and blithe ignorance of racism in America, but also against the crooked craving of any audience for a perfectly packaged victim, the Upstanding Young Man. Ultimately, you need only ask yourself: Why does this man have to prove he doesn’t deserve to be killed? In our culture, who has to prove themselves and who doesn’t?

FILM SHORTS

LIMITED RUN

COMPUTER CHESS

According to the Boston Globe, Computer Chess—set in the mid-’80s and concerning a small society of geeks at a computer chess tournament—was shot with “a consumergrade video camera from 1969.” As a consequence, the film looks like the ‘60s, the wardrobe and art direction look like the ‘80s, and the actors act like the geeks of today, the apps age. (I could be wrong about this, and maybe it’s just that, unlike video cameras or clothes, the geek mode is eternal, does not evolve, exists outside of history.) All in all, mumblecore master Andrew Bujalski’s fourth feature film is an excellent comedy that never goes dull or tired, contains lots of little and delightful bits of cultural history, and has no mumbling. (CHARLES MUDEDE) Varsity, Fri-Sun 2:30, 4:50, 7:20, 9:35 pm, Mon-Tues 4:50, 7:20, 9:35 pm.

THE DARK CRYSTAL

Landmark’s Midnight Movies recommence, now at the Harvard Exit. Harvard Exit, Sat July 27 at midnight.

THE FEARLESS FREAKS

A documentary about Capitol Hill Block Party headliners the Flaming Lips, with lead Lip Wayne Coyne in attendance! Northwest Film Forum, Sun July 28 at 3 pm.

THE FILMS OF TRENT HARRIS

See Festive, this page. Grand Illusion, Fri-Tues. For complete schedule and showtimes, see www.grandillusioncinema.org.

FINDING NEMO

Nemo is a little clownfish that gets lost. His dad has to find him. There’s a happy ending. Magnuson Park, Thurs July 25 at dusk.

FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL

Formulaic to perfection, it’s the story of a hapless, harmless musician whose TV star girlfriend dumps him for the world’s Britishest rock ‘n’ roll longhair. Here’s what makes it work: Jason Segel’s script takes this typical rom-com Mad Lib and fills in the blanks with sweet, human, relatable characters and legitimately funny jokes. (LINDY WEST) Fremont Outdoor Cinema, Sat July 27 at dusk.

FREE THE MIND

The Dalai Lama asked acclaimed neuroscientist Richard

Davidson to rigorously investigate compassion and kindness. This piece documents the results of that research. Northwest Film Forum, Fri 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun, 5, 7, 9 pm, Mon-Tues 7, 9 pm.

THE HITCHCOCK 9

See Festive, this page. A three-day series of Hitchcock’s nine silent features. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Fri-Sun. For complete schedule and showtimes, see www.siff.net.

HITCHCOCK UK MASTERPIECES

Eight of Hitchcock’s early British films, including The Lady Vanishes and Sabotage SIFF Cinema Uptown, July 29-Aug 1. For complete schedule and showtimes, see siff.net.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH

An extremely Tilda Swinton-esque David Bowie stars in this erratic but extremely watchable sci-fi film from 1976. Central Cinema, Fri-Sun, Tues 7 pm.

POST TENEBRAS LUX

The latest film by Carlos Reygadas is a visually arresting genre-jumper that’s yielded comparison to the works of Tarkovsky and Malick. Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Tues 7, 9:15 pm.

THE PRINCESS BRIDE

Everyone who can factually claim to be an American has seen The Princess Bride 150 times. So why go see it on the big screen? Here’s why: It’s delightful and hilarious, and the goopy framing device gets out of the way fast, and there’s that amazing scene where our heroine stands atop a hill, exclaims, “Oh, my love!” and then throws herself into a full-body roll down the hill. Mural Amphitheater, Sat July 27 at dusk.

STEEL OF FIRE WARRIORS 2010 A.D.

The evil lord Gilgazorg and his horde of Mutantzoids have met their match, in the unimpressively named Kevin and Travis (local comedians Kevin Clarke and Travis Vogt, who also wrote and produced). Can they bring peace to New World? The smart money is on “No.” Scarecrow Video, Sat July 27 at 8 pm.

TV DINNER: VERONICA MARS

Two classic episodes presented by GeekGirlCon. Central Cinema, Tues July 30 at 7 pm

NOW PLAYING

THE CONJURING

The story is based on an experience by real-life 1970’s ghost-hunting power-couple Ed and Lorraine Warren (exorcists and original investigators of the Amityville house). The film maintains a perfect balance of charmingly retro Satan-hysteria (demonic possession! Witches! Priests! Holy water!) and classic haunted-house trickery (doors slamming! Doors opening themselves! Rocking chairs rocking with no one sitting in them!). This balance, combined with spot-on acting by Vera Farmiga as Lorraine and Lili Taylor as the mother trying to save her family from certain demonic doom, is perfectly reminiscent of greats like Poltergeist, The Omen, and The Exorcist. (KELLY O)

CRYSTAL FAIRY

Seems like it’s been years—Superbad, maybe?—since we’ve seen Michael Cera in a movie with a truly dirty sense of humor. And we’ve never seen the Cera we meet in Crystal Fairy: In this Chilean comedy, Cera plays an asshole American tourist who’s in it for the South American drugs and not much else (he can’t even be bothered to learn Spanish). He picks up a dirty hippie American who calls herself Crystal Fairy (Gaby Hoffman, brilliantly putting the manic pixie dream girl trope under harsh lights and letting the imperfections hang out) and the two head out on a quest to try some hallucinogenic cactus. This is uncomfortable Ugly American comedy at its sharpest. (PAUL CONSTANT)

THE TO DO LIST

The year is 1993, and the place is Boise, Idaho, where uptight valedictorian Brandy Klark (Aubrey Plaza, from Parks and Recreation ) determines to fulfill a sexual checklist before summer ends and her life as an undergrad at Georgetown University begins. The checklist culminates in her ultimate sex goal: boning Rusty, a fellow lifeguard and glorified soul patch with abs. The film’s opening is a little rough. Plaza isn’t quite believable as the Type-A nerd. Writer/director Maggie Carey uses nostalgia (Trapper Keepers! Scrunchies! Pearl Jam!) as a crutch to draw her audience in and make up for the fact that she steamrolls over plot and character setup. The transitions are abrupt and clunky. Some jokes, like wishing people dead of AIDS in the early ‘90s, fall painfully flat. But those flaws can be forgiven, as Plaza and an amazing supporting cast—including Donald Glover as a student of cunnilingus, Bill Hader as a homeless pool manager, and Rachel Bilson as Brandy’s delightfully cunty older sister—hit their stride with great comedic timing. Soon enough, you don’t care about the limp summer rivalry with another pool, or whether Brady will lose her virginity to Rusty or her sensitive study buddy with the ‘90s bowl cut. It’s enough to sit back, relax into wave after wave of Hillary Clinton and Gloria Steinem jokes, and take pleasure in the fact that for once, you’re not watching a film about another nerdy girl’s quest for true love. Refreshingly, this is just one girl’s quest to fuck and get fucked. (CIENNA MADRID)

FESTIVE

FAKE OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN VS. SILENT ALFRED HITCHCOCK

At first, it seems almost too expedient to describe indie filmmaker Trent Harris as “Utah’s answer to John Waters,” but then you realize how well it fits. Swapping Waters’s Baltimore freak show for the friendlier, duller, but just-as-weird weirdness of Utah, Harris has crafted a small oeuvre of scrappy films that capture a side of America that hasn’t really been seen before. He’s also impressively obsessive, as proven by his de facto masterwork, The Beaver Trilogy, the instigating work of which is a serendipitous and amazing man-on-the-street interview that spirals into a mind-blowing documentary short involving a small-town talent show, shambolic drag, and an Olivia Newton-John lip-synch. For installments two and three, Harris directed recreations/expansions of his documentary treasure that star professional actors—first a baby-faced Sean Penn, then a pre–Back to the Future Crispin Glover, each of whom does a terrific job in an imperfect vehicle, as Harris’s reenactments try and fail to capture the magic of the real-life original. The whole thing’s an impressive study in the distancing aspects of art, and the original documentary short is a thing of eternal wonder. If this sounds like something you’d like, it is. (Also on the roster for the Grand Illusion’s Films of Trent Harris series: the woozy Mormon satire Plan 10 from Outer Space, the surreal road-trip tale Rubin & Ed, and Harris’s latest work, Luna Mesa. For full info, see grandillusioncinema.org.)

Meanwhile over at SIFF, things are getting very, very quiet with the Hitchcock 9, a weekend-long festival featuring freshly restored editions of Alfred Hitchcock’s nine surviving silent films. Breaking the silence: original live soundtracks for eight of the films, performed by Seattle musicians, including violinist Julie Baldridge, harpist Leslie McMichael, and cellist (and Stranger Genius Award winner) Lori Goldston. For full info on the Hitchcock 9 and SIFF’s tandem series of Hitchcock’s early-career sound films, see siff.net.) (DAVID SCHMADER)

The Films of Trent Harris runs July 26–31 at Grand Illusion, grandillusioncinema.org. The Hitchcock 9 runs July 26–28 at SIFF Cinema Uptown, siff.net.

Got a film festival you want us to write about? E-mail festive@thestranger.com!

CAGED HEAT

Women’s prisons… PRO OR CON?? Before you answer, I’m deﬁnitely PRO. While I’m not necessarily “pro” putting women in prison, I’m deﬁnitely “pro” women prisoners in general. Why? Because, as I’ve mentioned before, they inexplicably love I Love Television™! I’m not exactly sure why my column is so wildly popular with the women’s correctional demographic, but HEY. I’ll take my I Love Television™ readers wherever I can get them, and when push comes to shove? Women prisoners are farrrrr more interesting than most of you. (No offense, but… c’mon. You’re interesting… but you’re not women’s prison interesting.)

Now, I’ve shockingly never been to prison—though if I had to go? I’d choose women’s prison. Why? I tend to get along better with women murderers, thieves, and drug dealers than their male counterparts. Don’t get me wrong: I can totally get behind lots of sweaty, half-naked men conﬁned inside a very small space… but unless we’re talking about a clown car, there’s just too much testosterone involved.

That’s why I’m forsaking my regular summer TV schedule to watch a super-awesome and largely unsung new Netﬂix original series called Orange Is the New Black. (All 13 episodes are available right now on Netﬂix streaming.) Based on the book and true-life adventures of author Piper Kerman, Orange Is the New Black depicts the sometimes scary, often hilarious life behind bars at a federal women’s prison.

Not so long ago, Piper Chapman (played to comedic perfection by Taylor Schilling) fell in love with a lesbian drug runner (That ’70s Show’s Laura Prepon), but eventually decided to drop the lesbian/criminal lifestyle to pursue a normal life and relationship with her new ﬁancé, Larry (American Pie’s Jason Biggs—who is soooo charming in this! SQUEEEEEE!!). Unfortunately, because Piper agreed to transport drug money for her former lover (one time only!), she’s yanked from her new normality and sent to a federal women’s correctional facility to serve a 15-month (OUCH) sentence.

What follows is a classic ﬁsh-out-of-water story—peppered with laughs, scares, and moments of real humanity. Piper ﬂails as she attempts to navigate the confusing maze of prison politics, racism, and overt sexual tension—of which there is A LOT—while trying to hold on to her outside relationship and sanity. OH… and to make matters just a wee more complicated? Her former lesbian lover is in the same prison. AWWWWKWARRRRD.

Ultimately, this prison show is less about the place and more about the people who inhabit it. If a character is mean and scary, we ﬁnd out why the person is mean and scary in ﬂashbacks. Stereotypes are smashed on a minute-to-minute basis, and ever so slowly, we’re exposed to the humanity behind each character—but don’t worry, sensitivityhaters! There’s plenty of sex, nudity, and super-gross humor to go around. (Because I know how important that is to you.)

And don’t forget, Orange Is the New Black is also a great primer for when you eventually get thrown in prison—so it will behoove you to pay attention. (And when you get there? Be sure to subscribe to this paper and read I Love Television™ every week! BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO THOSE WHO DON’T.)

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

BY ROB BREZSNY

For the Week of July 24

you will discern cues and clues that are hidden from most people and that have been imperceptible to you in the past.

to embodying your soul’s code without lapsing into arrogance.

ARIES (March 21–April 19): “I have tried in my way to be free,” sings Leonard Cohen in his song “Bird on the Wire.” In other words, he has done the best he can to liberate himself from his unconscious patterns, bad habits, and self-delusions. He hasn’t been perfect in his efforts, but the work he has done has earned him a measure of deliverance from his suffering. I recommend you follow his lead, Aries. Do your best to bring more relief and release into your life. Get rid of things that hold you back. Overthrow a pinched expectation and ignore a so-called limitation or two. By this time next week, I hope you will be able to say sincerely, “I have tried in my way to be free.”

LEO (July 23–Aug 22): “I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.” So said the Leo science-fiction writer Greg Egan in his story “Learning to Be Me.” Let’s pretend that you, too, have a small dark jewel inside your skull that’s learning to be you. It’s a good metaphor for what I believe has been happening all these years: You have been gradually mastering the art of being the best Leo you can be. It hasn’t been easy. You weren’t born knowing how to be your beautiful, radiant, courageous self, but have had to work hard to activate your potentials. Now you’re moving into an especially critical phase of the process: a time when you have the chance to learn how to love yourself with greater ingenuity.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22–Dec 21): I suspect that you are longing to take a quantum leap of faith, but are also afraid to take that quantum leap of faith. You sense the potential of experiencing a very cool expansion, while at the same time you hesitate to leave your comfort zone and give up your familiar pain. In light of the conflict, which may not be entirely conscious, I suggest you hold off on making a gigantic quantum leap of faith. Instead, experiment with a few bunny hops of faith. Build up your courage with some playful skips and skitters and bounces that incrementally extend your possibilities.

TAURUS (April 20–May 20): “There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm,” wrote the novelist Willa Cather. According to my reading of the astrological omens, Taurus, you’re in a phase of your cycle when storm-learning isn’t your priority. The educational experiences you need most will unfold when you’re exploring the mysteries of peace and serenity. In fact, I suspect that the deeper you relax, the more likely it is that you will attract life-changing teachings—lessons that can transform your life for the better and fuel you for a long time.

VIRGO (Aug 23–Sept 22): “Dear Astrology Guy: Please tell me why I have to work so hard—meditate, reflect, read, analyze, poke, prod, investigate—to discover truths about myself that must be obvious to others. Why is it so hard for me to see where I need healing and where I need to let go? Why is it such an ordeal to grasp what is interfering with my wholeness when I can quickly pinpoint what other people’s issues are? —Overworked Virgo.” Dear Overworked: I’m happy to report that you Virgos will soon be offered a gush of revelations about who you are, how you can heal, and what strategies will best serve your quest to minimize your anxiety. Are you prepared to absorb some intense teachings? For best results, make yourself extra-receptive.

CAPRICORN (Dec 22–Jan 19): Hoaxes exposed! Bluffs called! Secrets revealed! Whitewashes uncovered! Curses banished! Taboos broken! Those are the headlines I expect to see emblazoned in your Book of Life during the coming weeks. Can you handle that many holy disruptions? Will you be able to deal with the stress that might come from having so much raucous success? These are important questions, because if you’re not up to the challenge, you may scare away the transformations. So steel your resolve, Capricorn. Mobilize your will. Do what’s necessary to harvest the unruly blessings.

AQUARIUS (Jan 20–Feb 18): The French novelist Flaubert declared that if you hope to write a book, you should first read 1,500 books. A Roman author named Petronius believed that the imagination does not work at its peak power unless it is inundated with reading material. I suggest you adopt their advice and apply it to your own field, Aquarius. Whatever skill or subject you want to master, expose yourself lavishly to the efforts of other people who have already mastered it. Flood yourself with well-crafted inspiration.

GEMINI (May 21–June 20): Is there a message you’ve wanted to deliver for a long time but haven’t been able to? Are you bursting with thoughts or feelings that you’ve been longing to express but can’t find the right way to do so? Have you spent months carrying around a poignant truth that you have felt wasn’t ripe enough to be revealed? If your answer to any of those questions is yes, I believe the time will soon be at hand to make a move. But it’s important that you’re not impulsive or melodramatic as you initiate your breakthrough communications. For best results, be full of grace and balance.

CANCER (June 21–July 22): Bees and other insects can see ultraviolet light, which is invisible to humans. When they look at flowers, they detect designs on the petals that you and I cannot. For example, the evening primrose appears completely yellow to us, but it calls seductively to bees with a flashy star pattern at its center. Many of the secret signs that flowers offer the pollinators are meant to guide them to where the pollen and nectar are. Let’s use this as our metaphor of the week, Cancerian. I am not predicting that you will be able to perceive a broader spectrum of light. But I do believe

LIBRA (Sept 23–Oct 22): One of the world’s best race car teams is McLaren. It wins about 25 percent of the events in which it competes. Its skilled drivers account for much of its success, but its technicians are also pretty sensational. During a pit stop in the middle of a race, they can change all four tires on the car in less than three seconds. Do you have helpers like that, Libra? If you don’t, it’s time to intensify your efforts to get them. And if you do, it’s time to call on them to give you an extra boost.

SCORPIO (Oct 23–Nov 21): Let’s try an experiment. It’s risky, but I’m hoping you will do it with such flair that there will be no karmic blowback. What I propose, Scorpio, is that you have fun expressing more confidence than usual. I invite you to strut a bit, even swagger, as you demonstrate your command over your circumstances. Enjoy acting as if the world is your plaything… as if everyone around you secretly needs you to rise up and be a bigger, bolder version of yourself. The trick, of course, will be to avoid getting puffed up with grandiose delusions. Your challenge is to be more wildly devoted

PISCES (Feb 19–March 20): Should you be worried that a venomous spider has crawled into your shoe while you were sleeping? Just in case, should you flip your shoe upside-down before putting it on each morning? My studied opinion: hell, no. The chances of you being bitten on the foot by a venomous spider lurking in your shoe are even less than the

sensual

THE

CRUISIN’ IN PIONEER SQUARE

Shout

made my day with your enthusiastic cat calls. Didn’t know you were calling to me or would have smiled back. When: Friday, July 19, 2013. Where: Pioneer Square. You: Man. Me: Woman. #919846

GERRY WITH A “G”

We Met On The Bus. You Said You Were Going To Burien To Buy “cheap Beer.”

You Had A Pot Leaf Hat And Amazing Eyes. But It Was Your Beard That Got My Attention. How About A Beer Sometime ? When: Thursday, July 18, 2013. Where: Bus Going To Burien. You: Man. Me: Woman. #919845

GREEENLAKE DOCKS, YOGA MAT, SWIMMING

You watched our stuff while we went swimming at GL off the docks by the boat launch. You talk to ducks. On a yoga mat. You wished us well on our test. Would you like to swim or get coffee? When: Thursday, July 18, 2013. Where: Greenlake. You: Woman. Me: Man. #919844

MT. BAKER LOOKOUT SMILE

You: gorgeous, dark-haired woman, perfect smile, taking pictures with friends. Me: adorable bald guy in sunglasses, reading and enjoying the sunset. We exchanged glances but didn’t talk. Then you caught my eye and smiled as drove away. Another chance? When: Tuesday, July 16, 2013. Where: Mt. Baker Lookout, 31st Ave.. You: Woman. Me: Man. #919843

YOU’RE FROM GREAT FALLS MONTANA

My friends’ mention of Great Falls caught your attention, then you caught mine. I asked about Pray, where I‚Äôm attending a wedding in September. I pray you‚Äôd like to join me for coffee or happy hour sometime? When: Wednesday, July 17, 2013. Where: Bait

“LOVE IS THE

Number nine to Raineer Valley

19 years ago. You had a green hat, brown eyes and worked in an elementary school. I worked for a sculptor. We talked brieﬂy when the bus broke down. Will you marry me? When: Saturday, April 12, 2008.

Where: Raineer Valley. You: Woman. Me: Man. #919826 I SAW U

SAVAGE LOVE

Head Fake BY DAN SAVAGE

I’ve been mostly happily married for 15 years. I’m a straight man. I love my wife. We used to have a great sex life. But after many years, children, and just day-to-day reality, our sex life is now pretty unsatisfying. While my wife was barely GGG at the beginning, now she will not go down on me ever. We do have sex 4 to 10 times a month, but it is always plain vanilla. I went on Craigslist to look at the “casual encounters” ads, and after months of just looking, I replied to some. My only actual response admitted to being a man pretending to be a woman. Long story short, I let him blow me. I didn’t touch him. I just watched some straight porn while he blew me. I have done this a few times with different guys. I am not turned on by men at all, but I do enjoy the enthusiastic BJs when combined with straight porn. I can’t tell my wife about this, as it would end an otherwise good marriage.

my attraction to him is limited, he roughhouses and I am afraid he will hurt me, and he is crap in bed when we do have sex. But I love him, I treasure our history, and I would love for our families to merge. I essentially can’t live without him. I had the opportunity recently to get sexual attention outside the relationship, and now I can see living a life with my partner while having a separate sex life that involves other people. This is something he would never agree to. I am currently trying to examine my morals to see if I can be okay with this arrangement. It is the only thing I can think of that will allow me to stay with him. Wondering If Faithfulness Endures

Questions: (1) Does this make me gay, bi, or neither? (2) Do I have to stop? I have been careful to keep it pretty safe, and since I am not really attracted to or interested in these guys, it just serves to satisfy a “disproportionate sex drive” situation without the risk of any emotional cheating. I’m pretty sure if I found a woman interested in an affair or a FWB situation, it would be a much riskier emotional tightrope. One more question, I guess. (3) What should I do?

Blow Job Secrets

1. I wouldn’t call you gay or bi, BJS, seeing as you’re concentrating on straight porn during those enthusiastic man-on-man blowjobs. What you describe sounds like a mild case of “situational homosexuality,” i.e., something that otherwise straight men are sometimes forced to do “for gratification or release in a single-sex environment,” as the sex-ed website SexInfoOnline puts it. You’re not locked in prison or stuck on a pirate ship or sweltering away in a shithole like Saudi Arabia, places characterized by the “the prolonged absence of partners of the opposite sex.” You’re just a blowjob-deprived married man with access to the internet who figured out that accepting blowjobs from gay or bi men is cheaper than paying female sex workers to blow you and less entangling than entering into an affair with a woman. But you probably don’t want to describe yourself as “situationally homosexual,” as that sounds pretty gay, so let’s just go with “opportunistically heteroflexible,” okay?

2. Yes, BJS, I’m afraid you do have to stop. I would be inclined to give you a pass if you were not having sex with your wife at all—or having sex with her once or twice a year, or if your wife announced she was asexual—but you and the wife are having quite a lot of sex. If you were to contract gonorrhea or syphilis from one of your male sex partners, BJS, you would almost certainly pass the infection on to your wife before you became symptomatic and got treated. (Sorry, BJS, but unless you’re using condoms during those blowjobs, they’re not “safe.”) If telling your wife about the blowjobs now would result in the end of your marriage, BJS, imagine the results if you have to tell your wife about the blowjobs after you’ve passed a sexually transmitted infection along to her.

3. You should get your wife’s permission— maybe she’d be down with outsourcing oral duties she finds tiresome, maybe she’d like to have an adventure or two of her own—or you should knock it the fuck off.

I am a straight woman who has been with my fiancé off and on for 12 years. I have broken up with him repeatedly, each time after two years of being together, but we always end up back together. The two-year point seems to be when I become so incredibly soul-crushed by our sexless relationship that I have to end it. Why is our relationship sexless? He is possibly asexual,

Would it be a good idea to marry a possibly asexual man you don’t find attractive, a guy who’s lousy in bed on those rare occasions when you do have sex, because you could see yourself being happy with him… so long as you can wrap your morals around lying to him for the next three or four decades?

Don’t do it.

The amount of stress that will pile up over the years—all that working to convince him that you’re not only not having sex with him, WIFE, but that you’re not having sex with anyone else either—will soon outweigh the stress of one knock-down, drag-out, open-and-honest conversation about the role of sex in your marriage. But instead of saying, “I’ll marry you, but only if I can fuck other people,” go with this instead: “Sex has never really been important to us as a couple. It doesn’t define our connection, honey, and it never has.” Then tell him that you won’t consider any sex that happens outside the marriage—so long as it is safe and completely discreet—grounds for divorce. Hopefully he’ll agree, WIFE. If not, don’t marry him.

In your response to FURFAG last week, the guy who has been in an online relationship with another furry guy who he has never met, you focused on their need to meet in person at least once (to confirm their connection) before moving across the country to be with each other.

Good advice for someone in a similar circumstance, perhaps, but I believe you focused on the wrong part of FURFAG’s letter. His real problem was revealed in the last part of his letter:

“Sex doesn’t hold a big interest for me, and porn doesn’t do ANYTHING for me—gay, straight, it’s like watching a sweaty, breathy anatomy class. I’ve never even masturbated. Am I going about this wrong?” That just screams POSSIBLE MEDICAL ISSUE. A 21-year-old man who is not aroused by visual stimuli and has never masturbated? This man needs to see his doctor and get referrals to an endocrinologist and a urologist. It is not normal for a 21-year-old man to have no sexual urges. (I know the asexuals will skewer me for this, but until someone has explored all possible medical and psychological explanations for a disinterest in sex, then I have to politely disagree with their assessment of their sexual orientation. The only places in nature where you find completely asexual creatures are in hive communities where there is a queen that does all the reproducing.) The likelihood of FURFAG having a spark with his online boyfriend when they do finally meet is nil if he didn’t find that spark with a gym sock at age 12. Get That Checked

Listen in as Dan gets drunk with NPR White House correspondent Ari Shapiro at Town Hall in Seattle: savagelovecast.com.

Dan’s new book— American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics —is available now.

mail@savagelove.net @fakedansavage on Twitter

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