Seattle Weekly, August 12, 2015

AUGUST 12-18, 2015 I VOLUME 40 I NUMBER 32

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SEATTLEWEEKLY.COM I FREE

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MUSIC SIX PIZZA SHOPS, SEVEN NOISE BANDS PAGE 29 ART ALONG THE DUWAMISH PAGE 21

THE SPIKE Prescription drugs are driving a new heroin epidemic.

Here’s how to make it less deadly.

By Casey Jaywork

Come Hell or High-Rise

What a shiny new apartment complex could mean for historic Pioneer Square.

By Ellis E. Conklin Page 7

Food Truck Fantasy?

These numbers will make you think twice about starting one.

By Jason Price Page 17

SEATTLE WEEKLY’S BEST OF SEATTLE 2015 READER POLL

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AUGU ST 12 — 18, 2015

Reprinted by permission Seattle Weekly

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GENIUS AT #BESTMUSEUM OPENS SEPT 26

inside» August 12-18, 2015 VOLUME 40 | NUMBER 32 » SEATTLEWEEKLY.COM

UPCOMING CONCERTS Vaudeville Etiquette Thurs, August 13 | City Hall Plaza

The Dusty 45s

Fri, August 14 | Harbor Steps

Correo Aereo »33

»25

news&comment 7

HOW HIGH IS TOO HIGH?

BY ELLIS E. CONKLIN | Pioneer

Square isn’t happy about a proposed new apartment tower.

7 | BRIEFLY

8

ME & THE MAYOR

BY ELLIS E. CONKLIN | A sit-down

with Ed Murray.

9

EARTHSHIP!

BY SARA BERNARD | Would you want to live in this trash-made eco-shed?

11 | SEATTLELAND

12 THE BIG SPIKE

BY CASEY JAYWORK | What’s behind the sudden rise in heroin deaths and ODs? The story starts with well-meaning pain doctors and Big Pharma.

food&drink

17 FOOD TRUCKS 101

BY JASON PRICE | An easy way to

make money? The operators say no.

17 | FOOD NEWS/THE WEEKLY DISH

arts&culture

21 OUTDOOR ART SAFARI!

BY BRIAN MILLER | We find it on the

Duwamish, in SLU, and beyond.

25 FILM

OPENING THIS WEEK | Kevin Bacon

as bad sheriff, the Man From U.N.C.L.E. reboot, and a daring first ascent.

27 | FILM CALENDAR

29 MUSIC

BY MEAGAN ANGUS, KELTON SEARS & DAVE LAKE | Three festivals

in one weekend! Pizza Crawl, VanFest, and LITA’s Summer Spectacular.

32 | THE WEEK AHEAD

odds&ends

33 | HIGHER GROUND 34 | CLASSIFIEDS

»cover credits

ILLUSTRATION BY BARRY BLANKENSHIP

Shelby Earl

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EDITORIAL News Editor Daniel Person Food Editor Nicole Sprinkle Arts Editor Brian Miller Music Editor Kelton Sears

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Editorial Operations Manager Gavin Borchert Staff Writers Ellis E. Conklin, Casey Jaywork Editorial Interns Alana Al-Hatlani, Jennifer Karami, Daniel Roth Contributing Writers Rick Anderson, Sean Axmaker, James Ballinger, Michael Berry, 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

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21 | THE PICK LIST 24 | PERFORMANCE, VISUAL ARTS & BOOKS

Editor-in-Chief Mark Baumgarten

Tues, August 18 | IBM Building

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DANIEL BERMAN

“Nothing about war has been learned in these 70 years.

We still have those in public life calling for more wars and rejecting, out of hand, diplomacy.”

chatterbox the

DROPPING THE BOMB

Last week, to mark the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Ellis E. Conklin sat down with Fumika Groves, the 81-year-old president of Seattle’s Hiroshima Club. Groves was a girl of 11 living in Seattle when the bomb was dropped, killing several of her relatives. “It makes me mad when people compare 9/11 to Pearl Harbor. No, Pearl Harbor was a military action. 9/11 was more like Hiroshima. Innocent civilians were killed,” she said.

wondered if the restaurant was too experimental for the Seattle scene. “Seattle is still a city that likes its experiments small and contained,” Geballe concluded. Others weren’t so sure, suggesting the Aragona was simply too ambitious or too obscure.

Tuesdays in July and August: 6 - 7 PM

Grab a glass of wine, a small bite and make your summer night count with local musicians in the Art Plaza!

August 18 Mikey and Matty

August 25 A String of Pearls

CHIHULYGARDENANDGLASS.COM

September 24-27 Schack Art Center

2921 Hoyt Ave. / Downtown Everett 425.259.5050 / schack.org

Glass pumpkin patch Make a blown glass pumpkin Activities for kids Beer & brat night, ages 21+

Made possible in part by the City of Everett Hotel/Motel Fund

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • AU GU ST 12 — 18, 2015

I think this is a cautionary tale for chefs who seem more interested in expanding an empire (Ahem!

Ethan Stowell I’m looking in your direction) than focusing on making one restaurant great. Sure, you might be able to find financiers who will give you a heap of money, but then you’re on a treadmill. One I am appalled by this terribly devastating event and thing seems clear: Seattle is changing very rapidly. by the fact that there has been no apology on the I reckon it won’t be long before part of the U.S. government. the “diners weren’t ready for the The bombing was totally Send your thoughts on menu” excuse flies out the window unnecessary. It is also disturbthis week’s issue to as Seattle grows up and desires ing that nothing about war letters@seattleweekly.com something better than burgers, has been learned in these 70 pizza, and beer. The mediocrity years. We still have those in and hyperbole that passes for cuisine in Seattle now public life calling for more wars and rejecting, out has a tenuous future as educated people with taste of hand, diplomacy with Iran and others. There are continue to swarm into Seattle. everyday people who take their children to warglorification events, like last week’s “Blue Devils” Susanna Parker, via seattleweekly.com (angels, not so much), and think nothing about what these planes do in real time, or what they are Don’t be silly, Zach. Seattle won’t touch Spanish teaching their children. I read no critique in the wine or Spanish food. Did you forget about the fate press about war planes flying over Seattle!! What of La Taberna del Alabardero? is more sad: That Hiroshima even happened, or cornichon, via seattleweekly.com that very few remember?

Carol Meyer, via e-mail Seattle won’t touch Spanish food/wine? Think again—Harvest Vine has been going strong for years, and Pinxto in Belltown and Ocho in Ballard Fumiko Groves says that “Pearl Harbor was a are always busy. Tried to go to Aragona several times, military action”. I beg to differ. Merely being carbut dining companions would scan the menu online ried out by the military doesn’t in itself make it a and opt out—the focus on unfamiliar ingredients military action; it is a military action only when and offal was too much for them to get past—and all avenues of diplomacy have been exhausted to others in Seattle obviously felt the same. Guess the no avail, and when the attacking force informs its literal nose-to-tail concept needs to be presented in adversary of its coming. Japan did none of those; Pearl Harbor was a terrorist attack, which involved baby steps, not the entire menu. neither diplomacy nor forewarning, that was carMelissa Chadwick, via seattleweekly.com ried out by the military. Harry Truman in the Potsdam Letter, on the other hand, informed the MORE LIKE SHITTY BARF Emperor of Japan that we were coming, why we And lastly, some of our readers weren’t stoked on who our were coming, what he had to do to stop us from readers voted the best graffiti artists in Seattle, the tagger coming (surrender), and what the consequences sHITbARF. would be if he failed to surrender and thereby bring the war, which Japan started, to a close.

Artist? That’s not art! It’s some idiot tagging up a Groves now “oversees the annual bomb victims’ beautiful city, it’s like a dog marking a spot. Dumb. memorial service at Seattle Buddhist Church.”

Kimberly Ann, via Facebook Perhaps a more appropriate place for her to hold that memorial would be at Pearl Harbor.

Why did you publish this? I can appreciate pieces and murals under bridges and on train cars, but tags Richard Askren, via e-mail are just vandalism.

ADIOS, ARAGONA Jared M. Simons, via Facebook E In the Bar Code, Zach Geballe dissected the closing of the restaurant Aragona, which focused on serving deliComments have been edited for length and clarity, but cious, but obscure, Spanish wine and cuisine. Geballe not for use of the words shit and barf.

SUMMER NIGHTS

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SEATTLE WEEKLY • AUGU ST 12 — 18, 2015

BELLEVUE SQUARE

6 Bellevue Square LRA 9-15 One Page.indd 1

8/7/15 1:35 PM

news&comment Come Hell or High Rise

SeattleBriefly Fast takes from the news desk

Pioneer Square’s preservation board found a proposed development out of keeping with the historic neighborhood. City Hall is letting the building go up anyway.

Weekend at Bernie’s

BY ELLIS E. CONKLIN

I

tions—ordering the developer to revise the building’s cornice and increase by four feet the setback of the rooftop, in hopes of making the structure “look less massive” and blend in better with other historic buildings.

Former longtime City Council member Jan

Drago, who with her husband lives in the Florentine Condominiums in Pioneer Square and sits on the board of Alliance for Pioneer Square, a neighborhood advocacy group that is supportive of the tower project, said, “It would seem that a recommendation from the [Preservation] Board would be upheld by the City, so I don’t know what’s going on.

But I have been told by people within the city, who I trust, that director Nyland made the right decision. I can’t say who told me that.”

Drago quickly added, “Still, I personally think the building is totally out-of-scale.”

In late December of 2014, Gerding Edlen, an active multifamily developer in the Puget Sound region and owner of the historic Dexter Horton Building in downtown Seattle, paid $12 million for the existing property at 316 Alaskan Way South, the current site of the three-story Old Seattle Garage. The company plans to tear down the garage to make room for its residential tower, which includes a “rooftop enclosed recreation area” and will provide unrestricted views of Elliott Bay, if and when the Alaskan Way Viaduct is finally brought to its knees.

Gerding’s acquisition is one of a number of examples of how developers are banking on lucrative profits from the transformation of the waterfront. Most assuredly, the so-called upzone approved in April 2011 by the Seattle City Council that increased heights to 120 feet Pioneer Square could be getting a new look.

on the perimeter of the Pioneer Square Historic District, has made development opportunities much more enticing.

The Portland firm offered no comment on the Preservation Board’s rejection of their development plan or the reprieve they received from the relatively new neighborhood director Nyland, who assumed the mayor-appointed post on June 2.

“You’ll just have to ask them about it,” said Natalie Quick, who, as she put it, provided “outreach efforts” on behalf of the developer. (Drago said Quick “lobbied her” since June to attend the Preservation Board’s twice-monthly meetings and speak out in support of the project. Drago declined to do so.)

From the get-go, the proposed tower was fraught with controversy. Residents living in the area were adamantly against it and began to attend Preservation Board meetings to have their say.

The 10-member Board—there are currently two vacancies—is charged with reviewing façade alterations, signage, new construction, and land-use changes, and submits its recommendations to the Department of Neighborhoods for all properties within the Pioneer Square Preservation District. It is rare for its recommendation—especially when the vote is as convincing as it was in shunning the 11-story complex—to be overturned by the department’s director. The board is currently composed of two district property owners, two architects, the owner of a Seattle fitness studio, an attorney, a historian, and the director of the Bread for Life Mission.

All members are appointed by the Mayor and subject to City Council confirmation.

The Weekly reached out to five board members who voted against the project. All of them were reluctant to comment. “I have nothing to say. You’ll just have to wait for the minutes [of the July 15] meeting to come out,” said member Willie Parish, executive director of the Bread of Life Mission. The minutes have not yet been made available. “I don’t want to talk to you,” said member Mark Astor, a property manager at Martin Smith Inc.

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 8

A Misfire at Garfield

PHOTOS BY CHRISTOPHER ZEUTHEN

On Friday, after months of deliberation, the Seattle school district fired popular Garfield choir teacher Carol Burton. Burton lead a group of students on a trip to New Orleans last March, during which two female students reported being groped by a male student in their hotel room. It was found that Burton had violated district policy by drinking alcohol while on the trip and allowing boys and girls to hang out in hotel rooms together. Yet it’s hard not to see Burton as a scapegoat for a district hoping to avoid a costly sexual harassment lawsuit. The student who allegedly perpetrated the groping had been disciplined before for such behavior, but that information wasn’t passed on to Burton before the trip. Furthermore, the male student appears to have justified his inappropriate touching by saying he was gay, suggesting a dire need for more sensitivity training amongst students. (Today’s lesson: Gay does make grab-ass okay.) Meanwhile, to punish the choir teacher and potentially restrict future field trips is to teach these girls that if you want to keep the things you love, you also have to keep your head down and not rock the boat. There are some instances where such an imperative might be true—eat your broccoli before you get dessert, perhaps—but “get groped in order to keep choir” should not be one of them. E

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • AU GU ST 12 — 18, 2015

t isn’t often during these times of relentless growth in Seattle that a big-time property developer gets kicked squarely in the ass.

But it happened on July 15 when the Pioneer Square Preservation Board appeared to have upended a Portland developer’s plan to build an 11-story, 120-foot-tall residential tower at the northeast corner of South Jackson Street and Alaskan Way South.

More than a half-dozen meetings were held before the Preservation Board in no uncertain terms told Gerding Edlen and their Weber Thompson GBD architectural team to forget it.

The vote was 7-1 in opposition to the project that sought to construct 200 market-rate housing units rising above nearly 5,000 square feet of streetlevel retail space. In essence, the Board concluded that the building was too bulky, visually jarring, and grossly out-of-scale with the surrounding historic Pioneer Square neighborhood. No deal, no development, they said.

Then, something odd occurred. Two weeks later, on July 30, the city’s Director of the Department of Neighborhoods, Kathy Nyland, overturned the Preservation Board’s recommendation and gave the developer the green light to proceed. It is not known at this time what may have transpired behind the scenes during those two weeks.

Nyland declined to return phone calls and e-mails from Seattle Weekly seeking comment on why she chose to disregard the Board’s near-unanimous determination that the residential undertaking—which the developer has spent more than a year working on—was a bad fit for Pioneer Square, the city’s oldest neighborhood.

Instead, she referred the disputatious matter to department spokeswoman Lois Maag. Last Thursday, Maag told the Weekly that Nyland, before making her decision to go ahead with the project, pored through the meeting minutes, revisited the architectural renderings of the building, reviewed city codes pertaining to height, and met with Board chairman Ryan Hester, who, according to the minutes of a January 21 meeting, agreed with fellow Board member Mark Astor that the building was “too massive.”

Maag said that the director then concluded that “the 120-foot height is allowed by city code,” and so she gave approval. Though she set some condi-

The two women who rushed the stage at Westlake on Saturday demanding that presidential candidate Bernie Sanders have a moment of silence for Michael Brown, the black teenager killed by a cop in Ferguson one year prior, brought out a lot of scolds critical of what they saw as unproductive political disruption.

But the fact that Marissa Johnson and Mara Jacqueline Willaford quickly became some of the most reviled people in Seattle—more so than tech workers! one techy Redditor celebrated— shouldn’t distract from the fact that they had a point: Bernie Sanders, liberal candidate de jure, has been notably quiet on a progressive cause de jure, racial equality. The senior senator from Vermont (whose population is 95 percent white, 1 percent black), had a similar confrontation with Black Lives Matter protestors at the Netroots Nation conference in St. Louis who said he wasn’t adequately addressing racial disparity during his barnstorming presidential campaign; following the Seattle incident, as Sydney Brownstone at The Stranger first noted, Sanders added a “racial justice” plaftform to his website.

And in Los Angeles Monday, Sanders made fighting institutional racism a major part of his appeal. Now, who said Johnson and Willaford’s antics weren’t productive?

news@seattleweekly.com

7

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Hell or High Rise » FROM PAGE 7 The 80 South Jackson building, located next to

the Old Seattle Parking Garage, became groundzero for the opposition to the project.

Leading the charges were Greg and Cindy Aden, who own a condo in the building, along with York Wong, a retired academic dean at Evergreen State College, who also lives in the Jackson Street dwelling and is quite proud of the colorful flowers he tends to in planters that decorate his balcony.

“The Board kept telling the developer that the building didn’t fit into the historical neighborhood,” the 78-year-old Wong, who decades ago served as an economic consultant to New York’s charismatic Mayor John Lindsay, recounted from the many hours he has spent monitoring the meetings held in the basement of City Hall.

“And so the architect kept putting more lipstick on the pig, but it was still a pig,” Wong said last week over coffee in Pioneer Square. Wong, joined by Cindy Aden, added, “Putting up this building would be like planting a giant cactus in a bed of roses.”

Aden, a curly-blonde-haired former journalist

“This whole thing is a Trojan horse. If this one tall building goes up here, there will be others.” and an impassioned community activist, said Seattle has been bending over backwards to satisfy developers’ interests for years now and that the project at 316 Alaskan Way is emblematic of this unfortunate trend. “This whole thing is a Trojan horse. If this one tall building goes up here, there will be others.”

Determined to convince the Board that the project needed to be derailed, the Adens and Wong showed members pictures of other modest-sized buildings nearby, such as the Crown Hotel, the C&H Building and the Bread of Life Mission, to demonstrate just how out-of-scale the proposal was.

“That really impressed them,” Wong recalled.

The day after Nyland overturned the Board’s recommendation, an outraged Greg Aden fired off a venting letter to Geena Nashem, the city’s Preservation Board Coordinator and to the full Board itself.

After thanking them for their efforts to try and kill the project, he wrote, “At this point, I must ask you where we all go from here. Is the existence of the Pioneer Square Preservation Board justified when it seem it only has purview over signage, lights, and sidewalks? Does it make sense that you only speak for buildings that already contribute to the district, but you have no power over the structures that do not contribute, or the new structures supported by developers back by the City Council, City Attorney, and Mayor?

“Frankly, I wouldn’t begrudge any of you if you resigned in protest to this decision. I would applaud it.”

The battle is not over yet. Cindy Aden says an appeal will likely be filed next week against the Department of Neighborhoods’ decision to ignore the Preservation Board’s recommendation.

Also, said Aden, “We are going to form a nonprofit group to collect all the people in Pioneer Square, and everywhere else, who are concerned about this building. We hope to have a petition they can sign, a website for more information and a way for them to contribute to our legal fund.” E econklin@seattleweekly.com

AGrowing Headache Ed Murray assesses a stinging summer in the mayor’s office.

BY ELLIS E. CONKLIN

M

ayor Ed Murray is still stewing over the flak he took over one extremely controversial component of his housing-affordability plan—that being the recommendation by his hand-picked advisory panel to effectively upzone all single-family neighborhoods in Seattle.

Facing a fiery backlash, Murray was forced to withdraw the proposal on July 29, just two weeks after his Housing Affordability and Livability Committee (HALA) unfurled 65 different strategies designed to lower or at least stabilize the cost of housing.

“Regrettably, the [narrative that ensued] was of a proposal that was a small part of a larger plan and a claim that we had not engaged in a process. And that’s how the thing went sideways, and I will blame myself,” Murray told Seattle Weekly last week during an interview at his City Hall office. “We probably should have reacted immediately when the leak happened, and basically blanketed the city.”

The leak Murray is referring to came from Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat, who more recently chastised the mayor for his decision last September, when he formed HALA, to keep its meetings closed to the public.

Bristling from the criticism, Murray added, “The frame was that we have not engaged in a public process. But what we were trying to do was prep a proposal to take public. My predecessor [Mike McGinn], at times, was hammered in the media for sending proposals that were half-baked. So we did the due diligence, we did the study, brought in a bunch of people other than policy people in the city to help us do that, [and] we were about to launch our public engagement by having a series of proposals people could react to.”

Did the media overreact?

“I think some of the media overreacted, yeah,” Murray replied. “I think this thing ... that we were going to allegedly do to singlefamily housing was not the proposal. And we knew by our own modeling that if you look at it, it would be a small number of units that actually gain from changing single-family zoning.”

Murray, for sure, has taken

his share of licks over the past three weeks, first by angering homeowners and neighborhood activists by initially seeking to open the gates to duplexes and triplexes on single-family lots, and then incurring the wrath of urbanists when he backed down. Still, Murray, citing “big wins” on a commercial linkage fee (which would help pay for more affordable housing) and mandatory inclusion zon-

ing (which would require developers to include affordable units in new developments), insists his affordable housing package will yield meaningful results.

“The fact that 6,000 units under this plan will be built by the private sector [for people] who make less than the median income is a huge win.

We’ve never had the private sector build [affordable] housing in this city.”

Eventually, the city code on single-family housing must change. “That is a conversation the city at some point should engage in, because there is no question that single-family housing drives up the cost of a house in general.”

Murray, meanwhile, is keenly aware that there is a palpable angst in the city over the escalating disparity in wealth, the rising level of homelessness, and the onslaught of massive high-density development that seems to have spawned a sense of growth fatigue.

“I think there is a real frustration out there around growth,” Murray said. “To some extent that frustration is around not knowing how the city is going to grow, and maybe more importantly, how we’re going to move through the city.”

Despite the fact that Seattle has become a construction camp with any-time-of-day traffic jams, Murray noted, “I have seen four or five polls over the last year, and in 2013 when I was polling [during my mayoral campaign], we saw 65 percent of the people saying the city was on the wrong track. Currently, the polls we see, that number has flipped.

“I think we’re only hearing part of the voice out there,” Murray continued. “A woman said this to me: ‘This is a good problem for a city to have.’ She’s right. We’re attracting jobs. We’re attracting revenue, and we’re attracting people.

Over my entire life, I’ve watched this city empty out. I watched the school district empty out. I watched jobs go to the Eastside. …So I see a city [where], once again, the jobs are returning, the children are returning to our schools.

So the question now is: Can we get it right?”

Asked whether the developers have had too much sway in Seattle over the past decade, Murray chuckled and said, “Well, I’ve been here a year and half, and they’re always half unhappy with me. But I wouldn’t say the developers have had too much sway.

“Let me put it a different way: The city has not managed development, and it certainly has not managed development for affordability.

The difference about the upzoning we’re talking about is that it’s not just about growing, but growing affordably. And that’s something Seattle has not done.” E NATE WATTERS

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AUGU ST 12 — 18, 2015

Epic Events presents: Seattle Outdoor Movies! July 9 August 27, 7 pm. Seattle Outdoor Movies at Magnuson Park summer events feature big screen flicks, live entertainment, triva and Seattle’s best food trucks.

news&comment»

econklin@seattleweekly.com

Behold the Earthship

Coming soon to a driveway near you.

BY SARA BERNARD is classified by the City of Seattle as a tool shed, but the hope for some Earthshippers is that, eventually, such structures could be built to city housing code.

Earthship Seattle founder and

SARA BERNARD

Welcome to your new home.

A

ttention eco-enthusiasts: Seattle’s first-ever Earthship is pulling into port. Built out of old tires, trashstuffed plastic bottles, salvaged chunks of concrete, and donated or scavenged wood, tarps, Styrofoam boxes, dirt, clay, sand, and straw, it’s a veritable DIY trash paradise, gradually taking shape in what was once an ordinary driveway in Columbia City.

It’s not the prettiest of structures—yet. But once the basic components are sound, it will be.

“Everything that isn’t a window is going to be mosaicked with broken pottery and jewelry and mirrors and things. I want it to be very photographable,” says Roxanne Fonder Reeve, the bubbly and enthusiastic owner of said driveway, who offered the space last summer to members of the volunteer-run group Earthship Seattle when she learned they needed a site for their pilot project.

Today, the structure has been dubbed the “Trash Studio,” and when it’s finished, Fonder Reeve imagines that it’ll be a place for school groups, artists, architects, city planners, natural-material builders, and everyone else to learn about green building principles and “how to live lightly on the planet” in a space that’s sparkly and inviting. “People will find it; kids will go home and say, ‘Mom! It’s a fairy castle and it’s made out of garbage!’,” she says. “And parents will come and learn about it.” Because, ultimately: “We want to create a world where this isn’t unusual.”

In some circles, it isn’t: Ask the 544 members of the Earthship Seattle Meetup group, for instance, or the 200-plus volunteers who’ve lent a hand during various work parties over the last year (still ongoing; interested folks can consult the group’s Facebook page), or the Chicago-based DJ Polish Ambassador who featured the Trash Studio as part of his Permaculture Action Tour last fall.

For the uninitiated, Earthship Biotecture is a greener-than-LEED eco-building design system developed by New Mexico-based architect Michael Reynolds. The result: curvy, Gaudíesque buildings capable of powering themselves, heating and cooling themselves, containing their own sewage and gray-water harvesting systems, and enabling their residents to grow food inside.

Not only is the Trash Studio made out of trash, recyclables, and natural materials (all donated or salvaged), it’s also designed to passively heat and cool itself and collect rainwater. The Trash Studio

sbernard@seattleweekly.com

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SE ATTLE WEEKLY • AU GU ST 12 — 18, 2015

Trash Studio construction lead Florian Becquereau studied Earthship techniques under Reynolds, and thinks “the Earthship philosophy, which is kind of like permaculture—using the natural phenomena of the Earth to take care of yourself, instead of burning fossil fuels and using nuclear power plants and stuff like that— is really a much healthier, more sane way to live.” (He has time to lead this project, by the way, because he quit his job as an editor for Pokémon to do something that felt more meaningful.)

The Trash Studio isn’t technically an Earthship. The official term refers to a structure that fulfills six eco-building principles, but the Trash Studio focuses on just three: materials, water harvesting, and heating and cooling. And it’s really the materials part that’s the most solid, for now. (“So it’s... an Earthboat?,” I suggested during a recent visit to the site. “An Earthcanoe?”

Roxanne Fonder Reeve laughed, then decided, with some gravitas: “It’s a dinghy.”)

Seattle’s first Earthdinghy got rolling last September. Florian Becquereau thought the build would take three or four weeks. Today, that optimistic schedule makes him laugh. Partly because Earthship Seattle wanted the price tag to be exactly $0, it’s taken a lot of time and creativity to source all the materials, then change course when certain things weren’t available. There are also a lot of time-consuming aspects to the build, like cramming a whole yard-sized bag full of plastic waste into each plastic “bottle brick” (“sort of like little portable landfills,” says Fonder Reeve) and endlessly sifting pebbles out of dirt piles. But it’s quite a feat: To date, “We haven’t spent five cents on putting it together,” Fonder Reeve says. “For me, that’s important, because permaculture and environmentalism are so often the province of rich white people. That annoys me. I really want to show that anybody, anybody can have this.”

Fonder Reeve—whose business card includes the words Princess, Sparkle, and Pants and who tells me gleefully that thanks to this project, “Queen of the Trash Fairies” has been her educational persona for the past year, complete with trash-art gown, crown, and scepter—possesses an infectious optimism about the project that makes the dream seem plausible: that this effort will have, in some small way, an impact on both the planet and Seattle culture. She’s even hoping that the Trash Studio can be a wedding venue: “How cool would that be—to have your wedding be in a beautiful place made out of trash?

“It’s my way of trying to make a better world,” she says. “I’m not rich and I’m not famous, but I have a driveway. And this is what I can do with it.” E

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10

news&comment» The Environmental Disaster Waiting to Happen at Monroe State Prison

MARK MULLIGAN/THE HERALD

The effluent source.

I

SEATTLELAND

randerson@seattleweekly.com

Rick Anderson writes about sex, crime, money, and politics, which tend to be the same thing. His latest book is Floating Feet: Irregular Dispatches From the Emerald City.

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • AU GU ST 12 — 18, 2015

n a somewhat noxious news release last week, the state Department of Corrections announced that some of its prisons had earned environmental awards from its fellow agency, the state Department of Ecology, for the handling of inmate sewage.

Four DOC wastewater treatment plants had received Outstanding Performance Awards “for perfect performance in 2014,” the release stated.

The awards were important, the announcement added, “because wastewater

BY RICK ANDERSON treatment plant operations are the first line of defense to protect public health and water quality.”

Indeed. And the DOC need look no further than its prison at Monroe as a prime example of how to fail at providing that protection.

The 2,400-inmate Monroe Corrections Complex was not one of the four winners of the human-waste awards, and went unmentioned in the DOC media release.

But, just a day earlier, the Monroe complex got a big mention in Prison Legal News, the 72-page national monthly based in Florida and edited by former Washington inmate Paul Wright.

I wrote the 6,000-word piece based on hundreds of prison and Ecology documents obtained

by PLN and its nonprofit owner, the Human Rights Defense Center, which agreed to also share the documents with Seattle Weekly.

The records reveal that a roughly half-million gallons of sewage water and other contaminants have been negligently dumped or accidentally spilled from the Monroe prison’s wastewater system over the last eight years, polluting local rivers and wetlands.

Ecology has no clear assessment of the damage and admits it has dealt lightly with DOC violations compared to private polluters.

Yet the systemic breakdowns and human negligence have at times badly polluted the pristine Skykomish River, whose icy headwaters collect in the Cascades. A nearly 400,000-gallon spill in 2012—caused by an effluent pump failure—went undiscovered by the prison for almost four days, while nobody was minding the wastewater helm.

Most importantly, Monroe’s aging waste lagoons—where human sewage is pre-treated before being pumped into the City of Monroe’s wastewater treatment plant—are a disaster waiting to happen. In 2012, according to a report from a DOE inspector, a dike separating the sewage

lagoons from the Skykomish was at risk of failure, and “could potentially release millions of gallons of untreated wastewater” into the river environment.

When I asked DOE for an update recently, spokesperson Larry Altose confirmed that “these concerns continue,” adding that the state was seeking legislative funding for a lagoon-replacement project that would address them.

Ecology referred me to a 12-year-old inspection report that placed the threat of a lagoon-busting waste deluge at a lower level.

Yet the 2003 report states the inspection was only superficial; and even at that, “erosion has likely created an almost vertical cut along the upstream slope and reservoir rim,” posing risk of a massive spill.

I also discovered a separate 2012 DOE PowerPoint presentation discussing a lagoon replacement.

“Pre-treatment lagoon dikes determined to be unsafe by Dam Safety” inspectors, it says without dispute.

DOE has recorded the spills and in some cases levied fines. But in recent years, Ecology appeared reluctant to come down too hard on its fellow agency. As a DOE biosolids specialist wrote in a 2012 e-mail to other department officials, “I was told it wouldn’t look good for a state agency to enforce on another state agency.

Really? I think it makes us look pretty bad when we overlook the environmental issues for them and enforce on others.”

Also among the state documents is a 2013 letter to Ecology from a Monroe prisoner who worked at the wastewater operation. Jonathan Jones-Thomas wrote that he “was thrown in the hole for asking too many questions about the wastewater treatment plant here on the Monroe compound.”

Ecology and Corrections were separately asked to respond, and—“tellingly” as PLN editor Wright puts it—they chose to do so in a joint statement authored by DOE spokesperson Altose and DOC spokesperson Susan Biller.

Has Ecology been soft on the DOC’s violations? Yes, the spokespersons admitted, allowing that it’s done purposely. “Repeated discharges from the same facility would ordinarily prompt Ecology to consider a penalty, a step Ecology has taken with state and public agencies in other situations,” they said.

“However, DOC’s corrective plan, if funded, would comprehensively address and eliminate the repeated failures at the facility. Because of this, and the caliber of [Monroe Corrections Complex]’s reporting and response, Ecology finds no value in a penalty, which is normally issued to compel attention and action.”

The DOC has had a wastewater lagoon replacement project at the bid-ready stage since 2010, they said. The plan for a new Fluent Exit Facility building that would send all prison waste directly to the city treatment plant would cost an estimated $5.9 million.

But during the recently completed budget session in Olympia, as in the past four years, legislators chose to not fund the new facility. The shit spills, and the threat of a multimillion-gallon one, continue. E

11

Prescription opioids have brought on a new heroin epidemic.

How can we make it less deadly?

By Casey Jaywork

I

t wasn’t until the evening after Lance Knight suffocated under the weight of his own lungs that his body was discovered. When his roommates left for work that morning, they’d assumed the pale 20-year-old, the newest member of their St. George, Utah apartment, was sleeping late.

When they returned and found the door to his $350 rented room still closed and locked, they called 911 to come break it down.

Police found Knight collapsed on his air mattress. He’d vomited, and foam was clogged in his mouth and throat. Knight was a recovering heroin addict, but other than a handful of syringes still in their blister packs and a bottle of injectable testosterone that Knight’s doctor had prescribed, his room appeared to be a drug-free zone.

Back in Seattle, Knight’s father Brian felt like someone had punched him in the gut when he heard the news. Over the phone, his ex-wife said it was suicide.

“How do you know it’s suicide?” he asked.

“Well, they found him dead,” she replied.

“Okay. Okay, I need to talk to people.”

Nearly a thousand miles from his son, Brian frantically called Lance’s recovery sponsor. He told Brian it was all speculation at this point. “Nobody really knows what happened, other than he had been in his room,” he said.

JOSE TRUJILLO

It was an overdose, a method of death that had been stalking Lance for a quarter of his life.

The former Poulsbo resident had used drugs, primarily oxycodone, since he was 15. He would crush the pills, then heat the powder on a piece of aluminum foil and inhale the fumes through a plastic tube. Smoking oxycodone smells like burnt marshmallows; the fumes pass through the mucous membranes inside the nasal cavity to the bloodstream and then the brain, where they scramble parts of the nervous system related to reward and emotion. After smoking Lance would feel euphoric, vomit, then feel euphoric again. The warm, soothing buzz would cover his entire body like a hot bath on a cold night. Suddenly, the world was a pleasant place to be.

Wages as a kitchen hand in rural Washington didn’t cover his new habit, so he found a way to monetize his passion: carrying drugs, and later selling them. At first, Brian—who’d moved to Seattle after he and his wife divorced in 2004— didn’t realize anything had changed with Lance.

assuring Brian that “Mom is lying to you” about how bad things had gotten.

And then one day he’d had enough. He called Brian. “Dad, I’m just tired of this,” said Lance.

“I’m tired of living this way. I think I need to go to rehab.”

“He sounded very logical,” says Brian, chuckling. “He was very upfront. He wasn’t desperate.

It wasn’t like he’d hit rock bottom yet. He was just like, ‘I’m tired of it.’ ” Brian sent him to Sundown Ranch, a recovery center in Yakima. At the end of the 28-day program, Brian sat in on a facilitated confession, in which Lance dumped all his shameful secrets into the open. Lance had owned a gun; during deals, Lance had both pointed a gun at other people and had a gun pointed at him. “He told us about all the money, he told us about all the people’s lives he had destroyed because he was a dealer,” says Brian.

After getting clean, Lance moved to Seattle to live with Brian in his West Seattle apartment,

by Alki Beach, from the fall of 2009 until February 2011. Brian taught him how to do laundry.

They’d cook dinners together, and Brian would drive him to therapy and Narcotics Anonymous meetings and GED testing sessions. Bent on fixing his son’s life, the project manager in Brian manifested with a vengeance. “I was convinced I could save him,” he says. But isolated from his friends and without a car, bored with TV and chain smoking, Lance began to use again. He’d disappear to his girlfriend’s house in North Seattle for days at a time, and Brian noticed things around the apartment had begun to go missing.

So, goaded by his family, Lance tried to get clean again. He fled to Utah in an attempt to extricate himself from his old life. When that didn’t work, he bounced back to Seattle and then Poulsbo, where he stayed with his mother until she had to rescue him from a heroin overdose. So he went back into detox, back into treatment, back to Utah. There, he managed to hang on to sobriety for several months, until one night in July of 2012, he didn’t. Lance sat in a friend’s car and injected himself with heroin for the last time. Then he returned to

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 14

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SE ATTLE WEEKLY • AU GU ST 12 — 18, 2015

But before long, his son started to disappear for weeks on end, riding down to San Francisco with a group of older guys in a Cadillac Escalade.

They’d pick up oxy in the Tenderloin district, then turn around and drive back up to Seattle, where they’d sell it for a couple thousand dollars per batch. Brian recalls sleeping with his cell phone under his pillow, hoping for a reply to his frantic texts: “Just let me know you’re okay.”

When Lance did call, he sounded sick. Impurities in the fumes from the opioid’s pill-packaging, plus cigarettes, were ravaging his throat.

One night the Poulsbo police showed up at his mother’s house, where he lived. They knew what Lance was up to, but he knew they knew. “The drug dealers are smarter than the police—they’re always one step ahead,” says Brian. Though the police tore the hell out of the place, they didn’t find much: just enough to put him on probation.

By the late 2000s, prescription opioid abuse came to be recognized as a public health crisis.

State legislatures, including Washington’s, passed regulations that dried up the supply of drugs like oxycodone. But what they didn’t, couldn’t, legislate were the habits. Deprived of oxy, Lance moved to street heroin. By now, he’d begun to lose weight. He was becoming some kind of deep-sea creature: Cut off from the sun, his skin grew pale, and his eyes sank into his head like oysters in their shells. He became verbally abusive, and played his parents against each other,

CHRISTOPHER ZEUTHEN

Shilo Murphy runs a needle exchange near the University of Washington.

13

The Spike » FROM PAGE 13 his new home in St. George, crawled into bed, and died.

Stories like Lance’s have been on the uptick.

vehicle of choice for people who wanted to get high on prescription drugs. “The Gucci, the drug that people wanted,”—people like Lance—“was OxyContin,” says Banta-Green.

As a consequence, recreational prescription opioid use skyrocketed. In the span of just one year, from 1999 to 2000, recreational use of prescription opioids nearly tripled in King County, and the trend continued throughout the decade. “Opiate prescribing went up 300 percent throughout the 2000s,” says Banta-Green.

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just the underlying ailments causing it. Opioids that had previously been restricted to ailments like cancer or physical trauma suddenly became widely available for more broadly defined problems like chronic pain. At the same time, Purdue Pharma introduced and aggressively marketed OxyContin (the brand name for oxycodone), a painkiller designed to gradually release opioids into the body.

As the sheer amount of opioids prescribed to Americans suddenly jumped, the drugs naturally found their way onto the street.

Users quickly figured out how to circumvent the drug’s time-delay feature, making oxy the

Withdrawal from opioids isn’t lethal, as it can be

with alcohol or benzodiazepines (Valium), but it is

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SEATTLE WEEKLY • AUGU ST 12 — 18, 2015

Brian Knight lost his son Lance, right, to a heroin overdose.

le a v e

14

CASEY JAYWORK

Heroin use, which had been relatively stable through most of the decade, began to spike in the late 2000s throughout the United States. Cheap and plentiful, the drug is a staple commodity in an underground market that is as big as the globe and as intimate as your arm. And while heroin has enjoyed widespread popularity since the end of World War II, demand has soared in the past five years as jonesing prescription opioid addicts like Lance have migrated to the street.

“If you’re addicted to opiates, and you’ve used opiates for a long time, your brain chemistry has changed,” says Dr. Caleb Banta-Green, a druguse researcher at the University of Washington’s Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute. “You lose your free will, because your priorities—literally, your biological priorities in your brain—are rotated around, so that the opiates become number one.”

Banta-Green is perhaps the most knowledgeable person in King County when it comes to regional drug trends. Analyzing data collected across a wide range of sources, Banta-Green found that heroin use and mortality has spiked: Drug-treatment admissions for heroin in King County have doubled since 2010; and the rate of heroin-related deaths is now higher than its former peak in the 1990s.

Researchers trace the rise in heroin use, in part, to the doctor’s office. In the late 1990s, there was a shift in health-care philosophy that emphasized treating patients’ pain rather than

It took several years for policy makers to catch up. “Washington state worked very hard to rein in [prescription opioid abuse], starting in 2007,” says Banta-Green. “We saw a very substantial leveling-off of prescribing those stronger opiates in 2009.” That decline persisted in the years that followed, as did a fall in prescription opioid deaths. In 2010, drug manufacturer Purdue reformulated OxyContin to make it harder to get high on. The same year, the Washington state legislature changed the law to make them more difficult for doctors to prescribe.

That move likely saved lives. But, as we now know, it also pushed many addicts out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Heroin deaths in King County began to rise in 2009. Starved of their oxycodone and similar opioids, addicts were going to the street for their fix, a trend mirrored around the country. In 2009, nearly half of heroin users in King County reported that they’d begun their journey into addiction with prescription opioids. Be it due to naïveté, ideology, or simply a lack of good choices, lawmakers had shifted thousands of users from the doctor’s office to the street.

CHRISTOPHER ZEUTHEN

deeply unpleasant, particularly for people with the kind of trauma or poverty that might drive them to drug abuse in the first place. Medication-assisted detox can ease the withdrawal by manipulating the brain receptors that trigger cravings. But without meds, a seasoned opioid addict can expect perhaps a week of snot, sweating, vomiting, nausea, and hot- and cold-flashes, plus—and often more importantly—the resurfacing of painful emotions that had previously been repressed by their drug use. Some addicts do manage to white-knuckle their way out of opioid addiction, but many—separated from friends and resources—are overwhelmed by the painful emptiness of their sober lives. Others, recognizing themselves as “addicts” who are a scourge on their friends and family, fall into a cycle of despair that heroin is particularly good at feeding.

For those on the frontlines of the new heroin epidemic, it’s that loss of hope that is nearly as dangerous as the drug itself.

“If you think you’re going to die tomorrow and you’re worthless, what does it matter whether or not you use a clean syringe?,” asks Shilo Murphy, who runs the University District’s needle exchange. The 39-year-old executive director of the radical People’s Harm Reduction Alliance, clad in dark jeans and a black denim vest covered in political patches advertising the needle exchange, peers out from beneath the massive woven cap that houses his formidable dreadlocks. The Alliance is best known to the general public for handing out clean crack pipes, but to users it’s the place where they go for help instead of judgment.

We talk in an office at the University Temple United Methodist Church, a long brick building across the street from the UW law school that hosts one of their needle exchange sites. Plants bask in sunlight from the window, and the office is strewn with donation materials and drug-

Dr. Caleb Banta-Green studies drug use at University of Washington.

safety pamphlets. “The police, the prosecutors, the entire system is set up to stop [drug users] and to shun [them],” Murphy says. “We spend trillions of dollars convincing drug users that they’re worthless human beings.

“That has been successful,” he says, “in the sense that a lot of drug users have a lot of selfhatred.”

The holy grail of Murphy’s work, he says, is to reverse that exclusion—to welcome drug users back into the human community. “Our job ... is to convince them that they’re worth something,” he says, because “then you will make differ-

ent choices” than someone who revels in selfdestruction. So the Alliance tries to meet users where they’re at instead of telling them where they should be. Sometimes this looks like the abstinence that Lance tried and failed to achieve; other times, it’s finding a way to stabilize their drug use.

Murphy’s motto, he says, is “Be the best damn drug user that you can be.”

He shows me the Alliance’s supply room.

Brown cardboard boxes are piled up to the ceiling, packed so deep there’s barely room for us to shimmy between them. Boxes of syringes are stacked in towering brown columns.

The Alliance gives out a lot of syringes—about 3.2 million per year to King County residents, says Murphy, and collects back as many as 5 million used ones. About a million of the former go to suburban users, he says—a demographic that he saw rapidly grow starting around 2010.

That would have been around the same time that Lance, and thousands of others, began their migration from Big Pharma to black tar.

“For me, it was a really sad and stressful time,” says Murphy. For a couple of months, the phone at the Alliance was ringing off the hook from prescription users asking for help. “We were getting multiple calls every week,” says Murphy, from frightened suburbanites trying to figure out how to buy heroin. Callers would say “I’m so scared” and “You gotta help me.” But Murphy couldn’t: The Alliance doesn’t hook people up with drugs. “It was hard to hear all these young folks in this really chaotic and traumatic experience,” he says. “We saw these folks quickly change into injection drug users, sometimes on the streets, sometimes in the suburbs.” Stable drug use, says Murphy, was transforming into unstable drug use, and quality-controlled drugs were being replaced by heroin off the street. “Our

delivery service really skyrocketed, to where in the Eastside and North King County, we do over a million syringes a year just delivering to the suburbs. The suburbs have just as much injection drug use as the city.

“The average drug user,” he says, “was much younger, and much more, let’s say, lack of city smarts or street smarts. It was really sad, that whole story and that generation. There wasn’t really a lot of older drug users to help teach them.

They were left on their own.”

None of this seems fair to Murphy. “We give people OxyContin,” he says, referring to society at large, “which is essentially legal heroin, and then we tell them that they can’t have it anymore and the only way they can get it is street heroin. We also let drug cartels be our FDA on what’s quality control. We allow people to ingest horrible cuts of drugs, with people getting horrible allergic reactions to stuff it’s [mixed] with.” Criminalization, he says, only drives people further into addiction, cutting them off from the social bonds that can help addicts to cope with undiluted reality.

“It’s not that hard to figure out that beating a human being up isn’t helpful,” says Murphy. “It’s not that hard to figure out that stripping someone of their rights and dignities by taking them to jail is a detriment to society.”

Banta-Green, the UW researcher, agrees.

“There’s no doubt that criminalizing drug use and drug users leads to all kinds of harms,” he says. But to their credit, he says, local leaders have been ahead of the curve.

The county has several programs that divert people from jail, including work-release and home detention. Since 2005 the county’s Community and Human Services department has worked with county jails to direct mentally ill and chemically

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 16

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • AU GU ST 12 — 18, 2015

15

The Spike » FROM PAGE 15

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dependent prisoners into services such as housing.

In the past decade or so, the overall jail population has dropped by nearly a third and the juvenile population has roughly been halved, though these decreases have disproportionately benefited whites.

Even more promising has been Law Enforce-

ment Assisted Diversion, or LEAD. Begun in 2011, the pilot program gives a small group of police officers the discretion to redirect suspects arrested for “low-level drug and prostitution crimes” away from court and toward “communitybased treatment and support services—including housing, health care, job training, treatment, and mental health support,” according to its website.

Concentrated in Belltown and Skyway, the program has had enormous success. Arrest rates for participants following their involvement in LEAD were cut by more than half in comparison to a control group of non-diverted arrestees.

But it’s a first step, not the last one, says Lisa Daugaard, advisor to LEAD and a policy director in the Public Defender Association. “It’s a transitional vehicle moving away from the War on Drugs,” she said in a recent interview.

In addition to the Alliance’s needle exchange in the University District, Seattle has two other needle exchanges in downtown and on Capitol Hill. The Alliance and the downtown exchange offer Noloxone, an antidote for opioid overdose also known as Narcan, as do several clinics and pharmacies. There are six methadone clinics in the

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AUGU ST 12 — 18, 2015

“We do over a million syringes a year just delivering to the suburbs. The suburbs have just as much injection drug use as the city.”

16

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city, and a take-home alternative to methadone is buprenorphine, also called Suboxone, which works by blocking the receptors in the brain that trigger withdrawal cravings.

At the state level, lawmakers passed the Good Samaritan Drug Overdose Law in 2010, after half a decade of debate. That law provides immunity to prosecution for drug possession to anyone who calls 911 to report an overdose. An early evaluation found that drug users said they were much more likely to call 911 for an overdose once they became aware of the law.

“Treatment’s a really big deal,” says BantaGreen, “and we need to get more of it out there to more people.” This means that rehabilitative programs can’t always narrowly focus on treatment per se; they also have to offer stability to the chaotic lives of addicts, particularly the homeless.

“There’s a lot of homelessness among the most acute users,” he says, “and to the think that they’re going to somehow grapple with opiate addiction while still not having housing is unrealistic.”

One thing we haven’t done yet: safe injection sites. These are spaces where intravenous drug users can shoot up under the supervision of trained nurses and counselors. Vancouver, British Columbia, has had one called InSite since 2003, and it works. A 2011 study published in the English medical journal The Lancet found that after InSite set up shop, illicit drug overdoses within half a kilometer dropped by more than a third.

According to a 2009 report summarizing various scientific evaluations, InSite also reduced public injecting, lowered syringe sharing, and increased

participation in addiction treatment—all without any discernible negative side effects. At least three different evaluations have each concluded that the facility saves taxpayers money in the long run—as much as four-fifths of what they would have paid, sans InSite, for downstream crisis services like police and ER doctors.

InSite’s website brags: “Although there have been 1,418 overdoses at InSite between 2004 and 2010, staff were able to successfully intervene each time. There has never been a fatality at InSite.”

By comparison, 314 Washingtonians died from drug overdoses in 2014.

On July 12, 2012, Brian Knight watched his son’s body be put to rest in a Utah cemetery not far from where Brian’s parents are buried. At the service, he read lyrics from John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy”:

Close your eyes Have no fear The monster’s gone He’s on the run and your mammy’s here Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful Beautiful boy Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful Beautiful boy After Lance died, Brian began to come apart at the seams. He would stand in the shower screaming and crying, then drink himself to sleep. He nearly lost his job as a manager at the Port of Seattle, he says, because of how distracted he became from his work. “I’ve spent the last three years trying to work through that grief.” It comes and goes, he says, like an emotional tide.

For half a year he tumbled down into depression. Then his daughter, also a recovering drug addict, relapsed.

Care of her 3-year-old daughter fell to Brian. He sheltered her with routine: rise at 6 a.m., daycare from 7 a.m. until 4:45 p.m., then cooking, eating, and cleaning up from dinner, then playtime, bath, quiet time to wind down, a storybook and a song, and bed by 8 p.m. Rinse and repeat. Every other Friday they took the ferry to Bainbridge Island, where Brian’s ex-wife would take her until Sunday afternoon. Other weekends they’d visit the parks and beaches near his apartment in Alki, or they would go see Brian’s partner in Bellingham, where the child would pick berries in his garden and watch the ducks.

It was his connection to his grand-daughter, the knowledge that another human being depended on him, that finally pulled Brian out of his personal hell.

“I was spiralling downhill very fast, in my depression,” he says, “so I had to stop doing that, pull up my bootstraps, and be responsible for her.

“I had to kind of pull myself up out of myself,” he says. “Having to take care of another person ... and be responsible for another life was what saved me.”

With time, he’s been able to think about his son, and how other families can avoid going through the pain he did.

Fundamentally, he’s decided, the solution to drug addiction is empathy. “I do question the tough-love, strict-boundary approach,” he says. “That may work for some people, but Lance was so far gone. He needed more help than any of us realized.

“In the beginning, I thought drug addiction was a choice,” Brian says. But now, “I’ve accepted that drug addiction is a disease ... and that [addicts] don’t know it’s a disease until they’ve made that choice.” E cjaywork@seattleweekly.com

Learn more about overdose prevention at stopoverdose.org.

food&drink A Hard Road

FoodNews

BY JASON PRICE

The economics of running a food truck.

Cheesemongers and their fans are gearing up for the annual Cheesemakers Festival on September 26 at the Seattle Design Center. The lineup includes 20 cheesemakers; among them newcomers such as River Run Creamery (Acme), Laurel’s Crown (Othello), and Little Dipper Dairy (Dayton), as well as Conway Family Farm (Camas) and Rosecrest Farm (Chehalis).

In addition to the wide array of artisan and farmstead cheeses, there will be several other local producers sampling accompaniments and beverages to pair with cheeses. Admission ($35) includes all cheese and food samples, and three drink tickets.

BY JASON PRICE

I

Food trucks in Westlake Park.

A Day in the Life of a Food-Truck Owner In order

to get a better understanding of the business, I wanted a sense of a typical day of running a food truck from my trio of food-truck masters. All agreed that the operators of the truck are essentially looking at about a nine- to ten-hour day on average to support a two- to three-hour service window—from setting up for service and driving to and from locations to breaking down and cleaning. Add to that, prep time in a commissary (typically happening while the truck is out or in the evenings), truck maintenance, or catering events later in the day, and that time is extended by anywhere from four to six hours.

If you are a vegetarian, then you may be interested in meeting up with fellow veggie lovers to munch on field roast and seitan. Vegetarians of Washington holds a monthly dinner for those of their ilk to get together and eat, talk, listen to live music, and chill.

This month’s event will be on Wednesday, August 19 at the Mount Baker Club at 7 p.m. Members pay $16.95 (guests $21.95) for this buffet meal. E

Rolling Gold Mine or Romantic Folly? Sure,

JOSE TRUJILLO

to increase speed, all parties agreed that three to four menu items was ideal. Lewis added that, “The speed at which people produce has nothing to do with number of items on the menu—it has to do with the skill set of the people on the truck and their systems. Most trucks don’t have extensive menus, but remember: It’s usually a mom-and-poptype operation. Most people that run a truck don’t go to culinary school and have never been exposed to systems to produce high-quality food quickly.”

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 18

morningfoodnews@gmail.com

TheWeeklyDish

Local 360’s Rabbit Meatloaf

BY ALANA AL-HATLANI

I’m not a fan of meatloaf. If I’m going to eat ground meat, I prefer it in burger or meatball form; but the rabbit meatloaf sandwich at Local 360 was intriguing enough to put aside my bias. And I’m glad I did.

It was the juiciest meatloaf I’ve ever had, nothing dense or dry about it—and, mind you, it didn’t even have a sauce to moisten it. This also made it the messiest meatloaf I’ve ever eaten, crumbling apart with each bite. Unlike traditional meatloaf whose meat is often bland or a mystery, the rabbit was bold and gamey, not weighed down by excessive breadcrumb filler. Caramelized onions, melted cheese, and crusty bread rounded out the sandwich—but I found myself picking out the meatloaf to eat on its own. I guess you could say I’m converted. E food@seattleweekly.com

17

ALANA AL-HATLANI

food trucks provide an opportunity to start a business for $50,000$100,000 versus a brick-and-mortar restaurant, which can cost many multiples of that amount.

But are food trucks a highly profitable business with little overhead?

Lewis said, “I can guarantee that they aren’t.

We’re in Seattle, where local and sustainable is on everyone’s mind—whether they’re at a food truck or at Canlis. Just because the walls are smaller doesn’t mean your food or labor costs are any different.”

Plus, he said, “Overhead isn’t that much cheaper than a traditional restaurant. Sure, you can buy a food truck cheaper; but outside of that, some of these guys in food-truck pods are paying over $100-$125 a day just to sell there.

If they’re running five days a week, then that’s

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • AU GU ST 12 — 18, 2015

The Need for Speed Says Edison, “We used to

operate in a space where six years ago—maybe there were 10 trucks of our nature that roamed around Seattle. Now, there’s over 180. What restaurant has that many direct competitors to fend off? None have seen their competitive landscape expand to that degree.”

Many of today’s food trucks have upped their game. People can now get a wide variety of street food, much of which is made with locally sourced ingredients and costs less than you might pay in a traditional restaurant. Others go for the speed of service when they don’t have time to sit in a restaurant. But how fast is fast enough?

I asked my food truckers about the ideal time from order to service. Lewis led the pack with a service time of “ideally two to three minutes,” where Henderson was a bit longer at “seven to eight minutes.” Edison was right in the middle at three to four minutes and added, “We can do as many as 95 tickets in an hour, and we start to get upset with ourselves if we take much longer than that.”

As far as reducing the number of menu items

On August 17, owner and chef Shota Nakajima will share the Naka kitchen for a French pop-up dinner with his friend and colleague, Chef Yuji Tsuji, who is visiting from France. They will produce a 13-course dinner that will highlight mostly French dishes. The cost of the dinner is $175 per person, plus tax and gratuity. Wine Director Jason Lock will offer a wine and beverage pairing for $40 per person. Seating is limited to 15 guests; call 294-5230.

BRENNAN MORING

recently read a story rant in a local publication that got me thinking about the business of food trucks. The writer focused on the immaturity of Seattle’s food-truck scene and complained about extensive wait times for food (10 minutes was apparently too long), the high costs, and menus too diverse to be efficient or good.

The piece went on to imply that there were good profit margins to be made by not having to pay high labor costs, reduction in prep time, and the purchase of expensive equipment. It went even further by comparing the Seattle food-truck scene to the hawker stalls of Singapore and Hanoi—where labor and food costs are a fraction of what is paid here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Knowing a bit about this business, I couldn’t help but poke holes in the illogical arguments. My goal—to explain the harsh realities of this difficult business model.

To help in this endeavor, I enlisted the aid of three of Seattle’s pioneering food-truck founders: Roz Edison of Marination and Good Bar, Josh Henderson of Skillet and now the Huxley Wallace Collective, and Matt Lewis, of Where Ya At Matt? and Restaurant Roux.

FRESH FRESH LIVE CRAWFISH FRE E PA R K I N G We Ship

» FROM PAGE 17

University Seafood & Poultry

$2,000-$2,500 a month in rent. Add on top of that the health-department requirements that all food trucks have commissary space, and you’re now looking at over $3,000 a month in fixed overhead before you sell a thing.”

Edison added that, “You have to maintain and insure a large, flammable kitchen on wheels.

These vehicles take a beating every single day. You hit one pothole and you’re out—you miss a day.

Any time taken to repair the truck is lost revenue.

And it’s much more difficult to get these trucks repaired. They’re basically commercial kitchens driving around in an older vehicle on city streets.”

So I dug deeper into the business model of running a food truck to understand the economics of the business. I wanted to know how much it really costs to run one of these things and how profitable they can be. I collected input from the trio and compiled my mini-P&L (see page 17).

These numbers do not paint a pretty picture—nor do they support the notion that there’s a ton of savings to be passed on to the consumer because they operate out of a truck. Essentially, after you sink 50-100 grand into your truck/kitchen/home, you now work 10-plus hour days and hope to hell that you can turn 150 covers in 3 hours or less of service. You read that right—150 covers in 180 minutes, or 1.2 covers per minute every day for 250 days a year. If you’re lucky enough to average that level of business every day of the year (including those dreary days in winter), then you may just walk home with enough profit to pay yourself minimum wage.

All three food-truck owners agreed that most of the successful trucks are also doing catering. Edison pointed out that some owners have evolved their businesses into brick-and-mortar spaces due to the profit constraints presented by the truck model. “There’s not a single truck from the ‘old guard’ that hasn’t expanded to brick-andmortar. Why? If we could sit back and retire on a single truck, we’d roll with that. But it’s just not possible. It’s a pretty honest way to make a dollar—but nobody’s getting rich off a single truck.”

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On the Road Again For all the kitsch, charm, and personality that food trucks bring to the masses, they are, by and large, businesses with limited upside—and with costs that street-food vendors in other parts of the world are much less encumbered by. Do you really think the guy selling prawns farmed raised in raw sewage by slave labor on the streets of Bangkok has that kind of overhead? I don’t.

The fact is that here in Seattle we have a much more discerning food-buying public than in other places where street food is cheap, abundant, and in many cases unregulated. We want our farm-to-table this and our organic that—and we should be willing to pay for it.

So Seattle, please don’t lament the embarrassment of riches we have on the food-truck scene, for it didn’t even exist a few short years ago. And please don’t try to compare us to places where people make less than a dollar a day. Remember—you all wanted $15 per hour, right? Enjoy the fact that you’re supporting a small business, eating some damned tasty food from the region, and that you have a few minutes to relax and enjoy dining al fresco. E

food@seattleweekly.com

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SEATTLE WEEKLY • AUGU ST 12 — 18, 2015

arts&culture

Outdoor Art Safari!

ThisWeek’s PickList

Three summer shows invite your urban exploration—if you can find them.

BY BRIAN MILLER

J

THURSDAY, AUG. 13

The Tennessee Tease

Tennessee Williams loved a hot, sticky night, so it seems just right that the artists of Sinner Saint Burlesque are steeping themselves in his work during this hotter-than-ever August. The Tennessee Tease samples Williams’ plays and memoirs to create a new burlesque work mixing fact and fiction, bringing his characters to life through movement. The cast of salacious stage names—including local burlesque legend Eartha Quake—is lead by Sailor St. Claire, with choreography by Fosse Jack. It should really be a hot night in the ID. (Through Sat.) Theatre Off

Jackson, 409 Seventh Ave. S., 340-1049, theatreoffjackson.org. $20. 8 p.m. SANDRA KURTZ

St. Claire herself.

steel orbs read like Buckyballs or molecules; you could imagine them sitting in the courtyard for some SLU biotech that’s propagating some new strain of patented DNA.

There are also some ghosts wafting through the visual-arts component of the Duwamish Revealed

festival (through September 30, see duwamishre-

bmiller@seattleweekly.com

FRIDAY, AUG. 14

Best of Enemies

After departing The Daily Show last week, Jon Stewart gets a nice, coincidental nod in the end credits to this wonderfully sourced and surprisingly prescient doc, about a series of 10 TV debates held during the two party conventions of 1968, when there were only three television channels. New and struggling ABC needed something cheap and controversial, so it hired Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley to pummel each other on camera. It worked better than anyone—including the two antagonists—could’ve predicted. So does this film by Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville. They dug up and carefully edited together the debate highlights, well supported with background on the two men (not household names today, as they once were). Best of Enemies also includes a chorus of contemporary experts (Frank Rich, Dick Cavett, Christopher Hitchens, etc.), who both admired the combatants and make connections to today’s TV punditry biz—Stewart, Colbert, O’Reilly, and company.

Vidal and Buckley were the rare intellectuals of their day who embraced television without

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • AU GU ST 12 — 18, 2015

Speaking of SLU, that’s where the empty gravel lot that is ALL RISE is hosting its penultimate show (see allriseseattle.org, ends September 5). It’s a desolate site, slated to be a City Light substation, surrounded by rising new towers.

At the July 25 opening of his The Stars Pulled Down for Real, I spoke with the visiting Scottish artist/poet Robert Montgomery. His main LED-illuminated text faces north ( John Street), toward Amazon-land and the Tesla dealership.

His series of six short poems—the other five aren’t illuminated—contain allusions to punk rock, global warming, peak oil, Jack Kerouac, and the curse/promise of the interstates. The late 19th-century advent of commercialized electrical power becomes something like original sin.

Montgomery had never previously been to Seattle. “They sent me an email,” he said of the ALL RISE curators. “It’s my first project in America outside of New York or L.A.” As for working on the site of a future electrical substation, he added, “I liked that idea. I like the theme of light and urban space.” Although he’s illuminated previous texts in neon, “I had to find a more carbon-neutral alternative”—hence the low-power LEDs. As befits a man who’s shown widely in Europe, Montgomery’s work is more conceptually sophisticated than the Carkeek artists, somewhat reminiscent of Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger. His main text (“Squares and squares of flame with memory inside them...”) is a riff on Ezra Pound. And, he added, “In my own mind, at least, an elegy to Kurt Cobain.”

vealed.com for map and performance schedule).

Famously our region’s most important—then most commercialized and polluted—river, now an EPA Superfund site, the Duwamish evokes both Native American culture and post-industrial shame (that latter point shared with Montgomery’s work). To commemorate its past, and celebrate possible restoration, about 40 temporary art installations are sited from South Park to Alki, but I won’t pretend they’re easy to find. Big rigs and big potholes make biking intimidating; and the drive-park-walk pattern isn’t nearly so convenient as at Carkeek. (And why do all Port of Seattle parks have a dumbbell shape that suckers you into parking too soon?) As at Carkeek, you’ll also find plenty of homeless encampments along with the art.

Still, I discovered a few novel outlooks (and probably missed more than I saw). The festival’s goal, really, is to get you down there—and the route-finding confusion serves that aim. In South Park by the river, Ben Zamora’s mirrored-box structure (Alone. Standing in the Middle of Darkness.

Invisible.) reads like an alien visitor, complete with a little hexagonal compartment (cockpit?) within.

It makes no attempt at environmental/historical context, one reason to like it. More plainly didactic is Sarah Kavage’s memorial to an old trolley bridge (1914-1937), part of the old urban rail network we’re now rebuilding at great cost. Bobbing nearby in the river are Buster Simpson’s two ladder-chairs, which may tempt some adventurous kayakers.

Jack Daws has posted several fake but officiallooking park signs among the dozen-plus Duwamish art sites. One reads “Critical Reflective Discourse-Free Zone,” a more tongue-incheek directive than Montgomery’s expansive urban verse. A puzzled passing park visitor asked me of Daws’ sign, “What does it mean?”

“Form your own judgments,” I replied. “There’s no correct response but your own”—not a bad way to approach all three shows. E

SINNERSAINTBURLESQUE.COM

Simpson’s Bobbing Discourse, in the Duwamish at Eighth Avenue South.

BRIAN MILLER

udging from the swarms at Olympic Sculpture Park, many of them tourists, summer is the time for art viewed outside the museum. The days are long, and there’s a welcome, exploratory aspect to such exhibitions. Most all are seasonal and impermanent. (Even the OSP has a short-run woodshop featuring Dan Webb that we’ll visit soon.) So while the weather’s fair, here are three shows to visit—with a car likely required for two of them.

Opened last month, the 7th Heaven and Earth show in Carkeek Park remains on view through October 15 (see heavenandearthexhibition.org for walking map and park hours). This year’s theme is “Propagation,” addressed by a dozen local artists. Their works, as usual, tend to be made of cheap, humble materials—unlike the OSP’s holdings—that are quick to install and can withstand the elements. There’s no requirement that they use wood and twine and recycled plastic (always a favorite), but persistent vandalism—and even overzealous city groundskeepers during one past show—means keeping the investment, and potential loss, minimal.

No matter what the theme, there’s always a kind of handmade, folk-art, Blair Witch rusticity that appeals; the sense of discovery as you follow the map can be like stumbling onto old pagan idols in the forest. (There’s an Andy Goldsworthy effect, too; only he photographs his ephemeral creations without meaning for us to find them.) Two main clusters are situated near the visitors center and the main parking lots by the beach. Either the art or the marker—often necessary to find the well-camouflaged sculpture—seemed to be missing at the southeast entrance. Even then, I couldn’t find everything; a GPS system would be helpful.

Suspended between two trees, Terra Holcomb’s plastic-lid orca Granny is named for a member of Puget Sound’s J-Pod, whose matriarchal alpha whale has apparently been glimpsed from the park. (What’s being propagated?

Mainly our litter—but doesn’t the city tell us not to recycle those bottle caps?) I could easily see the eco-educational sculpture dangling over a school lunchroom. More solemn and enigmatic is the totem-like Kodama Mama by Light Table Design Collective, which dispenses seed pods like a Japanese Shinto deity.

There’s an allegorical story of procreation spelled out for the whimsical wooden creatures of The Return for Love (by Bayu Angermeyer and Sam Trout). Hidden in a glade, the tableau provides some Dr. Seuss cartoon color; and kids eagerly responded to it like a storybook.

A friendly, fanciful new species is being propagated here, while the concentric chalk circles— unmarked and easy to miss—of Aaron Haba’s Confluence barely read like ripples in the grass.

Here one misses the massive environmental imposition of a Richard Serra or Robert Smithson. If it ever rains again in Seattle, the chalk will simply wash away. At the other end of the duration spectrum, Ulrich Pakker’s large stainless-

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 23 21

“Once in a blue moon, a show comes out blazing and restores your faith in Broadway, Matilda The Musical is that show.”

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AUGU ST 12 — 18, 2015

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» FROM PAGE 21 shame; both were elitists who saw that the political future belonged to the mass audience and the common man. (Call them eggheads with a populist streak.) And while Vidal’s politics—and proud candor about his homosexuality—will naturally appeal in Seattle, it’s the shark-smiling, martini-swilling Buckley who more influenced today’s political climate. Without Buckley, no Reagan; and no heirs of Reagan. Venomous and witty, Buckley and Vidal’s arrogance is irresistible. This the most enjoyable doc I’ve seen this year; and I plan to watch it again soon. (Oh, and an extra tidbit: Kelsey Grammer and John Lithgow read the writings of Buckley and Vidal, respectively—and they’re perfect! Someone needs to craft a Buckley/Vidal stage show for them immediately.) Seven

6 pm - Tues., August 25th

Arboretum for several years now. Watching Laage move through that environment is as much meditation as it is art. Today she leads a group of dancers and musicians who’ll be dispersed throughout the garden, embodying our responses to a late summer afternoon.

Yes, that’s Paul Newman (right) supporting Vidal in Miami ‘68.

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SANDRA KURTZ

TUESDAY, AUG. 18

Matilda the Musical

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The show was first a hit in London and then a smash upon its 2013 Broadway debut. (The New York Times called it “the most satisfying and subversive musical ever to come out of Britain.”)

As a member of the Development team, this position builds and maintains relationships with major and leadership current, prospect and lapsed contributors, and provides YWCA volunteers the support needed to engage solicitations on behalf of the YWCA. This position has a social justice component that will allow for critical thinking around how the external systems impact the work that we are doing through the lens of racism and intersections with poverty. Valuing diversity and championing anti-racism policy are core values. As an equal opportunity employer, we highly encourage people of color to apply.

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JOAN MARCUS

Being the state’s largest indie food extravaganza, the Seattle Street Food Festival needed more space. So, much like everything else in Seattle, that meant expanding into South Lake Union this year.

The third-annual gathering is essentially an artisianal outdoor food court spanRyness as Miss Trunchbull. ning three city blocks. With trucks, booths, and pop-ups, This is the touring production of the same 75 local food vendors will attend, including Tony Award-winning show directed by Matthew familiar names like Jemil’s Big Easy, Ezell’s, and Full Tilt ice cream. And when your stom- Warchus, about a bookish prodigy being raised in a home of, ahem, limited cultural horizons. (Three ach’s full, browse the 50 booths representing alternating child actresses play the plucky young Urban Craft Uprising, all offering handmade heroine: Gabby Gutierrez, Mia Sinclair Jenness, wares. There’s also a beer garden tonight, and Mabel Tyler.) Though her parents have no with live music. Running through Sunday, time for reading, even a horror of it, Matilda the festival will also feature bands including finds a kindly mentor in her schoolteacher Miss The Maldives and Manatee Commune. SLU Honey ( Jennifer Blood). Since every good chilDiscovery Center Meadow, 217 Ninth Ave. N., dren’s tale requires a villain, Miss Honey and her seattlestfoodfest.com. Free. 3-10 p.m. pupils are oppressed by a horrid headmistress, ALANA AL-HATLANI Miss Trunchbull (Bryce Ryness). Yet no obstacle can get in the way of Matilda’s avid imagination.

SUNDAY, AUG. 16 (Through Sept. 6.) 5th Avenue Theatre, 1308 Joan Laage This veteran Butoh artist has been performing Fifth Ave. 625-1900, 5thavenue.org. $35 and up. in the Japanese Garden at the Washington Park 7:30 p.m. BRIAN MILLER E

Spirituality Sant Mat

23

arts&culture» visual, performance & literary Openings & Events DARRYL ARY With homelessness in his past, we hope,

the prolific artist—who often sells his work on the sidewalk—paints dogs and other denizens of the city.

Opening reception, 5-9 p.m. Thurs. Vermillion, 1508 11th Ave., 709-9797, vermillionseattle.com. 4 p.m.midnight. Tues.-Sun., Ends Sept. 5.

RACHAEL BURKE Based in Pennsylvania, she paints big red nudes and scenes of urban disarray in To and Fro. Opening reception, 5-9 p.m. Thurs. Cloud Gallery, 901 East Pike St., 720-2054, cloudgalleryseattle.wordpress.com. 10 a.m-7 p.m. Mon.-Fri. 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

Sat. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sun. Ends Sept. 30.

CAPITOL HILL ART WALK Venues include Vermillion, Cloud, 12th Ave Arts, Calypte (featuring flags by Joey Veltkamp), Ghost, and Richard Hugo House. See capitolhillartwalk.com for map and all venues. 5 p.m. onward, Thurs., Aug. 13.

BRAD CAPLIS He paints bright and playful landscapes in To Dream in Color. Opening reception, 6-8 p.m.

Wed. Gunnar Nordstrom, 800 Bellevue Way N.E. (Bellevue), 425-283-0461, gunnarnordstrom.com. 9:30 a.m.-8 p.m. Mon.-Sat. Noon-5 p.m. Sun. Ends Sept. 5 GROUP SHOW Offering new work are Lisaann Cohn, Martha Dunham, Reilly Donovan, Joseph Gray, Shelley Higman, Tracy Lang, Jon Lewis, Michael Magrath, Shari Mendelson, Jeff Mihalyo, and William Vaegemast. Opening reception, 5-9 p.m. Thurs.

Dendroica Gallery, 718 E. Olive Way, 324-2502, dendroica.gallery. Call for hours. Ends Sept. 4.

PETER MAX This pop-up mall show concludes with two appearances by the prolific artist whose colorful Pop Art was so strongly associated with the psychedelic ’60s. Opens Friday. Pacific Place, 600 Pine St. RSVP for private receptions at 844-810-9100 or roadshowcompany.com. 10 a.m.-8 p.m. daily. Ends Aug. 23.

ANNA SKIBSKA Vanity of Vanities features her work in glass, photo collage, and even jewelry. Opening reception, 6-8:30 p.m. Fri. Kirkland Arts Center, 620 Market St., 425-822-7161, kirklandartscenter.org. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sat. Ends Oct. 10.

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Ongoing

• CHIHO AOSHIMA The contemporary Japanese artist

creates candy-colored, personal tableaux of animist cosmology and kawaii characters. She’s a constructor of intricate worlds whose denizens we can see in 35 small preliminary drawings—later translated by computer into a half-dozen large, glossy dreamscapes and one enormous, wall-filling animation. Played on a continuous loop, the 7-minute new Takaamanohara depicts the destruction (by volcano and tsunami) and rebirth of a fanciful coastal city. Mischievous Shinto spirits cause the cycle (one by farting), as ruination leads to regeneration, over and over again. Kids will love it, too; Takaamanohara is a manageable, almost cheerful way of contemplating mortality. Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), 6543100, seattleartmuseum.org. $5-$9. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Wed., Fri.-Sun. 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thurs. Ends Oct. 4.

LEO SAUL BERK From childhood trauma, art? That’s often the way it works, especially for actors and writers, though Berk isn’t re-enacting any primal scenes or revenging himself on his parents for moving the family from England to rural Illinois in 1980. Leo was only 6 then; and as he notes in the wall text to Structure and Ornament, the next six years of living in a leaky, impractical quonset-like cluster of three domed structures (by modernist architect Bruce Goff) ended their marriage. Now based in Seattle, Berk seems haunted by the place. Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., 6229250, fryemuseum.org. Free. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.Sun. (Open to 7 p.m. Thursdays.) Ends Sept. 6.

ILSE BING An early user of the 35mm Leica hand-held camera, the German Bing (1889-1998) is known as a pioneering woman in European photography. This selection of her images spans the 1920s through 1950s.

Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave. N.E. (UW campus), 543-2280, henryart.org. $6-$10. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Wed., Sat., Sun. 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Thurs.-Fri. Ends Oct. 11.

GREGORY BLACKSTOCK One of our favorite local artists, the autistic-savant former dishwasher is a cheerful explainer. Also on view, work by a dozen fellow outsider artists, called I Taught Myself, including Henry Darger and Grandma Moses. Greg Kucera Gallery, 212 Third Ave., 624-0770, gregkucera.com.

10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tues.-Sat. Ends Aug. 29.

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AUGU ST 12 — 18, 2015

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BY B R IA N M I LLE R

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

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Stage OPENINGS & EVENTS

FAMILY AFFAIR Jennifer Jasper’s cabaret on the theme

of family. This month, Jack Straw writers read.JewelBox Theater, Rendezvous, 2322 Second Ave., jenniferjasper performs.com. $10. 7:30 p.m. Wed., Aug. 19.

THE GREAT AMERICAN TRAILER PARK MUSICAL

A stripper on the run wreaks havoc at Armadillo Acres.

Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave., seattlestageright. org. $17.50–$22. Opens Aug. 14. 7:30 p.m. Fri.–Sat. & Mon., plus Thurs., Aug. 27. Ends Aug. 29.

HIGHLARIOUS COMEDY FESTIVAL Weed-themed comedy from more than 40 comedians in five hour-long shows each night. Theatre Puget Sound, Seattle Center, highlariouscomedy.com. 6 p.m. Fri., Aug. 14–Sun., Aug. 16.

ICICLE CREEK NEW PLAY FESTIVAL Jenny Connell Davis’ Goddess of Mercy (Tues.) and Eric Coble’s In Vivo (Wed.). ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., 292-7676, acttheatre. org. $10–$15. 8 p.m. Tues., Aug. 18–Wed., Aug. 19.

INDIAN INK Sound Theatre Company and Pratidhwani copresent Tom Stoppard’s play, which leaps 50 years before and after India’s independence. Center Theatre, Seattle Center Armory, 800-838-3006, soundtheatrecompany.org. $15–$25. Previews Aug. 13–14, opens Aug. 15. 7:30 p.m.

Thurs.–Sat. plus Mon., Aug. 24; 2 p.m. Sun. Ends Aug. 30.

JOHN BAXTER IS A SWITCH HITTER Ana Brown & Andrew Russell’s play about the controversy surrounding the 2008 Gay Softball World Series—namely, that hetero ringers were involved. Cornish Playhouse, Seattle Center. Previews Aug.18–19, opens Aug. 20. Runs Wed.–Sun.; see intiman.org for complete schedule. Ends Sept. 27. (Following in the festival are Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, Sept. 9–27, and Bootycandy, Sept. 17–Oct. 3.)

THE LOVE MARKETS This Weimar-inspired cabaret band returns. ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., 292-7676, acttheatre. org. 8 p.m. Sat., Aug. 15.

MATILDA THE MUSICAL The stage version of the Roald Dahl book opens the 5th’s season. 5th Avenue Theatre, 1308 Fifth Ave., 625-1900, 5thavenue.org. $35 and up. Previews Aug. 18–19, opens Aug. 20. 7:30 p.m.

Tues.–Wed., 8 p.m. Thurs.–Fri., 2 & 8 p.m. Sat., 1:30 & 7 p.m. Sun. Ends Sept. 6.

JENNIE MCNULTY & LISA KOCH Queer comedy.

Theatre Off Jackson, 409 Seventh Ave. S., brownpaper tickets.com. $18–$30. 7:30 p.m. Sun., Aug. 16.

THE PASSION AS TOLD BY ANTÍGONA PÉREZ Luis Rafael Sanchez’s play tranposes the Greek tragedy to today’s media environment. 12th Avenue Arts, 1620 12th Ave., thrivingartists.org. $10–$15. Opens Aug. 14. 7:30 p.m.

Thurs.–Sun. plus Mon., Aug. 24. Ends Aug. 30.

PIPPIN The Summer of Stephen Schwartz continues with his 1972 tale of Charlemagne’s son and his search for meaning, in a tour of the revival production that drew raves on Broadway.The Paramount, 900 Pine St., 877-STG-4TIX, stgpresents.org. $25 and up. 6:30 p.m. Sun., Aug. 16; 7:30 p.m. Tues., Aug. 18–Thurs., Aug 20; 8 p.m. Fri., Aug. 21; 2 & 8 p.m. Sat., Aug. 22; 1 p.m. Sun., Aug. 23.

THE TENNESSEE TEASE A burlesque mashup of Tennessee Williams’ art and life. Theatre Off Jackson, 409 Seventh Ave. S., brownpapertickets.com. $20. 8 p.m.

Thurs., Aug. 13–Sat., Aug. 15.

THE TUMBLEWEED ZEPHYR is a train to adventure in Maggie Lee’s steampunk romance. 12th Avenue Arts, 1620 12th Ave., porkfilled.com. $12–$18. Preview Aug. 12, opens Aug. 14. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Mon. Ends Aug. 29.

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CURRENT RUNS

AFTER HOURS ArtsWest AD Mathew Wright chats

with five local actresses in a cabaret/interview hybrid; this week, to close the series, Katherine Strohmaier.

ArtsWest, 4711 California Ave. S.W., 938-0339, artswest. org. Single tickets $25–$75. 7:30 p.m. Mon. Ends Aug. 17.

CAFÉ NORDO “Summer Nights at the Culinarium” includes literary and performance events practically every night: Maria Glanz’ solo show Being Naked Mon.; “Out to Eat” on Tues.; “Wine Wednesdays”; “Drinkers & Thinkers” on Thurs.; Chef/Artist dinners Fri.–Sat.; “Readers & Eaters” on Sun.; and more. Nordo’s Culinarium, 109 S. Main St., brownpapertickets.com. Full info at cafenordo.com.

THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH Schmeater’s family show about the mythical figure and “first superhero.” Volunteer Park, schmeater.org. Free. 5 p.m. Sat.–Sun. Ends Aug. 16.

FEEL YOU UP! Satirizing self-help seminars through improv. Market Theater, 1428 Post Alley, unexpectedproductions.org. $5–$15. 8:30 p.m. Fri.–Sat. Ends Aug. 15.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF Return to Anatevka in this classic musical based on the tales of Sholom Aleichem.

Shoreline City Hall, 17500 Midvale Ave. N., Shoreline.

Free. 8 p.m. Fri.–Sat. Ends Aug. 22.

GODSPELL Stephen Schwartz’s gospel musical is reset in Pike Place Market. Taproot Theatre, 204 N. 85th St., 7819707, taproottheatre.org. $20–$40. 7:30 p.m. Wed.–Thurs., 8

p.m. Fri., 2 & 8 p.m. Sat. Extended through Aug. 22.

GREENSTAGE The Two Noble Kinsmen and Much Ado

About Nothing in area parks, plus stripped-down versions of Macbeth and The Two Gentlemen of Verona in smaller venues. Runs Thurs.–Sun.; see greenstage.org for complete venue & schedule info. Ends Aug. 15.

• HOLD THESE TRUTHS Jeanne Sakata’s one-man show shines a light on a shameful chapter of history, the Japanese-American internment during World War II. The one-act monologue presents the life of our homegrown hero Gordon Hirabayashi (well played by Ryan Yu). Sakata’s decades-spanning script explores Hirabayashi’s legal woes and plumbs his experiences after realizing he was something “other than” white. ALYSSA DYKSTERHOUSE ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., 292-7676. $15–$44. Runs Tues.–Sat.; see acttheatre.org for exact schedule. Ends Aug. 16.

HOT TIN STREETCAR Unexpected Productions’ improvised Tennessee Williams sendup. Market Theater, 1428 Post Alley, 587-2414, unexpectedproductions.org. $10. 8:30 p.m. Sun. Ends Aug. 16.

INTO THE WOODS Twelfth Night Productions presents Sondheim’s fairy-tale mashup. West Seattle High School, 3000 California Ave. S.W., brownpapertickets.com. $18–$20. 7:30 p.m. Fri.–Sat., 3 p.m. Sun. plus Sat., Aug 15.

Ends Aug. 16.

IS SHE DEAD YET? Euripides’ Alcestis gets updated as a savage satire on race in America by Brandon J. Simmons.

Annex Theatre, 1100 E. Pike St., annextheatre.org. $5–$20.

8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat. plus Mon., Aug. 10. Ends Aug. 22.

PUTTING IT TOGETHER Youth Theatre Northwest presents this Sondheim revue. Emmanuel Church, 4400 86th Ave. S.E., Mercer Island, 232-4145 x109, youththeatre.org.

7 p.m. Fri.–Sat., 2 p.m. Sun. Ends Aug. 16.

QUESTIONABLE CONTENT Schmeater’s comedy panel game show. Theater Schmeater, 2125 Third Ave., 3245801, schmeater.org. 8 p.m. $15. Fri.–Sat. Ends Aug. 15.

ZIG ZAG FESTIVAL Short works by six young female playwrights. Annex Theatre, 1100 E. Pike St., annextheatre. org. $5–$10. 8 p.m. Tues.–Wed. Ends Aug. 19.

Dance

WANDERING & WONDERING A flock of dancers and

musicians dispresed throughout the Seattle Japanese Garden enhance your experience. 1075 Lake Washington Blvd. E. Free. 2–5 p.m. Sun., Aug. 16.

Classical, Etc.

• SEATTLE OPERA Verdi’s first success, Nabucco, a love

triangle (of course) set against the ancient clash between Babylonians and Hebrews. If you know anything from this opera, it’s likely the bittersweet chorus “Va, pensiero.”

McCaw Hall, 321 Mercer St. (Seattle Center), 389-7676, seattleopera.org. $25 and up. 7:30 p.m. Wed. & Sat. plus Fri., Aug. 14. Ends Aug. 22.

UNCLE GUNJIRO’S GIRLFRIEND This mini-opera (for storyteller Brenda Wong Aoki and bassist Mark Izu), which tells of an outrage-stirring interracial marriage in 1909, is performed in the wedding’s actual locale—Trinity Episcopal Parish, 609 Eighth Ave., trinityseattle.org. $30.

7:30 p.m. Wed., Aug. 12.

DOUGLAS DEVRIES & YVONNE CHEN Recent American music for flute and piano. Chapel Performance Space, 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N., waywardmusic.org. $5–$15. 7:30 p.m. Thurs., Aug. 13.

DAVID TRASOFF & RAVI ALBRIGHT Ragas for sarode and tabla from the North Indian tradition. East West Bookshop, 6407 12th Ave. N.E., eastwestbookshop.com. $15. 7 p.m. Fri., Aug. 14.

PARNASSUS PROJECT Adams, Crumb, Golijov, and a premiere by Cole Bratcher from this chamber ensemble.

Chapel Performance Space, 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N., waywardmusic.org. $5–$15. 8 p.m. Fri., Aug. 14.

OLYMPIC MUSIC FESTIVAL Chamber music each Sat. & Sun. at 2 p.m. through Sept. 13. This weekend, two programs: Schumann, Bartok, Dvorak on Sat., Stravinsky, Mozart, Tchaikovsky on Sun. 7360 Center Rd., Quilcene, Wash., 360-732-4800, olympicmusicfestival.org. $20–$32.

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ORCHESTRA SEATTLE/SEATTLE CHAMBER SINGERS

Marking the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII with Xian Xinghai’s 1939 anti-imperialist Yellow River Cantata.

Meany Hall, UW campus, yellowrivercantata.org. $15– $25. 7 p.m. Sat., Aug. 15.

NAT EVANS & SCOTT WORTHINGTON From the latter, music for solo bass and electronics; from Evans, music made from field recordings captured during his 2014 hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. Chapel Performance Space, 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N., waywardmusic.org. $5–$15. 8 p.m. Wed., Aug. 19.

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Author Events DEB CALETTI The Secrets She Keeps examines three

marriages. Elliott Bay Book Co., 1521 10th Ave., 6246600, elliottbaybook.com. 7 p.m. Wed., Aug 12.

FRIDA CLEMENTS Have a Little Pun is the illustrator’s new book of whimsical wordplay. 1927 Events, 1927 Third Ave. Free, but RSVP at dos23.com. 6 p.m.

Wed., Aug. 12.

LEE GRANT The veteran actress’ memoir (juicy and name-droppy, we pray) is I Said Yes to Everything.

Eagle Harbor Books, 157 Winslow Way E. (Bainbridge Island), 842-5332, eagleharborbooks. com. 7:30 p.m. Thurs., Aug. 13.

IT’S ABOUT TIME Michael Spence, Lori Powell, and Thomas Aslin read at this monthly open-mic. Seattle Public Library, Ballard Branch, 5614 22nd Ave. N.W., 684-4089, spl.org. 6 p.m. Thurs., Aug. 13.

DAVID LASKY & JOHN BURGESS Two takes on westward expansion: Lasky illustrated Oregon Trail: The Road to Destiny; by Land is Burgess’ poetry collection. Elliott Bay. 7 p.m. Thurs., Aug 13.

CHARLES STROSS The Annihilation Score is billed as a combo of “Lovecraftian horror, deadpan comic fantasy, and super-spy thriller.” University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, bookstore. washington.edu. 7 p.m. Thurs., Aug. 13.

MEILI CADY Smoke: How a Small-Town Girl Accidentally Wound Up Smuggling 7,000 Pounds of Marijuana with the Pot Princess of Beverly Hills is this Bremerton native’s memoir. Elliott Bay. 7 p.m. Fri., Aug 14.

NANCY PEARL’S BOOK CLUB The legendary librarian leads a discussion of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

by Michael Chabon. University Book Store. 6:30 p.m.

Fri., Aug. 14.

JACK LEWIS Head Check: What it Feels Like to Ride Motorcycles draws on his years of stories and essays on the topic. University Book Store. 7 p.m. Fri., Aug. 14.

RYAN BOUDINOT Hey, isn’t he the guy who said that not everyone in an MFA writing program is a genius, and the Internet exploded? The Octopus Rises is his new story collection. Elliott Bay. 7 p.m. Mon., Aug 17; University Book Store, 7 p.m. Wed., Aug. 19.

SUSAN CASEY explores the sea’s most intelligent denizens in Voices in the Ocean: A Journey Into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins. Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., 386-4636, spl.org. 7 p.m.

Mon., Aug. 17.

DANIELLA CHACE Better your health with her books Healing Smoothies and Turning Off Breast Cancer.

University Book Store (Bellevue), 990 102nd Ave. N.E., 425-462-4500, bookstore.washington.edu.

6 p.m. Tues., Aug. 18.

JENNIFER STEIL Her Middle East-set novel, The Ambassador’s Wife, draws on her own experiences as a journalist there. Elliott Bay, 7 p.m. Tues., Aug. 18; Eagle Harbor Books, 7:30 p.m. Thurs., Aug. 20.

A TRIBUTE TO IVAN DOIG Concurrent celebrations of the release of Doig’s Last Bus to Wisdom.

Parkplace’s guests include writers Tony Angell, David B. Williams, and Mary Ann Gwinn; at the library, Annie Proulx, David Laskin, Linda Bierds, and actor Myra Platt. Seattle Central Library and Parkplace Books, 348 Parkplace Ctr. (Kirkland), 425-828-6546, park placebookskirkland.com. Both 7 p.m. Tues., Aug. 18.

SAM FROMARTZ & KEN FORKISH The baker/ authors of In Search of the Perfect Loaf: a Home Baker’s Odyssey and Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza chat. Elliott Bay. 7 p.m. Wed., Aug. 19.

JOHN SCALZI The End of All Things is the latest in this sci-fi writer’s “Old Man’s War” series. Seattle Central Library, 7 p.m. Wed., Aug. 19.

GENDER ODYSSEY Kate Bornstein, Andrea Jenkins, and others speak at this conference about gender nonconformism. Washington State Convention Center, 800 Convention Pl., Thurs., Aug. 20–Sun., Aug. 23. See genderodyssey.org for schedule.

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& ERIKA DALYA • PAMELA MCCLUSKY The co-curators of SAM’s wonderful MASSAQUOI

ongoing exhibit “Disguise: Masks and Global African Art” talk about it. Elliott Bay. 7 p.m. Thurs., Aug. 20.

BOOTS RILEY The hip-hop activist discusses his book Boots Riley: Tell Homeland Security—We Are the Bomb with Jesse Hagopian. Guests include Gabriel Teodros and MC Geologic. University Temple United Methodist Church, 1415 N.E. 43rd St., 634-3400, bookstore.washington.edu. 7 p.m. Thurs., Aug. 20.

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

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

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

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

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» film

Cop Car OPENS FRI., AUG. 14 AT SUNDANCE AND SIFF CINEMA UPTOWN. RATED R. 88 MINUTES.

OPENS FRI., AUG. 14 AT SUNDANCE, MERIDIAN, MAJESTIC BAY, THORNTON PLACE, AND OTHERS. RATED PG-13. 116 MINUTES.

English director Guy Ritchie may not have a signature style, but from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels to his Sherlock Holmes reboot, you can tell what styles he likes—in movies, music, and fashion. Here appropriating the 1960s American TV series of the same name (which I’ve never seen), you can tell that he favors narrow ties, cuff links, good manners, tailored suits and tailored dresses, old mechanical watches, vintage Ferraris and Jaguars, island lairs, Nina Simone and Tom Zé, and the Cold War codes that give nostalgic context to it all. This isn’t a good movie, especially compared to the latest Mission: Impossible, but Ritchie is certainly generous about sharing his tastes and influences.

It’s 1963 East Berlin, JFK is still alive, and ex-blackmarketeer Napoleon Solo (Brit Henry Cavill, the latest Superman) is trying to extract the daughter of a missing nuclear scientist.

Gaby Teller is played by the Swedish Alicia Vikander, on a hot streak with Ex Machina, Testament of Youth, and now this new franchise.

In a typical bit of Ritchie’s lad humor, Gaby first presents as a grubby Lada mechanic, but the ever-suave Solo knows she’ll clean up nicely, heh-heh. Women, including the movie’s chief villainess, are very much objects of unruffled style who confound the CIA’s Solo and his KGB counterpart Illya Kuryakin (American Armie Hammer, who played those arrogant Social Network twins). Kuryakin and Solo meet as rivals, pummel each other into mutual respect, and generally act like two overprotective uncles around Gaby. There’s scant sexual tension to this Cold War bromance.

The stolen-nukes plot is basically a lift from every James Bond movie, and Ritchie doesn’t take his pastiche seriously for a second. Our handsome trio trots around Italy in high style—cue Gaby’s makeover, with her two uncles surprisingly savvy about women’s fashion!—until they meet their even more glamorous and icily lethal adversary: Victoria Vinciguerra (Elizabeth Debicki). Her designer frocks and eye makeup suggest mid-career Elizabeth Taylor; such is Ritchie’s omnivorous love for retro chic in this brisk, fun, shallow

OPENS FRI., AUG. 14 AT GUILD 45TH AND LINCOLN SQUARE. RATED R. 90 MINUTES.

There aren’t many docs or features about mountain climbing, and I suspect I’ve seen them all. As a forcibly retired member of the brotherhood of the rope, for me the current trend toward YouTube stunts and GoPro jackassery doesn’t reflect the beauty of the sport. A good climbing documentary must tell a story, since every expedition requires long, methodical planning, forming a team (aka, the casting process), and the final drama of ascent. Having done both, I can affirm it’s a bit like making a movie; and the phrase “We’re losing daylight” applies equally to both.

Co-director Jimmy Chin (with his wife, E. Chai Vasarhelyi) joined Conrad Anker and Renan Ozturk for two attempts on the

Chin looks for the correct line.

unclimbed Shark’s Fin line on Mount Meru, in India’s Garhwal region of the Himalayas. I’ve done the approach, and I remember other climbers telling me the granite quality was mostly shitty—prone to flaking and rockfall. It’s a region well-suited to photography (Chin is widely published in Outside, National Geographic, and beyond), but forbidding to climb. Anker, the graying veteran of the trio, tried Meru in 2003, 2008, and again in 2011. Meru covers the second two expeditions, and I’ll write around the specifics for the benefit of those who don’t read the alpine journals and websites.

First ascents are rare these days, when speed climbing has become the vogue. All the good lines have been done before, and what’s left are the sketchy, dubious routes. As he traces his Meru fixation from a comfortable home in Bozeman, Montana, with a concerned wife and

People Places Things OPENS FRI., AUG. 14 AT SIFF FILM CENTER. RATED R. 86 MINUTES.

Unlike, say, six-foot-six Vince Vaughn, who has a jazzy physical grace that makes him deft at comedy, the New Zealand performer Jemaine Clement is a big guy who looks uncomfortable in his skin. Or maybe he’s not that big (IMDb says he’s six-foot-one) and he just looks like a hulk—large facial features, arms that hang down awkwardly at his sides. The low-pitched Kiwi twang, too, is the voice of a lumberer. But this slow-looking man is a very funny person, as his old HBO series Flight of the Conchords and scattered big-screen appearances—in Jared Hess’ cracked-nuts cult picture Gentlemen Broncos, for instance—have proved.

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • AU GU ST 12 — 18, 2015

Kevin Bacon produced Cop Car and plays the bad guy—a crooked Colorado sheriff who suddenly needs to conceal his misdeeds when two curious 10-year-olds boost his squad car. Directed by Jon Watts, the film has a nice economy and specificity of action; one detects the guiding spirits of Steven Spielberg and Stephen King hovering overhead.

Possibly runaways, or just playing hooky, two unsupervised boys go looking for adventure on the grassy high plains. Travis (James Freedson-Jackson) is the leader of the pair, while Harrison (Hays Wellford) is the one more likely to be provoked by the taunt of “chicken”—an ever-more thrilling word than mere curses. It’s all high-spirited fun as they careen across the fields (Badlands is surely one reference among many), siren whooping, a joy ride that we suspect will eventually turn dark.

Looping back a bit, Cop Car then shows us how Sheriff Mitch Kretzer left his vehicle unattended, with cargo hidden in the trunk—as the boys will later discover. Bacon gives his lawman a certain stone-faced, Buster Keatonesque comic demeanor; he’s a sinewy, low-IQ predator who tends to panic when things go wrong, a malign cousin to Bacon’s desert yokel in Tremors. (Wile E. Coyote also comes to mind.) His flinty performance and Magnum, P.I. mustache suit the laconic mood; I don’t think he’s spoken so few lines in a movie since Animal House. Camryn Manheim shows up to limited plot purpose, and Shea Wingham’s dim, bloodied prisoner seems like a refugee from the Coen brothers (who’d probably cast Steve Zahn instead).

Since none of these characters have any more past or depth than the simple pursuit plot requires, Cop Car does feel like a short film stretched to 88 minutes. Yet Watts and his co-writer, Christopher D. Ford, create a tense mix of comedy and menace.

There’s a credible threat of violence directed against Travis and Harrison, who do learn one valuable lesson: All adults lie to children. (And another: Firearms hurt!) During the summer season of box-office bloat and fantasy, this is a lean little movie that also has the virtue of ending correctly. BRIAN MILLER

The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

PMeru

three sons, Anker seems ghost-haunted by two dead friends. The third expedition feels like a grudge, unfinished business, with Anker the Ancient Mariner of the trip. Chin and Ozturk start the film relatively unscathed, but a fateful winter in Jackson Hole radically changes their perspective. (Let me interject here: Kids, wear your goddamn ski helmets and pay attention to the avalanche forecast!)

Even if Chin chiefly makes his living by glorifying extreme-sportz bro-fests, here he keeps his camera unwaveringly focused on alpine fundamentals: the constant anxiety about weather, the weight of the gear, the dwindling food and fuel, the nervous pride when taking the sharp end of the rope, and the somewhat sociopathic requirement to forget loved ones back home. Once you marry and have kids, the guilt weighs heavier than any load on your back. (Into Thin Air author Jon Krakauer provides sharp commentary, reminding us, “You can’t control the risk.”)

During their second try, Chin taps his piton hammer against loose-stacked granite flakes that give an ominous, hollow ring. Fuck. They’re not really attached to the mountain, notes Chin, yet they must be climbed in order to summit.

Without undue chest-beating, Meru celebrates the arduous teamwork necessary to top a 21,000foot peak, but it never lets you forget the burden placed on those waiting for their loved ones to return—or not—back home. (Note: Anker and Ozturk will appear at the Guild 45th on Sunday afternoon.) BRIAN MILLER

RENAN OZTURK/MUSIC BOX FILMS

Opening ThisWeek

DANIEL SMITH/WARNER BROS.

Debicki as superstylish villainess

film that the exact period particulars don’t really matter. (They often tend toward the late ’60s, and I kept expecting Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway to appear by CGI magic.)

As Ritchie retrofits modern action-comedy tropes onto the Ian Fleming era, he keeps the tone light.

Neither of his two heroes seems much concerned about nuclear annihilation; and in the movie’s best bit, Solo gets ejected from a boat chase—then has a picnic while watching the mayhem, just like us popcorn-munching spectators. Later he asks Kuryakin (and by extension, Ritchie), “Not very good at this whole subtlety thing?” Well no, but that’s not why we’re buying tickets. BRIAN MILLER

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“TAUT, CREEPY, COMPELLING & SEXY” TIME OUT LONDON

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SIXTEEN CANDLES

AUG 14th - 20th

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NOW PLAYING

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Clement is one of the inspired pieces of casting in People Places Things, written and directed

by James C. Strause. As sad-sack Will Henry, he proves himself adept at playing both comedy and the authentic human qualities of a 40-yearold teacher who is profoundly disappointed in career (his work as a graphic novelist has stalled) and love (the mother of his twin six-year-old daughters dumped him for a Mike Daisey-like monologist). It’s a New York story so gentle in its approach that it feels insubstantial, with very few flourishes or new wrinkles to make it stick.

People is an easy watch if you’re a fan of Clement, who not only maintains his droll delivery, but seems to have real chemistry with the actresses who play his daughters (Aundrea and Gia Gadsby). The movie comes up short in what it allows its other excellent performers: Stephanie Allynne isn’t given enough to do as Will’s ex; and Jessica Williams proves ready to expand on her Daily Show persona, but acts purely as a plot advancer. And then there’s Clement’s romantic sparring partner, a Columbia literature professor who looks down her nose at comic books. (An out-of-date reference: Academics have long since claimed the graphic novel for the new canon.) Regina Hall is a great idea for the part. Even though she has worked steadily, she still seems underused—a notable exception being the raucous 2014 remake of About Last Night, in which she and Kevin Hart tore the place up. But having cast Hall in a fun role, the movie leaves her offscreen for vast sections of its running time.

Too bad—she and Clement are an odd couple we want to see more of. ROBERT HORTON

PPhoenix OPENS FRI., AUG. 14 AT SIFF CINEMA UPTOWN. NOT RATED. 98 MINUTES.

EGYPTIAN

UPTOWN

FILM CENTER

The End of the Tour

Phoenix

People, Places, Things

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AUGU ST 12 — 18, 2015

805 E PINE ST

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NOW PLAYING Imagine the greatest conversation you’ve ever had... The unforgettable five-day interview between journalist David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) and enigmatic author David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel).

“I love it...as good as it gets!”

- A.O. Scott, New York Times

MIDNIGHT ADRENALINE!

Rocky Horror SATURDAY, AUGUST 15 Don’t dream it…be it. With live shadow cast.

511 QUEEN ANNE AVE N

OPENS AUGUST 14 Actress Nina Hoss gives a Golden Space Needle Award-winning performance in this Vertigo-esque mystery of identity, illusion, and deception.

EXCLUSIVE PRESENTATION!

Cop Car

OPENS AUGUST 14 Kevin Bacon stars in this darkly comic thriller as a corrupt rural sheriff whose police cruiser has been stolen by two 10-year-olds looking for a joyride.

SEATTLE CENTER · NW ROOMS

OPENS AUGUST 14 Jemaine Clement (“Flight of the Conchords”) stars as a newly single dad doing his best to raise twin daughters.

Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck FINAL WEEK!

COMING SOON HELD OVER!

SIFF EDUCATION

“Relentlessly thrilling, smart entertainment!” - Entertainment Weekly

· Listen To Me Marlon · Guidance 8/28 · Mistress America 8/28 · 7 Chinese Brothers

Crash Kids

Feminist Imaginations

AUG 22, OCT 24 Kids ages 9-12 work in teams in this day-long, non-competitive movie production challenge.

Cinema Dissection

MONDAYS, SEP 14 - OCT 5 Hands-on video production workshop exploring film, video, and performance art. Beginners welcome.

Jaws (SEP 19) Night of the Living Dead (OCT 31) Dig deeper into the films you love, analyzing them scene-by-scene.

Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation

8/21 8/21

Check Movie Times and Buy Tickets · SIFF.net · 206.324.9996

Taking most of its plot from Hubert Monteilhet’s 1961 novel Return From the Ashes, the new movie by German filmmaker Christian Petzold feels like something out of that era. With its contrived plot and high-gloss possibilities, Phoenix would have been an ideal project for Lana Turner and director Douglas Sirk after Imitation of Life. It begins at the end of World War II, with the re-emergence of the heavilybandaged Nelly (the soulful Nina Hoss) from Auschwitz. She has been disfigured by a gunshot wound to the face; her friend Lene (Nina Kuzendorf ) helps nurse her back to health, urging Nelly to claim her postwar reparations and join other surviving Jews in Palestine.

Nelly, however, is fixated on her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld, who really looks like an old-fashioned movie star), but he thinks she is dead and doesn’t recognize her with her new face. He has an idea, however—the rat. If this mystery woman will pretend to be Nelly, they can claim her inheritance and split the money.

The resulting masquerade has many perverse moments. And Phoenix is an extremely well-made picture, with fine lead performances

by Hoss and Zehrfeld, who acted together in Petzold’s fascinating Barbara (2012). But I have to admit I found the serious, sober approach just a little on-the-nose. Everything here means exactly what it’s meant to mean, and each scene makes a single point, albeit quite well. With a few lively exceptions: Upon re-entering her old home, Nelly hears from her blunt housekeeper

that they still can’t open the windows around here, because of the flies. “The war didn’t seem to bother them at all,” she grouses, without irony—a brilliant line. But in general—compared to a wildly wicked comedy like Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair (1948), which also cruised through the wide-open world of black-market Berlin— Phoenix seems obvious.

It’s still a solid film, if you go with the melodramatic premise. And the final 10 minutes truly redeem whatever shortcomings the storytelling had to that point, as Johnny brings his dishonest plan to its conclusion at the same time Nelly has something up her sleeve. It’s a knockout of a finish, and brings full circle the film’s fascination with the Kurt Weill song “Speak Low”—and the unsustainability of pretending the past didn’t happen, an important theme in so much German art of the last 70 years. ROBERT HORTON

Tom at the Farm RUNS FRI., AUG. 14-THURS., AUG. 20 AT GRAND ILLUSION. NOT RATED. 102 MINUTES.

Not every 25-year-old filmmaker comes out fully formed, as Orson Welles did with Citizen Kane. Xavier Dolan, born in 1989 and already with five features as a director, is less protean in his talent, less wise, less articulate, than wunderkind Welles. But there’s something urgent going on with this French-Canadian director, and youth has a great deal to do with it. The success of his 2014 Cannes prizewinner Mommy has prompted a proper U.S. release for Tom at the Farm, a sinister 2013 film directed by and starring Dolan (from a play by Michel Marc Bouchard). The opening half-hour sets up expectations for a familiar kind of social drama, circa 1998.

A grieving man, Tom (Dolan), travels to the Quebec farmhouse of his late lover. The dead man’s brother, Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal) makes it clear that Tom won’t be talking about any of that gay stuff, either at the funeral or in front of dear unsuspecting Ma (Lise Roy).

Francis is a bully who begins acting out unresolved something-or-others, leading to the admittedly did-not-see-that-coming moment when he and Tom take a tango (literal, no euphemism) in a barn. But even this description suggests a path the movie is actually not interested in pursuing; Tom is not a gay saint, and things go a-kilter when Tom convinces a friend (Évelyne Brochu) to visit the farm as part of a strange pretense.

Tom at the Farm is more energetic than coherent. But it does go in peculiar directions, spinning around in vertiginous ways predicted by the opening song, a French-language version of that existential Oscar-winner, “The Windmills of Your Mind.” Dolan loves the close-up, as he demonstrated in Mommy, an exciting and ambitious film so aggressive it was finally exhausting. Here, because his own pouty, bleach-blonde head is frequently at the center of the frame, Dolan could be accused of extreme self-regard (the Hollywood Reporter review called it a “swooning intoxication” with his own mug). The charge might be easier to make if Dolan weren’t actually an intriguing screen presence. He’s no Orson Welles—well, nobody is—but such greedy ambition at this tender age (and such Linklater-like productivity) is scintillating to witness. ROBERT HORTON E

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Local & Repertory ADVANTAGEOUS Jennifer Phang presents her new sci-

fi tale, in which intelligence and beauty become market products. (NR) Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380, nwfilmforum.org. $7-$9. 7:30 p.m. happy hour, 8 p.m. screening.

BARBARELLA Jane Fonda stars as the comic-book heroine in Barbarella (1968), directed by her then-husband, Roger Vadim. It’s campy and awful, best remembered for the costumes, shagadelic set designs, and Fonda’s zero-gravity striptease. The laughs, when they come, are unintentional. (PG) Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $8-$10. 9:30 p.m. Fri.-Wed. THE DAMNED: DON’T YOU WISH THAT WE WERE DEAD This new music doc by Wes Orshoski follows

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the P.T.A.—still looks like the stuff of which legends “ ” are made. When the T-Bird gang first calls out “Hey, —NEIL YOUNG, Zuko!” and the camera zooms in to capture Travolta’s THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER magnificent mug, you know you’re in the presence of a god. Zac Efron? As if. (PG-13) STEVE WIECKING 6046 W. Lake Sammamish Parkway N.E. (Redmond), moviesatmarymoor.com. $5. Seating at 7 p.m., movie at dusk. Wednesdays through Aug. 26.

FILM NEWSLETTER MOVIES AT THE MURAL Give thanks to the Marvel —THE PLAYLIST The inside scoop on upcoming films and the latest reviews. gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser.

First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag —SCOTT TOBIAS, is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible THE DISSOLVE batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), who calls himself ...

“Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to SE AT TLE retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to ...

4500 9TH AVE. NE • 206-633-0059 align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will—in their own zany way—end up guard—DENNIS HARVEY, ing the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creaVARIETY tures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn understands that getting character right—and keeping the story’s goals simple—can create a momentum machine. NOTE: The film is playing at two venues on the same night. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Seattle —PAULA MEJIA, Center Mural Amphitheatre, 684-7200, seattlecenter.

NEWSWEEK com. Free. Outdoor movie begins at dusk. Saturdays through Aug. 22. West Seattle Movies at the Wall, 4410 California Ave. S.W., westseattlemovies. blogspot.com. Free. Screens at dusk. Saturdays through Aug. 22.

Monday is $6 ORCA Day THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW Tim Curry and BELIEVE IN THE IMPOSSIBLE company do their time-warp thing. (R) SIFF Cinema Show Your Orca Card and A FILM BY JIMMY CHIN AND Egyptian, 801 E. Pine St., 324-9996, siff.net. $7-$12.

ALL Seats are $6 ($7.50 for 3D).

ELIZABETH CHAI VASARHELYI Midnight, Sat. Tickets Avail at Box Office Only. Not good on holidays.

SIXTEEN CANDLES Show me a woman between the ages of 28 and 35 who didn’t have a crush on Jake Tuesday is Girls Movie Night Out! Ryan (Michael Schoeffling), the superfox dreamboat 2 or more ladies get $5 ($6.50 for 3D) Admission All Day. of John Hughes’ classic 1984 teen wish-fulfillment Tickets Avail at Box Office Only. fantasy, and I’ll show you, well, a lesbian. Hughes, the WINNER CHARLIE FOWLER AWARD man who would go on to make The Breakfast Club, TELLURIDE MOUNTAINFILM STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Weird Science, and just about 2015 every other great ’80s movie never remotely eligible for an Oscar, found his first and best muse in Molly THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. COP CAR Ringwald, the ordinary/extraordinary everygirl. Her pouty lips, gawky body, and frequent eyeball rolls—not TRAINWRECK THE END OF THE TOUR the flawless, über-confident sexpot represented by © SOUTHPORT MUSIC BOX CORPORATION Jake’s bitchy queen-bee girlfriend—truly captures the musicboxfilms.com RICKI AND THE FLASH agony and ecstasy of being a teenager. The role of merufilm.com Samantha was a breakout for Ringwald, but Anthony Michael Hall, as the jittery, froggy-voiced captain of the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: ROGUE NATION geek squad, and John and Joan Cusack in two of their SEATTLE BELLEVUE earliest roles, are just as much fun to watch. (R) LEAH THE GIFT AMY LANDMARK GUILD 45TH CINEMARK LINCOLN GREENBLATT Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686THEATRE SQUARE CINEMAS 6684, central-cinema.com. $7-$9. 7 p.m. Fri.-Wed. & FANTASTIC FOUR 2115 N. 45th 700 Bellevue Way NE 3 p.m. Sat.-Sun. (206) 547-2127 (800) CINEMARK SODO OUTDOOR MOVIE NIGHT From 1989, the com*Tickets available at the box office. edy Major League is screened, with the very ’80s starQ&A with the Climbers Sunday 8/16 after ring cast of Tom Berenger, Charlie Sheen, and Corbin the 1:30pm show at The Guild 45th Bernsen. (R) Pyramid Alehouse, 1201 First Ave. S., 682-3377, pyramidbrew.com. $5. 21 and over. Open at 8:30 p.m., movie at dusk. Fridays through Sept. 11.

THE SOUND OF MUSIC How do you solve a problem like Maria? Julie Andrews stars in this daz2.31" X 7" WED 8/12 zling widescreen adaptation of the Rodgers and SEATTLE WEEKLY Hammerstein musical, filmed in 1965 and one of Hollywood’s biggest hits of the decade. (G) Central DUE MON 4PM Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema. com. $8-$10. 8 p.m. Thurs.

THREE DOLLAR BILL OUTDOOR CINEMA From 1987, the comedy Adventures in Babysitting stars Elisabeth Shue. Chris Columbus directs. (PG-13) Cal Anderson AE: (circle one:) Artist: (circle one:) ART APPROVED Park, 11th Ave. & E. Pine St., 323-4274, threedolAngela Maria Josh Heather Staci larbillcinema.org. Free. Screens at dusk. Fridays

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“A MOVING TALE OF SUPER HUMAN PERSEVERANCE.”

FILM

HAPPY H

“AN IRRESISTIBLE WHITE-KNUCKLER.” “ENGROSSING HAIR-RAISING A NAIL-BITER.” “ABSOLUTELY WORTH THE CLIMB.”

Two Ways To Save At Sundance Seattle

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STARTS FRIDAY, AUGUST 14

SUNDANCECINEMAS.COM

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Teach English Overseas With the Peace Corps Information Session

through Aug. 28.

Emmett Steve TO CATCH A THIEF Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 classic pairs his two most iconic leads, Cary Grant and Grace Confirmation #: Kelly. An Oscar winner for its color photography, To Catch a Thief is something of a postwar salute to Europe, a vacation-postcard homecoming for its highliving director—an excuse to film on the Riviera, really.

And who could blame Hitchcock, with two such photogenic stars? Kelly shines like a diamond in the movie’s Monte Carlo setting (no wonder she caught a prince’s eye). Yet, as with all Hitchcock blondes, she’s not quite the innocent that retired jewel thief Grant might assume. Their dialogue is all innuendo and insinuation—is she talking about the fireworks or her own décolletage when she tells him, “I have a feeling that tonight you’re going to see one of the Riviera’s most fascinating sights”? You’ll have to see the movie. (PG) B.R.M. Henry Art Gallery, 15th Ave. N.E. and N.E. 41st St., 543-2281, henryart.org. $6-$10. 8:30 p.m. Fri. » CONTINUED ON PAGE 28

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Ronnie

Wednesday, August 19AE APPROVED Tim6 toJane 7 p.m. CLIENT APPROVED The School ofDeadline: Teaching ESL 9620 Stone Avenue North, Suite 101 Seattle, Washington

Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Benjamin Conway will discuss how you can improve a community’s English skills, teaching methods, and language competencies while gaining global skills for your career.

Life is calling. How far will you go?

855.855.1961 | www.peacecorps.gov

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • AU GU ST 12 — 18, 2015

the British punk band through nearly four decades.

(NR) Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 2675380, nwfilmforum.org. $7-$9. 8 p.m. Fri. 4 & 8 p.m.

Sat.-Sun. FREMONT OUTDOOR MOVIES Who you gonna call? I think we all know the answer: the top-grossing film of 1984, Ghostbusters! Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Sigourney Weaver star in the paranormal smash comedy. The movie’s a total star turn for Murray, playing the loosest and least professional academic on campus. Using Aykroyd as his uptight foil, with well-timed sideline zingers from the wonky Ramis, he’s like Cary Grant on mescaline, utterly assured in everything he says, even when nothing he says makes the slightest bit of sense. (PG) BRIAN MILLER 3501 Phinney Ave. N., 781-4230, fremontoutdoormovies. com. $5-$10. Movie at dusk. Fridays (generally) through Aug. 29.

MADCAP GENIUS Boy, is this film ripe for a remake.

In Hail the Conquering Hero, Preston Sturges sends up the reflex patriotism of the World War II era in this 1944 satire. Eddie Bracken plays the 4-F washout from the Marines who’s received back home as a war hero—no matter that he eventually tries to tell the truth. (NR) Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $42–$45 series, $8 individual. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Aug. 13.

MOONLIGHT CINEMA Author of Jurassic Park, the late writer Michael Crichton infamously tutored President George W. Bush on the supposed fallacy of global warming. He was no scientist, but the doctorturned-novelist, from The Andromeda Strain forward, knew how to mix popular science into exceptionally good potboiler fiction. He was a master of the in-flight novel, and Jurassic Park is one of his very best works.

Steven Spielberg’s 1993 adaptation benefits from equally from the then-new magic of CGI and our old love of dinosaurs running amok. (Long before Godzilla, silent movies were doing the same.) While Crichton warns us about the dangers of genetic engineering—in rather static debates among scientists Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum—Spielberg keeps things moving at a wonderful pace. As in Jaws, whose DNA is strongly felt here, the hunters become the hunted. The thud of the oncoming T. rex rippling in a water cup, the heat of his breath on a car window, the swarming Velociraptors—these ancient terrors trump our high-tech inventions. (PG-13) B.R.M. Redhook Brewery, 14300 N.E. 145th St. (Woodinville), 425-4833232, redhook.com. $5. 21 and over. Movie at dusk.

Thursdays through Aug. 27.

MOVIES AT MAGNUSON First of all, Up (2009) is not a movie about a cranky old coot who, with the help of a roly-poly Boy Scout, finds his inner child during a series of magical adventures experienced from the front porch of a dilapidated manse held aloft by hundreds of helium-filled balloons. The first few minutes of this Pixar animation present the most heartfelt—the most sincere—love story in recent memory: the love between a boy and a girl, who become a man and a woman, who become a husband and a wife, who become a widower and a memory that haunts the rest of what follows. The third act takes place almost entirely in the sky, atop a mammoth zeppelin piloted by a hero-turned-villain. But despite its title, Up is decidedly earthbound: The elderly Carl (voiced by Ed Asner) spends almost the entire movie schlepping his house across the South American landscape his wife had always hoped to visit. Carl’s literally tethered to a memory, an anchor with a garden hose wrapped around his torso to keep his home from floating away.

(PG) ROBERT WILONSKY 7400 Sand Point Way N.E., moviesatmagnuson.com. $5. Activities begin at 7 p.m., movie at dusk. Thursdays through Aug. 27.

MOVIES AT MARYMOOR 1978’s most popular film, Grease, cemented John Travolta’s movie superstardom, and gave Olivia Newton-John her only taste of it. And, make no mistake, Grease—despite the fact that everyone in the cast is obviously old enough to be running

MUSIC

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YOU AND A GUEST ARE INVITED TO A SPECIAL ADVANCE SCREENING OF

arts&culture» film » FROM PAGE 27

Ongoing • AMY One of the year’s best films, Asif Kapadia’s docuVISIT LIONSGATESCREENINGS.COM/REDEEM AND ENTER THE CODE AVJQR38556 TO DOWNLOAD YOUR PASSES! RATED R FOR STRONG BLOODY VIOLENCE, LANGUAGE THROUGHOUT, DRUG USE AND SOME SEXUAL CONTENT. Please note: Passes are limited and will be distributed on a first come, first served basis while supplies last. No phone calls, please. Limit one pass per person. Each pass admits two. Seating is not guaranteed. Arrive early. Theatre is not responsible for overbooking. This screening will be monitored for unauthorized recording. By attending, you agree not to bring any audio or video recording device into the theatre (audio recording devices for credentialed press excepted) and consent to a physical search of your belongings and person. Any attempted use of recording devices will result in immediate removal from the theatre, forfeiture, and may subject you to criminal and civil liability. Please allow additional time for heightened security. You can assist us by leaving all nonessential bags at home or in your vehicle.

IN THEATERS AUGUST 21

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mentary makes us cringe at its clickbait horror. Maybe we didn’t chase singer Amy Winehouse (1983–2011) down Camden streets with the paparazzi mob, maybe we didn’t introduce her to crack and heroin, but most of us surely clicked a few times on the lurid headlines about her spectacular fall into bulimia, booze, and drugs. Amy is mostly composed of archival montage augmented with new interviews. The early passages are unexpectedly cheerful as we meet a jazz-besotted teen fingering complex chords on her guitar and writing preternaturally sophisticated lyrics. After her rise, however, comes the plunge into fame, addiction, and relentless hounding by the English tabloid press. (R) B.R.M. Sundance THE END OF THE TOUR Based on journalist David Lipsky’s five-day interview with David Foster Wallace in 1996, following the publication of Infinite Jest, this film is well described by director James Ponsoldt as “a hang-out movie.” Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) travels from New York to Indiana for the precious interview, and he doesn’t want to risk looking foolish with Wallace (Jason Segel) by guessing wrong about the book’s meaning. Nor does he want to divulge the brew of resentment, envy, and hero worship that he feels about Wallace—only three years older but far more successful. And Wallace, in their very well-played tango, remains a guarded but friendly Midwestern soul facing a pesky Manhattan interrogator trying to peck away at the façade of presumed genius (and probe rumors of heroin and alcohol abuse). Thus the movie becomes a muted contest between two smart people determined to remain courteous despite their clashing agendas.

There’s no damning revelation or ah-ha moment, and we grow to appreciate Lipsky more as he grows more frustrated by Wallace’s clinging to normalcy. He refuses the tortured-genius story template that Lipsky may or may not be writing. Ponsoldt isn’t trying to make My Dinner With Andre, and the dialogue doesn’t sparkle. Rather, it feels true—and respectful to those who speak it. (R) B.R.M. SIFF Cinema Egyptian, Sundance, Lincoln Square IRRATIONAL MAN “I love that you order for me.” There are many reasons to dislike Woody Allen’s subpar but not terrible campus murder tale. That line comes from Emma Stone’s undergraduate, during dinner, to Joaquin Phoenix’s visiting professor. That they’re sleeping together goes without saying. But it’s Jill’s surrender not just to her teacher, but to dull genre conventions that makes Irrational Man so underwhelming. Right down to the (expected) twist ending, there simply are no surprises as Phoenix’s alcoholic, existentialist, blocked-at-writing/sex Abe undertakes one of those hoary old “perfect murder” schemes. Abandoning philosophy—where Allen’s curriculum is stuck in the ’60s, like the Ramsey Lewis-dominated soundtrack—Abe decides to commit a near-random murder for the sake of justice. (He even helpfully annotates a copy of Crime and Punishment for Jill to find.) In this way, Irrational Man is hopelessly dated, though a few cell phones are actually employed. Jill and her millennial peers all talk like 70-year-olds on the Upper East Side (in a film set in Newport); for topicality, Allen adds an equestrian scene—because that’s what all the kids are into these days. Aside from Parker Posey’s Albee-refugee wife, none of the supporting characters stand out. Yet even with its storytelling flab and dual-narration flub, Irrational Man is efficiently told. For us it may be a waste of time; but the 79-year-old Allen, already hard at work on an Amazon TV series, isn’t wasting his. (R) B.R.M. Guild 45th, others KURT COBAIN: MONTAGE OF HECK This fascinating documentary portrait has 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 disabled girl in Aberdeen, reminds me of a Raymond Carver story. 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.

Long before heroin entered his life, self-disgust had seeped into his veins. (NR) B.R.M. SIFF Film Center

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MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION Tom

Cruise has spent his 30 very willful years of stardom denying age, insisting that he performs his own stunts, and doing action flicks at an age when his relaxed-fit peers are sliding into more comfortable dadcore roles.

His initial M:I reboot was 19 years ago, and this fifth installment is full of the action, disguise, and gadgets we expect. Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, it’s fine summer entertainment, with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt predictably put through the wringer. By picture’s end, poor Hunt has crashed a motorcycle, crashed a car, suffered a gunshot, taken several beatings, grown a beard, shaved the beard, done some push-ups, shown his hairless chest, clung to the side of a flying aircraft (you saw that bit in the trailer, I know), jumped through several windows, dispatched a dozen baddies, and been deemed a rogue agent by the CIA. The complicated yet familiar script features stock components seemingly ordered from Amazon; best among them is mystery woman Ilsa (Sweden’s classy Rebecca Ferguson, who’d be right at home in a ’60s-vintage Bond movie). (PG-13) B.R.M. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Sundance, Pacific Place, Lincoln Square, Kirkland, Bainbridge, Admiral, others MR. HOLMES Now 93 and long retired to the countryside, Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen) has a pressing dilemma: His mind is fading. As he loses his memory, he tries to put down in writing what happened in his last case, some 30 years ago. He’s forgotten the details, but he knows that something went terribly wrong. In Bill Condon’s adaptation of Mitch Cullin’s 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind, scenes from the old case reel through Holmes’ mind, as he recalls a mystery woman he was hired to observe. More recently, the detective’s trip to post-WWII Japan, and his visit with a local admirer, become more significant as the film goes on. Adding to the mix are a plain-talking housekeeper (Laura Linney) and a naïve admirer—in this case, the housekeeper’s young son, who helps Holmes with beekeeping. Mr. Holmes is sneaky, because as it rounds to its purpose, it reveals a wonderful idea at its core: Sherlock Holmes, who disdains the romance of Watson’s short stories and prefers to deal only in facts, must learn how to accept the need for fiction. (PG) R.H. Guild 45th, Pacific Place, Kirkland, Lynwood (Bainbridge), others RICKI AND THE FLASH Because Meryl Streep and director Jonathan Demme carry so much career goodwill, Ricki is the kind of mediocre movie I can enjoy. (It’s written by Diablo Cody, and the script is nowhere near so sharp as her Oscar-winning Juno.) The family conflicts here are rote: irresponsible L.A. musician mother Ricki (Streep); her abandoned and remarried husband Pete (Kevin Kline) back in Indianapolis; two grown sons and daughter Julie (Mamie Gummer, Streep’s daughter), who’s in a near-psychotic meltdown after being dumped by her husband. Ricki leads a grizzled bar band in the San Fernando Valley (Rick Springfield is perfectly cast as her guitarist/love interest.) By night she cranks out Tom Petty, U2, and Springsteen covers; by day she’s a supermarket clerk. When was the last time Streep—who actually performs all the songs— played a woman this dumb? Clearly she relishes the part of an AARP rebel who thinks ALS stands for Alzheimer’s disease. Cody and Demme aren’t reaching for art, just trying to craft something as comfortable as an old car-radio song. (PG-13) B.R.M. Sundance, Pacific Place, Majestic Bay, Oak Tree, Lincoln Square, Kirkland, Bainbridge, others TRAINWRECK Playing Amy Townsend, a New York journalist, Amy Schumer is less a serial seducer than a steamroller, with a proven system for bedding guys and refusing sleepovers. That pattern works fine until Amy’s assigned to profile an earnest, dorky orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Aaron (Bill Hader). And here is where Schumer’s unapologetic, contrarian humor—call it feminist if you must—gets switched to the Hollywood mainline. Trainwreck is directed by reigning comedy czar Judd Apatow, and he mandates the formulas that Schumer so brilliantly spoofs on her Comedy Central show. He also dilutes her humor with testosterone— presumably to keep guys interested in a chick flick—by introducing jocks: John Cena, LeBron James, and Amar’e Stoudemire. They’re actually quite charming, but this is not why we’re paying to see an Amy Schumer comedy. Though it’s not the breakthrough that Bridesmaids was, Schumer’s fans won’t be unhappy with this movie, not with so many of her signature sotto voce punch lines. (R) B.R.M. Sundance, Big Picture, Meridian, Lincoln Square, others

BY B R IA N M I LLE R

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

•

» music

An Offering of Noise to the Pizza Gods Are 3,000 people really going to a walking pizza shop tour/guerilla noise festival?

BY MEAGAN ANGUS

I

Seattle’s mythic Pizza Crawl, a walking tour of

tive—casually sitting on their stoop, ribbons of wires streaming out their windows to power their analog equipment.

This year’s Crawl will wind its way through the neighborhood, stopping at six pizza shops with seven musicians scattered throughout.

Things will start weird, with a “huge secret guest thing,” and get even weirder as the attendees traverse the Capitol Hill route. Performers have been intentionally placed where sound and vision can combine in unusual ways, with artists tucked into parking garages, alleyways, and courtyards.

As for what you’ll hear during the eightplus hour event, the music is all over the board.

“We’ll have everything from traditional harsh noise to weird glitchy electronica, darkwave and shoegaze to Italo-disco, to stuff that can’t really be described,” Williams says. “It just has to be experienced. We encourage people to come with an open mind, and earplugs.”

Last year’s Crawl was attended by about 40 people, which is why the founding trio of weirdo friends were surprised to find that this year’s Facebook RSVPs to the event miraculously bloomed to over 3,000. If five percent of those people show up that’s 150 people. Williams recalls watching the numbers increase with confusion. “At first it was like, ‘Who are all these

strangers?’ ” When asked how all these new faces got turned on to the event, Price offers, “Probably the same way everyone else heard about it: They saw a friend was going, and thought, ‘This is the greatest thing ever!’ ” The Crawl organizers are hoping to channel these new faces into Seattle’s lively outsider noise scene through all this serendipitous, unexpected attention. With the predicted influx of newbies, and in light of the uptick in violence on Capitol Hill, especially targeted at the LGBTQ community, the promoters emphasize that, “Being respectful to the performers and to the neighborhood, and keeping a positive attitude, are the key to having fun at this all-ages event. We just want everyone to have a good-ass time,” says Foster.

In addition to the main event, a secret afterparty will be held the night of Pizza Crawl.

Those who attend this bonus round will be rewarded with another six acts and deep-dish pizza from Windy City Pie. “The after-party is pretty cool because of how eccentric the line up is,” Price says. “It’s kinda batshit.”

The artists at the after-party are more performance-based, featuring a reunion of the mind-blowing, leather-clad spectacle that is Mr. Tangles and Friends.

Coldbrew Collective, the winners of Seattle

Weekly’s Best of Seattle reader poll last week in the visual artist category, will be holding down visuals at the party with accompanying installations by Rich Stevens.

“It’s only secret because we couldn’t find a legit venue,” Williams says. “One of the reasons why there are so many more guerrilla shows is because The Josephine is gone.”

The Josephine, a Ballard-based DIY venue and noise-music haven with an incredibly liberal attitude towards hosting artists, was closed earlier this year due to noise complaints.

“Love to other venues,” reminisces Foster, “but the Jo would let people do stuff that no other venue would allow.” A unique community, and a fragile network of global connections, were severed when her doors were shuttered.

“Yeah,” continues Price, “before (the noise scene) was contained at The Josephine, but now that they’ve taken that away from us, they’re gonna get it in the streets.” E

music@seattleweekly.com

PIZZA CRAWL 2015 E. Mercer St. & Summit Ave. E. (and other locations). Free, all ages. See Facebook event page (pizzacrawl.party) for start time and location for after-party ($5, all-ages). Sat., Aug. 15.

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • AU GU ST 12 — 18, 2015

Capitol Hill’s pizza shops with guerilla noise performances—including Natasha El-Sergany, Zen Mother, and PRISONFOOD—at varying locations in between, has humble beginnings, according to the trio of noise musicians/friends/ pizza-worshippers who organize it. Price, local glitch-electronica guru, says it all started in an alleyway over some beers with local cartoonist Max Clotfelter and experimental musician/fan Foster, the Pizza God himself, just a year ago.

“It was after [local noise festival] Debacle Fest last year,” says Foster. “[Price] was telling a story about being super wasted and hitting two places to eat on the way home, and it just spun into ‘Ha-ha, it’d be funny if we just got trashed and hit every pizza spot on the Hill.’ ” “We weren’t even going to have music at first,” says Price. “It was [Foster’s] idea to have a few acoustic guerrilla sets. That’s where we got more excited about it.”

Last year’s inaugural Pizza Crawl featured performers like Contact Mike, who created dissonant chaotic sounds using contact mics on every surface available in a local park, as well as Slow Drips—the Moog-y audio project of the masterminds behind Coldbrew Collec-

From left, Marcus Price, “Wild” Bill Foster, and Dustin Williams.

PHOTO BY MEAGAN ANGUS

t was 4:20 in the afternoon. I laid on my couch in the blazing sunshine, my eyes drifting over a flyer I had been given. On it, a pizza man beckoned me to dance with him. I shook my head. My vision wavered. The room began to fill with light. An orange portal opened in my room. Two priests, or wizards, clothed in shimmering robes, stepped out. With them, God as my witness, was a living, talking, bearded slice of pizza. In his arms he carried their sigil, and a steaming deep-dish pepperoni pie.

I gestured to the couch. The trio settled themselves, conjuring cheap beers and paper towels from thin air, passing me a three-inch-thick slice of pizza from a box marked Windy City Pie. I waited for them to speak, but their mouths were stuffed. Finally, interrupting their mastication, I asked, “What summons you to this earthly plane, O Greasy Ones?”

The Living Slice, aka “Wild” Bill Foster, stared at me. “The Pizza Crawl.”

Seattle’s transcendent pizza and experimental music crusade, of course!

One of the priests, Dustin Williams, 12-string master and member of the Seattle noise group Stalebirth, gestured to the painting Foster was carrying. Said Williams, “The title of this is, We’re Building God. God is pizza. We’re leading a pilgrimage, and all of the performances [along the way] are stations of worship, and the method of worship… is noise.”

“Yeah, The Stations of the Crust,” mumbled Foster from behind the slice of pizza in his mouth.

“For the Supreme Being,” uttered priest Marcus Price, staring into the sun. “Give us this day our daily pie.”

A beat passed, and the three bust up laughing.

I laughed, too, taking another bite of the savory, holy deep-dish pizza.

29

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

JAZZ ALLEY IS A SUPPER CLUB

arts&culture» music

Small Town, Big Bands

Can one persistent 21-year-old put Maple Valley on the musical map?

BY KELTON SEARS

Grammy-winning vocal troupe famed for their crystal clear vocalese style - blending pop, jazz, swing and R&B

OTIS TAYLOR BAND TUES, AUG 18 - WED, AUG 19

Blues singer/guitarist/banjoist and visionary roots musician Otis Taylor and band are touring in support of their new release “Hey Joe Opus/ Red Meat”

THE STANLEY CLARKE BAND THURS, AUG 20 - SUN, AUG 23

Grammy-winning bassist delivers a virtuosic smorgasbord of old-school fusion, classical jazz, modern-day funk and introspective collaborations.

LEE RITENOUR AND DAVE GRUSIN TUES, AUG 25 - SUN, AUG 30

Grammy-winning genre-melding guitarist and pianist

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

tractor TIMES

DOORS 30-60 MIN. BEFORE. OPEN

LISTED ARE

SHOW TIMES.

WEDS,

AUGUST 12 TH 

AMERICANA SINGER/SONGWRITER

FREEDY JOHNSTON LESLIE DINICOLA THURS,

8PM - $15

AUGUST 13 TH 

SASSY SISTER FOLK

T SISTERS

THE WASHOVER FANS, THE LOWEST PAIR

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AUGU ST 12 — 18, 2015

SAT,

30

AUGUST 15

9PM - $10 TH 

SEATTLE WEEKLY PRESENTS

BLACKIE (A TRIBUTE TO BLONDIE) CFO ROLLING STONES EXTRAVAGANZA 9PM - $10 TUES, AUGUST 18 TH  SOULFUL FOLK

THE WICKS

9PM - $8

GRACE & TONY WEDS,

AUGUST 19 TH  SEATTLE WEEKLY PRESENTS R & B REVIVALIST

NICK $15 WATERHOUSE

9PM

BRANDEN DANIEL & THE CHICS DJ COOKY PARKER

Up & Coming 8/14 SUNDOG 8/20 TANGO ALPHA TANGO 8/21 DANNY NEWCOMB 8/24 SQUARE DANCING 8/25 MEIKO 8/26 KEXP 80’S LADIES BENEFIT 8/27 ACID TONGUE 5213 BALLARD AVE. NW  789-3599

www.tractortavern.com

M

Wolfe is one of the most precocious members of

a new emerging pack of savvy, headstrong individuals trying to bring big Seattle bands to small towns across Washington state. In Wenatchee, a couple by the name of Scott and Jenny Erickson have been hosting popular house shows and small bar gigs for touring Seattle acts (including The Maldives, The Moondoggies, and Cave Singers) under the production name “Two Bar” for four years. In the tiny Southeast Washington town of Dayton, Reggie Mace and Beth Rahn have been hosting “Middle of Nowhere” sessions for the past two years, welcoming bands from Seattle, Portland, Boise, and everywhere in between. Perhaps the most visible success might be the Everett Music Initiative, founded by Ryan “R.C.” Crowther and Steven Graham in an attempt to get bands to play in Everett. The initiative has spawned a new music venue (The Cannery), blossomed into a full-blown music festival with 60-plus

acts (Fisherman’s Village), drawn financial support from the City of Everett and Snohomish County, and launched the career of Everett band Fauna Shade (managed by Crowther), which rose to prominence with impressive performances on EMI bills with larger Seattle acts.

According to Crowther, the success came from being “persistent and thinking long-term. There are some shows that are so well received and give you the excitement to get through the next few that aren’t as great.”

Five years after the initial VanFest debacle, the persistent (and newly legal) 21-year-old Wolfe is mounting the fifth annual VanFest.

(Next year he hopes it might also get an official sponsorship from the city of Maple Valley.) The small-town event has grown into a four-stage outdoor bonanza sporting an impressive 36-band lineup, including smalltime Maple Valley bands and big Seattle acts that Wolfe scouted at all-ages DIY venues like Hollow Earth Radio. This year’s headliner is easily Wolfe’s biggest act yet: Kitty (formerly Kitty Pryde), of “OKAY CUPID” fame, a tour-mate and collaborator with infamously weird breakout rapper Danny Brown.

How did Wolfe get Kitty, a well-known L.A.based artist to come out to little Maple Valley? “I sent a Facebook message to her personal profile page, worked something out, and bought her a plane ticket. She’s crashing at my house. It’ll be a lot of fun.” (Also on the schedule are Fauna Shade, Gifted Gab, Heavy Petting, and Lures.)

The Captured Tracks signees and Seattle/ Olympia natives of Naomi Punk are rounding out the headlining slot. By happy coincidence, this neo-grunge punk act is a direct influence on Neukarzent, the small band of Maple Valley high-schoolers playing before them on the bill.

Wolfe hopes the two might network at the show. That’s kind of the point, he says: “We’re bringing the big bands closer, and letting the music community out there know that people who live here who are interested in what they are doing, and want to come out to see them.

We want to let them know Maple Valley is a good spot to be; and maybe these shows will inspire young teenagers in town to start making music.” Some may balk, but it’s the same approach a young Bruce Pavitt took with Sub Pop, a scrappy zine-turned-record label whose regional focus put Seattle, a city that used to be a cultural backwater, on the musical map. E RS

MANHATTAN TRANSFER THURS, AUG 13 - SUN, AUG 16

aple Valley, the wooded suburban enclave located 45 minutes southeast of Seattle, is known for its beautiful trails, good public schools, and Richard Sherman’s $2.3 million mansion. Growing up there, my bored friends and I would chase deer, wander around rock quarries, and jump in the icy cold Cedar River (competing to see who could stay in the longest) for fun. As of 2015, our most well-known cultural export is alternative country star Brandi Carlile, but beyond that, we’re not especially known as a town for artistic incubation. Most people probably know us as that town near where that one guy died having sex with a horse.

That town, the neighboring farming community of Enumclaw, is where a 16-year-old Maple Valley resident and Andrew W.K. doppelgänger named Van Wolfe involuntarily hosted the very first VanFest in 2010, a grassroots, DIY music festival. It was supposed to be in Maple Valley, but his dad told him hosting a large music festival at their house was “probably a bad idea.” So, the 20 pop punk, hardcore, and nerdcore bands booked for the event ended up playing in a barn typically reserved for country and swing dance.

The young Wolfe was so overwhelmed by the chaotic experience of organizing the event, he says he “had to find a quiet corner for myself to go and cry it out for a minute and just tell myself that it’s okay. But as hard as it was, and as many things went wrong, I just wanted to do again.”

The next year, the masochistic Wolfe managed to get the festival back in Maple Valley, at the small but scenic Royal Arch Park. That one also didn’t go so well. “The first two years were very rough,” he says. But the next year, he hit a home run.

“I had Dude York and Chastity Belt, XVIII Eyes, Fly Moon Royalty, Kung Foo Grip, Fox and the Law, Land of Pines, S, just so many great Seattle bands. That year was incredible. I finally figured some stuff out at that one.”

SEA

Rocking blues & the band Tower of Power was born from

KEL TON

LYDIA PENSE AND COLD BLOOD WED, AUG 12

ksears@seattleweekly.com

VAN FEST: ROYAL ARCH PARK 20821 S.E. Renton-Maple Valley Rd.,vanfestnw. com. $20 ($10 with high school/middle school ID). All ages. Noon-9 p.m. Sat., Aug. 15.

SHOWBOX AND KEXP PRESENT

THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS + THE CHURCH

Rejoice! Reissues!

Light in the Attic Records preps for its second annual Summer Spectacular.

DAWES

BY DAVE LAKE

L

with

8/16

BLAKE MILLS

8:30 PM

MISTERWIVES with

HANDSOME GHOST

8/19

8PM

FAILURE SHOWBOX AND KEXP PRESENT

8/28

Barbara Lynn

with KING LOS

8:30 PM

9/8

OLD 97’S with

SAM NOURALLAH

8:30 PM

9/13

9PM

EAGLES OF DEATH METAL 9/2

MACHINE GUN KELLY

8PM

SHOWBOX AND CAPITOL HILL BLOCK PARTY PRESENT

RATATAT 9/17

9PM

SHOWBOX SODO ALL YOU CAN EAT TOUR

WILDHEART TOUR

MIGUEL 8/23

with DOROTHY

8PM

10/22

SHOWBOX AND DECIBEL FESTIVAL PRESENT

STEEL PANTHER CREATURE CARNIVAL TOUR

THIEVERY BEATS CORPORATION ANTIQUE

9/27

with SHAPRECE

9PM

ANDREW MCMAHON IN THE WILDERNESS + NEW POLITICS 10/13

with THE GRISWOLDS + LOLO

9PM

SHOWBOX AND EMPORIUM PRESENT

STURGILL SIMPSON

7PM

TECH N9NE with KRIZZ KALIKO + KNOTHEAD + NEEMA

10/18

10/31

8PM

11/13

with BILLY WAYNE DAVIS

8:30 PM

THE CULT + PRIMAL SCREAM 11/14

music@seattleweekly.com

SUMMER SPECTACULAR 913 N.W. 50th St., lightintheattic.net.

Free, all ages. 3 p.m. Sat., Aug. 15.

8PM

SHOWBOXPRESENTS.COM

8PM

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • AU GU ST 12 — 18, 2015

Lynn, who in the 1960s toured with Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, and B.B. King amongst others, says she is thrilled that people are still interested in her music all these years later. “It brings back memories, too,” she confesses. “My daughter went out and bought me a turntable. And playing [my record], boy, it really sounds good.”

Though the label has seen a slight uptick in vinyl sales thanks to revitalized interest in the format from younger music fans, the label has seen more growth from its distribution arm, which Sullivan says now accounts for about 30 percent of the label’s business. Reissue labels are on the rise, and LITA sells not just its own records directly to key retailers, but releases from a diverse roster of 50-plus labels as well, turning their competitors into partners and placing LITA at the forefront of the reissue business.

Five years ago, hoping to be closer to the major labels around which much of his business revolves, Sullivan moved to Los Angeles. But the label still has a presence in Seattle. LITA’s Ballard office employs seven people and serves as a distribution warehouse and retail store, which is open to the public on Fridays and Saturdays.

“I miss the seasons,” Sullivan says about Seattle. “I miss swimming in Lake Washington. I miss the ferries, the San Juan Islands, the Smoke Shop in Ballard, Paseo. When it’s sunny, Seattle’s one of the most beautiful places in the world.” E

PHOTO COURTESY THE DOUG HANNERS COLLECTION

ight in the Attic Records has no affiliation with Shel Silverstein.

Though the label shares a name with the author’s famous volume of kids’ poetry, founder and coowner Matt Sullivan simply thought the phrase nicely described a place where dusty records would congregate. And dusty records are the heart and soul of Light in the Attic, a reissue label that launched in Seattle in 2002 with the goal of illuminating albums that were either underappreciated or not widely available—be it a vinyl pressing of The Stone Roses’ first LP or a three-record set of hardly heard, self-released New Age recordings.

This weekend, LITA is hosting its second annual Summer Spectacular in Ballard, featuring food trucks, a record fair, and a performance from Barbara Lynn, a guitar-slinging soul singer the label recently reissued. (Willie Thrasher, an indigenous Canadian folk artist on the LITA label, was slated to perform as well, but was forced to cancel due to health concerns.)

At any given time, the label is working on 80 or so projects that are in various stages of development. With such a varied catalog, ideas can come from anywhere. “It’s always kind of random,” Sullivan says. “Some things we discover. A lot are just friends or record stores or blogs that are turning us on to things. It’s really all over the map. We have spreadsheets and spreadsheets and spreadsheets of ideas.”

Once the label has settled on an idea, there are lots of hurdles to overcome before something can be added to the release schedule—namely licensing, which can be an arduous task. Sullivan has occasionally hired private investigators to locate hard-to-find artists or copyright holders.

There are also photos to be tracked down, master recordings to locate, artists to interview, and more.

The process is further complicated by the fact that many of the albums being reissued weren’t commercially successful the first time around, with assets packed away in basement boxes for decades. In short, reissuing records is an exercise in patience. The label’s Lee Hazelwood box set, for example, took seven years to complete.

For Here Is Barbara Lynn, a 2014 vinyl reissue of the 1968 LP by Lynn, LITA had to negotiate the rights from Warner Bros., but Sullivan didn’t want to do the release unless the Texas-born singer was directly involved. “She was instantly on board for doing stuff and looked around for photos and got on the phone with our liner notes writer,” he says. “She was a total sweetheart.”

8:15PM

9/3

SHOWBOX AND TRACTOR TAVERN PRESENT

31

newhome.kexp.org

I POWER KEXP

a&c» music

TheWeekAhead Thurs., Aug. 13

on Concert FREE Community COURTESY THE ARTIST

FREE Community Concert

Featurin Bring your Family & Friends g FREE Community Concert Silas Blak

Fri., Aug. 14

www.elcorazonseattle.com

FREE COMMUNITY CONCERT

Doors at 8:00PM / Show at 9:00.

21+. $7 ADV / $10 DOS

THURSDAY AUGUST 13TH FUNHOUSE

SEATTLE WEEKLY • AUGU ST 12 — 18, 2015

BRIAN FOSS PRESENTS:

1234 RAMONES TRIBUTE

w/Space Cretins, Die Nasty, Plus Guests

Doors at 8:30PM / Show at 9:30.

21+. $8

SUNDAY AUGUST 16TH FUNHOUSE

THE LEECHES (ITALY)

MRS. SKANNOTTO w/Among Criminals,

Doors at 8:00PM / Show at 9:00.

21+. $7 ADV / $10 DOS

Doors 7:00PM / Show 8:00.

ALL AGES/BAR W/ID+. $10 ADV / $12 DOS

w/Piston Ready, The STUNTMEN, Torch Burner

32

SATURDAY AUGUST 15TH FUNHOUSE

FRIDAY AUGUST 14TH EL CORAZON KISW (99.9 FM) METAL SHOP & EL CORAZON PRESENT:

Doors 8:00PM / Show 9:00. 21+. $12 ADV / $15 DOS

Doors 7:00PM / Show 7:30.

ALL AGES/BAR W/ID+. $8 ADV / $10 DOS

ARCTIC RECORDS PRESENTS:

THE QUIET CULL

w/Divides, Isthmusia, Shiver Twins, Wyatt Olney

Doors 7:00PM / Show 7:30.

ALL AGES/BAR W/ID+. $8 ADV / $10 DOS

SATURDAY AUGUST 15TH EL CORAZON

TONY MACK

MICHAEL DARE

ANTHONY EDWARDS

st

2015 ANTHONY EDWARDS MICHAEL DARE 6:00pm

FRIDAY

Mythologies, The recent debut EP from LONG DARK MOON, led by Aaron Starkey of Gibraltar, was recorded live at the Columbia City Theater, which I have a hard time believing. It all sounds too polished, Starkey’s downtroddenDoors yearning opencoming @ 5:30 MICHAEL through tooDARE clear, the band syncing up too well for a first release. I’m calling your bluff, Long Dark Moon. This show better be at least as good as this EP sounds. With Skates! and Trick Candles. Barboza, 925 E. Pike St., @ thebarboza.com.

7 p.m. $8. 21 and Doors open 5:30 over. DR

21

st

2015

Ernestine Anderson Ernestine Anderson Place st 6:00pm 21 2010 S. Jackson 2010 S. Jackson St. Ernestine Anderson Place Ernestine Anderson Place 2010 S.SEATTLE, Jackson St. WASHINGTON 98144 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON 9814 2010 S. Jackson St.

TUESDAY AUGUST 18TH FUNHOUSE

LOST IN THE CITY TONY MACK w/The Idle Tyrant, Rat King, Plus Guests Doors 7:30PM / Show 8:00.

ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $8 ADV / $10 DOS

WEDNESDAY AUGUST 19TH FUNHOUSE

THE WYLDZ w/Diamond Lane, Delta Rose,

KISW (99.9 FM) METAL SHOP & EL CORAZON PRESENT:

Doors 7:30PM / Show 8:00.

ALL AGES/BAR W/ID+. $10 ADV / $12 DOS

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

The Salt Riot, Olivia Awbrey

ANTHONY EDWARDS

TONY MACK LIHI RESIDENTS OPEN THE SHOW!

Unknown, Raphael, Emily Clementine

21

LIHI RESIDENTS OPEN THE SHOW! Sat., Aug. 15

MONDAY AUGUST 17TH FUNHOUSE

AUTHOR w/Megasapien, Destination

FRIDAY AUGUST 14TH FUNHOUSE

TONY MACK

Regional Faction, Ted Bunny, Wiscon

MAC SABBATH w/The Dread Crew Of

Oddwood, Ronald McFondle, The Falcons Of Fine Dining, Mothership

Featuring

OPENERS: Mary McBride LIHI RESIDENTS OPEN THE SHOW! FRIDAY

6:00pm

ANTHONY F EDWARDS R I D A Y MICHAEL DARE

AUG

w/Stoned Evergreen Travelers, Bakelite 78, GravelRoad, Coyote

Bring your Family & Friends!

AUGUST

g

AUGUST Mary McBride

Featuonrin

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

THE HOOTEN HALLERS

eaturing

Mary McBride

El Corazon E orazon

Ever since “Versace” splashed into the hip-hop world two summers ago, MIGOS has been less of a rap group than an industrial hit-making machine, churning out hot track after hot track. The group is finally making its way out to our corner of the country, and they’re bringing labelmate OG Maco, of “U Guessed It” fame along for the ride. Here’s hoping that Offset, the third Migo, currently incarcerated as of this writing, will be out in time for this show. #FREEOFFSET With JVN, SQD, ATM, Lil Ripp, and Carey Stacks.

Showbox Sodo, 1700 First Ave. S., showboxpresents. com. 9:30 p.m. $52.50. All ages. DR Portland’s NATASHA KMETO is not only a phenomenal singer, but she also manages to build her own backing vocals into sleek electronic tracks on the fly, using a sampler while she’s at it. Seriously, she’s a solo act, but she sounds like a five-piece band.

Thank the KEXP gods for putting this one on. With Manatee Commune and Shaprece. Seattle Center Mural Amphitheatre, 305 Harrison St., kexp.org. 5:30 p.m. Free. All ages. DR

Mary McBride

Bring onyour Family & Friend

Bring your Family & Friends F

WEDNESDAY AUGUST 12TH FUNHOUSE

on

One of the best things about monthly local hip-hop showcase HOMESLICE is that in over a year of putting together shows, there have hardly been any repeat artists.

Each lineup has been distinct, a testament to both the diversity of the scene here and the hard work organizers Andrew Savoie and Liz Rowe put in to every Homeslice, digging deep into all the local talent. With Silas Blak, KLTZ, Z3LLi, and Travis Thompson. The Crocodile, 2200 Second Ave., thecrocodile.com. 8 p.m. $5. All ages. DANIEL ROTH

(Doors open @ 5:30)

CASTLE w/Witch Ripper, SwampheavY, Kings Of Cavalier, Dogs Of War

JUST ANNOUNCED 8/26 FUNHOUSE - SAUSAGE SLAPPER 9/23 FUNHOUSE - NATHAN FOX 10/16 FUNHOUSE - CRUSHED OUT 10/23 - JELLY ROLL 10/24 - KNUCKLE PUCK 11/1 - HAVE MERCY 11/20 - HANDS LIKE HOUSES 12/12 - THE BLASTERS UP & COMING 8/20 - PACIFIC DRIVE 8/20 FUNHOUSE - THORAZINE 8/21 - AMSTERDAM 8/21 FUNHOUSE - STOLAS 8/22 - THE FREEZE 8/22 FUNHOUSE - 1234 RAMONES TRIBUTE 8/23 FUNHOUSE EARLY - SON OF MAN 8/23 FUNHOUSE LATE - THE SNUBS 8/24 - INSOMNIUM 8/25 FUNHOUSE - ROSEDALE 8/27 - NEKROGOBLIKON 8/27 FUNHOUSE - TOARN 8/28 - TOXIC HOLOCAUST 8/28 FUNHOUSE - SIOUX CITY PETE & THE BEGGARS 8/29 - EMERALD CITY ROCK PARTY FEAT. WE THE AUDIENCE 8/30 FUNHOUSE - GRAZ 8/31 - THE PROTOMEN 9/1 FUNHOUSE - BITERS THE FUNHOUSE BAR IS OPEN FROM 3:00PM TO 2:00AM DAILY AND HAPPY HOUR IS FROM 3:00PM UNTIL 6:00PM. 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

SEATTLE, WA 98144

This Sunday sees the return of VIBRATIONS, the phantasmagoric afternoon in Volunteer Park put on by local boutique/art space Cairo. Some great bands from Seattle and beyond will be there, as well as a veritable avalanche of visual artists. For the third eye-minded, there’s also a Metaphysical Tent, with yoga and aura readings. And of course an “Ice Cold Rollers Tent featuring Nude Dads on the Beach.”

We’re not sure what that is, but it’s certainly got our attention. With Chastity Belt, Mega Bog, So Pitted, iji, and more. Volunteer Park, 1247 15th Ave. E., templeofcairo.com. 2-10 p.m., Free. All ages. DR

MORE INFO MORE INFO SEATTLE, WASHINGTON 98144 & UPDATES

& UPDATES Send events to music@seattleweekly.com.

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odds&ends» Hempfest Still Matters, Dude

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Martinez, and Artis the Spoonman.

“I’m still tripping about that Timothy Leary sighting we had,” TJ mumbled, rolling his fourth fatty. “Pretty sure he was there.” (Professor Timothy Leary attended the Peaceworks Park Peace Vigil in 1990.)

instagram.com/

In fact, Hempfest isn’t all bands and buds and

Butterfingers; there’s an educational element, including Hemposium panels featuring the nation’s leading voices on hemp, medicinal uses of cannabis, and ongoing advocacy, including the No Prison for Pot campaign. Over the years, Hempfest has featured the likes of Jack Herer (activist author of The Emperor Wears No Clothes), Keith Stroup (NORML), Randi Rhodes (Air America), former Seattle Chief of Police Norm Stamper, travel guru Rick Steves, Rick Cusick (High Times), Jack Cole (LEAP), master grower Ed Rosenthal, Dennis Kucinich, and yes, Woody Harrelson.

“Fucking starving, dude,” TJ yelled while peering into his empty fridge.

“That reminds me of when I knew the pendulum had swung, man,” I tangentially countered. “Remember when the cops handed out bags of Doritos at Hempfest?”

“I do not.” (In 2013, Seattle Police conduced Operation Orange Fingers, handing out bags of Doritos with Dos and Don’ts about the new marijuana laws, including, “DON’T drive while high,” and “DO listen to Dark Side of the Moon at a reasonable volume.”)

Hempfest is a grassroots community gathering—and one of the few that has a peaceful vibe through-and-through. Thanks to the thousands of well-trained Hempfest volunteers, as well as a mellow SPD, the event has had hundreds of thousands of attendees without a single major health incident, fight or overdose.

(It helps the rally isn’t AlcoholFest.)

“The real reason to go, Bro-ham?” I began, standing on the couch for emphasis and attempting a Pot-Power salute. “The work’s not done, man!

Sure you and I can buy outrageously expensive herb at stores here in town, but the Feds think it’s a felony and a hard-core narcotic! Six-hundred and eighty-thousand Americans were arrested last year for marijuana-related offenses! Our war veterans don’t have access to it to help with their PTSD, and parents are having their kids taken away for using it as medicine all over the country!”

“Dude,” TJ replied, looking at my shoeless feet on his couch. “I think you crushed the remote, man.”

“The Revolution will not be televised!” After our laughter died down, I asked a serious question. “Is there a remote possibility you’ll go to Hempfest with me, man?”

“I do need a grinder…” TJ noted, stoned to the bejesus. “Allll right. What day are we goin’?”

Seattle Hempfest runs Friday, August 14-Sunday, August 16, from noon to 8 p.m., at Myrtle Edwards and Centennial Parks. See hempfest.org. Thanks to Vivian McPeak’s book, Protestival: Seattle Hempfest, for clearing up many of our foggy memories. E For more Higher Ground, visit highergroundtv.com.

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • AU GU ST 12 — 18, 2015

ot so sure about hitting Hempfest this year, bro,” said my biggest stoner pal TJ, loading yet another fat bowl of black market Blue Dream. “I mean, we legalized it. What’s the point?”

“I’ll HIGHERGROUND tell you

BY MICHAEL A. STUSSER why,” I replied, sucking down the tube. “As soon as I can remember what the question was!”

Amazingly, Hempfest is celebrating its 24th year this weekend. In addition to being the world’s largest cannabis rally, Hempfest has always advertised itself as a “protestival,” commemorating the advances of cannabis, and protesting the ongoing War on Drugs—and the fact marijuana is still very much illegal at the federal level.

“Dude,” I began, using a term I reserve only for our stoned sessions. “First, we’re fucking celebrating. Couple years ago you had to worry about going to jail if ya got caught with a bag o’ weed. Today, a $27 ticket….Dude!”

“No, I get it, bro,” TJ replied, no doubt recalling the numerous times he was busted for growing weed in his basement, giving him a permanent black mark on his record and winnowing the field of employers he could work for over the years.

“For me, a big part of the marijuana movement is being around a like-minded group of progressive, liberal, groovy….well potheads,” I noted, trying to sound better than the long-haired hippies—read “cannabis connoisseurs”—I resemble and represent. “Not everyday. But at least once a year. And I’ll admit it: I like patchouli.”

Started by peace-activist Vivian McPeak and cannabis crusader Gary Cook, Hempfest began at Volunteer Park in 1991. (It was originally called the Washington Hemp Expo.) The festival outgrew Volunteer Park as well as Gas Works Park, eventually finding its current home along Elliott Bay at Myrtle Edwards Park, the Olympic Sculpture Garden, and Centennial Park.

“We have been to a few good ones,” TJ mused.

“Was it two years ago we bought those Space Cakes from that rasta chick?” (The sale or use of cannabis is not permitted at Hempfest.) “I think I asked her to marry me in the Ganja Gardens…”

“Dude [again, I can’t help using that word when I’m around this guy]! Hempfest is also free! How many festivals with kick-ass music in a mindblowing setting are flippin’ free?!” In my effort to have TJ attend, I was appealing to his, let’s call it, “financially prudent” side. (Hempfest costs over $1 million dollars a year to produce. Please donate at the event and through annual memberships.)

“We have seen Heart blow the doors off that place a bunch of times,” he admitted. “And damn, Ann was sexy as hell last year; those ladies are still rockin’ babes…”

Over the years, Hempfest has featured hundreds of musical acts, including the Super Sonic Soul Pimps, DXD, Rockin’ Teenage Combo, Herbivores, 7 Year Bitch, Nu Sol Tribe, Vicci

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