Seattle Weekly, February 03, 2016

February 3-9, 2016 | VOLUME 41 | NUMBER 5

The Central

Saloon Is Cool

Again

How booker Michael Gill is bringing weird back to Seattle’s original weirdo hood.

PAGE 13

NAN MELVILLE

A Journey Through Seattle’s Pinball Scene

By CML Page 9 A FOND FAREWELL TO TRISHA BROWN •THE COLLISION OF ART AND THE INTERNET GRACE LOVE’S MOVING MUSICAL• A BRIEF HISTORY OF RAGTIME SHARON ARNOLD’S BRAVE NEW ART SPACE•THEATER IN THE NEARLY NUDE … AND 25 MORE THINGS YOU MUST SEE THIS SEASON. PAGE 15

KELTON SEARS

DANNI ASKINI

“Soon Alex and I are eliminated.

We drink more.

‘I am having some profound thoughts about pinball,’says Alex.

‘It’s about the relationship between choice and fate.’”

A

century before longhairs and goatees founded Cool Seattle™ on Capitol Hill in 1992, the Central Saloon in Pioneer Square was ground zero for this city’s Filson-clad, counterculture beardos. Like actual gold miners, loggers, and sailors.

Before Jimi Hendrix was a statue on Broadway, he was a real live person, who played the Central Saloon. Before Kurt Cobain died for our sins, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden played their first shows there, making it one of the early hubs for grunge.

When grunge’s flame was smothered by the cardigans of indie in the 2000s, stalwarts clung tightly to the sound at the Central, turning the bar into a hideout for cover bands content to relive their glory days on the weekend.

But in the past couple of months, something has been happening at Central Saloon. Thanks to new booker Michael Gill, relevant, contemporary local hip-hop, rock bands, punks, and weirdos have returned to Pioneer Square, the city’s birthplace of weird. We talked to Gill, a Missoula native who started booking at Central in March 2015, about what the hell is going on. Gill noted that the CONTINUED ON PAGE 4

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editorial

White Privilege Who?

Macklemore is cheesy, and so is pretending to be above him.

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inside 8

NEWS & COMMENT

Reclaiming the city’s woodland; making Monsanto pony up; Seattle’s community of pinball wizards. (No, there’s no twist.)

12 COMIX

The heartbreak of not dancing; the cult of Kurt; a cuddle-party how-to.

15 SPRING ARTS

What to watch for in dance, theater, visual art, and classical—and how the

Internet is changing all this.

Plus our picks for don’t-miss events.

25 FOOD & DRINK

The Eastside’s best Chinese; pro tips on cooking with beer.

29 ARTS & CULTURE The multiverse onstage, Auschwitz onscreen.

36 ODDS & ENDS

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Talking to other humans like this is the inevitable outcome of the Good White Person game—a game whose end is not to get to the heart of and begin to heal this country’s horrific colonial legacy of violence, but to prove we aren’t implicit in it.

What’s different about “White Privilege II” is that, unlike in his preachy, self-congratulatory “Same Love,” Macklemore takes the opposite approach. He starts by admitting that he is part of the problem and that he doesn’t already know the right answer, which is much scarier than pretending to be a white moral arbiter. The song begins with him hearing the Darren Wilson non-indictment come down, knowing something is profoundly wrong, heading to a protest, confessing how awkward it feels to be there, and wondering if he even should be there at all. It’s a moment I watched play out live on Twitter that eerie night—waves of tweets calling for Macklemore, as a white rapper, to join the protests, and then a counterwave of tweets calling for him to get the hell out of there and quit taking up space as soon as images of him marching appeared online.

The fact is, historically, white people created this mess and continue to passively benefit from it.

Instead of hiding behind the robotic trappings of the Good White People game or pretending we’re above it, it’s time we honestly and openly started working to heal it, not just POC, and that means putting your white ass in some scary, murky positions sometimes.

Sometimes it means shutting up and listening, sometimes it means passing the mic, but sometimes it also means putting yourself out there in a heartfelt way that extends beyond empty Facebook links. It doesn’t mean dwelling on unproductive “white guilt,” but it does mean accepting you’ll probably make mistakes in the process that will upset some people. But brushing the conversation aside with a “Whatever, Macklemore is corny” isn’t helping anything.

Yes, it’s nice that this song is doing work on white people who don’t play the Good White People game. Your average white American has heard of, and probably loves, Macklemore, but probably hasn’t heard of white privilege. His song has likely changed that for a lot of people. A friend of mine who works at a local middle school said this song has given teachers a platform to talk about white privilege with their students, almost all of whom love Macklemore. But we, dear white Seattle intelligentsia, also have some stuff to learn. Because all of us white Americans are, at best, also middle schoolers when it comes to this topic, so let’s stop pretending we’ve already graduated. E

Photos by Mark Kitaoka Illustrations by Kevin Harris

’ve had seven conversations about “White Privilege II” in the week and a half since it’s come out. Nearly all started with a shared sense of exasperation about Macklemore being a generally corny guy from Seattle, but nearly all ended with a genuine talk about the effect white privilege and systemic white supremacy have in American society. Some were messy, some were funny, all were productive.

A lot of the critiques of “White Privilege II” I’ve read online start in the same place most of my conversations did—“Ugh, Macklemore is Macklemoring again.” But they also end there.

Macklemore absolutely deserves most of the criticism he receives. The shamelessly Instagrammed Kendrick Lamar text, the weird Jew-face costume, signing a Nike sponsorship after writing an anti-consumer song about Nike—the guy has made some dubious choices.

That said, no white person in America (the song’s explicit target audience, as is this editorial’s) is too advanced or cool for the conversation “White Privilege II” wants to have. For white Americans, there is no cool way to talk about systemic white supremacy. There are offensive, problematic, and unproductive ways, but no cool ways. If the existing white dialogue on America’s legacy of white supremacy and privilege were to manifest in song form, it probably would sound a lot like “White Privilege II,” a messy, nine-minute, Broadway-style jumble. Either that or some terrible avant-garde harsh noise/pop-country hybrid. What it wouldn’t be is a cogent, neat, and tidy pop hit.

To be clear, as a white person, the easiest thing to do about race is not talk about it. The second easiest thing, which is Seattle’s favorite, is be a “good white person”—someone who proves their solidarity by sharing outraged articles and essays on Facebook and wielding the right preapproved terminology and talking points in the comments.

In Seattle, this has become something of a game among white people—who shall reign supreme as the most pious white person?

This fruitless exercise manifested at a recent artist talk at the Frye with Ishmael Butler and Nep Sidhu of the Black Constellation collective when, during the Q&A, someone in the crowd asked, “As a cis-het white woman, assuming you two identify as cis-het men of color, I was wondering why you used moon imagery in your work, given that the moon is traditionally a feminine symbol”—a question that could have simply been phrased, “Tell me about why you used the moon in your work.”

3

Michael Gill » FROM PAGE 1 Central is now the home of Chop Suey’s old sound system and a new stretch-wrap projector screen, which he is excited to use for upcoming Mario Kart nights and electronic shows.

From the music of Motown, to the genius of Bert Williams, Seattle Theatre Group joins arts organizations across the city to celebrate American traditions and the art of African Americans during February 2016.

SW: Is it hard to get bands to come down from Capitol Hill to play in Pioneer Square?

AMERICAN TRAD ITION S

Gill: Kind of. I flew under the radar for most of 2015, which was a conscious decision because I was trying to figure out what [the Central Saloon] was all about. In January, we just had Steal Shit Do Drugs, which almost sold out.

That show was awesome, it was packed. We had Tomten and Fabulous Downey Brothers. Now that the calendar is full far enough out, we can take more risks since we have that promo lead.

Also we’ve kind of churned the water enough that people are noticing this place again, and know that it’s not what it used to be. Due to its geographical location next to the stadiums, there’s so much sports walk-up.

For the first six months, my business practice was that I’d pull brand-new Capitol Hill bands and younger bands that would never get a show on Friday or Saturday up there, give them a show down here, and all of a sudden their friends can come and they get to play to 100plus people who would never have seen them otherwise. Baseball fans—they are more of a mellow crowd, but they get really excited and buy a lot of merch.

Are bands surprised when you ask them to come play down here?

BLACK MUSIC, DANCE, FILM, and more…

Very much—it’s so funny, because there’s a lot of people who live down here. Kyle from Blood Drugs, I was talking to him the other day, and he was like, “I used to live around the

corner and I’d always come in here, but never at night because it wasn’t my type of entertainment [laughs].” Steve from Crypts, his wife owns a salon around the corner, so Steve is in here a lot. People are here!

Is there a general philosophy that guides your booking practices?

Through trial and error I’ve learned that you should do what you know. Your marketing is going to feel more honest, because it’s stuff you actually like. In Missoula I learned I had to be willing to lose the guarantee because I actually liked the show.

What music in Seattle gets you stoked enough that you’d take that risk?

Blood Drugs. Bad Future, watching them in here, the feel was so cohesive—that loud rock vibe felt perfect in here, it feels honest in this room. Hip-hop does really well here. We had Diogenes in here recently. We had this thing called Bummed Out where we had a bunch of poets come in and read sad poetry, comedians told sad stories with no punchlines, and Jason and Faustine from Maldives just played a bunch of really sad country music. It was awesome.

That will be quarterly.

What’s your ultimate Central Saloon goal?

Our website is about to be revamped. Once that’s fixed, I want to start bringing in national touring acts and have music every night—this place can support it. We’ll pair them with local opening bands. Those shows will probably start being announced in April. We also have one of those “Seattle Underground Tour”-sized Pioneer Square basements, and we’re looking at putting a screen-printing set up down there and start doing limited runs [of posters] for the bigger shows that bands can take home. E

ksears@seattleweekly.com

Editor-in-Chief Mark Baumgarten

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 3 — 9, 2016

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Black Radio & Black Music How Motown Moved Music Radio 7-8am | 91.3 KBCS

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Motown Across the Years Intergenerational Sing-A-Long Various locations

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DANCE, DANCE, DANCE The Moore Theatre

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JOSHUA BOULET

“Hospitals are paying residents basically minimum wage for a highly skilled, education-intensive, accreditation-required profession...? I’d protest those kind of predatory employment practices, too.”

It’s false-poverty. Yes, the pay is relatively low. But these are folks who are playing the long game in terms of career. I work for UW part-time and make less than $24,000 a year. I’m also a graduate student, and my schedule has me working 60-plus hours a week. I share a one-bedroom apartment.

But you know what? I get by. I’m thankful for the world-class education I’ve been given access to, and I recognize that this is by no means the end of my career; I’m simply passing though here. True, it’s tough. But residency is not forever. These docI just read your article. I am a physician at tors will go on to make millions more than I ever Oregon Health & Science University and was will in their lifetime. Unless the state wants to start the director of the urology residency program increasing funding of its flagship institution, the for seven years. Your article was by far the most money has to come from somewhere. After years accurate description of the issues of being a resiof salary freeze, UW has a lot of catching up to do dent I have read. Well done. to stay competitive. But take that conversation to Michael Conlin, via e-mail Olympia where it belongs.

Ryan Brill, via Facebook UW should look at UCSF, another big public medical instiSend your thoughts on tution. They supplement their TUNE THEM OUT this week’s issue to residents’ stipends with a “housIn last week’s editorial, we took to letters@seattleweekly.com task pundits in the media who have ing supplement” of $10,000 to INFERNAL MEDICINE

Last week’s cover story by Casey Jaywork chronicled efforts by physicians in the University of Washington residency program to unionize and demand better wages and benefits. Among other things, the residents want a salary that reflects the high cost of living in Seattle, as well as better maternity benefits that would allow residents who are new moms to follow the same medical advice they give to patients.

$12,000 (so total compensation is $60,000–$70,000). Housing prices in Seattle are rising and will continue to rise. UW needs to catch up with the current times. This ain’t the ’70s. peachesorangesapples, via seattleweekly.com

So the hospitals are paying these residents basically minimum wage for a highly skilled, education-intensive, accreditation-required profession with life-and-death responsibility and consequences? And they only receive minimal benefits, while simultaneously bringing in up to three times the cost of their salary in service fees and federal funding for the employing institution? I’d protest those kind of predatory employment practices, too.

Errin Patton, via seattleweekly.com

BuffaloExchange.com

reacted to the spike in homelessness with little more than anti-homeless rage. We specifically cited KIRO radio’s afternoon shift, but readers noted the boys on 97.3 weren’t the only ones.

Yeah, and on TV . . . this means you, David Rose. Not all people experiencing homelessness were attracted to Washington from the East Coast due to drugs! Let’s see: returning vets from JBLM, untreated mental-health patients across our state, families fleeing foreclosures from 2008 onward—the list goes on and on.

Christine Dodson, via Facebook

Equity & Difference Keeping the Conversation Going

The real shame of our city is that of 400 posts under a recent Times story, only myself and one other poster had any sympathetic thoughts or expressed any compassion for the homeless in our city. That is pathetic. People that even by national standards are well off, that have everything a person could ever need, cannot be thankful enough for all that they have to find any room in their heart to say, “Goodness, I have so much, what do they need, how much will it take to find a place for these people? Me personally, how much?” Many of the posters at the Times wanted to run them out of town and refuse services to outsiders. Sound familiar?

Diana Mercedes Howel, via e-mail E

American Indians Talk: Why Isn’t The U.S. Listening?

Comments have been edited for length and clarity.

All cuts were downright surgical.

This year-long series of talks exposes and explains transgrsgressions, both systematic and personal, experienced by too many in our communities today.

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FREEDOM, RELIGION AND RACISM IN JEWISH-MUSLIM ENCOUNTERS

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SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 3 — 9, 2016

I have no sympathy for these individuals and their money issues. They knew before getting into the business of medicine they would not be making any during their internships or residencies. They will be making lots of money very quickly after they complete their education. Choosing to reproduce during their residency is also something that was in their control. What is wrong and is dangerous to patients is the long hours that the residents work and the sleep-deprived decisions they are making.

Young Johnny, via seattleweekly.com

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news&comment On the Hook THE WOODS

THE WATER

Urbane Forests

Can hiking trails solve the problem of ‘The Jungle’?

Monsanto knew its chemicals were harming the environment.

Seattle says it should help taxpayers pay for the mess.

BY DANIEL PERSON

BY SARA BERNARD

CASEY JAYWORK

green hillside or a condominium? Voters said, ‘No, we want these green belts.’ ” Harris is well aware that the greenbelts can attract homeless encampments, and that at times that creates a mess. However, he says, “We believe that despite the fact they are a burden to maintain, they still provide aesthetic ecological value.”

L

A clearing in the East Duwamish Greenbelt, aka The Jungle.

on Friday, found a 19 percent increase in the number of people sleeping outside in King County).

But as the city conducts sweeps to clear out encampments—many of which exist in Seattle’s sprawling urban forests—questions are also being reaised about why Seattle has so much undeveloped land to begin with, and what can be done to ensure it doesn’t become a haven for social ills.

Donald Harris, who directs parks and green-

spaces acquisitions for Seattle Parks and Recreation, says Seattle has made a conscious effort to buy and preserve many of the dense bands of greenery we see today.

The area of most concern in the homelessness conversation, The Jungle—which sprawls from beneath I-5 and up the western slope of Beacon Hill—is known officially as the East Duwamish Greenbelt.

“The theory behind our acquisition of those lands is to act as a buffer,” Harris says. “You have Beacon Hill up there and the freeway.

The idea was to preserve this band of green between them.”

The land wasn’t all purchased at once. Harris notes that there were some outright acquisitions, some transfers from the state, and some donations.

At times, Seattle voters have explicitly called for more protection of greenbelts around the city. “The classic was West Seattle.

People looked at those lands for years and years and thought they already were preserved,” he says. “All of a sudden [in the early 1990s], when everything else was built up in Seattle, little pockets of construction started showing up there.”

“We did a campaign, and took this one existing condo and replicated it all over the hillside. We asked, ‘Do you want to see this

dperson@seattleweekly.com

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 3 — 9, 2016

ike many of Seattle’s sprawling greenbelts, the Cheasty Greenspace provides a leafy, picturesque backdrop to life in the Emerald City.

But also like many undeveloped stretches of thick brush and trees, it can attract its share of nefarious elements. Neighbors have long complained about dumping in the undeveloped slope just west of Martin Luther King Way, between Beacon Hill and Rainier Valley. There have also been reports of drug activity and homeless encampments—not unlike the one under I-5 that this week saw two people killed in a hail of bullets.

These negative impacts were the impetus years ago for a group of neighbors to devise a plan to make the area more welcoming to all, with work focusing on a small plot of land called Cheasty Mountain View.

“When we started out work in Cheasty Mountain View, it was homeless encampments. There was drug activity. Prostitution.

Garbage. A ton of garbage,” says Joel DeJong, who with his wife initiated the effort.

By all accounts, the work has been successful. Today a network of trails circle through the small pocket of urban forest, allowing neighbors to, among other things, walk through the woods on their way to the lightrail station.

For DeJong, the lesson is clear: “You have to replace the negative activity with a positive activity. People will engage the space. It’s just whether it will be a positive or a negative engagement.”

Last week’s shooting has raised plenty of questions in Seattle, foremost among them what more can be done to address the large spike in homelessness across the city and the unsanctioned homeless camps that have grown out of that spike (the annual One Night Count, conducted in predawn hours

Craig Thompson, forest steward for the East Duwamish Greenbelt, says the area known as The Jungle has actually been subject to a significant amount of work over the years to encourage positive use of the natural area. He and other volunteers have reduced the amount of invasive ivy around trees, which, left to grow, makes the woods denser than they would naturally be; they’ve also built trails, orchards and dog parks. Thompson has also seen improvement with the construction of the Mountainto-Sound Greenway Trail, which brings hordes of road bikers through the area.

“As more people have become involved with that trail, and the off-leash areas, and the orchard and the forest path, that we’ve created and reclaimed, there has been more people present, which during the days has served to make a safer local park and natural environment,” he says.

Thompson emphasizes that he’s encountered many people living in The Jungle who care about the area and want to be good stewards.

“They’re not crazy; they just want to live outside,” he says.

However, he has also seen, in recent years, a return to many of the negative behaviors seen in the past, underscored by the murders last week. While he does not want to point fingers—especially so soon after a tragedy—he says that progress has suffered at the hands of too much overturn at the concerned agencies.

“I am probably the only person around who has continuity from 2003 to the present day over what has happened in those woods,” he says. “There’s been a regression.”

Thompson has also been active in efforts in Cheasty—including a controversal plan to activate more land on that side of Beacon Hill with a mountain bike trail. Neighborhood infighting aside, though, Thompson says getting people into the woods will provide far more long-term benefit that the sweeps now being conducted by the city.

“The city tends to have a project-oriented response to issues in these woods, in the areas under and around the highways,” he says.

“What is needed is a programmatic response, not one project. Unless this area is activated again in a very positive way, the work we’ve done will revert. There is a lot of trash that has been accumulating. There is human waste.

So we need to re-engage in such a way that human needs of the people living there will be met and at the same time address the environmental concerns.” E

W

hen the Seattle city attorney’s office filed a lawsuit last week against Monsanto for legacy pollution in the Duwamish River, it added contaminated fish to its list of grievances.

“Many residents of the City of Seattle, particularly people who are recent immigrants or lowincome, depend on fish and shellfish from the Lower Duwamish as a significant food source,” reads number 24 of 144 painstaking points that the filing document makes in its lengthy attack on the agrochemical giant, which was the country’s sole producer of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) from 1935 to 1979.

Seattle is the sixth city to join a recent spate of lawsuits that take Monsanto and its subsidiaries to task for producing PCBs—one of the nastiest and most ubiquitous environmental toxins out there, now known to accumulate to dangerous levels in fish tissue and wreak havoc on human immune, endocrine, and reproductive systems when consumed.

Like the other cities, Seattle is demanding that Monsanto help pay for the cost of removing PCBs in the Duwamish River’s drainage systems—a process that will cost local taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. But Seattle is unique in that it is also going after Monsanto for its chemicals’ role in making fish that live in the Duwamish River too contaminated to eat safely.

The lawsuit details internal documents that show Monsanto knew its chemicals were harmful to human health, but continued to market it—all but assuring that PCBs would eventually end up in waterways across the world.

The company formed internal committees on the subject acknowledging that PCBs were “global environmental contaminants leading to contamination of human food (particularly fish).”

But discontinuing production was not an option, one memo reads: “There is too much customer/ market need and selfishly too much Monsanto profit to go out.” It didn’t stop manufacturing PCBs until the late 1970s, by which time so much had been produced that they remain pervasive in Seattle—found in everything from old coats of paint to caulk.

“We’ve got plenty of smoking guns—their own documents are the smoking guns,” says Seattle Environmental Protection Section Director Laura Wishik. “They knew that PCBs were out there, getting into wildlife. They were in the air over London; they were in fish in Sweden.

They knew those things. And they continued to try to promote them, to market them, to make more money off of them. That’s why we’re in litigation today.”

(In a statement, Monsanto argued that “PCBs sold at the time were a lawful and useful product that was then incorporated by third parties into other useful products. If improper disposal or other improper uses allowed for necessary cleanup costs, then these other third parties would bear responsibility for these costs.”)

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 8 7

news&comment On the Hook » FROM PAGE 7 Both the Duwamish River and the fish and shellfish that reside in it are thick with PCBs, and people are eating seafood that should not be eaten. The cleanup process has been glacial, and even a good understanding of who’s fishing in the Duwamish—including how many people, where they’re from, and what measures would actually help the situation—is still just now taking shape. Final results from an EPArun Fisher Study, for instance, which surveyed people fishing in the Duwamish from summer 2014 to October 2015, should roll out at some point this year.

But so far, the most tangible “efforts to stop people from fishing are basically [warning] signs,” says Alberto Rodriguez, environmental and community health programs manager at Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition. “And now we’ve got them in nine or 10 languages. Does that work? It doesn’t.”

Thanks to plenty of photographic and survey evidence, “We have proof now that [the signs] are ineffective,” adds Linn Gould, executive director of Just Health Action ( JHA), a nonprofit that received two separate grants from the city’s Duwamish River Opportunity Fund to work alongside Vietnamese and Latino communities who fish in the Duwamish.

Gould’s approach is to solve this problem by asking for solutions from the people affected: “Let’s go deep,” she says. “Let’s go really deep into one population and find out what they’re thinking about.” As a result, Gould’s team discovered, for example, that building fishing piers around Puget Sound, stocking fish ponds, and creating accessible regional fishing maps are top priorities for the Vietnamese community. Meanwhile, ideas once floated by the EPA, such as a fish-trade system that would offer families clean fish in exchange for fish pulled out of the Duwamish, aren’t of interest at all.

Of course, underlying a lot of this work is an economic issue: the fact that subsistence fishing is necessary. Hunger doesn’t stop at a warning sign or a community meeting. “If you’re food-insecure, you’ll eat PCBs-contaminated fish,” says Gould. “Who cares if I get cancer in 20 years? I need to eat now.”

That Monsanto profited off chemicals it knew were harmful to human health, and that those chemicals continue to harm Seattle residents, begs a comparison to tobacco companies and major lawsuits brought against them.

However, there is plenty of skepticism about the city’s legal action.

James Rasmussen, coordinator of the DRCC, argues that the lawsuit is just a way for the city to abdicate responsibility for the environmental-justice concerns it should be prioritizing. “If I had some kind of auto accident where I hurt somebody, I wish that I could turn around and sue the car company for

some reason,” he says. “But if I hit someone, then I’m the one responsible.”

In Rasmussen’s view, it’d be better if the city wouldn’t keep laying blame, but instead “start talking positively about the cleanup. That’s what we’re lacking. We need the public to understand why this is important, instead of saying, ‘This cleanup is costing too much and we’re never gonna get there because it’s just too hard.’ ” The EPA’s estimated cleanup cost, $342 million, isn’t “chump change,” he adds, but notes that Seattle’s central waterfront improvement project now wears a hefty $1.12 billion price tag. “Let’s put this into perspective.”

With hundreds of millions of dollars on the line and such a dizzying number of agencies and nonprofits working on this, “One way or another we’re gonna get there.” Still, “good luck,” he says, if Seattle thinks Monsanto is the answer. E

sbernard@seattleweekly.com

8

Two lonely Donald Trump supporters attend a rally at UW Saturday. Trump placed second in the Iowa Caucus Monday. #notgreat.

BROOKLYN BENJESTORF

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 3 — 9, 2016

Exposure

GAMING

You Just Need One Ball A journey through Seattle’s kind, sprawling pinball culture.

BY CML

S

o this is your first tournament?” says a woman in a black hoodie. She hands me a cigarette and a light. “Welcome.

Are you having fun?”

We are at Add-A-Ball, a bar and arcade— mainly pinball—just south of North 36th Street in Fremont. The space, industrial, subterranean, is packed; the patrons, mixed in gender and diverse in appearance, overflow out the entrance and onto the patio. Not unusual for a weekend evening in Fremont—except it is Wednesday night, and most of the revelers are here to play pinball for money.

“It’s the biggest weekly pinball tournament in the world,” the woman explains. “Usually we get 50 to 60; today we only got 47. How are you doing?”

“I’m 2 and 1,” I answer.

“Good for you!” That I’ve won two matches bewilders me; it delights her. “Did you play a lot before?”

“Kind of.”

In the past week I have gone to the Pinball Museum, Shorty’s, and Add-A-Ball, several times. The people I’ve met, the in-person generosity that runs so retrograde to contemporary gaming culture, make me believe her when she exhales her last drag and declares: “Seattle has the best pinball scene in the country.”

I am a gamer. I played StarCraft for seven years, made a living through poker for one, and have traveled to Europe to play Magic: the Gathering. All these games consist of extremely cutthroat head-to-head competition and competitors. How are pinball and the people who play it different? With the help of friends Alex, Haylee, and Dan, I set forth to find out—and to see if pinball was cool again.

ball, like video games, has grown more forgiving over time to appeal to a broader audience.

The Pinball Museum has space for 40 games, a fraction of the 5,973 listed in the IPDB. A virtual machine, which projects hundreds of games onto a computer screen shaped like a pinball machine, covers a number of those missing, including my favorite, “Star Trek: the Next Generation” (1993). But the physical element can only be emulated so convincingly; it feels as phony as the J.J. Abrams reboot. But then Robert comes by, turns up the volume, refills the freeplay tickets, and I know there is no way to lose.

Typically there is some incentive to play well—draining three balls necessitates another infusion of quarters; a high-enough score can earn a free “replay”—but this afternoon we are playing terribly because we can.

Haylee and Dan leave; I wanted to finish my beer and play “The Champion’s Pub” 17 more times.

On Wednesday we head to Shorty’s. I rarely go there anymore—most games are 75 cents and the surrounding area has been swallowed by Amazon. Shorty’s was supposed to be the latest victim of New Seattle’s yuppie blight when the building around it was razed to make way for condos. But the city’s preservation board gave Shorty’s an indefinite reprieve last fall when it granted the building historical landmark status.

To Seattle pinball culture, Shorty’s itself is the same. “In 2007, Shorty’s was the only location in the area with more than four pinball machines, and everyone pretty much knew each other and hung out there,” says Gordon Ornelas, founder of Skill Shot, a local pinball zine, in an e-mail.

Tonight we play round upon round of “Medieval Madness” (1997), rated fifth-highest on IPDB. I can play any game of pinball and try to not die, maybe shoot some flashing lights, but

this is the only game I remotely understand in any depth. You just shoot the castle over and over.

You can also sink the ball in “Merlin’s Magic,” a kind of glory hole with randomized rewards.

The place has cleared out by midnight.

“Where is everyone?” says Haylee.

“At Add-A-Ball, for the tournament,” says Dan. We show up to Add-A-Ball a week later. Registration begins at 8. The bar gets fuller, and I get drunker, until the tournament starts an hour later.

Pinball tournaments are head-to-head. You’re paired against opponents with the same amount of losses, on random machines, and try not to lose three times—like pinball itself.

When the organizer, Sergei, calls my name, I hear “Eight Ball Deluxe” (1980) and have no idea what it is.

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 3 — 9, 2016

Museum in the International District, and I cannot figure out how to launch the ball.

I ask Robert the doorman for some help, and five seconds later I’m playing “The Texan.” At 56, it is the oldest machine at the museum.

“Our mission is to preserve pinball,” says the owner, Charlie Martin—and the machines, spanning six decades from “The Texan” (1960) to “Wizard of Oz” (2013), outline a long history.

The Pinball Museum is a family business; Charlie runs the show with his wife, Cindy, and son, Michael. “We’re all in 12 days a week,” he says. The machines, prone to physical deterioration, are in good shape. “I’m scared to think of how long we spend on maintenance.” Each machine bears a short description, and its rating from the Internet Pinball Database (IPDB), along with a QR code for more info.

The genius of the Pinball Museum is to pair history with participation: After the cover of $13, each machine is free to play. This serves an important purpose, says Charlie: “Otherwise, who would play the old machines?”

You can experience the evolution of pinball.

Games made by Gottlieb give way to those by Williams, then Stern; mechanics and shots go from simple to complicated; digital score displays roll over into dot matrices. When you play, though, you notice the main change is that pin-

BJÖRN

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» CONTINUED ON PAGE 10 9

Pinball » FROM PAGE 9

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to Flip Flip Ding Ding! in Georgetown. As fate would have it, there is another tournament, and my round-one adversary is Kayla Greet, who runs said podcast. “We usually get 200 listens,” I ask my good-natured opponent for some she says while disemboweling me at a game of tips. He obliges: “Shoot the numbers on the left “Space Station” (1987). “We talk to everyone to multiply your score.” Everyone I’ve played at about everything—the Pinheads guys, who do a tournament has tried to help me beat them, maintenance; nationally ranked local players with mixed results. We “coin in”—put in 50 reviewing new machines; even Todd Maccents apiece—then flip another quarter to see Culloch,” a Bainbridge Island resident whose who goes first, press start twice, play pinball. By neurological disorder allowed him to retire from some miracle I win. the NBA and focus on pinball.

The next round starts quickly. I’m playing Katie Janis, the owner, notes the result, against “Dave” on “Whoa Nellie” (2015), and “CML loses,” on an iPad. the machine’s mammary theme (“Big Juicey Next I lose to a gentleman named TerMelons, Ripe ’n’ Ready”) make it look old rence, who tells me he owns the 8-Bit Arcade enough for me to think I have a chance. Dave in Renton. Alex loses to Levi, who owns the crushes me. Strike one. machines in this very establishment.

“You know who that was?” says Dan. “That’s Soon Alex and I are eliminated. We drink Dave Stewart! He’s top-20 in the world. You more. “I am having some profound thoughts see all the initials ‘DBS’ on all the machines? about pinball,” says Alex. “It’s about the relaThat’s him!” tionship between choice and fate.”

Later, Dave corrects me: “I’m top-30.” (But It’s like what Charlie Martin told me at the the initials are his.)

Pinball Museum: “There’s one thing that pinThe next round starts quickly. I am again on ball has that single-player video games don’t: “Whoa Nellie.” I try to become a third-rate an element of randomness to it.” In games like Dave. It is enough. I am 2 and 1. I am a lucky poker or Magic, this is inseparable from the fraud. I go outside and bum a cigarette from a psychological element: You make decisions nice woman in a black hoodie. based on incomplete information. In pinball, Round four is on “Stars” (1978). I attempt a it’s the physical element that ensures some slap save, but miss the flipper button entirely. randomness: “Even the best players drain three I hump the machine to conduce bumper ricotimes,” Kayla tells me; nobody is perfect in real chets, but tilt my ball away. Strike two. time. And that, along with the game’s difficulty, “Are you drunk?” says my opponent. “I am the man-versus-himself drunk. You have to hit peak element, and the close-knit drunkenness to excel at this community, helps explain game. If I am sober, I am “Are you drunk? competitive pinball’s cheerbad. One beer, I am betI am drunk. You have to ful and open spirit. ter. Two beers, I am great.

Man need never walk After that, I get really bad, hit peak drunkenness to alone, bowl alone, tilt alone, really fast. You know what it’s like? It’s like bowling.” excel at this game.” pin alone.

“I’ve never won the tourRound five, Sergei puts nament,” says Kayla. Alex me on “Space Shuttle” and I stay until the end. She wins.

(1984), which “celebrates NASA.” I am in a huge deficit and on my last ball when my foe sportingly says, “It just takes one ball!”

“The popularity of pinball has always been cycliIt is true. I can still win. I do not. Strike three. cal,” Charlie Martin has told me, “and we’re Outside, Dan says, “I didn’t win a match. I’m currently in a resurgence.” Everyone, everyglad this is my hobby, though. I was playing too where, corroborates this. Greet: “We have 140 much ‘Dota 2’ ”—the second-biggest competipeople playing across Seattle in a bar league tive video game, or eSport, in the world. Ninety every Monday, plus 15 to 20 in the monthly percent of the time playing “Dota 2” was miserwomen’s league. And Todd MacCulloch!” Janis: able, he says. “There was too much pressure to “We opened about two years ago. Pinball is win, and I didn’t make any friends.” getting popular again. It’s been great to watch Back inside, I chat with the owners, Brad the scene grow in such a short amount of time.”

Johnsen and Travis Echert, who also run John Ornelas: “In Seattle, there are over 10 locations John’s Game Room on Capitol Hill. I tell them with five or more pins, and more are on the way.

I’ve become a junkie.

I’ll probably increase Skill Shot’s next print run, “What makes you like pinball?” says Brad. because most of the popular locations ran out.”

“The culture,” I say. “Compared to other At Nine-Pound Hammer, a block down from games, pinball isn’t nearly as aspirational.”

Flip Flip Ding Ding!, Kayla is celebrating her This is truer for players, who compete for top flawless victory with two friends, Alexa and Travis. prizes of four figures and not seven, than it is Alexa says: “If you want to get better, just for entrepreneurs. Add-A-Ball got started at play more. I play a lot of those weeklies.” (The the end of 2011, and, according to Johnsen, has calendar on Skill Shot shows nine tournaments “grown a lot” since then. The business model in the next week, from Edmonds to Renton.) makes sense: Gaming culture is now mainThen she says: “I’ve been a nerd all my life. stream, and taxation has not kept pace. For $50 I’ve gone to comic conventions and had people a year paid to the City of Seattle for an “Amuse- treat me well only because they wanted a female ment Device” license, plus maintenance costs, body. But I really was there to find comics for you can tap into a stream of quarters. Plus, my collection, and they couldn’t deal with it. people will buy beer. There’s more money in You know what the great thing about pinball is? gaming than ever before; why shouldn’t pinball I came in as a beginner, and nobody treated me entrepreneurs get in on it? like that, I was just a competitor—I’m ranked number 995 in the world!—and that’s what I love about it.”

At the center of the Seattle pinball scene is As I head out, Kayla says: “Make sure to put Ornelas’ Skill Shot, which boasts a circulation of that I won!” E 2,400 and a fortnightly podcast. The day after the Add-A-Ball tournament I drive with Alex news@seattleweekly.com

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KELTON SEARS

Organizer Minh Nguyen doing some last-minute research for Chat Room.

Chat Room aims to get people to log into earnest conversations about the Internet.

By Kelton Sears

T

he latest showed up in Philadelphia Magazine, though there is likely another being prepped for publication at this very moment—the asinine millennial-bashing thinkpiece.

“Raised with iPhones in hand, young people scorn the slow learning curves of their elders,” the article contends. “Their prowess with gewgaws like Slack and Snapchat has made them our masters; we’re forced to turn to them for information and advice on our devices. What seems to escape their notice is that all the tech is just the delivery system. And cool, fancy new delivery equipment

doesn’t make what’s being delivered worthwhile.”

This kind of shallow appraisal of technology, whether couched in tired millennial critiques that use the word “gewgaws” or not, rubs Minh Nguyen the wrong way.

“People being dismissive about the Internet really bums me out,” the 27-year-old youth & family programs manager at the Seattle Architecture Foundation tells me. “These are real, modern channels of communication. So much activism happens on Twitter. At the core of a meme is a very effective message. I’m more interested in looking at the Internet as a tool that we

it really is—an undeniable extension of most people’s everyday lives.

“I’m really hesitant to make value judgments about the Internet,” Nguyen says, “whether or not it’s this good or evil thing that’s descended upon the world. The angle I’m really interested in is how existing economies are adapting to the Internet, especially the art economy.”

These are questions Nguyen and producer Claire Buss are looking to tackle in Chat Room, a quarterly forum launching next week at the Northwest Film Forum that will feature discussions among “artists, thinkers, non-artists, and non-thinkers.” While the four Chat Rooms will each focus on a different sub-topic, the series’ overarching theme is a simple but increasingly relevant question: What does art mean in the age of the Internet? But rather than approaching the question from a dry pedagogical angle, Nguyen is hoping to achieve something closer to Casey Jane Ellison’s brilliant, down-to-earth web-talk

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 3 — 9, 2016

URL IRL

project our normal behaviors into—on which we all do what we would always do.”

For instance, are any of the anti-millennial screeds published in reputable magazines that different from a long Facebook rant written by some other grumpy stranger? Is it any different than a person screaming in the streets of the physical world?

“On Facebook, all the normal psychological behaviors are present,” Nguyen says, “but they are a little magnified because the way you are known is quantifiable by how many people like your stuff.”

Nguyen is one in a recent school of artists and thinkers starting to reframe the conversation around society’s relationship with the Internet.

Avoiding the stale dystopian or utopian extremes that have dominated the popular conversation while also attempting to bring levity to the rigorous academicism that often clouds more interesting discourse on the topic, Nguyen is trying to get people to talk about the Internet for what

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 16 15

URL IRL » FROM PAGE 15

the territory of “cool teens.” For instance, vaporwave—an enormous, expanding subculture that spans fashion, style, design, and music, born completely on, in reaction to, and as a critique of the Internet. While most people write it off as a Tumblr phenomenon, Nguyen is interested in engaging with vaporwave and contemporary net-art earnestly. “For instance, with vaporwave, I’m really interested in why Greek and Roman statues are such a big thing in the aesthetic, a big signifier of beauty,” Nguyen says. “I think net art can perpetuate these notions of race and gender we’ve held for a long time.”

Nguyen also hopes to dive into new conversa-

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 3 — 9, 2016

160129 Crossroads Seattle Weekly 4.83x5.54 f.pdf

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tions on race and gender that have been blown open by the anonymity afforded by online avatars.

Take SOPHIE, a popular electronic artist from the net-savvy PC Music collective out of London.

Iconic vaporwave album Floral Shoppe.

As blogs began to sing the producer’s praises, show Touching the Art. “Cool, casual, straight-talk many assumed, from the name and the highpitched vocals, that the artist was a woman. It ways of talking about art,” Nguyen says, “rewardturns out SOPHIE was a man, real name Samuel ing on a humor level, relaxing, comfortable, and Long, wielding web-enabled identity obfuscaaccessible. Nobody wants to go back to school.” tion as an artistic tool. Long went as far as to hire a transgender woman to mime a SOPHIE DJ The first edition of Chat Room on Feb. 11 will set at a high-profile Boiler Room show while he focus on how the Internet has redefined labor for stood on the side of the stage pretending to be a artists. It’s a question that’s plagued every corner bodyguard, his real identity then unknown to the of the industry—what is music worth if you can public. After the truth came out, some hailed the stream it for free? What is an original painting ruse as a progressive statement on gender fluidity, worth if you can just reblog an image of it on while others saw it as an act of appropriation.

Tumblr? What’s the value of a photograph in the “It’s a similar conversation for me to when age of Creative Commons and cameraphones? In people adapt black vernacular English in net art some undeniable ways, the massive distribution possibilities afforded to artists by the web has lev- or use slang from black teens without credit,” eled the playing field, but Nguyen also wonders if Nguyen says. “You want the cultural cachet but not the experience of living in that subjectivity the increased competition for attention has creevery day. But it’s a hard conversation, because ated uncertainty about the value we should place the way the Internet has stimulated cultural on art to begin with. globalization, everything “It’s so weird.

There’s a lot of con“Everything is so fluid and is so fluid and rebloggable and repostable, so people fusion around what rebloggable and repostable, don’t really understand the qualifies as labor in or there aren’t the creative sector,” so people don’t really under- boundaries, really boundaries, to how Nguyen says. “A lot of people have this stand the boundaries, or you should behave.”

But again, Nguyen is conception that art is made because it con- there aren’t really boundaries.” careful to reserve any hasty value judgments. tributes to some psyIn her final forum, Nguyen hopes to dissect chic value of yours. It’s this idea that artists just want to put truth and beauty into the world, but the idea of the artist as a “personal brand,” the widespread pressure put on artists striving for I don’t think people know how to think about success to present their identities on social compensation for that.” media with the careful, market-researched Nguyen’s series arrives at a crucial time, grooming usually reserved for corporations. when some artists are beginning to dream up While many decry the trend as the end of left-field answers to these questions—Mat artistic authenticity, Nguyen also sees its Dryhurst’s Saga project being one. Saga is an redeeming successes. in-development media self-hosting platform “Look at Darkmatter,” she says, referencing that doubles as a radical social statement and the popular social justice-oriented poetry group. an art piece. Artists who host their work on “They have a really consistent brand and sponsor Saga have control over every spot their media is their Facebook posts and do everything it takes embedded, opening up new potential dialogues to go viral, but here they are, two queer Desis, among creators, corporations, and consumers getting covered in The New Yorker because of that on the Internet. Did a terrible Buzzfeed-style consistency. I dunno, that really excites me.” website rip the GIF you created for a listicle?

People looking for easy answers or bias conYou can customize that particular embed and firmation may not find what they are looking layer a big middle finger over it, or a message for in Chat Room. But those hoping for a rare decrying how lame the ad placed next to it is. #authentic conversation about #’s will likely find Want to limit how many times someone listens lots to heart-emoji about in Nguyen’s overdue to your song? Make the web player dramatically look at this strange series of tubes that, like it or explode in animated flames after 10 plays. As Dryhurst explains it, through Saga, artists’ work on not, is changing the way we live. E the web “is no longer petrified, but live.” Nguyen is ksears@seattleweeky.com considering inviting Dryhurst to be a panelist for Chat Room #1, “Value, Labor and the Quantithe third edition of Chat Room, which will focus fication of Art Work,” with James Coupe, Dorothy on intellectual property and copyright law.

Hayword, Christopher Paul Jordan, Christ Bell, In the second edition of Chat Room, Nguyen and Sienna Shields. Northwest Film Forum, also plans to dive into the mystifying but thriving 1515 12th Ave., 329-2629, chatroom.vision. world of net art, a universe typically considered $8. All ages. 8 p.m. Fri., Feb. 11.

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diverse crowd into Georgetown, instead of what we usually see, which is diversity driven out.”

At Bridge Productions, there will be diversity at least among the generated and exhibited works. In the past, Arnold has focused on artists from the region (Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, B.C.), but her current roster lists many from outside the Pacific Northwest, who will not just be showing, but curating with Arnold and contributing to curated box sets—a concept she first launched with LxWxH. The boxes, produced in extremely limited editions, each contain two original pieces by two artists and a literary piece by a writer. (Full disclosure: I contributed writing to a past box set for LxWxH.) Going forward, Arnold is looking to use these especially as a platform to unite different creative worlds.

“The [final LxWxH] box sets began to get really interesting, featuring a musical release for one set and chefs in another. I am working towards that kind of fluid approach again, to feature a broader spectrum of creative work. I’d love to do a fashion-based box set.”

All the while, she’ll also be writing her own essays and responses to the works through an arts journal, Dimensions Variable, and she’s toying with other ideas for published material. In short, if there’s a way to get audiences more excited about culture as a whole, Arnold is going to try it, and she hopes more arts communities bring attention to neighborhoods south of the downtown core.

“I have a strong desire to see the residents of Seattle engage with the city more broadly, because there’s a lot more to it than I think people realize.” E

arts@seattleweekly.com

Bridge Productions’ first exhibit, TECTONIC, runs March 9–April 2. See Critics’ Picks on page 23 for more information.

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 3 — 9, 2016

any artists respond to the rapid flux of markets and media in their work, but few gallerists do. There should be no such thing as “business as usual” in art— which after all helps to illuminate the marginalized and unconventional—but breaking protocol is a risk. Yet the longevity of arts communities depends on advocates who take those risks in an attempt to communicate through multiple channels and create new entry points for audiences.

Artist, curator, and writer Sharon Arnold has done all of the above over the past 10 years through various projects, and this spring she is doing it yet again. Arnold is leaving her current role at Roq La Rue Gallery and opening a new gallery space and hub for her diverse pursuits, aptly called Bridge Productions. It will be in the Hamilton Studios in Georgetown, the same building where her past gallery, LxWxH, was located.

Arnold explains, “With this iteration, it is my ambition to create room for all these projects: the gallery, the box set, small booklets, artist catalogues and zines, and an online journal.”

With abundant artist studios, especially Sam Farrazaino’s massive Equinox Studios, Georgetown isn’t short of spaces where art is made, but historically it has not had many places where art is shown—at least not in curated exhibitions.

That is changing quickly.

“When I opened up [LxWxH], there was only one other white cube, The Firm, and they closed a month later,” Arnold recounts, describing the clean, small space of her former gallery. “In the 11 months I’ve been gone, it just feels like things have exploded.”

In the Hamilton Studios alone, Arnold’s space will be the third devoted gallery space. What was formerly LxWxH is now The Alice, whose programs pair writers in residence with visual artists. Upstairs, Interstitial Gallery specializes in art that uses new media and technology. Befitting the community-minded gallerist, Arnold sees the success of these spaces as intertwined and likeminded rather than antagonistic.

“Being there alongside The Alice and Interstitial is critically important, and completely energizing, because we complement and build on each other,” she says. “You see buildings like this in Bushwick that house multiple galleries at the same time, and I think it demonstrates the community-building capacity of a hub where galleries work together in a collaborative setting over an adversarial one.”

There is a noticeable trend of interdisciplinary programming that goes beyond Georgetown’s galleries. Arnold points to local clothing company Prairie Underground, which has been displaying collaborations with featured artists. Such connections can only enrich and expand audiences.

“It’s my hope that Georgetown gets support from the city as an arts district,” Arnold states.

“I would like to see a surge in welcoming a more

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THE FOOD OF LOVE

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“This is gonna sound random,” she says, “but I’ve always been a chef.”

In fact, over the past year, while she’s been making a name for herself with her band the True Loves, Love has also been catering events, cooking in popup kitchens, and making vats of baked macaroni for the hungry musicians she records with. “I love music, don’t get me wrong,” she says, “but I love creating stuff from scratch. And food has always been that one thing, no matter how homeless I got.”

Sex, Drugs, Rock & Soul, then, playing for one night only, February 27, at the Vera Project, is fully a means to an end, a fundraiser to start a pop-up cafe in her mother’s honor. “My way of mourning is this cafe,” she says. “I gotta honor this lady.”

Love doesn’t want to reveal very much about the show, but on a basic level, let it be known that the musical’s plot follows its title: “There’s a bunch of sex . . . some drugs . . . I hit a rock . . . and then there’s soul!” she says.

It’s primarily a one-woman show, anchored in the deep, dazzling voice that has seduced audiences all over the region, but she’ll also be backed up by a small gospel choir, a band, and an aerialist, all volunteers who popped out of the social-media ether just a few months ago. They sound like they’ve been together for years, though, Love insists.

And because it’s musical theater, and the genre revels in ripe, exaggerated metaphors, the choir becomes the struggle, personified. “The choir, they’re my thoughts,” she explains. In this musical, and in her life, too, by the way, “I think in song. There’s no talking in my brain. As much as I wanna get away from it, it’s just musicals up there.”

But this particular musical couldn’t be farther from Hair Grease. It’s confessional, it’s heart-wrenching, it’s sad as hell—and you’re going to hear all that in her voice. “I just want the universe to know: This is who I am,” Love says. “I went through all this turmoil and all this heartache and music saved my life.” When she’s through with this performance, this homage to past pain, “I get to go, ‘Hands up. I’m done.’ I’m letting go of that part of my life.” E

sbernard@seattleweekly.com

Sex, Drugs, Rock & Soul plays at the Vera Project, 305 Hamilton St., 956-8372, theveraproject.org. $20–$45. All ages.

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SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 3 — 9, 2016

hen Grace Love was 17, she rewrote the musical Grease. She had watched the 1978 movie version over and over, studying the dialogue, taking copious notes, making all her satirical changes; then she corralled a cast of 40 at her Tacoma high school to rehearse five days a week for three months. As a longtime theater geek, of course she wanted to play Sandy, but on her terms.

She called the reimagined production Hair Grease— but instead of Sandy, she dubbed herself Shaniqua; instead of Danny, her counterpart was Dante.

It was probably one of the most fun things she’s ever done, she says now, laughing and nostalgic: “It was just a matter of being a nerd like that.”

A few years later, shortly after she played the lead in a Tacoma theater version of Ain’t Misbehavin’, her feisty, Southern food-cooking, Heath Ledger-loving, deeply supportive 48-year-old mother, Nadine, died of a massive heart attack.

She was making tacos, Love remembers. The bereft daughter wasn’t able to eat tacos for a long, long time, but beyond that she didn’t have the opportunity to grieve properly; her father and brother depended on her too much, and she began to unravel. “After losing her, I lost focus of a lot of stuff,” she says. “When I needed someone to talk to, a best friend or anything, it was her.”

Meanwhile, she was also struggling with her identity as a bisexual woman who had grown up a pastor’s kid: “I was fighting with who I was and what I was; it was a lot of fighting.” She began to self-destruct—she left town, first to Florida, then to New York, where a cousin lived, taking odd jobs and seeking oblivion. When her cousin wouldn’t take her in, she was devastated; drunk, stoned, and homeless, she wandered numbly from hostels to couches to front stoops in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Through all that, she was also writing a lot of songs—searing, raw coming-of-age songs. They swiftly organized themselves into another musical, a “phoenix story” about a young woman who’d lost her mother, spiraled out of control, hit a low point, then pulled herself out of the ashes through the cathartic power of music. Sex, Drugs, Rock & Soul, it was called. She put a few call-outs on Craigslist for actors and musicians, but everyone flaked; she had no budget, and it fell apart.

Until now, nearly a decade later. And why?

Grace Love with her True Loves.

RICH ZOLLNER

MORGEN SCHULER

Soul diva Grace Love unearths her long-buried autobiographical musical . . . to become a chef.

By Sara Bernard

19 A1PianoReviewWeeklyKeyboard_4.83x5.54_HiRes.indd 1

9/15/14 3:42 PM

DOWN WALLS WALKING Seattle honors groundbreaking choreographer Trisha Brown.

I

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 3 — 9, 2016

f you’re a young dancer, just starting out on a career, you usually have a choreographer in mind. Someone whose work you admire, whose style you emulate—someone you want to dance for. And for many dancers over many years, that choreographer has been Trisha Brown.

As smart as she is slippery, Brown has been at the edge of the chaotic generation that took the title “postmodern,” mostly to separate themselves from what they felt were the more pompous aspects of their immediate ancestors in modern dance. Their hallmarks were a disregard for the traditional, a willingness to find dance movement in everyday actions, and a desire to create works that weren’t all about themselves.

Brown’s work has generous helpings of all these things. And when the company appears at Meany Hall this weekend, in the last performances of their final tour, we have one more chance to see that abundance.

Brown started out as a tree-climbing kid growing up in Aberdeen, and that sense of freedom seems to have permeated most of her cho-

20

reography. Early on, she applied that experience directly, in a series of works where a performer literally walks down the side of a building or around the walls of a gallery, suspended by a harness, rather like a rock climber. These “equipment pieces” helped her explode the idea of what might be an appropriate “dance” action—by the time she was creating works in a more traditional studio or theater environment, she’d left the conventions of dance far behind.

But if you do something long enough, eventually you will become the mainstream, and Brown has been at the forefront of the dance world for a number of years, producing works for her own ensemble as well as experimenting with opera and theater. By pursuing exactly what she’s been interested in all these years, Brown has set a course for a large part of the dance world. She’s been a leader without intending to be one, and sometimes without really knowing it. Several of her dancers have gone on to form their own ensembles, teach, and work within the infrastructure of the dance world—choreographer Stephen

You Can See Us, created in 1995, will be performed at Meany Hall.

Petronio and Dance magazine editor Wendy Perron are just two examples of that Johnny Appleseed effect.

Brown’s company is a familiar sight for Seattle audiences—they’ve been presented by On the Boards and the University of Washington’s World Dance series multiple times, but this visit is a sweet and sad one. The company is at the end of a cycle, and these upcoming performances are the last appearances of the Trisha Brown Dance Company as we’ve come to know it. Brown, who was diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2009, can no longer run the ensemble, so the decision has been made to shift the model. Two of her closest colleagues, Diane Madden and Carolyn Lucas, will oversee the repertory as it’s taught to other ensembles and becomes a part of curricula in college dance programs. The company is facing the chal-

ALFREDO ANCESCHI

By Sandra Kurtz

lenge that many other choreographer-driven ensembles do when the founding artists are at the end of their career: Some groups close up shop altogether, while others look for another singular leader to take over the job. Brown and her colleagues are aiming for something else.

In recognition of this major transition, the UW, the Seattle Art Museum, and Velocity Dance Center are sponsoring several events alongside the company’s mainstage performances to provide one more chance to witness and honor this astonishing dance maker and her work.

There will be exhibits of photos and drawings, talks and films—and of course there will be people walking down walls. E

dance@seattleweekly.com

Meany Hall, UW campus. $50–$55. 8 p.m. Thurs., Feb. 4–Sat., Feb. 6. For a complete list of events, go to uwworldseries.org and search “Trisha Brown.”

Imagine Spring

WRINGING THE RAG

CHOPSHOP BODIES OF WORK

Spectrum Dance Theater (Seattle) Michele Miller/Catapult Dance (Seattle) Kyra Jean Green (Montreal) Coleman Pester // Tectonic Marrow Society (Seattle) Lauren Edson/LED (Boise) Anna Conner +CO (Seattle)

A brief history of an indelible art form made in America and mangled in Europe.

By Gavin Borchert

Sub SubRosa Dance Collective (Portland) The Stone Dance Collective (Eastside) Alexander Pham (Minneapolis) Elizabeth Houlton and Dancers (Seattle)

COURTESY YOUTUBE

And misinterpreted it. By the time the term reached Europe just after World War I, “ragtime” became a catchall label for jazz, Tin Pan Alley tunes, Broadway musicals, practically all of American popular music. Stravinsky, fascinated by the phenomenon, included a rag in his theater piece The Soldier’s Tale and wrote a Ragtime for 11 Instruments, both in 1918. His Piano-RagMusic from the following year explodes everything he heard as American and reassembles the shards. Amusingly, the passages that sound the most traditional are the ones in which he chose not to use barlines in the score, resulting in an elegant flow coming closer to that heard Jeremy Denk at work. in Joplin’s compositions.

The densely dissonant “Ragtime” finale from t was a ragged sound, some said. The Paul Hindemith’s piano suite 1922 is a machinerhythms—typically syncopated tunes that don’t quite line up over a steady oom-pah age evocation; to most Europeans at the time, bass—had their roots in the indigenous music America = modernity = machines. You could hear of the Caribbean and South America, and ultiit as the soundtrack to Metropolis, if that epic mately in Africa. Piquantly and irresistibly, these silent film had a scene set in a Kansas City saloon. syncopations both play against and point up the Ives’ four “Ragtime Dances” subject the style to a toe-tapability of the underlying march, the melomad chaos of fragmentations and quotations; his dies curling like vines around it. Like the bouncbiographer Jan Swafford calls them “cubistic raging 2/4 beat, the overall form also came from time, enlivened with slapstick.” Yet Ives’ enthusiSousa marches—16-bar paragraphs and a second asm for the style was not without condescension, section in a contrasting key, in and out in three and worse: “It is something like wearing a derby to four minutes. The harmonic language, easy on hat on the back of the head, a shuffling lilt of a the ear with a dash of bittersweet, was crafted to happy soul just let out of a Baptist church in old appeal to lovers of the Victorian parlor song and Alabama,” he wrote in 1920. “Perhaps we know the lesser followers of early romantic composers [ragtime] now as an ore before it has been refined like Chopin and Schumann. into a product. It may be one of nature’s ways of Thanks to the genius of American composgiving art raw material. . . . It has its uses as the ers like James Scott, Louis Chauvin, and above cruet on the boarding-house table has.” Ugh. all Scott Joplin, all these streams fed together No music ever written is more “refined” and less in the last years of the 19th century to create “raw” than Joplin’s best, like his “Gladiolus Rag,” something quite unprecedented. There had “Heliotrope Bouquet,” or “Weeping Willow.” been earlier contributions to the European artGoing back to the real thing, Denk will also music tradition—the Colonial-era anthems of play jazz pianist Art Tatum’s take on Vincent composer William Billings, plain and strong Youmans’ “Tea for Two”: suave, glittering, ornate, as Shaker furniture, could have been written a breathtaking showpiece. And one final example nowhere but here—but ragtime was the first from Denk’s program will bring ragtime up to its to become a mass-culture phenomenon. Born 1970s revival and re-appreciation—when, within in bars and brothels, raised in social clubs, and a few years, pianist Joshua Rifkin made bestcoming out at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, it selling Joplin recordings for Nonesuch; the commade its way into respectable houses via sheetposer’s magical operatic fable Treemonisha was music sales—one million copies, it is claimed, reconstructed and recorded; and the inclusion for Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” of Marvin Hamlisch’s orchestrations of his rags But what was truly new was its influence on in the soundtrack to the film The Sting earned other composers, especially those in Europe— an Oscar and a Grammy. Seattle-born ragtime whose work will be on display during a March enthusiast William Bolcom himself contributed 18 Meany Hall recital by pianist Jeremy Denk. In to the genre with Three Ghost Rags. The first of addition to an example of classic piano ragtime, these, “Graceful Ghost” from 1970, is a direct the “Sunflower Slow Drag” co-written by Joplin homage to Joplin’s bittersweet, elegiac side, and and Scott Hayden, Denk will play works by probably the single loveliest piano piece of the composers inspired by it—who found ragtime’s past half-century. E rhythmic freshness intriguing and its connecgborchert@seattleweekly.com tion to black culture fashionably exotic, and who Jeremy Denk plays at Meany Hall, freely collaged it, kaleidoscoped it, and funhouseUW campus, 543-4880, uwworldseries.org. mirrored it. $45–$50. 7:30 p.m. Fri., March 18.

I

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Join us for a four-course dinner, music, wine and art, all centered in the Exhibition’s awe-inspiring Glasshouse.

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BARE ESSENTIAL

JULES DOYLE

A decade in, the Can Can has become a Seattle standard with its nearly naked take on dinner theater.

By Jacob Uitti

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 3 — 9, 2016

B

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’s y t i c s “thi

” t e k c i est t

hott

eautiful, nearly naked dancers. Aerial duets. Flying bears. These are just a few of the elements of French Kiss, the latest show at the Can Can Kitchen & Cabaret.

They also happen to be central ingredients of the Pike Place Market theater’s decade-long body of work (except for the flying bears). It is, says coowner Jonathan Bechtel, the pinnacle of a very particular kind of entertainment that can’t be found anywhere else in Seattle.

“It’s our sexiest show yet,” he says.

Bechtel, also a performer and production manager, has been with the theater since its opening; just graduated from Cornish, he started as a janitor and lead server. It isn’t surprising, then, that he has a command over the place.

He splashes through the night’s first curtain as Jonny Boy. Wearing a broad grin, he addresses the audience, his voice booming in the intimate 60-seat theater. His glowing visage welcomes, his bright eyes glisten. By night’s end, he will have gone from pull-ups on the ceiling pipes to a sexy duet in a tuxedo to slapstick. Oh, and you’ll know what he looks like in a trim thong.

The original, alluring, body-positive productions that Bechtel now leads have always been part of the Can Can, but relying solely on the risqué shows long seemed too risky. Performed on weekends, they were supplemented during the week by local rock acts, hip-hop performances, and comedians. Only in the past couple of years have owner Chris Snell and general manager Jeff Ramsey decided to take that financial and creative risk and stop booking outside groups.

“It’s nearly impossible to consistently represent your brand if you’re not in control of it,” says Snell. “We’re one of a handful of venues, maybe less, that produce all of our own entertainment.

We wanted our shows to run every night.”

The result has been success, says Ramsey.

“Immediately we started selling tickets, and we sold a lot of them,” he says. “People loved what

The Heavenly Spies in “Plastique”, 2009

we were doing.” Since the change, the theater’s yearly revenue has increased more than 70 percent, says Ramsey.

Recent performances have included “Flamingo,” a high-energy, two-hour barrage of bodies and the color pink, and “Wonderland,” a darker variety show with beautiful, wide-ranging vocal performances from Fiona Fory, a former student at Westlake Dance Center, and dramatic physical stunts from Keon Volt Price, who studied at Western Washington University.

Along with the performances, the Can Can’s physical space has changed over the years. Since Snell has taken over the former jazz club, management has erected new walls to make the main room feel more intimate and give the bar its own area, and installed a longer catwalk so dancers can traverse the entire length of the room and be close to patrons. The stage was moved from the west wall to the north one to be closer to the dressing room, allowing for quicker changes. And Ramsey says he hopes the theater will have tiered booths in time for French Kiss.

“We want to keep the space evolving,” he says.

“With each new show, if we can add a new element, dial it up a notch; it’s fun for us.”

Ramsey and Snell also recently hired a new chef, John Gilbert (most recently of Portage Bay), and the food, an important part of the dinner-theater experience, has vastly improved.

But the Can Can’s primary mission is still to offer a particular type of performance, ranging from sexy to comedic to nostalgic to modern.

“The world you see in movies never quite exists in real life, that escape from reality,” says Bechtel.

“I want to give you something you don’t quite experience in everyday life.” E

arts@seattleweekly.com

“French Kiss” runs at the Can Can Kitchen & Cabaret, 94 Pike St. $30–$40. See thecancan.com for showtimes, Feb. 11–May 29.

CRITICS’ PICKS Our expert opinions on the 25 things you must see this season.

THEATER

By Margaret Friedman Buzzer

Youth, race, real estate, and sex converge in this reportedly gritty new play

by Tracey Scott Wilson that comes to us via Minneapolis and New York’s Public Theater. Gentrification of traditionally poor neighborhoods is a familiar phenomenon, but how is it experienced by an interracial couple?

ACT, acttheatre.org Feb. 3–21.

Luna Gale

Gee, this sounds weird, which, if done well, could be a big plus. A “surreal, absurd” tragicomedy in which a young woman is prodded by her dead mom’s ghost to investigate her death. It’s Seayoung Kim’s first full-length play, directed by Sara Porkalob, but knowing nothing else about it I feel a yen to immerse in the foreign (to me) world of Korean convenience stores and dry cleaners. Annex Theatre, annextheatre. org, Feb. 2–17.

Just recently the last coal mine in England closed, and there went a chapter of British labor history from which few could have predicted a smash-hit musical would spring. This tale of a sensitive boy’s struggle to dance ballet amid the grinding and über-macho miners’ strike of 1984 offers winsomely offbeat characters and an affecting sentimental journey.

Seeing the kid dance with the older version of himself gets me every time.

Village Theatre, villagetheatre.org, May 12–July 3.

DANCE

By Sandra Kurtz Rambunctious & Dance, Dance, Dance

Donald Byrd always manages to create work that is both aesthetically complex and politically engaged, and this month he’s doing it twice with a pair of programs from his Spectrum Dance Theater that focus on AfricanAmerican composers and Africanist influences in American dance. spectrumdance.org; “Rambunctious” at Cornish Playhouse, Feb. 18–21; “Dance, Dance, Dance” at the Moore, Feb. 25–28.

Bob Wright and David Pichette follow up on their artistically virtuoso, crowdpleasing Hound of the Baskervilles

In the 1970s, in the middle of the dance boom, Bill Evans moved his company to Seattle and remade the community in his image. Not only was his signature style, full of easy flow,

“smart... surprising... shocking”

Usually the assumption is that a family matinee doesn’t hold much interest for the rest of the dance-going audience, but this condensed production of Marius Petipa’s ballet from Pacific Northwest Ballet and School is juicy enough for everyone—with choreography reconstructed from recently accessed period dance notation, this is an opportunity to see what the real thing actually looked like. They’re dancing like it’s 1899! McCaw Hall, pnb.org, March 20 & 26.

—THE SEATTLE TIMES

“multifaceted, unrelenting, ever-unpredictable”

“A dramatic triumph”

—SEATTLE WEEKLY

—HUFFINGTON POST

“BREATHTAKING! Raw and blistering.”

“shocking and powerful” —BROAdWAYWORLd.cOM

Crystal Pite is having her moment and then some, creating new work for the Royal Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, and the Juilliard School, as well as with her own Kidd Pivot company. They’re coming through town with the Electric Company Theater for a riveting new work exploring grief and trauma; in any other hands it would be a dicey proposition, but Pite’s ultra-kinetic style should take us through the chaos to a kind of transcendence.

The Moore, ontheboards.org, March 18–19.

Le Corsaire

“A theatrical bombshell”

—THE NEW YORK TIMES

Betroffenheit

Guest Artist Series: Bill Evans Sherlock Holmes and the American Problem

FINAL WEEK

—ASSOcIATEd PRESS

Winner

Bernard White, Nisi Sturgis, J. Anthony Crane and Zakiya Young in the Goodman Theatre production of Disgraced. Photo by Liz Lauren.

Do It for Umma

Billy Elliot

incredibly accessible, but he brought a virtual army of students, many of whom moved right in and became the backbone of most of the dance institutions we have now. Evans himself moved on, but is celebrating his 75th birthday with a tour, coming back through his former territory with a solo show. Velocity Dance Center, velocitydancecenter.org, Feb. 20–21.

Presented in association with GOODMAN THEATRE and BERKELEY REPERTORY THEATRE

of the

Pulitzer Prize

BY

Ayad Akhtar

DIRECTED BY

Kimberly Senior

Boost Festival

After taking a hiatus, this mixed repertory, multi-choreographer program is back, with a slate full

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 24

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SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 3 — 9, 2016

The pressures on social workers and the child-welfare system come to a head in this Pulitzer-nominated play about whether a baby belongs with meth-addicted young parents or a rabidly evangelical grandparent.

Rebecca Gilman’s play, thematically reminiscent of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, will surely spark lively moral debate. Seattle Rep, seattlerep. org, Mar. 4–27.

adaptation with an original story at least partially set in the Wild West.

With luck, director Alison Narver will reunite with sleuthy duo Darragh Keenan and Andrew McGinn for the New World jubilee. Seattle Rep, seattlerep.org, April 22–May 22.

COURTESY OF SEATTLE ART MUSEUM

Kehinde Wiley’s Morpheus

23

» FROM PAGE 23

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Producer Marlo Martin is committed to giving emerging artists a leg up on the process, taking the onus of production off their backs so that they can concentrate on the dancing—the festival is a great chance to catch young talent. Broadway Performance Hall, boostdance festival.org, April 29–May 1.

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The Others Who Were Here

The austerity of the Great Plains and its immigrant farming families has taken on a patinated nostalgia for those living in the urban centers that in no small part hastened the decay of these communities. Multidisciplinary artist Cris Bruch explores this landscape in the Frye’s front galleries with sculptures large and small, all evoking an elegiac meditation on loss and hope in a climate of extremes. Frye Art Museum, fryemuseum.org, closes March 27.

Productions, bridge.productions, March 9–April 2.

POP MUSIC

Six Weeks

Vince Staples

Throughout a six-week period, the Henry will present work from acclaimed international artists working across the time-based arts: Amy Stacey Curtis, David Horvitz, Lisa Radon, Lou Watson, Mårten Spångberg, Tamin Totzke, and Tia Kramer. Time is not just the medium of performances and installations; its fluidity in our perceptions is the very subject of these interdisciplinary works.

Henry Art Gallery, henryart.org, March 26–May 8.

CLASSICAL

By Gavin Borchert StuART Fest

Trombonist, improviser, explorer, and pioneer (he literally wrote the book—The Modern Trombone: A Definition of Its Idioms), and above all a pillar of the new-music world in Seattle for nearly half a century, Stuart Dempster celebrates his upcoming 80th with a concert of his works, joined by friends and colleagues.

Kerry Hall, cornish.edu, Feb. 6.

A New Republic

Artist Kehinde Wiley has made a huge splash in the art world with florid paintings that subvert conventions of 18th-century aristocratic portraiture, using young, contemporary people of color as his subjects. This solo show, curated by the Brooklyn Museum, raises questions about representation and appropriation, especially in historical and institutional settings. Seattle Art Museum, seattleartmuseum. org, Feb. 11–May 8.

Forbidden Fruit

Ceramicist Chris Antemann also takes a skewed look at 18th-century aristocratic figuration in the form of porcelain sculptures created at the Art Studio program of the legendary Meissen Porcelain Manufactory and inspired by the decadent banqueting craze of the ancien régime. The exhibition veers toward kitsch, but its sly commentary about 21st-century morality, lust, and gluttony gives this fruit some bite. Bellevue Arts Museum, bellevuearts.org, Feb. 26–May 29.

TECTONIC

Gallerist Sharon Arnold’s new space in Georgetown, Bridge Productions, opens with a group show highlighting the 2016 lineup of represented artists: Julie Alpert, Tim Cross, Sue Danielson, Emily Gherard, C. Davida Ingram, Dave Kennedy, Kat Larson, Ashleigh Robb, and Krista Svalbonas. The show is both an exciting assembly of talent and a taste of things to come. For more on Arnold’s new space, see “Out of the Box” on page 17. Bridge

Bern Herbolsheimer Musical Memorial

Lyricism, drama, craft, and an unerring ability to reach out to the listener combine in the work of the Seattle composer, who died on January 13. His legacy is honored in performances by Opus 7 Vocal Ensemble, the St. Helens Quartet, and others. Town Hall, townhall seattle.org, Feb. 7.

Seattle Symphony

John Adams returns to conduct his violin concerto Scheherazade.2— based on the tales of A Thousand and One Nights, but imagined from the queen’s perspective—with soloist Leila Josefowicz. The orchestra plays the work that inspired Adams, Scheherazade by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the following weekend. Benaroya Hall, seattle symphony.org, March 17–19.

A Tribute to Janice Giteck

For her 70th birthday, Cornish honors a Seattle composer and teacher whose sensitivity to social issues is as powerful as her sonic imagination. Kerry Hall, cornish.edu, April 12.

Pacific MusicWorks

The history of opera is a history of cycles of decadence and reform, of mannered overelaboration and a return to dramatic directness. Gluck’s 1774 opera Orphée, based on the ur-myth of the singer who journeyed to hell and back, is an example of the latter. Stephen Stubbs conducts. Meany Hall, pacificmusicworks.org, May 20–22.

By Dusty Henry

Vince Staples isn’t the biggest rapper in the game right now, but there’s a strong case that he should be. The 22-year-old wunderkind broke through last year with his monolithic debut double album, Summertime ’06, which simultaneously detailed a formative year in his life growing up in Long Beach, Calif., while also paying homage to Joy Division. The Neptune, stg presents.org, March 2.

Pusha T

Pusha T has had a lucrative rap career since his days grinding in Clipse, and now he’s been appointed president of Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music imprint. Yet, if we’re to take his lyrics at face value, he’s still dealing cocaine and finding new ways to creatively rap about it. His upcoming album, King Push, has potential to be the biggest sleeper hit of the year.

The Showbox, showboxpresents. com, March 3.

Iggy Pop

Iggy Pop isn’t just the godfather of punk; he’s also the godfather of post-punk, thanks to his two Bowie-produced solo records, The Idiot and Lust for Life. In the wake of Bowie’s death, it’s fitting that Pop would reveal that he recorded a sequel to Lust for Life with Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme called Post Pop Depression. Backed by more than half of Queens of the Stone Age and Arctic Monkey’s drummer Matt Helders, this lineup is more than suited to match Pop’s hellish demeanor.

The Paramount, stgpresents.org, March 28.

Hatsune Miku

Flesh and bones are so 21st-century. Japanese sensation Hatsune Miku is an anime hologram with a synthesized voice, making her the most future thing in music since Future. Paying for a hologram may seem weird to some, but people were once freaked out by electric guitars. Maybe it’s a change worth embracing. WaMu Theater, washingtonmusictheater.com, April 23.

Beach House

Last year Beach House asserted itself as one of the most consistent bands in indie rock by releasing two lush albums, Depression Cherry and Thank Your Lucky Stars. Now they’re going on the humblest of victory laps, taking their dreamy melodies on tour. Music historians will remember Beach House as a darling of its genre, and it would be a crime to miss the band at its creative peak. The Paramount, stgpresents.org, May 4. E For more seasonal selections, go to seattleweekly.com.

arts&culture

BEER27 FILM29 THEATER30 PICKLIST33

East Meets Eastside

BY JAY FRIEDMAN Tea and housemade sweets await at Smacha.

Boiling Point Choose from 10 individualized hot pots with a variety of broths and ingredients.

Try the House Special Hot Soup, which features fermented tofu. Get past its pungent smell and there’s a lot to enjoy. Like the best cheeses, stinky tofu’s flavor is complex (slightly sour and nutty) and can be an acquired taste. If still not convinced, then get the Taiwanese Spicy Hot Soup.

It’s super-spicy. 1075 Bellevue Way N.E., 425455-8375, bpgroupusa.com

Cafe Ori This Hong Kong–style Cantonese restaurant has a bit of a homey feeling—you might think you’ve entered someone’s large living room, with an unused fireplace and a bookcase containing an old hi-fi, a sign of better times in the past. The same can be said for the food, though the pan-fried squid with salt & pepper still has its shining moments, even if just for nostalgic reasons. 14339 N.E. 20th St, 425-7478822, cafeoribellevue.com Din Tai Fung This international import is most famous for its xiaolongbao (or juicy pork dumplings). And, yes, they’re delicious, even if they’re considerably better in the chain’s hometown of Taipei. The “hidden” gem on the menu: the shrimp & pork shao mai, juicy and terrific. Note that the long lines subsided after a University Village location opened, and should do so more once downtown Seattle and Southcenter locations open. 700 Bellevue Way N.E. #280, 425-698-1095, dintaifungusa.com

Dough Zone Dumpling House This place is so popular that there are two in Bellevue, with a third recently opened in nearby Redmond.

The juicy pork buns give Din Tai Fung’s soup dumplings a run for the money—and they’re cheaper. Equally good are a fried “relative” they call jian buns, more commonly referred to as sheng jian bao. They’re crispy on one side, yet still juicy on the inside. 15920 N.E. Eighth St. #3, 425-6518000; 14625 N.E. 24th St., Ste. 4B, 425-641-5555, doughzonedumplinghouse1.netwaiter.com Facing East Crowds, particularly of young

Chinese people, come to this restaurant serving Taiwanese food at once sophisticated and sweet. It’s an ideal place to try beef noodle soup, which many call the country’s national dish and for which there’s an annual festival and competition. Facing East’s version is on the sweet side, but still beefy—and even better with a Taiwanese pork burger on the side.

1075 Bellevue Way N.E., B2, 425-688-2986, facingeastrestaurant.com

Kung-Ho If offal doesn’t bother you, get the oyster noodle soup. The thin wheat noodles are extremely soft, such that you’ll barely chew them.

It’s the soup’s texture that’s most interesting—a starchy affair filled with thin bamboo strips, shiitake mushrooms, oysters, and intestines. With a dash of black vinegar for an acidic kick, it’s a satisfying rendition reminiscent of what you’d find at night markets in Taiwan. 3640 Factoria Blvd. S.E., 425-643-2268, kunghochineserestaurant.com La Bu La You’ll want to take a “Walk on the Wild Side,” as this Lou Reed–inspired menu is far more interesting than the regular one, with all the good stuff usually written only in Chinese. This is a Sichuanese restaurant, so expect spicy food. Adventurous eaters should try The Other Parts of a Pig, spicy and tangy with pickled cabbage, tofu, pork intestines, and pigblood cubes. Spice-loving but less daring diners will enjoy swimming fire fish: tender white fish bathing in chili oil with plenty of ma la (numbing and spicy) bite.

288 106th Ave. N.E., 425-688-7991, labula-dining.com

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 3 — 9, 2016

F

or years, Seattleites in the know have traveled across Lake Washington for Chinese food. That is changing, partly because many successful Eastside restaurants are opening Seattle-side. But Bellevue is still the destination for unique offerings from Chinese breakfast to dessert, from the innocuous to the adventurous, from biang-biang noodles to pungent hot pots. Here’s a guide to some of the best dishes to enjoy in Bellevue (or, where noted, in Redmond) just in time for your celebration of Chinese New Year.

JAY FRIEDMAN

A complete guide to Bellevue’s Chinese restaurants for the Lunar New Year.

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 26 25

East Meets Eastside » FROM PAGE 25

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Point offers individual hot pots, this Chinese chain is the place to come with a group—and hungry—for all-you-can-eat hot pot (dinnertime only). Ask for a yin-yang split pot with one side containing the house spicy soup. There’s so much to order from the menu to add variety to your hot pot. Don’t be shy, and don’t overlook the lamb wontons and the “thick noodles.” 1411 156th Ave. N.E., 425-653-1625, littlesheephotpot.com

Spiced While this restaurant has a fine selection of Sichuanese food (including many “chilli” dishes you can get with frog, sea cucumber, and numerous pork parts), what you’ll want is what you’ll see when you walk in—the front counter’s display of spiced cold dishes, which make a fine (and quick) start to any meal. Try the pig ear, tripe, and chicken gizzards. 1299 156th Ave. N.E. #135, 425-644-8888 Szechuan Chef One of Bellevue’s oldest Sich-

uanese restaurants, and still one of the best.

Order the special hot chow mein and ask for hand-shaved noodles plus your choice of meat. Holding a block of dough, the chef uses a knife to expertly flick noodle strips into boiling water.

They’re then stirfried, resulting in slightly chewy noodles with just a bit of smokiness from the wok. 15015 Main St., 425-7469008, szechuanchef.us

Miah’s Kitchen Technically in Redmond but literally across the street from Bellevue, this is the sister restaurant to Edmonds’ Qin, which introduced the area to biangbiang noodles.

Get the “hot oilseared” version, as its simplicity best shows off the springiness Tofu 101 On of the hand-cut Wednesdays and Biang-Biang noodles from Miah’s Kitchen wide noodles. Go Saturdays, there with a group, and might as well be a you can get the noodles layered at the bottom of revolving door here, as that’s when you can chicken on a “BIG” plate, otherwise known as get cifantuan for breakfast. You won’t see dapanji. 2022 148th Ave. N.E., Redmond, 425these rice rolls; you just ask the cashier, who’ll 644-6090, miahskitchen.weebly.com ask how many you want and whether you want warm soy milk to go with them. (You do.) The rolls are pretty big, made with purMonGa Cafe Like Facing East, this Taiwanese ple rice and stuffed with pickled vegetables, restaurant draws large groups of young Chinese pork floss, and a Chinese donut that adds students, but everyone’s invited. Cold dishes crunchy texture. Takeout only. 12816 Factoria like jalapeños stuffed with pork are fun, but save room for shaved ice. If you get the “large combo,” Blvd. S.E. # G, 425-974-1144, tofu101.com you can choose five toppings such as red bean, taro, and flan—all of which (like most of the Top Gun Seafood Restaurant The dim sum in menu) are actually made in-house. 14603 N.E. Bellevue is far from Richmond, B.C., quality, 20th St., 425-643-2295, mongacafe.com but this place is the best of the bunch. Carts come pretty quickly, and if you persist, you can find tripe and chicken feet below the baskets Regent Bakery and Café As with Miah’s Kitchen, of dumplings that the servers are quickest to Regent has a Redmond address, but is just across the street from Bellevue. You can stay and eat Hong pitch to non-Chinese clientele. The Football (hum sui gok) is a dumpling of sweet and Kong-style savory dishes here, but it’s the bakery chewy dough that’s deep-fried and filled with that’s of particular interest. As with many Asian ground pork and mushrooms. 12450 S.E. 38th desserts, the cookies, pastries, and cakes tend to be St., 425-641-3386, topgunrestaurants.com less sweet and relatively light. The green tea mousse cake is colorful and dazzling, and you can argue that the matcha makes it healthy. 15159 N.E. 24th St., Twilight 7 The language barrier can be difficult, Redmond, 425-378-1498, regentbakeryandcafe.com making menu deciphering somewhat challenging, but persevere and order the customizable house special combination pot. You can choose Sichuanese Cuisine Order the Ants on the Tree. your favorite meats, vegetables, and more. Quail The “ants” are the bits of ground pork; they cling eggs, pork belly, and “King mushrooms” are to the noodles like ants on twigs. The bean thread great, and the bowl will come with Sichuan noodles are softened, then stir-fried; they absorb a peppercorn and chili for a ma la experience. You lot of flavor and have a slightly chewy texture. The can also experience karaoke and a bit of cosplay sauce, of course, is a bit spicy. (You can request at this quirky restaurant. 2217 140th Ave. N.E., a desired spice level.) If you’re still hungry, the 425-644-5000 E steamed dumplings are a bargain. 15005 N.E. 24th St., Redmond, 425-562-1552, sichuaneserestaurant.com food@seattleweekly.com JAY FRIEDMAN

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Little Garden The highlights at this little (gardenless) hole-in-the-wall are the Hunan items. If you’re feeling adventurous, get the stir-fried pork stomach with dried bamboo, with smoky notes shining through. Less-daring diners can try pickled long beans with fried noodles. This restaurant can be especially busy on weekends, even if it doesn’t look it. With only one cook, food comes to one table at a time; people at other tables will sometimes go out shopping until it’s their turn to eat. 14725 N.E. 20th St., 425-644-9038, littlegardenchinese.com

Smacha The name connotes smartness with tea (cha), and the shop has a wise tea master (with gardens back in China) who’s put together an elegant yet comfortable setting. You can get a wide variety of tea to go (a “cake” block of pu-erh is perfect, as it gets better with age), but do yourself a favor and sit at the counter to slowly sip a cup, perhaps with a baked-in-house sweet like a matcha mochi red bean cake. 14603 N.E. 20th St., 425-643-2117, smacha.com

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BEER HUNTING

Beer Your Way to a Better Meal

BY JACOB UITTI

E

One of his favorite recipes involving beer, though, is making bagels. “We boil our bagels in unfermented beer,” he says, “and we can take that liquid after making the bagels and ferment it and turn it into a bagel beer.”

Jason Stratton, executive chef at Mamnoon and contestant on this year’s Top Chef, says one of his favorite beer-infused dishes is steamed clams with jalapeño, bacon, butter, cilantro, and shallots. “I think I made it for the first time with a can of Sapporo that I had in my fridge,” he says, “so any light, crisp beer would work—nothing too hoppy. A lighter, fruity saison could work well, too.”

Stratton sweats the bacon, shallots, and shaved jalapeño with julienned ginger in butter until the shallots are translucent and the bacon has rendered but not crisped. Then he adds the clams, beer, and herbs, steaming the mix until the shells open.

“It would be great with some diced apple or tomato too,” he says; “maybe a squeeze of lime.”

Restaurateur Josh Henderson, though, has the final answer to my question: Would beer make a good sauce over a cut of meat? In a word: Yes! One of Henderson’s favorite dishes to cook is braised lamb. He seasons it with salt, pepper, paprika, toasted fennel seed, and chili flakes overnight. The next day he sears the meat over medium heat in a Dutch oven to get a dark-brown coloring. He takes it out of the pan and adds the mirepoix (diced veggies) and a touch of tomato paste to caramelize.

Using a dark stout, Henderson deglazes the pan in which the lamb was cooking.

Deglazing is the process of diluting “meat sediments in a pan in order to make a gravy or sauce, typically using wine,” says Google.

But in this case, Henderson says it’s appropriate to use a dark, tasty beer. To the seasoned stout mixture he adds stock, finishing the sauce with which to baste the lamb and later serve it with after adding a little melted butter. E

beerhunting@seattleweekly.com

El Corazon E orazon www.elcorazonseattle.com

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

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 3RD FUNHOUSE BRIAN FOSS PRESENTS:

JACKSON’S ODDITIES

Mean Street Meanie, Brad Fowble, Kyle Johnson Doors 8:30PM / Show 9:00. 21+. $6

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ACT OF DEFIANCE

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The Kings, It Gets Worse, The Pimpsons, Echo Shot

Doors 8:00PM / Show 8:30. 21+. $12 ADV / $15 DOS

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ZEALANDIA

Thee Sean Ruse, Modern Heart, Ram Rams Doors 8:30PM / Show 9:00. 21+. $7

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THE FUNHOUSE BAR IS OPEN FROM 3:00PM TO 2:00AM DAILY AND HAPPY HOUR IS FROM 3:00PM UNTIL 6:00PM. Tickets now available at Ticketfly.com – no per order fees for online purchases! Charge by phone at 1-877-987-6487. Online at www.ticketfly.com. Tickets are subject to a service charge. You can also buy advance tickets at the El Corazon Box Office – open weekdays from 11:00am to 9:00pm at the Eastlake Waffle Window. There is a $2 service charge per ticket at The El Corazon Box Office.

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

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 3 — 9, 2016

very time I drink a good red or brown ale, I think about pouring that brew into a pan and reducing it to make a sauce. Sure, we’ve all heard of beer brats. But something about the malty, oaky flavor of a beer like Odin’s Ruby Red or the King St. Brown Ale seems like it would be perfect to glaze a holiday ham or steak.

Is this an impulse I should follow? Is it civilized? Sane?

To find out, I asked three Seattle chefs about cooking with beer—if it’s even a good idea, and if so, in what recipes do they like to use it?

Travis Kukull, chef/owner of Mollusk restaurant and brewery, assures me that I’m onto something. He says beer, especially dark beer, is great for braising meats like lamb and beef, but often he likes to combine both beer and wine for an extraflavorful dish.

“Especially in the darker winter months,” he says, “using red wine and a nice dark stout to braise lamb adds a nice complexity. You still get the sweetness of the traditional grape notes, but the beer can add some nice bitter and grain notes and create a really complex braise.”

Kukull says he often steers away from cooking with hoppy beers like IPAs because they’re overly bitter. But, he says, during the fresh hop season, when the hops are more citrusy and spicy, he’ll use an IPA for salad dressings or vinaigrettes.

27

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Todd Hayne’s sumptuous new romance between two women in the 1950s comes to Capitol Hill!

6 Academy Award Nominations, including Best Actress (Cate Blanchett), Supporting Actress (Rooney Mara) and Adapted Screenplay

28

COMING SOON FEB 5

Boy and the World FEB 12-14

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River of Fundament

From Matthew Barney (Cremaster Cycle) somes an epic opera of regeneration and rebirth presented in stunning 4K projection. Ages 18+ only. Co-presented by Seattle Art Fair.

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45 Years

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Emma Watson, Ethan Hawke, and David Thewlis star in this psychological thriller of small-town Satanic suspicion from director Alejandro Amenabar (The Others).

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Cinema Dissection Featuring Psycho - FEB 20

5 Academy Award Nominations, including Best Picture, Director, and Supporting Actor (Christian Bale)

The Danish Girl

4 Academy Award Nominations, including Best Actor (Eddie Redmayne) and Supporting Actress (Alicia Vikander)

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the carnage around them, the Sonderkommando aul is temporarily alive. A Hungarian are aware that they are dead men walking, and Jew at Auschwitz, he has been deswill be killed and replaced by others within a ignated a Sonderkommando; instead few weeks, if not days. In part because of their of being killed upon arrival, he was certain execution, Saul’s fellow Sonderkommandos made part of a detail that aids Nazi guards in the process of murdering people at the extermination are planning an uprising and escape (there was such a revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau in October camp. By the time we are introduced to Saul, 1944). As they desperately plot, Saul looks for a he has been at this for some time, so his eyes rabbi, his obsession unbreakable. are already vacant and his soul already battered.

Son of Saul has had some negative responses Whatever thin crust of humanity he has left is (along with its Oscar nomination for best foreign about to express itself in a gesture that is almost language film), which usually take the argument entirely pointless. Except to him. that to dramatize the Holocaust is inherently This specific horror is portrayed in Son of vulgar, perhaps obscene. But Nemes has anticiSaul, a film that—in its own claustrophobic pated that criticism. Most of the drama, way—is as astonishing as the big-as-alland the majority of the violence, is outdoors spectacle The Revenant. We to the side or out of view. Nemes watch a day and a half in Saul’s life Son of Saul doesn’t exploit the horror of the as he goes about the grueling busiRated R for ness of herding Jewish prisoners disturbing violent content, death camps for narrative punch; he presents it as a day-to-day into gas chambers, waiting as they and some graphic nudity. reality. That is what is so terrible are murdered, and then taking the Opens Fri., Feb. 5 about Son of Saul: This was a place bodies to the crematorium. What at Seven Gables where people worked, a factory of is extraordinary about Son of Saul is death meant to destroy even those it that director László Nemes conveys does not literally kill. this experience almost entirely in tight Röhrig’s face is frequently the focus of our proximity to Saul (played by Géza Röhrig). The attention, but he is not an actor in the traditional camera’s gaze never gets more than a few feet sense. He is a poet and schoolteacher, raised by from Saul’s perspective; we’re either looking at a foster family of Hungarian Jews with a direct his face in close-up or at things within arm’s connection to Auschwitz. His Saul watches, reach. The atrocities that unfold are therefore not and absorbs, and sometimes takes grim action, in our direct view. Instead, we see parts of things, but Röhrig doesn’t give a performance that or events happening out of focus in the distance. tells us what to feel. When we watch a skilled But—in one of the film’s most remarkable tacactor like Meryl Streep in a Holocaust role, tics—we hear what’s happening. The soundtrack she will convey emotions and help us identify is a chorus of scrapes and crashes and groans, with a character in a drama. Röhrig offers no truly a hellish din. consoling technique or emotion, but we do This particular day at Auschwitz is marked sense his human presence, somewhere in the

by Saul witnessing a boy who briefly and inexemotional wreck that Saul has become. What plicably survives the gas chamber. But only for the movie gives us is immersion in terror, and a minute. After that, Saul becomes insistent on the stubborn flicker of something like a moral finding a rabbi in the camp who can provide a purpose—a flicker all the more moving because ritual burial for this boy—a bewildering fixation, it’s in the service of something impossible. given the brutal slaughter going on. Saul says the Saul’s search is absurd. But it’s the only thing boy is his son, although we can’t be sure of the that staves off the void. E truth of that. If his sanity is affected, that seems normal under the circumstances: Along with film@seattleweekly.com

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Oh, the Possibilities!

Nick Payne’s lauded exploration of life and love in the multiverse could use some focus.

BY MARGARET FRIEDMAN

E

arlier this year, with admittedly little But here’s what’s good about the Rep’s Consteladvance notice, I attempted to procure lations: the intimate Leo K. Theater puts you close a ticket to the Broadway production of to the actors, who do mostly precise and lovely work with the tonal scene permutations. DirecConstellations —starring Jake Gyltor Desdemona Chiang eschews even the most lenhaal and Rita Wilson—without success. The basic distractions. Thus starkly presented, in one 65-minute romantic two-hander from wunderkind truly funny scene situated in the midst of tragedy, British playwright Nick Payne had sold out amid Marianne and Roland repeat a (previously vocalrave reviews and scalpers’ arbitrage. Was it the big ized) tirade against platitudes, this time using sign names, the execution of craft, the underlying matelanguage as graphic as props. Tavares impugns rial, or some mystical combination that caused the platitude-spewers with vulgar gestures, raspberries, rapturous stampede? After seeing Seattle Rep’s and an underslung jaw that beseeches “Get me the graceful and workmanly opening-night perforhell out of this wretched sliver of multiverse!” mance, it beats me what all the fuss was about.

Gordon Moore has previously provided ample The play, a slim love story in a handful of acts, evidence of his charms on stages all over the asserts a heavy-handed gimmick—that we live country, including as Johann Martin in a “multiverse” of simultaneous posSteindorff in ACT’s production of sible realities. Conveniently, one half Seattle Rep Itamar Moses’ Bach at Leipzig, a of the couple (Marianne, played 155 Mercer St. more effective “concept play” that with irresistible presentness by (Seattle Center), 443-2222, illustrates the dynamics of matheAlexandra Tavares) happens to be seattlerep.org. 7:30 p.m. matics in music as seen in the social an academic physicist who loves Wed.-Sun. plus matinees. relations of 18th century Europe. In to expound on—what else? The Ends Feb. 27.

Constellations his charms are a little physics of the multiverse! Luckily more disguised, with his best moments for slower-witted beekeeper Roland in the play’s opening scene, as he instinc(Max Gordon Moore), Marianne also tively deflects Marianne’s bizarre advances. But loves honey. With that the improbable, meetsubsequently, his character gets stiff—blocking, cute couple enters a kind of hall of mirrors, their reluctant, and grumpy—which begs the question dialogue repeated with varied intonations, illusof what these two are doing together at all. An trating the physics of the multiverse as refracted odd chastity pervades their interactions (because through the prism of a relationship. they’re nerds? or Brits? or inexperienced?). ChiThose not up on their Brian Greene are quickly ang’s multiverse has no voluptuousness. apprised that all of these possibilities dwell within Still, there are plenty of other vivid relationship every nanosecond, each spawning a completely separate set of subsequent possibilities, ad infinitum. realisms on display: ambivalences, inexplicable gravitational forces, optimistic (sometimes desThankfully we aren’t subjected to the infinitum. perate) do-overs, as well as resentments, sorrows, The gimmick of repetition and varied consequences and regrets. Little peripheral laws specific to of the variations, however virtuoso, gets tedious. this couple—like the mutually assured soporific Rather than craving five iterations of the relatively when either one talks the “shop” of his or her own banal situational dialogue, I found myself craving profession—created way more resonance for me more depth of character and plot advancement, than the bigger, more abstract laws of physics. however arbitrary and unfashionably unidimenBaffled by their separate realities, Roland wonders sional the picking of one story path may be. whether these interpersonal problems might occur This is not to disparage concept plays and the “because we don’t talk about space enough?” Stagillustration of content, such as multiverse physics, geringly unlikely, but in a fecund multiverse, who’s through form. However, to be interesting the gimto say that anything is untrue? E mick must evolve, not simply statically repeat. stage@seattleweekly.com

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32

calendar

PICKLIST

THIS THURS!

THIS SAT!

TONJE THILESEN

Julia Holter

FEBRUARY 3

Wednesday Julia Holter

The music created by L.A. composer and experimental pop songwriter Julia Holter is the best kind of baroque—not ostentatious and decorative for the sake of kitsch, but thick with heartfelt complexity that takes way more than one listen to absorb completely.

The multitude of layers in her songs show off a wide range of talents—sweeping classical piano-work, loungey ’70s yé-yé vocals that swirl in colorful tiers atop one another, and regal, brainy jazz arrangements that trickle in and out of her intricate pop visions. Her decadent, rich songwriting style is a great match for the grandeur of Columbia City Theater. With Circuit Des Yeux. Columbia City Theater, 4916 Rainier Ave. S., 722-3009, columbiacitytheater. com. $13 adv./$15 DOS. 21 and over. 8 p.m.

KELTON SEARS

David Cross

4849, stgpresents.org. $22.50–$32.50. 7 & 10 p.m.

DANIEL PERSON

Thursday Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia

Asked by Leonard Bernstein for a piece to mark the New York Philharmonic’s 125th anniversary in 1968, Luciano Berio decided, it seems, to give the legendarily difficult orchestra and its notoriously conservative audiences something of a precis of 20th-century music.

His half-hour Sinfonia’s most in-your-face movement is a grand collage, overlaying onto a Mahler scherzo (from his Second Symphony) quotes from a few dozen other works old and modern, first burying, then revealing the Mahler, which continues its flow like, in Berio’s simile, an underground river. In addition to the large orchestra and eight singers, a reciter quotes lines from Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable, the non sequiturs over the hallucinatory music becoming weirdly affecting. When the Seattle Symphony plays Sinfonia this weekend with vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, it’ll take on additional resonance. Given Gerard Schwarz’s championing of Mahler—the former music director’s performances of the Second in particular being to my mind among his greatest—and given Ludovic Morlot’s building on this legacy with a renewed interest in contemporary music, this Mahler collage will directly represent the SSO’s past and future. Benaroya Hall, Third Ave. & Union St., 215-4747, seattlesymphony. org. $21–$121. 7:30 p.m. (also 8 p.m. Sat.)

GAVIN BORCHERT

Funky Congregation

In honor of Black History Month, STG is devoting the February 22 edition of its Silent Movie Monday series to 1913’s Lime Kiln Club Field Day, thought to be the earliest surviving film to feature black actors. In preparation, the Northwest African American Museum will host a special edition of Catherine HarrisWhite’s regular soul and funk DJ night, Funky Congregation, that will pay homage to the film.

As the front woman for Sassyblack and partner in THEESatisfaction (and Seattle Weekly con-

tributor) spins, Martyr Sauce gallerist Tariqa Waters will take over visuals with an assortment of images of the film’s star, Bert Williams, one of the most widely heralded comedians and stage-performers of his time, regardless of race. Northwest African American Museum, 2300 S. Massachusetts St., 518-6000, naamnw. org. Free. All ages. 6 p.m. KELTON SEARS

FEBRUARY 5

Friday

Black Sabbath

When the Tacoma Dome was finished in 1983, it became the largest wood-supported dome in the world. These days, its best concerts are those featuring bands that, like itself, had peak relevance prior to the first Bush administration.

Last week it was AC/DC. Now comes Black Sabbath, the fountainhead of all dark metal that came after. The band is on the opening leg of its farewell tour, and early reviews have been positive, with big ups to a set list that fully explores the band’s influential catalog.

That said, a legacy act like this in a cavernous space like the Tacoma Dome presents certain perils—fatigued players, garbled sound. So perhaps what recommends this show more than anything else is this simple fact: This may be the last time in your life you can, in person, see Ozzy Osbourne stand at a mic and growl: I AM IRON MAN! Tacoma Dome, 2727 E. D

St., Tacoma, 253-272-3663, tacomadome.org. $35–$460. 7:30 p.m. DANIEL PERSON

FEBRUARY 6

Saturday

It’s a New Orleans Thing: A Tribute to Allen Toussaint

Seattle clubs are lousy with cover nights, but this event is so much more. During the Royal Room’s Mardi Gras Weekend, a handful of artists, including Jeff Fielder, Skerik, Sarah Rudinoff, Thaddeus Turner, and others, gather

» CONTINUED ON PAGE 34

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 3 — 9, 2016

David Cross told The Wall Street Journal recently that he’s not a political comic. How then to explain the too-obvious-by-half title of his new stand-up show, The Making America Great Again Tour? The truth is Cross has often mined some of his best material from the culture wars that define our political discourse, and it’s almost always been cleverer and more subversive than this current title suggests. His character Tobias Fünke on Arrested Development—as well as some of his best bits on the seminal HBO series Mr. Show—struck at the absurdity of homosexual repression in madcap fashion. A long and detailed standup skit of his, focused on a dessert in a high-end restaurant that features edible gold, speaks to the horrible injustice of global commerce. Denial of being a political comic aside, Cross tells the Journal that about a third of the new stand-up routine—his first in four years—focuses on “gun stuff, religious stuff.” For Cross, that’s the best stuff. The Moore, 1932 Second Ave., 784-

FEBRUARY 4

33

B A F TA AWA R D G O L D E N G NOMINEE L O B E AWA R D

calendar

®

Pick List » FROM PAGE 33

BEST ACTRESS Maggie Smith

“ACTING LEGEND MAGGIE SMITH’S TOUR DE FORCE.”

to honor Allen Toussaint, who passed away in November. These artists will pull from a catalogue that overflows with R&B and pop hits that you likely had no idea came from a single man, his music often finding audiences through performances by other artists, including Elvis Costello, Dr. John, Patti LaBelle, Otis Redding, the Rolling Stones, and many others. If you’re a Toussaint fan, you’ll be here.

If you are simply a fan of American pop music, you should be. The Royal Room, 5000 Rainier

-Lou Lumenick, NEW YORK POST

ACADEMY AWARD® WINNER

MAGGIE SMITH

ALEX JENNINGS

LADY VAN

THE IN THE

DIRECTED BY

NICHOLAS HYTNER

SCREENPLAY BY ALAN BENNETT FROM HIS MEMOIR

Ave. S., 906-9920, theroyalroomseattle.com. $12 adv./$15 DOS. 8 p.m.; all ages until 10 p.m.

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Noise Yoga With Bardo:Basho

For the latest installment of this popular music-and-yoga mashup, Seattle’s Kirsten Thom will be serenading all the willing weirdo yogis as Bardo:Basho, the name under which she makes hypnotic, meditative drone and ambient music. Thom’s work ranges everywhere from New Age-inflected life-affirming radiance to Kate Bush-style fantasias to dark cosmic techno rhythms. Whatever mode she happens to be in, all of her songs would fit perfectly soundtracking some sun salutations and tree poses—so get your mat ready and

KELTON SEARS

FEBRUARY 8

Monday The X Files

X-Files creator Chris Carter has been taken to task for upending the mythology of his ’90s series in its six-episode reboot, now airing on Fox. According to the first episode, aliens are real, but everything sinister we associate with them—abductions, probings, etc.—have actually been carried out by the military and corporations. Jarring as this may be to the X-Files storyline, it’s an interesting commentary on how conspiracies evolve with the world they distrust.

Halfway through the miniseries, I’m convinced the truth is still out there, even if “there” is a different place than we previously thought. Q13 Fox. TV-14 (language and violence). 8 p.m.

DANIEL PERSON

PICK PACK NO DICKS!

BY SARA BERNARD

etting tired of the intractable patriarchy that saturates all things, from the tech industry to the legislature to the stage? Never fear: Women are totally dominating this week . . . well, at least that last part. Here are a few of the calendar’s brassiest female performances.

That’s What She Said is not just an eye-rolling cliché, it turns out—it’s also a one-woman show that stitches together prominent female lines from the most-produced plays in American theater. Without any male voices to bounce off, fight with, scream at, or be overruled by, experimental actress Erin Pike embodies dozens of characters, sometimes at warp speed, to paint a stark and infuriating portrait of the construction of the American woman on the American stage over the past century. It’s by turns hilarious, poignant, and totally uncomfortable. Oh, and ladies: Your ticket is $5 cheaper, to reflect the 21 percent salary advantage men typically enjoy.

Rock on. Gay City, 517 E. Pike St., 860-6969, erinpike.com. $15–$20. 8 p.m. Thurs., Feb. 4– Sun., Feb. 7.

You know Pussy Riot, those radical women from Moscow who put “activist feminist punk” on the map with songs like “Kill the Sexist” and “Putin Pissed Himself”? They’ve been screaming their truths to unwilling audiences in such locales as the Red Square, an Orthodox cathedral, and the Sochi Winter Olympics since 2011, and some members

Pussy Riot

have been thrown in prison for it. On Monday, two Pussy Rioters—including Maria Alyokhina, who spent nearly two years behind bars for “hooliganism”—are coming to Seattle to dish the dirt on punk as protest, guerrilla performance, pussy politics, and their true feelings about Vladimir Putin. The conversation will be moderated by local scholar Mariana Markova, and follows a screening of the award-winning 2013 documentary Pussy vs.

Putin, an inside look at the infamous group and its effect on Russia, women, and the world. The Neptune, 1303 N.E. 45th St., 682-1414, stgpresents.org. $32.50. 7:30 p.m. Mon., Feb. 8.

Also on tap this week: the Highline’s female-only comedy showcase, Loudmouth Cunts. (Yes, that’s definitely a reclamation and celebration of the word.) Side-splitting host Maddie Downes will bring five local women to the comic stage—a refreshing scene in a very male-dominated industry. No dicks here, but very possibly some dick jokes. Highline Bar, 210 Broadway E., 328-7837, highlineseattle.com $5. 7 p.m. Sun., Feb 7.

IGOR MUKHIN

go

B

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Sunday

Ave., 622-9250, fryemuseum.org. $10 for members/$15 regular. All ages. 11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

G

in

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A

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FEBRUARY 7

prepare to really explore that mind/body connection. If you like what you hear and how you feel, look out for events from Elevator, an event series of which Thoms is a co-founder, that brings experimental and noise acts to Seattle and hosts them in delightfully freaky locations like giant warehouses and cavernous breweries. Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry

FIRST THURSDAY PICKS

BY T.S. FLOCK AND KELTON SEARS

Not a Hologram at Glass Box Gallery As a good friend once put it, the way most people use Facebook is equivalent to “going out into the streets and yelling your personal thoughts and opinions as loud as you can.” Living in the 21st century can be unnerving, which is exactly what local artist Dylan Neuwirth meditates on in this new show. Zooming in on “living in the Anthropocene, late-capitalist ecology, artificial life and post-human contemporary existence” through neon, new media, sculpture, video, and installations that he promises will create a “game-like environment,” Neuwirth hopes to replicate what living in our failed future might be like. 831 Seattle Blvd. S., glassboxgallery. com. Through Feb. 24. KS

F E A R A LWAY S FINDS ITS VICTIM

CIVICS

SCIENCE

ARTS & CULTURE

COMMUNITY

(2/3) WAmend : Derek Cressman ‘When Money Talks’ (2/3) Eli Sanders and Jennifer Hopper with Marcie Sillman ‘While the City Slept’ (2/4) Ted Rall Bernie Sanders, A New Political Era

The Mountains of Molenkamp and Speirs at Linda Hodges Gallery The mountains delight us daily in Seattle, but some artists are especially inspired and see them in wildly different ways. Ryan Molenkamp renders them in bright, striated, acrylic patchworks, sometimes spewing pillowy columns of smoke. Cheerfully ominous.

Meanwhile, Kentree Speirs sees them surging out of pale clouds and painterly splashes of rich, oily colors.

Ominously beautiful. Across from each other at Linda Hodges, these painters will show quite a range . . . or cordillera, as it were. 316 First Ave. S., 624-3034, linda hodgesgallery.com. Through Feb. 27. TSF

(2/5) Adam Grant with Jeff Ashby ‘How Nonconformists Move the World’ (2/6) Gay City Arts: Lush Us Showcase Feat. Mary Lambert and others (2/8) Alec Ross The Future of Innovation and Work

Marrons at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery

(2/9) John Donvan and Caren Zucker Unpacking the Mysteries of Autism

© FABRICE MONTEIRO 2015

(2/10) Seattle Arts and Lectures: Amber Tamblyn Feat. Bonnie Tamblyn (2/10) Courtney White Low-Cost Climate Change Solutions (2/11) The Art of Alzheimer’s: ‘His Neighbor Phil’ Film Screening

In recognition of Black History Month, Mariane Ibrahim Gallery presents Fabrice Monteiro’s acclaimed photo series Marrons. Shot in Benin, the series re-enacts and documents the practice of shackling slaves in that West African nation and beyond. Each portrait has its own character, not simply because of the brutally ornate shackles themselves, but in the models’ unique expressions, from defiant to heartbroken. It’s an uncanny window into a history which cannot be forgotten and from which the world is still trying to heal. 608 Second Ave., 467-4927, marianeibrahim.com. Through March 12. TSF

(2/11) Don Glickstein Stopping a War That Won’t End TM

(2/12) Lake Union Civic Orchestra Higdon, Lalo, Beethoven WEDNESDAY 02/03 2 COL. (4.83”) X 10.5” ALL.RGS.0203.SW

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(2/14) Valentine’s Day Special Romantic French Feast and Concert Global Rhythms: Les Chauds Lapins (2/17) Jeb Wyman The Invisible Scars of ‘Ordinary Soldiers’

(2/18) Baz Dreisinger Rethinking the Global Prison System #1

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SEATTLE SEATTLE SIFF Cinema at The Film Center Sundance Cinemas Seattle (206) 324-9996 (206) 633-0059

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Print Matters: Printmakers on the Northwest Coast at Stonington Gallery Indigenous Northwest Coastal art is traditionally understood in a three-dimensional context—carvings, masks, boats, and weavings. But in the 1960s and ’70s, Northwest indigenous artists began to embrace printmaking in all its various forms as a way to transmit their formline designs. Unsurprisingly, given their highly three-dimensional origins, these vivid prints pop off the page, bounding with deep saturated colors and centuries of design tradition. This salon-style show brings together some of the best of this relatively new tradition to exhibit the breadth of styles that have grown out of the form. 125 S. Jackson St., stoningtongallery.com.

Runs through March 2. KS

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Indica, Sativa, or What?

BY MEAGAN ANGUS

F

rom a botanical point of view, there is little difference between indica and sativa. But before I get into that, perhaps I should back up a little. When we are talking about cannabis that people consume for medicinal or recreational purposes, science regards it all as Cannabis sativa. Even industrial hemp, used to make paper, building materials, oil, food, textiles, and so much more, comes from this branch of the cannabis tree. But honestly, this designation is largely useless, like saying all beers are the same. (Speaking of beers, hops and cannabis actually come from the same family, Cannabaceae, which also includes nettles and cottonwoods.

But I digress.) In practice, the differences in cannabis strains are varied and complex.

As cannabis has become more readily available in our culture, and the understanding of it more sophisticated, the main question has begun to move away from “What are you smoking?” to “Why are you smoking?” While it’s mostly true that all weed “gets you high” to some degree, it’s worth repeating that the actual effects can range widely.

It’s also worth noting that while general traits are ascribed to indicas and sativas, nearly any effect can be coaxed out of any plant, depending on how it’s cultivated and the conditions it’s grown under. So it’s always good to do a little research into any new strain you try, and not just rely on what you’ve heard.

So with that in mind, let’s take a look at the sub-species commonly available: Cannabis sativa, indica, and ruderalis.

Sativa We truly don’t know how long sativa and

SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 3 — 9, 2016

humans have been hanging out together. The species can be found growing near the equator around the globe. These incredibly diverse plants will usually produce an “uplifting high,” primarily cerebral. that can manifest as feeling cheerful, artistic, heady, excited, conversational, physically lighter, and active, with some of the strongest strains potentially inducing mild hallucinations.

Some people are affected by these plants as they are by stimulants.

Medical users love this plant for its ability to reduce pain without “knocking them out” as opioids will.

Sativas often have a higher THC content— one of the 85 chemical compounds, or cannabinoids, found in pot—than the other strains, but that can differ greatly from breed to breed.

Indicas This strain comes primarily from that magical intersection of cultural exchange at the center of the Eurasian continent currently occupied by northern India, Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. These plants grow in as little as half the time it takes to grow a sativa, and tend to be altogether shorter and smaller plants. This demure size makes indica less effective as a textile, and so it’s generally regarded as a medicine, intoxicant, or spiritual offering. Indica also traditionally has a higher level of the cannabinoid CBD, which is primarily known for inducing a high located more in the body than the head, resulting in a “stoned” quality that is more of a “low” than a “high.”

Medicinally, this is used to treat severe pain, arthritis, insomnia, and a host of other ailments.

It is normal to feel sleepy, calm, mellow, relaxed, numbed, introspective and peaceful. The term “couchlock”—locked to the couch—is often used to describe the most common effects of this plant.

Ruderalis This hearty little plant is found all over the world. It gets its name from the Latin for “rubble,” and is often one of the first plants to move into an area after any soil disturbance, making it an amazing helper in cases of soil erosion. This little dude is significantly lower in THC than sativas or indicas, so it is usually not included in recreational use. Ruderalis’ CBD count is off the charts, however.

For most of the modern era, growers have concentrated on producing pot that packed the biggest punch for your dollar. The quickest way to the highest high was to ramp up the plant’s THC production as much as possible. But with legalization, researchers are finally getting the green light to explore all the other cannabinoids available in pot, and CBD is at the top of the list. Cited as being capable of treating everything from autism to epilepsy, CBDs are lining up to be the panaceas of the 21st century.

Now you know. E

stashbox@seattleweekly.com

JAMES THE STANTON

36

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Full Time- Year Round, No Layoffs Day rate DOE, Incentives, Medical & Voluntary Dental Must have climbing gear, vehicle & DL Email work experience to recruiting@treeservicesnw.com 1-800-684-8733 ext. 3434

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Stan’s Mountain View Towing Inc Abandoned Vehicle Auction 9000 Delridge Way SW, Seattle WA Wednesday 02/10/16 Gates Open 9AM, Auction 12 PM 206-767-4848

Employment Computer/Technology

Data Scientist sought by zulily, LLC. in Seattle, WA. Bld cmplx statstcl mdls tht lrn frm & scale to terabytes of data usng lang such as R, Python, Julia, etc.

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Malpaso DANCE COMPANY MARCH 3-5

Cuban troupe makes Seattle debut with live music by Grammy Award-winning Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble

GRUPO CORPO MARCH 24-26

Brazil’s internationally acclaimed dance company combines the precision of classical ballet with the sensuality of Latin dance rhythms

Vicente Amigo

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SEATTLE WEEKLY • FEBRUARY 3 — 9, 2016

MARCH 18

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MARCH 16

Jane Comfort & Company APRIL 7-9

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Gil Shaham with original films by

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