Seattle Weekly, September 09, 2015

SEPTEMBER 9-15, 2015 I VOLUME 40 I NUMBER 36

SEATTLEWEEKLY.COM I FREE

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MUSIC YOURYOUNGBODY’S BETRAYER IS A CRITICAL PILLAR FOR A NEW LOCAL MUSIC SCENE PAGE 25

THE SOLUTION TO SEATTLE’S HOMELESS PROBLEM IS SO PAINFULLY OBVIOUS.

BY ELLIS E. CONKLIN PAGE 11

The Art of Football

A little-known illustrator has become the toast of the Seahawks secondary.

By Daniel Person Page 8

Golden Girl

Jonathan Evison on his new novel’s marginalized heroine.

By Brian Miller Page 18

elevate

tonight AMERICAN IDOL WINNER

SCOTTY MCCREERY THUR | SEPT 10 | 7:30PM

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LAST COMIC STANDING SUN | SEPT 13 | 7:00PM

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AMERICA’S BAND

THE BEACH BOYS

SUN | SEPT 27 | 7:00PM

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GEORGE THOROGOOD AND THE DESTROYERS THUR | OCT 1 | 7:30PM

TICKETS: SNOCASINO.COM OR THE SNOQUALMIE CASINO BOX OFFICE I-90 E. Exit 27 | www.snocasino.com

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inside» September 9-15, 2015 VOLUME 40 | NUMBER 36 » SEATTLEWEEKLY.COM

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news&comment 5

WATER WORRIES

BY ROBERT MCCLURE | Experts thought Seattle’s long-term water-supply plans could withstand climate change.

Now they’re not so sure. Plus: proposals to ease the blow of apartment prices; an attorney under fire; and Seattle’s hot new sports artist.

11 A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

BY ELLIS E. CONKLIN | How Utah

borrowed—and improved—Seattle ideas on how to house the chronically homeless.

Should we borrow them back?

food&drink

15 MEALS ON WHEELS

BY JEFF RINDSKOPF | Evaluating five

local dinner-delivery services.

15 | FOOD NEWS/THE WEEKLY DISH 16 | HOP SEASON 17 | REVIEW/THE BAR CODE

arts&culture

18 GOLDEN GIRL

BY BRIAN MILLER | Bainbridge

novelist Jonathan Evison on his ignored new heroine.

22 FILM

OPENING THIS WEEK | George Clooney

is spotted in Sudan, plus rival brothers and would-be playas.

23 | FILM CALENDAR

25 MUSIC

BY DUSTY HENRY | Rumour has it a

local band is inspired by Fleetwood Mac. Plus: Going dark without guitars.

29 | THE WEEK AHEAD

odds&ends

4 | CHATTERBOX 30 | HIGHER GROUND 31 | CLASSIFIEDS

»cover credits

ILLUSTRATION BY JOSHUA BOULET

JAZZ FESTIVAL Seattle’s Jazz Festival

Editor-in-Chief Mark Baumgarten EDITORIAL News Editor Daniel Person Food Editor Nicole Sprinkle Arts Editor Brian Miller Music Editor Kelton Sears Editorial Operations Manager Gavin Borchert Staff Writers Sara Bernard, 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 PRODUCTION Production Manager Sharon Adjiri Art Director Jose Trujillo Graphic Designers Nate Bullis, Brennan Moring Photo Intern Christopher Zeuthen ADVERTISING Marketing/Promotions Coordinator Zsanelle Edelman Senior Multimedia Consultant Krickette Wozniak Multimedia Consultants Julia Cook, Rose Monahan, Peter Muller, Matt Silvie DISTRIBUTION Distribution Manager Jay Kraus OPERATIONS Administrative Coordinator Amy Niedrich Publisher Bob Baranski 206-623-0500 COPYRIGHT © 2015 BY SOUND PUBLISHING, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART WITHOUT PERMISSION IS PROHIBITED. ISSN 0898 0845 / USPS 306730 • SEATTLE WEEKLY IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY SOUND PUBLISHING, INC., 307 THIRD AVE. S., SEATTLE, WA 98104 SEATTLE WEEKLY® IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK. PERI ODICALS POSTAGE PAID AT SEATTLE, WA POSTMASTER: SEND ADDRESS CHANGES TO SEATTLE WEEKLY, 307 THIRD AVE. S., SEATTLE, WA 98104 • FOUNDED 1976.

Over 50 events in venues all around Seattle

October 9 – November 18

The Wayne Shorter Quartet Brad Mehldau Trio Charles Lloyd, Wild Man Dance Wayne Horvitz @ 60 Buy tickets now: Anat Cohen Quartet www.earshot.org Kris Davis Trio Myra Melford’s Snowy Egret 206-547-6763 Edmar Castañeda Pedrito Martinez Group The Scott Amendola Band w/ Nels Cline Chris Potter Trio Somi The Seattle Symphony Orchestra w/ Bill Frisell The Westerlies Tomeka Reid w/ Nicole Mitchell & Mike Reed Wil Blades w/ DJ Logic Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey w/ Skerik James McBride Andy Clausen Shutter Project Sarah Gazarek SRJO celebrates Billy Strayhorn Jacob Zimmerman Quintet Industrial Revelation Hugh Masekela and much more

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • SEPTEMBER 9 — 15, 2015

18 | THE PICK LIST 20 | PERFORMANCE & BOOKS 21 | VISUAL ARTS

EARSHOT

3

BROUGHT TO YOU BY

“So often the Seattle conversation about housing and development is about archetypes rather than actual people.

This is none of that.”

Celebrate!

Washington Organic Week SEPTEMBER 12-19, 2015

chatterbox the

WHERE THE HEART IS

Washington organic farms are a vital part of our local economy. Fresh, tasty food.

Good for you. Good for the environment.

WOW! is an annual campaign that connects consumers to Washington organic growers and products. WOW! offers unique opportunities for consumers to learn about organic foods: the healthiest, freshest and most environmentally friendly food available.

This week long campaign is a unique way to highlight the important role of organics in our food system bridging consumers’ health, the land and our community.

TILTHPRODUCERS.ORG/WOW THIS YEAR’S HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE:

SEATTLE WEEKLY • SEPTEM BER 9 — 15, 2015

4

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 6pm – 9pm. ORGANIC BEER, CIDER & CHOCOLATE TASTING (Lake City). Join us at a brand new location – Elliott Bay Public House & Brewery. Taste delicious beers, ciders and chocolate from Alpenfire Cider, Aslan Brewing Co, Elliot Bay Brewing, Hot Cakes, Pike Place Brewing, Sixknot Cider and Theo Chocolate. Tickets are $20 in advance or $25 at the door.

Purchase online: bit.ly/tpbccevent EAT ORGANIC FOR WOW! PLEDGE – We’ll be challenging all participants to spend the week focused on supporting local organic farmers and retailers while sharing tips on how to keep it affordable, healthy and delicious. Pledge now: bit.ly/tpwowpledge

WOW! EVENTS

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 10am – 4pm. HARVEST FAIR IN MERIDIAN PARK (Wallingford). Co-hosted with Seattle Tilth, the annual Harvest Fair is a fun, lively community festival with workshops, hands-on demonstrations, a raffle, book talks and signings...plus a brand new beer garden. Mark your calendar to spend the day enjoying sustainable food and live music with friends and family. FREE and open to the public, with voluntary donations accepted at the entrances.

More information online: bit.ly/2015harvestfair

WASHINGTON ORGANIC PRODUCTS AVAILABLE FROM OUR SPONSORS

Last week, in collaboration with the University of Washington News Lab, we published five stories about what home and housing means to people in Seattle, in their own words.

Thank you for this. So often the Seattle conversation about housing and development is conducted in shame-y, sneering, self-righteous fashion, and is about archetypes rather than actual people. This is none of that.

Joe Wolf, seattleweekly.com

unique circumstance in the U.S.

Sofie Madden, via e-mail OUR WHITE MOUNTAIN

On the blog, we noted the announcement that Mount McKinley in Alaska would be officially renamed Denali by checking in on efforts to rename Mount Rainier.

Change the name of the mountain to Mt. Fuck You White Man. Jim Mckinnon, via Facebook

White people are under attack. It’s totally unfair for a group to suddenly decide to rename a In the news section, Casey Jaywork reported on mountain that you love and is part of your culthe Honest Elections Seattle ballot measure, which ture. That would be wrong. ;) would provide voters with $100 in so-called “democracy vouchers” to be donated to candidates of Geoff Ringwald, via Facebook their choice. Readers were divided on the measure.

GRIP IT AND TIP IT Send your thoughts on Also on the blog, we wondered— this week’s issue to Prediction: New grass-roots in light of Uber and Lyft drivers letters@seattleweekly.com coming forward to say that their candidate is excited to get out and ask neighbors to take-home pay comes in well support him/her with the new voucher . . . only below the minimum wage in Seattle—whether it to find that the incumbent had already sent out was OK not to tip your driver. You’d have thought a swarm of locusts to blanket the area earlier we were asking whether Seattle should root for the that morning. As the grass-roots candidate tries 49ers this year. frantically to find a voter who hasn’t already surrendered the voucher, it soon becomes obvious Why are people tipping? I heard the tip is the sweep of the neighborhood by the well-oiled included in your ride already and is generous, so machine politician has left little if any vouchers you are way overtipping. for the newcomer.

Diane Cortese, via Facebook David Toledo, via seattleweekly.com I use Uber and find it incredibly valuable. I have never tipped. I will welcome the day when we I was delighted to read your most recent article get rid of service-industry tipping. One reason on I-122 [Honest Elections Seattle]. If passed, this initiative will revolutionize campaign finance is that people don’t carry cash as much as, say, 50 years ago. Another reason is that in concept one in Seattle, and we will set an example for the rest cannot adequately put into monetary value the of the country. Not only will more voters have service given in a consistent, standardized way— the opportunity to get involved in the political especially if the tip is supposed to supplement an process, but we will also have more candidates to unknown wage earned by a person performing a choose from. service. If the article is bringing into question the While I appreciated hearing from the opposicompensation that Uber drivers receive, let that tion for context’s sake, I would like to quickly stand on its own. Then there is the assertion that address one of [Sandeep] Kaushik’s objections. if you can afford to ride Uber, you can afford to He stated that the proposed property tax will not tip. Nope. Under no circumstance can you logifully fund the program, yet it is clearly stated in cally argue that the rider is expected to round the text of the initiative that the money can also out the earnings of the driver not knowing their come out of the general fund. I found his statewages with a tip while making a generalization ment somewhat misleading to readers. With the of the rider’s own income.

November election rapidly approaching, let’s all remember that the size of our wallets shouldn’t Christopher Breimhurst, via Facebook E determine the volume of our voices. Honest news@seattleweekly.com Elections Seattle would ensure that each regisComments have been edited for length, clarity, and tered voter has an equal voice, and that’s a fairly exhaustive quotation of Uber’s terms of services.

VOUCHING FOR I-122

news&comment Climate Crunch

SeattleBriefly

One of the country’s fastest-growing cities suddenly has a long-term water problem.

Fast takes from the news desk

BY ROBERT MCCLURE/INVESTIGATE WEST

Getting What You Paid For

T

Almost all the scenarios modeled by SPU show

big drops in what’s known in water-utility lingo as “firm yield”: the amount of water that can be reliably delivered. Even assuming a drastic cutback

edges SPU climate researcher Paul Fleming. But these simulations are clearly showing that “climate change will increase the magnitude and the likelihood of those events occurring,” Fleming says.

SPU planners will take a closer look at why the simulations are coming out this way. Are the scenarios they project realistic? For example, is that eye-popping 51 percent based on the equivalent of transporting Palm Springs’ weather to the Northwest—an unlikely event even with global warming?

Before this summer, SPU officials were confident there would be no huge water-supply problems before 2060. Their confidence was based on the 2007 output of three computer models. Now

Chester Morse Lake at the end of a dry summer.

in the amount of greenhouse gases being emitted today, Seattle is looking at a reduced firm yield in any given year of, on average, about 30 percent through 2050, according to three of these climate simulations.

And what if emissions stay on a business-asusual trajectory? Because of the vagaries of computer modeling, those three computer models come out at roughly the same number, actually a tad lower. But a 30 percent reduction in firm yield is a water manager’s nightmare. Further, the most eyepopping number came from another business-asusual model that projected a 51 percent decrease in water supplies. (Curiously, a fifth model projected a 1.4 percent increase in firm yield.)

How seriously should we take these simulations of future climate?

“The climate models are not perfect,” acknowl-

they are looking at many more models, and the accuracy of many models has improved since 2007.

All the simulations incorporate increases in population of 35 percent between 2010 and 2050. (The regional planning agency has not made projections to 2011 yet.)

Many of the regional simulations done so far were based on some of the global models that seemed likeliest to stress Seattle’s water system.

In other words, it’s possible that these model runs represent a worst-case scenario. But, by definition, we won’t know that until all the models are run.

That takes time. SPU estimates that the work will be completed sometime next year.

Then the fun begins. Utilities officials will have

to make educated guesses about what all these

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 6

Let’s all say it together: Bumbershoot was different this yearrrrrrr. Hmmph!

Well, Seattle, you are right. It was different.

Tickets were $109 a day (last year’s were $70); there were no fun, weirdo art installations hanging out; and everyone had a vape pen. After Danny Westneat’s admittedly “old man” column—entitled “Sorry about really messing up Bumbershoot for you kids”—crystallized all the latent Bumberhate into a sharable Seattle Times post, the city started doing what it loves best—complaining about how everything sucks.

The target of most of this ire was AEG, the national entertainment company that swooped in this year to take over Bumbershoot after the previous owners, the locally based One Reel (who’d run the fest since 1980), almost went bankrupt. Without the millions of dollars AEG injected into Bumbershoot at the last minute, the whole thing wouldn’t have happened.

That’s something One Reel artistic director Chris Weber wants people to remember.

“We would love for it to be less expensive, but the reason AEG is involved is because One Reel couldn’t make money,” Weber told me at the festival. “We experimented [with] years where we didn’t get as expensive headliners, and everybody complained. In 2011 we got Hall and Oates to headline, and people were just, like, ‘We want Kanye’ . . . It’s like, ‘Make it all local and make it free’ . . . well, are you going to Folklife and supporting it? We have that, and it’s awesome. This was a transition year.”

Thanks to the 80,000 people who bought tickets, there will indeed be a Bumbershoot 2016. Will you all hate it? Only time will tell. KELTON SEARS

Of Unions and Charters

The Seattle Education Association took what it’s calling an “unprecedented thunderous unanimous” vote last week to go on strike starting Wednesday, the first day of the new school year, if a contract agreement with the district isn’t reached. Sure enough, as of press time on Tuesday, no one is satisfied. The teachers’ union is very likely to strike, and Seattle Public Schools superintendent Larry Nyland has called an emergency school-board meeting that could vote to take the union to court if it does.

A common perception is that this battle is about teacher salaries and salaries alone. But teachers insist this is not just about the money. The negotiations, ongoing since May, have addressed a slew of other concerns, such as workloads for school counselors, too much standardized testing, and not enough recess time for elementary students: Until now, teachers say, there’s been a gap between how much recess students in north and south Seattle get.

“It’s not about the money,” said Washington Middle School teacher Debra Tarpley, who was picketing in front of Garfield High School last Wednesday.

And then there’s this: While Seattle’s public schools may not be open on Wednesday due to a strike the district calls “unlawful,” Seattle’s charter schools will be—even though last Friday the state Supreme Court ruled charters unconstitutional. Irony much? SARA BERNARD E news@seattleweekly.com

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • SEPTEMBER 9 — 15, 2015

PHOTOS BY PAUL JOSEPH BROWN/ECOSYSTEMPHOTO.COM FOR INVESTIGATE WEST

he weather is uncharacteristically drizzly for late summer when Seattle Public Utilities tour guide Ralph Naess, tooling along a back road in the cityprotected Cedar River watershed, suddenly looks skyward with alarm at a sudden sunbreak.

“Hey—the sun is coming out. Bad news!” Naess exclaims. Turning to visitors, he explains: “We would much prefer a dousing rain for a month.”

It’s not unusual for the folks at SPU, who are responsible for making sure Seattleites have drinking water, to get nervous this time of year. Officials carefully watch the weather and the calendar as the water level of the Chester Morse Reservoir recedes.

It’s their annual waiting game: When will the fall rains return?

However, new science is bringing a waiting game of another sort. For years, SPU assured the public that Seattle’s prized—visionary, even—watersupply system was resilient enough to weather the warming and drying effects of climate change.

Nothing to worry about for at least 45 years, they said.

But the long-term outlook for Seattle’s water supply is suddenly quite different. Quietly unveiled to regional water managers over the summer, the extremely sobering—though admittedly incomplete—calculations show that the amount of water Seattleites can count on could be reduced by as much as half over the next 35 years and by nearly three-quarters by the end of the century.

The magnitude of the potential water loss quickly caught utility managers’ attention. In short, climate is suddenly much more of a threat to Seattle’s water supply.

It wasn’t that long ago that SPU officials thought they’d gotten out ahead of the climate threat, utilizing a system of two mountain reservoirs: the Chester Morse, fed by the Cedar River just south of I-90, and the Tolt River south fork reservoir upriver from Carnation.

Showing remarkable foresight, Seattle voters in 1889 approved a plan to launch a city-run system to bring water to the city from the Cedar River. The system started operating in 1901. Today the city owns the watershed. But now we’re learning the limits of this investment as climate change worsens. SPU has run eight of a planned 40 regional climate-change simulations created by downscaling global computer models that plot the likely trajectory of climate change. The results are ugly, and as it happens, this summer may have provided a bit of a preview of what’s to come.

Scientists have long predicted that climate change will cause the Northwest to receive more rain and less snow. Less snow means more winter precipitation will flow out of the mountains right when it falls, rather than gradually melting into the watershed over the dry summer months. Hotter, drier weather causes more evaporation—and increases water demand. The scenario that played out this year included all of that.

Seattle and the Northwest saw snowpack plunge, in many areas to less than 10 percent of normal.

That was followed by a spring with relatively little

rain and an extremely hot early summer. That prompted SPU and neighboring utilities to request a voluntary 10 percent cutback on water use August 10 to avert potential water shortages in the fall.

“This year is a kind of stress test,” says Naess as he leads visitors down a trail to get a look at the Morse Reservoir. “This is what things could look like in 50 or 75 years—but who knows? It could be sooner.”

5

news&comment» Seattle Public Utilities’ Masonry Dam in the Cedar River watershed.

Climate Crunch » FROM PAGE 5 numbers really mean. Which models should they believe? Maybe they should blend the results of those closest to each other, figuring they’re most likely to be right?

Sounds reasonable. But on the other hand, climate change has progressed far faster than virtually any scientist predicted even 15 years ago. What if the 51 percent reduction in firm yield really is in store? What then?

And remember that’s just from now until 2050.

A second set of calculations using the same computer models examined 2050–2100. The average of five business-as-usual scenarios was a 51 percent reduction—the very same number that was an outlier in the 2015–2050 runs. Yowser.

At some point in the next year or two, SPU officials are likely to be sitting before the City Council explaining what the numbers show, what their best guess is as to what we face with climate change, and some suggestions for how to proceed.

“We are setting the stage for our decision-makers to wrestle with this,” said Ray Hoffman, director of SPU. “This year, as tough as it is, is a real revelation for what the future might look like.”

Already the utility is thinking about potential adaptations that could lessen the severity of future droughts. Water managers are kicking around a variety of options, although they have not done a formal alternatives analysis.

Interconnecting the Seattle, Everett, and Tacoma water systems could provide extra flexibility—but the political challenges of doing that could prove difficult, not to mention expenses that would easily reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The

city is also trying to obtain rights to new water from the north fork of the Tolt River.

But what’s been the most cost-effective method to balance the water budget historically has been water conservation, starting when water managers in the late 1980s could foresee a day when demand exceeded supply.

Seattleites’ now-legendary water-conservation efforts were strengthened by a severe 1991 water shortage which led to water-use restrictions, including the city’s first ban on lawn watering. The water cutbacks served as a wake-up call for the populace.

SPU programs, like giveaways of low-flow showerheads and block-rate pricing structure that encouraged conservation, all helped reduce the region’s thirst. One of the biggest changes in water use came from the state’s outlawing of inefficient toilets in the early 1990s.

Seattle today is using about the same amount of water as it used in the late 1950s—with double the population.

Water conservation could go a long way in helping the future water crunch. The numbers in the model refer to firm yield, which by definition means that the water system can meet all customers’ demands nearly all the time.So if we count on more frequent water cutbacks—say, once a decade, or 10 percent of the time—then by definition the numbers produced by the models won’t be so eyepopping. Still bad, but not as bad. And we’d have to make do with less water more often. That’s the bottom line.

SPU gets credit for even undertaking the modeling exercise. The utility is a longtime member of the Water Utility Climate Alliance, a

group of 10 large water utilities around the country paying special attention to climate-change planning. Similar water-supply exercises are going on in Tampa, New York City, and Portland. Most utilities aren’t doing this.

Alex Chen is doing a lot of thinking about this nowadays. SPU’s director of water planning, Chen is a thin man with a carefully trimmed beard who remembers all kinds of arcane numbers—and can quickly pull one up on his smart phone if he forgets it. “How are the demand and supply lines going to cross, and when?” he asks as Naess drives visitors around the watershed.

Chen is exploring various ideas for maximizing the water system’s performance. Maybe more water can be stored in the Cedar and Tolt reservoirs. Maybe more water that falls on Seattle itself can be reused somehow, though it’s unclear how practical or affordable that might prove. And there are really expensive solutions, like desalinization. SPU says it will first try to maximize the current system’s performance—its preferred method—but can again see a day when perhaps bigger investments will be needed to either increase supply or tamp down demand.

For all the thinking Chen does about the future, he’s also pretty focused on what’s happening this year. “I wonder if our sun is gone for the day?” he asks Naess when clouds return.

“That would be good,” Naess says. “We need rain.” E

news@seattleweekly.com

InvestigateWest is a nonprofit news agency based in Seattle and covering the Pacific Northwest.

Learn more at invw.org.

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SEATTLE WEEKLY • SEPTEM BER 9 — 15, 2015

7TH ANNUAL

ON SALE NOW!

NO V 13 & 14 BENEFITTING

TA S T E O F TU L A L I P. C O M TM

Major Appliances Since 1939

No Help From HALA New legislation to make housing affordable has little to offer Seattle’s poorest.

BY CASEY JAYWORK

coffee and serve the food and work in the grocery stores are going to live.”

And there are a lot of them. Among Seattleites earning 30 percent AMI or below, nearly twothirds are “severely cost-burdened,” paying more than half their income toward rent. Among renters at 50 to 80 percent AMI—those for whom the legislation would make rent affordable—that number drops to seven percent.

CASEY JAYWORK

T

oothpaste or deodorant?

That’s a decision Topher White has faced more than once. Unlike food or rent, his budget for deodorant is flexible. And with the majority of his income going to rent, sometimes he has to go au natural. “If I don’t leave my house for more than four hours, I don’t have to own deodorant,” he says.

White is one of roughly 110,000 renters in Seattle who are “cost-burdened”—that is, who spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent. Like White, these renters must constantly make tough choices about budget and logistics. Do you buy new work clothes or a bus pass? Repair the bicycle or pay the phone bill? Deodorant or toothpaste?

White shares a $1,375 two-bedroom apartment with a roommate on Capitol Hill. For the two of them, he says, it doesn’t take much to break the bank. “Even just something as simple as, if I don’t wear the right coat and it rains really hard—now all the sudden figuring out how to get that coat dry again turns into this balancing act where I’ve gotta find some money.”

Stories like White’s have become ubiquitous in the Emerald City, where the affordablehousing crisis has become a defining political issue this election year. Public pressure on city leaders to address Seattle’s skyrocketing rents led

to the creation of the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) committee, which released its recommendations in July.

One of these recommendations—to increase density in single-family zones, which cover the majority of the city—got canned after homeowners objected, but two others from HALA’s “grand bargain” between developers and housing advocates have now become legislative proposals before the City Council. Both would tax development to pay for affordable housing. In a press release, Mayor Ed Murray’s office says the two proposals would create 6,000 new units of affordable housing over 10 years. Together, the release continues, the two taxes are “a bold, progressive proposal where growth itself will support affordable and environmentally sustainable neighborhoods.”

One tax would institute a commercial linkage fee, which city leaders have rebranded as an “affordable-housing impact-mitigation program.” Whatever you call it, the tax—applied per square foot to commercial development— would fund “production and preservation” of affordable housing. It would be phased in over three years. The other tax is “mandatory inclusionary housing,” which would require new multifamily and mixed-use development to rent between five and eight percent of their units at affordable rates for half a century.

The commercial linkage fee, already studied and crafted into legislation, now exists as an actual bill the Council can consider and pass. The mandatory inclusionary housing tax exists only as a resolution—essentially a promise the Council could make to eventually pass an actual tax.

Topher White at home on Capitol Hill.

While the subsidy money from this pair of taxes has been trumpeted as a solution to the city’s affordable-housing crisis, the subsidies’ definition of “affordable” may strike some readers as over-optimistic: The subsidized apartments will cost, on average, $1,000 per month. This amount eats up roughly 30 percent of the budget of someone earning 60 percent of area median income, or AMI. Anyone making less that 60 percent AMI will remain costburdened even in a subsidized apartment.

For someone like White, $1,000 per month is roughly equal to all his income. “Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “I’m super-jazzed about the schoolteachers and the plumbers and the electricians and the tradespeople and the people who we absolutely, definitely need for our society to function to have affordable apartments. I just kind of want to know where the people who make the

Councilmember Mike O’Brien, the legislation’s sponsor, acknowledges that the 60 percent income cutoff targets “workforce” housing rather than poor renters per se. He points out, though, that the pair of proposed taxes is only one part of the city’s plan for lowering rents; city leaders also hope to double the city’s affordable-housing levy. Moreover, he says, the city could choose to spend development-tax revenue to subsidize lower-income housing—but with a trade-off. Since that bucket of tax revenue is finite, it can be spent widely or deeply but not both.

“The further we go down the subsidy scale,” says O’Brien, “your money buys fewer and fewer units.”

It’s a familiar problem: The people who need the most help are also the most expensive to help, and therefore the least able to get it.

White understands the trade-offs that policymakers face in allocating limited resources. He just wishes that leaders like Murray and O’Brien were more aggressive in dealing with a crisis that doesn’t really affect their own social class. “Is the goal to fix the housing crisis in Seattle?” White asks rhetorically. “Or is it to fix it enough that the poor people stop bitching, and then you can go back to the real business of running the city?” E

cjaywork@seattleweekly.com

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(9/8) Joe Whitworth Quantifying Conservation for Today’s Economy (9/8) The Moth presents: GrandSLAM Championship

TOWN HALL

CIVICS

SCIENCE

ARTS & CULTURE

COMMUNITY

(9/9)Jonathan Franzen ‘Purity: A Novel’

news&comment»

Drawing Inspiration

A little-known artist has become the toast of the Seahawks secondary.

BY DANIEL PERSON

(9/9) Leanne Brown with Rebekah Denn ‘Eat Well on $4/Day’ (9/10) SAMA Foundation: Staci Gruber How Marijuana Impacts Kids’ Brains (9/10) Thorne Lay Lessons from the Global Surge of Great Earthquakes (9/11) Daniel J. Levitin Restructuring the Brain for a Digital Age

(9/14) Arthur Benjamin Exploring the Hidden Magic of Math (9/15) Early Music Guild presents Tembembe Ensamble Continuo Labyrinth in the Guitar

COURTESY OF KEEGAN HALL

(9/14) Elliott Bay Book Company: Salman Rushdie ‘Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights’ Keegan Hall says his mother’s passing led him to start drawing again.

Hall at work on “The Huddle.”

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K

eegan Hall, 34, of Kirkland, grew up in a single-wide trailer in Sumner, went to the University of Washington to study visual art, and upon graduating in 2003 quit drawing “cold turkey.”

He loved sports growing up, even though his family rarely had the money to go to games in Seattle. His favorite Seahawk was Steve Largent. His favorite basketball player was Michael Jordan.

Out of college, he got a job with the Seattle Supersonics in the sales department. He advanced over the years, eventually becoming the team’s top sales rep—for season tickets, corporate suites, things like that.

From his position, he saw the organization implode from the inside. He couldn’t fault Howard Schultz’s business decision to sell the team.

“When your business is losing $20 million, you got to sell it or do something,” he says.

He met the new owner, Clay Bennett. “He assured me nothing would happen to the team.”

By chance, during a trip to Las Vegas, he ran into then-NBA commissioner David Stern. “He said, ‘You guys are fine.’ ” Then the team moved to Oklahoma City and Hall was out of a job. That did not inspire him to start making art again.

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He went back to school, earned an MBA, then went to work at a series of startups. But sports remained an important part of his life. He watched as Mariners teams floundered and the Seahawks built a Super Bowl-caliber team. In 2010 the Seahawks drafted strong safety Kam Chancellor. In 2011, Richard Sherman. In 2012, Russell Wilson.

While the Hawks were building a championship team, Hall’s mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. She beat it once, but it returned last fall. On a Friday in November, she said she wasn’t feeling well. “She went to the hospital on Saturday and died on Sunday,” Hall says.

For three months after her death, more than 10

years after graduating from art school, he still didn’t feel like drawing.

But then, in February, he did. His mom had always loved his artwork, and had it hung up around her condo.

“It was a culmination of . . . connecting the dots about what made her so happy. Something was pulling me to draw that day,” he says.

But he didn’t know what to draw.

Michael Jordan came to mind. So he drew Michael Jordan, midair in the midst of a fadeaway jumper. He shared the drawing on Facebook,

and the response was overwhelmingly positive.

He asked for suggestions on whom he should draw next, and a friend requested Chancellor, saying he’d pay $100 for it.

So he drew Chancellor. It took him, he estimates, about 30 hours. Sketching, fixing, fillingin. When he was done, he shared the drawing on Instagram and tagged Chancellor in the post, just in the hope he’d see it, nothing more.

Much to Hall’s surprise, Chancellor not only saw the artwork, but shared it and commissioned another. “S/o to the talented @Keegan.

Hall for this pencil drawing. Can’t wait to see the final touches on the new one to come,” the safety wrote.

Keegan couldn’t believe that Chancellor recognized him. And that he’d stopped drawing for so many years.

Chancellor’s social media reach was such that lots of people saw the work, and came calling.

From his time at the Sonics, Hall had connections with the Seattle Storm. When they saw his drawings, they asked if he could do some for them. They commissioned a drawing of Sue Bird and top draft pick Jewell Loyd. The drawing is now the centerpiece of the team’s season-ticket renewel campaign. Video of Hall working on the drawing, time-lapsed, is shown at Storm games during warm-ups.

As thanks for his work, the team gave Hall courtside seats for a game. By chance he was seated next to Russell Wilson and his girlfriend Ciara.

“It’s ridiculous. This whole thing is kind of ridiculous,” he says.

He posted selfies of the three on Instagram. He drew Clint Dempsey. He drew Felix Hernandez.

Sometime this past spring, expecting nothing to come of it, he reached out to Richard Sherman to see if the star cornerback wanted to collaborate on a charity event. Sherman was into it.

“Both these guys, Kam and Richard, are so thankful. It’s cool to see they care about the normal guys,” Hall says.

The result of the collaboration goes on sale Friday: 200 limited-edition prints of his drawing “The Huddle,” signed by both him and Sherman, for $200 a pop. The proceeds will go to Sherman’s Blanket Coverage, which provides school supplies to low-income kids.

The drawing depicts the Seahawks’ defense in, well, the huddle, with Sherman and Earl Thomas III in the foreground. You can see a bit of Chancellor, too.

When the Seahawks start the regular season

against the Rams in St. Louis on Sunday, there’s a good chance Chancellor won’t be in the huddle.

He’s holding out over a contract dispute with the team. Such are the vagaries of professional sports.

Such are the vagaries of life.

This time last year, Hall wasn’t even thinking about drawing. “This whole thing has been bizarre over the last six months. I don’t know if it was divine intervention or my mom was pulling strings,” Hall muses. “I’ve always been a believer of, if you’re a good person, good things will happen.” E

dperson@seattleweekly.com

The Attorney Who Got Suspended for Making Animal Sounds

T

JOSE TRUJILO

SEATTLELAND

siders Abele a good attorney thinks thatsome judges are unaware of her condition.

“I have experienced Kathryn occasionally making a loud outburst in my office,” the attorney says in an e-mail. “This was unrelated to anger or frustration, but rather a product of pain she experiences when she moves. I have observed this when she came in or out of the office, or when shifting her position while sitting. She has typically requested a special chair out of the office to make sitting more comfortable. The noises are loud and can be rather alarming.”

He adds that “I definitely believe that Kathryn’s height and appearance at times can be intimidating for others interacting with her . . . it’s also quite possible that Kathryn is sensitive to this issue and may be especially sensitive to times where she perceives she is being treated differently. This may well result in short-term outbursts.”

Besides violating rules of conduct, Abele was also found by the bar to have made a false report to Seattle police. At the King County Courthouse, she argued with two courtroom marshals and pushed between them to walk away. She spun about and accused one marshal of tripping her, then called 911.

A Seattle police officer reviewed security video and concluded that no one had tripped the attorney. He thought she forced her way between the marshals when she could have easily gone around. No charges were filed. But the Bar Association claimed she knowingly made false or misleading statements to the officer.

“I truly believed I was tripped. I was crying hysterically because I couldn’t believe a [marshal] would do that,” Abele says. “There was a lay witness who testified [at the bar hearing] that he saw the [marshal] stick his leg out to trip me, but the hearing examiner said he wasn’t credible.”

Two attorneys who testified on her behalf contended she was misportrayed by others. But “It didn’t matter,” Abele says. “The bar investigator sent e-mails to the sheriffs in King and Snohomish county after receiving a complaint by an opposing party calling me a Neanderthal.

The e-mails asked them to report any issue they had with me. The problem with the request to have people watch me was there was no basis for it” and invited retaliation. “It was, to say, a witch-hunt.”

Now without the license she obtained in 2002, Abele, in her late 50s, will be readmitted once the Bar Association decides she is “fit to practice” again. Meanwhile, she’s asked the high court to reconsider its decision. “I am not bitter,” Abele says, “just very sad.” E

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he scales of justice tend to tip when Kathryn Abele enters a Seattle courtroom. That’s not just because the Mill Creek attorney is an imposing figure at the litigants’ table. “Here it is,” she tells me. “I’m 6-3, 300 pounds, and loud.”

She’s a heavyweight fighter for the parents and children she represents in her family practice. “I care about my clients,” she says. “I worked hard for them and wanted only the best for them.”

Then again, her supersize court persona can also affect the outcome of cases, including her own, she thinks. Last week, it was mostly Abele’s courthouse demeanor, including bellowing outcries, that perBY RICK ANDERSON suaded the State Supreme Court to unanimously (9-0) uphold the suspension of her bar license for one year.

Abele—who was appealing two counts of misconduct brought by the State Bar Association in 2013—says she was suspended “because of my personality.” She definitely has one.

Among the recent claims against her is her alleged courtroom bullying tactics. She has yelled at judges, mocked their rulings, and said of a King County Court Protection Unit marshal, “Someone should fart in [his] face.”

When judges threatened her with contempt, she sometimes offered theatrical retorts. In one instance, she held her hands as if being handcuffed and fretted aloud, “I’m going to jail.

I’m going to jail.” After a recess was called in another hearing, a judge reported, Abele inexplicably screamed so loud it could be heard in other parts of the courthouse.

She also made animal noises in court, a judge claimed. Supreme Court Justice Charles Wiggins, in the court’s written opinion last week, said Snohomish County judge Anita Farris stated that Abele made “loud noises that sounded like an animal being killed.” In her 30 years as an attorney and judge, Farris said, “I have never heard any lawyer make any kind of noise, or do anything, like that before.”

Farris later found Abele in contempt for “your screaming, yelling, jumping up and down in my courtroom, stomping and then stomping out and refusing to represent your client.” Abele asked her what the fine was so she could just pay it and move on.

Abele can’t always hear herself due to internal deafness resulting from a childhood illness, she says. She also suffers from painful arthritic hips. A lawyer friend who con-

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HOMES Ultra-conservative Ultra-conservative Utah has all Utah but wiped out chronic homelessness. Why can’t we? has all but wiped out

By Ellis E. Conklin chronic homelessness. man named Ray sits in the shady weeds under the I-5 we? freewayWhy near Borencan’t Avenue. Beside him, a tattered couch

Grace Mary Manor houses many of Salt Lake City’s chronically homeless.

resides atop a mottled carpet where a Hershey bar lies in a melted heap. Wide-set hazel eyes sit behind oval-framed lenses that Ray says he found on a chair in Occidental Park. His dark-brown hair is overgrown and untamed, and crumbs from his Subway turkey sandwich have made a mess of the baggy black pants that cover his long, pole-thin legs. He says he’s 54 and has been living hand-to-mouth for two years, most of the time in Eugene, Portland, or Seattle.

“Sometimes I go to a shelter, but I’d rather be out here when the weather’s good, plus they kicked me out. Said I had a screw loose or something like that,” says Ray, amid the honk and hiss of the freeway above. Hands slightly trembling as he clutches his handrolled cigarette between his fingers, Ray slaps on his St. Louis Cardinals cap, its red beak badly frayed. “Man, I used to work there in a cement plant, south of town. That was a long time ago. I’d like to get back there someday. Just need a little dough.”

“Don’t listen to him, he’s a crazy asshole,” yells a camp compatriot kiddingly.

With that, Ray, with several top teeth missing, smiles like a jack-o’-lantern, and one can sense that some form of mental illness envelops him. Still, when he enthuses in a loud, raspy voice, “How ’bout those Red Birds,” even a stranger might glimpse the illuminant personality that may have bloomed as a younger man.

Ray is a member of a growing community: a homeless population that has swelled by 21 percent in King County in the past year alone. At this point, only New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas have greater numbers of people living on the streets than we do.

The signs of this intractable social ill become more apparent by the day: the dispossessed sleeping beneath mottled blankets in downtown alleyways and trash-strewn parks, under freeway ramps and makeshift camps.

“In the last 18 months, it has really exploded,” observers Daniel Malone, the new director of the Downtown Emergency Services Center, “and we are not keeping pace by increasing the number of shelter beds or psychiatric beds.”

Washington ranks 47th of the 50 states in access to psychiatric beds, according to the Washington State Institute for Public Policy—even though much of the $90 million the state slashed from the mental-health-care system during the recession-ridden years of 2009 to 2013 has been restored.

“By not investing more heavily in mental-health treatment, we are generating more and more chronically homeless people,” opines Vince Matulionis of the United Way of King County. He adds, “It feels a lot worse now, like the homeless are far more visible in Seattle.”

No one knows the numbers for sure, but it’s clear to the Washington State Department of Transportation that there’s been a sharp spike in the number of homeless people, most probably the chronically homeless, who in burgeoning numbers are taking temporary root under I-5 in and around Seattle.

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 12

KAIA D’ALBORA

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT

A

Encampments remain a sign of Seattle’s failure to address the current crisis.

SEATTLE WEEKLY • SEPTEM BER 9 — 15, 2015

12

Far from Seattle, beneath a gleaming Utah sun, Lloyd Pendleton climbs into his light-brown F-150 Ford pickup on a warm mid-August morning, guns the engine, and heads south from the airport. In the distance the craggy Wasatch range beckons, while the statue of the angel Moroni prevails over Salt Lake City’s skyline, his golden trumpet raised atop the highest spire of the Salt Lake Temple, a majestic granite creation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

A devout Mormon, at 75 Pendleton still works endless hours, to his wife’s occasional dismay, to put an end to chronic homelessness in Utah, among the reddest states in the Union. And he’s become quite famous for his efforts. As we begin a day-long tour of attractive apartment complexes that today house the state’s most incorrigible homeless population, he attributes the recent spate of glowing national media attention to a speech he gave in Casper, Wyoming.

“It was in November 2013,” Pendleton begins. “I was at a luncheon of business and political leaders, and I told them how we were eliminating chronic homelessness by giving them permanent housing and that it was working. So anyway, the story in the Casper paper got picked up by NPR, and next thing I know I was getting calls from all over the country.”

“So in 2003 at a big meeting in Chicago, there were all these homeless providers who were saying they wanted to end homelessness in 10 years,” recounts Pendleton. “And I thought, ‘What are you guys smoking?’ I didn’t think it could be done, because there are too many personal choices—alcohol, drugs, and all that.”

At that meeting, Pendleton was introduced to a program called Housing First, which finds the homeless houses first and takes care of their other needs later. “Yeah, I had an epiphany,” he recalls. “I’m flying back here, and I thought that if there’s any state that could do this, it would be Utah. We are collaborative, caring, and very compassionate.”

Pendleton managed to mobilize the Mor-

needs to make the homeless “housing-ready”— meaning they should be placed in temporary crisis shelters or halfway houses and complete drug-rehabilitation treatment or mental-health counseling or both before they can expect to live permanently in their own apartment. This concept, sometimes called “linear residential treatment” or “continuum of care,” often fails because very few chronically homeless people ever complete the work required to become “ready.”

“If you have to worry where you’re going to be sleeping tonight, you’re not going to care about dealing with staying clean,” Pendleton explains as we pass strip malls filled with Mexican food trucks and a scatter of old, wood-peeling clapboard houses on the city’s poorer west side.

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BRIAN NICHOLSON

“They cut the fences to get in there,” says Jim McBride, who oversees the WSDOT highway crews charged with cleaning up the areas. “We see them stretching all the way from Ravenna at 50th and 45th Streets way down to the Duwamish Bridge. You have hypodermic needles, human waste. We have a terrible time keeping employees. I’m getting ready to retire.

You can only take this for so long.”

Chloe Gale is the co-director of REACH, a nonprofit group created by the King County Public Health Department, whose 40 workers try to connect the unsheltered homeless with socialservice agencies. A kind, thoughtful woman with long hair streaked with gray, she says the city’s rental market, where vacancy rates are at an alltime low, has made things worse.

Citing studies that show that a $100 increase in rent can result in a 15 percent increase in homelessness, she says, “There’s so much development now. They used to camp under the Viaduct, but they got flushed out of there because of the construction, so then they started moving more into downtown and up to Capitol Hill. But now with all the development going on, they’re going under the bridges and freeways.”

“There’s a lot of misconception about these people,” says REACH employeee Kelly Craig. “I’ve been to camps under the freeway near Eastlake, and I’ve seen camps with people growing vegetables and flowers, beautiful little camps. There was one camp in the Queen Anne greenbelt where there was an umbrella, a little table, and all the shoes lined up neatly outside this wooden structure.”

To get into a real home, though, is a Herculean task for many of these chronically homeless, requiring them to first pass through a gauntlet of social programs to get them “housing-ready.” Individual success stories exist, but the numbers don’t lie: The system is not working. Most of it, anyway.

“We’ve done some innovative things like 1811 [Eastlake],” says Malone of a decade-old pilot program that provides permanent housing for the chronically homeless. “But we haven’t invested enough to scale. Utah came here and learned how to do it, and then they really went back and took it to scale.”

In January, Pendleton even landed an invite to The Daily Show, telling correspondent Hasan Minhaj “We did it by giving homes to homeless people.”

An elegant man with silvery hair and pale blue eyes, Pendleton, who could be mistaken for Senator Harry Reid, is trim and decorous in gray trousers, a button-down shirt, and cinnamon-colored cowboy boots. It’s the same dapper look he sported in the late 1960s as a financial analyst for the Ford Motor Company, where he was hired straight out of school after earning an MBA from Brigham Young University.

“I remember feeling like a country hick when I was sitting around with all these guys from Yale and Harvard at headquarters [in Dearborn, Michigan]. But none of them out-worked me.”

As director of Utah’s Homeless Task Force, Lloyd Pendleton, top left, spearheaded the Housing First program that resulted in housing like the Bud Bailey Apartments, lower left. In Seattle, above, most of the chronically homeless fend for themselves.

COURTESY OF LLOYD PENDLETON

Homes for the Homeless » FROM PAGE 11

Raised on a small cattle ranch and dairy farm in a remote desert town on the far western fringe of Utah, it took a long while for Pendleton to reject the notion that a person living on the street wasn’t simply lazy and indolent and had only himself to blame for his plight.

“When I was 6 or 7, I was milking the cows, chopping wood, even driving a truck out there in Vernon,” remembers Pendleton. “I was used to hard work, and so I’d tell these homeless guys, ‘You lazy bums. Go get a job.’ I figured that’s all they needed.”

Pendleton is a big name in the Beehive State.

After leaving Ford, he went to work managing the L.D.S. Church Welfare Department, a huge Salt City corporation which helps church members with food, money, and a place to live if they lose their job or home. “This is where I was exposed to the homelessness, and I got to know these people and their problems,” he says.

“I learned their stories, and when I found that they’re human just like me, we became brothers and sisters.”

Pendleton’s work at the charity caught the attention of then-Gov. Jon Huntsman, who convinced him to take the job as director of Utah’s Homeless Task Force.

mon Church, unite homeless-services providers throughout the state, and convince many skeptical politicians back in 2005 that in 10 years he would virtually eradicate the problem of chronic homelessness, defined as someone who has spent at least a year living on the streets and has other problems as well: a mental illness, substance abuse, or a physical disability.

Of the nearly 600,000 homeless people in the U.S., the vast majority, some 85 percent, spend relatively short periods of time (“the episodic homeless,” they are often called) sleeping in shelters and the like, according to the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. The remaining 15 percent are the real desperadoes—the ones who have fallen so far that night after night spent in a soggy blanket must suffice for a permanent home.

In 2005, Utah was home to 1,932 chronically homeless people. Today there are 178—a remarkable 91 percent drop statewide.

“It can be done. It’s not rocket science,” says Pendleton. “You just need the political will.”

What Utah did was discard the old paradigm

long employed by social-service agencies nationwide, which, in essence, dictates that first one

“Everyone living on the streets deserves a home, and we operate on the belief that no one should have to prove that they are ready or worthy of residing in their own place.”

The new model emerged from an extensive study that began in 1992 under the direction of a New York University psychologist named Sam Tsemberis. He and his associates, a group called Pathways to Housing, provided apartments in Manhattan and Westchester County, N.Y., to 242 chronically homeless individuals.

Few restrictions were imposed. No tests to take, no rehabilitation programs to attend, no forms to fill out. The longtime street denizens could still drink, take drugs, whatever, as long as they didn’t hurt anyone or bother their neighbors.

Let them decide, the thinking went, whether they wanted to avail themselves of free counseling, health care, or substance-abuse treatment.

What Tsemberis discovered is that permanent housing can actually foster sobriety and stability, not the other way around. The results were amazing. Five years later, 88 percent of the participants were still in their apartments, and the costs of their care had been dramatically reduced.

One study, in fact, found that each New York City homeless individual suffering from a mental illness—which is the reality for a large segment of the chronically homeless population—costs an average of $40,449 a year in emergency-room visits, police intervention, incarceration, and shelter expenses. Getting that individual into permanent supportive housing, though, saved taxpayers an average of $16,282.

And in Utah, says Pendleton, the price tag of providing an apartment and case workers to Hous-

ing First clients is about $11,000 a year, compared to $17,000 annually if they remain on the streets.

Tsemberis told Seattle Weekly in a recent telephone interview that “The system we have had is that if you see someone on the street, well, then, the only solution is to get them detoxed or something. The key to all this is that we have to treat the chronically homeless as human beings . . . Housing First has showed us that no one has to be housing-ready.”

Following its early success in New York City, the Housing First idea caught fire. By 2003, the Bush Administration had bought in and promoted the idea while encouraging communities nationwide to draft a detailed “Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness” by the year 2015. Seattle, says Tsemberis, was one of the first cities to embrace Housing First, but “never took it to scale.” He adds, “No one has made the kind of political commitment to the program the way Utah did.”

But, as Pendleton can attest, it is not an easy sell. “Landlords and even the politicians said to me, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t put alcoholics and drug users right into permanent housing,’ ” Pendleton recalls. “There was a lot of skepticism, so finally I had an idea: Let’s run a small test pilot program.

“So we went out and found the worst of worst, people on streets for many years, people with serious mental illness—the very worst. And then we [the task force] convinced landlords to give them apartments, and we [the state of Utah] gave them health care and other services. There were 17 people in the pilot, and after 22 months, they were all still in those apartments. Oh yeah, we all became true believers after that.”

Squeezing a packet of ketchup onto a platter of

Back in Salt Lake City, Pendleton pulls up to

the Sunrise Metro Apartments and is greeted warmly by the staff. The handsome four-story brick building opened in 2007, the first of five Housing First projects built in Salt Lake City, multimillion-dollar structures funded with state, local, and federal money and private donations.

About 100 formerly homeless people live here and pay $50 a month, or 30 percent of their income, whichever is more.

“There has to be accountability,” says Pendleton.

“That’s why they pay a little rent. And if they don’t pay, they are evicted. Or if they are violent, they are evicted.” (The eviction rate, though, is low: only 6 percent each year of the more than 600 residents in the five Housing First complexes.)

Pendleton says that about 10 percent of the participants leave the program to strike out on their own, and that the vast majority are successful in forging a new independent life. Also, each participant has a caseworker to help them stay on the straight and narrow and perhaps assist them in finding a job, though they still get to keep their apartment if that doesn’t work out. Same goes if they keep abusing drugs or alcohol.

The one- and two-bedroom apartments are the kind you might see in a college dormitory.

There’s a nice wooden table and chairs, a plush leather chair, a bed, dishes, towels, a walk-in closet, a refrigerator, a sink, and a stove, which comes with a 15-minute timer “so they don’t burn the place down,” says Nils Abramson, one of Sunset’s five caseworkers.

Most of the furniture is donated by the church, as is the food, which residents pick up weekly in the downstairs pantry. Outside, there’s a courtyard, beautifully landscaped, where volley-

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 14

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fries at a Seattle diner last month, Bill Hopson has a lot to say about the sorry state of homelessness in his city.

“In this town, it’s difficult to get the political community interested in anything but homeless families, homeless veterans, and homeless children. They got plans for all them, but there’s never been one to end chronic homelessness,” says Hobson, who retired in July after 31 years running the Downtown Emergency Services Center, the city’s largest nonprofit dealing with the homeless.

Hobson is well respected among the city’s socialservice providers. Seattle mayors dating back to Norm Rice have made certain to return his calls.

Lloyd Pendleton himself came a-calling during a Seattle visit in 2004, looking for advice when he was putting the final touches on Utah’s ambitious Housing First plan, aware of Hopson’s involvement in the late 1990s in one of the earliest permanent supportive-housing units in the nation: 1811 Eastlake, an $11.2 million project for 75 homeless men and women identified as chronic alcoholics.

“He was my mentor,” says Pendleton. “When he came to Utah and saw what we’d done, I remember Bill said to me, ‘I’d kill for the kind of collaboration you’d had here. In Seattle, everyone does their own thing.’ ” Hobson goes on. “This town I think is pretty progressive, but in the Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness, we ignored federal policy. We didn’t do a thing about the chronically homeless, and that’s been a big mistake. Study after study has shown that leaving the chronically homeless on the street is a lot more expensive than building affordable housing. It is an investment against greater downstream costs.

“For every 100 low-income households in King County, there are 15 apartments that are affordable. We got rid of all the flophouses and SRO’s [single-room occupancy units] decades

ago, and they are now all high-end condos. I don’t fault building a more livable, attractive city, but we didn’t realize the cost of displacement.

Until we turn this around and invest heavily in affordable, permanent housing for the homeless, we’ll never make any dramatic impact on people sleeping in the streets, living in shelters, in tents.”

The United Way’s Matulionis was part of the group that launched King County’s Ten-Year Plan to End Homeless, a report that he concedes paid scant attention to the need for permanent supportive housing for the chronically homeless—something that he says has been rectified in the updated “July 2015 to July 2019 Strategic Plan” prepared by the Seattle/King County Committee to End Homelessness.

The revised plan states, “Our goal is for all chronically homeless adults to be housed or in a shelter and on a pathway to housing. This will require significant new investment in Permanent Supportive Housing, the evidence-based solution to chronic homelessness.”

To meet this goal would require the city and county to rethink its priorities. In 2014, the city spent $40.8 million on various homeless services, spread across 183 contracts and 60 agencies. Of that, $28.7 million went toward intervention, such as emergency shelter, case management, outreach programs, and health care. Another $7 million was allocated toward prevention that included short-term rental assistance and getting landlords to accept homeless people with rentalassistance vouchers. Only about $7.6 million went to building permanent housing.

Sola Plumacher, Community Support & Assistance Division Director for the city’s Department of Human Resources, says DHS oversees 1,085 permanent housing units in Seattle, with about half dedicated to the chronically homeless. “We need at least 3,000 more units,” she estimates.

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Homes for the Homeless » FROM PAGE 13

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ball tournaments are played. In one corner of the commons, a memorial garden has been planted in honor of residents who have died.

About 25 percent of the residents in the Housing First network have low-paying jobs.

The rest are on Social Security Disability or Supplemental Security Income.

For many, the adjustment is difficult. “Some of the residents keep their rooms immaculate.

Others trash it. It’s like they’re still living in a homeless camp,” says Abramson. “We’ve had people living here for four years, and they are still sleeping on the floor, and they’re still hoarding food or getting it out of garbage dumpsters, even though it’s free here.”

Pendleton sees a resident he knows, Terri. He asks what she’s up to. “I’m just looking for a psychiatrist. They say I’m insane,” she replies. She’s joking, but like everyone here, she’s got issues.

Raised by a single mother, an alcoholic, in Fort Collins, Colorado, Terri had an abusive marriage, her life dragged further down by booze and drugs. She’s been living outdoors for more than a year, and after a few months at the Road House, a huge 800-bed shelter in Salt Lake City, she managed to get herself into Sunrise. “It’s hard. It takes a while to realize you’re safe,” she says.

Over at Grace Mary Manor, home to 84 residents—many of them afflicted with disabling conditions: cancer, severe depression and anxiety, brain injuries—caseworker Kay Luther says, “There are no requirements [in Housing First] to attend addiction treatment or mental-health counseling. My job is to treat them with unconditional positive regard. We do everything we can for them, but we’re not disciplinarians. All we ask is that they pay their rent and be good neighbors.”

It’s not a bad life at Grace, where the average resident was homeless for eight years before entering the Housing First facility. There’s a gym, a huge barbecue underneath the gazebo, a library with bay windows and comfy leather chairs.

Caseworkers, who are required to check in with their clients at least once a day, see their share of desperation. Says Luther: “These are people who have destroyed every relationship in their lives.”

Darren Deane is a caseworker at Palmer Court, a converted Holiday Inn, where one resident has scrawled this note on his door: “I’m already disturbed, so please come in.” Deane reflects, “You know, we never see the family until they die, and then the relatives come. And they’ll say things like, ‘I’m so glad Uncle Ed died here. We’re so grateful that he could spend his final years here.” ’ Seattle has recently taken steps toward address-

ing its homeless population in earnest. Earlier this year, Mayor Ed Murray made waves when he announced what, compared to Pendleton’s program, is a modest plan to install three tent cities to house 200 of Seattle’s homeless. It received mixed reviews. Some complained that they didn’t want encampments in their neighborhoods, but most agreed that something needed to be done.

“It’s absolutely a Band-Aid approach, but we have to do it,” stresses Plumacher.

As Murray told the Weekly last month, “Homeless encampments are a solution to nothing but a safer night for some. I don’t want them dying or getting killed out there.”

Hopson says we must do more. “The Mayor and the [King] County Executive, and their staffs, they are all singing the right music, but their recommendations are tepid,” he argues.

“What we are doing is not nearly enough. It will take over a billion dollars to do what’s needed to

build enough affordable housing in King County to handle the homeless.”

Even if the city could secure the funds, there remains the issue of placing such housing. The bitter fight between community activists and the city over the placement of Murray’s tent cities signals that this would be no easy task. In this regard, bright-blue Seattle might not be that different from cherry-red Salt Lake City.

“Seattle has this reputation for being generous, and that’s the reason why the homeless are coming here,” Hobson says. “That’s bullshit. We are no different than any other metropolitan area.”

Before entering the Kelly Benson Apartments

in West Valley City, a charming 59-unit complex on the outskirts of Salt Lake City that caters to once-homeless people 55 and older, Pendleton says pridefully. “We have no labels here. There is nothing to indicate that this is a place where the chronically homeless live.”

Of all the buildings in Housing First’s portfolio, this was the most challenging endeavor. “We encountered a lot of not-in-my-neighborhood sentiment here. There’s an elementary school nearby, and there were people who figured the kids were going to be raped and pillaged. We made a big mistake here, not paving the way first with the community.”

Pendleton says he learned from that experience that you have to forge a consensus in the beginning—get community leaders on board and invite neighborhood association groups, church pastors, and local elected officials to visit the site of the proposed facility, or even show them other places where the program has succeeded.

“It all worked out, though, in the end. Kelly Benson is part of the neighborhood now,” exults Pendleton. “We have families who bring food and clothing in. The kids wave to the residents on their way to school.”

One of those residents is Russell Flowers, a big, burly man who found his way to Utah’s capital city in 2009. The recession was at full boil and Flowers wasn’t making it in Memphis. He knew Utah had—and still has—one of the nation’s lowest unemployment rates, and he figured he might find work at the Kennecott Utah Copper Corporation’s Bingham Canyon Mine, one of the largest open-pit copper mines in the world, a 15-minute drive southwest of Salt Lake City.

“I did demolition work in Memphis. Figured they can use me at the mine,” he says inside the sun-washed community room at Kelly Benson. “I had $1,600 with me when I left and the money got stolen. I got here with 40 cents in my pocket.”

Flowers says he found a shelter near the Salt Lake City bus depot and landed odd jobs at construction sites and shoveling snow in Park City.

“Then I got an apartment until the money ran out, and then [in 2009] I had the heart attack.” For two years he bounced from shelters to group homes, spending many a night outdoors, until coming to Kelly Benson in 2011, where he pays $271 from the $936 in Permanent Disability he collects monthly. “My daddy used to say ‘People shy away from people who get sick, so don’t get sick.’ ” Like under-the-freeway Ray, Flowers yearns someday to get back to the city he came from. “But I don’t know if that’s going to ever going to happen.”

Pendleton gives Flowers a pat on the back and asks him whether he’d like to make a trip with him to Los Angeles in mid-September and speak at a conference of homeless providers about his experiences in the Housing First program.

Flowers eagerly accepts. “It’d be nice to get out of here for a while,” he tells Pendleton. “I could use a change of scenery.” E

econklin@seattleweekly.com

food&drink

Doorstep Dining

FoodNews

BY NICOLE SPRINKLE

The pros and cons of five Seattle gourmet delivery services.

Two Canlis chefs have joined forces to create Northwest Provisions, a pop-up restaurant series that sources ingredients within a two-hour radius of Seattle.

Their first dinner is set for Sun., Sept. 13 at 6 p.m. (or 5:30 if you want to hang out in the cocktail lounge) at Foundation at 2218 Western Ave. The four-course menu includes scallops with apple, strawberry, fennel, and smoked lava salt, and chicken, miso mushroom, and “Forbidden Rice.” Purchase tickets— $40/$70 with wine pairing—at dyne.com. An October event is in the works.

BY JEFF RINDSKOPF

T

he gourmet food-delivery boom is going strong, appealing equally to industrious tech workers and couchridden stoners—in other words, to Seattleites. Here are some of the most popular services founded in our fine city and its ’burbs, and how they stack up against one another.

Eat Local offers an impressive roster of diverse

Fresh and Ready Meals features a rotating roster

with the complicated delivery process. The foods come in reusable plastic containers inside a cooler, and all of it is picked up the next delivery date in your area. You incur a $4.50 charge per item you fail to return. I got mighty tired of having their cooler and containers gathering dust in my home for two weeks. Worse still, the deliveryman was next to no help explaining how the process works for a first-time customer.

I had orange sesame scallops that had to be pan-fried before serving—understandable, since scallops don’t hold up well to reheating. They came alongside a mandarin quinoa salad that was a bit bland on its own but a perfect complement to the flavorful scallops. Next came a golden beet

Maven Meals delivers their dishes for a $4.25 fee no matter the size of your order each Tuesday and Wednesday, depending upon your ZIP code.

Most menu items are foods you’d find at any mid-range hipster restaurant, familiar-sounding meals made interesting with unusual flavors and ingredients. The service prides itself on sustainable, healthy meals that can be made to accommodate most dietary restrictions. I was impressed by the variety of their dishes but less impressed

salad that was apparently supposed to come with some sort of creamy orecchiette, of which there was none. As it was, it was all beet and little else, and I gave up halfway through.

My order came with two sweets, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. The mighty Maven mini-bar was as chewy and sweet as it was alliterative, and the soft peanut-butter cookie was delicious and dotted with granules of sugary

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 16

Eat a salmon sandwich and help save Alaska’s Bristol Bay from a proposed mining operation. While supplies last, Grand Central Bakery is serving “The Bristol Bay Wild Salmon Sandwich”: cream cheese, lightly smoked wild sockeye salmon, capers, onion, local vine-ripened tomato, and a squeeze of lemon. $1 for every sandwich bought goes to the Chef’s Collaborative, a national organization of chefs who take on important food issues, including this one. Visit grandcentralbakery.com. E morningfoodnews@gmail.com

TheWeeklyDish

Fresh-from-the-garden pesto.

BY NICOLE SPRINKLE

It’s funny how certain foods become passé. I’m thinking specifically of pesto, all the rage 15 years ago (maybe more). It still shows up from time to time on restaurant menus, usually as a bit player rather than on center stage.

But with beautiful basil plants still thriving in my garden and my daughter’s recent interest in pesto via a jar of it from Trader Joe’s (go figure), it seemed high time to revisit this simple, delicious sauce that had no real reason ever to go out of fashion. Pesto is such a great thing to make with kids on many different levels. For starters, they get to experience going outside and picking a living, growing thing out of the dirt—and then see it turn into the very food they eat in mere minutes. They also get to do some fairly easy cooking tasks, like grating Parmesan cheese, pouring olive oil, adding salt and pine nuts, and pushing the button on the food processor as it all gets emulsified into the fragrant, grass-green resulting mixture. (Or using a pestle and mortar, if you’re really gung-ho.) The other nice thing about pesto is that while ratios are important, it allows for leeway, providing kids the opportunity to taste as they go along, adjusting here and there to get the flavor just so, which is such an important, underrated part of cooking. Plus, pesto needs no actual heat, so kids realize that sometimes the very best-tasting things come just from fresh, unadulterated ingredients. And of course there’s the ultimate reward: spooning it into a bowl of piping-hot pasta. Got basil? Got kids? Make some pesto. E

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • SEPTEMBER 9 — 15, 2015

Kitchen Door Meals has the same sort of familiar American-classic dishes as Fresh and Ready Meals, but with greater variety and, in my experience, greater success. Orders must be placed by 9 p.m. on Saturday for delivery the following Tuesday, and there’s an $8 delivery fee. My order was dropped off promptly around mail time with a thank-you note and a delectable complimentary chocolate-chip cookie. That was a good start.

My mint dressing salad was truly delicious, a savory-sweet affair with chicken, grapes, and goat cheese. The next meal was a braised pork shoulder sugo with broccolini and mashed potatoes, which refused to cook through evenly until I finally zapped it in the microwave for upward of 10 minutes. Thankfully, the reheating process couldn’t spoil the flavor or texture. The pork was delicious, basking in hearty gravy that mixed well with the potatoes. The whole dish, in fact, was almost hearty to a fault. Almost.

The final entrée came close to ruining the whole experience. Perhaps the spinach lasagna didn’t reheat properly, because the textures were all off. It was like taking a bite out of a hunk of oily melted cheese sculpted to resemble a lasagna. The flavors of the pasta and spinach were lost in this oily assault, and I couldn’t even finish the plate. Despite their lasagna folly, I can’t condemn Kitchen Door Meals for their caring service and the two delicious meals out of three I tried. kitchendoormeals.com

COURTESY OF KITCHEN DOOR MEALS

of Italian and Americana-style dishes, delivered to homes in Seattle and its suburbs on Monday or Tuesday, depending on location. Their site boasts about their generous portions and home-cookedstyle meals. A little discouraged by the lack of variety (they offer three dishes and one potential substitution per week for $40), I placed my order and awaited my Tuesday delivery date. The food came on time, right at midday, delivered in cumbersome packaging, plastic dishes stacked sloppily in a flimsy canvas bag with a rudimentarily designed sheet of information on reheating.

The shrimp pesto macaroni and cheese came with a container of the sauce and a plastic baggie of uncooked pasta. The pesto cheese sauce was decidedly light on both pesto and cheese but heavy on oil, so the final product tasted more like a bland scampi. But the richness lacking in the macaroni was present and then some in the next meal I tried—balsamic meatballs with a side of tomato cobbler. Overall, I liked it, though the balsamic sauce was somewhat redundant given the semisweet sauce already overflowing from the tomatoes.

Next came a big portion of chicken arugula salad with big hunks of bland chicken salvaged only by the arugula and vinaigrette. It was passable but unimpressive, which seems to be a good summary of my overall experience with Fresh and Ready Meals. freshandreadymeals.com

COURTESY OF EAT LOCAL

frozen meals, some vegetarian and some featuring grass-fed meats, but suffers a bit from a stunted delivery system that often makes pickup more feasible. Downtown deliveries are only $2 and orders over $98 are shipped free (stock up!) elsewhere.

Otherwise you’ll be saddled with an unfortunate $30-plus shipping cost. To save money, I had my meal delivered downtown, and found the ordering process and same-day delivery pleasantly painless. A smiley employee called and found me, and handed over my frozen meals, quick and easy.

My buffalo stew was a dark concoction of kidney beans and several types of grass-fed meat from Oregon. I liked it, though the sauce didn’t have quite enough kick. But I thoroughly enjoyed the soft, cheesy, crunchy salmon asparagus gratin and the Indonesian vegetable curry, despite some too-crunchy veggies.

Aside from some flaws in the system that possibly make them a better niche grocery store than delivery service if you don’t live or work downtown, I wouldn’t hesitate to purchase a few more frozen meals for a week of slow cooking. eatlocalonline.com

Prepare yourself for upcoming Sweet Week, Sept.

14–20, when you’ll have a chance to shove all kinds of confections, created especially for this occasion, down your piehole for $5 a pop. Among the offerings: Hot Cakes’ cherry-fig fennel crisp with salted caramel and vanilla soft serve; Hello Robin’s ice-cream sandwich with chocolate chai brownie chunk cookies; and Full Tilt’s blueberry-cheesecake ice cream bars. Visit sweetweekseattle.com for more info.

food@seattleweekly.com

15

» FROM PAGE 15 goodness. Though I liked Maven Meals for the most part, the pick-up aspect is a big detractor. mavenmeals.com

HAPPY HOUR: ALL DAY, EVERY DAY

Turmeric ’n More is one of the area’s most spe-

cialized services, bringing cooled-down Indian and Pakistani dishes straight to your door. For a $5.99 fee per order, they deliver meals each Sunday if you order by the previous Tuesday. I found the weekend delivery time a little inconvenient for my purposes—I could have been in church or bumming around a farmers market!—but was nonetheless eager to try whatever delicious food had sustained Seattle’s longest-running fooddelivery service since 2005. The employee left the food without knocking, but it came early enough that I don’t have any cause to complain.

I ordered a smorgasbord of unfamiliar dishes here, which all came in labeled, circular plastic containers. The chicken biryani rice was deliciously flavorful without being overseasoned, studded with incredibly tender pieces of chicken. The mint and saffron were well represented. The paneer bhurji was composed primarily of grated Indian cheese in a sauce of onions and peppers, a tasty dish but without the subtle complexities of the chicken. I preferred the ghia chanay kai dal—a fancy way of saying chickpeas and tomatoes in

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’Tis the season for freshhopped brews, and they’re going fast.

16

ADAM ROBBINGS

SEATTLE WEEKLY • SEPTEM BER 9 — 15, 2015

BY JACOB UITTI

S

eptember means one thing in the Northwest brewing world: fresh hops. It’s the month when those effervescent, light, sparkling IPAS and pale ales are produced from hops with fragrant oils just off the vine.

And timing is everything: There has to be a quick—usually 24-hour—turnaround from picking to brewing, or hops lose their signature lightness and vibrancy. Also, for consumers, batches of the beer are very limited due to the finite amount of fresh hops.

But the result of all this labor is a pint that drinks

COURTESY OF MAVEN MEALS

9TH ANNIVERSARY!

food&drink»

WATERVIEW COMMERCIAL RESTAURANT

curry sauce—whose spicy flavors complemented the chickpeas’ meaty texture. Next came the masoor musallam (lentils), another winner, though nothing to measure up to the biryani.

I wouldn’t hesitate to call Turmeric ’n More among the best services I tried. That may be in part because Indian dishes, for all their rice and paste-like consistencies, simply reheat better.

Primarily, however, it was nothing more than pure quality. turmericandmore.com E

food@seattleweekly.com

light and floral but still has a good body.

Launched in 2007, Two Beers Brewing serves fresh-hop beer at its SoDo tap room. Ahead of the game this year, it released its Fresh Hop IPA on August 21. Founder and head brewer Joel VandenBrink says the process used to feel hurried, but now feels comfortable and simplified. Most brewers, it turns out, don’t get much more than a day’s notice when fresh hops are ready. “We are used to the process now,” he says, “and we refrigerate the hops and use them all within 24 hours of harvesting.”

Two Beers sources its hops, which ripen in mid-August, from specific farmers in eastern Washington. “We have a hop-picking party on our dock every year to take them off the vines,” VandenBrink says. “We use the fresh hops in our hopback right before we send the wort [the extracted liquid from the mashing of hops] into the fermenter. This gets the most aroma out of the hop.”

Adam Robbins, co-founder and head brewer of Reuben’s Brews in Ballard—which also has a tap room for their beers, fresh-hop included—says his brewery gets their fresh hops from Yakima. “We drive over there and stay the night,” he says, “then we pick them up from the farm that morning and drive back to the brewery to brew the same day.”

Reuben’s, in operation since 2012, does not brew a fresh-hop IPA like many other breweries. Rather, Robbins says, they focus on pale ale. “Fresh hops are all about flavor and aroma,” he explains, “so we focus on that, not bitterness. We have an Amarillo Fresh Hop Pale Ale that we’ll brew that’s really tasty.”

He says his organization appreciates the “romance” of fresh-hop beers. “They are a real, true seasonal,” he says. “ You can’t brew a freshhop at any other time, unlike any other beer styles—it’s truly a great reminder of fall coming.”

A number of other Seattle breweries also produce fresh-hop beers—Stoup, Georgetown, Elysian, and many others—and Yakima’s Fresh Hop Ale Festival (this year, Oct. 3; freshhopalefestival.com) is known as one of the country’s best beer festivals. E

food@seattleweekly.com

Out at Sea

When Will the East Coast Embrace Washington Wines?

Salted Sea is always bustling and happy, but its menu is full of ups and downs.

A

BY NICOLE SPRINKLE The fries are good, but the oyster mayo is outrageous.

THEBARCODE

COURTESY OF SALTED SEA

T

he scene at Salted Sea on a recent Monday night was unexpected for a neighborhood restaurant. Every table was filled, backed by a pleasant, jovial hum from a diverse cross-section of people. The vibe was equal to that of the Friday night when I made my second visit. Columbia City seems overjoyed to have Salted Sea on its main drag, which consists mostly of pubs, bakeries, butchers, pizza, and brunch spots.

The large, open dining space includes a bar and a raw bar at the back, on which oysters are mounted atop a gleaming heap of ice. A big wooden crab crawls up the side of a wall beneath silver letters spelling the restaurant’s name, while a seahorse adorns another. Everywhere, it seems, there is beautiful wood, its grain variegated with light and dark tones.

The restaurant calls itself “a new modern American seafood restaurant and raw bar serving fresh and local seafare with a Vietnamese twist.”

The intent is to pay homage to the area’s abundant Vietnamese population; though a noble one, it falls a bit short, appearing in some dishes but not all, and when present, barely perceptible. For instance, in one of the most ridiculous appetizers, a plate of maybe 10 huge slices of heirloom tomatoes (some of which were not ripe), the “Vietnamese mint” consisted of two or three scant pieces. With barely any mint or “black olive oil” drizzled on it, it was tasteless. We took a few bites and sent it away, feeling sick about the waste of so much produce.

A crab and sweet-corn soup with ginger chicken broth, true cod, Dungeness crab, tomato, herbs, and lime, though not unpleasant, was missing any umami, the broth surprisingly on the bland side. To its credit, though, it was full of hearty lumps of crab meat, thus a steal for $13.

The biggest disappointment was the whole roasted trout, served head-on. It came with two big, cold orbs of unmelted anchovy butter on top. Despite being stuffed to the gills (literally) with herbs, the trout’s lovely white meat was tasteless. This made the anchovy butter essential,

but, because the fish was lukewarm (with, unfortunately, uncrisped skin), it failed to melt easily into the flesh. We awkwardly used our knives to try to smear the butter on individual bites, but the whole affair was unwieldy. It’s not difficult to cook trout well, and slimy skin with flavorless meat was inexcusable to this home cook.

What did work: Pan-seared Alaskan sea scallops ($27), cooked perfectly and served with a crab lumpia (shredded crab meat in what’s essentially a Vietnamese fried spring roll), a small bundle of rice noodles, and a peanut sauce.

Housemade frites with oyster mayo were a treat, the mayo tasting so thoroughly of oyster brine that I’m certain they must have puréed the bivalves into it. For $6 it seemed like a great way to get that flavor fix, compared to the $3-apiece raw oysters (the going rate in town) that come with specific mignonettes such as watermelon (watery and bland) or tarragon pickled mustard seed (interesting and tasty).

The absolute best thing on the menu? Shrimp

toast. Though you may recall it from your childhood Chinese-American restaurant’s pièce de résistance, the flaming pu pu platter, what few people know is that the Vietnamese also have their version, likely influenced in part by the French. Here, small rounds of French bread are slathered in shrimp paste, scallion, ginger, and lime, then broiled. The result is like a savory, shrimp-flavored cheese toast, as the shrimp paste melts and resembles cheese in texture. It’s completely delicious and gooey, and you should get two orders ($8 each) so that, if dining as a couple, you each get three.

As for service, it was somewhat uneven, though always friendly; given the full house and the restaurant’s infancy (it opened earlier this summer), longish waits here and there were forgivable.

If you don’t mind the haphazardness of the Vietnamese influence, you’re sure to find enough here to enjoy. But it may take more than a few visits to figure it out. E nsprinkle@seattleweekly.com

thebarcode@seattleweekly.com

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SE ATTLE WEEKLY • SEPTEMBER 9 — 15, 2015

rriving on the East Coast always provokes a bit of culture shock. No, I’m not talking about brusque manners or good bagels, but the virtual absence of a staple of Seattle life: Washington wine. For all the prominence that our state’s wineries have at home, you don’t have to stray very far outside our borders before the prevailing sentiment seems to be “What Washington wine?”

On a recent visit to New

BY ZACH GEBALLE York and Philadelphia, I set out to figure out why, though we produce far more wine than any state except California, our wines are nearly impossible to find on lists and shelves—especially beyond a few major producers like Chateau Ste. Michelle and Columbia Crest. Being known as a source of inexpensive wine is better than being entirely unknown, but it’s not exactly glamorous.

Speaking with friends and colleagues about wine, I was stunned at how little they knew about Washington: They wondered if there were vines in Seattle, or assumed it was too cold for grapes. The ignorance is widespread: Reading The Juice, a 2012 essay collection by former Home & Garden wine columnist Jay McInerney, you’d think that American wine outside of California didn’t exist, though he devotes rapturous pages to viticulture regions in the Golden State.

Even for those in the know, finding Washington wines can be tough. Andrew Schawel, wine manager at New York’s iconic Union Square Cafe and a former Seattleite, explains: “The wine is just not distributed here. Even for buyers like myself that are interested, there’s just not much there.” It’s a dispiriting sort of chicken-and-egg problem for the Washington wine industry: how to create demand in a market with minimal supply? If distributors in the east aren’t buying the wine, even those who’d like to stock it can’t. Of the shops I visited, only one had more than a Washington bottle or two, and three times as many Oregon wines.

One solution could be to spark the interest of the industry’s tastemakers, especially in urban markets. Wine buyers and sommeliers are fascinated by small or underdeveloped regions in Europe, yet many of them would find a welcome audience for ours if they were more familiar with them. Price factors in too: Obscure Euro wines come rather cheaply, especially in this economy. But those same restaurants and shops sell many cases of pricey West Coast wine—just not from here.

Sending winemakers on pilgrimages can work too. Years ago I saw a bottle of Fall Line wines in a shop in Charlotte, N.C. Taken aback, I spoke to the wine’s maker, Tim Sorenson. Turns out he’d taken a trip out there a year or so prior for the precise reason of putting his wine in front of buyers in the area (and other American cities). His wine was also represented in New York. In the end, it might require a bit of door-to-door salesmanship like this for Washington wine to establish an East Coast presence. I can think of a few local winemakers who’d be up to the task. E

17

arts&culture

Golden Girl

In his new novel, Jonathan Evison takes an expansive view of aging—and his aged heroine’s capabilities.

ThisWeek’s PickList

BY BRIAN MILLER

THURSDAY, SEPT. 10

Harriet’s ghost-haunted Alaska cruise and her prior life, readers will discern how her life is far richer and more complex than the granny stereotype. By the book’s end, we’ll come to realize that “there’s some heavy-duty stuff in her life,” per the author, who’s intent on “peeling back the layers of a little old lady.”

Before that, however, Evison says he wanted to begin with the stereotype. “That’s kind of how I started off. The first scene [I wrote], you’re stuck behind [Harriet] in the fucking Safeway line.

We all know what that feels like. I live part-time up in Sequim, a big retirement community, and

While the book isn’t based on his own family, Evison says This Is Your Life has roots in watching his own grandmother become a widow in the ’90s, when his mother had to build a new relationship with her surviving parent. Today, with his own widowed mother, he’s the one navigating

Philippe Quesne

If you didn’t make it to a theme park this summer, here’s a chance to make up the loss. Quesne is a French theater artist with circus roots who bumps up against dance and scenography in his work—in La Mélancolie des dragons, his six heavy-metal heroes work to build an anti-consumerist amusement park.

OtB opens its new season with a surreal version of a Rube Goldberg adventure, with music by the Scorpions and other masters of metal. (Through Sun.) On the Boards, 100 W. Roy St., 217-9888, ontheboards.org. $25. 8 p.m. SANDRA KURTZ

American Idiot

Evison and family reside on Bainbridge Island.

© KEITH BROFSKY

18

In short chapters, mostly alternating between

I’m totally guilty of profiling.

If there are four people in one line and two little old ladies in the other line, I totally get in the longer line! I know the fucking checkbook’s gonna come out, and the reading glasses, and the fucking coupon book. These are the stereotypes. We do see these all the time. Most of us, I think, sort of frame elderly people.”

Through the decades of Harriet’s life, that frame will crack. Plans for law school and a happy marriage are upset; her two kids aren’t easy to raise; and her best friend drops a bombshell in the form of a letter Harriet opens on her Alaska cruise. “Up the Inside Passage—see what I did there?”, Evison laughs.

“I always have one theme; the big one is reinvention. I wanted to write a coming-ofold-age book.”

In a way, as baby boomers are variously retiring, dying, and remarrying, the moment is right. The movies have done quite well recently with senior-related themes: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, I’ll See You in My Dreams, and next week’s Lily Tomlin–starring Grandma. (Tomlin and Jane Fonda also have a Netflix hit with Grace and Frankie.)

Evison has seen the same cultural trends. Yet, he cautions, “I think the book’s really accessible not only for readers of Harriet’s age.

It’s not like I’m trying to hit the 70s and 80s demo. I think it’ll speak to the daughters and sons, the people my age and your age. Our generation will recognize our mothers there. The book is very much about mothers and daughters.”

a new family dynamic. “In our adult lives, we get older and we have kids and we get busy—and we stop paying attention to the elderly people in our lives. Their lives seem so small.”

That’s the same fallacy, he says, for Harriet’s children. “I think they marginalize her. They look at her through this tiny aperture. It’s like me. I’ll say, ‘Hey, Mom, come over and see the kids.’ And she’ll say, ‘I have to wash my hair today.’ We have to realize that, yes, her life has gotten smaller in terms of action—because it’s hard to get around when you’ve got arthritis and are 80 years old!—but her mental life is now much richer.

“I think we all underestimate elderly people.

Whether it’s your mom or a little old lady in a grocery line. I think these are the people with the most experience. They’ve seen the most, and they have the most time to think about something and consider it.” E ALGONQUIN BOOKS

SEATTLE WEEKLY • SEPTEM BER 9 — 15, 2015

T

he region’s most steadily prolific— and increasingly successful—novelist may be Bainbridge Island’s Jonathan Evison, whose new This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! (Algonquin, $29.95) debuts this week. It’s his fourth book in seven years, following All About Lulu, West of Here, and The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (this last to be a Paul Rudd movie, with filming already completed).

Tangled family relations figure in all those prior works, and complications certainly emerge in the long life of Evison’s 78-year-old heroine— though at first glance Harriet appears to be an utterly normal, even boring, widow, the kind of Sequim senior citizen fumbling through her purse in the grocery checkout line ahead of you.

Speaking before he launches an extensive national publicity tour, Evison says he deliberately wanted to focus on the most overlooked class of American: the elderly. “The genus of the book, really, is that I always write about characters that are somehow marginalized,” Evison explains. “Somebody like a stay-at-home dad, people in non-traditional roles. They’re workingclass. Sometimes people describe the characters in my books as ‘losers.’ ” Would Donald Trump describe them that way? “Absolutely.”

Evison continues: “And who’s more marginalized than the old in our culture? We all kind of sigh when we gotta go visit Great-Grandma at the assisted-living facility. I think elderly people are marginalized in general, unless we’re dependent on them for something—like an inheritance! Nobody markets to them, nobody programs to them except the health-care industry. We ignore them.

“When I was 17, I lived in a senior citizen’s motor-home court to take care of my grandma.

I was the only person under 65 allowed to live there, because I was the caretaker. It was mostly widowed women. I was amazed how flexible they were. I watched old people reinvent themselves . . . shifting their whole political ideology from whatever their husband’s was for the last 50 years. Once they got out from these patriarchal, traditional Greatest Generation relationships, I was amazed.”

bmiller@seattleweekly.com

JONATHAN EVISON Third Place Books, 7 p.m. Wed.; Elliott Bay Book Co., 7 p.m. Thurs.; Queen Anne Book Co., 5 p.m.

Sat.; University Book Store, 7 p.m. Wed., Sept. 30.

It may sound like a jukebox musical, but it’s really a stage fleshing-out of Green Day’s 2004 concept album of the same name. The story is your basic drug-laced, suburbia-sucks bildungsroman, but the music makes it, packing a punk punch with an adhesive tunefulness, a touch of Hedwig-ian glam, and a good dose of the exhilarating larger-thanlifeness actors love to sell; it proves to be an ideal conduit for delivering emotion straight into the listener’s head and keeping it lodged there. (The show’s development is chronicled winningly in the doc Broadway Idiot, which shows front man/ composer Billie Joe Armstrong gradually seduced by the goddess of theater; he has more musicals in him, no question.) ArtsWest is offering two ways to take in its production: observational (i.e., traditional, seated) and immersive—I’m not exactly sure what that’ll entail, but they suggest bringing good shoes. (Through Oct. 11.) ArtsWest, 4711

California Ave. S.W., 938-0339, artswest.org. $19–$39.50. 7:30 p.m. GAVIN BORCHERT

Me and My Selfie

The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2013, the selfie has become even more ubiquitous in our culture. Appropriately, this show will start small, then gradually build in number through the fall. To accommodate so many new public-supplied images (submitted via #selfie_pcnw), this won’t be a traditional static show of prints in frames. Instead, the images will slowly alternate on video monitors “to highlight where selfies are most often created and viewed,” says PCNW. Part of the intent here is surely also to balance selfies’ inherent narcissism with their legitimate potential for populist selfexpression outside the academy. Even the most serious sanctioned artists have created self-portraits through the centuries (Picasso surely had more ego in one finger than does the entire Kardashian klan), so there’s nothing to sneer at in these pixels of self-validation. As with Facebook, iPhones, and the Internet as a whole, technology simultaneously dwarfs us—we insignificant, replaceable peons in the New Economy—and allows us to resist such belittlement. The selfie is a form of rebellion, however fleeting, against time and tide. But please, leave your selfie stick at home when visiting the gallery.

Someone might lose an eye. (Through Oct. 31.)

Photo Center NW, 900 12th Ave., 720-7222, pcnw. org. Free. Opening reception 6–8 p.m. BRIAN MILLER

IMAGES BY ALEC MILLER

La Mélancolie des dragons at On the Boards.

Pratt Presents

© MARTIN ARGYROGLO

Bohemia

When you think of Prague in the ’90s, you think of cheap beer, Internet startups, and American expats flocking to explore newly liberated Czechoslovakia as it emerges from Soviet rule. Think again. This new musical cabaret (with food and drinks, including absinthe) is set during the 1890s in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as rendered by Mark Siano and Opal Peachey in a fantasia that has composer Antonin Dvořák (Siano) visited by the ghost of Frédéric Chopin (Peachey). What follows is no history lesson, but a lighthearted riff on the artists and bohemians of that era: Sarah Bernhardt, George Sand, and Oscar Wilde included. Comedy, burlesque, and even trapeze performances are as didactic as the show will get, with live musical accompaniment from an onstage trio. Mark Wissing supplies the food and Maximillian Davis the drinks. No passport required.

(Through Sept. 27.) Nordo’s

SATURDAY, SEPT. 12

www.pratt.org/openhouse

OneHotNight

FALL OPEN HOUSE

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 19 • 6-9PM FREE ADMISSION • FREE PARKING • FAMILY FRIENDLY

BrechtFest

Angrier than Café Nordo, more confrontational (and way more political) than Teatro ZinZanni, brunch theater meets Germany’s angsty, classconscious modernist playwright thanks to The Horse in Motion. With the cast as servers, their show braids together characters and scenes from Bertolt Brecht’s Baal, The Good Person of Szechwan, and The Threepenny Opera to dig into issues of income inequality, gender dynamics, the nature of morality—and how it’s all made moot by an empty stomach. The presence of bacon on the menu is intentionally allegorical. Enjoy your mimosas, bourgeois leeches! (Through Oct. 4.)

1902 South Main Street • Seattle, WA 98144 Can an old love be rekindled, a time in life reclaimed, a new course set?

The Can Can, 94 Pike St., thehorseinmotion.org. $25–$35. 11 a.m. GAVIN BORCHERT E

Culinarium, 109 S. Main St., 800-838-3006, cafenordo.com. $25–$80. 8 p.m. BRIAN MILLER FRI DAY, SE PT. 11

Theatre Off Broadway, 1524 Harvard Ave., whimwhim.org. $25–$50. 8 p.m. SANDRA KURTZ

Illustration by Barry Blankenship

Cherry Manhattan as Sarah Bernhardt in Bohemia.

JOHN CORNICELLO

Since he founded Whim W’him in 2009, one of choreographer Olivier Wevers’ goals was to present the work of other dancemakers. With Choreographic Shindig, he’s taken himself even further out of the process—the three artists who have created new work for this program were chosen not

by Wevers, but by the dancers themselves. Maurya Kerr, Joshua Peugh, and Ihsan Rustem are all new to Seattle audiences, but they share some of the fluid virtuosity that is Wevers’ calling card. This should be a sinuous evening in the theater.

(Through Sept 19.) Erickson

Sep 11–Oct 11

Buy tickets today or see it with an ACTPass!

acttheatre.org | 206.292.7676

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • SEPTEMBER 9 — 15, 2015

Whim W’him

19

arts&culture» performance & literary Stage OPENINGS & EVENTS

AMERICAN IDIOT SEE THE PICK LIST, PAGE 18.

• BLOOMSDAY The premiere of Steven Dietz’s dramedy

about a couple brought together by Ulysses. ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., 292-7676. $15–$20. Previews begin Sept. 11–16, opens Sept. 17. Runs Tues.–Sun.; see acttheatre.org for exact schedule. Ends Oct. 11.

BOHEMIA SEE THE PICK LIST, PAGE 19.

BRECHTFEST SEE THE PICK LIST, PAGE 19.

CAPTAIN SMARTYPANTS This vocal/comedy troupe’s new revue, Zero Brides for Seven Brothers, salutes brothers from Grimm to Doobie. The Triple Door, 216 Union St., 838-4333, flyinghouse.org. $25–$35. 8 p.m. Sept. 12, 18, 19.

THE CHILDREN’S HOUR Lesbian innuendo tears two women’s lives to shreds in Lillian Hellman’s drama, here reset in 1980s Seattle. Cornish Playhouse, Seattle Center, 315-5838. $20 and up. Previews Sept. 9–10, opens Sept.

11. 7:30 p.m. Wed.–Sun. plus some weekend matinees; see intiman.org for exact schedule. Ends Sept. 27.

CINDERELLA A new musical adaptation. SecondStory Repertory, 16587 N.E. 74th St., Redmond 425-881-6777, secondstoryrep.org. $5–$10. Opens Sept. 12. 1 & 3 p.m.

Sat.–Sun. Ends Sept. 27.

DEAD END The Endangered Species Project presents a reading of Sidney Kingsley’s 1935 look at class differences in NYC (from whence sprang the Dead End Kids).

ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., 292-7676, endangered speciesproject.org. $15–$25. 7 p.m. Mon., Sept. 14.

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR Webber/Rice’s 1970 monster hit rocks the Gospels. Seattle Musical Theater. 7120 62nd Ave. N.E., Building 47, seattlemusicaltheatre.org. $20–$35. Opens Sept. 11. 7:30 p.m. Fri.–Sat. plus Thurs., Sept. 24; 2 p.m. Sun. Ends Oct. 4.

KNOCKING BIRD Umbrella Project premieres Emily Conbere’s thriller about a couple’s troubled post-caraccident life. West of Lenin, 203 N 36th St., umbrella projectnw.org. $15–$25. Preview Sept. 10, opens Sept.

11. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat. plus Mon., Sept. 21. Ends Oct. 3.

• • •

MAMA CANE’S BURLESQUE BIRTHDAY BLOWOUT

SEATTLE WEEKLY • SEPTEM BER 9 — 15, 2015

PACIFIC PLAY COMPANY

20

NOW PLAYING

She’s hosting a fundraiser for her 40th. Re-bar, 1114 Howell St., eventbrite.com. $15. 7 p.m. Sat., Sept. 12.

PHILIPPE QUESNE SEE THE PICK LIST, PAGE 18.

THE MEMORANDUM A dark satire of bureaucracy by Vaclav Havel. 12th Avenue Arts, 1620 12th Ave., 800-8383006, strawshop.org. $18–$36. Opens Sept. 10. 7:30 p.m.

Thurs.–Sat. Ends Oct. 10.

HASAN MINHAJ Global Washington’s fundraiser brings this Daily Show comic. ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., 2927676, globalwa.org. $75–$100. 6:30 p.m. Sat., Sept. 12.

PACIFIC PLAY COMPANY From this new company, two shows in repertory: the relationship comedy Everybody Here Says Hello! (Sept. 11, 17, 18, 24, 26) and Crime and Rockets (Sept. 10, 12, 19, 25), seven commissioned, futurethemed shorts. Ballard Underground, 2220 N.W. Market St., pacificplaycompany.com. $12–$20. All shows 8 p.m.

PATH WITH ART A multi-art performance showcase from this program for adults in recovery. Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave., pathwithart.org. Free. 6 p.m. Wed., Sept. 9.

SETEMBER Seattle Experimental Theater’s improv minifestival takes on fairy tales in The Wolf and the Witch, 2 p.m. Sat., and sends up Star Trek in Where No Man Has Gone Before, 8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat., opening Sept. 10. Both end Sept. 19. Theatre Off Jackson, 409 Seventh Ave. S., seattleexperimentaltheater.com. $15–$18.

SKID ROAD: ASH TO GOLD Seattle’s lowdown roots, revisited improv-style. Market Theater, 1428 Post Alley, unexpectedproductions.org. $12–$15. Opens Sept. 11.

8:30 p.m. Fri.–Sat. Ends Oct. 31.

SNAPSHOTS A new musical revue built on the songs of Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Godspell). Village Theatre, 303 Front St., Issaquah, 425-392-2202. $40–$68. Preview Sept. 9, opens Sept. 10. Runs Wed.–Sun.; see village theatre.org for exact schedule. Ends Oct. 18. (Plays in Everett Oct. 23–Nov. 15.)

SOUND Azeotrope premieres Don Nguyen’s drama exploring the clash between deaf and hearing cultures, in American Sign Language and spoken English, with supertitles. ACT, 700 Union St., 292-7676, acttheatre.org. $25–$30. Previews Sept. 9–10, opens Sept. 11. 7:30 p.m.

Thurs.–Sat., 2 p.m. Sun. Ends Oct. 4.

SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER Tennessee Williams’ lurid tale (I know, that doesn’t exactly narrow it down) of sexual secrets and a monstrous mom. Theater Schmeater, 2125 Third Ave., 324-5801, schmeater.org. $22–$29. Opens Sept. 11. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat. Ends Oct. 10.

•

CURRENT RUNS

FAERIES OF STRATFORD Fantasy meets biography in

pacificplaycompany.com

this magical look at Shakespeare’s life. Seattle Public Theater at the Bathhouse, 7312 W. Green Lake Dr. N., brownpapertickets.com. $20. 7:30 p.m. Fri.–Sat. plus Thurs., Sept. 17. Ends Sept. 19.

JET CITY IMPROV SUMMER MADNESS Themed

shows all summer; on Sept. 12, they salute football season with Tailgate Night. 5510 University Way N.E., jetcity improv.org. $12–$15. 8 & 10:30 Sat. Ends Sept. 19.

JOHN BAXTER IS A SWITCH HITTER Ana Brown and Andrew Russell’s dramedy takes off from a real-life incident: the controversy at the 2008 Gay Softball World Series when the San Francisco team was accused of bringing straight ringers. Directed by Rosa Joshi, the play blows up in a long, complex, masterfully crafted scene in Act 2, a fast and funny witch-hunt that descends to grilling players about losing their virginity. However, Act 1 is perky, bouncy, campy, and silly in a way that made me wonder if the creators oversugared the pill out of worry— not that straight audiences would be made uncomfortable by the subject, but that gay audiences might bristle at being satirized. GAVIN BORCHERT Cornish Playhouse, 201 Mercer St. (Seattle Center), 315-5838. $20 and up.

See intiman.org for schedule. Ends Sept. 27.

PIGGYBACK Stand-up (on Sept. 13, Drew Barth) inspires improv. Market Theater, 1428 Post Alley, unexpected productions.org. $10. 8:30 p.m. Sun. Ends Sept. 27.

TEATRO ZINZANNI A show for the Jem generation, “The Return of Chaos” is glitzy, campy, and definitely chaotic. Teatro ZinZanni, 222 Mercer St., 802-0015. $99 and up. Runs Thurs.–Sun. plus some Wed.; see zinzanni.com/seattle for exact schedule. Ends Sept. 13. (“Hollywood Nights” opens Sept 17.)

•

Dance

AU COLLECTIVE New work by Cheryl Delostrinos, Fausto

Rivera, Michael O’Neal Jr., and others in Gold&Skin. 12th Avenue Arts, 1620 12th Ave., audancecollective.com. $15. 7:30 p.m. Thurs., Sept. 10–Sat., Sept. 12.

WHIM W’HIM SEE THE PICK LIST, PAGE 19.

JOURNEYING BY CANOE AND ART Dance (and song, visual art, and more) from Coast Salish cultures. Port of Seattle Terminal 107 Park, 4700 W. Marginal Way S.W., duwamishrevealed.com. Free. Noon–6 p.m. Sat., Sept. 12.

BELLY DANCE OFF Audience members and a panel of experts determine the winner in this competition. Seattle Club Sur, 2901 First Ave. S., brownpapertickets.com. $18–$25. 5:30 p.m. Sun., Sept. 13.

•

Classical, Etc.

CAPPELLA ROMANA From this choir, Rachmaninoff’s

All-Night Vigil. St. James Cathedral, 804 Ninth Ave., cappellaromana.org. $26 and up. 7:30 p.m. Fri., Sept. 11.

OLYMPIC MUSIC FESTIVAL The festival ends this weekend with bluegrass, Celtic music, and more from violinist Jeremy Kittel and his band. 7360 Center Rd., Quilcene, Wash., 360-732-4800, olympicmusicfestival.org. $20–$32.

2 0.m. Sat., Sept.12–Sun., Sept. 13.

MARKET STREET SINGERS Classical to pop. Drop by during the Ballard Art Walk. Ballard First Lutheran Church, 2006 N.W. 65th St. Free. 3 & 7:30 p.m. Sat., Sept. 12.

RUSSIAN CHAMBER MUSIC FOUNDATION OF SEATTLE Mostly Russian, but Ravel and Franck too.

Mercer Island Presbyterian Church, 3605 84th Ave. S.E., russianchambermusic.org. $10–$25. 7 p.m. Sat., Sept. 12.

CHRISTINE MENSCHNER From this soprano, operetta and Broadway faves with tenor Derek Sellers and pianist Jason Suchan. Queen Anne Christian Church, 1316 Third Ave. W. $15–$25. 7:30 p.m. Sat., Sept. 12.

PETER VUKMIROVIC STEVENS Violist Mara Gearman plays this composer’s new Feral Icons. His August Ruins for solo cello is luscious; no reason to doubt this will be too. Steve Jensen Gallery, 1424 10th Ave. $10. 8 p.m. Sat., Sept. 12.

CAMERON O’CONNOR & ERIK STEIGHNER A recital (guitar and sax, respectively) by winners of the Ladies Musical Club’s 2015 Frances Walton Competition. Stage 7 Pianos, 522 Sixth St. S., Kirkland, lmcseattle.org. 7:30 p.m. Sun., Sept. 13.

EARLY MUSIC UNDERGROUND Overend and Blow.

(No, that’s not a request—that’s two of the English composers featured on this chamber-music concert.) Naked City Brewery, 8564 Greenwood Ave. N., emuseattle.com. $20. 7 p.m. Tues., Sept. 15.

TEMBEMBE ENSAMBLE CONTINUO Traditional and baroque music from Mexico. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave., earlymusicguild.org. $10. 7:15 p.m. Tues., Sept. 15.

•

• SEATTLE SYMPHONY PIANO COMPETITION

Nine pianists playing on Tuesday are winnowed to six on Wednesday and then three finalists on Friday in the SSO’s new endeavor. All rounds will be open to the public ($15 for Fri.; free Tues. & Wed. but RSVP at seattlesymphony.org), and an Audience Favorite prize will be awarded. Repertoire includes an interesting list of American and French concertos and a commissioned work by Kenji Bunch. Benaroya Hall, Third Ave. and Union St., 215-4747. 9 a.m. & 1 p.m. Tues., Sept. 15; 11 a.m. & 3 p.m. Wed., Sept. 16; 7 p.m. Fri., Sept. 18.

Author Events ONATHAN EVISON SEE INTERVIEW, PAGE 18.

• JJONATHAN FRANZEN Purity is his new “engross• Great

ing and provocative improvisation on . . .

Expectations.” Town Hall. $5. 7:30 p.m. Wed., Sept. 9.

T. GERONIMO JOHNSON Welcome to Braggsville is his South-set satire. Elliott Bay Book Co., 1521 10th Ave., 624-6600, elliottbaybook.com. 7 p.m. Wed., Sept. 9. is the his• DAVID B. WILLIAMS Too High and Too SteepUniversity tory of Seattle’s many topographical face-lifts.

Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, bookstore.washington.edu. 7 p.m. Wed., Sept. 9.

H.M. JONES Memories become literal currency in the dark fantasy Monochrome. Third Place Books, 17171 Bothell Way N.E., 366-3333, thirdplacebooks.com. 7 p.m.

Thurs., Sept. 10.

JENA LEE NARDELLA She recounts her work to bring clean water to Africa in One Thousand Wells: How an Audacious Goal Taught Me to Love the World Instead of Save It. University Book Store. 7 p.m. Thurs., Sept. 10.

MARY LOU SANELLI The title of A Woman Writing: A Memoir in Essays says it all. Queen Anne Book Co, 1811 Queen Anne Ave. N., 284-2427. qabookco.com, 7 p.m.

Thurs., Sept. 10; Third Place, 7 p.m. Thurs., Sept. 17; University Bookstore, 7 p.m. Fri., Sept. 18.

• WAVE IN THE PNW Wave Books poets read: Joshua Beckman, Don Mee Choi, Cedar Sigo, John Beer, and Alejandro de Acosta. Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave., 322-7030, hugohouse.org. 7 p.m. Thurs., Sept. 10.

SARA DONATI Her novel The Gilded Hour looks at wealth disparity, among other timely topics, in NYC in 1883.

University Bookstore (Bellevue), 6 p.m., Fri., Sept. 11.

• HUGO LITERARY SERIES Fiction writers Dinaw Mengestu and Alissa Nutting, poet Sarah Galvin, and the band the Foghorns will perform work on the theme of “Beating a Dead Horse.” Richard Hugo House. $10–$25.

7:30 p.m. Fri., Sept. 11.

SONYA LEA Discussing Wondering Who You Are, her memoir of her husband’s brain injury, with Claire (Poser) Dederer and Suzanne (Yoga Bitch) Morrison.

Elliott Bay. 7 p.m. Fri., Sept. 11.

DANIEL J. LEVITIN Stressed? The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload might help. Town Hall. $5. 7:30 p.m. Fri., Sept. 11.

SUSAN ABULHAWA The Blue Between Sky and Water is a tale of life in Gaza by this Palestinian writer and activist. Elliott Bay. 7 p.m. Sat., Sept. 12.

K.K. BECK A Seattle restaurant car-parker gets embroiled in dangerous intrigue in Tipping the Valet.

Seattle Mystery Bookshop, 117 Cherry St., 587-5737, seattlemystery.com, noon, Sat., Sept. 12.

DANIEL BENVENISTE explores The Interwoven Lives of Sigmund, Anna and W. Ernest Freud. University Bookstore (Bellevue), 3 p.m., Sat., Sept. 12.

NANCY SINGLETON HACHISU Learn about salting in Shizuoka and fermenting in Fukuoka in Preserving the Japanese Way. Eagle Harbor. 1 p.m. Sat., Sept. 12; Elliott Bay, 7 p.m. Tues., Sept. 15.

ADAM RAKUNIS In his novel Windswept, a labor organizer tries to get into the liquor game. Rumba, 1112 Pike St., rumbaonpike.com. 5:30 p.m. Sun., Sept. 13.

• AMANDA WILDE The KUOW host and jazz maven links Bing, Jimi, and Kurt in a lecture on Seattle’s music history. Burien Arts Gallery, 826 S.W. 152nd St., 2447808, burienarts.org. Free. 7 p.m. Sun., Sept. 13.

Years Eight Months and • SALMAN RUSHDIEis Two Twenty-Eight Nights his new collection of wideranging, culturally omnivorous tales. Town Hall. $35 (includes book). 7:30 p.m. Mon., Sept. 14.

• HECTOR TOBAR Deep Down Dark is his acclamed account of those trapped Chilean miners, now in paperback. Elliott Bay. 7 p.m. Mon., Sept. 14.

HARVEY FERGUSON The Last Cavalryman is his biography of WWII General Lucian K. Truscott, Jr. University Book Store, 7 p.m. Tues., Sept. 15.

EKA KURNIAWAN The Indonesian novelist’s Beauty Is a Wound and Man Tiger are newly translated into English. Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), 654-3100, seattleartmuseum. org. Free. 7 p.m. Tues., Sept. 15. & JOHN KEEBLE Dirt: A • DAVID MONTGOMERY Love Story collects thinkpieces on the fecund topic.

University Book Store, 7 p.m. Tues., Sept. 15.

MARK TUCKER Drive or Die: A Story of Addiction, Murder, and Hope is his new thriller. Third Place.

7 p.m. Tues., Sept. 15.

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

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

BEACON ART WALKABOUT Music, art, crafts, food

•

•

Ongoing

• CHIHO AOSHIMA The contemporary Japanese artist

•

•

•

•

The YWCA of Seattle|King|Snohomish seeks an

On-Call Domestic Violence Emergency Shelter Advocate This position is responsible for providing crisis intervention counseling and other social services to women in crisis who are temporarily housed in the Downtown Emergency domestic violence shelter. Must be available to work Grave Shifts and occasionally Day and Swing shifts. As an equal opportunity employer, we highly encourage people of color to apply.

On-call, hours as-needed. Rate $16.35/hr.

Respond to dohiring@ywcaworks.org Details @ www.ywcaworks.org

d e r i p s n i e B

ed roce s supp ll p

r k with ou r own loo ns & décor u o y te a re c io used fash vintage &

•

7710 SE 34th St., Mercer Island, WA 98040

(206)275-7760

www.miyfs.org

Store hours: Monday - Saturday 10-7, Sunday 12-5

FROM THE CREATOR OF WICKED

•

Snapshots

•

A new romantic comedy featuring the beloved songs of Stephen Schwartz

BY B R IA N M I LLE R

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

•

ISSAQUAH SEPT 10 – OCT 18, 2015

I EVERETT OCT 23 – NOV 15, 2015

ISSAQUAH (425) 392-2202 | EVERETT (425) 257-8600 SPONSORED IN PART BY

VillageTheatre.org

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • SEPTEMBER 9 — 15, 2015

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. You have to watch it several times, ideally from different vantage points, to appreciate the enveloping detail. I think 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.

AROUND THE BLOCK – COLORS OF AUTUMN Fall is the theme for invited local painters. (Also on view: works by Lois Haskell and Kimberly Adams.) Parklane Gallery, 130 Park Lane (Kirkland), 425-827-1462, parklanegallery.com. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Sat. Noon-6 p.m. Sun. Ends Oct. 4.

ANDY BEHRLE He updates and reconstructs old radio cabinets in his sonic sculpture show through static. Method Gallery, 106 Third Ave. S. (Tashiro Kaplan Building), 223-8505, methodgallery.com.

Noon-5 p.m. Fri.-Sat. Ends Sept. 12.

SUSAN BENNERSTROM & JOHN ANDERSON In Odyssey, Bennerstrom paints still lifes and scenes from Greece. Anderson, also a local, presents black-andwhite landscape photos in The Beautiful Confusion.

Linda Hodges Gallery, 316 First Ave. S. 624-3034, lindahodgesgallery.com. 10:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.Sat. Ends Sept. 26.

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. Ilse Bing: Modern Photographer is a selection of her images, spanning 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.

Treason Gallery, 319 Third Ave. S., 914-5236. See treasongallery.com for hours and end date.

LYDIA BOSS In Lost and Found, the local glass artist incorporates floral motifs into some of her works.

Pilchuck Glass School, 240 Second Ave. S., 6218422, pilchuck.com. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tue.-Fri. Ends Sept. 28.

RACHAEL BURKE Based in Pennsylvania, she paints big red nudes and scenes of urban disarray in To and Fro. 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.

LARRY CALKINS He creates new work from from rusted metal, found cloth, and scraps of wood. Gallery I|M|A, 123 S. Jackson St., 625-0055, galleryima.com. 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tues.-Sat. Ends Sept. 26.

CALLIGRAPHIC ABSTRACTION A collection of 35 works in calligraphy spanning from Islamic to archaic Chinese to the contemporary writing system. Seattle Asian Art Museum, Ends Oct. 4.

CYNTHIA CAMLIN Says the artist of her show Waterland, “Recent paintings use the motif of an ice shelf as a grid, or organization of grids, rigid structures undermined by melt and movement.” Punch Gallery, 119 Prefontaine Pl. S. (Tashiro Kaplan Building), 621-1945, punchgallery.org. Noon-5 p.m. Thurs.-Sat. Ends Sept. 26.

MARTIN CREED Those who frequented the old Western Bridge gallery, like me, will recognize Work No. 360: Half the air in a given space, though it occupied a much smaller room back in 2010. The English conceptual artist Martin Creed is calling our attention to volume by enclosing it here in 37,000 silver balloons, far more than five years ago. Back then at the cheerful opening reception, half of a small room meant the balloons were only waist-high (or thereabouts); now, in the Henry’s cavernous gallery they’re way over your head. Needless to say, there are certain restrictions on entry. Don’t wear anything spiky or sharp. Even then, expect some popping. And static electricity. And the overpowering smell of latex—like paint drying. It’s a somewhat overwhelming, enveloping immersion in art, more tactile than your average museum show. Henry Art Gallery. Ends Sept. 27.

DUWAMISH REVEALED 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. The festival’s goal, really, is to get you down there—and the route-finding confusion serves that aim. See duwamishrevealed. com for map. Ends Sept. 30.

DONALD FELS He appropriates and repurposes old posters and handbills from Southern Europe and India to form new collage works. Also on view: photos by Max Steele, paper art from Azumi Takeda and Mio Asahi. Davidson Galleries, 313 Occidental Ave. S., 624-6700, davidsongalleries.com. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Tues.-Sat. Ends Sept. 26.

JENNY FILLIUS She paints bright, whimsical scenes, sometimes with a maritime aspect. Zeitgeist, 171 S. Jackson St., 583-0497, zeitgeistcoffee.com. 6 a.m.-7 p.m. Mon.-Fri. Weekends vary. Ends Sept. 30.

SUSAN GANS & DAVID TRAYLOR The two use photos and drawings to document various aspects of Union Street. Gallery 110, 110 Third Ave. S. (Tashiro Kaplan Building), 624-9336, gallery110.com. Noon-5 p.m.

Wed.-Sat. Ends Sept. 26.

GROUP SHOW Eric Elliott uses botany as a departure point for the leafy paintings in Overgrown. Jenny Heishman explores the notion of a vessel in her paintings, presented as Dressing Room. And the dozen-plus master photographers represented in Up Close Ansel Adams, Aaron Siskind, Brett Weston, and Edward Weston. James Harris Gallery, 604 Second Ave, 9036220, jamesharrisgallery.com. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat. Ends Oct. 10.

MICHELLE HANDELMAN The New York artist presents a multiscreen video (and supporting materials) called Irma Vep, The Last Breath, based on the old French silent serial Les Vampires, coincidentally celebrating its centennial. In this modern update, an unhappy cat thief, clad in black leather skinsuit, pours our her problems to her shrink. Henry Art Gallery.

Ends Oct. 11.

t or

trucks, and more. See beacon-arts.org for map to venues. 1-9 p.m. Sat. CAPITOL HILL ART WALK Venues include Ghost Gallery, Northwest Film Forum, Calpyte, 12th Ave Arts, Photo Center NW, Glasswing (featuring illustrator Helen Bullock, photographer Charlie Schuck, and artist Olivia Knapp), Dendroica (with Keven Furiya, Shelley Higman, and Martha Dunham painting scenes of lost Seattle), and Vermillion. See capitolhillartwalk.com for all venues. 5-8 p.m. Thurs.

MAX CLEARY & JOE RUDKO Cleary creates sculptural objects out of old photos (and other materials), while Rudko takes scissors to found photos. Opening reception and artist talk, 6:30 p.m. Tues. ArtsWest, 4711 California Ave. S.W., 938-0963, artswest.org.

1:30-7:30 p.m. Thurs.-Sat. Ends Oct. 11.

GEORGETOWN ART ATTACK The Alice offers a group show called Jugs (no, not about breasts).

There’s art from Gina Siciliano at Fantagraphics. Patryk Stasieczek shows his “deconstructed photographs” at Interstitial. And Randy Gallegos, who creates game art for Wizards of the Coast and others, has a solo show at Krab Jab called Level Up! As always, music, crafts, booze, and food are part of the evening’s appeal.

Downtown Georgetown. See georgetownartattack. com for all venues. 6-9 p.m. Sat. GROUP SHOW A dozen gallery artists tackle the theme of Observing Observing (a White Cup). Opening reception, 2 p.m. Sat. Prographica, 3419 E. Denny Way, 322-3851, prographicagallery.com. 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

Wed.-Sat. Ends Oct. 31.

DAN LARSEN Stellar scenes and a 500-mile walk along Spain’s storied Camino de Santiago pilgrim path inspire the abstract paintings of his Natural Evolution. Opening reception, 6 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 Oct. 10.

NEIGHBORHOODS Urban change is the theme for Elizabeth Gahan, Kate Protage, and Kellie Talbot.

Opening reception, 6 p.m. Thurs. (The gallery spans the SAM book shop and Taste.) SAM Gallery, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. Hours vary.

End date TBD.

ERYN BOONE This new gallery opens with Luminous.

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arts&culture» film

Slow Learners

PWe Come as Friends

OPENS FRI., SEPT. 11 AT SUNDANCE CINEMAS. NOT RATED. 98 MINUTES.

RUNS FRI., SEPT. 11–THURS., SEPT. 17 AT SIFF FILM CENTER. NOT RATED. 110 MINUTES.

Lucas grew up in Gig Harbor—who knew?

Opening ThisWeek PThe Mend

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Nothing feels especially new in the first 10 minutes of The Mend ; after that, almost everything is unfamiliar. A black sheep, Mat ( Josh Lucas), shows up at a party given by his straight-arrow brother Alan (Stephen Plunkett). Mat’s got the leather jacket and the crusty attitude, and we dutifully note the differences between him and his sell-out brother, a guy dominated by his dancer girlfriend Farrah (Mickey Sumner, the daughter of Sting and Trudie Styler). The couple is about to go away to Canada so Alan can propose—Farrah’s planned the whole thing—which means shiftless Mat can crash here, uninvited, for a few days. Nothing works out quite the way you expect. The party goes on long after its usefulness at introducing the characters has worn off, taking on a peculiar, early-morning fuzziness. Alan returns from Canada early, for reasons he doesn’t explain—and he’s alone. Mat’s most recent shag, Andrea (Lucy Owen), comes over with her son because her apartment has bedbugs. Most important, the obvious differences between the siblings turn out to be not so easy to peg—well, aside from the fact that the two actors look absolutely nothing like each other.

Most of the action takes place inside the apartment, except for a few interludes—a mystifying visit to an uncle’s place (the character is played by old pro Austin Pendleton, who hogs center stage with the greed of the lifelong supporting player) and a much-needed fresh-air ramble around New York City. Writer/director John Magary, making his feature debut, stretches the tempo in interesting ways, and we get used to not having scenes tied off neatly or odd references explained. (I’m wondering what happened to the singing partygoer who used to be a member of his college’s madrigal society— there must be a story there.)

The longer it goes on, the more you can appreciate how Magary is exploring something intriguing. If the characters keep eluding the expectations we had for them in the early reels, maybe we can drop our expectations altogether

of Darwin’s Nightmare’s great strengths was Sauper’s willingness to let the locals speak for themselves about geopolitics, war, and resource extraction by the West. Here, after a few introductory musings from the air—one thinks of Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness—he mostly drops out of the conversation. For their protection, his Sudanese subjects are unnamed (though one wishes for maps to help track the various tribes and regions). “Now all the land is taken by the oil companies,” says a rueful village elder.

This film is a grim travelogue in which Sauper’s interviewees seem to let their guards down because he and his plane are so ridiculous. (The goofy gyrocopter and wasteland of The Road Warrior come to mind.) He meets smiling Chinese petro-engineers in the Muslim north and Texan missionaries in the Christian south; visits a British mine-disposal expert; watches at the periphery of a George Clooney media scrum; takes a friendly UN official up in his plane; and attends an economic-development conference in Juba, capitol of the new South Sudan, where cheerful arms merchants vend their wares. All these outsiders are unfailingly polite, secure in their belief that they’re doing good. Only the Chinese are truly candid with their comical guest. When he asks about the dumps and despoliation outside the drilling base, he’s told, “Environmental protection is their responsibility”—meaning the penniless, powerless locals. The Koch brothers would surely agree.

Light on its feet yet dead-serious in tone, this excellent doc alternates micro to macro, ground

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SEATTLE WEEKLY • SEPTEM BER 9 — 15, 2015

RUNS FRI., SEPT. 11–THURS., SEPT. 17 AT NORTHWEST FILM FORUM. NOT RATED. 111 MINUTES.

MOXIE PICTURES/CINELICIOUS PICS

and really watch what happens. I’m not convinced The Mend works out in an entirely coherent way, but it’s fun to watch it bop around. Part of this is seeing fresh faces; Lucas is a movie veteran, but the other leads have not had a chance to stretch out this much in a film. Wherever Plunkett, Owen, and Sumner go after this, they’ve acquitted themselves nicely when handed some very meaty chances. ROBERT HORTON

that the people onscreen actually would do the things they do, the movie is undeniably funny, not least for the way it unleashes two reliable actors—veterans of improvisational stage work— who are clearly ready for the next step. Sarah Burns (Enlightened ) and Adam Pally (The Mindy Project ) play Anne and Jeff, platonic best friends whose dull romantic lives need spicing up.

They’re tired of being overlooked and celibate, so a new wildness is in order—not with each other, but with the cool people they’ve been missing.

This leads to a few funny scenes,and eventually to an ending that is, of course, easy to predict.

Strung along this thin clothesline of plot are a series of comedy setups: Jeff ’s brutal assessment by a first date who would prefer to go home rather than eat her meal; Anne’s planned seduction of Jeff ’s pal Max (the admirably straight-faced Reid Scott) being interrupted by his ex; Anne putting on a Southern accent and disastrously retreating to the bathroom after going to a hook-up’s apartment. In all these bits—well, most of them—Burns and Pally weave truly daffy comedy business, aided by a strong surrounding cast (Catherine Reitman and Mary Grill are especially sharp). He underplays and she overplays, but this works for their dynamic together. If you don’t like Burns and Pally, the movie’s dead—that’s the price of foregrounding personality over story. ROBERT HORTON

Pally and Burns as belated playas.

People are talking about how the superhero-movie cycle is burning itself out through overuse, the same formula repeated with different-colored capes. We’ll see what happens, but another format out there is getting at least as much play. I refer to the improv-based comedy film, for which one needs only a slim premise, a loose atmosphere, and a cast peopled with alumni of sketch groups such as the Groundlings or Upright Citizens Brigade.

The style is dominant in big movies, Sundancescaled films, and small screens. And it has a key distinction the superhero genre can’t claim: These projects have rewarded a series of women in big roles, from Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy to the Tina Fey/Amy Poehler axis of power.

Slow Learners is another of these, and it has the genre’s conventions: eccentric conversational tangents, inspired riffing, and a performing style that goes for the zany topper instead of character consistency. Although it is difficult to believe

A visitor drops from the sky, almost as if an alien.

Only he’s not like the usual visitors who want your land, minerals, and oil. Pressed as to whether he’s Muslim or Christian—this is Sudan, before the 2011 referendum on partitioning the country—he politely tries to deflect the question with a joke.

No one takes him seriously anyway: He arrived in homebuilt aircraft that barely looks flightworthy, and he wears a pilot’s uniform that reeks of the thrift shop. Who is this cheeky impostor?

Hubert Sauper earned an Oscar nomination for his prior Africa doc, Darwin’s Nightmare (seen here in 2006), about the ruination of Lake Victoria and lingering colonization of Tanzania.

(That government later sued him for his temerity.) An Austrian based in France, he then built his Lindbergh-level puddle-jumper—dubbed “Sputnik”—and spent two years reporting this even better new film. His tone is wry outrage, with his sarcasm kept more in check. One

to air. One moment Sauper’s listening to displaced villagers (in the south) complaining about being forced to live in a graveyard, the next his aerial camera collects abstract images of rippling desert and lambent sky bisected by flamingo flocks; or of mud-walled villages reading like chessboards on the arid plain; or of the bulging brown hog’s-back of the Nile, leading from Lake Victoria to even more trouble in the Arab north.

Patterns of corruption and theft repeat across centuries, and the victims are always the same in this very calm, infuriating documentary.

Sauper has said he’s planning a trilogy of films about Africa and its neo-colonial woes, but I wish he’d bring his friendly little plane over here.

When it comes to stark inequality and stateless mercenary capital, the colonial model of 19thcentury Africa is now being applied to us all.

BRIAN MILLER E

film@seattleweekly.com

D I NI NG

WEEK LY

WWW.SEATTLEWEEKLY.COM/SIGNUP

Local & Repertory • THE DIPLOMAT The legendary late statesman

Richard Holbrooke is the subject of this new documentary, set to debut on HBO on Nov. 2. Filmmaker David Holbrooke will conduct a Q&A after the screening.

(NR) SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., 324-9996. Free, but RSVP to siff.net. 7 p.m. Wed. LOVE LIVE! THE SCHOOL IDOL MOVIE Nine schoolgirls vie in some sort of student popularity contest in this recent Japanese anime. (NR) Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935. $15. See grandillusioncinema.org for showtimes. Runs Sat.-Mon. A POEM IS A NAKED PERSON This is Les Blank’s 1974 documentary profile of singer-songwriter Leon Russell, a Tulsa transplant to L.A. during the heyday of the country rock revival. A producer and session musician, he mixed with the likes of B.B. King, Eric Clapton, and Bob Dylan. His few hits included “Tight Rope” and “Lady Blue.” He returned to notice in 2010, thanks to Elton John (a big fan), when the two of them recorded The Union. (NR) Grand Illusion, $5-$8. See grandillusioncinema.org for showtimes. Runs Fri.-Thurs.

THE PRINCESS BRIDE From 1987, Rob Reiner’s charming adaptation of the classic William Goldman children’s tale is sweet, funny, and well played down the line for both parents and kids. Cary Elwes and Robin Wright Penn are the handsome, occasionally quarrelsome lovers; Wallace Shawn, Mandy Patinkin, and the late André the Giant help get them together after many amusing adventures. (G) Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $7-$9.

7 p.m. Thurs.-Wed. & 3 p.m. Sat.-Sun. STATION TO STATION Over 60 one-minute films were made by director Doug Aitken during a transcontinental train ride. His performers include Beck, Jackson Browne, Patti Smith, Thurston Moore, and Ed Ruscha.

(NR) SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), 324-9996. $7-$12. See siff.net for showtimes. Runs Fri.-Sun. THIS IS SPINAL TAP The original 1984 “rockumentary” returns, and it remains the best film Rob Reiner has ever made. That’s owing mainly to the writing and improvisational talents of its main cast (including Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer). In the immortal words of Artie Fufkin (Paul Shaffer), “Do me a favor. Just kick my ass, okay?” (R) Central Cinema, $7-$9. 9:30 p.m. Thurs.-Wed. WEST SIDE STORY Maria! Maria! Maria! The 1961 take on Romeo and Juliet racked up 10 Oscars and remains a high-water mark for postwar American movie musicals. With a knockout book and score by Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein, the film boasts choreography by Jerome Robbins. We’ll admit that Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer don’t make the most dynamic or believable couple (while Rita Moreno is hot), but with the Sharks and Jets dancing madly around them—who cares? (NR) Central Cinema. $8-$10. 8 p.m. Thurs.

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• THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL This very frank

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padded from an old New Yorker essay by Katha Pollitt, and it doesn’t leave much elbow room for Patricia Clarkson (as heroine Wendy) and Ben Kingsley (as her Sikh driving instructor Darwan) to navigate. Both stars generate enormous goodwill, even while you worry about Kingsley going back to the South Asian well— kindly accent, sage wisdom, infinite forbearance, etc.

Playing an angry, jilted, selfish New Yorker suddenly confronted by her lack of a chauffeur (i.e., her cheatin’ husband), Clarkson is an awful lot of fun when mad and spitting F-bombs left and right. And we’d rather see more of her midlife dating misadventures; this is a movie that would be measurably improved by some cheap Tindr and eHarmony jokes. Its heart, though, is the Brief Encounter tension between the pious, honorable instructor and his slightly naughty student. But this is not the movie to push Darwan—or formula—out of the comfort zone. So in its comfortably therapeutic, How Wendy Got Her Groove Back kind of way, the picture works—no better or worse than a Lifetime original. (R) B.R.M. Seven Gables, Lincoln Square, Pacific Place LISTEN TO ME MARLON His parents were Midwestern Gothic: the father a bitter drunk who settled things with violence, the mother a poetic type who couldn’t lay off the booze. Yet in the way of strange, sad American stories, these two souls created a combination of DNA and childhood trauma that birthed one of the definitive actors—why not say artists?—of the mid-20th century. The son got his father’s name, Marlon Brando, an ideal moniker for an icon of bigger-than-life coolness and rebellious disdain. Directed by Stevan Riley, the film is in Brando’s speaking voice, sometimes drawn from interviews, but mostly taken from his own self-recorded thoughts. It’s illustrated with photographs and a few film clips. The movie’s not about the career, and it offers no outside analysis of why Brando changed movie acting; it’s about the interior life of an actor. One of the most intriguing threads here is how much Brando intended to change acting. He had very specific complaints about the kind of movie acting that dominated Hollywood before he came along. (NR) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Film Center MISTRESS AMERICA New to New York, Barnard freshman Tracy (Lola Kirke) falls under the sway of Brooke (Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote Mistress America with director Noah Baumbach). Brooke is a font of alluring ideas—business is the new sex—who lacks only the capital to implement them. Or, to put it another way, her capital is youth and dreams, which are losing market value as she nears 30. Brooke is both eccentric and unsinkable, and Gerwig plays her just to the edge of being unlikable for such obstinate self-belief. (Tracy is meanwhile taking notes for her campus literary journal.) Baumbach and Gerwig, a couple who previously collaborated on Frances Ha, are obvious movie lovers, and there are willfully retro traces here of screwball comedy, drawing-room farce, and early Woody Allen.

Even as Brooke’s boundless self-confidence is gradually revealed to be self-delusion (or a manic confluence of the two), this blithe, delightful movie isn’t some sort of Jamesian downfall. Mistress America gives us the comedy of catastrophe averted, if not plans realized. (R) B.R.M. Guild 45th, SIFF Cinema Egyptian, Ark Lodge, othrs MERU Co-director Jimmy Chin (with his wife, E. Chai Vasarhelyi) joined Conrad Anker and Renan Ozturk for two attempts on the unclimbed Shark’s Fin line on Mount Meru, in India’s Garhwal region of the Himalayas. First ascents are rare these days; 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 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.) Chin 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. (R) B.R.M. Guild 45th, Ark Lodge PHOENIX At the end of World War II, heavilybandaged Nelly (the soulful Nina Hoss) emerges from Auschwitz. She’s been disfigured by a gunshot wound to the face; her friend Lene 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), but he thinks she is dead and doesn’t recognize her with her new face. He has an idea, however—

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SE ATTLE WEEKLY • SEPTEMBER 9 — 15, 2015

and unrepentant coming-of-age tale is based on a 2002 graphic novel, semi-autobiographical, by Phoebe Gloeckner. Director Marielle Heller, making her accomplished feature debut, first wrote and starred in a stage adaptation of the book. Its 15-year-old heroine, Minnie, is now played by the very fresh and determined British actress Bel Powley; Kristen Wiig is her twice-divorced single mother Charlotte, a drinker and a druggie in 1976 San Francisco. Minnie lives an essentially unsupervised life, intent mainly on her drawings—which often spring into animation—and the opposite sex.

And Minnie really wants it; she’s no lazy virgin waiting to be deflowered. Some will be offended by Minnie’s affair with her mother’s dumb, handsome boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgård), who comes across as anything but a predator. It’s Minnie who’s obsessed with punching her V-card; Monroe is more an instrument than an equal. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance, others THE END OF THE TOUR Based on journalist David Lipsky’s five-day interview with David Foster Wallace in 1996, this film is well described by director James Ponsoldt (Smashed, The Spectacular Now) 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. 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. (R) B.R.M. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Sundance

LEARNING TO DRIVE This is a very small film, greatly

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MUSIC

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a&c» film » FROM PAGE 23 the rat. If this mystery woman will pretend to be Nelly, they can claim her inheritance and split the money.

Based on Hubert Monteilhet’s 1961 novel Return From the Ashes, Christian Petzold’s thriller feels like something out of that era. The resulting masquerade has many perverse moments. And Phoenix is an extremely well-made picture, even if its serious, sober approach is just a little on-the-nose. But 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. (NR) R.H. SIFF Cinema Uptown QUEEN OF EARTH Catherine (Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss) put her aspirations on hold to manage the affairs of her famous artist father. Virginia (Katherine Waterston, Inherent Vice) is a trust-fund baby spending her days on perpetual vacation. They are not what you would call likable. What should be a weekend of bestie comfort twists into a contemporary passive-aggressive take on the traditional Hollywood melodrama.

Catherine is a mess, recently dumped and mourning the loss of her father. In an upscale cabin getaway out of the city, these bitchy frenemies vie in close quarters, but without the showboating spectacle of divas in high dudgeon. Flashbacks of a previous visit—with Catherine so wrapped up with her boyfriend she never notices her best friend’s emotional turmoil—mirror the verbal sparring and petty sniping here. Confessions become opportunities to swipe at each other. The intrusion of Virginia’s neighbor and friend-with-benefits (Patrick Fugit, hiding his spite behind a boyish smile) is just something else thing to resent. Neither writer/ director Alex Ross Perry nor his actresses attempt to soften these characters. Yet, surprisingly, we actually come to care for them—or at the very least worry about them. (NR) SEAN AXMAKER Sundance STEVE JOBS: THE MAN IN THE MACHINE How is it possible that the creator of our beloved, indispensible iPhones was such an asshole? Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) begins his new doc with Jobs’ 2011 death, which occasioned many teary candlelight vigils outside Apple stores worldwide.

Those outside the cult can only ask why. Jobs’ family and close associates wouldn’t cooperate with Gibney, one reason this clip job fails to break any new ground in profiling the charismatic Jobs. This is not to say that Gibney ignores the manufacturing scandals at Foxconn or whitewashes the Apple co-founder’s bullying, tyrannical personality quirks. (“Ruthless, deceitful, and cruel,” he calls him.) But the wrong people speak freely—journalists, whose opinions are cheap—while the inner circle remains mum. We’ve heard most of these tales before; most date from Jobs’ rise, before exile from Apple. Gibney offers no conclusion but the familiar paradox: great products, unpleasant person.

(The contradiction will ring true in South Lake Union today, and it was no different in the age of Henry Ford.)

The New York Times’ Joe Nocera tells Gibney that product excellence often “requires you to shed extraneous things”—friends, family, and courtesy among them. (R) B.R.M. Sundance A WALK IN THE WOODS The problem in enacting Bill Bryson’s 1998 account of hiking (half) the Appalachian Trail, is that our two geezer heroes quit mid-journey, unlike the triumph depicted in the recent adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, a much better film. Robert Redford (as Bryson) and Nolte (as Katz, his alcoholic Sancho Panza) teeter along credibly, making jokes about their age and grousing about the whippersnappers who race past. Though the adventure is meant as late-life stock-taking and there are a few moments of sunset philosophy, mainly these two guys complain.

The movie’s Bryson is the last guy you’d want to meet on the trail. He’s a know-it-all. He’s aloof. He’s condescending to everyone he meets. He’s a pedant and—more damningly—not a very good friend to the sad fuck-up Katz, who could use considerably more support. Throughout this dismal movie—terribly lit and badly directed by TV journeyman Ken Kwapis—Bryson rolls his eyes in bemused disapproval. The tacit message is I’m too good for this, which is essentially our feeling for poor Redford and Nolte. They deserve better, as do the supporting cast: Emma Thompson, Mary Steenburgen, Kristen Schaal, and Nick Offerman, all entirely wasted. (R) B.R.M. Sundance, Ark Lodge, Meridian, SIFF Cinema Uptown, others

BY B R IA N M I LLE R

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

•

» music

Making Darkwaves Youryoungbody’s new EP, Betrayer, is a critical pillar in a developing local scene.

BY KELTON SEARS

S

KELTON SEARS

In a surprise move, Youryoungbody suddenly

released its fifth record, the Betrayer EP, on August 19, to the collective delight of its growing number

of Facebook fans. Betrayer is the duo’s most articulated sonic thesis statement thus far: a collection of four gloomy, frost-bitten graveyard rave tracks that came out of a particularly tough time for Cripe, who says she was dealing with “some pretty bad social anxiety when we started recording” a year ago. The record’s immediate tonal touchstone is Crystal Castles, but Youryoungbody’s approach is far more melody-driven, hi-fi, and chill than Alice Glass and Ethan Kath’s frenetic Gameboygoth dirges.

“I think our theme with this was to be able to strip the songs down so that we could play them on just a piano, which is something we haven’t done before,” Brom says. “Personally I’ve been really into using traditional rave synths in toneddown and unusual ways.”

The new toned-down approach pays off— standout tracks “January” and “The Garden” are sophisticated enough for the dance floor and a rainy day alone at home. In part that’s because the tracks don’t needlessly beat you over the head with wanton sub-bass, but also because of the strong melodies that came out of another new songwriting approach.

“In the past I would make a rough draft of something I was working on, show Duh a bunch of stuff, and we would pick one to do vocals on,” Brom says. “This time we tried working on stuff at the same time, and got some very naturalsounding results.” On Betrayer, Cripe’s vocal lines are more intertwined than ever with Brom’s production—a clear step forward for the two as they continue to develop their own particular voice in Seattle’s emerging crowd of darkwavers.

That voice, and how it’s perceived, is something the band is very aware of as they move forward— in part because of the bad taste the black-metal scene left in Brom’s mouth after he left his previous band, Drakul. With Youryoungbody, Brom says he at times has felt “pigeonholed as a witchhouse artist. That scene had cool elements, but once the genre’s sound developed, it became less about sonic and visual creativity and more about how cvlt you could be. I feel like a similar thing happened in black metal. I just want people to be themselves and push boundaries rather than criticize things for not conforming to their ideal version of being ‘outside the box.’ ” This burgeoning Seattle scene’s ability to push outside of that very narrow aesthetic and sonic box laid out post-King Night will be the key to its success—something Thraxxhouse is proving with its brilliant and bizarre New Age, punk, and grunge spin on the theme. If Betrayer is any evidence, Youryoungbody’s self-awareness of those trappings and vocal desire to push past them are starting to work. By the time a full-length comes out, don’t be surprised if a lot of people start loosening that death grip on their guitars. E

ksears@seattleweekly.com

YOURYOUNGBODY With Force Publique, Nightspace, Aeon Fux. Narwhal, 1118 E. Pike St., unicornseattle.com. $7. 21 and up. 9 p.m. Sun., Sept. 13.

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • SEPTEMBER 9 — 15, 2015

tarship’s classic “We Built This City (on Rock and Roll)” was written about San Francisco, a city most are loath to compare to Seattle. But it’s pretty inarguable that, yes, Seattle was also built on rock and roll. At Bumbershoot’s “Between Garage & Grunge” show last weekend, featuring Fantagraphics curator Larry Reid’s collection of classic Seattle punk posters from the mid- to late ’70s, a number of the artifacts on display proudly promised that audiences would be subject to absolutely “NO SYNTHESIZERS.” It’s something most modern Seattle show posters could still accurately promise. We here in Seattle love our guitars so much, we built an enormous shrine to Jimi Hendrix next to the Space Needle.

It’s supposed to resemble a smashed Stratocaster, but you probably know it better as that purple blob called the EMP. Back in 2012, all this guitar worship made it pretty tricky for Youryoungbody, a local darkelectronic duo that had just released its first EP, USER, to find anybody to play with.

“When we started, we were scrambling to find bands to fit on a bill with,” Youryoungbody singer Duh Cripe says. “We played some funky lineups, but I think that’s what makes us so appreciative of the musicians in the scene. Electronic fans are pretty damn loyal, and stylish as hell.”

Flash-forward to 2015: Seattle is a very different place. Thanks in part to the 2014 opening of downtown’s Clockwork Orange–inspired dance club Kremwerk, Seattle’s electronic, guitar-free, “stylish as hell” crowd now has a dedicated home base.

Not only is the city experiencing a sudden upswell in quality electronic acts, but, to Youryoungbody’s benefit, a sudden upswell in quality dark-electronic acts. With the witch-house-inspired hip-hop of recent Seattle Weekly cover subjects Thraxxhouse; the “dreamcore space punk” of Bailey Skye’s gender-bending project Nightspace; KEXP DJ Sharlese Metcalf ’s cold-wave crew False Prophet; Golden Gardens’ ethereal club goth; and KA’s “doom-gaze,” all of a sudden Youryoungbody is finding itself at the center of a burgeoning local scene.

“I really like what’s been coming out of Seattle’s electronic scene recently and been feeling inspired,” says Youryoungbody producer Killian Brom (who worked on the music for popular video games like Left 4 Dead, Starcraft 2, and DOTA 2). “Seattle has a habit of being fairly isolated when it comes to music trends, which can produce some cool results. All the groups you mentioned we have a pretty close connection to, and [we] all go to each other’s shows.”

25

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arts&culture» music

The garage-rock duo sees its reflection in new album Rumours 2: The Rumours Are True.

BY DUSTY HENRY

struck with inspiration for the imperiled album’s title. “I think it was when we were super-bummed out about how the record sounded, and I was like, ‘Wait, I have an idea so that it doesn’t even matter what it sounds like because the title’s so good,’ ” Peck says. Naming the album Rumours 2 after one of the best-selling records of all time may have been

taking out insurance on the album’s success, but they didn’t stop there. After a short break for some personal time, they opted to reunite with producer Don Farwell, who had recorded the band’s previous two albums, at Earwig Studios in Georgetown.

“I made extra-special sure this time to just be, like, ‘I want it to sound so full,’ and that I really like being [in the studio],” Peck says.

The results of that re-recording sound massive.

The drums on Rumours 2 are thunderous, clamoring violently against Beetham’s gargling bass tones.

Tracks like “Really Nice Guys” have a skuzzy punk aesthetic that could soundtrack a Mad Max post-apocalyptic wasteland. Beetham’s vocals keep everything grounded with pop familiarity, infusing fuzzed-out tracks like “I Like Your Shows” with ruthlessly catchy melodies.

Just like Fleetwood Mac, the band became immensely involved with the production. Together they put 20 to 30 hours into mixing. But the drama that came with the original Rumours wasn’t just about finding the right levels; it was steeped in romance and . . . rumors—both things Pony Time claims to know all about.

“We’re very dramatic all the time,” Peck says.

“There’s always rumors flying about—are we or aren’t we together romantically?”

Though the answer is “No, they’re not,” it hasn’t stopped speculation. When the two were working together at Beetham’s electric company, Luke Electric, people often thought they were married.

Although they aren’t personally involved in any band-crippling love triangles (they are a duo, after all), the group did find a different kind of beef— roast beef, to be exact—thanks to the rare Arby’s located close to Earwig Studios in Georgetown.

“Luke and I are pretty into fast food, and there’s not an Arby’s around, so it’s like a special treat for us,” Peck says. “But also, at that particular Arby’s there’s always

some kind of drama happening with the employees.”

“It’s amazing. I’ve never seen such an open display of workplace politics and scheduling than at the Georgetown Arby’s,” Beetham says. The two notably light up when discussing the disgruntled employees they’ve observed. People complain about working too much, but then show up at the restaurant on their days off. Once they saw an off-duty employee hop behind the counter in their street clothes to help someone with their order. “We have a song called ‘Roast Beef and Cheddar, Hold the Cheddar’ that didn’t make it on the record,” Peck says, joking that it could show up on a forthcoming deluxe edition. “It’ll be our ‘Silver Springs.’ ” When the band isn’t writing about sandwiches,

relationships tend to be a recurring theme in Beetham’s lyrics. This is most notable on Rumours 2 track “Time Tells Me,” which was inspired by dating someone and realizing your feelings aren’t being reciprocated. “I don’t mean for it to all be about relationships, but sometimes that’s just where it goes,” Beetham says.

Just off a tour, Pony Time is taking some muchneeded rest after Thursday’s album-release show.

On the lineup is Lisa Prank, who also appears on Rumours 2 ’s closer “Stop Talking” as part of their collaborative side project Party Girls. The project has appeared at only one show so far, and all signs point to Party Girls’ reappearance at the Lo-Fi. “That’ll be maybe the final Party Girls performance, but maybe not,” Peck says. “Is that a rumor?” E

music@seattleweekly.com

PONY TIME With Colleen Green, Lisa Prank. The Lo-Fi, 429 Eastlake Ave., 254-2824, thelofi.net. $8 adv./ $10 DOS. 21 and up. 9 p.m. Thurs., Sept. 10.

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • SEPTEMBER 9 — 15, 2015

Then, in a game-changing moment, Peck was

DUSTY HENRY

W

hen Fleetwood Mac set out to record its seminal album Rumours in 1976, they did so by snorting excessive amounts of cocaine and falling into intricate love triangles.

Local garage-rock duo Pony Time may not have replicated this experience to a T, but they did indulge in their own vices and fixations while recording Rumours 2: The Rumours Are True, out Sept. 10.

Much like the original Rumours, Pony Time found Rumours 2 becoming a maddeningly obsessive pursuit, groping toward fleeting sonic perfection. The band started working on the album in 2013 after the release of its second LP, Go Find Your Own. The first sessions, recorded with a new producer, didn’t pan out to the duo’s liking. “We did keep re-recording it ’til it was right. The last one we recorded was dogshit,” drummer Stacy Peck says.

“It was going to be a shame,” bassist and vocalist Luke Beetham adds. “We really didn’t want to release it if it was going to sound like dogshit, ’cause these songs are good songs and I didn’t want to fuck it up by releasing them not totally rockin’.”

Peck and Beetham agree that the sessions came out hollow—a far cry from the way they envisioned Pony Time’s live sound translating to record. Coupled with the fact that the new studio they were working with couldn’t even remember their name, it was truly a demoralizing period for Ponies Timed.

27

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THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 10TH FUNHOUSE BRIAN FOSS PRESENTS:

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RECORD RELEASE w/Stiff Other Lip, Wuttphuk, Plus Guests Doors at 8:30PM / Show at 9:00.

21+. $7

SEATTLE WEEKLY • SEPTEM BER 9 — 15, 2015

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 11TH EL CORAZON

28

ROMAN CITIZEN

w/The Home Team, Tonight We Fight, Variations, Megasapien Doors 7:00PM / Show 7:30.

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a&c» music

AN EVENING WITH

RUFUS WAINWRIGHT

TheWeekAhead Thursday, Sept. 10

I have never seen FREE MUSIC, but boy, have I heard about Free Music. Apparently this mysterious local solo act (who also goes under the aliases Kool Toad and Punishment) bumps trippy party electro through his array of big samplers, a very large bass amp, and his own massive PA. Sometimes he plays a little guitar through that sound system, but he’s also not afraid to simply push play on a track and sing along.

As a fan who’s seen him tells me, “It was like watching someone sing into the mirror listening to music, but while crowd-surfing with 100 people.” Tonight’s also an art show featuring the paintings of two talented scrappy locals: Aidan Fitzgerald (of The Intruder comics collective) and Minh Nguyen (of zine publisher Night Pong), both of whom will be repping the exciting new Risograph art-book publisher Cold Cube Press. Cairo, 507 E. Mercer St., templeofcairo.com.

7–11 p.m. Free. All ages. KELTON SEARS What a delightful name ASSS is. And hey, you can judge a book by its cover in this case, because this Portland duo will get you shaking your ass by emitting a lot of SSSSSSSSS sounds, thanks to its off-kilter noise-techno.

New single “102” sounds like 102 overheating modems processing high-volume torrent downloads while collectively getting flushed down a drain, all over a 4/4 beat!

The duo is joining a slew of similarly noisy DJs and producers at tonight’s Motor 26 party. With False Prophet, TEREKKE, Bankie Phones. Kremwerk, 1809 Minor Ave., kremwerk.com. 9 p.m. $10. 21 and up. KELTON SEARS

Friday, Sept. 11

OLD 97’S

9/13

TREVOR HALL 9/18

with CROWN THE EMPIRE + I PREVAIL

DUKE DUMONT

10/5

COURTESY GOOD TO DIE RECORDS

no-wave saxophone skronking with righteous riffing. Of all the bands on Seattle’s heavy-rock label Good to Die Records, Constant Lovers is easily the artiest, thanks to lead singer/guitarist/saxophonist Joel Cuplin’s beat-poet yelping and epileptic dance moves, tempered by the caveman brute drumming of Ben Verellen. If you like grunge and French cinema, you’ll probably love Constant Lovers. With Pinecones, Sis. Barboza, 925 E. Pike St., thebarboza.com. 8 p.m. $8. 21 and up. KELTON SEARS

Send events to music@seattleweekly.com.

See seattleweekly.com for more listings.

8PM

9PM

DOOMTREE with ASTRONAUTALIS

8:30 PM

10/14

MATOMA with PRINCE FOX + BOEHM

9PM

10/16

9PM

SHOWBOX SODO SHOWBOX AND DECIBEL FESTIVAL PRESENT

THIEVERY CORPORATION 9/27

with SHAPRECE

BIG GIGANTIC +THE FLOOZIES

10/2

CONSTANT LOVERS’ percussion-heavy rock marries

8:30 PM

10/10

with MATT JAFFE & THE DISTRACTIONS

7:30 PM

STEEL PANTHER

9PM

7PM

SHOWBOX AND KNITTING FACTORY PRESENT

TECH N9NE

10/18

7:45 PM

10/22

8PM

COHEED AND CAMBRIA with KNAPSACK +

with THE GRISWOLDS + LOLO

with KRIZZ KALIKO + KNOTHEAD + NEEMA

10/20

with BORN OF OSIRIS + BATTLE CROSS

ALL YOU CAN EAT TOUR

NEW POLITICS + ANDREW MCMAHON IN THE WILDERNESS 10/13

GWAR

8PM

10/23

THANK YOU SCIENTIST

7:30 PM

SHOWBOX AND REIGNCITY PRESENT

MAC MILLER with GOLDLINK + DOMO GENESIS + ALEXANDER SPIT

11/9

SHOWBOXPRESENTS.COM

8PM

SE ATTLE WEEKLY • SEPTEMBER 9 — 15, 2015

Constant Lovers

with DUSTIN THOMAS + DJ MISS ASHLEY

HOLLYWOOD UNDEAD

Sunday, Sept. 13

In case you missed our profile (page 25), YOURYOUNGBODY is a critical pillar in this city’s rapidly developing dark-electronic scene. If you worship at the eldritch cyber-altar of Alice Glass, you will definitely dig this duo’s gothic, windswept dance-hymns, fit for a graveyard rave. The lineup tonight is heavy on similarly moonlit, deep-web dwellers like Portland’s Force Publique and Seattle’s very own “dreamcore space punk” Nightspace.

And don’t miss a chance to check out the Tumblr-savvy alien doo-wop of Olympia’s Aeon Fux, who sings about reptilians and how she’s going to “beat the fuck out of Terry Richardson.” That pervy dickhead deserves it. The Narwhal, 118 E. Pike St., unicornseattle.com. 9 p.m. $7.

21 and up. KELTON SEARS

8:30 PM

SALIM NOURALLAH

7PM + 9:45PM

BLUES TRAVELER

SHOWBOX AND TAKE WARNING PRESENT

9/20

Our very own Ladies First columnist, SassyBlack (aka Cat Harris-White) of THEESatisfaction, is one of the founders and resident DJs of the new FUNKY CONGREGATION party night, where “Together we will praise sound!”

Tonight’s fellowship can look forward to sultry sermons from a stupid-talented array of local DJs and producers, including TaySean of the illustrious cloud-rap clan Kingdom Crumbs; the jazzy pirate-radio broadcasts of J’Von; DJ Sosa of the Night Shift dance party; and Chocolate Chuck’s sub-bass-bumping soul grooves. As SassyBlack sings on her new EP, tonight is an invitation to come “dance in my personal sunlight.” Chop Suey, 1325 E. Madison St., chopsuey.com. 9 p.m. $10. 21 and up. KELTON SEARS

with

10/6–TWO SHOWS!

29

21+

Recreational Cannabis

Central Seattle Soft opening

12pm - 7pm 2413 E Union St Seattle WA, 98122 206.420.2180

.5gm | $38

Disposable Vaporizer IonICTM

Ponder this: 7.00 grams!

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Antoine CreekTM

SEATTLE WEEKLY • SEPTEM BER 9 — 15, 2015

This product has intoxicating effects and may be habit forming. Marijuana can impair concentration, coordination and judgement. Do not operate a vehicle or machinery under the influence of this drug.

Thee may be health risks associated with consumption of this product. For use only by adults 21 and older.

Keep out of the reach of children. WAC 314-55-155

30

odds&ends» We’re Going to Smoke Weed

I

t’s time for us to come together and smoke marijuana.

Over and over, legislators at all levels in Washington state have prevented us from doing just that by hampering public marijuana use—in HIGHERGROUND fact, a

BY MICHAEL A. STUSSER recent law makes providing a place for public use a Class C felony. Lawmakers are making it impossible to promote and celebrate cannabis. Thus it’s time for some civil disobedience.

As an example of how cannabis can be used to elevate our civic engagement, let’s look at a state that’s getting certain things right: Colorado.

Not only is the state working with its medicalmarijuana dispensaries to expand patient care, many jurisdictions have licensed, members-only marijuana clubs where adults can safely use and learn about cannabis in a social, alcohol-free environment. In Seattle? Not allowed!

Colorado is also considering various social pot-use initiatives that would allow vape lounges and cannabis cafes. Another proposal would allow adults to bring marijuana into bars, theaters and restaurants. These establishments would all have dedicated smoking areas for adults, and smoking would never be visible from within 25 feet of any public space.

Colorado’s also leap years ahead on public events involving ganja. The best one I’ve seen so far was a collaboration between Edible Events, a cannabis company, and the Colorado Symphony.

Called “Classically Cannabis” in the symphony’s High Note Series, it was a Bring Your Own Bud evening, including swag tables full of lighters and rolling papers, a designated smoking patio, and a parking lot full of food trucks for when the munchies kicked in. (Don’t get mustard on your tux, man!)

We legalized weed here in Washington. That’s a fact. (So is the $70 million in tax revenue we collected in our first year, which the legislature had no problem spending.) It’s also a fact that legislative pinheads are getting in the way of the public actually using it. “Once people have the right to acquire cannabis, the next logical step forward is figuring out what do they do with it,” says Hilary Bricken, head attorney at Seattle’s Canna Law Group. “People are saying, ‘So I can have it, but where can I use it and not feel like a criminal?’ ” A voter-approved initiative banned cigar lounges (and all indoor smoking in public places) in 2005, and the mayor is attempting to shutter all private hookah lounges as well. We’ve already discussed the city’s no-smoking ban in parks.

And now, with the passage of this summer’s draconian Bill 2136, marijuana clubs can’t exist either: “ ‘Marijuana club’ means a club, association, or other business, for profit or otherwise, that conducts or maintains a premises for the primary or incidental purpose of providing a location where members or other persons may keep or consume marijuana on the premises.”

While designed to kill cannabis clubs, the law is (most likely) illegal, as it makes it impossible for medical patients to provide marijuana to other patients.

Even the Seattle City Attorney’s office thinks this is overkill. “We’ve supported creating adultonly areas where people can legally consume marijuana in order to avoid the problems caused by people using marijuana in public spaces, like streets and parks,” said Deputy City Attorney John Schochet. “Unfortunately, the blanket felony ban on ‘marijuana clubs’ in HB 2136 makes that impossible under current law. We hope to get that fixed during the next legislative session.”

In the meantime, you’d be a fool to risk being arrested with a felony conviction on the line.

The Evergreen State needs to get some basic elements about legalization in place so as not become a laughingstock, and because the voters demand it! We need to be able to grow marijuana for personal use. (All the other legal states have this in place.) We need to decriminalize marijuana and expunge all records of those who were arrested and imprisoned for nonviolent marijuana-related offenses. And we need to allow and accommodate the actual smoking and vaping and ingesting of cannabis in adult spaces such as vape lounges, stoned cinemas, culinary tastings, art events, and Bud & Breakfasts.

The fact is, not only do people use marijuana, but they support the legalization and taxation of the plant for recreational purposes. It’s fun!

It’s social! It’s no longer taboo! You’ve seen beer gardens and cocktail classes and wine-tastings galore, right? Oktoberfest, anyone? Walla Walla wine tours? Craft-beer workshops!? Hell, Smirnoff Vodka just signed as the official sponsor of LiveNation at 25 music festivals, and Blu, an e-cigarette (owned by Imperial Tobacco) sponsors IndyCar, handing out samples of their toxic-sticks at auto races! Marijuana may be safer than alcohol, but it’s still being shunned and shamed and banned throughout the state.

Well, guess what? In order to get it right (and rolling), I’ve decided to host a series of Higher Ground Cannabis Cultural Events. It’s not a club. I won’t sell tickets, and I won’t sell weed.

We also won’t pass joints around—as, shockingly, this is a felony offense (considered “possession and distribution,” with potentially five years in the slammer and a $10,000 fine!) The gig will be BYOBong—and we’ll all get along. It will be educational, instructive, and a way to exercise our rights. I’ve lined up one of Seattle’s best bands, and we’ll have a few surprise guests to elevate the dialogue. We’ll proudly and safely use cannabis in an adult-only environment, and have a damn fine time!

E-mail me at higher@seattleweekly.com if you want an invitation. And if the Feds decide to crash the party? We’ll check their IDs at the door and lay out the hemp welcome mat. It’s time to kick this Prohibition crap to the curb, once and for all. E For more Higher Ground, visit higher groundtv. com.

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