Seattle Weekly, August 13, 2014 by Sound Publishing

AUGUST 13-19, 2014 I VOLUME 39 I NUMBER 33

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NEWS» THE END OF LEGAL WEED? PAGE 5 MUSIC» STICKERS STUCK ON SHREDDING. PAGE 26

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CARLTON M. STEARNS' APPARENT MURDER HAS BEEN ETCHED INTO HISTORY. BUT A NEWLY DISCOVERED MANUSCRIPT TELLS A DIFFERENT STORY. BY RICK ANDERSON» PAGE 7

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inside» August 13-19, 2014 VOLUME 39 | NUMBER 33

» SEATTLEWEEKLY.COM

»29

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news&comment 5

UP IN SMOKE

BY ELLIS E. CONKLIN | A lawsuit in

Fife threatens the future of legal weed. Plus: the passion of Mars Hill, and the otter blotter.

CRACK A COLD ONE BY RICK ANDERSON

Eighty years ago, a Gray’s Harbor sheriff’s deputy died from a single bullet. But who pulled the trigger? A long-lost manuscript might have the answer.

food&drink

15 CREAM OF THE CROP BY CHASON GORDON | The best

of Seattle’s urban farms. 15 | FOOD NEWS/THE WEEKLY DISH 16 | THE BAR CODE

arts&culture 17 INNER VISION

BY BRIAN MILLER | SAM surveys the Northwest modernists. 17 | THE PICK LIST 17 | OPENING NIGHTS | A musical

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26 MUSIC

BY KELTON SEARS & DAVE LAKE |

Stickers shock and Murder City Devils awe. 29 | THE WEEK AHEAD 30 | CD REVIEWS

EDITORIAL Senior Editor Nina Shapiro 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 Terrence Hill, Reut Odinak 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 PRODUCTION Production Manager Sharon Adjiri Art Director Samantha Wagner Graphic Designer Nate Bullis, Brennan Moring Staff Photographer/Web Developer Morgen Schuler Photo Interns Anna Erickson ADVERTISING Marketing Jen Larson, Zsanelle Edelman Advertising Sales Manager, Arts Carol Cummins Senior Account Executive Krickette Wozniak Account Executives Cecilia Corsano-Leopizzi, Erin McCutcheon, Peter Muller Classifieds Account Executive Matt Silvie DISTRIBUTION Distribution Manager Jay Kraus

odds&ends 31 | CLASSIFIEDS

»cover credit PHOTO OF CARLTON M. STEARNS, COURTESY KARL DAVIDSON

OPERATIONS Administrative Coordinator Amy Niedrich COPYRIGHT © 2014 BY SOUND PUBLISHING, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART WITHOUT PERMISSION IS PROHIBITED. ISSN 0898 0845 / USPS 306730 • SEATTLE WEEKLY IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY SOUND PUBLISHING, INC., 307 THIRD AVE. S., SEATTLE, WA 98104 SEATTLE WEEKLY® IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK. PERIODICALS POSTAGE PAID AT SEATTLE, WA POSTMASTER: SEND ADDRESS CHANGES TO SEATTLE WEEKLY, 307 THIRD AVE. S., SEATTLE, WA 98104 • FOUNDED 1976.

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news&comment

Three Signs Your Megachurch Is In Trouble

Pot Shots

The City of Fife’s legal standoff with the state could mean I-502 goes up in smoke. It really could, man.

BY MATT DRISCOLL

BY ELLIS E. CONKLIN

t’s been a bad few months for Mars Hill pastor Mark Driscoll (no relation). Plagued by ongoing plagiarism scandals, best-seller list beefs, recent protests, and Neanderthal message board posts from the past, the Mars Hill kingdom that Driscoll helped build—some 15 churches and roughly 13,000 members in five states these days—has never looked shakier. Haven’t been following the apparent downfall of Seattle’s premier megachurch? That’s OK! Here are three of the most-recent signs that Driscoll and Mars Hill are in trouble.

A Leader in Exile When a religious organization you founded kicks you to the curb—and writes a plea for your resignation from the church you built—it’s a pretty clear sign things aren’t going well. And that’s exactly what happened last week between Driscoll and the Acts 29 Network, the worldwide band of more than 500 churches he helped create. In a letter to Driscoll obtained by faith blogger Warren Throckmorton, the Acts 29 Board writes, “Because you are the founder of Acts 29 and a member, we are naturally associated with you and feel that this association discredits the network and is a major distraction.”

For nearly a quarter of a century, Loren Combs has served as the Fife’s city attorney, and unquestionably, this is one of the most intriguing cases he’s ever litigated. “I wish the language in the law would have been clearer, but the fact is, marijuana is still a felony under federal law,” said Combs. “The easiest thing the judge can do is to allow the City of Fife to opt out of the law. That would be a victory for my clients. But if the judge rules that the attorney general is wrong and that a municipality cannot opt out, well then, things will get interesting. I hope it doesn’t come to that.” Nor does the attorney general. “If the court finds I-502 is preempted by federal law, and it is upheld on appeal, the marijuana legalization effort will be destroyed,” Ferguson said. Meanwhile, represented by the ACLU of Washington, three state-licensed marijuana business owners—Downtown Cannabis Company, a producer and processor in Pacific; Monkey Grass

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 6

otter popped » Did He Deserve to Die?

Late last month, a vicious otter attack on a boy and his grandmother at the Pilchuck River made headlines across the state. On Monday, the offending otter was shot and killed by federal officials. The otter-loving Internet did not like that. “This is bullshit. I’m sorry to the people who were terribly hurt, but the animal was probably just defending its territory. We humans are dicks. Really we are.” —Jen Sammons, via Facebook “A wild animal acts like a wild animal and pays the price? Ridiculous.” —Ryan Love, via Facebook “So let’s get this straight, a kid trespasses on the otter’s home, otter attacks and is then killed. Maybe stay out of the damn river?!” —Jenn Ayers, via Facebook “ugh you should only waste taxpayer money killing animals that taste good.” —pewpew, via seattleweekly.com

•

normal powers of local government to regulate within their jurisdictions.”

•

EVICTION BY LUIS PRADO AND PROTEST BY JUAN PABLO BRAVO FROM THE NOUN PROJECT

important (and controversial) opinion, declaring that individual cities and counties can ban the growing and selling of recreational marijuana, and could, if they chose to, opt out of abiding by I-502, which established a certain number of store licenses in all of the state’s 39 counties with the idea that the law would only work if all the state’s residents had reasonable access to recreational pot. (Colorado’s recently implemented legalization measure permits local jurisdictions to disallow cannabis businesses in their towns—and many jurisdictions, including Colorado Springs, have done just that.) But Ferguson stressed in January that it was only an opinion and that final interpretation of the law—which was approved by Washington voters in Nov. 2012 by a 56 to 44 percent margin—would come from a court ruling. As he wrote: “Although Initiative 502 establishes a licensing and regulatory system for marijuana producers, processors and retailers in Washington State, it includes no clear indication that it was intended to preempt local authority to regulate such business. We therefore conclude that I-502 left in place the

Lying About Tithing The

thing about a “global fund,” is those writing checks often assume their money will go to global causes. But as Mars Hill has recently admitted, money given to the church’s “global fund” by online donors has somehow found its way into the Mars Hill “general fund.” In response to an outcry from donors, Mars Hill issued a statement blaming the whole thing on a misunderstanding of what Mars Hill means when it says global (no, really), and offering to make sure that funds intended for international efforts actually find their way to Ethiopia or India, where Mars Hill is actively “planting churches.”

Exodus In early July, Mars

Hill abruptly laid off staff and went on a fundraising blitz to close out the fiscal year. Why? Because, according to Throckmorton’s reporting, the ongoing drama at Mars Hill has (predictably) led to a “dramatic decline” in donations and attendance. In a weekly communication to members posted in full at Patheos.com, the church’s leadership admitted that they “had to make the very tough decision” when it came to the layoffs. “If you know any of [the people who got laid off ],” the letter continues, “please reach out to offer your prayers and support during this transition, and please continue to pray for the church as we navigate through a tough season.” That’s one hell of an understatement. E

mdriscoll@seattleweekly.com

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • AU GU ST 13 — 19, 2014

ew places are as unremarkable as Fife, this industrial burb scattered along Highway 99 east of Tacoma. If it weren’t for the Poodle Dog diner and the Memorial Fountain, once a drinking trough for thirsty cargo-bearing horses, there would be little to distinguish this small city (pop. 9,290), aside from its surfeit of car dealerships, cheap motels, and drive-through smoke shops. But now, at last, Fife is poised to seize its 15 minutes of fame. If only the town’s namesake William J. Fife, an American lieutenant colonel in the battlefield during the Philippine Insurrection of 1898, were around to see it. On July 8, the day Washington state’s very first weed shops opened for business, making good on the passage of Initiative 502, the Fife City Council voted 5-2 to establish an outright ban on all pot retailers, producers or processors, from operating anywhere within the 5.83 square miles that comprise the city. This was hardly breaking news, as nearly 50 other municipalities in the state have enacted bans, moratoriums, or restrictive zoning to stave off voter-sanctioned recreational marijuana. What’s new—and has the potential of blowing up I-502—is the city’s argument that says the state law is invalid because federal prohibition of marijuana trumps the initiative. And since the U.S. government classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 narcotic, Fife, whose residents voted 53 percent in favor of I-502, is saying it cannot be forced to open retail pot outlets until federal law is changed. Wenatchee is the only other city in the state that has adopted a policy that requires applicants for licenses to sell pot to comply with federal law, which, of course, effectively means no licenses will be issued until the matter is resolved in the courts. Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s office announced last week that it will “vigorously” fight the federal preemption argument. In an interview with Seattle Weekly, Ferguson said if Fife is successful in making its case, “than that could eviscerate the state law and I-502 could be dismantled.” Ferguson continued. “This is something we’ve been preparing for for some time. We knew this day was inevitable.” Pierce County Superior Court Judge Vicki Hogan is expected to hear arguments in the case on Aug. 29. In mid-January, Ferguson handed down a very

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County; and Rainier on Pine, a retail store in Tacoma—moved last week to intervene in a lawsuit challenging the City of Fife’s ban on marijuana operations. The owners say the City of Fife’s ban on legal marijuana operations within the city is unconstitutional and is preempted by state law. “We are intervening in this case to ensure that Washington’s marijuana law goes forward as the voters intended when they adopted it,” said Alison Holcomb, ACLU of Washington criminal justice director and the author of I-502. “Federal law does not preempt our state’s marijuana law, nor can individual cities opt out of state law.”

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Douglas Hiatt, an impassioned criminal defense attorney and founder of Sensible Washington—a non-profit political committee devoted to repealing cannabis prohibitions for adults and shedding light on “the failed drug war”—said he believes Attorney General Ferguson is going to lose the preemption argument. “The federal law is super clear on marijuana,” said Hiatt, “and I think there’s a very high likelihood this [I-502] is not going to fly under federal law. We need to change the law at the federal level.” On July 9, days after the City of Fife voted for the pot ban, prospective weed retailer Tedd Wetherbee, owner of Graybeard Holdings, made good on his threat to sue the city if it went ahead with the ban. Wetherbee had secured two lottery slots to open stores in Gig Harbor and in Fife. But then, even though he had the necessary state retail license in hand and was ready for a grand opening of The Gallery in Gig Harbor, the city enacted a six-month moratorium. “And in Fife, I had everything lined up to open up a store [at 4500 Pacific Highway]. All I needed was to have had the premises inspected so I could get the license, and then they vote for a ban,” recounted Wetherbee. “The city had no concern for the voters, who voted 53.15 percent for the law. It was all about personal ideology, mainly from [Mayor] Tim Curtis.” Curtis, a semi-retired bookkeeper who was appointed mayor by the council in January, refused to comment, saying only, “I’ve been advised not to say anything because of pending litigation.” Messages left with several other council members went unanswered. Could be they were at the Poodle Dog. E

econklin@seattleweekly.com

THE DEADLINE AND THE DEPUTY

The mystery of Carlton M. Stearns’ death resurfaces with new details coming from a long-lost manuscript written by a newspaperman with sleuthing in his blood. BY RICK ANDERSON

was just a washed-up, drunken newspaperman, apparently worried I’d become one. But I guess he reached me anyway, if only by blood, or ink. He had worked at the paper where I later got my first newspaper job—as a delivery boy—and where I got my first influential whiffs of printer’s ink in the Washie’s backshop and press room. Not that many years later, I landed my first newsroom job as a teenage copyboy at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. And as I have just learned a half-century later discovering Charlie’s long-lost manuscript, my grandfather, like me, loved a mystery and loathed a story without an ending.

COURTESY KARL DAVIDSON

According to my grandmother Ruby K. Eddy—

Deputy Carlton M. Stearns

a tough sparkplug of a woman my friends called Sarge when they’d see her playing a pinball machine with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth—Charlie was always doing the kind of things you’d expect of a newspaperman. She used the word with disgust. Take the time, in the 1920s, that he tried to burn down their house for the insurance money. Or so she claimed. “She said she heard Grandpa Eddy up in the attic before the fire broke out,” recalls my sister, and family historian, Susan Merriman. “He was working in insurance with his dad at the time, and they were insured. She always felt he started the fire.” The damage to the house in Hoquiam was extensive enough that Charlie, Ruby, my mother Elinore, and my aunt Marge—then just little kids—had to move in with neighbors. But my cousin, Jan Fisher, thinks the fire was accidental. After all, she recalls her mother Marge telling her it happened on a Christmas Eve. “It would be a horrible thing for Grandpa to do, and I honestly don’t think he would have done it,” Jan says. ”My mother always said he was very nice and could have been a wonderful father if he hadn’t been an alcoholic.” A spare and spritely man with a gift of gab, Pennsylvania-born Charlie was a printer like his father and like many reporters and editors in those days. At smaller publications, men like Charlie wrote the news and set the type and ran the press. According to Seattle’s Historylink. org, Hoquiam readers received their news from a dizzying array of newspapers back then: “During the first three decades of the twentieth century, a steady flow of Republican, Democratic, Socialist, union, ethnic, and other area newspapers were issued. Most lasted only a very short time; others were started on the harbor and then moved on to Everett or Seattle. There were at the minimum 60 publications in Aberdeen, Hoquiam,

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • AU GU ST 13 — 19, 2014

hen the body of a deputy sheriff was found sprawled along a Washington coastal highway on the early morning of March 10, 1936, Charlie Eddy rolled out of bed, or the bar, and into action. A 55-yearold crime reporter for the Grays Harbor Daily Washingtonian, Eddy went after the story with the curiosity and confidence of a newspaperman with a drink in him. Within hours, he had scored the gritty details for that day’s edition. “Deputy Sheriff Carlton M. Stearns, chief criminal investigator for Grays Harbor county, was shot to death early this morning at Copalis Beach under mysterious circumstances pointing to murder,” he began, banging the keys on his manual typewriter in the Hoquiam newsroom for the “Washie,” which in those days competed with as many as a dozen other regional newspapers. “The deputy was believed slain while making an investigation of thefts and burglaries reported at the beach community since opening of the clam season recently. “The shooting occurred on the highway at the junction of the new seaside road and the main Copalis highway”—a few miles north of what, in the 1960s, would become the resort development of Ocean Shores. The story was a first draft of history that is still unfolding 78 years later. A recently unearthed manuscript of another, longer, apparently neverpublished story by Charlie Eddy challenges the official version of the shooting, one of the state’s oldest cold-case slayings of a peace officer. Though the murder weapon—the deputy’s gun—was found more than 60 feet from the body, and both the state and an insurance company compensated Stearns’ widow for his death in the line of duty, according to Charlie Eddy’s 14-page manuscript, the then-sheriff of Grays Harbor believed the powder burns on the deputy’s head clearly pointed to suicide. After reading the manuscript, today’s Grays Harbor Sheriff, Rick Scott, agrees that the theory has merit. It’s impossible to discern what exactly Charles Henry Eddy personally believed about all this beyond the story he left behind. He died in 1955, at age 74. He was my grandfather, but I was told never to talk to him. Among my recollections from a childhood in Hoquiam in the ’50s are the afternoons my mother would double-park in front of the old Savoy Hotel in Aberdeen. I would carry in a box of groceries to Grandpa Charlie in the rundown lobby. He was old and small and usually sat with a blanket folded on his lap. I had been told not to dally or chat because he might try to influence me. My grandmother drummed into me that he

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The Deadline and the Deputy » FROM PAGE 7

COURTESY KARL DAVIDSON

Cosmopolis, and other Grays Harbor towns; the number was more likely one or two hundred.” Charlie ran several small papers, but was best known as a reporter for the Washingtonian, and later The Aberdeen Daily World, the two most respected publications. The late Murray Morgan, who went on to author one of the Northwest’s most enduring histories, Skid Road, worked at the Washie from 1937 into 1941, and conceded that the World was bigger, richer, and better staffed. He told ex-World editor and nowstate chief historian John Hughes that “The World, in fact, was a lot better paper, though even now I feel a twinge at saying so.” Charlie had a healthy reporter’s disrespect for politicians, perhaps in part because two of the Washingtonian’s editor/publishers used the newspaper to launch Congressional careers—those of Russell Mack, who served in the U.S. House from

Sheriff Jeff Bartell

There seemed little doubt that deputy Stearns was murdered. Charlie wrote in his initial March 1936 story that, according to the then-sheriff—a big, easygoing man named Jeff Bartell who kept two baby alligators in a glass office cage for laughs—Stearns was killed after he “engaged in a terrific struggle.” In addition to being shot in the side of the head, Stearns had a severe scalp wound at the hairline, inflicted apparently by a blunt weapon or a fall. Stearns had been armed with a .38 Colt Police Special, a flashlight big enough to use as a club, and a gas gun, a non-lethal weapon capable of shooting a tear-gas cartridge. The gas gun and flashlight were lying next to his body in an area near the local school house. His .38 was missing. The body was found at 4:45 a.m. by a man named Jesse King, whom Charlie described as a “negro clam dig-

“SHERIFF BARTELL RETURNED TO HOQUIAM AND ASSERTED THAT HE BELIEVES DEPUTY STEARNS WAS MURDERED IN COLD BLOOD.” ger.” Stearns had apparently been searching for someone, walking through the brush and mud at a clam-diggers’ campground. A witness had heard what he thought was a car backfire sometime before 3 a.m. It was likely the single shot that killed Stearns. “Sheriff Bartell returned to Hoquiam this afternoon and asserted that he believes Deputy Stearns was murdered in cold blood,” Charlie wrote for the paper’s evening edition. “He said that his investigation would be pressed but that information would be withheld pending further progress.” Suicide was weighed, but considered unlikely by investigators. Details of the first-day story would essentially endure as an official summation of the lawman’s death: The 40-year-old married father of two was attacked and shot with his own gun by someone who would never be found. The New York Life Insurance Company paid Stearns’ widow $6,000 double indemnity based on that conclusion. And the state Department of Labor and Industries began shelling out regular $50 monthly death benefits in the belief that Stearns was murdered on the job. The shooting had faded from most memories when, two years later, fellow deputy and Stearns pallbearer Arthur Cobain also died from a single shot of his own gun.* As United

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*One of Arthur Cobain’s four children, Leland, was the grandfather of Kurt Cobain, the Nirvana frontman who would also die as a result of a single shot in 1994—a death that despite its own cloud of uncertainty was ruled a suicide. Leland, the one Cobain family member willing to talk about Kurt’s death and personal history, was quoted in an April 2004 issue of People as saying he thought Kurt was murdered. He had no proof beyond the theory. But the boy just killing himself like that made no sense to him. Leland died last year in Montesano at age 89.

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1947 to 1960, and his predecessor, Albert Johnson, who served 10 terms into the 1930s. Both were enemies of the radical labor movement of the day that literally came out of the woods—the International Woodworkers of America. They also fought with the socialist Wobblies, several of whom were shot or lynched during the infamous Centralia Massacre of 1919. Among Johnson’s avid supporters was the Ku Klux Klan, which Charlie apparently took exception to, reporting on Johnson’s associations when Charlie was editor of another paper, the short-lived News. In a letter to World publisher Werner Rupp that would turn up years later, Johnson called Charlie “a fly in the ointment” and said Rupp ought to hire him and get him under control. He complained that Charlie “is a little too narrow between the eyes to suit me. He is a good reporter and so because he has the instincts of a ferret.” But his job success included post-work celebrations at bars and long spells away from home. His marriage ultimately ended in divorce in the late ’40s, leaving Ruby poor and bitter. Years later, when Charlie died in his hotel room, she refused to claim the body. In all our family photo collections, there’s no picture of Grandpa Charlie. What’s left of him remains today in an Aberdeen cemetery, buried with other indigents in a pauper’s grave.

Not far away is the red granite marker of his friend, deputy Carlton M. Stearns, who beat him to the grave by 19 years. Long after he was gone, however, Charlie was still trying to determine how and why.

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Press International reported on Sept. 9, 1938, Cobain, who was also the county jailer, was killed when his gun accidentally discharged, even though he didn’t apparently feel the bullet hit. He was sitting on a stool at the beer counter of a store in Markham, a community on the road to Westport, when he apparently reached in his pocket for a cigarette. “The pistol dropped to the floor and discharged,” UPI reported. “As he reached for the gun, he asked if anyone had been hit, and then toppled over, dying before medical aid could be summoned.” The deaths of both Stearns and Cobain were soon forgotten by the county sheriff ’s office. Inexplicably, no one put up a plaque to remem-

“THE REVOLVER WAS NOT HIDDEN BY AN ASSASSIN BUT BY SOMEONE BENT ON SWITCHING A SUICIDE TO MURDER.”

S A N D EN T E R TA I N M E N T

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The Deadline and the Deputy » FROM PAGE 9

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ber them—or, if one existed, it was taken down at some point. But in recent years the two have been resurrected by a relative of Stearns, shedding new light on the cold case. Stearns’ grandniece, Nancy Ashley of Chehalis, felt the lack of a memorial to the deputies was a slight to their service, and began researching the deaths. She wrote background pieces for the website Find-a-Grave. She also contacted the sheriff ’s office. “The sheriff ’s office had no records of these deputies,” Ashley recalled in a Find-a-Grave entry. “The Grays Harbor Co Sheriff ’s Dept has now honored these fallen officers as has the Washington State Officer Line of Duty Deaths, and also the National Officer Down memorial.” The sheriff ’s office display in Montesano, with pictures and descriptions of their deaths, says both men “Died in the Line of Duty.” That got Ashley’s brother, Karl Davidson of Centralia, interested in the cold-case murder of Stearns. In February of this year, he wrote about it for the Moclips Ocean Wave, the newsletter of the Moclips-by-the-Sea Historical Society, edited by Jane Bennett. Fittingly, the Wave is a small publication on the Washington coast a few miles north of Copalis where Stearns died, and is a modern-day kin to the myriad publications that existed back in Charlie Eddy’s time. In his story—which a relative sent me— Davidson recounted the killing 78 years earlier of Stearns “by an assassin or assassins unknown.” Near the end, he mentioned that “a long article, apparently intended for a magazine, was written two years after Stearns’ death by his friend Charles Henry Eddy. It is not known if the article was ever published.” The Society’s Kelly Calhoun put me in touch with Davidson, who told me he in fact had a copy of the manuscript, discovered

among family memorabilia. “It was in a box of old family photos that I borrowed from my cousin in order to scan them,” he told me. “The copy was in with things she inherited from her mother, who in turn, inherited from her own mother. Both long since passed away.” The best guess is that Charlie, after finishing the manuscript in 1938, gave a copy to Stearns’ widow, and it got passed down the family tree. He sent me a copy. It runs 14 double-spaced typewritten pages, with Charlie’s first entry being his byline—By Charles Henry Eddy. It is a declarative recounting with touches of wordy, flowery prose. As I began to read, the fourth paragraph caught my eye. “Another amazing feature of this, the most mysterious and baffling case in the history of the Grays Harbor County sheriff ’s office, is that while the main theory of murder is based on finding the slain or self-destroyed officer’s gun 63 feet, 8 inches south of the body, it is considered with a preponderance of evidence that Stearns himself sent a bullet through his brain.” The man who was absolutely convinced it was suicide? Sheriff Bartell, who originally called it murder. The deputy, Bartell’s onetime brother-in-law, had even talked about ending his life, the sheriff said. Today’s Grays Harbor County Sheriff, Rick

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 12

Andrew Sullivan

U.S. Congressman Earl Blumenauer

Laura Blanco de León

Ed Rosenthal

Representative Peter Buckley

Steve DeAngelo

Tom Burns

Senator Floyd Prozanski

Andrew Sullivan Keynote Speaker Renowned international journalist with the most popular blog on the internet, The Dish, with more subscribers than any other exclusively-online journalism site U.S. Congressman Earl Blumenauer Authored a report in early 2013 called “The Path Forward: Rethinking Federal Marijuana Policy” Ed Rosenthal Cannabis guru and author Steve DeAngelo Executive Director of Harborside Health Center in Oakland, California, Steve is a cannabis industry leader, movement strategist and lifelong activist Laura Blanco de León Serves as President of the Association of Cannabis Studies of Uruguay Representative Peter Buckley Co-Chairman Ways and Means Committee, Sponsor of Dispensary Bill, Member of OHA Rules Committee on Dispensaries Tom Burns Oregon Health Authority (OHA) Director of Pharmacy Programs/Medical Marijuana Dispensary Program Senator Floyd Prozanski Sponsor of the Dispensary Bill and Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee Sponsored by

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Scott, can’t reopen this coldest of cold cases on the basis of a recently discovered manuscript alone. The official case files were long ago lost or destroyed, a record search shows. But, at my request, he read over Charlie’s story. “It would appear that alcohol was a factor,” says Scott, a Democrat appointed sheriff in 2012 who, running unopposed, was elected this month to a full term. “And that [the deputy] was wandering about at that hour is odd in and of itself. It has been my experience for the past 37 years in law enforcement that suicide is always hard to explain and understand. I have told many survivors of suicide victims that you cannot give a logical explanation for a completely illogical act. The physical evidence as described in the story would support the theory of suicide.” In his unpublished story, Charlie writes that “To clear this enigmatical mystery” of a suicide gun being found 20 yards from the victim, “Sheriff Jeff Bartell, veteran officer with nearly 12 years of service as sheriff behind him, has left no stone unturned in an effort to find the unseen hand which he believes removed the .38 calibre Colt’s Police Special revolver from beneath the lifeless body of Stearns and placed it where [it was] subsequently found not long after the body of the criminal deputy was discovered. When this man is located, Sheriff Bartell declares, it will be ascertained that the revolver, with one shell fired, was not hidden by an assassin but rather by someone who was bent on switching a suicide to murder.”

If it was murder, the usual suspects were the underworld outcasts, as Charlie put it, who populated the clam-digging colony, or a group that had been rumrunners during Prohibition and may have been out to get Stearns. Just before repeal in 1933, the sheriff ’s deputy had been instrumental in two big busts of rum-laden cargos worth $140,000—one hauled in by trucks, the other by steamers that sailed into Grays Harbor. Some of the bootleggers had since become money counterfeiters working the North Beach area. “It is no secret that Carl Stearns was in possession of a number of counterfeit coins”— Charlie had seen him with them many times, he noted—and he may have been on the perps’ trail. Did “two or more of these criminals seize him in the darkness, overpower and murder the criminal deputy with his own gun? Maybe so,” he wrote. But if that was the case, then “Stearns’ life was taken while he grasped his revolver in his right hand, and this hand was forced upwards by the assassins until the muzzle rested against the deputy’s head above the right eye and the trigger pulled. There was a telltale powder burn at the point of entry of the fatal bullet. There was another and stronger telltale, in the shape of a powder burn, in the palm of Stearns’ right hand.” Why would assailants go to the trouble of forcing Stearns to shoot himself when they could more easily have taken his gun away and shot him themselves? And wouldn’t he resist? “Officers who have studied the case carefully cannot convince themselves that Stearns would refrain from firing his revolver during such an attack,” Charlie wrote, noting the deputy was a 6´1˝, 226-pounder, powerfully built and considered fearless. “Rather,” with the gun in his hand being forced to his head by others, “they are inclined to the belief that he would have snapped the trigger two, three, or four times in a desperate effort to protect his life.” Stearns’ hat was found next to the body, with a bullet hole in it. Investigators determined he’d been wearing the hat when the head shot was fired. To Charlie and the detectives, that ruled out a struggle with assailants, “for those who knew Stearns were well aware he would fight desperately and no hat would remain on the head during such a struggle.” If it was suicide, might a fellow deputy have moved the gun to make it appear to be murder, hoping Stearns’ family wouldn’t miss out on death benefits? For the record, the first deputy on the scene insisted he did not see Stearns’ gun anywhere, finding only an empty holster when he unbuttoned Stearns’ coat. The sheriff and other lawmen began arriving at the beach crime scene and, Charlie recounts, “The sheriff at this juncture was informed that some man, not clearly recognized in the darkness, had been seen to walk away from the body and move into the brush-covered lot just south of the road.” Bartell and several deputies began scouring the area for the weapon. “Ten minutes later, the sheriff himself found it nicely hidden 63 feet, 8 inches south of the body. “It was noted that the gun was free of sand or dirt. No person with a bullet wound such as Stearns suffered could throw a gun so far, it was readily deduced. To prove it, the officers

The Deadline and the Deputy » FROM PAGE 11

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took turns throwing the revolver, muzzle first, from where the body was towards the spot where the gun was recovered. A throw of 50 feet was the best any officer could make. “That gun was lifted from close to Stearns’ body and placed where we found it,” remarked Bartell for Charlie’s story, recalling events at the scene two years later. “And in my opinion, the man seen entering this bush is the person who concealed it.” Bloodhounds had been brought to the scene, but, without a scent to follow, could pick up no trail. Reviewing the case, Bartell said that the day prior to the shooting, Stearns had cleaned out his locker at the sheriff ’s office and gave the sheriff a handcuff case as a keepsake, saying he wouldn’t be needing it anymore. The sheriff, Charlie writes, “was positive in his own mind” that Stearns was planning something mysterious, and might not be coming back from the beach: rather than take his own car that night, he had another deputy drop him off in Copalis. Witnesses would later add to this fatalistic notion, recalling that the deputy asked a bartender when he would re-open in

AUG 21 THE LITTLE MERMAID

several months. Stearns, Charlie reported, was depressed and had taken up drinking regularly to fill the void. As he put it in a rhapsodic line, “The shadow on the threshold of Stearns’ home which would not be shooed off, placed this glass of sparkle in the hand of Stearns with much regularity during the few months preceding his demise.” It is not clear whether state and insurance investigators were apprised of all these details; they completed their investigations and paid death benefits before Bartell, once married to Stearns’ half-sister, had wound up the case himself. He persisted even though, if he was right, such a finding could cause Stearns’ family to lose death benefits. Yet, long after the case landed in the cold file, Bartell continued to search for the elusive, gun-moving figure. “It is difficult to say with any certainty what may have happened that night,” says sheriff Rick Scott after reading Charlie’s story. “The movement of the gun, however, is hard to explain. The first thought people have when they find a body is not to change the scene, and I would think that insurance is not something anyone would be considering at that moment, at that hour either. The interviews of all those who he had contact with would The many drafts of Deputy Stearns’ death.

AUG 28 GHOSTBUSTERS

RICK ANDERSON

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the morning and when told 6 a.m., said “I will be as cold as a chunk of ice by that time.” Bartell also learned that during a drive from Montesano prior to the shooting, Stearns was sitting in the back seat of the patrol car when he impulsively pulled out his gun and pressed it against the neck of the driver, Chief Deputy A.E. Anderson. Anderson stopped the car and grabbed the gun, emptying the shells, asking Stearns what the hell he was thinking. He then gave him back the weapon. Minutes later, Stearns had reloaded the gun and again pressed it against Anderson’s nape. The chief stopped the car, jumped out, and snatched the revolver from Stearns, who apparently thought it was funny. Anderson worried Stearns had gone off the deep end. Also, it turned out Stearns’ wife had recently inherited $1,000 and took off with their daughter to California. She had been gone for

be important in knowing how was he behaving, what was his demeanor, and so forth. This might help in judging his state of mind. But we will never know.” Charlie went to his grave likely thinking his story would never see the light of day (much less be posted on the then-nonexistent Web). Like him, his old newspaper is also gone. The Washingtonian began as a daily in 1903, became a weekly in 1951, and printed its final edition in 1957, two years after Charlie’s death. I delivered some of those final editions on my bicycle. It didn’t mean much at the time. I didn’t think about all the news that wouldn’t be reported anymore. But, three-quarters of a century later, at least we got Charlie’s report in the paper. And surely he would have raised a cold one to what sheriff Scott said the other day after finishing the story: “I did enjoy the read.” E randerson@seattleweekly.com

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Goats and Fish Poop

BY MEGAN HILL

Seattle’s best urban farms revealed.

Chef John Howie will unveil a specialty cocktail at each of his restaurants to benefit the nonprofit buildOn. Howie will donate $1 for each cocktail purchased in August, and the money raised will go towards a buildOn trip to Nepal in March 2015 and towards construction materials for the school-building project.

BY CHASON GORDON

If chickens are the gateway drug into urban

farming, goats are a hardcore commitment. Just down the street from Feathered Fish Farm, Ingela Wanerstrand and Brian Genung have an urban farm that’s a bit of a neighborhood attraction with its goats, little chicken house, and edible gardens. It won the People’s Choice Award on the tour. “I felt bad,” says Wanerstrand, “because we also won it last year.” Wanerstrand, who specializes in garden design, initially decided to keep goats because she was allergic to cow milk but not goat milk. “I also like furry animals,” she adds, laughing. “We’re a neighborhood petting zoo.” The city legalized goats a few years ago (which didn’t get the fanfare marijuana did), and allows regular-sized lots to have up to “three small animals,” which can include dogs, goats, rabbits, cats, and pot-bellied pigs—in

The tiny Japanese bakery Umai Do, at 18th and Jackson, is closing its doors at the end of August. Owner Art Oki says he plans to move his shop to Beacon Hill to “co-locate with Hiroshi’s Japanese take out” on 15th Avenue South beginning at the end of October or beginning of November. Ultimately, Oki hopes to open his own shop again. E morningfoodnews@seattleweekly.com

Goats on wooden planks (following treats) at City Art Farm, with Joan Engelmeyer.

various combinations too lengthy to detail here. I would tell you more about goat ownership, but as I was reading a paper sign at the Wanerstrand farm entitled “What do goats need?”, one of the goats ate it. Over at City Art Farm, managed by artist Engelmeyer and her husband, it feels a bit like Shangri-La, and I found myself hanging around for much longer than necessary in a vague attempt to reverse the aging process. The garden at the side of the house is bursting with kale, lettuce, beans, bamboo, spinach, chard, yarrow, zucchini, beets, herbs, and little watermelon cucumbers. Most of the crops are grown for the Rainier Valley Food Bank. In the corner is a catnip bush. “The cats like to sleep there and space out,” says Engelmeyer. Along with goats, the farm has a lengthy chicken coop which stretches along the fence. How many chickens are there? “Whatever’s legal—that’s what we have,” she says, smiling. Inside the airy studio out back is a long wooden table surrounded by innumerable crafts on multiple shelves, where Engelmeyer teaches art classes to adults and children. The small attached gallery features their and Engelmeyer’s work, reminiscent of the insider art you’d see in Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum. During my visit, kids were spread about working on their various creations. A little girl ran up to Engelmeyer and asked if she could put her clay sculpture in the oven. “That’s very pretty,” says Engelmeyer. “It will be pretty,” corrects the girl.

Operating for 35 years, Seattle Tilth has been

at the center of the region’s organic-gardening movement, offering regular classes with names like “City Chickens 101” and “Raise City Goats.” “Our first chicken-coop tour was in 1999—it was the first in the nation, and is the longeststanding coop tour as far as we know,” says Tilth Communications Director Liza Burke. She suggests people start small when considering urban farming. “Don’t try to do everything at once! Try growing some easy crops and learn about building healthy soil,” says Burke. “Experiment— farmers spend a lifetime or generations doing that—try things out and see what happens.” The process is certainly a gradual one, but often rewarding. I ask Engelmeyer if she has any future projects in mind for the farm. “A hot tub,” she says, laughing. “That’s just a dream, though. Plans are different from dreams, but they’re very close to being the same thing here.” Don’t want to wait for next year’s Seattle Tilth Chicken Coop and Urban Farm Tour? Ingela Wanerstrand and Brian Genung will be offering classes at their award-winning garden; see facebook.com/LittleGreenFarmSchool for details. City Art Farm has year-round after-school art classes and open studios on Thursdays from 2 to 6 p.m. when kids can drop in and make things. See cityartfarm.com/City_Art_Farm/ Home.html for info. Want to find out more about urban gardening? Visit Seattle Tilth’s website for info and clases at seattletilth.org. E

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TheWeeklyDish The “Gangnam Burger” BY KELTON SEARS

Heeeeeeeeey, sexy lady. You should try the “Gangnam Burger.” It’s been getting me to opp, opp, opp, open my mouth a lot recently. All right, I’ll stop with the jokes. I know the song it’s named after is two years old (which is like 60 in Internet years), but the burger itself moves beyond other novelty burgers because it’s not precious, covered in vinaigrette-soaked arugula leaves, or served on a French roll just for fanciness’ sake. This creation by Pioneer Square’s BRGR Bar marinates the patty in Korean barbecue sauce, giving it a sweet, soy-saucy kick. Garlic aioli and housemade roasted-garlic mayo gives it a bite that you might not be used to in your burgers, a welcome innovation. A healthy heap of Oriental slaw on top lends it a satisfying crunch, and voilà. Normally, I’m a burger traditionalist—the furthest I’ll stray from the straight-up cheese/onion/tomato/ lettuce recipe is maybe the occasional Texasstyle barbecue burger—but something about the Gangnam Burger’s unconventional charm keeps me coming back. It might also be the BRGR Bar’s unreasonably delicious crinkle-cut sweetpotato fries, cooked perfectly so as to crunch on first bite before melting in your mouth. If Psy uploaded a video of him eating this meal, it would probably net him billions of views. E ksears@seattleweekly.com

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • AU GU ST 13 — 19, 2014

Amanda Cohn and Koji Yugawa, the aquaponic garden is a Rube Goldberg machine of sustainability. After the fish are fed and poop, the water is pumped through grow beds which act as a biofilter, ultimately feeding the plants and resupplying the fish with clean water. “It’s a lot of work to get it started,” says Cohn, “but once it’s started, the idea of being able to grow so much with so little work was really appealing. No more weeding, no fertilizing, and no watering.” Like many urban farms, Feathered Fish Farm started with chickens. “They’re kind of called the ‘gateway drug’ to urban farming,” says Cohn. I ask why her chickens are named after Shakespearean women. “Because I think Shakespearean women are kind of chicken,” she says. “You know, ‘Save me,’ and all that.”

Skillet Diner Ballard is preparing to host a fourcourse meal featuring “massive Mesquite-grilled Tomahawk Ribs with Memphis-style BBQ sauce” on Sunday, August 24. Each course of the meal (which also includes a grilled prosciutto salad and housemade pretzel sticks) is paired with a beer from North Coast Brewery. For reservations, call 206-512-2000.

KELTON SEARS

At Feathered Fish Farm in Ballard, run by

Capitol Hill’s Mezcaleria Oaxaca has extended its hours and is now open seven days a week starting at 5 p.m. The restaurant is also doing away with its Sunday brunch and will now be open from 5 to 10 p.m. on Sundays. Popular brunch items like tortas and tacos carne asada have been moved to a special Sunday menu.

CHASON GORDON

rom the street, you can’t really tell how much is going on in the backyards of these homes. In place of tightly kept lawns are elaborate urban farms, ripe with goats and chickens and enough fruits and vegetables to supply a produce aisle. “I always wanted to have a farm,” says Joan Engelmeyer, whose City Art Farm in southeast Seattle is a flurry of activity with gardens, animals, and after-school programs for kids. “When I walk in my neighborhood, it’s as if it’s not really in Seattle. There’s no sidewalk, and it has that gravelly feel. So I started pretending that I lived in the country.” City Art Farm was among the more than 20 urban farms to take part recently in Seattle Tilth’s 2014 Chicken Coop and Urban Farm Tour, highlighting some of the best in the city. There are hundreds of urban farms all over Seattle. In addition to chickens and goats, many house ducks, rabbits, honeybees, mason bees, aquaponics, and edible gardens, which are much healthier than the edible gardens in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

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MUS I C

Protecting the Brewshed

e Seattleites take water for granted. Be it salt water, fresh water, or rainwater, we’re surrounded by it. Throughout Western Washington, that water gets put to nearly infinite uses, but the one I’m concerned with is the massive but rarely mentioned role it plays in making beer, wine, and spirits. Protecting all that water is essential to all of us, but brewers, winemakers, and distillers are particularly dependent on water, yet just like the rest of us they’re often unaware BY ZACH GEBALLE of just how precarious our water quality and quantity can be. Most of the discussion around beermaking centers on hops, malt, yeast, and other ingredients. Yet water makes up the vast majority of beer. It’s no coincidence that breweries have traditionally been situated near sources of high-quality water, be they springs, rivers, or lakes. Seattle’s craft brewing movement was in no small part enabled and aided by our vast reserves of fresh water, and the future of the industry will depend on protecting that resource. That future was the topic of a recent event thrown by the Washington Brewshed Alliance (WBA), where I had a chance to explore some of the issues facing our waterways and the industry. My first question was: what in the world is a “brewshed?” Derived from the term watershed, the idea is that the members of Western Washington’s brewing community draw from a communal pool of water to make their beer. Thus, it’s very much in their interests to ensure that said water remains clean, plentiful, and easily accessible. Created by Washington Wild, a non-profit founded in 1979 to protect wild lands in the state, the WBA is a way to focus public attention on water quality problems in an approachable way. After all, most of us like beer. Some brewers at the conference admitted that long-term planning for them was more about saving for new equipment or experimenting with new strains of yeast. Threats to water quality weren’t something they’d considered, until they joined the Alliance that is. That’s not to say that they’ve all become diehard activists, but their involvement with the WBA has opened their eyes to the fact that water doesn’t just come out of the faucet. The WBA focuses attention on public lands, particularly National Forests. Given that those lands are used for a variety of different purposes, many of the challenges facing local waterways involve commercial and recreational usage. Most people are aware that logging wilderness areas causes erosion, damaging water quality and sometimes choking off streams and rivers. The lessunderstood challenge comes from off-road vehicles, mostly dirt bikes and ATVs, that also often generate erosion, especially when new trails are created. For the most part, water concerns seem to be more an issue of future planning than immediate emergency. Yet as Western Washington grows, more pressure will be put on our “beershed,” not the least of which will be from thirsty beer-lovers. Thus, it’s incumbent on all of us who enjoy the end product to protect the most important input: water. E

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Looking Inward and East

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SAM surveys the modest Northwest modernists who had their moment following World War II, then faded from national view. BY BRIAN MILLER

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ism in the Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical

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sacred creations-of-place, domiciles on Fidalgo Island and in Edmonds (both now gone). There’s a certain mossy shyness, especially with Graves, that meant these artists missed the publicity boat when it came to minting new art-world stars in New York. Pollock and company were proud, boisterous, press-savvy, and untainted by any delicate Eastern associations—all-American! (Gorky and de Kooning might chuckle at that representation.) Again, WWII helped quash such earnest spiritual impulses and communitarianism: Asian art, especially from Japan, became suspect—a theme we see in the ongoing Deco Japan show at SAAM. Also, the Northwest School was, by New York standards, retiring and inward looking. While Tobey’s pulsing, white-lined market and street scenes are certainly bold, there’s no egotism to them, no capital I. Neither he nor Graves can be categorized only as figurative painters, yet their work mostly refers to something in the physical or spiritual realm. It’s not abstract “pure painting,” as that term would be defined in the postwar years (though Tobey of the Big Four tended furthest in that direction). Likewise, Asian art generally simplifies—like Anderson’s landscapes or Graves’ birds—without losing sight of original form. The Northwest mystic artist is a humble intermediary, a medium, not the solitary, omnipotent agent of abstract creation. He’s part of something larger, forever connected to the vibrant crowd around him, the whispering forest, the native spirits and creatures, and their incessant, enduring thrum. E

bmiller@seattleweekly.com

SEATTLE ART MUSEUM 1300 First Ave., 654-3210, seattleartmuseum.org. $12.50-$19.50. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thurs. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Weds. & Fri.-Sun. Ends. Sept. 7.

SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), 324-9996, siff. net. $6-$11. 7 p.m. BRIAN MILLER FRIDAY, AUG. 15

Seahawks Vs. Chargers

Super Bowls are not won in the preseason. The Seahawks will not play a meaningful game until September 4, when the Packers come to town for the first week of the regular season. Until then, it’s all dress rehearsal, all just “practice,” as Allen Iverson would say with an inflection that makes it clear just how trivial all of it is. Behind staying healthy and avoiding overtime, winning an NFL preseason game, at best, comes in a distant third on the importance list—even for a guy as competitive as Pete Carroll, who probably has to gulp hard just to let kids beat him at Candy Land. Still, as we were reminded last week, throwing on a jersey in the morning and rushing out after work to catch the game—busting out a few “SEAHAWKS” chants on the way, of course—feels pretty damn good, especially as defending Super Bowl champs. After losing to Dever last week, the Seahawks’ second warmup game of the year won’t really matter. And, sure, starters like Russell Wilson and Richard Sherman will probably barely break a sweat. But that doesn’t

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • AU GU ST 13 — 19, 2014

may seem like old news to museum-goers who already know the hallowed names of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson. Still, for all the city’s many tech-industry newcomers, I suspect this summer survey show—now in its final month at Seattle Art Museum—is an entirely fresh introduction. The notion of a Northwest School, like most labels, was devised from outside Seattle Graves’ 1941 Dove of the Inner Eye, painted during the late ’30s and war before he was sent to military prison. years, when Tobey—eldest and most traveled of the Big Four—and Graves first drew notice in New York for refusing to serve when drafted.) All were museums and galleries. A distant provincial port syncretists looking East for both artistic and city, newly significant for Pacific shipping and spiritual inspiration. (Graves favored Zen BudBoeing, was briefly deemed an avant-garde hub. dhism, Tobey identified as Baha’i, and all were The eminent critic Clement Greenberg famously somewhat pantheistic seekers in a Thoreauvian cited Tobey, following a 1944 show in New York, sense.) The natural world was sacred, along with as an influence on Jackson Pollock, but that its original denizens (animals, Pacific Coast association was soon washed away by the tide of Indians, etc.); Graves famously invested his birds Abstract Expressionism. “They didn’t fit the narwith numinous symbolism; and Callahan—who rative, and they were edited out” of the postwar worked in a fire lookout during the war—would art canon, says Patricia Junker, who curated this depict mountains throughout his career. large, important show—containing nearly 100 The influence of Asian art—Fuller’s great works—and wrote its catalogue essay. obsession—can’t be overstated. Callahan, who It was the famous 1953 LIFE magazine worked for many years at SAM, is quoted in article, “Mystic Painters of the Northwest,” that the catalogue as saying that he and his Seattle introduced the Big Four to national readers. peers “saw the world composed of people, not (You can see it, enlarged, along with a helpful races or nationals, and found the various ancient timeline, in one of the gallery corridors.) SAM philosophies and religions, including Chrisgranted Tobey a career retrospective in 1959, but tianity, based on essentially the same chart of the following year he decamped for Switzerland. moral laws.” He continues, “As world conditions (Graves had by that time already absented himbecame increasingly complicated and the war self from the Northwest.) spread over the world, the Northwest artists Tobey’s and Graves’ work still sold, but it was began to question the old ironclad conceptions. Callahan, Anderson, and heirs to the school Why, one wondered, should America persist in who remained an active, living presence in our looking to Europe for cultural guidance, turning local art scene during the following decades. (Paul its back on the Pacific and the Orient?” Horiuchi, George Tsutakawa, Leo Kenney, and Yet just as these coastal artists were looking others are represented in the show’s final gallery.) east, as documented in the Frye’s spring show Significantly, and foundational to this new show, Mark Tobey and Teng Baiye: Seattle/Shanghai, it was during the ’70s—when Tobey and SAM the war put a rude end to such cross-cultural founder Dr. Richard Fuller died—that a new gencurrents. Tobey’s “white writing” period was eration began to reassess that wartime flowering. directly influenced by Asian calligraphy; then, Marshall and Helen Hatch became major collecever restless, he moved on to sumi ink and black tors, and their 2009 bequest to the museum brings brushstrokes. He had to coax Horiuchi and several works to public view for the first time. Tsutakawa to embrace such “native” forms precisely when they were out of favor. At the same time, Graves—who refused to be Geography apart, what do these guys have in interviewed for the LIFE story—was ever more common? All were pacifists repulsed by the war. reclusive and flighty, investing great effort in his (Graves was notoriously jailed for 11 months

Don’t you hate going to the movies, reserving extra time in advance to park and get your tickets and popcorn, and then you have to sit through all the trailers? They seem to go on forever. It’s like a 90-minute investment of your time before the movie even begins. That won’t be a problem for this week’s installment of the “WTF Wednesdays” series, hosted and selected by SIFF’s chief curator of the strange and obscure, Clinton McClung. The movie will never arrive, because the whole evening consists of bizarre old trailers screened on 35 mm snippets from the SIFF archives. McClung calls them “a mix of the craziest and weirdest ones I can find. I plan to include: Jaws III, The Beyond, Allegro non troppo, Dirty Harry, The Lair of the White Worm, Q: The Winged Serpent, Mean Streets ...” and his list is still growing. Naturally, he doesn’t want to give away any special WTF surprises. Still, I can drop a few hints: Themes will include cannibalism, hookers returned from the grave, William S. Burroughs, and a hotel inconveniently located over the gates to Hell. (Who issued the the building permit for that?) Oh, and here’s an easy one to guess: Michael Jackson plus Diana Ross will ease on down the road. And if you need any further incentive, says McClung, “I’ll also be serving Twinkies and Cheez Whiz hors d’oeuvres.” Total program length is about 90 minutes. Remember to get a beer first and often during.

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arts&culture» » FROM PAGE 17

unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned—the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming.

mean tonight’s home opener will be completely devoid of importance. Rather, the exhibition will serve as a needed opportunity for the team—and its fans—to get primed for the games that matter. As a wise Alaska Airlines pitchman once said, “The separation is in the preparation.” Even in the preseason. CenturyLink Field, 800 Occidental

Ave. S., seahawks.com. $72 and up. 7 p.m. MATT DRISCOLL

Ballroom With a Twist

TUESDAY, AUG. 19

Spotlight Night: A Chorus Line

5th Avenue Theatre, 1308 Fifth Ave., 625-1900, 5thavenue.org. $30–$90. 8 p.m. GAVIN BORCHERT

Aug 7–24

Buy tickets today or see it with an ACTPass! (206) 292-7676• • acttheatre.org

Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period—Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in

MATT LANKES/IFC FILMS

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AUGU ST 13 — 19, 2014

Boyhood

Coltrane’s Mason after an unhappy haircut.

The fall season at the 5th—and at ACT and the Rep and our other local stages—doesn’t get underway until next month, but tonight you can enjoy a free sampler of songs, plus a few dance moves, from the mostly local revival of A Chorus Line, which runs September 3-28. If you need reminding, or if your adult stage memory only begins with Cats, this is the show whose Broadway record (1975-1990) was only eclipsed by These choristers have already got the job.

MARK KITAOKA

Tickets: (425) 392-2202 • Sept 18 - Oct 26• VillageTheatre.org

(R) Continues at Ark Lodge, Sundance, and Lincoln Square. ROBERT HORTON

CRAIG SJODIN/ABC/GETTY IMAGES

Tony AwArd winner And PuliTzer Prize nominee

Though a longtime fan favorite among the professionals on Dancing With the Stars, Maksim Chmerkovskiy had never won until this past season, which ended in May. The show’s smoldering bad boy, who can go from seductive to prickly to cuddly and back in the space of one samba roll, finally earned the “coveted mirrorball trophy” with Meryl Davis as his partner. Big surprise, you say, the Olympic gold-medal figure skater won. But Maks’ unusual and envelope-pushing choreography—which Oh, Maks! in some instances even cost the pair points for coloring outside the lines—resulted in more than a few moments that soared above the merely excellent into some new sphere of dance art I’d never before seen on that show. No reason to think he won’t bring more of that when he appears here with traveling dance show Ballroom With a Twist alongside other DWTS pros: his younger brother Val, Karina Smirnoff, and Sharna Burgess. (Also 2 & 8 p.m. Sat., 1:30 p.m. Sun.)

Cats. And, so far as tourist- and mom-friendly blockbuster shows go, of the kind that tour endlessly and are revived from Kansas City to Kuala Lumpur, I would argue that A Chorus Line is a superior concoction. The Marvin Hamlisch songs are both buoyant and plaintive, each suiting the 17 stories of gypsy performers auditioning before the all-powerful Zach and Larry (elements of Michael Bennett, the show’s original director, are present in both characters). If these aspiring chorines are a bit typical, almost backstage archetypes today, that’s because A Chorus Line is so rooted in Broadway tradition, a kind of codified history of the craft. It’s a show about the creation of a show, yet it never seems terribly meta: It’s far too enjoyable for that. Tonight, the 5th’s David Armstrong will introduce numbers from the show, discuss the late Hamlisch with his friend, Richard Kagan, and consider Bennett’s showbiz legacy. Among the big cast rehearsing right now, it’s impossible to guess who’ll be singing “The Music and the Mirror” or “At the Ballet.” When the show opens next month, you’ll recognize many players from the 5th’s past productions (and other local stages), plus visitor Chryssie Whitehead, a memorable Lola in Damn Yankees two years ago, who’ll star as Cassie. David Bennett directs, with choreography by Kerry Casserly.

5th Avenue Theatre. Free, but RSVP via 625-1900 or 5thavenue.org. 7 p.m. T. BOND E

Opening Nights Urinetown SEATTLE MUSICAL THEATRE AT MAGNUSON PARK, 7400 SAND POINT WAY N.E., 3291050, BALAGANTHEATRE.ORG. $5–$35. 8 P.M. THURS.–SAT., 2 P.M. SUN. ENDS AUG. 24.

I long to declare that I love this musical-comedy revival; in truth, however, I’m ambivalent. Back in 2001, Urinetown earned a few Tony Awards; over a decade later, the satire has worn thin. This is not a happy musical. I overheard an audience member call it “Les Miz in a toilet,” not a bad way of encapsulating the over-thetop woes of this spoof created by Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis. ( Jake Groshong directs the coproduction between Balagan Theatre and Seattle Musical Theatre.) In brief, a 20-year drought leads to the privatization of all restroom endeavors by the mega-corporation “Urine Good Company,” pushing people to pay to pee while imposing powerful penal codes that, if breached, bestow banishment to Urinetown. After the exile of his father, facility attendant Bobby Strong (Frederick Hagreen) starts a revolution. From there, Urinetown mocks both the conventions of musical theater and the heavy-handed, wealth-favoring policies of Rudy Giuliani’s reign over New York City.

Inside Out The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) has an uneven record with its outdoor Heaven & Earth exhibitions at Carkeek Park, mainly because the works are almost always vandalized. (One year, a BY BRIAN MILLER main-

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west, not quite in view of the ocean, but it’s positioned to collect maximum western light, right up to sunset. It inverts the landscape, creating a haunting double image—or actually a quadruple image when it reflects from lens to iPhone to diver’s mask and back. That’s how I took this accidental selfie of my gnarled finger and ugly mug; I became a ghostly observer in Treasure’s antipodal realm, an unwelcome spectre. One almost wishes that there were 15 more such Stygian viewing stations deployed throughout the park, more shadow boxes to complement the sunlight. Carkeek Park, 950 N.W. Carkeek Park Rd., heavenandearthexhibition.org. Free. 6 a.m.–10 p.m. daily. Ends Oct. 20.

MULTI-AWARD WINNING SUPERSTAR

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WED | AUG 20 | 7PM

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SE ATTLE WEEKLY • AU GU ST 13 — 19, 2014

A TRIBUTE TO JOHNNY WINTER

BRIAN MILLER

tenance crew even removed a wooden hanging sculpture by accident, mistaking it for trash.) In its sixth edition, this year’s theme is “As Above, So Below,” a nod to myth and notions of the underworld. Most of the 16 pieces (by mostly local artists) are made of humble or durable allweather materials: wood, metal, scraps, fabric, and so on. Some refer to the park setting, but few make you see it differently. The notable exception is Megan Treasure’s Earthly Obscura, which mounts a camera obscura lens and viewing portal—through an old diving mask—on a conical mound that resembles a big red African anthill. The lens points

Its populist plot is akin to the Occupy Movement before there was an Occupy Movement. In Act Two’s opening number, Little Sally (Tatum Ludlam) sings, “For Urinetown is your town if you’re hopeless, down, and out!” (Anyone who’s waited for the bus at Third and Pine will know the same feeling—with nary a public restroom in sight.) Despite the intentionally hokey plot and stock characters, the cast does a STARTIN G splendid job in not letting Urinetown dwindle into live-action cartoon. Notably, the banter between Doug Willott’s Officer Lockstock and Ludlam’s Little Sally made me think, “Never has exposition been so witty and endearing.” With the help of musical director Matthew Wright and choreographer Tori Spero, Groshong nicely balances the technical elements with delightful acting, singing, and dancing. My only craft quibble is costume designer Carmen Olmedo outfitting Senator Fipp (Ryan Demerick) in an ill-fitting white suit. First, a legislator, especially one procuring payouts from a mega-corporation, would don a tailored suit. Is this symbolism to never trust a man in an ill-fitting suit? Second, why white? Is this a tribute to The Dukes of Hazzard’s Boss Hogg? But I digress. I remain favorably indifferent to Urinetown because, notwithstanding this fine presentation, it’s hard to care much about these clever stage caricatures who so knowingly comment on their own plight. ALYSSA DYKSTERHOUSE E

arts&culture» Performance S.A.M. COLLECTIVE

W W W. S E AT T L E W E E K LY. C O M / S I G N U P

S.A.M. Stage COLLECTIVE

a shady, controlling, unnamed church. The satire is slow to get underway, yet playwright/director Moore has a gift for setting up a great joke, then riffing on it. By the end the farce finally delivers on its promise. KEVIN PHINNEY OPENINGS & EVENTS Annex Theatre, 1100 E. Pike St., 728-0933, annextheatre. AS YOU LIKE IT This update drops Rosalind and Celia into a org. $5–$20. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat. Ends Aug. 30. CAUGHT ONE-HANDED Noah Duffy’s solo comedy ’90s music festival. Presented by Seattle Public Theater’s about growing up gay, fundamentalist, and horny. Annex Youth Program. Bathhouse Theater on Green Lake, 7312 Theatre, 1100 E. Pike St., annextheatre.org. $5–$10. 8 p.m. W. Green Lake Dr. N., 524-1300, seattlepublictheater.org. Tues.–Wed. Ends Aug. 27. Donation. Opens Aug. 15. 7 p.m. Fri.–Sat., 2 p.m. Sun., plus 14/48: OUTDOORS Fourteen plays, that is, created from 2 p.m. Sat., Aug. 23. Ends Aug. 23. A BOOK IS NOT A LADDER Choreographer KT Niehoff scratch in 48 hours, al fresco. Seattle Repertory Theater, directs Acrobatic Conundrum in this Borges-inspired cirSeattle Center. Various prices; see the1448projects.org. cus show. School of Acrobatics & New Circus Arts, 674 S. 8 & 10:30 p.m. Fri.–Sat. Ends Aug. 16. GREENSTAGE Othello, Love’s Labours Lost, All’s Well Orcas St., sancaseattle.org. $15–$20. 8 p.m. Fri., Aug. 15; New Hours: M-F 12:00 – 7:00 That Ends Well, and The Comedy of Errors in area parks 8 & 10:30 p.m. Sat., Aug. 16; 6 p.m. Sun., Aug. 17. A CHORUS LINE SPOTLIGHT NIGHT SEE THE through Aug. 16, all free. See greenstage.org for schedule. Saturday 10:00 – 5:00 GROUCHO RETURNS Back by popular demand, Frank PICKLIST,Sunday PAGE 18. 12:00 – 5:00 I GELOSI STAGEright Theatre presents David Bridel’s play Ferrante channels the slyly leering Marx Brother in this about commedia intrigue. Ballard Underground, acclaimed show. ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., 292-7676. Bring this addell’arte for an extra 10% off 2220weekly N.W. Market St., seattlestageright.org. $15–$20. $25–$35. 7:30 p.m. Wed.–Sat. plus weekend matinees; see For specials, follow us on Facebook Opens Aug. 15. 7:30 p.m. Thurs.–Sat. & Mon. Ends Aug. 30. acttheatre.org for exact schedule. Ends Aug. 24. ICICLE CREEK NEW FESTIVAL The98103 Change Room HELLO, DOLLY! That meddling matchmaker is at it again. 4023 Aurora Ave.PLAY N. Seattle, WA by Carly Mensch (7 p.m. Tues., Aug. 19) and Steven Dietz’s WSHS Theater, 3000 California Ave. S.W., 800-838-3006, www.samcollective.org Bloomsday, inspired by the life of James Joyce (7 p.m. brownpapertickets.com, twelfthnightproductions.org. 632-4023 Wed., Aug.(206) 20). ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., 292-7676, $15–$20. 7:30 p.m.Thurs.–Sat., 3 p.m. Sun. Ends Aug. 17. INTO THE WOODS Fractured fairy tales, with a dark acttheatre.org. $10–$15. A non-profit organization in accordance with chapter RCW 69.51A QUESTIONS OF THE HEART Ben Abbott based his play, Sondheim twist, via Aurora Theatre Company. Shoreline Forandweekly specials, usOutdoor on Facebook subtitled “Gay Mormons the Search for Identity,” follow City Hall, Amphitheatre, 17500 Midvale Ave. N., on real-life interviews. Tyee Yacht Club, 3229 Fairview Shoreline, 800-838-3006, brownpapertickets.com. Free. Ave. E., theatre22.org. $11–$22. 7:30 p.m. Mon., Aug. 8 p.m. Fri.–Sat. Ends Aug. 23. JANE EYRE—THE MUSICAL Paul Gordon and John 18–Tues., Aug. 19. ROLL OF THUNDER HEAR MY CRY LHPAI teens present Caird’s show, based on Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel, a musical based on Mildred D. Taylor’s Depression-set focuses on Jane’s middle period, after she’s hired as tale. Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, 104 17th a governess by apparent bachelor Edward Rochester. Ave. S., 684-4758. $7–$12. 7 p.m. Fri., Aug. 15, 2 & 7 p.m. Too often Jessica Spencer’s Jane seems bewildered Sat., Aug. 16–Sun., Aug. 17. and lost in her moral and spiritual upheaval; it’s difficult A SHORT-TERM SOLUTION TO A LONG-TERM to see the spark that draws Rochester. Even so, in the A non-profi t organization in accordance with chapter RCW PROBLEM David Schmader’s solo show takes on “marsong “Painting Her Portrait,” she69.51A gives a jaw-dropping riage, Mormons, and [a] dramatic life upheaval.” Part of performance. MARK BAUMGARTEN Taproot Theatre, 204 Intiman’s summer theater festival. Velocity Dance Center, N. 85th St., 781-9707, taproottheatre.org. $15–$40. 7:30 p.m. 1621 12th Ave., intiman.org. $10–$20. 7 p.m. Tues., Aug. 19. Wed.–Thurs., 8 p.m. Fri., 2 & 8 p.m. Sat. Ends Aug. 16. WHEDONESQUE BURLESQUE Self-explanatory, isn’t it? LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS The campy Ashman/Menken Saucy performers inspired by Buffy, Firefly, etc.Theatre musical. Islander Middle School Auditorium, 8225 S.E. Off Jackson, 409 Seventh Ave. S., jojostiletto.com. $25– 72nd St., Mercer Island, youththeatre.org. $13–$17. 7 p.m. $150. Opens Aug. 15. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat. Ends Aug. 23. Thurs.–Sat, 2 p.m. Sun. Ends Aug. 24. THE SCHOOL FOR LIES David Ives’ update of Molière’s CURRENT RUNS The Misanthrope. Center Theatre, Seattle Center Armory, ACT ONE-ACTS A confident cast, savvy direction by R. 800-838-3006, brownpapertickets.com, soundtheatre Hamilton Wright, and superior staging and effects boost company.org. $15–$25. 7:30 p.m. Thurs.–Sat., 2 p.m. Sun., this comely production. In Steve Martin’s Patter for the plus 7:30 p.m. Mon., Aug. 18. Ends Aug. 24. TEATRO ZINZANNI: WHEN SPARKS FLY Maestro Floating Lady, a loquacious magician (David Foubert) attempts to charm his glamorous assistant (Jessica Voronin headlines this mad-scientist-themed show. Teatro Skerritt) into loving him again, until her id (Hana Lass) sets ZinZanni, 222 Mercer St., 802-0015. $99 and up. Runs him straight. Woody Allen’s Riverside Drive raises the Thurs.–Sun. plus some Wed.; see zinzanni.com/seattle for stakes when a charismatic street person (a fantastic Eric exact schedule. Ends Sept. 21. URINETOWN SEE REVIEW, PAGE 19. Ray Anderson) who self-characterizes as “an original, like WISE GUYS Jet City Improv salutes mob movies. Historic Stravinsky, or ketchup,” corners a neurotic writer—Chris University Theater, 5510 University Way N.E., jetcity Ensweiler, uncannily channeling you-know-who— improv.com. $12–$15. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Fri. Ends Aug. 22. rehearsing to break up with his mistress. In The Unseen Hand by Sam Shepard, we find Blue Morphan (a jovial Anderson) awaiting the return of his two brothers from at least one other time period. MARGARET FRIEDMAN ALL RISE A site-specific dance series at the location ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., 292-7676. $44 and up ($20 of the future Seattle City Light electrical substation, in every Tues.) Runs Tues.–Sun.; see acttheatre.org for exact conjunction with Karl Burkheimer’s sculptural installation schedule. Ends Aug. 17. ANGELS IN AMERICA Tony Kushner won a Pulitzer In Situ, Saturdays through Aug. 23. This week, Portland’s and two Tony awards (among others) for his two-part Tahni Holt. 1250 Denny Way, allriseseattle.org. Free. 7 p.m. BALLROOM WITH A TWIST SEE THE PICK LIST, PAGE Broadway extravaganza in 1993–94, subtitled “A Gay 18. Fantasia on National Themes.” Part 1, Millennium Approaches, set in 1985, tells of the gay right-wing homophobe Roy Cohn (Charles Leggett) dying of AIDS; a Greenwich Village couple (Adam Standley and Quinn OLYMPIC MUSIC FESTIVAL Chamber-music favorites Franzen) whose relationship will founder because of the in a repurposed barn, 2 p.m. each Sat. & Sun. through disease; and pill-popping Mormon housewife Harper Pitt Sept. 7. This weekend, three string trios by Beethoven. (Anne Allgood), married to a closeted Republican husband Quilcene, Wash., 360-732-4800, olympicmusicfestival.org. (Ty Boice). Overseeing it all is Kushner’s omniscient angel $18–$33. (Marya Sea Kaminski). Andrew Russell directs the whole RUSSIAN CHAMBER MUSIC FOUNDATION Glinka, daunting enterprise. BRIAN MILLER Cornish Playhouse, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, and more. Luther Burbank Seattle Center, 441-7178. $25 and up. Millennium Approaches opens Fri., Aug. 15 and runs through Sept. 21; Park, Mercer Island, russianchambermusic.org. Donation. Part 2, Perestroika, runs Sept. 3–21. See intiman.org for 6 p.m. Sat., Aug. 16. EASTGATE CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL Concerts by complete schedule. ATTACK OF THE KILLER MURDER OF . . . DEATH Musicworks Northwest faculty and guests. Northwest “Agatha Christie meets Roger Corman” in this mystery University, 5520 108th Ave. N.E., Kirkland, 425-644-0988. sendup, set on a movie set in 1958. Theater Schmeater, See musicworksnw.org for repertory. $10–$20. 7:30 p.m. 2125 Third Ave., 800-838-3006, schmeater.org. $18–$25. Tues., Thurs., Fri. Ends Aug. 22. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat. Ends Aug. 16. BALCONIES With its huge cast and lofty ambitions to B Y G AV I N B O R C H E R T lampoon not only the gaming industry, but also celebrity, politics, and religious cults, Scotto Moore’s new comedy Send events to stage@seattleweekly.com, almost bites off more than it can chew. On a pair of dance@seattleweekly.com, adjoining condo balconies are two competing bashes: one or classical@seattleweekly.com a costume party to celebrate a new video game, the other See seattleweekly.com for full listings. a fundraising cocktail event for a senator supported by = Recommended

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PCalvary

The Dog RUNS FRI., AUG. 15-THURS., AUG. 21 AT GRAND ILLUSION. NOT RATED. 100 MINUTES.

BRIAN MILLER

Dinosaur 13 OPENS FRI., AUG. 15 AT SUNDANCE CINEMAS. RATED PG. 105 MINUTES.

Members of Sue’s original discovery team.

When did fossil hunting become a crime? For more than a century since paleontologists and amateurs began looking for geologic evidence to support Darwin, it was a fairly unregulated domain. Ph.D’s partnered with pirates, from the Gobi Desert to the Dakotas. But that all began to change during the ’70s and ’80s, as we learn in this very one-sided documentary, just as Peter Larson was beginning to build a business—and a private museum, called the Black Hills Institute—in Hill City, South Dakota. He and some college buddies began filling warehouses with, and selling, the finds they made on properties following handshake agreements with the owners—some of them Indians whose land was held in trust by the U.S. government. Flash forward to 1997, when a T. rex skeleton known as Sue sold for more than $8 million (including fees) at Sotheby’s in New York. Larson found those bones in 1990, paid $5,000 to the Sioux Indian on whose ranch he was prospecting. Todd Douglas Miller’s Dinosaur 13 tells Larson’s unhappy story. Much of Sue’s giddy discovery was captured

It would be easier to enjoy the madcap, strangerthan-fiction revelations of The Dog if it weren’t for the queasy awareness that its central subject is getting such a great kick out of all this. He is John Wojtowicz, the real-life guy whose botched 1972 bank robbery After prison, later became Wojtowicz at the basis for the scene of the Al Pacino the crime. film Dog Day Afternoon. The unlikely events of that movie really were based on fact, and The Dog is here to introduce us to the truth—if you want to believe Wojtowicz. Early in the film, Wojtowicz—interviewed by directors Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren over a period of years—comes across as blunt and outrageous, with a voice like Joe Mantegna in aggressive wiseguy mode. He declares himself a “pervert,” and the evidence follows. Once a Goldwater Republican, he did Vietnam duty and got married, then fell into the burgeoning New York gay-rights movement. Wojtowicz seems to have been less interested in political liberation than in having sex with anything that moved, although la dolce vita was interrupted when he fell for Ernest Aron, later known as Liz Eden. It was ostensibly to pay for Aron’s sex-reassignment operation that Wojtowicz led two accomplices into robbing a Brooklyn bank and holding hostages. Sidney Lumet’s 1975 film plays with the love story angle, although “love” hardly seems the operative word here. (Wojtowicz later admits that if Aron had not agreed to escape in

Jake Squared OPENS FRI., AUG. 15 AT SUNDANCE CINEMAS. RATED R. 100 MINUTES.

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This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions—is that simply to say it’s Irish?—and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Every one of McDonagh’s filmmaking errors is forgiven on account of Gleeson’s cleric, who tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. McDonagh, no dummy, knows the sterling worth of his leading man, while the villagers mostly scoff at Father James Lavelle. He’s widowed and on his second career, meaning we should be unperturbed when his depressed daughter Fiona (Kelly Reilly) arrives for a visit. Father James has been cast as a kind of turnaround artist for a dying enterprise: Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. He’s the right man for the wrong job, a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. He’s blameless, says the voice we’ll try to guess in the seven days ahead: “I’m going to kill you because you’ve done nothing wrong. I’m going to kill you because you’re innocent.” And so, by implication, was the former altar boy—once sexually abused—now grown to be a vengeful assassin. There’s a certain kind of sick logic to the threat, like a twisted joke made in a pub. Humor, and there is plenty in Calvary, is a way of testing the new boundaries of the permissible—if there are any such boundaries now that the church’s authority is gone. Along with his acclaimed playwright-director brother, Martin (In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths), McDonagh grew up on American movies and TV. Here he makes explicit nods to High Noon and I Confess; Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a color-

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SEATTLE WEEKLY • AUGU ST 13 — 19, 2014

OPENS FRI., AUG. 15 AT HARVARD EXIT AND SUNDANCE CINEMAS. RATED R. 105 MINUTES.

ful lot, not entirely plausible as people—more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. (One rent boy talks like James Cagney; the cop Stanton is back from The Guard; and M. Emmet Walsh is on hand, then gone, for no apparent purpose.) Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. McDonagh has a clunky way of staging dialogue scenes, where Position A and Position B stand up to declaim at each other. But he gets the moment exactly right when Father James, walking to the beach and talking with a seven-year-old girl, is startled by her angry father, a tourist in a SUV. He sweeps his child up and glares at the honorable priest, who can’t defend himself against the man’s tacit accusation. Gleeson looks stunned and wounded, slumps his shoulders in silence, and accepts the scorn. Then he keeps walking forward to his fate.

a plane to Denmark for the surgery, he would have shot him at the bank.) One of the robbers, Sal Naturale, did die at the end of the standoff. Because Wojtowicz is chatty and disarmingly frank, the film initially plays as black comedy. As the portrait of a sociopath emerges—after he got out of jail Wojtowicz would hang around outside the bank with an “I ROBBED THIS BANK” T-shirt—the laughs tend to curdle. What remains is a documentary of creepiness, a rock turned over to expose a very weird pocket of life. Wojtowicz’s mother Terry is like a character from a Scorsese film that got hijacked by David Lynch, wandering around her apartment declaring wrong-headed life wisdom and vaguely wondering what went on with her son. The movie is successful at capturing an oddball individual and the ineffable 1970s, but the geek-show spectacle leaves behind a squalid whiff of exploitation. ROBERT HORTON

JAKESQUAREDMOVIE.COM

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Gleeson’s cleric appeals to his bishop (David McSavage, left).

on grainy VHS, which alternates here with present-day interviews, a few reenactments, and ’90s news footage of Larson’s federal prosecution for theft, wire fraud, and other charges. Were he and his colleagues criminals, poaching bones from tribal or federal land? Sue’s unearthing was before GPS and without legal counsel. Dinosaur 13 presents Larson and his merry band in the best possible light, but their naïveté shines through. There was no contract for Sue, no chain of custody, no clearance from the feds. Oddly, this story—previously recounted in Larson’s 2002 book, Rex Appeal—may be better suited to law students than paleontologists. Good faith collides with an overzealous prosecutor (whom Miller can’t get on camera), and populist anger—cue Bill O’Reilly—confronts federal overreach. Though this story is 20 years old, it now carries a Tea Party tinge. During one of the TVoriented ’90s Hill City rallies against the feds, the camera catches a swastika on a protest sign—as if the jackbooted feds were trampling individual rights. (Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City would soon follow.) Dinosaur 13 tries put a happy spin on a long legal ordeal, though it ultimately reinforces the notion that the fossil record (i.e. history) is full of violent, pea-brained killers like Sue, as well as cruelty, sudden death, and mass extinctions—not justice. BRIAN MILLER

Director Jake (Koteas, left) and movie Jake (Vogel).

Pirandello meets midlife crisis, this vanity project by Howard Goldberg posits that filmmaker/realtor Jake Klein (Elias Koteas) is making a movie about his fucked-up life and all the unhappy women he’s left in his wake. The tone is comic, rueful, and absurd as Jake casts a young hunk (Mike Vogel) as his youthful avatar. Then while filming, director Jake and the rest of the crew are visited by his five iterations (played by Koteas, Koteas, Koteas, Koteas, and Kevin Railsback). Needless, to say, this creates much confusion for us, director Jake, his two kids, his ex, his current g.f. ( Jennifer Jason Leigh), and his BFF (Virginia Madsen). And to complicate things further, hovering in this Felliniesque film-set realm is Jake’s first great love (and second cousin), played by Jane Seymour in the present context and Liana Liberato in nostalgic recollection. The juggling would be a lot for Woody Allen—name-checked here—or Charlie Kaufman to manage. With barely a few film credits to his name, Goldberg isn’t nearly so sophisticated or funny, but he’s gentle with the material. The women are mostly wise and forbearing, while Jake generally reveals himself to be an idiotic horndog at every turn (particularly when trying to lure women into his hot tub time machine). The balding Koteas, usually cast as cop or criminal, from Shutter Island to The Adjuster, is actually such a warm, engaging presence that you could see him in a Woody Allen movie. But the writing isn’t there to support him; and the radiant auras of Seymour and Madsen are likewise wasted. When Jake finally loses control of his project, he indignantly shouts, “This is my movie! I say what happens!” You wish that Goldberg was in firmer command of this one. BRIAN MILLER

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PThe Kill Team

PRich Hill

OPENS FRI., AUG. 15 AT VARSITY. NOT RATED. 79 MINUTES.

RUNS FRI., AUG. 15-SUN., AUG. 17 AT SIFF FILM CENTER. NOT RATED. 91 MINUTES.

Is the story of The Kill Team singular? That’s the unspoken question that hangs over this award-winning documentary, another artifact from the “war on terror.” In 2010 a group of soldiers from Joint Base Lewis-McChord was arrested and charged with murdering Afghan civilians for fun while stationed in Kandahar Province. The accused had taken photographs of themselves with the corpses of their victims and in some cases collected body parts as trophies. The film lays out the chronology of the crimes, with a particular emphasis on the torment of Specialist Adam Winfield. Twenty years old at the time of the killings, Winfield is in the hapless position of being both whistle-blower and perpetrator.

A dispatch from the frontlines of rural poverty, this documentary follows three boys (and their families) in the small town of Rich Hill, Missouri. The coal is long gone from this declining hamlet, and with it the economic base that gave families their stability. “We’re not trash, we’re good people,” insists 14-year-old Andrew, who begins the film with the most intact family: two parents and a sister. There’s no money, but somehow they’re scraping by. The situation is more grim for 15-year-old Harley, on various meds and living with his grandmother; and for 13-year-old Appachey, a pudgy, volatile smoker who’s acting out at school, defiant of his single mother. The trap to avoid here for filmmakers (and cousins) Andrew Droz Palermo and Tracy Droz Tragos is that of red-state ghetto voyeurism, to collect these disturbing images and stories from flyover America, then screen them for our smug coastal concern. Fortunately they had family connections in Rich Hill, one reason for their close, non-condescending access; also they ease the camera back and let these three kids narrate their own stories. Though somewhat appallingly uneducated, they have plenty of self-awareness, which makes the situation all the sadder. “I don’t need an education,” says Harley, who seems barely literate—not someone who could even enlist in the Army. But what he may mean is that Rich Hill offers no prospects for those with an education; he’d only need it someplace else. Social mobility would require leaving. The pathologies pile up with few surprises, and the filmmakers eschew any context or questions. Theirs is an entirely trees-forthe-forest approach to these youths at risk. Rich Hill puts you in mind of recent feature films like Hellion and Joe, only without the Nicolas Cage father figure to intervene and save these kids. But again—that’s fiction, and this is real life. Harley’s mid-film explanation of why his mother’s in jail gives the doc its most shocking moment, yet one related without tears or swelling music.

Winfield during his trial.

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Harley’s prospects seem poor.

This year is, no coincidence, the 50th anniversary of LBJ’s War on Poverty—a subject that Democrats and Republicans will continue to avoid through the coming two elections. To help the inhabitants of Rich Hill would require social spending and taxes; it would also force the acknowledgement of poverty and need within culturally conservative and reliably red-voting districts. But to address poverty, much less wage war on it, first you’ve got to describe it. And that is what this small, admirable film does so well. BRIAN MILLER E

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DAN KRAUSS

Filmmaker Dan Krauss interviewed Winfield and some of the other principals in the case during the 2011 trial at Ft. Lewis (covered here and in all the other local media). Winfield, still jittery, describes his alarm at hearing that a new sergeant, Calvin Gibbs, had cultivated the idea of a “kill team” in Winfield’s platoon. Winfield feared for his own safety if he reported the crimes, but he told his exMarine father about them. The elder Winfield’s reports to military brass did not lead to action. Somehow Krauss got three other members of the platoon to talk on camera; Gibbs is noticeably—and not surprisingly—absent. Their remarkably calm accounts of dehumanization and violence are chilling in their detail. They describe Gibbs as a swaggering action-movie warrior, with his cache of dead men’s finger bones and his skull tattoos denoting each “kill.” Their interviews create a portrait of occupational boredom, anger, and resentment, spinning in a perpetual cycle. The film, to its credit, creates little sense of catharsis or resolution. Despite being intimidated into participating in the final killing because he says he feared for his own life (a threat that is confirmed by another platoon member), Winfield is given the choice of pleading guilty to two different charges. There’s little sense of a system working, and Private First Class Justin Stoner flatly declares, “We’re just the ones who got caught.” These crimes only accidentally came to light: When Stoner was annoyed at his fellow soldiers for smoking hashish in his room, he reported them to his superiors, which led to the discovery of the human bones kept as trophies. Stoner got beaten up for informing, which is why we see photographs of him—taken to document his bruises—that show a tattoo that stretches across his back and reads, “What If I’m Not the Hero.” It’s a quote from the Twilight series, and it rounds off the utterly disheartening experience of watching this excellent film. ROBERT HORTON

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her tutor and give her some class. A love triangle inevitably results. George Cukor directs, with typical finesse, building upon Garson Kanin’s play. (NR) Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $8 individual, $42-$45 series. 7:30 p.m. Thurs., Aug. 14. FREMONT OUTDOOR CINEMA Before the BBC’s The Office, or NBC’s version with Steve Carell, there was Office Space (screening on Friday as a 21-andover presentation), Mike Judge’s 1999 exposé of Initech, a generic edge-city software company rooted in his own pre–Beavis and Butt-Head cubicle days. Ron Livingston, David Herman, and Ajay Naidu play the trio of malcontents who gradually decide to revolt against their corporate overlords (led by Gary Cole in all his suspendered glory). Jennifer Aniston hints at a better career path not taken as Livingston’s crush at the degrading local TGIF-style franchise eatery, Chotchkie’s, where she’s required to wear multiple pieces of flair. Even if the exact nature and origin of those dreaded “TPS reports” is never explained, we’ve all had to file them. The following night, Ghostbusters remains our favorite comedy from 1984. It’s a total star turn for Bill Murray, playing the loosest and least professional academic on campus. He uses Dan Aykroyd as his uptight foil, with well-timed sideline zingers from the late Harold Ramis (who co-wrote the script with Aykroyd). BRIAN MILLER 3501 Phinney Ave. N., 781-4230, fremontoutdoormovies.com. $30 series, $5 individual. Movies start at dusk. Fri. & Sat. THE GOONIES Before he was Sam in the LOTR movies (before he could shave, for that matter), Sean Astin joined fellow child actors including Corey Feldman in the 1985 fantasy-adventure flick The Goonies, hatched by the powerful cartel of Steven Spielberg and Chris Columbus (though directed by Richard Donner). (PG) Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, centralcinema.com. $6-$8. 7 p.m. Fri.-Sat. 3 p.m. Sat.-Sun. 7 p.m. Mon.-Tues. GREASE SING-ALONG 1978’s most popular film cemented John Travolta’s movie superstardom, and gave Olivia Newton-John her only taste of it. And, make no mistake, Grease—despite the fact that everyone in the cast is obviously old enough to be running the P.T.A.—still looks like the stuff of which legends are made. When the T-Bird gang first calls out “Hey, Zuko!” and the camera zooms in to capture Travolta’s magnificent mug, you know you’re in the presence of a god. Zac Efron? As if. (PG-13) STEVE WIECKING Central Cinema, $8-$10. 8 p.m. Thurs. JE T’AIME, JE T’AIME We haven’t seen it, but this is evidently a new print of Alain Resnais’ 1968 sci-fi film, about a time-travel experiment gone awry. The Village Voice says it’s a somewhat comic reconstruction of a past love affair, as protagonist Claude keep reencountering Catrine, each time with a bit of helpful new information. Sounds a big like Groundhog Day or Edge of Tomorrow, non? (NR) Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380, nwfilmforum.org. $6-$11. Fri.-Thurs. THE LUNCHBOX In teeming Mumbai, a network of Dabbawallahs delivers hot lunches to desk-bound bureaucrats like Saajan (Irrfan Khan), a lonely widower nearing retirement. His food is commercially cooked, while luckier office workers have wives back home who employ the same Dabbawallah delivery service. Somehow the lunches get switched, regularly, between Saajan and neglected housewife Ila (Nimrat Kaur). What’s worse, her distracted and possibly adulterous husband can’t even taste the difference! She’s hurt and offended, while Saajan is delighted with his misdirected meals. The Lunchbox is the simple story of their accidental epistolary friendship. Saajan and Illa communicate by notes, and nowhere does director Ritesh Batra suggest his two leads will ever hook up. The Lunchbox describes an increasingly hectic, impersonal city, where two kindred spirits crave human connection. (PG) B.R.M. SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), 324-9996, siff.net. $6-$11. 7 p.m. Mon. MONTY PYTHON LIVE This is a rebroadcast of one of this month’s 10 live London reunion shows by the legendary comedy troupe (all together, now): John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. The five have been coy about convening for official performances (as opposed to stage chats), and they commanded a hefty paycheck for doing these gigs after a 30-year break. The Guardian sniffed that the whole lucrative enterprise was to pay for Cleese’s alimony, but tickets sold out instantly, no matter the

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price, no complaints from fans. Idle, who created the cash cow that is Spamalot, directed the show; and Gilliam, on something of an unwanted hiatus from film directing, was in charge of the animations and archival projections of past Python TV shows and movies—of which there are many. (Hence the “mostly” live qualifier.) But from both The New York Times and Guardian, the reviews were entirely warm about the Pythons’ warmed-over material. This is an oldies show, and they know it: vaudeville for the Lipitor and hip-replacement set (all five are in their 70s); entertainment now fit for grandfather-and-grandson outings. (R) B.R.M. SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., 324-9996, siff.net. $12-$19. 8:30 p.m. Fri. 1 p.m. Sat. 1 & 8:30 p.m. Sun. MOONLIGHT CINEMA “I love scotch. Scotchy, scotch, scotch. Here it goes down, down into my belly... ” Oh! Is the camera rolling? Well, then, let the broadcaster finish his drink before delivering the news. Which he does, on camera, without shame—and that’s the way Will Ferrell tears up Anchorman. Even after the recent, inferior sequel, the stupidity of Burgundy and his posse (including Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, David Koechner, and Fred Willard) is undiminished. In 1970s San Diego, the arrival of a hot, blonde, and actually capable woman (the very game Christina Applegate) is more than a threat to this cologne-addled crew—it’s downright emasculating. First the women take our jobs, then they make us give up our free-loving, jazzfluting freedom! (PG-13) B.R.M. Redhook Brewery, 14300 N.E. 145th St., Woodinville, 425-420-1113. $5. Outdoor movie screens at dusk. Thursdays through Aug. 28. MOVIES AT MAGNUSON PARK From 2012, Pitch Perfect proved to be a surprise hit, with Rebel Wilson and Anna Kendrick among the college girls competing in a big a cappella singing contest. A sequel is planned for next year. (PG-13) Magnuson Park, 7400 Sand Point Way N.E., moviesatmagnuson.com. $5. Thursdays. 7 p.m. MOVIES AT THE MURAL We’re guessing this is the non-3-D version of last year’s The Great Gatsby, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the mysterious doomed playboy of the roaring ’20s. Baz Luhrmann’s lavish adaptation demands 142 minutes to relate F. Scott Fitzgerald’s rather short novel. Though we see our narrator, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), making cold calls on Wall Street, this movie doesn’t look forward to the crash of 1929. Luhrmann is interested only in love, not money. And his Gatsby only uses money as glittering lure to attract his lost love Daisy (Carey Mulligan), which requires shady deals with the gangsters he fronts for. The party scenes in Gatsby’s mansion burst with manic energy; everyone’s singing and dancing like it’s La bohème. Yet in the movie’s quieter moments (particularly the ending), Luhrmann gets that somber mood exactly right—when the party’s over and the pool fills with dead leaves and broken martini glasses. (PG-13) B.R.M. Seattle Center Mural Amphitheater, 684-7200, seattlecenter.com. Free. Movies begin at dusk. Saturdays through Aug. 23. ROAD HOUSE “You’ve got a degree from NYU. What in?” “Philosophy.” “Any particular discipline?” “No, not really. Man’s search for faith. That sort of shit.” Care to guess who that philosopher is, and in what 1989 movie he kicks ass, trades quips with Sam Elliott (long before the Coen brothers got the idea), defeats Ben Gazzara, and wins Kelly Lynch? There can be only one man, one answer: Patrick Swayze in Road House. The 1989 movie finds Swayze in a contemplative mood. He’s a man of peace, yet not one afraid to fight. But the true fight, my friend, lies within one’s own mind. And the calm Swayze seeks through his mastery of martial arts is a deeply spiritual quest. He has a Ph.D in asswhooping. And each beating is a lesson. (R) B.R.M. Central Cinema, $6-$8. 9:30 p.m. Fri.-Tues.

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Ongoing

• BOYHOOD SEE THE PICK LIST, PAGE 18. Sundance, Lincoln Square, Ark Lodge, Kirkland Parkplace

BURKHOLDER Taylor Guterson, son of novelist David

Guterson, scored a hit at SIFF ’11 with the likable Old Goats, starring three geezers from Bainbridge Island whom he’d roped into making their acting debuts. Burkholder is essentially the sequel, which reconvenes its principal cast—mortality tugging ever more insistently at their sleeves. Pushing 90, Teddy (Bob Burkholder) is the long-time tenant and de facto BFF of Barry (Britt Crossley), long-divorced and equally indignant about enforced bachelorhood. Teddy’s libido is more intact, even as his wits are declining. Also returning from Old Goats is David Vanderwal (the best actor of the three), playing an inept and equally lonely New Age vision-quest leader who takes our main duo on a forest debacle. That this excursion comes at

the movie’s midpoint hints at its gentle pacing; very, very little happens in Burkholder apart from discussion about, and evidence of, our inevitable decline. The film becomes almost a documentary about the perilous making of a movie. You sense the pressures weighing upon the young director of a fragile cast, the pathos of an actor portraying his character’s—and his own—future mental decline. (NR) B.R.M. SIFF Cinema Uptown GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will—in their own zany way—end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right—and keeping the story’s goals simple—can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but

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it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) R.H. Majestic Bay, Sundance, Ark Lodge, Bainbridge, Thornton Place, Kirkland, Bainbridge, Lincoln Square, Big Picture, others THE HUNDRED-FOOT JOURNEY In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place—in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelinstarred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future—the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef (Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress whose facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?”). Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallström (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated

“An inventive whodunit with a pitch-blAck heArt.”

as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) R.H. Sundance, Ark Lodge, Majestic Bay, Kirkland Parkplace, Bainbridge, others MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ’20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest

Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. (PG-13) B.R.M. Guild 45th, Kirkland Parkplace, Lynwood (Bainbridge), others BY B R IA N M I LLE R

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•

Eileen Colin Marcia Hamish Simon Emma Jacki Atkins Firth Gay Harden Linklater McBurney Stone Weaver

“The summer’s mosT beguiling romanTic comedy.” -Peter Travers, rolling sTone

Magic In The Moonlight Written and Directed by

Woody Allen

Rodrigo Perez, indiewire

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arts&culture» Music 1303 NE 45TH ST

Stuck on the Shred Stickers peel away psychic layers on Swollen.

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AUGU ST 13 — 19, 2014

KELTON SEARS

BY KELTON SEARS

Stickers shredding at Vibrations Festival in Capitol Hill.

he chorus from “Swollen Future,” the first track off local band Stickers’ new album Swollen, goes: “Let me slip my dick in your wound/You’ll feel better in no time.” I ask the band about this. “Stickers is sex,” lead singer and saxophonist Gabi Page-Fort explains, standing under a tree with her bandmates. “Sex is healing. Sex is the shred. We found a sexual channel for our rage and sadness through Stickers—it makes us light and joyful.” Such a cheerful disposition is somewhat surprising, given how dissonant and heavy the band’s music is. Stickers, a no-wave group that formed in 2009, is so no-wavy that guitarist Colin Dawson says it possesses “essentially no waves.” According to the band, that chaos is essential to the zen-like state of mind its members seek to achieve on a personal level. “Talking about heavy stuff makes you lighter,” bassist Troy Ayala says. “You gotta take a shit, or else you don’t levitate,” Page-Fort adds. “You can’t be carrying all those heavy backpacks around.” Stickers says its early sessions quickly took on a therapeutic quality thanks to the gutsy “play from the balls” mentality the band adopted—an ideology that helped propel the band despite the fact that none of its members initially knew how to play their instruments. Seeing Stickers live, this sentiment makes sense. Walls of chugging post-punk riffs, formless, skronking sax, and semi-yodeled shouts attack you from onstage. The result sounds like four people taking a spiritual shit, if you will—a visceral, transcendent release of energy

“You gotta take a shit, or else you don’t levitate,” Page-Fort adds. “You can’t be carrying all those heavy backpacks around.” both scary and freeing at the same time. Take “Sacajawea.” “It’s a heavy song, man,” Page-Fort says of Swollen’s dark, standout single: a brilliant, moody, bellowing track that Teenage Jesus & The Jerks probably wish they wrote. “It’s about a mother’s love—all the beauty and purity and trauma of a mother’s love. My mother once gave me a Sacajawea coin as a good luck charm, and [I know] she’d lie fucking down for me. Every time we play that song, I cry a little, it’s intense.” Notions about the band’s sound and transformative power are neatly tied into Stickers’ take on what it calls “the shred,” an integral concept and guiding philosophy for the band. Normally attributed to surfers, Stickers interprets “shredding” similarly, like riding an ocean current, or in this case, tapping into the current. “Anytime anyone is in the spirit of the thing they are doing, they are shredding,” Page-Fort says. “It connects with health, it connects with movement, it connects with yoga. It connects with the way you think about yourself so that you can be free. Shredders are free.” The idea carries over to members’ daily lives. Drummer Emily Denton formed a

yoga group, Poseurs, that meets on the roof of her apartment to practice Vinyasa and Nidra yoga regularly in a free and open environment. Denton fell in love with yoga shortly after Stickers was formed. “Yoga means ‘to unite, to bring together,’” Denton explains. “You don’t need to twist yourself in a pretzel to achieve yoga, I’d already found it in Stickers. I found it in ‘the shred.’ I sit down and I sink into this unification with these other people and it’s this beautiful expression. It’s been marketed in this flexy-bendy, Oprah soccer mom way, but yoga is everywhere. We’re constantly seeking and tapping into it all the time. Stickers is truly yoga, and ‘shred’ is yoga. It’s about tapping into this collective, transformative thing together.” In its own way, Swollen is another transformation for the band. While the group’s first few EPs delivered their own particular brand of satisfying no-wave chaos, the new album is more polished and constructed, thanks largely in part to the addition of guitarist Colin Dawson, who joined the band two years ago after requesting to do so as his birthday gift. He is one of the band’s only members who says he could play his instrument before joining. “Having Colin in took this pressure off of me and Toby and Gabi to not have to fuck up,” Denton says, nodding to his significance in the band’s current iteration of “the shred.” “He instantly added this whole new dimension to the songs.” E

ksears@seattleweekly.com

STICKERS Swollen, out now, End of Time Records, endoftimerecords.com. Stickers perform live on KEXP August 16th at 6:30 P.M.

Murdering Again

dinner & show

Beloved post-grunge rockers Murder City Devils are still killing it.

WED/AUGUST 13 • 7:30PM

BY DAVE LAKE

jenn grinels w/ zarni

MCD in the thick of its goreobsessed shtick.

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dirty bourbon river show w/ nu klezmer army

ottmar liebert & luna negra MON/AUGUST 18 • 7:30PM COCKTAILS • TASTY HOT DOGS • LOTSA PINBALL

2222 2ND AVENUE • SEATTLE

206-441-5449

mary mcbride band TUE/AUGUST 19 • 7:30PM

the peter and will anderson trio WED/AUGUST 20 • 7:30PM

rafe pearlman with dust & gold

and more w/ anjuman THU/AUGUST 21 • 7PM & 9:30PM

brooks mcbeth w/ special guest joel mchale next • 8/22 amy ray w/ phil cook (megafaun) • 8/23 the posies (acoustic duo) • 8/24 the brian nova big band • 8/25 movie mondays :: heavy metal: the movie •8/26&28theenglishbeat•8/27sandithom•8/29jrcadillac•8/30cardsagainsthumanity live • 9/1 chris stamey of the dbs w/ skylar gudasz • 9/2 waa: david wilcox, corb lund & the hurtin’ albertans, willie nile • 9/3 waa: portland cello project, home free, logan brill

happy hour every day • 8/13 paul benoit trio • 8/14 red sun revue • 8/15 happy hour: supersones / danny godinez • 8/16 lushy w/ gigantor • 8/17 hwy 99 blues presents • 8/18 crossrhythm sessions • 8/19 singer-songwriter showcase featuring: the abbott o’dell roadshow, shakey blankets • 8/20 the echo devils TO ENSURE THE BEST EXPERIENCE · PLEASE ARRIVE EARLY DOORS OPEN 1.5 HOURS PRIOR TO FIRST SHOW · ALL-AGES (BEFORE 9:30PM)

MURDER CITY DEVILS The Showbox, 1426 First Ave., 628-3151, showboxpresents.com. $20 adv./$22 DOS. 9 p.m. Fri., Aug.15.

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216 UNION STREET, SEATTLE · 206.838.4333

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he legacy of Murder City Devils has always loomed larger than the band’s actual achievements. That’s not a diss. They were a powerful band, both on record and in clubs, at a time in the late ’90s when the city was nursing a post-grunge hangover. We needed them then, and their organdriven garage punk delivered. But after a few records and tours, in 2001 the band called it quits. Interest in the group remained, however, thanks to the myriad projects its members embarked upon in its wake, including Modest Mouse, Cold War Kids, and Pretty Girls Make Graves. The group’s legacy has also been solidified by how well their material has held up over the years, even if their gore-obsessed shtick has grown stale. 2000’s In Name and Blood remains a dark blast of punk energy, led by singer Spencer Moody’s urgent growl. “I wish you could have been a fly on the wall when I was 12 years old,” he belts on “Lemuria Rising.” “Crying over homework I would slit my wrists if it weren’t for rock & roll.” More than a decade later, Moody is still a dyedin-the-wool rocker, as evidenced by the band’s first new album since 2000, The White Ghost Has Blood on Its Hands. The album refines the group’s sound without compromising it, namely by scaling back on the organ that defined its later albums. “I Don’t Want to Work for Scum Anymore” rages with the energy of the Stooges and MC5, while “Pale Disguise” could be a Doors B-side, with Moody ranting like a deranged Jim Morrison over a staccato bass line and pumping organ. Though the city may not need MCD like it once did, the band remains a welcome attraction, and it will use the Showbox as the launching point for a West Coast tour that will also find it hitting a trio of major festivals: FYF Fest, Riot Fest, and Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin, Texas. E

THU/AUGUST 14 • 8PM

FRI/AUGUST 15 & SAT/AUGUST 16 • 7PM & 9:30PM SUN/AUGUST 17 • 7:30PM

VIOLETA ALVAREZ

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El Corazon www.elcorazonseattle.com

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

THURSDAY, AUGUST 14TH

THE AESTHETICS

with The Coyote Effect, Destination Unknown, Jennys Last Stand Plus Guests Doors at 7:30/ Show at 8PM 21+. $8 ADV / $10 DOS

SATURDAY, AUGUST 16TH

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AUGU ST 13 — 19, 2014

NOI!SE (Last Show Until Late 2015)

with The Loss (Album Release), Crooks To Kings DJ Lowlife Soundsystem Doors at 8/ Show at 9PM 21+. $8 ADV / $10 DOS

SATURDAY, AUGUST 16TH

BLICKY

with In Letter Form, Origami Ghosts Lounge Show. Doors at 7:30 / Show at 8PM ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $8 ADV / $10 DOS

SUNDAY, AUGUST 17TH

CHARM CITY DEVILS

with Direct Divide, Bad Idea, The Skins Doors at 7 / Show at 7:30PM ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $10 ADV / $12 DOS

TUESDAY, AUGUST 19TH EL CORAZON PRESENTS: AN EVENING WITH:

ANNI PIPER

Lounge Show. Doors at 8 / Show at 9PM 21+. $5

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20TH

HEALTH PLAN with Ted Bunny, Plastic Polly, Snyatta

Lounge Show. Doors at 7 / Show at 7:30PM ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $8 ADV / $10 DOS

THURSDAY, AUGUST 21ST

NORMA JEAN with Night Verses, Reach For The Sky, Sailor Mouth, Redeem The Exile Lounge Show. Doors at 7 / Show at 7:30PM ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $13 ADV / $15 DOS

FRIDAY, AUGUST 22ND NIGHT ONE KISW (99.9 FM) “LOUD & LOCAL” & EL CORAZON PRESENT: LAYNE STALEY BIRTHDAY WEEKEND CELEBRATION AT THE OFF RAMP Featuring: JAR OF FLIES (The Ultimate Alice In Chains Experience), OUTSHINED (Tribute to Soundgarden & Temple Of The Dog), An Acoustic Set and Electric Set from each of the two bands (4 sets of music) Doors at 8PM / Show at 9PM. 21+ $12 ADV / $15 DOS. Come celebrate the life and music of Layne Staley and Mike Starr with a portion of the proceeds to be donated to THS (Therapeutic Health Services) through Layne Staley Foundation.

JUST ANNOUNCED TUES 9/2 LOUNGE - QUIET MORNING & THE CALAMITY 9/20 - LACUNA COIL 9/26 LOUNGE - THE MAXIES 10/6 - SUFFOKATE 10/17 LOUNGE - THIS WILD LIFE 10/21 - THE TOSSERS 10/26 - MC CHRIS 11/2 - REAL FRIENDS 11/4 - MAYDAY PARADE 12/7 LOUNGE - COURAGE MY LOVE UP & COMING 8/23 - LAYNE STALEY BIRTHDAY WEEKEND FEAT. JAR OF FLIES/OUTSHINED 8/24 LOUNGE - NEUTRALBOY 8/25 LOUNGE - HEARTS LIKE LIONS 8/26 - EYE THE REALIST 8/26 LOUNGE - PROJECT WONDER BREAD 8/27 - COOPER & THE JAM 8/27 LOUNGE - HONOR AMONG THIEVES 8/28 - THE MAENSION 8/29 - SHE KEEPS BEES 8/29 LOUNGE - CAROUSEL KINGS 8/30 - EMERALD CITY ROCK PARTY FEAT. AMBER PACIFIC 8/31 - CORROSION OF CONFORMITY 9/1 - MC FRONTALOT 9/1 LOUNGE - PINATA PROTEST 9/3 LOUNGE - KIERAN STRANGE 9/4 LOUNGE - EXOHXO 9/5 - POORSPORT (FINAL SHOW) 9/5 LOUNGE - ‘MISS ALTERNATIVE SEATTLE’ MODEL COMPETITION 9/7 - SENSES FAIL 9/8 - PARADISE FEARS 9/9 - NOTHING MORE 9/10 LOUNGE - EVERYONE DIES IN UTAH 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

The EL CORAZON VIP PROGRAM: see details at www.elcorazon.com/vip.html and for an application email us at info@elcorazonseattle.com

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ART

arts&culture» Music

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

TheWeekAhead Wednesday, August 13

JAZZ ALLEY IS A SUPPER CLUB

‘77. Damn the Torpedos went platinum right out of the gates in ‘79 with tracks like “Don’t Do Me Like That” and “Here Comes My Girl” (it peaked at number two on the charts). Given the mostly positive reviews for Hypnotic Eye, Tom and his boys continue to roll. With Steve Winwood. The Gorge Amphitheatre, 754 Silica Rd., Quincy, Wash., (509) 785-6262, gorgeamphitheatre.net. 7 p.m. $97 and up. All ages. JESSIE MCKENNA

Despite forty years of evolution, rap music is still largely reluctant to adopt live instruments (unless, of course, you’re The Roots). THEORETICS is an instrumental quintet clearly capable of holding its own in the rap arena. In July, the group dropped the first installment of its “One a Month” series, for which it will release a new collaboration with a local MC every month. The first featured Moe Betta; the second, Grynch and Afrok. With The Seshen, Gems. Nectar Lounge, 412 N. 36th St., 632-2020, nectarlounge.com. 8 p.m. $7 adv./$10 DOS. MICHAEL F. BERRY

JON CLEARY WED, AUG 13

New Orleans funk pianist and composer

MARCIA BALL

Thursday, August 14

WITH SPECIAL GUEST CINDY CASHDOLLAR

THURS, AUG 14 - SUN, AUG 17 BELLA HOWARD

Seattle’s not short on summer music offerings—nor is it lacking in garage punk bands. Combining both, PIZZA FEST, now in its fifth year, collects enough acts, including Atlanta’s Coathangers, to set itself apart from larger festivals in and around town. Locals Dreamsalon will contribute a shoegazey take on the genre, replete with crib notes from Spacemen 3, while another local act, Freak Vibe, ramps up a more desolate Cramps influence. And of course, there’s a pizza eating contest Saturday night. Through Saturday. With The Coathangers, Summer Babes, White Fang, Musk, The Birth Defects, Pony Time, Freak Vibe, Lisa Prank, and more. 9:30 p.m. Thurs.: 2-Bit Saloon, 4818 17th Ave. N.W., 708-6917, the2bitsaloon.com. $7. 7 p.m. Fri. & 6 p.m. Sat.: Highline, 210 Broadway Ave. E., 328-7837, highlineseattle.com. $10 (three-day pass $22). DAVE CANTOR HUEY LEWIS AND THE NEWS have unfairly become a dad-rock punch-line in music history. Sure, the group had some cheesy hits in the ‘80s and for some reason thought it was a good idea to name an album Sports, but there’s something endearingly genuine about Lewis and co. The band has persevered over the years, spreading the good word of “Hip To Be Square” to its devoted fan base. Maybe it’s hard to keep a good band down. Maybe that’s just … the power of love. Snoqualmie Casino, 37500 SE North Bend Way, Snoqualmie, WA, 425-888-1234, snocasino.com. 7 p.m. $25-75. 21 and over. DUSTY HENRY

Too many acts these days hit the road with the singular goal of giving fans a live approximation of what’s on record. The three sisters who make up HAIM do it differently. While the band’s stupidgood debut Days Are Gone has been racking up comparisons to Fleetwood Mac, its live show has more in common with Thin Lizzy. Between Este Haim’s bass-face, Danielle’s cranked to eleven guitar, and Alana’s do-everything instrumentation, a Haim concert truly is a performance in the purest sense of the world. With Tacocat. The Paramount Theater, 911 Pine St., 902-5500, stgpresents.org/paramount. 8 p.m. $30. CORBIN REIFF

Saturday, August 16

D I N I NG Bluegrass duo MANDOLIN ORANGE is a treat for the ears. Mixing folk, Americana, and dashes of Southern Appalachia—with topics ranging from religion (“Hey Adam”) to addictions and vices (“Morphine Girl”)—its most recent record, This Side of Jordan, is a subtle meditation on the beautiful mess that is this life. If that’s not enough, Andrew Marlin’s dusty vocals marry seamlessly with Emily Frantz’s lush, rich singing in a way that is to die for. With Wren. The Jewelbox Theater at the Rendezvous, 2322 Second Ave., 441-5823, jewelboxtheater.com. 9 p.m. $10. 21 and up. BRIAN PALMER

Friday, August 15

A common household name in rock for four decades running, TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS pepper hits across modern and classic rock stations alike. The group’s latest release, Hypnotic Eye, is its first to reach the top slot on the Billboard 200, though the Gainesville, Florida natives have been charting since blues-rock “Breakdown” exploded in

W EEK LY

F IL M

TOM HARRELL “COLORS OF A DREAM” with Jaleel Shaw, Jonathan Blake, Ugonna Okegwo and Wayne Escoffery

TUES, AUG 19 - WED, AUG 20 Pure melodic genius

JANE MONHEIT

HELLO BLUEBIRD - CELEBRATING THE JAZZ OF JUDY GARLAND

THURS, AUG 21 - SUN, AUG 24 Dazzling jazz vocalist

HALIE LOREN TUES, AUG 26 - WED, AUG 27

in This Bring T And ge n o p Cou Tizer e p p A one 2 oFF! For 1/

Sultry jazz singer with pristine vocals and impeccable phrasing

all ages | free parking full schedule at jazzalley.com

W W W. S E AT T L E W E E K LY. C O M / S I G N U P

NTw.RlitYtlereMdhUenS.coICm LIVE COUww AUGUST 14TH

BUCKAROOSTERS 9 PM - $3 COVER AUGUST 15TH

KNUT BELL & THE BLUE COLLARS 9 PM - $5 COVER AUGUST 16TH

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KNUT BELL & THE BLUE COLLARS

E VE NT S

9 PM - $5 COVER

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AUGUST 17TH

JERRY & THE PHILBILLYS 9 PM - $3 COVER

4 PM - OPEN MIC ACOUSTIC JAM WITH BODACIOUS BILLY AUGUST 19TH

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SE ATTLE WEEKLY • AU GU ST 13 — 19, 2014

COURTESTY OF THE ARTIST

As festival season winds down, the diverse lineup of the SECOND ANNUAL COLUMBIA CITY BLUES FESTIVAL will fill you up with enough soul to last until Bumbershoot. In the mood for some rootsy blues? Singer Betsy Olson, with drummer Sera Cahoone, is on it. Want to shimmy to a blend of Delta blues and rock & roll? Gravel Road has got you covered. Hoping to catch a bit of “antifolk”? Stick around for the Foghorns. With Michael Wohl, Fat Yap Harwood & the Thesaurusauruses, The Scotch Tops, Bigfoot Wallace and His Wicked Sons. Through Sunday. Columbia City Theater, 4918 Rainier Ave. S., 723-0088, columbiacitytheater.com. 9 p.m. Saturday; 8:30 p.m. Sunday. $8 adv./$10 DOS. 21 and older. AZARIA C. PODPLESKY Whether you long for AEROSMITH’s ‘70s hard rock staples or its ‘80s and ‘90s pop hooks, the 44-yearold Boston band will serve up both on its umpteenth summer arena tour. Though response to 2012’s Music From Another Dimension! was tepid at best, the band has remained (semi) relevant via Steven Tyler’s reality TV judging, a decision that seemed to irk the rest of the band, but which has contributed to its ability to still sell concert tickets so many years into a deep career. With Slash. The Gorge. 7 p.m. $50 and up. DAVE LAKE FUCKED UP is an anomaly. The fact that a band with such a name has achieved anything outside of underground success doesn’t seem feasible. Yet the Toronto band has successfully courted an indie rock audience with its experimental punk wailing, a testament to the band’s willingness to delve into some very non-punk concepts (like writing rock operas or opening a song with a flute solo). Its latest album, Glass Boys, finds leader Damian Abraham contemplating philosophy and soliloquies on what it means to be an adult in the 21st century. With Tijuana Panters. Neumos, 925 E. Pike St., 7099467, neumos.com. 8 p.m. $15 adv. 21 and over. DH His father is a member of the Country Music Hall Of Fame, but despite following in dear old dad’s musical footsteps, BOBBY BARE JR. isn’t as easy to pigeonhole. Undefeated, his latest LP with Young Criminals’ Starvation League, reinforces that Bare’s bag of tricks is deep, with rootsy folk sitting alongside psychedelic, rock, and harmonyrich pop sounds. While in Seattle, he’ll encore with an acoustic in-store performance at Easy Street Records on August 19. With Cahalen Morrison and Country Hammer, The Almond Butters. The Tractor, 5213 Ballard Ave. N.W. 789-3599, tractortavern.com. 9:30 p.m. $10. 21 and over. DL

American blues singer and pianist joined by 5x Grammy-winning steel guitar and dobro player

AR T S AND E NT E R TAI NM AT 8PM; SUN, MON, TUES

HAPPY HOUR 9AM-NOON & 4-7 PM • MON-FRI

WELL DRINKS & DOMESTIC BOTTLED BEER $3 DINNER: 5-10PM EVERYDAY BREAKFAST & LUNCH: SAT 9AM-2PM / SUN 9AM-2PM 7115 WOODLAWN AVENUE NE 522-1168

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Walk to save animals!

2014

King County’s Marymoor Park, in Redmond

Join Us!

Sat., Sept.6

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Raise Money for Animals 5k Course Dog Agility, Contests, Prizes Beer & Mimosa Garden