Seattle Weekly, June 18, 2014

JUNE 18-24, 2014 I VOLUME 39 I NUMBER 25

SEATTLEWEEKLY.COM I FREE

BREAKING UP WITH A RESTAURANT, PAGE 17 | WHAT’S WRONG WITH PORGY AND BESS? PAGE 20

WE ARE ONESIES Fighting for FEMINISM’S UNFINISHED BUSINESS BUSINESS.

BY NINA SHAPIRO

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inside» June 18–24, 2014 VOLUME 39 | NUMBER 25

» SEATTLEWEEKLY.COM

Semi-Annual

»20

»10

news&comment 6

TAG, YOU’RE IT

BY KELTON SEARS | Who’s defacing

a poster company’s posters? Another poster company? Also: Scher’s farewell tour, and more.

10 MOM POWER

BY NINA SHAPIRO | With her

burgeoning political clout, Kristin RoweFinkbeiner fights for the women whom feminism forgot.

food&drink 17 IT’S OVER!

BY NICOLE SPRINKLE | Breaking up

(with a restaurant) is hard to do.

17 | FOOD NEWS/THE WEEKLY DISH 18 | THE BAR CODE

arts&culture 20 BUMMERTIME

BY GAVIN BORCHERT | Why does Gershwin’s iconic opera need tinkering?

20 | THE PICK LIST 22 | OPENING NIGHTS | Five hours of

Michael Chabon, curious Spanish history, and a rock biography.

23 | PERFORMANCE 26 | VISUAL ARTS/BOOKS

27 FILM

30 | FILM CALENDAR

31 MUSIC

Seattle’s Michael Wohl is keeping a storied guitar style alive.

32 | SEVEN NIGHTS 34 | CD REVIEWS

EDITORIAL

40%

Senior Editor Nina Shapiro

BOTH THIRD PLACE LOCATIONS

Editor-in-Chief Mark Baumgarten

Food Editor Nicole Sprinkle Arts Editor Brian Miller Entertainment Editor Gwendolyn Elliott Editorial Operations Manager Gavin Borchert Staff Writers Ellis E. Conklin, Matt Driscoll, Kelton Sears Editorial Interns Thomas James, Diana Le, Laurel Rice Contributing Writers Rick Anderson, Sean Axmaker, James Ballinger, Michael Berry, Sara Billups, Margaret Friedman, Zach Geballe, Dusty Henry, Megan Hill, Robert Horton, Patrick Hutchison, Sara D. Jones, Seth Kolloen, Sandra Kurtz, Dave Lake, John Longenbaugh, Jessie McKenna, Jenna Nand, Terra Clarke Olsen, Brian Palmer, Kevin Phinney, Keegan Prosser, Mark Rahner, Michael Stusser, Jacob Uitti

35 | CLASSIFIEDS

»cover credits PHOTO OF KRISTIN ROWE-FINKBEINER AND MEMBERS OF MOMSRISING BY KYU HAN

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SEATTLE WEEKLY • JU NE 18 — 24, 2014

OPENING THIS WEEK | Jenny Slate’s abortion rom-com, Robert Pattinson lost in a lawless Oz, and a strange gondola ride in Nepal.

Used Book Sale!

June 21 & 22

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news&comment

Don’t Be a Dick

Four Things to Know About the KC Exec’s Metro Veto

Seattle’s tone-deaf “Penis Army” might have trouble finding recruits.

BY KELTON SEARS

JEREMY DWYER LINDGREN

6

But the most public battle Poster Giant waged was in the summer of 2012. The Sunset Electric wall on 11th Avenue, which has since been replaced by an upscale apartment building, then served as something of a neighborhood bulletin board for the Capitol Hill community. Grrrl Army, an anonymous feminist group that promotes awareness of rape culture, had painted the wall pink with anti-misogynist messages, declarations of solidarity with queer groups, and fierce indictments of status quo sexual politics.

KELTON SEARS

draw that conclusion,” he says. On the day I called Zimmerman, he said reports had come in that Poster Giant tore down Polite Society’s Pride Week posters and stuffed them in trash bags, photos of which were later shared on the “Poster Giant is scum” Facebook page.

I contacted Poster Giant twice about the “Penis Army” graffiti. Each time the receptionist sighed, took down my name and number, and said someone would return my call, which has yet to happen.

Horrid penises popped up unexpectedly across Seattle last week (no pun intended).

Poster Giant proceeded to wheat-paste over the guerrilla feminist installation. Undeterred, Grrrl Army returned in force to replace its mural.

Thus began a months-long back-and-forth battle—both parties intermittently covering each other multiple times on the same day. At its peak, Grrrl Army began sticking coathangers on the wall, which Poster Giant had to swat down with shovels.

After the incident, Grrrl Army came out and endorsed Polite Society. “Grrrl Army has been supportive of our policy of not covering or tearing down posters for independent bands and sharing the poles with people,” says Zimmerman, who has made it a company prerogative to leave community posters up for shows and events that haven’t happened yet. “As far as this ‘Penis Army’ thing, it seems as though whoever is responsible is making a mockery of our association with the Grrrl Army.”

While Zimmerman is not accusing “our competitor” of the Penis Army vandalism and no direct evidence exists to indict them, considering the company’s history with Grrrl Army and the fact that only Polite Society and its clients’ boards across the entire city were targeted, “You can

Whoever is behind the Penis Army tags couldn’t have been more tone-deaf in regards to their timing. With the Isla Vista killing spree, driven by misogynistic delusions, just a month behind us and Pride Week quickly approaching, the messages were less than funny.

“As a woman, I find it incredibly distressing,” says Tallulah Anderson, a six-month Polite Society employee. “One of the reasons I decided to work there is because it is so female and gayfriendly. I wanted an organization I would feel very comfortable and safe working for. Considering we are such a female- and gay-run organization, it’s particularly offensive.”

“The statement ‘Penis Army is coming for you’ implies sexual violence, makes a mockery of the Grrrl Army’s stated purpose of stopping abuse against women, and perpetuates rape culture,” Zimmerman says. “There are people walking by on the street, children and victims of sexual violence, who probably find this disturbing. Our staff isn’t afraid of this sort of intimidation, and we have materials to replace the posters.

“Our statement is ‘The Penis Army: What a bunch of little dicks.’ ” E

ksears@seattleweekly.com

Rumor had it Marshawn Lynch wouldn’t show up to the Seahawks mandatory mini-camp. Beast Mode wanted a “small token of appreciation,” the word was, and he might retire if he didn’t get one. The tension mounted as the team opened camp Tuesday. The Internet tracked the story. “Our Long Regional Nightmare is over. Marshawn will report to a minicamp that no one will remember he almost missed.”

•

•

—Michael Grey, ESPN Seattle, via Twitter “I can confirm that Beast Mode is in the building.” —Terry Blount, via Twitter “That’s a big win for the word ‘mandatory.’ ” —Blake Price, Team 1040 AM Vancouver, via Twitter “You have to wonder if the Seahawks did anything to entice Marshawn Lynch to attend camp. Bringing in a bushel of midgets, perhaps.” —Seattle Sportsnet, via Twitter

•

BY KELTON SEARS

O

n June 9, King County Executive Dow Constantine issued his firstever veto since taking office. The casualty? A King County Council proposal that would have delayed, and possibly avoided, budget cuts to Metro currently scheduled for February, June, and September 2015.

Here’s the lowdown on what happened and why: 1. Under the proposal, led by councilmember Rod Dembowski, the county would have revisited the scheduled cuts in November so that it could update its sales-tax revenue numbers. The hope was that a possible upswing in revenue could offset the 16 percent budget cut that King County Metro service faces. The proposal passed 5-4.

2. The first round of cuts were still going to happen, no matter what. The proposal would not have affected September plans to discontinue routes 7 Express, 19, 47, 48 Express, 61, 62, 82, 83, 84, 139, 152, 161, 173, 202, 203, 205 Express, 209, 210, 211 Express, 213, 215, 243, 250, 260, 265, 280, 306 Express, 919, 927, and 935.

3. Dow Constantine’s veto came just 20 minutes after the council passed the proposal, and was accompanied by a very blunt statement explaining his decision. “We cannot spend

MORGEN SCHULER

SEATTLE WEEKLY • JUNE 18 — 24, 2014

I

n 15th–16th century Bhutan, a saint who called himself the “Madman from Kyishodruk” traveled the countryside preaching Buddhism and convincing common folk to paint giant erect penises on their homes. The Madman called his own dick the “Thunderbolt of Flaming Wisdom,” and sometimes painted it with wings attached. The tradition lives to this day in rural parts of the country, where a painted phallus is believed to drive away demons, the evil eye, and malicious gossip.

The practice elicited the opposite effect in Seattle on June 10, when employees of marketing company Polite Society discovered the phallic markings of a madman claiming to be the “Penis Army” spray-painted on its poster installations citywide. Giant dicks, bent at a jarring angle, blared out at the city in Capitol Hill, Belltown, and beyond: PENIS ARMY IS COMING FOR YOU. “Every one of our advertising boards in the city of Seattle for our clients was defaced, even though our competitor’s boards next to them were untouched,” says Chuck Zimmerman, the founder of Polite Society. “It’s a very bizarre behavior.”

In Seattle, a majority of the posters you see stapled on telephone poles or wheat-pasted on advertising boards come from either Polite Society or its competitor Poster Giant—a company whose postering tactics have elicited such ire from the local music and art communities that a Facebook page called “Poster Giant is scum” was created two years ago to document it. The page, active to this day, has 577 likes.

Independent bands who try to advertise shows with do-it-yourself poster campaigns often return the next day to find their work torn down and covered with posters from Poster Giant clients—a practice documented by opponents of the company through videos and photos. In 2012 Poster Giant wheat-pasted over a public art mural in Pioneer Square, a move the company apologized for after it was met by a wave of criticism from local artists who claimed the company was monopolizing public space.

money we do not have,” Constantine wrote.

“Transit service levels must align with current known revenue. I will not support legislation passed by a bare majority vote that seeks to avoid this reality. We must have a balanced budget.

We can budget based on hope. Or we can budget based on reality. This ordinance commits us to spending money that we do not know to exist.” Constantine also called the proposal full of “empty managerial platitudes like ‘budgetscrubbing’ and ‘top-to-bottom’ review.’ ” 4. In May, Mayor Ed Murray proposed a bill, now on the November ballot, which will attempt to save Metro routes in Seattle specifically. The bill aims to recoup the $45 million a year necessary to forestall 90 percent of the slated bus-route cuts by adopting a $60 car tab fee and upping the sales tax by 0.1 percent. The bill is essentially a Seattle-specific reboot of April’s failed Prop.

1, which was rejected by 55 percent of King County voters. E

ksears@seattleweekly.com

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bye on Twitter and Facebook, then watched the reactions fly. At Crosscut, David Brewster published nearly 2,000 detailed words on the subject, calling the loss of Scher “a big one in local journalism” and grouping it as “part of the steady loss of experienced journalists with lots of institutional memory.” Over at the P-I, Joel Connelly pounded out a fitting ode to Scher’s nearly three decades on the air, including praise from the likes of former mayor Paul Schell and retired Seattle Times editorial-page editor Mindy Cameron. KUOW general manager Caryn Mathes, meanwhile, thanked Scher “for his dedication to the station’s mission and to our audience,” despite the fact that editorial differences so obviously played a key role in his decision to leave.

Saturday morning at Starbucks, none of it seems lost on Scher. He has taken it all in, and describes his current mood as “excited and grateful,” though later he admits that he’s also “a little bit sad.” He tells me that his first Friday without a Week in Review—KUOW’s weekly news roundtable, which immediately went on hiatus after his departure—was “tough,” and more than anything he regrets not offering listeners a proper on-air sign-off.

“I didn’t understand, I don’t think, that [not

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» CONTINUED ON PAGE 8

7

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A

I

t’s the second Saturday morning of Steve Scher’s post-KUOW life. He meets me early, a little after 8 a.m., at a Starbucks on Lake City Way—the makings of a grizzled gray goatee forming on his chin and a copy of The New York Times in front of him.

Behind glasses, Scher’s eyes look weary—at least compared to the promo shot that accompanied the announcement of his departure from Seattle’s NPR affiliate after 28 long years, posted online exactly a week earlier. In fairness, it’s early.

Despite the magnitude of the transition in his life, Scher’s morning seems to be proceeding normally. Using an adjective he begrudgingly came to know quite well during his tenure, one might even call it “dull.” Scher meets me after dropping off his 1998 Dodge Caravan at the shop for an alignment. The minivan, he says, has 190,000 miles on it and “has been a surprisingly good car.” “I’m hoping I don’t need four new tires,” he says.

Life goes on.

In truth, however, there’s more on Scher’s mind than car troubles. News of his decision to leave KUOW hit Seattle abruptly, and seemed particularly jolting to the aging lions of local journalism. Making no official announcement over the airwaves, Scher said a quick good-

30

BY MATT DRISCOLL

For Father’s Day.

30 30

Steve Scher leaves KUOW for “the writer’s life.”

100 40

Time to Go

40 100

Scher is shaping up an 86,000-word novel. “I hope it doesn’t sound dumb,” he says.

Job Number:

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Sephora

news&comment» The Worst World Cup Spots

Time to Go » FROM PAGE 7 saying goodbye and thank you on air] wasn’t a fair thing to do,” Scher admits. “I’m sorry for that.”

Still, it was time to go, he says.

For Scher, who turned 60 earlier this year, the decision to split from KUOW wasn’t as abrupt as it came off. Driven by a desire to increase listenership, new directions at the station had soured him, he admits, and didn’t play to the long-form, in-depth strengths he’d honed over the years. But more than anything, as Scher noted in his official online goodbye, he simply “couldn’t let another year pass without at least giving an honest attempt at the writer’s life.” Scher assesses that it’s now or never. He’s reached a point where he’s counting the productive years he has left. The number hovers around 15 summers, he guesses. “The urgency was there and growing,” Scher says of his need to write.

“I didn’t understand, I don’t think, that [not saying goodbye and thank you on air] wasn’t a fair thing to do.

I’m sorry for that.”

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mdriscoll@seattleweekly.com

SPORTSBALL

Fans watch the U.S. team play Ghana.

I saw that people were piling in like it was a subway car at rush hour. I called a quick audible and went up to Frolic, the bar atop the Red Lion Hotel that’s best known for its outdoor patio. It was deserted. My co-workers and I had a couple of couches to ourselves right in front of their four HDTVs. Saturday, my friend drove past the George & Dragon (“line out the door,” he said), to meet me at the Iron Bull on 45th for England vs. Italy. We had our pick of seats when we got there, right in front of their giant projection TV. A decent crowd showed itself; there was plenty of cheering. But I didn’t have to elbow my way to the bar when I needed another $6 pitcher of Bud Light.

A similar approach should prove fruitful for another internationally watched event happening in Tacoma this time next year. Tickets just went on sale for the 2015 U.S. Open at Chambers Bay Golf Course. If you decide to invest in tickets (the cheapest are $110), do yourself a favor and buy them for the Thursday or Friday sessions. The crowds will be smaller and you’ll get to see more golfers than you would on Saturday and Sunday, when only the top 60 or so get to compete. E

ANNA ERICKSON

JUNE 24@7:30PM

The longtime voice of KUOW approaches this next chapter of life as seriously as one might expect. During a recent sabbatical, Scher says he wrote a 86,000-word novel—a romantic comedy, to be exact—set in two places he knows well: Seattle and the radio business. The main character, Scher tells me, is a 23-year-old who “works as the third banana for a morning zoo show” and has written a screenplay that “some guy wants to make into a movie.” Scher says he plans to put the finishing touches on the book over the next two months, promising “a big finale where everything blows up.”

The explosions, he assures, are literal. “I hope it’s funny,” Scher says of the book. “I hope it doesn’t sound dumb.”

When asked whether he’s nervous, the response comes without hesitation: “Hell, yeah.”

Truth be told, however, in talking with Scher you get the feeling that the reaction to his literary effort is secondary. Pursuing writing—and doing it now—is part of a strategy built on advice received from the countless successful authors he’s interviewed over the years—many of whom, he says, told him the same thing about the craft: If you’re a writer, at some point you’ve simply got to make time to write.

“This became more important—that push to get the work done that was in my heart,” Scher says of his decision to leave radio, finish his book, and take up writing full time. “You fulfill your contract with yourself, and then even if [the book] is still in the drawer, you’ve finished it.

“I had to get it out. I have to get it out.” E

L

ast week The Seattle Times released a list of 10 local soccer bars they called the “best” places to watch the World Cup. But if you want to actually see the game, these are probably the 10 worst places.

Crowding into the George & Dragon to watch England play, or Prost to watch Germany, is terrific if you’re there for the experience—of course, you’ll need to get there a couple of hours early if you want to make it in at all.

The World Cup at a soccer bar is like St. Patrick’s Day at an Irish pub.

If you’re in

BY SETH KOLLOEN the mood to stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers, order two beers at a time, and shout when you want anyone to hear you—and this has its charms— then go for it.

For me, the “best” places to watch the World Cup are sports bars that don’t specialize in soccer—or bars not really known for sports at all.

Case in point: On Friday I took a long lunch to watch Spain vs. Netherlands. I’d planned to go to the brewpub Yardhouse, across from Westlake Park on Fourth Avenue, but as I approached

sportsball@seattleweekly.com

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We Are Onesies

Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner has built one of the most powerful grassroots organizations in the country fighting for feminism’s unfinished business: moms.

10

KYU HAN

SEATTLE WEEKLY • JUNE 18 — 24, 2014

K

ristin Rowe-Finkbeiner never expected to be a stay-at-home mom. Her own mother, after getting divorced, impressed upon her the need for women to be financially independent. She was living up to that mantra as the well-regarded field director of what is now Washington Conservation Voters. Then her young son, born in 1996, was diagnosed with an immune deficiency disorder that made it impossible for him to be put in a child-care facility. Rowe-Finkbeiner quit her job to look after him.

“It was very isolating,” Rowe-Finkbeiner recalls. She was then living in the small, woodsy town of Duvall, on the eastern edge of the legislative district that her husband, Bill Finkbeiner, represented as a state senator.

A self-described “numbers geek” who studied political economics and biochemistry at the Evergreen State College, she started looking into how many other stay-at-home mothers were out there. The information was surprisingly hard to get. The U.S. Census, she found out, didn’t track it. When she did find statistics, they were incomplete, but revealed that many families with stayat-home moms were living in poverty.

“I found out two things,” she says. One was that stay-at-home moms were “invisible.” The other—contrary to the image of elite moms living a comfortable life after “opting out” of the workforce—was that motherhood apparently put many in danger of falling off a “fiscal cliff.”

She started exploring these themes in freelance articles for such publications as Hip Mama and Mothering. And she delved into some positive discoveries about motherhood too: Notably, some women—Madeleine Albright and Sandra Day O’Connor among them—rose to great professional heights despite staying home for a time with their kids. “Sequencing,” or moving in and out of the workplace, was becoming an increasingly popular phenomenon, she wrote in an article successfully pitched to Ms. in 2002. Getting an assignment from Ms.—the publication of the feminist movement, co-founded by Gloria Steinem—was a coup.

Then came her second awakening: Ms. killed the story. She says she was told that, after a rousing debate, the editorial staffers had decided that they didn’t see motherhood as a “feminist” issue.

That was when Rowe-Finkbeiner realized it was time for a “new feminist revolution”—one that recognizes that the vast majority of women

BY NINA SHAPIRO

Rowe-Finkbeiner sits outside her home with MomsRising members.

become moms, at which point they face not only economic consequences if they stay home but a wage gap if they work, along with astronomical child-care costs and outdated workplaces that in most cases offer no paid maternity (or paternity) leave and little flexibility for parents.

Twelve years later, motherhood is more and more on the feminist agenda. “It is the absolute most important unfinished business of feminism,” asserts Linda Hirshman, a New York– based author and retired professor of philosophy and women’s studies at Brandeis University.

“Yes, yes!” enthuses National Organization for Women president Terry O’Neill when the subject comes up during an interview on a recent trip to Seattle. “The single best predictor of whether a [woman] will face poverty in her retirement years is whether she had children and

how many children she had.” She knows this, she adds, because of statistics, drawn from government agencies and various studies, that RoweFinkbeiner has publicized.

Ms. now glowingly quotes Rowe-Finkbeiner and retweets her pronouncements.

Indeed, it is no coincidence that motherhood now registers as a feminist cause; RoweFinkbeiner has pushed it to the forefront with a group she co-founded in 2006 with MoveOn.org principal Joan Blades: MomsRising.

What’s more, MomsRising—an operation that now boasts 26 staffers, a $3 million budget, and a radio show, and that claims one million members across the country—and its executive director are getting traction beyond feminist circles. The 45-year-old Kirkland resident, who now has two kids, 15 and 17, flies to Washing-

ton, D.C., several times a month to testify before Congress, attend briefings, and give speeches.

Her influence seems to have reached a critical point.

She was an invited guest to the White House when President Obama delivered his State of the Union address in January, and she clapped as he delivered this line: “It’s time to do away with workplace policies that belong in a Mad Men episode.” MomsRising, Rowe-Finkbeiner notes, had been using that analogy for over a year.

A few months later, Obama signaled a new focus on women’s economic issues, including those affecting mothers, at a speech in Florida that was seen as a run-up to the midterm elections. On June 23 the White House will host a “Summit on Working Families,” at which RoweFinkbeiner will speak.

UNDERSTAND ME

Allen relates that she didn’t know about this panel until her young employee, sitting with her, mentioned it a few hours ago. Upon hearing that Rowe-Finkbeiner was speaking, Allen says, she knew she had to go.

Allen’s full-throttle support for the MomsRising leader comes after a change of heart. “In my world, there was always this looking down on women who had babies,” she mentioned before Rowe-Finkbeiner sat down.

Allen, who is in her early 60s, came of age when the women’s movement was preoccupied with fighting stifling gender roles that had many “housewives” going crazy with boredom and frustration. This was the world that gave rise to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Feminists of the era were more nuanced than some might recall. Friedan, for instance, assumed in that 1963 tome that women would stay home for the first few years of their children’s lives, according to Olympia historian Stephanie Coontz, the author of a book about Friedan’s best-known work. Still, the focus was on encouraging women to enter public and professional life.

“I started telling every woman that she had to have a career,” recalls Allen. The political consultant didn’t have kids herself, and when she saw women who did, she says she would think: “We’re losing her.” So even though she calls women’s issues “my life’s work”—Allen often works for female candidates and chairs a group called the Center for Women & Democracy— she says moms’ issues “were beneath my radar.”

Some years back, however, Allen says she started reading more deeply about societal problems, such as the large number of juvenile offenders. “Many of these kids had grown up with no parental supervision,” she says. “They did not have the day-to-day attention and love of a parent.” That’s when it hit her: All her friends whom she had looked down upon for devoting themselves to motherhood were in fact doing something vitally important for society.

Then, along came Rowe-Finkbeiner, whom Allen knew in the ’90s as “this absolutely terrific” Conservation Voters field director who mystifyingly married a Republican legislator, Bill Finkbeiner (now a real-estate investor). “Not only did we gasp,” Allen recalls of the odd couple’s wedding plans, “we tried to talk her out of it.”

Rowe-Finkbeiner, who calls herself independent but falls in line with many Democratic positions, met her husband while working as a

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 12

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It’s a May night at Town Hall, and RoweFinkbeiner is speaking on a panel addressing the subject of “gender and work.” Two other speakers have flown in for the event: pollster Greenberg— whose A-list clients include New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio—and Saru Jayaraman, a fiery activist from Berkeley who co-founded Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a national group that advocates on behalf of restaurant workers.

“There are some kick-ass women here,” observes veteran political consultant Cathy Allen, scanning the crowd. Seated among the tables that fill Town Hall’s lobby, cafe-style, are the type of women who consider themselves progressive, drawn from activist, Democratic party, and liberal nonprofit circles.

Rowe-Finkbeiner, walking the room before the forum gets underway, plops down by Allen.

There’s a feeling of sisterhood that pervades events like this, and after the two warmly greet each other, Rowe-Finkbeiner confesses that she didn’t have time to plan what to wear because she was getting ready for a trip the next morning to the Bay Area for a MomsRising retreat. “Just wear the blue dress,” she says a friend told her, referring to the tailored outfit now on her.

MY CARE MY WAY IS EXPERTS WHO

Rowe-Finkbeiner takes a selfie at a White House event last month.

KRISTIN ROWE-FINKBEINER

There’s even a buzzword that has been circulating in the last year among politicians: the “women’s economic agenda.” No wonder.

While the issues involved have long been viewed as marginal—and when thought about at all, embraced only by Democrats—they actually “poll off the charts” among voters of both parties, according to Anna Greenberg, a prominent Washington, D.C., pollster.

Seattle political consultant John Wyble marvels at the level of influence MomsRising has had in a relatively short period of time. “It’s one of the great grassroots groups to have risen in the last few years,” he says.

“Oh my God, it’s K.R.F.!” Adriana Hutchings, a MomsRising member from Olympia, says she’ll exclaim when she sees Rowe-Finkbeiner.

The executive director is graced with telegenic blonde good looks and a boundless enthusiasm that makes rebellion seems like a fun, wholesome activity; she’s prone to talking about “superheroines” and cheering “Yay!” Germaine Greer—the acid-tongued feminist writer who rose to prominence in the ’70s—she’s not. Hutchings, alluding to Rowe-Finkbeiner’s three-pronged name and star power, laughingly compares her to another icon: Sarah Jessica Parker.

Rowe-Finkbeiner’s ascent stems not only from charisma, but from sophisticated tactics that build on those developed by MoveOn.org, which has influenced the political debate by playing to both politicians and the media. Equally significant, she has managed to transcend the so-called “mommy wars” that have played out over the past 15 or so years.

For all that, it is unclear whether moms’ issues have really taken center stage—or even whether most people know what they are.

11

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Conservation Voters staffer advocating for its environmental positions during a meeting at the Redmond Family Pancake House. The two kept talking and drinking coffee after everyone else in their group had left, recalls Rowe-Finkbeiner. She says the couple sill has lively arguments, but have learned that “there are good people on both sides.”

With the birth of her first child in 1996, Rowe-Finkbeiner “went into hibernation,” as Allen saw it. “But then she starts appearing as someone talking about all these moms’ issues.”

Allen was hooked. “She’s a woman warrior. She has great facts. She always tells me something new that gets me fired up.” Which is exactly Rowe-Finkbeiner’s intention.

“It’s time to get fired up!” the MomsRising leader declares on this May evening, her rabblerousing call leavened by her cheerful, chirpy voice.

She has just run through a gauntlet of statistics and studies: Women without children earn 90 cents to a man’s dollar; those with children just 73 cents. (Like everyone in politics, she stresses the most dramatic statistics. After controlling for education and work experience, researchers have typically found a smaller but still significant 10 to 15 percent maternal gap, according to the same paper, by Columbia University professor Jane Waldfogel, cited by Rowe-Finkbeiner.)

“She’s a woman warrior.

She has great facts.

She always tells me something new that gets me fired up.”

Mothers, she goes on, also face hiring discrimination. Here Rowe-Finkbeiner alludes to a 2007 Cornell University study that asked participants to look at made-up job application materials in which the hypothetical applicants were equivalent in every respect except one: Some listed “PTA coordinator” as “Other Experience” near the bottom of their resume. As Rowe-Finkbeiner relates, participants were 80 percent more likely to recommend the childless women for hire, and the moms elicited suggested starting salaries that were an average of $11,000 lower than the nonmothers’. It’s tempting to chalk this discrepancy up to the peculiarity of putting PTA experience on a resume, except that the same test for men resulted in 18 percent more hiring recommendations for the dads and suggested salaries that were $6,000 higher.

Rowe-Finkbeiner goes on. “Two-thirds of low-wage workers are women, and a large number of those don’t have access to paid sick leave.

We have a crisis.” Child care, she adds, now costs as much as a college education, yet child-care workers earn “hugely low pay. Again, a crisis.” On top of all that, she notes, most countries in the world (182, according to a U.N. report that came out last month) offer paid maternity leave or financial support to new mothers.

“Everyone in the room who is a mother, take a moment to stand,” she now exhorts. Roughly half the audience members rise to their feet. “Now everyone who has a mom stand up.” With the requisite chuckles, the other half, including the few men present, follow suit.

“Feel the power,” Rowe-Finkbeiner beams. “Our movement is for anybody with a bellybutton.”

In 2004, a manuscript with a provocative title—

The F-Word—came across Joan Blades’ desk. “I don’t always read them,” the MoveOn co-founder says of the many such works sent to her, but this exploration of how feminism had become a “dirty word,” despite its continued relevance, caught her eye. A chapter of the book was devoted to motherhood; when she came to it and its statistics on moms’ smaller earnings, Blades, who has two kids, said to herself: “Oh, I get this.”

Blades, who co-founded a successful software company before launching the organization that introduced online organizing to progressive politics, was herself affluent. But she says her “businessperson’s perspective” led her to recognize that a “system” of discrimination was at play. Blades was so moved that she dashed off a two-page moms’-rights “manifesto.”

She showed it to some of her friends, including Arianna Huffington, who had not yet started The Huffington Post but was an influential figure in Democratic politics. “What are you going to do about it?” Blades says Huffington and others asked her.

She hit upon the idea of writing a book, but was too busy to do it herself. So she contacted the author of The F-Word to explore the idea of a joint project. That author was Rowe-Finkbeiner, who eagerly agreed. And so in 2006 came The Motherhood Manifesto, a call to action that linked each letter of the word “mother” to a demand: M stood for maternity and paternity leave, O for “open, flexible work,” and so on.

MoveOn promoted the book among its millions of members, ensuring that it got attention, even though it left at least one reviewer wanting more substance: “When it comes to the nitty gritty, The Motherhood Manifesto is more packaging than product,” wrote Tracy Thompson on a website called The Mothers Movement Online. A documentary based on the book followed, which had an early screening on Capitol Hill with Obama and Hillary Clinton, both senators at the time, in attendance, according to Rowe-Finkbeiner.

Meanwhile, she and Blades decided they needed to go further. On Mother’s Day 2006 they launched MomsRising, announced again to MoveOn’s e-mail list. People started signing up for the new group, and its membership— measured by the number of people who make a donation or participate in some kind of action— has grown ever since. Blades, who has gone on to found a new organization devoted to changing workplace culture, now leaves much of MomsRising’s day-to-day work to Rowe-Finkbeiner.

Like MoveOn, MomsRising builds power online. State Sen. Karen Keiser recalls the 2007 effort to pass a bill, which she sponsored, that provided paid leave to new parents. MomsRising members deluged legislators with e-mails supporting the bill—one of the first times that had ever happened, according to Keiser. Legislators, she says, “were in awe.”

What’s more, the Kent Democrat continues, legislators saw that the senders were “real people”—an important category for politicians, who use it to mean everyday constituents: not lobbyists or organizational leaders, but the people who vote them in or out of office. On top of that, a couple dozen such real people, many of them pushing strollers, came to Olympia and strung a clothesline on the lawn in front of the capitol building with babies’ onesies decorated with slogans promoting family leave. It was fun and funny—and not business as usual in stuffy Olympia, Keiser recalls.

The bill, which called for five weeks of paid

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 14

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leave, passed, making Washington one of a handful of states with such a law on the books. The House, however, took the funding mechanism out of the bill, so the law, for all intents and purposes, is meaningless.

MomsRising’s effort nevertheless set its template: mixing online strategies with mediafriendly gimmicks. Members have also shown up in the halls of Congress with diapers, cookies, and storks arrayed with political messages.

MomsRising doesn’t stop there. One of its savviest techniques is to encourage members to share their stories on its website. They do so in droves, and the organization groups the stories, posted beneath adorable pictures of smiling kids and their parents, according to issue and state. Then MomsRising picks out the most compelling stories, vets

KRISTIN ROWE-FINKBEINER

on moms’ issues at the White House? It depends how you look at it. Asked for some examples of his work with MomsRising, Carson cites the sequester debate of 2012, which resulted in the shutdown of various government services because Democrats and Republicans could not agree on spending cuts. “That’s a complicated issue,” Carson says. But MomsRising made it relatable by having “moms tell their stories about how the sequester would impact them.”

That was no doubt useful for the White House, but the sequester isn’t exactly what comes to mind when thinking of core moms’ issues, I suggest. “What would you consider core moms’ issues?” he responds, sounding taken aback. I tick off maternity and paternity leave, subsidized childcare, and workplace flexibility, and ask whether he sees any momentum on them. Actually, two female senators late last year proposed an act that would fund 12 weeks of family leave through payroll contributions. Carson, however, says he’s not up on the details of all these issues, and “couldn’t speak to them one by one.”

The discussion calls to mind another political dynamic.

Ever since the 1996 presidential election, politicians have been courting votes from moms—soccer moms, security moms, Walmart moms—but issues like paid maternity leave and affordable child care have not come up in major political debates. Miriam Peskowitz, a Philadelphia author who writes about mothers, dryly observes that politi-

14

them, and provides their authors with training with a D.C. public-relations firm so they can be ready for interviews and public appearances.

Congress members routinely turn to MomsRising for such media-ready real people, according to Rowe-Finkbeiner. Witness AnnMarie Duchon, who wrote a post for MomsRising about earning less than a male colleague at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she worked in disability services, and ended up testifying before a Congressional hearing last month on the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would prohibit retaliation against women claiming wage discrimination and ensure compensation if the claims are proven.

Jon Carson, director of the White House Office of Public Engagement from 2011 to 2012, says MomsRising “was the first group I called when we needed to really get people activated around the country.”

“It’s one thing to get people fired up in progressive places like Seattle and San Francisco,” elaborates Carson, who continues to work with MomsRising in his current job as head of Organizing for Action, a Chicago-based group devoted to carrying out the Obama agenda. “But to do so in Cleveland and Little Rock, Arkansas, that’s impressive.”

Yet was Carson engaged in firing up people

KYU HAN

SEATTLE WEEKLY • JUNE 18 — 24, 2014

MomsRising, calling for paid parental leave, delivered storks to members of Congress.

cians “seem to want our vote, but they don’t want to do anything for us.”

Rowe-Finkbeiner doesn’t necessarily buy into that view. She says she worries about the pub-

lic’s cynicism toward politicians (her marriage perhaps influencing her rosier view). But she also espouses a moms’ agenda that is unexpectedly broad—too broad, one might argue.

It encompasses health-care reform (MomsRising held house parties across the country to

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help people enroll in Obamacare), increases to the minimum wage (Rowe-Finkbeiner appeared on MSNBC in early June to declare Seattle’s $15-an-hour wage agreement a “giant win”), the defense of moms’ interests in budget battles (hence her work with Carson on the sequester), environmental concerns like toxins in children’s products, gun control, healthy school lunches, and even immigration reform.

“Doesn’t that sound a little diffuse?” asks Stephanie Wilkinson, who once lamented the lack of a “mothers’ movement” in a piece for the thoughtful parenting magazine Brain, Child, which she co-founded.

There’s certainly an argument to be made that all of MomsRising’s issues affect mothers. The country’s immigration policy, for instance, has resulted in countless families split by deportation, and what affects families affects mothers. But as Wilkinson asks: “What doesn’t affect families?”

“We are all about listening to our members,” Rowe-Finkbeiner says, mulling the question.

She’s eating an early lunch at a South Lake Union Taco Del Mar, across the street from the CBS studio that she uses to tape her weekly radio show, which runs on the We Act Radio network. She acknowledges her core issues as wage and hiring discrimination, but adds that members have come to MomsRising with other issues important to them, and acting on them has been a key part of the organization’s strategy.

Staffers hold a weekly “Monday metrics” meeting devoted in part to measuring how many people are responding to suggested actions, and over which issues.

A broad agenda also allows MomsRising to attract diverse followers. For decades, accusations have flown that the women’s movement caters only to affluent whites. MomsRising works hard to counter that stereotype, pitching stories to Spanish-language media, mentioning whenever possible that the vast majority of women earn under $75,000 a year, and championing causes like minimum-wage hikes and immigration reform.

When dealing with moms, another type of diversity is important. The great “mommy wars” of the past couple of decades have been between stay-at-home and working moms. Whether the antagonism between the two camps was a media fabrication is open to debate, but there’s no question that there has been endless, angstridden, and at times combustible discussion about what moms should prioritize and what their choices symbolize. Witness Hirshman, the retired Brandeis professor, who wandered into “ground zero of the Mommy Wars,” as she put it in a 2006 Washington Post piece, after writing an essay arguing that moms who stayed home were making a mistake: “The mommy blogs vilified me as a single, childless, bitter loser; the feminists claimed women weren’t quitting; and a chorus of other voices didn’t care what I said—criticizing women just wasn’t allowed.”

Consider, then, an Olympia gathering in early May sparked by MomsRising. Hutchings, the mom wowed by Rowe-Finkbeiner’s star power, has taken up the organization’s call to hold such gatherings for groups of local moms, and she has invited a few friends into her home on a Sunday afternoon.

Hutchings is a gracious mother of three who, before having children, worked long hours in a marketing position for an architectural firm.

Her boss once remarked that she hadn’t seen her baby awake in two weeks, at which point Hutchings realized that she needed a more flexible profession if she wanted kids. She works now as a massage therapist. The first to arrive for this

15

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questions!” “Take Action,” it urged, with a red button linking to an e-mail you could sign that would go to U.S. senators, urging them to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Sunday meeting is a stay-at-home mom named Elaine, who once worked for the state Department of Ecology. Then comes Elisa, a recently divorced mom who brings her two kids. She’s a self-employed property manager. Finally, Rachel, a lawyer, shows up.

Nothing remotely mommy-wars-ish comes up. Instead, over vegetable and fruit smoothies, the group launches upon the topic Hutchings has plucked from a list suggested by MomsRising: “food justice.”

“I’m not really sure what the issue is,” Rachel says at one point, reflecting the group’s attempt to get their heads around the ambiguous title.

After a half-hour or so, though, they’ve gotten enthusiastic about calling around Olympia schools to find out what’s being done to serve healthy lunches. They also veer into discussing the prevalence of food dyes, giving Elisa an idea: “What if we started a thing where you shop in white and that shows you don’t want dyes in your food?” They end the meeting planning another on the same topic and an outing to see Fed Up, the recent cinematic exposé about the food industry.

The group’s cohesion is undoubtedly due in part to the topic, which invites no judgment about career choices. But something else may be at play too. Mommy-wars stories are thin on the ground these days. The opt-out/opt-in debate may have exhausted itself, or perhaps come to seem irrelevant in an economy where fewer and fewer have that choice.

“I’m Kristin. I’m waiting for Jill,” Rowe-Finkbeiner tells a security guard at McCaw Hall who has just announced that it’s time to get out of a hallway and into the room where a forum on workplace flexibility is about to start. “Jill” would be Jill Biden, the Second Lady, who has come to town to open this late-May forum, one of a handful that the White House is holding across the country as a lead-up to its Summit on Working Families. Rowe-Finkbeiner has worked behind the scenes with the White House to come up with a guest list, and so gets some face time with the Second Lady before the event.

Rowe-Finkbeiner joins the crowd a few minutes later and looks it over. A lot of wellturned-out professional women are on hand, as well as a few TV cameras. But she seems to think it’s not the crowd it could have been. A number of people who might otherwise have come are at Senator Patty Murray’s “golden tennis shoes” award ceremony, also today, which features a star speaker, Senator Elizabeth Warren.

The topic of workplace flexibility doesn’t carry the same clout, and so Rowe-Finkbeiner finds her issues, once again, not quite in the limelight.

The White House is here, but in the form of the Second Lady. The event will generate a little, but not a lot of, press.

Still, Biden, when she appears, gives a heartfelt speech about the challenges facing working parents. “I vividly recall getting a master’s degree at night while raising three young children,” she says. Believed to be the first Second Lady to hold down a job—she teaches English full-time at a Virginia community college—she says she sees many of her students struggling with similar commitments.

Then, former REI CEO and now Interior Secretary Sally Jewel, back in town for the forum, presides as women from six organizations deemed by the White House to be models of flexibility talk about their workplace cultures. It emerges that a couple of companies, like REI, offer paid parental leave. Another, a technology company called MOZ, gives its employees $3,000 every year to use toward a vacation. Overall, though, the discussion features a lot of fuzzy talk about valuing employees and their family commitments but few examples of specific policies.

Asked what she thinks afterward, RoweFinkbeiner—carefully at first, but gradually more forcefully—makes clear that she’s not completely sold on the event. While it’s “important to shine a bright light” on model companies, she says, “too often the discussion begins and ends here.” Legislative change is also needed to create a “floor” of “basic workplace practices,” including fair pay and paid maternity and paternity leave.

“These are not cookies,” she says, alluding to one speaker’s remark that her company thinks of its accommodations to employees as “chocolatechip cookies.” Nor, says Rowe-Finkbeiner, are they “benefits.” “These are essentials to have for a modern workplace economy.”

That’s what she says she’ll be pushing for at this month’s summit, before which MomsRising plans to hold a series of house parties across the country to gather information to share at the event. Of course there will be a cutesy gimmick.

Rowe-Finkbeiner is thinking kites, colored and decorated by members with messages about workplace policies, soaring in unison above the nation’s capitol. E

» FROM PAGE 15

The mommy wars have perhaps come to seem irrelevant in an economy where fewer can opt out of work.

“I think that’s dead, thank God,” says Leslie Morgan Steiner, author of a 2006 anthology entitled Mommy Wars. Steiner, who now gives talks for companies and organizations based on themes in her book, doesn’t find that women are entirely done with the subject. Instead, she says, they’ve moved on to how to combine work and home. She increasingly hears from dads trying to figure out the same thing.

For moms, a new cultural touchstone is Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, which argues that women need to fight their tendency to hold back at work. The Facebook COO’s thesis is not without controversy. Steiner says there’s “sort of like a mommy wars 2.0” brewing about whether you really can have a super-top job and an engaged family life.

Indeed, Rowe-Finkbeiner remarks that her first reaction to Lean In was negative because she saw it being used to rationalize the glass ceiling. Women weren’t achieving top jobs and pay because they weren’t “leaning in,” went the narrative.

Yet MomsRising recently found a way to use this zeitgeist moment to its advantage. On May 14, The New York Times fired its first female editor, Jill Abramson, prompting a tsunami of stories about whether the abrupt dismissal was related to gender and Abramson’s complaints about what she believed was pay discrimination. The very next day, MomsRising sent an e-mail missive. “Apparently, ‘leaning in’ can get you FIRED when you start asking inconvenient

nshapiro@seattleweekly.com

food&drink

Breaking Up With a Restaurant How unkind service made my heart hurt.

BY NICOLE SPRINKLE

S

In the end, it wasn’t really about the pork chop.

realized that it would be unfair to base a review on a single isolated experience, which is why, in this recounting, I’m leaving the restaurant’s name out of it.

But I couldn’t just let it go. I wanted to know why this episode stung so much. So the next week I called the owner to hear his side of the story. He told me that the pork chop was indeed three-quarters eaten when he finally saw it, to which I asked: “What does ‘by the time I saw it’ mean exactly?”

In a nutshell, the cook who prepared it might have tried it to see how salty it was. But the owner never actually talked to the cook, nor to the waitress who would have seen firsthand how much of the chop we actually ate. “On such a busy night, it was just easier to find out what had happened by asking you guys,” he told us.

So essentially, since their process had completely broken down, he’d put the burden of explaining on us—his paying customers.

After replaying the incident and our follow-up phone conversation, I still couldn’t redeem the owner’s actions. Sure, people screw up. People have bad nights, as Richman points out in his article, restaurant owners included. But this was just too egregious.

The more I thought about it, the more I under-

stood why I was so upset about what had happened—why poor service rattles us. “You can always shrug off a tough steak, since the chef didn’t mean to disappoint you. But everyone takes poor service personally,” Richman goes on to say in his article. I realized how much we rely on our restaurant experiences to be fulfilling, not just physically but emotionally. There’s a reason the 20 percent tip has become de rigueur, and it’s not just because we’re all robotic morons afraid to look like cheapskates. It’s because we truly do find value in our exchange with the people who feed us. Hospitality is an industry, but it’s one that’s rooted in the personal and primal. It begins when our mothers consider what to ingest in their own bodies to ensure our healthy entrée into the world.

Then, as we grow, we continue to be fed by our loved ones. Some of my most enduring childhood memories involve the “hospitality”—the accommodation, the generosity, the obligingness—of my family: my grandmother picking blue crabs and handing me the best chunks of back fin meat; my grandfather making breakfast every morning on vacation and keeping it warm for me, the lazy teenager, who rolled out of bed hours after everyone else had eaten. Post-college, my chef boyfriend brought me home strawberry shortcake from the restaurant he worked in as a loving midnight snack. My mother continues year after year to mail Christmas cookies (made from the same old cookie cutters we used when I

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 19

Theo Chocolate has released fair-trade-certified peanut-butter cups in partnership with small-batch roaster CB’s Nuts, based in Kingston. The heart-shaped cups—available in milk and dark chocolate, and free of soy and palm oil—are for sale at the Theo retail store in Fremont and at regional Whole Foods markets.

Chef Ericka Burke, of Volunteer Park Café, has announced she will open Canal Market later this summer. The market will sell groceries, fresh produce, household items, gift items, and grab-and-go food at 2919 Fuhrman Ave. E. The shop will have a large breakfast buffet, a juice and espresso bar, organic rotisserie chicken, local and imported wine and beer, and a growler fill station.

Shanik has recently opened a new front patio, which seats 32. The South Lake Union restaurant has also released a new bar menu and launched a happy hour from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. E morningfoodnews@gmail.com

TheWeeklyDish

Green Sauce for Your BBQ

BY NICOLE SPRINKLE

Before the rain descended last weekend, I got really grill-happy—as I’m sure many of you did too. When I get the grill out, the first thing that usually comes to mind is barbecue chicken. It’s inexpensive, and it feeds a lot of people. I’ve been doing a sort of Indian tandoori-meets-adobo chicken, which is to say my marinade includes vinegar as well as spices you’d find in a garam masala blend: cumin, turmeric, and pepper. It’s been a big hit, but what’s really blown guests away is the green sauce I make to serve with it.

Basically, I wanted to replicate the mojito sauce that Mojitos—a South American/ Caribbean restaurant off Lake City Way—makes.

It’s spicy and garlicky and completely addictive.

I knew those guys weren’t going to divulge their recipe to me (hell, they don’t even give it to their own cooks), but I was able to approximate it pretty well after having eaten it so often—and looking at different recipes online. While their sauce is orange, mine is green because I add lots of cilantro from my garden. Serve it with chicken or steak, or even as a dipping sauce for crudités.

Ingredients: 3 or 4 seeded jalapeño peppers depending on your spice comfort (serranos could work, too, though you’ll probably need only two); 1 cup cilantro leaves; 2 cloves of chopped garlic; ¼ cup sour cream; ½ cup mayo; 1 tablespoon lime juice (fresh preferred); ½ teaspoon salt; pinch of black pepper. Directions: Blend all ingredients in a food processer until smooth. Refrigerate what you don’t use.

SEATTLE WEEKLY • JU NE 18 — 24, 2014

us a free dessert or drinks. (I’d never met him before and was happy to see him; he didn’t know I was the food editor at Seattle Weekly.)

Instead he said, “I heard you had a problem with the pork chop.” My stepfather politely explained to him that the pork chop had just been too salty to enjoy. What came out of the owner’s mouth next shocked us all: “Well, by the time it got to me it was three-quarters eaten,” he stated in an accusatory tone.

My stepfather, one of the friendliest, least confrontational people I know, understandably took offense: “We ate four bites of it.”

“I’m just telling you what I saw,” the owner shot back.

“Then why don’t you bring the pork chop back out and we’ll measure it?” my stepfather retorted.

Not possible, the owner said. “Hey, I just came out here to talk to you and find out what happened. If you guys want to take it here . . . ” he then said, implying that we were escalating.

“How do you expect me to react?” my stepfather continued.

“You questioned my honor.” The owner finally said he would take it off the bill.

We all left angry and stunned.

Why would an owner ever treat a well-meaning customer so terribly?

We’d just spent upward of $200. The $22 pork chop didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. It was just the principle. But before leaving, I politely informed the owner that I was the food & drink editor at Seattle Weekly. I wanted him to know that we weren’t just some jerks trying to get a free pork chop; that I’d chosen his restaurant with care. Letting my anonymity slip, though, meant that I couldn’t return— even if I wanted to—to review the restaurant. I also

BY MEGAN HILL

NICOLE SPRIINKLE

ooner or later, depending on how long it takes to get a reservation, you’ll end up having a bad time at what is supposed to be a good restaurant. When that happens, you might be startled by how upset you become. It probably won’t be the food that’s to blame.” So wrote renowned food critic Alan Richman in a 2011 GQ article, “Dinner for Schmucks,” after having a particularly bad service experience.

I returned to this story by Richman, under whom I studied at the French Culinary Institute, because I just had my own all-time worst restaurant encounter. Before I hadn’t quite grasped his thesis, but now his words resonated. My parents were in town recently, and I wanted to treat them to a great Seattle restaurant—somewhere memorable, beloved by a city that makes great food. I chose a currently popular, relatively new place that served a style of cuisine my parents love.

After our entrées arrived, my partner took a bite of his pork chop and got a puzzled look on his face. “What’s wrong?” I asked him. “This is really salty,” he said. “Can you taste it?” I took a bite and grimaced. My mom and dad each took a bite. The verdict: way oversalted. Inedible. We hailed the waitress. She was extremely apologetic and asked if we’d like another. At this point it was pretty late, and we weren’t up for the 20-minute pork-chop prep time again. We declined dessert.

When the check came, we were surprised to see the $22 chop on the bill—especially considering we’d had only four bites of it and didn’t accept another one or any other entrée.

An innocent mistake, I thought. When the waitress came back and we pointed it out, she apologized and said she’d get a manager. At least 10 minutes later, the restaurant’s owner came to our table, presumably to apologize and ask if he could get

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food&drink» Breaking Up » FROM PAGE 17 was little) to me and my family—no matter that they get smashed up on the trip.

When finally we’re old enough to head out to restaurants on our own, we’ve been conditioned to expect, if not outright love, a close approximation of affection. Smiles, friendly conversation.

A commitment to getting us happily fed. We’ve entered into a “relationship” that’s loaded with preconceptions and desires. Good service draws on our history and delivers us something we subconsciously craved—even if we didn’t realize it.

When that relationship breaks down, it’s not just anger we’re left to feel (though certainly that’s a legitimate feeling), but flat-out hurt.

I get that this puts a whole lot of pressure on the people who cook and serve us at restaurants—probably far more than they deserve.

Yet I think anyone in the food-service industry needs to think hard about what they’re entrusted with—as so many do.

We’ve been conditioned to expect, if not outright love, a close approximation of affection.

nsprinkle@seattleweekly.com

Have you ever broken up with a restaurant, and if so, what put you over that edge? If you haven’t, what do you think would? Go to seattleweekly.com/restaurants to read what our food panelists have to say, and share your thoughts.

W

e live in an era of unprecedented choice. While the dilemma that creates could manifest itself any number of ways in your life, in mine it mostly comes in the form of bloated wine and spirits lists. Many bar managers, wine directors, and sommeliers have confused quantity for quality, and as a result the dining and drinking public is all the worse off.

Of course there’s something to be said for offering an array of choices to the discerning drinker, but too often they’re empty choices. Only the most dedicated whiskey drinker could possibly hope to distinguish the hundreds upon hundreds of American whiskeys that, for

BY ZACH GEBALLE example, Canon has available, and most will end up choosing based on price, reputation, or random chance.

Even a trained bar staff can do only so much; even if they’ve tasted every bottle, which is unlikely, do they actually know the difference between Buffalo Trace’s Single Oak Project barrel #122 and #164?

Hell, if they do, can they explain it to you in a way that meaningfully informs your purchase?

I understand the appeal of collecting rare and interesting (and often very pricey) spirits or wines.

It looks cool and establishes a certain atmosphere.

Yet I don’t think it does a damn thing for the vast majority of customers. That’s why I’ve become more partial to restaurants and bars that actively curate their beverage programs.

Sure, it’s fun to stare at a wine list whose heft rivals the Encyclopedia Britannica’s, but three pages of Sancerre is probably overthinking it. Part of the role of a good bar manager, wine director, or sommelier is to do some of that heavy lifting for you—to take the massive world of wine and spirits and (pardon the pun) distill it into a cohesive and approachable list.

Anyone with the money can build an impressive wine list, as RN74 did when they opened a few years ago. Yet building a list that matches the food, offers great bottles at a wide array of price points, and is actually navigable by most guests and servers is much more of a challenge.

That is where many of these lists break down.

Sure, the bar manager or sommelier might know it intimately, and if you happen to be there when they’re on the floor, you should have a fine time.

But what about all those quiet early weeknights, or that celebratory lunch when you want a nice bottle, or when they happen to be assisting another table? If the list is decipherable only to a select few employees and the rare expert guest, what good does it really serve?

Of course, plenty of Seattle bars and restaurants do a great job offering creative and unusual wines and spirits without burdening you with hundreds of choices; off the top of my head, that’s something that small cocktail bars like Suite 410, The Hideout, and of course Zig Zag Cafe do best. I’m also always impressed by how Renee Erickson’s wine lists balance price, uniqueness, and accessibility.

I think it’s time to ask more of Seattle’s bars and restaurants to make conscious, critical choices about what they stock and serve, because that’s the biggest value they can offer. Not just laying before us a vast cornucopia of options, but guiding us toward the very best ones. E

THEBARCODE

thebarcode@seattleweekly.com

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SEATTLE WEEKLY • JU NE 18 — 24, 2014

Sure, we want delicious food, we want good ambience. But ultimately we also want to be treated kindly. As Julia child says in My Life in France: “The waiters carried themselves with a quiet joy, as if their entire mission in life was to make their customers feel comfortable and well tended.” While that may be taking it to a bit of an extreme, the sentiment behind it is spot-on.

Perhaps most important, though, this isn’t a diatribe about the customer always being right.

The customer is often not right—or at least is exercising poor judgment. And the whole concept of “right” can be a very gray area when it comes to something like taste. Plus, servers and other restaurant staff don’t deserve to be treated poorly either. But if an amiable customer politely makes a request or expresses dissatisfaction, a restaurant should take the high road and do what they can to make them feel better—not dismiss their opinion or make accusations.

If you get bad food, it’s easier to blame it on a bad night and still feel like you want to come back and give a place a second chance. But unkind treatment sticks with you—and in this case it means I’ll never come back to this particular restaurant, because ultimately I won’t feel welcome.

Waiters, cooks, and certainly restaurateurs have a big job—one that brings with it more power over their customers than they might actually fathom. I think we assume it’s the customer—the one with the money—who has the upper hand in this dynamic. And while a customer does have power, it’s a far less meaningful kind. I unfortunately learned this the hard way. E

Drunk on Choices

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Tastes Flat! Less Filling!

ThisWeek’s PickList

How do you get Porgy and Bess to soar? Sing it. All of it.

BY GAVIN BORCHERT

THURSDAY, JUNE 19

20

Modernism in the Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical

MICHAEL J. LUTCH

SEATTLE WEEKLY • JUNE 18 — 24, 2014

S

ince its 1935 premiere, Porgy and Bess has not only been the center of a tugof-war over whether it’s an opera—as George Gershwin conceived it—or a musical; more damagingly, it’s been the victim of misconceptions about these genres.

The latest in a long line of pokings and proddings, now on tour at the 5th Avenue, premiered on Broadway in August 2011. The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess is the brainchild of American Repertory Theater’s Diane Paulus, whose goal, she says, was “to create a more dramatically complete version of Porgy and Bess for a 21stcentury audience . . . to fully realize the impulses in the story and the characters” by making it “less operatic and epic and more focused and intimate.” This involved trimming a character or two and a significant amount of Gershwin’s music, replacing much but not all of his recitative (a stylized way of handling speech between musical numbers by setting it to neutral music) with new dialogue by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks.

Parks described her job in similar terms (apparently, P&B needed a lot of work): “Sometimes I’m restructuring a sequence of action, sometimes rewriting an entire scene, sometimes I’m inventing whole new scenes or excavating deeply underwritten original moments, sometimes strengthening the plot line and individual character through-lines, sometimes, you know, ‘fleshing out’ and ‘unpacking’ emotional beats.”

But, judging by this touring production and recalling Seattle Opera’s recent successful staging (coincidentally, also from August 2011), what P&B needs to make it throb and soar is none of this, but instead the breadth, richness, and gravitas of Gershwin’s full score and the original concept. DuBose Heyward, co-lyricist (with Ira Gershwin) and author of the source novel, even drops a hint in the very first song: “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy” can be read as a stage direction, the key to the generous unfolding process that brings the atmosphere and characters to life.

There’s no reason to regard these traits as specifically “operatic,” and thus as flaws that require correction. Shortchange this breadth, and the result is a weird theatrical paradox: The absences get in the way. What’s left is a “musical,” with all that implies of a slick surface on which nothing deeper can take hold. A friend, who knew nothing about this reboot going in, nailed it when he remarked of its streamlined feel, “It just rattles by; there’s no time to absorb any emotion.”

The original P&B’s length, roughly a halfhour more at McCaw Hall than at the 5th (now two and one-half hours with intermission), is not a barrier to appreciation; it’s what allows you to settle into this world and get to know these people. One thing Seattle Opera’s performance brought home is how masterfully Gershwin paced his show, and how deftly and flexibly he was able to deploy recitative alongside the

Bess (Alicia Hall Moran) and her Porgy (Nathaniel Stampley).

detachable songs that joined the Great American Songbook. It’s a textbook of theatrical construction for any composer.

Converting sung text to spoken also upsets Gershwin’s simple but uncommonly effective notion of having all the blacks onstage sing everything and none of the few whites sing anything. Gershwin biographer Larry Starr describes it as “the ‘negative’ musical space in which the white characters live and act,” and points out this idea’s source in Heyward’s novel: Catfish Row “had been full of many-colored sounds . . . Now, gradually, the noise shrunk . . . All knew what it meant. A white man had entered.”

Starr goes on: “Such a dramatic portrayal of the racial barrier finds expression . . . through [Gershwin’s] denial of any music to the white characters. They speak against a backdrop of silence.” Not in the Parks/Paulus version: Everyone at one time or another speaks against a backdrop of silence, sacrificing Gershwin’s powerful and racially pointed effect.

So be it. All art is fair game to be rethought and reused, and the original remains available. And certainly I’m sympathetic to the economic and logistical constraints of Broadway—especially of touring shows—where the only realistic alternative to a stripped-down P&B (in this case, one set, a smaller cast, and a 22-member orchestra) is no P&B at all.

But what’s profoundly irritating is the notion that the piece had been stranded on Planet Opera and needed to be rescued. In a New York Times preview back in 2011, those involved in the Broadway revival weighed in. Paulus: “In the opera you don’t really get to know many of the characters as people . . . [the] show requires having your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.”

Philip Boykin, who played Crown: “Usually the performances and experience of Porgy and Bess are all about voice, sound, worrying about the B flat . . . Now there’s an actual dramatic arc. ” Audra McDonald, who played Bess: “None of us wanted to do a Porgy and Bess where the audience would sit back comfortably and just, ahhhhhhh, soak in the big gems from the Gershwin score. The music is gorgeous. We all know that.

But the opera has the makings of a great love story too that I think we’re bringing to life.”

Bullshit, all of it. And it’s all salt in a larger

wound. Classical music eternally gets accused of insularity, no matter how much effort we put into being otherwise. In return, we get these prejudices thrown back in our face. When the Seattle Symphony plays “Baby Got Back” one weekend and pairs a Strauss waltz with Schoenberg the next, and when Broadway meanwhile is snatching Porgy and Bess out of our elitist hands and indignantly shouting “MINE!” under the pretense of improving it, which they so dishearteningly don’t—well, it rankles. If our domain still seems to have a fence around it, it’s only because all our neighbors have built fences around theirs. (You disagree? Then tell me when hip-hop musicians are going to return the favor and start performing classical works.)

Three summers ago I left McCaw Hall bowled over and convinced anew that P&B was one of the greatest American stage works ever. Saturday night I left the 5th frustrated that people seeing the show for the first time would remain unaware of what it can be. E

gborchert@seattleweekly.com

THE 5TH AVENUE THEATRE 1308 Fifth Ave., 625-1900, 5thavenue.org. $39.25 and up. Runs Tues.–Sun. Ends June 29.

Summer is usually the season for tourist-friendly blockbuster shows at SAM, like Japanese fashion last year, traveling from other institutions. This one is entirely local, celebrating the native quartet of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson. How did the Northwest become a school? Isolation, for one thing, since prewar Seattle was remote and provincial when the four got their start. Institutions also played a part: Cornish, the UW, and especially the brandnew SAM helped form a community of artists and collectors. (SAM founder Richard Fuller was particularly instrumental, employing and buying from the Big Four.) Seattle had a little bit of money then, but it was dowdy old money, two generations removed from the Denny party— derived mostly from the land, the port, and timber. What Tobey and company brought to national attention during the war years and after was a fresh regional awareness and reverence for place. This meant not simple landscapes, but a deeper appreciation for the spiritual aspect of nature, traces of Native American culture, and currents from across the Pacific—including Eastern religion and Asian art. Many of the paintings here, publicly exhibited for the first time, come from the 2009 bequest of Marshall and Helen Hatch. They, like Fuller and the Wrights, were important collectors and patrons of the Big Four during the postwar years. What they preserved can now be a fresh discovery to all new Seattle residents unfamiliar with the Northwest School. (Through Sept. 7.)

Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $12–$19. 10 a.m.–9 p.m.

BRIAN MILLER

FRIDAY, JUNE 20

Fremont Fair

Fremont fairgoers have famously ushered in the arrival of the sun’s solstice zenith by riding through the streets on bicycles, completely nude.

(That contingent trails the traditional procession of floats and marching bands, which commences at 3 p.m. Saturday.) But there’s so much more to the 43rd annual Fremont Fair than painted dongs and breasts. There’s a parade for dogs, too, where completely nude—or sometimes costumed—pups get a chance to strut as their masters proudly smile behind them (2 p.m.

Sun.). Some choose to greet the sun with “Yoga for the Solstice,” a outdoor session “complete with summer salutations.” This year also packs a hefty lineup of musical entertainment, with local legends Built to Spill leading the bill on Friday. Saturday features Seattle hip-hop staples The Physics and Blue Scholars and the Afrobeat groove of Cascadia ’10. But it wouldn’t really be a Fremont event without all sorts of odd craftiness. The Fremont Craft Market’s labyrinth

elevate

Engine or nods to the almighty Atari 2600.

This isn’t highbrow conceptual art, but the careful attention to the craft of screen printing is impressive. Frida Clements’ fine, almost scientific detail, Trevor Basset’s wide-ranging styles, and Mike Klay’s clever use of space elevate what might seem like cultural detritus to galleryquality collectables. In addition, those looking to dive into screen printing can watch an artist demo at tonight’s reception. (Through July 13.) Ltd. Art Gallery, 307 E. Pike St., 457-2970, A marcher at the 2010 solstice parade.

tonight.

SW FILE PHOTO

JOAN RIVERS

maze of vintage clothing, postcards, and various doohickeys will be open alongside an “Art Car Blowout,” an exhibit of vehicles decked out with weird paint jobs, glued-on dental equipment, and lobsters. (Through Sun.) Downtown Fremont,

SUN | JUNE 22 | 7PM

ltdartgallery.com. Opening reception: 7–11 p.m.

KELTON SEARS

ROGER HODGSON

fremontfair.org. Free (music stage passes $35 two-day, $20 one-day). 5–11 p.m. KELTON SEARS

THUR | JULY 3 | 7PM

Escape From New York

Deep Pulls

In Seattle, we often take for granted how many amazing posters are around us. The city’s light and telephone poles serve as far more than convenient perches for birds to poop on you; they act as miniature galleries for the everyman walking by. The group show Deep Pulls celebrates seven top local screen printers, makers of rich and varied street art—with no clip art allowed!

On view are works incorporating obscure pop references that define the millennial generation, with cheeky reimaginings of Thomas the Tank

KOOL & THE GANG SAT | JULY 5 | 7PM

SUNDAY, JUNE 22

Joan Rivers

This pioneering comedienne, now 81, would probably never touch the dread F-word, feminist. Joke about it, sure; mock the notion that men would ever recognize women as their equals (look what happened when she tried to launch a rival talk show against Johnny Carson, who cut her dead).

Yet she’s been a trailblazer since the ’60s, forging a career in an era when the number of women doing stand-up basically amounted to her and Phyllis Diller. (Elaine May came a little later.) Today, I hate to say, she belongs to that class of livinglegend comics whose each new tour might be their last. (Don Rickles and Bob Newhart are in the same fragile category.) Rivers has always made hay of her looks and surgical hold-backs against the press of time. You can’t separate the defiance from the bitchiness; if she was a little harsh recently about Kristen Stewart, let’s see how the latter has maintained a career 50 years hence. With all her Emmys, TV shows, books, and 1.5 million followers on Twitter, Rivers has persevered not just by wit but by work. That’s why she’s still touring and still an influence on all the women who’ve followed her into comedy. Never mind Lean In—Rivers simply succeeds by leading. Snoqualmie Casino, 37500 S.E. North Bend Way, 425-888-1234, snocasino. com. $40 and up. 7 p.m. BRIAN MILLER E

DWIGHT YOAKAM SUN | JULY 6 | 7PM

HAPPY TOGETHER TOUR 2014

The Turtles, Mitch Ryder, Mark Farner, Gary Lewis & Chuck Negron

FRI | JULY 11 | 7PM

I-90 E, EXIT 27 SNOCASINO.COM

SEATTLE’S CLOSEST CASINO

I-90 E, EXIT 27 | SNOCASINO.COM FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT OUR SUMMER SERIES VISIT SNOCASINO.COM

SEATTLE WEEKLY • JU NE 18 — 24, 2014

Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $6–$8. 9:30 p.m. BRIAN MILLER

Klay is among the artists in Deep Pulls.

MIKE KLAY

One of the undersung bad-ass screen heroes of the 1980s, Snake Plissken was a signature role for Kurt Russell in John Carpenter’s blunt dystopian satire, set in the far-off year of 1997. Everyone knows the plot to the 1981 movie: Snake has to break into prison (i.e., Manhattan) to rescue a president who’s run our country into the ditch and oppressed the underclass, whose numbers certainly include Plissken and his criminal cohort. (Payback is sweet, so long as you’re paid for it.) Carpenter’s oeuvre generally depends on a no-nonsense, working-class hero fighting a corrupt system—or monsters, as in The Thing, his best pairing with Russell. The two reunited less successfully for 1996’s Escape From L.A. (set in the far-off year of 2013), and if ENY isn’t a great movie, it’s the template for a franchise with an iconic hero. Talk of a remake has been swirling for years (to star Gerard Butler? Jeremy Renner?

Jason Statham? Tom Hardy?). Mega-producer Joel Silver wants to reboot it as a trilogy, natch, since New York itself is an internationally salable brand. And who today can’t relate to ENY ’s themes of social inequality? Mostly shot in St. Louis, of all places, ENY boasts a supporting cast too weirdly diverse to have been equalled before or since: Lee Van Cleef, Donald Pleasence, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton, Adrienne Barbeau, and Ernest Borgnine. Try matching those players today on IMDb. (Through Wed.)

21

arts&culture» Stage

seattle pride guide

on stands June 25th

Opening Nights

in spades, so if the early acts seem slow, hang in there. And the show, despite its bulk, can be surprisingly nimble thanks to Christopher Mumaw’s ever-morphing sets. Legions of flats depict towering buildings and bland suburbs, straight from the imaginations of adventurecraving youth. Live musical accompaniment

by Micahel Owcharuk and Beth Fleenor helps evoke our heroes’ quick-changing moods.

Sometimes we follow them from the map of the known world into pure escapade. In one episode, Peachey doubles as comic-strip heroine Judy Dark, who molts into superhero Luna Moth amid airborne motes like Ben-Day dots.

In another, Kavalier bombs through a strobestorm in Antarctica on a gruesome mission.

The clockwork precision of this complicated adaptation seems a feat of magic in itself. It’s like a trick Kavalier might have tucked up his sleeve to dazzle a captor long enough to escape with his life. MARGARET FRIEDMAN

PThe Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

CENTER THEATRE AT THE ARMORY (SEATTLE CENTER), 216-0833, BOOK-IT.ORG. $25–$43.

6 P.M. WED.–SAT., 2 P.M. SUN. ENDS JULY 13.

Boyd as the imaginative Josef.

For advertising contact us at: advertising@seattleweekly.com or 206.467.4341

The Hunchback of Seville THE LITTLE THEATRE, 608 19TH AVE. E., 325-5105, WASHINGTONENSEMBLE.ORG. $15–$20. 7:30 P.M. THURS.–MON. ENDS JUNE 30.

SEATTLE WEEKLY • JUNE 18 — 24, 2014

JOHN ULMAN

22

On Stage: Now - July 6 Box Office: (425) 392-2202 VillageTheatre.org

Whereas Book-It’s epic past productions of The Cider House Rules spread the feast over two nights (several months apart), delivering Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-winning novel in one five-hour mega-serving makes sense in our age of TV binge-watching. If the audience is going to focus its ADD-ridden brain for longer than a YouTube video (so the logic goes), it might as well gorge on one jumbo-sized wallop.

And indeed you should. This production—in which two superhero-obsessed cousins encounter the harsh and exhilarating realities of the real world (1938–’50s) through a comic-book filter—brings emotional KAPOW!s aplenty.

Incredibly, after four one-hour acts separated by two intermissions and a dinner break, you could even ask for more.

Not having read Chabon’s 2000 book, I don’t know how the two leads compare to their characters on the page. Yet here we have a dream team of moxie and melancholy from David Goldstein, as Brooklyn-born Sammy Clay, and Frank Boyd, as Czech-born Josef Kavalier. Boyd in particular goes from strong to extraordinary as Josef alters his ambitions to fit wartime and postwar circumstances. Nate Kelderman, who plays Kavalier’s younger brother in the old country (and later his son), perfectly mirrors Kavalier’s wary intelligence. Other memorable performances among the 18-member cast include Opal Peachey as shared romantic interest and activist Rosa Saks and Robert Hinds as the radio actor who voices one of the superheroes.

Directed by Myra Platt from an abridged script by Jeff Schwager, Kavalier & Clay obviously requires some audience endurance.

The third act is where the setups start to pay off

Washington Ensemble Theatre is the Icarus of the Seattle stage scene: aiming high for glory and risking the a spectacular fall. Over the years, WET has skittered back and forth between more accessible shows (RoboPop, Bed Snake) and works that defy an audience to figure out what’s happening onstage. In the latter camp, count Charise Castro Smith’s new one-act. Clocking in at mere 90 minutes, it runs at the pace of an interminable SNL sketch.

The Miami playwright’s farce is set in the wake of Columbus’ discovery of the New World. Back in Spain, circa 1504, his patron Queen Isabella (Maria Knox) is profoundly concerned about the survival of her empire, and rightly so. For starters, she’s dying of some mysterious malady that leaves her short of breath and covered in sores. Worse, next in line for the throne is her schizoid brat of a daughter, the Infanta Juana (Libby Barnard), who’s equal parts shrill enfant terrible and scheming manipulative sociopath.

Who’s the hunchback? Up in her bedchamber—a masterpiece of economy from set designer Cameron Irwin—is Isabella’s brilliant but godless sister, Maxima (Samie Detzer).

Isabella could die peacefully if only she can convince Maxima to renounce atheism to become counselor to her daughter, the next queen.

There’s much mixing and matching of anachronisms here, with guns and smartphones deployed, and Smith breaks the fourth wall on numerous occasions. This chiefly allows all-seeing chambermaid Espanta to provide a steady stream of superstitious warnings about what dire possibilities await. (Rose Cano’s Espanta bears more than a passing resemblance to Rosario, the maid from Will & Grace.)

Are there laughs? Yes, there are. But Hunchback packs 10 minutes of humor into an hour and a half. And director Jen Wineman’s reins are too slack: Jokes are consistently overplayed, and the acting styles are all over the map.

Detzer’s hunchback speaks like a Valley Girl; Knox plays her monarch like Maya Angelou; and the cartoonish messenger (Benito Vasquez) seems to be from another play altogether.

Of particular mention is an epic tantrum thrown by the Infanta, which outlasts an average Def Leppard drum solo. Onstage, the other players wait patiently for the princess to finish her tirade, some rolling their eyes or with gazes fixed on the horizon. But in the audience, more than a few eyes darted repeatedly toward the exit. KEVIN PHINNEY

PPassing Strange ACT THEATRE, 700 UNION ST., 292-7676, ACTTHEATRE.ORG. $20–$40.

RUNS WED.–SUN. ENDS JUNE 29.

Rock & roll doesn’t translate well to the theater.

The whole idea of a script is antithetical to the kind of spontaneity—real or imagined—that makes for a great rock show. Then there’s the issue of volume, of particular concern when a stage band performs in a small space with questionable acoustics. They’ve got to play loud enough to relate the musical-autobiographical tale that is Passing Strange, but quiet enough for you to hear the dialogue. That’s the dilemma in ACT’s Bullitt Cabaret, where a PA announcement first asks you to turn off your cellphones, then declares, “Let’s rock & roll!” Cringe.

And yet this local revival of the 2008 Tony winner works really well, conveying the lifealtering qualities of sex, drugs, and rock & roll without needing to turn the volume up to 11. The inaugural production of Sidecountry Theatre, directed by Tyrone Brown, this show is ambitious and, at times, rushed during its two and one-half hours (with intermission). And occasionally, yes, the band overwhelms the dialogue. But when it takes time to breathe—particularly when its young protagonist is exploring his art or when the characters are experimenting with drugs—the stage floods with a powerful mix of emotion, angst, and humor.

Created by the musician-turned-playwright named Stew (with Heidi Rodewald and Annie Dorsen), Passing Strange is basically his life story, though his character is never named.

His journey starts in 1976 South Central L.A. before twisting through the marijuana cafes of Amsterdam and the riot-torn streets of Berlin.

Our protagonist narrates his path, interspersed with songs and episodes from his life (enacted by a cast of six).

The main role originated with Stew, obviously, and here his shoes are remarkably filled by first-time actor LeRoy Bell, the veteran local R&B singer who had a moment of fame on The X Factor some years back. Bell, a black musician who grew up middle-class, like Stew, is a perfect fit for the role. Even if he’s a little older, at 62 (though looking far younger with his muscles and tats), he came of age in the same era as Stew. This might explain his ease with the material.

The fact that Bell, a professional musician, can sing these songs with nuance and grace is easy to take for granted. You’d almost think they were his own, not written by Stew and Rodewald.

That ease continues into Bell’s droll narration, so comfortable and relaxed that it’s easy to think he’s riffing on his own life—until a reference to a New York street gives the script away. And when the play’s emotional heft lands on his shoulders alone in the final moments, he carries it to the end, capping an impressive performance. MARK BAUMGARTEN E stage@seattleweekly.com

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SEATTLE WEEKLY • JU NE 18 — 24, 2014

THE B

L A C I S MU

23

HEAR THE GO WHERE

THE FUNNIEST COMEDY JOKES IN SEATTLE

ISSINCE ALWAYS

“LIGHT RAIL DIVINE COMPLETION DATES” SEE THE COMEDY LINEUP AT BUMBERSHOOT.ORG THE BUMBERSHOOT COMEDY LINEUP IS FINALLY HERE

a&c»Performance B Y G AV I N B O R C H E R T

Stage

OPENINGS & EVENTS

THE CONSTRUCTION ZONE An unhappy couple must

face themselves, and a man-eating tiger, in this staged reading of Mark Chrisler’s play-in-progress Worse Than Tigers. ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., 292-7676, acttheatre.org. $5–$10. 7 p.m. Tues., June 24.

FAMILY AFFAIR Jennifer Jasper’s “sick, hilarious, and ultimately relatable” monthly cabaret on the theme of family. JewelBox/Rendezvous, 2322 Second Ave., jenniferjasperperforms.com. $10. 7:30 p.m. Wed., June 18.

LADIES NIGHT Live Girls!’ sketch-comedy show. Annex Theatre, 1100 E. Pike St., 800-838-3006, lgtheater.org. $7–$10. 7:30 p.m. Sun., June 22.

SERIOUS PLAY: THE 18TH SEATTLE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF IMPROV Troupes

from as far afield as Hungary and Japan gather to make it up as they go along. Unexpected Productions’ Market Theater, 1428 Post Alley, 587-2414. Single tickets $5–$15, festival pass $30. See unexpectedproductions.org for schedule, Wed., June 25–Sat., June 28.

THERE ONCE WAS A MAN Ricki Mason, aka Lou Henry Hoover, puts a personal spin on the image of men in current society with this new work. Lou is a husband, a father, and apparently also a cockroach, perhaps doing time as Gregor Samsa. SANDRA KURTZ Re-bar, 1114 Howell St., kittenandlou.com. $20. 8 p.m.

Fri., June 20–Sat., June 21.

THE VENTURE BRAS A burlesque takeoff (nudge nudge) on the Cartoon Network’s The Venture Bros.

JewelBox Theater at the Rendezvous, 2322 Second Ave., 800-838-3006, brownpapertickets.com. $18–$30.

7:30 p.m. Fri., June 20–Sat., June 21.

CURRENT RUNS

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY SEE REVIEW, PAGE 22.

THE AMAZING ACRO-CATS From skateboarding to

ball-balancing, a festival of felines. Theatre4, Seattle Center Armory, circuscats.com. $24. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Fri., 5 & 8 p.m. Sat., 2 & 5 p.m. Sun. Ends June 22.

EVERY MOVIE IS A MUSICAL When Jet City Improv gets their hands on it, that is, and when you tell them what movie to transform. Wing-It Productions, 5510 University Way N.E., jetcityimprov.com. $12–$15. 8 p.m Thurs.–Fri. Ends June 20.

FUNNY GIRL In the starring role of this revival, directed by Steve Tomkins, Sarah Rose Davis has to be exhaustively gawked up and geeked out by her costumers to match the song “If a Girl Isn’t Pretty.” But by the time the show reaches “I’m the Greatest Star,” Davis owns the part of the legendary stage performer Fanny Brice (1891–1951), whose talent famously surpassed her looks. Davis bounces from pushy to pleading to soulful to catty, bratty, soulful, and back again.

Good, because Funny Girl is a show that lives and dies on its Brice. However, the one dull spot in this practically Technicolor production is the central romance between Brice and the hit-and-miss gambler Nick Arnstein (Logan Benedict). Davis and Benedict have talent but no chemistry—perhaps because they and everyone else are so busy rushing from one number to the next. DANIEL NASH Village Theatre, 303 Front St. N., Issaquah, 425-392-2202. $30–$65. Runs Wed.–Sun.; see villagetheatre.org for exact schedule. Ends July 6.

(Runs in Everett July 11–Aug. 3.)

THE GERSHWINS’ PORGY AND BESS SEE ARTICLE, PAGE 20.

THE HUNCHBACK OF SEVILLE SEE REVIEW, PAGE 22.

THE LISBON TRAVIATA Art imitates life in Terrence McNally’s play about opera obsessives. Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave., 800-838-3006, theatre22.org.

8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat., plus 2:30 p.m. Sat., June 28. Ends June 28.

LOVE IN THE TIME OF ZOMBIES Damian Trasler’s play examines marriage in a post-social-media apocalypse.

Ballard Underground, 2200 Market St., vagabondalley. com. $10–$14. 10 p.m. Sat. Ends June 28.

PASSING STRANGE SEE REVIEW, PAGE 22.

PETER PAN He still won’t grow up! Studio East, 11730 118th Ave. N.E., Kirkland. $12–$18. Runs Fri.–Sun.; see studio-east.org for exact schedule. Ends June 22.

THE PRICE Arthur Miller’s psychologically astute mid-career (1968) drama is given a deeply satisfying production, with four great performances you should go out of your way to see, sensitively steered by Victor Pappas. Its themes feel bespoke for today: the emotional fallout from economic distress; the fear of one’s own idealism; and the life-shaping rationalizations we invent to justify our past misjudgments. The gist: Policeman Victor (Charles Leggett) and surgeon Walter

SEATTLE WEEKLY • JUNE 18 — 24, 2014

•

24

TOWN HALL

TOWN HALL

(Peter Lohnes) converge in their childhood bedroom after many years to dispose of their Depressionwrecked parents’ belongings, aided by elderly Jewish furniture dealer Mr. Solomon (Peter Silbert). Each brother sees the past through an entirely distinct lens, with Victor’s good-sport-whose-patience-is-wearingthin wife Esther (Anne Allgood) rounding out the play’s Rashomon-esque trifocal vision. The delectable Solomon is the wise, mythical nudge who catalyzes the inevitable blowout between brothers and has the last laugh—though not how you might think. ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., 292-7676. $20–$61. Runs Tues.–Sun.; see acttheatre.org for exact schedule. Ends June 22.

MARGARET FRIEDMAN A SMALL FIRE We meet the confident Emily (Teri Lazzara), who runs a construction business, trading dirty jokes with a foreman on a job site. She’s a foulmouthed, middle-aged broad. At home, however, she’s got a cowed husband, John (Gordon Carpenter), and an exasperated adult daughter, Jenny (Sara Coates), who’s about to wed. Then—let’s get the big plot twist out of the way early—the indomitable Emily is struck by a degenerative disease, and suddenly the shit gets real. In Adam Bock’s affecting 2011 drama, directed by Julie Beckman for Sound Theatre Company, we watch Emily gradually lose her independence and dignity. In outline, I know, this sounds like a disease-of-the-week TV movie. Yet Lazzara makes Emily entertaining as hell; her lovable, cussin’ grumpiness reminds you of Melissa McCarthy. And there are unexpected laughs amid the

SAVANNAH FUENTES FLAMENCO Her local company

is touring the Northwest with a full-blooded, footstomping program called La Luna Nueva. UW Ethnic Cultural Center, 3940 Brooklyn Ave. N.E., 800-838-3006, savannahfuentes.com. $10–$35. 8 p.m. Sat., June 21.

CIVICS

SCIENCE

ARTS & CULTURE

CIVICS

SCIENCE

ARTS & CULTURE

COMMUNITY

COMMUNITY

(6/18) Crosscut presents Community Idea Lab (6/18) Marla Spivak Saving Wild Bees

Classical, Etc.

THE MET SUMMER ENCORES Favorite “Live in HD”

broadcasts from past seasons, starting with 2013’s Vegas-styled Rigoletto, 7 p.m. Wed., June 18, and Puccini’s bittersweet La rondine, 7 p.m. Wed., June 25.

See metopera.org for participating theaters.

PUBLIC OPERA Arias and ensembles from a vocal quartet, with dinner. Ristorante Picolinos, 6415 32nd Ave. N.W., 781-8000. $35. 6:30 p.m. Thurs., June 19.

SEATTLE SYMPHONY Stravinsky’s three landmark ballets: The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring.

Benaroya Hall, Third Ave. & Union St., 215-4747, seattlesymphony.org. $19 and up. 7:30 p.m. Thurs., June 19; 7 p.m. Fri., June 20 (The Firebird only, $17); 8 p.m. Sat., June 21. Also, hear Petrushka performed with Olympic Ballet Theatre at a “Discover Music!” family concert 11 a.m. Sat., June 21 ($15–$20).

SEATTLE REPERTORY JAZZ ORCHESTRA Music by Stan Kenton and Gerry Mulligan. Benaroya Recital Hall, Third Ave. and Union St., srjo.org. $15–$44. 4 p.m. (a family concert) & 7:30 p.m. Sat., June 21, and Kirkland Performance Center, 350 Kirkland Ave., Kirkland, 425893-9900, 2 p.m. Sun., June 22.

•

(6/19) Kadampa Meditation Center presents Buddhist Meditation and Wellness

THURSDAY, JUNE 26, $5

Yukari Kane

The Future of Apple’s Innovation

(6/19) Jordan Ellenberg Think Math, Be Right (6/26) Tom Robbins ‘A True Account of an Imaginative Life’ (6/26) Yukari Kane The Future of Apple’s Innovation (6/27) Damien Echols and Lorri Davis Keeping Love Alive Behind Bars

FRIDAY, JUNE 27, $5

Damien Echols

(6/28) Town Green Day of Service Just Garden Project TOWN HALL

CIVICS

SCIENCE

ARTS & CULTURE

and Lorri Davis

Keeping Love Alive Behind Bars TOWN HALL

COMMUNITY

(6/30) Robert Bryce WWW.TOWNHALLSEATTLE.ORG Innovation Will Save the Planet

CIVICS

SCIENCE

ARTS & CULTURE

COMMUNITY

WWW.TOWNHALLSEATTLE.ORG

(7/1) Novella Carpenter ‘Tracking My Dad Through the Wild’

earshotjazz tripleshot

(7/7) Michael Waldman ‘The Right to Bear Arms’

Dance

SEATTLE INTERNATIONAL DANCE FESTIVAL

Performances by troupes from Seattle and all over the world; see SeattleIDF.org for full lineup, schedule, and South Lake Union venues including Raisbeck Hall, 2015 Boren Ave. Through June 22.

•OLD-FASHIONED LOVE SONGS New works and

rethinkings of older ones (John Dowland, Norah Jones) by Aaron Grad on “electric theorbo.” Chapel Performance Space, 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N., aarongrad.com. $5–$15. 8 p.m. Sat., June 21.

ONYX CHAMBER PLAYERS Music by Debussy and Faure for two, three, and four musicians. First Church Seattle, 180 Denny Way, 800-838-3006, onyxchamber players.com. $10–$25. 5 p.m. Sun., June 22.

SEATTLE CHILDREN’S CHORUS A 25th anniversary celebration with all the choirs in the organization.

Benaroya Hall, 200 University St., seattlechildrens chorus.org. $20–$45. 6 p.m. Sun., June 22.

TOWN MUSIC The Joshua Roman-curated concert series presents soprano Mary Mackenzie performing music by Schoenberg and Roman himself. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave., townhallseattle.org. $10–$20. 7:30 p.m.

Tues., June 24.

NORTHWEST MAHLER FESTIVAL Communityorchestra players gather to tackle large works they don’t often get a crack at. See nwmahlerfestival.org to sign up. On Tues., June 24, Debussy and Chadwick; Thurs., June 26, Bruckner’s 4th; Mon., June 30, Strauss’ Alpine Symphony; Wed., July 2, Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique. All readings 7 p.m. St. Mark’s Cathedral, 1245 10th Ave. E.

•

Send events to stage@seattleweekly.com, dance@seattleweekly.com, or classical@seattleweekly.com See seattleweekly.com for full listings. = Recommended

•

Ambrose Akinmusire

Chris Speed

photo by Autumn DeWilde

photo by Daniel Sheehan

photo by Hörður Sveinsson

Ambrose Akinmusire Quintet

Human Feel

Andrew D’Angelo, Chris Speed, Jim Black, Kurt Rosenwinkel

Sunna Gunnlaugs Trio

Darius Jones featuring Tarbaby

The Westerlies

Dawn Clement Band

THurSDAy, June 26, 8PM

FriDAy, June 27, 8PM

SATurDAy, June 28, 8PM

+

+

Sunna Gunnlaugs

+

VENUE: Seattle Art Museum | Plestcheeff Auditorium | 1300 First Avenue TICKETS: www.brownpapertickets.com | 1-800-838-3006 INFO: www.earshot.org | 206-547-6763

SEATTLE WEEKLY • JU NE 18 — 24, 2014

pathos. And as Emily’s condition worsens, this parent becoming almost childlike, the cast keeps the play from drowning in despair. JENNA NAND New City Theatre, 1404 18th Ave., 800-838-3006, soundtheatrecompany. org. $15–$25. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat. Ends June 21.

TEATRO ZINZANNI: WHEN SPARKS FLY Maestro Voronin headlines this mad-scientist-themed show.

Teatro ZinZanni, 222 Mercer St., 802-0015. $99 and up.

Runs Thurs.–Sun. plus some Wed.; see zinzanni.com/ seattle for exact schedule. Ends Sept. 21.

TO THE NAKED EYE Innocence or dirtiness—what does nakedness mean? A half-dozen comic shorts try to find out. Cornish Playhouse, Seattle Center, playwrights-theatre.org. $20–$25. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat. (Thursdays are clothing-optional.) Ends June 28.

URINETOWN A musical fable about a town in which “It’s a Privilege to Pee.” Renton Civic Theatre, 507 S. Third St., Renton, 425-226-5529, rentoncivictheatre.org. $20–$25. 7:30 p.m. Thurs., 8 p.m. Fri.–Sat., 2 p.m. Sun. Ends June 21.

WRITERS GROUP SHOWCASE Readings of eight works-in-progress by Seattle Rep’s resident Writers Group. PONCHO Forum, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Seattle Center, seattlerep.org. Free. 7:30 p.m. Fri.–Sat., 4 p.m. Sat.–Sun. Ends June 22.

ROBERT FALK

Daniel Christensen and Kyle James Traver in Theatre22’s The Lisbon Traviata.

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EVENTS

PR OMO TIO NS

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VARIETY

JENNY SLATE IS BRILLIANT.”

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COMPLEX

HILARIOUS!

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SEATTLE WEEKLY • JUNE 18 — 24, 2014

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B Y K E LT O N S E A R S

BY BRIAN MILLER

Openings & Events

Author Events

• BUILDING 30 OPEN STUDIOS Magnuson Park’s art-

• HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON There will be a

ist studios open up for all to explore the photography, painting, printmaking, mixed media, installation, public art, and sculpture that occurs within. Building 30, 7400 Sand Point Way N.E., spaceatmagnuson.com. Free.

Noon-5 p.m. Sun., June 22, GATE TO NOWHERE The 520 ghost ramps, due for demolition these next couple of years, are memorialized by an artist who wrapped one of its pillars in reflective metal sheet. Near 26th Ave. E. and E. Miller St. Opening ceremony: 6-8 p.m. Thurs., June 19, THE • MODERNISM IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST: SEE PAGE 20.

MYTHIC AND THE MYSTICAL SUMMER FIELD STUDIES Starting from the Henry Art

Gallery’s lobby, this intermittent free walking series pairs visitors with artists, musicians, but mostly, explorers, who will act as guides through various projects that deal with the surrounding landscape and its reflective power. See website for exact schedule.

Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., 543-2280, henryart.org. Free. Through Sept 14.

PIECE OF THE SKY Graffiti artists Jonathan Wakuda Fischer and John Osgood team up for a live mural painting. MudBay, 522 Queen Anne Ave. N., bombshellarartlabs.com. 5-7:30 p.m. Weds., June 18.

BETSY WILLIAMS AND BIRDIE BOONE Two ceramic artists from New Mexico show their wares, inspired respectively by the traditions of Japan and the culture of Virginia. KOBO Gallery (at Higo), 604 S. Jackson St, 381-3000, koboseattle.com. Opens Sat., June 21.

Through July 13.

Ongoing

ARTCADE Vintage arcade consoles are strewn

across the gallery floor with video game art accompanying them. Vermillion, 1508 11th Ave., 7099797, vermillionseattle.com. On view through June.

AT YOUR SERVICE Ariel Brice, Gésine Hackenberg, Molly Hatch, Giselle Hicks, Garth Johnson, Niki Johnson, Sue Johnson, and others mess with crockery and other tokens of the domestic table.

Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E., 425-519-0770, bellevuearts.org, $8-$10, Tues.Sun., 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Through Sept. 21.

HOWARD BARLOW Bite presents an array of mutated looking sculptures with teeth and bone dangling in grotesque fashion. Punch Gallery, 119 Prefontaine Pl. S. (Tashiro Kaplan Building), 621-1945, punchgallery.org. Through June 5.

RACHID BOUHAMIDI Fanfare for the Area Man collects the Los Angeles artist’s colorful, busy paintings. Blindfold Gallery, 1718 E. Olive Way, 3285100, blindfoldgallery.com. Through July 5.

ALLI CURTIS The Decay of an American Dream captures photos of homes and businesses after foreclosure and bankruptcy in wake of the financial crisis.

A/NT Gallery, 2045 Westlake Ave., 233-0680, antgallery.org. Through June 29.

DANISH MODERN: DESIGN FOR LIVING A survey of modern style Danish furniture from 1950-60.

Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 N.W. 67th St., 789-5707, nordicmuseum.org, $8, Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Through Aug. 31.

•

RACHEL DEBUQUE AND DANIELLE PETERS

Performing as Candied Calamari, the local duo will be “engaging in sacramental action in a futuristic landscape.” In the back space: Julie Alpert’s LookAlikes, a drawing series based on a pair of identical lamps. SOIL Gallery, 112 Third Ave. S. (Tashiro Kaplan Building), soilart.org. Through June 28.

DECO JAPAN This is a somewhat unusual traveling show in that it comes from a single private collection: that of Florida’s Robert and Mary Levenson. The specificity and period (1920–1945) are also unusual. Among the roughly 200 items on view—prints, furniture, jewelry, etc.—we won’t be seeing the usual quaint cherry-blossom references to Japan’s hermetic past.

We may think that, particularly during the ’30s, the country was concerned with militarism and colonial expansion, but these objects reveal the leisure time and sometime frivolity of the period. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), 654-3100, seattleartmuseum.org. $5-$7, Weds.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Through Oct. 19.

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sales and signing event only for the former New York Senator, former Secretary of State, and likely presidential candidate. No public remarks are scheduled. Her new book is Hard Choices. University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, bookstore. washington.edu. 5 p.m. Weds., June 18.

KAREN FINNEYFROCK The local writer’s new YA novel is Starbird Murphy and the World Outside. Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave., 322-7030, hugohouse. org. 7 p.m. Weds., June 18.

TYLER MCMAHON His thriller Kilometer 99 is set in the world of NGOs, aid workers, and surfers. Third Place Books, 17171 Bothell Way N.E., 366-3333, thirdplacebooks.com. 7 p.m. Weds., June 18.

ALEX TIZON Formerly a journalist with The Seattle Times, his new memoir is Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self. Elliott Bay Book Co., 1521 10th Ave., 624-6600, elliottbaybook.com. 7 p.m. Weds., June 18.

THOMAS BELLER J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist is yet another entry into the canon of finding/harassing the reclusive author. Elliott Bay, 7 p.m. Thurs., June 19.

JORDAN ELLENBERG The University of WisconsinMadison prof will discuss her How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave., 652-4255, townhallseattle.org. $5. 7:30 p.m. Thurs., June 19.

SUSAN JANE GILMAN Her New York immigrant saga The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street stretches from the 1910s to the 1980s. Third Place, 7 p.m. Thurs., June 19.

BRITTAIN BERGSTROM Steal the North, a love story, is her debut novel. Elliott Bay, 7 p.m. Fri, June 20.

JENNIFER MURPHY Murder and romance figure in her new beach-set thriller I Love You More. University Book Store, 7 p.m. Fri, June 20.

AARON BURCH Backswing collects his short stories.

Elliott Bay, 2 p.m. Sat., June 21.

J. MICHAEL HOLLOWAY His frontier memoir is Dreaming Bears: a Gwich’in Storyteller, a Southern Doctor, a Wild Corner of Alaska. Elliott Bay, 2 p.m.

Sat., June 21. (Also: 7 p.m. Thurs., June 19 at Ravenna Third Place, 6500 20th Ave. N.E., 523-0210, ravennathirdplace.com.)

AUBRY ANDERSON Isaac the Fortunate is part of a new fantasy series. Eagle Harbor Books, 157 Winslow Way E. (Bainbridge Island), 842-5332, eagleharborbooks.com. 3 p.m. Sun., June 22.

100 YEARS OF SOLITUDE: A BILINGUAL TRIBUTE READING The Los Norteños Latino writers group

reads selections from the late Gabríel Garcia Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude. Readers will include Kathleen Alcalá, Raul Sanchez, Flor Fernandez Barrios, Jose Carrillo, Marta Sanchez, and Carmen Carrión.

Passages will be read in both Spanish and English.

Seattle Public Library, Greenwood Branch, 8016 Greenwood Ave. N., 684-4086, spl.org. 1:15 p.m.

Sun., June 22.

ALEXI ZENTNER The novelist reads from his new The Lobster Kings. He’s joined by Jennifer Murphy (I Love You More) and Urban Waite (The Carrion Birds).

Richard Hugo House, 7 p.m. Sun., June 22.

PACIFICA LITERARY REVIEW LAUNCH PARTY

Local contributors to the fourth issue share their work.

The theme is shanzai, Chinese for “mountain stronghold.” The Pine Box, 1600 Melrose Ave., 588-0375, pineboxbar.com. 8:30 p.m. Mon., June 23.

STEVEN RAICHLEN His new cooking guide is Man Made Meals: The Essential Cookbook for Guys. RN74, 1433 Fourth Ave., 397-4271, booklarder.com. 6 p.m.

Mon., June 23.

CLARION WEST SUMMER READING SERIES Paul Park is the author of 10 novels, including Soldiers of Paradise, Celestis, and The Tourmaline Quartet. His latest is All Those Vanished Engines. University Book Store, 7 p.m. Tues., June 24.

DEBORAH RODRIGUEZ She follows her first memoir, Kabul Beauty School, with a second volume, Margarita Wednesdays: Making a New Life by the Mexican Sea. Elliott Bay, 7 p.m. Tues., June 24.

CHEVY STEVENS That Night has a woman released from jail 20 years after being wrongfully convicted of killing her sister. Seattle Mystery Bookshop, 117 Cherry St., 587-5737, seattlemystery.com. Noon, Tues., June 24.

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•

» Film

The Dance of Reality RUNS FRI., JUNE 20–THURS., JUNE 26 AT GRAND ILLUSION. NOT RATED. 130 MINUTES.

Manakamana

out his craziest visions as though nobody’s ever cautioned him about the foolishness of such behavior. The similarly unfiltered David Lynch is a more rigorous spiritual cousin. This approach means Dance of Reality has its share of mystifying moments. And the digital format imparts a flatness to the colorful images—Jodorowsky needs to dream on film, not video. But the overall impression is energetic and imaginative, suggesting that all his past insanity had done wonders for this octogenarian’s creative process. ROBERT HORTON

RUNS FRI., JUNE 20–THURS., JUNE 26 AT NORTHWEST FILM FORUM. NOT RATED. 118 MINUTES.

The Discoverers OPENS FRI., JUNE 20 AT VARSITY. NOT RATED. 104 MINUTES.

Walken as sentimental mobster.

They didn’t have a member die in a plane crash or overdose on drugs, so the backstage saga of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons mostly remained out of the public eye. Until, of course, the 2005 Broadway smash Jersey Boys, a stillrunning musical that revealed a few genuinely colorful tales lurking in the backstory of the falsetto-driven vocal group. That property comes to the screen under the calm guidance of director Clint Eastwood—and though more a jazz man, he appears to have responded to the late-’50s/early-’60s period and the ironies beneath this success story.

Turns out the original members of the Four Seasons emerged from a milieu not far removed from the wiseguy world of GoodFellas—a comparison that becomes delightfully concrete in one of the story’s revelations. In the case of selfappointed group leader Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza from Boardwalk Empire), the mob connections are deep and troublesome, including the protection of a local godfather (Christopher Walken). The movie presents Frankie Valli ( John Lloyd Young, a veteran of the stage show) as a much straighter arrow, but even he understands the value of having friends in the right places.

(The other Seasons are played by Erich Bergen and Michael Lomenda.) It would seem natural to apply a little Scorsese-like juice to this story, but Eastwood goes the other way: The film exudes a droll humor about all this, as though

Placing the camera inside a moving gondola, running up and down the hill to a Nepalese monastery, sounds like a purely formal exercise. Each trip takes about eight and a half minutes; and directors Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez—who were also crammed into each small gondola car—divide their movie into two halves: uphill journeys and down.

It sounds terribly boring, like some kind of a process doc that simply illustrates the world without illuminating it. And yet the film takes on a kind of fascination for its anthropological aspect. Each car carries a little group of strangers (to us), two or three people related in some way: an old married couple, peasants, making a pilgrimage; three more affluent metal-loving teens, evidently from the city, with cell phones and digital cameras to do selfies; a pair of hired musicians who tune their instruments and rehearse; even two Western tourists with SIGG water bottles and Moleskine notebooks.

Tourists on the tram.

Each of the 11 continuous takes is edited together in the whirring blackness of the gondola stations at the top and bottom of the hill.

Each vignette is a bit like staring through a one-way mirror at these passengers. (Though again, they’re quite aware the camera is running, and were “cast” for the doc as in any Hollywood feature, as the directors admit.) Our boredom is in a sense the passengers’ boredom. Some have never been on an aerial tram, and they seem to be focusing attention on the sky. (“Don’t look down. Don’t look down . . . ”) Others tell stories, eat ice-cream bars, or tend to their offerings to the goddess Manakamana. (Spoiler: A rooster, carried by the only travelers we’ll see twice, does not make the return journey.)

SEATTLE WEEKLY • JU NE 18 — 24, 2014

Griffin Dunne, where ya been? The ’80s didn’t mint many movie stars (one of Alec Baldwin’s constant complaints); and following An American Werewolf in London and After Hours, Dunne mostly dropped back to supporting roles and TV work. This generous-hearted little indie was actually made before he popped up as a graying hippie naturopath in Dallas Buyers Club, and Dunne brings to both films a warm ember of goodwill. When young, he had an exasperated sense of humor—I can’t believe this is happening to me! Thirty years later, a showbiz survivor, all that has happened and more. Playing failed history professor Lewis Birch, now reduced to teaching at a Chicago community college, Dunne has the salted beard and laugh lines of a man who expected the worst and got it. The joke’s on him, and he knows it.

Dragging his two sullen teenagers (Devon Graye and Madeline Martin) to the Idaho home of his disappointed parents, the recently divorced Lewis is caught in the classic boomer demographic bind: no respect from the kids (who don’t want his help); no appreciation from the elders (who need his help, but won’t admit it). His father (Stuart Margolin, forever Angel on The Rockford Files) is near-comatose with grief at being widowed. He runs off, possibly senile, to join an annual gathering of Lewis and Clark re-enactors (hence Lewis’ own name), who wear buckskin and bonnets, shoot game with muskets, and churn their own butter. Lewis’ kids are eye-rollingly aghast at the family rescue mission, which forces them to join the corny charade. Lewis is meanwhile late for an Oregon academic conference where he hopes to announce the publication of his revisionist L&C opus. Instead he’s on an expedi-

KEITH BERNSTEIN/WARNER BROS.

Bring on the legless dwarfs, cue the full-frontal nudity, and pass the peyote: Alejandro Jodorowsky has made a new movie. Born in 1929, Jodorowsky was already a veteran of wigged-out experimental theater when he devised El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973), films that crammed together intense violence, spiritual searching, and preposterous grotesquerie—guaranteeing their success as counterculture happenings. ( Jodorowsky essentially invented the midnight-movie phenomenon.) He nearly made an epic of Frank Herbert’s Dune, a misadventure chronicled in the recent documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune. Many years past his last feature, here’s The Dance of Reality, an autobiographical look at the filmmaker’s youth in small-town Chile. There’s something almost heartwarming about the fact that this movie is— for all its zaniness—almost a normal film.

Jodorowsky himself appears as the narrator, a dapper man given to trailing aphorisms in his wake. His youthful self (played by Jeremias Herskovitz) is a sensitive lad, coddled by a Rubensesque mother (Pamela Flores, whose dialogue is entirely sung) and bullied by a hard-backed Communist father (Brontis Jodorowsky, the director’s son—he was the kid in El Topo). We witness the father’s macho child-rearing habits and his mission against Chile’s right-wing president, a cause that leads to a long and curious third-act detour including dog shows and political torture. Around this curved spine of plot, Jodorowsky brings in a carnival sideshow, sharp childhood observations, and frequent bouts of on-camera urination.

However strange it all gets, the mood is somehow optimistic. You sense that Jodorowsky believes his movies can liberate the world, and they undeniably bustle along with supreme, if silly, confidence. And perhaps there is something liberating here after all—maybe not in the subject matter itself (some of this is like listening to a well-read blowhard getting loose at the end of the bar), but in the spectacle of an artist spilling

OPENS FRI., JUNE 20 AT SUNDANCE AND OTHER THEATERS. RATED R. 134 MINUTES.

CINEMA GUILD

Opening ThisWeek

there really isn’t too much to get excited about.

This applies even to the music, including the amusing re-creations of American Bandstand and The Ed Sullivan Show during their cleanscrubbed heyday. (“Sherry” gave the boys their first #1 in 1962.) Most of the characters speak in awe of Valli’s voice (Walken has a great moment getting teary-eyed at one of teenage Frankie’s maudlin ballads), though the sheer oddness of his amazing caterwaul isn’t much remarked upon.

Although Young is an engaging actor—his New Jersey slouch is expert—his singing can’t match the force of Valli’s octave-scampering range, so high-pitched hits such as “Rag Doll” and “Walk Like a Man” lose a bit of oomph. Despite some third-act blandness, Jersey Boys is quite likable overall. Eastwood’s personality comes through in the film’s relaxed portrait of the virtues of hard work and the value of a handshake agreement.

This may be the least neurotic musical biopic ever made. ROBERT HORTON

Jersey Boys ABKCO FILMS

From left: Herskovitz, Flores, and Brontis Jodorowsky portray the director’s family during the ‘30s.

tion, if you will, through past family grievances and wrongs—a whole continent of regret.

Writer/director Justin Schwarz hews to familiar themes and family conflicts in his debut feature.

The Discoverers feels like a lot of indies you’ve seen before, only milder and more forgiving. No one in the Birch family is willing to shock or offend; a spirit of bland, reasonable accommodation prevails in this gentle dramedy. (One exception: As Lewis’ successful younger brother, John C. McGinley caps the mother’s funeral with a dismissive “E-mail’s best” adieu to his sibling.)

Lewis, like his namesake, is still the idealist who believes in a grand, inclusive America (read: Birch clan). It’s an old-fashioned vision that, like the movie, is hard to dislike. (Note: Schwarz will attend the 7 p.m. Saturday screening.) BRIAN MILLER

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 28 27

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arts&culture» Film » FROM PAGE 28

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MEET THE MAN WHO INVENTED SEX, DRUGS AND ROCK ‘N’ ROLL

Robespierre gets the tone exactly right in Obvious Child. The movie doesn’t “normalize” abortion or diminish the decision to get one. Rather, we see how it doesn’t have to be a life-altering catastrophe, and how from the ruins of a one-night stand a new adult might be formed. BRIAN MILLER

Would this movie work if, say, filmed inside an elevator at Pacific Place? The claustrophobic intimacy and self-consciousness might not translate; and I’ve never seen any goats at the mall. Spray and Velez come to their subject from a highbrow Harvard/CalArts position; there’s the imposed, academic sense of these people being framed for our scrutiny, like microbes on a slide. As the cable car continues its endless loop, we grow accustomed to the regular rhythm of each journey, like the Hindu cycles of life. The older pilgrims talk of days before roads, bridges, and trams. The younger visitors will post their photos to Facebook and Instagram. And the goats forage on the hillside below, indifferent to our gaze. BRIAN MILLER

PThe Rover OPENS FRI., JUNE 20 AT SUNDANCE AND OTHER THEATERS. RATED R. 102 MINUTES.

PObvious Child OPENS FRI., JUNE 20 AT GUILD 45TH AND LINCOLN SQUARE. RATED R. 85 MINUTES.

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CHECK YOUR LOCAL LISTINGS

Ha-ha!

You stepped in dog poo!

Lacy and Slate.

Written and directed by Gillian Robespierre, this movie has already been pegged as the abortion rom-com, which is great for the posters and pullquotes but isn’t strictly accurate. Those hostile, antithetical terms trigger harsh reactions from both the right (We hate abortion!) and left (We hate rom-coms!). Yet Obvious Child confounds those volleys of easy scorn. It doesn’t embrace abortion. It doesn’t endorse cheesy love matches between unlikely partners. What it does—winningly, amusingly, credibly—is convey how a young woman right now in Brooklyn might respond to news of an unplanned pregnancy.

And this fateful information comes for Donna (SNL’s excellent Jenny Slate) after being dumped by her boyfriend, told that her bookstore day job is about to end, and rejected at her comedy club, where a drunken stand-up set of TMI implodes into self-pity and awkward audience silence. (“I don’t have any secrets” is her comic mantra.)

Donna wants to tell the world about her love life and its consequences, to make jokes about it; but suddenly she’s alone when the A-word comes up.

But Donna Stern c’est moi. Her abrupt isolation and fear is the human condition. It’s the norm when biological happenstance so rudely intervenes. Obvious Child is foremost a comedy, and it treats accidental pregnancy—caused by an earnest, likable Vermont dork in Top Siders, played by Jake Lacy from The Office—as one of life’s organic pratfalls, like cancer, childbirth, or the death of one’s parents. These are things that happen to us all (all of us generally being unprepared), the cosmic banana peels that cannot be avoided. All you can do is laugh about them, or cry, or both in Donna’s case.

With its jokes about dog poo, drunk dialing, and farts, Obvious Child hardly comes bearing an agenda. If anything, expanded from Robespierre’s short, the lurching script could stand more polish and the supporting characters more depth.

(You want to see more of Richard Kind and Polly Draper as Donna’s divorced parents.) But as we laugh and wince at her heroine’s behavior,

MATT NETTHEIM/A24 FILMS

-TIME OUT NEW YORK

KEITH BERNSTEIN/WARNER BROS.

HHHH

Like a Road Warrior writ small, The Rover skitters across a slightly futuristic Australia, a car chase pitched against a great void. But this doesn’t feel like an adventure movie—more like a stripped-down Western about a single-minded quest.

The single mind belongs to Eric (Guy Pearce), a blasted soul whose car is stolen while he’s getting a drink at a desolate spot in the outback. His wheels have been taken by three criminals fleeing a robbery; they’ve dumped their getaway vehicle outside. This means Eric can actually commandeer their still-drivable car and make pursuit. Or he could just take their car and drive away. In this wide-open world, that seems like a fair trade—yet he spends the rest of the film brutally tracking the thieves down. He has to have that car. There’s no law enforcement around to set things right; the dog-eat-dog world is the result of an unexplained economic collapse, which has made people even more suspicious and corrupt than usual. Complicating the hunt is a wounded robber, Rey (Robert Pattinson, of Twilight renown), left behind by his confederates. His trajectory crosses Eric’s path at an inopportune moment, and the two men are uneasily joined in the search.

The Rover is written and directed by David Michôd, whose 2010 Animal Kingdom heralded a tough new talent on the scene.

Maybe because it’s so lean on the bone, The Rover is even better. An exceedingly grim Guy Pearce—incongruously dressed in shorts throughout—is absolutely locked into Eric’s survival mode. This is a figure without history and beyond morals, so his trek across the wasteland is not heroic, just determined. Think Mad Max, but without all the cuddly warmth.

At this point, Pearce has complete control of his onscreen presence, so it’s interesting to watch him opposite heartthrob Pattinson. Rey is dull-witted and childlike, and although Pattinson might be over-busy at times, his twitchy performance makes an effective contrast with his co-star.

Pattinson is twitchy but effective.

I like movies that provide creature comforts and eye candy, but there’s something to be said for a film boiled down to essentials (in that sense, the barrenness of Australia’s Flinders Ranges is the perfect backdrop). Michôd is playing a tricky game here: Lean too far on the abstract nature of the quest, and the movie turns into a parody of itself.

Mostly he’s gotten the mix right, and The Rover cuts a strong, bloody groove. ROBERT HORTON E

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BY BRIAN MILLER

Local & Repertory • THE AFRICAN QUEEN In The African Queen, you

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YOUR TICKET TO THE ULTIMATE MOVIE & DINING EXPERIENCE.

get Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, their little boat, and a very hokey—but very enjoyable—mismatched romance as they careen downriver toward a German gunship. World War I has broken out in Europe, and Hepburn’s spinster is determined to strike a blow for England. Bogart’s drunken river captain wants nothing to do with heroics—he’s like Casablanca’s Rick gone to seed (the part earned him an Oscar). But wouldn’t you know he gradually softens to Hepburn and embraces her cause? Director John Huston shot the 1951 Technicolor picture on location in Africa, where Hepburn got very sick while Huston and Bogart got very drunk. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $6-$8. 7 p.m. Fri.-Tues. & 3 p.m. Sat.-Sun. ERNEST & CELESTINE Can mice and bears be friends? NO THEY CANNOT—which is the one thing the denizens of the above-ground bear city and the subterranean, Borrowers-style mouse city agree on in this French/Belgian nominee for the 2013 Best Animated Feature Oscar. The two are linked by mutual fear and a weirdly interdependent dental-based economy too fancifully complex to go into here.

(Mice and bears, that is, not France and Belgium.)

But independent-minded and (consequently) lonely Celestine, who lives in a mouse orphanage and likes to draw, isn’t afraid of bears, shocking everyone. She befriends Ernest, a grumpy and none-too-successful busker, and the two outlaws (after raiding a confectioner’s) settle down in Ernest’s cabin. The pair’s final peril, after the Bear Police and Rat Police finally catch up with them, is scary enough for kids to enjoy, but not too scary to freak out parents. The masterful animation, sketchy and watercolory in a way that reminded me a bit of William Steig’s illustrations (CDB!), hits its peak of adorableness early with a mass mouse pillow fight, though a lot of what comes after comes close. (NR) GAVIN BORCHERT SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), 324-9996, siff.net. $6-$11.

1:30 p.m. Sat.-Sun. ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK SEE THE PICK LIST, PAGE 21.

FINAL CUT: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN With this compilation film, György Pálfi pays tribute to the precious moments of movie history: It’s a feature-length mosaic weaving 400-ish clips into a single story. This film buff’s salmagundi is therefore fun to watch, but Pálfi is also slyly teasing the sameness of so many movie plots. It always comes down to Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl Back Again. And so a coherent Every-narrative can be spliced together from movies as different as The Sound of Music, Stalker, Star Trek—The Motion Picture, and Stranger Than Paradise, to pick one alphabetical run (the film’s website lists all the sources). Final Cut walks through every step of the classic romance: the chance meeting, first date, kiss, wedding, disenchantment, reconciliation. It should be noted that this arc includes sex,

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ALSO NEW THIS WEEK For a full list of New Releases for rent + sale, visit scarecrow.com THE FINAL MEMBER Yes, this is Really about a Penis Museum DVD $21.95 Blu-ray $22.95 MASTERPIECE MYSTERY: THE ESCAPE ARTIST David Tennant vs. a Serial Killer DVD $18.95 Blu-ray $21.95 JOE Rural Drama from David Gordon Green Blu-ray $21.95

and a few moments of explicit coupling are included from porno features. This movie lasts just long enough to make its clever point and let you marvel at the stunt, before it walks off into the sunset. It’s unlikely ever to be a DVD—rights issues would prevent that— so if you’re into the idea, this is your shot. See SIFF website for showtimes. (NR) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., 324-9996, siff.net. Fri.-Sun. THE MAGNIFICENT ANDERSONS This series salutes the unlikely duo of Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson. The rather charming heist movie Bottle Rocket (from Wes) plays Tuesday, followed by the Vegas gambling tale Hard Eight (from Paul) on Wednesdays. Both are debut features. (NR) SIFF Film Center, $6-$11. 7 p.m. Mon.-Tues.

MYRA BRECKENRIDGE Part of NWFF’s pride-themed “Coming Out All Over” series, this is the scandalous 1970 adaptation of Gore Vidal’s scandalous novel, with an improbable cast featuring Raquel Welch, John Huston, Mae West, Farrah Fawcett, and Rex Reed.

It’s pretty bad, but in a memorable kind of way. (NR) Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380, nwfilmforum.org. $6-$11. 6:30 p.m. Thurs.

THE PAST IS A GROTESQUE ANIMAL This new documentary follows musician Kevin Barnes (Of Montreal) and his unspecified troubles. (NR) Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935, grandillusioncinema.org. $5-$7. 7 p.m. Thurs., June 19.

TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE Take a trip back to 1986 with this animated Japanese feature, based on the toys, made long before Michael Bay got his hands on the franchise. With the voice of Orson Welles!

(NR) Grand Illusion, $5-$7. 10 p.m. Fri.-Sat. UNDER THE SKIN Yes, this is the movie where Scarlett Johansson gets naked and—playing an alien huntress cloaked in human skin—lures men to their deaths.

Let’s get that out of the way early. Adapting a 2000 novel by Dutch writer Michael Faber (not really a sci-fi guy), Jonathan Glazer dispenses with suspense or context. Instead we have process. Aided by some motorcycle-riding minions, Johansson’s unnamed character functions like part of the same hive-mind.

She’s more worker bee than killer, a drone programmed to do one particular thing. This consists of driving around Scotland in a white van, calling out to single men with a posh English accent, then leading them back to her glass-floored abattoir. Her victims follow willingly and seem to die painlessly. (Also naked and erect.) Not only is the eerie, affectless Under the Skin not really sci-fi, it’s not really horror, either. Johansson is suitably blank (and gorgeous) for her dispassionate role, with several scenes filmed with ordinary Scots who were unaware of the hidden cameras. Intelligence is here vying with instrumentality. If this alien can question her role, consider her apartness from the hive, might she then have a soul?

(NR) B.R.M. SIFF Film Center, $6-$11. 7 p.m. Mon.

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» Music

The New Primitive

Guitarist Michael Wohl and American Primitivism benefit from a long view of history.

BY DAVE CANTOR

T

maybe not right contextually for the group I’m playing in,” says Wohl, who also leads the ’70s-style hard-rock act Mystery Ship. “In a sense, when you play on your own, you have complete creative control. That can be a good thing and a bad thing, in some ways.”

Wohl performing at Hollow Earth Radio.

Basho, according to Kyle Fosburgh of Grass-

Tops Recordings, first performed Indian classical forms on the guitar, and remains a singular mystic within American Primitivism (a name, by the way, coined by Fahey). Insinuating Eastern structures into the style “was really [Basho’s] creation before anyone was doing it,” Fosburgh says. “Basho had the vision. He wanted to see and demonstrate the limitless potential of the guitar.”

Those six and 12 strings being constraints themselves, it’s debatable whether Basho found exactly what he sought—though it’s a fact he

in This Bring geT n And Coupo er iz T e p one Ap oFF! 2 / 1 For

2033 6th Avenue (206) 441-9729 jazzalley.com

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MICHAEL WOHL With Duncan Byargeon, Luke Leighfield. The Mix, 6006 12th Ave. S., 767-0280, themixseattle.com.

No cover. 6 p.m. Sun., June 22.

JAZZ ALLEY IS A SUPPER CLUB

FRANK VIGNOLA AND VINNY RANIOLO WED, JUN 18

World-renowed technical jazz guitar duo

MACEO PARKER THUR, JUN 19 - SUN, JUN 22

American funk and soul saxman best known for his work with James Brown and ParliamentFunkadelic

ANGELIQUE KIDJO MON, JUN 23

Grammy-Award winning Beninoise singersongwriter and activist

JEFF HAMILTON TRIO FT. TAMIR HENDELMAN AND CHRISTOPH LUTY TUES, JUN 24 - WED, JUN 25 “One of the most celebrate jazz drummers of our time.” - Edward Blanco, eJazzNews

BRIAN MCKNIGHT THUR, JUN 26 - SUN, JUN 29

R&B Multi-Instrumentalist singer/songwriter

all ages | free parking full schedule at jazzalley.com

SEATTLE WEEKLY • JU NE 18 — 24, 2014

never found much of an audience for it. Fahey similarly struggled with the same shackles, ostensibly ignoring listeners and focusing on his inner desires, but over time he emerged as the genre’s most visible proponent.

Even so, says Steven Lowenthal, author of Dance of Death: The Life of John Fahey, American Guitarist, “Not only was there a certainty that [Fahey] wouldn’t be popular, but he did everything he could to prevent himself from being more successful.”

Whatever conclusions Lowenthal arrives at after taking in the artist’s many obstinate recordings, he figures Fahey’s music resonates today for the same reasons it was initially a commercial dead end.

“The same kids who now have John Fahey records love Black Flag or Stockhausen,” he says. “The hybrid of different styles is not at all shocking, as it was to a lot of audiences then.”

Lessons taken from Fahey’s decades of anonymous toiling are apparent not just to Seattle’s Wohl, but to a spate of other contemporary players, including Dublin-based Cian Nugent and New York’s Steve Gunn. Each first delivered solo work—Nugent’s live Childhood, Christian Lies & Slaughter in 2008 and Gunn’s self-titled work indebted to American Primitivism in 2007—then, deeper into their careers, started to incorporate full-band accompaniment, electronic experiments, or vocals into their work.

Those players— plus Seattle denizen Sir Richard Bishop—notwithstanding, the style’s always going to attract monkish devotees unwilling to defame its framers’ intent.

“Maybe people don’t realize it,” Lowenthal says, “but in every town, there are guys who do great Fahey-style finger-picking. Just like in every town, there’s a punk-rock band that’s really good.”

Wohl could be that guy, even as his endeavors continue to include more than just solo work.

Even in a two-song release, he’s able to imprint his personality on such a stubborn genre; this indicates not just skill, but that American Primitivism, even with its limitations, can and will persist in some form. It’s just up to Wohl and this new cadre of players to figure out where to take it. E KOLIN POPE

he cloistered American Primitive guitar style is a curious thing, its players and stewards comprising mostly retrofitted bluesmen, historians, and folkies. Easily recognized from its syncopated, finger-picked delivery of blues and ragtime, the style often summons visions of country jaunts and bedeviled barrooms, and it’s a genre that’s remained largely unchanged since its founding works were issued in the late 1950s and 1960s, notably John Fahey’s Blind Joe Death and Robbie Basho’s The Grail & the Lotus.

Since those initial releases on Fahey’s Takoma imprint, waves of adamant admirers have cropped up, most unable to earn acclaim without drastically expanding on the essence of the genre, firmly rooted in America’s rustic acoustic past. Over the years, developing ideas within, parallel to, and beyond the music’s germinal ideas has become tantamount to any player’s success at it.

“I was shy about the world of American Primitivism, because I love a lot of music that’s described in that way,” Seattle guitarist Michael Wohl says.

“But it limits itself. A lot of people playing this music are more like Civil War re-enactors; they’re acting out a fantasy of something that was.”

A Chicago transplant now living in Wallingford, Wohl grew up fawning over hard-rock classics, leading to an adoration of icons like Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page. Rock’s twisted back roads eventually led the guitarist to punk and also schooled him in the blues, an education that dutifully included a hefty primer on American Primitive.

But Wohl, though he admires the style, is reticent to fully commit to it. “I think a lot of people can’t see beyond the shadow of John Fahey, because he created something enormous,” he says, hinting he’d like to expand its perimeters. In fact, his latest release, a two-song 7-inch on Knick Knack Records, is a glimpse into his eccentric solo style. A-side “Moonfeeder” opens with a midtempo stutter before moving into its bucolic statement, as Wohl adds rhythmic variations and blues references. It’s still a tincture comprising ideas Fahey began exploring about 50 years ago, but Wohl’s interests are clearly broader, as he’s keenly aware of what happened to the style’s progenitors and wants to avoid a similar fate.

“The music I play acoustically . . . there was always stuff I was playing that I thought was kind of interesting and worth recording, but

31

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El Corazon www.elcorazonseattle.com

109 Eastlake Ave East • Seattle, WA 98109 Booking and Info: 206.262.0482

THURSDAY JUNE 19TH

LATE SEPTEMBER DOGS with Tatarus and Trigger Happy Lounge Show. Doors at 7:30pm/ Show at 8pm ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $5.

FRIDAY JUNE 20TH

SEATTLE WEEKLY • JUNE 18 — 24, 2014

WUSSY with Jake Marsh Trio and

32

Poeina & The Lucid Dreamers LOUNGE SHOW. Doors at 8pm/ Show at 9pm 21 & OVER. $7 ADV / $10 DOS

SATURDAY JUNE 21ST

THE MARCH VIOLETS with Suction, Post Adolescence and Prelude To A Pistol Doors at 8pm/ Show at 8:30pm 21 & OVER. $15 ADV / $17 DOS

SATURDAY JUNE 21ST

FEA (featuring members of Girl In A Coma) with Captain Algebra, Gliceryn, The Finger

Guns and Plus Guests LOUNGE SHOW. Doors at 8pm/ Show at 8:30pm ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $8 ADV / $10 DOS

SUNDAY JUNE 22ND

THE BUSINESS with 13 Scars, Lucky Boys,

Vile Display Of Humanity and Supernothing Doors at 7pm/ Show at 8pm ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $13 ADV / $15 DOS

SUNDAY JUNE 22ND

A PIECE OF THE ACTION with Autumn Tragedy, Cornerstone, Built By Machines and Esoteria LOUNGE SHOW. Doors at 5:30pm/ Show at 6pm ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $8 ADV / $10 DOS

TUESDAY JUNE 24TH

CUT YOUR LOSSES with Alcojuana, Regional Faction

and Communist Kayte LOUNGE SHOW. Doors at 8pm/ Show at 8:30pm ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $5

WEDNESDAY JUNE 25TH

PHINEHAS with The Ludovico Treatment

and Plus Guests Doors at 7pm/ Show at 7:30pm ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $8 ADV / $10 DOS

JUST ANNOUNCED 7/17 FILTER / HELMET 7/30 LOUNGE OFF TRENDS 7/31 RINGS OF SATURN 8/11 THE SPIRITUAL BAT 8/12 LOUNGE THE SINGLES 8/17 CHARM CITY DEVILS 8/27 LOUNGE HONOR AMONG THIEVES 9/5 POORSPORT (FINAL SHOW) UP & COMING 6/25 LOUNGE - SLEPWALKER 6/26 GRAHAM LINDSEY / BILLY COOK 6/26 LOUNGE FALLSTREAK 6/27 TO THE WIND 6/27 LOUNGE GREAT FALLS / SWAMPHEAVYY (ALBUM RELEASE) 6/28 WITCHBURN / WILD THRONE 6/28 LOUNGE KEPI GHOULIE 6/29 SHOWTIME 6/29 LOUNGE DISTRICT 7/1 LOUNGE LAKODA 7/2 WATSON 7/3 LOUNGE THE CERNY BROTHERS 7/4 AXE MURDER BOYZ 7/5 LOUNGE PEACE MERCUTIO 7/7 LOUNGE KIERAN STRANGE 7/8 LOUNGE THE CHRIS O’LEARY BAND 7/9 LOUNGE MUSIQUESTRIA 7/10 RYAN FARISH 7/10 LOUNGE KOLDUN 7/11 & 7/12 FLAMEFEST 7/13 DWARVES / THE QUEERS 7/14 SAVING ABEL Tickets now available at cascadetickets.com - No per order fees for online purchases. Our on-site Box Office is open 1pm-5pm weekdays in our office and all nights we are open in the club - $2 service charge per ticket Charge by Phone at 1.800.514.3849. Online at www.cascadetickets.com - Tickets are subject to service charge

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arts&culture» Music

TheWeekAhead Thursday, June 19 Even if you don’t know MACEO PARKER by name, you’ve surely heard his funky saxophone work as a member of Parliament and a key part of James Brown’s band alongside his drumming brother Melvin. The alto, tenor, and baritone sax master has also played on records by Prince, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the Dave Matthews Band—and even gets name-checked in Jane’s Addiction’s “My Cat’s Name Is Maceo” (he plays on that one, too). In short, he’s a bad-ass, and one of the most influential funk horn players ever; at 71, his playing still burns with the reckless energy of his youth. Parker plays six shows Thurs.–Sun. Jazz Alley, 2033 Sixth Ave., 441-9729, jazzalley.com. 7:30. $34.50. DAVE LAKE

Friday, June 20

SEAPROG FESTIVAL “Prog rock” can be a scary word,

conjuring images of Geddy Lee’s terrifying soul patch and beady circular glasses staring you down. But “progressive music” by nature isn’t just bound to one sound or one Canadian space-rock band—it’s an amorphous term that just means “music with roots in psych rock that tries something a little different.” Seaprog—an artist-created festival featuring local proggers— ranges from Midday Veil’s Jungian synth-landscapes to Fang Chia’s jazz odysseys to Super Z Attack Team’s brave use of the Chapman Stick, a relative of the guitar that’s wider and designed for tapping. We promise Lee won’t be there to terrorize anybody. With Autumn Electric and more. Through Sunday. The Royal Room, 500 Rainier Ave. S., 906-9920, seaprog.org. 8 p.m. $60 two-day pass. 21 and up. KELTON SEARS There is much joy in the music of PAPER BIRD. Residing at the intersection of Appalachian hymnals and bombastic pop, this Denver-based ensemble holds its own in the vast sea of newgrass. Fronted by charismatic sisters Genny and Esme Patterson, their baroque-folk compositions are reminiscent of those of fellow troubadours the Avett Brothers. At first listen, you’ll be hit with the constant vocal harmonies that drive the songs; upon repetition, a wealth of instrumental ear candy unravels in every piece. Their most recent album, Rooms, has a fitting title; each song is a doorway into a different mood and narrative. One leads to swelling strings, while another holds your hand through a soulful, gospelinspired arrangement. Between faster-paced anthems and slow-swinging ballads, there’s something for everyone here—including the irrepressible smile you’ll no doubt be wearing by the end. With Home Sweet Home, Pocket Panda. Tractor Tavern, 5213 Ballard Ave. N.W., 789-3599, tractortavern.com. 9 p.m. $10. STIRLING MYLES

Saturday, June 21

Tupac and Biggie. Jay Z and Nas. Now we have WIMPS VS POSSE. The two Seattle indie-rock outfits will face off in the only reasonable way possible—with a cutthroat round of rock-&-roll Family Feud. The smack talk has already been fierce in anticipation. “You know what, Posse? More like posers!” Wimps said in a diss video posted to their Facebook page. Posse was quick to retaliate, with a video in which they use a Wimps T-shirt to clean up spilled Budweiser and Clamato.

Forget Death Row versus Bad Boy—this matchup of Help Yourself Records and Beating a Dead Horse Records might change Seattle . . . forever. The Highline.

210 Broadway Ave. E., 328-7837, highlineseattle.com.

9 p.m. $8. 21 and over. DUSTY HENRY Cartoonish Canadian CHAD VANGAALEN’s latest album Shrink Dust is more subdued than his other outings.

Ambling at about the pace of a carefree space cowboy, the tunes take on an unexpected country twang, albeit one as strange as anything else the artist has done in his Technicolor career. Lap steel guitar slides alongside weird warblings about monsters and the cosmos, but beyond all the fantastical imagery you get the sense that VanGaalen is dealing with some real stuff. He sings that he’s “weighed my sin” and that he’s going to “fall asleep and disappear/Pop some pills to chase your fear.” But as dark as VanGaalen occasionally gets, you never feel as though you’re drifting too far out of his colorful dream world. With Cousins, Hibou. Tractor Tavern. 9 p.m. $12. 21 and up. KS

Sunday, June 22

MERLE HAGGARD & EMMYLOU HARRIS To call this

show a special treat is an understatement. On one hand, you have the Okie from Muskogee—a country-music

legend and one of the genre’s few remaining authentic outlaws. On the other, you have one of the most important and enduring female country stars ever. They’re sharing a bill for one night only—that’s right, this isn’t some 40-city tour, but a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Though they’ve spent some 40 years working in the same circles, they haven’t crossed paths often (outside of the star-studded track “Same Old Train,” which won a Grammy in 1999). It’s a shame, really. With Harris’ penchant for collaboration and Haggard’s sensibilities, one can only imagine the magic their collective experience and talent will produce. Joining them will be singer Rodney Crowell, a familiar face to those following Harris’ career; last year, the two teamed up for the Grammy-winning Old Yellow Moon. Modern country music bears but a passing resemblance to its earlier history; this isn’t a knock, it’s just the way things are. If you want to hear the real stuff—and with every passing year, your opportunities to do so diminish—head to Woodinville tonight. With Rodney Crowell. Chateau Ste. Michelle, 14111 N.E. 145th St., 425-488-1133, ste-michelle.com. $60 and up. 7 p.m. CORBIN REIFF

Monday, June 23

ROBYN HITCHCOCK is a songwriter’s songwriter,

an alt-rock icon before there was such a thing. He founded the Soft Boys in 1976 in Cambridge, England, then, nearly a decade later, Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, but neither found much commercial success—which is also true of his four decades of myriad solo releases. Critics, however, have long heaped praise on his work, comparing him to Dylan and Lennon for his often surreal lyrics and melancholy melodies. Rolling Stone called his 2013 Love From London “delightful” and “an album Syd Barrett might have made if he’d stayed cogent and seen the end of days.”

Columbia City Theater. 8:30 p.m. $20. 21 and over. DL Back during the golden age of alternative music—the ’90s—VERUCA SALT was a glorious kick in the ’nads: “Seether” roared across the airwaves, and singers/ ax women Louise Post and Nina Gordon acted like a couple of snarling sirens aiming musical missilelaunchers at your ears. Their 1994 debut, American Thighs, rocked big-time, and 1996’s Blow It Out Your Ass It’s Veruca Salt EP offered a similar, beautifully aggressive aesthetic. But things went south after 1997’s Eight Arms to Hold You; Gordon left to launch a solo project while drummer Jim Shapiro and bassist Steve Lack pursued other opportunities. Post kept the band name alive over the years, but without her crackling energy and interplay with Gordon, it just wasn’t the same. But then last year word came that the original lineup was reuniting, and when they recently played on Conan—their first performance together in well over a decade—it was as if nothing had changed. The group released a 10-inch vinyl on Record Store Day featuring two new songs, “It’s Holy” and “The Museum of Broken Relationships,” and the latter shows the four haven’t lost their talent for making crunchy alternative tracks about relationship angst. If this song is an indication of what they have up their sleeve, then sign me up! With The Echo Friendly. Tractor Tavern. 8 p.m. $25.

21 and over. BRIAN PALMER

Tuesday, June 24

Leisha Hailey and Camila Grey are UH HUH HER, an emo synth-pop duo from Los Angeles. You may know Hailey as bisexual journalist Alice Pieszecki on The L Word, while Boy Meets World fans will recognize her as the cute and overly peppy struggling musician Corinna from the “Shallow Boy” episode. Uh-huh, her. The ultimate synth-pop duo fantasy, Hailey and Grey are not only bandmates, but also partners in life and love. The pair released their third studio album, Future Souls, earlier this year, independent of label backing. Its first single, “Innocence,” is five minutes of moody shoegaze that brings to mind Twin Peaks’ Audrey Horne’s sexydancing-by-herself type of swaying. The second single, “It’s Chemical,” features a beautifully haunted, distorted voice singing “We’re chemical dancing/Colors colliding/We’re chemical dancing/Halfway to the beat.” Like the 2004 PJ Harvey album after which the band is named, Souls was self-recorded (in Hailey and Grey’s home studio); and, like Harvey herself, still going strong, Uh Huh Her are proving they’re the babes with the power. Neumos, 925 E. Pike St., 709-9442, neumos. com. 8 p.m. $18 adv. 21 and over. DIANA M. LE Send events to music@seattleweekly.com.

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WED/JUNE 18 & JUNE 19 • 7:30PM // FRI/JUNE 20 • 8PM

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SAT/JUNE 21 • 7:30PM - STG PRESENTS

jay & silent bob get old live!

SAT/JUNE 21 • 10PM

kevin smith presents edumacation with andy mcelfresh SUN/JUNE 22 • 7:30PM

the yardbirds COCKTAILS • TASTY HOT DOGS • LOTSA PINBALL

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MON/JUNE 23 • 7:30PM

world party w/ gabriel kelley TUE/JUNE 24 • 7:30PM

NTw.RlitYtlereMdhUenS.coICm LIVE COUww

rodney crowell w/ will kimbrough WED/JUNE 25 • 7:30PM

THURS JUNE 19TH

JUKEHOUSE HOUNDS 9 PM - $3 COVER

FRI JUNE 20TH & SAT JUNE 21ST

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ROY KAY TRIO 9 PM - NO COVER

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KARAOKE WITH DJ FORREST GUMP 9:00PM • NO COVER

FREE COUNTRY DANCE LESSONS WITH OUR HOST MARY ANN AT 8PM; SUN, MON, TUES

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WELL DRINKS & DOMESTIC BOTTLED BEER $2 DINNER: 5-10PM EVERYDAY BREAKFAST & LUNCH: SAT 8AM-2PM / SUN 9AM-2PM 7115 WOODLAWN AVENUE NE 522-1168

next • 6/26 & 27 bob schneider and hayes carll • 6/28 zach fleury & lena davidson • 6/29 spanish gold w/ clear plastic masks • 6/30 movie mondays :: control • 7/1 s. carey w/ the pines • 7/2 & 3 freedom fantasia • 7/5 commander cody • 7/7 movie mondays :: muscle shoals • 7/9 frank fairfield • 7/10 kobo town • 7/11 the paperboys • 7/12 freddypink • 7/13 dark divas • 7/14 & 15 the fixx: by request • 7/16 henry kapono • 7/17 susan ruth robkin • 7/18 roy rogers & the delta rhythm kings • 7/19 sinatra at the sands • 7/21 the polyphonic spree w/ sarah jaffe • 7/22 noura mint seymali • 7/23 dervish • 7/24 - 26 the buckaroos • 7/27 matt wertz • 7/30 & 31 x full band acoustic show

happy hour every day • 6/18 the sufferings of mike and ron • 6/19 the papillion saints • 6/20 supersones / billy brandt • 6/21 joe doria/brad gibson/ari joshua • 6/22 hwy 99 blues presents: cracker factory • 6/23 crossrhythm sessions • 6/24 singer-songwriter showcase featuring: whitney monge, brandon pratt and kim archer • 6/25 jd hobson TO ENSURE THE BEST EXPERIENCE · PLEASE ARRIVE EARLY DOORS OPEN 1.5 HOURS PRIOR TO FIRST SHOW · ALL-AGES (BEFORE 9:30PM)

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arts&culture» Music

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Buzz “King Buzzo” Osborne, This Machine Kills Artists (out now, Ipecac Recordings ipecac.com) In their 31-year career, the Melvins never played it straight. If things ever got too predictable, they would change it up and head down a path

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different from the one you might expect—one that either left you in the dust or took happily along for the wild ride. Singer/guitarist Buzz “King Buzzo” Osborne’s first solo record sounds exactly what you might expect it to. That’s not a bad thing—in fact, it’s a refreshing surprise. On the acoustic This Machine Kills Artists (a parody of the famous message “This machine kills fascists” scrawled upon Woody Guthrie’s guitar), Buzz showcases his ability to create riff after riff with ease. Keeping things within the realm of his band’s work, Buzzo bypasses the notion of someone notorious for “heavy” music going “folk” or showcasing a sensitive side. Since a majority of the Melvins’ songs were constructed on acoustic guitar, it’s a charming glimpse into the process of developing the megariffs the band is known for—which, as its founder, had always been Buzzo’s role. He’ll perform an acoustic set at Neumos on June 20, sure to include plenty of songs off his solo record and a mix of Melvins songs too. JAMES BALLINGER

SEATTLE WEEKLY • JUNE 18 — 24, 2014

My Goodness, Shiver + Shake ( June 24, Votiv, mygoodnessmusic.com) Listening to My Goodness, it’s easy to compare it to the Black Keys.

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Both bands have two primary members (for My Goodness, they’re guitarist/vocalist Joel Schneider and Andy Lum on drums); both are no strangers to writing about the highs and lows of love—“I could be your man/But, baby, I don’t know where you’re at/I could be your man/ Why do I keep hangin’ on?” sings Schneider on “Hangin’ On”—and both rock a mix of bluesy

guitar riffs, thundering beats, and vocals that can be both rugged and warm. What sets My Goodness apart, though, is its ability to add different dimensions to its blues-rock sound. On the duo’s latest album, produced by Rick Parashar (Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains), the band bounces from the blistering title track to the slightly twangy “Sweet Tooth.” My Goodness also channels folk-rock quartet the Avett Brothers on the sweet and slow “Bottle,” then jumps into garage-rock territory on “Say You’re Gone.” And just when you think the pair have pulled every card from their sleeves, Schneider and Lum play “Lost in the Soul,” a solid indie-rock track full of acoustic guitar and orchestral features, before ending on the raucous “Hot Sweat.” While Shiver has an overall bluesrock feel, thoughtfully incorporated elements make it a fresh take on the genre. (Fri., June 20, The Crocodile) AZARIA C. PODPLESKY Scarves, Empty Houses ( June 20, self-released, scarvesmusic.bandcamp.com) Coming-of-age stories have become modern mythology (you know the gods: The Catcher in the Rye, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, John Hughes). With its debut full-length album Empty Houses, Seattle indie-rock group Scarves adds to the lore. “Icarus With a Rattle Can” explores the idea of impulsively getting matching tattoos, one of Icarus

and one of the sun—an apt summation of the epic, hyperemotional messiness that comes with youth (teenage years are a time of flying too close to the sun, you see). Vocalist/guitarist Nikolas Stathakopoulos plays up the gravitas with lines like, “Thou shalt not swim in man-made lakes/ Thou shalt not eat on paper plates.” The riffs and wordplay are further enhanced by the perfectly muddy and chaotic rhythm section of bassist David Price and drummer Marcus Verdoes. The trio makes the precision of math rock rough and relatable. The opening of “A ‘Pop’ Song” showcases Stathakopoulos’ guitar virtuosity before pummeling with dissonant and harsh guitar chords; it’s indicative of those sleepless highschool nights and moments of serenity among the hijinks; of a teenage world in which everything is like the Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979” video. As Stathakopoulos bellows on the chorus, full of the uncertainty of tomorrow, “When they say be brave/They mean brace for impact.” (Sat., June 21, The Vera Project) DUSTY HENRY E

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KING COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES AND PARKS NOTICE OF INDUSTRIAL WASTE DISCHARGE PERMIT APPLICATION NO. 7906-01 TAKE NOTICE: That Sound Transit: Northgate Link extension - Roosevelt Station - Phase 2, located at 6600 Roosevelt Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115 has filed an application for an industrial waste discharge permit to discharge industrial waste into the West Point Treatment Plant from its construction dewatering operation in the amount of 626,400 gallons per day following treatment, in compliance with rules and regulation of the King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks; Washington State Department of Ecology; and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The approximate point of discharge is 6600 Roosevelt Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115.

Any person desiring to express their view, or to be notified of the King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks’ action on this application, should notify the King County Industrial Waste Program at 130 Nickerson Street, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98109, in writing, of their interest within 30 days of the last date of publication of this notice. Publication dates of this notice are: June 18, 2014 June 25, 2014

Real Estate for Sale King County

HUD HOMES For Sale Save $$$! Seattle: 2 BR, 1.5 BA, 988 SF, $440,000, ext. 5093.

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Chris Cross, Keller Williams Realty, Bellevue, WA. 800-711-9189, enter ext for 24-hr rec msg. www.WA-REO.com Splendid Lake WA View!

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Employment Computer/Technology EBAAI seeks Sr. Software Eng. Design & develop speech modeling software for Text to Speech (TTS) Prompts & Voice Recognition (VR) Commands in C++ language using Microsoft Visual Studio & EB GUIDE Studio modeling software on an embedded target platform running QNX Real Time Operating System (RTOS). Follow software eng practices during the project life cycle to meet SPICE certification rqmts. Rqmts: Bac Electrical & Comp Eng or foreign equiv + 1 year exp in the job position. Send resume to Elektrobit Automotive Americas Inc., 22745 - 29th Drive SE, Ste 200, Bothell WA 98021.

Engineering ServiceNow, Inc. has Software Development Engineer (Req #2673) job opportunities available in Kirkland, WA. Job Duties: Build scalable and reliable cloud computing solutions to support the rapid growth of our SaaS products. Solve complex technical challenges and design, implement, test and deploy scalable Cloud Computing solutions. Mail resume to ServiceNow, Inc., Staffing Department, 4810 Eastgate Mall, San Diego, CA 92121.

Must reference Req. #.

SOFTWARE Help build the next generation of systems behind Facebook’s products. Facebook, Inc. currently has openings in Seattle, WA (various levels/types) for: Software Engineer (SWE0614BN) Create web and/or mobile applications that reach over one billion people & build high volume servers to support our content. Bachelor’s degree required.

Software Engineer (SWE0614-MN) Create web and/or mobile applications that reach over one billion people & build high-volume servers to support our content, utilizing graduate level knowledge.

Master’s degree required.

Mail resume to: Facebook, Inc. Attn: JAA-GTI, 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, CA 94025. Must reference job title and job # shown above when applying.

Employment General MARKETING COORDINATOR The Daily Herald, Snohomish County’s source for outstanding local news and community information for more than 100 years and a division of Sound Publishing, Inc. is seeking a Marketing Coordinator to assist with multi-platform advertising and marketing solutions of print, web, mobile, e-newsletters, daily deals, event sponsorships and special publications as well as the daily operations of the Marketing department.

Responsibilities include but are not limited to the coordination, updating and creation of marketing materials across a range of delivery channels, social media, contesting, events, house marketing, newsletters and working closely with the Sr. Marketing Manager to develop strategies and implement the marketing plan. The right individual will be a highly organized, responsible, self-motivated, customer-comes-first proven problem-solver who thrives in a fast-paced, deadline-driven environment with the ability to think ahead of the curve. We offer a competitive salary and benefits package including health insurance, paid time off (vacation, sick, and holidays), and 401K (currently with an employer match.)

If you meet the above qualifications and are seeking an opportunity to be part of a venerable media company, email us your resume and cover letter to hreast@soundpublishing.com No phone calls please.

Sound Publishing is an Equal Opportunity Employer (EOE) and strongly supports diversity in the workplace. Check out our website to find out more about us! www.soundpublishing.com

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Attention Women!

Seattle Be a part of the largest community news organization in Washington! *Do you have a proven track record of success in sales and enjoy managing your own territory? *Are you competitive and thrive in an energetic environment? *Do you desire to work in an environment which offers uncapped earning opportunities? *Are you interested in a fast paced, creative atmosphere where you can use your sales expertise to provide consultative print and digital solutions?

If you answered YES to the above, then we are looking for you! Seattle Weekly, one of Seattle’s most respected publications and a division of Sound Publishing, Inc. is looking for self-motivated, results-driven people interested in a multi-media sales career. This position will be responsible for print and digital advertising sales to an eclectic and exciting group of clients.

As part of our sales team you are expected to maintain and grow existing client relationships, as well as develop new client relationships. The successful candidate will also be goal oriented, have organizational skills that enable you to manage multiple deadlines, provide great consultative sales and excellent customer service.

This position receives a base salary of $24k plus commission; and a benefits package including health insurance, paid time off, and 401K. Position requires use of your personal cell phone and vehicle, possession of valid WA State Driver’s License and proof of active vehicle insurance. Sales experience necessary; Media experience is a definite asset. Must be computer-proficient. If you have these skills, and enjoy playing a pro-active part in impacting your local businesses’ financial success with advertising solutions, please email your resume and cover letter to: hreast@sound publishing.com, ATTN: SEA. Sound Publishing is an Equal Opportunity Employee (EOE) and strongly supports diversity in the workplace. Visit our website to learn more about us! hreast@soundpublishing.com

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Drop off resume in person & book list to: 1530 1st Ave (serious inquiries only)

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Must live in Seattle area.

Weekend & live-in positions available. Call 206-439-2458 • 877-271-2601

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Firewood, Fuel & Stoves

NOTICE Washington State law requires wood sellers to provide an invoice (receipt) that shows the seller’s and buyer’s name and address and the date delivered. The invoice should also state the price, the quantity delivered and the quantity upon which the price is based. There should be a statement on the type and quality of the wood.

When you buy firewood write the seller’s phone number and the license plate number of the delivery vehicle.

The legal measure for firewood in Washington is the cord or a fraction of a cord. Estimate a cord by visualizing a four-foot by eight-foot space filled with wood to a height of four feet.

Most long bed pickup trucks have beds that are close to the four-foot by 8-foot dimension.

To make a firewood complaint, call 360-9021857. agr.wa.gov/inspection/ WeightsMeasures/Fire woodinformation.aspx agr.wa.gov/inspection/WeightsMeasures/Firewoodinformation.aspx

Appliances AMANA RANGE Deluxe 30” Glasstop Range self clean, auto clock & timer ExtraLarge oven & storage *UNDER WARRANTY* Over $800. new. Pay off balance of $193 or make payments of $14 per month. Credit Dept.

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Housekeeping Job Fair Fri. June, 30th - July 1st from 10am-12pm Come to the NE VIP • Detail Workers located on the north • Event Worker side of the stadium. • Post Event Workers • PT Housekeeping Positions

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