The Stranger Vol. 23, No. 1 by Noisy Creek

STUDY GUIDE

Questions for The Stranger, Volume 23, Issue 1

1a. DOMINIC HOLDEN has written a “think piece” about Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement that the federal government will allow Washington State and Colorado to continue down the path to marijuana legalization. In Holden’s opinion, this is a game-changing, history-making move. While Holden has written capably about state marijuana law in the past, this seems a bit like an overstatement, as Holden does not have any experience as an expert on federal law. Could this hyperbolic, too-trusting article about the goodness of the Obama administration perhaps be a way for The Stranger to avoid having to write something negative about Stranger-endorsed President Obama’s march to war with Syria, which is obviously the most important news story of the week?

1b. With a red pen, circle every mention of Syria in this week’s Stranger. What have you learned from this exercise?

2. The lead “news” story is about the conservative response to last week’s fastfood workers’ strike. Perhaps you noticed the quotation marks around the word “news.” They are placed there to indicate disbelief in the fact that a story about the internet response to a week-old happening after a long weekend could be considered, by any stretch of the imagination, news. Another example of this would be referring to the piece’s author, GOLDY, as a “journalist.” Now it’s your turn: Please indicate sarcasm by using quotation marks in your own example.

3. DAVE SEGAL reviews the songs in the Billboard Top 10 Singles Chart in what is supposed to be an innocuous post-Bumbershoot ﬁller story, but which ends up feeling like a sneering rant by someone who has spent far too long in the music-writing game. Write a three-page double-spaced essay explaining how popular music has outlived the stodgy dinosaurs of music criticism.

4. CIENNA MADRID wrote Last Days this week. On a blank piece of paper, draw up a schedule demonstrating what you will do with the time you normally dedicate to reading Last Days.

5. In the restaurant review section, MEGAN SELING heartily praises a chicken salad from the Cheesecake Factory, sans the chicken part of the salad. (Seling is an unrepentant vegetarian.) What, in your opinion, is the gravest problem with Seling’s article? Second gravest? Third?

COVER ART

Fountain Head by RICH LEHL

From Backwards Telescopes, Sept 12–Oct 5 at Vermillion (vermillionseattle.com). The show also features paintings by Jed Dunkerley and Jason Puccinelli.

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LAST DAYS

The Week in Review

BY CIENNA MADRID

Introducing... The Stranger’s New Film-Rating System!

MONDAY, AUGUST 26 This week of assaults on the eyes and humorless dictators gets off to a depressing start in Billings, Montana, with news that a high-school teacher convicted of raping a 14-year-old female student would only serve one month in jail for his crime. In 2008, Stacey Dean Rambold, 54, was ﬁrst charged with three felony counts of sexual intercourse without consent after the teen told a church counselor that she’d been sexually assaulted by a teacher, court documents reveal. But while the case was pending—and just a few weeks before her 17th birthday—the girl took her own life. As the Billings Gazette reports, prosecuting attorneys asked the judge to sentence Rambold to serve up to 20 years in prison, given that the victim’s mother testiﬁed that her daughter’s relationship with Rambold was a “major factor” in her suicide. But in explaining his insultingly lenient sentence, Montana district judge G. Todd Baugh said that he believed the teen was “older than her chronological age” and that she was “as much in control of the situation” as her middle-aged teacher. As the girl’s mother would state after the sentencing, “I don’t believe in justice anymore. She wasn’t even old enough to get a driver’s license.”

To submit an unsigned confession or accusation, send an e-mail to ianonymous@thestranger.com. Please remember to change the names of the innocent and guilty.

LIVE TO TELL

I think it was during the winter of 2008/2009, but it might have been the next winter. Back then, I was a hot mess. On the day our paths crossed, I had already been hospitalized for an overdose and subsequently released. I was on an epic combination of methadone, benzodiazepine, promethazine, and dextromethorphan. The ﬁrst time I regained consciousness, I was restrained in a hospital bed with a breathing tube down my throat. I was a homeless junkie, and they quickly sent me on my merry way. My next memory is falling suddenly through darkness into icy water and thinking, “I must be close to the surface,” then someone was pulling me to the shore. I looked around and realized I had fallen into Green Lake. Some kind soul had jumped into that icy water and saved my sorry ass. I didn’t feel any gratitude. I just felt cold. Then his female companion gave me her coat and they called an ambulance for me. I was a really awful person back then, so I didn’t even bother to say thank you to anyone. But I want to now. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to turn my life around and become a decent person. Thank you for literally everything.

•• In slightly redemptive news, Judge Baugh’s comments will spark an immediate backlash, including protests, calls for his resignation, and requests that his sentence be reevaluated, reports the LA Times . On Wednesday, Baugh will apologize for his comments in an open letter to the Billings Gazette, conceding that they were “demeaning of all women .” Then he’ll go ahead and demean women some more by arguing that while a 14-year-old “obviously” cannot give consent, “I think that people have in mind that this was some violent, forcible, horrible rape… It was horrible enough as it is just given her age, but it wasn’t this forcible beat-up rape.”

TUESDAY, AUGUST 27 Shield your eyes, the week’s about to get worse: Today brings reports that a 6-year-old Chinese boy’s eyes were gouged out to sell on China’s transplant black market. (Only about 10,000 out of 300,000 Chinese transplant candidates receive organs each year, mostly harvested from death-row prisoners—hence the thriving black market.) Police say the boy, who press reports call Binbin, was kidnapped and drugged while playing outside over the weekend. “His family found him covered in blood and crying in pain three to four hours later,” reports the Daily Mail . “ His eyes were found nearby with the corneas missing, police say, implying that an organ trafﬁcker was behind the attack.”

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28 Today, Americans celebrated the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, each in their own way. Labor groups across the country prepared for tomorrow’s fast-food workers’ strike; thousands of people, including presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter, gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to pay homage to King’s call for equal rights for all people and a $2 minimum wage (which would be more than $15 today, adjusted for inﬂation); and thousands of other people who believe in neither of those things took the opportunity to post exceptionally racist garbage on the internet.

•• Also today, details from a British misconduct hearing revealed that an undercover Sunday Times of London reporter might’ve sexed up a dentist in order to persuade him to perform female genital mutilation on two young girls. The unnamed reporter originally approached the Somali-born dentist Omar Addow, 56, in his offices, reports the Independent , with a request that he ritualistically mutilate two girls, ages 10 and 13 The dentist was at ﬁrst vocal about opposing the practice of female genital mutilation, reports say. Then things got weird: “When the reporter’s stomach apparently started rumbling, Mr. Addow… examined her abdomen,” states the Independent. “This led to him checking her breasts for abnormalities and performing a vaginal ‘exploration’ before inviting her back to his ﬂat, it is claimed.”

This is a great day for ﬁlm lovers—because after years of forcing our readers to actually read Stranger reviews to ﬁnd out how we feel about movies (UGH! I know , right?), we’ve decided to add easy-to-understand rating icons to every movie review!

For example, the recent sci-ﬁ thriller World War Z receives the following rating: 18

Here’s what these icons mean:

Finger to the Side: If the ﬁnger points left, that indicates the ﬁlm director’s last name begins with a letter from A–H. If it points right, their last name begins with I–Z!

Stars of David: Obviously, the number of Stars of David reﬂ ects how many stars there are in the movie. For example, World War Z stars Brad Pitt and Matthew Fox. Pitt is a legitimate “star,” while Fox is merely “half a star.” Neither are Jewish.

Numbers: This number indicates the number of letters in the stars’ names. “Brad Pitt” and “Matthew Fox” = 18.

Snowflakes: Does the lead actor or actress enjoy catching snowfl akes on their tongue? Four snowfl akes means he or she likes to do so very, very much. One snowfl ake signifi es he or she lives in Los Angeles!

Smiley Face, Frowny Face: The smiley face is the Stranger ﬁ lm critic. The frowny face is the reader.

Mouse: This icon indicates whether or not the reader watches pornography on his or her computer.

Old-Timey Telephone: Call your friends and tell them about the new Stranger ﬁ lm-rating system!

It’s so awesome, we give this new ﬁlm-rating system a 29 !!

Once at the flat, a hidden purse camera recorded the pair disappearing into the bedroom for an hour, after which the sarong-clad dentist was recorded on the handbag-cam saying, “I will do it for you. Between you, me and Allah only.” Addow was subsequently arrested on suspicion of offenses contrary to the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003, the Independent reports. “We did sex,” the dentist said to police ofﬁcers, which the reporter denied.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 29 The week continues with a horrifying dose of common sense: If you want to live a long and happy life, don’t date dictators. Numerous media outlets today reported on a South Korean newspaper article alleging that Kim Jong-un’s ex-girlfriend, Hyon Song-wol, was among a dozen well-known North Korean performers executed by ﬁring squad for allegedly violating laws against pornography. Hyon, a singer with the Unhasu Orchestra, is said to have been arrested on August 17 with 11 others, the Telegraph reports. “All 12 were machinegunned three days later, with other members of North Korea’s most famous pop groups and their immediate families forced to watch,” the paper states. “The onlookers were then sent to prison camps, victims of the regime’s assumption of guilt by association.” Condolences to everyone.

•• Speaking of dictators behaving badly, Russian artist Konstantin Altunin was forced to flee Russia and seek political asylum in France after his painting depicting President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in women’s underwear was seized by police. “Altunin said he ﬂew out of Russia as soon as he heard that the exhibition had been shut down on Tuesday evening and the organisers had been detained by police and questioned into the night,” reports Yahoo! News. “He said that the police had described the exhibition at

the newly opened Museum of the Authorities as extremist and he feared criminal charges.”

FRIDAY, AUGUST 30 Here’s another horrifying dose of common sense: Don’t use your butt as a bank account—the returns are shitty. As the Smoking Gun reports today, a Tennessee woman was hospitalized and now faces criminal charges for allegedly stealing $5,000 in cash from her boyfriend and shoving it up her rectum for safekeeping. When 43-yearold Christie Black was confronted about the theft by her boyfriend, Black reportedly “admitted to him she’d wrapped it up and stuck it in her rectum,” the police report states. She also became ill and “threw up a Saran wrapped baggy of partially dissolved pills .” Black then attempted to retrieve the cash—which was rolled up in $100 denominations—using a toilet brush and a set of tongs. “She was bleeding severely and was transported to the Hawkins County ER,” the police report states. “There the wad of money was removed and collected as evidence.”

SATURDAY, AUGUST 31 Nothing happened today except an incredible performance by Heart at Bumbershoot.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 Nothing happened today.

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

Use your eyeballs at THESTRANGER.COM/SLOG

PUTTING CONSERVATIVES ON THE DEFENSIVE One yardstick of the strike’s successs was the angry, spittle-ﬁlled, right-wing backlash it generated.

Fast-Food Stroke

Conservatives Throw Fits as Fast-Food Strikers Seize Control of Living-Wage Debate

BY GOLDY

“Rain, rain, go away, give your workers higher pay,” about a hundred soaking-wet protesters chanted outside a Panera Bread on Capitol Hill as the heavens opened up and

dumped rain on striking fast-food workers and their supporters. It was a ﬁtting end to Seattle’s part in a nationwide walkout last Thursday by low-wage service workers demanding a $15 an hour minimum wage and the right to organize without retaliation.

Building on the success of a one-day strike earlier this year in Seattle and eight other cities, organizers had planned the mass action for August 29 in about 50 cities, only to see the strike spread as workers spontaneously walked out on their own in about a dozen more cities. Altogether, thousands of workers from Boston to Tampa to Topeka to Missoula walked off their jobs in solidarity, including workers throughout the Deep South, the most anti-union part of the country.

Here in the Seattle metro area, the strike

State Apologizes to Pot Dispensary

Enforcement Ofﬁcer Made an Uninvited Visit

BY BEN LIVINGSTON

ast Friday afternoon, an enforcement ofﬁcer from the Washington State Liquor Control Board walked into a Kent medical cannabis dispensary and requested access to the secure areas of the building for “training purposes.”

That was enough to concern the medical cannabis industry, which feverishly opposed last year’s initiative to legalize cannabis for recreational use. Many pot shop owners, attorneys, and patients argued that Initiative 502 would

respect of long-powerless low-wage workers. This newfound (dare I say) class consciousness was most clearly displayed at a downtown Specialty’s Coffee, where Jonathan, a barista, got a call to ﬁll in on an understaffed shift, only to discover that he was replacing striking coworkers. So he too walked out. “They called me in to work to keep the store running,” he told strike organizers. “But I can’t be a scab.”

“That’s one more way movements grow, by shifting expectations about what’s normal and acceptable,” says Sage Wilson of Working Washington, the labor-backed community group that organized Seattle’s strike. Given labor laws that would require collective bargaining with thousands of individual franchise owners rather than corporate giants like McDonald’s and Subway, fast-food workers may never be able to form a traditional union—but they are already beginning to display the solidarity that comes with one.

And they are also displaying the sort of media savvy that promises to keep their demands for a living wage on the front burner. Cynics might dismiss these one-day strikes as symbolic made-for-TV events, but in a nation where most people get the bulk of their news from TV, this coverage is exactly the point. And the cameras just ate it up, rebroadcasting tales of fast-food workers paid so little that they sometimes can’t afford to buy food. Until the cameras tire of the workers’ plight and their David-versus-Goliath struggle, it’s hard to chalk up these strikes as anything but a win.

SOURCES SAY

• As KIRO’s Brandi Kruse ﬁrst reported last week, Seattle city attorney Pete Holmes, who is backing Ed Murray’s run for mayor, reportedly refused to show up at an August 27 press conference about cracking down on drunk driving because he refused to stand near the mayor. When called for comment, spokespeople on both sides weren’t forthcoming about what went down, exactly. “Sean and I canceled it because we weren’t ready,” city attorney spokeswoman Kimberly Mills said about SPD spokesman Sean Whitcomb (she didn’t respond to an e-mail asking if she denied Kruse’s story). For his part, Whitcomb would only say, “It had too many moving parts, and how you interpret that is up to you.” Here’s one interpretation: Holmes is acting like a child

• Dreams of an endless summer for thousands of schoolchildren were burst over Labor Day weekend, when the Seattle School District and its teachers union reached a tentative contract agreement just days before the start of the new school year. Teachers will get a modest raise, and class sizes and workday length will remain unchanged under the compromise agreement. School board president Kay Smith-Blum

Dreams of an endless summer were burst when the school district and its teachers union reached a tentative contract.

They said striking workers are “lazy,” “unskilled” “scumbags” who should’ve gotten a “real job.”

spread to Tacoma and Shoreline, while expanding to include baristas. A few dozen stores were struck, according to organizers, although this time, only one was shut down: Unlike Seattle’s May 30 strike, the chains were prepared, stafﬁng stores with extra managers. But, as one striking worker put it, “When a manager has to make the fries, that’s a victory, too.”

It was not only a battle over pay and better working conditions, it was also a battle for

lead to a crackdown on dispensaries, and they see this intrusion from the liquor board—which is supposed to regulate the recreational pot industry, but not the medical cannabis industry—as a conﬁrmation of their worst suspicions.

“It was very surprising. We were deﬁnitely caught off guard,” says Angie R., co-owner of Lady Buds in Kent, who asked that we not print her full last name. “We’ve had the local police in here before, and their approach is much different—we actually like them. When this woman walked in, her attitude was completely different, like she thought she was in charge.”

Even liquor board director Rick Garza is shocked. “We have not instructed enforcement staff to do anything related to medical marijuana dispensaries, and as you probably know, we don’t have authority over medical cannabis,” he says. Agency ofﬁcials have visited several dispensaries during the I-502

But if there was ever a yardstick of the fast-food strike’s success, it was the angry, spittle-ﬁlled, right-wing backlash it generated. As strikers marched, the internet was set ablaze with contemptuous tweets, blog posts, and comments belittling both the workers’ demands and the workers themselves. Fast-food workers are “lazy,” “unskilled” “scumbags” who should’ve stayed in college and gotten a “real job,” the twitterverse screamed while reviling the active role of unions in the day’s events as some sort of moneymaking scam. No, we wouldn’t want organized labor to actually organize laborers. That would be just wrong. Or something. Meanwhile, the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB)—the staunchly conservative lead plaintiff in the lawsuit to repeal Obamacare—spent much of the day purchasing promoted tweets with the fasttrending #829Strike hashtag, warning of the adverse impact a higher minimum wage would have on the workers it’s supposed to help. “Raising #minimumwage denies more low-skilled workers the opportunity to get a job,” one NFIB tweet cautioned. Because nobody cares more about the welfare of low-skilled workers than the corporatefunded, minimum-wage-hating NFIB. Whatever. Make what you will of the strikers and their cause. But it’s not often you see low-wage workers put corporate lobbyists on the defensive. And that is a victory in itself.

rule-making process, but ofﬁcers should never stop by a medical pot shop uninvited, he emphasizes, saying the ofﬁcer’s decision was a personal one that is being investigated.

The timing couldn’t be worse for the agency, Garza laments, given an announcement last week from the US Department of Justice saying states that legalize marijuana in some form must conform to strict standards. “Some people are paranoid that the liquor board is out to close down all the medical dispensaries, and that’s just not the case,” Garza stresses. “I’m a little embarrassed. It plays into the paranoia some people have.”

The liquor board’s chief of enforcement, Justin Nordhorn, has since contacted Lady Buds to apologize for the mishap, and Lady Buds seems pleased with the apology. “I was irate, pissed off, and everything else,” says Angie. “I feel much better today.”

says she would have liked to have given in to more of the teachers’ demands, if she could have found the money to pay for it all. “We stink,” says Smith-Blum about our state’s woeful underfunding of K–12 education.

• On August 30, a group called the Grafﬁti Defense Coalition asked the city for a 30-day extension to claim a $49,251 grant to fund several murals on Capitol Hill buildings. The grant has been in limbo since last November, when GDC began warring with its one-time collaborator, the nonproﬁt group the World Is Fun (both groups claim ownership of the name Stunning Seattle, and TWIF has reportedly threatened litigation if GDC uses the name for its mural project). GDC leader Justin Hart wrote an open letter to TWIF last week, asking that the organization state in writing that “no legal action will be taken” against GDC or the city for use of the name. Hart has received no response.

• The Seattle Times has a cool map of the August 6 primary election results, showing the precincts in which the contenders came out on top. In short: Ed Murray prevailed in more traditionally conservative or wealthier parts of town (Magnolia, Queen Anne, Blue Ridge, Laurelhurst, Broadmoor, North Capitol Hill) and in West Seattle (which loved the same deep-bore tunnel that Mayor Mike McGinn opposed). Meanwhile, McGinn prevailed in more diverse, staunchly liberal, or working-class parts of town (Central District, South Capitol Hill, Aurora corridor, Wallingford).

KELLY O

THE FIRST POT PRESIDENT

Obama decides to let legalization in Washington and Colorado stand.

This is a landmark moment in the dismantling of the war on drugs created by his predecessors.

BY DOMINIC HOLDEN

Last fall, a prominent Seattle pot lawyer named Jeffrey Steinborn predicted doom for Initiative 502, the ballot measure that legalized marijuana in Washington State: “I truly believe that when this law passes, a legal challenge by the Feds will pretty much void all of it,” he said. Steinborn’s point was that, even though he supported legalizing marijuana, the measure would overstep Washington State’s authority by attempting to license pot farms and pot stores. Not only would federal prosecutors sue our state, he believed, the initiative would be “a law enforcement sting in plain sight” for anyone who tried to open a pot business. That argument made for bizarre bedfellows. Other pot activists picked up Steinborn’s rallying cry, with one organization calling the initiative a “house of cards in a windstorm.” A passel of former federal antidrug ofﬁcials made this argument their primary talking point in a conference call with reporters last fall, in which they urged the president to oppose the initiative in Washington and a similar measure in Colorado. “Federal law, the US Constitution, and the US Supreme Court decisions say that this cannot be done because federal law preempts state law,” said former DEA administrator Peter Bensinger at the time.

In addition to legalizing personal possession of marijuana, the initiatives were written in a way that would replace the illicit pot market with a legal one—thereby ending the need to arrest dealers and growers (which pot activists like), while also cutting off cash to gangs that profit from illegal pot sales (which antidrug officials like). But these ambitious initiatives could clash with the federal Controlled Substances Act, meaning that the greatest strength of a fully fledged replacement for the drug war—a regulatory model that cuts crime, raises taxes, and gets dealers off the street—would also be its greatest weakness in federal court.

So what happened when voters in Washington State and Colorado handily passed both initiatives last November? How did the Feds actually respond when state ofﬁcials began a rule-making process this year to license pot farms, certify distributors, and let pot stores open? We ﬁnally got the answer last Thursday, when President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder announced that they would let the initiatives stand. That alone was stunning news, and before we move on, let’s just pause to appreciate it: Entrepreneurs in Washington and Colorado will be growing large-scale recreational marijuana farms by next year, and adults will be buying pot in stores.

This is a real thing that is happening.

OBAMA IS LAUGHING AT THEM Under Presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and Bush junior, pot busts more than doubled and then doubled again. Under Obama, states are now successfully opting out of the drug war.

Under presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and Bush junior, pot busts more than doubled and then doubled again. The FBI reported 853,000 pot busts nationwide in the year 2010 alone—a year when pot arrests accounted for 52 percent of all drug arrests. That is, most of the drug war on US

and Colorado implement these new laws, Obama has declared that the US drug war is not mandatory. If a state can present a comprehensive legal framework as an alternative—an alternative to the abstinence-only model—the president is saying, in essence, he’ll let the states try it.

States can opt out of the drug war. This is radical.

soil was about busting people for pot (disproportionately racial minorities). The White House drug czar’s ofﬁce has also spent years ﬁghting attempts to legalize marijuana, most recently opposing initiatives in California and Nevada, with a deluge of threats that federal law would preempt any state reforms. But now, President Obama has grabbed the steering wheel and taken America on a hairpin turn.

By standing back and letting Washington

States can opt out of the drug war, in other words.

This is radical.

The federal government has espoused only one message for decades when it comes to recreational drugs: You can never use them. And for decades, every state was required to fall in line.

But at least for this administration, the president will formally defer to the states on drug policy, much the way the federal gov-

ernment now defers to states on marriage equality. So last week’s news is about more than just two states and two pot initiatives. Defying the expectations of lawyers and antidrug hawks, this president will now let the states replace the drug war with something entirely new.

“If you step back, we’re talking about ending the war on drugs, and the federal government has given a green light to the states to try different approaches,” says Alison Holcomb, a lawyer who works for the ACLU of Washington and drafted Initiative 502, which contained exactly that strict framework for marijuana that the Feds have tacitly endorsed. “That is much bigger than legalizing marijuana in Washington and Colorado.”

But Obama has a few caveats, of course. On the phone with the governors of Colorado and Washington, AG Holder explained the US Justice Department would not sue Washington and Colorado for preempting the federal Controlled Substances Act, provided that the states do two things: (1) strictly enforce their own laws that

regulate the pot market, and (2) abide by eight federal conditions. The weightiest of those conditions are preventing pot from leaking outside state borders, not allowing unregulated cannabis commerce, and banning access for minors. Those are admittedly tall orders. But what wasn’t in those conditions stands out dramatically. Holder didn’t tell states to prevent massive regulated pot farms, to ban wholesale marijuana distribution, or to prohibit storefronts selling marijuana just like bottles of wine. Those are also major violations of federal law—technically—but the Feds are, stunningly, groovy with them if the farms, distribution, and sales are done in compliance with state laws.

After the talk with Holder, Washington State governor Jay Inslee explained his understanding of the deal in a press conference: “If you are following Washington State law and following these eight rules, and our state follows them as well, we are going to have a successful program here—and successful business,” he said.

This signals a deliberate decision about who is in charge of large-scale drug enforcement. “The thrust is that they will allow the state of Washington to be the principal law-enforcement agent in this regard,” Inslee said. That is, for the ﬁrst time, the president and head of the US Department of Justice have chosen to hand over the reins on major, controversial drug-control policy to the states.

(A quick aside about medical marijuana: Under Obama, the Feds have raided hundreds of medical marijuana cooperatives, mostly those that don’t comply with state guidelines. Still, the vast majority of patients, growers, and cooperatives have not been busted. Most of them do business without a lick of penalty. The difference in this case is that medical marijuana is a much smaller market than recreational marijuana, and medical marijuana has a much higher level of public support. This time around, the pot in question has no pretense of medical need.)

So why would Obama open this ﬂoodgate?

First, there’s no guarantee that a federal challenge of state pot laws would win in court. State bureaucrats issuing licenses and enforcing rules for the industry doesn’t necessarily create a so-called positive conﬂict with federal drug laws (state employees would not necessarily be handling the marijuana).

But second, Obama’s decision seems even more tactical than legal. The purported goals of the drug war have been to reduce access to kids, cut off proﬁts to organized crime, and make streets safer—but the drug war has been a renowned failure at achieving those goals. Kids can buy pot at school, cartels are getting rich, and drug-related violence is commonplace enough to become banal. A damning Rasmussen poll released last November found that only 7 percent of American adults think we are winning the war on drugs, 82 percent say were are losing it, and 12 percent didn’t know.

Colorado and Washington essentially forced the federal government’s hand to see who has a better proposal. The states have contended that they can implement a tight regulatory framework that will more effectively reduce violence and drug abuse. And as a result, the Feds folded. It was an unprecedented admission that the White House is paralyzed in its drug-war straitjacket, the federal drug war failed, and they are ready to work in tandem with states that have more ﬂexibility.

Washington and Colorado forced the federal government’s hand, and the Feds folded.

To catch up with the new decree for recreational pot, Deputy Attorney General James Cole emphasized state control last Thursday in a memo to federal prosecutors about how to handle prosecutions in “jurisdictions that have legalized marijuana in some form.” While the memo says prosecutors can bust offenders at their discretion (a boilerplate caveat), Cole essentially instructed prosecutors to butt out if states have their own “strong and effective regulatory and enforcement systems.” Cole added that even large-scale marijuana businesses—marijuana agriculture, essentially—would not be a priority if conducted in compliance with the state guidelines.

So, if the Obama administration is handing over the reins to the states, where can those states go with it? Holcomb, the ACLU lawyer, says that courts, treatment centers, and communities can begin crafting new policy. “And we should not be shy about doing it.”

In my opinion, this could extend to states decriminalizing hard drugs, counties diverting hard-drug dealers into treatment programs instead of jail, or cities opening supervised-injection sites for heroin users— all basic reforms that many have feared could clash with federal law. Or even more simply, this tells dozens of other states that they can pass their own legalization initiatives.

Of course, if Washington’s and Colorado’s legal weed starts showing up in California, if kids start buying pot at the stores in signiﬁcant numbers, or if people with licenses are running shady proﬁt deals outside the regulatory scheme, you can be sure the Department of Justice will seek an injunction against the states to shut this down. They still may not win, but they will have grounds to try.

This was a political gift to Obama. He’s a liberal, ultimately. And as our ﬁrst black president, he wants ineffective drug laws dismantled as a means toward racial justice and economic stability. But he needed it dismantled by someone else.

Zooming out to look at the drug war internationally, the US has been breathing down the necks of other countries to stop them from legalizing marijuana, too. I called the cell phone of Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a preeminent authority on drug strategy in the US and abroad, as he was sitting in a car driving down a narrow, winding road in Jamaica between Kingston and Negril. He’d spent the day before in conference with members of Jamaica’s past and current cabinet, and members from dueling political parties, to talk about legalizing ganja. He said some were uneasy about it; a few years ago when the issue came up, the US ambassador made imposing phone calls.

“To the extent that they are no longer scared of the call from the ambassador or of losing trade preference, to the extent that other countries feel less intimidated, I think this announcement today is signiﬁcant internationally,” Nadelmann said. “State Department ofﬁcials have no credibility to criticize marijuana reform in other countries when the US is leading the way on marijuana law reform.”

The Sawhorse REVOLUTION

Why Inner-City High-School Kids Learning to Build Bridges, Towers, and Tree Houses at a Farm North of Seattle Every Summer Matters to the Rest of Us

BY BRENDAN KILEY

Earlier this summer, a high-school senior named Hannah stood on top of a tall wooden lookout tower in the middle of a sunny field, gazing at two exquisite bifold French doors. Her expression was complicated, more complicated than one would expect from a high-school senior looking at French doors: both loving and rueful. She had, to her own surprise, built those doors over the previous several days at Fortnight, a summer carpentry camp at Smoke Farm, about 60 miles north of Seattle. It was the final day of Fortnight, the bus carrying the students back to the city would be arriving soon, and she seemed to be having trouble figuring out how to tell those doors good-bye.

Hannah is the daughter of Chinese immigrants, works at her parents’ restaurant, gets good grades, and does well on her high-school track team. But she’d never done something like this before—picking out bits of salvaged farm lumber to build French doors with eight hinges and 12 large panes of glass, meanwhile learning to use hammers, routers, screw guns, and a metal drill press. A few days earlier, Hannah had been visibly frustrated with herself for not being able to drive a screw straight into a piece of wood. Now she’d just tapped the ﬁnal pin into the ﬁnal hinge.

At the edge of the ﬁeld below, the rest of the dozen or so students were cheering and dancing across a 42-foot-long bridge they’d just constructed over a streambed—made from 2,000 linear feet of lumber, with 700 screws and bolts holding it together. Hannah had helped with the bridge, too, but decided to linger with her doors.

“I’ve been working on these all week,” she said, her eyes slightly teary. “I want to hug it.” Then she did. I’d never seen anyone hug a door like that before. Arne and Micah, two of the Fortnight counselors, admired her craftswomanship, from the color gradation of the lumber she’d selected to how snugly it all ﬁt together. “This was handmade with care, and it shows,” Arne said, running his hand along the wood. “No machine made this.”

“Don’t ever let him tell you you’re not a machine!” Micah joked.

“Okay,” Arne said. “No mindless machine made this.”

Hannah smiled, nodded, snifﬂed a little, and scrambled down the watchtower to join the party. Below, a counselor named Matthew—a burly, bearded builder—watched the students celebrating from a distance. He seemed almost as emotional as Hannah. “This week is what I’ve been looking forward to for months,” he said. “For us counselors, this is like…” He made a stabbing gesture at his

WORKING IT OUT Above: Students from all over Seattle building a Chinese-style arched bridge. Right, above: Hannah (the students’ names have been changed) going at it with a power saw. Right, below: The ﬁnished bridge.

heart and twisted the invisible knife. “Like tearing our guts out and stufﬁng them back inside in a different order.”

In the four years of Fortnight’s existence, its students have completed three major structures: the watchtower, the arched Chinese bridge, and the “tree house,” an 18-foot octagonal platform wrapped around an old Douglas ﬁr 30 feet above the ground. With its retractable staircase and lower crow’s nest, it looks like a safe perch to sit out a catastrophe. Since its completion, the tree house has been the site of a few dinner parties (using rope-and-pulley systems to hoist up the food) where the adult diners are astonished that the magniﬁcently improbable structure they’re sitting in was built by teenagers.

At this summer’s Fortnight, the majority of the students were girls and the majority were students of color. Most of them had been recruited from Chief Sealth, Franklin, Nova, and Garﬁeld High Schools, and many had been to Smoke Farm in the past, either

for Fortnight or for some of the farm’s ecology and education camps. Their personalities and backgrounds were all over the map: from friendly to surly, from shy to maniacally exuberant, from valedictorian types to those who seemed to be struggling just to stay in school.

But that was just my impression—there was no way to know for sure. Fortnight cofounder Adam Nishimura explained that it’s not the kind of camp where counselors play amateur psychiatrist or armchair social worker. There’s not much in the way of coddling, name games, icebreakers, or prodding about what’s going on with the students’ home lives.

“We say it’s a volunteer experience,” he said. “They’re there to learn how to do stuff, and they’re there to help complete a project… It’s trying a little to give them the feeling of what it’d be like to drop into a jobsite. We’re not trying to treat them like kids.”

That approach seemed to work wonders. Within a few days, the social divisions and built-in cliques the students came in with noticeably softened: The chronic slouchers straightened up, smiled more, and became full participants in all the conversations and activities. Other students were having sur-

prisingly candid conversations about race. I jotted down one excerpt I overheard during a lunchtime conversation, when one of the black girls said to one of the white girls: “The only reason that cop let you go is because you’re white. If you were black, he’d have slapped you like that girl at Franklin got slapped.” The white kids would sputter during these exchanges (the moment one realizes one is the involuntary beneﬁciary of a brutal history is never pleasant), but they’d all keep talking. In a short period of time, it became radically less important where the students came from or where they might be going. What started mattering was how well their teams worked together in the “hammer games” (a hammer-and-nail relay race), or whether they could coordinate themselves to load those 2,000 linear feet of lumber onto pickup trucks, or who moved whose tape measure and speed square without asking, or whether the team working on gluing and screwing together boards for the bridge was moving fast enough for the team behind (which was cutting the lumber) and the team ahead (which was assembling the bridge’s wooden arches). At one point, the gluing-and-screwing team received

an affectionately scolding note scrawled across one of the boards: “You guys need to move a little faster. Boredom is setting in. Love, the team behind you.”

Throughout the week, I kept hearing from the Fortnight supervisors that the sign of a successful counselor is one who’s standing around and seems to be doing nothing. “Walk away and watch” was their slogan. The trick, one counselor said, is to observe carefully while appearing to be doing something else, or nothing at all—step in if there’s a safety issue, but otherwise let them encounter, wrestle with, and solve whatever problems they come across. “That,” Nishimura says, “leads

Fortnight was started four years ago by a few experienced carpenters and a few recent college graduates, all do-gooder types who’d been involved with other programs at Smoke Farm. (It’s a retired dairy farm where I’ve done some volunteer work myself, primarily as the cohost of a summer lecture series called the Symposium. I had never been to Fortnight until this summer.)

Many of Fortnight’s founders talk about it as a kind of social-justice program. Like arts education, trades education (the preferred nomenclature, for political reasons we’ll get into later, is CTE, or “career technical educa-

to a much greater sense of accomplishment than having the IKEA directions.”

Nishimura admits that in the beginning, Fortnight wanted to differentiate itself from other camps by not having any “dumb camp songs.” That’s one battle the counselors had to concede. Now the students insist on songs and chants, some they make up on the spot, some remembered from previous years. The students seemed to love them all the more because they weren’t your typical Pollyannaish summer-champ cheers—they felt more like an expression of the real world. An especially popular one from this year, typically led by Micah, a tall counselor who’d stand in the middle of a group of students, went like this:

Are we here to have fun?

NOOOOO!

How do we play?

WAY! TOO! SERIOUSLY!

What do we do?

CHEAT TO WIN! CHEAT TO WIN!

Then everyone would jump up and down and scream for joy.

dized college educations for returning WWII veterans, resulting in millions of American veterans getting BA degrees they otherwise might not have been able to afford.) “That led to a lot of our parents and grandparents going to college—it was a great thing in the 1940s and ’50s. But we don’t live in that world anymore.”

Siegel says that during his time as the CTE manager for Seattle Public Schools, he heard principals get up in front of hundreds of students and declare: “All of you are going to college!” But not all of them—perhaps not even the majority of them—are going to get a four-year degree, Siegel argues, which sets the rest of them up to feel like losers and make ill-informed choices about the many, many other options they could successfully pursue, such as the trades. “And, in certain schools, if the kid doesn’t go to the four-year college, where do they go?” he asks. “They go into the military! In some schools, they’ve been left with nothing in between.”

But if the emphasis for principals is improving standardized-testing scores (as has been the case since the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act), the imperative to provide a relevant and strong education for all students, whether or not they’re bound for a four-year degree, is compromised. “It’s the difference,” Siegel says, “between a principal

ing and experiment with applied geometry in the afternoon. “There’s a population that learns better when there’s a hands-on component,” he says. “That population frequently becomes disaffected in ordinary classroom settings where you sit and are lectured to and take notes and so on. But if they can put their hands on something, and can go back and forth between that and books so they can see the application, they learn better.” Moreover, a college-bound kid with trades education should have a much easier time paying off those student loans.

Jonathan Knapp, a longtime auto shop teacher, who is now the head of the Seattle Education Association, tells stories about students who were flailing in their other classes—some were immigrants with shaky language skills and chip-on-their-shoulder attitudes—but were extraordinarily gifted mechanically. Being good at one thing gave them the confidence to buckle down and work in their other classes. Knapp also sees a sinister factor in the elimination of CTE and arts education, and other teach-to-thetest trends: “There are a lot of really powerful, unsavory characters who are interested in privatizing public education for financial gain,” he says. “A good number of characters in the education-reform game are actively trying to narrow the scope of public education because they don’t see a value in it.”

It’s not the kind of camp where there’s coddling, name games, icebreakers, or prodding about what’s going on with the students’ home lives. They’re there to learn how to do stuff.

walking into a shop class and saying, ‘Let’s update all this and get a great 21st-century shop,’ and a principal saying, ‘Hey, if we get rid of all this equipment, I can have another remedial math classroom.’ And I’ve seen a lot more of the latter than the former.”

Ttion”) has been whittled away in recent years by budgetary pressure for school districts to improve their standardized-testing scores.

As Dr. Shepherd Siegel, a longtime CTE advocate, who got his start in education by teaching incarcerated youth, puts it, “I once heard a superintendent from another state bring that issue to its most cynical level: ‘If they don’t test it, we don’t teach it.’ So byebye, arts. And bye-bye, CTE.”

This is a problem on several fronts. The ﬁrst—which several CTE advocates told me was a political hot potato—is the disservice to students who deserve a relevant education from their public-school system but who aren’t necessarily going on to earn a fouryear degree at a liberal arts college. This is a controversial idea to articulate for several reasons, not least because it’s extremely unpopular to suggest that any student in public education isn’t bound for a baccalaureate degree.

“People who purport to be the progressive leaders of education reform are way behind the times,” Siegel says. “They’re still operating in the post-WWII model, the G.I. Bill model.” (The G.I. Bill, passed in 1944, subsi-

There’s also the sticky question of dignity, Siegel says, and the American stigma associated with “shop” class and working in the trades. (That stigma is partly why educators prefer the term CTE, which includes accounting and computer programming, instead of “shop” or “trades education.”) He, and other CTE advocates I spoke with, talked about individuals who were very good at and very happy with their jobs in the trades, but who still felt a pit in their stomachs about being losers. “I have a lot of friends in the trades,” Siegel says, “and it bothers them because some principal at some point gave them the idea that the only winners are those with baccalaureate degrees. So they’ll be out there, raising a family, earning six ﬁgures doing work they love, and they’ll still have selfesteem issues.”

Michael Theriault, the secretary-treasurer of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, is also a strong advocate for CTE, but disagrees with the idea that CTE is of primary importance to students who aren’t going to college. “The way you’re describing it is a bit outdated,” he says. “Shop is not just a sort of fork in the road for those folks—you have it to bring them back to the possibility of a college education, so they see there is a purpose for trigonometry, or English, or even history.”

Theriault’s ideal school would fold CTE in with the rest of the curriculum so, for example, students could read Euclid in the morn-

wo years ago, the Fortnight crew expanded their programming from the farm into the city, and began conducting multiweek after-school programs. They named their umbrella project—the Smoke Farm camp plus the in-city programs— the Sawhorse Revolution. Besides building things at the farm, Sawhorse students have constructed garden shelters for P-Patches and done remodeling at Youngstown Cultural Arts Center. The Sawhorse budget for 2012 was about $35,000, which mostly comes from grants and donations (a tiny sliver—1.5 percent—of the budget comes from a suggested donation instead of tuition, for the families who can afford it).

Nishimura and other counselors say the economic and education issues raised by the CTE teachers were part of the early inspiration for Fortnight and Sawhorse. But as they kept working with the students, and hearing the parents talk about how proud their children were to walk around the city and point out different parts of a building, or how one might fix a broken fence, larger and more ineffable questions of dignity started to emerge: What do students lose, whether they’re going to college or not, when they have no idea how the built environment they move through fits together? What do we all lose when we’ve acquired a sense of learned helplessness that comes with not knowing how any of the things we interact with every day (doors, toilets, light switches) actually work and we have to rely on specialists to fix even the simplest things?

“A student who can build or take down walls is not so trapped by them,” says Sarah Smith, another young Fortnight/Sawhorse cofounder. Building bridges, garden shelters, and French doors might seem like a lark, but it has deeper implications. “It’s a preparation for urban living in many ways,” she says. “How to be engaged with the built world of the city as well.”

And, I would argue, with each other.

Comment on this story at THESTRANGER.COM

PHOTOS BY GREG KIRCHER

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2013

6 p.m. • Palace Ballroom

Hosted by Sister Glo of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

Catered by Tom Douglas Restaurants

Tickets and information available at ywcaworks.org/events/stella or call 206.461.4481

STRANGER SUGGESTS

Shin Yu Pai and Whiting Tennis

BOOKS/MUSIC

A while back, poet Shin Yu Pai moved from Seattle to the Deep South. Her poetry collection about the experience, Aux Arcs—the title is a play on the word “Ozarks”—is a beautiful and wary book. (Spoiler alert: For those wondering about its tone, Pai said in an interview, “I am done with the South and will never again live in Texas or anywhere within the Bible Belt or Stroke Belt.”) Tonight’s launch party will feature music by visual artist and Aux Arcs cover designer Whiting Tennis, whose sad, Southern-tinged rock should provide context for Pai’s reading. (Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, hugohouse.org, 7 pm, free) PAUL CONSTANT

Jonathan Raban

BOOKS

The man whom I consider the best writer in the city, and one of the best writers of our times, Jonathan Raban, reads from his collection of essays titled Driving Home: An American Journey. For reasons that relate to his health, the “eloquent Englishman,” as one reviewer at the New York Times called him, has been out of the public eye for more than two years. This reading is something like the return of a major writer, a writer whose opinions have been attacked by the likes of Christopher Hitchens and admired by the likes of Salman Rushdie, who once wrote: “When Raban describes America and Americans, he is unfailingly witty and entertaining.” (Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave, spl.org, 7 pm, free) CHARLES MUDEDE

Free Cheese! CHOW

An entity called Cheeses of France is in town today giving out samples of 21 kinds of French cheese, cheesy hors d’oeuvres, and wine, all for FREE. While Cheeses of France promises “some pretty amazing and hard-to-ﬁnd stuff,” a cheese snob will recognize a number of unimpressive industrial-production cheeses on offer—still, though, FREE CHEESE AND WINE. Also: actual French people to tell you about the cheeses with the appropriate accent Ask them why the hell they brought Fromage Frais Strawberry, a strawberry-ﬂavored cheese spread. (The Piranha Shop, 1022 First Ave S, 11 am–7 pm, free, 21+) BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT

Love as Laughter

MUSIC

The on-again/off-again Love as Laughter are back on! Some history: Sam Jayne (previously of Oly band Lync) formed Love as Laughter back in 1994, releasing records on K, Sub Pop, and Isaac Brock’s Glacial Pace with an ever-changing carousel of bandmates. Laughter’s sturdy tunes are slightly-delic and classicfeeling with a wink and a shrug; shaggy licks and Jayne’s hoarse croon are perfect for that eye-closed, hair-shaking dance move you only do when you’re feeling it. If you remember LAL, you’re already excited—if you don’t, it’s time to introduce yourself. (Tractor Tavern, 5213 Ballard Ave NW, tractortavern.com, 9:30 pm, $10 adv/$12 DOS, 21+) EMILY NOKES

Abay Ethiopian Cuisine

Badminton Royale SPORTS

CHOW

Many years ago, two Ethiopians opened Cafe Noir on Aurora Avenue and sold Italian dishes and delights Abay, which is owned and run by Tesfaye Haile Selassie and Blen Teklu, is similar to Cafe Noir (which no longer exists) in the sense that it is very cosmopolitan. But whereas Cafe Noir’s cosmopolitanism was based on its Ethiopian/Italian cultural combination, Abay’s cosmopolitanism is drawn from its unique approach to traditional Ethiopian dishes, emphasizing health (in the urban and not country meaning of that word) and lightness. Abay is undoubtedly one of the best Ethiopian restaurants in Seattle. (Abay Ethiopian Cuisine, 2359 10th Ave E, 2574778, 11 am–2 am) CHARLES MUDEDE

‘The World’s End’

The World’s End is the latest from the guys who made 2004’s Shaun of the Dead and 2007’s Hot Fuzz. Like those ﬁlms, it’s a fantastic genre movie that ends up accomplishing far more than most genre movies. On its surface, the apocalyptic, increasingly drunken The World’s End is a funnier, smarter Invasion of the Body Snatchers; dig a bit more, and it’s an affecting movie about how you can’t go home again, even if your crappy hometown isn’t literally besieged by mindless automatons. And oh, yeah: It’s phenomenally, relentlessly funny. (See Movie Times, thestranger.com/ﬁlm) ERIK HENRIKSEN

Nobody knows when or where badminton originated. People have been swatting at bits of wood festooned with feathers in Vietnam, France, and Zuñi country for centuries. Today, On the Boards turns its big stage into a badminton palace for the annual Badminton Royale tournament/party, where arts organizations large and small battle for the championship title. Historically, larger organizations (such as Seattle Art Museum) tend to lose, while smaller ones (such as Pottery Northwest) tend to win, adding a dash of populist piquancy to the games. Badminton Royale is fun with claws. (On the Boards, 100 W Roy St, ontheboards.org, 2 pm, free) BRENDAN KILEY

DANIEL CARILLO

Photo by Mark Kitaoka

ARTS

ART

Being Beaten About the Mind and Eyes

The 55th Venice Biennale Is a High-Speed Train Very Focused on a Destination, and Prone to Crashing

BY JEN GRAVES

You only get lost in Venice, Italy, if you have an idea of where you want to go. If you attempt focus. At this, Venice will rise up against you. Let’s say your desired destination is this one restaurant named after assassins, or this other one where the politicians hang out and the fishes are prepared in the Venetian style. Or maybe your destination is this exhibition by Chinese artists that includes a full-scale replica of the highspeed commuter train that crashed and killed hundreds of people not long ago, with laundry lines of actual workers’ clothes dangling

rather his premise in selecting individual artists seems to be that they are people who have drilled very far down in their core sampling of whatever tiny piece of the universe they love. This involves artists who have cared more about their subject than about being artists. They include Shakers and Haitian practitioners of voodoo, Catholics who make vows with objects rather than words, and mystic abstract philosopher painters who also happened to be women. Also, social outsiders drawing in soot and spit, or working in the medium of whatever obscenity means at that moment. Tantrics, eccentrics. Or they are artists with formal training who practice devotion to color and paint, or repetition, or YouTube. They are believers in something, all. The something is just not necessarily Art.

It’s nice—sometimes nice-looking and sometimes good-feeling. It’s both in art by Hilma af Klint, James Castle, Patrick Van Caeckenbergh, Robert Gober (dollhouses!), Jessica Jackson Hutchins (go, PDX!), Maria Lassnig, Sharon Hayes, Ron Nagle. Oh Ron Nagle, Ron Nagle, Ron Nagle, I have a crush on everything you make and want to cradle it. Seattle artists who would fit right in: Jeffry Mitchell, Matthew Offenbacher, Dawn Cerny,

As Mary McCarthy said, everything has already been said about Venice and yet no one can stop saying it.

Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Sherry Markovitz, Matt Browning, Sol Hashemi. I’ve made my lists short, the better to google with.

LOOSE LIPS

ARTS GOSSIP, ETC.

BY GEORGE C. SCOTT

above the train replica—not to be confused with that other exhibition by Chinese artists that includes so many artists that looking at it would be like trying to picture the whole of China at once inside your head, so why try.

Instead of whatever destination you have in mind, you will end up inside an old palace along a canal in which young Saudi artists are making jokes about passing for Mexicans while visiting the United States to avoid being apprehended as terrorists. Or you’ll turn a corner, go up a flight of stairs decorated for a dead duke, and come upon Manet’s sensational 1863 painting Olympia (hey, that is supposed to be in Paris, where it lives) hung next to Titian’s sensational 1538 painting Venus d’Urbino (hey, that is supposed to be in Florence, where it lives). Is anything in the world not in Venice during biennale season? Being in Venice during biennale season is like being an infant convinced that what is not in view is gone forever and must be immediately mourned, and yet still not needing to mourn. It’s funny in an enjoyably doomed way, then, that this 55th edition of the Venice Biennale—lasting through November 24—is obsessed with focus, focused on obsession. There is one enormous central exhibition featuring artists from all over, this year organized by a curator named Massimiliano Gioni. He chose as his title The Encyclopedic Palace, which would suggest comprehensiveness, but

One also feels, by turns, in The Encyclopedic Palace, that one more tantric repetitive quilted pile of obsessively arranged bits of aged found objects assembled into folksy vehicles or cosmic swirls or miniature houses, and someone might take a match to the whole damn thing. Maybe you. Sometimes one catches the rancid scent of “outsider-ishlooking inside art (there’s more and more of this around),” as critic Holland Cotter put it.

Simple gestures mean more amid this noise, expense. Monument to a Monument is the exhibition sponsored by the Ukraine. It contains tiny portraits in matchboxes and sketches of one stray thought each by Gamlet Zinkovsky (one stray thought: “There is no dinner”). Actual big and heavy monuments appear only in flux, being demolished and rebuilt in video by Mykola Ridnyi or hovering spectrally in a holograph by Zhanna Kadyrova. An old man in a bunker—a former spy?—teaches a boy to load a weapon rapidly; to the man’s dismay, the boy does not need the skill. The feeling is of a memorial being conducted underground.

Mary McCarthy starts her classic Venice travelogue by admitting that everything has already been said about Venice and yet no one can stop saying it. It’s a place of gluttonous layering, a light-footed endless processional you see when new biennale art is shown in a place with old art already on its walls. The old art doesn’t get taken down; it stays. Sometimes the lights on it are turned off, so it’s there in shadow. Or the priceless Botticelli paintings and porcelain sculptures stay right where they are in the Palazzo Cini, the usual light fully on them, while they’re joined by stacks of posters on the floors by the Angolan artist Edson Chagas. You can take a poster for two euros. Each poster is a photograph

Christopher Harrell’s good-bye.

• Last week, there was a giant reading and art exhibition for the soon-to-be-vacated block at Melrose and Pine that’s been a haven for artists and writers for years, centered around Bauhaus. The novelist Rebecca Brown read a tumbling, wordplaying, bittersweet vigil she’d written for the occasion: “A vigil is waiting with a light or something for something that you may not want but that is coming anyway… The end of Melrose and Pine is. The mellow rose is fading. We ought to put it in a box made of pine.” She was followed by greats Maged Zaher, Sarah Galvin (who wrote her ﬁrst poem at Bauhaus, she said), and Rich Smith, who read, “You fuck like a broken toy,” which you might want to use someday. Amazingly for a one-night event, most of the 100 artists had made their pieces especially for the show. A mirror shaped as if it had been squeezed into a trapezoid was printed with the words “YOU ARE FUCKED.” It was by Kelly O, The Stranger’s staff photographer, who had found the frame in the free bin when someone was moving out of her apartment building on Capitol Hill because they, too, couldn’t afford it anymore. Graham Downing made a framed piece that was just a brown-paper background with a scrap of a newspaper headline torn out and placed in the center, with the word “grief” above the word “city.”

• Cinerama’s 70 mm festival starts September 13. Just seeing the opening scene of Patton on the Cinerama’s giant, gorgeous screen will make your nether bits tingle

• The Stranger published a negative review of memoirist Nicole Hardy’s book Confessions of a Latter-day Virgin a couple of weeks ago. Cienna Madrid, who reviewed it, thought it needed more editing and that it didn’t delve deeply enough into the issues it was ostensibly exploring. Last week, the Boston Globe published a positively glowing review of the same book. So the question is, who do you trust? The Stranger? Or the paper of record for a two-bit town that will never be anything more than a New York City with training wheels for self-important prudes?

• After a number of impressive works created for the New York Times’ Op-Docs series, Seattle animator/ﬁlmmaker Drew Christie is jumping in a poppier pool, producing the series “Vanity Code” for Vanity Fair. The ﬁrst installment concerns etiquette for swingers’ parties and can be found at vanityfair.com.

• Seamus Heaney died last week. He signed a napkin once for Richard Hugo House. They’ve got it in a frame; ask to see it next time you stop by.

• University Audi is expanding to serve you better. They’re adding three steelreinforced 40-foot watchtowers and seven guards armed with sniper riﬂes

DAVID QUIGG

DEATH BY TRAIN The replica, with actual victims’ clothes.

of debris arranged and shot on the streets of Angola’s capital. You can see how popular each poster is by how low the stacks have gotten. Why is a single abandoned sneaker something people want to take home with them so much more than a wooden stool left in a mess of green vines like a barrette in a great head of hair? I took home the vines (plus two others, six euros total).

The last best thing I’ll describe is the Romanian pavilion. (Other greats: Britain, Lebanon, and the Chinese show involving the commuter train, which is called Mind-Beating.) Nothing is inside the Romanian pavilion except five performers. They’ve picked a list of artworks from past Venice Biennales. They re-create these artworks by acting them out. I saw them perform Santiago Sierra’s 2003 installation; Sierra blocked the entrance to his Spanish pavilion to anyone who didn’t have a Spanish passport. The Romanians stood in a row across the entrance to their building. A man came by and wanted in. “Only if you have a Romanian passport,” they said. He did not, and left. That bit of history reinterpreted, they disassembled the line and moved on to the next.

BOOKS

Out of Rage

Shin Yu Pai’s Aux Arcs

Rails Against Injustice

BY PAUL CONSTANT

The word “angry” doesn’t come up a whole lot in discussions of poetry. Which is not to say that poetry can’t be angry—like a lot of rock stars, Sylvia Plath is remembered more for the tragic end of her story than for the fire that fueled her career—but that people prefer to acknowledge poetry when it’s funny, or brilliant. Local author Shin Yu Pai’s new collection, Aux Arcs (La Alameda Press, $18), is both funny and brilliant, but the quality that kept coming back to me as I read the book and then read it again was its anger.

PREVIEW

Shin Yu Pai

Wed Sept 4, Hugo House, 7 pm, free

Aux Arcs is in part about Pai’s experience living in the Bible Belt (specifically, Texas and Arkansas), and the book is prickly with observations. The second poem in the book, “Main Street,” is about a time when a cluster of white teenagers spit at Pai on the sidewalk, their “sputum” landing “inches/from my leather dress shoes.” As she relates the story of the disrespectful teenagers to her partner, Pai draws a line directly from those teenagers to her neighbors, who are “proud to wag/the Southern Cross/ displays we bristle/against & those which/we resign ourselves to.” Some other things in Aux Arcs that arouse Pai’s ire: wastefulness, tainted infant formula that sickens hundreds of thousands of children, the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the white Southern inventor who came up with a fishgutting machine called an “iron chink” explicitly to put Chinese immigrants out of work, the fact that female sushi chefs are still discriminated against (because, allegedly, “the core temperature/of a woman’s palms aren’t quite suited/to sushi production”).

This is not anger disguised by metaphor, or leavened by ironic distance. Pai witnesses and hears about injustices, and she becomes outraged, the same way you or I would. She turns that outrage into art. Sometimes, her poems

feel more like journalism, as when she visits a homeless encampment tucked underneath an interstate. They’re all living in cars—Pai notes that “condensation fogging windshields is a tell-tale sign” that a car is being lived in. And she meets a woman who “stows her cat’s ashes beneath a seat.” These people living out of their cars are the underbelly of the city, the poor and forgotten, who put the lie to that unquestioned Southern pride that Pai rails against elsewhere in the book.

The book is obsessed with the things that most people don’t see. Pai admires the beauty of “night monks” performing an evening prayer while “on the other side of campus:/ Tristan Taormino, feminist/pornographer draws a record/crowd of students in a talk/on polyamory, swinging/& sex-positive culture.” She alone appreciates the spiritual beauty of the monks, while everyone else is nearby being titillated and shocked and aroused. She sees crops left out to rot and blood spilled in a protest, and imagines the lives that could be saved by both. Pai imagines the lonely municipal back rooms of communist China:

Heavenly Peace:

Chairman Mao’s visage wheatpasted & restored

after every incident of disfigurement, depleting a storeroom depot

stuffed full w/ stock replicas

There’s an irresistible connection between Pai’s passion for the unseen and her raging against injustice, of course. Advocating for the unnoticed is one of the greatest callings a writer can answer. That she decided to focus her advocacy through poetry adds another level of injustice—people just don’t read poetry the way they would, say, a blog—but Pai responds to that with her knack for bringing out the beauty in a poem. In the excerpt above, her lack of patience for the little words, using “w/” and “&” instead of spelling out prepositions and conjunctions, indicates her desire for the reader to cut directly to what matters. Pai’s knack for finding exactly the right word, and then positioning each word just so around the page, guides her reader through each poem easily. Cut as they are from sheets of pure red rage, Pai stitches her words into something undeniably beautiful.

DANCE

Spin Cycle

The Whirling of Daniel Linehan

BY MELODY DATZ

This spring, at an On the Boards/Culturebot event called Everyone’s a Critic, where critics, artists, and audience members talked about the relationship between art and audiences, a woman turned to me and said: “I hate modern dance. I don’t understand it. There’s no story. It makes no sense.” It’s true that classical ballets can be easier to understand—usually there are enough program notes, literal costuming, and miming movements to communicate a very clear story, and this can be a super-fun way to experience dance. But even the old story ballets (Swan Lake, Nutcracker, Giselle) have hidden and intricate commentary about emotions, politics, and human society. It’s the same with modern dance—it just sometimes requires a little more looking to see it.

improvisation or a set series of dance phrases, but that would still have that strong physicality and energy to it.” He was spinning around in a circle one day and stuck with it, finding different rhythms and speeds to create a composition of different actions and energies within that single action of spinning.

The kind of “energy” Linehan describes is the same thing that compels us to give standing ovations, or to stop and stare at a painting, or to bust out our lighters and sway during a Journey concert. Linehan’s work can create this energetic charge with unpredictable series of movements and sound, “choreographed” by him—this is not improvisation, but seems so outside what most dance audiences might expect as to seem alien, making it surprisingly easy to be gripped by and lost in the image of a single man spinning in circles.

Velocity Dance Center Sept 12–14

Next week at Velocity Dance Center, Daniel Linehan will present and participate in a series of the kinds of events that help us look a little better, culminating in a presentation of his solo piece Not About Everything Everything begins with Linehan standing stock-still, hands at his sides; he starts slowly spinning in a circle and then gaining speed, arms sometimes slack, sometimes on his head, and sometimes out to his sides like a child pretending to be a helicopter. He chants, repeating phrases over and over that are recorded in real time and played back almost in unison with his live voice. The phrases—including “This is not about everything” and “This is not about therapy”—are parts of what Linehan considers his self-produced dance rhythm, a way to break from reliance on outside music.

While he was working on a different project, Linehan says, he realized that he didn’t want to keep making pieces made of dance phrases (groups of steps strung together to constitute a piece of choreography, similar to the way stanzas help constitute a song). Linehan wanted to “find an action that wouldn’t be

The whirling is very reminiscent of Sufi dervishes, who spend hours spinning in circles for meditation and inspiration. Linehan acknowledges this similarity but says he didn’t research that for this piece. “It’s kind of like [Sufi whirling] in its meditative qualities,” he says, “and there’s something about the action that brings me inside myself—my vision gets blurry, and I can’t see. There’s also the text on top of it, so there’s something being thrown outside of myself, two forces that produce an experience for everyone rather than just meaning for myself.”

Linehan talks about this kind of experience with dance as a “certain force.” This “force” includes things that aren’t normally considered dance, including photography and point-of-view camerawork by his dancers (though not in the pieces presented this week) to give audiences a chance to see what the dancers see while they’re dancing.

This week’s events at Velocity include an open-forum series titled “The Good Life” (Sept 5–14), with classes, performances, and conversations about “what it means to take an ethical approach to life and art.” Linehan, like most artists, creates work through a process of discussion (be it only in the artist’s head, or via months or years of exchange with friends and colleagues), but it’s rare that the rest of us get a direct invitation to these kinds of conversations—the kinds of conversations that make dance seem less tricky and intimidating, and can help us all to look a little more closely.

See velocitydancecenter.org for a full schedule of events.

PREVIEW

Daniel Linehan

JASON SOMMA

DANIEL LINEHAN Spinning himself into a blur to help you see more clearly.

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ARTS CALENDAR Only the most noteworthy stuff.

ART Gallery Openings

4CULTURE

Boating with Clyde : Clyde Petersen offers you the “experience” of going out on Lake Washington in his homemade dingy, replete with lily pads and that special, listless conversation that only happens on a boat and when it is sunny. Free. Reception Thurs Sept 5, 6-8 pm. Mon-Fri. Through Sept 25. 101 Prefontaine Pl S CORNISH COLLEGE OF THE ARTS

The 2013 Neddy at Cornish: Work from all eight nominees for the 2013 Neddy Awards in one room. Free. Reception Thurs September 12, 5-8 pm. Mon-Sun. Through Oct 19. 1000 Lenora St

DAVIDSON GALLERIES

Estuko Ichikawa: New Works: Ichikawa has a highly satisfying propensity to use fire in her work and arrange things in rainbow order. This show has 2-D and 3-D works, as well as a sound installation. Free. Reception Thurs Sept 5, 6-8 pm. TuesSat. Through Sept 28. 313 Occidental Ave S, 624-1324.

G. GIBSON GALLERY

New works from Seattle artists Gala Bent (The Ether and the Mantle ) and Diem Chau (A-Z: Northwest Natives). Free. Reception Thurs Sept 5, 6-8 pm. Wed-Sun. Through Oct 5. 300 S Washington St 587-4033.

GROVER/THURSTON

GALLERY

David Kroll : Paintings that depict birds standing on fine china bowls and vases. Free. Reception Thurs Sept 5, 6-8 pm. Tues-Sat. 319 Third Ave S, 223-0816.

HEDREEN GALLERY,

SEATTLE UNIVERSITY

Garek J. Druss: The Celestial Din : Sound installation and works on paper by the Seattle artist. Free. Tues-Sat. Through Oct 5. 901 12th Ave, 296-2244.

LINDA HODGES GALLERY

Jennifer Beedon Snow makes the loveliest paintings of tennis courts and subdivision pools. Free. Reception Thurs Sept 5, 6-8 pm. Tues-Sat. Through Sept 28. 316 First Ave S 624-3034.

MIA GALLERY

Frank Marshall, Renegades : Portraits of metalheads in Botswana. At once amazing and perfectly normal. Free. Reception Thurs Sept 5, 6-8 pm. Tues-Sat. Through Oct 2. 1203A 2nd Ave, 467-4927.

PATRICIA ROVZAR GALLERY

Z.Z. Wei: Journey: Recent oils from a Northwest artist. Free. Reception Thurs Sept 5, 6-8 pm. Mon-Sun. Through Sept 30. 1225 Second Ave 223-0273.

PLATFORM GALLERY

Jaq Chartier: SubOptic : Paintings inspired by scientific procedures, like gel electrophoresis. Free. Reception Thurs Sept 5, 6-8 pm. Wed-Sat. Through Oct 12. 114 Third Ave S, 323-2808.

PUNCH GALLERY

Cara Jaye: After sifting through the archives of the Louvre for six weeks, Jaye presents reinterpretations of classic drawings of falling figures. Free. Reception Thurs September 5, 5-8 pm. Thurs-Sat. Through Sept 28. 119

Prefontaine Pl S, 621-1945.

SHIFT STUDIO

Palimpsests I : A group show that exhibits layers of progress and mark-making. Free. Reception Thurs Sept 5, 6-8 pm. Fri-Sat. Through Sept 28. 306 S Washington St, Ste 105, 679-8915.

SOIL

The Edge and a Little Beyond: Six painters, selected by Seattle

artist Julie Alexander, wonder where the painting ends and the real world begins in this investigation of the demarcating edges of abstract paintings. Free. Reception Thurs September 5, 6-8 pm. WedSat. Through Sept 28. Heady: More than 50 from-the-head pieces from Nola Avienne, whose past work includes monstrous dentures, sculpted magnets, and crystals grown from her own blood. Free. Reception Thurs September 5, 6-8 pm. Wed-Sat. Through Sept 28. 112 Third Ave S 264-8061. WINSTON WACHTER FINE ART

Erich Woll: When Things Go South : Squirrels, burnt matches, beetles, and “glass aphorisms” with a certain cartoony bounciness. Free. Reception Tues Sept 10, 6-8 pm. Mon-Sat. Through Oct 25. Peter Waite: Space Travel: The real depicted with great clarity in paintings, the subjects of which include escalators, stairs, and doorways. Free. Reception Tues Sept 10, 6-8 pm. Mon-Fri. Through Oct 24. 203 Dexter Ave N, 652-5855.

Continuing Exhibitions

GREG KUCERA GALLERY An American Knockoff : The masterly Roger Shimomura blends traditional Japanese and contemporary American styles (specifically comic art) in both technique and concept. Free. Tues-Sat. Through Sept 28. Léon Guyer: Guyer’s paintings ad drawings are about as unimposing as you can imagine, and there is something very pleasing about that. Free. Reception Thurs Sept 5, 6-8 pm. Tues-Sat. Through Sept 28. Lynne Woods Turner: Her paintings are usually so faint that they are hardly there at all, forcing the eye into action and discovery. But these are more vivid. See her other side/s. Free. Reception Thurs Sept 5, 6-8 pm. Artist talk Sat Sept 7, noon. Tues-Sat. Through Sept 28. 212 Third Ave S, 624-0770.

Events

WAYZGOOSE 2013

The School of Visual Concepts celebrates 12 years of bringing letterpress printing to the people with its great annual Wayzgoose, a printing festival where you can make your own prints, stock your print shop, and witness 16 teams of local designers competing to make the best poster using a steamroller! School of Visual Concepts, 500 Aurora Ave N, 623-1560. wayzgoose. svcseattle.com. Free. Sat Sept 7, 1-6 pm.

visualart@thestranger.com

READINGS

Wed 9/4

ROBERTA WINTER

Since we’re about a month away from the big rollout of Obamacare, it stands to reason that you’ll want to attend this reading for Unraveling U.S. Health Care: A Personal Guide University Book Store, 4326 University Way NE, 634-3400. Free. 7 pm.

SHIN YU PAI

See Stranger Suggests, page 19. Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030. Free. 7 pm.

Thurs 9/5

JONATHAN RABAN

See Stranger Suggests, page 19. Seattle Public Library , 1000 Fourth Avenue, 624-6600. Free. 7 pm.

Fri 9/6

BROOKS GREER RAGEN Ragen is the author of The Meek Cutoff: Tracing the Oregon Trail’s Lost Wagon Train of 1845. It’s about a real-life game of Oregon Trail that ended badly. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600. Free. 7 pm.

Sat 9/7

LEE CHILD

The author of the Reacher mystery series, which is about a perfect man who never messes

we recommend it.

up and is always smarter and stronger than his opponents, reads from the newest entry in that series, Never Go Back Seattle Mystery Bookshop 117 Cherry St, 587-5737. Free. 12:30 pm.

BRIAN RALPH

Oh, man. Ralph’s new comic book Reggie-12 is a crazy amount of fun. It’s about a boy robot who is created by an absent-minded scientist to attack giant monsters. It’s not for kids, but it feels as fizzy as a Saturday morning cartoon, in the best way possible. If you were raised on Astro Boy or Godzilla movies, you’ll love the fuck out of this book. Fantagraphics Bookstore and Gallery, 1201 S Vale St, 658-0110. Free. 6 pm.

Mon 9/9

DAVY ROTHBART The Found Magazine founder reads from his collection of essays, My Heart Is an Idiot Rothbart knows how to throw an event; this should be fun. Lucid 5241 University Way NE, 6343400. Free. 7 pm.

LET’S MAKE SEATTLE A UNESCO CITY OF LITERATURE Author Ryan Boudinot will “present an overview of the UNESCO City of Literature program,” and then “discuss the application process, and what to expect if UNESCO designates Seattle a City of Literature.” This is a neat idea, and even if it doesn’t work out, we’ll still have a hell of a time getting all of Seattle’s literary community together to work on a single cause. Hugo House 1634 11th Ave. Free. 7 pm.

KATIE HAFNER Mother Daughter Me is a memoir by a New York Times contributor about a year in which she and her mother decided to work through their issues together. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, 634-3400. $5. 7:30 pm.

Tues 9/10

JAMIE FORD Songs Willow Frost is the newest novel by the local author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, 366-3333. $5. 7 pm. KIM STANLEY ROBINSON Shaman is a novel about a shaman in prehistoric times. University Temple United Methodist Church 1415 NE 43rd St, 634-3400. Free. 7 pm. readings@thestranger.com

THEATER

Opening and Current Runs

FREE DESIREE A one-woman multimedia play about being black in 1970s America. West of Lenin, 203 N 36th St. westoflenin.com. $15. Thurs-Sat. Through Sept 7. THE FUSSY CLOUD PUPPET SLAM: VOLUME VII Adult-oriented puppetry, hosted by Emmett Montgomery. Theater Off Jackson , 409 Seventh Ave S, 340-1049. brownpapertickets.com. $10. Sat Sept 28 at 7 and 9:30 pm.

MISÉRABLES An “intimate and immersive” chamber production of the

musical, based on the

about a

on the

Seattle Center House, 4th Floor, 305 Harrison St. rockpapertheater.com. $10. Fri-Sat at 8 pm. Through Sept 14. THE REALM OF WHISPERING G HOSTS: IF TRUMAN MET EINSTEIN This play reimagines nuclear history in a world where Albert Einstein met and counseled Harry Truman. Seattle Public Theater, 7312 W Green Lake Dr N, 524-1300. brownpapertickets.com. $10-$20. Thurs-Sat at 7:30 pm, Sun at 2 and 7:30 pm. Through Sept 15. THE SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS A silly servant gets a ridiculous idea into his head: Work for two masters and receive two wages! Those of us currently employing the same occupational contrivance will undoubtedly relate to the folly that results. This is the Yale Repertory Theater’s production, directed by Christopher Bayes. Seattle Repertory Theater 155 Mercer St, Seattle Center, 443-2222. seattlerep. org. Wed-Sat at 8 pm, Sun at 2 and 8 pm. Through Oct 20. Dance

AIR TWYLA Three works from celebrated choreographer and current Pacific Northwest Ballet artist-inresidence, Twyla Tharp, including the debut of her new collaboration with Allen Toussaint, Waiting at the Station McCaw Hall, 321 Mercer St, 441-2424. pnb.org. $28-$108. Thurs-Sat at 7:30 pm. Through Oct 6. DANIEL LINEHAN Daniel Linehan’s critically lauded Not About Everything which involves lots of spinning in circles, was described by The New Yorker as a “self-reflexive tour de force.” He’ll perform that on Sept 12–14, with workshops, speaking, and public-forum events for a week beforehand. Velocity Dance Center, 1621 12th Ave, 325-8773. velocitydancecenter. org. $12-$18. Thurs-Sat at 8 pm. Through Sept 14. theater@thestranger.com

with an orphan while the French Revolution explodes around them. Directed by Jake Groshong and starring Balagan’s new artistic director Louis Hobson. Erickson Theater Off Broadway, 1524 Harvard Ave, 329-1050. ThursSat at 8 pm, Sun at 2 pm.

Brian Ralph’s Reggie-12

WEDDING CRASHER

BY SARAH GALVIN

MAGIC:

THE

WEDDING GATHERING OF ERIKA TAYLOR AND STEVEN BIRKLID

Erika Taylor and Steven Birklid might never have met if it weren’t for Magic: The Gathering. Steven, a former professional poker player, took up Magic (it’s less lucrative but has more dragons), and while visiting Seattle for a tournament, he couch-surfed into Erika’s heart. “I immediately started freaking out and turning red,” Erika said of the ﬁrst time she saw Steven. They were ﬁrst married in Steven’s hometown of Fairbanks, Alaska, far enough north that there was sunshine at midnight during the ceremony. The couple wanted a second wedding because many people they love couldn’t make it to Fairbanks, and because, of course, two parties are better than one.

Erika Taylor and Steven Birklid

August 10, 2013 Brier, Washington

The house in Brier where Erika and Steven had their second wedding was equipped for at least five parties, with a beer-pong table in the garage and a sort of ongoing booze potluck and makeyour-own cupcake station in the kitchen. Their friends and family gathered in the front yard, and Steven recited a poem he wrote for Erika. Erika said, “The only thing that really has to be perfect is the person you fall asleep next to every night. And that person doesn’t have to be perfect, what you have with them does. I found that with you.” They kissed, inspiring cheers, and then there was a surprise—Erika’s parents renewed their vows. Erika gathered her parents and sister around her and said: “Even though shit really sucks sometimes, it’s going to be okay. Because we have the four of us.” “The five of us,” her dad added, nodding to Steven. Steven highfived him, eyes full of happy tears. “Now let’s eat and drink!” Erika yelled, and she led the joyful assembly to a feast of Ezell’s under a banner of lyrics by fun., one of the couple’s favorite bands. It read: “Together, a sandwich with everything on it.”

TOM MONDAY AND RUBÉN POLENDO’S BOND FROM BEYOND

Tom Monday and Rubén Polendo were married on a balmy August evening in the courtyard of Fremont Mischief. Strands of lights swayed in the breeze off the ship canal as excited friends and family members hugged each other hello and sipped cocktails. Stacks of paintings by Steve Keene, which guests were invited to take home at the end of the night, lined one wall of the courtyard. Formerly of alt-country and roots music magazine No Depression, Tom runs Small Batch America, a guide to independent food and drink companies—and as much as humanly possible, the celebration was sourced from anticorporate, anti-awful local makers. Rubén is the executive director of arts for NYU Abu Dhabi and runs a theater company called Theater Mitu. A steam whistle on the roof announced dinner was ready, and theater and music-industry folk politely attacked a mountain of barbecue.

The ceremony was held under a sign with a Sanskrit wedding blessing to mark the auspicious day. Tom’s mother wished them a happy marriage. “I love Rubén,” she said. “He takes care of me.” Two tiny kids delivered the rings to the stage in the mouth of a plush turtle. Rubén raised his glass to the guests, saying that the room was everywhere they had been and everywhere they were going. Some of those who couldn’t be there had ﬁlmed their congratulations.

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A family in India expressed their belief that the couple’s bond was from beyond this life, eliciting cheers of agreement. Two friends played “In Spite of Ourselves” on guitar while a guy danced on a couch behind them—this was sweet enough that people teared up, and funny enough that some had to ﬁght to keep their drinks from coming out of their noses. One girl revealed she had

been saving all of Tom’s e-mail subject lines, such as “Hamsters are stuck up.” Judging by how hard he laughed, he had no idea she had been doing this. Friendship Bracelet, a band the couple’s friends formed just for the occasion, took the stage. The looks Tom and Rubén exchanged while their friends played their favorite songs were the wedding’s greatest event. It was clear they were admiring something they see in each other that is truly cause for celebration.

Comment on Wedding Crasher at THESTRANGER.COM

THE STRANGER

STEVEN AND ERIKA Two parties are better than one.

Tom Monday and Rubén Polendo August 17, 2013

Fremont Mischief

THE STRANGER

RUBÉN AND TOM Here’s looking at you.

CHOW

Super Food

We Heart Salads! Especially These Ones!

BY MEGAN SELING

Kale. There was so much kale. It wasn’t marinated with lemon juice to weaken the thick, nearly-impossible-tochew leaves, and the sprinkling of quinoa, edamame, carrot

shreds, and almonds was pretty much lost in the intimidating mound of it. But I was undeterred—I was on a mission to tackle that salad—so I chewed. And chewed. And chewed some more. Yes, my jaw hurt afterward, and, yes, kale was stuck in my teeth for hours, but was it good? Indeed, it was.

Aside from the problematic kale-toanything-else ratio, the worst part of the salad, served up at Evergreens (evergreenssalad.com), the new salad place downtown, was the name—Dooon’t Stop… Be Veeegan. Oh, how I loathe “cute” menu names. Unfortunately, quite a few of the salads at Evergreens have them: the Cobbsby Show, with chicken, avocado, and bacon; Pearly Legal, with Gorgonzola and pear; and Blazin’ Asian, with baby oranges, edamame, and sesame sticks.

But dumb names be damned: Evergreens is a refreshing addition to downtown Seattle’s lunch options. The herbed-mint vinaigrette that attempted to cover Kale Mountain was ﬂavorful—the shop takes pride in their house-made dressings that come in ﬂavors like blueberry sriracha, roasted tomato, and orange ginger— and it was pretty cool to watch Evergreens’ salad makers chop the ingredients with the double mezzaluna knife, a moon-shaped blade that rocked back and forth on the counter, cutting everything down to size.

If you’re not a kale fan, there’s something for you, too. Paul Constant tried the Walk the Flank and My Little Skinny Greek Salad (ugh, right?) and says both were good. He

the gandules dip, and you’re set.

And the Veggie Grill (South Lake Union and University Village, veggiegrill.com) is generally overpriced, but its Baja Fiesta salad, with papaya and avocado for $8.95, is worth it, and especially ﬁlling if you get it with grilled tempeh.

My colleagues and I are also quite taken with the taco salad at Rancho Bravo (Capitol Hill, facebook.com/ranchobravotacos), or, as Cienna Madrid calls it, the “salad trough.” For about ﬁve bucks, you get a large, but not overwhelmingly so, pile of chopped romaine leaves, your choice of black or pinto beans, your choice of meat or veggie mixture, toma-

Cienna Madrid calls Rancho Bravo’s taco salad “the salad trough.”

toes, onions, a sprinkling of cotija cheese, and tortilla strips. They’ll throw some avocado on there, too, for a dollar extra. It is worth it.

While I’ve yet to sample it myself, Dominic Holden says the “best salad in the universe” is the brown rice, tofu, and avocado salad at the Sunlight Cafe (Roosevelt, sunlightcafevegetarian.com), which, he says, comes with tahini dressing that “is made of god particles.” Bethany Jean Clement is not shy about her feelings for the salade verte at Cafe Presse—she wrote a love letter to it in The Stranger a few years back (“The toasty nuttiness of your hazelnuts is all that your pretty, sweet leaves want; there’s no argument, no dramatics, no longing for something imagined to be better… Here is the secret of your dressing that nobody knows: reduced orange juice”).

Shockingly, Capitol Hill’s Unicorn (unicornseattle.com), a palace of deep-fried wonders, also has a worthy contender in the city’s salad game—it involves mixed greens, quinoa, and candied pecans, and Brendan Kiley eats it all the time.

added, however, that neither could top the lime peanut salad at Seattle Salads (Madison Valley, seattlesalads.com), which is his favorite salad in the city.

And that’s how The Stranger’s salad discussion began.

Despite the fact that I’ve been a vegetarian for more than half my life, it wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I ﬁnally started paying attention to the salad section on menus. I thoughtlessly shunned it as a collection of non-meals that existed only for trophy wives who needed something to pick at while their dates talked about stock options. Then I had the fried green tomato salad at Alligator Soul, a now-defunct Creole restaurant in Everett.

Holy shit, that salad was wonderful.

A bed of greens topped with thick slices of corn-fried green tomatoes, all covered in perfectly spicy rémoulade—I miss that salad so much that sometimes my heart aches.

But after the heartbreak, I found the ability to love other salads. Many of them, in fact. Seattle is silly with wonderful salads!

The house salad at La Isla (Ballard and Redmond, laislacuisine.com) is simple, but so delicious—greens, carrots, green onions, and hunks of fresh mango all tossed with the restaurant’s balsamic vinaigrette (or, if you’d like, rum dressing made with real rum). Get that with an empanadilla (I recommend the papa, with mashed potatoes and cheese!) or

Salads aren’t just for herbivores, either. Anna Minard says the duck conﬁt salad at the Latona Pub (Green Lake, 3pubs.com/latona. html)—it comes with a large serving of Mt. Townsend Creamery’s Seastack cheese—is “worth killing over.” Bait Shop (Capitol Hill, baitshopseattle.com) recently redid their fried chicken salad, so now it is “fucking awesome,” says Christopher Frizzelle. And the next time you go to Pestle Rock (Ballard, pestlerock.com), get the yum larb isan, with pork and chicken, because Cienna Madrid says it’s amazing.

I’ve come to love salads so much that sometimes at Pagliacci (everywhere, pagliacci. com), I skip the pizza and get a big bowl of the Pagliaccio salad, with garbanzo beans (a tragically underused ingredient), red pepper, kasseri cheese, and, if you’d like, salami. I even go to the Cheesecake Factory (downtown, thecheesecakefactory.com)—I know, I know!—to get the barbecue ranch chicken salad (hold the chicken), made with what appears to be a whole head of romaine chopped up with black beans, roasted corn, cucumber, avocado, tomatoes, fried onion strings, and a sweet barbecue ranch dressing. It might not be the best in town, but it’s certainly the biggest, and, frankly, it’s still a better deal than Whole Foods’ “ﬁrstborn child per pound” salad bar.

Freak about salad at THESTRANGER.COM/CHOW

DRNIKING WIHT CHARLSE MUDEDE

BY CHARLES MUDEDE

THE GREAT WHEEL OF DRINKING FORTUNE

Von’s 1225 First Ave, 621-8667

The wheel of drinks is pulled, the wheel turns, the wheel’s pointer lands on the lemon drop. One part of the bar cheers; another part awwwwws. The wheel’s puller announces that lemon drops, normally $9, will for the next hour be sold at half price. Von’s 1000 Spirits Gusto Bistro—a restaurant/bar that used to be near Sixth and Pine (with its loud outside drinkers at high tables) but is now on First and Pine (its outside drinkers are now less boisterous and fewer in number)—has been doing this wheel-of-drink-specials thing for as long as I have been legally allowed to booze in this town.

From where I sit at the bar, I can see parts of the sad Hammering Man and the

top of what remains of Clinton-era dreaming, the Harbor Steps. The room behind the wheel has a west-facing window that views a walkway that leads into an apartment building. Beneath it are the tops of very green trees. (This area is like a hidden pocket of urban utopia.) A large and square window that’s south of the wheel of drinks holds a view of the Seattle Great Wheel. The wheel outside carries people around and around; the small one inside names the drinks that get us drunk and loud. Outside, the wheel of life; inside, the wheel of high life.

The lemon drop turns out to be great. The lemon juice and vodka have the right amount of dryness and sourness that works against/with the right amount of sugar granules sprinkled on the rim of the chilled martini glass (I have two of these). A young woman pulls Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories from a row of LPs on the bar, places the vinyl on a turntable, presses the power button, and sets the needle, and the music plays. I also order a glass of white wine, and a bowl of midsize meatballs, and a large plate of crunchy broccoli. The man sitting next to me is about to conquer a massive hamburger with thick slices of bacon. The smell of fat gets me. The smell of fat gets all humans. Millions of years in the fat-starved wild made us love that smell. The man next to me does not eat right away, but waits and waits and seems to contemplate the deep biological history of that smell.

IT’S EVERYWHERE Lindsay tosses a Pagliaccio salad.

KELLY O

SO MUCH BOOZE At Von’s.

CHARLES MUDEDE

Kitchen, and speaker

Saru Jayaraman, author of Behind the Kitchen Door

University Christian Church, 4731 15th Ave NE, 405-4600. seattleglobaljustice.org. $40-$100. 5-9 pm.

Tues 9/10

Sat

dinner by Cafe Flora and Madres’

EAT OUT FOR COUNTRY DOCTOR Country Doctor Community Health Centers have been treating the uninsured and underinsured of Seattle since 1971—they are great people doing great work. Today, eat (or drink!) out at any of the participating restaurants (which includes pretty much every place on Capitol Hill), and a portion of your bill will go toward keeping the downtrodden unsick. (Or, hey, just make a donation.) Various restaurants. countrydoctor.org.

MEANS WE RECOMMEND IT. SEND EVENT INFO TO: chow@thestranger.com

Find grazillions more food events online.

LUCKY AND APPLE AT SILVER TRAY

Lucky Buamanee Co-owner, Silver Tray 2101 N 45th St, silvertraythai.com

Lucky Buamanee and her husband, Apple, whose names are perhaps the best ever, run a Thai restaurant in Wallingford called Silver Tray. Silver trays are traditionally used on special occasions in Thailand, where the Buamanees are from. One such tray is on display in the restaurant, as well as, curiously, a toaster-sized shopping cart with a ribbon on it. When asked about the cart, Lucky said it came from Target. Then she asked for a picture of us together. She and Apple, who came out of the kitchen to greet me, were actually as friendly and cheerful as their names suggest. With a BA in hotel management and 10 years of restaurant experience at the much-praised Buddha Ruksa in West Seattle, she handles Silver Tray’s management and accounting, while Apple is head chef. Silver Tray serves traditional phad thai, made with tamarind juice rather than ketchup. I tried their avocado green curry with fried tofu and one star—though Lucky says she likes everything better with about 10. Each piece of tofu had a divot in it, providing more crispy surface area to trap more green curry. I cleaned my Frisbee-sized plate, containing a glorious multitude of avocado slices, at a potentially dangerous pace. Lucky says she’s had interesting and tasty results substituting locally available ingredients, like tuna, for those used in traditional Thai cooking, and she’s planning a series of seasonal dishes, starting with pumpkin curry in the fall. Currently, it’s the ideal season for Thai iced tea on Silver Tray’s patio. SARAH GALVIN

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MUSIC

The Chart Thickens

America’s Top 10 Songs Don’t Rock—at All

BY DAVE SEGAL

Welcome to the second annual survey of Billboard’s Top 10 Singles Chart by The Stranger’s resident weird-music specialist. Critically speaking, this is your basic ﬁsh-out-of-water

scenario, and I’m hoping not to ﬂounder. Let’s dive into the pop-radio shallows, shall we?

10. “Safe and Sound” by Capital Cities

“Safe and Sound”? No kidding, guys. This is like baby’s ﬁrst EDM tune—an airbrushed swoosh of a dance track that strives for the nonchalant sensuality of Hall & Oates’s “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do),” but the vanilla textural patina, painfully earnest, bland vocals, and trance-lite synth arpeggios keep this rated PG. Capital Cities’ Sebu Simonian and Ryan Merchant are LA-based jingle writers who met cute on Craigslist and then got a deal with Capitol Records. That backstory makes so much sense.

9. “Cups (Pitch Perfect’s When I’m Gone)” by Anna Kendrick

Anna Kendrick is a major American actor with a decent, strong-fragile, coffeehousesinger voice. The best part of “Cups” is the brief, spare clapping and cup-slapping-ontable percussion intro. The main lyrical theme of this old folk ditty (done by the Carter Family in 1931) is “You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone,” but it’s about 100 acid trips away from the 13th Floor Elevators’ manifestation of that message. Kendrick’s “Cups” is 129 seconds of winsome, innocuous folk pop.

8. “Treasure” by Bruno Mars

Department of Obviousness: Bruno Mars is Michael Jackson—if MJ ate a sensible diet and didn’t try to morph into a white woman. Vocally, Mars has mastered Jacko’s panoply of tics (rhythmic hiccups, gliding “oohhs,” believable sincerity, etc.). The irrepressibly upbeat R&B of “Treasure” positively sparkles, yet it also cracks with militaristic crispness. One can detect hints of Ray Parker Jr. circa “You Can’t Change That,” too. Certainly, Mars oozes pizzazz and possesses smooth dance moves and a winning smile. He has the looks and aura of an old-school entertainer, and Hollywood is

bit starts, N-bombs drop, cautionary tales of fame stream out (“Here’s where my vastly poorer fans shed tears of sympathy for me”), Hammer, Tyson, and Cobain references commence (zzz), and then JT faux-croons the chorus to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (“This is where we snag ’90s-rock nostalgiacs”). Then Jay and J alternate between perfunctory rapping and heart-on-sleeve singing; the beat plods, the strings waft. Bet your snapback that this song is on Mayor Bloomberg’s iPod.

4. “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons

If this is what passes for popular rock in 2013, we have a crisis on our ears. “Radioactive” is grandiose yet self-pitying, an anthem with a defeatist demeanor. Imagine if Bono had self-esteem issues and the Edge watered down his guitar tone to a pallid, shimmery whimper. Imagine Dragons are the new U.02.

WHAT'S CRAPPENING?

• After several decades spent pitching pennies in the royalty coffers of Counting Crows and Shawn Colvin, Seattle’s warm ’n’ folky radio station The Mountain 103.7 has abruptly gone off the air. In its place will be another Entercom-owned station aimed at appealing to “Seattle’s modern women” via female-friendly adult contemporary with a rhythmic format.

• At the Snoop Dogg aka Snoop Lion show on Thursday, the Dizzle’s backup dancers included a giant purple dog (with a very long dog dong) and an old man who looked to be pushing 80 years old.

surely slavering to slot him into a juicy romcom role any minute now.

7. “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk feat. Pharrell Williams

You will probably never get sick of this track. Classy, platinum-plated vet Nile Rodgers’s guitar lick chatters laid-back luxuriousness, and the nudge-nudge bass line suggests discreet libidinousness. Pharrell Williams sings with conﬁdent restraint, and the beat knows it can keep it up till the break of dawn (the beat was an indefatigable porn star in another life). Try to hate the sun-melting-into-the-sea disco of “Get Lucky,” but realize it’s like attempting to repel the zapping sensation of lust at ﬁrst sight. Just give in to zee French robots… or bow out of the eternal mating dance, because you’re old and in the way.

6. “Applause” by Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga songs are merely excuses for her to blow more money on videos than the entire Stranger editorial staff—including Dan Savage—makes in one month. If her music were as interesting as her wardrobe and set designs, Gaga would be a stunning amalgam of Kraftwerk, Donna Summer, and Sparks. But no. “Applause” is an oddly stilted, unbeautiful Eurodance quasi-anthem about Gaga’s voracious hunger for adulation… of which she already has too much. Fascinating, darling. Now give your hairdresser a raise.

5. “Holy Grail” by Jay-Z feat. Justin Timberlake

“Holy Grail” reeks of synergizing corporate stratagem. Are the skreets listenin’? Do Fortune 500 CEOs like hiphop? Do you want to make Shawn Carter even richer? Whatever the case, “Holy Grail” starts out like a maudlin ballad, Justin Timberlake viscerally emoting like something’s actually at stake (“This is where we reel in the sentimental schmaltz lovers”). Then the rapping

3. “We Can’t Stop” by Miley Cyrus Oy. Have daddy issues ever been worked out in public in a more desperate, crass manner? The VMAs hoo-ha—forget about alleged cultural appropriation and counterarguments about slut-shaming for a second; we’re strictly focusing on aesthetics—triggered an epidemic of cringing from which it will take weeks for the nation to recover. The video for “We Can’t Stop” channels shock-tacticsera Madonna, as Miley Cyrus strains to rile cultural guardians—and her father—with provocative gestures and allusions to varieties of hedonism (“dancing with Molly,” “everyone in line at the bathroom, tryin’ to get a line in the bathroom”). But for such a single-minded paean to hedonism, the poppy R&B of “We Can’t Stop” dawdles at a sluggish pace. Oh, look, though: Miley’s gettin’ turnt up and twerkin’. Let’s hope this slanguage lasts longer than her musical career.

2. “Roar” by Katy Perry

A vacuum-packed, empty-caloried pop confection like “Roar” makes one yearn for sonic roughage like 1930s blues or Indonesian gamelan. Maybe this song comes off as an empowering “We Are the Champions” for conventional young women, but from my salty vantage point, the tune palls by the time the second chorus blusters in. Let’s blame Russell Brand.

1. “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke feat. T.I. and Pharrell Williams

This stinks to low hell with douchebro come-ons. No wonder it’s the most popular song in America. (Hey-o!) Yes, it shamelessly appropriates the sparse funk rhythm from Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up,” and that’s the best thing about it—followed closely by the kinetic, Liquid Liquid–like cowbells hits. “Blurred Lines” perilously tightropes that thin line between plagiarism and homage. If privileged ofay Robin Thicke were cool, he’d just hand the Gaye estate a few mil and move on. Anyway, by this point, you’ve watched the video for “Blurred Lines” 19,000 times because you enjoy supermodely titillation with your Tamla/Motown rip-offs. In it, Thicke is thoroughly unlikable, boasting about his “big dick” (uh-huh), blowing cigarette smoke in a topless blond’s face, and making Justin Timberlake sound like Michael Jackson. Let’s hope Thicke receives his comeuppance in the most humiliating way possible.

Pharrell: always the feat., never the bride at THESTRANGER.COM/MUSIC

• The battle between the members of the band Bristleburr—and, by extension, the fate of the nascent “fogtwang” genre as a whole—has gotten almost too complicated to explain, with the majority of squabbling moved behind a password-protected fan-run ﬁrewall. Still, we’re piecing the story together. Look for the Bristleburr/fogtwang exposé in the forthcoming A&P fall arts quarterly.

• On Sunday at Bumbershoot, a couple left their baby unattended in a stroller outside the beer garden near a garbage pile. When a security guard asked around, a man ran out. When confronted, he said, “Don’t tell me what to do with my baby!” What else happened at Bumbershoot this year, you ask? Well…

• Bumbershoot 2013 was the year of the super-sibling: The Deal sisters put on a ﬁne Breeders performance, the McDonald brothers in Redd Kross had the ﬁnest hair in all of Bumbershoot, and the sisters Wilson impressed and then some with their Heart set at KeyArena.

• Zombies keyboardist Rod Argent is 68, but looks about 20 years younger. During his band’s great Sunday night set, he repeatedly gave the two-thumbs-up gesture and clapped his hands over his head— mainly to show off his guns, it seemed.

• Crotchety old vocalist Eric Burdon of the Animals had the best onstage banter of Bumbershoot: “Fuck you, motherfucker!” This outburst was due to somebody in the crowd having the audacity to swat a beach ball in his direction. Burdon’s viciousness may have been uncalled for, but his point remains airtight: Hitting a beach ball around during a concert is inane.

• Before Death Cab for Cutie took the stage to play Transatlanticism in its entirety, a young woman in the crowd started spinning around. She was quickly stopped by security and told she was not allowed to spin. Her spirit would not be dampened, though—soon, everyone around her started chanting “Let her spin!” When that failed, the crowd at the KeyArena started to do the wave, incorporating a spin move in her honor. Spin on, spin girl. Never stop.

• A female dressed as a zombie, to a man passing out religious pamphlets: “Does it look like I give a shit about Jesus?”

NEWS, REVIEWS, AND SNOOP BY SMILEY VIRUS

TREVOR CRUMP

Redd Kross

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.

DANIEL JOHNSTON Songs of Pain (Stress Records)

The ﬁrst song on Songs of Pain is “Grievances,” a lo-ﬁ recording of a man playing tinny but smooth piano and singing a sort of wacky folk ballad. He’s got an interesting voice—really high, with a Southern accent and conversational delivery—and the song makes sense, mostly. “I saw you at the funeral/You were standing there like a temple/I said, ‘Hi, how are you, hello’/ And I pulled up the casket and crawled in.” It’s goofy and sweet and gets you excited about what’s to come.

In the second track, things go a certain way: a retelling of the story of Christianity

Okay, sure. It starts to sound less carefully written, it gives you a prickle of a question in your head, but you have to hear it to understand why. “He never did bad to anyone/He never did no wrong” could work in tons of music, but something’s different here. Who is this guy?

Track three is “Joy Without Pleasure.” Again, the song is unabashedly great and just sounds like an old recording of a funny song. “The son of Charles Dickens and a little red hen/Danced the Watusi like it was a sin.” He’s loose and fun—you can listen to him sing “like it was a sin” over and over. At the end of the two-minute song, he announces into the microphone, “That song was about premarital sex.”

Oh, okay. From here on out, you can tell all over the album that something is different about this person and this music than, say, a found recording of an old folk artist or the usual lo-ﬁ indie artist. The religious and sexual overtones are constant. There are recordings of his mom yelling at him. His voice gets so yowly sometimes. There’s something urgent about everything, and serious, and sad. (“Never relax, never relax, never relax” is the refrain in one song.)

Daniel Johnston and his life story got a lot of exposure in a documentary a few years ago called The Devil and Daniel Johnston, which made the fact that he has bipolar disorder a big part of his public identity. Kurt Cobain famously loved Daniel Johnston. And there’s something about the way certain arms of wider culture tend to love unguarded, raw, talented outsidery people that makes me nervous. Like, is it an appreciation of the art or the story? Can they even be separated? Is there a condescension or disrespect that creeps in under any of that?

But there’s no denying that this album is affecting and brilliant; it sucks you in. Lines like “ There was a naked lady on TV /She had no care, she had no shame/ She had little propellers on” are irreplaceable. Sometimes people want you to listen to something weird and just laugh. But you can’t do that with this—it gets inside you.

I give this a “so try it, then” out of 10.

SOUND CHECK

THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS: THE FEEL IS EVERYTHING

In the ’80s, there were jelly shoes, and people were hopping on Pogo balls. Every piece of clothing had shoulder pads. It was a time of awkward, stylized spryness. E.T. and Michael Jackson had a ﬂing. Techno music was born, Pac-Man chomped eightbit dots, Hungry Hungry Hippos and Prozac were invented. Denise Huxtable ran it ALL. In 1981, a band from London called the Psychedelic Furs released the album Talk Talk Talk on Columbia Records. The single was “Pretty in Pink.” In 1985, Molly Ringwald asked director John Hughes to write a movie based on the song. She loved it, and could cry better than anyone at your prom. Singer Richard Butler’s voice hinted at David Bowie’s, and the Furs’ dour, poshy post-punk pop became a deﬁning sound of the decade. They touched on an arty new wave and probably never played Hungry Hungry Hippos. Sprung out of the British punk scene of the late ’70s, they would go on to cut austere mega-hits like “Love My Way.” It was hot, “white hot,” as Ringwald would say. Bassist and founding member Tim Butler spoke—in a beautiful, wafting, cursive English accent—from his home in Liberty, Kentucky. He was sitting in his car outside a grocery store waiting for his wife.

What do you remember about writing “Pretty in Pink”? We came up with it when we were writing songs for Talk Talk Talk. It was later in the evening. A couple of the guys in the band had left. At some point, we started playing that riff, and immediately we were like, “Wow, that’s a good riff.” We played it a few times, then Richard said, “Let’s play it again!” When he says that, it means he has an idea for a vocal melody or a lyric. At the time, we didn’t think it would be the single, we just thought, “Good, another track.” It ﬁt. We recorded it and were sitting in the studio listening back, when our producer, Steve Lillywhite said, “This should be the single.” We didn’t really care, we just wanted to get out and play live, and do some carousing. It was sort of a hit when it was ﬁrst released, but then John Hughes was asked by Molly Ringwald to write a movie vehicle for her around that song. It snowballed from there.

The Psychedelic Furs w/the Burning of Rome Thurs Sept 5, Showbox at the Market, 8:30 pm, $22 adv/$25 DOS, 21+

How does your brother, Richard, come up with his lyrics? The “Pink” in that song refers to nudity, right? I think certain words popped up that night, but I also think he worked on them a bit and honed them down. By the end of that jam session, he had a pretty good handle on it. He’s a complicated guy. He used to go around with pockets full of lyrics written on pieces of paper and napkins. He was constantly writing things down. We’d be in a pub drinking, and he’d say, “Anybody got a piece of paper? And a pen?” Maybe for “Pretty in Pink,” he just stuck his hand in his pocket and they came out on a piece of napkin.

left on the street, smelling up the place. It was a depressing time, which is why punk happened. The kids didn’t see any future. Richard and I were living in Muswell Hill, North London, where the kings come from [laughs]. Richard was going to art school, and we wanted to form a band—he realized he could get a message across to more people in a song than in a painting. But I couldn’t play any instruments. I wanted to be a drummer or a bass player, and playing bass was the cheaper option.

Who else was on that bill with the Sex Pistols the night you decided to form a band? It was the Clash, playing their third show. Keith Levene was playing guitar with them. Paul Simonon had the bass notes painted on his fret board. Siouxsie and the Banshees also played that night—Marco Pirroni was playing with them, and they had Sid Vicious on drums. They did a 20-minute version of “The Lord’s Prayer.” I think the Sex Pistols had just signed to Virgin, and it was some kind of festival. The Pistols headlined one night, and the Damned headlined a night, I think—it’s still the best rock show I’ve ever seen. When they had Glen Matlock, a bass player that could play. Before the whole thing with Sid Vicious came about. It was amazing and life-changing to see and hear. Glen left because I don’t think he got along with John Lydon. Sid came into the picture and it all went downhill.

Tell me a Sid story. I met him a couple times. Right when he started playing with the Pistols, I remember seeing him at an Iggy Pop show. David Bowie played key-

How’d you end up in Kentucky? Something tells me Liberty, Kentucky, is slightly different than the London post-punk scene. Well, I met my wife on MySpace, when that was going strong, and we began a long-distance relationship. I’d ﬂy down here to see her, and she’d ﬂy up to Southern New Jersey where I was living, which ain’t the prettiest or friendliest place. I wanted to move because I was ending a previous relationship, and she said, “Why don’t you come down and live in Kentucky? I’ve got a house.” And here I am six years later, happily married, and calling Kentucky home [laughs]. Lots of horse farms here— Kentucky is similar to where I grew up in the countryside of England, with the rolling hillsides and all the green.

You met on MySpace. What happened? Were y’all in each other’s Top Eight? She had been a fan since she was 14 or 15 years old—way back, around the time of the Forever Now album. I guess she had sort of a crush on me. I had gotten on MySpace, and she found me. We started talking, one thing led to another, and here I am. I guess MySpace is trying to make a comeback with Justin Timberlake.

The Psychedelic Furs have a couple decade-deﬁning mega-hits. Where do you play the mega-hits in your live set? Gotta be strategic with those. It can work both ways. We did a tour a few years ago where we started the set with “Love My Way.” We still have enough songs that are well-known among our audience. Like, we can put in a “President Gas,” which wasn’t a hit, but people go crazy for it. I think some people like it when we play the hits early and don’t keep them waiting. I don’t think it really matters where we put them, though—what hurts a set is when you put too many slow songs together. Obviously, if we don’t play the hits, we get lynched [laughs].

Whose idea was it to rerecord it for the ﬁlm? John Hughes wanted to use the song, but the company that was helping him gather music said that the guitars sounded out of tune. They are a bit discordant, but that’s part of the sound of the song—it’s arranged to sound like that. It wasn’t squeakyclean enough for what they thought should be in a movie soundtrack. Then they said, “Well, you don’t have to be the ones to redo it if you don’t want to—we can get some other band to rerecord it.” But if they were going to use the song, we wanted to be the ones playing it, so we rerecorded it ourselves and added the saxophone to the second version. To me, the rerecorded version is inferior to the original. Steve Lillywhite’s one of the best producers in the world. Maybe they just wanted to get someone else to do it [laughs].

Walk me back to London in the late ’70s, when the Psychedelic Furs were forming. What bands did you like to see? We used to go see the Clash a lot. We saw the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club, and that was what made me want to form a band. Listening to them play three-chord songs, seeing that you didn’t have to play a million notes a minute. The feel was everything. Punk had the feel, it didn’t have the musicianship. It had this passion that was sorely lacking in the music of that period with all the progressive rock bands. And then there was the Clash—they just had anger. In England back then, something like three out of ﬁve kids leaving school were unemployed. The year we saw the Pistols, there was a garbage strike, and bags of garbage were

boards in Iggy’s band. It was at the Rainbow in London. Sid was living up to his name. He was sitting on the foyer steps on the way out of the Rainbow, and there was just a whole line of security guards walking toward him. He looked like he was about to be a bit of a problem [laughs].

I take it you’re a big bluegrass fan now, living in Kentucky? What have you been listening to lately? Bluegrass actually isn’t my cup of tea. I like the Killers, and Space Hog. We played some shows with Space Hog recently. They’re great. I like early Roxy Music a lot. I’m still old school.

Any surprises in the set for this current Psychedelic Furs tour? We’re doing a lot of songs we haven’t played in quite a while, which makes it exciting. We’re doing “Pulse,” “Wedding Song,” “Soap Commercial,” and “Here Come Cowboys.”

Any bluegrass? Maybe a bluegrass medley? A “Love My Way” bluegrass redux? That would be a surprise, but we haven’t worked that up just yet. I’ll let Richard know about the medley.

THU/SEPTEMBER 5 • 7:30PM the baseball project FRI/SEPTEMBER 6 • 8PM 2013 raise the roof w/ brandi carlile

TUE/SEPTEMBER 10 • 8PM STG PRESENTS grouplove (special acoustic set) w/ the rubens

THU/SEPTEMBER 12 • 7:30PM swamp dogg w/ brother james & the soul-vation

The Psychedelic Furs

TRAPPED LORDS AND SPIRITUAL DEPRESSION

“Just remember, when it hits the fan, brother, whether it’s next year, 10 years, 20 years from now, you’ll never be able to say that these brothers lied to you, JACK!” Millie Jackson

People keep talking to me about the MTV Video Music Awards. I have to stop them like they’re about to spoil Breaking Bad for me—I don’t wanna fuckin’ know. Don’t watch the VMAs. Don’t talk about them. (Oops.) Don’t give that poison that power. That is not our culture, that is not what is real, that is not us. Our culture is alive, it is vibrant, it is us. Let’s deal with that.

Myself—since you asked—I don’t want more empty pop. I don’t want more replicas of copies of knockoffs. Give me something that speaks to our deep economic and spiritual depression. That’s not a call for any particular style, as that can take any form. Even Nacho Picasso, who, lyrically speaking, stays mired in tales of extreme pharmacology, cheap sex, and easy violence (not to mention cartoons and ’80s pro wrestlers)—even he gives glimpses of the pain behind it all. (FYI, Nacho’s High & Mighty release reportedly drops at the end of this month, on his birthday, September 30.) That’s honest. So you and your brodie rapping about playing Frisbee, enjoying fast food and/or shitty domestic beer—that shit don’t move me. Do you, though—I can’t tell you to feel any different.

And your man’s over here, breath hitting, trying to ask me about A$AP Ferg’s Trap Lord? Its got a couple cheap thrills, and some cool beats‚ but it’s overall symptomatic of so much shit that I stand against that it’s hard as fuck for me to get over. Where to even start? There’s the A$AP Clan’s wholesale colonization of “trill” (if “trill” were “twerk,” they would be Miley Cyrus)—when Ferg doesn’t even know who the fuck a Houston icon like Z-Ro is. There’s the wholesale bite of the BasedGod’s whole formula on “Shabba”; 75 percent of your favorite rappers rip off Lil B and then pay him no homage—or even show him blatant disrespect while ﬂagrantly draping themselves in his whole essence

There’s the whole thing of naming yourself “Trap Lord” when a much bigger—and, believe it or not, much more original—rapper, Gucci Mane, has already called himself Trap God over the course of three mixtapes. All this sounds like quibbling to you, maybe, but this kind of cheap, knockoff, frontin’with-bootleg-ass culture is the shit that rots the underside of this ship, while the VMAs set the sails on ﬁre. All of us who have been forced to live below decks are really feeling like we got no choices. Man, I hope some of y’all feel me. Oh, but what about that Big Sean Hall of Fame album? Man, go buy Harlem World again, b.

So on that note, fuck rap—go see Cody ChesnuTT at the Neptune on Thursday, September 5, or the Weeknd at the Paramount on Tuesday, September 10. Turn down ’til you can hear your heart again.

Comment on the colonization of “trill” at THESTRANGER.COM/MUSIC

SATURDAY OCT 19TH

HIPHOP YA DON'T STOP

BY LARRY MIZELL JR.

The Weeknd

UP&COMING

Lose your brains, bongs, and basements every night this week!

For the full music calendar, see page 45 or visit thestranger.com/music For ticket on-sale announcements, follow twitter.com/seashows

Cody ChesnuTT

Wednesday 9/4

Austra, Diana

(Neumos) See Data Breaker, page 46.

LoveHoldLetGo, Thorn & Shout, Jordan O’Jordan, Beyon (Gas Works Park) See Underage, page 49.

Titus Andronicus, And And And, Lost Boy

(Vera) The other day, comic artist Mitch Clem tweeted, “When I got into punk, the go-to notpunk-but-still-cool musicians were Tom Waits and Billy Bragg. Post-2K this changed to Springsteen. Lame.” Now I fucking love me some Springsteen (sorry, Segal), but I completely agree that modern rock’s adoration for the man has gotten out of control, and Titus Andronicus is just one more band to add to the list of examples. Hailing from New Jersey (of course), they play impassioned, anthemic rock with punk leanings, and it shamelessly carries Springsteen’s working-class/growing-up-in-Jersey torch. That said, I do like TA—they're a good band to listen to when my mood or productivity needs a kick in the ass. But c’mon, guys, we get it, you like Springsteen. Now let’s see what else those guitars can do. MEGAN SELING

Thursday 9/5

The Psychedelic Furs, the Burning of Rome (Showbox at the Market) See Sound Check, page 37.

(Neptune) See My Philosophy, page 39.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Total Life

(Showbox Sodo) Canadian post-rock collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor are really the only band I can think of whose 20-minute, creepy/somber instrumental songs are somehow not boring. In fact, those droning, buzzing, dense arrangements of artful destruction are rather fascinating and—especially on their 2012 album (the ﬁrst one they’d released since 2002), ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!—if not downright heartbreaking. Wear comfortable, non-name-brand shoes. EMILY NOKES See also Data Breaker, page 46.

Larry Coryell and the Eleventh House Reunion Band

(Jazz Alley) A jazz-fusion guitar master of the soulfully fiery and intricately melodic persuasion, Larry Coryell is reuniting with his vaunted Eleventh House Band for a four-night run at Jazz Alley. For these dates, he’ll have drummer Alphonse Mouzon, trumpeter Randy Brecker, bassist Danny Trifan, and keyboardist Mike Mandel performing a repertoire that stands among the loftiest in ’70s fusion circles. Coryell turned 70 in April, but footage of recent concerts finds him still in fleet-fingered and questing form. At their peak, the Eleventh House Band approached the virtuosity of Mahavishnu Orchestra; in 2013, they might not be on that level, but they’re damn close. DAVE SEGAL

Shuggie Otis, Jessica Hernandez & the Deltas, Rippin Chicken

(Neumos) The ﬁrst 21 seconds of Shuggie Otis’s

“Inspiration Information” transmit more pleasure and soulfulness than most artists’ entire outputs. Thankfully for everyone with functioning ears, this oldster on the comeback trail has about a dozen other songs with which to inﬂate your sense of well-being. After reports of a disastrous 2001 tour, Shuggie’s Triple Door set in April came off as surprisingly sterling. He and his big band reviviﬁed old favorites like “Strawberry Letter 23,” “Aht Uh Mi Hed,” and “Ice Cold Daydream,” and displayed instrumental dexterity and exuberant soulfulness. If some of the newer material didn’t sparkle as brilliantly as the ’70s material, it still carried Otis’s dazzling guitar showmanship. You should see the psychedelic-soul legend who turned down a 1974 job offer from the Rolling Stones. DAVE SEGAL

Friday 9/6

Love as Laughter, Memories, Sonny and the Sunsets (Tractor) See Stranger Suggests, page 19.

Larry Coryell and the Eleventh House Reunion Band (Jazz Alley) See Thursday.

Pollens, Tangerine, Land of Pines, Lures (Comet) You have to see Pollens. You must. You need to witness, live and in person, what this Seattle sextet is capable of doing with their voices.

Deadkill Saturday 9/6 at the Comet

Their songs are entrancing, percussion-driven pieces, but while they do use instruments, their voices— through harmonies and noises—play a huge part in the structure of the songs. Listen to “Helping Hand” and “Without Their Hands” at pollens.bandcamp.com to get a taste (the use of horn on the latter is so good, too!). Then get to the Comet to see it happen live—it’s mesmerizing. MEGAN SELING

YOB, Brothers of the Sonic Cloth, Bell Witch (Chop Suey) Tune low, play slow. This motto was obviously adopted early on by the likes of YOB, one of the heaviest-hitting bands of doom-bringers the Northwest has ever seen. That’s no small feat, as the dreary weather of this region has inspired dozens upon dozens of distortion-driven sludge makers—two of which are opening this very same show. By the time YOB even hit the stage, there’s a good chance your ears will be ringing, as both local openers Bell Witch and Brothers of the Sonic Cloth—the latter featuring the almighty Tad Doyle—have been known to crush brains, bongs, and basements with their collective sonic onslaught. KEVIN DIERS

Saturday 9/7

Prefuse 73, Theoretics, IG88 (Crocodile) See Data Breaker, page 46.

Muhammadali, Lindseys, Wasted USA, Bad Future (Black Lodge) See Underage, page 49.

Larry Coryell and the Eleventh House Reunion Band (Jazz Alley) See Thursday.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Mount Eerie (Neptune) Trying to describe the music of Will Oldham (aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy) in 2013 is problematic. Throughout his 20-some-odd years of recording, Oldham has always favored a bucolic, warbled, and forlorn take on American underground rock. In his early years, his peers were poetic folk slackers like Silver Jews. In 2013, artists who similarly qual-

ify as both “rustic” and “indie” raise red flags of phony old-timey pap. But c’mon, this is a guy who’s recorded with both Johnny Cash and Tortoise; he’s a goddamn American icon. And there’s no better opener for tonight’s concert than Phil Elverum (aka Mount Eerie)—Washington’s own prolific and reclusive master of the haunting, lo-fi backwoods ballad. BRIAN COOK

Adam Ant & the Good, the Mad, & the Lovely Posse Tour

(Showbox at the Market) Adam Ant was one of the biggest, most ﬂamboyant pop stars of ’80s Britain— which is really saying something. He and his Ants pushed a gimmicky and ultra-catchy brand of Burundi beat–powered, glammy new wave, peaking with 1980’s Kings of the Wild Frontier. (Dirk Wears White Sox is a close second.) Adam and guitarist/co-songwriter Marco Pirroni crafted earworms so distinctive that I can recall some of the hooks instantly after going more than 30 years between listens. Now 58 but looking superbly ﬁt, Adam returns with a new album, Adam Ant Is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner’s Daughter. Unlike many records by aging ’80s musical icons, this one’s pretty good. It sounds like it could be the successor to 1981’s Prince Charming, with the camp element muted a bit. Recent set lists for this tour lean heavily on Adam’s

Austra Wednesday 9/4 at Neumos

early output, which is a great idea. DAVE SEGAL

Ty Segall, Mike Donovan, Night Beats (Neumos) If you’re sad that Sic Alps broke up, dry your sweet scuzzy tears, because Mike Donovan is still here, and he basically was Sic Alps, so now we go right to the source of that messy brilliance. Donovan recently announced his solo album, titled Wot (to be released on Drag City in October), and the single is a loping, bluesy slide number called “New Fieldhand Bop”—on the 2:06 mark on the song’s Soundcloud, a commenter wrote, “ROLLING FEEL OF A SPLIFF.” Speaking of, trippy rippers Night Beats are also on the bill and their swirling new LP Sonic Bloom (out September 24) sounds like that part of the party where you take waaay too big a bong rip and cough until your throat is raw and then everything is the most fun until it’s terrifying and then fun again. And, hey, the talented Ty Segall is in town—we always have a great time when he’s around! EMILY NOKES

School of Rock Presents: The Music of Rage Against the Machine (El Corazón) I made fun of an RATM cover band here one time, and while there were extenuating circumstances (4/20, Pioneer Square, energy drinks), I felt a little bad. I was the biggest RATM fan as a

teenager (I stopped buying new clothes and started thrifting in case I ever met Zack De La Rocha, because I ﬁgured he’d be pretty judgmental about sweatshops. Jesus, teen me, get a grip), and I still have mad respect. Though rap rock is not an illustrious genre, little could better educate you about history and society than an adolescence spent memorizing lyrics to these albums. So come celebrate ’90s-’00s hippiedom by screaming about rolling down Rodeo with a shotgun. ANNA MINARD Sandrider, Grenades, Deadkill (Comet) I almost typed a really bad sentence that went something like: “If you don’t know who this headliner is, well, duuuuude, you better pull your head outta the sand!” Thankfully I didn’t. For real, though, Seattle trio Sandrider take the best elements from metal, hardcore, and sludgy stoner rock, and put them through their own special kind of fun ﬁlter. Those who know local rock stalwarts Nat Damm and Jon Weisnewski (formerly of Akimbo) and Jess Roberts (ex–Ruby Doe), already know that even though they skillfully play the heaviest of heavy riffs (and straight up punish a set of drums), they still somehow make it kinda silly. This formula will always remind me of NW bands like Karp, in all the best of ways. KELLY O

Sunday 9/8

Larry Coryell and the Eleventh House Reunion Band (Jazz Alley) See Thursday.

Sweet Dreams: The Music of Patsy Cline

(Triple Door) In this beloved annual tradition, a half-dozen-plus female vocalists from a variety of genres and backgrounds come together with an Aplus band to bring to life songs made famous by the late, great Patsy Cline. Among those on the 2013 roster: Kim Virant, Mackenzie Mercer, V. Contreras, Shane Tutmarc, Katy Cornell, and—swoon!— Star Anna, who can do things with a mile-wide Nashville melody that’ll make your privates blush.

DAVID SCHMADER

NECTAR LOUNGE 412 N 36th St 206.632.2020 www.nectarlounge.com

LARRY CORYELL and THE ELEVENTH HOUSE REUNION BAND

LIMITED ENGAGEMENT

THU, SEP 5 - SUN, SEP 8

Jazz guitar great with original members of the Eleventh House Randy Brecker (trumpet), Mike Mandel (keyboards), Danny Trifan (bass) and Alphonse Mouzon (drums)

NELLIE MCKAY

TUE, SEP 10 - WED, SEP 11

Witty singer, pianist and songwriter touring in support of her new release, Home Sweet Mobile Home

JACQUI NAYLOR

TUE, SEP 17 - WED, SEP 18

“Naylor remains one of the most superbly arresting vocalists around.” - JazzTimes

PHRONESIS

TUE, SEP 24

British/Scandinavian Jazz Trio

MEKLIT HADERO

WED, SEP 25

“...combines N.Y. jazz with West Coast folk and African ﬂourishes, all bound together by Hadero’s beguiling voice” -Filter Magazine

DAVID GRISMAN QUINTET

THU, SEP 26 - SUN, SEP 29

9.5 Thursday (Latin / Reggae) ORQUESTA LA GRANDE DEL NORTHWEST

AIMA MOSES with THE HIGHLIFE BAND and Manigua

$6 adv. $10 Doors, 8pm, 21+

9.6 Friday (Americana / Rock) MASSY FERGUSON’s 8 YEAR ANNIVERSARY PARTY with Sassparilla, The Big Medicine

$8 adv / $12 dos, 7pm doors, 21+

9.7 Saturday (Country / Americana) WEATHERSIDE WHISKEY BAND HEELS TO THE HARDWOOD THE DARK HORSES

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

9.8 Sunday - Ofﬁcial Hightimes Cannabis Cup Afterparty feat. DJ ALLEN MICHAEL, DJ PARLE and performances by Houston Zizza & The Real Chance Morris... and more.

$15 adv, 8pm doors, 18+

9.10 Tuesday (EVERY 2nd & 4th TUE!) KaraokeGrass!!! NO COVER, 8pm Doors, 21+

9.12 Thursday (Latin / Funk) THE CUMBIEROS The Braxmatics, Gravity Kings $6 adv.

A unique blend of folk, swing, bluegrass, Latin, jazz and gypsy.

2033 6th Ave. | 206.441.9729

all ages | free parking full schedule at jazzalley.com

Jimmy Cliff, Ethan Tucker

(Neptune) The stunning thing about Jimmy Cliff, one of the most famous reggae crooners to ever walk the earth, is that he hit the big time 41 years ago (1972) with the cult movie The Harder They Come, and yet today he is not dead or even that old (65). Meaning, Cliff has been singing his hit songs (“Wonderful World, Beautiful People” “Many Rivers to Cross”) for a very long time. No sane critic can call Cliff one of the greatest (in terms of talent) singers from that island of many great singers, but he certainly deserves credit for the sheer length of his career. True, he no longer makes new music (or at least new music you run to the store to buy or download from the web), but it’s not a bad thing to become a living monument to your own recordings, a museum of yourself and the peaks you achieved in your youth. CHARLES MUDEDE

Saves the Day, Into It. Over It., Hostage Calm

(El Corazón) Back in the late ’90s and early ’00s, when Saves the Day were at the peak of their fame, their unapologetically emotional lyrics were constantly quoted on LiveJournal and Makeoutclub. Being young themselves, the band inadvertently became the voice of the emo generation that was just starting to ﬁgure out how to vocalize their feelings. Today, singer (and only original member) Chris Conley hasn’t changed. The lyrics on “Ring Pop,” the ﬁrst single from the band’s new self-titled record, feature the same juvenile simplicity—the chorus, for example, is “If it’s the last thing that we do, we wanna sing along with you.” The only thing different is the generation they’re speaking to. Now their lyrics will be used as subtweets and Facebook statuses. Admittedly, I’m a sucker for nostalgia, but there is a tinge of sadness when a band doesn’t appear to grow up at all in over a decade. MEGAN SELING

Monday 9/9

WHY?, Lovers Without Borders (Neumos) See Underage, page 49.

High Wolf, Chicaloyoh, WOTT, DJ Explorateur, DJ Veins

(Electric Tea Garden) Mysterious Frenchman High Wolf assimilates the beatific and hypnotic elements of master musicians such as Terry Riley, Don Cherry, Jon Hassell, and Rapoon, and then repurposes them into new forms of sonic enlightenment. In his four-year career, High Wolf has released around 20 LPs, EPs, cassettes, and singles that merit extensive audiophile-headphone time. His new album, Kairos: Chronos, continues to flow down that sweet river of tonal healing, leaving a wake of dubby bass, trance-inducing hand-drum patterns, glistening, FX’d guitar, and spectral chants. It’s as if the mystical-hippie vision of the ’60s weren’t a corny failure, but rather a beneficent reality. Tonight also marks the live debut of Seattle underground-rock supergroup WOTT (Unnatural Helpers’ Dean Whitmore, Tom Ojendyk, Walls’ Nick Turner, and Climax Golden Twins’ Jeffery Taylor. [Disclosure: I helped to organize this show.] DAVE SEGAL

Tuesday 9/10

The Weeknd, Anna Lunoe, Banks (Paramount) Abel Tesfaye—aka the Weeknd—put on a veritable clinic in how to make it in the music biz (ca. 2k12) with his House of Balloons/Thursday/ Echoes of Silence free mixtape trilogy, released under a guise of faux-anonymity and cosigned by fellow Torontonian R&B/sort-of-rap star Drake. Though his initial buzz has waned, the Weeknd’s ﬁrst ofﬁcial album, Kiss Land, drops September 9, and judging from the title track and accompanying NSFW video, Tesfaye has either really gotten into this year’s Tumblr-wave/VHS-Shinjuku aesthetic or he really enjoyed his last couple of Japanese tours. The track, however, fails to be as interesting as the visuals—simply jacking a beat used much better by Main Attrakionz (on their “Nothin’ Gonna Change”) and throwing another previously released beat from producer Silky Johnson’s 2012 Hater of the Year mixtape in for the second half of the contrived seven-minute opus. Let’s hope the band-backed live performance will outweigh the Weeknd’s apparent lack of originality. MIKE RAMOS See also My Philosophy, page 39.

RON VAUDRY

Wed, Sept. 4

INDIE-ROCK HEGEMONY

9/4 LIVE 418 PUBLIC HOUSE Claudio

Rochat-Felix, guests, free AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm COMET UN, Dogs of War, Trashcan Wizard, Audrey Horne, $6

CONOR BYRNE Broomdust Blues Jam, free a CROCODILE In the Back Bar: Brainstorm, Dafugadaheer, Sconone, Don Dishes, 8 pm, $5; Crash Kings, 8 pm, $10/$12

a EL CORAZON The Acacia Strain, Within the Ruins, Fit for nn Autopsy, American Me, Prestige, 7 pm, $15/$18 FOUNDATION Tittsworth

HIGHLINE No Problem, Ruleta Rusa, Long Knife, Schizophasia HIGHWAY 99 Dean Reichert, 8 pm, $7

a JAZZ ALLEY Jon Cleary, $18.50 a KEYARENA Eagles, $49$189

NECTAR Rowe

Combinator, the Mystic Arrows, 8 pm, $5/$7

NEUMOS Austra, Diana, 8 pm, $17

NEW ORLEANS Legacy Band, Clarence Acox

OHANA Live Island Music

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

RENDEZVOUS Bobby Malvestuto, 8 pm

THE ROYAL ROOM Blue

Hawaiian

SHIP CANAL GRILL The Canteloupes Jazz Jam, 7:30 pm

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB

Open Mic: Guests a STUDIO SEVEN (hed) P.E., Mettal Maffia, Jack Havoc, December in Red, Pride Fails, Dirge Era, 6:30 pm, $15/$17

SUNSET TAVERN Kite Repair, Royal Wolfe, Diamondwolf $6

TRACTOR TAVERN

Shelby Earl, Tomten, Andy Fitts , $6

a VERA PROJECT Titus Andronicus, And And And, guests, 7:30 pm, $10/$11

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Tim Kennedy

BALTIC ROOM Crunk: DJ Henski, Marty Mar, Blue Eyed Soul, Bgeezy, guests

CONTOUR Rotation: Guests, 10 pm, $5

THE EAGLE VJDJ Andy J

ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN

Passage: Jayms Nylon, Joey Webb, guests

HAVANA SoulShift: Peter Evans, Devlin Jenkins, Richard Everhard, $1

LAST SUPPER CLUB Vibe

Wednesday: Jame$Ervin, DT, Contagious

LAVA LOUNGE Mod Fuck Explosion: DJ Deutscher

Meister

MOE BAR The Hump: DJ Darwin, DJ Swervewon, guests, 10:30 pm, free

NEIGHBOURS Undergrad: Guest DJs, 18+, $5/$8

SEE SOUND LOUNGE Fade: DJ Chinkyeye, DJ Christyle, 10 pm

THURS 9/5

LIVE AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BLUE MOON TAVERN Fernando’s Bones, Spank Williams, Cecilia Durbin, $5

CAN CAN Vince Mira

CHOP SUEY Lazy Animals, Charms , Skyways are Highways, Sundries, 8 pm, $7

COMET The Break Up, Mary Abaddon , Post Rapture Party, guests, $6

CONOR BYRNE Horseshoes & Hand Grenades, $10

a CROCODILE Poolside, Gold Wolf Galaxy, Nordic Soul , 8 pm, $12

DISTRICT LOUNGE Cassia DeMayo Quintet, 8 pm, free

a EL CORAZON Downfall of Gaia, Black Table, A God or an Other, Chasma, Into the Storm , 8 pm, $8/$10

a GUAYMAS CANTINA

Oleaje Flamenco, 8 pm, free

HARD ROCK CAFE My Cartoon Heart, Matt Bekker, Liz Crowley, 8 pm, $5

HIGH DIVE Julien, Will Wakefield and the Congress Hotel , Stereo Sons , 8 pm, $6

HIGHLINE Mary Abaddon , the Break Up, Post Rapture Party, DJ Coldheart, $8

HIGHWAY 99 Brian Lee & the Orbiters, 8 pm, $7

JAZZ ALLEY Larry Coryell and the Eleventh House Reunion Band, $26.50

LITTLE RED HEN Quenby & the West of Wayland Band, guests, $3

LUCID The Hang: Caffeine, 9:30 pm, free

NECTAR Orquesta La Grande del Northwest, the Highlife Band, Manigua, 8 pm, $6/$10

a NEPTUNE THEATER

Cody ChesnuTT, 7 pm, $20/$22

NEUMOS Shuggie Otis, Jessica Hernandez & the Deltas, Rippin Chicken, 8 pm, $25

PINK DOOR Bric-a-Brac, 8 pm

RENDEZVOUS The Albertans, Lonnie Winn, Johnny Nordstrom & the Retailers

THE ROYAL ROOM

The Royal Ramble, the Americans

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

SHOWBOX AT THE MARKET The Psychedelic Furs, 7:30 pm, $22/$25

a SHOWBOX SODO Godspeed You! Black Emperor, 9 pm, $25

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB

The Flying Tortugas, Josh Damigo, 8 pm, $6

THE STEPPING STONE PUB

Open Mic: Guests

SUNSET TAVERN Shinyribs, guests, $10

TRACTOR TAVERN the Jesus Rehab , the Hoot

Hoots , Poor Folks Live Well, $6

SHADOWHAWK, KING OF BUMBERSHOOT, AND HIS “PIRATE SONG”

ou may remember Shadowhawk from the cover of last week’s Stranger. I saw him again at Bumbershoot, where he made approximately $215 in stomach punches and autographed Stranger covers. Even better than ANY OF THIS, though, is Shadowhawk’s “Pirate Song.” It’s a rowdy drinking song that puts ALL other drinking songs to shame. Watch the video at thestranger.com/drunkoftheweek. Yo, ho! Yo, ho! KELLY O

Guest DJs, free

UN DOGS OF WAR, TRASHCAN WIZARD, AUDREY HORNE

BERMUDAS

RED CLOUD, GUESTS $5

POLLENS

TANGERINE, LAND OF PINES, LURES $10 SANDRIDER GRENADES, DEADKILL $8

BOATS

LOUD EYES, BOTTLE NOSE KOFFINS, GUEST $8 THE BULLETPROOF TIGER GUESTS $5

BRIAN JOHANNESEN

HONEY NOBLE, GUEST $5 NU KLEZMER ARMY

AWFULLY SUDDEN DEATH, BLACKIE VALENTINO AND THE BASTARD FAMILY, AN AMERICAN FORREST $17

SPINNING WHIPS

SUGAR SUGAR SUGAR, MYSTERY SHIP, SAD HORSE (PDX) $7 MATINEE

CUTLASS SUPREME ATOMIC BRIDE

TACOCAT, EVER SO ANDROID, ACAPULCO LIPS $8 EAGLE TEETH MELVILLE (PDX), OUT ON THE STREETS $5

to book a show e-mail cometbooking @gmail.com

W. CLUB CARD)

SATURDAY SEPT 7 | 7:30 PM

DAWSON

BARIBEAU

HEART BREAKS $11 ($10 W. CLUB CARD) SATURDAY SEPT 14 | 7:30 PM

HIRES, PARADISE FEARS

$13 ($12 W/ CLUB CARD) ADV

TUESDAY SEPT 17 | 7:30 PM BLOUSE FEATHERS, WEEK OF WONDERS

$10 ADV

FRIDAY SEPT 20 | 7:30 PM ISLANDS

BEAR MOUNTAIN, HIBOU

$13 ($12 W. CLUB CARD) ADVANCE

WEDNESDAY SEPT 25 | 7:30 PM

ONWARD ETC.

SHEBEAR

$$8 ADV

TRIPLE DOOR The Baseball

Project, 7:30 pm, $15

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Joe Doria Trio, Casey MacGill, 5:30 pm, Free

THE WHITE RABBIT Marmalade, $6

BALLROOM DJ Rob, free BALTIC ROOM

Revolution: DonnaTella Howe, Olivia LaGarce, guests

CAPITOL CLUB Citrus: DJ Skiddle

CONTOUR Bottom Heavy: Covert Ops, guests, 10 pm, Free

THE EAGLE Nasty: DJ King of Pants, Nark

HAVANA Sophisticated Mama: DJ Sad Bastard, DJ Nitty Gritty

LAST SUPPER CLUB Open House: Guests

LAVA LOUNGE Rock DJs: Guests

LO-FI Noctum Caro: Guests

MOE BAR Chuch: Phospho, Mars One, Sosal, free NEIGHBOURS Jet Set Thursdays: Guest DJs

NEIGHBOURS

UNDERGROUND The Lowdown: DJ Lightray, $3 OHANA Chill: DJ MS

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

9/6

LIVE

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BARBOZA Bleached, Bleeding Rainbow, 7 pm, $8

BLUE MOON TAVERN

Heavy Petting, Vapor Trails, Leatherdaddy, $6

CHOP SUEY YOB, Brothers of the Sonic Cloth, Bell Witch, 8 pm, $12/$14

COMET Pollens, Tangerine, Land of Pines, Lures, $10

CONOR BYRNE Purty Mouth , the Moonspinners , $7

CROCODILE 3rdegree, Tulsi & DJ Able, the Knowgooders, Lokeye, Big Time, Kelly Castle Scott, $8

a EL CORAZON Single Mothers, Slatwall, Lo There Do I See My Brother, Kids on Fire, 8 pm, $8/$10

HARD ROCK CAFE Blyss, Simple Gravity, Horse Bodies, $7

HIGH DIVE Knathan Ryan and the Silent K’s, Not From Brooklyn, Airport Way 9:30 pm, $8

HIGHWAY 99 Carl Verheyen Band, 8 pm, $18

JAZZ ALLEY Larry Coryell and the Eleventh House Reunion Band, $26.50

THE KRAKEN BAR & LOUNGE Guns of Barisal , Shelter Red, Gladiators Eat Fire , Hunter Destroyer, $5 LITTLE RED HEN Quenby & the West of Wayland Band, guests, $5 NECTAR Sassparilla, the Big Medicine, 7 pm, $8/$12 NEUMOS Youth Lagoon, guests, 8 pm, $18 a NEW ORLEANS Leslie “Stardrums” Milton and Lady Keys, 8 pm, free PARAGON Levi Said, free a PUYALLUP FAIRGROUNDS Craig Morgan

RAVIOLI STATION TRAINWRECK Dizzy, guests RENDEZVOUS Lust of Money

Experience a THE ROYAL ROOM Kole Hansen, Tae Phoenix, Cordaviva, Piano Royale, 5:30 pm

SEAMONSTER Funky 2 Death, 10 pm, free SHOWBOX AT THE MARKET Chvrches, $18/$20

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB Bad Rites, 8 pm, $7 SLIM’S LAST CHANCE PLFC, the Slimpoles, Low

WEDNESDAY 9/4

Land High

a STUDIO SEVEN Bullys Wit Fullys, Guce, the Jacka, Philthy Rich, Joe Blow, 9 pm, $15/$20

SUNSET TAVERN On an On, Hands, Maiah Manser, $8/$10

TIM’S TAVERN The Whywolves, Poorsport , Highlight Bomb

TRACTOR TAVERN Sonny & the Sunsets, Love as Laughter, Memories, $6

a TRIPLE DOOR 2013 Raise the Roof: Brandi Carlile, 8 pm

THE WHITE RABBIT

TBASA’s Birf Day Bash: Warning Danger, the Fabulous Downey Brothers, Swingset Showdown $8

95 SLIDE DJ Fever One

BALLROOM DJ Tamm of KISS fm

BALMAR Body Movin’ Fridays: DJ Ben Meadow, free

BALTIC ROOM Dirty Work: Rotating DJs including Sean Majors, BGeezy, Mikey Mars, Sir Kuts, guests

BARBOZA Just Got Paid:

100proof, $5 after 11:30 pm

CAPITOL CLUB Blackout!: DJ Potatoes O’Brien, DJ Homonegro, 10 pm, free CONTOUR Afterhours, 2 am CUFF TGIF: C&W Dancing: DJ Harmonix, DJ Stacey, 7 pm, Guest DJs, 11 pm, $5

FOUNDATION Mord Fustang

FUEL DJ Headache, guests HAVANA Rotating DJs: DV One, Soul One, Curtis, Nostalgia B, Sean Cee, $5

LAST SUPPER CLUB Madness: Guests

LAVA LOUNGE DJ David James

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND Caliente

Celebra: DJ Polo, Efren OHANA Back to the Day: DJ Estylz

PONY Beefcake: Beefcake: DJ Jack, Freddy King of Pants: DJ Jack, King of Pants

SCARLET TREE Oh So Fresh Fridays: Deejay Tone, DJ Buttnaked, guests SEE SOUND LOUNGE Crush:

BY DAVE SEGAL

AUSTRA BEAT AROUND THE (KATE) BUSH

During a summer afternoon at 2011’s Capitol Hill Block Party, I staggered into the sauna known as Neumos and encountered Austra, a female-dominated Canadian group who were singing the heaven out of emotionally fraught, gothinﬂected electronic tunes—while busting graceful, ﬂuid moves. What a pleasant surprise amid the indie-rock hegemony of that day. In a Line Out review of that performance, I wrote that Austra came off “like three Kate Bushes if they were recording for 4AD circa 1984.” Now with their latest album, Olympia, Austra come close to exuding the grandeur of Zola Jesus. This isn’t really a dance record as much as it is a showcase for Austra’s chilly, gorgeous compositional skills and vocal dramaturgy. They’re a class act. With Diana Neumos, 8 pm, $17, 21+.

THURSDAY 9/5

TOTAL LIFE ASCENDS TO THE DRONE Love or hate avant-rock anti-stars Godspeed You! Black Emperor, you have to respect their choice to open for them on this tour: Total Life. The solo project of Growing guitarist Kevin Doria, Total Life is a rising force on the international power-electronics/drone circuit. He wowed the crowd at this year’s Debacle Fest and has released two excellent records for the great labels Debacle (Bender/Drifter) and Important (Radia-

THERAPY LOUNGE Rapture: Guests, $3 after 11 pm

TRINITY Tyler, DJ Phase, DJ Nug, guests, $10

THE WOODS Deep/Funky/

Disco/House: Guest DJs

SAT

9/7

LIVE AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BARBOZA Ewert and the Two Dragons, the Family Crest, 7 pm, $12

BLUE MOON TAVERN Jetman Jet Team , Rainbow Wolves, Silty Loam, $6 COMET Sandrider, Grenades Deadkill

CONOR BYRNE Ball of Wax #33 Release Party: The Luna Moth , Lowmen Markos, Sun Tunnels, Michael Wohl, $7

CROCODILE Prefuse 73, Theoretics, IG88, 8 pm, $15 a EL CORAZON School of Rock Presents: The Music of Rage Against the Machine, 6:30 pm, $10/$12

FOUNDATION Dubvision HIGH DIVE 80s Invasion, 9:30 pm, $8

HIGHLINE Poison Idea, Milhous, 13 Scars, Jerry A and the Basemakers, $10 HIGHWAY 99 Bump Kitchen, 8 pm, $14

JAZZ ALLEY Larry Coryell and the Eleventh House Reunion Band, $26.50

THE KRAKEN BAR & LOUNGE Cron, Northern Bastards, Exogorth, Black Mold, $5

LITTLE RED HEN Bucking Horse, $5

NECTAR Heels to the Hardwood, Dark Horses, 7 pm, $5/$8 a NEPTUNE THEATER Bonnie “Prince” Billy, $23/$25

NEUMOS Ty Segall, Mike Donovan, Night Beats , 8 pm, $13

PARAGON Solbird, free a PUYALLUP

tor). Both albums feature epic, powerful blasts of third-ear-expanding drones that possess a meditative quality, despite the massive generator-like hum spuming forth. There’s something about the rasping tones and relentless intensity of Total Life’s music that makes me think it’s the logical successor to the transcendently prickly ambient music of Fripp & Eno’s (No Pussyfooting) Showbox Sodo, 8 pm, $25 adv/$28 DOS, all ages.

SATURDAY 9/7

PREFUSE 73’S DISPERSED HIPHOP MUTATIONS

Prefuse 73 was once the golden boy of IDM/radical instrumental hiphop—until Flying Lotus barged in and swiped most of his glory. Prefuse (Guillermo Scott Herren) has been relatively quiet lately; his last album, The Only She Chapters, came out in 2011. That work found him retreating from his trademark hyper-rhythmic disjunctions and plying a more melodic approach, bolstered by several collabs with female vocalists (the late Trish Keenan, Zola Jesus, Niki Randa, etc.). It’s kind of a lost gem in Prefuse’s catalog, which spikes with some of the most intoxicating mutations of hiphop by an American producer from the last decade. His ability to translate his bafﬂing beat science on record to the live stage has been inconsistent; the best Prefuse shows I’ve seen have happened when he brings a full band. Fingers crossed. With Theoretics and IG88 Crocodile, 8 pm, $15, 21+.

W JARELL PERRY

FAIRGROUNDS Trace Adkins

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

RENDEZVOUS Tape Stacks, Oh! Pears

a THE ROYAL ROOM Duffy Bishop, Piano Royale, 6 pm

SEAMONSTER Sound

Dialog: Porkchop Express,10 pm, free

a SEATTLE CREATIVE

ARTS The Cloves, James Coates, Arbaney Kittle, 8 pm, $7/$10

SHOWBOX AT THE

MARKET Adam Ant & the Good, the Mad, & the Lovely Posse Tour, 7 pm, $27.50/$30

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB The Sparks, Goodbye Heart, Levator, 8 pm, $7

SLIM’S LAST CHANCE

Earfest III: Hemlock Pop, Certain Inertia , Julia Massey & the Five Finger Discount, the Albert Lerner Trio, the Fentons, guests a STUDIO SEVEN From the Waters of Chaos, Primordial Conviction, Betrayed By Weakness, South Kitsap Infidels, guests, 2 pm

SUNSET TAVERN Crushed Out, guests, $8

TIM’S TAVERN Tim Fantastic and the Styrofoam Meat Trays , Uninvited , Sir Mark the Poet

TRACTOR TAVERN Kristen Ward, JD Hobson 1uppers, $8

a VERA PROJECT Kimya Dawson, Paul Baribeau, Your Heart Breaks, 7:30 pm, $10/$11

VICTORY LOUNGE The Bismarck , Glose, Seminars, $5

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Ruby Bishop, 6 pm, the James Band, 9:30 pm

THE WHITE RABBIT Primal Times, the Springboards Ian Jones, the Fremont Whiskey Team, $6

BALLROOM DJ Warren

BALTIC ROOM Good Saturdays: Guest DJs

BARBOZA Inferno: Guests, 10:30 pm, free before 11:30 pm/$5 after CAPITOL CLUB Get Physical: DJ Edis, DJ Paycheck, 10 pm, free CONTOUR Europa Night: Misha Grin, Gil

CUFF Bear Heat: DJ Mattstands

HAVANA Rotating DJs: DV One, Soul One, Curtis, Nostalgia B, Sean Cee, $5 LAVA LOUNGE DJ Matt

NEIGHBOURS Powermix: DJ Randy Schlager

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND Club

Vogue: DJ Chance, DJ Eternal Darkness

OHANA Funk House: DJ Bean One

RE-BAR Cock & Bull: DJ Freddy King of Pants, $5 SEE SOUND LOUNGE Guest DJs

TRINITY ((SUB)): Guy, VSOP, Jason Lemaitre, guests, $15/free before 10 pm

THE WOODS Hiphop/R&B/ Funk/Soul/Disco: Guest DJs

SUN 9/8

LIVE AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BLUE MOON TAVERN Two

Sided Trio, 8 pm, free CAFE RACER The Racer

Sessions

CHOP SUEY Artache Two

Year Anniversary: Lisa Dank, DJ Ea$y Iri$, 1 pm, free COLUMBIA CITY THEATER

Fela’s Cooties, 7:30 pm, free COMET Boats, Loud Eyes, Bottlenose Koffins, guests, $8

CONOR BYRNE Open Mic:

Guests, 8 pm

a CROCODILE Young Roddy, Corner Boy P, Fiend 4

Da Money, DJ Swervewon, 8 pm, $15/$17

a EL CORAZON Saves the Day, Into It. Over It., Hostage Calm, 7:30 pm, $15/$18

HIGH DIVE X Suns, Dead Sea Symphony, Plains, 8 pm, $6

HIGHLINE Mob 47, Desperat, Koszmar, Deathraid, 8 pm, $10

JAI THAI BROADWAY Rock Bottom Soundsystem, free JAZZ ALLEY Larry Coryell and the Eleventh House Reunion Band, $26.50

KELL’S Liam Gallagher

LITTLE RED HEN Open Mic Acoustic Jam with Bodacious Billy: guests, 4 pm; Tequila Rose, $3, 9 pm

a NEPTUNE THEATER Jimmy Cliff, 8 pm, $35

NEUMOS The Dodos, the Love Language, Learning Team, 8 pm, $15

PIES & PINTS Sunday Night Folk Review: Guests, free RENDEZVOUS Young Relic, Hamartia & Elude

THE ROYAL ROOM Electric Circus

a SEATTLE CENTER Aloha Hawaiian Cultural Festival: Kupaoa, 11 am, free

SHIP CANAL GRILL Jay Thomas a STUDIO SEVEN Open Mind, Sorrow’s Edge, Losing Daylight, Antitheus, 4 pm, $10/$15

SUNSET TAVERN

Phosphenes, Prat Attack , guests, $6

TRIPLE DOOR Sweet Dreams: The Music of Patsy Cline: Guests, 6:30 pm

TULA’S Jim Cutler Jazz Orchestra, 8 pm, $8

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Ruby Bishop, 6 pm, the Ron Weinstein Trio, 9:30 pm

BALTIC ROOM Mass:

THURS–SAT 9/5–7

DROPPING BOMBSHELLS

Smell that? No, not THAT. This: the bittersweet twinge of fall singing upon the breeze. Bitter! Sweet! And tragic as fuck-all. It’s always so damn depressing to kiss another summer good-bye, I know you understand. And what a summer! Red Dresses, Jinkx Monsoonings, cabarets, Cabernets, drag brunches, gay cruises (tee-hee), sexy, sweaty, nearnaked Nark events, and so forth. But take heart! Don’t stop believin’! (Hold on to that feelin’, damn it! HOLD ON TO IT!) Summer isn’t in the pine box yet, and this very weekend is veritably fudgepacked with fabulosity. Tonight, for instance, brings us a ﬁstful of burlesque

Guest DJs

CAPITOL CLUB Island Style:

DJ Bookem, DJ Fentar

CONTOUR Broken Grooves:

DJ Venus, Rob Cravens, guests, free

THE EAGLE T-Bar/T-Dance:

Up Above, Fistfight, free a FULL TILT ICE CREAM

Vinyl Appreciation Night:

Guest DJs, 7 pm

LAVA LOUNGE No Come Down: Jimi Crash

MOE BAR Chocolate Sundays: Sosa, MarsONE, Phosho, free

NEIGHBOURS Noche Latina:

Guest DJs

PONY TeaDance: DJ El Toro, Freddy King of Pants, 4 pm

Q NIGHTCLUB Revival:

Riz Rollins, Chris Tower, 3 pm, free

RE-BAR Flammable: DJ

Wesley Holmes, 9 pm

SEE SOUND LOUNGE Salsa:

DJ Nick

THE STEPPING STONE PUB

Vinyl Night: You bring your records, they play them

MON 9/9

LIVE

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Jerry Frank

BALLARD STATION PUBLIC

HOUSE Christian Smith Quartet, 7 pm, free

COASTAL KITCHEN Pork

Chop Trio, 9:30 pm, free a CROCODILE Grouplove, the Rubens, 8 pm, $20

a EL CORAZON Vader, Vital Remains, Sacrificial Slaughter, Execration, Extremely Rotten, Chemical Castration, 7 pm, $18/$20

KELL’S Liam Gallagher

MAC’S TRIANGLE PUB Jazz and Blues Night: Guests, free MOLLY MAGUIRES Open

Mic: Hosted by Tom Rooney, free a NEUMOS Why?, Lovers

and performance artistes known collectively as the Atomic Bombshells. Yes, burlesque. Yes, as in fancy ladies taking their clothes off! I KNOW! On paper, it might seem a bit peculiar—if not downright, if you’ll pardon the expression, queer—for a bunch of big fucking queers to invest attention in such booby shenanigans. THAT’S MADNESS! They have to be seen to be believed. You will recognize beloved names like Kitten LaRue and Lou Henry Hoover (recently gay married, you know, in the most spectacular ceremony) as well as designer/burlesque savant Jamie Von Stratton and more, and they are all fresh off their East Coast tour to bring their bare-skinned magic to us. One weekend only! Columbia City Theater, 9 pm, $22 adv/$25 DOS, 21+.

SUNDAY 9/8

JULIA’S DRAG BRUNCH PREMIERES

Speaking of drag brunches (weren’t we just?): They’ve certainly become something of a BIG FUCKING THING, haven’t they? The TITS that is Mama has one, and our old friend SYLVIA’s got hers out in Columbia City, too, and now the throbbing drag empire known as Julia’s is tossing its feathered tiara into the drag brunch ring. Yes, Julia’s, home of Le Faux, recently made super famous by, let’s face it, JINKX MONSOON. (She’s not there just now, calm down.) It’s hosted by their newest Le Faux hostess, the delightful and efﬁng gigantic Kristie Champagne. Julia’s Queen of the Brunch Drag Show will have a new theme each week, and this is its inaugural run. Julia’s on Broadway, 1:30 pm, $10, all ages.

BY ADRIAN RYAN

Atomic Bombshells

3RDEGREE

Tulsi & DJ Able, The Knowgooders, Lokeye, Big Time Hosted by Kelly Castle Scott 21+

The Crocodile, ReignCity & Decibel present: PREFUSE 73 Theoretics IG88 21+

TYPHOON 1939 Ensemble Sama Dams All Ages

Elixr Production Presents FLAVOR WAVE: A TRAP DJ BATTLE Hosted by DJ Yaddiya 21+

Jet Life, The Crocodile & ReignCity present: THE RED EYE TOUR FEAT. YOUNG RODDY CORNER BOY P & FIEND Dj Swervewon All Ages

SOUND REMEDY Clark Kent Just One All Ages

CAMPFIRE

ALBUM

SHOW Sean Nelson, Rafe Pearlman with Dust & Gold All Ages

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

ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN High Wolf, Chicaloyoh, WOTT, DJ Explorateur, DJ Veins

HAVANA Manic Mondays: DJ Jay Battle, free

THE HIDEOUT Introcut, guests, free

LAVA LOUNGE Psych/Blues: Bobby Malvestuto

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

THE MIX Bring Your Own Vinyl Night: Guests, 6 pm

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

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND SIN: DJ

Keanu, 18+, free

OHANA DJ Hideki

PONY Dirty Deeds: Guest

DJs

Q NIGHTCLUB Electric

Penetration, 6 pm, free; Reflect, 8 pm, free

TUES

9/10

LIVE

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

CONOR BYRNE Ol’ Time

Social: the Tallboys , 9 pm

a CROCODILE Typhoon, 1939 Ensemble, 8 pm, $15

EL CORAZON Vista Chino,

Witchburn, Black Pussy, 8 pm, $20/$23

ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN

Monktail Creative Music

Concern, DJ Shonuph, free

HARD ROCK CAFE Victory

Swig, Kylan Johnson, Miss Lopez & the Wandering Few, 8 pm a JAZZ ALLEY Nellie McKay, $24.50

KELL’S Liam Gallagher

LITTLE RED HEN Tequila

Rose

MAC’S TRIANGLE PUB Open Mic: free THE MIX Jazz Night: Don Mock, Steve Kim, Jacques Willis, 8 pm

NEUMOS Jason Isbell, Amanda Shires, 8 pm, $17

OUTWEST Wine and Jazz Night: Tutu Jazz Quartet, free

OWL N’ THISTLE Jazz Improv Night: Guests

PARAMOUNT THEATER The Weekend, Anna Lenau, Banks, 7 pm, $36.20/$41.25 a PUYALLUP

FAIRGROUNDS Celtic Tenors, 7:30 pm, $25 - $65

SEAMONSTER McTuff Trio, 10 pm, free

SLIM’S LAST CHANCE Los Colones, Shane Tutmarc, Knut Bell, 7 pm

SUNSET TAVERN Half

Japanese Girls, the Crush Sit Ubu Sit, $6

TIM’S TAVERN Open Mic:

Linda Lee, 8 pm

TRACTOR TAVERN Steve

Poltz, guests, 8 pm, $15

a TRIPLE DOOR Grouplove, the Rubens, 8 pm, $20

DJ 95 SLIDE Chicken &

Waffles: Supreme La Rock, DJ Rev, free

BALTIC ROOM Drum & Bass Tuesdays: Guests

BLUE MOON TAVERN Blue

Moon Vinyl Revival Tuesdays:

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

THE EAGLE Pitstop: DJ Nark

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

LAVA LOUNGE Metal: Doctor

Jonze

MERCURY Die: Black Maru, Major Tom, $5

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

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND Vicious

Dolls: DJ Rachael, 9 pm, $5

OHANA DJ Marc Sense

WILDROSE Taco Tuesday: Guest DJs

BY BRITTNIE FULLER

WEDNESDAY 9/4

POETS, PUPPETS, & FOLK: LOVEHOLDLETGO

There likely isn’t a better way to kick in fall’s incoming sunlessness than at Gas Works Park tonight. With the magical ukulele stories of Jordan O’Jordan and Vashon Island–rooted folk band Thorn & Shout’s old-timey meditative sounds, spectators will be pleasantly displaced to a more isolated space, mentally and physically. LoveHoldLetGo, a touring queer poetry duo from Halifax, Nova Scotia, will also perform “Silence & the Earth,” a post-apocalyptic love story between the last person and the earth” as told through shadow puppetry, dialogue, and folk music. Gas Works Park, 7 pm.

SATURDAY 9/7

MUHAMMADALI, LINDSEYS, WASTED USA, BAD FUTURE

Maybe you’ve been lucky enough to encounter the miraculously disturbing ﬂyer for this show. If not, seek it out, and if your eyes are still intact, treat yourself with an evening of punk horror transcendence. Houston’s funcore party outﬁt Muhammadali melodically bludgeon ears with sludgy, gnarled psych-punk riffs. Their Future Songs cassette continues where their excellent

2012 EP (both via Dirt Cult Records) left off, with a sound that’s like “sticking [your] head in the garbage can.” In a live setting, Muhammadali harness the hormone-addled fun into an adrenalized limb ﬂurry. Also, with the LP release for Religious Sexts, the latest from local fuzz-punk band Lindseys, tonight has been perfectly designed to ﬂail your anyaged teenager. Black Lodge, 9 pm.

MONDAY 9/9

WHY?, LOVERS WITHOUT BORDERS Oakland-based avant-rap/indie-rock band WHY? have a half-jokey reverse-stalker thing going on. Their Golden Tickets EP— out September 17 on Joyful Noise—spotlights the band’s super-fans, who they’ve also presumably internet stalked. “Murmurer” is an ode to one fan’s OkCupid proﬁle (“Dude’s a constant worrier/And weren’t it for his nervous nature/He’d by now be engaged”). Their staggeringly cheeky songs have the earnest nerve to tap into the uncomfortable, taking themselves seriously without being serious at all. Show up early for Lovers Without Borders Karl Blau’s latest project, which I described a few months back as “wistful avant-folk tunes for brooding.” Prepare to get enchanted with effortlessly cast folk incantations. Super sigh! Neumos, 8 pm, $15.

FILM

Film Review Revue

Three Good Movies

Drinking Buddies

dir. Joe Swanberg

SIFF Cinema Uptown

Human behavior, when placed under a microscope, is interesting, even if the humans under the microscope are an infuriatingly speciﬁc and privileged class of people.

Yep, you guessed it—we’re talking about mumblecore again.

Director Joe Swanberg is best known for Hannah Takes the Stairs and Nights and Weekends. His new ﬁlm, Drinking Buddies, is about the tight friendship between Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson), two coworkers at a brewery who ﬂirt, share lunch, and go out for drinks—and who are both romantically involved with other people.

On the surface, these characters are just another installment of Stuff White People Like. Who cares about these hot, drunk people and their nice apartments and glamorous lives?

But dig a little deeper—crank up the microscope—and Drinking Buddies has a lot to say about gender dynamics in an age and social milieu where friends often stand in for extended family, and men and women regularly form friendships that don’t lead to sex. Drinking Buddies doesn’t come to any grand

conclusions—it just puts some people in a petri dish and lets ’em pinball around, crashing into each other and trying to navigate their feelings while not always understanding what, exactly, those feelings are.

The script was largely improvised, and some of the actors handle that challenge better than others: Johnson (aka Nick on New Girl ) is natural and conﬁdent, and Wilde creates a character who seems genuinely fun to be around, but the usually unimpeachable Anna Kendrick turns in an unfocused performance as Luke’s coldfooted ﬁancée.

Drinking Buddies is distinctly more polished than Swanberg’s previous efforts. It’s not an earth-shaking film, nor a particularly expansive one—but within its admittedly narrow parameters, it has a lot to say.

ALISON HALLETT

Short Term 12

dir. Destin Cretton

Seven Gables

Besides being a good band name, Chekhov’s Gun is the principle protecting cumulative narrative coherence: A gun introduced in the ﬁrst act must go off by the

end of the third. In the ﬁrst act of Short Term 12, the studiously humane drama written and directed by Destin Cretton, we’re instantly introduced to number of ﬁgurative guns, all of them human, most of them pre-adult, all packed with explosive secrets.

Our setting: a residential facility for highrisk kids, overseen by a staff not far from childhood themselves. Leading the charge is Grace (Brie Larson), a twentysomething of remarkable passion and self-possession, who devotes her days to cleaning up the messes after the facility’s human guns go off. And go off they do—these are kids who have experienced things that are left unspeciﬁed by the movie, but still have the power to inspire emotional explosions, from shrieking to cutting to deadly mayhem. Helping Grace is Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), her live-in boyfriend and fellow counselor, who buffers Grace’s no-bullshit approach with an avuncular-stoner vibe.

From top to bottom, Short Term 12 is laced with moments of deep, messy humanity that will take your breath away. That these moments are found in a milieu packed with the potential for mawkish clichés—see the handful of scenes wherein Grace and Mason must crack the shell of a hardened-by-hurt kid—is a testament to the skill and talent of writer/ director Cretton, who has a great knack with actors and idiosyncratic detail. In lesser hands, Grace and Mason’s artsand-crafts date night might’ve been nothing more than shorthand for hipsterism, but in Short Term 12, it touches on everything from the shittiness of their wages to their ongoing sexual dysfunction.

far from the reality Cretton and his cast have worked so hard to create. But it’s a good, tough movie, and Brie Larson gives a performance that should win awards. DAVID

SCHMADER

The two films (The Girl from Monaco, My Worst Nightmare) I have watched by the Luxembourg-born, French-based director Anne Fontaine did not in any way prepare me for the beauty and enchantments of her first English-language (Aussie English, that is) movie, Adore. It’s not that her earlier films were bad, but they certainly were not cinematic. (To explain what I mean by cinematic: It is to synthesize the primary resources—music, image, drama, writing, narrative—of moviemaking into a consistent mood, tone, movement. There are certainly other meanings out there, but this is all that I mean.)

Short Term 12 is laced with moments of deep, messy humanity.

With Adore, two middle-aged mothers, Roz and Lil (Robin Wright and Naomi Watts), who are old friends and neighbors in a seaside paradise located not far from Sydney, fall in love with each other’s sons. The sons, Ian and Tom (Xavier Samuel and James Frecheville), fall in love with each other’s mothers. The only problem that this erotic crisscrossing faces is time: The mothers fear that the sons will eventually see them as old, lose interest in them, and naturally desire younger women. This realism is felt more strongly by Roz than Lil, with Roz eventually forcing the quartet’s return to normal society. Sexual normalcy, however, turns out not to be the solution. (The movie is based on the short novel The Grandmothers by Doris Lessing.)

The ﬁlm’s not perfect—the emotional explosions sometimes land with a whiff of plot-forwarding expedience, and Grace is saddled with a late-breaking twist that feels

The music for this wonderfully twisted story is gravid but spare, the acting is expertly measured, the characters are carefully deﬁned, and all of the images of the sea—the town by the sea, the swimming in the sea, the sea in the windows of cars and homes—are dominated by the eternal and radiant image of the four lovers on a wooden ﬂoating dock. CHARLES MUDEDE

DRINKING BUDDIES Stuff white people like (plus revelatory gender dynamics).

Adore

dir. Anne Fontaine SIFF Cinema Uptown

Kathryn Hahn Juno Temple Josh Radnor and Jane

BY WM. TM STEVEN HUMPHREY

LET’S GET SUBVERSIVE!

Hello friends! I’m on vacation this week, but check out this classic I Love Television™ from the archives, which features hilariously old and quaint pop-culture references and a good description of what is still one of my fave shows of all time. See ya next week!

—Humpy

It’s a pretty ridiculous state of affairs when a show like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is still considered to be one of the most subversive shows on television. Christ in a bag of cats, people! The show’s not subversive if my grandma prefers Carson Kressley and his ugly belts to my twiceyearly visits to her rest home. (Old people can be sooooo petty!)

You wanna see subversive? I’ll show you subversive! In just over a week, THE MOST SUBVERSIVE SHOW I’VE EVER SEEN will be returning for another slam-bang season— and it’s called Wonder Showzen [Which you can still watch on MTV’s website, on DVD, or via YouTube clips—future Humpy.] In fact, this show is so subversive, I’m continually astonished it ever made it to TV. The mentally impaired brainchild of New Yorkers John Lee and Vernon Chatman—self-proclaimed artists, rock musicians, television executives, and sex-collective members—Wonder Showzen is a viciously hilarious antigovernment, antireligious screed disguised as a classic children’s show… with naughty puppets. Consider Sesame Street, Teletubbies, Zoom, or any number of kiddie shows you’ve come to know and love. Then take those same shows and add atheism, masturbation jokes, cannibalism,

anarchy, and puppet-on-puppet oral sex, and you’ve got a pretty good starting point for Wonder Showzen. Hosting the show is a group of puppets led by a derby-wearing yellow furball named Chauncey who goes on a new adventure every week—which generally ends horribly. For example, in one episode, Chauncey and a (real) little girl named Kaitlin decide to take a rocket to outer space—and end up accidentally killing God (and then eating him). Whoops.

Wonder Showzen also specializes in live-action segments, featuring a cast of prepubescent kids in a variety of wildly un-PC situations—such as performing a musical dance tribute to slavery, or deﬁning “love” as “something special between my dog’s butt and the carpet.” But my favorite segment is called “Beat Kids,” featuring a 9-year-old child reporter named Trevor who interviews adults in a variety of occupations and pastimes. When Trevor visits the horse track, for example, he asks the trainers if slow horses “get sent to the chop suey factory.” In another particularly offensive (and therefore hilarious) segment, he dresses up like Adolf Hitler and asks passersby, “What do you think is wrong with the youth of today?”

I’m continually astonished Wonder Showzen ever made it to TV.

Much like the quickly paced kiddie shows it parodies, the jokes in Wonder Showzen are piled on fast and furious, with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gags involving pigs (what they call “Hindu kryptonite”), milking cows (“I saw my daddy doing that in the bathroom!”), and Abraham Lincoln (“It never occurred to me to shave my beard and free the slaves—though I have thought about shaving the slaves and freeing my beard!”).

So did you hear that, Grandma?? That means it’s time to dump Carson Kressley and check out the true “King of Subversive TV,” Wonder Showzen. (And don’t forget, Granny: There are no TVs in the chop suey factory!)

Read Humpy’s weekly TV listings at THESTRANGER.COM

FILM SHORTS

More reviews and movie times: thestranger.com/ﬁlm

LIMITED RUN

AMERICAN PSYCHO

Based on the much-reviled book by Bret Easton Ellis, the movie is actually pretty good. Really. Set at the height of the Reagan ‘80s, American Psycho deftly satirizes the deadening effect of unchecked corporate wealth and power. (ANDY SPLETZER) Harvard Exit, Sat Sept 7 at midnight.

CHARADE

Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant star in this 1963 thriller comedy about spies and ladies and money and Paris and MURDER. Central Cinema, Fri-Tues 7 pm.

DIRTY DANCING

Patrick Swayze exploits a position of authority as a ballroom dance instructor to seduce an underage woman and ruin a family’s vacation. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Tues Sept 10 at 7 pm.

FILM FORWARD SHOWCASE

Film Forward and SAM present a program of films “selected to stimulate cross-cultural conversations.” Films include The Light in Her Eyes, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Chasing Ice, each of which will be followed by a Q&A/discussion. Seattle Art Museum, Sat Sept 7. For complete schedule and showtimes, see seattleartmuseum.org.

GUITAR INNOVATORS: JOHN FAHEY & NELS

CLINE

Two short documentaries about guitar virtuosos: In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey and Approximately Nels Cline. The late shows on Friday and Saturday will be preceded by a live performance from Seattle guitarist Bill Horist. Grand Illusion, Fri 8 pm, Sat 5, 8 pm, Sun 5, 7, 9 pm, Mon-Tues 9 pm.

HEAVEN’S GATE

A new digital restoration of Michael Cimino’s 3.5-hour-long tale of the Old West, which was widely panned when it was released in 1980 but later lauded as a classic. Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Sat 7 pm, Sun 3, 7 pm, Mon-Tues 7 pm.

MOLE CARTOONS

A 90-minute program of great Czech children’s animation by

Zdenek Miler. Northwest Film Forum, Sat Sept 7 at 5 pm.

OCTOBER COUNTRY

October Country is a horror film. Completed in 2009, it’s the scariest horror film since The Blair Witch Project, a film completed in 1999. October Country is a documentary that rises to the art of a fiction; The Blair Witch Project is a fiction that falls to the realism of a documentary. What made Project so terrifying was the dead (nature); what makes October Country so terrifying is the living. The living live in a small town in upstate New York. The small town is dominated by a death factory—a munitions plant. The factory exploits the workers, and the workers abuse their partners, and the partners abuse themselves and their children. No one breaks out of the cycle of violence. The babies are doomed; the old people are gloomy. But the filmmakers (Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri) manage to find beauty in all of this sadness. A tree in the wind, ghost balloons blown back and forth, the lights of the night, a crazy woman/witch/sister of a Vietnam vet (the morose Mr. Mosher) in a graveyard—what makes these scenes so beautiful is, to use the words of the dying android in Blade Runner, they are “moments [that] will be lost in time... like tears in rain.” (CHARLES MUDEDE) Northwest Film Forum, Sat-Sun 5 pm.

OFF LABEL

A documentary that takes a critical look at the effects the pharmaceutical industry has had on our society. Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Tues 7, 9 pm.

A PLACE AT THE TABLE

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about hunger in America is how invisible it has made itself. The social stigma around admitting an inability to provide for your family creates a certain silence that muffles the issue. What this documentary exposes are the systems that perpetuate malnourishment and food insecurity while maintaining the trappings of abundance. The massive grain subsidies (which make nutrient-poor foods so accessible and affordable), the urban and rural “food deserts” that isolate people from fully stocked grocery stores, the limitations of economic safety nets: These are structural reasons why obesity, hunger, and poverty are so intertwined. (KRISHANU RAY) Keystone Church, Fri Sept 6 at 7 pm.

THE REP A documentary about the struggles of a small repertoire cinema in Toronto and about the widespread dying off of old, nice movie theaters. Grand Illusion, Mon-Tues 7 pm.

ROAD HOUSE

The legendary 1989 Patrick Swayze classic, aka Showgirls for boys. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Tues Sept 10 at 9 pm.

RUNAWAY DAUGHTERS

A 1994 Joe Dante film that sought to remake the juvenile delinquent films of the ‘50s with the perspective of the ‘90s. Scarecrow, Mon Sept 9 at 7 pm.

SPARK: A BURNING MAN STORY

The first of three Burning Man documentaries screening in Seattle this season. (God bless Kickstarter.) SIFF Cinema Uptown, Fri-Sun at 9:30 pm.

STUDENT BODIES

An Airplane! style (gag-heavy) take on teen horror movies from 1981. Scarecrow Video, Fri Sept 6 at 8 pm.

TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY

David Foster Wallace once wrote an excellent essay— republished in his posthumous collection Both Flesh and Not—that recognized Terminator 2: Judgment Day as both a mind-bending cinematic achievement and the dismal end of filmmaking as we know it. (PAUL CONSTANT) King’s Hardware, Mon Sept 9 at dusk.

WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER

“Now finish up them taters. I’m gonna go fondle my sweaters.” Central Cinema, Fri-Tues 9:30 pm.

NOW PLAYING

BLUE JASMINE

The title character, played by Cate Blanchett, is (or was) a wealthy Manhattanite. When her ex-husband Hal (Alec Baldwin) turns out to be a Madoff-like crook, she loses everything, so she relocates to San Francisco to stay with her working-class sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins). Everyone is lying to themselves—about who they are, what they want, and what they feel they deserve. Blanchett is amazing as this supremely deluded neurotic. It’s a showy performance, and

“THE FINEST AMERICAN DRAMA SO FAR THIS YEAR. Brie Larson gives a star-making performance.”

“GRADE A: A DRAMA OF ASTONISHING EMOTIONAL PURITY.”

–Owen Gleiberman, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY “BRIE LARSON IS A REVELATION... ONE OF THE YEAR’S BEST PERFORMANCES. An exceptional ﬁlm in every way.”

–

“A WONDER. EXCEPTIONAL, MOVING AND INTIMATE. Honestly earns every bit of its emotional impact.

–Kenneth Turan, LOS

“ONE OF 2013’S BEST! One of the most gripping ﬁlms about human decency ever made.” –Bob Strauss,

it’s refreshing to see Allen’s jangly, sometimes unpleasant protagonists channel that energy toward masking something potentially more sinister: a measure of complicity in their personal disasters. (MATT LYNCH)

IN A WORLD...

Actress Lake Bell’s directorial debut digs into the subculture of voice-over artists. Carol (Bell) is a vocal coach who wants to break into the industry. The supporting cast includes Bell’s Childrens Hospital costars Ken Marino and Rob Corddry, as well as Tig Notaro and Demetri Martin, and Bell is a likable protagonist. The film works because In a World... evidences a genuine interest in the day-to-day work of a voice-over artist: The thing is the focus, rather than the character who is interested in the thing. It’s the difference between superficial quirk and acknowledging that the world we live in is a weird and interesting place. (ALISON HALLETT)

LEE DANIELS’ THE BUTLER

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is based on a real African American man who worked at the White House for eight presidential terms, played by (genius) Forest Whitaker. The opening is a brutal series of crimes that happen to the future butler and his parents in a Southern cotton field, where they’re still functionally enslaved decades after abolition. Act two lionizes the civil rights era, the era of black folks rising up to help themselves. The butler’s son is a Freedom Rider/Black Panther played by (genius) David Oyelowo. The Butler is a pretty good Hollywood movie. Oprah Winfrey is great. It’s probably worth seeing, even though as the credits are about to roll, an epigraph dedicates the movie to those who “fought” for equal rights. Not fight: fought. (JEN GRAVES)

THÉRÈSE

Oh, the brooding; oh, the inevitability. If you like Madame Bovary and the staring, staring, STARING of Audrey Tatou’s eyes, you’re going to love this ponderous, beautifully shot French period drama about a stifled but materialistic wife and betrayal. Thérèse is the last film from director Claude Miller (The Accompanist, A Secret), who went to the great beyond last year. It is billed as “an exquisite adaptation of the classic novel by François Mauriac,” and while there’s nothing new under the sun, Flaubert might rightly feel a little ripped off. There is much Bovarian here—the whole stifled-wife-in-the-countryside thing, the obsession with status, the casual cruelty, the poisoning. (There’s also a distinctly Anna Karenina moment on a train.) Unfortunately, the sex has been extracted except for an implied lesbian longing that involves more of Audrey Tatou staring. And while Audrey Tatou is good at staring—her eyes are like black holes—she cannot convey enough of her character’s motivation to keep things interesting. The importance of appearances is everywhere apparent, and Thérèse evinces jealousy and greed, but the assertion that “she thinks too much” and her endless brooding (and smoking, because: France) do not a complicated portrayal make. In Thérèse, somehow even attempted murder becomes banal. In the end, her reasons for her actions are “inexact,” to use her own word. And, in the end, Thérèse gets what she wants… as far as anyone can tell. (BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT)

THE WORLD’S END

Gary King (Simon Pegg) has built up a long-ago pub crawl called the Golden Mile as the greatest night ever. He convinces his friends—Andy (Nick Frost), Steven (Paddy Considine), Oliver (Martin Freeman), and Peter (Eddie Marsan)—to revisit that night. They’re a few pints in when the killer robots attack. On the surface, the apocalyptic, increasingly drunken The World’s End is a funnier, smarter Invasion of the Body Snatchers And the movie is phenomenally, relentlessly funny. Dig a bit more, and it’s an affecting movie about how you can’t go home again, even if your crappy hometown isn’t literally besieged by mindless automatons. (ERIK HENRIKSEN)

NOW SHOWING 9/6 - 9/12

BLUE JASMINE (PG-13)

Fri: (4:35), 7:10*, 9:50*

Sat & Sun: (2:20)*, (4:35), 7:10*, 9:50* Mon - Thu: (4:35), 7:10*, 9:50* THE WORLD’S END (R) Fri: (4:45)*, 7:20*, 9:55 Sat & Sun: (2:15), (4:45)*, 7:20*, 9:55 Mon - Thu: (4:45)*, 7:20*, 9:55

LEE DANIELS’ THE BUTLER (PG-13)

Fri: (4:25)*, 7:00, 9:30*

Sat & Sun: (1:35)*, (4:25)*, 7:00, 9:30*

Mon: (4:25)*, 7:00, 9:30*

Tue: (4:25), 7:00^, 9:30

Wed & Thu: (4:25)*, 7:00, 9:30*

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AVANT-ROCK BAND SEEKING cellist. Swans, Black Sabbath, A Silver Mt. Zion, My Bloody Valentine, Of Cabbages and Kings, John Zorn, Masada, Medicine, Amber Asylym, Diamanda Galas, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Laibach, No drugs. 206.547.2615/omaritaylor@hotmail. com/www.myspace.com/branavinix

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EXPERIMENTAL ROCK BAND seeking keyboardist/soundscape artist. Swans, Big Black, Neurosis, Black Flag, Killing Joke, Throbbing Gristle, Laibach, SPK, Coil, Godflesh, Savage Republic, Pigface, Jarboe, Diamanda Galas, Head of David. No drugs. Bass/drums/guitar. 206.547.2615/ omaritaylor@hotmail.com/ www.rendingsinew.com

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KEYBOARDIST WANTED FOR an avant-rock band. Swans, Black Flag, Masada, John Zorn, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Zero 7, Of Cabbages and Kings, Suicide. No drugs. 206.547.2615/omaritaylor@hotmail. com www.myspace.com/branavinix

ORCHESTRA OF FLIGHT comprises recreational musicians with the mission of sharing music with those who cannot attend traditional concert venues. We currently are recruiting strings, percussion, and bassoon. We rehearse in Columbia City Monday nights. Please email OOFFlightorchestra@gmail.com.

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

BY ROB BREZSNY

For the Week of Sept 4

ARIES (March 21–April 19): “No regrets? Really?” asks author Richard Power. “I have regrets. They are sacred to me. They inform my character. They bear witness to my evolution. Glimpses of lost love and treasure are held inside of them; like small beautiful creatures suspended in amber.” I think you can see where this horoscope is going, Aries. I’m going to suggest you do what Powers advises: “Do not avoid your regrets… Embrace them. Listen to their stories… Hold them to your heart when you want to remember the price you paid to become who you truly are.” (Find more by Richard Power here: tinyurl.com/RichardPower.)

TAURUS (April 20–May 20): Urbandictionary.com says that the newly coined word “orgasnom” is what you call the ecstatic feelings you have as you eat especially delectable food. It’s derived, of course, from the word “orgasm.” According to my reading of the astrological omens, you are in an excellent position to have a number of orgasmic-like breakthroughs in the coming week. Orgasnoms are certainly among them, but also orgasaurals, orgasights, and orgasversations— in other words, deep thrills resulting from blissful sounds, rapturous visions, and exciting conversations. I won’t be surprised if you also experience several other kinds of beautiful delirium.

GEMINI (May 21–June 20): If you were about to run in a long-distance race, you wouldn’t eat a dozen doughnuts. Right? If you were planning to leave your native land and spend a year living in Ethiopia, you wouldn’t immerse yourself in learning how to speak Chinese in the month before you departed. Right? In that spirit, I hope you’ll be smart about the preparations you make in the coming weeks. This will be a time to prime yourself for the adventures in self-expression that will bloom in late September and the month of October. What is it you want to create at that time? What would you like to show the world about yourself?

CANCER (June 21–July 22): The Con-

stitution of the United States is the supreme law of the land. It’s the foundation of the most politically powerful nation on the planet. And yet when it originally went into effect in 1789, it was only 4,543 words long—about three times the length of this horoscope column. The Bill of Rights, enacted in 1791, added a mere 462 words. By contrast, India’s constitution is 117,000 words, more than 20 times longer. If you create a new master plan for yourself in the coming months,

Cancerian—as I hope you will—a compact version like America’s will be exactly right. You need diamond-like lucidity, not sprawling guesswork.

LEO (July 23–Aug 22): There are two scientific terms for tickling. “Knismesis” refers to a soft, feathery touch that may be mildly pleasurable. It can be used to display adoring tenderness. The heavier, deeper kind of tickling is called “gargalesis.” If playfully applied to sensitive parts of the anatomy, it can provoke fun and laughter. Given the current planetary alignments, Leo, I conclude that both of these will be rich metaphors for you in the coming days. I suggest that you be extra alert for opportunities to symbolically tickle and be tickled. (P.S. Here’s a useful allegory: If you do the knismesis thing beneath the snout of a great white shark, you can hypnotize it.)

VIRGO (Aug 23–Sept 22): In his “Song of the Open Road,” Walt Whitman wrote some lyrics that I hope will provide you with just the right spark. Even if you’re not embarking on a literal journey along a big wide highway, my guess is that you are at least going to do the metaphorical equivalent. “Henceforth I ask not good fortune—I myself am good fortune,” said Uncle Walt. “Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing. Strong and content, I travel the open road.”

LIBRA (Sept 23–Oct 22): Mystical poet Saint John of the Cross (1542–1591) was one of Spain’s greatest writers. But not all of his work came easily. When he was 35, a rival religious group imprisoned him for his mildly heretical ideas. He spent the next nine months in a 10-foot-by6-foot jail cell, where he was starved, beaten, and tortured. It was there that he composed his most renowned poem, “Spiritual Canticle.” Does that provide you with any inspiration, Libra? I’ll make a wild guess and speculate that maybe you’re in a tough situation yourself right now. It’s not even 1 percent as tough as Saint John’s, though. If he could squeeze some brilliance out of his predicament, you can, too.

SCORPIO (Oct 23–Nov 21): The American naturalist John Burroughs (1837–1921) traveled widely and wrote 23 books.

“I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think,” he testified, “all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.” Let’s make that longing for abundance serve as your rallying cry during the next two weeks, Scorpio. According to my analysis of the astrological omens, you have a cosmic mandate to push to the limits—and sometimes beyond—as you satisfy your quest to be, see, and do everything you love to be, see, and do.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22–Dec 21): Punk icon Henry Rollins did an interview with Marilyn Manson, rock and roll’s master of

the grotesque. It’s on YouTube. The comments beneath the video are rife with spite and bile directed toward Manson, driving one fan to defend her hero. “I love Marilyn Manson so much that I could puke rainbows,” she testified. I think you will need to tap into that kind of love in the coming days, Sagittarius: fierce, intense, and devotional, and yet also playful, funny, and exhilarating. You don’t necessarily have to puke rainbows, however. Maybe you could merely spit them.

CAPRICORN (Dec 22–Jan 19): If you want to know a secret, I talk less crazy to you Capricorns than I do to the other signs. I tone down my wild-eyed, goddessdrunk shape-shifting a bit. I rarely exhort you to don an animal costume and dance with the fairy folk in the woods, and I think the last time I suggested that you fall in love with an alien, angel, or deity was… never. So what’s my problem? Don’t you feel taboo urges and illicit impulses now and then? Isn’t it true that like everyone else, you periodically need to slip away from your habitual grooves and tamper with the conventional wisdom? Of course you do. Which is why I hereby repeal my excessive caution. Get out there, Capricorn, and be as uninhibited as you dare.

AQUARIUS (Jan 20–Feb 18): Germany’s Museum Ostwall displayed a conceptual installation by the artist Martin Kippenberger. Valued at $1.1 million, it was called “When It Starts Dripping from the Ceiling.” Part of it was composed of a rubber tub that was painted to appear as if it had once held dirty rainwater. One night, while the museum was closed, a new janitor came in to tidy up the premises. While performing her tasks, she scrubbed the rubber tub until it was “clean,” thereby damaging the art. Let this be a cautionary tale, Aquarius. It’s important for you to appreciate and learn from the messy stuff in your life—even admire its artistry—and not just assume it all needs to be scoured and disinfected.

PISCES (Feb 19–March 20): In her novel White Oleander , Janet Fitch suggests that beauty is something to be used, “like a

bucketloads more (or place your own) online at

SCC BIO/ENGINEERING/

PAX MAN

You’ve recognized me on several occasions. The first time in Chelan, then at PAX. I don’t even know your name. Who are you? want to get to know you, or at least know your name. Study sesh this quarter? When: Sunday, September 1, 2013. Where: PAX. You: Man. Me: Woman. #919971

I HAVE YOUR PHONE CASE

We met at bandits. On our way to Belltown you kept trying to ride my skateboard and falling down. And calling everyone we saw bitches. Then you got kicked out of the bar in Belltown for dry humping me. When: Sunday, September 1, 2013. Where: Bandits bar. You: Woman. Me: Man. #919970

BAD PHONE IN RADIOSHACK

ASIAN WOMAN TRADER

In the crown hill RadioShack, was the employee putting out tags, the one you didn’t talk to about your phone that wouldn’t charge that you hated. You certainly caught my eye When: Sunday, September 1, 2013. Where: Crown hill. You: Woman. Me: Man. #919968

SCOOTIN’ ON ROOSEVELT

Roosevelt way, @ 45th. Me: red BMW, You: Lil scooter and you had your cargo box open. I gave you a heads up and exchanged thanks. Hard to say hello with a full helmet on. Go for a ride sometime? When: Saturday, August 31, 2013. Where: Roosevelt and 45th. You: Woman. Me: Man. #919966

LFP BAR&GRILL

was wearing a denim vest and you asked about the buttons that were on it, we talked about punk for a lil bit. was meeting a friend and she stole me away. You’re cute, lets grab a beer:) When: Friday, August 30, 2013. Where: LFP Bar & Grill. You: Man. Me: Woman. #919965

74TH ST ALEHOUSE; DARK HAIR

You: white iPhone, blue shirt, left (without giving me your number!) in a small yellow Fiat(?). Me: blonde, talking with my oldest friend about my latest breakup, which suddenly didn’t seem so bad in light of your repeated glances/smiles. Drinks? When: Friday, August 30, 2013. Where: 74th St Alehouse. You: Man. Me: Woman. #919964

40 DAYS OF DATING, BAUHAUS

You were reading 40 days of dating. You told me to look it up and not to tell you the end. did! Then you left! I’m caught up! Let’s chat about it! When: Thursday, August 29, 2013. Where: bauhaus. You: Man. Me: Woman. #919963

SOUTHCENTER PACSUN WORKER

You had on a long dress, cute nose stud and were just gorgeous. We talked for a little about your work. But chickened out on asking for your number. Went back a few times but never saw you. When: Saturday, August 10, 2013. Where: Southcenter Mall Pacsun. You: Woman. Me: Man. #919962

BLONDE GIRL IN GREEN SHIRT

You were sitting waiting for the bus on Queen Anne Ave on a bench in front of Uptown Espresso while a bunch of pigeons started to fearlessly surround you to get at food(?) under the bench. U R Cute When: Thursday, August 29, 2013. Where: waiting for Rapid Ride. You: Woman. Me: Man. #919961

ZEITGEIST COFFEE

Hey there, I introduced myself today. And have been wanting to for the past year and a half. Your

RACE TO BE SLOWEST You asked ‘Why not?’ while getting on the elevator at REI and challenged you to a race. You definitely won the race to be slowest. Rematch sometime? When:

Beat Connection Beauty at Bumbershoot

You: blue top, black shorts, and the cutest, most amazing girl at Bumbershoot on Sat. At Beat Connection you were taking notes, and were probably Press. Please be braver than I was and say hi if you see this.

When: Saturday, August 31, 2013. Where: Bumbershoot, TuneIn Stage, Beat Connection. You: Woman. Me: Man. #919967

HAND PAINTED FUJI

CHIHULY

center. You: Man. Me: Woman. #919953

SAVAGE LOVE

Quickies BY DAN SAVAGE

Settle this for us, Dan? Which is the bigger ask: a one-time, once-in-a-lifetime threesome or regular (and elaborate) bondage sessions?

Ruling On Private Enquiry Required

Let me guess: Your partner is into bondage, ROPER, and you’re not. But you’ve been doing the hard work of tying him/her/ some-other-point-along-thegender-spectrum up for years… and the partner you’ve gone to great lengths to indulge (and restrain) regards your request for a once-in-a-lifetime threesome as too much to ask of him/ her/SOPATGS.

My ruling: Regular and intense bondage sessions are the bigger ask in terms of time and effort—particularly if I guessed wrong, ROPER, and you’re the person who’s getting tied up and bondage isn’t your thing—but a threesome, even just one, is a bigger ask emotionally for most people. While the former requires patience and endurance, the latter requires revisiting feelings about monogamy, sharing your partner with another person, etc. A smaller ask in terms of time and effort, yes, but a higher hurdle in fee-fee terms.

Now that he is—now that your feet are in play— he doesn’t have any issues getting and staying hard. And you don’t need the internet, TOES. You already have everything you need to support your boyfriend: the shit in your shoes (your lovely feet) and the shit between your ears (your supportive, sex-positive attitude). Have fun.

At my 50th birthday party, my older brother announced to everyone—including my new wife, our parents, and his teenage son—that I used to wear women’s clothes. I was humiliated and deeply hurt. I wanted to punch him and tell all his secrets. But I didn’t. Now I am planning to humiliate him on a special occasion of his. Childish, I know, but what else can I do to save face?

Devastated In Denver

I am a single hetero male. I had a female FWB for several months. She started dating a new guy, and he asked that she stop talking to me. That seems like a red flag. If he’d asked that we stop having sex, that would be one thing, but asking her to completely end the friendship seems like a warning sign of a controller. Am I overreacting? Should I say anything to her? Can’t Understand Lover’s Loss

Isolating a romantic partner from her family and friends is a red flag—that’s a classic abuser move—but asking a girl you’ve just started dating to cut off a friend she’s been fucking for months isn’t necessarily an abuser move. If he’s asking her to cut off non-FWB friends and family members in addition to you, CULL, then it’s a red flag and you should speak up. But if it’s only you, CULL, then it’s garden-variety insecurity on the new BF’s part. Let your ex-FWB know that you hope you can reestablish your friendship once her new BF is feeling more secure or her BF is out of the picture—whichever comes first.

Hetero, 44, female. I cannot orgasm when I have been drinking. But oh, baby, I orgasm fast and hard when I am sober. Why? Also, what is a bad mama jama? I have always wanted to know. Where Did O Go?

Shakespeare diagnosed your problem centuries ago: Boozing “provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.” As for “bad mama jama,” WDOG, I wasn’t familiar with the expression—first guess: a Martin Lawrence comedy about a male FBI agent who goes undercover as the first black woman to edit the Journal of the American Medical Association —but the Google tells me it’s a song about something or other.

My boyfriend and I have been having lots of problems. I am way too critical, and he has “erectile dysfunction,” aka issues getting and staying hard. But I recently discovered that he can get hard in an instant by licking my feet or using them to masturbate! This is great! He is finally opening up sexually! I want to explore this with him and let him know that his sexuality is a beautiful thing. But I can’t find information on the internet on how to support him. Advice?

Truly Over Erotic Slump

Your boyfriend doesn’t have “erectile dysfunction,” TOES, and never did. Your BF, like millions of other men who are presumed to have ED, simply wasn’t doing the things that turn him on

You could’ve saved face in the moment by laughing and saying something like this: “Yeah, I was quite the little pervert back then, bro, but weren’t we all at that age?” Your parents, your new wife, your brother’s son, et al. would’ve imagined your brother doing something much, much worse than wearing women’s clothes. But it’s too late for that comeback. ( Avoir l’esprit de l’escalier, right?) So my advice now: Pick a special, solemn occasion—your brother’s anniversary party, midnight mass, his son’s graduation—and show up in full fuckin’ drag.

I’m a 33-year-old lesbian. A year ago, my partner and I split up for five months. During that time, I dated a girl while my partner engaged in multiple sexual relationships—all with men. We ended up getting back together. One problem keeps me from moving on: I am the only woman my partner has ever been with, and I can’t stop thinking about the fact that she spent so much “quality time” with so many men while we were apart. I can’t help but wonder if she’s bi or straight! It also hurts that she feels like she can’t be honest with me about what she likes or wants or needs sexually. I should mention that we are a little over a year into our “new” relationship and we never have sex. I initiated sex a week ago—the first time we’ve had sex in four months!—and she came, I didn’t, and she didn’t care. Any time I try to talk to her about it, she gets defensive and tells me that she is attracted to me and insists she doesn’t like sex with guys. What do I do, Dan? Fixing To Explode

Thought experiment: Let’s pretend your girlfriend is a lesbian. (And why not? Your girlfriend does.) What kind of a lesbian GF is she? The kind of lesbian GF who doesn’t fuck you much, sucks in bed on those rare occasions when she does fuck you, and manipulates you emotionally to keep you from calling her on her doesn’t-fuck-you-much/ sucks-in-bed-when-she-does bullshit. So, FTE, your GF—lesbian or not—is selfish and inconsiderate and she’s making you miserable. DTMFA.

I’m a submissive gay boy into puppy play. And I have a huge crush on a certain sexadvice columnist and his crazy-hot husband. How do I get to be their owned puppy?

Boy After Real Kinks

Good news, BARK! Terry says we can get a puppy! But he says we’ll have to get our puppy fixed. That’s a big ask, I realize, but we wanna be responsible dog owners.

This week on the Savage Lovecast, Dan speaks with porn-industry director, performer, and producer Joanna Angel at savagelovecast.com.

mail@savagelove.net @fakedansavage on Twitter

JOE NEWTON

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Become a Pilates Teacher! Enroll now for our fall program Pilates Instructors are in high demand! We’ve been training career instructors since 2004. vitalitypilates.com/teach

DO YOU WANT TO STOP USING ALCOHOL?

The UW and the Seattle VA are looking for people ages 18 and over who use alcohol frequently, have problems with it, and want to stop using it. Non-veterans are welcome! Study is evaluating whether an investigational medication is effective at reducing alcohol craving and use. Study takes 16 weeks. Volunteers will be compensated. Call Ian at 206-277-4872.”

Get Strong and Live Long, Quantum Martial Arts! 964 Denny Way, Seattle. (206) 322-4799 Quantumseattle.org

WAFFLE BRUNCH

Support Big Brothers Big Sisters of Puget Sound. We offer free pickup of used vehicles in most cases running or not. Tax deductible. (206) 248-5982

LEGENDARY PIANIST AVAILABLE

Opened for Jeff Bridges! Clubs, Weddings, Parties

I’m Richard Peterson, 64 year old composer, arranger, and pianist. I’m available to play parties, weddings, clubs, shows, etc. $200/gig. Covers and originals. Please call 206-325-5271, Thank You! CD available. Must have piano|

SEX OFFENDER REGISTRATION GOT YOU DOWN?

We may be able to help to remove that requirement. The Meryhew Law Group, PLLC (206)264-1590 www.meryhewlaw.com

Trees Collective / Greenwood $30 off coupon inside the paper. Incredible selection, flowers, concentrates, edibles, clones, and more! 206-257-4407/ 1052 Greenwood Ave N

TEASE Pin-Up

Be a pin-up!

Featuring costumes, hair + makeup, and retouching. Women-owned and operated. www.teasepinup.com

Featuring sweet & savory wa es and other edibles, Bloody Marys, Mimosas & Bellinis! Sat/Sun 10a - 2p Fremont, across from the Rocket bthief.com Donate Your Car, Truck or Motorcycle