Seattle Weekly, February 18, 2015

FEBRUARY 18-24, 2015 I VOLUME 40 I NUMBER 7

SEATTLEWEEKLY.COM I FREE

A NUE HOME FOR STREET FOOD»PAGE 14 SAM SMITH AND STEALING SOUNDS»PAGE 25

ACADEMY BORED

A SHELTER DIVIDED

BRIAN MILLER’S OSCAR GRIPES

THE SHAKY STATE OF TENT CITIES

PAGE 7

PAGE 17

THE DIRT BEHIND BERTHA There was another way.

By Ellis E. Conklin

JUVIE JUSTICE

ACTIVISTS FAIL TO STOP JAIL PAGE 5

PAGE 9

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SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

inside» February 18–24, 2015 VOLUME 40 | NUMBER 7 » SEATTLEWEEKLY.COM

»14

news&comment 5

LOCKED UP

BY MARCUS HARRISON GREEN

A new youth detention center gets the go-ahead. Plus: yet another teacher allegedly gets Hot for Student. And who’s going to run Murray’s new Nickelsvilles?

9

TUNNEL VISION

BY ELLIS E. CONKLIN | Did the

surface-street option to replace the Viaduct ever get a fair hearing?

food&drink

14 A NUE BEGINNING

BY NICOLE SPRINKLE | A closer look

at a restaurant’s ambitions to bring street food indoors.

14 | FOOD NEWS 14 | THE WEEKLY DISH 16 | THE BAR CODE

arts&culture 17 ALL ABOUT OSCAR

BY STEVE WIECKING & BRIAN MILLER | Our annual Academy Awards

bitch-fest.

17 | THE PICK LIST 19 | OPENING NIGHTS | A Rodgers

& Hammerstein revival, a Charles Portis road trip, and a Victorian-era comedy.

22 FILM

EDITORIAL Senior Editor Nina Shapiro Food Editor Nicole Sprinkle Arts Editor Brian Miller Music Editor Gwendolyn Elliott Editorial Operations Manager Gavin Borchert Staff Writers Ellis E. Conklin, Matt Driscoll, Kelton Sears

Editorial Interns Bianca Sewake, Alexa Teodoro Contributing Writers Rick Anderson, Sean Axmaker, James Ballinger, Michael Berry, Roger Downey, Alyssa Dyksterhouse, Jay Friedman, Margaret Friedman, Zach Geballe, Chason Gordon, Dusty Henry, Rhiannon Fionn, Marcus Harrison Green Robert Horton, Patrick Hutchison, Seth Kolloen, Sandra Kurtz, Dave Lake, Terra Clarke Olsen, Jason Price, Keegan Prosser, Mark Rahner, Tiffany Ran, Michael Stusser, Jacob Uitti PRODUCTION Production Manager Sharon Adjiri Art Director Jose Trujillo Graphic Designers Nate Bullis, Brennan Moring Photo Intern Kaia D’Albora ADVERTISING

in Japan, sci-fi from Russia, delinquents in France, and vampires in New Zealand.

Senior Multimedia Consultant Krickette Wozniak

BY GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT | Inside the

Sam Smith plagiarism flap. Plus: Lucinda Williams as gateway drug, and a blog throws a party for Black History Month.

28 | THE WEEK AHEAD

odds&ends

29 | HIGHER GROUND 30 | CLASSIFIEDS

»cover credits

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WARNING: JOE ROGAN’S COMEDY SHOW

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news&comment The Arc of Justice

Is This Teacher Rape Case a Mary Kay Letourneau Sequel?

The King County Children and Family Justice Center is being built, but for the community activists who came together to fight it the battle is far from over.

T

BY MARCUS HARRISON GREEN

T

SEATTLELAND

CELIA BERK

Police stand guard at the council chambers during last week’s hearing.

“I don’t doubt their intentions, but at this point, continuing to protest against the prison is wasted energy and could be focused on other issues that impact youth,” asserted councilmember Kathy Lambert following an earlier vote by the City Council to grant the county a master land-use permit.

“All but one member of the council is white,” a furious Washington replied at the time. “Their children aren’t going to be affected by this. It is the height of arrogance for Kathy Lambert to suggest what we should do for our liberation. She is the most glaring example of a paternalistic liberal racist.”

Contrary to Lambert’s assertion, several organizers believe that their efforts have been anything but in vain. At the root of the community protests is the larger issue of inequity in the nation’s and county’s prisons. Activists cite the county’s own data that reveals that as of 2012, 42 percent of the juveniles incarcerated in Washington’s most populous county were black, even though blacks account for only 7.7 percent of the general population—noting that this figure is almost identical to the national average (43 percent), belying our region’s claim as a bastion of progressive values.

“This isn’t going away,” asserts James Williams, a member of the group Ending the Prison Industrial Complex (EPIC). “This is about structural, systemic racism, and it has been about that from the moment the county voted to build this prison and then sell it to the general public as a Disneyland fun center instead of an actual prison.”

The county has asserted that the new building is a necessity, given the deplorable conditions of the current facility—leaky pipes, brown tap water,

The opposition voices its concern.

the community will ultimately judge them.”

Washington, who has been at the forefront of opposition to the center, wants it to be known that the movement goes far beyond just one building. He also contends that the vote, while deflating, serves not as an end but a start to the next phase of that movement.

“Prison buildings are often lobbied for by corporations, construction companies, architects, [and] prison-supply companies, while people of color fill the prisons. That is part of a systemic problem, and we all know that can’t be destroyed in one day. They couldn’t have thought we would admit defeat after one vote,” says Washington.

The legislation the Council adopted last week puts the county on the hook for $154 million, solidifying its commitment to the facility, which was put into motion in August 2012 when 53 percent of King County voters passed a nine-year property-tax levy that provided the $210 million for its construction.

With construction all but assured, the question now is what will become of the energy generated by what detractors have come to call the “new youth jail”? There has been disagreement about how this energy should be directed, even before the vote.

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 6

NATE WATTERS

home address » Mayor Murray Surveys His City

In just under 40 minutes Tuesday, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray delivered his second annual State of the City address. As is customary, the mayor struck a tone of “Hey, things are pretty good! But not that good . . . ”—with themes of inequality, education, transportation, and police accountability featured prominently. A few specific lines from the mayor stood out for us: “Income inequality is real, and it’s growing in Seattle.”

“We lack a unified, modern, interconnected transportation plan . . . until now.”

“Our efforts to reform the Seattle Police Department

•

remain a top priority of my administration.”

•

•

“It is time for Seattle to talk with each other about how we heal the wounds of race.”

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • FE BRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

wo years of protests, countless public hearings, and canvassing from neighborhood to neighborhood appeared to culminate last week in a contentious King County Council meeting as opponents of the county’s proposed new juvenile detention center were dealt a seemingly fatal blow.

On February 9, hundreds of those opponents flooded the Council’s chambers on the 10th floor of the King County Building to denounce the future $210 million King County Children and Family Justice Center, to them a shrine of a brutal and broken juvenile-justice system desperately in need of repair. For six hours, community members delivered fiery public testimony accusing Council members of racism. At one point, activists declared a “people’s filibuster” and took turns reading from Angela Davis’ famous screed Are Prisons Obsolete?

Then, at the conflict’s nadir, a Council member called in the police to arrest one speaker for going over his two-minute limit for public testimony. Twenty-five Seattle and King County officers entered the chamber as protesters formed a halo around the speaker to prevent his forceful removal. He was eventually allowed to remain.

But it was a minor victory in what would become a major defeat. In the end, Council members voted unanimously (7-0) to approve a designbuild contract with developer Howard S. Wright and designers Integrus Architecture for a new building that in 2019 will replace the current detention facility at 1211 E. Alder St. The vote was the latest chapter in a prolonged duel between the county and adversaries of the detention center. Opposition has rallied in large numbers at nearly every stage of its development: public hearings held by the county prior to its appearance as a ballot measure in 2012; this summer’s Seattle City Council land-use meetings, at which the county sought and received amendments to existing land-use codes; and the most recent contract-approval vote.

Detention-center opponents view the facility as a malicious extension of what they call the prison-industrial complex: a network of government, media, criminal-justice systems, banks, and corporations that economically, professionally, and politically benefit from the mass incarceration of the poor and people of color.

“No one on the county could ever argue that the new jail is not an expansion of the [prisonindustrial complex]. The PIC is modern slavery,” said a disappointed Dustin Washington of the American Friends Service Committee, talking to Seattle Weekly by phone later in the week. “They might have won this racist vote, but history and

he online petition to save Darcy Marie Smith from becoming the new Mary Kay Letourneau has almost 150 names and counting.

It’s called the Petition to Act as a Witness for Darcy Smith, and is tied in with a Twitter hash tag, #SaveMrsSmith. The mostly youthful crowd behind this rescue mission showed up in court last week to support the teacher who some say is like a mother

BY RICK ANDERSON to them.

They’re convinced she did not have illegal sex with one of their fellow students—who says she was like a lover to him.

As the shapely 5´4˝ grade school teacher with blonde ringlets stood before a judge at the Regional Justice Center in Kent and pled not guilty to three counts of child rape, her former students and their parents from McMicken Heights Elementary in SeaTac waved signs from a glassed-off gallery. They tried to cheer on the admired educator who has been put on leave from her $65,000-a-year job.

Smith, 41, seemed unblinking and composed for someone accused of having sex with a minor over the nearly six years the boy lived in her Renton home. Now 19, he claims they began to have intercourse when he was 13 or 14, after moving into the house when he was 12 while Smith was his sixth-grade teacher.

The boy’s parents approved of the live-in arrangement. After all, Smith was married with children of her own.

No one seemed aware that Smith, who would become regional Teacher of the Year during that time and be cited for “her unique and exceptional talents,” supposedly became amorous when she drank. At first she allegedly was touchy-feely and began to exchange kisses with her young roomer. The boy would later tell an investigator that, being a teen and all, he thought kissing “was cool.” Besides, he confessed, being a teen, he also had this raginghormone problem.

As the relationship progressed, he and his live-in teacher began to have sexual intercourse after the hubby and kids went to bed, or during the day when Smith had time off, he claims. That continued until the boy moved out at age 18 a year ago.

Smith’s Seattle attorney, Brad Meryhew, says there’s more to the story, and contends that King County Sheriff investigators did not fully probe the accusations nor talk to all potential witnesses. He says Smith will be vindicated.

That’s what attorneys said in a weirdly similar case 18 years ago. Then-35-year-old Mary Kay Letourneau, like Smith, was an attractive, blonde, married-with-children grade-school teacher in the Highline District who had sex with a student from her sixth-grade class and wound up being charged with child rape.

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 6 5

news&comment» Mary Kay Letourneau Sequel? » FROM PAGE 5

The Arc of Justice » FROM PAGE 5 and freezing temperatures that make medieval torture chambers appear favorable by comparison—and believe opponents have picked the wrong target to lash out against. “[The new building] will replace outdated facilities which are broken, overcrowded, and unsafe,” King County Council Chair Larry Phillips said via e-mail. “I support the construction contract to start building a new center, including new courtrooms, space for an alternative school, and access for families to needed social services in addition to limited detention facilities. While I support replacing this dilapidated structure, I also agree wholeheartedly that prevention—not detention— is the best tool for dealing with crime.”

Phillips claimed some success on this last item, noting that the youth incarceration rate has dropped by two-thirds in the past decade. Yet, this accomplishment rings hollow in the minds of the center’s opposition, which is eager to point out that over the last 15 years, the disproportionality between youth of color and whites in the system has steadily grown, per county data.

Activists have gotten busy organizing a slew of actions to counter the latest milestone in the center’s advancement. They will host a “people’s tribunal” on March 28 at Seattle University that “will place the entire juvenile-justice system on trial.” It will feature firsthand testimony from black youth decrying King County’s incarceration system along with panelists proposing solutions for its repair.

Organizers will also lay out plans for an alternative building. Calling it a “holistic restorative justice center,” their vision is of a communityrun building that replaces prison guards with “healing workers” equipped with a better understanding of race. It would eschew punitive approaches for “truly rehabilitative” ones.

“Our center would address the severe emotional, physical, and spiritual trauma kids in the juvenile-justice system often face but never resolve,” says Washington.

The tribunal will follow a series of teach-ins that will seek to explore the relationship between the prison-industrial complex and the detention center. The first of these will take place this Sunday at Madrona Grace Presbyterian Church.

With disappointment from last week’s vote rapidly dissipating, organizers continue to recruit to their swelling cadre—an eclectic mix of antiprison activists, white anti-racist groups, clergy from multiple faiths, taxpayer advocates, and lay citizens increasingly alarmed at the racial composition of the county’s juvenile prison population.

“I’m sure the county would love for us to fall back asleep and admit defeat, but we’re not quitting,” proclaims Brown. “This fight against the prison will only be over when we’ve won. At the end of the day we’re going to change how juvenile justice is done in King County forever.” E

news@seattleweekly.com

Follow Marcus Harrison Green’s continuing coverage of the King County Children and Family Justice Center at southseattleemerald.com.

been troublesome, he said, and Mrs. Smith would likely keep him “on the right track.”

She left her husband and four kids and, That led to the day she took his hand and while out on bail for the rape charge, gave steered him into the bedroom, he said, where birth to her student/lover’s child. Letourneau he was introduced to lovemaking with Teach. received a relatively light sentence—three As Priebe-Olson states in court papers, the months in custody. But she violated parole by boy told her “he was hormonal at the time and getting back together with her young beau, he wanted to do it. He said he knew it was Vili Fualaau, and getting pregnant again, givwrong. He said there was no sex that [first] ing birth in prison while she did six more time and it went on for a few nights like that. years.

[The boy] said they They wed in 2005 then started having when she was 43 and he The boy said that “Smith vaginal sex and she 22. Their headline-makwould tell him that she gave him oral sex. He ing relationship, turning they did not use them into global celebs, loved him” and bought him said protection.” was rooted in love, they He guessed they insisted, and perhaps 10 a closetful of clothes. had sex two to three years of marriage does She counseled and advised times a week for speak to that. and more when him and called him “Babe” years, she had days off. He But there’s an obvious couldn’t tell anyone, difference with the when they were alone. though, Smith allegnewest Highline case— edly told him. If he talked, she’d go to jail.

Darcy Smith has said nothing about leaving He did, and she did. She’s now free awaither family to be with her former student. He, ing trial. Ultimately, it will likely be jurors who for reasons so far unstated, is suddenly telling all, even though she supposedly did express her will decide what she and Mary Kay Letourneau might have in common. E devotion to him. According to county detective Marylisa Priebe-Olson, the boy said that randerson@seattleweekly.com “Smith would tell him that she loved him” and Rick Anderson writes about sex, crime, money, bought him a closetful of clothes. She counand politics, which tend to be the same thing. His seled and advised him and called him “Babe” latest book is Floating Feet: Irregular Dispatches when they were alone. Up to then, his life had From the Emerald City.

Music Matters 10

Dave Nauber President Classé

A Special Evening of Presentations Devoted Exclusively to the Reproduction of Music

You are invited to join us for Music Matters 10, our annual special event devoted exclusively to the reproduction of music, and the beginning of our celebration of 40 years of high performance audio. Regardless of your favorite artists, your music library, or the way you listen - if music is important to you - you will want to attend Music Matters 10.

Peter McGrath Director of Sales Wilson Audio

Thursday, February 26th, 5-9pm SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

Seattle Showroom | 6206 Roosevelt Way NE

6

During our tenth celebration of Music Matters, you will have the opportunity to see and hear the absolute finest in 2-channel systems in six calibrated sound rooms - presented by the manufacturers. Many of the products at Music Matters 10 are making their public debut.

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Dave Gordon Managing Dir. of Sales Audio Research

Keith Robertson CTO Linn Products

20-minute presentations will be made throughout the evening by the following: AMG Classé JL Audio Rotel

Audioquest D'agostino Linn Transparent

Audio Research Devialet McIntosh Vienna Acoustics

Bowers & Wilkins HRS NAD Wilson Audio

Dan D'Agostino President D'Agostino

Seating is limited, please RSVP to 206-524-6633, or online at definitive.com.

Light hors d'oeuvres & refreshments will be served. No dealers please.

Doug Henderson President B&W Group

Seattle Showroom - February 26th from 5:00 - 9:00 pm CELEBRATING 40 YEARS OF HIGH PERFORMANCE

Shaky Republics

Mayor Murray has proposed three new homeless encampments. So who will run them?

BY MATT DRISCOLL

A

the very real role that politics plays in how the self-managed homeless encampments have historically operated in Seattle. For the people who end up staying in them, there’s almost no avoiding it. And given Mayor Ed Murray’s

Nickelsville almost disappeared after an internal battle.

recently announced plans to create up to three new encampments in the city, serving up to 100 people each, these politics—and the instability they bring—are worth scrutinizing.

With what Murray has called a “full-blown” homelessness “crisis” on Seattle’s hands, the mayor submitted an ordinance to the City Council last month to authorize the encampments on city-owned land. An approving vote is expected by early March; the Council threw $200,000 into its most recent biennial budget to fund neces-

“We just want a place to stay, and don’t want to get caught up in the politics,” said one camper. sities at the encampments. These new homeless camps would add to a patchwork of at least five similar locations across the region, including Nickelsville in the International District.

The real question is how the camps will be operated and governed. According to the mayor’s plans, they will be run by area human-services providers, who will seek permits to do so, and will offer case-management services and collect data as part of the federal Homeless Management Information System. That final requirement will help make them eligible for federal funding. But what’s unknown at this point is which human-services providers will take on the herculean task of running the camps.

“I think that’s an important question, and one people are only kind of starting to consider,” admits Mark Putnam, director of the Committee to End Homelessness in King County. Putnam was part of a homelessness task force convened by the mayor that, as part of a long list of recommendations, pushed for the city to go forward with creating the additional encampments.

“I’m not sure, and frankly I haven’t really talked with service providers about their interest in it,” Putnam continues. “I know there’s not a lot of money, and they’re not an easy thing to run, politically or logistically.”

If there is a human-services provider in Seattle that understands the logistics of operating homeless encampments, most agree that it’s SHARE/ WHEEL and Scott Morrow. Though there are exceptions, such as Camp Unity on the Eastside, the bulk of the Seattle area’s encampments are organized and run by SHARE/WHEEL and Morrow, utilizing partnerships with local churches and LIHI. And all these camps, out of necessity or tradition, employ a self-management style that relies on creating communities at the camps with democratically elected leaderships.

In other words, exactly the recipe that led to the drama at Nickelsville last week.

“Scott gets a lot of crap from people, gets called a dictator and things like that, and people aren’t always happy with him,” says homeless advocate and Real Change founder Tim Harris. “But I’ve got to hand it to the guy; he’s been doing this for, like, 20 years and he’s still standing.”

But while Harris is quick to give Morrow and SHARE/WHEEL credit—telling Seattle Weekly that it’s difficult for him to imagine any other local social-service providers jumping at an opportunity to run encampments—he’s equally quick to warn that the organization is overextended as is, and would have trouble taking on more responsibilities without hiring more staff and making other structural changes—a shift Morrow has historically been resistant to. Morrow was unavailable for comment for this article.

“The thing that I always wonder is what would it take to make their model more sustainable and to scale it up?” Harris says. Assuming that Murray’s encampment plan comes to pass, that’s the very important question Seattle will soon be left to answer. E

mdriscoll@seattleweekly.com

City of Seattle

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • FE BRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

The recent drama at Nickelsville brings to light

KAIA D’ALBORA

t the gates of Nickelsville two Fridays ago, a week’s worth of persistent, soaking rain combined with a week’s worth of turmoil inside the well-known homeless encampment in Seattle’s International District to create a palpable sense of uncertainty.

“It’s like Survivor,” one Nickelodeon told me, between bites of a hastily made chili dog. “We’re all just trying to not get voted off the island.”

I was at the encampment hoping to track down Lisa Hooper, a relatively new Nickelsville resident who, eight days earlier, had taken over as the camp’s leader on an interim basis. But she wasn’t there. And as it would turn out, she wouldn’t even be part of the camp much longer. Just 24 hours later Hooper and her helper, Anthony Jenkins, would be the next residents voted off the Nickelsville island.

But that hadn’t happened yet. As it stood, according to an official-looking press release that had hit my e-mail inbox earlier in the week, Hooper—the camp’s former arbitrator—had taken over for Scott Morrow, the founder of the nonprofit that has run Nickelsville for its decade of existence (and who has a history twice that long of running encampments in Seattle as part of SHARE/WHEEL). Morrow, the release said, had received a vote of no confidence. So he was out and Hooper was in. Some longtime Nickelodeons called it a coup, or a “vicious takeover” carried out by intimidation and threats of violence. Others likened Morrow to a dictator, saying the well-known homeless advocate’s tenure was marked by an iron-fisted rule, insisting that campers follow the Nickelsville bylaws, as he interpreted them.

Basically, there was drama at Nickelsville— and plenty of it.

The reason any of this mattered—especially to the 35 campers hunkered down on a muddy hill in the shadow of I-90—was that the relationships Morrow had forged as camp leader are what make Nickelsville feasible. The Low Income Housing Institute, which pays for porta-potties, trash removal, and water at the camp, stated that it would continue to support the camp only if Morrow was reinstated. The Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd, which allows the camp to stay at its Dearborn Street location, echoed the sentiment. Without Morrow, Nickelsville appeared doomed.

And so, by the weekend, campers had reinstated the man ousted by a vote of no confidence little more than a week earlier. It was back to business as usual, crisis averted.

“We just want a place to stay, and don’t want to get caught up in the politics,” the camper with the chili dog told me. “I haven’t even been voting at the meetings.”

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Powerful interests rallied around the tunnel and left the surface-street option in the dust. But would a Bertha bust pave the way to revisit that plan?

BY ELLIS E. CONKLIN

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 10

Cary Moon: “I don’t think our politicians realize what a disaster this is.”

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • FE BRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

as the late-January morning fog gingerly flees, revealing a postcard glimpse of Elliott Bay’s churning blue waters, Cary Moon prepares to dig into a steaming bowl of lentil soup at the Sound View Cafe in Pike Place Market. Engineer and landscape designer by trade, Moon is an urban activist at heart. More than a decade ago, she founded the People’s Waterfront Coalition, a tunnel-averse group committed to seeing the Alaskan Way Viaduct, badly weakened in the Feb. 28, 2001 Nisqually earthquake, ripped down and replaced with a waterfront park and a reconfigured boulevard with ample transit services. • Now, as the most expensive transportation project in Washington history is the subject of both jokes and groans, there’s a growing sense that those earlier Viaduct replacement plans might not seem as impractical or farfetched as many considered them years ago. • As is her way, the 51-year-old Moon, whose most striking feature is a shimmering mane of silvery hair, gets right to the point. The soup will have to wait. “The surface-street option has never been on the ballot,” she begins. “It was too hard to explain. It was politics and money that gave us the tunnel. The downtown business interests, the Chamber of Commerce, Boeing, the unions, they all wanted a highway, period. Nothing was going to stop them. Then to name it Bertha, our only woman mayor—how appalling and disrespectful.”

9

» FROM PAGE 9 Moon, the Pennsylvania-born daughter of an engineer, is highly regarded among transportation planners and those Seattle progressives opposed to plans to build a waterfront highway—whether elevated, constructed at ground level, or submerged—to replace the Viaduct. No one has been more relentless and persistent than Moon, who made Seattle her home in 1997.

“She’s brilliant,” says Ben Schiendelman, co-founder of Seattle Transit Blog. “She’s been right on this street option, and it’s nice to see her vindicated.”

Moon, whose People’s Coalition was a force to reckon with when the raging tunnel debate reached its zenith, works quietly now, usually behind the scenes. City Council contenders have in recent weeks begun to seek her counsel, meeting with her in the back corners of coffee shops, mindful that the ongoing tunnel drama (and resulting trauma) may surface in candidate forums and debates in the 2015 election.

“I think there’s a strong possibility this will be a political issue this year,” speculates Peter Steinbrueck, a former Seattle councilmember who waged an unsuccessful bid for mayor in 2013. “Not exploring further the street option, I believe, was a lost opportunity.”

No one can say at this point whether Bertha’s failures, if they continue, could result in the

most prolific tunnel detractor, put it: “Cary deserves all the credit for just saying that when you take a closer look and study all the facts, there is a better way.”

She is polished, professional, and fact-driven, says Transportation Choices Coalition director Rob Johnson. “And,” he adds, “she is always very good at disagreeing with people without being disagreeable.”

Says City Planning Director Marshall Foster: “Her commitment is deep. Cary really started the discussion about a surface street, and she’s kept that discussion going.”

Moon, a political comet, led the so-called “Hell and Hell No!” campaign in 2007, when, in an advisory vote taken March 14, Seattle’s electorate expressed widespread opposition (55 percent) to a new elevated highway. Voters were even more critical of the six-lane cut-and-cover tunnel pushed by former Mayor Greg Nickels, with nearly 70 percent opposed.

Recalls Sightline executive director Alan Durning: “At an election-night gathering, they asked Nickels who was the night’s biggest winner. He nodded to Cary Moon.”

“It was fun then,” muses Moon. “We had the momentum.”

Moon’s crusade crested that breezy evening in March 2007. A string of defeats would follow, culminating in the final days of December 2008— the most critical month of the project’s contentious

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

The June 2012 groundbreaking: The first shovelful is the easiest.

10

deep-sixing of the project in favor of a waterfront street. But the city says it is prepared to resort to a de facto surface option if the Viaduct must come down before the tunnel opens. As Seattle Transportation Department director Scott Kubly told Seattle Weekly, “We have plans what to do if we need to immediately close the Viaduct, which would call for a huge increase in transit in this area.” Still, the price tag for turning tail and abandoning ship is anyone’s guess.

A mother of two teenagers and married to architect Mark Reddington, the lead designer of Benaroya Hall, Moon says her motives are simple. “I love cities, and the waterfront is precious land that I want to reclaim for the public.

It has become clear now we can transform the waterfront without a tunnel.”

“She may well yet succeed,” says Denis Hayes, president of the Bullitt Foundation and a key organizer of the nation’s first Earth Day, in 1970.

“The politics may well line up against the tunnel.”

“Cary Moon has created the culture that made it possible to look and see if there wasn’t another way of doing this project,” says former King County Executive Ron Sims, an early booster of what Moon has long envisioned, a transit-rich street in lieu of a tunnel.

Or as ex-Mayor Mike McGinn, the city’s

14-year history—when vigorous pro-tunnel pressure was exerted on then-Gov. Chris Gregoire by business, aerospace, and organized labor interests.

On Jan. 13, 2009 came “the Kumbaya moment,” as Moon and others have come to call it: Gregoire, long a vocal advocate of a bigger and wider elevated freeway, stood smiling with Nickels and Sims at the World Trade Center in Seattle.

That morning, Gregoire, who had won reelection two months before, again beating Republican Dino Rossi, proceeded to reveal her choice to replace the aging Viaduct: a four-lane, two-mile tube running beneath Seattle’s waterfront—at 54 feet in diameter the widest deep-bore tunnel ever attempted. Its cost was estimated at $3.1 billion, which included demolition of the Viaduct. Construction would begin in 2011 and the tunnel would open in 2015. (Note: The overall cost of the project was estimated at $4.25 billion, which included the actual tunnel, utility realignments, a seawall upgrade, and street and transit improvements.)

On Jan. 30, 2009, then-state Sen. Ed Murray introduced SB 5798, requiring the state to take the necessary steps to replace the Viaduct with the deep-bore tunnel. The bill set funding limits at $2.4 billion in state funds, generated largely through an increase in gas taxes, and $400 million from tolling.

(Murray declined to be interviewed for this story.)

“We couldn’t believe she would turn around and do this. None of us believed Gregoire would build that tunnel for $2.8 billion,” recounts Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien. In 2008, O’Brien was a Sierra Club director and one of the 29 members of the Stakeholders Advisory Committee, created to advise city, county, and state transportation leaders. The Committee comprised members of neighborhood and advocacy groups (Moon represented the People’s Waterfront Coalition), as well as representatives of business and labor. The state legislature set December 2008 as the deadline for these groups to recommend a Viaduct replacement solution.

“It should be called Gregoire’s Bertha, for she did the bidding for business and labor. She gave us the tunnel,” says David Bricklin, a prominent Seattle environmental attorney.

“We were defeated by Gregoire,” says Moon.

“I went to that event that day [the World Trade Center press conference] and I asked, ‘What will you do if this doesn’t come together, if the technology doesn’t work out, or if the funding doesn’t come through?’ And David Dye [then-deputy secretary at the Washington State Department of Transportation] said, ‘There is no Plan B.’ ” (Gregoire declined to be interviewed for this story; former mayor Nickels also did not return numerous calls seeking comment.)

Despite’s Gregoire’s tunnel-ahoy declaration in January 2009, the battle went on, until finally on Aug. 16, 2011, Seattle voters, weary of the

that it works when they fire Bertha up, perhaps in March or April.

The repair work has destabilized the Viaduct, a 62-year-old structure built on landfill with 24,000 cubic yards of concrete and 10,000 tons of steel—and in soil, no less, with a risk of liquefying in an earthquake. Some parts of one of the city’s historic neighborhoods, Pioneer Square, have sunk by an inch or more, while cost overruns are becoming an increasingly serious concern. At the same time, nobody is certain exactly what caused the machine to break down in the first place; whether it can be fixed; or, if it is, whether it will break again. The new tentative ribbon-cutting date for the tunnel is September 2017, nearly a year and a half late.

Meanwhile, distrust festers between the project’s overseer, WSDOT, and the contractor, Seattle Tunnel Partners. So frayed are relations between the state’s Highway 99 project and the city of Seattle that the City Council on January 12 signed off on a $155,000 independent engineering study into whether tunnel work is making the Viaduct unsafe to drive on. SDOT’s Kubly told Seattle Weekly that the CH2M Hill report should be completed next month.

As of press time, Seattle Tunnel Partners has completed a cradle at the bottom of the 120foot pit. But now Bertha will have to grind her way about 20 feet through a concrete wall to reach it and enable crews to remove the cutting head, 57 feet in diameter. At that point, a massive crane will hoist it to the surface for repairs. There is concern, though, that Bertha won’t be able to drill that far.

As if to mock the project’s repeated setbacks, late last month two GOP state senators, Doug Ericksen of Ferndale and Mike Baumgartner of Spokane, introduced a bill to order WSDOT to stop the project dead in its tracks and devise a plan to fill in the incomplete tunnel.

Senate Transportation Committee chairman Curtis Wilson (R-Yakima), though, quickly pulled the plug on the legislation, saying the bill would not even get a hearing, never mind pass out of committee.

“Cary Moon has created the culture that made it possible to look and see if there wasn’t another way of doing this project.”

Today, Seattle’s megaproject is reeling. In

December 2014, the deep-bore tunnel was the runaway winner for Streetsblog USA’s “Highway Boondoggle of the Year” award. The same month, Engineering News-Record, an influential weekly magazine that provides news, analysis, and opinion for the construction industry worldwide, listed Seattle’s tunneling endeavor, now two years behind schedule, as one of “the year’s [2014] worst projects.”

Since Bertha pulled up lame 14 months ago, her seals and central bearing broken, the world’s largest tunnel-boring machine has barely budged an inch. Just 1,000 feet of the nearly two-mile subterranean highway has been completed. A 120-foot-deep rescue pit is nearly completed, which means that at long last workers can extract the cutter head of the stranded $80 million monstrosity, fix it above ground, lower it back down, and pray to the almighty tunnel gods

“It’s coming down in 2012,” a defiant Gregoire declared at a press conference in Olympia on Jan. 3, 2008. “That’s the time line. I’m not going to fudge on it. And if we don’t have some alternative by then, boy are we going to have a mess on our hands, because it’s coming down.” Asked whether she could, as governor, unilaterally tear down a highway that carries more than 100,000 vehicles a day through the state’s largest city, Gregoire said, ‘Yeah, watch me.’ ” Later in 2008, as replacement alternatives boiled down to three—a new Viaduct, a tunnel, or a surface street—the city hired Nelson/ Nygaard Consulting Associates to explore the feasibility of pursuing the street/transit option.

In essence, the firm was tasked to flesh out the details of a broad-brush surface-street plan outlined by Moon and other land-use professionals who’d enlisted in the People’s Waterfront Coalition, including Grant Cogswell, co-author of the 1997 Seattle Monorail Initiative; Julie Parrett, a UW land architecture instructor; and Ralph Cipriani, a former manager of the Metropolitan Transportation Plan for the Puget Sound Regional Council. (“We weren’t a bunch of amateurs,” notes Moon.)

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 12

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • FE BRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

prolonged debate, voted by a nearly 60 percent margin to go ahead with the tunnel. Moon says the People’s Waterfront Coalition disbanded soon afterward.

“That was pretty much it for me, and I just started working on the waterfront with the city,” says Moon, who was a member of the design-oversight committee that last September unfurled plans to redevelop 22 blocks along the downtown waterfront.

11

» FROM PAGE 11 Their surface-street concept was similar to the Urban Mobility Plan led by the SDOT in late 2007, which Nelson/Nygaard helped prepare and rolled into their report, concluded in late December 2008. Tim Payne, a principal with Nelson/Nygaard, today tells Seattle Weekly that the so-called “I-5/surface/transit plan” could still work.

On December 11, 2008, the city, state, and county announced two finalists for Viaduct replacement. The tunnel did not make the cut.

WSDOT, for one, concluded that the deepbore tunnel was too costly. Before the closing meeting of the stakeholders’ group a week later, WSDOT’s Dye said, “It is out of reach in the current state of affairs to make it happen.” He added, “It would be disingenuous of me to sit here representing the state to say, ‘Geez, you

Western Avenue would become a one-way northbound street with three lanes and a bike lane. The estimated cost of the street plan came in at $2.2 billion, but with construction, traffic mitigation, and related projects, the cost would be $3.3 billion.

On its website that same month, December 2008, WSDOT wrote: “This [surface-street] alternative is put forward for further consideration as it offers a lower-cost SR-99 that maintains the economic vitality of the city and region

“We couldn’t believe she would turn around and do this. None of us believed Gregoire would build that tunnel for $2.8 billion.”

Outgoing governor Christine Gregoire hands Bertha to newly elected Jay Inslee.

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

In an interview earlier this month, Payne said, “Nothing has happened since to give me a thought that our conclusions were not correct.”

He went on: “I don’t know what became of our report, but I can see why people are still asking what-if questions.” It is not known whether Gregoire saw this report.

12

know, let’s go build a deep-bore tunnel.’ ” The two options left standing were a new $3.5 billion elevated structure and a surface/transit hybrid that would direct most traffic over a pair of north- and southbound streets along the waterfront. Alaskan Way would become a one-way southbound street with three lanes and a bike lane.

while reconnecting the city’s historic waterfront with downtown.”

But the Great Recession was at full tilt by then, and Gregoire was concerned with costs.

“Who’s going to pay?” she asked. “We have $2.8 billion, period.”

Six days later, on December 18, 2008, the snow

arrived in Seattle. Six inches fell, a prelude to

a week-long storm that would cripple the city.

Tardy removal of the white stuff would go a long way toward ringing the death knell on Mayor Nickels’ re-election bid the following year. On this snowy evening, only about half the stakeholders arrived at a SDOT office inside the Municipal Tower. Though clearly divided on a Viaduct replacement, most of them made it clear that the tunnel option needed further evaluation and should be subjected to the same environmental review as the elevated and street alternatives.

At the meeting, according to Moon, she said, “We need to move forward with something we can afford now, but leave the door open [for the tunnel].” Last week, Moon clarified: “The compromise we were making was to move forward with the surface/transit option, and if it didn’t work out and provide enough bypass capacity, then go ahead with the tunnel.”

Tayloe Washburn, then a member of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, spoke out vigorously for the tunnel that December evening. “We can do this and we must,” he recently recalled saying. “If we start from a few sensible building blocks and a few sensible principles, we can build a bored tunnel.” Last week, Washburn, now CEO of Northeastern University in Seattle, told the Weekly, “We had very diverse opinions, but the main reason the tunnel was chosen is that it would enable better truck and cargo flow.”

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John Odland, a stakeholder representing the Manufacturing Industrial Council, agreed, then and now. As he explained in a recent interview, “I never believed the surface street-option would have given us the mobility we needed.”

Also pushing hard for the tunnel was the Discovery Institute’s Cascadia Center, a nonprofit think tank that explores transportation issues in the region. “We told [those at the stakeholders’ meeting] that our research had found that technologies had dramatically increased that would allow the Viaduct to stay up during construction of a tunnel,” the Center’s policy director Bruce Agnew recalled.

This proved a significant tipping point, particularly among business and maritime interests who feared major disruption if the Viaduct would have to come down before any kind of waterfront highway, including the tunnel, could be built.

“Bruce was a very good salesman,” recalled Moon. “He brought in [to stakeholder meetings] the world’s biggest tunneling experts, who were very convincing in making that case.”

The experts apparently impressed the MIC, which in mid-December 2008 dispatched a letter to Gregoire that read in part, “It appears the deep-bore tunnel might provide adequate through-capacity both during construction and upon completion, because of the potential to preserve the existing SR 99/I-5 corridor while the tunnel is being built.”

Still, Councilmember O’Brien, a stakeholder at

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the time, stressed that “there was never a group recommendation that came forward” following months of discussion by the advisory committee. “The closest thing to a recommendation was the letter.” O’Brien is referring to a December 18 letter, revised several times, that was sent to Gov. Gregoire, Nickels, and Sims. It stated: “After considerable analysis, input, and consultation with our constituencies, we recommend & conclude the following: Move forward with an Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement Plan that includes improvements to I-5, transit, surface streets, and potential for construction of a deep-bore tunnel. These improvements should move forward as soon as possible to mitigate removal of the Viaduct.”

The letter was signed by seven members of the advisory committee: Mary McCumber of Futurewise; Rob Sexton of the Downtown Seattle Association; David Freiboth, executive director of the King County Labor Council; Rob Johnson of the Transportation Choices Coalition; Washburn of the Seattle Chamber; O’Brien of the Sierra Club; and Moon.

In retrospect, says Moon, “We should have been firmer in support of the surface street. They [the governor’s office] took this letter as a sign of capitulation, that somehow there was unanimous agreement [for a tunnel].”

Freiboth sharply disagrees. “No, that was not my interpretation of the letter. What we were saying, and it was a consensus [among the 29 stakeholders], was that if the tunnel was not feasible, then, OK, go ahead with the surface street.

Everyone agreed we’d had enough discussion. It was time [for the governor] to make a decision.”

The longtime labor leader adds, “For me, the a-ha moment came when we were given a presentation by Gehl [Architects], out of Copenhagen, who said that when you take down the Viaduct and dump 40,000 cars on the streets, you are going to have a very adverse and disruptive impact on mobility. I know that [finding] came much to the consternation of O’Brien and Cary Moon.”

approaching. On the phone was Grace Crunican, then director of Seattle Department of Transportation; King County Transportation director Harold Taniguchi; and WSDOT’s David Dye. “We were all trying to reach closure and we’d worked up two options, the tunnel and the surface street,” Crunican, now general manager of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), told the Weekly in a recent phone interview from San Francisco.

“The governor asked me if I thought the surface option would work, and I said, ‘Yes, it would work to my satisfaction,’ ” Crunican recalled. “I don’t recall her being that enamored with the surface option.”

Taniguchi, long a supporter of some version of a surface-street, transit-laden alternative, corroborated Crunican’s account of the conference call. “I also said to her [Gregoire] that I was comfortable with the surface option, and I know [Ron] Sims was too.”

Washburn concedes that Boeing and Microsoft, in particular, pressed their case for the tunnel with Gov. Gregoire. “Certainly, they had an interest for obvious reasons, being able to move their product and their people.’ But Washburn stressed that any pressure that they, or the Chamber, exerted was no more aggressive than anyone else’s.

“No,” counters Moon, “their voice was always louder than ours.”

“Put yourself in her shoes,” Washburn continues, referring to the ex-governor. “We [the stakeholders] were simply an advisory group.

Once we were done, we moved the ball to the political court and she was just trying to identify a viable path.”

On why Gregoire chose the tunnel, labor chief Freiboth says, “The discussion had to end.

We were being held up as a community that could not make a decision. You know, the Seattle Process.” He points to the long and anguished debate over whether to expand Seattle’s monorail and how repeated votes on that ill-fated endeavor prompted national headlines that Emerald City residents were veritable Hamlets when it came to making up their mind. “But I think what it finally came down to was she felt she could make it fit in the budget.”

Despite the troubles, Washburn remains a tunnel enthusiast. “Like most projects, stuff comes up along the way. But my views have not changed.”

Nor has City Councilmember Tim Burgess had second thoughts. “The opponents of this project will grasp at any hiccup that arises and will continue to do so from now until the ribbon is cut,” he says.

But like many others, Moon isn’t so sure any tunnel-christening ribbons will be cut. “I don’t think our politicians realize what a disaster this is,” Moon says quietly earlier this month over a cup of green tea at a Lower Queen Anne cafe.

“After 2009 [when Gregoire made the decision to build the tunnel], I thought it was a lost cause.

Now, who knows? Maybe not.”

Nonetheless, Moon has moved on. She says she’d like to start another urban advocacy group, and that she has begun to feel out the possibility with others. “I want to try and see if we can’t be a middle-income community, where we have affordable housing and open spaces, and we keep industrial and manufacturing jobs in Seattle, so we don’t become another San Francisco.”

She confides then, “You know, I sort of liked the Viaduct, until the earthquake. I sort of thought it was the last bit of grittiness in Seattle.”

As to the future, Moon says, “We need another plan if we have to close the Viaduct for safety reasons. Instead of arguing, let’s find a way to make a surface street work.” E

13

food&drink

Takin’ It to the Streets

FoodNews

BY JASON PRICE

Nue serves tasty twists on global street-food favorites.

Food trucks have been woven into the fabric of Seattle culture over the past several years. And so it stands to reason that food truck “pods” should start popping up around town. Ballard will be the first recipient: Steve Katsandres, former owner of Bad Albert’s Tap and Grill, will work with his partners to transform a vacant lot at 1502 N.W. 50th St. into a beer garden and food-truck park called Ballard Bites and Brews by this upcoming April. The venue will also feature drive-thru espresso and a stage for live music.

BY NICOLE SPRINKLE

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Momofuku alumnus Christopher Yang’s Chinese Laundry @ Bellini pop-up is scheduled for Monday, March 2. He promises “flavor bombs” in the form of General Tso’s sweetbreads, lion’s-head meatball, and scorched rice. This is the third in a three-part series, so it’s your last chance to go home a winner. But at $35 all-in for a five-course meal, you are already a winner—if you get tickets, which are limited.

PHOTOS BY MORGEN SCHULER

Top: Nue’s cozy, eclectic interior.

Bottom left: chicken yakitori. Bottom right: prawn laksa.

Ballard Avenue haunt Percy’s and Co.’s “Shuck It!” happy hour includes local crustaceans from Taylor Shellfish for only $1 apiece from 4 to 8 p.m.

Bonus: The team also serves $6 shots of Jameson with half-priced bottles of wine from 4 to 6 p.m. E morningfoodnews@gmail.com

TheWeeklyDish

Stateside’s exotic fruit plate.

BY NICOLE SPRINKLE

old daughter’s favorite dish.) South African bunny chow comes served atop lightly toasted slices of Pullman bread that hold up under the heaping mound of shredded chicken breast cooked with Indian masala, lime, and cilantro.

The meat yields an almost stew-like affect that in some wondrous way manages to taste like both curry and barbecue. Ripping at the bread with your fingers and using it to “spoon” up the meat certainly screams messy, on-the-fly street food.

The grilled jerk pig tails, unfortunately, were almost all fat. The waitress (who happens to be the owner’s wife) told us that fat content varies wildly from pig to pig. I believe her, but there needs to be a check in place to make sure that they’re not serving ones as inedible as ours.

Spicy Korean jumbo chicken wings really were gigantic; they ask for the largest possible, apparently. More important, though, they’re glazed with garlic, ginger, sesame, scallion, and a spicy gojujang (a Korean fermented soybean, red chili, and rice sauce) that brings delightful heat and requires wet-wipes to clean your hands after eating, as well they should. I can’t decide if these or

the tasty ones at Tray Kitchen are superior. I’ll keep eating both until I reach a verdict, which could take, you know, forever.

We cooled it all down with a composed Vietnamese spinach & herb salad, which, while not resembling street food, reminded me of those papaya/peanut/fish sauce salads in a cup you get on the street in Vietnam and Thailand. There isn’t any papaya, but the leaves are dressed with shiso, basil, peanuts, nuoc cham dressing, candied shrimp, sawtooth (similar to cilantro), and rau ram (Vietnamese coriander). It isn’t spicy, but the intersection of all of those ingredients, surprisingly, works—the pungent tempered with the subtle. It’s a haiku of a dish, straightforward yet mysterious.

Speaking of all those herbs and sauces, it’s commendable how Nue really takes the time to source authentic, harder-to-find ingredients. It makes reading the menu challenging, but the staff is more than happy to answer any questions.

A prawn laksa, a spicy noodle soup found mostly in Malaysia, is given a southern Indian spin via a thicker peanut and coconut curry treat-

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 15

COURTESY OF STATESIDE

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

W

hen Chris Cvetkovich announced that he would open a street-food-inspired restaurant, the buzz was palpable.

He shared an early working menu with me then, in October—one that he and his chef, Chris Godwin of the Fat Duck in London and The Salish Lodge in Snoqualmie, were still tweaking.

I eagerly gobbled it up, writing an excited, likely far-too-early preview for the new place that would be called Nue. Talk of Romanian mititei, Indonesian curry sandwiches, and even some modernist-technique items—like compressed fruit inspired by the ultra-fresh, beautifully cut chilled fruit found on the streets in countries like Malaysia—seemed an exciting antidote to a food writer’s occasional palate fatigue.

By the time I made the trip to the Capitol Hill restaurant a couple weeks ago, I was still hopeful, but also knew that this could get ugly.

My biggest concern was that taking dishes from so many places around the world, with so many flavor profiles, could result in a cacophonous assault on the taste buds. But as I discovered, Nue has avoided this potential pitfall—in part by incorporating Asian flavors on almost half of the menu, with a focus on Vietnam, Japan, and Korea.

So when Barbadian pig tails or Latvian smoked sprats are thrown into the mix, it’s more a welcome departure than a global war on the tongue.

Also helpful: the relatively small size of the plates (with perfect price points generally in the $7–$12 range). They are, however, easy for two to share generously. You’d be smart to curate your choices and ask to have them brought in an order that makes sense to you. On our first visit, almost everything (five dishes) arrived at once, which is hardly ideal. The second time around we called the shots, and the experience was far better.

Nue’s small interior holds three communal tables and a few seats at a back bar, and the cratelike shelves that make up the main wall— garnished with papier-mâché dragons, cans of Thai fruits and other exotic foodstuffs, bottles of cheap foreign beers, and tattered Lonely Planet guides—give off an Asian food-stall vibe. A large painted mural of a pig and a goat drinking together, labeled respectively as “hungry” and “horny,” are whimsical and kind of out of left field, yet feel at home among the rest of the pitch-perfect kitsch.

However, there’s nothing kitschy about the food. The big flavors found here are spot-on, and their balance, as well as the textures, are actually quite complex, in the way that the best street food can be. A bite of the chunky Japanese yakitori chicken thigh—grilled, bone-in (no street-style skewer)—encompasses the sweet teriyaki-style sauce, the “kewpie” mayo (a creamy Japanese mayo made with rice vinegar instead of distilled vinegar), the thin strips of nori, and the julienned pickled ginger, and is one of the most beguiling I’ve had in a very long time. (It’s also my 7-year-

Here’s a dessert that manages to be both exotic and delicious: The fruit plate at the recently opened French-Vietnamese Stateside on Capitol Hill offers a chance to experience many of those funky Asian fruits you see at Uwajimaya but are possibly too intimidated to try. Served on a bed of ice are rambutans popping from their spiky shells; fleshy chunks of jackfruit; slices of fuchsia-skinned dragonfruit; wedges of grapefruit-like pomelo; and spheres of longan (similar to lychees). It’s served with jasmine ice cream enhanced by lemon balm and orange bergamot. Despite being a light dessert, there’s a lot of it, so two should share easily. E

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» FROM PAGE 14 ment, but the galangal (think ginger and eucalyptus), sambal (a vinegary chili-based sauce with notes of fish and shrimp paste), and duan kesom (Vietnamese mint) keep it true to its origins.

Romanian mititei was fine if not memorable, the grilled pork sausages enlivened by two dipping sauces: a horseradish mustard and ajvar, made from smoky eggplant and red peppers.

Most impressive on this plate were the pickles, which achieve a cooling, milder bite than your average pickle while managing not to taste like an underbrined cucumber. I’d buy these by the jar. Likewise, the Indian spinach pakora were entirely reputable, though not what I’d seek here.

However, their ability to keep the chickpea filling moist deserves mention.

After two visits, I have yet to explore Trinidad (goat curry), Latvia (sprats), the Caribbean (the cubano sandwich) or Hungary (paprikash), though of course I have every intention to.

I’ve also tried Nue’s single dessert item— liquid-nitrogen ice cream, a nod to their love of Modernist cuisine—only once, but found the infusion of shiso honey rather lackluster.

Had it not been dinner, I would have gone for the Vietnamese-coffee version. (They plan to change up flavors regularly.)

Finally, while I’ve grown weary of imbibing and

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SE ATTLE WEEKLY • FE BRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

describing six-ingredient craft cocktails, Nue surprised me with a drink menu worth mentioning.

On a whim, I ordered the “Little Diddy ’bout Jack and Siam” (cue cheesy laugh track), curious about a cocktail described as “chilled Chardonnay, jackfruit, Thai chili, basil.” I’m a fan of jackfruit’s earthy, soapy, ever-so-slightly-sweet, pineapplegone-bad flavor. It’s definitely what you’d call an acquired taste, but it’s not in fact related to the stinky durian that it resembles. In this preparation, several chunks of the meaty fruit, soaked in alcohol for hours, float in a slightly sweet chardonnay and get a spicy blast from the chili pepper and an herbal note from the basil.

I fell in love with this inimitable drink. I had two, and talked about it to whomever would listen the following week. Throughout the day before my second visit, I spent more than a few minutes fantasizing about it. Then, crushingly, they told me they were out. I think I gasped. The server explained that they hadn’t soaked the jackfruit in time, which I’ll chalk up to new opening kinks rather than laziness. Apparently, other customers also asked for it that night, which I hope bodes well for this unusual but bewitching cocktail.

With or without it, Nue, with its shabby charm and killer food, is going to be just fine—as long as they continue to surprise us with their unique takes on favorite street fare and execute them as well as they have to date. Street food is in danger of becoming a cliché, it’s true, but this exciting new restaurant reminds us why it’s so utterly addictive. E

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ou can usually fill a medium-sized dictionary with the words used to describe wines, especially if you really like obscure fruits and types of bedrock. Yet recently, Washington winemakers have been using one term with increasing frequency.

That word is balance, and it was everywhere at the “Walla Walla Wine” event held last week in Seattle.

Whereas for years

BY ZACH GEBALLE winemakers described their reds with words like “big,” “powerful,” “rich,” and “opulent,” the clear trend now is toward well-balanced wines. So what’s up with that?

In the Washington wine industry’s early years, grape growers and winemakers sought the warmest parts of eastern Washington for their vineyards. It makes sense: You need sun and warmth to ripen grapes, and since lots of smart people doubted you could even make wine here, there was no reason to take additional risks with cooler sites. Consequently, many early Washington wines were made from very ripe grapes, which gives you big, bold wine. Given that the American palate was at that time largely dictated

by California wines in general and Napa in particular, loads of flavor, color, and alcohol became the norm. Sales grew, hundreds of wineries opened, and a style was established.

Predictably, there was a backlash. Big wines may do well at tastings, in magazines, or by themselves, but they tend to be hard to pair with food. All that alcohol can be a problem, and many of them don’t age as well as you’d like. A second wave of winemakers, who modeled their wines less on Napa and more on Europe, came to value slightly cooler sites, higher acidity, and that ephemeral concept, “balance.”

Granted, part of the popularity of balance is that who wouldn’t want a balanced wine? Like a lot of words put on wine labels and in descriptions, it exists less as an accurate reflection of what’s in a bottle and more as a sales pitch. Yet it also explains an important concept in winemaking: the idea that a wine’s various elements— fruitiness, acidity, tannins, minerality, alcohol— should be harmonious and complementary instead of one or two of them being prominent.

So what does that mean going forward? Well, that our state’s industry is maturing. Much as most of us stop loving super-sugary food and drink as we get older (seriously, can you imagine enjoying Pixy Stix now?), our tastes tend to evolve away from the intensely flavorful wines of our youth. We’re also doing a vastly better job of understanding what grapes to plant where. Some do in fact need all that warmth to fully ripen (think cabernet franc or petit verdot), while others actually thrive in slightly cooler environs (syrah, say).

Finally, winemakers better understand and respect wine’s place as a part of a meal, and how more balanced wines become more versatile at the table.

Balance is here to stay, and while just putting it on a label or mentioning it in a tasting room doesn’t make it true, it’s a positive and exciting direction for our state to be heading. Now if only we could get brewers on board . . . E

THEBARCODE

thebarcode@seattleweekly.com

arts&culture

ThisWeek’s PickList

Steve & Bri Bitch About the Oscars, Vol. II

FRIDAY, FEB. 20

David Axelrod

The glamour! The gowns! The injustice of it all!

Again our two Oscarologists share their gripes and grievances.

BY STEVE WIECKING AND BRIAN MILLER Editor’s Note: In advance of Sunday’s telecast, former SW theater critic Steve Wiecking, now based in L.A., again joins his former colleague in assessing this year’s Academy Awards hype and hysteria.

Left: Redmayne with ALS; right: Moore with Alzheimer’s.

SW There were exceptions. Steve Carell borrowed Nicole Kidman’s nose from The Hours and went all Peter Sellers with his bad self for some stellar crazy, don’t you think? My question for you: How many people were actually awake watching that film? And back to gay—did you think Carell’s character was literally humping Channing Tatum on the wrestling mat? Because it divided the house I saw it with.

BRM Yes, dry humping, then emission in his wrestling pants, which Tatum’s jock registers with equal parts disgust and sympathy. I thought Tatum was good, though he didn’t make the cut in the Supporting pack, where the races are always super-stacked and competitive. I have no problem with J.K. Simmons (Whiplash) and Patricia Arquette (Boyhood), both guaranteed to win. Yet both those wins will seem institutional—rewarding long careers in the trenches.

Where’s the ingénue or fresh face this year? Or has Anne Hathaway spoiled that notion forever?

SW Hathaway has spoiled every notion she’s touched forever. I haven’t been so annoyed at having to call someone an Oscar winner since the days of Mira Sorvino. I wouldn’t be surprised or disappointed if Stone sneaks in an underdog win for Birdman, though. You know what fresh face got robbed? Miles Teller. That kid was better than Simmons in Whiplash. And while we’re at it, please explain how David Oyelowo got left out.

BRM Too many Brits (Redmayne, Cumberbatch) already in the top five. I honestly believe the Academy has a secret quota system, the way the Ivy League used to keep out the Jews.

But if we can talk about Original Song, those

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 18

1119 Eighth Ave., 652-4255, townhallseattle.org. $38.05 (incudes book, admits two). 7:30 p.m.

BRIAN MILLER

GoodFellas

De Niro as the ice-cold Jimmy.

Martin Scorsese’s violent, funny 1990 mob opus is oddly running as part of a noir series (The Maltese Falcon, playing concurrently, is a better fit), but let’s not quibble about the categories.

As we learn from the perspective of apprentice mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), the source for Nicholas Pileggi’s nonfiction source book, the Irish hoodlum Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) can never be a made man, unlike the volatile Sicilian-blooded Tommy ( Joe Pesci). Perhaps because of this ethnic exclusion, Jimmy is one

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • FE BRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

Julianne does wrecked grace better than anyone.

But, yeah, getting sick, ugly, or crazy is still “Bingo!”

BRM I’m not saying that being gay is a handicap, but Benedict Cumberbatch going homo in The Imitation Game seemed dull and routine.

Basically he was an emasculated, sexless Rain Man, a high-functioning Asperger’s case who helped win WWII. There was more gay content in The Interview, if you ask me.

SW Ha! Oh, yeah, there’s an unappetizing Rogen/Franco sex tape somewhere, I’m sure, and we’ll see it once James finishes tweeting photos of himself hitting the boy bars with Zachary Quinto. Live long and prosper, Spock, you lucky bastard. As for Cumberbottom, neither he nor Imitation Game really went gay, which is why neither deserved a nomination. That film had decades of can’t-miss controversy as source material, but scrubbed it of all outrage. I’m glad people now know who Alan Turing is, but the most affecting part of that film was the written epitaph at the end which finally explained why we should care.

BRM Yes, the postscript about his suicide was a dagger in the heart: another war hero, not unlike like American Sniper’s, killed by our uncaring culture. (Though “today we call them computers” was awfully clunky.) But I refuse to believe that Turing and all those Oxbridge dudes, confined for years together in the barracks, didn’t have some same-sex fun. This movie’s Turing, like so many of the Best Actress/Actor nominees, was too recessive—everyone’s so pent-up and constricted. Only Keaton (in Birdman) and Reese Witherspoon (in Wild ) were any fun. The rest were a noble, suffering snooze. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned c-c-c-razy?

WARNER BROS.

LIAM DANIEL/FOCUS FEATURES

LINDA KALLERUS/SONY PICTURES CLASSICS

Brian Miller The old adage is that the Oscars are the Super Bowl for people who don’t watch sports. But you know what? I watched exactly one football game this past season (the Super Bowl, obvs), and I say bring on more Katy Perry and her dancing sharks! Also Kanye West to pull a Grammy and startle some poor sound editor by yanking away his award for Beyoncé’s sake.

NPH seems too tasteful and sedate a host for our culture—someone your mom would like. Can’t we have more of a rowdy, populist, tailgate-andfacepaint Oscars for once?

Steve Wiecking I’m down with Neil. It’s the only thing he really does well, and I’m happy for him. The guy spent nine seasons on How I Met Your Mother trying to convince us he was a pussy hound. You want facepaint, watch the SAG awards. Emma Stone looked like the kid from Powder, and Michael Keaton was sprayed orange. I know you’re a frontrunner for an Oscar, but, geez, Mike, let’s keep the gold on the statue.

Speaking of which, are we really down to him (in Birdman) and Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything) for Best Actor, or is all the lastminute American Sniper hype happening here in Hollywood going to pull a Bradley Cooper surprise on us? You know how they like to sneak in an Adrien Brody every now and then.

BRM Cooper does die, which usually helps one’s awards prospects, but only off-camera.

Brody was the hero of a Holocaust movie. And pacifist Academy members vote blue, not red.

Sniper’s victory is at the box office: $250 million and counting. But on that subject, will anyone have the guts to call out that movie for its insane hard-on for guns? We can honor our troops and care about PTSD, sure, but the terrible irony to that picture is overwhelming: Traumatized gun nut kills traumatized gun nut in the end. So maybe it’s the guns at home, not the wars abroad, that are the real problem? Is Clint Eastwood smarter and more subversive than we give credit?

SW Eastwood is at home talking to a giant invisible rabbit, Brian. And showing it Play Misty for Me. BRM For me, in the top-tier acting derbies, this is another disappointing Year of Affliction.

Redmayne with ALS. Julianne Moore with Alzheimer’s (in Still Alice). Do these talented performers really sign up for such parts with Oscars in mind, or is just their handlers who steer them to malady movies?

SW I think actors and agents are in collusion on that one. To be fair, Redmayne and Moore did give the best performances in their respective categories—Redmayne transformed himself, and

You know that the 2016 presidential campaign has begun when consultants from the last two go-rounds begin publishing their tell-alls. (Partly the motive is learn-from-my-advice, and partly fishing for a job.) Such is the case for journalistturned-consultant Axelrod, who famously helped send an unknown Illinois state legislator first to the U.S. Senate and then to the White House.

Back in Chicago now, Axelrod has plenty of friendly, intimate tales about Barack Obama in Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (Penguin Random House), though I think it’s the future lessons that’ll draw most voters to hear him speak. Washington state will tip blue no matter who tops the ticket (likely Hillary), but how can that candidate beat the insurgent red tide? Does Axe have any pertinent advice to offer for the next election? (Former KUOW host Steve Scher has the onstage job tonight of eliciting his wisdom.) Believer lauds the power of idealism and ideological purity: Obama beat Clinton in ’08 because he seemed more pure; he’d voted against the Iraq War, which she supported. And there were more strikes and scandals associated with her (shared) name during the ’90s—Whitewater and Troopergate, etc. Obama was by contrast a blank slate, maybe the last time we’ll ever see such an unsullied résumé glide into the Oval Office. A gifted writer (like his pupil), Axelrod is all about the message—what we in journalism call the sell copy. But the purity of the message must eventually give way to the dirty business of governing, and that will be the next great challenge for the leader of Axelrod’s party. Town Hall,

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 18 17

Europe’s Pending Catastrophe (2/5) David Linden Unraveling the Science of Touch

arts&culture»

(2/10) Seattle Arts & Lectures: An Evening with Sheri Fink

» FROM PAGE 17

(2/10) Loretta Napoleoni The Islamic State, ‘Redrawing the Middle East’ (2/12) Seattle Architecture Foundation presents Cultural Landscapes Building a Narrative with Seattle (2/13) Early Music Guild: Northwest Baroque Masterworks Handel’s ‘Theodora’ (2/13) Kekuhi and Kaumakaiwa Kanaka’ole Hula: Our World Consciousness

Global Rhythms Valentine’s Day Special Hawaiian Music with

KEKUHI AND KAUMAKAIWA KANAKA’OLE and a

Succulent Traditional Hawaiian Feast 4301 Leary Way NW Seattle 98107 Fremont / Ballard

www.HalesBrewery.com (2/15) Thalia Symphony Orchestra: The Virtuoso Violin

Locally owned since 1983 (2/15) Simple Measures: Messiaen Around with Time TOWN HALL

(2/16) Christian Appy Vietnam’s Lasting Legacy CIVICS SCIENCE ARTS & CULTURE COMMUNITY

(2/18) Tom Davis & Martin Frost Two Former Representatives’ Plan to Fix Congress (2/18) Ignite! Seattle Enlighten us, but make it quick

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

(2/19) Jane Charles, Nature Carter, and Peter Qualliotine Human Trafficking in Seattle and Abroad

18

(2/20) Jonathan Moreno The Father of Psychodrama (2/20) University Book Store: David Axelrod with Steve Scher (2/21) Saturday Family Concerts The Pop Ups (2/22) Urban Poverty Forum The New Debt (2/23) Start School Later, Let Teens Sleep Maida Lynn Chen, Catherine Darley, and Wendy Sue Swanson (2/25) Women’s Funding Alliance Kathy LeMay & Jacki Zehner Leading with Philanthropy TOWN HALL

CIVICS

SCIENCE

ARTS & CULTURE

COMMUNITY

(2/26) Gary Wenk How Food Affects the Brain WWW.TOWNHALLSEATTLE.ORG (2/27) LUCO presents Park, Mendelssohn, & Sibelius (2/28) PSSO presents

will presumably be performed by the nominees (Common, John Legend, etc.). But poor Glen Campbell has been locked away in a memory ward with Alzheimer’s since completing the doc Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me. Does that mean that he, like Moore, will win?

SW No, and If that awesome Selma song “Glory” doesn’t take the award, you’ll get your Kanye moment.

BRM Another detour: The memorial reel for those Hollywood luminaries who died during 2014, Philip Seymour Hoffman perhaps being the most prominent. Is it wrong that this is my favorite part of the show? I feel like it’s the only time the Academy thinks about history and posterity: Look, Clooney and Jolie: this, too, will be your dusty fate. And who will you mourn the most?

Harold Ramis hit me hard. Especially with another Ghostbusters coming this year.

SW Oh, that’s always the best part. When they do it right, I’m in tears. I miss James Garner—great actor, good liberal. But on a more cheerful note, what about the ads for the studios’ big forthcoming movies? I want to see teasers for all 18 movies Tom Hardy has coming out. That guy works as much as Franco, but he can actually act. And you?

BRM I want to see promos for the next Star Wars, Mad Max: Thunder Road, and the Point Break remake. (No more Judi Dench movies, please, unless she gets blown up in the Australian outback or a distant galaxy.) But let’s consider the serious nominees now. First, Best Director. Bennett Miller (Foxcatcher) and Morten Tyldum (Imitation Game) do not belong in the Group of Five. Boring, well-crafted movies, both of them. But Alejandro González Iñárritu for Birdman? That guy did some work. Deserves to win, will win, or do you differ?

SW I really want Linklater to win for Boyhood. But, yes, Iñárritu pulled off a true technical feat—hammy, to be sure, but loose and risky. He might pull an upset, and I wouldn’t be upset.

BRM Best Picture: I am so torn. I loved Boyhood for its 12-year humanistic commitment to craft, family, process, and the small-but-enormous moments we experience in quotidian life but have never been presented so artfully. Linklater is one of those filmmakers I’ve met several times and admire tremendously: a first-class dude. And I am forced to admit that Grand Budapest Hotel, though twee, is a great movie (or a great movie-in-a-bottle is more like it). But for me Birdman takes it: weird, watchable, human, unpredictable, and a technical marvel. Boyhood made me wet in the eyes, but it was a camera-on-the-tripod experience.

SW Birdman was a director’s film, and I liked it, but Boyhood was the one that really flew for me. Anytime someone tells me that nothing happened in Boyhood, they go down a notch in my estimation. It’s like someone adoring Love, Actually. But enough about love—what Oscar omissions stir your righteous indignation, Brian?

BRM Those Belgian bastards who didn’t submit Two Days, One Night from the Dardenne brothers. Why, apart from cinema and cyclocross, does that country even exist? They should drop the “be” from Benelux. But so far as Oscar spectacle is concerned (again, I’m of the more-isbetter camp), what award would you like to see added to the interminable evening?

SW The Tom Cruise Award for Most Convincing Run From an Explosion. There are dozens of such scenes every year, but Cruise is still the master. E bmiller@seattleweekly.com

Camera coitus?

Hemmings and Veruschka in Blow-Up.

MGM/UA

(2/8) Elliott Bay Book Company: Nick Hornby

» FROM PAGE 17 cold bastard. After his crew makes a huge score with an airport robbery, the other mooks start buying cars and minks. To protect their secret (and enlarge his share), Jimmy starts killing off his old compadres without compunction.

Henry can’t believe it—Is there no honor among thieves?—and soon becomes a target himself.

The closer Henry gets to his old mentor and the center of the mob, the more he apprehends the danger in what seemed such a glamorous, loyal fraternity. Jimmy’s credo goes like this: “Never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut.” And if you cross him, he’ll kill you. Yet Conway has his sentimental streak—GoodFellas is one of the rare films in which De Niro cries— though Pesci’s sociopath doesn’t deserve his tears.

(Through Mon.) Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $7–$9. 9:30 p.m.

BRIAN MILLER

SATURDAY, FEB. 21

Semele

Handel’s 1743 opera Semele—based on the myth of a mortal seduced by Jupiter,who pays a price when she ambitiously asks to see the god in his full splendor—is proving catnip to Seattle Opera’s creative team. Tomer Zvulun’s production promises “a goddess with winged heels and fingertips that shoot lasers, a god whose vast cloak shines with all the constellations of the night sky, and a nymph emerging from a giant clamshell.” There’ll be vocal fireworks, too, with Stephanie Blythe taking the role of Juno; an incomparable Fricka in SO’s Ring cycles, she pretty much nails the jealous-goddess thing.

Gary Thor Wedow conducts; sung in English with English supertitles. (Through March 7.)

McCaw Hall, 321 Mercer St. (Seattle Center), 389-7676, seattleopera.org. $25 and up. 7:30 p.m.

GAVIN BORCHERT

Terminal: On Mortality and Beauty

February is the cruelest month. With such an early spring (or an absence of winter), the trees budding and flowers blossoming, it’s hard to think about death—yet here it is, staring us in the face. The morbid subject of this group show unites disparate photographers including Sylvia Plachy, Joel-Peter Witkin, David Wojnarowicz, and (closer to home) Robert Adams and Isaac Layman. There are no dead bodies (though one mummy), yet images of illness and decay abound.

Animal carcasses prove irresistible subjects, and

Catherine Chalmers actually creates some interesting scenes with dead cockroaches. (Eeew!)

Corpses being static, early photography—when exposures took minutes, not seconds—often memorialized the dead. Here, in this contemporary selection of 16 postwar artists and 43 images, death is more conceptual than personal.

Old dogs, taxidermy animals, and even the tinfoil remnants from some cooked salmon—this courtesy of Seattle artist Layman—make one think about our animal kinship with the natural world.

Our furry and feathered cousins are interred with less respect (see Richard Misrach’s desert burial pit), though how we treat their remains—or photograph them—here seems a kind of rehearsal for human rites. (Through April 4.). Photo Cen-

ter NW, 900 12th Ave., 720-7222, pcnw.org. Free.

Noon–9 p.m. BRIAN MILLER TUESDAY, FEB. 24

Blowing Up Cinema: The Art of Michelangelo Antonioni

Northwest Film Forum is co-presenting this five-film retrospective, running Tuesday nights through March 24. Beginning the series is BlowUp (1966), Antonioni’s first film in English.

Apart from the accessibility of the language, what made it a huge international hit was its crystalization of diffuse mid-’60s moods: free love and sexual liberation (e.g., the famous photo session with David Hemmings and Veruschka), rock and roll (cue the Yardbirds), Carnaby Street fashions (enter Vanessa Redgrave), and the youthful suspicion that a crime was being committed by an older generation, yet no one was being held to account. That latter point is essentially the Vietnam War, which supplies the implicit political context as Thomas (Hemmings) tries to investigate a crime he thinks he inadvertently captured in a park photo. Did the murder even happen? Does it even exist if there’s no witness, no documentation? Blow-Up has its epistemological component, with echoes of L’Avventura, though this quest for truth is more a trip to the funhouse. Thomas steps into a hall of mirrors where nothing is what it seems. If earlier works by Antonioni (1912–2007) were more starkly existential, Blow-Up has an almost playful, riddling quality. Like that famous tennis ball, Thomas bounces along, propelled by forces beyond his ken, until he finally enters the mystery of modern life. Following titles in the series are La Notte, L’eclisse, Red Desert, and The Passenger.

Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 267-5380, nwfilmforum.org. $8–$12 individual, $35–$54 series. 7:30 p.m. BRIAN MILLER E

KYLE ABRAHAM

Performance

Opening Nights Carousel 5TH AVENUE THEATRE, 1308 FIFTH AVE., 625-1900. $29 AND UP. RUNS TUES.–SUN; SEE 5THAVENUE.ORG FOR EXACT SCHEDULE. ENDS MARCH 1.

With its tricky mix of kitchen-sink realism, cornpone Americana, and supernatural fantasy—and not an overabundance of likable characters—what this 1945 musical needs to stay buoyant is air, light, poetry, and a dash of sea spray; it needs to cast a spell. The 5th Avenue’s new staging of the Rodgers and Hammerstein show does this in one scene: the Act 2 dance sequence featuring Spectrum Dance Theater, led by Madelyn Koch’s luminous Louise (suddenly, from her first gesture, you feel you’re outdoors) and enlivened by the reappearance of the louche carnival troupe from the show’s opening number. (Imagine the “unconventional conventionists” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show dressed up for a go at Cabaret.)

accent when they sing, anyway, so I would say, on the whole, don’t bother. There are other ways to make the coast of Maine come to life— which this production needs to come up to the 5th’s usual standard as a company whose valuable strength is to make a case for great-butneglected musicals more often honored than actually staged. GAVIN BORCHERT

abrahaM.In.MoTIon

PThe Dog of the South CENTER THEATRE AT THE ARMORY, SEATTLE CENTER, 216-0833. $25.

RUNS WED.–SUN.; SEE BOOK-IT.ORG FOR EXACT SCHEDULE. ENDS MARCH 8.

Currently celebrating its silver-jubilee season, Book-It Repertory Theatre has a simple yet formidable mission: “transforming great literature into great theater.” Is Charles Portis’ 1979 novel The Dog of the South great literature? (He’s best known for True Grit, twice adapted to film.) I can’t say, not having read the book, but Judd Parkin’s adaptation makes for a classic road-trip story—self-discovery mixed with self-effacing comedy.

We are placed immediately into the predicament facing Ray Midge (Christopher Morson).

His wife Norma (Shannon Loys) has run off, ironically, with her ex-husband, Dupree

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O’Neill’s Billy Bigelow with Laura Griffith’s Julie.

( Joshua C. Williamson), who also happens to be Midge’s co-worker and childhood friend. A journalist and a student of history, Midge narrates these facts with a deadpan, dry tone, then puts his investigative skills to work and chases them. He isn’t after Norma, and he doesn’t care about Dupree; he just wants his beloved blue Ford Torino back. Eventually this quest will lead to British Honduras (now Belize).

En route, Midge visits historical sites of the Mexican Civil War, makes friends, starts fights, and maintains a healthy pill addiction. When he runs low on funds and high on loneliness, he helps Dr. Reo Symes ( Jim Gall), a hapless, money-grubbing ex-physician, after his school bus-turned-camper (christened “The Dog of the South”) breaks down. What ensues is a sort of comedy of errors, laced with magical realism.

Told in flashbacks as they’re enacted on stage, these picaresque vignettes are kept short and sweet. ( Jane Jones directs.)

A reclusive, still-living Arkansan who published his last novel in 1991, Portis was a ’60s newspaperman who counted Nora Ephron among his colleagues and admirers. The Coen brothers’ True Grit remake helped revive interest in his small canon, and SNL alumnus Bill

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 20

March 4 & 5

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SE ATTLE WEEKLY • FE BRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

One scene only, that is. Overall the production is fairly unenchanting, despite a cast of local favorites that would be very hard to surpass—Laura Griffith, Brandon O’Neill, Billie Wildrick, and Anne Allgood, to name just a few. But other details work against them.

That opening number, from director Bill Berry and choreographer Donald Byrd, is kind of a clustercuss; it’s hard to extract the mimed plot exposition from the razzle-dazzle. Martin Christoffel’s Our Town-y, bare-stage set seems designed for practicality and economy rather than atmosphere. And the sound system does no favors for the cast’s strong singing voices or for the pit orchestra, which was rendered shrill and coarse—most deflatingly, right from measure one, in the opening waltz, probably my favorite Rodgers number of them all.

It raised intelligibility issues with the dialogue, too, though the cast has to take some blame here. I don’t envy any actor who has to cope with a New England accent; if not kept well under control, they tend to veer off goodness knows where, to Britain, Brooklyn, or somewhere between the Carolinas. But not everyone makes the attempt; O’Neill, as an earthy Billy Bigelow, doesn’t, and it’s not in the least a drawback. Everyone abandons their

19

arts&culture» Performance » FROM PAGE 19

Stage

Hader recently optioned The Dog of the South.

There are hints of darker, deeper wisdom in this deftly created, whimsical production that may yet emerge onscreen. IRFAN SHARIFF

OPENINGS & EVENTS

The Explorers Club

ERIK STUHAUG

TAPROOT THEATRE, 204 N. 85TH ST., 781-9707, TAPROOTTHEATRE.ORG. $15–$40.

7:30 P.M. WED.–THURS., 8 P.M. FRI., 2 & 8 P.M. SAT. ENDS MARCH 7.

20

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SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

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Neddersen and Lass.

Victorian England makes me think of depressing Dickensian characters, somber tea ceremonies, and gloomy, sooty skies—not puerile men sipping spirits, smoking cigars, and behaving like characters in a Monty Python sketch. Taproot’s pleasing production of Nell Benjamin’s 2013 comedy is no stodgy period piece. Normally I am not a fan of farces, but The Explorers Club won me over.

In 1879 London, the asshat male adventurers of the Explorers Club argue about adding the assertive and attractive anthropologist Phyllida Spotte-Hume (Hana Lass) as their newest member—and, controversially, first woman. Though her credentials include finding the Lost City of Pahatlabong—represented by a gibberishspouting tribesman (Bill Johns) she’s dubbed “Luigi”—that discovery may also propel England into war. Thus we have jokes about British imperialism, domination of the Irish, and sexism.

Aside from Phyllida, these characters are as socially awkward as Amazon programmers.

Professor Walling (Rob Martin) drags around his dear “subject,” Jane the guinea pig, while Professor Cope (Solomon Davis) is eternally enveloped in his pet cobra. Harry Percy (Ryan Childers) arrives from a failed attempt to trace the East Pole. Yes, the East Pole.

Under the direction of Karen Lund, this even ensemble expertly executes goofy gags, even if the blocking is often problematic. Strikingly silly is their spontaneously singing a snippet from H.M.S. Pinafore. Lass’ stainless performance couples the spiritedness of Jane Eyre and the accomplishment of Margaret Mead. Johns’ antic, virile savage provides the perfect foil to the other putzy male characters. Conner Neddersen channels David Hyde Pierce as the timid Lucius, hopelessly in love with Phyllida.

This is not a posh production: The clubhouse is trimmed with taxidermy trophies, animal rugs, and African-print furniture that designer Mark Lund might’ve sourced at the bankruptcy sale of Joe and Teresa Giudice. Sarah Burch Gordon’s foppish period costumes help balance the overwhelming faux fur and contribute to the comedy. The science here is no sounder than that of the anti-vaccination crowd, but Benjamin is intent only on giggles in this gentle lampoon. ALYSSA DYKSTERHOUSE E

stage@seattleweekly.com

BLOOD/WATER/PAINT Live Girls! premieres Joy

McCullough-Carranza’s drama about baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Theatre Off Jackson, 409 Seventh Ave. S., 800-838-3006, lgtheater.org. $15–$22. Preview Feb. 19, opens Feb. 20. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat. plus Mon., March 9. Ends March 14.

CINDERELLA In this telling of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, Cinderella “is a contemporary figure . . . with savvy and soul who doesn’t let her rags or her gowns trip her up in her quest for kindness, compassion, and forgiveness.” The Paramount, 911 Pine St., 877-STG-4TIX, stgpresents.com. $25 and up. 7:30 p.m.

Tues., Feb. 24–Thurs., Feb. 26; 8 p.m. Fri., Feb. 27; 2 & 8 p.m. Sat., Feb. 28; 1 & 6:30 p.m. Sun., March 1.

DATE NIGHT WITH ERIN & TANNER Sketch comedy from Erin McSmith and Tanner Todgeson, partners in love and in comedy. The Rendezvous, 2322 Second Ave., jewelboxtheater.com. $10. 7 p.m. Thurs., Feb. 19.

DEAR EDITOR Letters to The Bainbridge Review from the ’40s through the ’70s—maybe yours?—become theater, charting the shifting culture of the island and of America. Bainbridge Public Library, 1270 Madison Ave. N., Bainbridge Island, 842-4162, islandtheatre.org. Free.

7:30 p.m. Sat., Feb. 21–Sun., Feb. 22.

FAMILY AFFAIR Jennifer Jasper’s “hilarious, twisted, and ultimately relatable” cabaret on the theme of family.

JewelBox Theater at the Rendezvous, 2322 Second Ave., jenniferjasperperforms.com. $10. 7:30 p.m. Wed., Feb. 18.

14/48 “The World’s Quickest Theater Festival” divides participants (tasked with writing and staging new plays from scratch within 48 hours) by age: artists under 35 the first weekend, over 35 the second. Cornish Playhouse, Seattle Center, the1448projects.org. $10–$20 (festival pass $60). Opens Feb. 20. 8 & 10:30 p.m. Fri.– Sat. Ends Feb. 28.

THE GOD OF HELL Sam Shepard’s dystopian drama pits Wisconsin farmers against malevolent corporate interests. (Are there any other kind?) Stone Soup Theatre, 4029 Stone Way N., 633-1883, stonesouptheatre.org. $15– $25. Previews Feb. 18–19, opens Feb. 20. 8 p.m. Thurs.– Sat. plus 4 p.m. Sun., March 1 & 8. Ends March 14.

GODSPELL Or, the Passion According to Stephen Schwartz. Presented by Twelfth Night Productions.

Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, 4408 Delridge Way S.W., 800-838-3006, brownpapertickets.com. Opens Feb. 20. 7:30 p.m. Fri.–Sat., 3 p.m. Sun. Ends March 1.

TOM GREEN Laugh your bum off with this Canuck comedian and ’90s survivor. Parlor Live Bellevue, 700 Bellevue Way N.E. #300, Bellevue, 425-289-7000, parlorlive.com. $25–$35. 7:30 & 10 p.m. Fri., Feb. 20–Sat., Feb. 21.

RICHARD MAXWELL Three denizens of a dive bar loop back and forth in time in The Evening, from the avantminimalist New York playwright. On the Boards, 100 W. Roy St., ontheboards.org. $23–$25. 8 p.m. Thurs., Feb. 19–Sat., Feb. 21, 5 p.m. Sun., Feb. 22.

NEXT TO NORMAL A “typical” American family is anything but because of the mother’s 16-year battle with manic depression. The musical won a Tony in New York and has its roots at Issaquah’s Village Theatre, where playwright/lyricist Brian Yorkey got his start.

SecondStory Rep, 16587 N.E. 74th St., Redmond, 425881-6777, secondstoryrep.org. $27. Opens Feb. 20. 8 p.m.

Thurs.–Sat. plus 2 p.m. Sun., March 15. Ends March 15.

OVUM SI’AHL Alycia Scott Zollinger asks us to contemplate where those eggs on our plate come from in this theatrical meditation on a chicken’s first year. Open Flight Studio, 4205 University Way N.E., 800-838-3006, brownpapetickets.com. $10. 7 p.m. Sun., Feb. 22.

SEATTLE FESTIVAL OF IMPROV THEATER Five nights and 31 groups (from as far as Italy). Performances at Jet City Improv, 5510 University Way N.E., and the SFIT Second Stage, 3940 Brooklyn Ave. N.E. Full info at seattle improv.com. $15–$18 (festival pass $60). 8 & 10:30 p.m.

Wed., Feb. 18–Sun., Feb. 22.

ARI SHAFFIR He hosts This Is Not Happening on Comedy Central and appears on Delivery. Parlor Live Seattle, 1522 Sixth Ave., 602-1441, parlorlive.com. $20–$30. 7:30 p.m.

Thurs., Feb. 19, 7:30 & 10 p.m. Fri., Feb. 20–Sat., Feb. 21.

VOYAGE FOR MADMEN Not Don Draper and company, but the voyage of Seattle’s ill-fated, real-life Ardeo Theatre Project. West of Lenin, 203 N. 36th St., the1448projects.org. $20. Preview Feb. 19, opens Feb. 20.

8 p.m. Fri.–Sat., plus 8 p.m. Mon., March 2 & 2 p.m. Sun., March 7. Ends March 7.

CURRENT RUNS

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS Five actors take

on a total of 39 roles in this madcap adaptation of Jules Verne’s adventure novel. Village Theatre, 303 Front St., Issaquah, 425-392-2202. $35–$67. Runs Wed.–Sun.; see villagetheatre.org for exact schedule. Ends March 1.

(Runs at the Everett PAC March 6–29.)

THE BLACK LODGE Design your own Twin Peaks

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SWEET CHARITY A dance-hall girl looks for love in this

classic. Seattle Musical Theatre at Magnuson Park, 7120 62nd Ave. N.E., Building 47, 800-838-3006, seattle musicaltheatre.org. $20–$35. 7:30 p.m. Fri.–Sat. plus Thurs., Feb. 26; 2 p.m. Sun. Ends March 1.

TEATRO ZINZANNI: THE HOT SPOT In TZ’s new show, “love and magic in the digital age collide.” Teatro ZinZanni, 222 Mercer St., 802-0015. $99 and up. Runs Thurs.–Sun. plus some Wed.; see zinzanni.com/seattle for exact schedule. Ends June 7.

TREASURE ISLAND A musical adaptation of Stevenson’s archetypal pirate adventure. 425-881-6777, second storyrep.org. $5–$10. 1 & 3 p.m. Sat.–Sun. Ends March 8.

ZAPOI! Quinn Armstrong’s imaginative fantasia on Soviet life. Annex Theatre, 1100 E. Pike St., 728-0933, annex theatre.org. $5–$20. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat. Ends Feb. 21.

Dance

DOUBLE VISION Tara Dyberg and Ashleigh Miller co-

present two evenings of dance, music, and projection storytelling. Velocity Dance Center, 1621 12th Ave. $15–$20. 8 p.m. Fri., Feb. 20–Sat., Feb. 21.

America's Greatest Big Band Show

“A meticulously researched recreation of the Swing Era Era” —Peter Donnelly, Australia

artbeatshows.org

Classical, Etc.

UW JAZZ INNOVATIONS Standards and originals from

student ensembles. Brechemin Auditorium, School of Music, UW campus, 685-8384, music.washington.edu. $5. 7:30 p.m. Wed., Feb. 18–Thurs., Feb. 19.

UW CHAMBER ORCHESTRA Music by Atterberg, Sibelius, and others; violinist Quinton Morris is the soloist. HUB Lyceum, UW campus, 685-8384, music. washington.edu. Free. 7:30 p.m. Thurs., Feb. 19.

JERUSALEM QUARTET Haydn, Bartok (his everunsettling Fourth Quartet), and Schubert. Meany Hall, UW campus, 543-4880, uwworldseries.org. $40–$45.

7:30 p.m. Thurs., Feb. 19.

BULL ROARCHESTRA Stuart Dempster’s bass drum/ hand bullroarer/didgeridoo ensemble performs in response to the installation Ann Hamilton: the common S E N S E. Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E., 543-2280, henryart.org. Free w/admission. 7 p.m. Fri. Feb. 20.

MARK STEINBACH Organ works TBA. St. Mark’s Cathedral, 1245 10th Ave. E., 685-8384, music.washington. edu. $15. 7:30 p.m. Fri., Feb. 20.

NORTHWEST SINFONIETTA Christophe Chagnard’s final performance as music director (the ensemble’s transitioning out of the single-leadership model) is devoted to Mozart overtures and arias. Benaroya Recital Hall, Third Ave. & Union St., 215-4747, nw sinfonietta.org. $20–$55. 7:30 p.m. Fri., Feb. 20.

UW ORCHESTRA Haydn and Mozart with soprano Cyndia Sieden. Meany Hall, UW campus, 543-4880, music. washington.edu. $10–$15. 7:30 p.m. Fri., Feb. 20.

SEATTLE SYMPHONY Bach’s four orchestral suites.

Benaroya Hall, Third Ave. & Union St., 215-4747, seattle symphony.org. $20–$122. 8 p.m. Fri., Feb. 20–Sat., Feb. 21.

MARC SEALES Music from ths UW faculty jazz pianist and friends. Meany Hall, UW campus, 543-4880, music. washington.edu. $12–$20. 7:30 p.m. Sat., Feb. 21.

TUDOR CHOIR A new setting, by Gabriel Jackson, of The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed Sacrament Church, 5041 Ninth Ave. N.E., 323-9415, tudorchoir.org. $20–$30. 7:30 p.m. Sat., Feb. 21.

SEATTLE OPERA SEE THE PICK LIST, PAGE 18.

SEATTLE REPERTORY JAZZ ORCHESTRA With special guest clarinetist Anat Cohen. Benaroya Recital Hall, Third Ave. & Union St., 7:30 p.m. Sat., Feb. 21; Kirkland Performance Center, 350 Kirkland Ave., Kirkland, 2 p.m.

Sun., Feb. 22. $15–$47. 523-6159, srjo.org.

FORTUNE’S BONES Subtitled “The Manumission Requiem,” Ysaye M. Barnwell’s choral/orchestral cantata sets Marilyn Nelson’s poem about an 18thcentury Connecticut slave. The Paramount, 911 Pine St., 877-STG-4TIX, stgpresents.com. Free. 4 p.m. Sun., Feb. 22.

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MUSIC FOUNDATION OF • RUSSIAN CHAMBER Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for piano fourSEATTLE

hands, and more. Benaroya Recital Hall, Third Ave. & Union St., 425-829-1345, russianchambermusic.org. $10–$30. 5 p.m. Sun., Feb. 22.

MUSIC OF TODAY Fearless pianist Cristina Valdes plays Lachenmann and Scelsi. Meany Hall, UW campus, 543-4880, music.washington.edu. $12–$20. 7:30 p.m.

Tues., Feb. 24.

UW BAROQUE ENSEMBLE Bach, Handel and Telemann.

Brechemin Auditorium, School of Music, UW campus, 685-8384, music.washington.edu. $5. 7:30 p.m. Tues., Feb. 24.

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B Y G AV I N B O R C H E R T

Send events to stage@seattleweekly.com, dance@seattleweekly.com, or classical@seattleweekly.com

ping p a t e “A to gic ride to l nosta year” ll yester —Brad Downa

BENAROYA HALL S. MARK TAPER FOUNDATION AUDITORIUM

Saturday, March 7 ~ 2 pm 200 University Street, Seattle 206-215-4747 or 1 866-833-4747 benaroyahall.org

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • FE BRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

episode at this improv show. Unexpected Productions Market Theater, 1428 Post Alley, 587-2414, unexpected productions.org. $12–$15. 8:30 p.m. Fri.–Sat. Ends March 7.

CAROUSEL SEE REVIEW, PAGE 19.

CIRQUE DU SOLEIL “KURIOS—Cabinet of Curiosities” asks “What if by engaging our imagination and opening our minds we could unlock the door to a world of wonders?” Marymoor Park, 6046 W. Lake Sammamish Pkwy.

N.E., Redmond, 800-450-1480, cirquedusoleil.com/kurios. $35–$156. 8 p.m. Tues.–Sat., 4:30 p.m. Sat. (& some Fri.), 1:30 & 5 p.m. Sun. Ends March 22.

DEAR ELIZABETH Sarah Ruhl’s portrait of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell is built on their correspondence. Seattle Repertory Theatre, Seattle Center, 443-2222. $17–$67. 7:30 p.m. Wed.–Sun. plus some Wed., Sat., & Sun. matinees; see seattlerep.org for exact schedule. Ends March 8.

THE DOG OF THE SOUTH SEE REVIEW, PAGE 19.

THE EXPLORERS CLUB SEE REVIEW, PAGE 20.

I LOVE YOU, YOU’RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE Joe DiPietro’s long-running off-Broadway hit about the vagaries of love. Burien Actors Theatre, 14501 Fourth Ave. S.W., Burien, 242-5180, burienactorstheatre.org. $7–$20.

8 p.m. Fri.–Sat., 2 p.m. Sun. Ends March 22.

I MAY HAVE SEEN THE DEVIL Alejandro Stepenberg’s take on Hamlet “transplants the action to a New England asylum circa 1946, and rewrites the lead role . . . to be played by a woman who is locked in a lesbian relationship with Ophelia.” $10–$15. 800-838-3006, brownpaper tickets.com. 8 p.m. Fri., 2 & 8 p.m. Sat. Runs Feb. 20–21 at the Ballard Underground, 2220 N.W. Market St., and Feb. 27–28 at Theatre4, fourth floor, Seattle Center Armory.

LOCALLY GROWN This festival promises “5 weekends. 9 productions. 32 performances” of new works by K. Brian Neel, José Amador, Jennifer Jasper, and others. New City Theater, 1404 18th Ave., 800-838-3006. $12–$15. Shows run Thurs.–Sat.; see radialtheater.org for full lineup. Ends Feb. 28.

MATT & BEN The comedy that launched Mindy Kaling’s career: her sendup of the Hollywood bromance that gave us Good Will Hunting. Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave., seattlestageright.org. $10–$22. 7:30 p.m. Fri–Sat. plus Thurs., Feb. 19 & Mon., Feb. 23. Ends Feb. 28.

NATURAL Winsome, full of flair, but not terribly edgy, Marcus Gorman’s comedy has Art (Shane Regan) and his live-in milksop boyfriend Theo (Sam Turner) sharing a snug though sexless life until brazen bartender Samantha (Allie Pratt) comes along, causing confusion about sexual orientation between the pair. Another disruptive force is Chloe (Pilar O’Connell), Theo’s disgruntled customer-service co-worker, an erotica blogger who arouses attention every time she enters the stage. Dating and career woes drive the plot, though it oddly lags behind the times: While the rules of dating get updated as quickly as your OS, we hear no mention of social media or sexting, and when Jeremy (Jaryl Draper), the poor man’s Barney Stinson, wants an escort, he uses the phone. Seriously? There’s an app for that. Natural sometimes feels like it was written by someone who hasn’t dated since MySpace. Director Jen Moon does expedite the action in this properly minimal production, which reminds me of the 1992 ensemblecom Singles. In that flick, you may recall, a half-dozen Gen-Xers were searching for love and stumbling toward adulthood. Here, essentially, a half-dozen millennials do the same thing. ALYSSA DYKSTERHOUSE Annex Theatre, 1100 E. Pike St., 728-0933, annextheatre.org. $5–$10. 8 p.m.

Tues.–Wed. Ends Feb. 18.

OUR TOWN Thornton Wilder’s 1938 warhorse is is quintessential meta-theater. In the provincial town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, circa 1901, things are slowly changing (and America, by implication, along with it). We meet the Gibbs and Webb families. We hear histories and gossip. We are witness to blossoming love between sporty young George Gibbs (Joe Cummings) and the bookish but beautiful Emily Webb (Anastasia Higham).

And finally we see the inevitable loss. Our Town has a clear arc that symbolizes in microcosm the life cycle of a community: daily life, love and marriage, and finally death.

What is doesn’t have, however, is much dramatic action.

Wilder’s play provides a condescending reminder of things we already know, a guiding hand that makes decisions for us and tells us how to think. As a result, though well cast and directed (by Greg Carter), this Strawberry Theatre Workshop production makes a better case for the company than for the text itself. IRFAN SHARIFF 12th Ave Arts, 1620 12th Ave., 800-838-3006, strawshop.org. $18–$36. 7:30 p.m. Thurs.–Sat., 2 p.m. Sun. Ends Feb. 21.

SAVAGE/LOVE More vagaries of love, by Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaiken, with original music by Michale Owcharuk. The Pocket Theater in Greenwood, 8312 Greenwood Ave. N., thepocket.org. $10–$14. 8:30 p.m.

Feb. 20–21; 7 p.m. Feb. 22 & 27.

SIDE BY SIDE BY SONDHEIM A revue showcasing the greatest theater composer of the past half-century.

Bainbridge Performing Arts, 200 Madison Ave. N., Bainbridge Island, 842-8569, bainbridgeperformingarts. org. $19–$27. 7:30 p.m. Fri.–Sat., 3 p.m. Sun. Ends Feb. 22.

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arts&culture» Film

PBig in Japan

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I am not going to insist you should’ve heard of the local band Tennis Pro, nor be a fan, to enjoy this ersatz documentary, which follows the trio from Seattle ignominy to a slight bump of fame in Tokyo’s grubby bar-scape. What’s real here (chemistry, fun, music) is inseparable from the scripted material (fake, fake, fake) that director John Jeffcoat devised while trailing the poprockers on three Japanese tours. As he explained prior to the film’s SIFF screenings last year, comic vignettes were extrapolated and rewritten from the band’s travels abroad and struggles at home.

The band members (and some family members) capably play themselves: David Drury, the phlegmatic guitarist and part-time professional blackjack player; Phillip Peterson, the buoyant bassist and family man; and Sean Lowry, the deadpan drummer/hairstylist/bachelor at large.

In the film, Tennis Pro resists the notion that they’re “a fucking novelty act” that doesn’t fit into our post-grunge/Macklemore music scene. On a bare-bones tour in Japan, however, they find the grunge halo useful—and even busk in a park wearing their Björn Borg tennis whites. Shady managers come and go, record deals are dangled, and our three heroes try to maintain their ideals (basically: loyalty to one another and their springy, bouncy pop sound). There’s even a detour into a Miyazaki-style anime sequence.

The plot here—and the zippy energy—isn’t much more complicated than an old episode of The Monkees: simply the comic misadventures of innocents abroad. What Big in Japan really has going for it is street-level pace and texture.

Jeffcoat and his cast shot the film guerrilla-style, without permits, as the band performed and cavorted around Tokyo’s colorfully bohemian Shimokitazawa district (usually called Shimokita). This gives the film—which is not a documentary—a documentary feel; and Jeffcoat, director of the 2007 local comedy Outsourced, has ample experience with music videos and clubland milieu. (This project sprang from his experi-

Hard to Be a God RUNS FRI., FEB. 20-MON., FEB. 23 AT NORTHWEST FILM FORUM. NOT RATED. 170 MINUTES.

Hard to Be a God as one of the most densely designed movies ever made; somewhere in the world Terry Gilliam is weeping in despair at ever approaching its level of beastly creativity.

German (who died in 2013, before completing post-production) was some kind of visionary, and labored for many years on this project. His previous movie, Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998), is arguably more connected to recognizable reality, but is just as baffling in its refusal to submit to audience expectations.

Presumably German is showing us human existence refracted through his cracked lens.

But the film seems less about ideas than about creating a troubling experience, one in which the viewer is constantly assailed by things being thrown at the camera: birds, weapons, excrement.

As a fully imagined carnival, Hard to Be a God is astonishing, but it’s hard either to discern how it sheds light on mankind’s backward character or guess for whom it’s intended. “I’m speaking to you,” says a character in the film, “but that doesn’t mean we’re having a conversation.” We are shown that the world is a cesspool, in repetitive detail, for three hours. It’s an incredible-looking and -sounding immersion, but not quite a conversation. ROBERT HORTON

Girlhood OPENS FRI., FEB. 20 AT SIFF CINEMA UPTOWN. NOT RATED. 112 MINUTES.

There’s no parallel between the American film Boyhood and the French film Bande de Filles, except that a clever marketer thought it would be useful to have Girlhood be the title for the latter movie. Can’t blame them for that one, but Girlhood stands on its own as a thoughtful, nonjudgmental look at a lost teen who finds definition over the course of a few rocky months. Her name is Marieme (Karidja Touré), a wary girl whose mother works nights as a janitor. (She’s barely seen in this youth-ruled scenario, set in a poor, immigrant-filled banlieue outside Paris.)

Touré as Marieme.

Marieme’s older brother is a bully, and she seems to have made herself as plain and anonymous as possible. One day at school she falls in with a trio of cool girls, led by the glammed-up Lady (Assa Sylla), whose habits include shoplifting, taunting other groups of girls, and connecting over their shared sense of displacement. A lip-synching scene to Rihanna’s “Diamonds” shows their powerful bond better than 20 pages of dialogue could.

Writer/director Céline Sciamma (Tomboy) is white, but she brings no outsider perspective to this clique of black teenagers; whatever kind of trouble they might get into, the movie stays right at that level, letting us understand how

STRAND RELEASING

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

RUNS FRI., FEB. 20–THURS., FEB. 26 AT NORTHWEST FILM FORUM. NOT RATED. 100 MINUTES.

ence on MTV’s $5 Cover series.) Certainly Big in Japan has its promotional aspect, but few films (or bands) manage the trick of both wanting to be liked and actually being likable. So if Tennis Pro thus books more gigs and sells more albums (yes, there’s a soundtrack), I’m fine with that.

Note: The band will perform after the Friday and Saturday screenings (preceded by Jeffcoat’s remarks); on Monday, Jeffcoat will present five Tennis Pro music videos, one new, at a free 6:30 p.m. screening. BRIAN MILLER

KINO LORBER

Opening ThisWeek

JOHN JEFFCOAT

From left: Drury, Lowry, and Peterson perform in Yoyogi Park.

that stuff might happen with decent kids. Most of the material falls into the category of closely observed behavior, from Marieme’s tentative romance with a guy who’s friendly with her brother—he’s afraid of making a move because the brother could get rough with him—to the way Marieme tries to enact a motherly role toward her two younger sisters. The movie doesn’t spend a whole lot of time with the sisters, but it’s a tribute to Sciamma’s economical storytelling that you can see the writing on the wall for these children in desperate need of supervision.

Not everything in Girlhood works that well, but it’s definitely better than the average coming-of-age tale. When Marieme truly begins to fall through the safety net, the film looks as though it’s going to take on epic proportions— but it doesn’t fulfill those ambitions. At the core, though, is that persuasive portrait of how other people make a difference, and how these girls are brightened by their shared experience—like diamonds in the rough, as the song puts it. ROBERT HORTON

A typical village scene on planet Arkanar.

Perhaps it is hard to be a god, according to the title of this sprawling Russian epic. But everybody else looks miserable, too. We are in a world called Arkanar, invented by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky for a speculative 1964 novel that must be easier to understand than this film. Arkanar is a pigsty, a horror show, a decadent party at James Franco’s house. It resembles the muddier years of Earth’s Middle Ages, but we are told it is a planet where the society has developed more slowly than ours. We are also told—and this is important to grasp in the movie’s swirl—that our main character, Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik), is actually a visitor from Earth. He pretends to be a god in Arkanar, passing through the squalid society and observing it.

The film’s 170 minutes are oozing with bodily fluids, casual brutality, and complete disdain for anything like conventional suspense or storytelling. Director Aleksei German uses black-andwhite and an incredibly complex soundtrack to immerse us in this unpleasant world, his camera snaking around cramped interiors and muddy hillsides. It would be no exaggeration to claim

McFarland, USA OPENS FRI., FEB. 20 AT KIRKLAND PARKPLACE AND OTHER THEATERS. RATED PG. 128 MINUTES.

Disney has really carved out a genre for itself: the underdog sports story as cultural melting pot, complete with the Middle American white coach/scout/father figure whose preconceptions are overturned by scrappy kids who overcome every hurdle with heart and hard work. That guy was Jon Hamm in Million Dollar Arm and Josh Lucas in Glory Road. In McFarland, USA, also inspired by a true story, he’s a high-school football coach whose temper has landed him at an underfunded school in a largely MexicanAmerican town in the California desert. “Are we in Mexico?,” his daughter asks, as they drive past sad little homes of cracked stucco and sunparched dirt yards. It gets a laugh, but makes a point: This is a Third World neighborhood within our borders. For that I give the film some credit. It gives a big-screen face to an American culture generally relegated to the margins of mainstream movies. Too bad it belabors as many stereotypes as it challenges.

Voted Best Movie Theater F

2014 The New York Times

Costner as coach, Pratts as his star athlete.

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Two Ways To Save At Sundance Seattle Monday is $6 ORCA Day

RON PHILLIPS/DISNEY

Show Your Orca Card and ALL Seats are $6 ($7.50 for 3D).

Tickets Avail at Box Office Only. Not good on holidays. strandreleasing.com FIlm Center STARTS FRIDAY, Seattle SIFF Center, Northwest Rooms (206) 324-9996 FEBRUARY 20

D I NI NG

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Tuesday is Girls Movie Night Out!

2 or more ladies get $5 ($6.50 for 3D) Admission All Day. Tickets Avail at Box Office Only.

MUSIC

E VE N T S

FIFTY SHADES OF GREY con and basement-dwelling Petyr (the latter in full Nosferatu fright makeup). Mind-control WWW.SEATTLEWEEKLY.COM/SIGNUP WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS and flying are uncertain aids to their blood 2.31" X 3" WED 2/18 KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE feasts, and these vampires make a for a hapless coven—flock? pack? gaggle? what is the proper SEATTLE WEEKLY MR. TURNER THE IMITATION GAME term?—of undead would-be swingers. Viago is DUE FRI 12PM still stuck on a lost paramour, now 96; and while STILL ALICE BIRDMAN TIMBUKTU Vladislav talks a great game, like some bloodAMERICAN SNIPER thirsty Lord Byron, he can barely get lucky.

Patrolling the darkened streets of Wellington, JUPITER ASCENDING in 2D our three main vamps can’t get invited into any FILM NEWSLETTER *Tickets available at the box office. of the good clubs or discos—they end up forone:) reviews. e inside scoop on upcoming filmsAE: and(circle the latest Artist: (circleThone:) SUNDANCECINEMAS.COM ART APPROVED lorn in an all-night Chinese diner.

Angela Maria Josh Heather Staci AE APPROVED After all the aestheticized languor of Only Tim Jane Emmett Steve Ronnie Lovers Left Alive (and the earnest teen soap CLIENT APPROVED opera of Twilight), the silly deadpan tone here Deadline: Confirmation #: is quite welcome. Clement and Waititi know this is a sketch writ large (forget about plot), so they never pause long between sneaky gags.

The ever-polite neatnik Viago, before a date, carefully lays out newspapers on the floor to contain the mess. A rival pack of werewolves, led by Conchords manager Rhys Darby, struggles mightily against lupine transformation— they’re like a sensitive Robert Bly talk circle.

The recent convert to the group, besotted with his new flying powers, quickly becomes a nuisance. Instead of the window, Vladislav snaps, “Why don’t you just use the door?”

FILM

HAPPY HOUR

AR T S AN D E N T E R TAIN ME N

PWhat We Do in the Shadows UNISON FILMS

OPENS FRI., FEB. 20 AT SUNDANCE CINEMAS. NOT RATED. 85 MINUTES.

“We’re not Twilight!” Thus protests a New Zealand vampire, confronted with a noob—bitten within the past decade—who tries to drag his exiled undead tribe into the 21st century of Skype and instant messaging. There are no jokes about Facebook here, but What We Do nicely settles upon the conflict between age-old vampire traditions and today’s hook-up customs.

Granted, the premise here is ’90s-stale: basically MTV’s The Real World cast with vampires, presented as direct-address documentary. The droll comedy comes from the brain trust behind 2007’s Eagle Vs. Shark: Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords) and Taika Waititi, who play neck-biters Vladislav and Viago, respectively.

Also in their unkempt household are lazy Dea-

Waititi as the friendly, thirsty Viago.

When the city’s vampires, zombies, werewolves, and witches assemble for their annual masquerade ball, the gathering has a desperate, dorky air like Comic-Con or cosplayers. But that’s really Clement and Waititi’s core joke: These neck-biters have been at it so long that they’re only imitating old vampire stereotypes.

Things have gotten to the point, Vladislav admits, where they’re even cribbing from The Lost Boys. BRIAN MILLER E

film@seattleweekly.com

PR OMO T IO

g all Playin KS W SEAHAMNF and es!

Gam

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • FE BRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

Kevin Costner plays Jim White (the film has fun with that one), who provides our perspective into McFarland. There White soon loses his football coaching position and creates a crosscountry team. His prejudices and assumptions are mirrored right back at him by a glib coach from an affluent school, a nice moment that Costner handles with a mix of shame and selfreflection. As a coach, White sees the untapped speed and endurance of his Cougars; as a person, he’s got no idea of their real lives. This is, after all, a town where the prison is across the street from the high school to remind kids that it’s pretty much their only alternative to working the fields.

Director Niki Caro (Whale Rider) stirs Southwestern spices through the usual scrappy-littleteam-that-could ingredients. The kids are types rather than characters with agency or aspirations.

They run in sneakers that threaten to fall apart midstride. Coach White rides his daughter’s undersized Barbie-bike as a pace vehicle. There’s a quinceañera and a dancing chicken. There’s even a romance between the angry but earnest team star (Carlos Pratts, of the TV show The Bridge) and the coach’s teenage daughter—so chaste that it feels like a checklist tick from the screenwriter’s manual. Costner meanwhile delivers rousing pep talks as a mix of private conversation and earnest confessional. Otherwise the film favors easy sentiment over sociology.

All these kids needed was someone who believed in them—preferably a flinty but compassionate white guy who can overcome his preconceptions in the process. Go, Cougs! SEAN AXMAKER

23

arts&culture» Film SHOWTIM ES

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EGYPTIAN KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE Midnight Adrenaline | Feb 21

ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW

UPTOWN From the director of Tomboy

GIRLHOOD

8 Academy Award nominations including Best Picture

THE IMITATION GAME

Academy Award Nominee Best Actress: Marion Cotillard

TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT Frank Capra Restored | Feb 24

MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON

FILM CENTER

FESTIVAL 2015 PASSES & TICKETS ON SALE NOW!

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

The Godfather of Bollywood

24

GANGS OF WASSEYPUR Feb 20-22

Recent Raves | Feb 23

THE HOMESMAN

SIFF EDUCATION One-day film challenge

CRASH KIDS

Local & Repertory Maria Volonté playing a murderous cop playing cat and mouse with the detectives on his own squad. (NR) Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $63–$68 series, $8 individual. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through March 19.

THE DEVILS From 1971, Ken Russell’s satire of 17thcentury France features shocks and sex aplenty. Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave star. Did you know Derek Jarman did the sets? (NR) Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935, grandillusioncinema.org. $5-$9. 9 p.m. Fri.-Sat. GANGS OF WASSEYPUR This is a five and one-half hour Hindi epic, being screened in two parts. The film, directed by Anurag Kashyap, follows bandit Sardar Khan from colonial days through independence and beyond. (R) SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), 3249996. $7-$12. See siff.net for showtimes. Fri.-Sun. THE HOMESMAN This movie is so good it makes you wish Tommy Lee Jones could somehow make a Western a year, just to keep exploring the pockets of American frontier experience that still need filling in.

This one offers a series of new wrinkles, beginning with its route: The story goes from west to east, the opposite of most Westerns. During the 1850s, Nebraska “spinster” Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) volunteers to transport three women back to Iowa. They’ve been driven mad by the prairie and their men, or at least they have become no longer socially acceptable. Claimjumper George Briggs (Jones) will accompany Mary on her grim, weekslong job. Their episodic adventures bring them into contact with a variety of frontier types along the way (played by Tim Blake Nelson, James Spader, Hailee Steinfeld, Barry Corbin, and no less than Meryl Streep). The setup suggests the potential for showing the West from the female characters’ perspective, which isn’t entirely the case, although the story does depict the unfairness of frontier life for women. The real subject is the West itself—the brutality of it and the price paid for settling it. (R) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Film Center, $7-$12. 7 p.m. Mon. THE LAST: NARUTO THE MOVIE Earth faces destruction by gigantic meteorites in this new sci-fi anime from Japan. (NR) Grand Illusion, $5-$9. Runs Fri.-Thurs.

THE MALTESE FALCON John Huston made a memorable debut as director with his 1941 adaptation (the third) of Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel. Who next would play Sam Spade and attempt to own the role? George Raft was briefly attached, but he didn’t trust Huston, a mere screenwriter. (Pshaw!) So it was that Humphrey Bogart cemented his screen persona as the hard-boiled detective ensnarled by a dame (Mary Astor) and various eccentrics (Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet) all searching for the precious little statue. He’s unsentimental, even cold, but he has his code—famously expressed in the line “When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it.” (NR) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $7-$9. 7 p.m.

Fri.-Sat. & Mon. THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW Everyone’s favorite cult musical from 1975 stars Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, and Barry Bostwick. (R) SIFF Cinema Egyptian, 801 E. Pine St., 324-9996, siff.net. $7-$12.

Midnight, Sat. SATURDAY SECRET MATINEE Hosted by The Sprocket Society, this Saturday matinee series (through March 28) features the 1941 serial The Adventures of Captain Marvel, preceded by various vintage cartoons and shorts. Total program length is about two hours. (NR) Grand Illusion, $5-$9. 1 p.m. Sat.

•

FIRST DRAFT

• BIRDMAN A movie star in a career skid since he

David Cronenberg’s

MAPS TO THE STARS Opens Feb 27 | Uptown Two by Kubrick

2001 & THE SHINING

Feb 27-Mar 3 | Uptown & Egyptian

SIFF CINEMA EGYPTIAN | 805 E Pine St SIFF CINEMA UPTOWN | 511 Queen Anne Ave N SIFF FILM CENTER | Seattle Center NW Rooms

•

•

•

Ongoing

COMING SOON

vive even the Oscar-bait effect. Benedict Cumberbatch plays the brilliant English code-breaker Alan Turing as a borderline-autistic personality, a rude brainiac who during World War II fiddles with his big computing machine while his colleagues stand around scratching their heads. Turing’s homosexuality only gradually enters the picture, and even when he proposes marriage to fellow code-breaker Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), it isn’t treated as a really big deal. Even if the movie sketches simplistic conflicts among its principal characters, the wartime world is so meticulously re-created and the stakes so compelling that it emits plenty of movie-movie sparks. (Morten Tyldum, of the ridiculously entertaining Headhunters, directs.) But the real reason to like this movie is that it’s so diligently pro-weirdo. Especially in Cumberbatch’s truly eccentric hands, Turing stays defiantly what he is: an oddball who uses rationality to solve problems. (PG-13) R.H. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Sundance, Majestic Bay, Kirkland, others LEVIATHAN At the core of this Oscar-nominated drama is a simple land-grab, but the implications are far-reaching. Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov) is a rough handyman who’s managed to carve out a livelihood on the seafront near Murmansk. His house sits on a rocky piece of oceanfront property that is being claimed by the town’s crooked mayor. Kolya’s old Army friend Dmitriy (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), now a lawyer, has just arrived from Moscow to help in the case; his big-city sophistication is in stark contrast to Kolya’s country ways, a fact that Kolya’s wife (Elena Liadova) notices.

As we sink into the situation, every strand of life is revealed to be rigged. The shady mayor is blatant in his greed, and the legal system is a comically wordy charade. The success of this study-in-corruption by director Andrey Zvyagintsev has brought Vladimir Putin’s minions, Russian nationalists, and religious authorities out in force to condemn it as “evil,” “a cynical and dirty parody,” and “a cinematic anti-Putin manifesto.”

In other words, it needs to be seen. (R) R.H. Guild 45th MR. TURNER Must the great man also be a nice guy? Mike Leigh’s comprehensive biopic tempers our admiration for the English painter J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), unquestionably a genius, and recognized as such in his day. Turner (Timothy Spall), when we meet him, is famous, prosperous, and possessed of a nice London home. His cagey old father (Paul Jesson) aids in the family business, as does the devoted maid Hannah (Dorothy Atkinson), who’s plainly, painfully in love with her indifferent master. (He is by turns tender and terrible to the women who surround him.)

During the last 25 years of his life, Turner and his art—in late career tending toward abstraction—are mutable. He travels under an assumed name to the coastal village of Margate, where he eventually takes a new lover, Sophia (Marion Bailey), to replace poor Hannah. Yet the film’s no melodrama. Leigh and his Oscar-nominated cinematographer Dick Pope periodically pause for us to see 19th-century views as Turner did: lambent light on a Flemish canal, the sun filtered through sea mist near the shore, or locomotive steam bursting into a halo above the green countryside. As for the final nature of this selfish, sensitive, uncompromising artist, Leigh simply frames him in a portrait, leaving us to grope for psychological shapes and colors. (R) B.R.M. Sundance, others TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT Sandra (Marion Cotillard) has been on medical leave from her workplace, owing to depression. She has a low-level job in a manufacturing plant in Belgium. She’s ready to go back to work, but management has decided to cut her position.

According to labor laws, her 16 fellow employees can vote to keep her on the job—but the boss has offered them each a 1,000-euro bonus if they agree to lay off Sandra. She has a weekend to plead her case to each co-worker. Every few minutes we are reminded of the cruelty of being put in this position, and the humiliation of having to repeat her argument. Throughout, the deglammed Cotillard is more than up to the task of convincing us of Sandra’s modest place in the world. The very human stories of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have always had a political purpose, and this film’s portrait of the power of manipulation and greed is one of their clearest. Many of the employees casting votes for or against Sandra could really use 1,000 euros. They’ve got problems of their own, stories comparable to hers.

That’s what is so devastating about this superb film.

(NR) R.H. SIFF Cinema Uptown

ITALIAN STYLE From 1970, Elio Petri’s • CINEMA Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion has Gian

Feb 21 | SIFF Film Center Feb 23 | SIFF Film Center

• THE IMITATION GAME A ripping true story can sur-

stopped playing a masked superhero named Birdman back in the ’90s, Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) is preparing his big comeback in a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver stories. Obstacles abound: Riggan’s grown daughter (Emma Stone) is his assistant, and not his biggest fan. And, in the movie’s funniest headache, Riggan must endure a popular but insufferable stage actor (Edward Norton, doing a wonderful self-parody) who’s involved with the play’s other actress (Naomi Watts). This is all going on while Riggan maintains a tenuous hold on his own sanity. To create Riggan’s world, director Alejandro González Iñárritu and Gravity cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki present the film as a continuous unbroken shot. Birdman serves so many heady moments it qualifies as a bona fide happening. It has a few stumbles, but the result is truly fun to watch.

(R) R.H. Sundance, others

•

BY B R IA N M I LLE R

Send events to film@seattleweekly.com See seattleweekly.com for full listings = Recommended

•

arts&culture» Music

THE INFAMOUS STRINGDUSTERS + KELLER WILLIAMS

Hey, That’s My Line How and why artists steal each other’s work.

3/6

BY GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT

RUN DMC REMIXED

SHOWBOX AND KISW METAL SHOP PRESENT

KARL DENSON’S TINY UNIVERSE 2/19

featuring VOKAB KOMPANY with BROWNOUT

COAL CHAMBER FILTER + COMBICHRIST + AMERICAN HEAD CHARGE

featuring

9PM

SHOWBOX AND KEXP PRESENT

3/11

7PM

FLIGHT FACILITIES BEAT CONNECTION

2/21

with

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

COURTESY WARNER BROS.

B

Why? Because there are only so many notes in the musical language, and riffing off already established ideas has been going on since . . . forever. Killing Joke’s “Eighties” undoubtedly inspired Nirvana’s “Come As You Are.” There’s a striking similarity between Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California” and Pearl Jam’s “Given to Fly.” Led Zeppelin, it’s long been noted, appropriated the Southern blues of artists like Willie Dixon and Robert Johnson in its own edgy, soulful rock—and is currently being sued by the band Spirit for stealing the famous intro to “Stairway to Heaven” from its song “Taurus.”

gelliott@seattleweekly.com

3/18

BLUE

8PM

OCTOBER HARVARD OF THE SOUTH + with

4/17

ASHLEIGH STONE

7:30 PM

7:30 PM

SHOWBOX, CAPITOL HILL BLOCK PARTY, KEXP PRESENT

with PARADISE FEARS

8PM

LEIGHTON MEESTER

LORD HURON with LEON BRIDGES

4/18

9PM

THE MARCHFOURTH! WATERBOYS

2/26

with DUKE EVERS

8PM

8:30 PM

2/28

8:30 PM

5/21

SHOWBOX SODO

There’s an excellent scene in the second season

of Louie (Louis C.K.’s dark, brilliant comedy show on FX) when the comic confronts fellow comedian Dane Cook, whom Louie has long implied stole three of his jokes. Cook has been upset for years and denies it, but Louie is reticent to back down, so to speak, because, as he says: “I don’t think that you saw me do those jokes and said ‘I’m going to tell those jokes, too.’ I don’t think there’s a world where you’re that stupid.

Or that bad a guy. I do think, though, that you’re like—you’re like a machine of success. You’re like a rocket. You’re rocketing to the stars, and your engines are sucking stuff up. Stuff is getting sucked up in your engines, like birds and bugs and some of my jokes . . . I think they just went in your brain, and I don’t think you meant to do it, but . . . they got in your brain, you shat them out. Maybe it was inadvertent, but maybe it did happen.”

While Smith probably didn’t set out to steal Petty’s song, he also probably didn’t take the time to reflect on the idea that a song like Petty’s might already be in him. That doesn’t excuse the giddy part of the Twitterverse that believed Kanye West discovered McCartney—but perhaps, the next time the next big thing steps up to receive a Grammy, he or she might pause to thank someone like Tom Petty, whom Smith neglected to mention in his acceptance speech, for giving him the idea. E

with SENSES FAIL + MAN OVERBOARD + SEAWAY

RODEO TOUR

IRATION 2/20

with STICK FIGURE + HOURS EASTLY

YOUNG THUG + TRAVI$ SCOTT

8PM

3/31

with METRO BOOMIN (DJ SET) THE MISSING LINK TOUR

IN FLAMES +

MASTODON ALL THAT REMAINS +CLUTCH 4/26 with WOVENWAR 3/7 7:45 PM

CHOP SUEY

8PM

with BIG BUSINESS

7PM

PARAMOUNT THEATRE

LIL DICKY THE REPLACEMENTS

4/4

9PM

4/9

SHOWBOXPRESENTS.COM

8PM

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • FE BRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

efore Sam Smith postponed his February 2 appearance at KeyArena and then swept the Grammys on February 8, raking in four awards, the young British songwriter was quietly stewing in a pot of hot water. Details emerged toward the end of January that he had, in fact, kind-of-sort-of ripped off Tom Petty—the title track from Smith’s chart-topping Stay With Me bore an uncanny resemblance to Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down”— and had settled out of court, striking a deal that earned both Petty and co-writer Jeff Lynne a reported 12.5 percent writing credit on the track.

Petty played it cool, saying he had “no hard feelings” and that “all my years of songwriting have shown me these things can happen. Most times you catch it before it gets out the studio door, but in this case it got by.” Smith’s representatives were equally cordial, claiming Smith and the song’s other writers, William Edward Phillips and James John Napier, were “not previously familiar with the 1989 Petty/Lynne song.”

That quote strikes me as odd, because claiming the entirety of Smith’s songwriting team had never heard one of Tom Petty’s biggest hits is more likely bullshit. Yes, Smith was born three years after its release in a different county, but saying you’ve never once heard a song so welletched into the American classic-rock songbook, a beloved canon with far-reaching tentacles in the Western pop world, is like saying you have no idea who Paul McCartney is (we’ll get to that later). I wasn’t born during their heyday or in their country, but I know who the Beatles are. (There’s some irony in the example, too, since Petty’s involvement with members of that group is common knowledge—and George Harrison actually plays guitar and sings on the song in question.)

Just as different bands share members, they also share themes in their work, forms and ideas floating around in the collective pop consciousness. Those themes—catchy hooks, pleasant melodies—are why the majority of the world prefers pop[ular] music in general. But as we see here, so many of them are not original—not by a long shot.

with PAN ASTRAL

ANDY GRAMMER ALEX & SIERRA

2/24

BAYSIDE

9PM

LOTUS

2/22

8PM

25

arts&culture» Music Lucinda Williams, Right in Time The singer/songwriter rekindled my love of country music.

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

BY GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT

El Corazon www.elcorazonseattle.com

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

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 18TH

HAIL THE SUN

with The Ongoing Concept, Brent Walsh (of I The Mighty), A Taste Of Daylight, From The Futures Lounge Show. Doors at 7:00PM / Show at 7:30 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $10 ADV / $12 DOS

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 20TH

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

MIKE THRASHER PRESENTS:

26

SUICIDE SILENCE

with Emmure, Within The Ruins, Fit For An Autopsy, Says The Snake Doors at 5:30PM / Show at 6:30 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $17 ADV / $20 DOS

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 21ST

REAGAN YOUTH

with 13 Scars, Load Levelers, Loud Eyes, Stab Me Kill Me Doors at 7:30PM / Show at 8:00 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $10 ADV / $12 DOS

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 22ND CHAINBANGERS DISC GOLF SHOP PRESENTS

IPL @ THE EL INDOOR PUTTING LEAGUE

PS3 Disc Golf * Prizes * Ping Pong * Mini Putting Challenges * Drinks * Food $10 Singles / $5 Doubles ($10 per team)

Doors at 6:00PM / Event at 6:00PM

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 22ND

SHINE BRIGHT BABY

with Rowe, Raven Zoe, Plus Guests Lounge Show. Doors at 7:00PM / Show at 7:30 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $12 ADV / $15 DOS

TUESDAY FEBRUARY 24TH

ENUFF Z’NUFF

with The Prophets Of Addiction, Trigger Happy, Plus Guests Doors at 7:30PM / Show at 8:30 21+. $13 ADV / $15 DOS

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 27TH

BLACK PUSSY

with In The Whale, Black Map Lounge Show.

Doors at 8:00PM / Show at 9:00 21+. $8 ADV / $10 DOS

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 28TH

SUBJECT TO DOWNFALL

with The Wild Things, Aces Up, The Common Names, Life As Cinema Doors at 7:00PM / Show at 7:30 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $10 ADV / $12 DOS

JUST ANNOUNCED 3/2 - INCITE 3/15 - MAGIC MIKE MALE REVUE 3/26 LOUNGE - KYE KYE 4/11 - STRUNG OUT 4/14 - ABK / BIG HOODOO / AXE MURDER BOYZ 4/16 LOUNGE - PEELANDER-Z 4/26 LOUNGE - FLOODLOVE 4/29 - WAYNE “THE TRAIN” HANCOCK 5/4 LOUNGE - IT LIES WITHIN 5/5 LOUNGE - THE CREEPSHOW 5/7 LOUNGE - SICK OF SARAH 5/9 - ENSIFERUM / KORPIKLAANI 5/16 - LOCAL H 5/22 LOUNGE - DIAMANTI UP & COMING 3/3 LOUNGE - CHEAP GIRLS 3/4 LOUNGE - WYLDSKY 3/5 LOUNGE - NATHAN KALISH & THE LASTCALLERS 3/6 LOUNGE - MENTAL REX 3/7 EARLY - FALLUJAH 3/7 LATE - EDDIE SPAGHETTI (SUPERSUCKERS) 3/7 LOUNGE - THE DREAMING 3/8 - MOTIONLESS IN WHITE 3/10 - SET IT OFF 3/10 LOUNGE - SURVAY SAYS! 3/11- ENSLAVED / YOB

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

A

s a horseback-riding kid, I listened to my share of pop country: Reba McEntire, Kathy Mattea, Clint Black. By the time I was 15, having discovered alternative music, I was over it—and altogether embarrassed I might have once been a Randy Travis fan.

Through high school and until my senior year in college, I convinced myself that country music was shit. That my small-town upbringing made me a yokel, and that if I could wax philosophical about Tom Waits, no one would know I grew up listening to “redneck” tunes. Little did I know when I was tuned in to it—these were the late ’80s and early ’90s—that most contemporary Americana dominating the charts was more pop than country. I have no recollection of hearing Merle Haggard or Hank Williams back then, but to this day I could probably recite the lyrics to Garth Brooks’ “The River” word for word— though I hope that’s the last I ever have to expound on the subject.

Shortly before graduation, I acquired a copy of Lucinda Williams’ 1998 album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. I was listening to a lot of female singer/songwriters then—Ani DiFranco, Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, Natalie Merchant, and Liz Phair, some even with a country bent (Cowboy Junkies)—so it wasn’t that much of a stretch. But from the first reverberating notes of lead track “Right in Time,” it was clear I was heading into territory south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Scratch that. I was headed to the deep South, and it might as well have been another planet.

Name-checked throughout Car Wheels were places I’d never been—places remembered with such a thick and sensual drawl, with such exquisite detail, they sounded as exotic as Istanbul and Lisbon: Jackson, Mississippi. Baton Rouge and Lake Charles, Louisiana. Nacogdoches (in East Texas, not far from the border). Here was a voice—a distinctly country voice—that didn’t gloss over the human experience like the thick platitudes and nameless characters I knew abounded elsewhere in the genre; Williams lived in these places and knew them intimately.

“Sitting in the kitchen/a house in Macon/ Loretta singing on the radio,” she sighs on the languid title track. I had to look up Macon. Did she say “a-making”? What’s a Macon? Loretta who? I

had to work as hard to clarify much of her material as I did with Faulkner—and the more I unravelled the mystery, the more I was drawn into it. With its incarcerated lovers and drunken protagonists, Car Wheels is a novel—and a stormy romance, at that.

Williams played the Neptune a week ago Tuesday, and my husband Toby and I met some friends there—former Seattle Weekly editor-inchief Mike Seely and his wife Cary.

Williams was ebullient. I had seen her bring down a house before—in Salt Lake City in 2003—but this night she sparkled. Her wellseasoned band—Stuart Mathis on guitar, David Sutton on bass, and drummer Butch Norton— was dialed in, and everyone was talking about it: Cary and Mike both reported that it was the dominant chatter they heard throughout the crowd (and perhaps Miranda Lambert waiting in the wings—she would play the Tacoma Dome on Friday the 13th—added to the buzz).

She’s released seven albums since Car Wheels, but Williams played a lot from her early catalog that night. When she reeled out the steamy “Lake Charles,” Cary leaned over and asked, “Has anyone ever made you ever want to visit Lake Charles like Lucinda Williams?”

It was a fine question, and I knew exactly what she meant. The unique persona of Car Wheels, home to “Lake Charles” and 12 other songs, is that it’s so rooted to a place and its people, you can’t help but want to know them. Turns out Lake Charles is a humid, buggy, dumpy little town, but on account of Williams and that song, I went there.

But that’s a story for another time. On account of Lucinda Williams, who opened my eyes to a new world of storytelling in country music, I am also now acquainted with the work of Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, George Jones, Bob Wills, George Strait, Dwight Yoakam, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Charley Pride, Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, Hank Williams, Buck Owens, Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs, Conway Twitty, Porter Wagoner, Steve Earle, Bobby Bare, Gillian Welch, Roy Acuff, Eddy Arnold, Townes Van Zandt, and a subsequent list equally as long. On account of Williams, I learned there’s no shame in country music—when you do it right. E

gelliott@seattleweekly.com

» Music Infinite Blackness OCnotes on why Black Weirdo matters.

BY ALEXA TEODORO

A

RESERVE THE TROPHY ROOM FOR YOUR NEXT EVENT!

COCKTAILS • TASTY HOT DOGS • LOTSA PINBALL

2222 2ND AVENUE • SEATTLE

206-441-5449

St. Paul and the Broken Bones It’s RIFF RAFF’s world, we’re just living in it. Since debuting his carefully crafted persona—which includes cornrows, elaborately shaped facial hair, a grill, and numerous tattoos—on MTV’s From G’s to Gents, the rapper, born Horst Simco and also known as Jody Highroller, has cranked out pseudo-philosophical lyrics full of oddball references (he mentions Frankie Lymon, David Hasselhoff, and Allen Iverson in the same verse on “Lava Glaciers” on his debut full-length, Neon Icon) that make him seem both laughable and as if he knows something listeners don’t. It’s hard to tell what’s driving Riff Raff, the music or the fame, but it’s clear he’s not ready to leave the spotlight anytime soon. With Jarv Dee. The Showbox, 1426 First Ave., 628-3151, showbox presents.com. 8 p.m. $25 adv./$30 DOS. All ages.

Thursday, Feb. 19

Whitney Mongé “Searching, I’m still searching/For a life that brings me peace/Working, I’m still working/On being the better me,” alt-soul musician WHITNEY MONGÉ sings on “Gracefully,” the bonus track from the deluxe edition of her Steadfast EP. Though she may still be searching, Mongé is definitely getting closer to her goal. A Spokane native who has called Seattle home since 2008, Mongé began her career busking in Pike Place Market and has slowly but surely worked her way up to venues like Neumos and the Neptune on the strength of her pleasing yet rough vocals and lyrics with heft. With ambition to match her talent, Mongé’s search is in good shape. With Nick Hilden, Matney Cook. The Highline, 210 Broadway Ave. E., 328-7837, highlineseattle.com. 9 p.m. $7. 21 and over.

As Robot Science, Charlie Yin produced 8-bit music. Then in 2011, Yin adopted GIRAFFAGE as his new moniker and began remixing R&B tunes by everyone from Tinashe and Janet Jackson to R. Kelly, even remixing the Dream’s Love/Hate in full. For his latest release, No Reason EP, Yin switched gears in a big way and did away with artist samples. He’s still borrowing sounds (album-opener “Hello,” for instance, features the sound of a text notification and dial tones), but musically, it’s all Yin. There’s an ambient feel to the EP’s production, though hints of his 8-bit background come

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 28

& Clive Carroll

thursday february 19 moore theatre 1932 2nd Ave · SeAttle, WA 7:30pm ShoW · All AgeS ticketS AvAilAble At ticketS.com chArge by phone 1-800-225-2277

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • FE BRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

BLACK WEIRDO PARTY With THEESatisfaction, DJ OCnotes, DJ Mursi Layne. Northwest African American Museum, 2300 S. Massachusetts St., 518-6000, naamnw.org. $20. 21 and over. 8 p.m. Fri., Feb. 20.

For the 11th installment of Little Big Show, a concert series that supports local art organizations (this time, Rain City Rock Camp for Girls), KEXP, Starbucks, and the Seattle Theatre Group have booked Alabama soul septet ST. PAUL AND THE BROKEN BONES. Paul Janeway, clad in a suit and bowtie, is an inconspicuous front man, but his church-choir experience is immediately apparent, especially when he’s singing lyrics like “The streets are paved with pain” from “Half the City,” the title track from the band’s debut full-length.

Janeway and the very talented Broken Bones understand the highs and lows of soul, and can take listeners from jubilant to yearning at the drop of a hat. With Shaprece, Sean Rowe. The Neptune, 1303 N.E. 45th St., 682-1414, stgpresents.org/neptune. 8 p.m. $15. All ages.

JANAE JONES PHOTOGRAPHY

ateodoro@seattleweekly.com

Wednesday, Feb. 18

Join us in the Trophy Room for Happy Hour: Thursday Bartender Special 8-Close Fridays: 5-8pm

DAVE MCCLISTER

s we celebrate the 39th federally recognized Black History Month, many are struggling with the reminder that the course of black history is one of perseverance against the oppressive structures on which our society is built. The accumulating murders of young black men like Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Trayvon Martin as well as black LGBT folks like Lamia Beard, Lamar Edwards, and Penny Proud are a dark reflection of how far we have yet to go in the journey to racial justice.

Black lives matter indeed, and Black Weirdo, a blog and cultural movement created by THEESatisfaction’s Stasia Irons and Catherine Harris-White, has something to say about that. In 2008 the pair set up a blog (uniquenoir.tumblr.com) to bring together pieces of black culture that “attracted [their] eyes.” Since the blog’s inception, Black Weirdo has grown to encompass tours, clothing, and the Black Weirdo Party, a traveling affair filled with DJ sets, live performances, and dancing.

Otis Calvin III, aka OCnotes, has become a staple at them, DJing several parties in Seattle, Oakland, D.C., and Brooklyn. Originally from Tucson, OCnotes has been making music almost his whole life, with over 20 albums to his name and a new one dropping soon. The artist connected with Stas and Cat over a shared love of creating. “We just all have respect for each other’s art,” he says.

All three are also linked through Black Constellation, a black artist collective that is the brainchild of Shabazz Palaces’ Ishmael Butler.

Last year, OCnotes and other members of Black Constellation hosted a well-received night at the Frye Art Museum with live music and visual art.

It may seem like a cool club, but in reality Black Constellation is a concept as abstract as its art.

“It’s more about the authenticity than it is about some sort of crew,” says OCnotes.

The same goes for Black Weirdo. In this day and age, he says, when black culture is (literally) under fire, it’s important to have a place for folks to come together and appreciate blackness outside of the categories and boxes imposed by society. “You can never put any one thing into a certain type of category or box, feel me?”

“There’s a zillion people who just like to get down to good music, that are peaceful, loving, and black.” OCnotes points out. “And it’s always not just black people, it’s always all people,” he says of Black Weirdo Party. “It’s a great love experience.”

For OCnotes, Black Weirdo is about owning your identity and representing your own truth, and he’s grateful to be a part of it all. “I get to stir people’s souls up with my tunes and get people free for a minute,” he says.

“I have daughters, I have younger family members,” he goes on. “It means a lot to me that, when I’m dead, cats will see that I represented something, I stood up for truth.” E

TheWeekAhead

27

JAZZ ALLEY IS A SUPPER CLUB

CECILE MCLORIN SALVANT WED, FEB 18

2014 Grammy Nominee for Best Jazz Vocal Album

NETTWORK TRIO

FEATURING CHARNETT MOFFETT, STANLEY JORDAN AND JEFF “TAIN” WATTS FEATURING SPECIAL GUEST PHARAOH SANDERS

THURS, FEB 19 - SUN, FEB 22

CHRISTIAN MCBRIDE TRIO TUES, FEB 24 - WED, FEB 25 in This Bring T And ge n o p Cou Tizer e p p A one 2 oFF! For 1/

Grammy-winning jazz bassist Christian McBride hits the jazz sweet spot with his trio and recent release “Out Here”

STEVE TYRELL THURS, FEB 26 - SUN, MAR 1

G”The warm and fuzzy baritone of Steve Tyrell can always be counted on to add the right romantic touch to an evening of songs.”

- International Review of Music

all ages | free parking | full schedule at jazzalley.com

arts&culture» Music » FROM PAGE 27 through as well. With Spazzkid, DJ HOJO. Neumos, 925 E. Pike St., 709-9442, neumos.com. 8 p.m. $15. All ages.

Fans of KARL DENSON’S TINY UNIVERSE are in for a treat with this show, as the funk and jazz multiinstrumentalist-led six-piece will perform not one but two full sets. The night kicks off with Tiny Universe originals, most recently heard on New Ammo, plus a few covers like Cold War Kids’ “Hang Me Out to Dry” and the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army,” both of which also appear on New Ammo. Then it’s time for a Tiny Universe favorite: Run-D.M.C. Remixed. With the help of San Diego-based MCs Vokab Kompany, the group will add even more funk to Run-D.M.C. classics like “It’s Tricky,” “My Adidas,” and “Walk This Way.” With Brownout. The Showbox. 9 p.m. $22.50 adv./$25 DOS. All ages.

Alt-rocker COLLEEN GREEN is looking to change, as evidenced by her forthcoming Hardly Art release, I Want to Grow Up. But based on singles “TV” and “Pay Attention,” a few things are holding her back. “TV” is an ode to the one thing that’s always kept Green company. “I feel a real connection when my TV’s on . . . TV is my friend/Made me who I am,” she sings. And on “Pay Attention,” Green admits to losing focus often— so much so that she even forgets her own interests.

Grow Up doesn’t feature as many electronic elements as its predecessor, Sock It to Me, but it does have the same straightforward lyrics, this time about the bumpy road to adulthood. With Sonny and the Sunsets. Sunset Tavern, 5433 Ballard Ave. N.W., 784-4880, sunsettavern. com. 9 p.m. $12. 21 and over.

After 19 albums, alt-country singer FRED EAGLESMITH can write a solid record with his eyes closed. But always the artist, he put just as much attention to detail into Tambourine as he had in each of his previous releases. He chose to track Tambourine live with an eight-track analogue console to capture the feel of his touring act, billed as the Fred Eaglesmith Travelling Steam Show. And instead of incorporating more modern influences into the album, he made the decision to stick to his roots, a mix of rock, blues, and twang.

Tambourine also features the story-like lyrics that have made his tunes so revered by fans and critics alike.

With Tif Ginn. Tractor Tavern, 5213 Ballard Ave. N.W., 789-3599, tractortavern.com. 8 p.m. $20. 21 and over.

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

Friday, Feb. 20

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If you plan on attending this show, part of Chateau Ste. Michelle’s SESSIONS series, I highly suggest setting your wine down before the music starts, as eight-piece FUNKY 2 DEATH is providing the entertainment. The band, which you’ve probably heard during its weekly sets at Seamonster Lounge, takes its name very seriously, whether covering funk greats like James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, and Chaka Khan or performing originals, like those on the group’s debut, F2D in Stereo. MC/drummer Woogie D and singer/keyboardist Melissa Montalto are especially dynamic, and with thick bass lines and a solid brass section, F2D can do no wrong. Dancing shoes are a must. Chateau Ste. Michelle, 14111 N.E. 145th St., Woodinville, 425-4881133, ste-michelle.com. 7 p.m. $25. 21 and over.

No matter the somewhat-rotating lineup, TUATARA can always be considered a supergroup. Formed by Peter Buck (R.E.M.), Justin Harwood (Luna, the Chills), Barrett Martin (Mad Season, Screaming Trees), and Skerik (Critters Buggin) in 1996, the instrumental jazz-rock band has grown to include Mike McCready (Pearl Jam), Scott McCaughey (R.E.M., Young Fresh Fellows, The Minus 5), and more. This show will feature Martin and Skerik playing alongside local favorites Andy Coe, Thione Drop, Evan Flory-Barnes, and Steve Moore. Tuatara’s revolving lineup plays into its everchanging sound; its latest release, a double album called Underworld, for example, features everything from jazz to alt-rock to worldly influences. With Happy Orchestra, Molasses. Nectar Lounge, 412 N. 36th St., 632-2020, nectarlounge.com. 8:30 p.m. $8. 21 and over.

It could be the mix of Portuguese and English vocals, or it could be the electronic elements paired with more traditional bossa nova, but BEBEL GILBERTO’s latest, Tudo (“everything” in Portuguese), is mesmerizing from beginning to end. On originals and covers, including Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” and bossa nova creator Jobim’s “Vivo Sonhando,” Gilberto, the daughter of João Gilberto and singer Miúcha, is almost able to slow time with her jazzy voice. It’s warm and rich, but not overpowering, and Gilberto knows just when to kick things up a notch. The Neptune. 8 p.m. $35. All ages.

Be patient, ROSE WINDOWS fans—it’s only two and a half months until the band releases its self-titled sophomore album. And based on the recently released

LAUREN RODRIGUEZ

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

Rose Windows lead single, “Glory, Glory,” the psych-rock sextet has taken its sound in a heavier direction than that heard on its debut. While The Sun Dogs seems almost wistful, especially on tunes like “Heavenly Days,” “Glory, Glory” is full of sludgy guitar riffs (perhaps a result of the band’s recording in Louisiana) and aggressive vocals from Rabia Shaheen Qazi. It’s difficult to tell what the rest of the album will sound like from just one song, but Rose Windows seems to have found a heavier niche. With Motopony, Missionary Position, So Pitted. Neumos. 8 p.m. $12. 21 and over.

After releasing and touring behind its fourth album, Dear Miss Lonelyhearts, California-based blues-rock quartet COLD WAR KIDS were prepared to work on its follow-up, but hit a speed bump with the departure of drummer Matt Aveiro. But the band recruited Joe Plummer (Modest Mouse, the Shins) and soldiered on with Hold My Home. The album is perhaps the most the band has sounded like itself since its 2006 debut, Robbers & Cowards. Each song, but especially lead singles “All This Could Be Yours” and “First,” is chockfull of the soul Cold War Kids infused into its breakthrough hit “Hang Me Up to Dry.” With Elliot Moss.

The Showbox. 9 p.m. $22 adv./$25 DOS. All ages.

Saturday, Feb. 21

THE GRIZZLED MIGHTY is a force to be reckoned

with. Or as the blues-rock duo, vocalist/guitarist Ryan Granger and drummer Lupe Flores, explains on Facebook: “Together they create a force that rips the very fabric of space and time.” Judging by “Chantael” from the pair’s third album, Closed Knuckle Jaw (the release of which is being celebrated at this show), that’s not far off. The song’s ferocity seems bigger than just two musicians, but Granger and Flores pack enough punch for an entire crew. If you missed the duo’s album listening party last month, this is your last chance to experience the fierce pair’s new tunes before everyone else. With Smokey Brights, Constant Lovers, Cabana. Neumos. 8 p.m. $12. 21 and over.

Sunday, Feb. 22

Dance-pop singer TAYLOR DAYNE, who found success with songs like “Tell It to My Heart” and “Love Will Lead You Back,” still has an ear for crafting dancefloor-ready tunes. Her latest single, “Dreaming”— which followed the 2013 release of Playlist: The Very Best of Taylor Dayne—pairs Dayne’s powerful voice with plenty of synth, a pulsing beat, and an unexpected guitar solo. The tune hasn’t performed as well on the charts as previous singles, but it’s not difficult to picture a nightclub floor filling up as it blares through the speakers. And though “Dreaming” isn’t attached to an album, it might hint at what Dayne has planned for her next release. With Ambrosia. Snoqualmie Casino, Mountain View Plaza, 37500 S.E. North Bend Way, Snoqualmie, 425-888-1234, snocasino.com. 8 p.m. $15 and up. 21 and over.

Country singer DOUG SEEGERS has had a truly unique rise to fame. After performing in New York and Texas, he headed to Nashville, where he frequented openmike nights while essentially homeless. But after a Swedish crew working on a TV show about the city filmed Seegers singing an original called “Going Down to the River,” he became an instant star overseas. His debut album, named after the song that started it all, reached #1 in Sweden, and though the U.S. was slower to catch on to his talent, Seegers can now count artists like Emmylou Harris and Buddy Miller, both of whom appear on River, as his peers. With Barbara Lamb, Fredd Luongo. Tractor Tavern. 8 p.m. $12.50. 21 and over.

BY A Z AR IA C . P O D P LE S K Y

Send events to music@seattleweekly.com.

See seattleweekly.com for more listings.

odds&ends»

DID WE GET IT

RIGHT?

Marijuana Meet Markets, Ganja and Girl Scouts, and the Kettle Falls 5

FEBRUA

RY 1824, 2015

SMOKIN’ SINGLES

THE KETTLE FALLS 5

With all the openness of weed dating sites and potrepreneurs selling their wares in broad daylight, let’s not forget growing cannabis is still a

SMITH AN D STEALIN

SEATTL EWE

EKLY.COM I FRE

A SHELTER

DI

ACADEM

PAGE 7

federal crime, even here in Washington. In a high-profile case, five Stevens County residents, known as the Kettle Falls 5, are looking at mandatory 10-year sentences for growing marijuana for medical purposes and in compliance with state law. The U.S. attorney is of the mind that the collective had more weed than they needed and were selling ganja to others—thus they raided the property in August 2012 and seized 75 plants. Given the recent passage of the Cromnibus spending bill that bans any Department of Justice funds (read bulldozers, DEA submachine guns, etc.) from being spent on prosecuting medical-marijuana patients who comply with state law, the defendants were hoping to have the case dismissed. U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Rice instead dismissed the argument, and the trial is scheduled to begin Feb. 23 in Spokane. It’ll be hard for the family to build much of a defense, as medical marijuana doesn’t exist (and thus can’t be argued) at the federal level. The case should be a bellwether regarding future legal actions against medical collectives.

On a side note, family patriarch Larry Harvey probably won’t have to stand trial . . . because he has Stage IV pancreatic cancer.

E

THE DI R BEHINDT B ER There was THA another wa

JUVIE JUST

By Ellis E.

ICE

ACTIVISTS TO STOP JAFAIL IL

Conklin

BRIAN MILY BORED OSCAR GRLER’S IPES PAGE 17

y.

PAGE 9

PAGE 5

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PUT THAT IN YOUR PIPE AND WAIT TO SMOKE IT

Finally, a bill being sponsored in the legislature by Rep. Tina Orwall would make Washington the first state in the country to raise the smoking age from 18 to 21. This point is moot for potheads, as the legal marijuana smoking age is already 21— not to mention the (almost unbelievable) study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association which shows that moderate long-term cannabis smoking is not associated with negative lung health. So let’s dogpile on tobacco—which will kill ya: Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who claims smoking kills 8,000 Washingtonians a year, strongly supports the idea of raising the puffing age. “We know that 95 percent of teens who don’t smoke by the time they are 21 never end up smoking,” he said. “It’s really important we are limiting access in those teenage years.” It’s estimated that a raise in the smoking age from 18 to 21 would cost the tobacco industry $20 million a year. Ya know what business they might get into to make up for those losses? Welcome to Marijuana-boro Country . . . E

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • FE BRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

Another overlooked market in the marijuana space is the meet market. Over one-third of all couples married since 2005 met online. In addition to match.com and eHarmony, other dating sites help narrow the pool: VeggieDate is for vegetarians looking for love (and a salad), Equestrian Singles hooks up horse-lovers (that sounds weird), TrekPassions transports Trekkies together (“Live love and prosper!”), and Tastebuds attempts to unite music lovers of similar genres. (You’d hate to find out too far down the line that her favorite band is Mumford & Sons.)

And now there’s a dating site that connects frisky 20-somethings by their common interest . . . in weed! High There is basically a Tinder app for stoners that matches not only the way you like to get high (bongs, vapes, edibles) but your energy level once you’re fully baked (while marijuana turns me into a hyperactive dancing housecleaner, others may prefer to remain couchlocked . . . ). It’s funny: People used to list drug use as a way to weed out potential paramours.

PAGE 14 SA M

visit

The best ganjapreneurial story thus far hasn’t been about a boutique grower, high-tech vape, or artisan edible—it was a Girl Scout! For the second year in a row, 14-year old Danielle Lei has set up shop outside San Francisco’s Green Cross medical dispensary and sold boxes of cookies like gangbusters. (What a surprise!) This year the Super-Scout sold 208 boxes in two hours. While there have been no such efforts from the Seattlebased GS Troops (perhaps pestering potheads in front of Cannabis City is too politically incorrect in the Evergreen State), it does make me wonder if the Girl Scouts of America should make a licensing deal with some big-time edible maker. They could broker a hefty up-front fee and royalty, and allow Bhang Chocolates or 420Bars to make THCMints and Cannabis DeLites! Just don’t give any to Maureen Dowd. She’ll chow the whole box.

7

THE SHA VIDED STATE OFKY TENT CITIE S

BRIANNA CASHIN

GIRL SCOUT PUSHERS

40 I NUM BER

G SOUNDS »PAGE 25 GIVE US YOUR TAKE ON BERTHA

M

arijuana-related business—and the cold, hard cash that comes with it—is the driving force behind the current Green Rush.

In Washington and Colorado alone, consumers purchased $370 million worth of cannabis products HIGHERGROUND in 2014.

BY MICHAEL A. STUSSER The U.S. market for legal ganja was $2.7 billion—up 75 percent from the previous year. If growth continues—and it will as more states legalize (most predict at least 15 more in the next five years, including California in 2016)—the projected numbers could soar to $11 billion by 2019. I don’t suggest investing in green stocks (after all, most of these businessmen and -women were literally drug dealers last year), but the dope frenzy is just getting started.

So this week, let’s start with a market report.

I VOLUME

A NUE HO ME FOR ST REET FOOD »

For more Higher Ground, visit highergroundtv.com.

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facebook.com/seattleweekly SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 18 — 24, 2015

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

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Employment Computer/Technology Quality and Performance Engineer 2 sought by Providence Health & Services - System Office in Renton, WA. Rspble for qlty prod & tool rls. BS in Cmptr Sci, Bus Mgmt, Info Srvcs, or rltd fld, + 3 yrs of IT QA/QC exp w/ 3 yrs of apln dvlpmnt exp.

Exp in MS NT or 2000+ Srvr envrs req, as well as exp dvlpg in fllwng lngs: HTML, JavaScript, JQuery, VB Script, C#, XML and SharePoint. Exp w/ manl &/or auto Func Intgratn Testng (FIT), regrssn, load, scalablty, & perf testg & undrstndg of algo in areas such as mach learng for anlss of lrg datasets. Exp dvlpg aplns in Visual Studio, Rails, or Python MVC frmwrks, as well as exp w/ Microsoft Office (Project, Excel, Visio, etc), ORACLE or SQL Srvr databases, HP/Mercury Test Suite (or othr equivlnt testg sftwr), & exp w/ Nintex & Infopath SharePoint tools. Exp in mngng code migratns from Dvlpmnt to QA to Prodn in cmplx Web envir. Demnstratd knowldg & undrstndg of QA methdlgs & best prac in QA anlytc, testg & dvlpmnt includg ISO 9000 std & ITILWorks, data govrnance aspects of aplns & integrtd tools usd in clncl & bus ops, all intrfc pnts of core bus/sys & prcs, back-end testg, Bus Prcs Dsgn & integrtn into dvlpmnt spec, Automatd Scrptng Lng & Tools, & Source Code Contrl & Prod Rls prcs.

Demonstrtd strong anlytcl, intrprsnl & verbl/written comm skills. Domstc trvl as ndd.

Perm US work auth. Aply @ www.jobpostingtoday.com ref# 2039

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BIOTECH/SCIENCES Gilead Sciences, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company, has an opening in Seattle, WA for Sr. Biostatistician (BIOSTAT10): Perform statistical analysis of biomedical data using SAS® software. Ref. code and mail resume to Gilead, Attn: HR, #CM-0819, 333 Lakeside Dr. Foster City, CA 94404.

Employment Computer/Technology ENGINEERING CyberSource Corporation, a Visa Inc. company, currently has openings in our Bellevue, Washington location for: - Release Engineers (Job# 150810) to work closely with Infrastructure Provisioning, Application Development and Operations teams to provide fully automated build and deployment routines for Development, Staging, and Production environments. Implement Build & Release automation towards the goal of Continuous Delivery. Apply online at www.visa.com and reference Job# 150810. EOE VP; Consultant - Systems Engineering sought by Bank of America. Reqs: BS & 5 yrs exp; & exp w/a sr/lead role wrkng on Java/J2EE & web app dvlp’t; Oracle, SQL server, DB structure & stored procedures, good at prfrmnce tuning by using DB tech; Web srvcs, Spring, MVC, Struts, Maven, Perforce; Multithread progmng; Coherence Cache & familiar w/Cache tech; Data replication; SiteMinder, Single Sign-On & Web access mgmt; Exp wrkng w/offshore resources, ability to lead offshore dvlpt. Job site: Seattle, WA. Ref #8K5PSK & submit resume to Bank of America HR Box 02, 161 Maplewood Ave, Maplewood, NJ 07040. No phone calls or e-mails. Must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. w/o sponsorship. EOE.

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

Employment General Experienced tree climbers wanted full time/year round work. Must have own gear & climb saw, reliable transportation & driver’s license req. Email work exp: recruiting@ evergreentlc.com 800-684-8733

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