Seattle Weekly, April 29, 2015

APRIL 29-MAY 5, 2015 I VOLUME 40 I NUMBER 17

SEATTLEWEEKLY.COM I FREE

»

BEER FROM HERE THE PIONEERING BREWERIES PUTTING SEATTLE ON THE MAP. PLUS WHAT TO DRINK NOW! PAGE 17

Leaders from two very different Seattles stop shouting at each other and start talking.

By Kelton Sears Page 9

TE A R O P R O ST C I I T T R N A A DIA E M NEW

ST I T R A IA CEO D E M NEW ED TECH TURN

E E L E I S U N S E S R E PET N A I T S I R H C

Police Vs. Protesters Are we seeing a new tactic at play in the decades-old battle?

By Casey Jaywork Page 5

T VS. S I T R A OSTERTUP LIAISON P A L L I R GUERSR TECH-STA H C .

E T ' IST VLSOPERS ANTI- R MURRAY T R A E AR MAYO -COLILST FOR DEV E U L B OBBY ACED DISPLLEADING L LE'S SEATT

Spader Vs. The Avengers In Joss Whedon’s Marvel world, even the murderbot delivers punchlines.

By Robert Horton Page 25

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THE DOOBIE BROTHERS with special guest PAT SIMMONS JR.

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THE B-52s JUNE 28

INDIGO GIRLS JULY 12

MELISSA ETHERIDGE & BLONDIE JULY 21

BRUCE HORNSBY & THE NOISEMAKERS JULY 22

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STAPLES, PATTY GRIFFIN & AMY HELM JULY 26

EMMYLOU HARRIS & RODNEY CROWELL JULY 29

ZIGGY MARLEY AUGUST 9

TRAMPLED BY TURTLES & THE DEVIL MAKES THREE AUGUST 16

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AP RI L 29 — M AY 5, 2015

KENNY LOGGINS

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inside» April 29–May 5, 2015 VOLUME 40 | NUMBER 17 » SEATTLEWEEKLY.COM

»17

»5 5

COPPING AN ATTITUDE

BY CASEY JAYWORK | Are police targeting protest organizers for arrest?

Plus: backstage clashes over the housing issue, and the sudden close of a rehab center. Oh, and who’ll pay for light rail?

9

CULTURE CLASH

BY KELTON SEARS | Tech bros and

rising rents are driving artists off Capitol Hill and ruining it—or so goes the narrative. In three conversations, we search for common ground.

food&drink

14 GREEN ACRES

BY JASON PRICE | Escaping the rat race

(well, Ballard) for a bucolic Bainbridge life.

14 | FOOD NEWS/THE WEEKLY DISH 15 | THE BAR CODE 17 | BREWERY GUIDE

arts&culture 21 TRIMPIN VS. SSO

BY GAVIN BORCHERT | Seattle’s madgenius composer teams up with Morlot.

21 | THE PICK LIST 23 | OPENING NIGHTS | Angry House-

25 FILM

OPENING THIS WEEK | James Spader battles the Avengers, Juliette Binoche confronts Kristen Stewart, and more.

28 | FILM CALENDAR

29 MUSIC

BY LEENA JOSHI | A punk outfit

from Olympia battles “society’s shit.”

Plus: the oddly homophilic subtext of hip-hop’s misogyny.

31 | THE WEEK AHEAD

odds&ends

33 | HIGHER GROUND 34 | CLASSIFIEDS

»cover credits

PHOTOGRAPHY BY SOFIA LEE

EDITORIAL Senior Editor Nina Shapiro News Editor Daniel Person Food Editor Nicole Sprinkle Arts Editor Brian Miller Music Editor Kelton Sears Editorial Operations Manager Gavin Borchert Staff Writers Ellis E. Conklin, Casey Jaywork

$

53

plus tax & gratuity

AY 3

Available during dinner service only.

COME ON UP

Calendar Assistant Diana M. Le Editorial Interns Olivia Anderson, Kate Clark, Warren Langford 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 A. Stusser, Jacob Uitti

APRIL

206.905.2100 | spaceneedle.com THE VIETNAM WAR AND THE OREGON SENATOR WHO TRIED TO STOP IT BEFORE IT BEGAN.

PRODUCTION Production Manager Sharon Adjiri Art Director Jose Trujillo Graphic Designers Nate Bullis, Brennan Moring Photo Intern Joanna Kresge ADVERTISING Marketing/Promotions Coordinator Zsanelle Edelman Senior Multimedia Consultant Krickette Wozniak Multimedia Consultants Cecilia Corsano-Leopizzi, Rose Monahan Peter Muller, Matt Silvie DISTRIBUTION Distribution Manager Jay Kraus OPERATIONS

The Ghosts of Tonkin

By Steve Lyons Directed by Mark Kuntz

Co–presented with Bellingham TheatreWorks

Administrative Coordinator Amy Niedrich Publisher Bob Baranski 206-623-0500 COPYRIGHT © 2015 BY SOUND PUBLISHING, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART WITHOUT PERMISSION IS PROHIBITED. ISSN 0898 0845 / USPS 306730 • SEATTLE WEEKLY IS PUBLI SHED WEEKLY BY SOUND PUBLISHING, INC., 307 THIRD AVE. S., SEATTLE, WA 98104 SEATTLE WEEKLY® IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK. PERIODICALS POSTAGE PAID AT SEATTLE, WA POSTMASTER: SEND ADDRESS CHANGES TO SEATTLE WEEKLY, 307 THIRD AVE. S., SEATTLE, WA 98104 • FOUNDED 1976.

May 2–10

Buy tickets today or see it with an ACTPass!

acttheatre.org | 206.292.7676

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • APRI L 29 — MAY 5, 2015

wives returns, Tennessee Williams still strikes a nerve, and refugees show up at your door.

Special 3 course prix fixe menu designed by Executive Chef Jeff Maxfield

Editor-in-Chief Mark Baumgarten

Photo by Levy Moroshan

news&comment

CELEBRATING OUR 53RD ANNIVERSARY!

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Best Availability Weekday Matinees Apr il 30–May 10 • The Par amount Theatr e 877-784-4849 • STGPresents.org

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AP RI L 29 — M AY 5, 2015

Due to the nature of live entertainment; dates, times, performers, and prices are subject to change.

All patrons, regardless of age, must have a ticket. No exchanges or refunds. Tickets are subject to additional fees.

4

news&comment

‘We Aren’t Judges’

Recent incidents draw scrutiny to how Seattle police target protesters.

The Heavy Costs of Light Rail

BY CASEY JAYWORK

BY KATE CLARK

t the intersection of Fairview Avenue North and Denny Way in December, Jorge Torres had gotten a little way ahead of the other protesters in a “Black Lives Matter” march when, in the corner of his eye, he saw the bike cop. “I saw [him] starting to pick up speed on his bike, with this really angry and determined look on his face.

And he leaps off his bike and tackles me to the ground,” Torres says.

“I moved in quickly and contacted Torres, who immediately tried to break free from me,” says that officer, Thomas Burns, in the arrest report. Because Torres had put other protesters in danger by leading them into open traffic on city streets, Burns says in the report, “a decision was made” to arrest him.

“I spun Torres to the ground and he was laid out flat on his stomach,” Burns says. “Torres flailed about for a few seconds and immediately pulled both his arms under his body . . . I then had to use all my strength to pull out Torres’ [right] arm so we could place him in cuffs.”

Torres, who regards the arrest report as “wholesale opinion, interspersed with factoids,” describes getting dogpiled beneath several officers, with one holding his legs in a hogtie position while another ground his head into the pavement.

Charged with reckless endangerment and pedestrian interference, Torres spent a long December night in the county jail, an experience he recalls as boredom occasionally interrupted by guards’ petty bullying. After five months of hearings, which in his description mostly consisted of scheduling other hearings, the judge dismissed both of his charges “with prejudice,” meaning that they cannot be brought against him a second time.

Torres’ lawyer, Patricia Sully, describes the circumstances of his arrest as novel and alarming: “The [pre-trial] discovery supports the impression ... that police were targeting and arresting those leading the march solely because they were leaders.” Scooping up protest leaders, even on charges that won’t stick, might be an effective tactic for hastening the end of a march. If so, Sully concludes, “That is a new development in the policing of protests in Seattle, and a disturbing one.”

Seattle police spokesperson Sgt. Drew Fowler doesn’t deny that police sometimes target protest leaders, but says that the main goal of Seattle police at political demonstrations is to protect lives and property. “There’s no specific effort to focus on someone who, per se, might be a leader, unless that person is going out of their way to put people into danger,” he says. If they are endangering people, he says, “that is a reasonable arrest by, I think, any standard.”

ast week, Sound Transit announced it was moving forward with its $15 billion Sound Transit 3 (ST3) ballot measure. But before ST3 can appear on the 2016 ballot, Sound Transit needs the approval of the state Senate, which has only approved an $11 billion plan. Seattle’s Department of Planning and Development says that by 2035, we will have 120,000 more people and 115,000 more jobs, which means more congestion. The influx of tech workers is already increasing the flow of traffic into Seattle; at this point expanding light rail is necessary, but will take time. In the interim, what exactly does the ST3 ballot measure mean?

A

L CECILIA CORSANO-LEOPIZZI

What do the Black Lives Matter protests portend for May Day?

One way police can totally fail at both those

goals: randomly pepper-spraying passersby. That’s what happened to Jesse Hagopian, a high-school teacher and activist, on Martin Luther King Day in an incident that McGinn calls “horrible . . . absolutely terrible.” Video of the January

20 attack quickly went viral: a thin line of bike cops is blocking protesters’ advance up Westlake Avenue when one appears to panic, screaming “Get back! Get back!” before hosing down every civilian within a 10-foot radius with pepper-spray.

A mere 20 minutes before the incident, Hagopian says, he’d been addressing marchers inside the Garfield High gym, reminding them that “there will be many people that praise Martin Luther King in word, but then turn around and disparage direct action and civil disobedience” whenever it rears its head in the present.

“That is a vulgarity to the legacy of a man who was arrested I don’t know how many times in the struggle for civil rights,” Hagopian says.

King’s struggles took place primarily in the South, but Seattle’s got its own history of civil disobedience. When shipbuilders’ bosses refused to raise pay and lower hours, Seattle’s economy screeched to a halt as 60,000 workers walked off the job in the General Strike of 1919. Nineteen years later, after watching a coalition of radical leftists come this close to seizing the governorship through a procedural maneuver, the U.S. Postmaster quipped, “There are 47 states and the Soviet of Washington.” And ever since the infamous 1999 World Trade Organization protests, the Emerald City has kept its reputation as the town where activists throw down.

In many of these protests, Seattle police have found themselves on the wrong side of public perception after the crowds disperse. Torres’ and Hagopian’s experiences suggest that that tradition, too, isn’t going away anytime soon. E cjaywork@seattleweekly.com

the chatterbox »The Snoqualmie Split

Last week, staff writer Ellis E. Conklin documented the struggles of old-town Snoqualmie natives forced to adjust to the dramatic increase in newcomers (“Tale of Two Towns,” April 22, 2015). Snoqualmie residents on both sides of the divide read it and chimed in. “The next article in this series should be about whether the Ridge has fulfilled its ‘promise’ to anyone besides the shareholders of Weyerhaueser/

Quadrant. The Ridge is not self-contained and it was poorly planned and built in many ways, causing many problems to homeowners and community administrators. Someone needs to ask the hard questions about the impacts it has caused and who made billions.” —Linda Gretz, via seattleweekly. com “We moved here from the East Coast ... we just knew that this was a beautiful place to settle into! I wish that the businesses of Snoqualmie knew that I want to spend my money here . . . to keep the businesses that border the river alive and thriving.” —guest, via seattleweekly.com

•

Why $15 billion? If the Senate and

Washington voters agree, the $15 billion will expand light rail to Everett, Redmond, Tacoma, Ballard, and West Seattle, and will fund rapid-transit buses on I-405. Ideally, by 2023 riders will be able to get from Lynnwood to Northgate in 15 minutes, Angle Lake to downtown Seattle in 40 minutes, Overlake Transit Center to Bellevue Transit Center in 10 minutes, and downtown Bellevue to downtown Seattle in 20 minutes.

Numerous other commutes will be shortened.

That Sound Transit study notes that the average Puget Sound resident spends 33 hours in traffic each year—enough time to “make 198 omelets” or “bike around Lake Washington 6.5 times.”

What’s next? Beginning in June, Sound Transit will ask the public which projects should be given priority and absolutely placed on the 2016 ballot. “Meanwhile, we will continue working to secure the funding authority the legislature must grant us to move forward with a public vote in November 2016,” Sound Transit Board Chair and King County Executive Dow Constantine said in a statement. Later this summer, the board will compose a final Priority Project list, taking public opinion into consideration. If they aren’t able to tax Puget Sound residents the full amount, difficult choices involving who gets efficient mass transit first will have to be made. E

news@seattleweekly.com

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • APRI L 29 — MAY 5, 2015

But are police using bad arrests as a tool for snatching protest leaders off the street? Fowler won’t say yes or no. “We aren’t judges,” he says.

“If someone breaks the law, then we can make an arrest, and then what happens beyond that point is out of our control.”

Sully and Torres’ concern is as pertinent as ever. With May Day right around the corner and kayactivists’ showdown with a Shell oil rig expected later that month, Seattle’s long-running competition between social order and social justice shows no sign of waning.

Former mayor Mike McGinn says that competition is a good thing. “We should be glad we’ve got a city where people are using these tools of civil disobedience and protest to bring attention to things that need to be changed,” he says. This isn’t a wholesale endorsement of illegal protest tactics: When protesters began breaking windows during 2012’s May Day protests, McGinn banned weapons and weaponlike objects from all of downtown.

For him, that’s what responsible governance looks like: finding a way to balance the government’s obligations to protect both First Amendment rights and property rights. “You just have to figure out how do it and to provide an environment in which people can engage in civil disobedience” without compromising public safety.

How much will it cost you? Many have protested this expensive ballot measure because it involves reaching into the pockets of taxpayers in King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties from 2017 to 2032. ST3 calls for a sales-tax increase of 0.5 percent, a property-tax increase of up to 25 cents per $1,000 property value, and an increase in the motor vehicle excise tax. According to the Washington Policy Center, the new taxes will cost the average household $600 a year, approximately.

ST3 is undeniably expensive, but according to a study done by Sound Transit, congestion costs drivers and businesses over $1 billion per year in gas and lost productivity.

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t was late February, and Jonathan Grant was getting frustrated. For three months the fledgling City Council candidate and thenhead of the Tenants Union had been participating in Mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Affordability and Livability Advisory Committee, known as HALA. Convened in the wake of the mayor’s successful income-inequality advisory committee, which hammered out a $15 wage agreement, the HALA was supposed to find consensus on an issue that is arguably boomtown Seattle’s most urgent: Its lack of affordable housing.

Consensus, however, was not exactly what Grant saw happening—or what he wanted, as made clear by dozens of HALA-related documents recently disclosed to Seattle Weekly in response to a public-records request. The documents show fear among some HALA members that the committee is acting as rubber stamp for the mayor’s agenda, while also revealing that some Seattle developers tried to have Grant removed from the committee as he pushed for rent control.

In a February 23 e-mail to a number of apparent allies within HALA, Grant attached a list of recommendations he and other left-leaning housing advocates wanted to see HALA pursue.

Grant wrote: “When [the list] goes public, it could give us some momentum within the committee to cherry-pick the policy concepts that we think may be a harder push to advance within the HALA process, and call on the Mayor to truly broker deals amongst the members, rather than let the private sector essentially block us with the consensus process.”

He went on to talk about “the failures” of the consensus process. If that was going to be the

way things were done, “we are going to be facilitated into obsolesce [sic], and we should bring it to the Mayor’s attention that if he doesn’t push the industry to concede more on some of these issues, the tepid results of this process could result in a community backlash.

“That is our leverage,” he concluded, “and we should use it.”

Grant also warned HALA co-chair David Wertheimer that “a number of the advocates on HALA have become increasingly silent as they perceive that HALA will not be tackling any of the big, controversial ideas and will just be working at the edges on the projects that the City has already prioritized,” according to an e-mail Wertheimer sent co-chair Faith Li Pettis and committee facilitator John Howell.

Grant would thus appear to be the Kshama Sawant of HALA. The socialist councilmember famously threatened to go to voters with a $15wage initiative if the mayor’s income-inequality committee didn’t achieve the results she and her labor allies wanted. Grant does not have the profile that Sawant had when she issued her threat; nevertheless, he apparently is considered enough of a pain in the butt that “landlord and developer groups” called on the mayor to take him off HALA when he announced his candidacy for the council in February, according to one document. The mayor did not do so. Yet Wertheimer, in his lengthy conversation with Grant, stressed the need to keep a “boundary” between his HALA and candidate roles, and to avoid “grandstanding, electioneering” and “intransigence.”

Grant agreed.

That does not mean he won’t stir controversy.

Grant is pushing “rent stabilization” (otherwise

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SEATTLE WEEKLY • AP RI L 29 — M AY 5, 2015

TYLER,

Documents from the mayor’s housing committee show tensions over who’s in control and what can be done.

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How important is HALA, really? That seems to be the question that committee member Alan Durning, executive director of Sightline Institute, asked in an February 24 e-mail with the subject header “process foul.” Written to HALA’s cochairs, its facilitator, and Price, it was provoked by an e-mail the mayoral adviser sent out to committee members calling for the March 2 Big Ideas meeting. Durning wrote: “One of the things that’s been troubling to me, and perhaps to others on HALA, is the degree to which the HALA process has been not just supported but driven by city staff. Staff generated the original list of policy reforms.

Staff generated the list of work groups and then the lightly revised list of work groups. Staff generated the list of participants, HALA and nonHALA, in the work groups. Staff play a big, muscular role in the work groups themselves, too. Each of these decisions concerned me as examples of questionable group decision-making process—a danger of HALA being a rubber stamp for the mayor and council’s agenda, advanced by staff—but I’m trying to be a good soldier and just keep marching along, trusting the process.”

Pettis responded: “Although the e-mail ask came from Leslie, I was fully involved in the planning of the meeting agenda for Monday and helped to draft the e-mail that went out. We’ve been working closely as a team—the co-chairs, department directors and facilitator, as well as City staff . . . I simply did not have the time to send out seven e-mails to the HALA members on each workgroup today, so Leslie took that on.”

Judging by the documents,the working relationship between the mayor’s office and HALA’s co-chairs is indeed close. Before Murray announced last month that he would be giving HALA a goal of creating strategies for 50,000 new housing units, 20,000 of them affordable, Price consulted with Pettis and Wertheimer about possible committee candidates to hear a “preview” of the numbers.

“We will be asking the Mayor tomorrow if he wants to talk with Paul Lambros and one or two others about the target,” Price wrote. “The goal is to bolster the mayor’s announcement and to make sure we have someone in the room prepared to fill the space with acceptance vs. resistance (or ‘oh shit’).”

Pettis, asked by Price to provide quotes for a press release on the announcement, sent over a few favorable lines. “Viet or Mike,” she said, addressing mayoral communications staffers Viet Shelton and Mike Gore, who were included in the e-mail exchange, “I welcome edits.” It’s hard to know whether entrepreneur Howard Wright and labor leader David Rolf, the co-chairs of the mayor’s minimum-wage committee, similarly vetted their quotes with the mayor’s PR staff.

But, both strong personalities, they appeared to be choosing their own words and driving their own agendas.

One day in January, Price mentioned to Pettis in an e-mail that a new policy staffer for the mayor was working on coordinating growth planning across all city departments. Appreciative of Pettis’ views on growth, Price wondered whether the HALA co-chair would have time to talk to the new staffer. “Um yeah,” Price quipped in a parenthetical aside, “you are becoming an extension of the Mayor’s Office . . . who got you into this? :)” E nshapiro@seattleweekly.com

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SE ATTLE WEEKLY • APRI L 29 — MAY 5, 2015

known as rent control) and has at least broached the subject of an “anti-speculation tax,” which would charge property owners additional, steep taxes if they flipped a building within a short period. As related by a white paper submitted to HALA by a party not identified in the documents, a recently failed San Francisco proposition would have charged property owners an additional 24 percent tax if they resold a building in less than a year and 14 percent if in less than five years.

Both ideas show up in a chart of so-called “Big Ideas” aired in a March 2 HALA meeting. At that meeting, HALA members stuck green dots by those ideas they liked and red dots by those they didn’t. The chart shows rent stabilization going down two green dots to six red ones. The anti-speculation tax racked up five red dots and zero green.

In an interview, Wertheimer cautioned against reading too much into the chart. “There have been a lot of changes since that time,” he says, adding that HALA work groups are only now coming forward with detailed proposals. The committee isn’t scheduled to deliver its final recommendations until the end of May. Still, the chart offers clues about what’s on the table and members’ initial views.

The green-dot winner, with 11 to its name, would allow denser development (two to three units per lot) and a variety of housing types (“small lot dwellings,” duplexes, triplexes, and the like) in single-family zones—if indeed such zones even continue to exist. One HALA document refers to a suggestion that such areas be renamed “low-density” zones. That idea might get a lot of red dots outside HALA, though, as resident groups throughout the city are already protesting what they see as the destruction of neighborhood character by runaway development.

These and other housing proposals are not solely the purview of HALA—a point of irritation and confusion to some committee members.

“Bottom line,” Gabe Grant, a HALA member and HAL Real Estate Development vice-president, wrote in a February 9 e-mail to HALA co-chair Faith Li Pettis and Leslie Price, a senior policy adviser to the mayor, “Councilmembers Clark and O’Brien seem to be working at cross purposes with HALA.” Sally Clark had just sponsored legislation proposing bigger concessions from micro-housing landlords who receive tax incentives for setting aside a portion of their developments for affordable units. Mike O’Brien, Gabe Grant noted, was working on changes in low-rise zones that responded to resident complaints about hyperdevelopment.“Other than re-election calculus, I can’t think of why they would be doing this,” Gabe Grant lamented. “ I’m beginning to think that we might want to consider a letter on behalf of the HALA asking them to stop these efforts until we can complete our work.”

Price, the mayor’s adviser, let Gabe Grant know that Murray, not Clark, had originally instigated the micro-housing legislation. Just a week after his message, the developer must have also learned that Clark’s re-election calculus was nil; she announced she would not run again. O’Brien, who is rumored to have mayoral aspirations, is a different story.

But there’s no indication in the documents that a castigating letter was ever written to any councilmembers. Rather, Pettis, a partner with the Pacific Law Group, proposed compiling a list of all housing legislation in the works to hand out to HALA members so they won’t feel behind the curve.

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8

A critical King County detox center shuts down without warning. Why?

BY ELLIS E. CONKLIN

(e.g., rape, attack, combat, or serious car accident)

➢

No Recovery

Recovery Centers of King County headquarters

O

ver the past 20 years, The Recovery Centers of King County has admitted thousands of impoverished drunks and addicts, laboring to get these desperate people—many of them homeless or admitted from hospital emergency rooms— past their physical withdrawals.

Suddenly, though, the RCKC has gone bellyup, abruptly severing its $1-million-a-year detox contract with the county and sending its treatment staff and certified chemical-dependency counselors packing. Officials in the mental-health community are not quite sure why—or aren’t saying. “They were having financial problems, but I can’t say what happened. You’ll have to get that from Carole Hayes,” said Jim Vollendroff, director of King County’s Mental Health, Chemical Abuse and Dependency Services Division.

“My understanding is that they are going out of business, but I can’t give you any specifics,” said Michael Langer, chief of Behavioral Health and Prevention for the Department of Health and Social Services, which holds the state’s $890,000-a-year contract with RCKC for inpatient residential care. “Have you talked to Carole?”

Hayes is RCKC’s executive director, a job she began in December 2014. She declined to return numerous phone calls last week, but we managed to track her down at the detox center, a 27-bed clinic nestled inauspiciously within a quiet, treelined Rainier Valley neighborhood.

Resembling a small motel, complete with outdoor fountain, the white two-story building was dark and nearly empty, lending an air of dispirited abandon. A few workers were packing boxes when Hayes appeared. She was not happy.

“I’m not going to talk right now,” she said, clearly annoyed at this unannounced visit. “There are no patients here. I’m trying now to connect them with other services. So I’m going to have to ask you to leave, politely.”

But why are you closing?

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Not long after our unceremonious departure, Seattle Weekly learned from a former employee, a $19-an-hour counselor who said he was recently laid off, that the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hours Division is engaged in an ongoing investigation of The Recovery Centers.

Julie Shellhorn, the lead investigator in the Department of Labor’s Seattle office, confirmed last Wednesday that the treatment facility is in fact the subject of a federal probe. “But I cannot discuss it or tell you anything about this investigation,” Shellhorn told the Weekly.

Meanwhile, the former counselor, who asked to be identified only by his first name, George, and whom Shellhorn acknowledged speaking with during her investigation, says he and “maybe 15 others” at RCKC were contacted and interviewed by Department of Labor investigators in late July or early August 2014.

“The substance of it is unpaid wages, and that we were asked to work off the clock,” says George. “Some of this goes back years. I know I was working 30 hours per month off the clock.”

Whether the Labor probe was the tipping point that led RCKC’s powers that be to pull the plug is anyone’s guess. “I can’t say, since I didn’t know anything about this investigation until now,” said Vollendroff when we informed him of it last week.

It is not unusual for treatment facilities such as RCKC to go under. Last April, a 41-year-old inpatient center in Madrona, the 48-bed Genesis House, closed its doors, unable to maintain costs due to the vagaries of contracts from the state Department of Social and Human Services and ever-scarce state general-fund dollars.

Genesis House, like RCKC and similar facilities, could not rely on Medicaid money due to a long-standing and much-criticized rule under the Affordable Care Act that limits Medicaid to facilities with 16 beds or fewer. Known as the Institutions for Mental Disease exclusion, it’s intended as an incentive in this era of deinstitutionalization to empty psychiatric hospitals.

“Reimbursements are low, so these places have to operate on a pretty thin margin,” says Vollendroff, “but I don’t think the reimbursements had anything to do with them [RCKC] closing.”

RCKC—which in addition to the detox center was operating two other outpatient clinics serving more than 400 clients in Kent and on First Hill—charged the county $190 a day to keep a person in detox.

Vollendoff said the unexpected termination of the contract on April 3—without the required 30 days’ notice—left the county scrambling to secure an interim three-month contract (at a rate similar to what RCKC was charging) with Fairfax Hospital and Cascade Behavioral Health for 20 temporary detox beds. A request for a proposal for a new contract was sent out last week.

“I think it is weird and very troubling that no notice was given us,” says King County Council member Dave Upthegrove, chair of the county’s Health, Housing, and Human Services Committee. E

econklin@seattleweekly.com

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eattle is not an adolescent anymore.

In the early 1990s, our little port city hit puberty big-time. We got angsty. Everything Smelled Like Teen Spirit, and we were very proud of that smell. And then the growth spurts started happening. It was awkward.

Money started flooding into what used to be a simple, salty, blue-collar hideout. Money from this place called Microsoft that started making this thing called software in the ’80s.

Money, most recently, from a giant orange “A” by the name of Amazon, an e-commerce company currently on track to employ seven percent of the city by shipping products all over the planet. Suddenly the world knew where to find Seattle on a map. Not only that, but many people were actually moving here—either to work for all this money or to embed themselves as artists, hoping to find community in that unique, scummy teen spirit that caught the world’s eye.

More than two decades later, Seattle is very quickly on its way to becoming a full-blown adult. Some might say it’s already gotten there. And like any arty teen confronting adulthood and the responsibilities that come with it, things are getting a little existential. Seattle is very vocally asking itself: How do I make money without selling my soul? Can I grow up without becoming the thing I hate (*cough cough* San Francisco *cough cough*)? Like most teens, from the ’90s onward, Seattle has defined itself in opposition to things. Now that it’s about to become an adult, it suddenly has to figure out what it aspires to.

In asking these important questions, the forces that initially kicked Seattle’s puberty M RO OMtwo culture-driving into gear have broken FRinto ERS F T D S A R E E L EN EAD tech camps—art NWTHICHThe Dprevailing Emoney.

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EY NEWeekly EW- -MONSeattle E N I T Seattles NT Athese I-MO TIST Ashoved RTIStwo ANTunceremoniously A I R D A E A M them to talk to each I and asked MEDtogether other. No shouting into the ether allowed. We wondered if maybe the three pairs of leaders we brought together could figure this whole Seattle thing out, since, you know, rapidly approaching irrevocable cultural death and T all TISSEARS T R A A I that. HereAisAwhat KELTON RTIShappened.

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JOHN CRISCITELLO vs.

REBECCA LOVELL A tattoo artist, painter, and filmmaker, John Criscitello launched a guerrilla street-art series in 2014 by wheat-pasting the image of a giant penis over a Jägermeister ad on Capitol Hill. His name has since become international shorthand for the cultural effects gentrification has had on Seattle, reaching iconic status via wildly popular articles from The Seattle Times, The Stranger, and, most recently, UK publication The Guardian. Decrying the decline of Capitol Hill as an affordable, alternative “gayborhood,” Criscitello’s wheat-paste poster art depicts drunken, tiara-wearing “Woo Girls” and violent, homophobic “Bros” from Amazon and the tech industry at large. He blames the lack of awareness and general privilege of these Seattle newcomers for the city’s cultural decline—a message he summed up most directly in a recent poster bearing the message “TECH MONEY KILLS QUEER CULTURE DEAD.” For the past five years he’s lived on Capitol Hill, where he maintains an active art studio producing work he sells online and in local galleries.

Rebecca Lovell serves as the startup liaison for the city’s Office of Economic Development, a position that didn’t exist even two years ago. Her job is to foster startup communities and entrepreneurs in Seattle’s booming tech industry—many of whom are new to the city—and help them connect, find mentors, and develop business, marketing, and sales strategies for their burgeoning tech projects. Before taking the position, Lovell taught venture-capital investing for seven years as a professor in the University of Washington’s MBA program and served as the chief business officer for GeekWire from 2011–13, helping it become Seattle’s leading tech-news resource.

Lovell was raised by two “blue-collar studio-artist parents” on Capitol Hill, where she still lives.

The two met to talk at Ada’s Technical Books on Capitol Hill, where they were surrounded by literature on JavaScript, HTML, and C++. Before the discussion, Criscitello quipped that he’d “never understood this place.” Although he’d never met Lovell, he said he recognized her from around the neighborhood because of her “fabulous hair.”

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Criscitello: Seattle does feel like a city that’s evolving. But it’s sad because it feels like it’s being built for only one small segment of people.

And fuck everybody else.

Lovell: I’m terrified of what is happening in our neighborhood and community at large. I’m actually across the street from 12th Avenue Arts on 12th and Olive myself. And I don’t like going out on Friday and Saturday nights. I’m like, “Who are these people?” But in terms of my day job, I work with startup entrepreneurs, with technologists—people saying “I’m going to build something. I’m going to put my baby out in the world, and my baby will probably get rejected nine times out of 10.” That’s sort of what entrepreneurs go through. You’re an entrepreneur yourself. I’ve checked out your site.

JC: If you’re motivated and you’re talented, there is no reason why you can’t utilize this technology to have a career of your own.

RL: Right, yeah. You’ve got your own e-commerce site.

JC: You’re probably not going to make six figures—most people aren’t—but you’re going to be happy. And I think happiness is really what working’s about. Eventually. I don’t really know how happy some of these people are in their jobs at Amazon. I have a feeling there’s a little bit of malaise going on over there.

RL: I feel like there’s some connection points between scrappy starving startups and scrappy starving artists that are a separate experience from

Z E Z D E L D VAL VA » CONTINUED ON PAGE 10 9

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the Amazonians and Microsofties of the world.

That said, I think one of my deepest concerns that I’m trying to address in my work is that this whole boom of technology that’s created prosperity has not been shared or equitable in any way.

I’d love to see Amazon be a different kind of corporate citizen. Look at the impact on South Lake Union. The way it is now—that’s not how the plan . . . err, that wasn’t the vision with zoning.

JC: It’s a cautionary tale. So we’ve seen the wave coming, and Seattle’s not as warm and fuzzy as San Francisco.

RL: You don’t think so?

JC: I feel like San Francisco sort of just laid down and let it happen. I don’t think that’s going to happen so much here.

RL: Good! I’d like to think we [technologists/ entrepreneurs] were all sort of open to saying “Yeah, what’s going on here? Like, how can we take the best practices from startups and see if there’s anything in that the art community can benefit from.”

An example that came to mind for me was crowdfunding. Like, how do you get your stuff funded?

And the stat that I remember is that in 2013, Kickstarter had funded more arts projects than the National Endowment for the Arts. Back in the day

“There’s this sort of divide, it’s this sort of lunch table-ism of life. Right? Like ‘There’s the nerdy kids over there, and here’s the art-fag kids over here.’ ” it was the rich art-patron family, these fancy nobles who patronized the arts.

JC: It’s very Medici.

RL: Right, exactly. But now, you know, people with not a lot of money can fund campaigns in a more democratic way. So all right, Kickstarter funds tech projects, and it also funds art projects. So what are the other intersections we can find? How can this nouveau riche community that now lives in Seattle be supportive of the people that made Seattle what it is?

JC: I’ve been doing some reading on this, and the one take I got was that people in tech have computer-science degrees and not liberal arts or humanities degrees. So that sort of veers off and . . .

RL: I’m a history major. Liberal arts through and through [laughs].

JC: So there’s this sort of divide, it’s this sort of lunch table-ism of life. Right? Like “There’s the nerdy kids over there, and here’s the art-fag kids over here,” and these two tables are on opposite sides of the cafeteria, and we’re never going to see each other’s way.

RL: So what do we do about that?

JC: Construction moratorium on Capitol Hill starting today. No more building permits. No more liquor licenses on Capitol Hill. Period. Thoes are the two things I would push [Mayor] Murray for.

Like, stop. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. Stop tearing everything down!

RL: So in terms of what we can do, now, we’ve got “Stop, just stop.” So then what about this conversation that’s just started, and in my opinion, totally stalled—how can we leverage the assets of the creative community, the art community, and maybe the money and time of techies? I don’t know, like how do we . . .

JC: I feel like they’re probably pretty flapped out.

They all work 80 hours a week, and the last thing they’re going to do is go to a gallery, unless they

have a date to go on.

RL: Once in a while you do want to get out of your basement, because entrepreneurship is lonely.

JC: Being an artist is lonely. Visual art is a lonely, solitary pursuit.

RL: Exactly. So being surrounded by other artists or other entrepreneurs, you get not just the cure for loneliness but the sort of water-cooler, beer-keg conversation. A place where you’ve got other smart people that can become business partners, or who knows, just push each other’s thinking. So there are 27 spaces like that just in Seattle alone that are primarily designed for the tech community—co-working spaces.

Digital creatives also have these tech meet-ups— it’s a fairly grassroots platform where community organizers can say “Hey, you know, I care about health care and technology and I just wanna get together and have a beer and talk about it.” In Seattle, if you just go to that site and look up “Seattle Tech Startup” there’s 295 little grassroots groups that get together, and they’re anywhere from 10 people to this New Tech Seattle group that meets at Cornish Playhouse—300 people. So they’re trying to create some serendipitous opportunities. Just getting a bunch of people in a room together who have something in common, shake it up, add a little alcohol, and see what happens.

JC: But their community is pretty insular.

RL: It is. Yeah. Going to a tech conference, I’m one of 10 women out of 150 people.

JC: They’re all college-educated, they all have the potential to earn a lot of money. I feel like maybe a lot of them haven’t really struggled.

RL: So it’s more of an echo chamber, you think?

JC: It’s an echo chamber. Just like the “gayborhood” is its own ecosystem, those startups or meetups or whatever you called it is its own ecosystem.

The difference with that ecosystem is that it has limitless capital being thrown at it all the time, where we’re like, “Oh my God, how am I going to pay the City Light bill?”

RL: Well, I am hoping to bust open that echo chamber by making these opportunities more equitable for young women, people of color, and lowincome students that haven’t gotten access to those experiences. But that’s a 10-, 15-year long game.

JC: Money feeds art in a way, so we’re hearing all about money. But it’s “new money,” from people who, instead of renting their $4,000 apartment and then buying a $10,000 piece of art, going to the ballet, gallery openings, and being a sophisticated, cosmopolitan part of the city’s culture, they’re interested in seeing “how many Star Wars toys can I buy?” It’s like, “Oh my God! You should actually own a work of art!

It makes you a whole person. It makes you real and not just a facade of money.” Up in the Sunset Electric [a new luxury apartment building on Capitol Hill] there are apartments that have empty liquor bottles on the windowsill like dorm rooms.

RL: Do we need some arts education for techies?

JC: Obviously.

RL: I drive kids in a city van to meet with startups for work sometimes. Do we need to take techies out to Capitol Hill Art Walk? Sign me up.

I’m not even kidding.

JC: I would bet that there would be a large contingent who would! I’ve noticed that Friday, Saturday night, they bring so many party buses to The Hill now—you could totally get them here by bringing a party bus. “Look! We’re going take you to an art walk! And hey! We’ll stop at each of the million bars in between each gallery!” My studio is literally open whenever. Anybody that can get down the stairs can come down. I’d be more than happy to have them see what I do and talk about it. Because I do think these kids work hard. I’m not going to take that away from them. I certainly couldn’t do what they do.

RL: I’m so game.

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CHRISTIAN PETERSEN vs. SUSIE LEE For nine years, graphic designer and newmedia artist Christian Petersen has lived on Capitol Hill, where he founded the now-dissolved creative agency Dumb Eyes. He’s created album art for artists including Shabazz Palaces, Animal Collective, and Erik Blood, and currently heads his own independent design firm, I Want You Studio. Petersen is the curator and founder of I Want You, a free international art publication, and the curator of two international online GIF galleries, GIF Lords and Digital Sweat.

His contribution to a recent anti-gentrification poster-art project, entitled #CapHillPSA, resulted in more than 300 comments on Reddit. The poster’s message? “ALL DICKHEADS FUCK OFF.” Shortly after his poster was made public, Petersen told Seattle Weekly that he was considering moving to L.A. thanks to the “totally sad David-and-Goliath story between super-rich developers and artists” on Capitol Hill. He refers to modern Seattle as a “corporate Disneyland,” and questions whether money and art can truly coexist in the city.

Susie Lee is a Seattle-based artist with an MFA from the University of Washington whose large body of work has been shown across the U.S. as well as in Italy and Korea. She incorporates technology in her art-making, utilizing computer programming, video, IR cameras, microprocessors, light, real-time digital drawing, electrical engineering, motion sensors, and cell phones in her performances and installations.

She once held a “social orchestration” called Speed Dating, which paired 10 artists with 10 technologists in a speed-dating format, and liveTweeted eavesdropped portions of their interactions. In 2014, Lee co-founded a celebrated startup called Siren, an iPhone dating app that quickly garnered coverage from national outlets like CNN and The Guardian and is in the running for GeekWire’s App of the Year thanks to its key innovation: Women share their profile photo only with men they choose. Lee now employs a regular staff of seven developers and marketing agents, and says that “being the CEO of a startup and being an artist feels exactly the same to me.”

The two met to talk about Capitol Hill’s newmoney problem at Siren’s headquarters on First Hill. The offices are located inside Stimson-Green, an enormous mansion built in 1901 by a lumber tycoon who kept two black bear cubs as pets on the rooftop veranda.

Vermillion is oftentimes considered a place for artists. One of my developer’s bands played there last night. But at that particular event, no artists showed up. It was mostly tech people. It sort of broke my heart because I thought, “Wait a second. For all the complaining we do . . . ” I’ll go to an art event and it’s like, “It’s the same people always here.”

CP: Exactly. That’s what I’m talking about. It’s like a mafia [chuckles]. It’s one of the big reasons I started I Want You, and I did three shows called ACTION three or four years ago, new-media net-art shows at Ghost Gallery. Very few people were interested. I was really trying to turn people onto this new form of digital-art happening that’s exciting, but it didn’t happen. It’s this intransigence on the part of the Seattle art scene coupled with this comfortable bubble where you all get drunk and slap each other on the back at the same show.

Combined with that, there is a kind of insularity and lack of understanding of the tech industry. So it’s like two brick walls facing each other and nothing has happened.

SL: Well, what would be your solution?

CP: Move to L.A. [Laughs] SL: The thing about this isolation and exclusionism—that totally doesn’t exist in the tech world.

They’ve embraced my questions like nobody’s business. I kind of wish the Seattle art scene took this approach, where it’s like, “You’re new here! Let me introduce you to so-and-so because it’s important for us to all thrive.” What’s funny is, I think we are surrounded by people in both the art and

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Petersen: Capitol Hill, from basically grunge onwards, became this creative place. When I first moved here nine years ago it was a very creative, inclusive, exciting art scene. And . . .

Lee: . . . and you don’t feel that it is now?

CP: It’s definitely not now. It’s quite the opposite. It’s been co-opted by all this money. Culturally, it’s very visibly a total horror show on the Hill now.

And the arts scene is totally exclusive.

SL: The argument with gentrification I always push against a little bit because I’m a daughter of immigrants. It’s always like, “Now we shut the door after I got in.” Nostalgia can be a really dangerous thing because it’s always on the inside, right? So the people on the outside are like, “Hey, wait a second.

Why can’t we be a part of this thing and participate in some way, like you did when you first came here?” I’d also say that the arts community actually hasn’t done a good job of bridging over to the technology sector.

CP: Oh yeah, that’s totally true.

SL: One time John Boylan [the host of a local conversation series] wanted to bring together art and tech people for this talk at Vermillion. And

“If you are a developer at Amazon, you aren’t allowed to be creative. And if you’re creative, you’re not allowed to have a ‘job.’ ” tech world. And it seems like some of the misunderstanding comes from the fact that you have to choose. If you are a developer at Amazon, you aren’t allowed to be creative. And if you’re creative, you’re not allowed to have a “job.”

CP: Exactly.

SL: That seems toxic. I’m more interested in where the commonalities are; that’s where things can thrive. I just get tired of the people complaining who don’t do anything. It’s just “rabble rabble rabble.” I’m just like, do something about this, and that’s kind of what you were trying to do.

CP: I’ve got a willingness to do a lot of things.

It’s just like . . .

SL: What do you need to keep you here in Seattle? From moving to L.A.?

CP: Um . . . I guess a lot of it has to do with people not relating to the things I’m into in terms of art.

SL: One of my developers upstairs was saying he wanted to talk to you because he likes your work!

I think you just have to make those conversations more available so these things can happen. In the digital space you have no excuse. You know the artist Evan Flory-Barnes? He does this thing called “The Hang” where you and a group of random people from Facebook just come meet with him at a cafe and you talk about whatever. I bet if you did that and invited people to talk about digital art, people would come.

CP: Maybe my influence is bigger than I think.

I’m never going to be totally comfortable with that idea, but that’s how I roll [laughs]. It’s a Hollywood movie in the making!

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SL: Or a small indie documentary [laughs].

That’s why I would say people like you or me, we have to stay here because we are the conduits at some level.

CP: I have a lot of arguments with artists who say if you truly love your art, you don’t make money from it. But to a certain extent there’s a self-imposed poverty because it’s romantic, which is kind of stupid. A lot of people use that as an excuse not to push their art further and explore new territory. It’s a digital city. Why is art not a part of that?

SL: Some of the most exciting art endeavors I’ve seen push past what “canvas” means, or this idea that artists are just these producers of these objects that people are supposed to come and buy in these privileged gallery spaces. Like, take Greg Lundgren’s bar, The Hideout. Sarah Bergmann’s Pollinator Pathway.

Or Tanya Lockyer, who is a dancer and choreographer taking a role as the executive director of Velocity and using that venue as a canvas.

I always say Siren is just the vector for this thing that I think of as art. I don’t make objects, so people are always saying, “Oh, it’s like conceptual art?” And I’m like, no. I’m not just in a corner, like, [in evil voice] thiiiiinkiiiing. Why not change a corporate structure as an “artist”? Redefine “artist.” Why not do that instead of working at the coffee shop during the day, then going home and doing your small painting at night? Or be a kick-ass barista because you think of it as an art. If you think of it as art, then you are an artist.

CP: Art should have a much wider definition.

SL: We’re supposed to take that rein. If you sat in a coffee shop and talked about art, I’d argue that’s an “artistic endeavor.”

CP: A performance rant.

SL: Maybe! Or you know, that’s what interesting artists do. They just shape something. When art is truly interesting, it’s not an object. It’s a changing in culture, or networks, or perceptions. Siren was just me trying to create a lightning rod around the conversation about broken dating services. I was, like, “I know how to do that; I’m an artist.”

CP: I feel like I’ve been toying with that idea for a while now. I don’t know. You could be right.

SL: Really interesting art transcends boundaries. Only when I tapped into the tech and entrepreneurial world did I feel a reinvigoration of energy in what I do. Only then did I think, “Hey! Artists! We can actually do it!” They use really empowering language in the tech world.

Disruption. Innovation. I mean . . . usually it’s applied to something like a sandwich-delivery app, which isn’t actually innovative, but they take that language as their own. It’s so annoying that artists feel so broken. Like, “Ohhhh, we don’t have any galleries or money and nobody wants to buy my art.” There should be this indomitable spirit that’s like, “Fuck you guys!

Whatever the corporate world is, I’m going to say fuck you and take your money too.” It’s being a double agent.

CP: There’s two sides of a coin to it, really. I go between “Oh, God, everything is fucked” and “C’mon! Let’s do it.”

SL: That’s actually a tech-startup mentality. We go through that thought process literally every day.

The art and tech scene, I feel like there are so many more commonalities than differences. It’s a tragedy the two worlds are so separate. What would heal this divide are more people who are bridges.

CP: I’m less negative than I sound, I promise. I’m just English. There’s a huge potential for something really exciting to happen in Seattle. I used to do a club night called Penetration that was lots of live visuals, and tech people were way more likely to come talk to me about the visuals as this expression of art than the arts people . . . which is . . . an interesting thought I just had now.

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TIMOTHY FIRTH vs. ROGER VALDEZ A wide-ranging Seattle-based multimedia artist, Timothy Firth was recently pushed out of his shared artist workspace in SoDo when the warehouse was put on the market for millions of dollars. He says that “all these shifts just pushed me and my personal practice over the edge.” As an act of “spiritual” retaliation, Firth signed a lease on an old, dusty appliance-repair shop in Belltown and spearheaded a highly successful IndieGoGo campaign that raised nearly $30,000 to transform the location into Common Area Maintenance, a DIY community artist workspace and multiple-use gallery, slated to open at the end of spring. Utilizing his background in fabrication, Firth is currently working hands-on with contractors to renovate the space—sawing holes in the floor, building stairs and entirely new walls, and installing infrastructural elements all himself.

Roger Valdez has written for The Seattle Times and Forbes, but is best known as one of Seattle’s most prominent and vocal lobbyists for developers and homebuilders—a regular figure at Seattle City Council meetings. His anti-preservationist, progrowth take on land use has, in his own words, made him “rather unpopular” with gentrification critics in town. Valdez writes prolifically about his desire for less restrictive land-use codes and his belief that increased development is the solution to Seattle’s housing crisis on his blog, Smart Growth Seattle.

Firth and Valdez met to talk in the very underconstruction Common Area Maintenance space in Belltown. Firth conducted the conversation in his “work glasses,” which were cobbled together out of old, broken Ray-Bans, a paper clip, tape, and a fork.

At the end of the chat, Valdez offered Firth a belt sander to get the weird black tar off the wood floors.

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Firth: I don’t have the hard numbers on how many buildings are being built in Seattle right now, but it seems to me to be a copious amount in the past 10 years. It looks like a war zone.

Every fucking corner there’s a building being torn down and a new one being built up. I don’t know how much more liberal we can be with letting developers build. It seems to me this market is so incredibly hot right now, that five years ago they should’ve put, not restrictions, but incentivized developers—mandated all new buildings to have some affordable space or art space, whatever that might be—but I just can’t imagine that if we create a system that reflects what we want our city to look like, development will stop.

Valdez: Right, but if you put more brakes on it or make it more expensive for developers or put restrictions on it, the demand keeps going up. We need to build more housing, lots of it. If we stop it, all that’s going to do is continue to increase the prices. So—there’s other solutions. I’ve always said both 4Culture and the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture should have real-estate people.

They should spend all their day working on real estate on behalf of the people creating culture in this city—that would be their whole job, connecting artists with affordable space or buying that space for public arts use. What I see is us just continuing to do the same nonprofit funding we’ve done forever. You fill out a million pieces of paperwork and have to be an official this or that artist or blah blah blah, and then maybe you get a grant from the city, but maybe not. You’re all competing for these public dollars that are not prioritized like Bertha is prioritized. Four and a half billion dollars for Bertha. The city has not made it a priority. It’s doable, the money is there, and the innovation in our city there.

TF: I think it’s absolutely there. There’s not really a model for people to follow. This space in particular— I had to figure a lot of stuff out on my own, but there

was also a lot of help from Seattle’s Arts and Culture department; they were great. But, fundamentally, I had to work the lease, work through DPD, an architect, and go through that whole process blind.

RV: You’re like a lot of the guys I work with.

You are confronted by the same difficulties. You have to figure out all this stuff and rules are always changing and costs are always going up, and there’s nobody at the city that’s got a comprehensive vision on how to support that.

TF: Well, we have a couple of resources now.

Everyone at Arts and Culture are really fantastic.

It’s great that we have a city that wants the arts to thrive here, but is building a bunch of housing going to help? Free-market housing, just build as much as possible? Unless you have a system to funnel some of that money into very specific programs, then what the fuck are you doing?

RV: I think we should do that, could do that, and have to do that. I think right now from my perspective, what you are doing here with this space is invaluable; I’d suggest what the city should do is pay you to— TF: I completely agree. [Laughs] RV: I’ll go down there with you to advocate for this side by side—your space here should be a pilot example of “Here’s what I learned,” and you can create a manual for people, a program for people, so when they come into the same situation, there’s a common point of reference and a resource, a paid resource. The city should invest in what you’re doing here and produce some knowledge from it.

My problem with the government-funded arts organizations is that they are not investing in the human capital and asking arts organizations and individuals, “OK, what do you want to do, and what’s your business model?” And if the two things are in fucking conflict, then somebody needs to intervene and say “You’ve got to go back to the drawing board and figure this out, and we’re going to support that. We’re not just going to make you fill out a bunch of forms.”

TF: I don’t know. I also think maybe you are coming from a more bureaucratic side, and I’m coming from more of an independent, “What am I going to have to do to scrap together and make this work” side, and that’s what happened here. I tapped into the community, the community supported it, and many other projects are shining examples of that kind of energy. I’ve talked to many other people who want to have a little symposium here to talk about how to navigate the system. I’m not going to wait for the city to come in.

RV: And I will help you find the resources to do that because the development community should invest in that. If you can find a way to have a regular series of discussions, I would bring developers, builders, the guy in the Carhartts out building shit right now, and he’s not going to look so different from you. I would love to have some of our builders talk to artists, because we have the same problems.

A bureaucracy that limits us with codes and rules and stupid things that prevent you from doing things you already know you can do.

TF: That’s kind of a confusing statement. It seems like it’s not challenging to build in the city.

It seems like developers are not having a hard time buying and selling property and building.

RV: I’m talking about your regular builders, not big corporate builders like Vulcan.

TF: I think with deregulation, free-market stuff, people just take as much as they can. We have the potential with regulation to guide our city and where it’s going. I think that every single building built, the top tier should pay for, in some percentage, for everyone to live there. I think every building should cross all income spectrums.

RV: And I don’t disagree with you. But if you saw the portfolio for the 12th Avenue Arts project,

compromise—the market produced a lot of good results out of that.

TF: Do you know The Globe? Do you remember The Globe? The biscuits-and-gravy place up on 14th?

RV: Yeah, yeah.

TF: That’s what I’m talking about. We’re kind of in, like, subtly different worlds. The people I’m talking about . . . OK, Oddfellows is great, but it’s also addressing a certain demographic. The Globe was fantastic, and that addressed a certain demographic.

There used to be a contingent in Seattle—we don’t have much money, but we’re following our passions, and we’d buy things from places who support us like The Globe. You could get a biscuit and gravy for, like, $2. And then their rent went up, like, 1,200 percent when they remodeled the building, and you know, it’s like—it’s like there’s a famine in Seattle. I can’t think of any spaces or restaurants or little niches where people can gather that’s truly representative of alternative culture. Everything is Oddfellows. Everything is $15 to get an egg. It’s like, that’s cool, but I believe very strongly in biodiversity within economics, and it’s, like, is this all we can do? Is this all Seattle gets now?

I’m passing every saving dollar-for-dollar to the arts here. There’s no profit being made whatsoever on this project. I just don’t know if that can exist in the city without strong independent intervention.

I don’t see how the city could help unless they had some sort of incentivized package deal with developers that said, “We need to support small businesses. We need to support arts and culture. We need to support lower-income families. We need to support them through all this massive development.” If we want to shape the future of Seattle, we need to create some kind of system! I don’t know how to do that; I can only do it in my own sphere.

The next generation of people being innovative and curious and not having to make tons of money to afford their fucking space—they go away, and you don’t even see it. We lose so much. That’s true for small business too. I want to start a small business called Spaghetti Toast. Just serve spaghetti on toast.

RV: That’s a lot of carbs.

TF: It is a lot of carbs; it’s great. But I’m not going to be able to do that without a 200–300 square-foot space that’s affordable. You need something affordable.

RV: What you are talking about is the basic principle of—you need low cost on the back end so you can produce things that are priced affordably on the front end. It’s the same exact thing developers go through when they try to build housing.

I don’t think we have a difference of opinion on what the problem is. I think the difference is, the way I think we are going to get there is encouraging the entrepreneurial skill set of people that are highly motivated in the city and getting the fuck out of their way and letting them go at it. Part of it is having the conversation so we know we have a common problem. It’s not going to be by taxing or trying to shake down rich developers and give the money to you; all that’s going to do is make things more expensive and perpetuate the problem. If we figure out a way to incentivize it, though, and steer it, I think we could come up with some really good stuff. This whole conversation, this whole polarizing debate, has been going on way too long.

TF: Way too long; it’s crazy.

RV: I’d love get you together with some of our developers and small-scale builders and talk about this.

TF: Yeah, let’s do it. I think if you get the needs out there—identify what our city’s needs are and where we all intersect, developers and artists, we can all make some serious progress.

We need that dialogue so bad. E ksears@seattleweekly.com

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SE ATTLE WEEKLY • APRI L 29 — MAY 5, 2015

you’d see lots of money for lawyers and consultants and transaction costs—those units are very, very expensive. If I just gave you the same amount of dollars, you probably could’ve built three times the amount of those units and probably made them a lot more functional and better, simply because you wouldn’t be constrained by the federal, state, and local limits imposed on the money that was spooled out to that project. There’s this imposed dichotomy on building more buildings and growing a better, more diverse city. Those things can work together.

TF: I mean, they can.

RV: This debate has been so polemicized, polarized by people who are self-interested single-home owners who want to generate a lot of anxiety and anger at developers and say “Those are the bad guys.” But it’s really them who are sitting on 65 percent of the land that’s worth billions of dollars; they want to keep the city like Leave it to Beaver. You try to build anything in Wallingford or Fremont, and now Capitol Hill, it’s like, “Oh, it’s greedy developers.” But, no, our guys are building the future of the city. If we could collaborate with the arts and culture community more effectively, facilitated by the city I think, we could produce some really great models for reducing the barrier for entry for artists who want their own space. The last thing we tried, the Cultural Overlay District Advisory Committee? What happened to that? It just became some kind of blah blah blah exercise: “Oh, we are going to build an arts district!” Well, fuck that. That doesn’t solve any problems.

TF: Well, that’s the thing—all of that is debatable. I don’t know where I stand on that artsdistrict stuff yet, but the intention of it is, there is a problem here, let’s try to shine a light on it and see if we can work with developers and the existing space we have. But—do I think it’s bad to spend energy on creating an arts district?

RV: Well, no! If the arts district has teeth. If it has the ability to, for example, borrow money. We already have 4Culture that can be—actually is—a public development firm. It can sell bonds, take the proceeds from the bonds, buy land, develop the land in the public interest of the arts, and then pay back the bonds over time using various sources of revenue, including what’s coming from the building.

Why are they not tapping into the bonding authority they have to acquire property and buy land?

TF: Sure, well, yeah!

RV: The answer is: We can do that today, but we don’t have the political will. They’ll tell you, “Oh, we don’t have any revenue to pay back the bonds.”

But do we have the revenue to pay back the bonds for the stadium? Well, yeah! We’ll figure that out!

Because it’s a fucking stadium. I’ve been watching this for 10 years—I was on the first South Park Arts Council, and we created a public park with public art to be a gateway to the neighborhood.

I have never seen anything but grassroots efforts scrapped together to make shit happen. Then the city comes along, funds the last little bit of it, gets some photos, and says “Yay, we funded it,” and then they disappear. As long as the city continues to do things like focus its energy on building a basketball stadium instead of just putting 10 percent of that energy into acquiring, like, Washington Hall in the Central District or art spaces in the industrial area and managing that . . . I mean, come on!

TF: But you don’t suggest that model as being applicable to normal developers? That’s what it seems like you are saying.

RV: I do, but what I’m saying is that’s already what happens to some degree. If you look at what Liz Dunn did, people criticize what she did at Melrose Market—but she’s a developer that tries to do things like that. Melrose Market has space available there—not necessarily for nonprofits, but I think Oddfellows is a good example, too, of that

13

food&drink

Bainbridge Island’s Heyday Farm

FoodNews

BY JASON PRICE

Former Portage Bay Café chef Avalon Zanoni is running an IndieGoGo campaign to fund her Please Maid Café. The restaurant will be high on cosplay, with servers creatively dressed in “maid attire,” and will be located either in the ID or on Capitol Hill. The café will be open for lunch and dinner and feature seasonal fare.

A Seattle couple quit their day jobs and make a living off the land.

BY JASON PRICE

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Kukai Ramen and Izakaya opened a third outlet at 320 E. Pine St. this past weekend. The restaurant continues to explore our newfound fascination with bone broth (aka stock) and ramen. What we all used to buy in five-packs for a dollar has now become the latest food “craze”; instead of eating MSG-laden noodles in your dormroom hotpot, you can now get an otherworldly rendition of tender noodles with rich, unctuous broth for $8 to $12.

PHOTOS BY JASON PRICE

On May 13 at Tilth Restaurant, Nora Pouillon of Restaurant Nora in Washington, D.C., will read from her new book My Organic Life. Restaurant Nora, the first restaurant to be certified organic, inspired Tilth, the second. Join chefs Maria Hines and Jason Brzozowy for a four-course meal with wine pairings and a copy of the book for $125. Call 633-0801 for reservations. E morningfoodnews@gmail.com

TheWeeklyDish

Kedai Makan’s lamb murtabak.

BY NICOLE SPRINKLE

Top: their thriving egg business. Bottom left: a simple cow’s-milk chèvre.

Bottom right: a well-tended field.

hogs. They are passionate about their work, and I can see how well the animals are taken care of based on the carcasses coming in to my shop.” I also ask Smaciarz about the benefits of raising hogs on pasture, as Heyday does. “Environment and feed play a tremendous role in hog production,” he says. “If you don’t take care of them, or any animal, they won’t take care of you.”

The farm has grown and diversified over the

past four-plus years, starting with eggs that are now known Island-wide for their quality, as evidenced by the customer lines at their farm store in the Island’s Lynwood Center. Restaurant clients include Greg Atkinson at Marche and Brendan McGill at Hitchcock. Heyday doubles as a B&B and as a teaching space, offering classes in the farmhouse kitchen on a wide variety of topics including whole-animal butchery, canning, and cooking for kids.

The Skiptons’ partners in the business, Ty Cramer and Steve Romein, say that “We both feel a deep satisfaction for the shared farm and food legacy to which Alice and Craig are contributing here on Bainbridge Island. They are committed to the hard work and ethics of providing local, sustainably grown food and improving the broken food system. We could not do it without them.”

After going through such significant changes in work and life, does Alice have any words for those who want to embark on a similar path?

“This Island used to be covered with farms,” she says. “With people thinking more about what they are going to eat and the changing dynamics towards sustainability, I believe that what we’re doing is worthwhile.” E

food@seattleweekly.com

If you’re interested in visiting the Heyday Farm to stay, plan an event, or take classes, check out their website at heydayfarm.com.

NICOLE SPRINKLE

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AP RI L 29 — M AY 5, 2015

I

have a dream—a dream in which thousands of people quit their day jobs and return to the land to grow healthy produce and raise animals sustainably. Sure, it’s a Pollyanna dream, but who can argue with the concept? I know not everyone is going to trade a laptop and a BMW for a pitchfork and a tractor, but for some this represents a lifestyle to aspire to.

Over the past several years there has been a surge in the number of people wanting to know where their food comes from and how it’s grown—just like Alice and Craig Skipton, who left their big-city endeavors and headed to Bainbridge Island seeking to incorporate food and farming into their lives.

Alice was a consultant for foundations and nonprofits while Craig was a landscape architect and a board member of Seattle Tilth. And while the Ballard lifestyle was fine, they craved something closer to traditional farm life. So in 2009 they created a plan to sell their place in Seattle, rent one on Bainbridge, and network with folks looking for an opportunity to farm full-time.

Through local connections, they heard about a couple who had purchased the property and nearby land that would become Heyday Farm— and they pounced on the opportunity. They met the owners, presented their vision and business plan, and struck a deal: The Skiptons would run the farm while the owners would finance its build-out and operations.

Given that the couple had never farmed professionally, the learning curve was steep. I asked Alice how they compensated for their lack of farming experience. “We have a lot of creative skills combined with practical business knowledge,” she said. “We both learn on the job and network with other farmers—all help is welcome.”

Heyday has recently added a dairy operation that includes six Dutch Belted cows. The farm will always be a micro-creamery because of the amount of land (25 acres) they have to work, and they are currently making yogurt and simple cheeses, including a fromage blanc, a bovre (a cow’s-milk chèvre) and the Eagledale tomme, a havarti-style aged cheese.

Steve Phillips of Port Madison Farm has been consulting with the Skiptons in building out the creamery and in cheese production. “He is a fabulous cheesemaker, and he and his wife Beverly ran a goat dairy and creamery for many years and they recently retired,” Craig says. “He came when the first cow calved and taught us how to milk.”

Renowned butcher Tracy Smaciarz of Heritage Meats in Rochester, Wash., does cut-andwrap for Heyday as well as sausage production.

About the quality of meat being produced there, he says, “They are doing a great job with their

On a warm summer-weekend night, there’s something rather magical about waiting outside Kedai Makan for your order, smelling the Malaysian spices wafting into the air as you hungrily anticipate your meal. My daughter and I practiced dance moves to bide the time until our name was called about 10 minutes later. Among the many things I ordered from the popular Capitol Hill takeout window was the lamb murtabak, essentially small square “sandwiches” of roti bread filled with minced lamb, mint, and spices.

Alone they were delicious. Accompanied by a side of dhal curry, they were phenomenal—in part because the dhal itself is superior. Forget the thin, watery broths that come free with Indian takeout and claim to be dhal. This one is chunky—the lentils intact and spiced as they’re meant to be. It’s tempting to eat it on its own (it’s that good), but dip your lamb roti into it to get the full, flavor-packed effect. E nsprinkle@seattleweekly.com

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he first warning sign might have been when Jamie Boudreau stained the bar at Canon with two cases of Angostura bitters when it opened. What until then had been merely an interesting side note to the cocktail boom was instead becoming a key story: the fetishization of bitters.

BY ZACH GEBALLE While it can be thrilling to see the wide range of brands and flavors now available, bitters have moved from subtle supporting actor to brash leading lady, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

I miss the days when a dash of bitters went a long way. They added a necessary bite to a Manhattan, rounded out a Sazerac, or helped downplay the sweetness in an Old Fashioned.

Yet as the range of bitters available has gone from just a few basics to a dizzying array, fewer and fewer bartenders seem to know what to actually do with them.

Bitters have two purposes in a drink. The first is implied by the name: to be bitter. Many cocktail ingredients are sugar-based or have at least some sweetness: fruit juices, liqueurs, or straightup sugar. As such, keeping a drink balanced is one of the keys to quality bartending. Bitters are uniquely suited for this role because they’re so concentrated; they can do the trick without adding much to the total volume of the drink.

The thing is, many bartenders have an overly lavish hand. Sure, a too-sweet drink is no fun, but a too-bitter one is even less palatable. All it takes is one or two extra dashes and a drink can be spoiled, yet I see bartenders haphazardly splashing bitters around. Even those meticulous with measurements can let their guard down when it comes to bitters. I’ve been served several drinks at bars like Zig Zag and Rob Roy that would have been great except that “two dashes” turned into three or four.

Complicating matters even further is the explosion of flavors and brands available in Seattle these days. When Miles Thomas first started making bitters under the “Scrappy’s” label almost a decade ago, most bars didn’t have much beyond Angostura, Peychaud’s, and possibly orange bitters. Now it’s not uncommon to see 40 or 50 bottles behind a bar, and while a skilled bartender might be able to put all those flavors to good use, too often they’re thrown into a drink without much thought.

After all, can you really tell the difference between allspice and cardamom bitters when they’re added to a drink?

More choices always seems like a good thing: I’d rather be able to choose from 10 gins than from two. Unfortunately, having all those bitters just tempts some bartenders into overindulging, turning what should be an enjoyable experience into, well, a bitter one. E

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THE TRAILBLAZER

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AP RI L 29 — M AY 5, 2015

Holy Mountain takes the lead with its unconventional styles—bringing them into the mainstream.

Adam Paysse wriggles loose the stopper in an oak barrel. He shines a flashlight into its depths, revealing a primordial goop of opaque white bubbles emerging from a pond-scum-like film.

Underneath, apparently, is beer, which will one day be consumed by the eager masses lining up inside Holy Mountain Brewing’s taproom to sip Paysse’s latest experiments.

As Paysse, Holy Mountain’s president, explains, that “white, gnarly looking thing” is called a pellicle, a layer that forms over beer that ages on Brettanomyces, a type of yeast used in beer styles like saisons and lambics. Brewers endear-

18

As such, they’re helping write the newest chapter in the city’s maturing beer scene. Seattle’s proliferation of breweries shows no sign of slowing, but increasingly they’re departing from the predictable model and going for something more unique, mature, and creative. And they’re speaking to an increasingly broader, more educated audience.

No longer are the types of beers brewed at Holy Mountain and other edgy Seattle breweries the exclusive realm of “beer nerds,” a small subsection that is incredibly knowledgeable about various styles and well-versed in everything beer.

The sours and saisons and barrel-aged beers are becoming mainstream.

If Holy Mountain had tried to open a decade

ago—or perhaps sooner—it’s doubtful they would have been able to fill their current 60-seat taproom as consistently as they do today. Without the standard flagship pale/blonde/stout model, they may have been relegated to a smaller space, the sort of nanobrewery that would fly under the radar for all but the most dialed-in beer nerds.

But they’ve found incredible success right off the bat, testifying to Seattle’s maturing palate. They’ve added more employees and expanded their taproom hours, and say their beer has been “very well received.”

It appears Seattle was waiting for a place like Holy Mountain to open.

“It was surprising to all of us, when we started talking about opening a brewery four or five years ago, we were like, ‘Why isn’t anyone doing this in Seattle?’ We didn’t understand it,” Paysse says. “It was a huge void.”

Paysse sees evidence in popular beer events like Brouwer’s annual Sour Beer Fest, part of Seattle Beer Week, which is consistently packed. “Sour beers are defiTaps at Holy Mountain. nitely achieving much more mainstreaming now. People realize that they’re awesome. But there are more and more people willing ingly call it “Brett,” as if it were a good buddy. to try things that aren’t as commonplace.”

“What happens is—this is kind of rad—Brett It helps Holy Mountain’s cause that beers like will form this protein layer on top of the liquid it’s sours are attractive to a non-beer-drinking audience. in,” says Paysse with noticeable excitement in his Paysse says the brewery’s gose, a tart wheat beer that voice, in an effort to control the rate at which oxyis barrel-fermented with coriander, was ordered by gen enters. “And here’s the really cool part: The pel“all sorts of people who had that ‘I don’t really like licle will string together like a little bucket brigade, beer but this is amazing’ reaction to that beer. That and when it wants more oxygen, the Brett cells at kind of stuff is rad. The spectrum of types of beers the top will pass down oxygen to other Brett cells and flavors is impossibly broad.” until they put it in the solution,” he continues. “And But Paysse emphasizes that while Holy you see all these crazy bubbles form because that’s Mountain is bucking tradition in the context CO2 that’s trapped in the pellicle. It’s super-gross. of Seattle, they’re actually brewing some pretty We usually try not to show this to people.” traditional beers.

Such seemingly bizarre science experiments are “We use a lot of old-school brewing traditions commonplace at Holy Mountain, which opened in common in Belgium, Germany, and England, January in Interbay. It’s here where Paysse and his with very yeast-forward beers,” he says. “Most partners Colin Lenfesty and Mike Murphy disAmerican breweries don’t highlight the yeast; it’s pense with the common notion of “flagship” beers. just there to ferment the beer. American beers, Most breweries in Seattle consistently stock a by and large, are very yeast-neutral. They sit back predictable lineup, including an IPA, a pale ale, and allow the malt and the hops to shine, which a blonde, and a stout. “For lack of a better term I is awesome, and you can make some phenomenal always call that the ‘American brewpub model,’ ” beers like that, but it’s a different balance. Our Paysse says. “It’s like hamburger, French fries, milkbeer is pretty out-there for Seattle and pretty proshakes. You expect that.” gressive, but it’s not that weird in a wider context.”

But you won’t find those standard offerings Paysse also says that Holy Mountain is still just at Holy Mountain. Instead, the brewery’s menu getting started; they’re ramping up production of rotates constantly, with a heavy dose of barrel-aged farmhouse ales, and have a growing number of beers, farmhouse-style ales, and yeast-forward crebeers aging in barrels for later release. “We’re about ations, like sour beers. Holy Mountain concentrates to start really testing the waters with some of those on the types of brews usually surfacing as limited styles,” he says. “We’ll see what the market is.” releases at more traditional breweries.

tractor THE OUTLIER

TIMES

available to him. Barrel-aged sours are Morris’ forte; he also makes the enthusiastically named Party Time!!! Ale, an unaged, tart beer that can be combined with a rotating selection of syrups (like spruce tip and red currant) at Gastropod.

Morris’ partner in crime, Travis Kukull, has received much praise for his equally imaginative cuisine at the minuscule 38-seat Gastropod, whose rotating menu includes such wonders as honeydew bubble-tea pie and green-banana soup. But despite their success, the duo has stayed small-scale—until now.

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SE ATTLE WEEKLY • APRI L 29 — MAY 5, 2015

Ghostfish’s (delicious, seriously) gluten-free brews.

In another sign of Seattle’s maturing beer scene, the state’s first and only dedicated glutenfree brewery opened in SoDo in February.

Ghostfish Brewing works with a 15-barrel brewing system; like Holy Mountain, it’s not at all a closet-sized nano.

Founded by Randy Schroeder, Brian Thiel, and Jason Yerger, Ghostfish’s beers are brewed without barley. Instead, brewer Yerger A beer and a bowl of relies on naturally gluten-free green-banana soup grains like millet and buckat Epic/Gastropod. wheat in a highly experimental, trial-and-error fashion.

But the beer he’s making has been well-received, as evidenced by a consistently busy taproom and an audience reaching beyond just those avoiding gluten.

“Success is relative, but we knew there was a gaping hole in the craft-beer offerings for this category,” says Schroeder.

“People stop by because they heard the beers are great or the space is great or the service is great—no idea about the GF underlay. We don’t preach, so it is very common for patrons to come in, drink the beer, compliMorris and Kukull are emerging from the ment us on the beer and vibe, then leave, vowing to shadowy hinterlands of SoDo to launch Mollusk return. We love that, and it was our goal from the in late summer or early fall in Seattle’s newest beginning.” buzz neighborhood, South Lake Union—not Though it was initially a challenge to create a bad idea, given all the dudes on the Amazon even a basic stout or pale without using barley— campus there. Mollusk will cover 5,000 square and to do so with great body and flavor—Yerger feet and seat 100, with a brewhouse double the has mastered that and more. He’s also created size of the current space in SoDo. “dozens of small-batch experimental beers” While patrons can expect common styles like including a Belgian-style witbier, a grapefruit IPAs on tap at Mollusk, Morris isn’t shying away IPA, a smoked porter, and a Belgian-inspired red, from his love of weirdness. “It will be more familbrewed with an inventive combination of roasted iar, but there will be some playful twists,” including rice malt, saison yeast, and tangerine peel before the possibility of brewing beer with squid ink, aging with hickory wood. They’re surprisingly serving beer cocktails, and including at least one full-bodied and smooth; most people wouldn’t sour beer on tap. On the food side, Kukull is cenknow they’re brewed without barley. tering the menu around Indonesian curry.

Ghostfish believes they’ve captured a wide“We decided it would be fun not to get comenough audience that they can distribute beyond pletely bored by the beer you have to brew all the the taproom. Their Watchstander Stout is availdamn time,” Morris says. They’ll keep their SoDo able in bottles, and they’re canning their Vanspot for “more challenging” food and beverages. ishing Point Pale and their Shrouded Summer Witbier—available at bottle shops around Puget Sound, like Chuck’s Hop Shop and 99 Bottles.

Schroeder thinks that Seattle’s attitude of welBoosting brewers’ reputations— coming innovation has created the perfect climate and bringing their product to the people. for his beer. “The beer-drinking community in If you ask Adam Paysse, Seattle’s beer bars and Seattle, and Seattle in general, embraces and bottle houses are helping lay the groundwork for expects new things,” he says. “It’s not just beer; we breweries like Holy Mountain. “We can exist now love to see that next new idea in all areas of busias a brewery in Seattle doing so many barrel-aged ness and life. It is precisely this culture and open and fermented beers, as well as Brett and farmhouse embrace of the new that emboldens entrepreneurs beers, largely because of the people who have paved to venture forth here in the Pacific Northwest.” the way with the great beer bars pouring Belgian beer for the last decade plus,” he says.

In fact, there is such a proliferation of these styles that experts like Matt Vandenberghe, who owns beer bars Brouwer’s Café and Burgundian and the Epic Ales’ massive expansion: taking their specialty bottleshop Bottleworks, is feeling chalquirky beers and food to South Lake Union. lenged. “There’s just so many beers coming out, it’s Across the street from Ghostfish sit the Epic actually—I won’t say overwhelming, but it’s a fullAles brewery and its accompanying gastropub, time job just trying to keep up,” he says. the acclaimed Gastropod. Brewer Cody Morris Vandenberghe opened Brouwer’s, which stocks has been creating highly experimental beers here since 2009, using every inch of the 180 square feet » CONTINUED ON PAGE 20

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scores of otherwise hard-to-find American and European beers, in 2005. “That was a much simpler time,” he says. “The styles were very straightforward and kind of similar. Ambers and porters and pales and IPAs. It’s nice to see the breweries branching out and not just offering sort of the standard styles—which is wonderful if you do that well, to be able to offer really incredible IPA or really nice porter—but it’s nice to see the diversity. Now it’s just absolutely anything goes.”

event’s website gets hits from around the world, and beer drinkers from around the country plan their vacations around it.

“I think that this is something that will continue to grow,” Vandenberghe says. “I don’t think this is a bubble that will burst. The beer scene is totally wild and better than ever.” E

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SEATTLE WEEKLY • AP RI L 29 — M AY 5, 2015

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Ghostfish Brewing Company

Bellying up to the beer bar.

As a co-founder of Seattle Beer Week and the owner of Capitol Hill’s beer-focused Pine Box bar, Ian Roberts knows this pattern of experimentation well. He’s been sourcing farmhouse ales and sours for Pine Box from other markets, but it seems that finally these styles are beginning to be brewed closer to home.

“IPA will always be king as far as sales go, at least in the Northwest,” he says, but they’re having to make room for sours and saisons in the tap lineup. “When I first opened Pine Box [in early 2012], I was really hoping to have five sours on at all times. Even just three years ago I couldn’t do that. Now it’s pretty easy, between domestic and imported. I’ve seen it change a lot over the years. It used to be that there were specific craft-beer bars, and it seems like every bar now is a craft-beer bar. You can walk into a shitty dive bar and they’re going to have a handle on of something amazing. They might even have a sour beer on.”

This new-found interest has also manifested itself in exponential crowd growth during Seattle Beer Week events. “The first year we did it, it was all the same people that we knew, the same beer nerds. You’d walk into an event and you’d recognize everyone in the room,” Roberts recalls.

“Now the idea of a successful event is to go and see no one that you recognize among 200 or so faces.” He’s noticed, too, that the interest in Seattle Beer Week reaches well beyond locals; the

2942 First Ave. S. 397-3898, ghostfishbrewing.com Notable beers to try now: Watchstander Stout

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food@seattleweekly.com

arts&culture

Two-Part Invention

ThisWeek’s PickList

The Seattle Symphony collaborates with the city’s— likely the world’s—paramount musical gadgeteer.

BY GAVIN BORCHERT

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29

D

we have in town,” says Morlot of his collaborator—particularly ironic since Trimpin is in many ways continuing the legacy of John Cage, whose two years at Cornish College (1939–41) inspired

As Riot Grrrl, the feminist punk movement of the ’90s, has been rehistoricized and come back into style in recent years, Kathleen Hanna has undeniably become the face of that revolution. This is something both she and critics have a problem with. Though she didn’t ask for it, she has taken on the responsibility with grace. Riot Grrrl has been accused of lacking diversity, for not including women of color.

Two decades later, married (to the Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz), resurgent in her musical career (with The Julie Ruin), and recovered from Lyme disease, Hanna is now seeking a dialogue with her feminist heirs. “We put ourselves out to be criticized,” she says, “and I hope that people criticized things that I said, because it’s all about the exchange.” Riot Grrrl was monumental in creating spaces both safe and separate from men in punk (hence the famous “Girls to the front” commandment), and a supportive community for women to navigate within it. In this non-musical appearance, Hanna will speak about the movement and her career in a lecture called “Riot Grrrl Then and Now.” The Neptune, 1303 N.E. 45th

St., 877-784-4849, stgpresents.org. $24 (sold out). 8 p.m. DIANA M. LE THURSDAY, APRIL 30

Above: Trimpin (left) and Morlot in rehearsal. Below: the score and the prepared piano.

some of his most far-reaching innovations and who became one of the school’s most famous sons. For all their Rube Goldbergian intricacy and technological innovation, the actual soundmaking objects in Trimpin’s installations—a struck chime, a vibrating reed, a marimbalike array of wooden bars—are familiar, even comfortingly so, their sounds gentle, inviting, beguiling.

Setting up a complex system, then getting out of its way and delighting in the aural result: This is the joint method of both creators, even though Trimpin employs cutting-edge video technology or earthquake data (vide his “seismofon” at the Science Museum of Minnesota) where Cage used the I Ching and an orchestra of radios. Both men share a playfully enthusiastic yet disciplined demeanor; both fit somehow into a very American tradition of the DIY tinkerer, the “mad inventor.”

Cage, though, found it nearly impossible—to the extent he ever bothered to try—to get access to mainstream performing institutions. (Look up what happened in 1964 when Leonard Bernstein tried to get the New York Philharmonic to play his Atlas eclipticalis.) Yet here’s the Seattle Symphony happily reaching out to and spotlighting his aesthetic descendant—a mere half-century later! Friday’s performance will be yet another example of how the SSO under Morlot is moving, season by season, closer to where it belongs—at the forefront of creativity and novelty in the city’s classical sphere. E

gborchert@seattleweekly.com

SEATTLE SYMPHONY Benaroya Hall, Third Ave. & Union St., 215-4747, seattlesymphony.org. $20. 10 p.m. Fri., May 1.

INCOUNTRYFILM.COM

In Country

In Country’s role-players assemble.

The premise sounds like Christopher Guest: Portland filmmakers Meghan O’Hara and Mike Attie follow a “platoon” of Vietnam War re-enactors into the woods. Your first thought, as mine was, is likely to be “Jesus Christ, you fucking losers, get a life and stop pretending you’re at war. American troops are still dying abroad. This is in really bad taste!” O’Hara and Attie confess to just the same qualms, but their sympathetic doc is anything but a simple takedown. To begin with, several re-enactors are actual veterans of recent wars. Their mentor is a Vietnam War vet. And one of them, a teen, is set to enlist in the Marines. So your snickers end quite soon. Then the directors interlace scenes of this Oregon “war” with actual Vietnam War footage to show what these guys are after. The old newsreels and stills have an

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • APRI L 29 — MAY 5, 2015

“Seattle is not aware of what kind of genius

Kathleen Hanna

COURTESY OF THE SEATTLE SYMPHONY

o I have to use musicians?” was Trimpin’s first question when planning began for his new commission for the Seattle Symphony. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, since the German-born local sound artist is best known for working in visual media. His elaborately fanciful and beautiful sound-generating sculptures and installations have graced venues around the world. Closest to home is the giant guitar tree, titled IF VI WAS IX, permanently displayed at the Experience Music Project; and last year his You Are Hear group of listening stations was a summer installation at the Olympic Sculpture Park.

But his original concept—a solo work for SSO music director Ludovic Morlot—remained at the center of Above, Below, and In Between, to be premiered at this Friday’s concert in the orchestra’s [untitled] new-music series. Morlot will control the musical instruments set up by Trimpin in the Benaroya Hall lobby via a motioncapture camera (something very roughly akin to a Wii video-game controller) devised by Dimitri Diakopoulos of Intel. It’s a short step for a conductor who, of course, is accustomed to guiding live musicians by gesture; here, Morlot’s batonwielding arms, as caught on video, will start, stop, and change the volume of Trimpin’s gadgetry.

A February visit to Trimpin’s wondrously cluttered Central District workshop—part warehouse, part circus prop room, part Santa’s toy shop—revealed the sound makers that will fill the Benaroya lobby. First are 24 “reed horns”: blue, triangular, organ-pipe-like devices each fitted with a reed and its own blower. An octave and a half ’s worth of “Brant chimes,” tubular bells once owned by composer Henry Brant, are each struck by a tiny mechanical piston that taps it delicately. More pistons are set up to strike the keys of a prepared grand piano; also, the piano’s strings will be set in motion by a magnetic field, without anything touching them at all, generating a ghostly, sonorous drone. All these will be placed and hung among the lobby’s nine columns, hence the work’s title. Responding to Morlot’s movements, those blowers and pistons will fill the space with a curtain of delicate and whimsical pings and hums.

As for live musicians, there’ll be 10: two violas, two cellos, two basses, and three trombones spaced out on the promenade level above those nine columns, plus soprano Jessika Kenney, performing Trimpin’s written-out score. (The reason for using strings and trombones is the ease with which they can slide between the notes of the standard scale—unlike, say, pianos—enabling the use of the full spectrum of pitch.)

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 22 21

arts&culture» Aoshima’s A Contented Skull.

© 2003 CHIHO AOSHIMA

A look back to ACT’s inaugural season in 1965.

Now–May 17

Buy tickets today or see it with an ACTPass!

Illustration by Barry Blankenship

» FROM PAGE 21 enduring power to startle, in large part because Vietnam was the last time photojournalists were allowed such intimate access; all wars since have been strictly stage-managed by the Pentagon. An amusing footnote: For the sake of veracity in this amateur-theatricalin-the-woods, O’Hara and Attie agreed to “play” reporters following the platoon with their camera. And the two directors will attend tonight’s screening. (Through Sun.) SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., 324-9996, siff.net. $7–$12. 7 p.m. BRIAN MILLER

acttheatre.org | 206.292.7676

FRIDAY, MAY 1

STIFF

“Acrobatics liquified into poetry.”

The acronym for the newly renamed and broadened Seattle Transmedia and Independent Film Festival was always a cheeky bit of misdirection, since SIFF proper begins on May 14. The motley, spunky STIFF programs differently—like Slamdance punching upward at Sundance. This year’s lineup has a typically impudent feel, with highlights including Jen Marlowe’s Arab Spring doc Witness Bahrain; an interactive web game called Pirate Fishing (intended to raise awareness about overfishing off West Africa); the Chilean Assent (about the ’70s military coup, designed for Oculus Rift); Coney Island: Dreams for Sale (about gentrification in New York); and Lost Conquest (about a Minnesotan’s quest for his supposed Viking heritage). Tonight’s screening of the romantic thriller Bristel Goodman (6 p.m., Grand Illusion) is followed by a gallery event and opening-gala afterparty. Grand Illusion, Lucid

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AP RI L 29 — M AY 5, 2015

—The New York Times

22

May 14-16

Angela Hewitt

Lounge, Wing-It Productions, and other venues. Tickets (mostly $12) and schedule: trueindependent.org. Runs through May 9.

BRIAN MILLER

/ May 18

Pianist performs works by Bach, Scarlatti, Beethoven and Liszt

MEANY HALL ON THE UW CAMPUS | 206-543-4880 | UWWORLDSERIES.ORG

SATURDAY, MAY 2

Ariadne auf Naxos

For all its frivolity and ebullience—the aspects of Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos that Seattle Opera is selling the hardest for its upcoming production—it cost its composer, and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, years of grueling and contentious labor. The latter’s original comic concept, the onstage clash of a tragic Greek-myth opera performance and a commedia dell’arte troupe—so avant, so meta— was itself stuffed, like some giant theatrical

turducken, into his adaptation of Molière’s play Le bourgeois gentilhomme. (One of Molière’s characters presents the two-operasin-one as an entertainment in his home, or so goes the contrived premise.) Strauss wrote a great deal of music for this hybrid: incidental music for the reworked Molière plus the complete 90-minute double opera. When this proved less than a hit, mainly because it made for an evening of Wagnerian length, Strauss and Hofmannsthal had to detach what they had so painstakingly spliced together, adding a new prologue to the opera (depicting the manic backstage preparations) so it could stand on its own. Happily for Strauss, though, this overelaborate concept called for two very different styles of music, both of which he excelled at: elegant, sparkling 18th-century pastiche to evoke the commedia players; and soaring, opulent music for his tragic heroine Ariadne. Seattle Opera revives its 2004 production—including, memorably, onstage fireworks at the climax. (Through May 16.)

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

Chiho Aoshima

This is SAAM’s second exhibit by a contemporary young Japanese artist associated with Takashi Murakami. (The artist known as Mr. was the guy who recently filled a gallery with tsunami detritus.) Aoshima is a woman, however, who ought to provide a different perspective on the oppressive sexism of most anime. In addition to 30-plus drawings and two large “dreamscapes,” her show Rebirth of the World will include new animated work, Takaamanohara (or The Plain of High Heaven), dealing with Shinto deities. In her typically colorful paintings, ethereal kawaii sprites roam in enchanted glades where the colors are anything but natural. Long, undulating hair mixes into the undergrowth and vines, suggesting deeper connections to the planet. There are cityscapes, too, as in her 2005 animation City Glow, where the towers rise like wormy, human-faced figures. Corporeal, architectural, and natural realms blur together in her work.

Aoshima is a syncretist whose diverse subjects grow from the same spiritual undercurrent.

(Through Oct. 4.) Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), 6543100, seattleartmuseum.org. $5–$9. 10 a.m.– 5 p.m. BRIAN MILLER E

» Stage

JOE BONAMASSA

Opening Nights Angry Housewives ARTSWEST, 4711 CALIFORNIA AVE. S.W., 938-0339, ARTSWEST.ORG. $17–$36.50.

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ACT THEATRE, 700 UNION ST., 292-7676. $15–$44. TUES.–SUN.; SEE ACTTHEATRE.ORG FOR SCHEDULE. ENDS MAY 17.

The choice of Laura Griffith and Brandon O’Neill for Maggie and Brick—two examples of the superb casting of ACT’s current Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Kurt Beattie—was for me a revelation, since I’d only ever seen them in musicals (most recently as the hero and heroine of the 5th Avenue’s Carousel ). There can’t be many actors with both Tennessee Williams and Gilbert and Sullivan on their resume, but O’Neill’s portrait of the multiply wounded ex-athlete (kids, some advice: Don’t peak in high school) is a cocktail of bitterness and dry, resigned wit,

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wringing an amazing amount out of so few words. He speaks one for every 50 Maggie does in his Act 1 scene with Griffith, turning unflappability into emotional abuse in an epic clash of the irresistible and the immovable. Yet if Brick were merely an ice-cold villain, you’d never buy that Maggie could continue to be so hot for him; it’s a tightrope O’Neill walks expertly.

Advertently or not, Griffith’s Maggie and John Aylward’s breathtakingly good Big Daddy come off as fascinating mirror images. Part of this is the performers’ easy physicality; they seem analogously comfortable in their (extremely different) skins. (Watching Aylward, I thought of Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker and the curious grace in the way he lumbered across a room, shoulders rolling.) They’re monstrous and sympathetic, sometimes turning in a millisecond; you’re as captivated as you are appalled. Contempt for the “mendacity” surrounding them is their fuel, truth their driving engine and their weapon—wielded cruelly, yet somehow you can’t help cheering for them (considering the rest of the family is even more vile). Still, Maggie’s triumph comes when she abandons truth for her one big final lie, which Griffith plays like a diva’s exit aria.

Only an occasional hint of caricature—which leads to laughs, which leads to a slight emotional distancing—keep Marianne Owen’s Big Mama and Morgan Rowe’s Mae, both performances full of panache, from perfection. Charles Leggett, as Mae’s husband Gooper (Brick’s older brother), is highly effective in his character’s ineffectuality.

I also want to mention Kyle Ballard, Kai Borch, Annika Carlson, and Nina Makino, excellent as Mae and Gooper’s four loathsome brats; shrieking like the violins in Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score, they provide incidental music from hell.

Testament to the skill of the acting is that the play’s frankness of language and subject matter became startling, even shocking, simply because the cast recreates the milieu so well.

To make this material pack a punch similar to what it must have done at its 1955 premiere— in our age of The Book of Mormon, Broad City, and Amy Schumer—is some feat. Ah do declare, all that talk of “fornicatin’ ” and “queer” and “unnatural”—if I’d’a been wearin’ pearls, I’d’a clutched ’em. GAVIN BORCHERT

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 24

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NESHOLM FAMILY FOUNDATION

Emily Chisholm and M.J. Sieber, photo by Nate Watters.

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • APRI L 29 — MAY 5, 2015

PCat on a Hot Tin Roof

MAY 14, 15 & 16 MICHAEL BRUNK

After watching 1979’s Rock ’n’ Roll High School, I wanted to be in a punk band. How hard could it be? In late elementary school, my friends and I formed a group called RAF. We had a drum set—a Tupperware container of bottle tops—and some stellar lyrics about nuclear bombs. Watching this revival of the long-running ’80s musical, created by A.M. Collins and Chad Henry, I experienced an intense wave of ’80s nostalgia.

Whatever the show’s original punk-feminist spirit, today it provides simple and almost wholesome entertainment, like riding the Duck.

Widowed Carol (Ann Cornelius), divorced music teacher Bev (Heather Hawkins), unhappily married Jetta (Chelsea LeValley), and single bridge operator Wendi ( Janet McWilliams) decide that forming a band will be more profitable than hawking pyramid-scheme cosmetics. (Thirty years later that’s probably still true.) From there we witness how adapting punk personas creates both empowerment (for them) and disapproval (from their men). Ably directed by Shawn Belyea, the entire cast provides potent performances— including the signature tune “Eat Your Fucking Cornflakes.” A keenly comic moment ensues when Carol’s son Tim (Trent Moury), a punk himself, confronts these covert middle-aged rockers. Mom! You’re embarrassing me!

Though billed as a punk-rock musical, Angry Housewives features a mostly traditional score, plus some choreography (by Troy Wageman) that wouldn’t look out of place on Broadway during the ’30s. Dennis Culpepper’s set is strewn with handbills that evoke the pre-Internet era of band promotion, augmented by videos from Brianna Larson and Brody David. Yet K.D. Schill’s lazy costume design hits the wrong end of the ’80s: The large hair bows and oversized jean jackets are post-Madonna, while Collins’ original conceit sprang from the Patti Smith era. Spiky-haired Tim sports a Ramones T-shirt while carrying a Nike backpack. Nothing says counterculture like a corporate sports logo.

Yet Angry Housewives has its nostalgic pleasures, including its heroines’ determination to “make vinyl.” Somehow mp3s and Instagram just aren’t as punk. ALYSSA DYKSTERHOUSE

23

a&c» Stage » FROM PAGE 23

PLittle Bee CENTER THEATRE AT THE ARMORY (SEATTLE CENTER), 216-0833. $25. RUNS WED.–SUN.; SEE BOOK-IT.ORG FOR SCHEDULE. ENDS MAY 17.

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AP RI L 29 — M AY 5, 2015

JOHN ULMAN

In Book-It’s version of Chris Cleave’s 2008 novel (adapted and directed by Myra Platt), who in the world gets to live in peaceful prosperity is the thorniest of many conundrums, nestled like an artichoke heart among interlocking barbed petals. In the play’s primal scene (which comes late in the first act), Brits Sarah and Andrew cavort on a Nigerian beach where they meet locals Little Bee and her sister just before the adolescent girls are kidnapped by insurgents. True character is revealed during these harrowing moments; afterward, these scarred individuals must come to terms with what they have seen in themselves and in others. It’s an undeniably potent formula for drama, and this moving interpretation takes good advantage of the setup. Atmospheric sound

by Evan Mosher, lights by Andrew D. Smith, and Will Abrahamse’s flexibly austere sets help lubricate the shifts between Africa and England, where Little Bee is unexpectedly reunited with the Brits a few years later.

24

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Andrews (left) and Mboligikpelani Nako.

For the sake of suspense, I’m dancing around what happens on the beach, and some other reveals, despite the book’s wide readership. (A Nicole Kidman film adaptation is rumored.)

Suffice it to say that the bond between Sarah (a wistful, compelling Sydney Andrews) and Bee quickly eclipses most others, including Sarah’s marriage to Andrew (Eric Riedmann) and her extramarital courtship with British Home Officeer Lawrence (Michael Patten). Still, the show depends—and succeeds—on the basis of its star: Claudine Mboligikpelani Nako. With shy smile and unflinching gaze, her Little Bee radiates intelligence even while puzzling over such cross-cultural mysteries as how a coffee table can be made of coffee. She elicits reckonings from all who confront her. And her melding of gallows humor and hope, expressed in painstaking Queen’s English, melts hearts onstage and in the audience.

Per Book-It recipe, there’s a lot of direct address as characters share inner thoughts and desires (plus dutiful exposition). A few glaring improbabilities mar the second act—particularly the contradictions between Lawrence’s words and actions. One could also squint at the wish-fulfillment ending, but this would be to let cynicism mutate the dream gene. Little Bee posits a reverie that deserves to be indulged: a First-Worlder reaching outside her comfort zone to support a refugee’s birthright to a decent life.

MARGARET FRIEDMAN E

stage@seattleweekly.com

» Film Johansson is back as the Avengers’ Black Widow.

Adult Beginners OPENS FRI., MAY 1 AT SIFF CINEMA UPTOWN & VARSITY. RATED R. 90 MINUTES.

toward self-validation in this rote, predictable dramedy, it’s Justine’s fate than haunts you after the final hugs. Jake can move on, charming and childless, while she’s stuck in New Rochelle. If there are other options for such women, Adult Beginners ends without exploring them. BRIAN MILLER

Avengers: Age of Ultron OPENS FRI., MAY 1 AT CINERAMA AND OTHER THEATERS. RATED PG-13. 141 MINUTES.

The characters in current superhero movies must’ve grown up reading comic books. In Marvel’s run of blockbusters, Iron Man and Thor and the gang (well, maybe not Captain America) are steeped in cultural references; they know all the clichés of pulp fiction, even as they embody them. Aware of the absurdity of wearing tights and wielding magical hammers, they make jovial banter about it when they’re not busy saving the world. This self-conscious tendency reached its peak in Guardians of the Galaxy, a stealth-bomber sendup of the superhero movie.

Avengers: Age of Ultron can’t top Guardians in that department. But writer/director Joss Whedon balances comedy and derring-do with dexterity, and this sequel to 2012’s top grosser doesn’t stall the franchise. Plus it’s got new characters to geek out about, villains especially.

Ultron is an artificial-intelligence “murderbot” inadvertently created by billionaire Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.)—also known as Iron Man, of course—and scientist Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), aka the Hulk. Ultron changes robotic shape during the film, but his voice is provided

by James Spader, who sounds like a tiger mellowed out on expensive brandy. He’s fun, if perhaps overly humorous for a creature who seeks to end mankind’s dominance on Earth. But Whedon, an encyclopedia of pop culture, can’t help himself—earnestness about this nonsense is for 20th-century suckers.

The Avengers must fight Ultron as well as newcomers Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen). Paul Bettany, previously the voice of Tony Stark’s computer, gets an expanded role here, and makes something haunting out of it. It’s a crowded field, although Whedon tries to find bits and bobs for everybody. Except Thor (Chris Hemsworth). Even Whedon can’t really make Thor very interesting. What gave The Avengers its kick was the recognizably human interplay between these titans, and on that score Ultron

PClouds of Sils Maria OPENS FRI., MAY 1 AT SEVEN GABLES. RATED R. 123 MINUTES.

Try to draw a straight line—I sure can’t—from Olivier Assayas’ sexy film-set shenanigans in Irma Vep (his 1996 breakthrough) to his Eurotrashy Boarding Gate to his exquisitely rendered family drama Summer Hours to his terror opus Carlos. His last film to play here, Something in the Air, ventured back to the tumult of 1968 France, while his newest settles uncertainly in the serene Swiss Alps. Like the clouds that garland the titular valley, this drama of three woman laboring in showbiz has an odd, evanescent quality: Now you see it, now you don’t.

The edits are weird and abrupt: a silent sepia Bergfilme from the ’20s suddenly gives way to celebrity YouTube snippets on an iPad; important moments are omitted entirely.

The picture starts with film star Maria ( Juliette Binoche) arriving in Zurich to pay tribute to the eminent old playwright who launched her career. Inconveniently, he kills himself, leaving Maria at loose ends until a rising stage director proposes a new adaptation of that signature project. But here’s the catch: Maria originally played the pert young seductress Sigrid; now she’s being offered the role of Helena, the tragic older woman. It’s not being put out to pasture, not yet, but the transition would clearly set Maria on that menopausal path. It’s a dilemma she discusses fitfully with her personal assistant, a very competent yet unformed young woman named Valentine (Kristen Stewart, excellent).

Their conversations wind along Alpine roads and hiking trails, continuing through cigarette smoke and too much late-night wine. Running lines for the play, the two drop in and out of those scenes to comment on the material. The line between art and life becomes increasingly blurred (sometimes frustrating the viewer). Even if Valentine is no professional threat to Maria, she chides her boss: “You can’t hang onto the privileges of youth.” (Meanwhile Maria tells her agent via Skype, “I want to stay Sigrid!”)

Youth is represented by the Lohanesque tabloid troublemaker cast as Sigrid: Jo-Ann (Chloë Grace Moretz, arriving steely and late), who fascinates Maria with her volatile TMZ meltdowns.

The old celebrity firmament is gone; Maria’s notions of Continental stardom have been rudely

disrupted by IMDb and Google (with Valentine her stoic mediator). No actress (or actor) can escape time, a notion reinforced by the ancient Swiss peaks and glaciers—plus regular passages from Handel and Pachelbel. Even if an ambitious young sci-fi director entices Maria with a role that will enable her to “to live outside of time,” Assayas offers her no such consolation. Though Clouds has a few welcome laughs (digs at vampire and comic-book movies, Binoche even doing a spit-take!), it’s a film about time and a woman’s passages through time. Each age forces a different role—Sigrid or Helena—despite her wishes.

Of the modern audience, Jo-Ann explains to Maria, “It’s time to move on. They want what comes next.” In other words, her. BRIAN MILLER

Man From Reno RUNS THURS., APRIL 30–MON., MAY 4 AT NORTHWEST FILM FORUM. NOT RATED. 111 MINUTES.

If you’ve ever been trapped in a cabin during a rainy summer-weekend getaway, you’ll know the feeling of cracking a yellowed old mystery paperback, tea in hand, with a dismissive “Oh, I don’t really go for detective novels.” But three hours later you’ve finished the book without even noticing the sun outside. That’s the way it is with Dave Boyle’s sneaky, multilayered Bay Area mystery. It’s totally traditional—there’s even a Nancy Drew reference!—yet refreshingly indie. Among its disparate ingredients are wildlife smuggling, a guy who seems to be killed twice, identity theft, a bestselling series of Japanese detective novels, a menacing paparazzo, and a friendly serial killer.

“I feel like a fraud,” says successful mystery writer Aki (Ayako Fujitani), who’s hiding in San Francisco to escape her fans’ clamoring for a new book. Instead she seems morbidly intent on killing off the franchise. In that doomy state of mind, she consents to a one-night stand with a handsome stranger (Kazuki Kitamura) she’ll initially know as Akira. But both of them, we’ll discover, are imposters. Meanwhile a rural sheriff is looking for a mysterious fugitive, struck by his own patrol car, who’ll eventually lead him to the Aki/Akira conundrum. Paul (veteran character actor Pepe Serna) is a cop perhaps past retirement age, seemingly stepped from a Matlock episode, who even uses a flip-phone. Though he understands nothing of Japanese customs, his dogged investigation runs parallel to Aki’s when Akira abruptly disappears. It takes a leisurely hour for these two sleuths to meet—during which time I wondered if Aki wasn’t the author of the mystery Paul is pursuing.

She’s not, and Man From Reno is more oldfashioned than postmodern, steeped in the scenic San Fran of Vertigo. The sex and violence are tame, and Paul’s fond, quasi-paternal relationship with Aki gives the film an almost winkingly atavistic quality. Doyle, whose Surrogate Valentine played during SIFF ’11, knows we’re expecting the Coen brothers but gives us Agatha Christie instead. His two protagonists are thoroughly decent types, and even their chameleon-like foe is polite to the end—a nicer sort of cipher than Mr. Ripley, who finally even takes the trouble to explain the entire plot. (Mum about all personal details, he coyly mentions that he works in “human resources.”) Not quite comic, Man From Reno wears its genre conventions lightly. You’re sorry to turn the last page. BRIAN MILLER

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • APRI L 29 — MAY 5, 2015

A popular basic-cable performer on The League and Kroll Show for the past half-dozen years, Nick Kroll can be forgiven for arriving a little late to the movies’ post-recession flop-com genre.

His brash NYC tech maven Jake watches as a planned product launch goes down in flames, losing all his and his investors’ money, then retreats— a broken man, ashamed, tail between legs—to his childhood home in New Rochelle. Never mind that most millennials are now cycling in the other direction during our current tech boom; Adult Beginners lags behind the times in more ways than one. (Kroll supplied the premise for the movie, directed by Ross Katz, with screenplay by Jeff Cox and Liz Flahive.) The Skeleton Twins recently offered sibling melodrama in such a return-tothe-nest scenario (also sans parents), while This Is Where I Leave You put a more entertaining, multigenerational spin on the same material. (Happy Christmas, starring Anna Kendrick, at least made the prodigal fuck-up a woman.)

Kroll’s basic task here is fairly lazy and certainly unoriginal: Make Jake just enough of a selfish asshole to need redemption, then redeem by the proven means of cute children and family values.

Does Jake truly need to change in this familiar story template, or show any final evidence of change? Not really. The script is contrived to add skimpy notions of growth to his character: reconciling with his married suburban sister (Rose Byrne, no damage to her career), forgiving his doofus brother-in-law (Bobby Cannavale, coasting more than he should), and bonding with their icky-sweet 3-year-old son (cue the poop jokes, please).

Even while Jake’s diaper-changing maturation is a given (he’s forced to “manny” in exchange for living with his sister’s family), Adult Beginners does at least strive for gender parity. Byrne’s Justine is a borderline-alcoholic Ivy Leaguer who dropped out of law school when pregnant, now married to a contractor with the disposition and smarts of a golden retriever. Her discontents are like those of Kristen Wiig’s character in Skeleton Twins, compounded by the child that keeps her trapped below potential. As Jake glides easily

JAY MAIDMENT/MARVEL

Opening ThisWeek

falls down a little: The rivalry between Stark and Steve Rogers (aka Captain America, played by Chris Evans) isn’t fresh; the heat between Banner and Natasha Romanoff (aka Black Widow, played by Scarlet Johansson) feels obligatory; and the backstory for Hawkeye ( Jeremy Renner) is a standard attempt to provide “depth” for one-dimensional characters.

Still, it’s possible to approve of how such a billion-dollar apparatus can be this fast and breezy. And—as though Whedon absorbed some of the criticism of the first film’s endless climax, in which countless citizens must have perished while the superheroes cracked wise—the big finish here isn’t as bloated. Even Marvel skeptics have Ultron to enjoy. It’s not easy to out-irony Robert Downey, Jr., but Spader succeeds; Ultron wouldn’t be out of place as a campy Austin Powers villain.

“I’m glad you asked that,” says Ultron in response to one of Stark’s questions. “Because I wanted to take this time to explain my evil plan.” He then destroys everything in sight. ROBERT HORTON

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 27 25

SEATTLE WEEKLY PROMOTIONS TICKET GIVEAWAY! SEATTLE REIGN VS. CHICAGO RED STARS

Seattle Reign FC presents: Reign vs. Red Stars Sat., May 30, 7 pm. Moda Pitch at Memorial Stadium

TICKET GIVEAWAY! OUTSIDE MULLINGAR

Seattle Repertory Theatre present: Outside Mullingar Show runs through May 17th, Bagley WrightTheatre.Tony Award nominee for Best Play. From the author of Doubt and Moonstruck comes a romantic comedy set in rural Ireland.

TICKET GIVEAWAY VIJAY IYER TRIO

Cornish College of the Arts present: Vijay Iyer Trio Sat., May 9, 8 pm, PONCHO at Kerry Hall. Described in The Village Voice as “the most commanding pianist and composer to emerge in recent years.”

TICKET GIVEAWAY CRISTELA ALONZO

STG presents: Cristela Alonzo, Sat., May 16, 9 pm, Neptune Theatre. Cristela rose to fame in the world of standup and has since topped multiple comedy powerplayer lists.

FOR MORE DETAILS AND TO ENTER TO WIN, VISIT US AT:

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AP RI L 29 — M AY 5, 2015

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26

a&c» Film

MAY �–�

» FROM PAGE 25

APRIL 24 - 30

ROPE

“Do you have to be miserable to be funny?”

That’s the question at the center of Kevin Pollak’s documentary, signaling a somewhat different approach to the culture of comedy and comedians. (A veteran stand-up performer himself, Pollak also acts on TV and in films including The Usual Suspects.) With Robin Williams’ startling suicide still a fresh wound (the film is dedicated to him), it’s a fair question and a serious one. If comedy is tragedy plus time, is stand-up comedy a kind of higher math used to survive that equation?

F

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OPENS FRI., MAY 1 AT SUNDANCE CINEMAS. NOT RATED. 94 MINUTES.

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Misery Loves Comedy

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Larry David is among Pollak’s interviewees.

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EGYPTIAN

WHILE WE’RE YOUNG

May 1-3 | Final three days!

KURT COBAIN: MONTAGE OF HECK May 4-6 | Rolling Stones on Screen

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EX MACHINA WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS THE AGE OF ADALINE DIOR AND I

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MISERY LOVES COMEDY

Fri May 1 - Thu May 7

NE

As Pollak interviews 50-plus practitioners of his trade, his talkshow-generic questions are both serious and softball. He gives his subjects an opportunity to go any which way they want with their answers—generally yielding more comedy than tragedy. (A partial roster includes Amy Schumer, Jimmy Fallon, Janeane Garofalo, and Christopher Guest.) Their reasons for taking the stage aren’t new or surprising: getting noticed, attracting attention (or at least positive attention), riding the rush of the performance high, propping up self-esteem, etc. In aggregate, from their varied backgrounds, a different and perhaps darker portrait emerges. Is there a higher percentage of depressed and damaged people in comedy than regular society? If so, is it because comedy offers an alternate form of therapy? And if comedy is a drug, as more than one comedian confesses, is performing actually healthy—or a means of avoidance? All these question are touched upon, but Pollak doesn’t push them to dig deeper.

Clearly these folks are going put a comic spin on any response. That’s what they do, and that’s why audiences will go see them in the clubs or Pollak’s movie (his first) in theaters. As a director, Pollak is genuinely sympathetic and interested in his subjects, some of whom—Tom Hanks, Judd Apatow, Lisa Kudrow—have left the circuit for other comedy outlets. Are those healthier outlets? Again, Pollak isn’t a probing interviewer, but he manages to get a few subjects to open up.

Still, Misery Loves Comedy is more party than postmortem. It’s also about as conventional as can be: a series of interviews with the occasional flashback photo. There’s no performance footage, just personal reflections and war stories of the stand-up circuit. There’s a good film yet to be made about the connection between misery and comedy. Until then, you’ll have to settle for amusing and periodically insightful. SEAN AXMAKER E

Final three days!

NOW PLAYING

27

arts&culture» Film Local & Repertory

Ongoing

BALIKBAYAN #1 Director Kidlat Tahimik will intro-

• KURT COBAIN: MONTAGE OF HECK This fascinating

duce his Filipino essay film, about the history of the Philippines and its colonial legacy. (NR) Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380, nwfilmforum. org. $6-$11. 7 p.m. Tues.

BFE: DVD RELEASE PARTY Seen during SIFF last year, local actor/director Shawn Telford’s low-key teen drama has its roots in his unsupervised Idaho panhandle upbringing. The titular acronym stands for “Bum Fuck, Egypt,” he told us during the fest last year. Shot in lovely widescreen by Ty Migota, B.F.E. puts you in mind of The Last Picture Show and Dazed and Confused—all are looks back at youth that are by turns bitter, nostalgic, angry, and wondering. The kids are mostly unsupervised (or party with their irresponsible parents); the specter of meth hangs overhead; and teenage pregnancy is a fact of life. None of the misbehavior depicted is autobiographical; rather, says Telford, “It reflects the sense of the place, the wildness. The setting of the film is a character in itself.”

(NR) BRIAN MILLER Northwest Film Forum, $6-$11.

7:30 p.m. reception, 8:15 p.m. screening, Sat. CROSSFIRE HURRICANE/ GIMME SHELTER Directed

by Brett Morgen (of the new Kurt Cobain doc), Crossfire is his 2012 tribute to The Rolling Stones, alternating with the Maysles brothers’ great (and disturbing) 1970 concert doc. (NR) SIFF Cinema Egyptian, 801 E. Pine St., 324-9996, siff.net. $7-$12. 7 p.m. (Crossfire) & 9:15 p.m. Mon.-Wed. FROZEN SING-ALONG Don’t pretend you don’t already know the lyrics to “Let It Go.” (NR) SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., 324-9996, siff.net. $7-$12. Noon, Sat. GRINGO TRAILS This new doc by Pegi Vail examines the environmental costs of eco-tourism. (NR) Northwest Film Forum, $6-$11. 5 p.m. Sun. MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO If you’ve got kids, or even if you don’t, Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 enchanted anime adventure film is sure to bring a smile. The gentle tale concerns two sisters who encounter woodland spirits when they move to the country. (G) Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $7-$9.

7 p.m. Fri.-Wed. & 3 p.m. Sat.-Sun. NOIR DE FRANCE As allusive as its title, Jean-Pierre Melville’s all-but-unknown Army of Shadows, a French resistance saga made—and tepidly received—in 1969, emerges from the mists of time as a career-capping epic tragedy. Adapted from Joseph Kessel’s wartime novel, Shadows follows a taciturn resistance agent (the bulky, self-contained Lino Ventura) through a series of arrests, escapes, and betrayals. Wearing glasses and carrying a briefcase, he looks like an accountant and thinks like a chess master. Ventura is reason made tangible, exuding a purity of purpose beyond mere action. Moving from rainy prison camps through sun-baked Marseilles and blitzed London to the bleak windswept towns of northern France, Shadows sustains an atmosphere of total paranoia, occasionally leavened with existential pathos. Only when Melville’s vision reaches its chilling conclusion is it apparent that the title is absolutely literal. This really is an army of shadows. They are, all of them, dead men. (NR) J. HOBERMAN Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $63–$68 series, $8 individual. 7:30 p.m. Thurs.

SERENITY This 2005 sci-fi Western by Joss Whedon is a brainy valentine to fans of the short-lived Firefly.

A gaggle of tough-talking, gun-slinging space cowboys (and -girls) rocket through the 26th-century cosmos, pilfering cash from the sinister Alliance and sometimes swearing in Chinese. Confused neophytes may find solace in several witty fight scenes, a Whedon trademark, in which the jabs exchanged are alternately verbal and physical. And though Serenity is a bit too cerebral for its own good, that same quality lifts it above most sci-fi flicks. (PG-13) NEAL SCHINDLER Central Cinema, $7-$9. 9:30 p.m.

Fri.-Wed. SONG OF THE SEA Dazzling in its visual presentation, though not so thrilling in its conventional storytelling, the Irish-animated Song features a plot is drawn from Celtic folklore, specifically the tradition of the selkie, those mythological shapeshifters who can live on land or sea, as humans or seals. Our hero is Ben, a young lad whose mother vanishes under dramatic circumstances the night his mute younger sister Saoirse is born. They live on a wee shard of an island with their mournful father, a red-bearded lighthouse-keeper, but a series of marvelous events lead Ben into a secret world of magical creatures and spell-spinning songs. Director Tomm Moore and the Cartoon Saloon crew seem more interested in creating the gorgeous vistas that occupy virtually every frame. (PG) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), 3249996. $7-$12. Sat.-Mon. See siff.net for showtimes.

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SEATTLE WEEKLY • AP RI L 29 — M AY 5, 2015

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documentary portrait will have strong appeal in Seattle— even among viewers for whom, like me, Cobaniana seems a completely exhausted subject, two decades after the Nirvana front man’s suicide. It’s a vivid, impressionistic, and often contradictory profile that reaches deep into the Cobain family archives. Director Brett Morgen spent an arduous eight years on the project; the movie’s too long, though never less than engrossing, and you can see why Morgen wrestled so long with the editing. What a short, rich, and troubled life his subject lived. Cobain’s cassettetape journals from the late ’80s spring into animated vignettes. The most remarkable of them, about trying to lose his virginity with a possibly disabled girl in Aberdeen, reminds me of a Raymond Carver story: concise, unsparing, brutal in its details, yet oddly compassionate toward all thwarted, unhappy parties. The episode ends in shame and a suicide attempt. There’s a mournful self-awareness here that colors the rest of the film. Even as Cobain grasps for success, there’s the parallel feeling that it’s undeserved and fraudulent. (NR) B.R.M. SIFF Cinema Egyptian THE SALT OF THE EARTH This is an unwieldy documentary portrait of the great Brazilian humanist photographer Sebastião Salgado, made by two authors: Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire, etc.), a professed fan who provides voiceover praise; and Juliano Salgado, the artist’s elder son, who’s part of the family enterprise. Stacked with stunning images (almost like a pedestal), this overlong doc can feel like a promo reel for Salgado’s ongoing Genesis photo series. No outside voices or critics dare interrupt the master or his tribute. Acclaim came in the ’70s and ’80s, as Salgado began haunting war zones, sites of famine and displacement, and scenes of brutal, backbreaking labor in the Third World. Salgado himself speaks in contented aphorisms—sometimes sounding like Bono, so secure in his compassion for the world’s poor and downtrodden. (PG-13) B.R.M. Guild 45th THE WATER DIVINER Part of Russell Crowe’s immense credibility as an actor is how grounded he is—woo-woo stuff is really not for him. Yet in his directorial debut, he plays Joshua Connor, a dowser who’ll use that a talent to search for the bodies of his three sons, all lost on the same day in the disastrous World War I battle of Gallipoli. Yet in 1919 Turkey (the Ottoman Empire having collapsed), Crowe’s convincing depiction of grief morphs into melodrama.

Connor strikes up a friendship with hotelkeeper Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko) and her impish son, escapes from a train ambush on horseback, and runs afoul of political unrest. As a director, Crowe is earnest and old-fashioned, and there are movie-watching pleasures to be had here. Lord of the Rings cinematographer Andrew Leslie knows how to look at big open spaces so you sense the bones beneath the surface. The film gets bogged down in its many flashbacks and sidebar dramas, and finally uncorks one too many unlikely coincidences. The Water Diviner feels almost too careful in its desire to hit all the right notes and do justice to all sides. Which makes it more of a war memorial than a living, breathing movie. (R) R.H. Sundance, Bainbridge, Thornton Place, Pacific Place, Lincoln Square WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS The premise is ’90s-stale: basically MTV’s The Real World cast with vampires, presented as direct-address documentary.

This 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. Our three main vamps are a hapless lot. They can’t get invited into any of the good clubs or discos—ending up forlorn in an all-night Chinese diner instead. After all the aestheticized languor of Only Lovers Left Alive, the silly deadpan tone is quite welcome. Clement and Waititi know this is a sketch writ large (forget about plot), so they never pause long between sneaky gags. (NR) B.R.M. Sundance, Admiral, SIFF Cinema Uptown & Film Center, Majestic Bay WHILE WE’RE YOUNG Documentary filmmaker Josh (Ben Stiller) and producer wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) are stalled in careers and marriage. They need a shakeup, and it arrives in the form of a spontaneous, fun-loving Brooklyn couple half their age: would-be documentarian Jamie (Adam Driver) and wife Darby (Amanda Seyfried). Noah Baumbach’s lively, careerbest comedy sends cynical Josh into unexpected bromance, and much of the movie’s charm lies in our being swept along, too. In denial about his fading eyesight and arthritis, Josh will discover that being foolish and confounded is good for the system, a tonic. Extra bonus: Charles Grodin. (NR) B.R.M. Sundance, Ark Lodge, Kirkland Parkplace, others

•

•

BY B R IA N M I LLE R

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

•

» Music

Girls Just Wanna Live Outside Society’s Shit A rapidly rising Olympia hardcore band’s redemptive femme fury.

LEENA JOSHI

BY LEENA JOSHI

music genuinely raw, believable, and necessary.

What you feel from being in the same room as them is linked to the elements that make them who they are—but even more so, their eruptive, eyes-in-the-back-of-your-head shredding makes you feel like it matters who you are too, regardless if you relate to the band or not.

For a band so relatively young in its existence (they started playing together in September of 2014), G.L.O.S.S.’s Demo EP and live set feel fully actualized and expertly executed, due in part to a history of musicianship in previous and current projects such as Vexx, Slouch, Body Betrayal, Parasol, and more. Its five members—Corey Evans, Jake Bison, Tannrr Hainsworth, Julaya Antolin, and Sadie Smith—rip through their set onstage with a tightly synced yet frenetic energy.

Asked what feels best about playing together, there’s a pause, a sly comment (“When we touch each other”) followed by laughter, then an earnest answer from Evans: “It feels both safe and tough.

It feels like everybody’s got each other’s back in such a real way.” Their uncompromising attitude

of self-acceptance extends beyond respect for each other and their audience to the practice of music creation as well. On being courted by major record labels who want to turn a profit off their “liberal, progressive message,” Smith says, “It’s easy to get caught up and feel as though, oh, this person is validating me and telling me they have these other ideas about me, but if you step back from it and see what they’re trying to do, you realize you’re already doing it for yourself. We already are something, to ourselves and to other people.”

What comes through every song on G.L.O.S.S.’s EP is unparalleled emotion and a no-bullshit celebration of loving your true self in an often dark world that wants to shut you down. Aside from guitar riffs that feel like window-whipped cloth from a car doing 80 on the freeway and freak D-beats fast enough to match, G.L.O.S.S.’s lyrics add a dimension of truth that sets them apart from other thrash and hardcore.

As is usual with hardcore punk, the songs are economical in duration, but they do more in 1:54 (at most) than most bands accomplish in

10 minutes. The combination of technical prowess and lyrical sincerity transmits face-melting feeling from the band to the listener within seconds. “Targets of Men” burns with the lyrics “You follow me around/Catcall from behind/See my face and cut me down/‘Tranny’/‘Shemale’/ ‘Faggot’/‘Whore’/But I’m a flawless bitch and you’re a fucking bore.”

When G.L.O.S.S. takes the stage at the end of the night, lead vocalist Sadie lays into the mic with the spine-tingling opening line of “G.L.O.S.S. (We’re From the Future)”: “They told us we were girls/How we talk, dress, look, and cry/They told us we were girls/So we claimed our female lives/Now they tell us we aren’t girls/Our femininity doesn’t fit/We’re fucking FUTURE GIRLS, Living Outside Society’s Shit!”

In the heavy seconds after the rallying cry, everyone in the crowd seemed to sway in the same cloud of guitar feedback, waiting for the song to split open. It was like we were reaching out for the same electrical socket together. E

music@seattleweekly.com

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • APRI L 29 — MAY 5, 2015

W

hen I feel angry about the world’s patriarchal shit-spiral of oppression, sometimes I can’t summon the energy to deal. I default to tired accommodation, leaving no wake in the water so I can just go home. What eats away at me is getting home and realizing that the world will continue to be disastrous in its treatment of women, femme folk, marginalized people, people of color, and the Earth. I feel stationary, psychically beat, and marinated in bad feelings.

Don’t stay home when hardcore punk can save you.

Last Wednesday I went to Seattle DIY venue Black Lodge to see the rapidly rising stars of G.L.O.S.S., a punk outfit from Olympia that released a flawless, widely raved-about-five track demo at the onset of 2015. G.L.O.S.S. (“Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit”) gives out good anger like a gift you’ve waited forever to get.

As trans, queer, femme musicians, the politics of G.L.O.S.S. is not so much the music’s focus, but rather the catalyst that makes the band’s

29

PIANO SHOW

YOU NAME IT WE’LL CELEBRATE IT!

ANNIVERSARY BIRTHDAY CORPORATE EVENT DIVORCE ENGAGEMENT FORECLOSURE GRADUATION HAPPY HOUR INDEPENDENCE DAY JUST BECAUSE KICKING BACK LOOKING FOR FUN MARRIAGE NIGHT ON THE TOWN

JAZZ ALLEY IS A SUPPER CLUB

OUT OF TOWN GUESTS PARENT’S NIGHT OUT QUITTIN’ TIME REUNION ST. PATRICK’S DAY TIRED OF THE USUAL SCENE VALENTINE’S DAY WHY NOT? NAUGHTY X-RATED PARTY

THE JONES FAMILY SINGERS WED, APR 29

DON’T WANNA MISS OUT ZANY FRIENDS

A bona fide guitar hero and perennial poll-winner, Di Meola has been recognized internationally over the past four decades as a virtuoso of the highest order.

(JUST KIDDING!)

VOTED BEST PIANO BAR & BEST PLACE TO TAKE AN OUT OF TOWN GUEST

N BRING IPON U O C THIS T ONE AND GE IZER APPET OFF! FOR 1/2

“Modern practitioners of a long musical tradition...infusing their joyful, reverent songs with elements of vintage soul and R&B.” - The Wall Street Journal

AL DI MEOLA - ELEGANT GYPSY & MORE ELECTRIC TOUR THURS, APR 30 - SUN, MAY 3

ERIC BIBB W/MICHAEL JEROME BROWNE TUES, MAY 5 - WED, MAY 6

“The appeal with blues troubadour Eric Bibb has always been his positive hopeful tone conveyed with a warm voice, and a pristinely picked acoustic guitar.” - Something Else

RAMSEY LEWIS QUARTET THURS, MAY 7 - SUN, MAY 10

SEATTLE, WA • 206.839.1300 WWW.ILOVE88KEYS.COM 315 2nd Ave South

Jazz Piano Legend who has recorded over 80 albums and received seven gold records and three Grammy Awards.

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

El Corazon E orazon www.elcorazonseattle.com

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

WEDNESDAY APRIL 29TH EL CORAZON

WAYNE “THE TRAIN” HANCOCK with Billy Joe Huels

of The Dusty 45’s, Lost Dogma, Darci Carlson Doors at 7:00PM / Show at 8:00 21+. $15 ADV / $17 DOS

THURSDAY APRIL 30TH FUNHOUSE

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AP RI L 29 — M AY 5, 2015

BRIAN FOSS PRESENTS:

30

LAS ROBERTAS (COSTA RICA)

with Branden Daniel and The Chics, Event Staph, Sun Thieves Doors at 8:00PM / Show at 9:00. 21+. $8 / $10 DOS

FRIDAY MAY 1ST FUNHOUSE

CHILDREN OF SERAPH

with Toarn, Cornerstone, This Vast Ocean, Thistopia, Tallest/OfMountains Doors at 7:00PM / Show at 7:30 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $8 ADV / $10 DOS

SATURDAY MAY 2ND EL CORAZON

JAKE E. LEE’S RED DRAGON CARTEL withZero

SUNDAY MAY 3RD FUNHOUSE WEST COAST DESTRUCTORS TOUR 2015 FEATURING:

MADROST

with Brain Dead, Plus Guests Doors at 7:00PM / Show at 7:30 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $8 ADV / $10 DOS

MONDAY MAY 4TH EL CORAZON

THIS LEGEND

with Stanley And The Search, Dear You, Bad Luck, Islvnd Doors at 7:00PM / Show at 7:30 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $10 ADV / $12 DOS

MONDAY MAY 4TH FUNHOUSE

IT LIES WITHIN

We Rise The Tides, Nevada Rose, Sorrow’s Edge, Redeem The Exile, Avoid The Void Doors at 7:00PM / Show at 7:30 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $10 ADV / $12 DOS

TUESDAY MAY 5TH FUNHOUSE

THE CREEPSHOW (10TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR)

with Butterflies Of Death, Stoned Evergreen Travelers, Raw Dogs Doors at 7:00PM / Show at 8:00 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $11 ADV / $13 DOS JUST ANNOUNCED 5/23 FUNHOUSE - SICK WARD 5/29 - PRESTIGE (FINAL SHOW) 6/11 - MISCHIEF BREW / RAMSHACKLE GLORY 6/13 FUNHOUSE - THE HOLLOWPOINTS 6/27 - TYSEN 7/11 - DESIGNER DISGUISE 7/16 FUNHOUSE - MOBILE DEATHCAMP UP & COMING 5/7 FUNHOUSE - SICK OF SARAH 5/8 FUNHOUSE - ICARUS THE OWL 5/9 - ENSIFERUM / KORPIKLAANI 5/10 - SÛLSTAFIR 5/11 - MOTHERSHIP 5/11 FUNHOUSE - MAID MYRIAD 5/12 - CARTEL 5/13 - TODAY IS THE DAY 5/14 FUNHOUSE - EVE TO ADAM 5/15 - EMERY 5/16 - LOCAL H 5/16 FUNHOUSE - LORIN WALKER MADSEN & THE HUSTLERS 5/17 FUNHOUSE - DETECTIVE AGENCY THE FUNHOUSE BAR IS OPEN FROM 3:00PM TO 2:00AM DAILY AND HAPPY HOUR IS FROM 3:00PM UNTIL 6:00PM. Down, Late September Dogs, Cradleman Doors at 7:00PM / Show at 8:00 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $20 ADV / $25 DOS

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: details at www.elcorazon.com/vip.html for an application email info@elcorazonseattle.com

arts&culture» Music Hip-Hop: Homophobia or Homophilia?

Stasia of THEESatisfaction reveals anti-woman lyrics that veer into comically overblown man-love.

I

had an eye-opening experience during my first trip to SXSW in 2010. I’d maneuvered my way through several rude security guards into this bar where they were hosting a hip-hop showcase. I knew a couple of acts on the bill, but I was really there to hang out with some of my friends. One thing I noticed almost immediately was that Cat and I were the only women in this 250-capacity venue. I looked around and most of the men were wearing similar outfits: a pair of expensive tennis shoes, jeans, a T-shirt, and a fitted baseball cap.

The showcase began and all the men roared in excitement, stretching their arms out with palms facing downward and waving in “hip-hop hands”

BY STASIA IRONS AND CATHERINE HARRIS-WHITE fashion.

The songs performed included themes like “Trust no bitch,” “Me and my niggas,” and “Leave your woman at home.” Slurs of all kinds were tossed around with disdain for men that looked like women but, overall, praise for gangsterism.

This music I am referring to is so anti-woman that it comes full circle in praising all manliness.

As I stood there taking in the scene, I realized that their lyrics were not only homophobic but conversely homophilic: men aggressively appreciating the company of other men.

This kind of music is generally discussed as being problematic because of the vernacular, but I’d never realized how much it praised men.

Music for men, made by men and only appreciated by men.

I decided to dig into some lyrics, and what I found was pretty astonishing. Two songs called “My Nigga,” with similar themes, show that some rappers would rather use the L word with men than women:

LADIESFIRST

If you love yo’ nigga, hug yo’ nigga, Look ’em dead in the eye, And tell yo’ nigga, tell that nigga you love ’em (you love them).

—“My Nigga” by K Camp feat.

Lil Boosie (2006) In this song, Boosie certainly lets us know how he feels about his male comrades. He not only shows them, he tells them that he loves them.

This is something that we don’t see when he refers to women or “bad bitches.”

Boosie’s song is about 10 years old, but these DEF JAM RECORDS

ROCKIN

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

YG

ideas haven’t gone anywhere. Many modern hip-hop music videos have even done away with the “video girl” trope. We are now seeing music videos featuring only men, often shirtless, saggin’ pants, dancing around together. Women are pushed to the side completely: First things first, I love all of my niggas, This rap shit crack, then I involve my niggas . . .

You know I’m down with the niggas down for me, I got two words for you, love and loyalty . . .

Tryna leave my nigga, shawty see me and wanna leave with a nigga, But it wasn’t enough room ’cause I came with my niggas.

—“My Nigga” by YG (2014) This entire song is an anthem for man-love.

An ode to man-for-man friendship. YG, Young Jeezy, and Rich Homie Quan list all the things they do for and with their homies. With their word choice, I’m assuming they aren’t talking about women when they say “my nigga” because they use words like “shawty” and “bitch” to describe them. In that last line, they say that a woman tried to to leave with them, but there wasn’t enough room for her with all their male friends in tow. I was intrigued by their use of the phrase “love and loyalty” toward their fellow men. If you take away the beats and rapping, this song reads like a love poem.

I’m a woman and I love women. I also love men. I love the genderless and genderqueer.

I find no fault in honoring the people I love by creating music that expresses my adoration. In our music video “QueenS,” directed by dream hampton, we intentionally highlighted black women enjoying each other’s company without the male gaze, imagery often not seen in music videos. By doing this we were able to provide visibility and hopefully open minds to different possibilities within the hip-hop genre.

The contradiction lies in the belittling of women and the disgust for homosexual men while engaging in extreme love for your “niggas.” Why should a celebration of manhood coincide with the degradation of womanhood? Is it guy code? Maybe it’s something I’ll never get a chance to understand. In the past I’ve been able to turn off lyrics in my head when the beat is undeniably great, but I’m getting too old to do that now. I’m annoyed and tired with hip-hop’s he-man-womanhater style. E

music@seattle weekly.com

TheWeekAhead Wednesday, April 29 VATS is three cool people from Seattle: Gabriel, Sarah,

and JJ. So cool that they just released a VHS tape.

Their music is moody, dreamy, and groovy. They’ll send off basement-show vibes wherever they play, and that’s my favorite thing about them. Vats follows Naomi Punk’s social-media stance, with only a very primitive Internet presence. It’s frustrating, but you gotta respect it—mostly you just gotta dance to it.

With Roses, Moaning, Gang Cult. Chop Suey, 1325 E. Madison St., 324-8005, chopsuey.com. 8 p.m. $8. 21 and over. DIANA M. LE Nothing says “Springtime!” like Pony’s gothic boogywoogy BLOODLUST. Get ready to meander backward in a haze whilst lackadaisically pulling imaginary ectoplasmic taffy from the ether. Bloodlust is welcoming a brand-new resident DJ (Al Niño) to this monthly night, so get hyped. But not too hyped, my dear night child, for this is a nocturne of glam gloom jams. Pony, 1221 E. Madison St. 9 p.m. Free. 21 and over. WARREN LANGFORD

Join us in the Trophy Room for Happy Hour: Thursday Bartender Special 8-Close Fridays: 5-8pm RESERVE THE TROPHY ROOM FOR YOUR NEXT EVENT!

Thursday, April 30

What’s tongue-in-cheek lounge act RICHARD CHEESE & LOUNGE AGAINST THE MACHINE covering in the name of “humor” these days? Its version of Disturbed’s “Down With the Sickness” was pretty funny during a zombie-killing montage in the remake of Dawn of the Dead, but that was forever ago, and I feel like I might not find this shtick hysterical any more, especially after the downfall of Big Nü Metal.

Lounge acts also remind me of fedoras. Fedoras are not funny. With iPod in a Chair. The Showbox, 1426

COCKTAILS • TASTY HOT DOGS • LOTSA PINBALL

2222 2ND AVENUE • SEATTLE

206-441-5449

TOWN HALL

ALESSANDRA GORDON

Crater

Friday, May 1

Folklife is a great place to let your granola flag fly every year. When you think Folklife, you don’t typically think hip-hop or jazz, although both genres are totally American folk music even though no dusty acoustic guitars are involved. This year, the NW FOLKLIFE PREFEST PARTY includes performances by Porter Ray, Gabriel Teodros, and Industrial Revelation, with KEXP’s Street Sounds DJ, Larry Mizell Jr, as the host. If this is any indication of this year’s festival lineup, we’re in good hands. The Crocodile, 2200 Second Ave., 441-4618, thecrocodile.com. 8 p.m. $10 adv. All ages. DML

Saturday, May 2

If you’re from the Southwest like me, you probably miss sifting through the endless sea of mariachi on the radio dial. You also likely yearn for the

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 32

SCIENCE

ARTS & CULTURE

COMMUNITY

(4/29) Sam Quinones Heroin, and The Roots of American Addiction (4/29) Elliott Bay Book Company presents David Brooks 2-for-$5 Double Feature!

(5/1) Emily Youngblom Differentiating Brittle Bone Disease and Child Abuse (5/1) Adrian Raine Combatting the Genetic Origins of Violence (5/1) Seattle Arts & Lectures: Frank Bruni (5/2) Saturday Family Concerts Mariachi Fiesta Mexicana (5/2) Seattle Poetry Slam: Grand Slam (5/3) The Bushwick Book Club Seattle Original Songs Inspired by ‘Animal, Vegetable, Miracle’ (5/4) Sydney Padua with Paul Constant ‘The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage’ (5/4) The Common Acre: Paul Stamets Mushrooms, Bees,and Saving the World (5/5) Ginny Gilder with Marcie Sillman Title IX’s Personal Impacts, Lasting Legacy TOWN HALL

CIVICS

SCIENCE

ARTS & CULTURE

COMMUNITY

(5/6) Stella Stylianidou, Shivani Gupta, & Vinayak Vittal WWW.TOWNHALLSEATTLE.ORG Three Talks on Biology, Molecules, and Bacteria (5/6) Scholar in Residence Mona Akmal Scratch Night

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • APRI L 29 — MAY 5, 2015

First Ave., 628-3151, showboxpresents.com. 8 p.m. $32–$95. 21 and over. WL This show brought to you by: filling voids with . . . voids.

Hear me out! Basement club Kremwerk embodies the spirit of dance culture this town has been seriously lacking for the past eight years or so, filling that local electro-hole in your life. On that same note, CRATER fills a very similar space, which is weird for a band with such a concave moniker. In a town lousy with silly punk bands (I love you, but the market is saturated) it’s so goddamn satisfying to get hit with a little sincerity. VOIDS, AMIRIGHT?! With Hosannas, Tokyoidaho, DJAO. Kremwerk, 1909 Minor Ave., 6822935, kremwerk.com. 8 p.m. $7. 21 and over. WL

CIVICS

31

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“A

days when eating out meant running the risk of having your meal interrupted by marauding men in ornate outfits regaling you loudly in Spanish.

Alas, in Seattle they don’t make it easy—but hey!

MARIACHI FIESTA MEXICANA is here to bring it allll back. Mariachi doesn’t find you—you have to get up early and find mariachi your damn self!

Town Hall Seattle, 1119 Eighth Ave., 652-4255, townhallseattle.org. 10:30 a.m. Adults $5, kids free. WL

Sunday, May 3

TRIUMPH .

Kayus Bankole, Graham Hastings, and Alloysious Massaquoi met in Edinburgh at an all-ages hip hop show when they were 14, choosing the name YOUNG FATHERS because all three have their fathers’ names. The group won the UK’s 2014 Mercury Prize for its debut studio album, Dead .

Following that was the controversially titled White Men Are Black Men Too , which, whether you agree or not, can spur productive discussion. The album pairs raw and heavy subject matter with catchy melodies. Massaquoi explains that it’s the hip-hop group’s “interpretation of what a pop album should be.” With Mas Ysa, Murder Vibes.

Neumos, 925 E. Pike St., 709-9442, neumos.com.

8 p.m. $15 adv. All ages. DML

Binoche gives a master class in acting.”

– DAV I D E D E L S T E I N , N E W YO R K M AG A Z I N E

A RAZOR-SHARP, MYSTERIOUS, AND PLAYFUL META DRAMA.

“

Kristen Stewart is perfection.”

– C H R I S N A S H A W A T Y, E N T E R T A I N M E N T W E E K LY

JULIETTE

BINOCHE

KRISTEN

STEWART

CHLOË GRACE

MORETZ

F R O M O L I V I E R A S S AYA S, D I R EC TO R O F C A R LO S A N D S U M M E R H O U R S

CLOUDS

Monday, May 4

OF

Local ragamuffins TOMTEN have a new(ish) record called The Farewell Party. You ever put a random tape in your Teddy Ruxpin (that weird animatronic teddy bear that played cassettes)? Well, The Farewell Party would be perfect for that. Lead singer Brian Noyes-Watkins is a suspiciously lovable presence, and nothing can stop Tomten’s almost unsettling positivity. It would pair well with any movie montage featuring a young couple in the park, eating snowcones, falling in love, etc. I almost started skipping just thinking about it. Barboza, 925 E. Pike St., 709-9951, thebarboza.com. 8 p.m. $6 adv./$8 DOS. 21 and over. WL

SILS MARIA EXCLUSIVE ENGAGEMENT STARTS FRIDAY, 5/1

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AP RI L 29 — M AY 5, 2015

SEATTLE WEEKLY NEWS STAND DATE WED 4/29

32

LANGUAGE AND BRIEF GRAPHIC NUDITY

LANDMARK THEATRES SEVEN GABLES 911 N.E. 50TH ST. AT ROOSEVELT (206) 632-8821 • SEATTLE

2x3.5 w/THE SILENT WAR

MICHAEL PETERS

W I N N E R — BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS KRISTEN STEWART — CÉSAR AWARD

Tomten

Tuesday, May 5 KEXP is teaming up with Noah Gundersen to bring you KEXPETTY: cringe-worthy wordplay combined with the sweet, sweet grooves of Tom Petty! Gundersen will be joined by Black Whales, the Hollers, and Courtney Marie Andrews to perform the iconic rock ‘n’ roller’s back catalog. Free fall into this night of unabashed fangirling, which will help support KEXP’s campaign to build a new headquarters at Seattle Center. Tractor Tavern, 5213 Ballard Ave. N.W., 7893599, tractortavern.com. 8 p.m. $14. 21 and over. DML Send events to music@seattleweekly.com.

See seattleweekly.com for more listings.

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SE ATTLE WEEKLY • APRI L 29 — MAY 5, 2015

hen the team behind Initiative 502 wrote their marijuana law, they left the already well-established medical dispensaries and collective gardens out of the equation, assuming they’d be dealt with at a later date. Well, they were dealt with, all right—last week the Governor signed a bill to eliminate both entirely.

Lawmakers in Olympia had been looking to overhaul HIGHERGROUND the

BY MICHAEL A. STUSSER parallel medical- and recreational-marijuana systems, and agreed on a bill (from hell) that will close each and every medical-marijuana dispensary. I’m not going to get all policy-wonky on this and lose my audience in the third sentence. (Still with me?) So lemme just break this down with one simple point: For millions of Americans, marijuana is medicine. But most of us are not paying attention to this devastating legislative boondoggle, because—for most of us—cannabis is not stopping our seizures, halting our cancers, or helping to ease our chronic pain.

Yes, hundreds of storefronts are currently posing as medicinal dispensaries. And those false fronts are mucking up the legal retail system ushered in by I-502, which is designed to sell weed and collect taxes on said chronic. Still, that’s no excuse to derail a long-established collective that heals and soothes the masses. The problem of rogue green-cross clowns and overgrown gardens can be fixed without eliminating the main source of medicine for a community that’s been the very engine that started the GreenRush in the first place.

BuzzKill Bill 5052 has eliminated every non-I-502 store and suddenly tasked an already overwhelmed state Liquor (and now Cannabis) Control Board with evaluating and licensing a handful of medical dispensaries beginning in July 2016. But while dispensaries linger in the LCB Waiting Room, what might individuals with real medical needs do, exactly?

Go back to Big Pharma and the addictive opiates that many of them have kicked by turning to cannabis?

And what about those in rural areas that have banned marijuana entirely? Will Grandma with glaucoma get in her wagon and drive from Black Diamond to obtain her organic medicine?

Those on the outside might think patients can simply obtain their meds at a recreational store. But I-502 shops are not set up for—and do not meet the needs of—medical patients.

Rec stores sell high-THC products for folks like me who want to get high as a kite for pure fun. As for lower-THC products, lowdose edibles, and specially formulated cannabidiol tinctures, not so much. Just as

you wouldn’t send a patient to talk to a bartender about pain relief, your average budtender doesn’t have the hard-earned knowledge of proprietors at medical dispensaries, many of whom have been working hand-in-hand with farmers and MMJ companies since passage of the Medical Use of Marijuana Initiative in 1998.

Different patients use different products to elevate their suffering: elixirs, cannabis juices, topicals, CBD oils, suppositories, and particular strains that have been fine-tuned, tested, and refined over a period of years. Safe access to thousands of these unique products will no longer be available—because rec stores won’t stock them. Why would they, when Bubba Kush and Sour Diesel are flying off the shelves? And the common practice of medical dispensaries giving marijuana to low-income patients? Not. Gonna.

Happen. In fact, the new law slaps a 30 percent excise tax on medical sales.

There’s also a not-so-little legal problem. Bill 5052 mandates that in order for medical patients to receive their marijuana allotment (which has been lowered from 24 ounces to three), they must “voluntarily” put their names on a registry or database. The patient registry forces them to admit to a federal felony—not a great choice for anyone who is interested in holding public office, in a custody dispute, or applying for a job that employs background checks. And I’m no lawyer, but folks a lot smarter than me have pointed out that turning medical-marijuana regulations and oversight over to a Liquor Control Board is probably in violation of a whole lotta laws on the books at both the Food and Drug Administration and Department of Justice, not to mention that the registry is in clear violation of federal HIPAA laws.

One thing is for sure: Individuals and families being aided by cannabis are not going to go away just because we passed some dimwitted bill that eliminates their medical access. As you or I would, they’ll do whatever it takes to remain healthy. They will operate underground, thrive in the black market, and risk prison to produce and distribute medicine to their veteran husbands, elderly parents, debilitated wives, and seizing children.

Our Grand Cannabis Experiment does need to be tinkered with, but not at the expense of the medical community. If we’re going to do this right, unlike the federal government, we must acknowledge and respect that cannabis is used to truly heal our loved ones in a myriad of ways for a plethora of ailments. To herd patients into pot stores, take away their choices, eliminate their ability to speak to medical professionals in a safe environment, and force them to sign a registry admitting that they are felons? That’s not compassionate care, and it’s not what true legalization should look like. E For more Higher Ground, visit highergroundtv.com.

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