The Stranger Vol. 23, No. 2

THE BIGGEST ART & PERFORMANCE CALENDAR YOU’VE EVER SEEN! PLUS: THE LIES THAT ARTISTS TELL, THE CLOTHES THAT SALINGER WORE, THE FALLOUT OVER FOGTWANG, AND MORE! PULLOUT

BERING ON THE AGE OF CONSENT P.17

STUDY GUIDE

QUESTIONS FOR THE STRANGER , VOLUME 23, ISSUE 2

1. This week’s edition of The Stranger should feature a copy of A&P, the arts and performance quarterly written by The Stranger’s arts editors and various other contributors. If your copy of The Stranger doesn’t have an A&P inside of it, please detail what you think happened to your copy of A&P. (Examples: Shielding a homeless person from the elements, public restroom out of toilet paper—wait, The Stranger still has a print edition?)

2. Ostensibly to celebrate the artistic community in Seattle, BRENDAN KILEY has written an A&P piece about artists and performers who left Seattle for New York City or Los Angeles, those who did not do so, and how (in Kiley’s opinion) it no longer makes any difference. From A&P’s extensive arts calendars, choose six events upcoming in Seattle this fall that deserved the space that was given to this piece. Why are they more important than Kiley’s pointless article?

3. REBECCA BROWN and TRISHA READY have an argument in A&P about irony that would have been of much interest back when irony was a “hot topic” in 1999 and 2000. Read these pieces again, only this time, pretend they were written at the dawn of

McSweeney’s-era postmodernism. Does that make them more relevant? Why or why not?

4. Also in A&P, DAVID SCHMADER writes about the genre known as fogtwang as though it were already dead, when fogtwang is in fact a burgeoning musical genre just getting its start. Is Schmader’s jaded, beenthere-done-that tone intended to amplify the emotional content of the story? Or does Schmader really believe that he has seen and done everything of value? If so, why does he still work at a magazine purportedly devoted to finding and celebrating new works of art?

5. Meanwhile, back in The Stranger proper, DOMINIC HOLDEN argues that crime is not increasing in the downtown core. This piece is clearly designed to be an attack on mayoral candidate Ed Murray, who is arguing that the Seattle Police Department is not doing its job. If you have been a victim of crime in the downtown core during Mayor McGinn’s term in office, please write a persuasive letter to Holden asking him why he chose to diminish your personal experience for the purpose of scoring a political “point.” Be as clear and direct as possible. Remember to include a complimentary close to your letter!

MANAGER Kevin Shurtluff

CIRCULATION ASSISTANT Paul Kavanagh

PUBLISHER Tim Keck

LAST DAYS

The Week in Review BY

DAVID SCHMADER

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 2 Hello readers, and thank you, Cienna Madrid, for filling this space in our absence. The week starts as it will end: with ridiculous violence. Our first setting: the Little Buckaroos Reading Roundup Literary Fair in Lodi, California, a pro-literacy event where many children learned about the pleasures of reading and one child wound up shooting a police offi cer with his own gun. Details come from CBS News, which reports today that the police officer appeared at the fair to show kids the SWAT truck and other police gear. Everything was reportedly fine at the August 24 event until a little kid approached the officer and pulled the trigger of the Glock stashed in the officer’s thigh holster. “The bullet hit the officer’s leg,” reports CBS. “He was taken to the hospital for a minor injury and released.” As for the shooter (whom witnesses place between 6 and 8 years of age), the police are looking for him. As Lieutenant Sierra Brucia told CBS: “Hopefully, speaking

I BELIEVE THE CHILDREN ARE THE FUTURE OF MY CAREER AS A MURDERER

Dear teenagers at Bumbershoot: I loathe you. I understand that this is probably karma for being a horrible little shit teenager myself, but it doesn’t make you any more tolerable. “DO YOU WANT TO GO TO ANDREA’S AFTER?” you screamed to your friend, standing a foot away. Right in front of me. “I’M NOT SURE. MAYBE IF I CAN GET A RIDE?” When I suggested you ladies finish your conversation after the song was finished, you sneered so hard, I was afraid your face would tear. “Ummm, we’re at a concert.” Yes. Yes we are. And I would appreciate it if you shut the fuck up for a minute so I could hear the music. At least when you’re awkwardly dancing, I don’t have to listen to your insipid conversation about scoring some molly and then having to call your mom high. Go buy another pair of high-waisted shorts and practice your twerking—and stay the hell away from me.

to the child and the child’s parents to find out how they were able to get access to the officer’s gun, what the child’s intent may have been—we don’t know if it was accidental or unintentional.” (Confidential to Lieutenant Brucia: Those words are synonyms, and the child’s “motives” seem the least of your worries. Good luck.)

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 Speaking of problematic accidents, the week continues in upstate New York, where a marijuana farmer who’d set up snares to protect his crop wound up killed by his own trap. As the New York Daily News reports today, “Daniel Ricketts was almost decapitated Saturday after he drunkenly drove his quad bike into barely visible thin piano wire strung up around his plantation in Berne, Albany County. The 50-year-old was thrown from his Honda Foreman, his head almost entirely severed from his body. Hikers spotted his lifeless corpse and called cops… Officers removed the plants from the property and are now continuing their investigation into the tragedy.” (Confidential to the Daily News : “Lifeless corpse” is redundant.)

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 Nothing happened today, unless you count Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama’s ongoing international tour to rally support for a war with Syria.

DEAR GOD

Dear God,

Since You created both, You must know: Which are better, cats or dogs? Lauren, Greenwood

Dear Lauren,

First of all, it’s not a competition. All life is beautiful, and I shine the exact same Godly light on everything I created: the lilies of the field, the killing squads in Syria, Twitter comedian Rob Delaney, the rotting body of Ariel Castro. As for your query, the answer can be found by looking into the eyes of the animals in question. In a dog’s eyes, one finds warmth, faith, and endless devotion. In a cat’s eyes, one finds a clock ticking down the minutes until you’re dead and it can commence feasting on your corpse. (Also, dogs poop outside, which is how I planned it, despite the apostate habits of cats.)

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 The week continues in the Pacific Northwest, where this morning a motorcyclist was enjoying a ride along Interstate 5 through Chehalis when he was struck by lightning. Details come from a variety of sources starting with the Associated Press, which identifies the biker as a 59-yearold man from Tenino, who had just passed a car when the lightning struck. As witness Martin Zapalac told KOMO, both biker and bike suddenly “lit up,” after which the biker pulled over to the side of the highway and Zapalac drove him to a nearby gas station. After being treated locally for burns to his ears, the biker was transported to a Seattle hospital and listed in stable condition. For a closing statement, we turn to Chehalis firefighter Steve Emrich, who told the Centralia Chronicle: “It is amazing he is alive, walking, talking, and didn’t crash his motorcycle.” •• Meanwhile in San Antonio: After a battle that saw Christian extremists broadcasting fearmongering lies and city council member Elisa Chan caught on tape describing gay people as “disgusting,” today the San Antonio City Council voted 8–3 to approve a nondiscrimination ordinance protecting San Antonio’s LGBT citizens. “The newly passed ordinance amends sections of the city code that cover public accommodations, fair housing, city employment, city contracts, and appointments to city boards and commissions,” reports DallasVoice.com. “The changes will take effect immediately.” Congratulations San Antonio, and thank you Diego Bernal, the mix master/DJ who ran for San Antonio City Council, won a seat, and authored the ordinance that passed today. Celebrate with his wonderful For Corners , available for free download at diegobernal.bandcamp.com.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 In stupider news, the week continues with Kenneth Cole, the successful shoe designer who’s repeatedly revealed himself to be one of the world’s least successful users of social media . History buffs will recall 2011, when the bloody revolution in Egypt inspired Cole to tweet, “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online.” (“Mr. Cole deleted his message and apologized on Facebook,” the Daily Mail reminds us.) But no apologies have been forthcoming for Cole’s latest Twitter idiocy, in which he attempted to use the tragedy unfolding in Syria as a whimsical bouncing-off point for selling shoes: “‘Boots on the ground’ or not, let’s not forget about sandals, pumps, and loafers. #Footwear,” Cole tweeted yesterday afternoon. (“The phrase ‘boots on the ground’ is used by President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry in regards to the controversial deployment of American troops on Syrian soil,” explains the Daily Mail.) Cole’s defense, as shared with the Daily Mail last night: “For 30 years I have used my platform in provocative ways to encourage a healthy dialogue about important issues, including HIV/ AIDS, war, and homelessness,” Cole wrote. “I’m well aware of the risks that come with this approach, and if this encourages further awareness and discussion about critical issues, then all the better.” (Dear Kenneth Cole: The only thing your social media actions have encouraged is further awareness and discussion of your repellent self-absorption. Please pull your head out of your butt.)

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 Speaking of failed jokes, the week continues in Longmont, Colorado, where an 18-year-old tried to

jokingly prank a friend and wound up fatally shot. Details on the shooting that police called “unintended and extremely tragic” come from CBS, which says the scene played out around 8 p.m. last night after Premila Lal hid herself in a closet to surprise 21-year-old Nerrek Galley. “Family members said Lal and Galley were best friends and Lal… jumped out to scare Galley and he shot her after being startled,” reports CBS. Lal was rushed to a hospital where she was pronounced dead. Galley remains in Boulder County Jail on charges including reckless endangerment. Condolences to all.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 From a horrible fatal shooting, we move to a nonfatal stabbing. The victim of the stabbing: an unnamed 14-year-old boy who was tending a backyard bonfire at an Enumclaw house party when 21-year-old James Sweet stepped up to criticize the boy’s fire. As Seattlepi.com reports, “The boy told Sweet the fire would be bigger if he tossed Sweet into it—a joke, according to charging papers—which prompted an angry response from Sweet.” According to court papers, “Sweet told [the boy] that he should not mess with a Juggalo,” referencing the ostensibly badass, white-faced fans of joke rappers Insane Clown Posse, to which the boy “responded jokingly, ‘You mean those guys that wear makeup?’” Seattlepi.com continues: “Apparently outraged, Sweet went to his backpack, drew a knife, and stabbed the boy in the side of the chest, the detective told the court. Sweet then fled the area, and the boy was rushed to Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center.” Sweet has been charged with assault and remains jailed on $250,000 bail. The unnamed 14-yearold was treated for a lacerated liver and will live forever in Juggalo-mocking glory.

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

Get hit by lightning at THESTRANGER.COM/SLOG

The First Tests

Three Hurdles to Universal Preschool in Seattle

BY GOLDY

It was kinda-sorta amazing watching the Seattle City Council’s September 4 meeting on Council Member Tim Burgess’s proposal to make high-quality preschool available

and affordable to all of Seattle’s 3- and 4-year-old children. Don’t get me wrong—the meeting was as boring as any council meeting. But the fact that there is now a consensus that Seattle can no longer afford to wait on the legislature to get its shit together and properly fund early learning is both exciting and encouraging.

Anybody who reads The Stranger knows that we can be a bit obsessive about this issue—in fact, it’s become a litmus test in our election endorsements. Why? Because highquality early learning is the only education reform that everybody agrees works (higher academic performance, less truancy, and fewer dropouts). And we mean everybody. Even Republicans. The legislature just doesn’t have the collective will and/or the balls to raise the taxes necessary to pay for it.

Which is why we here in Seattle have to do it ourselves.

And that’s what makes Burgess’s leadership so important. Mayor Mike McGinn has highlighted universal preschool as a secondterm priority, but Burgess represents the “serious” wing of the council. And so the other serious people (you know, editorial boards, muni leagues, chambers of commerce) are going to have a tough time arguing that this is an investment we can’t afford.

The recommendations of the legislature’s bipartisan Early Learning Technical Workgroup (ELTW) provide a blueprint for a citywide program, but what are the obstacles

Out of Mind?

The Council Moving Nickelsville Out of Sight Did Not Help Homelessness

BY ANNA MINARD

I

n early summer, the fight over the homeless encampment Nickelsville in West Seattle was coming to a head at city hall, and it seemed possible that the rising tensions might force some new, creative options to arise in the city’s longrunning fight over how to serve a homeless population that far exceeds housing and shelter resources.

Instead, the Seattle City Council threw half a million dollars at the camp’s residents through a contract with Union Gospel Mission (UGM), told the camp to get lost, and then acted confused when it didn’t disappear.

Now Nickelsville has moved to three different sites (two sites in the Central District and another in Skyway, which is outside of town). By the time they packed up over Labor Day weekend, the camp’s numbers had doubled, from around 80

to implementing the state’s first municipal universal preschool program?

Raising the Money

San Francisco, with a population about a third larger than Seattle, spends about $80 million a year funding its preschool program. So figure about $50 million or so to run a similar program here.

The ELTW’s recommendations call for serving all 3- and 4-year-olds from families with income up to 250 percent of the federal poverty level, a formula that would have set a cutoff of $58,850 for a family of four in 2013. But because high-quality preschool is often too expensive for middle-class families, Burgess is proposing a sliding-scale fee schedule to make quality preschool affordable for all our families, regardless of income level. The generosity of our sliding scale will determine the final cost.

It

As to how to fund it, Burgess promises that “every option will be explored,” but the truth is, there aren’t that many revenue options. So voters should likely expect a dedicated property tax levy to go to the ballot, possibly as soon as November 2014.

high-quality programs. That means additional health and family resources for those who need it. But it also means classrooms run by trained and certified professionals. “The quality of the teacher is the single most important variable,” testified Seattle School Board director Michael DeBell.

will cost about $50 million a year to put 7,000 kids through preschool.

Paying Teachers Enough

At last week’s hearing, all of the witnesses testified to the importance of funding only

to around 150. All told, UGM says they served about 60 people with housing and travel vouchers, treatment programs, and other services. Which is nice, but when seven city council members signed a letter to the mayor announcing their plan, their stated goal was that “Nickelsville be closed” by September 1, not split up and moved around.

What Real Change director Tim Harris called “an exceptional moment” this June to rethink our approach to homelessness devolved into the realization that the anti-encampment wing of the council is “apparently incapable of critical thought on the issue,” says Harris now.

Carolyn Stauffer of the neighborhood group Highland Park Action Committee, which fought the city to address problems they saw with Nickelsville staying at the Highland Park site for so long without adequate services, says she’s “floored” by the mayor and council’s “lack of desire to be political leaders or to be problem solvers unless political heat is on.”

What happens now? Tent cities will persist. “Tent cities are tenacious because they’re meeting a survival need,” Harris says.

ELTW’s recommendations call for lead teachers to have BA degrees in early childhood education or a related field. But as Council Member Mike O’Brien repeatedly pointed out, preschool teachers often don’t make a living wage. This results in high turnover and poorquality classrooms. So if our program is to succeed, teachers must be paid an amount commensurate with the high level of training, certification, and competency we are demanding. Burgess believes that rigorous credentialing might address the compensation issue, but says the council will explore establishing minimum pay standards.

Can Cities Block Legal Pot?

Cities Pass Moratoriums Based on Bogus Excuses

BY BEN LIVINGSTON

Washington State voters overwhelmingly approved a legal cannabis industry last November, yet many cities and counties have since enacted moratoriums on pot businesses. City councils in Olympia, Kent, Sammamish, Puyallup, University Place, Sunnyside, Pacific, East Wenatchee, Mill Creek, Longview, and Millwood have enacted moratoriums, as have the councils in Clark, Pierce, and Yakima Counties. Council members say they fear the Feds will prosecute government employees who issue permits to pot shops. But this seems irrational. The federal government has never done this once in more than 15 years of locally licensed medical cannabis providers. And last month, the US Department of Justice went on the record saying it won’t interfere in legal pot experiments in Washington and Colorado. The justification for the local

Finding Buildings

DeBell emphasized that the Seattle School District is “not interested in becoming a dominant provider” of classrooms. That is because, thanks to ballooning enrollment (and the stupidly misguided rounds of school closures during DeBell’s tenure), the district simply does not have the space to house thousands of preschoolers. That means a majority of our children will be enrolled in programs run by independent providers—likely (but not necessarily exclusively) not-for-profit. It will take years to build and outfit facilities capable of handling about 7,000 additional preschoolers a year, so Seattle’s program would take a number of years to phase in, starting with the neediest children first. But it will be worth the wait to overcome these obstacles. For if we do it here, surrounding cities will surely follow. And once voters throughout the rest of the state see our children benefiting from high-quality preschool, perhaps they’ll finally push their own legislators to (gasp) raise the taxes necessary to pay for the services they need.

moratoriums looks like a charade, an attempt by politicians to nullify the will of the voters.

And they could get cities in trouble. While temporary moratoriums “are fine” while the state hashes out rules for the marijuana industry, according to Alison Holcomb, the ACLU lawyer who drafted the pot initiative, local governments will wade into legally dangerous waters if they try banning businesses outright. “Permanent bans invite expensive litigation,” she cautions. If an applicant receives a state license for a pot business but is denied a permit locally, based on such a ban, the person can sue under the new state law. She adds that state attorney general Bob Ferguson “has made it clear he is ready to defend the law.”

The state needs to intervene now. The liquor board should proactively engage uncertain city councils like this: (1) Explain cannabis zoning issues, such as keeping pot shops 1,000 feet from schools, (2) remind them that state law preempts cities from opting out of Initiative 502, and (3) tell them to act quickly. The Association of Washington Cities, a quasi-governmental agency, should advocate the same points.

The war is over, and cannabis won. Cities and counties need to recognize this and stop allowing their small-time politics to stand in the way of pot progress.

GEORGE PFROMM

SOURCES SAY

• “There’s only one ‘the tunnel,’” quipped Tom Rasmussen—who is a fanatic supporter of the $4.2 billion deep-bore tunnel, which is currently stalled—in a recent Seattle City Council meeting, when a colleague asked him to clarify which tunnel he was talking about.

• Earlier this week, the city council proclaimed that August 26, 2013, was “Women’s Equality Day” and urged the city to “celebrate the achievements of women.” How? By time-traveling two weeks into the past?

• In actually useful work, the council approved bills last week essential for creating a local bike share network. In 2014, Seattleites will likely be able to rent a bike at 50 stations.

• Washington State Court of Appeals judge Stephen J. Dwyer delivered an asswhooping at a September 6 hearing on the attempt to remove SeaTac’s $15 an hour minimum wage initiative from the November ballot. City of SeaTac lawyer Wayne Tanaka had barely opened his mouth in defense of a city ordinance that empowers a board with discretion to toss out signatures before Dwyer disparagingly demanded, “What is up with that goofy ordinance?” The three-judge panel quickly overturned a lower court decision, ordering SeaTac’s “Good Jobs Initiative” back onto the ballot.

• Press flacks working for state senator Rodney Tom, a Democrat who switched sides in the legislature this year to hand power to Republicans, sent reporters a “Q&A” video answering questions about transportation and education funding. To which Seattlepi.com’s Joel Connelly replied, “Why don’t you make the man available for question and answer sessions rather than sending working members of the press this kind of pre-packaged propaganda?” The press flack replied, “Sen. Tom is available for question-and-answer sessions with working members of the press all the time.” Nice work, Joel.

• In a move intended to block singlestory, strip-mall-style buildings on prime real estate, the city council this week unanimously passed minimum density legislation. The bill requires developers to build about half, at least, of the maximum allowable density in certain pedestrianoriented neighborhoods.

• Celebrating the one-year anniversary(ish) of Seattle’s paid sick leave ordinance on September 10, members of the Main Street Alliance of Washington, a coalition representing more than 2,500 small businesses, released a report that basically confirms that despite the business-killing socialist hellscape promised by paid sick leave opponents, business is still booming in King County. Seattle-specific business data won’t be available until next year, and almost half of the county’s accommodation and food service jobs, as well as 37 percent of its retail jobs, are located in Seattle. That said, “There were 7,200 more retail jobs and 3,200 more jobs in food services and drinking places in King County during the first seven months of 2013 than for the same period of 2012,” the report found.

APOCALYPSE TATTOO IS LOOKING FOR ANOTHER TATTOOIST. MINIMUM FIVE YEARS PROFESSIONAL TATTOO EXPERIENCE—WITH CLIENTELE PREFERRED. PLEASE EMAIL RESUME WITH PHOTOS OF YOUR WORKS AND YOURSELF TO: INFO@APOCALYPSETATTOO.COM.

Storewide mark downs on showroom samples, clearance, one-of-a-kinds, discontinued styles, and slightly damaged treasures. Including sectionals, chairs, dining, bedroom, occasional, accents, lighting, rugs, and more! Shop early for the

(9/11) Indefinite Detention without Due Process

(9/13) David Montgomery A Geological Perspective on Noah’s Flood

(9/13) Vedic Education & Development Academy presents Grand Violin Duo

(9/16) Erik Assadourian & Annie Leonard with Chip Giller Is Sustainability Still Possible?

(9/16) Amanda Lindhout ‘A House in the Sky’

(9/17) Standardized Testing in Our Public Schools

(9/17) Gabor Zovanyi ‘The No-Growth Imperative’

(9/18) City of Seattle Dept. of Planning & Development Planning Seattle’s Future

(9/18) A. Scott Berg A Biography of Woodrow Wilson

(9/19) Town Music Season Preview & Happy Hour with Joshua Roman (9/19) Town Music Roomful of Teeth

(9/19) Scott Berkun ‘The Year Without Pants’

(9/20) Peter Doherty Birdlife & Pandemics

(9/21 & 22) Saturday Family Concerts Caspar Babypants ‘Baby Beatles’

(9/23) Lucy Moore with Alice Shorett Stories from an Environmental Mediator (9/23) Bill McKibben The Education

Crime Is Not Actually Spiking Downtown

The city’s power brokers say crime is spiking. They say it’s a crisis. But data shows crime is mostly flat or down. Why are they trying to scare us? By Dominic

Holden

Mayoral challenger Ed Murray invited reporters to a press conference last week to roll out his new publicsafety agenda, partly in response to what he called a “public safety crisis.”

“It is a crisis of crime in the streets,” said the state senator, before pivoting, as politicians do during election years, to take a swing at his opponent. “The mayor says crime is down,” Murray said, when, in fact, “violent crime is up.”

But overall, crime dropped citywide 6.9 percent in the first seven months of this year compared to those same months last year, according to a city council analysis of violent crime and theft. Crime is down 12.4 percent since 2009. Murray is wrong about violent crime, too, which is down less than 1 percent since last year and down 6.5 percent since 2009. Those declines are even more pronounced when accounting only for serious violence, which is down 4 percent since last year and 9.5 percent since 2009, according to data from the Seattle Police Department.

And if you look at the seven policing beats covering what is considered downtown—including the retail core, the central business district, Belltown, the International District, Pioneer Square, and Lower Queen Anne— serious violent crime has dropped 5 percent since last year. If you include South Lake Union, it’s down 8 percent.

In fact, major crimes, as classified by the FBI’s uniform crime-reporting standards— including murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, larceny, and vehicle theft—are at their lowest levels in Seattle for 30 years.

So what is the “public safety crisis”?

Murray is echoing a meme that’s grown popular with the city’s power brokers this election season. A front-page headline of the Seattle Times last month warned of crime “spikes” downtown. The accompanying article attempted to debunk Mayor Mike McGinn’s recent comment that there is “a significant reduction in violent crimes downtown and throughout the city.” The same morning that paper hit the streets, Seattle City Council members Tim Burgess, Sally Clark, and Bruce Harrell published a lengthy blog post chiding the mayor and issued a detailed letter—including tables of crime data and bar graphs—that tried to show crime was, in fact, up a tick downtown. Both the Seattle Times and the council members began their pieces, sensationally, by linking the recent shooting of a Metro bus driver to street “disorder” (a term used to describe low-level offenses like inebriation, urination, and panhandling).

Jordan Royer at Crosscut recited the same talking point in a piece on the “dirty little secret of downtown safety” that linked the bus-

driver shooting to “chronic street disorder” in the opening sentences. The Seattle Times kept it up with an anecdotal article headlined “Downtown crime shocks New Yorker” (about a guy from New York who told Danny Westneat he was shocked by “the homelessness, mental illness, public urination, panhandling, drug use, and drug dealing” around First and Pike), and last weekend, the Seattle Times banged the drums again with an editorial titled “Downtown Seattle feels unsafe.”

The Seattle Times made this proclamation after examining four policing beats downtown—mostly the shopping district and waterfront—and a portion of First Hill. Their analysis found “violent crime in the retail core has basically held steady” for five years, while violent crime in the first seven months of this year “is up about 7 percent” over the same period last year.

But even that claim is misleading.

The Seattle Times didn’t include data from the beats in Belltown, Pioneer Square, or the International District—all parts of downtown with a history of crime problems. If they had, it would show that in Belltown, violent crimes including assaults actually dropped about 30 percent in the past four years, according to the city’s crime records. But that was left out of the reporting. Meanwhile, the Seattle Times factored in areas that are outside downtown, including Har-

borview Medical Center on First Hill, where crimes from around the region are reported even though they didn’t occur at that location. Finally, the analysis also included simple assaults—historically, uniform crime tracking considers major crime to include aggravated assault but not simple assault.

In doing so, the Seattle Times omitted data that would belie their point and included data that didn’t really represent downtown. It was an apples-to-oranges comparison. It was cherry-picking data. It was bananas. It was a whole fruit bowl.

There are other reasons why this trope is overblown right now:

• More People Are Downtown: In its State of Downtown Economic Report for 2013, the Downtown Seattle Association reported the residential population of downtown has grown by 24 percent since 2000, outpacing the 10 percent growth for the city overall. Downtown also now has a record 202,222 employees (up 10 percent from just three years ago). More people are downtown than ever—so the fact that serious crime is fairly steady (up in a few places but mostly down) suggests the per capita crime rate may actually be dropping amid the downtown population surge. This isn’t a crisis; it’s a victory. West Precinct police captain James Dermody points out that crime rates are always “fluid,” and “we will always find crime

downtown,” but council members say this thinking is wrong. “The notion that we must tolerate some level of crime is misguided,” wrote Burgess, Clark, and Harrell. They insisted, “We must start from the premise that crime on our streets can always be prevented or reduced.” But if tolerating any crime is misguided, claiming that it can “always be prevented or reduced” is ludicrous. Not all crime can be prevented—it just can’t—and this argument is nearly comical in its political framing intended to cast any reasonable discussion about the issue as pro-crime.

• More Police Are Walking Around Downtown: A few years ago, the SPD redeployed dozens of officers to foot patrols, including downtown. Captain Dermody reports that in the West Precinct (which includes all of downtown), officers made 74 percent more community contacts in the first half of this year than last year. Not coincidentally, they are documenting more crime. That’s not a sign that things are getting worse, as critics suggest. It seems to show cops are busting more of the right people. What could be our best evidence that they are being effective— making arrests—is being twisted to say that crime is up.

• Linking “Street Disorder” to Violent Crimes Is Wrong: There has been a popular idea in American policing for the last 20 years that cracking down on street disorder will prevent serious crimes—the broken windows theory. But New York University sociologist David Greenberg upturned that notion this year. His study released in January was the most comprehensive of its type, using more granular precinct data and controlling for variables, and it found no causal link between increasing low-level misdemeanor arrests in New York City during the 1990s and the drop in felonies, such as murder, robbery, and assault. In reexamining that city’s crime data from 1988 to 2001—when felonies also decreased in cities that didn’t use this strategy—Greenberg found “most of the decline in these three felonies had other causes.” Katherine Beckett is a leading social scientist who studies street crime here at the University of Washington. She says, “This study by Greenberg shows… that cracking down on disorder does not necessarily lead to reductions in serious crimes. Forcing a law-enforcement tactic on those populations is very harmful in that it does not adequately address the

MANUFACTURING A CRISIS Ed Murray (right) said we need to stop a crime surge and elect him mayor. Two campaign endorsers, City Attorney Pete Holmes (left) and Council Member Bruce Harrell, backed him up.

Back to School Guide

crime problem.” Moreover, Beckett says, linking nonviolent addicts and drunks, the sorts typically associated with street disorder, to truly violent criminals creates needless fear in the public mind.

Before I say anything else: Sometimes downtown is unsafe and feels unsafe.

That bus driver really was shot last month. A 16-year-old boy was stabbed on Second Avenue last Friday night. Meanwhile, there’s been a 60 percent spike in domestic violence cases in Seattle over the last four years, which the SPD says it cannot explain. Many tourists are also appalled by vagrants quaffing beer in Victor Steinbrueck Park, and locals feel uneasy about street kids getting high in Westlake Park. These are problems that can be—and absolutely should be—mitigated. In particular, I have advocated heavily the last three years that we appoint more foot patrols to the city’s 5 percent of hotspot blocks (like around Third and Pine), which account for one quarter of all crime in Seattle, and expand programs that target high-rate offenders for treatment. More park rangers and public restrooms would also be helpful. The problem is that the city has limited money.

“If someone feels fearful, it doesn’t matter that crime is down 10 percent,” says Captain Dermody, citing the double-digit drop in major crimes in his jurisdiction over the last year. Nonetheless, the “public safety crisis” is a manufactured crisis. Crime is not spiking. To the extent that the public is feeling panicked about it, it’s because supposedly credible voices are manipulating data and outright lying to make people panicked. After all, they’re linking so-called street disorder with shootings and making blanket claims that “violent crime is up.” And their alarming message is being propagated just as the election approaches.

It absolutely must be mentioned that the people behind the “public safety crisis” meme are the same people trying to oust McGinn. The Seattle Times has opposed McGinn for five years and has endorsed Murray; the three council members who signed that letter either ran against McGinn this year or considered running against him (they also coordinated that letter with the Seattle Times story); Jordan Royer’s father, former mayor Charles Royer, is the public face of a PAC trying to elect Murray; and Murray, obviously, is running for mayor. The message that the city is dangerous and we need to get tough on crime is the world’s oldest political trope—and it’s being used by people who want to regain access to the mayor’s office.

“Change in leadership is the only way to make change, and that is by electing a new mayor,” Murray told reporters. Of course it is.

Murray, the council, and the Seattle Times don’t advocate solely arresting our way out of the problem. They also advocate that we continue with the Center City Initiative Roundtable, a coalition of lefty political groups, downtown business, and law enforcement that figures out methods to target major offenders and provide social services. They support a Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion project that directs offenders into treatment and breaking up drug markets.

The thing is, so does McGinn. These are all programs that have grown under Mayor McGinn’s watch. Even Murray’s public-safety platform is, by and large, indistinguishable from what the mayor is already doing.

Lisa Daugaard, who is deputy director of the Defender Association and sits on the roundtable, says the mayor does not deserve full credit for bringing together unlikely bedfellows to collaborate on downtown crime. But she is adamant that the unity between warring factions during his term is an unparalleled accomplishment for Seattle poli-

tics (bringing together homeless advocacy groups and business lobbies, for example).

“Campaigns are dangerous times, because people who don’t actually disagree with a policy agenda of a particular candidate may posture as if they do to create a wedge to advance their chosen candidate’s chances,” she says.

“But that is unhealthy for us as a community right now. Street-level drug use is an issue, but confounding that with violent crime is a sure way of coming up with the wrong solution. We have unprecedented consensus about how to tackle difficult problems, and the last thing we need is for that to be missed in the discussion.”

We’ve heard reasonable discussions about downtown crime drowned out by chatter about street disorder before. Council Member Burgess proposed an aggressive solicitation bill in 2010 that would penalize panhandlers with a citation, in addition to the criminal penalty for aggressive begging already on the books. The problem was, a survey of downtown residents showed they believed street disorder was already the number-one area where downtown was showing improvement, and the city’s human rights commission said Burgess’s proposal would violate human rights standards. McGinn vetoed that bill. But now, if Burgess and other backers of that legislation (which includes the Seattle Times) can stoke fear of growing street disorder—they say it’s linked to shootings—people will believe the problem is more serious and support another bill. And this strategy seems to be working. When I asked Murray at his press conference if he would approve a similar bill as mayor, adding a fine for aggressive panhandling, he said he would consider it. “That is something that has to be looked at,” Murray said.

In July, Murray said unequivocally that he would oppose legislation that adds new penalties for panhandling. But Murray has been talking out of both sides of his mouth on this issue. At his press conference, he lamented that the city didn’t have more funding for mental health (which the legislature slashed by $24 million in 2011, when Murray was the budget chair in the senate). Police are also grappling with more convicts who are being released early from probation and who have a high tendency to re-offend. That results from another $9.4 million in cuts for supervising convicts under Murray’s tenure.

Those budget cuts aren’t really Murray’s fault, and I point that out because, likewise, an anomalous blip in crime in a few segments of downtown isn’t McGinn’s fault, either. However, McGinn may be faulted for folding the Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault Prevention division into other human services units.

But encouraging people to be afraid will just make this problem worse: It drives people out of downtown (the fewer people downtown, the fewer eyes on the street and the more actual crime will rise). This fearmongering also encourages people to worry that vagrants who piss in the alley are violent criminals (the best research shows they aren’t), and that we need to find more ways to ticket and arrest them. But the key to making downtown safer is not by bringing the hammer of the law down on people who don’t have anywhere to go to the bathroom. There are things we can do that are more collaborative: allocate more money for police foot patrols and continue the Center City Initiative.

But we do all those things by having an honest dialogue, by bringing more people to downtown, and we do it by bringing people together and focusing on data-driven discussion. This “crime crisis” is the opposite. This is a divisive political ploy based on misrepresentation of the context and facts. We’re not going to find a solution if we’re being dishonest about the problem.

Information Session

Thursday, September 12 • 12 to 1 p.m.

Jet City Animal Clinic

Lunchbox Laboratory

Pumpkin carving contest, dinner, full bar & our famous chocolate fountain. Free to Members. THE LUXE 5220 ROOSEVELT

AGE OF CONSENT

Psychologist Jesse Bering on What the Law Says Versus What the Science Says

If the supermodel Kate Upton were to walk into my office right now and tie me to my chair before doing a slow striptease and depositing her vagina in my face, I think I’d require therapy for years. But if this identical event were to happen to my heterosexual brother or to one of my lesbian friends, I suspect their brains would process such a “tragic” experience very differently. And my not-very-amused sister-inlaw would see my brother’s encounter with said vagina differently still.

A universally objective reality simply doesn’t exist in the sexual domain; what’s harmful to me isn’t necessarily harmful to you, and vice versa. It will change as soon as I put this comma right here, but as of this very moment, there are exactly 7,088,343,858 people on the planet. If all but one of these individuals were to experience harm in exactly the same way from a certain sex act, that solitary person is nevertheless just as right

The sexually abused child has essentially been implanted with a psychological time bomb. There’s a marginal chance that it won’t detonate at all, but if it does, it’s often catastrophic.

(or just as wrong) as all the others combined. This is because there’s no “correct” way to experience a sex act, only individual differences in subjective realities. It may be a moot point, since it’s not logic that guides culture but instead sheer social mass shouldering into it with brute force, but nonetheless 7,088,343,857 shared subjective realities do not add up to a single objective

fact. What was harmful to them was not harmful to him, and that, as they say, is that.

That’s all well and good, you might point out, but there are issues here far more serious than two people disagreeing over whether, say, getting tied up and forced into Kate Upton’s crotch is sexy or cruel. Take sex between adults and minors, for instance. Is harmfulness “subjective” with that, too? Well, yes and no. This is a dark and treacherous path that we’re about to embark on, so it’s all the more important for us to be guided by the light of clear thinking. There’s no doubt whatsoever that children who are sexually abused are often irreparably damaged—and not only psychologically but, sadly, physically as well. As the recent Montana case of a teenage girl who committed suicide after a 49-year-old teacher sexually assaulted her (for which he was sentenced to a measly month in jail) strongly attests, denying that children can face

JAMES YAMASAKI

grievous, debilitating, and permanent harm from being violated by manipulative adults in this way is just asinine. It flies in the face of scientific data showing such trauma, for many, is all too real. Yet, an inconvenient fact is that research has also revealed that not every minor who has a sexual encounter with an adult is traumatized.

One important thing to highlight here is that when it comes to sex, there’s a world of difference between a 6-year-old and a 16-year-old. (The term “pedophilia” has become so misused that it’s now difficult to reclaim its proper scientific meaning from the vernacular, but this area of what the sexologist John Money called the “chronophilias” gets fairly complex.) A 6-year-old child may subjectively experience little, if any, harm at the time of being molested by an adult, but that doesn’t mean significant damage hasn’t been done. As the child grows older, his or her interpretation of the experience on coming to understand what really happened may become increasingly traumatizing. One way to think about it is that the sexually abused child has essentially been implanted with a psychological time bomb that may or may not go off down the road. There’s a marginal chance that it won’t detonate at all, but if it does, it’s often catastrophic. This can also be the case with teens (many of us have regrets about being taken advantage of when we were young and naive, sexually or otherwise), but for a 16-year-old who has hormonally fueled desires that are just as intense as those of the adult he’s having an encounter with, it’s a very different can of emotional worms.

The more controversial “yes” part of my response to the question of whether the harm in such sexual encounters is subjective, therefore, refers to the fact that for some individuals looking back on their childhood or adolescent experiences, the event was not harmful

to them. For whatever reason, their bombs never went off. Whether or not we have a hard time understanding their perspective, there are indeed people out there who feel this way. (And some who, believe it or not, even view their sexual encounter with an adult positively.) The “no” part of my response, by contrast, relates to the fact that the child’s sexual subjectivity inevitably changes as he or she grows older. To say that a 6-year-old who doesn’t understand what’s happening to her isn’t being harmed because she appears to be

be. Bruce Rind, for example, an expert on the study of “intergenerational sexuality,” set off some explosions of his own in the late 1990s when he published a set of highly contentious (to put it mildly) findings to this effect. The best predictor of subjective harm—past, present, and future—he found, is the minor’s lack of consent. Obviously, there’s consent in the legal, underage sense of the term, but there’s also consent as a mental state (basically, the feeling of wanting to do something) that occurs regardless of age. Rind was more

Speaking only for myself, I suspect that had a very adult Mr. April 1991 stepped out of the calendar that hung in my sister’s dorm room, the last thing that my 15-year-old self would have felt was harmed.

just fine otherwise, or even that she “likes it” (as deluded child molesters sometimes claim), is to miss the point entirely of these delayed, and potentially devastating, emotional injuries that may affect her later. If we were to follow up with this little girl in 20 years, we might find a woman damaged beyond repair by the memories of the very events that were inconsequential to her at the age of 6. In other words, the bomb has gone off. So, again, although harm may not be inevitable in every case, what is inevitable is the very high risk of shattering a child’s life for the sake of one’s own immediate sexual gratification. When it comes to adolescents’ sexual experiences with adults, where the distance between the subjective present of the child and his or her subjective future has grown narrower, some researchers believe that the damage isn’t as significant as it’s often assumed to

interested in this latter, psychological meaning. In 1998, he and his coauthors, Philip Tromovitch and Robert Bauserman, managed to put the American Psychological Association (which is composed mostly of academic, research-oriented clinical psychologists) in the rather awkward position of having to publicly acknowledge that not every incident of an adult having sex with a juvenile is harmful. Actually, “awkward” may not be entirely the right way to describe it—it was more that the APA locked horns with every wrathful, powerful politician in the country for defending this very politically incorrect view.

It all started when Rind and his colleagues published a study in the association’s flagship journal, Psychological Bulletin. The authors argued that it makes little sense to refer to something as “child sex abuse” if, as an adult, the individual doesn’t personally feel harmed

and if his or her harm can’t be detected by any known empirical measures. The most delicate issue for the APA was that this wasn’t just the authors’ personal and controversial opinion, but a statement based on scientific findings. Rind’s study was a meta-analysis of previously published data on the sexual histories of a whopping 35,303 college students from around the world. One thing that set his project apart from most others in the field of child sex abuse was that the data being evaluated wasn’t from clinical samples of adults who’d sought help for ongoing problems stemming from their being raped, molested, or otherwise sexually exploited as children or teenagers, but from random samples of college students. And what Rind and his coauthors found by using a large nonclinical sample was that the majority of those people who reported having had consensual encounters with adults as minors were, at the time of testing, no more likely to have pervasive psychological problems than those who hadn’t.

Now, it’s extremely important to bear in mind that for the most part, these mentally healthy individuals weren’t those who’d been subjected to terrible abuses as children. More often they were those who, as adolescents, had consensually (again, in the psychological sense of that term) “fooled around” in various ways with someone on the other side of the legal line (wherever that line had been drawn at the time, since, remember, it was an international sample and, as we’ll be examining in detail shortly, the legal age of consent varies by country).

I never had any such experience with an adult while growing up, so it’s hard for me to know for certain. But speaking only for myself, I suspect that had a very adult Mr. April 1991 stepped out of the calendar that hung in my sister’s dorm room that year, ripped, hairless legs beaded with river water, his

PHOTO: Jeff Shanes

unkempt hair plastered against his forehead and glistening clavicles, wearing nothing but wild green eyes and a tapioca-colored fishnet loincloth (my vague recollection), and proceeded to gently guide me on the ways of man-on-man love, the last thing that my 15-year-old self would have felt was harmed. I only wish I had such a memory to look back on now. On the other hand, had he forced himself on me, I could be a quivering pile of jelly right now. But the point is that even when it comes to illegal sex with a minor, the likelihood of psychological harm is reduced by the minor’s consenting mental state.

You might think that Rind and his fellow investigators had a dark agenda of some sort (and certainly many critics have accused them of such), but in fact they were exceedingly careful to note that their findings shouldn’t be used to implement any policy changes to existing laws concerning underage sex. Rather, their intention was only to call into question some widely held assumptions about the universal harmfulness of such developmental experiences.

ods and motives, and others, in turn, questioning their motives for questioning his. Given the brouhaha, scholars on both sides of the debate left things for a while on a “Let’s just agree to disagree” note (which essentially meant cursing each other under their breath and taking a break from duking it out in public). But in 2006, the psychologist Heather Ulrich replicated the 1998 findings, concluding cautiously that the presumption of universal harm from juveniles having a sexual encounter with an adult is too simplistic to account for the variance in people’s subjective interpretations of their own life experiences. Now, ostensibly, there’s no good way for one to lean on this hot-button issue. If you conclude from Rind’s findings that having sex with minors is “sometimes okay,” then to many people you’ll sound like an advocate of child molestation. Yet if you still get red in the face and believe that anyone having sex with a minor is manipulating an innocent child, then you’re glossing over all the gray areas. Much of the disagreement, I think, stems from our failure to define our terms.

But then the conservative radio talk-show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger (whose PhD, incidentally, is in physiology, not psychology, not that she’s ever let that get in the way of giving mental-health advice with a side of Old Testament gloom) somehow got wind of it and proceeded to stir up a bit of a hornet’s nest by complaining about Rind’s “junk science” and pedophilia apologia to listeners of her nationally syndicated program. That incendiary development, combined with NAMBLA’s (the notorious North American Man/Boy Love Association) gushing over Rind’s findings on its website, quickly escalated into outright chaos. Before long, some members of Congress learned of the study (whether that was from being regular listeners of Schlessinger’s show or from being loyal followers of NAMBLA is hard to say).

By the spring of 1999, Alaska, California, Illinois, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania had passed official resolutions executively condemning Rind’s scientific findings.

On July 12 of that same year, in an incident without precedent in the history of psychology, the US House of Representatives convened to establish Resolution 107, in which 355 members of the House (all of whom were even less qualified than Dr. Laura Schlessinger to evaluate a study in psychological science) legislatively lampooned Rind’s empirical work by declaring—data be damned—that any and all sexual relations between minors and adults were categorically abusive and harmful. Just a few weeks later, the Senate passed this anti-Rind resolution by a unanimous “Hear! Hear!” voicevote margin of 100 to 0. (No senator would dare to go against the grain and kiss any future political aspirations good-bye by being known as the one pervert voting in favor of Rind’s findings.) One of the few politicians to abstain from voting on the study was Representative Brian Baird, a Democrat from the state of Washington who boasted a PhD in clinical psychology. Baird wanted to go on record as saying that out of the 535 members of the House and Senate, only 10 had actually bothered to read Rind’s article. The advisory board members of the APA, meanwhile, butted heads with these suits in Washington, DC, over the fallout. After all, the former were in the business of science, not moralizing. They staunchly defended the Psychological Bulletin editor’s decision to publish the study in their prestigious outlet. Moreover, the study had been carefully vetted—and ultimately recommended for acceptance—by other experts in the field.

The Rind data remains polarizing, with some researchers still questioning his meth-

When, exactly, does “childhood innocence” end? Most of us have some vague sense of once having had it—or at least something like it—but how does one quantify or even standardize such an abstract construct? At what precise moment in time, for instance, did you lose yours? Perhaps you never had it, or perhaps you never lost it.

Few of us are so naive as to believe that it happens at the stroke of midnight, dividing childhood from legal adulthood, especially given that such a line is culturally arbitrary. There are a lot of uncomfortable philosophical problems with age-of-consent laws that continue to lead to people, including teenagers themselves who have sex with someone just a few years younger, being treated unfairly in our society. It’s only when it comes to sex that on some mandated calendar day the legal concept of “consent” changes so abruptly from being a chronological state to a mental state. Having sex with a person before the bell tolls on that day, even if it’s the minor who makes the first move and you’re but the target of his or her passionate underage desires, will change you abruptly into a criminal sex offender. Whatever was going on inside the minor’s head is usually seen as inconsequential.

In other legal contexts, however, minors are tried as adults precisely because of what was going on inside their heads at the time. A 16-year-old boy who rapes a woman after she rejects his solicitous advances would typically be punished as an adult. But if a woman encourages a solicitous 16-year-old boy after he tries to kiss her, he’d be regarded by criminal prosecutors as a child victim. In other words, legally, the minds of minors matter only when they’ve caused adults sexual harm; their mental states are inadmissible in court when they cause adults sexual pleasure. I don’t know about you, but to me there’s an unsettling tension in the logic between these contrasting scenarios.

Age-of-consent laws are admirably meant to protect adolescents from being sexually exploited by adults (and there are, sad to say, plenty of the latter for parents to be concerned about). But there are problems with a hard-line approach to this emotional immaturity argument as well. One might be stig-

matized for doing so, but it’s perfectly lawful to have sex with consenting adults who have the intellectual and emotional capacity of an underage child. To take a rather extreme example, the average mental age of an adult with Down syndrome is 8, yet unlike having sex with a 17-year-old equipped with a threedigit IQ, being with someone with this or any other developmental delay isn’t a crime, so long as the person is 18 years of age or older and “consents.” So if we’re really trying to protect the vulnerable from sexual harm due to their mental immaturity, then using chronological age, rather than mental age, to draw the legal line seems a somewhat odd way to go about it. I can assure you after an early dating mishap with one particular—to put it both kindly and mildly—intellectually blunt grown man, these are often orthogonal measures.

Recent work by the cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore shows in fact that there’s no hard-and-fast threshold at which a person crosses over into a clear brain-based psychological adulthood. The prefrontal cortex, arguably the neuroanatomical region most relevant to sexual decision making due to its executive role in longterm planning abilities, empathy, and social awareness, doesn’t stop growing until we’re in our mid-30s. For some, it’s still developing well into the fifth decade of life.

Those who want to have sex with minors often cite in their defense the cultural arbitrariness of ages of consent. But they’re at least right about that, and these numbers are in perpetual flux even within cultures. The first such age-restricting statute, Westminster I, appeared about seven centuries before the popular TV series To Catch a Predator first aired, in the year of our Lord 1275, under the heading of a broader rape law in England. According to this new legislation, any man who dared to “ravish” a “maiden within age,” with or without her consent, was guilty of a misdemeanor. English legal scholars interpret the phrase “within age” to mean the age of marriage, which at the time was 12. Had the man been married to this same 12-year-old girl, in other words, this agebased rape statute wouldn’t have applied. In the centuries that followed, similar edicts meant to protect children (namely girls) from sexual abuse or exploitation by adults (namely men) started to dust the globe. And wide variations in the age of consent are written across this historical landscape.

In the 16th century, for example, the North American colonies adopted from Britain the age of 10 as the appropriate cutoff, and this remained in the formal legislatures of 37 US states until long after the Civil War. Of the other existing states in the 1880s, only nine had by then decided that the “advanced age” of 12 was probably a more reasonable number. (One state, Delaware, had even lowered its cutoff to a mind-boggling 7.) Only in the late 19th century was the age of consent raised to 16 throughout most of America, a concession by the social reformers who had spearheaded the campaign and had initially sought to have it changed nationwide to 18, which they’d largely accomplish by 1920. Some in the growing feminist movement even hoped to raise it to 21, the age at which women could legally inherit property. Today, each state has its own numerous and complex series of clauses dealing with factors such as age differences between parties and the nature of specific sexual acts, but general ages of consent presently range from 15 (in Colorado only) to 18.

Tidal changes were happening with Europe’s age-of-consent laws over this long time span as well. With the Enlightenment really coming into bloom in the 18th century, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential ideas on childhood spread throughout

France and beyond. His portrayal of children as social tabulae rasae, or “blank slates,” lasted well into the Napoleonic era and replaced the archaic notion of kids as adults in miniature. Inspired by Rousseau, public sentiment came to hold that children were intrinsically pure and became tainted only by the corrupting influence of society. Rousseau also marks the dawn of developmental psychology and the implementation of age-segregated education. Children and teenagers were now seen as having qualitatively different kinds of minds from grown-ups, marching through what Rousseau believed was a universal pattern of cognitive and emotional stages. (Development wasn’t just a matter of acquiring more and more facts, in other words, but the very way in which one processes information and perceives the world changes over time as well.) Yet even at the peak of this radical new moral Enlightenment, the sexual readiness of children was, strangely enough, apparently seen as a separate issue. The age of consent in France during this whole time was a mere 11, getting bumped up to 13 only in the year 1863.

By the late 19th century, 13 had also been chosen as the carnal threshold in other European nations, including Portugal, Switzerland, Spain, and Denmark. Today, Spain is the only country in the region to keep 13 as its age of consent, with other nations variously lifting theirs to 14, 15, or 16, at most. Deplorable tales of child prostitution during the industrial revolution spurred moral reformers in England and Wales, meanwhile, to raise the age of consent across the British Isles from 13 to 16, a social cause to combat child exploitation that had also reverberated in the American age-of-consent campaign mentioned earlier.

Similarly wobbly views on sex and adolescents—or rather sex with adolescents—are on profligate historical display elsewhere. It goes in the opposite direction, too. The age of consent in 1920s Chile was 20, but now it’s 16. A century ago in Italy, it was 16, too. But today it’s 14 there. Overall, studying the numbers in even the most contemporary international age-of-consent table will give you the impression that you’re looking at a flurry of seemingly random digits between 12 and 21 (a sizable range): It’s 13 in Argentina, 18 in Turkey, 16 in Canada, 12 in Mexico, 20 in Tunisia, 16 in Western Australia, 15 in Sweden, and so on. “More than 800 years after the first recorded age of consent laws,” writes the historian Stephen Robertson, “the one constant is the lack of consistency.”

Just as when we’re assessing religions with conflicting theologies, we can draw only two possible conclusions from Robertson’s observation: Either some societies have the one true age of consent and every other has therefore got it wrong, or any given society’s age of consent is based on what its citizens have simply chosen to believe about human sexuality and psychological development. And similar to what any objective analysis of competing religious beliefs would force us to conclude, there’s no evidence that the former is the case for cultural variations in age of consent laws (that there is “one true age”) and every reason for us to conclude the latter is in fact what we’re dealing with.

JESSE BERING is a psychologist and frequent Savage Love guest expert. This essay is excerpted from his forthcoming book, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us, to be published October 8 by Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright 2013 by Jesse Bering.

book

Suffering from terrible anal pain? Does it hurt to go to the bathroom? You may have an anal fissure. (We’re completely serious and may be able to help)

You may qualify for a research study of an investigational cream. All study related medication and treatment will be provided at no cost. You do not need health insurance to participate. If eligible, you will be compensated for time and travel.

To find out if you qualify, email VEN307@ventrusbio.com call 855-4-PAINAF (855-472-4623) or visit www.clinicalstudysites.com

STRANGER SUGGESTS

Nellie McKay

MUSIC

The last time I saw Nellie McKay live, she was doing a manic one-woman musical about convicted 1950s murderer Barbara Graham—she has another show where she plays Rachel Carson. I left the theater convinced that I would never again be in the same room with as brilliant and talented a human being. Now she’s touring for her latest album, Home Sweet Mobile Home She’s a wacked-out combo of syrupy sweet and totally deranged, she’s smart and funny as hell, and she clearly loves the stage. Don’t miss her live. (Jazz Alley, 2033 Sixth Ave, jazzalley.com, 7:30 pm, $24.50, all ages) ANNA MINARD

Maria Bamford

Maria Bamford has been working her ass off to be your new favorite comic since at least 2004, when she toured America as part of the Comedians of Comedy tour. In addition to being super-funny, she’s also superduper weird—her 2012 comedy special The Special Special Special was recorded in her parents’ living room, with her parents as the only audience. Tonight, after a year that saw her triumph as Arrested Development’s DeBrie, Bamford brings her brilliantly nutty standup to town. (Neptune Theater, 1303 NE 45th St, stgpresents.org, 8 pm, $25.50, all ages) DAVID SCHMADER

‘In

a World…’ FILM

Writer/director/star Lake Bell’s In a World… is a comedy about a woman trying to make it in the movie-trailer voice-over business, a field in which her vain, competitive father has experienced great success. It’s partly a family drama, partly a romantic comedy, partly a documentary-style examination of the culture surrounding a very weird entertainment job, and entirely a positive, funny force for cinematic good. After a depressing summer in which most movies failed the Bechdel Test, In a World… is a fun, feminist example of how to do it right. (See Movie Times: thestranger.com/film) PAUL CONSTANT

James Murphy

MUSIC With electronic-rock juggernaut LCD Soundsystem defunct, leader James Murphy has more time to focus on his DJing (he also coruns DFA Records). No mere dabbler in the disc-jockeying arts, Murphy is a serious collector with vast knowledge and excellent taste, as one listen to the litany of musical heroes in LCD’s 2002 single “Losing My Edge” proves. Murphy can get the floor thrumming with funk, house, disco, electro, and post-punk jams that span decades of underground club culture’s peaks. (Neumos, 925 E Pike St, neumos.com, 9 pm, $25, 21+) DAVE SEGAL

‘An Experience’ ART

The Bloedel Reserve is a great big kempt landscape on Bainbridge Island. There’s a long, haunting reflecting pool, a Japanese garden, and a mansion where nobody lives anymore with a pond that a husband once gave a wife for Christmas or her birthday; it’s hard to remember which. These are the more picturesque aftereffects of the Bloedel lumber dynasty. To celebrate its 25th anniversary, the garden has invited a Northwest artist for the first time to display new work there. Julie Speidel has strewn 12 sculptures across the gardens and waters like clues to a mystery you have to figure out. (Bloedel Reserve, 7571 NE Dolphin Dr, Bainbridge Island, bloedelreserve.org, 10 am–4 pm, $13, through Oct 13) JEN GRAVES

‘Philosophical Zombie Killers’

THEATER Philosophers have been using “philosophical zombies” (hypothetical creatures that behave like humans but aren’t sentient) in thought experiments for many years. Now Stranger Genius Award–winning playwright Paul Mullin is using them in a new play about consciousness, an alcoholic professor, a depressed ex-cop, a rash of beheadings in Seattle, a corporation called “Omnisoft,” and your death. (Yes, yours.) This is a staged reading, not a full production, but it stars John Q. Smith, Susanna Burney, and other actors who are a pleasure to watch. (Freehold Theater, 2222 Second Ave, freehold theatre.org, 7:30 pm, free) BRENDAN KILEY

‘Miami Connection’ FILM

Mai Thaiku

To call Miami Connection bad is a crushing understatement. The plot—involving a tae kwon do troupe that moonlights as a bouncy pop band that’s challenged by a gang of jealous drug-dealing bikers—is insane. The actors are not actors, but tae kwon do students. Badly overdubbed dialogue abounds. There is much random toplessness and hyuk-worthy bloody violence. It is terrible. But out of this tragic mess of failure and incompetence, a distinctly sweet spirit emerges Miami Connection is drenched in a goofy joy that is contagious. (Central Cinema, 1421 21st Ave, central-cinema.com, 9:30 pm, $6 adv/$8 DOS) DAVID SCHMADER

CHOW

Chef Maria Hines of Tilth, Golden Beetle, and Agrodolce likes Mai Thaiku “‘cause it’s not overly sweet Thai food made for the American palate. The spicy is hella spicy, and the sour will make your face pucker.” The former Ballard favorite reopened (finally!) in a sweet Phinney Ridge bungalow at the beginning of the year, adding “mai” to its name (“mai” means “new” in Thai). And it’s true: Mai Thaiku makes fresher, more interesting, and way more delicious Thai food than you might be used to—along the lines of the great stuff you’ll find at Little Uncle. You’ll wish you lived closer to it. (Mai Thaiku, 6705 Greenwood Ave N, thaiku.com, 4–11 pm) BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT

RICK GONZALEZ

ARTS

BOOKS

They Forgot to Write the Book

Salinger Is a Phony Biography of a Goddamned Genius

BY PAUL CONSTANT

The day J. D. Salinger died, anyone with a brain and a library card could tell you what was going to happen next. The publishing industry would do one of the things that the publishing industry does best: descend upon a famous dead man’s estate and pick everything clean. Literary gossip maintained that Salinger had never stopped writing, that he’d kept an array of new manuscripts neatly tucked away in a safe. Those books would be released to great clamor (and profitability) by a lucky publisher on a nice, steady schedule for years after Salinger’s passing. And then there would be the other race: the journey to publish the definitive biography of the author, to interview all his acquaintances while they’re still alive and publish as much taboo material as quickly as possible—good biographies can take decades—while still maintaining some modicum of literary credibility.

through Salinger’s 91 years in just shy of 600 pages, giving extra attention to the most lascivious moments. (Shields reminds us repeatedly throughout the book that Salinger had a congenital defect, an undescended testicle, and he attributes so much meaning to Salinger’s relationship with his single ball that it almost becomes the genital version of Citizen Kane’s Rosebud.)

What nobody can deny is the fact that Salinger lived an exceptional life. He landed on the beach at Normandy on D-Day. He fought through Europe during World War II, befriending Ernest Hemingway along the way. He was one of the first US soldiers to lay eyes on a Nazi concentration camp. Even before the war, Salinger lived a bizarre life, losing his first girlfriend, Oona O’Neill (daughter of Eugene O’Neill), to a 54-year-old Charlie Chaplin, a trauma that would play out in reverse during his dotage, as he seduced and abandoned a succession of very young women. Add in the fact that he’s the world-famous author of one of the most popular books of the 20th century, and that he swore off a public life fairly early in his career, and Salinger becomes practically a biographer’s wet dream. It seems like it would be impossible to screw this story up.

SThree years after his death, we now know that Salinger left behind at least five manuscripts, which will be published starting in 2015. We have that information thanks to the first posthumous biography of Salinger, which, seemingly flying in the face of any realistic timeline, has been published this month. The writers of Salinger, director Shane Salerno—his documentary of the same name will open on September 13—and local author/UW professor David Shields, have surreptitiously been working on the book for more than a decade. If it’s just shocking revelations you’re looking for, you’ll probably be happy with Salinger. The book is packed full of neverbefore-published photographs of the camera-shy author, both in his youth and during his four decades of hermitage in New Hampshire. Salerno and Shields speed

with Salinger, and pieces of Salinger’s prose interspersed throughout to add emotional depth. It’s really just the bare bones of a great biography, without any of the technical skill or, really, the writing, on top.

I don’t mean to disparage the research. Salerno and Shields interviewed more than 200 people for Salinger, many of whom hadn’t spoken on the record about the man before. The fact that the interviewers managed to break the omertà surrounding Salinger—the author would immediately, and with great prejudice, cut off any friend, lover, or acquaintance who talked to the press about him—is a credit to their researching skills. I can’t wait to watch the documentary that accompanies the book, if just to watch the faces of Salinger’s friends as they publicly talk about him for the first time.

But when it comes to biographies, the research is only half the job. The minimal authorial intrusion in Salinger mostly comes in the form of short blurbs, casting Shields and Salerno as additional contributors to the oral history. Shields’s additions tend to be of the sweeping, obvious variety: “Eugene O’Neill’s absence was the formative event of Oona O’Neill’s life,” for example, or “[Salinger] was a twenty-five-year-old ghost, looking for rebirth, placing stamps on envelopes sent stateside. Writing about the war was the only way for Salinger to survive the war. He was seeking oblivion, but he was also seeking fame.” At its worst, Salinger is too simpleminded and too sycophantic to fully plumb the depths

Shields reminds us repeatedly that Salinger had an undescended testicle.

of all that research (the actor Edward Norton is summoned as a kind of expert witness on fame, even though he has nothing to add to the conversation).

A good biography is by definition a good piece of writing. Biographies of great writers, especially, should be of high literary quality. Salinger, with his brilliance and his monstrous flaws, deserves better than this unfinished, leering text. One day, he’ll be the subject of a truly great biography, a beautifully written work of genius, and Salinger will probably be an important resource for the creation of that book.

alerno and Shields haven’t quite screwed it up, but they haven’t exactly produced a book for the ages, either. Salinger fails both in structure and in tone, making for a highly unsatisfactory reading experience. Salinger is the highestprofile book yet to test the thesis of Shields’s 2010 anti-narrative manifesto Reality Hunger. In that book, using a style that was heavily reminiscent of author David Markson’s masterpieces Reader’s Block and Vanishing Point, Shields argued that modern readers do not have the patience for the frippery and delayed gratification of most traditional narratives. And so Salinger is constructed out of bits and pieces of trivia, giving the book the appearance of an oral history, but it’s really something less than that. Whereas Studs Terkel’s oral histories were highly crafted symphonies of rhythm and voice, Salinger appears to be a cluster of note cards shuffled into something resembling chronological order. Each little burst of text is culled from a different source: books about World War II, chunks of interviews having nothing to do

THEATER Theater

Review Revue

A Magical Middletown and a Disappointing Les Mis

Middletown ACT Theater

Through Sept 29

Will Eno is the rare kind of playwright who makes artists and audiences of all ages swoon—his plays have been produced by the august Seattle Repertory Theater (Thom Pain (based on nothing)) and the young, experimental Satori Group (Tragedy: a tragedy). It’s easy to see the attraction. Eno’s language is loopy and sharp in a David Foster Wallace kind of way, his cheery obsession with death and oblivion has a Woody-Allen-in-his-prime charm, and his meta-theatrical devices—actors disguised as audience members who sometimes appear onstage or leave the theater in a huff—are

LOOSE LIPS

• At the opening night of ACT’s Middletown (an absurdist wonder based on Our Town that you should definitely go see), there was no preshow reminder to turn off your cell phones, FOR ONCE, which made attendees feel like capable, sentient, considerate beings instead of nanny-state big dumb babies, FOR ONCE. Then some guy’s cell phone rang in the middle of the first act. Twice.

• Up-and-coming dance star Kate Wallich will perform at the Genius Awards on September 28 at the Moore Theater, backed by Seattle Rock Orchestra’s rendition of “Dear Prudence.” Wallich describes the choreography she’s working on as “like a beach fire at sunset… but filled with some baller dance moves, of course.”

• For the past year, Seattle’s Massive Monkees have run the hiphop dance academy the Beacon out of the old Milwaukee Hotel in the International District. Facilitating the residency: Seattle Storefronts, the Shunpike-run program connecting arts groups with empty retail spaces. Typically, such placements are strictly temporary, but the Massive Monkees’ first year of classes went so well, the Beacon’s been invited to stay put, with MM signing a long-term lease with building owner Coho Real Estate. SUCH GOOD NEWS.

• Genius Award finalist APRIL Festival is hosting a new book club, starting October 6. The first selection is local author Matthew Simmons’s excellent collection of short stories, Happy Rock. For more information, visit aprilfestival.com.

• The New Foundation is moving into a building in Pioneer Square, across the street from Platform and SOIL and G. Gibson Gallery. Shari and John Behnke, the collectors behind the New Foundation, bought the building at 123 Third Avenue South—let’s just name it now: the 123 Building—and plan to make it an exhibition venue for contemporary art. They’ll release plans in 2014, says director Yoko Ott. Meanwhile, another philanthropist-driven space, Mad Art, is under development in South Lake Union. Stay tuned.

• Amazon has announced an ingenious new book-to-e-book bundling program, in which Amazon shoppers are offered deeply discounted or free e-book versions of physical books they’ve bought through the site since its launch in 1995. The name of the program is MatchBook, continuing Amazon’s troubling trend of naming its digital services after book-burning imagery—e.g., Kindle, Fire.

• After 28 years at the Seattle Repertory Theater, managing director Benjamin Moore announced his retirement last week. The world didn’t seem to notice. But it might mean a new spring at the Rep if the board hires a future-minded someone to rethink how big theaters should function.

• Debbie Harry was seen mostly nude during a screening of Videodrome at

Grand Illusion.

• University Audi has begun enriching uranium, claim anonymous UN sources.

the

ARTS GOSSIP, ETC. BY JEFF KOONS’S BALLOON DOG

REVIEW

Salinger by David Shields and Shane Salerno (Simon & Schuster, $37.50)

THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY DIMENSION FILMS

J. D. SALINGER The happiest camera-shy recluse you’ll ever see.

NAAM Community Conversation Series September 26, 2013 6-8pm

Author David Leeming presents The Prophecy of James Baldwin

Northwest African American Museum

Free for NAAM Members

Free with museum admission 2300 S Massachusetts Street 206-518-6000 | www.naamnw.org

PHOTOGRAPH BY SEDAT PAKAY

Therapy for the People for individuals, couples & families

Nicole Donahue, MA, LMFT (206) 486-2655 www.nicoledonahue.com sliding scale available

“Suck it, Proust. This book about stuff is much better than those things you wrote.”

—GARY SHTEYNGART

shiny dramatic toys for actors and directors to play with.

AWARDS SHOW + DANCE PARTY = MAGIC.

DEMONSTRATION OF PHYSICAL GRACE BY KATE WALLICH.

MADONNA’S GREATEST HITS TRANSFORMED BY THE CLASSICAL ALCHEMY OF SEATTLE ROCK ORCHESTRA.

15 FINALISTS DISTILLED TO

5 GENIUS AWARD

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 28

7:30 PM DOORS/8:00 PM PROGRAM THE MOORE THEATRE • 1932 SECOND AVE

$12

Those productions of Thom Pain (a selfreflexive monologue about a man trying to come to grips with the fact of his own existence) and Tragedy (about workaday people, especially newscasters, trying to come to grips with the fact that they might be living through the apocalypse) were, at their core, exercises in trying to dance with existential dread—to caper around a corpse. But sometimes their capering was a little too cute. One got the sense that Eno was a clever tease, flirting with our ennui, but couldn’t really deliver the goods. Thom Pain and Tragedy were intellectual seductions but not worth more than onenight stands—Middletown, on the other hand, is a play worth having a relationship with.

A riff on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Middletown oscillates between small-town clichés, skewering of clichés, and surprise punches of sincerity. The result, an unlikely synthesis of deadpan wit and emotional pyrotechnics, can be magic.

Ray Tagavilla plays the town’s wise drunk (cliché) who, in the first moments of the play, meets a stern but secretly sentimental cop (cliché) played by Matthew Floyd Miller. The cop welcomes us to Middletown and earnestly describes the place: “Population: stable; elevation: same. The main street is called Main Street. The side streets are named after trees. Things are fairly predictable. People come, people go.” He pauses for the kicker: “Crying, by the way, in both directions.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” mutters the drunk (who’s also a mechanic). Within seconds, the cop is viciously choking him for no apparent reason—their social roles simply make them natural enemies. The choking stops. “I apologize,” the cop tells us. “I was just trying to imitate nature.” The next scene begins cheerfully, in the town library, where a perky young housewife who’s just moved to town (Alexandra Tavares) wants to get a library card. “Good for you, dear,” chirps the cheerful older librarian (Marianne Owen). “I think a lot of people figure, ‘Why bother? I’m just going to die anyway!’”

Expertly directed by John Langs, the 10-person cast works together so well, it’s as if they’re holding hands and merrily skipping through the text. They’re convincingly ordinary people in ordinary situations who happen to have a cosmically minded comedian writing their lines: The housewife cultivates a friendship with a charmingly glum divorcé (Eric Riedmann). The drunk mechanic hangs out at the library and looks for leftover pills in hospital dumpsters. An astronaut, Middletown’s only famous resident, looks down on earth from his space capsule. Two bumptious tourists (Sarah Harlett and R. Hamilton Wright) who consider themselves “seekers” encourage a flustered small-town tour guide

(Renata Friedman) to “skip the speeches” and tell them some “serious truth”—so she begins rhapsodizing about the air, the dirt, and “a beautiful sunset on earth, before human beings had ever evolved. No one there to say ‘Oooh’ or ‘Ahhh.’”

By the end, most of the characters meet at the hospital, coming and going, and there’s some crying in both directions. Tagavilla has a powerful moment in this section—the drunk mechanic has to perform community service by dressing up as a stereotypical “Chakmawg Indian” to entertain the kids. (“Don’t use ‘to be’ verbs,” one nurse instructs him condescendingly. “Keep it simple… ‘It rain and children grow strong, like tree. Sun cross sky many time…’ Sound good?”) But when he’s alone, wearing the headdress and ankle bells, he begins a slow, private chant that builds in intensity until Tagavilla is howling like there’s a cyclone in his throat, and all the pain, confusion, and fear of Middletown—which is to say, your town—is pouring through him in one wild wail.

Those are the kinds of moments that set Middletown above other Eno plays Seattle has seen. It’s as if the script’s ambient wit slowly ionizes the atmosphere until Eno finds just the right moment hurl a lightning bolt our way.

BRENDAN KILEY

Les Misérables

Balagan Theater at Erickson Theater Off Broadway Through Sept 28

If you close your eyes, Balagan’s production of Les Misérables is marvelous. Jean Valjean is sung by Louis Hobson, whose upper register could make angels weep. (Hobson just returned to Seattle from New York City, where he’d been working on Broadway, to be Balagan’s new artistic director.) Brian Giebler sings Marius with a brightness and power that nicely counteracts the dewy sentimentality of all of Marius’s songs. And Tessa Archer (as Fantine) and Danielle Barnum (as Eponine) round out the principal female singing roles with competence and grace, backed by an 11-piece orchestra conducted by Nathan Young. (He’s also playing keyboard— seen dimly through a screen in the set, Young appears to be conducting with his forehead.) Had director Jake Groshong made this a concert version of the show, this would be a rave review. Alas, this is a full staging—with limited resources. The set (by Ahren Buhmann), lighting (Emmett Buhmann), and costumes (Lauren Karbowski) utterly fail to transport you to Paris in the 19th century. Jean Valjean ages before our eyes by way of what looks like Halloween spray-on gray hair coloring. The battle sequences are full of guns that do not fire. And the blocking is clumsy: Marius sings “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” while all of his dead comrades spring back to life and line up on bended knee

COURTESY OF JAMES HARRIS GALLERY

STUPID GORGEOUS Igloo Mini Playmate Cooler, by Matthias Merkel Hess, is porcelain (celadon), at James Harris Gallery.

with their rifles raised (why?). Likewise, while no one sings “Bring Him Home” better than Hobson, why is he up on a platform so close to the ceiling, and why does he get down on his knees halfway through, his face partly blocked by a handrail? My constructive advice: Get rid of the set, let us see the orchestra, and just sing the thing. The only characters who really inhabit the space well are the sick and twisted Thénardiers, played perfectly by Robert Scherzer and Rebecca M. Davis. CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE

ART

Touching Things

Trash-Can Ceramics and a Pile of Paintings at James Harris Gallery

BY JEN GRAVES

TREVIEW

Matthias

Merkel Hess and Patrick Driscoll

James Harris Gallery Through Oct 12

he ceramics on the floor are in the shapes of things kept in the garage, where ceramics would get broken. They’re useful things—milk crates, flashlights, a trash can of the type that homeowners drag curbside, a white five-gallon bucket, an Igloo Mini Playmate Cooler—dressed in aesthetic drag, as ceramics with beautifully glazed surfaces. Igloo Mini Playmate Cooler is celadon, that washed-out green porcelain that originated in Chinese ceramics and has become a staple of refinement in upscalesoothing home decor. Here, it conjures a vision of Chevy Chase leading his sticky family down the Silk Road. It is both sad and reassuring that the cooler is sealed. It never will get gross. It never will have anything to offer except what you see. No beer, no sandwich.

In the realm of things you see—let’s say you aren’t starved for a sandwich—Igloo is quite something. Stupid gorgeous, intentionally both. The series is by Los Angeles–based artist Matthias Merkel Hess in his first show at James Harris Gallery. When did ceramics become more refined than useful? When did durable goods make the final changeover to metal and plastic? These are historical and environmental questions. Another, closer-tothe-skin question: When do aesthetics come into practical decision making? We eat from ceramic. That’s mostly where we touch it now, right in our mouths. Oh, and porcelain toilets. Trash cans and sludge buckets never to be shat in or buttered embody an impossible nostalgia for cleanliness.

Also to-be-handled: paintings by Patrick Driscoll of Portland, also in his first show at James Harris. Paintings are the ultimate surfaces for viewing, seldom touched. (This triggers a body memory of the time I took home a painting that had hung in a bar for years and cleaned it with Q-tips and water, which only caked it in dirty fuzz. When I looked at it on my wall thereafter, I felt the actual sensation of grimy knobbiness on the skin of my fingers.)

Driscoll has a saggy stack of pieces of dun-colored cloth on the floor. Each piece of cloth is a painting. You have to handle them to see them—pick them up like shed skins, lay them down like bodies in a stack. Each is a different style: gooey cartoon, brushy design, primordial soup of abstraction. Making a show of stylistic noncommitment comes as no surprise in a young contemporary artist. What’s interesting instead is the enduring discomfort of certain eye-skin meet-ups.

Magic: the Gathering Mondays and Fridays from 6 p m to midnight.

WETHINKCAPITOLHILLCOULDUSEMORE

MAGIC. PHOENIX

COMICS & GAMES 113 Broadway E, Seattle

CHOW

Oktoberfest for Apples

Washington Cider Week Wants to Put Its Stuff in Your Mouth

BY CIENNA MADRID

There’s a thin beltway encircling the globe in which all of the world’s apples are grown, and Washington State shines as that apple beltway’s buckle. Our state’s panoply of

apple orchards produce more than half the apples Americans eat fresh every year, as well as the nation’s best apples for pieing, juicing, jamming, and saucing. And now, more and more of our great state’s great apples are being made into great cider—the fermented, gets-you-drunk kind.

Since 2009, the Northwest Cider Association has grown from five cidermakers to more than 30. In the last three years, these regional cidermakers have trucked the fruits of their labor to Seattle for Washington Cider Week, a 10-day Oktoberfest for apples. If you’re not already a convert, these cidermakers are out to change your mind about cider: It doesn’t all taste like the sugar-heavy ones cranked out by large manufacturers like Hornsby’s and Woodchuck (the Budweiser and Coors of ciders, respectively). In general, good cider should not taste like a boozy Jolly Rancher. It should taste like apples.

cidermakers pouring four-ounce shots of their tastiest brews this past weekend. (You missed it, but hey, there’s always next year.)

David White, founder of Olympia’s Whitewood Cider, doesn’t have his own orchard—he buys his apples from nearby—but he’s a hardcore cidermaker who was key in founding the Northwest Cider Association. His ciders have good acid and a nice spice. My favorite, the Northland Traditional cider, tastes baroque. It’s a medium-dry, European-style cider whose appley flavor spreads across the tongue in tendrils, followed by a honeyed finish that lingers. It’s like a goddamn electric symphony playing in your mouth, and you should BYOBabyback ribs.

Port Townsend’s Alpenfire Cider has been around since 2008. Their cider is organic, unfiltered, and fermented with wild yeast found in their apples—in other words, they simply press their orchard apples down to juice and voilà: fantastic cider reminiscent of the stuff bobcats get drunk on in nature. Pirate’s Plank

Good cider does not taste like a boozy Jolly Rancher. It tastes like apples.

is a cloudy cider with a full-bodied, woody flavor, as if you’re licking the prow of a classy ship. Pick up a bottle and tongue this motherfucker—it’ll tongue you right back. Love it or hate it, it’s assertive; it’s reminiscent of English and French artisan ciders, and they’ve been making cider for a looong time.

British Columbia’s Sea Cider is already a rock star in the cider world, for good reason. Its Kings & Spies is a dry, Italian-style cider. It’s complex, effervescent, revolutionary— like your first sip of non-Cook’s champagne. Prohibition is a sweeter cider that tastes like deep apple with echoes of burnt sugar.

varieties as there are ways to craft cider, and Washington cidermakers are experimenting with them all, including our beloved Honeycrisps and Pink Ladys.

Washington Cider Week Through Sept 15 nwcider.com

That said, cider apples are traditionally not the same as eating apples—they’re smaller, more tart and tannic (more crab-appley, if you will), with a higher acidity than the chomping apples you normally find on the supermarket shelf. However, there are as many apple

Washington Cider Week wants to introduce local ciders to your mouth. There are restaurants offering cider pairings with select dishes, or flights of cider to sample (cider pairs well with rich, high-fat foods like cheese and meat because its acid and carbonation cleanse the palate). Last week, Tieton Cider Works teamed up with Theo Chocolate for cider and chocolate pairings in South Lake Union, and Ballard’s The Pantry at Delancey hosted a sold-out, two-hour crash course that explained how to appreciate local cider as you would a fine wine. Local cider is so great that Washington Cider Week lasts 10 days—check out nwcider.com for events through September 15, including cider flights at the Beer Authority, kegs and talks with the folks behind Finnriver Cider, and Bottlehouse’s annual Cider Fete with live music, local cheesemakers, and, of course, cider. And keep your eyes peeled for my favorite ciders from South Lake Union’s two-day Cider Summit, which featured 32 local and international

Ciders are also branching out into flavors other than the perfunctory cherry (apple and cherry seasons overlap, which is why the pairing is common). Yakima Valley’s Tieton Cider Works produces an apricot variation, which has floral and sage aromas—it smells like summer in the high desert—and the tart apricots give the even sourer apples a sweet finish. (It also pairs beautifully with dark Theo Chocolate.) Finnriver’s Habanero Cider is clear and tart, and will make your glands squirt with joy— where some other ciders strike your taste buds like a sledgehammer, this one falls like an ax. Oregon’s Wandering Aengus’s Anthem Hops Cider was the first hops-brewed cider in the business, and in my opinion, it remains the best hops cider out there—it sips like a cider, but then the apples take a timely exit and it lingers like a good beer in your mouth. Finally, Seattle Cider Company, located in Sodo, produces a Gin Botanical Cider whose aromatic juniper-berry notes make its apples taste lush in comparison. Much like brewers, cidermakers labor over their craft. Get out and talk to them during Northwest Cider Week, and they will tell you the origin story of every apple in their bottles; they will brag about the brightness of their flavors or the petulance of their bubbles. They will charm you and seduce you, and only very rarely bore you; those who are passionate about apple juice that gets you loaded turn out to be pretty much intrinsically interesting. Ciders can be sweet, tart, dry, full-bodied. Like wine, well-crafted ciders can have other flavor notes, like floral undertones, spices, tannins, and yeast. They can contain 80 different kinds of apples that electrify your taste buds like fireflies lighting the way to flavor town, or one variety that consumes your mouth like a deep-throated kiss. The only way to figure out what you like is to try them all.

Comment on the greatness of cider at THESTRANGER.COM/CHOW

TIETON CIDER AND THEO CHOCOLATE Yum.

THE STRANGER

New Places for Stuffing Faces BY

BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT

TRADITION,

• WESTWARD and LITTLE GULL • North Lake Union: Josh Henderson (Skillet) runs this pair of dockside places on north Lake Union, with Zoi Antonitsas (formerly of the great Madison Park Conservatory) heading up the kitchen. Westward is the “contemporary Northwest Mediterranean” restaurant, with (of course) seasonal foods cooked on (of course) a wood-fired grill, views of the lake and downtown, and a patio and beach area. Adjoining Little Gull houses a 22-seat oyster bar and upscale grocery (where, if you can stand it, “offerings” include “bottles of beer and wine, charcuterie, little snacks, wool navy blankets, sun visors, and impeccably sourced wooden rolling pins”). If you have a boat, you can boat right up to both, eat/drink, then boat away, you lucky bastard. (2501 N Northlake Way, 552-8215, $$–$$$)

• CENTRAL PIZZA • CD/Madrona/Leschi: Central Pizza is more pizza where AllPurpose Pizza used to be—at 29th and Jackson, it’s sorta-kinda in the Central District, but arguably in Madrona/Leschi too—brought to you by some former Belltown Pizza people. Note: Central Pizza has a full bar and a gluten-free crust option, too. (2901 S Jackson St, 602-6333, $$)

A three-hour whirlwind of cirque, comedy and cabaret served with a five-course feast.

• PERCY’S AND CO. • Ballard: Percy’s and Co. is named for the men’s shop that once occupied its 1898 building (most recently the Old Town Alehouse). The bartend-

Little Gull sells oysters and “impeccably sourced wooden rolling pins.”

ers are two Seattle guys recalled from a Brooklyn “apothecary bar,” meaning drinks with tinctures made with local stuff; they have mustaches and suspenders, and they are apothecarying at Percy’s, too. While the owners (same as Bimbos/the Cha Cha, Ace Hotels, and Rudy’s Barbershops) hinted to My Ballard that the space once housed a speakeasy, they do not want people to think they’re “doing a period piece.” Okaaaaay. Most exciting: Dave Lamping, who helped make Re:Public so great, is making the probably awesome local/seasonal food. (5233 Ballard Ave NW, 420-3750, percysseattle.com, $$)

• WITNESS • Capitol Hill: From veteran Seattle bartender Greg Holcomb (Knee High Stocking Company, Chez Gaudy), it’s a Southern-ish place for craft cocktails on Broadway in the space formerly occupied by Five Fish Bistro (and before that, the UPS Store). The menu by chef Jesse Elliott (most recently of T-Doug’s Cuoco) leans “more toward ‘soul food’ than ‘New Southern cuisine.’” (410 Broadway E, 669-3853, $$)

• BAR SUE • Capitol Hill: Located where the ill-fated Lucky 8’s used to be (that’s next door to Diesel and across the street from Skillet Diner, since you probably never went there), Bar Sue bills itself as “Capitol Hill’s Southern Bar” (though technically Witness beat them to the punch by a week or so). (1407 14th Ave, 245-7351, $$)

• BLOOM RESTAURANT • Ballard: Chef Jason Harris (formerly of Showa, Sushi Kappo Tamura, and Chiso) runs this farm-to-table

Japanese restaurant (formerly the pop-up Bloom Bento, with its super-cute, returnable/reusable bento lunch boxes). He appears to have a healthy obsession with beautiful local produce, and there will be ramen. (5410 17th Ave NW, 7068080, bloombento.com, $)

SEAHAWK

• KIMCHI HOUSE • Ballard: After the owner/ head chef of O’Shan Sushi retired, his daughter started this Korean deli in the same spot. She told My Ballard that they’re making their own kimchi; the signature dish is grilled pork belly served with sautéed kimchi and rice. Also: kimchi fries, reportedly like chili fries but with a Korean twist. Note: cash only. (5809 24th Ave NW, 784-5322, $)

Moti Mahal on Broadway rates as “Not bad. Not great. Cheap and urban.”

• CORAZON TAQUERIA • Columbia City: Where the little Puerto Rican place El Pilon used to be, it’s a taqueria that is reportedly both friendly and tasty (5303 Rainier Ave S, Suite B, 557-7921, $)

• THE MASONRY • Queen Anne: The Masonry offers wood-fired pizza and lots of craft beer (including growlers to go). Promising: The chef used to work at Cafe Lago, which has been making good woodfired pizza since approximately 1876. (20 Roy St, 453-4375, themasonryseattle.com, $)

• GEO’S CUBAN & CREOLE • Ballard: It’s a Cuban and Creole cafe from Cuban-born Seattle-restaurant-vet Geordanys “Geo” Rodriguez Turro. (6301 Seaview Ave NW, 706-3117, $)

• EVERGREENS • downtown: Salads! Evergreens makes them with produce that’s sourced “hyperlocally” in the “biggest bowls in town.” Despite the cutesy names—the “Cobbsby Show,” “Walk the Flank,” “My Little Skinny Greek Salad”— they’re pretty good. (823 Third Ave, Suite 107, 949-8633, evergreens-salad.com, $)

• MOTI MAHAL INDIAN CUISINE • Capitol Hill: This hole-in-the-wall Indian place is where Taco del Mar used to be on Broadway. Stranger sources say: “Not bad. Not great. Cheap and urban,” “mediocre at best,” and “I had the buffet. It was okay.” (1520 Broadway, 323-9189, $)

MOVED/RENAMED: MEANDER’S

KITCHEN • White Center: Now two blocks south of where it originally moved to not that long ago • TOAST BALLARD • Ballard: Formerly known as Aster Coffee Lounge • PRIME 21 • Bellevue: Formerly known as Daniel’s Broiler Vintage Lounge, Prime 21 “offers the feel of a modern-day speakeas[zzzzz]y”

NEW LOCATIONS OF EXISTING PLACES:

• BAR CANTINETTA • Madison Valley: In the spot where La Côte Creperie used to be in Madison Valley, it’s a smaller, drinky version of the very good, Tuscan-style Cantinetta in Wallingford and Bellevue—go for the handmade pasta, stay for several cocktails • SKILLET DINER • Ballard: More Skillet goodness • THE DISH • Green Lake: More breakfast all day, plus another edition of the Wall of Hot Sauces • PECADO BUENO • West Seattle: Where Wing Dome used to be

More, more, MORE at THESTRANGER.COM/CHOW

MUSIC

Pussy Riot ’93

The 20th Anniversary of Three Sex-Drenched Musical Landmarks

BY DAVID SCHMADER

In the hierarchy of internet content, the 20th-anniversary commemoration ranks somewhere between the deep-thinking oral history (see GQ’s treatment of Goodfellas and Freaks and Geeks)

and a Buzzfeed slide show of “23 Reasons Why [X] Rules!” Sure, such anniversarybased commemorations land with a certain expedience—and a good risk of superficial nostalgia trumping inspired reflection—but done properly, they can cover the sort of territory typically traversed only by obituarists, with none of the depressing death baggage. (Sometimes I feel guilty about how not-sad I will feel about the passing of my beloved Bob Dylan—because what else is going to make America’s best writers sit down and summarize their deepest feelings about Bob Dylan?)

Ultimately, the value of such commemorations comes down to one’s level of interest in the work being celebrated, and for me, 2013 has brought the 20th anniversaries of three endlessly commemorable works, each made by a female artist determined to say something new and profound about the oldest story in the book: the life-bestowing, life-enhancing, and occasionally life-ruining entanglements of dicks and pussies.

CUNT IN SPRING

What’s left to say about Exile in Guyville, Liz Phair’s stunningly masterful debut that gave voice to the millions of women for whom dating meant accepting instructive mixtapes and casual disdain from sexy jerks, while simultaneously rubbing those same jerks’ faces in its own musical and lyrical brilliance? Not much, especially after 2008’s wellpublicized 15th-anniversary reissue (complete with making-of DVD). Nevertheless, the 3,821-word oral history published by Spin pins down some rich specifics about the creation of Phair’s out-of-the-blue masterpiece.

that leads into “Shatter,” the talent of a person who can fit her most private thoughts into melodic song structures that feel canonical. That each of Guyville’s 18 song-stories could double as plot points for HBO’s Girls—“girl gets good head from weird guy,” “girl gets hit on by has-been TV actor,” “girl gets erotically taunted by male roommates”—is a testament to the record’s stature as the holy grail of plainspoken female fuckery.

LICK MY INJURIES

Like Liz Phair, Polly Jean Harvey came to music from a fine-art background. Like Phair, Harvey has no qualms about sexual directness and laying herself bare. (Like Exile in Guyville, Harvey’s 1993 release Rid of Me features the artist topless.) But where Phair takes aim at a very specific world of guys (early’90s Wicker Park alterna-players), Harvey goes after big, mythic game: not men, but Man, and Woman, and sometimes God.

It’s hard to convey just how shocking PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me was on its arrival, but Spin’s David Peisner—in another 20thanniversary-commemorating oral history— gets at the heart of the matter: “A howling smashup of blues, punk, and Beefheartian avant-garde stomp, Rid of Me felt like an expression of pure, unadulterated id—albeit an id with defiant post-feminist ideals and a sneaky sense of humor.” As Harvey tells Peisner, “[In 1993,] I very much wanted to write songs that shocked. When I was at art college, all I wanted to do was shock with my artwork. When I wrote ‘Rid of Me,’ I shocked myself. I thought, ‘Well, if I’m shocked, other people might be shocked.’”

explosion, you get it: This is how it goes. As with many of the best of the best albums, Rid of Me comes with a dazzling second-half sprint, with the abruptly triplespeed “50ft Queenie” storming into a run of songs that find Harvey assuming a variety of mythical positions, from Tarzan’s mate (“MeJane”) to the Garden of Eden’s Eve (“Snake”) to that lady who rolls her eyes when you stick your dick in (“Dry”). Individually, the songs kill. Cumulatively, they’re overwhelming, until Harvey slows things down with the (still brutal) finale, “Ecstasy.” And lest you think all of Rid of Me’s sex happens on a symbolic plane, just listen to the music. No one’s ever interacted with a guitar like PJ Harvey.

FEEL SO GOOD, I’M GONNA CRY

Like Rid of Me and Exile in Guyville, Janet Jackson’s 1993 release janet. is obsessed with sex and features a cover photograph of the artist topless. The similarities end there. Because while Liz Phair was chasing cool jerks and PJ Harvey was conceptually pegging Casanova, Janet Jackson was busy fucking—in bed, in her head, in the car, “Any Time, Any Place.”

(Reversing the process used on most recordings, Guyville was created with Phair laying down her rudimentary, highly idiosyncratic guitar and vocal tracks first, with producer Brad Wood fleshing things out with drums and bass and everything else afterward.) And despite her novice status, Phair was defiantly opinionated, firing her first would-be producer because, as she told Spin’s Jessica Hopper, “He really felt strongly that he knew more about tasteful music than I did.”

Despite her creative defiance, Phair speaks plainly about the pleasure she took in watching her music land on the type of guy whose attentions she’d been chasing for years. Recounting a night in Chicago during the making of Guyville, Phair tells Spin:

I remember some guy had come back to my apartment after the bars closed, and we were going to get high or something, and this happened a lot... They’d be like, “Blah blah my music, I’m going to do this, blah blah.” And then I would be like, “Oh, I’m recording a record, too,” and they’d be like, “Really?” I’d put it on, and they’d be, like, “Oh my god, you really are recording a record.” And that was always a proud moment, because I could blow them away because it was a totally good record.

It’s a telling anecdote, because beyond all of Guyville’s attention-grabbing sexual bluntness—“I want to fuck you like a dog,” “I’m a real cunt in spring,” the topless cover shot—the sexiest thing about the record is the artistic accomplishment: the gorgeously complex chord-chime that kicks off “Strange Loop,” the long stretch of droney strumming

Other people were. Between the aggressively perverse sound mix (soft very soft, LOUD VERY LOUD, all but demanding multiple mid-song volume interventions) and the unhinged shrieking that closes the track, “Rid of Me” cemented Harvey’s stature as an artist driven by impulses beyond the experience of the majority of contemporary musicians.

On Rid of Me, the title track was just the beginning. What followed was an astounding collection of songs, almost all composed of the same limited ingredients (guitar, bass, drums, vocals, recorded live in the studio by Steve Albini). At first, many of these songs sound suspiciously alike, building from a scratch of percussive guitar into raw explosions of noise, with a good number of them channeling intense agony, communicated through the triumvirate of Harvey’s guitar, voice, and fearless performance-art tendencies. On paper, it sounds repellent. In truth, it’s Harvey’s masterwork, and one of the greatest rock records ever made.

Janet Jackson was busy fucking—in bed, in her head, in the car, “Any Time, Any Place.”

At the time of its release, janet. was presented as an international pop superstar’s declaration of independence—thematic territory Jackson had covered reasonably well with her two previous releases. This time, Jackson made it deeply personal, crafting an album drunk on a highly specific sexuality. This wasn’t Liz Phair’s postmodern discussion with the male sexuality presented in the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. or PJ Harvey’s mythic horror orgy—this was one woman writing about what it feels like to have the man you love slide his dick in you exactly the way you like it. And to anyone tempted to consider janet.’s achievement purely physical, I present the lyrically ingenious “That’s the Way Love Goes,” wherein Jackson repurposes a “que sera, sera” lament into a play-by-play of being wonderfully, wonderfully fucked. In 1993, Jackson’s lived-in sexuality was a revelation. It was also a knockout answer to the question that plagued every pop superstar in the late 20th century: How does one distinguish oneself in a world that contains Michael Jackson? Janet Jackson’s awesome answer: have a richly satisfying sex life. BURN.

The first half of Rid of Me pummels the listener with a series of lurching mid-tempo compositions, weirded up with complex time signatures and Harvey’s seemingly endless willingness to Go There, lyrically, vocally, emotionally. (Legs are severed, scabs are scratched off, and in “Rub ’Til It Bleeds,” Harvey’s wildest banshee howl resolves itself in a suddenly soft, effortlessly controlled “I was joking.”) As the tracks line up, the structural similarities reveal themselves, as does the purpose of this similarity. After the fifth track that leads back to the same insistent, obsessive scritchscritch-scritch that builds to a lose-your-shit

What the two decades since its release have made clear is that no one has ever captured actual sexuality as well as Jackson does on janet. Madonna’s lust is mythic; she wants to fuck the whole world (or at least wants the whole world to want to fuck her). Same with Prince, who’s undoubtedly good at everything that can be done in a bed but has that weird God shit running perpetually underneath. On janet., Jackson’s celebrating actual sex she’s actually having, and she makes something sleek and gorgeous and resolutely sane out of it. In 1993, I couldn’t be bothered with a concept as obvious as “Sex feels good.” (I was 25, and to my mind, “good sex” was what happened whenever you got someone to have sex with you.)

In 2013, when I understand more about all the would-be hindrances to the execution of good sex, janet. sounds like a triumph.

Comment on this story at THESTRANGER.COM/MUSIC

By Emily Nokes and Bree McKenna

Where would we be without Kathleen Hanna? Once you start a conversation about the riot grrrl movement, third-wave feminism, the 1990s music scene in the Northwest (and beyond), or just badass women in general, you can’t say enough about the effects Kathleen Hanna and her outspoken sisters had (and continue to have) on generations of those uninterested in aligning themselves with bullshit societal norms.

The Julie Ruin w/La Sera Sun Sept 15, Neumos, 8 pm, $15 adv, all ages

Hanna helped bring attention to issues like rape, abuse, racism, and sex/ gender issues through DIY subculture and her bands: the patriarchy-smashing punk of Bikini Kill, her solo project under the name Julie Ruin, and the catchy feminist electropop group Le Tigre, who announced their indefinite hiatus in 2007.

Hanna’s brand-new band, the Julie Ruin—which includes Carmine Covelli, Sara Landeau, Kathi Wilcox (Bikini Kill, the Frumpies), and Kenny Mellman (Kiki and Herb)—marks her triumphant return to her career as an artist and as a talented pop-driven songwriter. She never stopped being a feminist hero and a punk pioneer. Two decades have passed since Hanna brought girls to the front, and while a lot of the same stuff still plagues us today, from queer issues to walking home alone at night, we are still fighting back. For many of us, riot grrrls showed us how in the first place.

Welcome back, Kathleen Hanna—we missed you.

Hanna returned to the public eye via a recent documentary called The Punk Singer, which explained that she was forced into musical dormancy for the last several years due to her struggles with Lyme disease.

A great thing about loving Bikini Kill in 1993 was that they drew a clear line in the sand for punk types: Did you hear the future, or did you hear screeching man-haters? Punk/skater guys I knew gave me and my 15-year-old, small-town, grunge-transitioning friends tons of grief for liking them, but it cemented our opinion that acknowledging the sexist/homophobic attitudes in the punk scene was a valuable stance and should have been a no-brainer for a subculture of “outsiders.” In ways too complicated for these few sentences, I am personally grateful for the experience of self-analyzing my role in a subculture as a white man to the beat of some unbelievably catchy songs. Thank you, Kathleen Hanna. —Corey Brewer (musician)

When I first heard Bikini Kill, my faith was restored that women could truly kick ass and not give a shit about social norms. Growing up in a small rural town and stumbling upon Bikini Kill and the rest of the riot grrrl movement was a lifechanging experience—something I could identify with and relate to on a level much bigger than the music itself. Kathleen Hanna made my downstairs tickle and might be responsible for who I am today!

—Jodi Ecklund (booker)

Kathleen Hanna has a tendency to pop up every few years—whether through a Le Tigre song blasted at some college party, being scandalized by an album called Pussy Whipped, or seeing her anguished pic on the cover of the collected Punk Planet interviews—but the most important time she made an appearance was when I first learned of Bikini Kill (the backward way, via Elliott Smith) and picked up a copy of Reject All American. It was one of the first times my mind-set went from sad to angry, and the title track became an accidental theme song for the realization that you can live whatever life you want. —Sarah Moody (record label president)

I discovered riot grrrl/ zine culture as an adult, so I’m still finding truths of what Kathleen Hanna touched upon—sorry, not touched, she smashed a bottle on its head. —Rachael Ferguson (musician)

I discovered Bikini Kill on someone’s Napster library when I was downloading the Letters to Cleo songs off the 10 Things I Hate About You soundtrack (along with Huggy Bear and the Raincoats). I had never heard anything like it before; it was my first introduction to punk rock and feminism that I could relate to, and I was hooked. —Bree McKenna (musician, writer)

For most of my landlocked upbringing, I didn’t even realize there was a name for my frustrations with the way women were thought of/treated/expected to act. Discovering riot grrrl in the last year of my teens finally empowered a part of my personality that had been long misdi- agnosed as simply “angry a lot.” —Emily Nokes (musician, writer)

It was the early ’90s, and I was playing guitar and singing in 66 Saints, an allgirl band from Seattle. We were on our first West Coast tour, and the f irst show was in Portland at an all-ages art gallery. The openers were a then-unknown band from Olympia called Bikini Kill. From the f irst seconds they went on, the energy changed to something electric—it was impossible to ignore and brought everyone to the front

of the stage. Even though you couldn’t put your f inger on what it was, it was clear something different was happening, a paradigm shift of sorts. Things wouldn’t be the same after that. —Lisa Orth (musician, tattoo artist)

Let’s talk about it at THESTRANGER.COM/ MUSIC

WED/SEPTEMBER 11 • 7:30PM beth orton w/ laura gibson THU/SEPTEMBER 12 • 7:30PM swamp dogg w/ brother james & the soul-vation FRI/SEPTEMBER 13 • 7:30PM vagabond opera

SAT/SEPT 14 • 7:30PM & 10PM THE SHANGHAI PEARL PRESENTS burlesque royale

MON/SEPTEMBER 16 • 7:30PM AMERICAN RAG ON TOUR PRESENTS megan & liz with kalin and myles

WED/SEPTEMBER 18 •

SOUND CHECK

PEANUT BUTTER WOLF IS THE WHAT’S-WHAT GROUND

Peanut Butter Wolf (Chris Manak) is the Los Angeles–based DJ/producer and mastermindcontriver behind Stones Throw Records. Can you say they’re the best record label in the world? If you’re having that conversation, Stones Throw is in there, and they’re up there. People like to classify Stones Throw as a “leading name in underground hiphop circles,” but they’re not underground—Stones Throw is the ground. The innate-gold ground, tasty ground, or foreground—the consistently what’s-what ground. Since 1996, Manak has simply been putting out what he likes. And what he likes is the shit. His J Dilla connection brought about the holy Donuts (and last year’s all-7-inch reissue). Then there’s the vitalical (yes, that’s vital, critical, crucial, essential) nature of Madlib/Madvillain. More recently, Manak has spread his spectrum with James Pants, DâM-FunK, and Mayer Hawthorne. At his core, Manak is a crate-digger extraordinaire whose ear-brain can smell what the world needs to hear. Manak spoke, calling in from Montebello, California.

the reissue, it was kinda awesome that it went full circle like that.

Jeff Jank also got involved. He does our artwork and website, but he was a musician first. He usually stays out of creative decisions musically with Stones Throw, but with Donuts, when Dilla turned it in, Jeff really liked it but thought it should be sequenced differently—he thought some of the songs should be extended and some should be shortened. He got really passionate about it. I would never have asked Dilla to change it, but Jeff talked to Dilla, and he said, “Yeah, do whatever you want with it.” Jeff made the changes, and Dilla signed off on it. The Donuts album that everybody knows, Jeff more or less coproduced it. I still have the CD Dilla gave me that says Donuts in his handwriting.

Butter Wolf w/THE NEW LAW, Zac Hendrix, Shapey Sat Sept 14, Re-bar, 9 pm, $10 adv/$15 DOS, 21+

You’re a crate-digger extraordinaire. What’s the difference between a collector and a hoarder? When I saw that TV show about hoarders, I felt really awkward because I felt like it was me. I definitely have more records than I need, or will ever listen to in my lifetime. I continue to buy things from record stores when I have things at home I don’t even know I have.

But with hoarders, there’s a maggot element. You don’t have maggots. That’s true. Sometimes I might leave a cup in my car, but my car’s usually clean, except for a bunch of demo CDs.

You’ve been on the road. Do tell us a road story. The worse the better. I have a bad one. We were driving in the tour bus near Denver, and out of the blue, I started having breathing problems. I couldn’t figure out what it was. First, I thought it was a panic attack, then I thought it was the altitude, being in Denver. Then I just thought I was losing my mind and asked them to pull the bus over. I’d kind of let it go for a long time because I didn’t want anybody to think I was a weirdo. I really couldn’t figure out what it was. We googled it, and someone thought it might be cabin fever from being in the bus too long. I thought maybe it was a mosquito bite and the mosquito had malaria or something. Or the flu. Or a spider bite.

A spider bite. You’re Spider-Man. I thought the story would have nudity, but Spider-Man is better than nudity. I was convinced I was going to have either a heart attack or a stroke—I wanted to tear my face off. I almost drove, thinking it might help to be in control of the bus. I cooled off for a bit, and then we started again. About an hour or two later, one of the guys noticed I’d eaten some of his weed-laced gummy bears. I didn’t even know weed gummy bears existed. These things had professional levels of weed in them. I was so relieved to figure out what it was. I have a bad reaction to any of that. I’ve eaten mushrooms and tried ecstasy a couple of times—I try to stay open-minded—but they’re not a good thing for me. Last time I smoked weed was, like, 12 years ago, and that was only because I was with Madlib and Dilla in the same room. How do you say no to that [laughs]?

For the reissue of J Dilla’s Donuts, what comes to mind when you look back at putting it together? It’s all 7-inches, you know. That was DJ House Shoes’s idea. When Dilla made Donuts, he gave me a CD of it and explained that he’d sampled a lot of 7-inches. We listened to it in the car, and I told him, I want to put this out. For the reissue, it never dawned on me to put it out as a 7-inch box set—it’s such an obvious idea. House Shoes was the guy who introduced me to J Dilla originally, so with

Speaking of demos, what’s next for Stones Throw? I recently signed a band called Boardwalk. Kind of shoegaze,

My Bloody Valentine music-wise, but the producer works with Dr. Dre and has his feet in different worlds. I also signed another group that doesn’t have a name yet. That’s always good. They’ve never played a show.

They’ve never played a show? What made you sign them? I just heard their music—that’s all it takes for me. I want to put my logo on the back of the record. I’m always hungry for people who nobody knows about.

If you were to play me a song right now, what would it be? See, I don’t know. I’m never good at that one. You’d have to come to my house.

Then what? You have a section of records on a shelf you’d go to? No. I moved, and my stuff’s unorganized now. I actually almost prefer to keep it that way. For a while, I had it genre-specific—the top shelf was the best from that genre, and on down.

Like in the grocery store cereal aisle—the bottom row is for the crackrock version of Cocoa Pebbles. True. In the cereal aisle, I go for the Honeycomb and Lucky Charms. No matter what row they’re on [laughs].

INTERVIEWS BY TRENT MOORMAN

Peanut Butter Wolf

Peanut

JAKE GREEN

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 19TH

GLITTERBANG

NIKKI’S BIRTHDAY! DOUBLE DUCHESS // MAGIC MOUTH

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.

HELDON Interface (Cobra)

This relentless electronic music makes me feel rewound a couple decades, when the internet was still exciting, all just walls of different colors and fonts and asterisks. What will these futuristic machines really mean to us? Everyone still wondered. Music nerd king Dave Segal is enamored of Heldon’s complete machine-ness, their lack of longing. He thinks they have no human qualities, that the sounds emanate from some hollow tube of otherworldly noisemaking, perhaps technically channeled through a being resembling a human.

play some sweet trumpet at me for a second.

But this stuff just is not human-less. The freewheeling guitar sounds in track two, “Jet Girl,” are not accidental or automatic, they’re haunted—a deliberate experiment, an attempt at replicating emotions or memory.

The dreamscape “Bal a Fou” could never be made by a robot. Nor the soundtrack-like “Le Fils des Soucoupes Volantes (Vertes),” which goes womp-a-womp, womp-a-womp, spelling out the heartbeat of a French man in a car at night. I thought the 19-minute-long “Interface” might annoy the shit out of me, but instead its back-andforth stereo—leeefffft into riiiiiiight—and driving drumbeat (obviously a man in a black cloak hitting sheet metal to call ghosts or aliens to come visit) and boopy-beepboops were affecting. They left me twitchy and easily startled. I fucking dare you to listen to this in the forest at night without pooping your pants or turning to witchcraft

I’m not sure I agree. This sounds like what Darth Vader listened to inside his helmet. That dude may have had some robot parts, but he was really, really human. This could be what the (human) Wachowski siblings listened to while writing The Matrix It’s what I listened to, aptly, while reading a long interview with a dude who prefers relationships with dolls to relationships with human women. Okay, then I got hella skeeved and I wanted a warm human to come

MY PHILOSOPHY

LOST DEEP IN THE CORN

My last week has been better not looking at the news, I have to say—I feel like I can trust our government totally and completely to do the right thing, not bow to special interests, and represent the wishes and best interests of the American people and the international community.*

Kid Cudi, onetime clerk at American Apparel and BAPE (shouts-out to Olive Garden, yo!) turned hit-making electrorock-rapper, the living inspiration to lanky hipsters the world over, is coming back to Seattle (Wed Sept 11, WaMu Theater). I know I’ve gone hard on Cudi in the past, but only because that first album of his was such trash—actually, it could be more accurately termed coffee-shop compost. (That column was kinda popular online, but it strengthened my resolve never to skew negative just for props… at least not if I can do it instead for my own twisted enjoyment—see you next paragraph.)

The mostly dope follow-up, Man on the Moon 2, conclusively changed my tune, though, as did his contributions to his big bro Kanye West’s whole aura, most notably on 808s & Heartbreak—an album that many actually believe contains a fraction of Cudi’s spiritual essence, and that if you play it backward, you can hear him warble, “Give us free.” Maybe that’s just the cost of GOOD Music. Cudi’s latest, the mostly selfproduced Indicud, was his last with Yeezus’s imprint, and was, as most of you already know, fairly jamming—if you at all have a

Here’s what you should do instead: When you need to concentrate at your desk job, pop this into your big padded earphones, turn it up loud, and see if you can’t power through some all-star single-tasking. Let its metallic heart be your compass, since you can’t be bothered with the real world while it’s playing. Dive face-first into your computer screen like a cartoon character, do your shit, and then pull your head out after one go-round of the album. Success!

Note of caution: After listening to this album a couple of times, it’s possible that I have joined the robot conspiracy and am now trying to recruit you away from the human world.

I give this an “I’ll never tellllll” out of 10.

yen for his deep-sounding navel-gaze selfieset raptronica. For the record, I do, most of the time at least. That said, the date Cudi chose to visit Seattle is one that lives forever in infamy—September 11, forever known as the day that (Cudi’s tourmate) Big Sean comes to Seattle this year. (“Never forget”? More like “Try to remember!”) If there ever was a walking personification of right-now rap mediocrity, he’d be… somewhere behind Wale, but way up there nonetheless. (He needs more Ambition.)

So Big Sean apparently saw a big spike on Google Trends (cut the check, y’all) a li’l minute ago due to his song “Control,” specifically Kendrick Lamar’s verse, which we already talked about. The fact that Sean’s star shines brightest when other niggas do shit is honestly a time-honored tradition at this point, and reflects the very nature of the thing he seems the most preoccupied with in his personal rap narrative: fame. (He wanna live forever.) From Finally Famous—not just the name of his debut album from a couple years back, but his debut mixtape from 2007—to his newest album, Hall of Fame, he makes it clear what he’s about. Whatever happened to “fuck the fame”? Lost, deep in the corn. Fame is a weird monster; it’s gotcha boy CeeLo Green in his seventh or so year of being America’s Sweetheart—that’s cool, I’m sure it produces good opportunities and great Christmases for him and the (Dungeon) fam, so it’s good. Musically, though, he’s been hot tap water for a minute—and in turn, the new Goodie Mob is sounding kinda blandiose. He’ll be at that young Puyallup Fair September 12, so get you a scone. *NOT.

HIPHOP YA DON'T STOP

BY LARRY MIZELL JR.

UP&COMING

Lose your anti-Midas touch 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

Wednesday 9/11

Nellie McKay

(Jazz Alley) See Stranger Suggests, page 23.

Kid Cudi, Big Sean (WaMu Theater) See My Philosophy, page 39.

Cosmic Psychos, Communist Eyes (Barboza) Grungy Australian punks who’ve been carousing around the planet for about 30 years, Cosmic Psychos surely have their bratty/aggro shtick down by this point. Much to my surprise, The Stranger’s resident garage/poonk-rock aficionado, Mike Nipper, has zero time for these dudes, and sampling from bits of their albums one can hear why. Cosmic Psychos plow a middling path in these familiar denim- and leatherclad realms of rock, showing no great grasp of melody or ability to spur you into will-to-power mode. In short, after all these years, they’re not cosmic or psycho enough. (However, they occasionally do possess a nice, heavy bass tone not unlike that of fellow Aussie group feedtime. So there’s that.) DAVE SEGAL

Cheap Trick

(Puyallup Fairgrounds) Yes, yes, Nothing Can Hurt Me was wonderful, surprising, revelatory, and long overdue, but now that Big Star have received their doc, will some enterprising filmmakers please point their cameras at America’s other, much more productive power-pop miracle band? For 750 years, Cheap Trick have been reliable purveyors of smashingly melodic rock. Sure, the closest they get to innovation is adding a heart-exploding key change before a final verse (see “Surrender”), but who

cares? They’re a great American product (and the story of their weird fake “live” breakthrough record alone will make their hopefully forthcoming documentary a must-see). DAVID SCHMADER

Thursday 9/12

DJ Shadow, dj100proof

(Neumos) See Data Breaker, page 46.

Swamp Dogg, Brother James & the Soul-Vation (Triple Door) Those who’ve slept on Swamp Dogg— i.e., most of us—can catch up, to a degree, with reissues of three key early-’70s albums by the Virginiaborn soul man: Gag a Maggot, Rat On!, and best of all, Total Destruction to Your Mind. These releases (back in circulation via Alive Naturalsound Records) evidence a vocalist of raw, soulful vigor and a lyricist of sociopolitical insight and irreverent humor. The man’s music from this era is a loose-limbed combo of Southern-fried funk, animated blues rock with surprising country undercurrents, and heart-punching soul. Now Swamp Dogg (aka Jerry Williams Jr.) is doing a rare late-career tour, and it would be a serious blunder to miss him. He may be 71 now, but recent footage reveals Mr. Dogg’s voice has lost very little of its vibrant timbre or emotional turbulence. DAVE SEGAL

CeeLo Green (Puyallup Fairgrounds) Look, CeeLo Green just does things his way is what. (There used to be a dash in Cee-Lo, but it appears to have disappeared.) “I am not like them at all, and I cannot pretend,” he says

BRIAN SCOLARO

Brian Scolaro is most known for being Doug on TBS’s “Sullivan And Son”, Stuart on FOX’s “Stacked”, and Gordon on NBC’s “Three Sisters”.  He has his own half hour special “Comedy

in the throat-clearing track on his first studio album (2002), Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections which ends with the spat line, “Now can I do my shit?” Despite the goofiness, you have to respect his skills, and the realness of his compass. Two days before this concert, CeeLo’s putting out not another record, but his “tell-all” autobiography, Everybody’s Brother. He’s both everybody’s brother and he is not like anyone at all, and he cannot pretend. JEN GRAVES See also My Philosophy, page 39.

Friday 9/13

Digitalism, Sean Majors, Embolism, Rion (Foundation) See Data Breaker, page 46. Carrie Underwood (Puyallup Fairgrounds) As far as American Idol people go, Carrie Underwood is up there in my book, mostly

DJ Shadow Thursday 9/12 at Neumos

because I have heard of her (my extensive knowledge of the show includes Kelly Clarkson, the closeted-Manilow-esque ginger, Ruben something, William Hung, and a whole bunch of white handsomes with hair). BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY because she is responsible for the song “Before He Cheats.” Never mind the fact that this lady-centric cheat-revenge anthem was written by two dudes; if you haven’t had the pleasure of hearing someone bleat this jaded gem out at karaoke, you simply haven’t lived (in a sorority) (zing!). Seriously, though, folks, her voice muscles are above average and the fair is the perfect place to get your nu country on. EMILY NOKES

Campfire OK, Sean Nelson (Crocodile) I’m so fucking sick of hand-claps, you guys. And foot-stomps, and folk music that basically sounds like a Pinterest board filled with pictures of Mason jars and birch trees. The Lumineers, Mumford & Sons, all of ’em—throw them in a pit and let’s never hear from them again, okay? But Campfire OK get a pass. Why? I don’t know! There’s something about the local band’s banjo-laced ditties (a word I generally despise but seems appropriate here) that convinces me that unlike their woodsy peers, they’re not afraid to get a little dirty. It isn’t perfect, it isn’t pure—they have grit on their hands and their songs have a slight darkness within. Unlike those other jerks, who are trying to sell the “I jump trains while wearing spotlessly clean white button-ups” look. LIARS. MEGAN SELING

White Poppy, Secret Colors, Pill Wonder

(Cairo) Vancouver producer/vocalist White Poppy (Crystal Dorval) is yet another young musician making waves in the sugary whirlpools of late-’80s/ early-’90s dream pop and shoegaze rock. Her very productive 2013 has, so far, yielded the Drifters Gold cassette on Constellation Tatsu and a selftitled album for the Not Not Fun label. On them, Dorval creates hazy, vaporous songs that swirl in intoxicating, ascending helices of blurry passion. If you like your music dispersed alluringly into the ether, White Poppy will satiate you with melodies of angelic beauty and vocals of feathery breathiness. Float on, babies, float on. DAVE SEGAL

Saturday 9/14

James Murphy, Shit Robot (Neumos) See Stranger Suggests, page 23 and Data Breaker, page 46.

Peanut Butter Wolf, THE NEW LAW, Zac Hendrix, Shapey (Re-bar) See Sound Check, page 37.

Diarrhea Planet, the So So Glos (Barboza) Naming your band Diarrhea Planet says a few things about how much ambition you’re going to put behind the thing, but it also belies the talented and earnest nature of this Nashville six-piece guitar-rock outfit’s sound. Not, as one might imagine, glib and unpracticed punk rock, Diarrhea Planet employ no fewer than four guitars to bring this midtempo and serviceable brouhaha into reality

(obviously, one of those guitars is backstage pounding a tall boy at any given time). But there is squandered greatness here. Diarrhea Planet’s latest, I’m Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams, screams undelivered potential; it also screams “fucking great live show.” In case you need things spelled out for you, this is an endorsement. GRANT BRISSEY

Monogamy Party, Gaytheist, Haunted Horses, Prism Tats (Chop Suey) I’m shocked that the world didn’t implode when Monogamy Party added Pleasureboaters’ main guitar shredder Ricky Claudon to the mix earlier this year. Claudon’s six-stringed spasms brought an even more exhilaratingly unpredictable element to Monogamy Party’s already craggy sonic fits—it is the most perfect pairing. Tonight Monogamy Party, now a foursome, celebrate the release of their debut full-length, False Dancers. It’s an album that seems to be trying really hard to make

the listener physically uncomfortable—gut-rattling bass lines and relentlessly piercing guitars stab and shake you to the core while wily vocalist Kennedy Carda spouts out lines like “Take one look around the room/Nobody wants you!” It’s punishing, yes, but it’s just too good to leave be. MEGAN SELING

Sunday 9/15

The Julie Ruin, La Sera (Neumos) See Underage, page 48 and preview, page 35.

Seattle Symphony: Opening Night Concert and Gala (Benaroya Hall) The Symphony’s season-opener features star pianist Lang Lang (Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3) and the Seattle Symphony Chorale and Seattle Symphony performing folk-inspired music

Clark Kent Just One All Ages

Sean Nelson, Rafe Pearlman with Dust & Gold All Ages

Andrew Garcia Rachel Gavaletz All Ages

School of Rock Presents: SCHOOL OF ROCK SEATTLE AUGHT ROCK: THE BEST OF 2000 - 2010 All Ages

Shelton Harris & Tyler Dopps, Kublakai, Symmetry All Ages

Benefit for WA Proposition 522 Presents BENEFIT FOR LABELING GMOS with THE REFUSERS

Midori & Ezra Boy, Garage Heroes, Special guest Pamm Larry (The Erin Brockovich of GMOs) All Ages

by Brahms, Dvorak, and Bartok, and Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances (which once inspired Warren G, so there’s that). If you want to get really done up, there are private pre-concert receptions and a glitzy post-concert gala dinner. The music will be the main course, given Ludovic Morlot’s fresh direction. JEN GRAVES

Monday 9/16

Happy 87th birthday, B.B. King!

Tuesday 9/17

Blouse, Feathers, Week of Wonders (Vera) See Underage, page 48.

Blondie, X

(Marymoor Park) I feel weird telling you about this show because DUH. Legends, friends. I mean, you’re already excited, right? New York’s Blondie (who are celebrating their 40th anniversary next year, Deborah Harry is a 68-year-old goddess, etc.) and Los Angeles’s X (whose original lineup is still intact with Exene Cervenka, John Doe, Billy Zoom, and DJ Bonebrake) were both pioneers of the best new-wavey neat punk their respective coasts had to offer—their contributions to music way back in the mid to late ’70s probably influenced (and continue to influence) your favorite bands. If you’re not convinced, Wikipedia just told me that “Marymoor Park is King County’s largest, oldest, and most popular park.” Hot damn. EMILY NOKES

Woods, the Fresh & Onlys

(Barboza) Brooklyn’s Woods have a split personality. Sometimes they come off as overly earnest folk-pop dweebs featuring Jeremy Earl’s yearning, high-pitched vocals, making you think of pleasant and innocuous early-afternoon Pitchfork Fest acts. At other times, Woods summon a deep psychedelic vibe, like a cleaner-veined Velvet Underground going long and hypnotic on a couple of choice chords and Eastern-leaning tonalities (see “September with Pete” from Songs of Shame or “Sol y Som-

bra” from Sun and Shade). Then there’s the übercool krautrock epic “Out of the Eye” from Sun and Shade—tremendous. One wishes Woods focused more on the latter two facets of their sound, but why should they pay attention to a music journalist from Seattle with the anti-Midas touch, anyway?

DAVE SEGAL

Windhand, Wounded Giant, Addaura (Highline) When did all the Southern metalheads ditch speed for “Sweet Leaf”? Seriously, how many stoner/doom bands does Dixie have at this point?

I’d argue that there’s enough that it’s almost tempting to shrug off Relapse Records’ recent Richmond-based signees Windhand solely based on the press release comparing them to Black Sabbath. But curiously, Relapse also compares the doom band to Nirvana. And, fortunately, it’s a strangely apt comparison. If you take Cobain’s most flagrant moments of Melvins-worship, tuned them down a couple steps, dragged the tempo a few dozen BPMs, and cranked up the fuzz, you actually get a pretty close approximation of Windhand’s remarkably simple-yet-effective riffage and powerful Grohl-like drum stomp. Add singer Dorthia Cottrell’s smoky and soulful vocals to the fray and any cynicism toward Southern metal disappears.

BRIAN COOK

Curren$y

(Studio Seven) New Orleans’s Curren$y is (1) one of the best modern-day rappers with a dollar sign in their name and (2) at least partly responsible for making weed as insanely popular as it’s become since his 2009 release This Ain’t No Mixtape, a step outside his previous No Limit/Young Money comfort zone. With a drawl that’s relaxed by the herb, but somehow never lazy, and an ear for jazzy, sample-based beats that never sound outdated, Curren$y’s music is the audio equivalent of being extremely stoned in an expensive foreign car, perhaps with “Arizona grape in the cup holder.” While weed rappers’ live performances can be hit-or-miss, a chance to hear some new material from Spitta’s upcoming Pilot Talk III may be reason enough to head to Sodo for this show.

MIKE RAMOS

Fall 2013

9.13 Prince vs. Michael Tribute

9.14 Clinton Fearon

9.18 The New Mastersounds

9.20 Winston Jarrett

10.10 Poor Man’s Whiskey performs “Old And In The Way” 10.11 Gift of Gab

9.21 80s vs 90s Dance Party 10.17 Echoes plays Pink Floyd

9.22 Mistah Fab 9.25 Everton Blender

9.26 The Quick & Easy Boys

9.27 Natural Vibrations

10.18 Whitewater Ramble

10.25 Kore Ionz plus New Kingston (of Collie Buddz)

9.28 TRL Dance Party 10.26 Best 80s Halloween Party w/ live 80s hits from NiteWave

10.4 The Bad Tenants w/ Sophistafunk, Q Dot

10.5 Piece of Mind 10 Year Party w/ Trolls Cottage, World’s Finest

10.9 Fox Street All Stars

10.3 Blackberry Bushes www.nectarlounge.com

10.31 A Green Halloween Party feat. Longstride & Elton Jah

11.8 Mad Professor

11.15 DJ Vadim / DJ Abilities

11.14 Head For The Hills 10.19 Emerson Windy 12.12 Phutureprimitive

and Lonesome, 8 pm, $7

a JAZZ ALLEY Nellie McKay, $24.50

NEUMOS Heatwarmer, Baby Gramps, 8 pm, $8

NEW ORLEANS Legacy Band, Clarence Acox

OHANA Live Island Music

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

a PUYALLUP

FAIRGROUNDS Cheap Trick

THE ROYAL ROOM Dani Gurgel & Debora Gurgel

SHIP CANAL GRILL The Canteloupes Jazz Jam,

7:30 pm a STUDIO SEVEN Warhead, guests, 7 pm, $8/$10 SUNSET TAVERN Subways on the Sun, Verlaine, Chris Staples, $6

TRACTOR TAVERN The Preservation, the Billy Joe Show, Evening Bell, $6

a TRIPLE DOOR Beth Orton, 7:30 pm, $30-$40

TULA’S Swojo, 7:30 pm, $8

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Jerry Zimmerman, 8 pm

WAMU THEATER Kid Cudi, Big Sean, Logic, $68

DJ

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

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

THE EAGLE VJDJ Andy J

ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN Passage: Jayms Nylon, Joey Webb, guests FOUNDATION Pegboard Nerds

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

WILDROSE 2nd Hand: Mother Church, Pavone, free

THURS

9/12

LIVE 2 BIT SALOON Swamp Heavy, Burning of I , Witch Ripper, 8 pm

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BARBOZA No, 8 pm, $12

BLUE MOON TAVERN March to May, Pepper Proud, Alki Jones, Each & All, $5 CAN CAN Vince Mira

CHOP SUEY The Tom Price Desert Classic, the Piniellas , John Lee Spectre , 8 pm, $5/$7

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER Dawn Clement, Whitney Lyman, Red Ribbon, $8/$10

COMET Aloha Drones, Disastroid, Photon Pharaoh, $5

CONOR BYRNE Sneakin’ Out, Ashleigh Flynn, Ian Jones & the Fremont Whiskey Team

CROCODILE Sound Remedy, 8 pm, $10/$12

DISTRICT LOUNGE Cassia DeMayo Quintet, 8 pm, free a GUAYMAS CANTINA Oleaje Flamenco, 8 pm, free

HARD ROCK CAFE Arkansas and the River Bandits, Angelo

Delsenno and the Empty Sky, Fallen Angels, 8 pm, $5

HEARTLAND Twin Steps, Stickers, Ubu Roi, 8 pm

HIGH DIVE The Salt Riot, Colophase, the Requisite, 8 pm, $6

HIGHLINE Sacred Signs, RED MARTIAN , Liight, $6

HIGHWAY 99 James King & the Southsiders, 8 pm, $7

JAZZ ALLEY Earl Klugh, $28.50

THE KRAKEN BAR & LOUNGE the Lucky Eejits, Heroes at Gunpoint, Poke da Squid, $5

LITTLE RED HEN Buckaroosters, $3

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

NECTAR The Cumbieros, the Braxmatics, Gravity Kings, $6/$8

PINK DOOR Bric-a-Brac, 8 pm a PUYALLUP

FAIRGROUNDS CeeLo Green, 7:30 pm

THE ROYAL ROOM Greg Vandy Presents American Standard Time

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

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB

Phavian, Autumn Electric, Abi Grace , 8 pm, $6 a STUDIO SEVEN Eye Empire, Crud Guns, Minimum Age, 7 pm, $11/$13

SUNSET TAVERN Tripwires, “Bumbershoot Blackout”, Jay Vons, $8

TOMMY GUN Rain Dogs:A

Curated Evening of Tom Waits Music and Paired Cocktails: Guests, 8 pm, free

a TRIPLE DOOR Swamp Dogg, Brother James & the Soul-Vation, 7:30 pm, $20/$25

TULA’S Isabella Du Graf, 7:30 pm, $10

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Jimmie Herrod and Friends

THE WHITE RABBIT Marmalade, $6

DJ

BALLROOM DJ Rob, free

BALTIC ROOM Revolution: DonnaTella Howe, Olivia LaGarce, guests

CAPITOL CLUB Citrus: DJ Skiddle

THE EAGLE Nasty: DJ King of Pants, Nark

WHAT DO YOU DO?

There’s a man passed out on the sidewalk in front of Jabu’s Pub in Lower Queen Anne. He looks sleepy! What do you do?

• Gently shake him awake and offer to call him a cab.

• Twerk in his face and sing Miley Cyrus songs until he wakes up.

• Wake him up and tell him that Hempfest is over.

Cast your vote at thestranger.com/drunkoftheweek! KELLY O

KELLY O

FOUNDATION Gregor Salto

HAVANA Sophisticated

Mama: DJ Sad Bastard, DJ

Nitty Gritty

LAST SUPPER CLUB Open

House: Guests

LAVA LOUNGE Rock DJs: Guests

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

NEIGHBOURS Jet Set

Thursdays: Guest DJs

NEIGHBOURS

UNDERGROUND The Lowdown: DJ Lightray, $3

NEUMOS DJ Shadow All Basses Covered 2013 DJ Set, $30

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

9/13

LIVE

2 BIT SALOON Pytons, Load Levelers, Autolite Strike

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BARBOZA Gibraltar, Dust Moth, Wishbeard , 7 pm, $8

BLUE MOON TAVERN

Bastard Sons of Norway, Combinator, Shores of Oblivion, $6 BOGART’S The Pynnacles, F-Holes , guests, free CAFE RACER Black Nite Crash , the Daemon Lovers, free a CAIRO White Poppy, Secret Colors, Pill Wonder

CHOP SUEY Blue Sky Black Death, Kid Smpl, Real Magic, $10/$12

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER

Daniel Ellsworth & The Great Lakes, Matty and Mikey, Lotte Kestner, $8/$10

COMET Spinning Whips, Sugar Sugar Sugar, Mystery

Ship, Sad Horse, $7

CONOR BYRNE Joel Savoy & Jesse Lege, the Tallboys Country Band

a CROCODILE Campfire Ok, Sean Nelson, Rafe Pearlman, Dust & Gold, 8 pm, $15

a EL CORAZON Charlotte Sometimes, Jamie Nova, Amanda Markley, Kari Jakobsen, guests, 7:30 pm, $15; Stolas, Strawberry Girls, guests, 8 pm, $8/$10

HARD ROCK CAFE The Concert for Bangladesh: A NW Musicians’ Tribute: Guests, 8 pm, $10/$12 a HEARTLAND Wynne Greenwood, Of Magic, HITS, Jongu, 8 pm HIGH DIVE The Hard Count, Post Adolescence , Ghost Town Riot, 9:30 pm, $8 HIGHLINE Stargazer, Knelt Rote, Space in Time, Anhedonist, Burn Pile, $8 HIGHWAY 99 Kim Field and the Mighty Titans of Tone, the Emerald City Horns, Arthur Migliazza, 8 pm, $15 JAZZ ALLEY Earl Klugh, $28.50

LITTLE RED HEN Bullet Creek, $5

NEUMOS We Can Dance

If We Want To!: Nite Wave, Rewind, 8 pm, $20 PARAGON Levi Said, free a PUYALLUP FAIRGROUNDS Carrie Underwood, 7:30 pm RAVIOLI STATION TRAINWRECK Dizzy, guests RENDEZVOUS Frame, 10 pm a THE ROYAL ROOM Scott Law Trio, Piano Royale, 5:30 pm

SEAMONSTER Funky 2 Death, 10 pm, free a SHOWBOX SODO Big Gigantic, Ill-esha, $20.50/$25

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB Canals of Venice, North, 8 pm, $7 SLIM’S LAST CHANCE Kinski , the DT’s, the Thingchangers

STUDIO SEVEN Kik the Summer Sun, guests, 8 pm SUNSET TAVERN Patitude, Jealous Dogs, the Dee

THURSDAY 9/12

Dees, $8

TIM’S TAVERN The Hooten Hallers, Hot Roddin’ Romeos

TRACTOR TAVERN Shook Twins, Hannalee, $10/$12

a TRIPLE DOOR Vagabond Opera, 7:30 pm, $20-$30

TULA’S Ted Brancato and Friends, 7:30 pm, $15

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Steve Messick Quartet

THE WHITE RABBIT Swindler, Crooked Smile, Opposite Orbits, $6

DJ

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 Neoplastic: Marcus G, Jay Battle, DJ Shorthand, free

CENTURY BALLROOM

Century Tango: DJ Anton, 9 pm, $10

CONTOUR Afterhours, 2 am CUFF C&W Dancing: DJ Harmonix, DJ Stacey, 7 pm; TGIF: Guest DJs, 11 pm, $5

ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN Digging Deep: Ramiro, Jeromy Nail, Derrick Deepvibez

FOUNDATION Digitalism, Sean Majors, Embolism, Rion 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

SCARLET TREE Oh So Fresh Fridays: Deejay Tone, DJ Buttnaked, guests

SEE SOUND LOUNGE Crush: Guest DJs, free

BY DAVE SEGAL

MILES OF STYLES: DJ SHADOW’S ALL BASSES COVERED TOUR

No matter what style he’s spinning, DJ Shadow always brings a fierce technical facility and expansive knowledge to the decks. For his All Basses Covered tour, the California hiphop producer plans to, as his Soundcloud page notes, “incorporate as many different contemporary genres of urban and electronic music as possible.” This was the type of set that provoked a big Miami club last year to truncate his performance, allegedly because it was alienating the crowd Shadow said the promoter told him the music was “too future for y’all,” but it sounds pretty 2012-ish to these ears. Whatever the case, it should be interesting to see how much ground Shadow covers, hear his usually spectacular transitions, and witness his scratching prowess. With dj100proof Neumos, 9 pm, $30 adv, 21+.

FRIDAY 9/13

DIGITALISM’S ELECTRO HOUSE GIVES YOU A LIFT

For a while in the late ’00s, German duo Digitalism were challenging acts like Justice and Mr. Oizo for abrasive-textured electro-house supremacy. Check out their 2007 album Idealism for a stringent dose of said sound. With 2011’s I Love You Dude, Digitalism veered toward a slicker, more upbeat pop approach while retaining a bit of that lucrative Ed Banger style

THERAPY LOUNGE Rapture: Guests, $3 after 11 pm TRINITY Tyler, DJ Phase, DJ Nug, guests, $10

WILDROSE Lezbro: L.A. Kendall, Tony Burns, 9 pm, $3 THE WOODS Deep/Funky/ Disco/House: Guest DJs

LIVE AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BARBOZA Diarrhea Planet, the So So Glos, 7 pm, $10 BLUE MOON TAVERN Crooked Timber, Super Crow, Blackburn, Halcion Halo , $6

CAFE RACER Brendan Shea, Sarah Pasillas, free CHOP SUEY Monogamy Party, Gaytheist, Haunted Horses , Prism Tats, $7 COMET Atomic Bride , TacocaT, Ever So Android Acapulco Lips, $8 CONOR BYRNE Joy Mills Band a CROCODILE School of Rock Seattle Aught Rock: Guests, 5 pm, $10/$12; Holy Fuck, Iska Dhaaf, 9 pm, $12 a EL CORAZON Moving Units, Some Ember, guests, 8 pm, $13/$15; Easy Big Fella, the Skablins, Original Middle Age Ska Enjoy Club, 8:30 pm, $8/$10

ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN Drop: Phil Western, Manos, Kadeejah Streets, Rhines, Night Train, $10 after 10:30 pm a EMPTY SEA STUDIOS 10 String Symphony with Josh Philpott, 8 pm, $14/$18 FOUNDATION Shogun a GORGE AMPHITHEATRE Zac Brown Band, 7 pm, $45-$90

HARD ROCK CAFE Nolie Durham, the Cody Rentas Band, 8 pm, $10/$13 HIGH DIVE Candela, the Band of Certainty, Shelley Doty, 9:30 pm, $8

HIGHLINE Valient Thorr, Lord Dying, Ramming Speed, Ancient Warlocks , $12

of club pummel; “ReeperBahn” is the hottest cut in that vein. From what I’ve heard of Digitalism’s new Lift EP, they’re combining both the tunefulness of their second LP and the booming rhythmic necessities of big-room venues. Tonight, Digitalism will be doing a DJ set for a Friday night crowd in Belltown that will surely want the thick and creamy hits With Sean Majors, Embolism, and Rion Foundation, 9 pm, $10–$20, 21+.

SATURDAY 9/14

JAMES MURPHY AND SHIT ROBOT TRY TO PROVE DFA HASN’T LOST ITS EDGE You’re likely coming to see DFA honcho James Murphy spin records from his ultra-hip collection—because that mix he did for Fabric with Pat Mahoney kills, and you’re still mourning LCD Soundsystem’s demise. That’s cool. Murphy surely will bring the crucial jams. But you shouldn’t miss Shit Robot, the alias for Marcus Lambkin’s disco-house project. Shit Robot attained an early peak with the transcendent Italo-disco of 2006’s “Wrong Galaxy”/“Triumph” and dropped a very good full-length for DFA in 2010, From the Cradle to the Rave. The latter’s one of those nuanced, diverse works full of club fodder that takes on the multiple personalities of its many guest vocalists. Shit Robot’s latest single, “Feels Real,” sounds like the Saturday Night Fever–era Bee Gees falsettoing— courtesy of the Rapture’s Luke Jenner— over a steadfast, Moroder-esque disco throb Neumos, 9 pm, $25, 21+.

HIGHWAY 99 Son Jack Jr.’s Delta Hothouse, 8 pm, $14

JAZZ ALLEY Earl Klugh, $28.50

LITTLE RED HEN Marlin

James Band, $5

THE MIX The Soft Offs, Christa Says Yay, In Cahoots

NECTAR Clinton Fearon & the Boogie Brown Band, Selecta Raiford, 8 pm, $12/$15

PARAGON Solbird, free

QUEEN CITY GRILL Faith

Beattie, Bayly, Totusek, Guity, free

RE-BAR Peanut Butter Wolf, the New Law , Zac Hendrix, Shapey, $10/$15

REDHOOK BREWERY

Sausage Fest: Beat Connection, My Goodness, the Grizzled Mighty, Big Eyes, Fly Moon Royalty, the Pynnacles, 3 pm, $10/$15

RENDEZVOUS Aerial Ruin, Taurus, Iron Tongue, 10 pm, $10

a THE ROYAL ROOM A Magical Evening of Disney Music: Robin Holcomb, Katie Jacobson, Rachel DeShon, Jimmie Herrod, Michael Stenger, guests, $12/$15

SHIP CANAL GRILL Kelley Johnson , 8 pm

SHOWBOX AT THE MARKET

Led Zepagain: A Tribute to Led Zeppeli, $15/$18

SHOWBOX SODO Rebel Souljahz

a SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB

Alyse Black , Jordan Biggs, 4 pm, Tit Nun, the Jilly Rizzo, the Albert Lerner Trio, 8 pm, $7

SLIM’S LAST CHANCE Six Gun Romeo, Crown Hill, Rat Patrol, Rat Attack

STUDIO SEVEN Choke, Rorschach Test, Hell Monkeys, Pinch, Local 808, the Brain Dead, guests, 4 pm, $15

SUNSET TAVERN Half Kingdom, Lanford Black, Red Orchestra, J. Martin, $8

TIM’S TAVERN The Twitch, Dogstrum

TRACTOR TAVERN Robert Walter’s 20th Congress, Snug Harbor, 9:30 pm, $15/$17

TULA’S Greta Matassa Quartet, 7:30 pm, $15

a VERA PROJECT

Parachute, Matt Hires, Paradise Fears, 7:30 pm, $13/$15

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Ruby Bishop, 6 pm

DJ

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 Sensorium: DJ Almond

Brown

HAVANA Rotating DJs: DV One, Soul One, Curtis, Nostalgia B, Sean Cee, $5

HEARTLAND CAFE & BENBOW ROOM

Candylandia: DJ Cotton Candy, DJ Christophett, DJ Deep Parris, free

LAVA LOUNGE DJ Matt

LO-FI Emerald City Soul

Club: Kenny Mac, Gene Balk, Marc Muller, Alvin Mangosing, Mike Chrietzberg, Brian Everett, George Gell, Mike

“MP3s Forever” Nipper, 9 pm, $10

MOE BAR Panther Down: DJ N8, Anthony Diamond, free

NEIGHBOURS Powermix: DJ

Randy Schlager

NEIGHBOURS

UNDERGROUND Club

Vogue: DJ Chance, DJ Eternal Darkness

NEUMOS James Murphy DJ Set, Shit Robot, $25

OHANA Funk House: DJ

Bean One

PONY Glitoris: Queen Mookie, Devil Eyes:

SEE SOUND LOUNGE Guest

DJs

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

VERMILLION Flux: Dj

Res , guests, free THE WOODS Hiphop/R&B/ Funk/Soul/Disco: Guest DJs

SUN 9/15

LIVE AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BARBOZA Julia Holter, Nedelle Torrisi, 8 pm, $12

a BENAROYA HALL Opening Night Concert and Gala: Seattle Symphony

CAFE RACER The Racer

Sessions

COMET Eagle Teeth, Melville, Out on the Streets, $5

CROCODILE Travis Garland, Andrew Garcia, 7:30 pm, $12

a EL CORAZON We Butter the Bread With Butter, Incredible Me, Never Met a Dead Man, Promethean Eulogy , guests, 8:30 pm, $8/$10

a EMPTY SEA STUDIOS Marty O’Reilly & the Old Soul Orchestra, Porterbelly Stringband, 7 pm, $12/$15

HIGH DIVE Robert Jon and the Wreck, the Higgs, 8 pm, $7

HIGHLINE Lark vs Owl, Agony & Ivory, guests, $6

JAI THAI BROADWAY Rock Bottom Soundsystem, free JAZZ ALLEY Earl Klugh, $28.50

KELL’S Liam Gallagher

LITTLE RED HEN Dark Horses, $3

a NEUMOS The Julie Ruin, La Sera, 8 pm, $15

PIES & PINTS Sunday Night Folk Review: Guests, free SHIP CANAL GRILL Jay Thomas, noon

a SHOWBOX AT THE MARKET The Mission UK

a SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB

Tugboat Country, Jet City Metro, Ian Jones, 3 pm, $5

TRACTOR TAVERN Valerie June, guests, $10

TULA’S Jay Thomas Big Band, 4 pm, $5, Jim Cutler Jazz Orchestra, 8 pm, $8

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

DJ

BALTIC ROOM Mass: Guest DJs

BY ADRIAN RYAN

THURSDAY 9/12

EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE, AGAIN!

Do you remember the last time we saw Everything Is Terrible? Like almost two years ago? February 12, 2012, to be exact? Of course you do. My poor little brain is still abuzz and a-marveling at the weirdness of it all. So if you haven’t been hit hard on the head, you also likely recall the concept—it’s much like our good friend Collide-O-Scope at the Rebar place, but even stonier and psychedelic-er somehow. A couple of amazingly dedicated and batshit crazazy freaks piece together an archive of colorful and frenetic found-footage mental illness, put on fuzzy costumes, and force it all down your eyeballs. And tonight they are serving up not one, but two new movies: Comic Relief Zero! and Everything Is Terrible! Does the Hip-Hop! I won’t

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 9/16

LIVE

2 BIT SALOON The Ruines ov Abaddon, Funeral Age Binary Holocaust, $7

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Jerry Frank

CHOP SUEY Octopus

Project, Paper Lions the Hoot Hoots , 8 pm, $10/$12

COASTAL KITCHEN Pork Chop Trio, 9:30 pm, free EL CORAZON The Grahams, guests, 8:30 pm, $6/$8

HIGHLINE Dead on the Wire, guests, $6 KELL’S Liam Gallagher

NEW ORLEANS The New Orleans Quintet, 6:30 pm a PUYALLUP

FAIRGROUNDS Alabama, 7:30 pm THE ROYAL ROOM Royal Room Collective Music Ensemble, 8 pm

TRACTOR TAVERN New Honky Tonkers, $5 a TRIPLE DOOR Musicquarium: Free Funk Union, free; Megan & Liz,

encourage you to get stoned for this, for a change—baby, it hardly seems necessary. Central Cinema, 8 pm, $13 adv, all ages.

PONY WORSHIPS THE CURE

There’s no need to choose! You can easily make both events tonight, and if you are a fan of Pony—as I am rumored in some circles to be (ahem, coughcough)—you’ll know that this is one of the very bestest things they done do: Hero Worship, the every-now-and-again night in which they celebrate certain musician/ band crushes/obsessions. Tonight is the Cure. Yes, THE CURE. And that’s all I am saying about that. (Besides Dee Jay Jack and K-Kost. Swoon.) Pony, 9 pm, free, 21+.

SUNDAY 9/15

CC ATTLE’S BOOBS AND TUBES

Do you know what we never, ever talk about anymore? CC Attle’s. I KNOW! It just kind of sits there, not making a fuss, being rather beary and leathery and reliable. But tonight, they bring us something that is certainly never seen ’round those throbbing pink parts: BOOBS! Also, TUBES! Boob Tube! A curated night of music videos and fun with VJ Andy that is just about as good excuse as any to go down and visit our dear old friend.

CC Attle’s, 7:30 pm, free, 21+.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 21ST

THE EFFERVESCENT AND WONDERFUL, HEIDI PARK’S BIRTHDAY PARTY

SATURDAY SEPT 14 | 7:30 PM

PARACHUTE MATT HIRES, PARADISE FEARS $13 ($12 W/ CLUB

WITH BATTLEME AND NIGHTRAIN $10 / 9:30PM DOORS / 21+ ALWAYS ALL AGES

NU KLEZMER ARMY AWFULLY SUDDEN DEATH, BLACKIE VALENTINO AND THE BASTARD FAMILY, AN AMERICAN FORREST $7 SPINNING WHIPS SUGAR SUGAR SUGAR, MYSTERY SHIP, SAD HORSE (PDX) $7 ATOMIC BRIDE TACOCAT, EVER SO ANDROID, ACAPULCO LIPS $8 EAGLE TEETH MELVILLE (PDX), OUT ON THE STREETS $5 HUMAN EYE BLOOPER, GUESTS $8 NO SLEEP SEATTLE + NEON SIGH PRESENT LIQUID SKY DARK FEATURES THEM ARE US TOO (SANTA CRUZ), STRES, SILTY LOAM, DJ TEEN GIRL DIES@RAVE, EA$Y IRI$ $5 THREEFOLD SEAHORSE MOOSE PORTRAIT,TIBURONA, ELBOW COULEE $6 SEX W STRANGERS GOLD WOLF GALAXY, YEVTUSHENKO, UH OH ESKIMO $7 SHENANDOAH DAVIS TOMTEN, ANTHONIE TONNON $8 KEPI GHOULIE & THE MEAN JEANS PLAYING GROOVIE GHOULIES MISS CHAIN AND THE BROKEN HEELS (ITALY), BIG EYES, WOLFHAMMER3, BAD TATS, STAB ME KILL ME $12

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

The Cure

7:30 pm, $15/$17

TULA’S Jim Knapp Orchestra , 7:30 pm, $10

THE WHITE RABBIT

Michael Shrieve’s Spellbinder, $6

DJ

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

Campfire Ok, 7 pm, free

a EL CORAZON Kamelot, Delain, Eklipse, 7:30 pm, $23-$75

ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN

Monktail Creative Music

Concern, DJ Shonuph, free

HIGH DIVE JoDee Purleypile and the Messengers, Seacastle, Silverships, 8 pm, $6

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

CAPITOL CLUB The Jet Set: DJ Swervewon, 100 Proof

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

CONOR BYRNE Get the Spins: Guest DJs, free HAVANA Manic Mondays: DJ Jay Battle, free THE HIDEOUT Introcut, guests, free 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 Reflect, 8 pm, free

TUES

9/17

HIGHLINE Windhand, Wounded Giant, guests, 9:30 pm, $8 a JAZZ ALLEY Jacqui Naylor, $22.50

KELL’S Liam Gallagher LITTLE RED HEN T & D Revue

LO-FI OCNotes, Absolutemadman, Ohmega Watts, 100proof, $5 a MARYMOOR PARK Blondie, X, 7 pm, $39.50

THE MIX Jazz Night: Don Mock, Steve Kim, Jacques Willis, 8 pm

NEUMOS Lee Fields & the Expressions, the Bayous, Down North , 8 pm, $15 OUTWEST Wine and Jazz Night: Tutu Jazz Quartet, free OWL N’ THISTLE Jazz Improv Night: Guests

PINK DOOR Michel Navedo, 8 pm Thru Oct 1 a PUYALLUP FAIRGROUNDS Jeremy Camp, 10th Ave N, Kutless, Jars of Clay, 7 pm, $20/$30/$40

THE ROYAL ROOM Blues To Do: Guests

LIVE

2 BIT SALOON the Epilogues

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BARBOZA Woods, the Fresh & Onlys, 8 pm, $15

CHOP SUEY You May Die in the Desert, the Littlest Viking, guests, 8 pm, $5/$7 COMET Human Eye, Blooper, $8

CONOR BYRNE Ol’ Time

Social: The Tallboys , 9 pm

a CROCODILE Bosnian Rainbows, 8 pm, $18 a EASY STREET

RECORDS (WEST SEATTLE)

SEAMONSTER McTuff Trio, 10 pm, free SLIM’S LAST CHANCE Amy Lynn, 7 pm a STUDIO SEVEN Curren$y, guests, 8 pm, $27 a TRIPLE DOOR Matt Wertz, Elenowen, 7:30 pm, $18/$20 TULA’S Roadside Attraction Big Band, 7:30 pm, $8 a VERA PROJECT Blouse, Feathers, Week of Wonders, 7:30 pm, $10 THE WHITE RABBIT Paco Le Gato, Dead on the Wire, Aggressive Aggressive, $5 DJ

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

SUNDAY 9/15

THE JULIE RUIN, LA SERA

Kathleen Hanna recently resurrected her first solo project, the Julie Ruin, and released an album of uniquely inspiring songs. On Run Fast, there are tongue-incheek looks at feminism, slinky seduction jams, and deep meditations on her own life that cover childhood, adulthood, and her recent fight against Lyme disease It’s been nine years since her last album, and Hanna’s lyrics on Run Fast are urgent, fine-tuned maxims designed to wake you the fuck up. Like some of her earlier work in Bikini Kill or Le Tigre, Hanna often sounds as if she’s shouting through a megaphone, à la Poly Styrene and XRay Spex, and the Julie Ruin are further propelled by Kenny Mellman’s springy keyboards and call-and-response vocals that evoke the B-52s. It’s a collision of everything fun about punk music, and you shouldn’t miss it. Neumos, 8 pm, $15.

TUESDAY 9/17

BLOUSE, FEATHERS, WEEK OF WONDERS

If you’re already a fan of the Portland group Blouse, hearing the first single from their upcoming album, Imperium, might have thrown you for a loop. Compared to their 2011 self-titled album, a downcast, suffocating, and immensely engrossing work of synth pop, “No Shelter” shows that the band has moved

Full disclosure: I am in this band, so take all of this with an even larger grain of salt than usual. Journalistic ethics be damned, attention must be brought to the great work being done by Jesse Codling at For Young Moderns! Find more cool stuff at foryoungmoderns.com.

AARON HUFFMAN

Campfire OK w/Sean Nelson, Dust & Gold Fri Sept 13, Crocodile

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 LINDA’S TAVERN

Distortions: DJ Explorateur, DJ Veins

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

in a different direction. Distant and plucky guitars start the song off, instantly recalling band member/producer Jacob Portrait’s other group, the warped, ’60s-channeling Unknown Mortal Orchestra. As vocalist Charlie Hilton begins to coo, “There is no shelter from this storm, nothing in nature can make my body warm,” her vocals sound familiar at first (unhurried, ambrosial, and Trish Keenan–esque) before quickly taking on a newfound immediacy. As the song picks up steam, Hilton lets out, “Give me your body, I need a thing to hold,” seemingly in contrast to her earlier evasive and nostalgia-dripping lyrics. I’m not sure whether I prefer the new sound over their earlier work, but it’s worth applauding the protean Blouse for doing different styles so well. With Feathers and Week of Wonders Vera Project, 7:30 pm, $10.

BY JACKSON HATHORN

The Julie Ruin

SHERVIN LAINEZ

FILM

Film Review Revue

Touchy Feely dir. Lynn Shelton Harvard Exit

Afrequent criticism of mumblecore films is that nothing really happens in them, which has always struck me as a weak line of reasoning. Life doesn’t have a plot (spoiler!), and it’s still pretty interesting most of the time. But Lynn Shelton’s new film, Touchy Feely, tweaks the formula a bit: Nothing really happens, except for a few things that are really goddamn weird.

Paul (Josh Pais) and his daughter Jenny (Ellen Page) are a morose family unit living in Seattle—just a quiet dentist and his quiet kid who quietly work together at Paul’s dental practice. Wacky, free-spirited aunt Abby (Rosemarie DeWitt) is a massage therapist who believes in elixirs and energy work. Her outlook stands in clear contrast to that of her science-minded brother, who spends his days diligently scrubbing the teeth of his elderly patients. Meanwhile, shy Jenny is in love with her aunt’s boyfriend, a grubby bikemessenger type (Scoot McNairy, who’s perfectly cast as the kind of guy who’s irresistible to a young woman and slightly questionable to an older one).

One day, Abby develops a sudden aversion to human touch—problematic for a masseuse—and so she takes some time off work and spends it crying in the supermarket and freaking out her boyfriend. Meanwhile, her brother has discovered a mysterious ability to heal patients who have jaw pain—a strange gift that leads him toward the very world of touch and energy healing that Abby has fled. Director Shelton has a knack for coaxing natural, lived-in performances from her actors, so it’s no surprise that the performances here are top-notch. Allison Janney has a brilliant turn as a hard-edged energy healer (who, sensing the disturbance in Abby’s Force, suggests that Abby give ecstasy a shot), and Page is painfully convincing as a shy young woman who’s afraid to do what’s best for herself and move away from home. (Unfortunately, Page is about five years too old for the part, and since Pais looks younger than his years,

Department of City Planning, said in an interview for the American Society of Landscape Architects: “Urban design and infrastructure and the streetscape [are a] trellis for growth.” What we hear and see in this black-and-white documentary is precisely the life that grows on and in the fixed spaces of the city, the trellis. This life also has lots and lots to say about politics, religion, communism, atheism, colonialism, music, cinema, money, real and fake flowers, food, transportation, strikes, housing, the youth, the old, the French, the language, the history of civilization, what works in the

Le Joli Mai has lots and lots to say about politics, religion, communism, real and fake flowers,

city and what doesn’t work, and, most importantly, what makes a Parisian happy.

they make for a not-very-convincing father/ daughter duo.) This is DeWitt’s film, though, and she renders the hippie-dippy character of Abby with empathy and depth.

Shelton is the Seattle-based filmmaker who, along with directing a few episodes of Mad Men and New Girl, wrote and directed 2009’s thoroughly charming Humpday, about two straight male friends who try to make a sex tape to enter into the HUMP! porn festival. Humpday begins with a silly idea—two straight dudes try to do it! In the butt!—but unpacking that premise leads to moments that are revealing, awkward, and hilarious. Shelton’s next film, 2011’s Your Sister’s Sister, was a perceptive character study that threw a few complicated people together in a cabin in the woods and waited to see what happened—until a left-field plot device stirred the pot and disrupted the credibility of the whole endeavor. Touchy Feely runs into the same sort of trouble that Your Sister’s Sister did: The characters are great, and their interactions feel authentic and wellobserved, but certain plot elements—a dentist with magic powers that heal TMJ?—are just so weird that it’s hard to reconcile them with the natural, unfussy filmmaking that is Shelton’s strength. ALISON HALLETT

The subject of this 1963 documentary is none other than the famous city of Paris. But this film is not about its streets, monuments, and buildings; it’s about the life of the city. Recall what Alexandros Washburn, the current urban design director for NYC’s

The documentary, which has a young and beautiful and eloquent black African man at its heart, covers every level of society. It goes from the poor on the outskirts to the core of the busy stock market to the high-society partying on a fifth-floor balcony. Everyone smokes. The city is beautiful. The traffic is impossible. Business is sometimes good and sometimes bad. And when the life of this city—a city that’s recovering from a great war and is also dealing with trouble emanating from Algeria—is quiet, we hear the European actress Simone Signoret commenting philosophically about the existential and political condition of the Parisian. This city is wonderfully endless. CHARLES MUDEDE

Illusion

This good-hearted documentary tracks the US comedy tour undertaken by a group of standup comedians who happen to be Muslim (plus a Jew or two). Aiming squarely at red states, our fearless comics hand out flyers at gun shows, do interactive promotions in town squares, and perform their gigs in tiny bars and meeting halls to prove a host of points: Muslims live among us and always have. Very, very few of them want to kill us. And some of them are funny as poop.

Directors (and featured performers/ subjects) Negin Farsad and Dean Obeidallah spice up their road-trip footage with pedantic gags (including an illuminating Old Testament/New Testament/Koran pop quiz) and spliced-in video bits of Islamophobia in action (thanks primarily to Fox News and internet commenters).

As those name-checked sources attest, The Muslims Are Coming! has a whiff of shooting-fish-in-a-barrel about it, but the film makes its important points with charm. The group is the point: Seeing one Muslim standup is cool, but seeing five Muslim standups, each one trying to be the funniest Muslim in the room (while looking very little alike), is revelatory. As for the comedy: A couple jokes made me do a spit take, a whole bunch of others made me chuckle, and a special few reminded me that Muslims are just as likely as anyone else to suck at comedy. DAVID SCHMADER

7:20*^, 9:55* Wed & Thu: (4:15), 7:20*, 9:55* LEE DANIELS’ THE BUTLER (PG-13) Fri: (4:25)*, 7:10* Sat & Sun: (1:50)*, (4:25)*, 7:10*, 9:20 Mon: (4:25)*, 7:10*, 9:20 Tue: (4:25)*, 7:10*^, 9:20 Wed: (4:25)*, 7:10*, 9:20 Thu: (4:25)*, 7:10*

Le Joli Mai

dir. Chris Marker, Pierre Lhomme Northwest Film Forum

The Muslims Are Coming! dir. Negin Farsad, Dean Obeidallah Grand

TOUCHY FEELY Juno’s not sad, she’s just listening to a beautiful song by Tomo Nakayama.

FILM SHORTS

More reviews and movie times: thestranger.com/film

LIMITED RUN

AIRPLANE!

Among the unquestionable facts of modern life: Kitties are cute, pizza is delicious, and Airplane! is fucking hilarious. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Tues Sept 17 at 7 pm.

BETTER OFF DEAD

“You ski the K-12, dude, and girls will go sterile just looking at you!” SIFF Cinema Uptown, Tues Sept 17 at 9 pm.

BIG SCREEN 70MM FILM FESTIVAL

A week of humongous classics shown on 70mm, including 2001, Vertigo, Baraka, Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music, and more. Cinerama, Fri-Tues. For complete schedule and showtimes, see seattlecinerama.com.

BLEEDING SKULL BOOK LAUNCH & DOUBLE

FEATURE

Celebrate the release of the new book about 1980s trash horror with back-to-back screenings of two examples of the genre. A Night to Dismember will be shown on VHS and Boardinghouse on 35 mm. Grand Illusion, Sat Sept 14 at 9 pm.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN

The Gubernator stars in this 1982 action epic. King’s Hardware, Mon Sept 16 at dusk.

EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE

Everything Is Terrible is a video blog. Everything Everything Is Terrible does is terribly great. Nothing is terrible. This week, EIT presents its live show, complete with fur and glitter. Central Cinema, Thurs 8, 10 pm.

FIRST STORIES: EARLY FILM NARRATIVES, 1901-1913

A program of short films from Europe and America that “trace the early evolution of narrative cinema.” Presented on 16 mm. Northwest Film Forum, Mon Sept 16 at 7 pm.

HARAKIRI (1962)

A film about samurais chopping each other up, directed by Masaki Kobayashi. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Mon Sept 16 at 7 pm.

THE KING OF KONG

Brisk, hilarious, and surprisingly moving, the documentary

The King of Kong tells the story of Steve Wiebe, a Boeing worker who, after being laid off, became obsessed with playing a battered Donkey Kong machine parked in his garage. A devoted husband and father, not to mention an all-around swell guy, Wiebe’s life up until then had been one of routine disappointment; he’s in bad need of a personal victory. And, delusional or not, he believes conquering the all-time high score on Donkey Kong will provide it for him. Every hero is only as good as his villain, however, and famed arcade champion Billy Mitchell, current holder of the worldwide Donkey Kong high score, proves to be a perfect foil. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER) Central Cinema, Sat-Tues at 7 pm.

LE JOLI MAI

See review, page 51. Northwest Film Forum, Fri 7 pm,

Sat-Sun 4, 7 pm, Mon 7 pm.

MIAMI CONNECTION

See Stranger Suggests, page 23. Central Cinema, SatTues at 9:30 pm.

MOTORCYCLE GANG

A family vacation morphs into what Taken would have been if the bad guys had been a motorcycle gang and Liam Neeson’s character had not been CIA-trained. Made in 1994 as a tribute to the juvenile delinquent movies of the ‘50s. Scarecrow Video, Mon Sept 16 at 7 pm.

MUSIC CRAFT: LEONARD COHEN

Lenny’s 1988 I’m Your Man tour performance in San Sebastian, Spain, is the latest entry into the NWFF’s series of remarkable concert films. Northwest Film Forum, Sat Sept 14 at 5 pm.

SEATTLE DESIGN FESTIVAL

One part of this year’s Seattle Design Festival— which involves three days of new films featuring architecture and design—is a program called Design Inspirations, a collection of short films capturing different aspects of the current urban condition. One short, This Is Shanghai, is a mindblowing blast through the various levels of life in the financial capital of the second largest economy in the world, China. This is the new, bold, and bright Shanghai, with its spectacular skyscrapers, small apartments, big and small businesses, flows of traffic on elevated freeways, and the river. Another short, Splitscreen: A Love Story, is a sweet little tale of two huge cities, New York and Paris, that ends in another huge city, London. The story concerns two lovers who leave their apartments, one in NYC and the other in Paris, and move about their cities on a split screen. We see NYC sky/Paris sky, NYC subway station/Paris subway station, and so on/and so on. Another short, Tiny Living, is set outside of our city, Seattle, in a rural area where a young and creative couple lives in a tiny house. Theirs is the future of living, which is microliving—living with as few possessions and as little room as possible. The house cost the couple $20,000 to make and runs mostly on solar power. The couple seems happy and liberated from the heaviness of owning too much dumb stuff. Other shorts show other equally interesting urban situations.

(CHARLES MUDEDE)

THE MUSLIMS ARE COMING!

See review, page 51. Grand Illusion, Fri 7, 9 pm, Sat 5, 7 pm, Sun 5, 7, 9 pm, Mon-Tues 7, 9 pm.

PARADISE: FAITH

Missionary Anna Maria spends her days unaccompanied, quietly flourishing under the burden of so many precise religious duties. She reasons calmly with nonbelievers, sings hymnals in stark rooms, and briskly flagellates her naked body any time she deserves it. Suddenly her estranged Muslim husband returns. It’s unclear how it happened, but he’s a paraplegic now, and he flings insults, jostles crucifixes, explodes into violence, and generally ruins Anna’s orderly world. Their exchanges bring stirring and intelligent aftermaths, loaded with yearning, and there’s a jaw-dropping masturbation scene. (MARTI JONJAK) SIFF

Cinema Uptown, Fri 4:30, 6:50 pm, Sat-Sun 2:10, 4:30, 6:50 pm, Mon-Tues 6:20 pm.

PINK FLOYD: THE WALL

The stoner classic about a self-absorbed rock star and a school full of children who are secretly made of gristly Play-Doh goes back where it belongs: on a midnight-movie screen, in front of a bunch of stoners. Harvard Exit, Sat Sept 14 at midnight.

PLAIN CLOTHES

In this comedy from 1988, a police officer goes undercover at a high school. Notable are an abundance of Seattle location shots. Scarecrow Video, Fri Sept 13 at 8 pm.

RIDING GIANTS

A documentary about surfing and surf culture in America, from the director of Dogtown and Z-Boys Seattle Art Museum, Thurs Sept 12 at 7:30 pm.

RISING FROM ASHES

This documentary is about the Rwandan national cycling team, most of whom grew up during the 1994 genocide. Varsity, Fri 5:15, 7:15 9:15 pm, Sat-Sun 3:15, 5:15, 7:15, 9:15 pm, Mon-Tues 7:15, 9:15 pm.

SEATTLE DESIGN FESTIVAL

See Festive, facing page. A three-day festival celebrating films that highlight architecture and design. SIFF Film Center, Fri-Sun. For full schedule and showtimes, see siff.net.

SPARK: A BURNING MAN STORY

The first of three Burning Man documentaries screening in Seattle this season. (God bless Kickstarter.) SIFF Uptown, Fri-Sun at 9:15 pm.

WAR ON WHISTLEBLOWERS

With Manning convicted and Snowden in exile, this documentary takes a critical view of the crackdown on

I TELEVISION TM

BY WM. TM STEVEN HUMPHREY

BOO OLD THINGS! YAY NEW THINGS!

For those of you who pride yourselves on your oh-so-interesting “social lives,” you’re gonna have to think of something else to bore us to tears with—because the new fall season of TV shows starts this week! HURRAH!! Boooooo old things! Yaaaaaaay new things! And sure, while most of the shows debuting this week range from somewhat to downright terrible—hey! THEY’RE NEW. And I’ll take a semi-terrible new thing to a semi-terrible old thing any day of the week. (And yes, I’m looking at YOU, Dancing with the Stars and Speaker of the House John Boehner!)

So let’s take a look at these shiny, new, somewhat terrible baubles, shall we? Getting out ahead of the rest of the networks, Fox is debuting three of its new shows this week, and here’s the lowdown:

• Sleepy Hollow (Fox, Mon Sept 16, 9 pm). The historic town of Sleepy Hollow is a nice place to live… until its most famous former resident, the Headless Horseman, returns to lop off some heads! (There goes the local tourism industry.) Luckily for the residents, the horseman’s old nemesis, Ichabod Crane, also wakes up after a two-century nap to join the local police (which includes Orlando Jones, the guy from the 7-Up commercials) in chasing down the Horseman, who actually turns out to be one of the biblical “four horsemen of the apocalypse,” and—WHAT THE FREAK IS GOING ON HERE??? As it turns out… a whole freaking lot! And while the

whistleblowers in the military and intelligence departments. Keystone Church, Fri Sept 13 at 7 pm.

NOW PLAYING

ADORE

In this wonderfully twisted story, two middle-aged mothers and old friends, Roz and Lil (Robin Wright and Naomi Watts), fall in love with each other’s sons. The sons, Ian and Tom, fall in love with each other’s mothers. The only problem that this erotic crisscrossing faces is time: The mothers, especially Roz, fear that the sons will eventually see them as old, lose interest in them, and naturally desire younger women. Roz eventually forces the quartet’s return to normal society. Sexual normalcy, however, turns out not to be the solution. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

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 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)

DRINKING BUDDIES

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 (Anna Kendrick, Ron Livingston). On the surface, these characters are just another installment of Stuff White People Like. But dig a little deeper, 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. (ALISON HALLETT)

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)

pilot looks surprisingly only semi-terrible (they really nail the spooky atmosphere), there’s still a poop-ton full of unnecessary ka-razy

* Recommended only for those who love Grimm, Scandal, and Adderall.

• Dads (Fox, Tues Sept 17, 8 pm). First things first, Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy, Ted) is a goddamn a-hole, and one of the UNfunniest people on earth. And he’s executive producing this new sitcom about two best friends/business partners whose dads coincidentally move in with them—soooo… this does not bode well on any level. Dads is really not worth anyone’s time, but quickly—just so you can explain to people why you’re not watching it—it’s deeply stupid, it’s unoriginal, it thinks racist jokes are edgy, and like its executive producer, it’s one of the UNfunniest things on earth.

* Recommended only for goddamn aholes like Seth MacFarlane.

• Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Fox, Tues Sept 17, 8:30 pm). Of the three Fox shows debuting this week, Brooklyn Nine-Nine is the best… which still isn’t saying much. Former SNL cast member Andy Samberg stars as a smart-assy detective cracking cases while trying to avoid the ire of his tough, by-the-book captain (Andre Braugher), and his uptight but—ooh-la-la—sexually attractive partner (Melissa Fumero). Have you heard this story before? OH YES, YOU HAVE. And yet? Samberg is charming, the cast is talented, the jokes occasionally land, and Barney Miller has been off the air for 31 years. Ehh! So why not?

* Recommended for people with short attention spans or who have undergone a recent surgery in which their doctors have advised them not to laugh too hard. Read Humpy’s weekly TV listings at THESTRANGER.COM

COMIC | BY ROBYN JORDAN

FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

BY ROB BREZSNY

For the Week of Sept 11

ARIES (March 21–April 19): “A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart,” wrote Chuck Palahniuk in his book Stranger Than Fiction. From what I can tell, Aries, the sequence is the reverse for you. In your story, the disruption has already happened. Next comes the part where you laugh. It may be a sardonic chuckle at first, as you become aware of the illusions you had been under before the jolt exposed them. Eventually, I expect you will be giggling and gleeful, eternally grateful for the tricky luck that freed you to pursue a more complete version of your fondest dream.

TAURUS (April 20–May 20): Taurus musician David Byrne was asked by an interviewer to compose a seven-word autobiography. In response, he came up with 10 words: “unfinished, unprocessed, uncertain, unknown, unadorned, underarms, underpants, unfrozen, unsettled, unfussy.” The coming days would be an excellent time for you to carry out similar assignments. I’d love to see you express the essential truth about yourself in bold and playful ways. I will also be happy if you make it clear that even though you’re a work in progress, you have a succinct understanding of what you need and who you are becoming.

GEMINI (May 21–June 20): The French word sillage means “wake,” like the trail created behind a boat as it zips through water. In English, it refers to the fragrance that remains in the air after a person wearing perfume or cologne passes by. For our purposes, we will expand the definition to include any influences and impressions left behind by a powerful presence that has exited the scene. In my astrological opinion, Gemini, sillage is a key theme for you to monitor in the coming days. Be alert for it. Study it. It will be a source of information that helps you make good decisions.

CANCER (June 21–July 22): “Cataglottism” is a rarely used English word that has the same meaning as French kissing— engaging in liberal use of the tongue as you make out. But I don’t recommend that you incorporate such an inelegant, guttural term into your vocabulary. Imagine yourself thinking, while in the midst of French kissing, that what you’re doing is “cataglottism.” Your pleasure would probably be diminished. This truth applies in a broader sense, too. The language you use to frame your experience has a dramatic impact on how it all unfolds. The coming week will be an excel-

lent time to experiment with this principle. See if you can increase your levels of joy and grace by describing what’s happening to you with beautiful and positive words.

LEO (July 23–Aug 22): This is Correct Your First Impressions Week. It’s a perfect time for you to reevaluate any of your beliefs that are based on mistaken facts or superficial perceptions. Are you open to the possibility that you might have jumped to unwarranted conclusions? Are you willing to question certainties that hardened in you after just a brief exposure to complicated processes? During Correct Your First Impressions Week, humble examination of your fixed prejudices is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself. P.S. This is a good time to reconnect with a person you have unjustly judged as unworthy of you.

VIRGO (Aug 23–Sept 22): This is a good time to free yourself from a curse that an immature soul placed on you once upon a time. I’m not talking about a literal spell cast by a master of the dark arts. Rather, I’m referring to an abusive accusation that was heaped on you, perhaps inadvertently, by a careless person whose own pain made them stupid. As I evaluate the astrological omens, I conclude that you now have the power to dissolve this curse all by yourself. You don’t need a wizard or a witch to handle it for you. Follow your intuition for clues on how to proceed. Here’s a suggestion to stimulate your imagination: Visualize the curse as a dark-purple rose. See yourself hurling it into a vat of molten gold.

LIBRA (Sept 23–Oct 22): The current chapter of your life story may not be quite as epic as I think it is, so my advice may sound melodramatic. Still, what I’m going to tell you is something we all need to hear from time to time. And I’m pretty sure this is one of those moments for you. It comes from writer Charles Bukowski: “Nobody can save you but yourself. You will be put again and again into nearly impossible situations. They will attempt again and again through subterfuge, guise, and force to make you submit, quit and/or die quietly inside. But don’t, don’t, don’t. It’s a war not easily won, but if anything is worth winning then this is it. Nobody can save you but yourself, and you’re worth saving.”

SCORPIO (Oct 23–Nov 21): The cosmos hereby grants you poetic license to be brazen in your craving for the best and brightest experiences… to be uninhibited in feeding your obsessions and making them work for you… to be shameless as you pursue exactly and only what you really, really want more than anything else. This is a limited-time offer, although it may be extended if you pounce eagerly and take full advantage. For best results, suspend your pursuit of trivial wishes and purge yourself of your bitchy complaints about life.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22–Dec 21): At the last minute, Elsa Oliver impulsively canceled her vacation to New York. She had a hunch that something exciting would happen if instead she stayed at her home in England. A few hours later, she got a message inviting her to be a contestant on the UK television show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? In the days and weeks that followed, she won the equivalent of $100,000. I’m not predicting anything quite as dramatic for you, Sagittarius. But I do suspect that good luck is lurking in unexpected places, and to gather it in you may have to trust your intuition, stay alert for late-breaking shifts in fate, and be willing to alter your plans.

CAPRICORN (Dec 22–Jan 19): “The only thing standing between you and your goal,” writes American author Jordan Belfort, “is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can’t achieve it.” I don’t entirely agree with that idea. There may be other obstacles over which you have little control. But the bullshit story is often more than half the problem. So that’s the bad news, Capricorn. The good news is that right now is a magic moment in your destiny when you have more power than usual to free yourself of your own personal bullshit story.

AQUARIUS (Jan 20–Feb 18): Is the truth a clear, bright, shiny treasure, like a big diamond glittering in the sunlight? Does it have an objective existence that’s independent of our feelings about it? Or is the truth a fuzzy, convoluted thing that resembles a stream of smoke snaking through an underground cavern? Does it have a different meaning for every mind that seeks to grasp it? The answer, of course, is: both. Sometimes the truth is a glittering diamond and at other times it’s a stream of smoke. But for you right now, Aquarius, the truth is the latter. You must have a high tolerance for ambiguity as you cultivate your relationship with it. It’s more likely to reveal its secrets if you maintain a flexible and cagey frame of mind.

PISCES (Feb 19–March 20): It’s a good time to indulge in wide-open, high-flying, anything-goes fantasies about love—IF, that is… IF you also do something practical to help those fantasies come true. So I encourage you to dream about revolutionizing your relationship with romance and intimacy—as long as you also make specific adjustments in your own attitudes and behavior that will make the revolution more likely. Two more tips: (1) Free yourself from dogmatic beliefs you might have about love’s possibilities. (2) Work to increase your capacity for lusty trust and trusty lust.

Homework: What’s the part of yourself that is least evolved and needs most transformation? Testify at Freewillastrology. com.

www.easywork-fromhome.com (AAN CAN)

THE TREES KEEP growing and so do we! Speak to Home Owners and Generate FREE, NO OBLIGATION Consultation Appointments for Trimming, Pruning or Removals of Trees and Shrubs. *Work Outdoors *Set your own Schedule (Part Time or Full Time) *Training/ Marketing Materials/ Company Apparel provided *Cell/ Travel/ Medical Allowances Available *Reps average $1000-$1400 every two weeks. Requirements: Vehicle, DriverÕs License, Cell Phone & Internet Access. Complete the Order Generator Application at www.tlc4homesnw.com or Submit a Resume to recruiting@ tlc4homesnw.com Questions Call 509227-7410 Jasmine Ext. 3304 or Heather Ext. 3308

CUSTOMER SERVICE

MAKE THE LIVES of others a little more wonderful! Full time house cleaners, M-F, 8am-5pm, best paid in the city. Hardworking, family-owned, local company. Join our team - Call (206)527-4290

PAID RESEARCH

ARE YOU SUICIDAL, but resisting harming yourself? We want to hear from you! The UW is recruiting participants for a study on suicide. Call 206-543-2505.

RESTAURANT/HOTELS/CLUBS

MCMENAMINS SIX ARMS and Queen Anne are now hiring Line Cooks! Qualified apps must have an open & flex sched including, days, eves, wknds and holidays. We are looking for applicants who have prev exp related exp and enjoy working in a busy customer service-oriented enviro. We are also willing to train! We offer opps for advancement and excellent benefits for eligible employees, including vision, med, chiro, dental and so much more! Please apply online 24/7 at www.mcmenamins.com or pick up a paper app at any McMenamins location. Mail to 430 N. Killingsworth, Portland OR, 97217 or fax: 503-221-8749. Call 503-952-0598 for info on other ways to apply. Please no phone calls or emails to individ locs! E.O.E.

VOLUNTEERS

ATTENTION: UNIVERSITY-OFWASHINGTON-SCHOOL-OF-ART STUDENTS Interested in assisting award-winning gallery? UW credit, graduate school recommendations for weekly four-hour shift, six-month commitment preferred. 206-349-2509.

MILITARY STRESS reduction acupuncture clinic for active military, veterans & their family. MONDAY nights at SolidGround in Wallingford. 206.930.1238 or SeaAcupForVeterans@gmail.com.

HELP A NONPROFIT Create a Strategic Technology Plan! Serve as a Pro Bono Planning Consultant in the Deep Dive Cohort Program. Email vistatech@501commons.org for information.

THIS JOB IS just crafted for you if love to meet new people working outdoors at your preferred flexible work schedule. Please visit http://shiroube.com/

VOLUNTEERS NEEDED

WEDNESDAYS and Fridays to pick up donations from bakeries for food bank in Central District. Anytime between 7am-11am. 206-324-7100 x23 or volunteer@thefbsm.org.

SKILLED TRADE/CRAFT

APOCALYPSE TATTOO IS looking for another tattooist. Minimum 5 years professional tattoo experience- with clientele preferred. Please email resume with photos of your works and yourself to: info@apocalypse tattoo.com.

LESSONS

PRO GUITAR LESSONS Specializing in technique and theory. Rock, metal, blues, funk, jazz, acoustic. Taught by G.I.T. grad and teaching 12 years. All ages welcome! 206-261-6363

SING WITH CONFIDENCE. Beginners welcome. Breathing/Range Dev. Sliding Scale. Call Rosy 782-9305 singwithconfidence.com

THE VOCALIST STUDIO

We Train Vocal Athletes www.thevocaliststudio.com Scream technique, 5 Octave range. Eliminate Tension. Downtown Seattle studio. 425.444.5053

MUSICIANS AVAILABLE

I LIVE IN SEATTLE, SING, PLAY SYNTH, WRITE SONGS: CALL 206 860 3534

LEAD SINGER/GUITARIST LOOKING to form or join an original hard rock band. My previous group is disbanding and can be found here to check photos/songs/sound/vibe: www.facebook.com/cadillacradio ...Please reply to this, call or text 253797-7330 -Todd

LEGENDARY PIANIST

AVAILABLE

MUSICIANS WANTED

DRUMS WANTED - blues/rock coverband. Infl: Bonham, Kirk, Baker, etc. Please be pro, hard hitting with lots of exp. 40s+. Call for details 206-7553044 or 206-919-0514

LOOKING FOR BASS player with backup or lead vocals - Lighthouse Xplozion. Contact Gary 425-268-7850 or Joe 206-407-7876

PUNK/METAL/GROOVE/NOISE

BAND LOOKING for singer/vocalist. We are in our late 30s , practice space in Fremont. no egos, No rockstars. http://splitskins.band camp.com/

ROCKY HORROR SHOW auditions - STRONG SINGERS needed for Chandelier Productions live stage version. Please contact chandelierprod@ gmail.com for more information.

SINGER/SONGWRITER LOOKING FOR MUSICIANS/PROGRAMMERS: I PLAY KEYS AND LIVE IN SEATTLE, WANT SOMETHING LIKE MACKLEMORE RYAN LEWIS SETUP murphy.thomas8@gmail.com

ZEPPELIN SINGER WANTED Local Zeppelin Tribute needs new singer. We have paying gigs and a solid line-up. Must know the material. We strive to deliver the sacred Zeppelin material with exact accuracy. Call for audition (253)312-3033

RECORDING/REHEARSAL

Opened for Jeff Bridges! 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 a piano.

BAND REHEARSAL SPACE 1 Shared Room @$210/month Incl. 36hrs/month & Private closet and Private Rooms @ $500/mo.

COUNSELING

Male Therapist. Relaxation, Deep Tissue. Customized. Firm pressure. Strong hands. Great technique! Clean, quiet home studio in North Seattle. Avail early evenings, 7 days a week. All day Tues & Sundays. $55.00 for 1hr & 15min. Call/Text; 206-992-8375

605-4992. Licensed and Insured. www. maidfortheearth.com

WOMEN SEEKING MEN

A SWEET TREAT

I’m a loyal affectionate girl, who just wants that in return. I’d like someone who enjoys the little pleasures in life, like a good lunch, or going for a walk. Someone that pulls me out of my comfort zone just little. chubbyhuggs, 25

CURIOUS, ENGAGED AND INTRIGUED

I am really passionate about a lot of things... it’s the one thing people notice about me and comment on...you don’t have to agree with me, however... I like a good discussion/debate. warhem, 39

I LOVE LAMP

I’m smart and funny and usually making things. I love to travel. I’m looking for someone that is honest, fun, active(but still likes to lay low and relax), funny and wants to partake in life in a positive way.

Without_PenAndPaper, 28

COUNTRY TIME

I live in the loveliest mountain valley, a heaven of sagebrush and big skies, the Methow. I’m seeking someone to join me here for a life of small-scale homesteading, frequent travel, warm social times, and occasional mind-blowing adventures. woodsy_artsy_smartsy, 40

I SWALLOWED A BUTTERFLY

I love used books with sweet inscriptions. Kitten purrs make every thing better. I am dedicated to my personal work and seek a partner who is committed to his personal work too while we make time for fun and connection. Lady_Grey, 37

MUST LOVE NERDS

I am an optimistic, fun loving, energetic personality that loves to explore new places, meet new people, and challenge my wits. I welcome all opportunities for laughter and new experiences in this life. melacase31, 31

DOWNTOWN GIRL

I Am A Hippie Chick Who Doesn’t Want To Be Judged By How I Look But What Is Inside. I Am A Kind Person . Laid Back. I Am Unconventional And Considered A Little Wierd By Less Enlighten Souls. Downtowngirl69, 44

SWEET, FEISTY,DOWN TO EARTH

MEN SEEKING WOMEN

TOKEN BLACK SURFER

I’ve recently arrived from Toronto, after a 7 year vacation, but because I never said Eh! enough time in my sentences had to relocate. Big sports fan, avid bookworm, and overall fun loving guy. datfunnyguy, 36

CALM AND FUN

Honestly, I’m a hopeless romantic but not looking for anything serious. I would be the best person you ever find a friend in and will make you feel like the world is a better place. But,ask for honesty and sanity. newguyseadt, 25

WITH RESPECT TO ALL THINGS

I invite one woman for investing a mere few moments of her time to share together and see if we want to build on a moment creating and communicating

PROFILE OF THE WEEK

NICE-N-FIESTY ARTSYSCIENTIST ENDLESS-FUN

Endless fun seeking new adventures, experiences and subjects.

FILL IT:

FIT GREAT GUY

Open on what I’m looking for.... at the very least fwb.... open to dating, possible ltr.. I’m in good shape, and wanting someone to spend time with.. i’m 5’11, redblonde hair, blue eyes, 185 lbs. live in Lake Stevens... LookingForU, 39

INTROSPECTIVE INDIE NERD, LOW MILES

Hi there! Oh boy, shy and back to dating, Hopeful/cynical, too weird for the squares and too square for the weirdos... or just right? Into indie stuff, the Golden Rule, black humor, low-key fun, potential physical affection. Yes? LangdonAlger, 41

BRAINS ARE SEXY.

Superficial aesthetics are no substitute for intellect. Funny is pretty

Something I learned from the last person I dated is that emotional depth is very important to me.

The quickest way to my heart is: honesty. The quickest way to my bed is: honesty and time. And in the morning, I like my eggs cooked: sunny side up.

The last show I saw was Rose Windows Great sex calls for lots of Tenderness lady_sapience Seeks: Man for DATING

Let us know if you would like to be featured in the Stranger. If selected, you will receive a 2 week complimentary subscription.

(PHOTO REQUIRED) Visit: thestranger.selectalternatives.com/ gyrobase/Personals/Contact

I’m the one for you if you like sweetness combined with a direct, no-nonsense approach to life, communication, and relationships.I’m looking for someone to date, have amazing sex with, and see if a longer term companionship/partnership develops. ardorgirl, 42

TATTOED HOPELESS ROMANTIC

I’m looking for someone to challenge me. A best friend to have adventures with. I like to be silly and make the most out of every moment. I have a fairly decent collection of tattoos and plans for many more. baby_firefly, 35

I WROTE THIS SONG

I guess I’m somewhere between a Den Mother and a Sex Kitten. You will probably not understand at first why you like me so much unless you are WAY smart. I think “Drunk History” is hilarious. My dresses are pretty. RedOne, 40

into one very special connection we both can grow into. Realized_Dreamer, 37

SMART FUN AND RELIABLE

Im a easy laid back guy just looking to see if maybe i can find a match.I keep things simple and drama free and know how to have fun.Outdoor activities is also a plus or stay in and watch movies. dekreame, 32

LIFE IN IT’S FULLEST

Hello, I am interested in an intelligent woman, who is active, funny, compassionate and passionate for good and stupid conversations, good food, passionate encounters and a general fun time. I have a good life, Join me on an adventure. Wanderingbob, 59

HOMEBODY LISTENER LOVER

Hi, facing my fears! Friendly, kind, caring, waiting for that right lady to come into my life. Even though I am older I am trying to start my lovelife which I have recently found to be ready and willing! balint, 42

IE, TATTOOED, PISCES. Hopes of meeting an interested girl or just making some new friends. I’m 21, a cosmetology graduate, and on the path to bartending. Love anything creative and pleasing to the senses. I like to dance, cook, adventure, and have fun. ModifiedMisses, 21

CHILL, HONEST, FUN, OPENMINDED, ARTISTIC I’m a hairstylist and I live in Seattle.I like live music, traveling,trying new things,going out,going to mov ies,walks,skateboarding,cam ping,hiking, etc. My biggest turn off is dishonesty or people who play games.I’m interested in people who will eventually like to meet in person. Jonesy, 37

MEN SEEKING MEN

ENERGETIC, EASY GOING, PEOPLE PLEASER

I am a selfless person, always looking to make someones day just a little bit better. Tell me what you dont like about yourself, and I will find a way to change your mind. Little bit of a hopeless romantic. Nocturnal_Flame, 20

SMART, FUNNY & INTO IT

Successful guy has some passionate impulses that he likes to act on often. Well traveled, worldly/sophisticated, sociable, charismatic, thoughtful, creative but grounded, reality based but provocative, love performing arts, intelligent, driven, ambitious, hysterically funny if you get smart humor.... m4mORALguy, 52

SAVAGE LOVE

Sheathe That Thing BY

DAN SAVAGE

I’m a Savage Lovecast listener, but I’m sending this question to your column because my boyfriend would FOR SURE recognize my voice if I called the show. I’m 25, I live in Portland, and my boyfriend and I have been monogamous for five years. His dick is of average size. It’s not small enough for him to have dealt with the emotional baggage associated with “small dicks.” Yet I’ve had sex with big dicks, and I would love to try one of those dick sheaths or extenders or whatever. But my boyfriend is a sensitive guy, and I feel like I’m going to permanently fuck up our sex life if I ask for one. How can I propose this without him feeling like his manhood is insufficient? I’ve heard you talk about how it’s best to share your kinks as if they were added bonuses—and not as if they were terminal cancers—but I can’t figure out how to talk about this without hurting his ego. Advice?

Sincerely Loves Average Man

“Getting a sheath onto her boyfriend’s dick without hurting his feelings will be a bit tricky,” said Matthew Nolan of OhJoySexToy.com. “No matter their size, lads around the world are brought up with dick insecurities. Having said that, a dick sheath isn’t the worst thing in the world for her to bring to the table: It involves her boyfriend as a participant, and it keeps his dick in the loop.”

Matthew and his partner, Erika Moen, collaboratively create an informative, subversive, and entertaining weekly comic that focuses on the world of sex—from sex-toy reviews to interviews with people in the sex industry to sharing sex-education lessons. They research and write the text together, and Erika does all the drawing. Why comics?

“Sex education is typically very dry,” said Erika. “A wall of text about abstract concepts and then some alien diagrams—it’s really hard to relate that information to your own body. Comics are especially well equipped to teach people about their bodies, sexual options, and reproductive choices because they combine images and text together, making subjects approachable and visually appealing. And, hey, adding in a joke or two helps make people feel included in the conversation instead of being lectured at.”

In a recent comic, Matthew gave cock sheaths a try. Cock sheaths—for those of you who haven’t visited a sex-toy shop in a while—are a popular new sex toy that allows an average dude to be huge, and a huge dude to be ridiculous. They’re pliable-but-firm hollow dildos that a guy wears over his dick. The dude slides his hard, lubed-up dick inside the sheath, pulls his balls through a ring at the base that prevents the sheath from sliding off, and proceeds to bang away at his partner’s hole(s) like a porn star.

That’s the theory anyway.

“The dick sheaths I tried weren’t the greatest thing for my partner and me,” said Matthew. “They dull the senses and turn your dick into an unwieldy mess. Despite owning a few, my preference is to use a big dildo on my partner instead of wearing a dick sheath.”

But if it’s a dick sheath you want, SLAM, Matthew has some advice about how to get one.

“SLAM should suggest going sex-toy shopping with her boyfriend,” said Matthew. “She could tell her boyfriend she’s in a filthy mood and fancies something big. She should put the emphasis on wanting him to give her some big-toy fucking and add that this is something that you can both do together. Have him help pick out different toys—like some big dildos— while saying encouraging things like ‘Ooohh, wouldn’t you like to fuck me with this one?’ When you come across the cock sheath, add it to your cart explaining that it would be a perfect sex-toy solution for your mood.”

I’m going to break in here for a second:

If you feel like your boyfriend might have a meltdown if you start talking about wanting something huge for a change—the implication being, of course, that he isn’t able to provide you with that something on his own (how big are his forearms?)—head to the sex-toy shop without any stated agenda and see how he reacts to the cock sheaths on display. If he recoils from them, SLAM, you might wanna steer him over to the body paints and bondage gear. But if he seems intrigued and not threatened by the cock sheaths, ask him how he’d feel about fucking you with one of those, without seeming too hugely invested in being fucked by one of those yourself. And what do you do if you manage to leave the sex-toy store with a cock sheath and a boyfriend whose ego is still intact?

“Be encouraging about enjoying the extra size and having him fuck you with toys,” said Matthew. “When it comes to the sheath, keep it jovial—laugh about it and tell him he’s sexy. A fun atmosphere can help alleviate insecurities. And by the time you’re done and dusted, you’ll know better if you prefer him with or without the sheath.”

Go to OhJoySexToy.com to see examples of Erika and Matthew’s work. Their comic about pregnancy is particularly inspired and a great resource for parents who are having a hard time explaining where babies come from. Follow them on Twitter @PlusTenStrength and @ErikaMoen.

I am a 22-year-old heterosexual female . I may possibly be bi, but I don’t know. I really like the dick, but I am attracted to women and fantasize about fucking a pretty woman with a strap-on. I asked my boyfriend of a year if I could live out my fantasy, but he said he doesn’t want me “fucking another woman like a man.” I asked if maybe I could do this to him instead, but he said no. I like BDSM, but the most he’ll do is hold my arms down and spank me. I’ve asked for other things—bondage, nipple clamps, paddles, etc.—but he says that stuff takes too much time and the bother of it “kills the mood.” I offered to set up stuff beforehand— ropes already tied to the corners of the bed, for instance—but he doesn’t want me to do that because “what if someone saw it.” Am I just being inconsiderate and selfish? Maybe I’m asking too much, but I felt that I was beyond honest about all of this before we started dating. My ex-husband (yes, ex-husband: I got married at 16 and divorced last year) was never okay with any of this, either, and would call me a freak when I opened up about my desires—so I made sure not to hide them from my current boyfriend when we met. Now what am I supposed to do? Just drop it? Or should I talk to him? How do I talk to him?

Confused And Sexually Denied

Yes, CASD, you should drop it—and by “it” I mean “him.”

You wasted five years of your life on a man who couldn’t meet your needs and sex-shamed you about your perfectly ordinary, perfectly average kinks. You’ve been with this new guy for a year, and he’s revealed himself to be every bit as lazy, inconsiderate, and sex-shamey as your ex-husband. DTMFA. There are tons of guys out there who would (1) be happy to indulge your kinks, and (2) make lovely boyfriends and/or husbands. Go find one—or two or three or four.

On the Savage Lovecast, it’s Bible study time with nondouchey Christian John Shore at savagelovecast.com.

mail@savagelove.net @fakedansavage on Twitter

It’s okay to cheat on your waxer. Sugaring Hair Removal Women & Men All Natural Safe, No Burning, Lifting Skin A superior service.

$20 off Any Sugaring Service First Time Clients Only. May Not Be Combined Expires 10/23/13 4013 Stone Way N 206-512-3033 • www.sugarplumspa.com

JOE NEWTON

Ahh! Time to get *Ahh-thorized* 24/7 Patient Verification

Doctor-Nurse Owned Holistic Center 425-243-2441 or 888.508.5428 Seattle - Issaquah - Ellensburg AdvancedHolisticHealth.org

Be an Egg Donor

Are you a healthy woman in your 20’s who loves to help others, or know someone who is?

We would love to talk with you! Generous compensation. Call: 206-515-0042 or email: DonorEggBank@pnwfertility.com

Donate Your Car, Truck or Motorcycle

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

Female Social Drinkers interested in dating men wanted for a study on alcohol and dating experiences. Single women of all ethnic backgrounds aged 21-30 can earn up to $320 for a multi-part study that includes online surveys and one study visit. Call Project FRESH at (206) 543-5536 or visit www.fresh.uw.edu. Part of a research project at the UW, Dept. of Psychology. HAPPY HAULER.com Debris Removal 206-784-0313

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 top shelf 1/8th coupon inside the paper. Incredible selection, flowers, concentrates, edibles, clones, and more! 206-257-4407/ 1052 Greenwood Ave N

Major credit cards accepted , If you have SEVERE or LIFETHREATENING FOOD ALLERGIES your plasma is vital. Learn more at www.plasmalab.com 425-258-3653 | Everett, WA Earn $200 per donation

WHISKEY FLIGHTS

tasting ights of bourbon, scotch, rye, gin, cognac, armagnac, grappa, tequila, mescal, wine & more!

Fremont, across from the Rocket bthief.com