The Stranger Vol. 23, No. 5

LAST DAYS

The Week in Review BY

ANN ROMANO

NEW COLUMN!

David Schmader returns next week.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 Today, rapper Kanye West sat down for an epic (for him) one-hour interview with BBC Radio 1 in which, for once, he didn’t say anything even remotely crazy. JUST KIDDING! “We culture. Rap is the new rock ’n’ roll,” Kanye opined. “We the new rock stars, and I’m the biggest of all of them. I’m the number-one rock star on the planet.” Now, before you accuse Kanye of being egotistical, he did concede, “There would be no Kanye West if it wasn’t for Michael Jackson”—but right before he said that, in certain ways, he’s better than Michael Jackson “I’ve got to a point that Michael Jackson did not break down… I look around and I say, ‘Wait a minute. There’s no one around here that looks like me. And if they are, they’re quiet as fuck.’ So that means, wait a second—now we’re seriously, like, in a civil rights movement .” Soooo… we guess he’s saying that thanks are in order? Well, okay! Thank you, Kanye! For the new civil rights movement. Thank you, Kanye! For being the number-one rock star in the world, and for being, in some ways, better than Michael Jackson. And thank you, Kanye! For marrying Kim Kardashian (otherwise, we might be sitting here thinking you’re not full of shit). MEANWHILE… In “news of the YUCK,” yesterday during a game with the New Orleans Saints, Arizona Cardinals safety Rashad Johnson

Please remember to change the names of the innocent and guilty.

PARENTAL GUIDANCE NOT SUGGESTED

You felt entitled enough to let me know that “I was endangering my child’s life” by crossing a quiet side street next to QFC when it wasn’t a walk sign (the sign is tilted just enough so you can’t actually see it anyway, I’ve always just gone when it’s safe). I informed you that I felt like I waited until it was safe and that I couldn’t see the sign anyway, to which you responded, “They should take that child away from you.” If crossing the street when it’s not a walk sign is a reason to take a child from someone, I’d guess about 95 percent of parents would have their parenthood revoked. I’ve seen 5-year-olds still sucking on binkies, car seats in the front seat of cars with the windows rolled up while the mom is smoking, and worse. But you know what? I didn’t say a damn word, because those aren’t my children. You probably won’t even read this—you seem like the kind of guy who’s suffocating inside the Seattle Times’ butthole rather than reading The Stranger—but I hope karma does what I had to hold myself back from doing and slaps you in the face. —Anonymous

took off his glove after a particularly nasty play and discovered part of his fi nger was still in it EEEEEEEEEE!!! Kent Somers of the Arizona Republic reported on the gruesome accident in which Johnson lost the top of his left middle finger by twattering: “Johnson had surgery yesterday. Bone was exposed so must watch for infection.” EEEEEEEEEEE!!!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 This just in: Bucktoothed-hillbilly-turned-twerkingprovocateur Miley Cyrus enjoys the taste of heavily chlorinated water! Or so that’s what we were led to believe after seeing her topless cover photo for Rolling Stone, which depicts her climbing out of a swimming pool and lustily licking the water from her bare shoulder . (Confidential to Miley’s tongue: We’ve seen enough of you, dear. Climb back into your mouth.) In the accompanying article, Miley talked about her now-tedious VMA performance, the critics’ reaction, and rejecting the notion that she thinks she’s black (while almost simultaneously referring to Kanye West as her “homie”). In the most ridiculous portion of the interview, she accompanied the writer to a tattoo parlor, where she had the words “Rolling $tone” tattooed on the soles of her feet. “I thought about going to play laser tag,” she said by way of explanation, “but laser tag sucks. And we could have gone bowling—but what are we? 90?” It should be noted that Miley also has a huge dream catcher tattooed on her side. So yes, Miley… you are 90. A 90-year-old hippie.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 It was reported today that two Thai men were arrested after pop starlet Rihanna posted an Instagram picture of herself posing with the men’s pet slow loris—which is kind of an endangered species. WHOOPSIE! The men had been regularly (and illegally) charging tourists to take pictures with the protected animal, but were busted after local police— who apparently follow Rihanna with the same glee as the rest of us— posted a pic of her and the loris with the caption “ Look who was talkin dirty to me! ” Once again, Rihanna is the world’s inadvertent hero. Now if she could only get Chris Brown incarcerated… MEANWHILE… Today, Republican senator Ted Cruz —aka the smarmiest-looking politician in the history of the world—finished a 21-hours-and-19-minutes-long filibuster against Obama’s health-care plan… and then voted along with everyone else that he should shut the fuck up and continue the necessary work to prevent a government shutdown. So why did he choose to perform this filibuster in the first place? Because he is an idiot. And this is America, where increasingly idiotic things like this occur. Good day.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26 In a similar story, according to In Touch magazine, 18-year-old Ashley Horn—the estranged halfsister to Lindsay Lohan —has undergone $25,000 worth of plastic surgery… in order to

PTHIS ROOT BEER IS ROOTIN’ TOOTIN’ BY VLADIMIR PUTIN

rivet, stupid Americans! It is I, Russian president Vladimir Putin, with another installment of my weekly root-beer review. (If you not reading it, you are the idiot. My column is number-one choice in Pravda.)

SHASTA ROOT BEER: I like the Shasta! True… the flavor? Not so complex. But what it lack in flavor, it makes up in creaminess. Creaminess big deal to me! I tell underlings, “Get Shasta root beer in Kremlin soda machines, or I send you to Siberia! HAR-HAR-HARRRR!” I don’t joke.

A&W ROOT BEER: You idiots cannot run a country to save your life—but you make pretty good root beer. I like the A&W—it clean. It crisp. It nonoffensive. Not like your idiot John McCain. Fuck your American idiot John McCain. “Yippee-kiyay, motherfucker” YOU, idiot John McCain. (Wait. My assistant tells me this was movie Die Hard John McClane who say this. My assistant now in gulag for smarty pants. Gulag mean “labor camp,” idiots!)

IBC ROOT BEER: I like this root beer! It is… how you gay American cowboys say… “rootin’ tootin’!” Nyet? We don’t have the gay cowboys in Russia. We don’t have the… the… “Brokeback Mountain.” Seriously? A mountain that is devoted solely to gay cowboy sex? Do you see now why we harass and beat you to death? But IBC—that’s the good stuff. Rootin’ tootin’! Bang, bang! Pew, pew!

BEST ROOT BEER OF THE WEEK: Once again, for the 14th consecutive time in the row, the best root beer of the week goes to my good friend Bashar al-Assad! Yes, this Syrian president may have trouble keeping rebels in line, but he make damn… fine… root beer! In his basement, no less! It have strong nose, traces of wintergreen and licorice, and faintest chemical aftertaste… not unlike the sarin. But that’s nonsense! MY GOOD FRIEND TOLD ME HE WOULD NEVER MAKE THE SARIN IN HIS BASEMENT HAR-HAR-HAR-HARRRRR!

I see you next week, idiots.

look more like LiLo. Now, you may be asking yourself: WHY? “My goal was to look like Lindsay in her good days, when she was around 18, 19 years old,” tittered Ashley, who added, “Now I’m hotter than Lindsay! I have no problem saying that.” (Translation: “Because I am an idiot. And this is America, where increasingly idiotic things like this occur. Good day.”)

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 Guys, there’s a brand-new social network for us to waste thousands of unproductive hours on—but don’t worry about signing up, because we’re already in it! Thanks to the New York Times and a few more sinister Post-it Notes from good ol’ Edward Snowden , we’ve learned that the National Security Agency has been “exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions , and other personal information.” The Times story—which might as well be headlined “Oh God, Fox Mulder Was Right All Along”—adds that thanks to “bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls, and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data,” the NSA has portraits of us that are “perhaps more complete and predictive of behavior than could be obtained by listening to phone conversations or reading e-mails.” Well, on the upside, at least this social network doesn’t fill up our feed with people’s dumb pictures of their dumb kids. Sign us up!

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 Speaking of dumb kids: Following a sketch in which Jimmy Kimmel made fun of Kanye West ’s ridiculous BBC Radio 1 appearance—by replacing Kanye with a small child—Kanye got, as Kimmel noted, “VERY, VERY ANGRY.” A selection of West’s hate-tweets: “JIMMY KIMMEL IS OUT OF LINE TO TRY AND SPOOF IN ANY WAY THE FIRST PIECE OF HONEST MEDIA IN YEARS.”

“JIMMY KIMMEL PUT YOURSELF IN MY SHOES… OH NO THAT MEANS YOU WOULD HAVE GOTTEN TOO MUCH GOOD PUSSY IN YOUR LIFE…” “YOU CAN’T PUT YOURSELF IN MY SHOES. YOUR FACE LOOKS CRAZY… IS THAT FUNNY?… OR IF I HAD A KID SAY IT WOULD IT BE FUNNY???” And “I LIKE YOU, YOU KNOW ME, I WENT TO YOUR FAMILY’S WEDDING.” (To which Kimmel replied, “I like you too! Glad we cleared this up.”) And, finally, “SARAH SILVERMAN IS A THOUSAND TIMES FUNNIER THAN YOU AND THE WHOLE WORLD KNOWS IT!!!” (“I know!” Kimmel agreed. “#WreckItRalph, right?!”) What can we learn from this, dears? Well, for starters, don’t ever hire a child actor to play Kanye West—because there’s no way he’ll ever, ever act childish enough.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 This morning, House Republicans pulled a Kanye , throwing a tantrum and voting for a government shutdown to express their anger over Obamacare (which, we should note, passed back in 2010). The shutdown could result in 800,000 government employees not getting paid, suspended government services, and, if it stretches out for a while? Another recession. (We should note that Obamacare will not be affected. Sigh.) IN OTHER NEWS… Been wondering how sweet, innocent Hannah Montana turned into tongue-lolling, bottomtwerking Miley Cyrus? Wonder no more. In the MTV special Miley: The Movement, Pharrell Williams explains: “Her dad is Billy Ray Cyrus, her godmother is Dolly Parton, and she grew up in an era when kids listen to hiphop. People ask, ‘Why is she twerking? Why is she doing this?’ Because she’s a product of America.” Forget about Ted Cruz, the NSA, and the government shutdown. What Pharrell just said? That’s the most horrific thing we’ve ever heard about America.

Sakuma Brothers Berry Boycott

Workers at a Farm Outside Seattle Demand Better Conditions and Wages

BY ANSEL HERZ

An hour north of Seattle, along Washington State Route 11, the land is flat but colorful. Bountiful acres of farmland stretch in every direction. Lush fields of raspberries,

strawberries, and blackberries begin just yards from the edge of the road. They belong to Sakuma Brothers Farms, a regional grower that sells the berries by the millions of dollars to grocery stores nationwide, and to Häagen-Dazs for its ice cream.

Tucked at the bottom of the hill across from ripening blackberries, there’s a labor camp in a dirt clearing—a grouping of wooden sheds with tin roofs, some larger cabin-size models. The mattresses inside the sheds look ratty and old, and the workers complain that rain leaks through the roofs. It reminded me of refugee settlements I’ve seen in Haiti.

One of the farmworkers from this labor camp is Luis. He’s only 15 years old and he likes video games. Luis was not making

SOURCES SAY

• After a spirited September 30 discussion on

a

for the neighborhood to have the toilet and the building, then ended

minimum wage this summer, despite working eight-hour days on his knees picking strawberries for Sakuma Brothers Farms, he and his family say. “In the strawberry fields, I couldn’t pick fast enough,” Luis explained to me. Because wages are doled out based on the quantity of berries picked, Luis says he was only making around $45 in a day, instead of closer to $80. “I thought I was getting ripped off. I deserve to get paid minimum wage, and that’s it,” he said. “They weren’t paying the kids minimum wage for the whole season.”

Sakuma Brothers Farms did not respond to Luis’s specific allegation by press time, but even if the farm wasn’t paying minimum wage, that would not necessarily be illegal.

“Farmworkers have no right to overtime pay,

with classic Clark-ian doublespeak: “I look forward to great development happening at 200 Occidental, and I’ll be voting against the legislation this afternoon.” This led to some off-mic chat between Council Members Sally Bagshaw and Bruce Harrell, until Clark asked them what they were talking about. Said Bagshaw, “We just wanted to confirm what you said.” Answered Clark: “That I’ll be voting against it.” To which Harrell responded, “With everything you said, I thought then you were going to support it.” Then everyone laughed awkwardly at how unusual it was for Clark to take an independent, losing vote instead of safely joining the

Mixteco farmworkers.”

Workers also asked the farm to stop hiring white teenagers from Skagit County to do tasks the workers themselves could do, like checking the weights of boxes of berries that workers bring in. “They’ll stand in one spot talking with each other, until a farmworker comes over with a bucket of berries,” anthropologist Seth Holmes, who worked and conducted research on farms in Skagit Valley, says of the teenage checkers, explaining that they have the power to decide whether to round up or down when a worker brings in a bucket that weighs, say, 12.5 pounds. It creates a racial hierarchy of inexperienced white kids bossing around Latinos who are older or have worked on farms all their lives, he says, which is why the farmworkers called for an end to the practice.

Ramon Torres, Luis’s uncle, was in the leadership of the strike that began in July. Torres wrote the list of their demands by hand, in Spanish, on a scrap of notebook paper. “When I have something to say, I say it,” Torres told me in broken English. Luis calls him “loud” and says when he speaks, “people pay attention to him.” Torres’s tall frame and snapback hats make him stick out in photographs of tense-looking negotiations between crowds of farmworkers, their arms crossed, and the owners, the Sakuma brothers, back in July.

Two key demands were soon met: The owners agreed to reinstate Federico Lopez, while a foreman who workers described as verbally abusive, Antonio Lopez, was either dismissed or moved to another farm. (Sakuma Brothers’ spokesperson says Antonio Lopez “was fired for cause.”)

workers on small farms are not entitled to receive minimum wage, and children as young as twelve are legally allowed to work in the fields,” according to the National Farm Workers Ministry. The National Labor Relations Act still doesn’t allow farmworkers to have protections around the right organize and bargain collectively. Even though Washington State has a robust agricultural sector, with more than 90,000 farmworkers, the state does not protect farmworkers the way that, say, California does—protections that go back to a landmark movement for farmworker rights led by Cesar Chavez in the 1960s. There’s never been a similar movement here. Not yet, anyway.

Farmworkers at Sakuma Brothers Farms have been expressing discontent with this state of affairs and the conditions at Sakuma for a while now. In mid-July, Federico Lopez was working in the fields when he complained to his supervisor about low piece rates and asked for a raise. The supervisor claimed this violated the company’s “no intimidation policy,” according to the workers, and Lopez was fired that day. (Through a spokesperson, Sakuma Brothers Farms would only say that Federico Lopez “was fired for cause.”) This triggered a sudden strike by more than 250 workers, demanding Lopez be reinstated, along with other demands presented in writing, including: “Cease and desist from disrespectful and racist language, such as such as ‘oaxaquita,’ ‘indio,’ ‘estupido,’ and the use of stereotypes around inherent ‘laziness,’ ‘drunkeness,’ or ‘dirtiness’ of Triqui and

majority. May the record show: When Clark took a bold stand, which is out of character for her, it was a vote that would result in more homeless people illegally pissing and shitting in alleyways

• Washington State Democratic Party chair Dwight Pelz—whose party lost control of the state senate this year after two members defected and another party leader allegedly embezzled about $250,000 from campaign coffers—announced his resignation on September 30. Pelz was best known for his fiery rhetoric and for leading a party that failed in the legislature to

According to workers, the farm also agreed to bump wages up slightly, and to hire migrant farmworker teenagers, like Luis, into more senior positions. They say the farm even agreed to consult with farmworkers each day to set pay rates based on the physical conditions and the difficulty of labor in a given field of berries. Those were encouraging developments, but there were doubts, even at that time, that the agreements between the farm owners and the workers would be enforced and lasting.

The Häagen-Dazs shop in the U-District has joined the boycott: “We are not going to be serving strawberry ice cream, to support the pickers who are being mistreated.”

John Segale, a public relations consultant who serves as Sakuma Brothers Farms’ spokesman, says there was no such agreement about setting pay rates: “The idea of negotiating piece rates prior to picking a specific field is not feasible or practical.” Segale also says charges of racism on the farm are “outrageous” and a “ridiculous lie.” According to Segale, “The cause for this labor unrest is not due to our treatment of our workers, many of whom have been

accomplish its most basic economic agendas, such as repairing our worst-in-the-country regressive taxation scheme (which leans more on the poor and less on the rich than any another state), while funding for colleges plummeted, tuition at universities spiked, money for basic education funding atrophied to unconstitutionally low levels, and right-wing initiative promoter Tim Eyman successfully recast the entire frame around state spending. Nevertheless, “The State of the Party is strong,” Pelz wrote in a resignation letter to Vice Chair Valerie Brady Rongey. Pelz will serve in the position until a party meeting in February.

with us for over 10 years, but their opposition to the federal guest worker program.” He says, “Labor activists—most from outside our community—came in and convinced some of our employees to go on strike to help bring attention to the activists’ opposition to the guest worker program.”

“This whole thing about outside agitators is just silly,” says Rosalinda Guillen, of the organization Community to Community, who has been helping workers organize. She says Sakuma Brothers workers reached out to her in July after hearing her on the radio. “I grew up in Skagit County. I grew up on a berry farm… Sakuma Farms has always been known as one of the worst berry farms to work in. It’s common knowledge in Skagit County.” Guillen characterizes the federal guest worker program, under which the farm began bringing in unskilled temporary labor on August 8, as “an exploitative, almost slave-like worker program… I equate it to human trafficking. It’s like going to Mexico and renting humans to harvest your crop and then shipping them back.” Guillen says the workers feel “there is a plan to displace the domestic workers with a controllable workforce. It’s easier to have 170 males who don’t live in the community and are going to be gone as soon as you’re done with them, than these other workers who have seven kids and live in the labor camp.” One condition that comes with using guest workers is that wages are set at $12 an hour, and employers have to pay the same wages to domestic workers as they do to the guest workers. Since the guest workers showed up, everyone has been making at least $12 an hour, Segale says. However, once the farm is done with guest workers, they would be under no obligation to keep paying domestic workers that wage.

In early September, Ramon Torres pushed for higher piece rates in the blueberry and blackberry fields after supervisors refused to consult with workers over the wages, he says. According to a press release issued later by the workers, “Farmworkers held two separate workplace work stoppages over wages at Sakuma Brothers Farms, one with 150 blueberry pickers and another with 200 blackberry pickers. Both strikes gained wage increases of $1.00 and $0.75 respectively.”

After the second work stoppage, the press release continues, “Torres was summarily fired for his role in the strikes. Farmworkers contend that Torres was fired for refusing to negotiate proposed minimum productivity requirements that grower Ryan Sakuma sought to implement as a condition of the wage increase. Torres saw this as a productivity ‘speed up’ that not all pickers would be able to meet, putting at risk their ability to work.”

The news of Torres’s termination spread quickly among the berry pickers. The next day, they walked off the job again by the hundreds. “They think if they get rid of him, we won’t strike anymore,” 17-year-old farmworker Sophie Ramirez told me. She marched with her colleagues days after the firing, across a highway overpass and right up to the gate of the farm’s processing plant, where they delivered a petition calling for Torres’s reinstatement and a return to negotiations over a contract.

Sakuma’s management says Torres was fired because of an arrest on August 30 for domestic violence. Segale puts it bluntly: “He was fired for beating up his wife.” According to a Skagit County Sheriff police report, Torres’s wife told a 911 dispatcher that Torres “was trying to hit and push her.” Torres says it was just an argument. He insists he was fired because of his leadership in the strike effort.

And his wife, Deanna Torres, says the same thing. “I called the police on him because I thought they were just going to come talk. In California, they just come to calm you down. They don’t arrest you,” she told me, standing at the labor camp, after

Nicole Donahue, MA, LMFT

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9

Jill Lepore

Benjamin Franklin’s Sister

(10/2) Sightline Institute presents Matt Taibbi How Money Influences Governance

(10/2) Daniel Lieberman The Evolutionary Story of the Human Body

(10/4) Paul Polak & Mal Warwick

‘The Business Solution to Poverty’

(10/4) Margaret Atwood ‘MaddAddam’

(10/5) Earshot Jazz Festival presents La Familia Valera Miranda

(10/6) Short Stories Live Portraits of Three Women

(10/7) Debora Spar ‘Wonder Women’

(10/7) UBS presents Salman Rushdie ‘Joseph Anton: A Memoir’

(10/8) Paul Bogard Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light

(10/8) ParentMap presents Rosalind Wiseman The Secret Life of Boys

(10/8) Tom Barbash with Jess Walter ‘Stay Up With Me’

(10/9) Jesmyn Ward with Vivian Phillips ‘Men We Reaped’: A Memoir

(10/10) Seattle Public Library presents Jhumpa Lahiri

(10/10) Women’s Funding Alliance presents Modern Girlhood Redefined

(10/10) S eattle Speaks Wage Worries @NEWHOLLY GATHERING PLACE

ROCKIN PIANO SHOW

driving alongside the marching workers, handing out bottled water from her pickup truck. “The [next] day, I tried to go to bail him out, but they said I couldn’t.”

“It’s because of the strike,” she said. “That’s probably what they fired him for… He’s the one who talks more; the people talk to him. They’re trying to get rid of him so all this will stop.” Other workers claimed that their colleagues had been arrested multiple times for getting into fights, or breaking and entering, but were never penalized by the farm.

The day after the march, farm co-owner Ryan Sakuma went to the labor camp to deliver “last checks” to workers, says Segale, the farm spokesman, but he insists it wasn’t to kick the workers out or evict them. “But obviously that’s problematic if they’re taking up space at a farmworker’s camp and not doing the work,” he adds. The workers interpreted Sakuma’s appearance at the camp as an eviction threat, says Guillen. “They’re under unbelievable stress. They’ve lost wages; they’re wondering what’s going to happen.”

That’s not all. Deanna Torres says “security guys” hired by the farm since the strike began following her around. “One of them… he would pop out. I was kind of scared to go to the bathroom, so I would go before it got dark.” Deanna, Ramon, and their daughter have since moved out of the labor camp and into a Burlington apartment. But the rest of the workers still had to contend with the farm’s hired security personnel hovering around.

Then, on September 25, a Skagit County judge handed down a temporary restraining order barring the security personnel from the labor camps. Superior Court judge John Meyer found that the workers “have a clear legal right to… full freedom of association, self-organization,” and they “have a well-grounded fear of continuing invasion of those rights.” This is because farm management “placed security personnel at labor camps where Plantiffs reside in such a manner as to potentially surveil the statutorily protected concerted activities of the Plaintiffs and in a way that chills the exercise” of those activities, the judge wrote.

Now the workers are trying to build on the momentum of their court victory with intensified calls on the public to boycott Sakuma

Are Dispensaries Doomed?

State Work Group Attacks Medical Pot Shops, Rights of Patients

BY BEN LIVINGSTON

In June, the state legislature created a work group to make recommendations on regulating medical cannabis, which has been legal since 1998 but remains largely unregulated, now that pot is also legal for recreational purposes. The work group consists of two members each from the state’s health department, revenue department, and liquor board, as well as the governor’s office and legislative staff.

Regulators have their sights set on gutting key portions of the state’s medical marijuana law. In a legislative hearing last month, Department of Health spokeswoman Kristi Weeks said medical cannabis retailers have always been illegal, echoing opening remarks made by committee chair Representative Christopher Hurst, who asked, “What’s it going to take to shut these all down?”

Next month, the legislature will receive recommendations on how to address its perceived medical marijuana problem, and a document obtained by The Stranger offers a glimpse into those options. The memo lists several “strategies” that would equalize rules for medical and recreational marijuana. Among them: reduce the amount patients can possess (currently 24 ounces), eliminate or

Brothers Farms berries. Last week, delegations of workers, including Ramon Torres, picketed at Seattle-area stores selling the berries. At Uwajimaya, produce managers agreed to temporarily pull them, but the store director tells me he wants more information before making a final decision. Lois Ko, who owns a franchise Häagen-Dazs store in the U-District, joined the boycott almost immediately.

“We are not going to be serving strawberry ice cream, to support the pickers who are being mistreated at the farm,” she told me, adding that she plans to visit the farmworkers’ labor camp herself to see the conditions. And at Weavers Way Co-op on the opposite end of the country, in Pennsylvania, employees told me by phone they’ve asked their supplier to stop providing them with Sakuma berries, after a co-op member urged the store to join the boycott. Nestlé, the parent company of Häagen-Dazs, hasn’t responded to repeated requests for comment.

The boycott is a tried-and-true tactic—the same tactic that Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers used in the 1965 Delano grape strike. That effort took years of boycott marches and pickets, including a pilgrimage from Delano to Sacramento, before the growers finally caved and let the farmworkers sign a contract and unionize.

John Segale, the farm spokesperson, emphasized over and over to me that Sakuma Brothers Farms is a family-owned business, going back four generations. “We’re a family business, and we don’t give out that information,” he said, when I asked if he could give me an idea of the scale of the farm’s activity. (According to Duns Market Identifiers, Sakuma Brothers’ net sales last year were $6.4 million, a LexisNexis search reveals.) Segale says their workers are better paid than most in the industry. But the striking workers can be replaced with other (possibly mechanical) pickers, he explained. And he was resolute: “There is nothing to negotiate. There is no contract or agreement.”

I asked Ramon Torres if the farm owners can really afford to pay more. He pointed at the seemingly endless fields of berries around us and shot back, “They make like $6 million per year. What do you think?”

restrict home growing, ban collective gardens, and eliminate certain legal defenses in court.

However, the document suggests keeping dispensaries in a “system parallel to recreational sales,” and it concedes certain changes are unlikely. Removing organ transplant protections and parental rights for patients “would likely be met with great resistance,” the document states.

The Department of Health confirmed it drafted the advice for the medical cannabis work group, but downplayed its significance.

“The state Department of Health isn’t proposing or recommending anything in the document; rather, we’re providing advisory information on options that the legislature might consider as ways to eliminate some of the contradictions or conflicts within the marijuana laws,” spokesman Donn Moyer told me.

But the work group’s recommendations will be the starting point for debate this legislative session, and liquor board director Rick Garza said at last month’s legislative hearing that options regarding “health care professionals and patients and the collective garden and the possession amounts we leave to the Department of Health.”

Representative Hurst tells me he isn’t considering any medical cannabis legislation at this point, not even to address dispensaries, which he predicts will scatter next year after getting raid notices from the federal government. But if the medical pot work group suggests any reform, he says, “I’d be happy to look at it.”

PTHE STRANGER GENIUS AWARDS celebrates artists at all stages of their careers and rewards them with $5,000 each, no strings attached. Our presenting sponsors Snoqualmie Tribe Fund and Alaska Airlines Visa Signature Card made this year’s awards possible. Thanks also to a Kid from Kent, inventor of Genius Juice, a special vintage of wine made by Sparkman Cellars, proceeds of which fund future awards. Genius Awards finalists are selected by Stranger critics and announced each June in A&P, The Stranger’s art and performance quarterly.

2013 GENIUS AWARD WINNER FOR VISUAL ART

Rodrigo Valenzuela

HAS:

A wardrobe full of crisp white shirts.

IS MOST KNOWN FOR:

Making photographs of two landscapes—say, North America and South America—stitched seamlessly into one.

LIKES TO:

Joke, think, work, talk, drink, in that order.

reparing to lose, Rodrigo Valenzuela raised his fist at the Moore Theatre Saturday night. “Low-income forever!” he cried. Eight years ago, he entered the United States without papers from Chile and sat outside Home Depot offering day labor. Offer the work, hope someone wants it—being an artist is not so different, except on glittery nights like the Genius Awards, when your adopted city erupts at the sound of your name being pronounced over the loudspeaker. “And the winner is…” Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker intoned, tearing the envelope in her capacity as Most Approachable Museum Director in Seattle (she heads up the artist-friendly Frye), “Rodrigo Valenzuela!” He strode onstage to the swell of an overture by Seattle Rock Orchestra and took a swig from a communal bottle of Smirnoff—the nonhomophobic vodka, as it’s come to be known—conveniently located on a table near the mic for just that purpose: consecrating Genius Award winners.

BY JEN GRAVES

“It’s really amazing how this city has opened up opportunities for me,” the characteristically suave Valenzuela told the audience, naming immediately the artists who have helped him.

“Seattle is particularly lucky to have, like, amazing women working for our city. If it wasn’t for these people, I wouldn’t have a chance to make my path. I want to say thank you especially to Mandy Greer, Susan Robb, Susie Lee, and Amanda Manitach for opening doors.” SuttonBeresCuller—dudes—also “have been really influential in my short career.”

He thanked the University of Chile, his first art school back in Santiago, where he got his formal training. In 2010, five years after he moved to the United States, he finished his master of fine arts at the University of Washington.

“I know it’s not like an Oscar theme, but because people are taping it and my mom will get to see… I’d like to say hello to my mom, my dad, my sister,” Valenzuela continued. He thanked families who “helped me with a bowl and food in my mouth when I didn’t have it” along the way. And he thanked

his girlfriend and sometime collaborator Anastasia Yumeko Hill.

“The work could be done anywhere, you know what I mean?” Valenzuela said. “But this work couldn’t happen unless people gave you opportunities to do it.”

Sweaty and boozy like everyone backstage, Valenzuela said he planned to spend the $5,000 in award money to pay the rent at his Capitol Hill studio, where he sleeps on a bed squeezed up against a bookshelf squeezed up against a chair. It will be empty for a few months. The morning after the Genius Awards, he was flying to the East Coast to work on upcoming shows. At 7 a.m., he posted a picture on Facebook of himself looking haggard, sitting at the computer by his window in a hazy light blending machine glow and Seattle gray—this is our naturalest light now—still wearing his white genius sash.

“See you next year, Seattle,” he wrote. “I will be in NYC and Santa Barbara making new work and drinking mojitos.” One hundred and seventy-five people immediately

liked this. “Buena suerte, Rodrigo. Voy a echar de menos,” responded Beth Sellars, the great Seattle curator who heads Suyama Space. Good luck, Rodrigo. I’ll miss you. “A fine young man,” writer Jim Demetre wryly added. “I like his deportment.”

In three quick years, Valenzuela has embedded himself in Seattle. He’s generous and hardworking. In addition to solo and collaborative exhibitions this year, he spent the summer in residence at Skowhegan (in Maine), completed a traveling performance roaming from campus to campus along the University of California system while making sitespecific videos and displaying them along the way (with Yumeko Hill), and journeyed into the freaky fracking culture of North Dakota to help artist Susie Lee, herself a Genius Award winner, make new work about her transformed home state.

In a recent panel conversation called “Why We Make Things” at Town Hall, Valenzuela was asked why he became an artist. There was art school, he said, but he equally credited watching the repetitive labor of his father, a mailman, and grandfather, a carpenter, plus “hours and hours and hours” of TV and movies dubbed from Hollywood, which were something like magazine-cut-out ransom notes rather than smooth illusions.

“Pinochet really helped, too,” Valenzuela said, the dictator’s censorship obvious and instructional even to a child just looking to understand words and pictures. Now Valenzuela makes videos and photographs about being located and dislocated.

The slide show during the Genius Awards ceremony flashed images by all three finalists before the winner was announced—the subversively resisting bodies of Matthew Offenbacher’s openhearted paintings and writings; the intense, bright spirits of Sherry Markovitz’s talismanic paintings and sculptures. The slides of Valenzuela’s work were some of his portraits of people existing on the borders of documentary and fiction—people like him, and the rest of this city of old transplants and new natives all mixed up together.

SARE: A CREATE: U USE:

The dance creations of choreographer Zoe Scofield and designer Juniper Shuey are masterful, but they’re not what you’d call soothing. They feel mythological and unsettling, like a dream that’s urgently trying to tell you something in a language you used to know but can’t quite remember. The pair began working together almost a decade ago, and the intimacy of their collaboration has grown so tight, it’s sometimes hard to tell where the dance ends and the design begins. Scofield’s choreography has the sculptural rigor of ballet (it prefers angles to undulations), and Shuey’s kinetically manipulative lighting work can completely change the shape of a theater, shrinking it to a claustrophobic bar of light trapped in a black void or expanding it to the grandeur of a Technicolor snowfall on a vast Midwestern plain.

BY BRENDAN KILEY

Their most recent full-length performance, A Crack in Everything (which premiered at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival before touring nationally), was a parade of difficult, visceral images: taut red thread extending from unseen hands offstage into the mouths of the performers onstage, who danced on the ends of their lines like hooked fish; a large hooded figure (death? Fate? Eternal recurrence?) who would appear and interrupt dancers’ progress by picking them up and moving them back to where they’d come from; a tiny white woman (Scofield) and a tall black man (the astonishingly lithe and graceful Raja Feather Kelly) sitting nearly naked, their faces inches away from each other, erupting into furious barking; Scofield playing a frighteningly fast round of “five-finger fillet” (the knife game in which a player splays her hand on a flat surface and quickly stabs at the gaps between her fingers) before Shuey blinded the room with a blast of light from bulbs pointed at the audience. The power of their work lies in troubling images, and their ability to linger and haunt. Their work also has the invigorating scent of rebellion—which, given their backgrounds, makes sense. When she was 14 years old, Scofield moved from Gainesville, Georgia (the self-proclaimed “poultry capital of the world”), to an arts boarding school in Massachusetts to study ballet. She and ballet had a painful breakup (she got expelled). Scofield took a hiatus to sort things out before moving

versity of Washington with an emphasis on ceramics. In other words, the future awardwinning designer of light majored in earth.

“I was the ceramicist who rebelled against objects,” he said. How so? “Oh, I just never really made any.” Instead, he took the materials assigned to him for various projects (for example, a one-to-ten ratio of white clay to red clay) and made performances using projected light, movement, and surprises. For one project, he hung himself in a gallery (like a painting, not like a suicide) with clay smeared on the floor to capture people’s footprints as they walked past. He graduated anyway.

has more time, resources, space, and institutional advocates (including On the Boards and Velocity Dance Center) for their work than other cities do. Creating part of A Crack in Everything in New York, for example, was a serious struggle.

“And it sounds overplayed,” she said, “but this DIY-ness, this self-inventiveness is available in Seattle. It allows people to do what they want to do.” It’s a place where she, at least, has had room to forge her own aesthetic despite a series of professional rejections: She was asked to leave her dance conservatory, she didn’t get into Juilliard, she didn’t get into companies she auditioned for, she didn’t get some grants she applied for. “I was told I couldn’t make it because my family was poor,” she said, “or because I’m from the South. But sometimes, being told ‘no’ is a great thing. The nos help you get clarity and strength. They refine your understanding of why you’re doing this.”

The duo’s hard-won rebellion is an affirmative rebellion. They didn’t simply reject the received wisdom—what to do with clay, how to be a dancer—but, through their rejection, created something new. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” Scofield said. “Maybe art in Seattle is the same way. If it’s not already there, it gets made.” Scofield and Shuey are the kind of artists who make it.

to Seattle and meeting Shuey, who encouraged her to start dancing again. Shuey, in the meantime, had dropped out of Emerson College, where he’d danced in a few school productions (he got his start when his roommate had a crush on a dancer who wanted “regular people” to be in one of her pieces) but also debated with his fellow artists over their tendency to make what he considered aggressively abstract, audience-alienating, “art star” bullshit. Shuey moved to New York, wasn’t satisfied there, and eventually moved to Seattle to finish an art degree at the Uni-

Their overturn-the-applecart histories are evident in their work, where Scofield and Shuey tend to harness conventions, rigor, and control, only to explode them. During their acceptance speech at the Genius Awards ceremony, Scofield said (after confessing that she didn’t expect to win, so she’d hadn’t thought about what to say, only what to wear): “I’m really glad that we’re in Seattle, because we wouldn’t be able to do what we do if we weren’t in Seattle. And I’m also really glad and thankful for everybody who said that I couldn’t do what I was doing and shouldn’t do it—and that I just kept doing it anyway.”

The following day, she added that Seattle

For their most recent experiment, at Velocity Dance Center, a small group of audience members lay on their backs on the floor, looking up at projections on the ceiling while performers danced over them, just inches away from their faces. It was a bracingly intimate performance in which the audience got to examine things one can only barely see from a theater seat: the precise articulation of a hand gesture, the texture of skin on a dancer’s elbow, each vertebra of a spine twisting and releasing. The audience members weren’t just scrutinizing, but were scrutinized back—it was not unlike lying on a table before a surgery, before the anesthesia kicks in, with highly trained professionals hovering and working right above you. The new project (currently called BEGINAGAIN) is another Scofield/Shuey revolution in the relationship between audiences and artists—which remains, all these years after Shuey argued with his college “art star” peers, a guiding obsession. “It’s not just a ‘me make it, you like it’ kind of thing,” Shuey said about their work. “It’s more like ‘me make it,’ and then maybe we can have some kind of connection because of it—we can meet somewhere in the middle.”

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Maged Zaher

HAS WRITTEN POEMS ABOUT:

Helicopters, investment bankers, ancient Arab poets, revolution, porn.

SAYS WHEN HE’S WRITING IN EGYPT, HIS POEMS:

“Start to be about dust and walking and tea. Once you see dust and tea, you know I am in Cairo.”

WILL USE HIS GENIUS AWARD MONEY TO:

“Pay the rent and the house insurance, and I think I might support the publishing and translation of some young Egyptian poets.” Or maybe: “I’m just going to spend it on hookers. If you read my poetry, you know that’s where I’m going to spend it. Strip clubs.”

If you’re looking for an introduction to what Maged Zaher is like as a human being, you probably couldn’t find a better example than the 60 seconds after Ellen Forney announced him as the winner of the 2013 Genius Award for literature. The first thing he did was hug Willie Fitzgerald, one of the organizers of the APRIL literary festival, a fellow finalist.

Then he hugged his way down the aisle, targeting other APRIL organizers. He climbed the stairs to the stage, and then he dove into the thick of the Seattle Rock Orchestra mid-song and hugged a friend of his who was trying to play violin at the time. Then he hugged me (Zaher gives heavenly hugs; he encompasses your whole body in a warm cocoon as he murmurs appreciative words in your ear) and he hugged Forney. Then he gave a generous acceptance speech, calling fellow finalist Neal Stephenson “a true genius,” recited a poem, and took a shot of vodka, straight.

BY PAUL CONSTANT

Zaher is a lover, an all-inclusive, bighearted poet who can’t wait to laugh and pull you close and whisper affections. This doesn’t mean he’s always polite—one of his first actions with the Genius Award finalist “bully pulpit,” as he describes it, was to call out poetry publisher Wave Books on Facebook for not publishing more multicultural poets—but it does mean that he’s interested in finding common ground. “Poetry was never a popular genre,” a “slightly hungover” Zaher says in a post-awards phone interview. “It needs to reach. If someone needs to teach literature to understand your poem, we are in trouble.” He often bristles at the contemplative, vaguely mystical air that some poets take a whole life to cultivate, often to the exclusion of other moods. “Poetry can be exhilarating, like Frank O’Hara,” Zaher says. “Poetry can make us exciting.” He’s quick to add that he doesn’t just place

the blame for poetry’s relative obscurity on the part of poetry; education has failed, too: “People who have bachelor’s degrees should be able to read and enjoy poetry.” But though it’s not the most popular form of literature, Zaher thinks “the poet is a revered kind of artist. Like whenever someone wants to say something is wonderful, they say, ‘Oh my God, this is like poetry.’”

So what’s the difference between a bad poem and a good poem? Zaher is fairly prolific, writing about one short poem a week. One line, maybe two, tops, appear in his head, and then he has to sit down with a pen and

paper and write the poem as it comes. “I sit with [my poems], and the editing is what makes the poem look okay.” He says, “I want to advise other poets to edit out. You would be surprised how amazing it can be.” Zaher has written prose pieces—one essay about recent changes in Egypt was published in The Stranger over the summer—but his heart just isn’t with prose. “A long piece is torture for me. A poem is not torture for me at all. I reveal myself in order to feel like it is worth living an occasionally difficult life.”

All of Zaher’s books—The Revolution Happened and You Didn’t Call Me, Thank You for the Window Office, Portrait of the Poet as an Engineer—spring from the soil of Seattle and Egypt, Zaher’s homeland. You’re likely to find references to both a sterile Seattle skyscraper

and the revolution in Cairo in the same 10-line poem. It’s easy, now, to turn on a phone or a computer and instantaneously see what’s happening on the other side of the world. But just because you’re aware of something doesn’t mean that you truly understand it. The situation that’s currently unfolding in Cairo is complex and uncomfortable, which is to say, for better or worse, it’s a very human situation. And nobody is better at explaining humanity to humans than poets. Zaher can take any moment, from the drama and heartbreak of a revolution to a deflating night at a dance club, and tap into the bubbling layer of humanity just beneath the surface and share it with everyone. He can find the awkwardness in a street fight, and the comedy in a bland corporate memo. This is something that CNN can never do: Zaher excels at introducing us to ourselves, at making us laugh and hope and want to go cry in the shower until everything just goes away for a little while. He is the best kind of correspondent, because he makes everything feel domestic and foreign at the exact same time. So what’s next? Last month, Zaher finished a manuscript called If Reality Doesn’t Work Out that’s scheduled to come out next year from SplitLevel Texts. For the last year and a half, he’s been working on editing and translating a “conflation of six Egyptian poets” that’s nearly ready to find a publisher. With other exceptional Seattle poets like Don Mee Choi, Robert Mittenthal, and Laura Neuman, Zaher is part of a collective called Margin Shift that regularly discusses poetry and curates a reading series at Hedreen Gallery on the fourth Thursday of the month. (The next reading, on October 24, features poets Standard Schaefer and Maryrose Larkin, and begins at 7 p.m.) Next month, Zaher is planning to visit Cairo again. He seems to be at home with his feet planted firmly in two worlds. “I am a poet who talks about location, and language matters a lot to me” because of that, he says. Writing, to Zaher, is all about location: “It is putting a word next to a word in order to create a field of meaning that is different from any meanings these words held before.”

CHALLENGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE.

We all know that people look different. While these differences are socially and culturally real, contemporary scientific understanding of race and human variation is complex and may challenge how we think about it.

RACE: Are We So Different? builds understanding of what race is and is not, providing tools to recognize racial ideas and practices in contemporary life in the U.S.

In conjunction with this exhibit, the Seattle Race and Social Justice Initiative is offering free workshops for groups to expand their understanding of racial equity in the community. Learn more at seattle.gov/rsji

DISPLAY IN CAN’T LOOK AWAY: THE LURE OF HORROR FILM THU " OCTOBER 3

CREATURE FEATURE SCREENING: DRACULA (1931) BELA LEGOSI PORTRAYS COUNT DRACULA IN THIS ICONIC

2013 GENIUS AWARD WINNERS FOR MUSIC

Eyvind Kang and Jessika Kenney

WRING:

Maximal emotion from minimal means.

SOMETIMES SOUND LIKE:

The ancient world, a force of nature, the voice of gods and ancestors.

USE:

Viola, voice, Persian poetry, erhu, tuba, time, space, eyeglasses.

Jessika Kenney flapped her arms up and down like wings twice, flying. Wearing big glasses and permanently alert expressions, Kenney and her collaborator, Eyvind Kang, already looked a little like birds, maybe owls. Onstage to win their Genius Award in music, they were the opposite of glam. They were the curious creatures they always are. “This is completely unexpected,” Kang said. “I didn’t think we stood a chance against Katie Kate and Jherek Bischoff, because they’re fucking awesome.”

BY JEN GRAVES

Minutes earlier, Katie Kate had rocked the stage with a composition that involved hardrhyming, soft-cooing, and playing the flute, demonstrating her magnificent hiphop to pop to classical range in collaboration with Seattle Rock Orchestra. And Jherek Bischoff had started the night by charming the pants off everybody—hunched over his ukulele, plucking giddily, dancing on tiptoes, singing. Kang and Kenney gave a performance that will go down in Genius history. It was a Persian song that filled the whole body of the Moore with incantations of breath and sound, and Kang and Kenney performed it unamplified and unlit, wandering along the aisles of the theater. It felt both intimate and otherworldly, probably because this world so often fails to be intimate. These two musicians never fail to be intimate.

Their music—her voice and his viola, commonly, though he is a full-on multi-instrumentalist, and her voice often sounds like something else entirely—is unfailingly present, live. They wring maximal emotion from minimal means, and this is why your body responds to them even if you have no interest in whatever style they happen to be playing. Everyone wants to work with them. In the months since the Genius Award nominations were announced, Kate and Bischoff have been unabashed about declaring their admiration for the duo.

Cellist Lori Goldston, last year’s Genius Award winner in music, opened the envelope that set Kenney to

flapping-flying, and after the ceremony, a lot of people said this was like a lifetime achievement award for Kang and Kenney, not unlike Goldston’s last year—richly deserved recognition after so many years of excellent work done relatively under the radar, even though it was international in scope and incredibly farranging stylistically. Kang and Kenney have performed around the world, making album after album, and have studied and collaborated with musicians from Persian master Ostad

Hossein Omoumi to metal bands Wolves in the Throne Room and Sunn O))) to Beck, Gamelan Pacifica, the Decemberists, Bill Frisell, and composer Lou Harrison.

“Genius—I mean everybody’s talking about geniuses,” Kang said in his acceptance speech, pointing up at a slide of a brain drawing wearing a crown. “They have a picture of a brain? And then the brain gets the crown? But we’re not random geniuses, and we’re not cutie-pies that just came up out of nowhere, we’ve got… we’re part of a family, a musical family. We’ve got cousins from hundreds of years ago and over a thousand years ago. We have friends yet to be born. So we’re part of this continuum. We’re really, really so grateful, so thankful to do what we do. Sometimes you would think, in the world, it’s not actually possible to do this, so everyone gathered here— it’s just so meaningful and thank you so much.”

Onstage, wearing their white satin winners’ sashes, Kang and Kenney took their time speaking. They paused often, shifted weight from foot to foot, and looked around as if absorbing the scenery rather than acting as performers for an audience. When Kang finished trying to distance them from the word “genius,” they gave one final look back at the people in the seats and were about to walk offstage when, as if on cue, Kenney’s sash fell away from her body of its own accord and sailed to the ground.

Kenney had given her version of an acceptance speech before Kang’s. She’d stepped up to the microphone and spoke in a language other than English, then translated what she’d said: “I don’t know the place I was at, that place I was at last night.” She stopped and was silent for a moment, then she said, “Maybe tomorrow, you’ll all be thinking the same thing.”

The next day did bring a search, to anyone wondering about the origins of the words she’d quoted. They were a line from a poem called “What Was the Place,” by 13th-century dervish Amir Khusro, according to the helpful PoemHunter.com. The first two lines:

I wonder what was the place where I was last night, All around me were half-slaughtered victims of love, tossing about in agony.

After Kang and Kenney went backstage to reflect, the Seattle Rock Orchestra played Madonna, and everyone stormed the stage and danced.

WBenjamin Kasulke

IS:

HAS WORKED WITH:

The premier cinematographer working in Seattle—and perhaps all of independent cinema—today.

Lynn Shelton Megan Grif ths Dayna anson and Amy Sedaris.

MANAGED TO MAKE THE GENIUS AWARDS PARTY THANKS TO:

A freakishly a rupt round trip ight from Iceland where he s shooting the new Guy Maddin lm.

e are living in a real-time golden age of new Seattle cinema. Touchy Feely, the latest film from 2008 Genius Award winner Lynn Shelton, is currently enjoying an extended run. Lucky Them, the brand-new film from 2012 Genius Award winner Megan Griffiths, just had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it drew very good reviews. Meanwhile, Eden, the film that all but required The Stranger to give Griffiths her Genius Award, is now available everywhere: Redbox, Netflix, Amazon, even these amazing places called actual video stores. (It is not an easy time to be an actual video store, but Seattle is home to a number of great ones, and it’s sometimes easy to forget how good we’ve got it. But visit a video store in any other town, mention you’re from Seattle, and you’ll be tackled by someone jealous of you for living in a city with Scarecrow Video in it. Seriously—an hour spent strolling through Scarecrow is as rewarding as an hour spent in any museum or gallery, and I encourage us all to take advantage of it while we can.)

BY DAVID SCHMADER

And finally, at this very moment, we have the Northwest Film Forum’s Local Sightings Film Festival, which kicked off last week and is packed with nothing but new cinema from the Northwest. This year’s fest features a bunch of seriously lovely and provocative work, and I don’t know if we’ve had a film Genius Award winner who hasn’t come up through Local Sightings—a tradition that continues with the 2013 Genius Award winner for film, Benjamin Kasulke. Kasulke’s work has drawn notice from the start: In 2006, his second credit as director of photography—for Lynn Shelton’s debut feature, We Go Way Back—earned him the Kodak Vision Award for best cinematography at the Slamdance Film Festival. In 2011, his work on Megan Griffiths’s The Off Hours got him nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. Since then, he’s distinguished himself all over the place, shooting the acclaimed indie films Humpday, Your Sister’s Sister, and Safety Not Guar-

anteed, and winning Seattle’s 2012 Mayor’s Award for outstanding achievement in film.

Some history: After earning a film degree from Ithaca College, Kasulke landed in Seattle in the mid-’90s. Originally drawn by the music scene, Kasulke instead found himself naturally enmeshed in Seattle’s contemporary dance scene, shooting performances and experimental films for 33 Fainting Spells, Dayna Hanson, and Maureen Whiting, and becoming the dance community’s “go-to film guy.” (That Seattle’s densely brilliant ’90s contemporary dance scene has proved to be so widely generative seems entirely apt.)

The phrase “director of photography” gets at the specifics of Kasulke’s talent: He takes gorgeous, evocative, humane pictures that

happen to be moving. In the world of Lynn Shelton (his primary collaborator), Kasulke’s work is subtle and adamantly nonshowy—the splashiest moves he makes involve the quietly gorgeous framing of regular old people/ places. But his aim and framing are big parts of what makes Shelton’s world of point-blank humanity come to life on the big screen.

Beyond the Shelton universe, Kasulke has a style of his own—maybe many styles of his own, but the one that’s been most impressive so far is his work on Brand Upon the Brain!, a highly mannered black-and-white film that couldn’t be further from his mumblecore work. Now he’s doing everything. Among his most recent projects are Mike Birbiglia’s My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend (now available on Netflix), the forthcoming film version of Seattle storyteller Matt Smith’s solo play My Last Year with the Nuns, and numerous episodes of the deeply upsetting Amy Sedaris comedy series The Heart, She Holler (on Adult Swim). Also: Shelton’s new film Laggies, now in postproduction.

“To find the level of talent that he has in

someone who’s also really easy and fun to be around is a truly rare and wondrous thing,” says Shelton, who praises Kasulke’s rare ability to “tune in to the working methods and particular vibe of each set he works on.” Considering the profound admiration Kasulke has earned for himself with all his directors, it’s no surprise that his was the name on the envelope read by a giddy Megan Griffiths on Saturday night at the Moore. Fellow nominees Scott Blake and Zach Weintraub could’ve made Citizen Kane or A Woman Under the Influence (and soon maybe will), and they still would have had a hard time competing with the ocean of goodwill Kasulke has earned in the trenches. Zach Weintraub, Scott Blake, and all other Northwest filmmakers: Keep it coming. (And everyone else: Go see Weintraub’s new film, You Make Me Feel So Young, at Northwest Film Forum, where it screens as the closing night film of the Local Sightings Film Festival on October 3.) As for Ben Kasulke: Congratulations, you’re officially a Fucking Genius, and Seattle is so lucky to have you.

TRACTOR:

HATTIES HAT:

STRANGER SUGGESTS

Pet Shop Boys

MUSIC

Sardonic, effete, and proudly, conceptually commercial upon their ’80s arrival, Pet Shop Boys have since cemented themselves as world historically great pop artists. From the introductory Euro-rap of “West End Girls” through the emotional lushness of Behaviour and Very to their brand-new Electric, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have infused electropop with sui generis drama and humanity for three decades. And to make up for the dinkiness of their “band,” their stage shows are extravagant visual productions, this one created with designer Es Devlin and choreographer Lynne Page. (Paramount Theatre, 911 Pine St, stgpresents.org, 8 pm, $35.75–$55.75, all ages) DAVID SCHMADER

AXIS Dance Company

Making its Seattle debut (after enjoying a profile-exploding appearance on So You Think You Can Dance), AXIS is the internationally acclaimed San Francisco dance company known for mixing dancers who perform in wheelchairs and on crutches with dancers who use their boring old legs. On the bill for their Meany Hall show are works by three choreographers: Sebastian Grub’s duet The Narrowing, Victoria Marks’s physical exploration of if/then statements What if Would You, and Marc Brew’s for-matureaudiences Full of Words. (Meany Hall, UW Campus, meany. org, 8 pm, $39–$44, Oct 3–5) DAVID SCHMADER

The Depressed Cake Shop

SUGAR

The Depressed Cake Shop is coming to Seattle! The DCS started in the UK and has spread across the world with pop-ups in places like Scotland, Los Angeles, and London. The goal is this: Sell gray-colored cakes and cookies to raise awareness of and fight the stigmas that often come with mental-health issues while raising money for mental-health organizations. Proceeds from Seattle’s DCS will go to the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. And full disclosure: I’ll be there selling stuffed cupcakes! (Sole Repair, 1011 E Pike St, depressedcakeshop.com, 10 am–4 pm, free) MEGAN SELING

‘Broken on All Sides’

FILM/SOCIAL JUSTICE

Matt Taibbi BOOKS

Given his role as chief bullshit-caller at Rolling Stone, everyone expected Matt Taibbi to be the next Hunter S. Thompson. But what Taibbi does is arguably more valuable: He provides well-reported stories of greed and excess in a time and a nation that’s choking on greed and excess. Taibbi didn’t fall for the glitz and glamour of celebrity reportage—instead, he ventured out into heavily researched attacks on Goldman Sachs, the Obama administration, and everyone else who’s trying to screw the 99 percent these days. Tonight, Taibbi gives a talk as part of the Sightline Institute’s 20th-anniversary reading series. (Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, townhallseattle .org, 7:30 pm, $5) PAUL CONSTANT

‘Gravity’ FILM

It takes a lot for a blowhard like James Cameron to notice something outside of himself, which makes it all the more impressive that he has publicly hailed Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity as “the best space film ever done.” The setup is bracingly simple: High above the earth, a bunch of astronauts are making repairs on their space shuttle when things go terribly wrong. Left virtually alone is Sandra Bullock, who fills the majority of Gravity’s running time trying to navigate a series of life-saving challenges in outer space. But the real star is the setting—Cuarón’s slow-moving, gravity-free plain of wonder and terror. (See Movie Times: thestranger.com/film) DAVID SCHMADER

‘Hometown

Tonight, dare to have a conversation with the chief of police about race, as the Pacific Science Center presents Broken on All Sides, an award-winning documentary that examines racial inequities in the American criminal justice system. Afterward, stick around for a panel discussion staffed with a kick-ass variety of people, including a former Monroe inmate, a lawyer from Columbia Legal Services specializing in representing institutionalized populations, and Seattle police chief Jim Pugel. Bonus: Starting at 5 p.m., the first 800 people will get in free to PSC’s RACE: Are We So Different? exhibit. (Pacific Science Center Paccar Theater, Seattle Center, seattle.gov/ rsji/arewesodifferent.htm, 7 pm, free) CIENNA MADRID

Boy’: Liu Xiaodong ART

Liu Xiaodong was the one who moved away from his hometown, an industrial village, to go to Beijing and make it big. He did—he’s a star in world art But 30 years after he left at 17, he went back to paint his childhood friends, who look lost in history, suspended on the other end of instant Chinese urbanization. The artist works directly from life to make his oil paintings, and even this far away, in an American museum of Asian art, they feel warm and close. (Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E Prospect St, seattleartmuseum. org, 10 am–5 pm, $7 suggested, through June 29) JEN GRAVES

Guitar Wolf

Now in their third decade of kicking out extreme feedback-centric power garage/ punk (if you haven’t already guessed their influences by their press photo, song titles like “Kung Fu Ramone” and “Link Wray Man” may be helpful), the leather-jacket-obsessed Japanese jet-rock trio Guitar Wolf will blast the cobwebs off your life with their ultra-frenetic live set. Also on the bill are shrieky fun punks the Coathangers, whose snotty pop masterpiece “Nestle in My Boobies” makes the world a better place. (Chop Suey, 1325 E Madison St, chopsuey.com, 8 pm, $13 adv/$15 DOS, 21+) EMILY NOKES

ARTS

Sarah Silverman …below Meringue-pie mountains…below

THEATER

An American Tale

A Glowing Solo Show About Comedy Pioneer

Jackie “Moms” Mabley

BY BRENDAN KILEY

Jackie “Moms” Mabley is a keystone of American comedy—an African American woman who came out of the closet in the 1920s, was telling jokes about race and class and sex back when Bing Crosby was America’s idea of a good time, and influenced everyone from Milton Berle (who is said to have ripped off some of her jokes) to Richard Pryor and Sarah Silverman. In Hello, Darlin’s!, a world-premiere solo show, Josephine Howell plays Mabley with the sauciness, attitude, and fearlessness you might imagine from Mabley herself. “Moms ain’t dead yet!”

she hollers at us from the stage—and, for a few moments, it’s easy to believe her.

was 1969, and the song was a cover of “Abraham, Martin, and John,” about civil-rights pioneers who were assassinated. Mabley still holds the record.)

Hello, Darlin’s! has a few small bugs—some of the transitions and pacing are a little sluggish—but it’s the kind of world premiere that should only get better with age. As a lesson in history, comedy, and a remarkable woman who lived through (and told jokes about) America’s transition from Jim Crow to the Harlem Renaissance to the Stonewall riots and the Black Panther Party, it can’t be beat.

BOOKS

Hell Is Other People

A Translation of Dante’s Inferno That’s Fun to Read

BY PAUL CONSTANT

TREVIEW

Hello, Darlin’s! Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute Through Oct 26

Hello, Darlin’s! is a collage of biographical material, satirical songs (accompanied by the nimble pianist Cedric Thomas), and standup/vaudeville routines Mabley performed throughout the decades. The standup—which ranges from cute jokes you could tell at a preschool to heavy hitters about police brutality, lynching, and what other people’s crotches smell like—is a thorough treat. But Mabley’s autobiography is stunning. She was born in the 1890s in North Carolina, largely raised by her grandmother (a former slave with a wicked sense of humor), repeatedly raped, married off to an old man by the time she was 15, and encouraged by her grandmother to run away and make a life for herself. So she did, becoming a top performer on the chitlin’ circuit, the first woman to headline a show at the Apollo Theater, and the oldest person to ever have a hit on the Top 40 list. (She was 75, the year

ARTS CALENDAR Only the most noteworthy stuff.

PAUL MARIONI

he only thing you need to know about poet Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (Graywolf Press, $20) is how readable the thing is. To compare, here’s a passage from the opening canto in Ernest Risdale Ellaby’s 1874 translation, the first edition that comes up on a Google Book search for Dante’s Inferno in English:

Why lingerest thou where groveling cares annoy?

What hinders thee to scale the beauteous mountain,

Which is the source and giver of all joy?

It’s dense and serious, but sticky. That “groveling cares annoy” is awkwardly internecine, and the “what hinders thee” also momentarily staggers your approach to the mountain, which is, unspecifically, “beauteous.” Have you ever seen a mountain you would consider unbeauteous? Now, take that same passage from Bang’s translation:

But you, why return to what made you unhappy?

Why not climb the meringue-pie mountain ahead of you?

It’s the ultimate end, and means of all pleasure.

It’s simple and direct, and it keeps the rhythm of the poem gallumphing through each word, propelling you forward. The first line is an obvious question that, when used on the right person at the right time, could rip the heart out of someone who’s living a lie. The pinnacle of these three lines, of course, is the “meringue-pie mountain,” a phrasing that certainly wouldn’t have carried much meaning during Dante’s time, but is wonderfully evocative to a contemporary reader. You can practically taste the dewy white clouds hugging the surface of that mountain, its gentle slope and generous views. One could argue that Ellaby seizes the lyrical edge to this line with “the source and giver of all joy,” but Bang’s “ultimate end” has more than one meaning—a life lived solely for pleasure is not, as a rule, a long one—and which adds an appropriate sense of dread to the passage. Bang’s phrasing is simply much more fun to read.

This verse tour of hell features cameo appearances by Eric Cartman from South Park (he stands in for Ciacco, an Italian nickname that means “hog” or “glutton”), the song “Hotel California,” and Donald Rumsfeld. The references, almost entirely replacing cultural references from Dante’s time, never feel forced, as though delivered by a selfdescribed “cool” teacher.

PREVIEW

Mary Jo Bang on Translation

Fri Oct 4, Hugo House, 7 pm, $10 ART

Museums

HENRY ART GALLERY

David Hartt: Stray Light : The photographer David Hartt got inside the iconic 1971 headquarters of Johnson Publishing in Chicago—the launching pad for Jet and Ebony magazines— right before the building was sold. The photographs, pictures, and sculptures he created are deadpan memorial documents of a specific time of pride and purpose. $10 suggested. WedSun. Through Jan 5. 4100 15th Ave NE, 543-2280.

Gallery

Openings

MIA GALLERY

Izzie Klingels: Playing Games: Themes of luck and failure, what is earned and what is deserved, are explored through painting and drawing. Free. Reception Thurs Oct 3, 6-8 pm. Tues-Sun. Through Nov 2. 1203A Second Ave, 467-4927.

TRAVER GALLERY Walking Through Heaven: An

exhibition of the painted glass vessels of Cappy Thompson. Thompson made the giant, jeweltoned glass mural at Sea-Tac airport, and the installation in the main hall at the Museum of Glass, too. Check her out in small scale. Free. Reception Thurs Oct 3, 6-8 pm Tues-Sun. Through Nov 3. 110 Union St #200, 587-6501.

Events

CUTIE BEAUTY & THE BEAST BEARSOMETIMES-MAN A live tele-novella shoot of the latest episode of Cutie Beauty & The Trailer Of Doom! a collaboration between artist and performer Keeara Rhoades and UW photo professor Paul Berger. Andralamusya, 4831 47th Ave S. Free. Fri Oct 4, 8 pm. FACEOFF Faceoff: Artists face off and are given only 15 minutes to create something praiseworthy, revelatory, and, most importantly, cashworthy, because there’s an auction after each bout. Presented by Bherd Studios. Naked City Brewery & Taphouse, 8564 Greenwood Ave N, 838-6299. Free. Wed Oct 2, 7-9:30 pm.

Part of the “How Is Seattle Remembered?” series put on by the Project Room, this event includes a discussion with Marioni as well as a screening of his short experimental film, HOLE, down the street at the Northwest Film Forum, following the talk. The Project Room 1315 E Pine St. Wed Oct 2. visualart@thestranger.com

READINGS

Wed 10/2

DANIEL LIEBERMAN Daniel Lieberman is author of The Story of the Human Body Town Hall 1119 Eighth Ave, 652-4255. $5. 7:30 pm.

MATT TAIBBI

See Stranger Suggests, page 25. Town Hall 1119 Eighth Ave, 652-4255. $5. 7:30 pm. Thurs 10/3

2013 WASHINGTON STATE BOOK AWARDS PARTY

This is “a party to celebrate winners and finalists for the 2013

Washington State Book Awards.”

You like parties, don’t you? Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 3227030. Free. 7 pm.

Fri 10/4

MARY JO BANG

See review, above. Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 3227030. $8-$10. 1 pm.

PAUL HARDING

Harding’s novel Tinkers came out of nowhere to win the Pulitzer Prize a few years back. Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave, 3864636. Free. 7 pm.

MARGARET ATWOOD

MaddAddam is the third and final book in the dystopian trilogy Atwood started with her novel Oryx and Crake Town Hall 1119 Eighth Ave, 652-4255. $5. 7:30 pm.

Sat 10/5

SHERLOCK SEATTLE CONVENTION

This convention is reportedly “a celebration of all things Sherlock.” It features a brandnew Sherlock Holmes play and appearances by Holmes authors Laurie R. King, Leslie Klinger, and

Lee Eric Shackleford. Plus panels featuring Sherlock experts. This sounds like an adorable way to spend a day. Broadway Performance Hall 1625 Broadway, 325-3113. sherlockseattle.org. $35-$75. 10 am.

Mon 10/7

KATHRYN DAVIS

Duplex is a novel in which a pair of young lovers find themselves stuck in time, unable to enter an adulthood of “robots and sorcerers, slaves and masters, bodies without souls.” This looks like a really delightfully bizarre little mashup of a book. Elliott Bay Book Company 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600. Free. 7 pm.

Tues 10/8

TOM BARBASH AND JESS WALTER

Barbash’s collection of stories, Stay Up with Me, features stories that have appeared in Tin House McSweeney’s , and Virginia Quarterly Review Town Hall 1119 Eighth Ave, 652-4255. www.townhallseattle.org. $5. 7:30 pm. readings@thestranger.com

THEATER

Opening and Current Runs

BROKE-OLOGY

Two brothers from a poor neighborhood in Kansas City—one with a graduate degree, one with a fast-food job and a child on the way—try to figure out what their responsibilities are to each other and to their dying father. Directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton, produced in association with the Hansberry Project. Seattle Public Theater, 7312 W Green Lake Dr N, 524-1300. seattlepublictheater.org. $10-$22. Thurs-Sat at 7:30 pm, Sun at 2 pm. Through Oct 20. THE DOUGLAS PAASCH PUPPET PLAYHOUSE

A three-day puppetry showcase in honor of the late Douglas Paasch, who contributed unusual and inventive puppets to productions at Seattle Children’s Theater and Strawberry Theater Workshop, including his personality-filled, stylistically roughhewn creations for the Woody Guthrie musical biography This Land Lee Center for the Arts, 901

Bang smartly decorates her passage through hell with homages to countless other poets, too—the “grave cave” from Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” makes an appearance; Virgil beckons the narrator into hell with the line “Let us go then, you and I.” These tributes could make for an entertaining game of literary Where’s Waldo?, or you could get swept up in the language and then, after you’ve finished your visit with the devil, dip back into the notes for illumination. (If I could change one thing about this Inferno, I’d put all Bang’s notes at the end, rather than inserting them between each and every canto, which displeasingly chops up the rhythm of the journey.)

All translation involves a little bit of murder and a little bit of resurrection, but Bang did something incredibly smart before she coaxed Dante’s corpse to sit up and sing for us: She taught him how to talk like us. Hell is more appealing in the form of a mirror.

12th Ave, 296-5360. brownpapertickets.com. $10-$25. ThursSat at 7:30 pm, Sun at 2 pm. Through Oct 6.

RED LIGHT WINTER & 25 SAINTS

Companion pieces by Adam Rapp and Joshua Rollins about loneliness and alienation. Red Light Winter concerns two college buddies who get wrapped up in a love triangle with a prostitute. 25 Saints concerns meth dealers, coal miners, and cops in Appalachia. Azeotrope at ACT Theatre, 700 E Union St, 292-7676. acttheatre.org. $30. Thurs-Fri at 7:30 pm, Sat at 2 and 7:30 pm, Sun at 2 pm. Through Nov 24. THE WALWORTH FARCE Enda Walsh’s gothic Irish comedy was described by the New York Times as a “Hibernian Three Stooges routine, directed by a drunken Dadaist.” New Century Theater Company at New City Theater 1404 18th Ave. wearenctc.org. $27-$30. ThursSun at 8 pm. Through Oct 27.

Dance

STUDIO SERIES 1 Spectrum kicks off its season

with Truth and Betrayal , by Cyrus Khambatta, and Prodigal a humorous riff on Balanchine’s The Prodigal Son by Donald Byrd. Spectrum Studio Theater, 800 Lake Washington Blvd, 325-4161. spectrumdance.org. $25-$50. Fri-Sun at 8 pm. Through Oct 20.

TRE “In the summer of 2008, Cornish dance student Joe Sodd III (special skill: tap dancing) was murdered on the streets of Minneapolis, his hometown. The crime is still unsolved. Before his murder, Sodd cofounded a dance collective called The New Animals with his friend Markeith Wiley (special skill: b-boying). Five years later, The New Animals are ready to perform Tre their ‘ode and shout-out’ to Sodd, which embraces both life and death. It contains gleeful college party scenes and gut-clenching passages where dancers are struck down onstage while others torque their bodies as if wrenched by fate and grief.” (Brendan Kiley) Inscape, 815 Airport Way S. brownpapertickets.com. $15. Fri-Sat at 8 pm. Through Oct 12. theater@thestranger.com

means we recommend it. Tons more listings at THESTRANGER.COM

CHOW

Coffee and Mars Hill

The Story Behind Storyville

BY BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT

“W E COME IN PEACE,” shouts the Storyville Coffee Company website. “Love everybody,” say the T-shirts worn by the exceptionally cheerful, helpful staff.

“CAN WE BE OPEN WITH YOU?” the website asks.

Storyville started as a specialty coffee roaster in 2006 on Bainbridge Island, eventually also selling grinders (“BUY HAPPINESS” reads the website copy for one) and coffeemakers (one’s called FREEDOM) and other equipment. And now Storyville has just opened its first cafe—“COFFEE HAS A NEW TOMORROW,” as they say—in the former Shea Chez space, upstairs in Pike Place Market.

Storyville clearly put a lot of money into the place. It’s far more upscale than most Seattle coffee shops, with leather couches, sepia-toned lighting, and arched windows looking out on the market’s famous clock. If it looks designed by committee—riveted metal panels in some places, polished wood elsewhere, a wall of stock-photo-style Pacific Northwest images, a flock of shapely old-fashioned lightbulbs with glowing filaments near the space-age underlit coffee bar—at least it looks designed by a committee with a capacious budget. It’s ready to replicate, and two more Storyville cafes, on Queen Anne and downtown, are already planned. Storyville is making much of its intent to provide superior service, too (the website: “Around the moment you realize that you’re not expected to buss [sic] your own table… it becomes surreal”).

A source in Pike Place Market reports seeing Storyville advertised by plane, Tesla, and bicyclists riding through the market and around downtown. Storyville also spent a pretty penny on several weeks of invitationonly soft opening; anyone could sign up, via their website, to come in for free coffee and a pastry. “It’s so cool, it’s a secret,” an “Editor’s Pick” at KING 5 breathlessly reported. “At least that’s how Seattle’s newest coffee

shop appears during it’s [sic] invitation only roll-out… Storyville Coffee Company is brewing intrigue at what is described a new coffee experience [sic].”

What’s not a secret: The owners of Storyville are heavily involved with neoevangelical, homophobic, misogynist Mars Hill Church.

Mars Hill, you’ll recall, is led by ultraconservative bro pastor Mark Driscoll, who advocates for women submitting to men, men submitting to church leadership, and everyone submitting to God (as interpreted, of course, by church leadership). If you’re gay,

The owners are heavily involved with homophobic, misogynist Mars Hill Church.

well, you should be aware that, according to Driscoll, “sex is for marriage, and marriage is for one man and one woman,” and that all sex outside of that is a sin. (So is pornography.)

The thing for gay people to do, he says, is confess your sin to Jesus, receive “a new heart,” and it’ll all be cool. Mars Hill has “all kinds of groups to help you” with your homosexual “temptation,” he assures in a March 2013 YouTube video, answering a question received via text message during a sermon, wearing a hoodie, distressed jeans, and a silver chain.

One of the copresidents of Storyville is Jamie Munson, former executive pastor of Mars Hill Church. Munson was on staff at Mars Hill for a dozen years before resigning from this high-up role in 2011; his resignation letter, posted online

at marshill.com, declares “I LOVE MARS HILL,” noting, “My time on staff at Mars Hill Church has come to an end, but the Munson family is not going anywhere, and we’re so excited to see what Jesus does in the next fifteen years.” (The tone of protestation may be because Mars Hill has been known to ostracize those who question or part from it. The letter is followed by one from Driscoll assuring everyone of Munson’s good standing—“If you are their friends, keep being their friends,” he dictates creepily—and detailing plans for Munson to become an elder and a member of the board of directors.) Another Storyville copresident is Kris Rosentrater; his LinkedIn profile says he got his education at the “School of Hard Knocks” and was previously a “Freelance Ditch Digger,” but he’s been with Storyville since 2006, and he played on a double live album from Mars Hill Church called Death to Life, as part of the band Ex Nihilo, led by Pastor Tim Smith. (Mars Hill preaches through music, too.) Jon and Esther Phelps are cited as Storyville owners; as Mars Hillers, they merited a thank-you from Driscoll in his 2009 book The Radical Reformission: Reaching Out Without Selling Out I tried to reach Munson, Rosentrater, and Esther Phelps for comment; I was directed to send an e-mail. A Storyville marketing manager then assured me, “As a company, we are not affiliated with any religious organization of any kind.” I answered that while there may not be an official connection, given the involvement in Mars Hill of the company’s principals, it seems logical that profits from Storyville will end up benefiting Mars Hill. Would they be willing to comment on that? As of press time, no reply has been forthcoming. I signed up for an invitation-only Storyville visit. The coffee was smooth, the pastry was buttery, and the staff was bright-eyed and very friendly. I asked to see one staffer’s tattoo. “It’s scripture,” he said, and so it was, Romans 8:18 (about our present suffering and future glory). Everyone was very informative until I asked about Mars Hill. They were still friendly, but the answer was just that there’s no connection. One worker said “not everyone” who works there goes to Mars Hill Church. I persisted, and then the staffer checked with someone else and gave me the same media e-mail address. They probably shouldn’t say anything else, they said.

TRACTOR:

HATTIES HAT:

Campfire OK

MACEFIELD

CHVRCHES

Head

BY CHARLES MUDEDE

THE FEET OF A PEASANT GIRL

After a long day of writing, I turned off the computer, rose from my desk, left the office, walked down Pine, made a left on Ninth, opened a door on the side of the Paramount Theatre, walked down a set of stairs, entered the Paramount Club, and, after some small talk with an attractive woman and a handsome man, began tasting the wines displayed on a table at the back of the room. The occasion was the Paramount’s first ever preshow wine tasting. The show that night was the numinous Neko Case (for once, I have a good reason to use the word “numinous”). The wine selection was provided by Garagiste, a locally based retailer founded by the eccentric Jon Rimmerman (eccentric in a posh way—the shoes he wore for the event that evening were odd, but did not fail to say “classy”). This is what the New York Times had to say about Rimmerman and his wine empire a year ago: “Rimmerman is the founder and sole owner of Garagiste, the world’s largest e-mail-based wine business. With 136,000 subscribers, Rimmerman says that Garagiste does, on average, $30 million in annual sales offered exclusively through his long, florid, self-mythologizing daily emails… ‘At some point, the land gives up. It must be resuscitated over decades to fully

escape the poison (similar to smoking—the body eventually cleans itself and regenerates, but a certain scarring remains).’” All of the wines presented on the Garagiste table were great—but it does not take a lot to please me. My only request is that a wine be drinkable. Undrinkable is where I draw the line, and it’s very easy to extend that line into most mini-marts and gas stations. However, one bottle got my attention during the wine tasting: a 2009 Raats Cabernet Franc. What made this wine special was not only its excellent quality, but the simple fact that it was South African. And what makes South African wines special, even the bad ones, like the Zaràfa Pinotage that Trader Joe’s used to stock (I haven’t seen it at the Madison branch in a long while), is that rustic, deeply earthy, musky/musty taste. It’s easy for a wine slob like myself to miss an Australian or even a Chilean wine, but missing a South African one is impossible. The soil of that country does something profoundly strange and singular to its grapes. I once wrote that a good Bordeaux tastes like the muddy feet of a pretty French peasant girl, but all South African wines taste like the muddy feet of a shine eye South African country gal.

(here!) and far (Norway!), bringing more than 60 kinds on pumpkin beer. And the traditional giant pumpkin cask will be tapped, its heavenly juices will flow, and good times will be had by all. Welcome, great pumpkin beer. Elysian Brewing , 5510 Airport Way S, 860-3977. elysianbrewing.com. $25.

Sat 10/5

COYLE’S BAKESHOP

Rachael Coyle’s pop-up bakery at the Book Larder is full of all kinds of sweet and savory baked goodness. Come early before it’s all gone! The Book Larder, 4252 Fremont Ave N, 397-4271. booklarder. com. 9 am-noon.

THE DEPRESSED CAKE SHOP

See Stranger Suggests, page 25. Sole Repair , 1001 E Pike St, 979SHOP. 10 am-4 pm.

Mon 10/7

MARCHÉ

ANNIVERSARY PARTY

Marché used to be Campagne (sigh), but now it’s been Marché for two years already. They’re celebrating with $1.25 oysters and free bubbly (and sabering the bottles—that’s where they slice the top off the whole bottle with a big knife!). Marché, 1600 Post Alley, 728-2800. marcheseattle. com. FREE B UBBLY!

Tues 10/8

YES ON 522 BARNACLE COCKTAIL PARTY

Learn more about Initiative 522 and our right to know what the hell is in the food we eat with the great Renee Erickson at her brand-new, teeny-tiny bar, Barnacle (attached to her restaurant the Walrus & the Carpenter, it’s the best-named place ever). Barnacle , 4743 Ballard Ave NW, 395-9227. yeson522.com. $60. 5:307:30 pm.

MEANS WE RECOMMEND IT. SEND EVENT INFO TO: chow@thestranger.com

Find the full calendar online.

CHEESE PARTY AT BIG JOHN’S PFI

Max Carpenter and Alex Flacco are assistant managers at Big John’s Pacific Food Importers, or “ass mans,” as one coworker calls them. When asked how they became ass mans, Max said they just “started bagging nuts and worked their way up.”

Max Carpenter and Alex Flacco

Assistant managers, Big John’s PFI 1001 Sixth Ave S, 682-2022

Big John’s is a wonderland of European foods in an old brick warehouse in Sodo. Owner

“Big John” Croce began his career as an importer in 1971, with a Plymouth Valiant loaded with olive oil. Alex and Max share his passion for imported foods, especially cheese.

“It’s about broadening people’s horizons,” Max said. “You give them a few samples, and they get interested, and 40 minutes later, they have four pieces of cheese, and they say, ‘I guess I’m going to have a party.’” Big John’s first customers were local immigrants, including Max’s and Alex’s families (from Greece and Switzerland, respectively). I tried a few of their favorite cheeses, like the Saveur du Maquis, a cheese with a salt and rosemary rind that dissolves on the tongue like a buttery cloud, and Abbaye de Tamié, which has been produced by monks in the French Alps since 1132. The best smoked Gouda I’ve had tasted like Kraft Singles in comparison. SARAH GALVIN

DARK STAR ORCHESTRA

MUSIC

Non-Regional Rock

Big Eyes Are Your New Favorite Male-Backed Band

BY MEGAN SELING

Big Eyes are a fema—wait, no.

“I always get a little twinge of ‘What the fuck?’ when I see ‘female-fronted,’” says Big Eyes singer and blazing guitarist Kate

Eldridge. “When it’s the first thing there, like that’s the first thing people need to know about our band?”

“I like to refer to us as not a female-fronted band, but a male-backed band,” bassist Chris Costalupes chimes in with a grin. “It’s a bit more progressive.”

As Eldridge, Costalupes, and drummer Dillan Lazzareschi slowly weave through the Women Who Rock exhibit at EMP (which is mostly just a collection of clothes worn by Mama Cass, Gwen Stefani, Lady Gaga, and Aretha Franklin, among others), we come upon one of Joni Mitchell’s lyric notebooks. Her handwriting is impeccable and youthful—penmanship I dreamed of having when I was in high school.

“She wrote her lyrics in a notebook just like Taylor Swift does in that Diet Coke commercial!” I (dumbly) joke. Eldridge laughs, “Oh my god, when Taylor Swift first came out, I was having a conversation with my mom, and she was like, ‘Kate, it’s so amazing! She writes all her own songs and plays the guitar and sings. I was like, ‘Oh, good for her! Hi, I’m Kate. I’m your daughter.”

Though she insists she’s awkward, Eldridge, who writes all the songs for the band, carries herself with a cool, subtle confidence. She’s been playing guitar since middle school (and viola for years before that) and has been in bands for nearly as long—one of her bands before Big Eyes was Cheeky, a great Long Island–based pop-punk band that put out

records on both Quote Unquote and Freedom School Records. And perhaps because Eldridge can shred better than most humans, male or female, she doesn’t seem intimidated or even that bothered by the undeniable double standard in the music industry.

Speaking of Taylor Swift, not only is it not news when a man writes his own songs, but when men sing song after song about their ex-girlfriends, they’re never criticized for it the way Swift, for example, has been (earlier this year, after Swift broke up with One Direction’s Harry Styles, Billboard.com quipped, “It’s time to play a familiar game: Which song is about Taylor’s ex?” Huffington Post, Vulture, and several other blogs have posted similar quizzes ad nauseam). Sting has a song about stalking a woman, and people play that shit at weddings as an ultimate declaration of love for chrissake, and I think we can safely say nearly all pop songs are about relationships.

“It’s so stupid,” says Eldridge. “That’s what all my songs are about, too. A good 80 percent of [my songs] are about relationships, I’d say.”

Thankfully, she hasn’t had to defend herself against too many Taylor Swift comparisons. “I get a lot of Joan Jett comparisons,” she says, while we stand in front of the pink blazer and “Bad Girl” T-shirt Jett wore on the cover of I Love Rock ’n’ Roll. “I grew up in the town she lived in. She’s cool. I definitely have a lot of the same influences as her, like Cheap Trick and Gary Glitter—a lot of that classic rock stuff.”

I’m wanted sometimes,” Eldridge sings with both wistfulness and a matter-of-fact tone.

Almost Famous is also noticeably thicker than 2011’s Hard Life. Before, their songs had the same bouncy pep as, say, the Fastbacks. In fact, the song “Back from the Moon,” released last year as half of a two-song single, sounds like the follow-up to the Fastbacks’ fed-up pop-punk anthem “Gone to the Moon.” (“I didn’t even hear that Fastbacks song until afterward,” says Eldridge.)

But Almost Famous is darker. It sounds almost like their relocation to Seattle from New York two years ago, and the city’s dreary eight months of clouds, played a role. “I used to play a Fender Mustang through a Music Man through a Fender cabinet, which has a very thin sound,” says Eldridge. “Then I started playing out of a Marshall cabinet. That thickens it up. And I started playing an SG, so the sound got a lot fuller. That’s why the newer stuff sounds heavier and fuller.

“There’s a lot of heavy music [in Seattle],” she continues. “In New York, there’s still a lot of jangly softer stuff. It’s not like I was ever in that whole New York scene anyway. I always felt like I never really fit in anywhere.”

Even though Big Eyes have technically been a Seattle-based band for a couple years (Costalupes is from Reno, and Lazzareschi is from Tacoma), they’re still trying to find their place in the local music scene, which is partly why you’ve probably seen their name on just about every club calendar in town.

The band is on the road for about half of the year— putting other bands’ twomonths-a-year tour schedules to shame.

Big Eyes’ catalog is a must-hear for those who still throw their fists in the air when they hear Jett snarl, “I don’t give a damn about my reputation.” And their latest release, Almost Famous (released last spring on Grave Mistake Records), is their best yet. Their sound, thick with distortion and free of modern slickness, will strum a nostalgic chord in your heart. “A Matter of Time” sounds like a fuzzier, beefier Ramones song about getting over a broken heart, while “Wanted Sometimes” is your new best friend for all those moments you’re pining over someone you had, and don’t necessarily want anymore, but still kind of miss. “I don’t care who you’re kissin’/I just like to think it’s me you’re missin’/I don’t mind that you’re not mine/It’s just nice to feel like

“When we first moved here, we had to let people know that we lived here and who we were,” says Costalupes. “We played so many shows as soon as we got here. And we still do! I think we’ve also done a pretty good job of not just being a Seattle band but also a Northwest band—we’ll play Portland, Vancouver, and Tacoma as much as we can.”

Costalupes estimates that the band is also on the road for about half of the year—putting so many other bands’ twomonths-a-year tour schedules to shame. “You’ve got to stay in people’s minds,” adds Eldridge. “A lot of bands in Seattle don’t leave Seattle, and no one’s heard of them. And then they go on tour, and they’re like, ‘Why is my show so bad?’ Because you don’t tour and you don’t try to do anything! They’re just content with being a cool Seattle band.”

Big Eyes, who are currently on tour in Europe, aren’t trying to be just a hobby or a regional band. “Everything we do, I just always try to step it up,” Eldridge says. So the next time they play Seattle, be sure to catch ’em when you can. They don’t stay in one place for very long.

10/18 GOBLIN 10/21 THE BLOW 10/25 COCOROSIE 10/26 THE 1975 BERNHOFT 10/30 CHARLI XCX 11/2 AYRON 11/4 SEPULTURA 11/6 OF MONTREAL 15 11/10 A$AP FERG 11/15 OBITS 11/18 MELLOWHIGH 11/19 BIG FREEDIA MAGNET 11/27 NIGHTMARES ON WAX

CRYSTAL BALL READING ROOM

THURSDAY 10/3

CUMULUS KITHKIN + SUNDRIES

WEDNESDAY 10/9

DELOREAN SUPERHUMANOIDS + PILLAR POINT

MONDAY 10/14

PALMA VIOLETS SKATERS

FRIDAY 10/4

FOX AND THE LAW + HOBOSEXUAL KEATON COLLECTIVE + THE STRANGE KIND

THURSDAY 10/10

MARKY RAMONE’S BLITZKRIEG WITH ANDREW W.K. ON VOCALS FIGO + LOUD EYES

TUESDAY 10/15

HOLY GHOST! MIDNIGHT MAGIC

COMING UP: 10/2 HAND OF THE HILLS 10/9 JACCO GARDNER 10/10 BUDO 10/11 SIR SLY 10/12 TIM KASHER 10/13 HELADO NEGRO 10/15 CRYSTAL STILTS 10/16 TONY LUCCA 10/17 NEEMA 10/19 SAN FERMIN 10/20 YOU MAY DIE IN THE DESERT 10/22 CLAIRY BROWNE & THE BANGIN’ RACKETTES 10/23 KEEP SHELLY IN ATHENS + CHAD VALLEY 10/24 SCRIBES 10/26 KODALINE 10/27 LEAGUES 10/29 TANGERINE 10/30 GOLDROOM 11/1 WHITE LUNG 11/2 RUBBLEBUCKET 11/3 STRANGE TALK 11/6 RAC 11/10 DIEGO GARCIA

SATURDAY 10/5

MAN MAN XENIA RUBINOS

FRIDAY 10/11

OVERSEAS

(DAVID BAZAN, WILL JOHNSON, BUBBA & MATT KADANE) RADAR BROS + CHRIS BROKAW

WEDNESDAY 10/16

SUNDAY 10/6

THURSDAY 10/17

KING KHAN & THE SHRINES HELL SHOVEL

TUESDAY 10/8 RED BULL SOUND SELECT PRESENTS DESSA DUDE YORK + WISHBEARD

LOGUE

COMING UP: 10/2 ROBERT EARL KE 10/22 DEER TICK 10/24 GODFLESH 1 10/27 AU REVOIR SIMONE 10/28 BERNH JONES AND THE WAY + SIR MIX-A-LOT 1 11/7 RADIATION CITY 11/9 BARSUK 1 11/16 RAVENNA WOODS 11/17 CULTS 11/ 11/20 BILL CALLAHAN 11/22 MONSTER M INFERNO SATURDAYS

BY TRENT MOORMAN

A RANDOM LADY, WHO I THOUGHT WAS DINA MARTINA, TALKED ABOUT BON JOVI

Jon Bon Jovi and Dina Martina are two of our country’s leading drag queens. They’re performers who have faced unique challenges and prospered. Since 1984, the schlock New Jersey hair rock of Bon Jovi has sold 130 million albums worldwide. You know, “Shot through the heart, you’re to blame, you give love a bad name,” whether you want to or not. Dina Martina, famous Bryman College sorceress, will be midway through a run of shows at New York’s Laurie Beechman Theatre when this column appears in print. Martina has keen insight into the mind and world of Jon Bon Jovi—she met him in Kauai during the shooting of Ivan Reitman’s film Six Days, Seven Nights starring Harrison Ford and Anne Heche. (Heche had just gone public with her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres.) More recently, Bon Jovi was a runner-up on RuPaul’s Drag Race I met Martina at the Sephora across from Westlake Center, where she was browsing the eye shadows. She had on huge red sunglasses and some sort of green cap. We spoke briefly about the Bon Jovi show and then went up the street and got a table at Cyber-Dogs.

to break it to you, but the poodle look was in. These tough guys spent hours and hours on their hair. I think Ellen DeGeneres is from New Jersey, so I could see she and Jon getting together. I saw that Harrison Ford and Anne Heche movie in the theater and liked it even though it got horrible reviews.

Cowboy phase: “You Give Love a Bad Name.” Bon Jovi are from New Jersey, how can they be cowboys? Fake cowboys are everywhere. There were two at Sephora wearing incredibly expensive boots. That song is about one of Jon’s early relationships that soured. So sour he wrote a song about it [laughs]. Personally, I don’t think you should talk bad about exes.

Bon Jovi Sat Oct 5, Tacoma Dome, 7:30 pm, $19.50–$575, all ages

Bon Jovi did an album in 2007 called Lost Highway, combining influences from butt rock and country. These are the worst sounds ever made by humans. I’m actually a fan of country music. I die for Kenny Rogers and Waylon Jennings and Dolly Parton. She needs to stop having surgeries, though. She was beautiful before.

Native American/lipstick lesbo phase: “Blaze of Glory.” Jon looks great as a woman wearing a vest with no shirt and a Native American chest plate, but it’s bad cultural appropriation. I’d say, yes, that’s cultural appropriating. I still can’t believe there’s a professional football team in the NFL that calls itself the Bears. That’s terrible. Jon would make a beautiful woman; he’s beautiful [laughs]. A lot of people did the vest with no shirt underneath. Jon Bon Jovi just did it better.

[laughs], so maybe that one was partly her fault. I wouldn’t want any of my guy friends to date her.

Apparently, Sambora left Bon Jovi recently for “personal reasons.” People online say it’s because he fell off the wagon. Other people say he was jealous of Jon, and jealous of Charlie Sheen because Sheen told Rolling Stone that he still wanted to have sex with Denise Richards. All these men have very large egos. I don’t think Richie has anything to worry about with Charlie Sheen. That man is a skunk. S-K-U-N-K.

Wait a second, I figured it out: Jon Bon Jovi is Ellen DeGeneres. They’re the same person. Think about it, have you ever seen them in the same place? And for the song “Runaway,” Ellen and Jon weren’t having a fling, they were battling to see which side of the personality would win. Clearly, Ellen won. I have no idea what you’re talking about. I thought we were talking about Denise Richards.

As Dina Martina, famous drag queen, do you look up to Jon Bon Jovi? Has he paved the way for other drag queens? Dina Martina? My name is Tammy [pauses]. I’m not a drag queen. My first husband’s last name was Martinez. [At this point, she takes off her glasses and cap, and she is definitely not Dina Martina. She is some other random lady.]

What’s Jon Bon Jovi like? Did you two bond in Kauai over being higherprofile drag queens? I think Jon Bon Jovi is probably a nice man altogether. Compared to the other nincompoops out there playing music professionally from that era. Those boys from Mötley Crüe don’t seem like nice people. The drummer Tommy Lee made sex tapes and wasn’t nice to his wife from Baywatch. Oh yes, you could say I bonded with Bon Jovi [laughs]. I was a fan before they were big—my best friend Barbara is from New Jersey where they’re from. We called her Babs Jovi.

What were you doing in Kauai? My second husband, Steve, and I had our honeymoon there.

Since the 1986 multiplatinum Slippery When Wet, Bon Jovi has gone on to tirelessly fight for drag queen rights. I remember he did that Christmas song with Cindy Crawford where they kissed heavily in the video, almost the entire time. I think that’s the benefit you’re talking about. Jon was so good-looking there. But it was also strange because I think he and Cindy Crawford were both married to other people.

Let’s do a “Dina Martina Guide to the Phases of Bon Jovi.” First we have the spandex poodle phase of “Runaway.” They look like poodles in spandex. Especially the bass player. I read that this song is about the three weeks Jon Bon Jovi and Ellen DeGeneres spent together on Kauai after Heche and DeGeneres broke up. Even though in the video, it looks like it’s about a girl exposed to nuclear radiation, who is daddy’s little girl, who is a rebel, who dances with the band. Oh, and fire comes out of her eyes. My friend Barbara hated that video. The nuclear part is confusing, and the girl’s outfits are god-awful. That came out around the time fax machines were invented. I hate

And Ellen was so not into Jon’s lipstick lesbo look. Is that why they broke it off? I don’t know if he and Ellen were really an official couple. What do you mean by lipstick lesbian?

Also, in the video, what’s with the abandoned drive-in theater on top of a butte that no one can get to? Is this a metaphor for the isolation he feels as a lipstick lesbian who’s going through a cheesy Native American phase? Wait, is that a butte or a bluff? I think it’s actually a mesa. Steve and I spent some time in the Southwest. It’s a metaphor for something, but I don’t know if it has anything to do with lesbianism. That song was for a western movie, Young Guns. With Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, before he went crazy. Lou Diamond Phillips was so nice with long hair. I saw it in the theater, too.

Every note Jon Bon Jovi sings has that I’m so handsome, I’m tortured by it vibe. Are we supposed to believe he’s really tortured? He’s an entertainer. He sure entertained me. You must not like him.

The Bon Jovi logo is a knife going through a heart. The knife has wings. They could pay any 10th grader in the country $20 to do a better logo than that. You really have it out for Bon Jovi, don’t you?

Then we get into the love life of Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora. First he was married to Heather Locklear. Then he dated Denise Richards. I’ve always liked Denise Richards. She deserves to be happy. I like Denise Richards, too. Hopefully she can find a nice man to settle down with, one who has a yacht and property. Like a Dodi Fayed. She has lots of money herself. Men don’t like that. Heather Locklear has been married to everybody

So you came here with me and talked this whole time for no reason? I thought you said my name! You said you were from the paper, doing a Bon Jovi story. I’ve been a Bon Jovi fan for years, seen them five times. I’ll be at the Tacoma Dome.

But what about all the stuff with Ellen DeGeneres and Kauai? I asked if you bonded with Jon Bon Jovi as drag queens. I guess I didn’t hear the drag queen part. I have been to Kauai, with my second husband, Steve. Do you want to interview me about that? Thanks for the hot dog.

Let’s stick to Bon Jovi. So why’d Jon drop the H out of his name? Is J-O-N sexier? They all do that. Pat Benatar was a fake name. Do you think Dr. Seuss was Dr. Seuss’s real name?

Dr. Seuss was a pen name. But you get my point. I’ve also heard that Emilio Estevez isn’t nice to his wives, either. He was married to Paula Abdul. You know Charlie Sheen is his brother. You could interview me about the Estevezes, too

Comment on daddy’s little girl, who is a rebel, who dances with the band at THESTRANGER.COM/MUSIC

TUE/OCTOBER 8 • 7:30PM STG PRESENTS kat edmonson w/ shelby earl WED/OCTOBER 9 • 7:30PM 91.3 KBCS WELCOMES dave simonett (trampled by turtles) w/ ark life (acoustic trio)

Hosted by Neema All Ages

The New Futures Ghost Town Riot All Ages

Monqui Presents: TOM ODELL Vance Joy 21+

Monqui Presents HALF MOON RUN MisterWives 21+

Mylets,

The Crocodile, ReignCity & The Town Ent. Present JOJO Leah LaBelle All Ages

The Crocodile & 90.3 KEXP Present: LITTLE GREEN CARS Kris Orlowski All Ages

NEVER HEARD OF ’EM

BY ANNA MINARD

Anna Minard claims to “know nothing about music.” For this column, we force her to listen to random records by artists considered to be important by music nerds.

DEAD CAN DANCE

The Serpent’s Egg (4AD)

It’s windy and cold outside, big burly clouds scooting across the tops of condos, everyone’s summer-remnant patio umbrellas whipping in the wind, the light between tree branches winking on and off. Earlier today, a swarm of birds was moving en masse back and forth in front of the window in front of me, a swooping clot of wings, a free nature documentary.

I mention the window because I’ve been looking out it all day, and appreciating it. Our office has been turned into some noisy, disturbing S&M dungeon as they remove and replace a wall of windows, so that in place of windows is a big black zippered plastic-bag curtain shutting out all but the tiniest edges of light peeking out. I have elected to work from somewhere that is not such a horrible womb. And in doing so, I made the perfect choice. For listening to the strange angel choirs of Dead Can Dance with a perfect view of a gathering storm is exactly what I’d recommend to anyone.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but most certainly not this. This sounds like landscapes, like skies. It starts with mostly chanting, then some bells, more chanting, then some organ. It’s pretty much all chanting, bells, and organ (or synthesizer organ, I assume?). For variation from the chanting, there’s some slow, drawn-out singing There are occasional sort-of beats. At one point, knives or swords are swiped against each other, a shimmering unclang of metal.

With all these voices (air through vocalcord tubes made of meat) and all this hollowness (air through organ tubes made of metal), the gray-white storm is set to a soundtrack that matches its metallicair feeling. The branches of naked trees, crouching bushes, and wispy herbs all look like they’re performing the right kind of shuddering dance for this airy drone.

The female voice reaches up high and then slides through notes outside of the Western scale, like if seals could sing—higher and more playful than whales, but still green-gray like the ocean. At the end, there are weird fairies.

It wasn’t until I was almost done writing this (right exactly NOW) that I thought to wonder if I was supposed to laugh at these guys. Maybe they’re goofy jerks who everyone remembers liking when they were a stoner 15-year-old? But it’s too bad if that’s true, because I liked this weird storm experience. Also, working alone is a surefire way to send me into the lonely zone, where the Velcro hooking me to the loops of the world starts to slip and uncatch.

I give this an “everyone knows it’s windy” out of 10.

MY PHILOSOPHY

SOME THINGS OL-D, SOME THINGS NEW

Word up, cousin, nigga/I seen it/Like a 27inch Zenith/believe it! —Cigar Shallah Raekwon the Chef, “Incarcerated Scarfaces”

Before he started a lucrative service setting up black dudes with older white ladies (you seen them “White Walls” spin), rapper Macklemore admitted to being maad jealy of a couple NW hiphop groups that had broken out of the NW’s reaches via MPLS indie juggernaut Rhymesayers Entertainment (on his fantastic 2005 song “Ego”): the now-defunct Boom Bap Project, and their Oldominion cuzzos Grayskul—still rocking close to a decade later, now on their 10th album, fittingly titled Zenith. “Zenith”—if you ain’t know, you proudly ignorant, big-word-fearing jum-babies—means the highest point of an arc. Onry Ozzborn and JFK had announced that album title at least a couple years back, when it was going to be their third album for RSE—and at the time, I was like, “Welp, better be their best shit.” Welp, it is. Zenith—out now on Fake Four, and FREE CESCHI please—is hard as a Hadoken, fierce as the rightmost punch on Street Fighter 2. (Oh, and thanks for getting off GTA5 long enough to read, genius.) The intro is courtesy of Raekwon… Wu-Tang forever! The Skul spins through several fly chambers for the wardrobe, sonically speaking, including the epic dream-bap familiar to fans of Onry’s Dark Time Sunshine stuff, hard-break boom-bap, and Siouxsieass goth rock, making for an unmistakably

fresh fit. It all sounds unified and singleminded, a nice trick considering it was built on brolic production from Smoke, Marcus D, Kuddie Fresh, PeeGee 13, Aesop Rock, Void Peal, Bruce Wayne, Moodie Black, and 6 Fingers

Suffice it to say, On and Jeff the Filipino Killer have weathered untold waves of Seattle hiphop, NW scene power shifts, and industry-wide upheavals, and consistently stayed at cats’ necks—even more relevant, their newest shit is their best shit, which is the most important thing motherfuckers can say about you. This is sharp blades, bright sparks, loud noise. I mean it, this is the best rapping—scratch, best music—that I’ve heard from Grayskul, period. “Had to lock in after Rae,” Onry texts me—niggas looking like preach! Zenith’s CD release party is Sunday, October 6, at Neumos.

Speaking of such: Their Oldominion (and Facefeeder) cohort Xperience aka XP (aka Macklemore’s Step Cousin, fresh off two years touring the globe with one of the biggest new names in music) and producer MTK combined forces for the Revelations EP, whose release party is Thursday, October 3, at the Croc with Vitamin D Nissim John Crown, Dice, Perry Porter—not a bad opening crew at all—and hosted by Neema Revelations itself kicks off with a duo of overbombastic cuts that mirror the super-hokey artwork—XP the warrior priest vanquishing mic-clutching demons in a postapocalyptic wasteland. Okay, but after all that, it’s butter. XP favorably evokes Pharoahe Monch circa Desire, the beats slap with soul and synth, and Open Mike Eagle, Casual, and singer Ashely DuBose aid the crusade to good effect. I’ve always thought XP was dope, sans his gothier instincts, and the bulk of the EP (six of the eight tracks) prove me right (and his ease at being a superb, soulful MC). Not that I care about that sort of thing. At all.

SEEKING MUSICIANS

Win RECORDING TIME, GEAR, AIRPLAY, SPOTS AT BUMBERSHOOT AND OTHER MUSIC FESTS

EMP IS SEEKING BANDS + SOLO ARTISTS OF ALL GENRES TO APPLY FOR SOUND OFF! 2014 apply NOW ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS THROUGH NOVEMBER 4, 2013

UP&COMING

Lose your Deadheads who miss the real deal every night this week!

For the full music calendar, see page 45 or visit thestranger.com/music

For ticket on-sale announcements, follow twitter.com/seashows

Wednesday 10/2

Pet Shop Boys (Paramount) See Stranger Suggests, page 25, Homosexual Agenda, page 49, and Data Breaker, page 48.

Glenn Tilbrook, Joe Michelini (Tractor) Glenn Tilbrook has earned entry into whatever songwriting hall of fame you and your mates care to construct for his work with UK new-wave pub rockers Squeeze. Their first four albums—Squeeze, Cool for Cats, Argybargy, East Side Story—abound with some of the juiciest, most supple melodies and indelible choruses ever conceived. Seriously, “Another Nail in My Heart” is the kind of song that could (and probably did) make John Lennon and Paul McCartney jealous. Now 56, Tilbrook is still slogging around the circuit, even if his last album, Pandemonium Ensues, came out in 2009. It’s a very fine middle-aged-guy pop-rock opus, better than most such efforts and of relevance to hardcore Squeeze fans. Tilbrook’s compositional chops are aging like a champ.

DAVE SEGAL

Thursday 10/3

Headhunterz, Coone, Brennan Heart, Wheelz (Foundation) See Data Breaker, page 48.

Xperience of Oldominion, Vitamin D, Nissim, John Crown, Dice, Perry Porter, Neema (Crocodile) Those who have heard the local rapper

John Crown on Fleeta Partee’s “This Is Hip Hop,” a slamming track produced by Jake One, and also on RA Scion’s “Amalgam X,” one of the best tracks on Adding to the Extra (an album that was released earlier this year), know that he has a lot of talent that’s just waiting to be tapped. Crown is a rapper with the rare ability to not only express his ideas well, but also generate interesting ideas. Line after line, you hear great idea after great idea. And, unlike standard rappers, the ideas come out of his mouth with almost no effort. I actually think the world would be a better place if there were a 10.4 Rog/John Crown collaboration. Those who know what I’m talking about know what I’m talking about. CHARLES MUDEDE See also My Philosophy, page 39.

Cumulus, Kithkin, Sundries

(Neumos) Cumulus is the little local band that could, and this is their record release show! At the foundation, the songwriting is the work of Alexandra Niedzialkowski. After initially pairing with her childhood friend Lance Umble and meeting firsttime bassist Leah Julius at a Bruce Springsteen tribute show, the core trio was formed. Watching the band mature from self-recording via Kickstarter to their current state has been delightful, and finally their debut album was picked up by Trans-Records (Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla’s label) and produced at Phil Elverum’s Anacortes studio. Besides being compared to contemporary acts like Best Coast and Tennis, their music also makes me think of Yo La Tengo and dreamy indie rock that wanders into twee territory only to be interrupted by the contrast of raucous guitars. So go watch these happy little clouds soar on their record release day! BREE MCKENNA

Dark Star Orchestra (Showbox at the Market) Dark Star Orchestra keep the indomitable legacy of the Grateful Dead twinkling with their spot-on tribute concerts. They plunder the mother lode of the jam-band progenitors’ vast output for Deadheads who miss the real deal or for those unfortunates who never had the chance to witness them live. DSO’s MO is to replicate momentous Dead set lists from the group’s deep archives, and then nail every facet of the music. Clearly, DSO have their inspiration’s wonderfully tight/loose chops, fluid sense of time and space, and that allimportant stamina to keep on truckin’ through the transitive nightfall of diamonds. DAVE SEGAL

Friday 10/4

Fiona Apple, Blake Mills (Benaroya Hall) Way back in the mid-’90s, Fiona Apple impressed my impressionable young self, first with her venomous, bruised-heart lyrics and the

NECTAR LOUNGE 412 N 36th St 206.632.2020 www.nectarlounge.com

overall woozy darkness of Tidal (telling boyfriends to go to hell with a ferocity twice her age!), then with her heavy public image—Apple's past issues (rape, eating disorders) were no secret—and her refusal to shimmer synthetically under the spotlight (see: her “this world is bullshit” VMA acceptance speech). Since then, her often excessively wordytitled albums have been even more intriguing, brutal, and strange, with Apple still marching to the beat of her own, perfectly offbeat drum. EMILY NOKES

No Joy, Heavy Hawaii (Barboza) Montreal’s No Joy are frozen in a perpetual 1991 of the fuzzily distorted guitar tone of the mind. They could be Central Casting’s go-to modern-day shoegaze band. Which is a good thing if you like that classic ’gaze sound: sugar-rush tempos, hazy female vocals, tuneful feedback, a sense of fiery dreaminess, melodies that induce lightheadedness, and dutiful worship of My Bloody Valentine and Lush’s back catalogs. If you don’t

THE YELLOWJACKETS

TUE, OCT 1 - WED, OCT 2

Celebrating 30 years and their debut project with new band member, bassist Felix Pastorius.

KARRIN ALLYSON

THU, OCT 3 - SUN, OCT 6

“Ms. Allyson is one of the most grounded singers working today.” – New York Times

DAVE HOLLAND - PRISM

TUE, OCT 8 - WED, OCT 9

Featuring Kevin Eubanks, Craig Taborn, and Eric Harland

PAT MARTINO TRIO WITH JAMES CARTER

THU, OCT 10 - SUN, OCT 13

Jazz guitar great partners with epic modern-day saxman

KPLU 88.5 WELCOMES

HALIE LOREN

TUE, OCT 15 - WED, OCT 16

“Sweet, sly, sultry...jazz vocalist” - All About Jazz

FOURPLAY

THU, OCT 17 - SUN, OCT 20

Bob James, Harvey Mason, Nathan East and Chuck Loeb - formidable... jazz quartet

GINGER BAKER’S

JAZZ CONFUSION

TUE, OCT 22 - WED, OCT 23

Ft. Pee Wee Ellis, Alec Dankworth, Abass Dodoo

2033 6th Ave. | 206.441.9729

all ages | free parking full schedule at jazzalley.com

10.3 Thursday (Bluegrass) The Coral Creek Stringband Weatherside Whiskey Band Blackberry Bushes Stringband Pepper Proud & Friends

$6 adv / $8 dos, 7pm doors, 21+

10.4 Friday (Hip-Hop) THE BAD TENANTS SOPHISTAFUNK Q Dot, Ayo.O, Daniel Halligan, DJ Einstein

$7 adv / $10dos, 7pm doors, 21+ 10.5 Saturday (Reggae / Ska / Jam) PIECE OF MIND 10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY PARTY feat TROLL’S COTTAGE

World’s Finest, DJ Duncan

$7 adv / $10 dos, 7pm doors, 21+

10.8 Tuesday (EVERY 2nd & 4th TUES!) KARAOKEGRASS!!! NO COVER, 7pm Doors, 21+

10.9 Wednesday (Funk) FOX STREET ALLSTARS w/ Rippin Chicken and Friends (members of Polyrhythmics, Lucky Brown)

$6 adv / $10 dos, 7pm doors, 21+

10.10

like those things, you may need to readjust your aesthetics. San Diego’s Heavy Hawaii make muted, quasi-camp, Beach-Boys-lovin’ surf rock. Of course they do. DAVE SEGAL

Universe People, Dreamsalon, Le Shat Noir

(Rendezvous)

Universe People consist of some excellent Seattle people who kinda remind me of Kleenex, Country Teasers, and/or Raincoats—though it’s hard to keep track of who’s in this newish, femalefronted garage-pop band. First it was Kellie Payne (the Snacks, Charming Snakes, See Me River), Min Yee (A Frames, Dreamsalon), and a rad lady named Jo Claxton (Welcome, the Intelligence). Now, I believe the lineup has changed to Jo Claxton, Dave Ramm (Wimps), and Kimberly Morrison (Dutchess and the Duke). In any case, they’ll debut some new songs at this show and, if all goes well, play one that I love from their debut LP, Go to the Sun, called “Bad French”—a droll and fantastic song about having bad friends and committing crimes. KELLY O

Saturday 10/5

Bon Jovi (Tacoma Dome) See Sound Check, page 37.

Queer F*ck Fest: Cold Lake Ox, ET Russian, Nation of Two, My Parade (Heartland) See Underage, page 47.

Swamp Meat, Waxing Hearts, Pitschouse, Julie Byrne (Atlas Space) See Underage, page 47.

First Annual Macefield Music Festival: Polyrhythmics, the Intelligence, the Blakes, Constant Lovers, Young Fresh Fellows, Special Explosion, Hounds of the Wild Hunt (Multiple venues) When the Seattle Weekly announced it was canceling its annual Ballard-based Reverb Fest, local music fans were not havin’ it. The festival was already (mostly) booked, and the venues and bands were already counting on the shows

to happen, so folks banded together to keep it alive. They renamed it the Macefield Music Festival, paying tribute to another resilient Ballard icon, Edith Macefield, who refused to give up her house to developers. The lineup features performances from dozens of great local acts, including Constant Lovers, Lori Goldston, Keyboard Kid, Special Explosion, Vox Mod, and so many more. Buy tickets (for just $10!) and get the full schedule at macefieldmusicfestival.com. MEGAN SELING

Sunday 10/6

Le1f, Antwon, Lakutis (Chop Suey) See Data Breaker, page 48.

Grayskul, Sadistik, Graves33, Continental Soldiers, DJ Spark (Neumos) See My Philosophy, page 39.

Father John Misty

(Moore Theatre) When most of the talk about an artist is about his or her offstage antics, the general rule is that his/her music must not be that interesting. That is not the case with Father John Misty, aka J. Tillman, who wiggles onstage in .gif-worthy ways and makes blog news by taking on his critics via Twitter and bonding with drunk women who interrupt his interviews. But while that might be what so many people choose to talk about, it’s easy to forget that Father John Misty’s vintage-tinged psychedelic-rock music is actually great. Tonight we’ll have extra evidence of that fact as he performs solo, stripping down his songs to their vulnerable cores. Comedian Kate Berlant, who could possibly out-weird Tillman, will open the show. MEGAN SELING

Monday 10/7

And So I Watch You from Afar, This Town Needs Guns, Mylets (Crocodile) Never heard of And So I Watch You from Afar? What would you think if I told you they’re an instrumental post-rock band? A bunch

of mopey dudes playing boring, delay-drenched ballads? You’d be way off. Instead, imagine Fucking Champs trying to fuse Riverdance melodies with Just a Souvenir–era Squarepusher, and you get a vague idea of the Belfast quartet’s super-ecstatic sound. Oxford trio This Town Needs Guns don’t aim for the same level of tooth-gnashing, pupildilating ecstasy as their fellow UK tourmates, but their adept math pop certainly suggests an Adderall-fueled study of American Football and Owls Be sure to show up early for Mylets, the solo project of 18-year-old Henry Kohen, who crafts jittery and jagged songs by looping guitar lines and electronic percussion on the fly. BRIAN COOK

Christian Death, Sioux City Pete and the Beggars (El Corazón) Whoever booked this show hit things right on the nose. If there were ever a local band to support the depravedly dark sounds of groundbreaking LA noisemakers Christian Death, Sioux City Pete & the Beggars are just that band. While their sounds don’t necessarily match up—Sioux City Pete plays a downright dirty blend of punk rock and blues, while Christian Death are forefathers of goth—it’s all in the delivery. Both are hauntingly catchy, but most importantly, both are fairly odd, right-brained projects created for the freaks by the freaks. Fitting, freaky, and fucking awesome.

KEVIN DIERS

Tuesday 10/8

Guitar Wolf, the Coathangers, Coward, Trash Fire (Chop Suey) See Stranger Suggests, page 25.

The Cuntz, Acapulco Lips, DJ CMRTYZ, Bad Future

(Bogart’s) I’m pretty excited to check out Bogart’s since Brian Foss (former Funhouse owner, punk champion) recently started booking there. Local quartet Acapulco Lips had me at the first song on their Bandcamp, “An Instrumental about Weed.” Their popidelic grooves have a ramshackle moviesoundtrack feel, like an early John Waters movie

(cue Divine: walking down the street, about to do something horrible). Maria-Elena Juarez’s vocals may bring a carefree sweetness to the Cramps-y tunes, but she’s definitely not crying over you, buddy. Also on the bill: the Cuntz, bringing you postoffensive headache rock from down under, the lo-fi best-friend necklace that is CMRTYZ (Ty Ziskis and C.M. Ruiz), and the speedy pop punk of Bad Future. Wee! EMILY NOKES

Mark Lanegan

(Neptune Theatre) Mark Lanegan’s gravelly, Tom Waits–esque voice is so quintessentially Northwestern to me. I found his 1990 album, The Winding Sheet, within the first week of moving to Seattle. It’s still one of my favorite rainy-day albums. Listening to it reminds me of how darkly beautiful and sometimes melancholy the winters are here. The former Screaming Tree and friend of Kurt Cobain is currently touring with his new covers album, Imitations which includes him covering songs by Nick Cave, Chelsea Wolfe, and Andy Williams. My favorite Mark Lanegan cover, though, will probably forever remain the folk classic “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”—which, of course, was also later covered by Nirvana. If Lanegan busts this one out at this show, I won’t be melancholy. I will full-blown cry. KELLY O

Tal National, Cascadia ’10, DJ Darek Mazzone

(Tractor) The press materials hail Tal National as “Niger’s #1 band,” and, honestly, I’m not up on that African country’s scene to dispute the designation. On their latest album, Kaani, Tal National—who sound way more lively and interesting than THE National—roil with an almost-maniacal complexity and mantric intensity… like a more prog-rock-oriented Konono Nº1. (Both of these African groups record for England’s FatCat Records, by the way.) Check the track “Banganeseba” for exhaustive proof. Niger’s a cool place if music like Tal National’s regularly charts. This is more boisterous than most of the highlife music I’ve heard and nearly as soulful as the Tuareg Desert blues made famous in the West by Bombino and Tinariwen. Work up a righteous sweat to it. DAVE SEGAL

IN YOUR 20s FOR 40 YEARS

OHANA Live Island Music a PARAMOUNT THEATRE Pet Shop Boys, 8 pm THE ROYAL ROOM Mike Clark, Skerik, Joe Doria, Andy Coe, Mike Clark, Guests, 8 pm

SHIP CANAL GRILL The Canteloupes Jazz Jam, 7:30 pm

a SHOWBOX SODO Bullet For My Valentine, Black Veil Brides, Stars in Stereo, Throw the Fight, 6:30 pm

SUNSET TAVERN Elk and Boar, Buffalo Stagecoach, the Faradays , $6

TRACTOR TAVERN Glenn Tilbrook, Joe Michelini, 8 pm, $20

TRIPLE DOOR John’s Scofield’s Uberjam, 9:30 pm VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE The Michael Owcharuk Trio

Tha Element Aka Tha Cali Supastar

NEUMOS Robert Earl Keen, 8 pm, $25

NEW ORLEANS Legacy Band, Clarence Acox

DJ

BALTIC ROOM Crunk: DJ Henski, Marty Mar, Blue Eyed Soul, Bgeezy, Guests THE EAGLE VJDJ Andy J

ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN Passage: Jayms Nylon, Joey Webb, Guests FOUNDATION Luminox, Alex Bosi, Jameson Just, BizZaRa, $10 after 10:30 pm

HAVANA SoulShift: Peter Evans, Devlin Jenkins, Richard Everhard, $1

LAST SUPPER CLUB Vibe Wednesday: Jame$Ervin, DT, Contagious

LAVA LOUNGE Mod Fuck Explosion: DJ Deutscher Meister

MOE BAR The Hump: DJ Darwin, DJ Swervewon, Guests, 10:30 pm, free

NEIGHBOURS Undergrad: Guest DJs, 18+, $5/$8 Q NIGHTCLUB All Bands on Decks: O.C. Notes

THURS 10/3

LIVE

2 BIT SALOON Will Wakefield and the Congress Hotel , The Last Great

SUBMISSION OF THE WEEK: THE TWERKSHOP

Anice lady named Cara sent this photo in, and she had this to say: “Sean was instructing a sidewalk twerkshop. It was very educational, albeit without any foam fingers.” I say, “Nice panties, Sean!” And I wish this came with video. I bet Sean is better at twerking than ol’ what’s-her-face whose name rhymes with Guylee Papyrus. KELLY O

Love, The Willed, The High Council , 8 pm

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BLUE MOON TAVERN

Bugs, Hellbat, Striker, Sailor Mouth, $5

CAFE RACER Rafferty’s List

CAN CAN Vince Mira

CHOP SUEY Wild Arms, Buffaloes, Eternal Bad

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER

Lache Cercel, Savannah Fuentes, Jed Miley, the Entertainers, $25/$30

COMET Babysitter

CONOR BYRNE Ayron Jones, Kara Hesse, Intisaar

Jubran, Charley Wheeler, $7

CROCODILE Oldominion, Vitamin D, Nissim, Guests

DISTRICT LOUNGE Cassia

DeMayo Quintet, 8 pm, free a EL CORAZON Lisa Dank, The Eli James Experience! a GUAYMAS CANTINA

Oleaje Flamenco, 8 pm, free

HARD ROCK CAFE Cassie

Correlle, Jessica Lynne, Lainey Wright, 8 pm, $5

HIGH DIVE Kaffeine, Hilltalks, Leanne Wilkins, 8 pm, $6

HIGHLINE Golden Gardens, Blue Light Curtain , DJ Coldheart

HIGHWAY 99 Brian Lee and the Orbiters, 8 pm, $7

LITTLE RED HEN 8 Second Ride, $3

LUCID The Hang: Pornadoes, 8 pm, Caffeine, 9:30 pm, free

NECTAR Weatherside

Whiskey Band, The Blackberry Bushes Stringband, Pepper Proud, 7 pm, $5

NEUMOS Cumulus, Kithkin, Sundries, 8 pm, $10

RENDEZVOUS Sky Colony, Wren, Br’er, 10 pm

THE ROYAL ROOM The Royal Ramble

SCARLET TREE How Now Brown Cow , 9:30 pm

SHOWBOX AT THE MARKET Dark Star Orchestra, $25/$30

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB

Colt Kraft Band, Susie Philipsen, Zach Michaud 8 pm, $6

SUNSET TAVERN Josh Krajcik, Jesse Morrow

TRACTOR TAVERN Martha! Mother , Day Laborers And Petty Intellectuals , J. Martin, $6

VITO’S RESTAURANT &

LOUNGE The Random Access Quartet, Casey MacGill, 5:30 pm, Free

THE WHITE RABBIT Marmalade, $6

DJ

BALLROOM DJ Rob, free

BALTIC ROOM Revolution: DonnaTella Howe, Olivia LaGarce, Guests

CONTOUR Bottom Heavy: Covert Ops, Guests, 10 pm, Free

THE EAGLE Nasty: DJ King of Pants, Nark

FOUNDATION Headhunterz, Coone, Brennan Heart, Wheelz

HAVANA Sophisticated

Mama: DJ Sad Bastard, DJ Nitty Gritty

LO-FI Noctum Caro: Guests

MOE BAR Chuch: Phospho, Mars One, Sosal, free

NEIGHBOURS Jet Set

Thursdays: Guest DJs

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND The Lowdown: DJ Lightray, $3

SEE SOUND LOUNGE

Damn Son: DJ Flave, Sativa Sound System, Jameson Just, Tony Goods, $5 after 10:30 pm

THERAPY LOUNGE

DUH.: DJ Omar, Guests

TRINITY Space Thursdays: Rise Over Run, DJ Christyle, Johnny Fever, DJ Nicon, Sean Majors, B Geezy, Guests, free

Eliot Chang’s Comedy Central Half Hour was voted #2 in Comedy Central’s Stand Up Showdown. Other TV appearances include E!’s “Chelsea Lately” and Showtime’s “Minority Report.” He studied improv in NY at Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) and then with Armando Diaz at the Magnet Theater. Born and raised in NY, he currently resides in Los Angeles and travels regularly between both coasts for projects.

FRI 10/4

LIVE

a 88 KEYS Blues On Tap, free AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BARBOZA No Joy, Heavy Hawaii, 7 pm, $10

BLUE MOON TAVERN J.P. and the Geminis, Fat Opie, Dan Coyle, Saint John, $6

CAFE RACER Actuary, Conscious Summary Forest Friends, Plastic Boner Band

CHOP SUEY Kultur Shock, Zyan, The Unfit, Grackles, 8 pm, $12/$15

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER the Nathaniel Johnstone Band, House of Tarab, 8 pm COMET Piggy, the Lucky Boys, Phantom Tank, Wolfhammer 3, $8

CROCODILE Floater, The New Futures

DARRELL’S TAVERN the Fuzz, Johnny Astro, Matt the Hoopla, $7

a EASY STREET

RECORDS (WEST SEATTLE)

Mark Pickerel and His Praying Hands, 8 pm, free

EL CORAZON Between the Buried and Me, The Faceless, The Contortionist, the Safety Fire, 7:30 pm, $20/$24

a FREMONT ABBEY Leif Vollebekke, Lucy Horton Band, Nick Drummond, San Juan, 8 pm

a HARD ROCK CAFE the Circus in Your Town, Undercard, Beyond Today, $10/$13, Sammy Witness, free HIGH DIVE the Mothership, Blood Hot Beat, Halcion Halo $6

HIGHWAY 99 Curtis Hammond Band, 8 pm, $15

a KEYARENA Josh Groban

THE KRAKEN BAR & LOUNGE 7YOBG, The Vatican, Exogorth, Guests, $5

LUCID Fade Jazz Quartet, 9:30 pm, Fade Jazz Quartet, 11 pm

NECTAR The Bad Tenants, Sophistafunk, Q Dot, Ayo.

O , Guests, 7 pm, $7/$10

NEPTUNE THEATER Jon Batiste and Stay Human, 8 pm, $30

NEUMOS Fox and the Law, Hobosexual , Keaton Collective, the Strange Kind, 8 pm, $10

PARAGON Levi Said, free

Q NIGHTCLUB Luis Junior, Johnny Monsoon, Osiris Indriya, Chiyona, Guests, $5

RAVIOLI STATION

TRAINWRECK Dizzy, Guests

RENDEZVOUS Universe People, Dreamsalon, Le Shat Noir, 10 pm

a THE ROYAL ROOM Dayna

Stephens Trio, Justin Brown & Ben Street, Bria Skonberg, 5 pm, Piano Royale, 5:30 pm, Dayna Stephens Trio, Guests

SEAMONSTER Funky 2 Death, 10 pm, free SHOWBOX AT THE MARKET Stereophonics, The Wind + the Wave, $25

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB

Supply and the Man, Fellow Traveler, 8 pm, $7

SLIM’S LAST CHANCE Acid Angels, On the Make SUNSET TAVERN Dismal Tide, The Crying Shame, the Western Red Penguins

TIM’S TAVERN Frog Flag, the Dark Blue

TRACTOR TAVERN Laura Veirs, Karl Blau, 9:30 pm

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE The Blue Sky Trio

THE WHITE RABBIT My Cartoon Heart, Guests

DJ

95 SLIDE DJ Fever One

BALLROOM DJ Tamm

BALMAR Body Movin’ Fridays: DJ Ben Meadow, free

BALTIC ROOM Dirty Work: Rotating DJs including Sean Majors, BGeezy, Mikey Mars, Sir Kuts, guests

BARBOZA Just Got Paid: 100proof, $5 after 11:30 pm

CONTOUR Afterhours, 2 am

CUFF TGIF: C&W Dancing: DJ Harmonix, DJ Stacey, 7 pm, Guest DJs, 11 pm, $5

FOUNDATION Helena

FUEL DJ Headache, Guests

HAVANA Rotating DJs: DV One, Soul One, Curtis, Nostalgia B, Sean Cee, $5 LAVA LOUNGE DJ David

SATURDAY 10/5

QUEER F*CK FEST

It’s a queer punk’s paradise at Heartland tonight. Queer F*ck Fest sees barbed hardcore band Cold Lake headlining; their anxious, shrill punk should titillate fear in queers (in a good way). Having played together for more than 15 years, Seattle-based transgender twopiece Nation of Two are what might happen if a Bryan Ferry–esque glamtasia collided with a Rozz Williams death buzz over driving funk-grunge riffs. Their latest release, The Sorceress, is a theatrically sideways avant-rock spectacle produced by experimental musician/Stranger Genius Award finalist Jherek Bischoff

Continuing the “F*ck Fest” is Seattle’s premier all-person-of-color queer dancepunk band My Parade, who just released the Good Manners, No Morals EP, which sounds like it could have been born in Olympia circa 1992. With the bonus of crafty synths to their consciously riotous sound, My Parade should stir some politically charged footwork. With Ox and ET Russian Heartland, 8:30 pm.

JULIE BYRNE’S WELL-CULTIVATED

PASTORAL FOLK

If you’re feeling more of a subdued night, cozy up to some cute shoes and pretty sounds at Atlas. Since I last checked in with local four-piece Swamp Meat, they’ve exchanged their countrified garage blues for something more melodic and grandi-

James LO-FI Dug Rare Funk Dance Party: Guests

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND Caliente

Celebra: DJ Polo, Efren

PONY Beefcake: Beefcake: DJ Jack, Freddy King of Pants: DJ Jack, King of Pants

Q NIGHTCLUB Sied Van Riel, Guests

SCARLET TREE Oh So Fresh Fridays: Deejay Tone, DJ

Buttnaked, Guests

THERAPY LOUNGE Rapture: Guests, $3 after 11 pm

TRINITY Tyler, DJ Phase, DJ Nug, Guests, $10

THE WOODS Deep/Funky/ Disco/House: Guest DJs

SAT

10/5

LIVE AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BARBOZA Exile Parade, the Novocaines, the Copper Gamins, 7 pm, $8

BLUE MOON TAVERN Crazy Eyes, The Great Um, Ratbite, Sebastian and the Deep Blue, $6

CAFE RACER The Flying Tortugas

COMET Fen Wik Ren, Hoot Hoots, Timothy Robert Graham, $7

CONOR BYRNE First Annual Macefield Music Festival: Guests, $10 festival wristbands

CROCODILE Tom Odell, Guests, $12/$14

DARRELL’S TAVERN the Load Levelers, Hot Roddin Romeos, Angie & the Car Wrecks, $7

EGAN’S JAM HOUSE

Downtown Mountain Boys, Hopscotch, 7 pm, $10

a EL CORAZON Helloween, Coldsteel, Watcher’s Eye, Last Bastion

a EMPTY SEA STUDIOS The Paul Hemmings Uketet, 8 pm

a FREMONT ABBEY Pepper

Proud, Bronto & Charlotte Puppet Show, Sat, Oct 5,

noon

HEARTLAND Cold Lake, My Parade, Ox, E.T. Russian,

Nation of Two , 8 pm

HIGH DIVE Alabaster

American Island, Home Alone, Joyfield, $8

HIGHLINE Wimps, Chastity Belt, Pony Time , Babies

HIGHWAY 99 Franco Paletta & the Stingers, Steve Kerin, 8 pm, $14

THE KRAKEN BAR & LOUNGE the Greengoes, Kramer, The Triple Sixes, Enemy Combatants, $5

LITTLE RED HEN Fine, $5

LUCID Kaffeine, 9:30 pm

a MOORE THEATRE

Michael Franti & Spearhead, 8 pm, $32.50

NECTAR Troll’s Cottage, 7 pm, $7/$10

NEPTUNE THEATER Gary Clark Jr., Sat, Oct 5, $29.50

NEUMOS Man Man, Guests, 8 pm, $18

PARAGON Solbird, free

QUEEN CITY GRILL Faith Beattie, Bayly, Totusek, Guity, free

RENDEZVOUS Clent, Wizdom, Guests, 10:30 pm

a THE ROYAL ROOM Piano Royale, 6 pm, Crack Sabbath, Red Dress, 8 pm

SEAMONSTER Sound

Dialog: Guests, 10:30 pm

SEAMONSTER LOUNGE

Jared and the Mill, 7 pm, free

a SHOWBOX AT THE MARKET Papa Roach, Pop Evil, Age of Days, 8 pm

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB

Crawler, Balsa, Medula Pinata, 8 pm, $7

SLIM’S LAST CHANCE

Industry People, the Jilly Rizzo, Green Pajamas

a STUDIO SEVEN Bell Witch, Church of Hate , Unhailoed , Lb!, Blood and Thunder, the Devils of Loudun, All the Hellbound

SUNSET TAVERN First Annual Macefield Music Festival: Guests, $10 festival wristbands

TACOMA DOME Bon Jovi

TIM’S TAVERN Edewaard, Supernothing, Shakin’ Michael J, On The Ground

TOWN HALL La Familia

Valera Miranda, 8 pm, $30

TRACTOR TAVERN First

Annual Macefield Music Festival: Polyrhythmics, The

ose, and with bassist Laura Seniow now occasionally on viola, downright orchestral. Joining them on this local-boosted bill are Waxing Hearts, with a particularly huggable brand of introspective lo-fi folk/ cracklecore. Seattle #sadboys Pitschouse will also reverb out a sulkified dream-coma of bedroom pop accented with low-lit keyboard flourishes. If you like local pop bands iji and Mega Bog, watch out for them. Headlining the night for quiet, known pleasures is Chicago songwriter Julie Byrne. Her gentle, ethereal folk pop tiptoes on well-cultivated sonic pastures, with acoustic guitar gingerly tickling her threadlike vocals. Byrne’s sound treads lightly, and with a pungent air of nostalgia for agrarian simplicity in the aggressive hustle of urban life, it may make time seem to move slower tonight. Atlas Space, 8 pm, $7.

Saturday October 5th

Tim’s Tavern 2nd Annual “Rocktober”fest Celebration

Supernothing

Shakin’ Michael J On The Ground

Scary Cherry & The Bang Bangs (dallas, featuring lezlie deane from nightmare on elm street 6: freddy’s dead) Buckbye, Edewaard

$4.50 Spaten Octoberfest Draft and Brats! Oompah music at noon. Live bands and Happy Hour specials at 4pm

Tim’s Tavern: 206 N 105th St 21+, 9pm, $5 pm, $5

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 2ND

Intelligence The Blakes , Constant Lovers, Young Fresh Fellows, Special Explosion, Hounds of the Wild Hunt, 3:30 pm

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Ruby Bishop, The Tarantellas, 6 pm, The Cocktail Set, 9:30 pm

CAFE RACER The Racer Sessions, The Flying Tortugas a CENTURY BALLROOM

Casey MacGill, 9:30 pm

CHOP SUEY Le1f, Antwon, Lakutis, $10/$12

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER Opera on Tap, 8 pm, $8/$10

Sundays: Sosa, MarsONE, Phosho, free

NEIGHBOURS Noche Latina: Guest DJs

PONY TeaDance: DJ El Toro, Freddy King of Pants, 4 pm

100proof, Sean Cee, Blueyedsoul, free

COMPANY BAR Rock and Roll Chess Night: DJ Plantkiller, 8 pm, free

CONOR BYRNE Get the Spins: Guest DJs, free

CONTOUR Manic Mondays: Guests

RAW GERONIMO

WISHBEARD // THE TROUBLE STARTS

FRIDAY OCTOBER 4TH

KULTUR SHOCK

ZYAN

SUNDAY OCTOBER 6TH

MONDAY OCTOBER 7TH

KELLEY STOLTZ LOW HUMS // OLD LIGHT

TUESDAY OCTOBER 8TH

GUITAR WOLF THE COATHANGERS // COWARD // TRASH FIRE

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 9TH

TJUTJUNA

THE WHITE RABBIT Yo Zomby, Poverty Bay, Lot Lizard, Victims of Eternity

DJ

BALLROOM DJ Warren

BALTIC ROOM Good

Saturdays: Guest DJs

BARBOZA Inferno: Guests, 10:30 pm, free before 11:30 pm/$5 after CONTOUR Europa Night: Misha Grin, Gil

CUFF Bear Heat: DJ

Mattstands

FOUNDATION Henrix, Wayne & Woods, Darrius, Gravity Lift

GAINSBOURG Dead Ship

Sailing Listening Party, free HAVANA Rotating DJs: DV One, Soul One, Curtis, Nostalgia B, Sean Cee, $5

HEARTLAND CAFE & BENBOW ROOM Chris Moore

LAVA LOUNGE DJ Matt

NEIGHBOURS Powermix: DJ Randy Schlager

NEIGHBOURS

UNDERGROUND Club

Vogue: DJ Chance, DJ Eternal Darkness

RE-BAR Cock & Bull: DJ Freddy King of Pants, $5

TRINITY ((SUB)): Guy, VSOP, Jason Lemaitre, Guests, $15/free before 10 pm

THE WOODS Hiphop/R&B/ Funk/Soul/Disco: Guest DJs

SUN

10/6

LIVE

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BARBOZA Houses, Guests, 8 pm, $10

BLUE MOON TAVERN

Brendan Shea, Sarah Pasillas, Alex Rasmussen, 7 pm, Free

CROCODILE Half Moon Run, MisterWives, 8 pm, $11

HIGH DIVE Ramblin’ Years, The Bottom Dollars, the Mystic Arrows, 8 pm, $6

JAI THAI BROADWAY Rock Bottom Soundsystem, free KELL’S Liam Gallagher a MOORE THEATRE Solo

Performance: Father John Misty, 7 pm, $25

NEPTUNE THEATER Gary Clark Jr., 8 pm, $29.50

NEUMOS Grayskul, Sadistik, Graves33, Continental Soldiers , DJ Spark, 8 pm, $12

PIES & PINTS Sunday Night Folk Review: Guests, free THE ROYAL ROOM the Onlies, Scrape, Feeds on Majesty, 6 pm

SEAMONSTER Pocket Time Slice, 10 pm, free a SEATTLE FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH Inga Swearingen

SHIP CANAL GRILL Jay Thomas, Sun, noon a SHOWBOX AT THE MARKET Blue October, the Unlikely Candidates, Tori Vasquez, 7 pm, $26.50/$30 a SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB Audentia, 3 pm, $5

TRACTOR TAVERN Bronze Radio Return, Graham Colton, $10/$12

TRIPLE DOOR Vinicius Cantuária, 7:30 pm, $22

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Ruby Bishop, 6 pm, The Ron Weinstein Trio, 9:30 pm

DJ

CONTOUR Broken Grooves: DJ Venus, Rob Cravens, Guests, free

THE EAGLE T-Bar/T-Dance: Up Above, Fistfight, free a FULL TILT ICE CREAM Vinyl Appreciation Night: Guest DJs, 7 pm

LAVA LOUNGE No Come Down: Jimi Crash MOE BAR Chocolate

Q NIGHTCLUB Revival: Riz Rollins, Chris Tower, 3 pm, free

RE-BAR Flammable: DJ Wesley Holmes, 9 pm

SEE SOUND LOUNGE Salsa: DJ Nick THE STEPPING STONE PUB

Vinyl Night: You bring your records, they play them

MON

10/7

LIVE AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Jerry Frank

COASTAL KITCHEN Pork Chop Trio, 9:30 pm, free a CROCODILE And So I Watch You From Afar, This Town Needs Guns, Mylets, 8 pm, $10/$12 EL CORAZON Christian Death, Sioux City Pete and the Beggars, 8:30 pm, $13/$15

KELL’S Liam Gallagher MAC’S TRIANGLE PUB Jazz and Blues Night: Guests, free

HAVANA Manic Mondays: DJ Jay Battle, free

THE HIDEOUT Introcut, Guests, free LAVA LOUNGE Psych/Blues: Bobby Malvestuto LO-FI Jam Jam: Zion’s Gate, Sound Selecta, Element, Mista Chatman , $5

THE MIX Bring Your Own Vinyl Night: Guests, 6 pm MOE BAR Minted Mondays: DJ Swervewon, 100proof, Sean Cee, Blueyedsoul, free NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND SIN: DJ Keanu, 18+, free PONY Dirty Deeds: Guest DJs

Star, Stag, $10/$12

TRIPLE DOOR

Musicquarium: Free Funk Union, free, Bob Schneider, Guests, 7:30 pm, $22/$25 a VERA PROJECT Dan Croll, Guests, 7 pm, $12 THE WHITE RABBIT Michael Shrieve’s Spellbinder, $6 DJ

BALTIC ROOM Jam Jam: Zion’s Gate Sound, $5

BARBOZA Minted: Icon Mondays: Sean Majors, Guests, free, DJ Swervewon,

BY DAVE SEGAL

WEDNESDAY 10/2

PET SHOP BOYS ARE SO ELECTRIC, DARLING

Talk about durability and reliability. Pet Shop Boys just keep on giving their fans the goods, some 27 years into their casual career. Their new, 12th album, Electric, is expansive, mannered techno crafted by a couple of worshipped UK pop veterans that is better than it has any right to be (most musicians by this point in their careers are running on creative fumes). An upbeat affair in contrast to 2012’s Elysium Electric is about as tantalizing a dance record as you could expect from fiftysomething hit-makers. First single “Love Is a Bourgeois Concept” is the perfect PSB track title, and it encapsulates the album’s charms with its witty, self-aware lyrics and understatedly ebullient melody.

“It’s a blatant fallacy,” Neil Tennant deadpans, and only a naïf would argue with the man. Expect a night of frictionless, poised dance music for the carefully flamboyant clubber. Paramount Theatre, 8 pm, $35.75–$55.75, all ages.

THURSDAY 10/3

HEADHUNTERZ IS GONNA GO “HARDSTYLE” ON YOUR ASS Dutch DJ/producer Headhunterz has more than 633,000 “likes” on Facebook, the sort of number that usually portends a first-class cheese merchant. A trawl through his productions confirms this. Headhunterz is a proponent of “hardstyle,” which sounds

like happy hardcore repurposed for the stadium-dubstep generation, with occasional smatterings of mainstream trance’s saccharine synth timbres. Making matters worse, he frequently threads into his tracks those hammy, he-man voice-overs often heard in film previews. On the plus side, Headhunterz donated the earnings from his 2012 album Sacrifice to Dance 4 Life, an organization dedicated to informing the public about HIV and AIDS. With Coone, Brennan Heart, and Wheelz Foundation, 9 pm, $20 adv/$25 DOS, 21+.

SUNDAY 10/6

LE1F’S INTELLIGENT BLING IS OUT THERE

Le1f (pronounced “leaf,” he said, reassuringly) sounds like a music writer’s wet dream of a subject: a gay rapper who’s stylish as all get-out and can twerk up a storm (he studied ballet and modern dance at Wesleyan). Oh, and he supplied the beat to Das Racist’s “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” for bonus hip cred. It takes bravery to be out in the often-homophobic hiphop realm, and thankfully, Le1f has the lyrical and production skills to make him more than just a curious anomaly. His flow has a molasses-y Sly Stone feel to it, while his music’s a flashy strain of bass music accentuated with intricate, kinetic bleepwerk, not too far off from Danny Brown’s output. I guess intelligent bling is a thing now. With Antwon and Lakutis Chop Suey, 9

BY ADRIAN RYAN

WEDNESDAY 10/2

We’re so gosh damn lucky, we big gays, aren’t we just? Magical creatures that can do fabulous things others are simply too silly and/or hidebound to achieve. Things like being in your 20s for 40 years, for example. And not accidentally getting pregnant ever (that’s a biggie for me—you, too, I’m sure). And chief among them all is the ability—well, it’s more of a biological imperative, really—to roller-boogie to the irrepressible soundtrack of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Firstly, it harks back to those glorious days of gay yore when gay skates were quite the thing (RIP, Gay Skate in Bellevue, I loved you well). Secondly, science fiction! Double feature! There’s a light! At the Frankenstein place! TIME WARP AGAIN! In skates, though! You know you want to. Just try not to kill yourself. Southgate Roller Rink, 9 pm, $7 (includes skate rental), all ages.

THE PET SHOP BOYS ARE OF PARAMOUNT IMPORTANCE

But one small thing even we magical, unicorn-like geighz can’t do, tragically enough, is BE IN TWO EFFINK PLACES AT ONCE. I should know, I’ve seriously done my best. (The most I get is a headache, and I prefer tequila to be the source of all my headaches, thank you.) And so, tonight I am afraid it is necessary to make a very tough choice. We can either (a) go gay skate to Rocky Horror, get a little exercise, hook up, fall down, and have a flaming fabulous time, like I just suggested, or (b) forget that entirely AND SEE THE PET SHOP BOYS, like I also just suggested. (Pay attention!) How you decide will say much about your character and your willingness to leave the blessed borders of Capitol Hill for a damn change. SO WHAT’S IT GONNA BE, ’MO? Paramount, 8 pm, $35.75–$55.75, all ages.

SATURDAY 10/5

DJ RIZ IS COCK & BULLISH

We’ve sadly missed the last few installments of the always fun and sexy newish dance night Cock & Bull, because we’ve been damn busy, that’s why. (Can’t dance at every wedding, right?) But we are going to sure as hell go tonight for myriad reasons, including the indomitable spinnings of the equally indomitable DJ Riz Rollins and sexy-schmexy almost-nude pole dancers. But mostly DJ Riz, though. Really. Come on! I’m totally serious, you guys… Re-bar, 10 pm, $5, 21+.

HIP HOP, SALSA, TANGO, WEST COAST SWING, EAST COAST SWING, BACHATA, WALTZ, TAP, LINDY HOP, HIP HOP, SALSA, TANGO, WEST COAST SWING, EAST COAST SWING, BACHATA, WALTZ, TAP, LINDY HOP, HIP HOP, SALSA, TANGO, WEST COAST SWING, EAST COAST SWING, BACHATA, WALTZ, TAP, LINDY HOP, HIP HOP, SALSA, TANGO, WEST COAST SWING, EAST COAST SWING, BACHATA, WALTZ, TAP, LINDY HOP, HIP HOP, SALSA, TANGO, WEST COAST SWING, EAST COAST SWING, BACHATA, WALTZ, TAP, LINDY HOP, HIP HOP, SALSA, TANGO, WEST COAST SWING, EAST COAST SWING, BACHATA, WALTZ, TAP, LINDY HOP, HIP HOP, SALSA, TANGO, WEST COAST SWING, EAST

FILM

In Space,

No One Can

Hear You Say “Whoa”

Goddamned Amazed by Gravity

BY PAUL CONSTANT

F

rom Orson Welles to Christopher Nolan, some of the most influential filmmakers in history have been obsessed with stage magic. I don’t think that’s an accident; one reason people go

to the movies is in the hopes that they will come away astonished. Some of the best movies of all time—2001, The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Citizen Kane—leave us, on first viewing, with the same question a good magic show does: How the hell did they do that?

mouth hanging open, blown away by the amazing spectacle.

Gravity dir. Alfonso Cuarón Wide release

Drop-jawed gawking doesn’t happen much in the multiplexes anymore, because more often than not, we know exactly how they did that: computers. Obviously, they did that with computers. Ask me on my most cynical day, and I’ll tell you that the sense of mystery and magic has all but disappeared from moviemaking. But parts of Gravity were so incredibly beautiful that I couldn’t do anything but watch with my

Seriously, though: How the hell did they do that? Gravity opens in the soundless void of outer space. A new, somewhat reluctant astronaut named Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and a seasoned space walker named Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) are repairing a satellite in Earth’s orbit. They’re just floating in their bulky NASA-supplied space suits, and the camera spins around them, looping and arcing and phasing into and out of their helmets and gliding beneath them as they make small talk to keep a nervous Stone’s mind off of throwing up. Something like the first third of the film is made up of one long tracking

shot. This is not the sort of thing you do with wires that get wiped out in postproduction. You can’t manage this kind of weightlessness by sticking the actors in a water tank. I know it was done with computers, but the artifice looks so real and is sustained so beautifully from every angle that it appears seamless. You want to believe that Cuarón actually flew

A large portion of the soundtrack is Bullock hyperventilating.

Clooney and Bullock into outer space in order to achieve Brandoesque realism. (Springing for 3-D is recommended, but people who suffer from motion sickness should be warned that the floatiness can be more than a little nauseating.)

Gravity follows Stone as her shuttle (and contact with Mission Control) is destroyed in a hail of space debris from a Russian satellite demolition gone awry and she’s forced to try to find a way to safety. A large portion of the soundtrack is Bullock hyperventilating. (It’s a good thing that she has two of the most comforting voices in cinema—Clooney and Ed Harris as Mission Control—to talk her down when she most needs it.) There are no flashbacks or cuts to somewhere with an atmosphere, and the narrative unspools in more or less real time. It’s your basic human versus nature survival story, only instead of the wilds of the Yukon, the nature happens to be an airless, inky pool that can kill you in seconds.

Bullock is outstanding, and I say this as someone who doesn’t generally enjoy her work. Cuarón manages to make the most of her innate prickliness by turning it into a defense mechanism for a wounded, scared woman who’s still raw from the death of her daughter and has no idea how to survive. She’s on-screen for almost the whole movie, and she’s riveting to watch.

Gravity is an awe-inspiring film, but it’s not a perfect one. When that first, soundtrack-free tracking shot ends and the tinkly score and traditional scene cuts return, the movie loses a little of its luster. There are some unfortunate Hollywoodisms tossed in to amp up the threat. (She’s running out of oxygen! Except here’s this extra bit of oxygen we didn’t tell you about

before! Now that countdown we were so worried about means absolutely nothing!) And Gravity gets a little schlocky by the end. But as far as I’m concerned, if you can show me something I’ve genuinely never seen before—and do so with a confidence that leaves me gobsmacked about how the hell you managed to do it—you’ve earned a moment or two to try to apply an Important Life Lesson for the cheap seats. For God’s sake, don’t wait for Gravity on DVD; it’s the sort of experience for which the phrase “movie magic” was intended.

FESTIVE

SOUTH ASIAN FILM, LATINO FILM, SEATTLE FILM

In the Pacific Northwest, the month of October brings an explosion of film festivals, plus the type of dusk-in-the-afternoon weather that makes going to the movies all the time seem perfectly sensible. This week alone brings the start of two worthy fests. Now in its eighth year, the Seattle South Asian Film Festival has grown from a one-off screening at Elliott Bay Book Company into something truly huge, filling venues in two cities (SIFF Cinema Uptown and SIFF Film Center in Seattle, Mobius Hall in Bothell) with seven days of films from and about Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Commemorating 100 years of Indian cinema, the 2013 SSAFF is loaded with more stuff than we can enumerate here—find the full schedule (with gorgeous graphics) at ssaff.tasveer.org. Some highlights: Miss Lovely, a dark Indian drama set in the world of Bombay’s C-grade “sex horror” film industry of the ’80s; Chayiliam, a mythic exploration of “the various shades of red in the feminine”; and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the latest film by the great Mira Nair, which Charles Mudede described as “a political thriller, an economic critique, and a masterpiece.” (Bonus: live chat with Mira Nair after the October 6 screening!) Now in its fifth year, the Seattle Latino Film Festival has expanded to screens in three cities—Seattle, Tacoma, and Bellevue—with 30 titles from 17 countries and a spotlight on Cuban cinematography. Highlights include the Mexican epic 5 de Mayo: La Batalla (chronicling the events leading up to the 1862 Battle of Puebla); Aquí y Allá (Antonio Méndez Esparza’s Cannes-honored drama about a migrant worker’s complicated return home); and Chico & Rita, the Oscar-nominated animated feature that Charles Mudede called “a visually stunning… story about what makes great music and art: sex.” It’s all at slff.org. (DAVID SCHMADER)

The Seattle South Asian Film Festival runs Oct 4–13 in Seattle and Bothell; go to ssaff.tasveer.org. The Seattle Latino Film runs Oct 4–13 in Seattle, Bellevue, and Tacoma; go to slff.org.

FILM SHORTS

More reviews and movie times: thestranger.com/film

LIMITED RUN

BLUE CAPRICE

Inspired by the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks, the reserved, grim Blue Caprice boasts no fewer than four fantastic performances (particularly from Isaiah Washington, who gets a lot more to work with than anybody else). But while director Alexandre Moors sets a disconcerting, melancholy atmosphere, Ronnie Porto’s script, crammed with foreshadowing, never lets you forget how the story will end, keeping its characters at a chilling but safe distance. For a film that spends nearly all its time leading to a horrific and forgone conclusion, Blue Caprice says frustratingly little about how these men transformed into killers. At the start of Blue Caprice, we know John and Lee will become monsters, and at the end, they do, and that’s that. (ERIK HENRIKSEN) SIFF Cinema Uptown, Fri 7, 9:30 pm, Sat 2:45, 5, 7, 9:30 pm, Sun 2:45, 5, 7, 9:10 pm, Mon 5, 7, 9:10 pm, Tues 5, 7 pm.

guitar-friendly changes to deforestation practices. Grand Illusion, Thurs 7 pm, Sat 5 pm.

NIGHT OF EXPLOITATION MAYHEM

A 65-minute long compilation of grindhouse trailers, followed by a presentation of Lucio Fulci’s gore feature, The Gates of Hell, all on 35 mm. Presented by Portland’s Grindhouse Film Festival. Grand Illusion, Sat Oct 5 at 8 pm.

PRINT GENERATION

thestranger.com

This 50-minute experimental film is composed of one minute of footage reprinted 50 times. With each print, the original image becomes less recognizable, slowly mutating into an abstraction. Director in attendance for this special 16 mm screening. Northwest Film Forum, Sun Oct 6 at 5 pm.

SEATTLE LATINO FILM FESTIVAL

GRAVITY IN 2D (PG-13) Fri: (4:40)*, 7:20, 9:35 Sat: (2:20)*, (4:40)*, 7:20, 9:35 Sun: (4:40)*, 7:20 Mon: (4:40)*, 7:20 Tue: (4:40)*, 7:20^ Wed & Thu: (4:40)*, 7:20

CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 2 IN 2D (PG) Fri: (4:50)*, 7:10*, 9:45* Sat: (1:50), (4:50)*, 7:10*, 9:45* Sun: (1:50)*, (4:50)*, 7:10* Mon: (4:50)*, 7:10* Tue: (4:50)*, 7:10*^ Wed & Thu: (4:50)*, 7:10* SALINGER (PG-13) Fri: (4:25), 7:00*, 9:25* Sat: (2:00)*, (4:25), 7:00*, 9:25* Sun: (2:00)*, 7:00* Mon - Thu: (4:25), 7:00*

ENTER THE DRAGON

That dead guy from Lakeview Cemetery stars in the first American martial-arts movie. Harvard Exit, Sat Oct 5 at midnight.

HAUTE CUISINE

This film is loosely based on the real-life story of Danièle Delpeuch, personal cook for French president François Mitterrand and the first female chef in the Élysée Palace. Hortense Laborie couldn’t be more surprised when the president picks her to be his personal chef, wanting her to cook the regional food of his childhood. To do her job, she must navigate the rigid conventions of the palace and the prejudices of the male chefs, while also creating great food and pleasing the president’s palate. Actor Catherine Frot is a worthy lead, but regrettably there is little context for her character’s work or personality. And the narrative of the film is continually interrupted by a peculiar secondary story line of her working in Antarctica. Sadly, the film makes what should be an interesting and hunger-inducing story into something as flat as a crepe. (GILLIAN ANDERSON) Varsity, Fri-Sun 2, 4:45, 7:05, 9:15 pm, Mon-Tues 4:45, 7:05, 9:15 pm.

HERB AND DOROTHY 50 X 50

In 2009, the film Herb and Dorothy introduced the Vogels, proletarian art collectors who had amassed a staggering collection of minimalist and conceptual art in their tiny apartment. This follow-up documentary focuses on their project to gift 50 works of art to one lucky museum in each state. Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Sun 7, 9 pm, Mon 9 pm, Tues 7, 9 pm.

THE LAST STARFIGHTER

In this 1984 sci-fi movie with newfangled computergenerated effects, a video game whiz (Lance Guest) ascends to the heavens to fight aliens. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Tues Oct 8 at 9:15 pm.

See Festive, page 51. Various locations, Fri-Tues. For complete schedule and showtimes, see slff.org.

SEATTLE SOUTH ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL

See Festive, page 51. SIFF Film Center, Fri-Sun. For complete schedule and showtimes, see tasveer.org.

THE SUMMIT

This documentary tells the story of the 11 people who died in 2008 trying to climb K2, the deadliest mountain in the world. Harvard Exit, Fri 2:20, 4:45, 7:10, 9:45 pm, Sat 2:20, 4:45, 7:10, 9:30 pm, Sun 2:20, 4:45, 7:10, 9:45 pm, Mon-Tues 4:45, 7:10, 9:45 pm.

TALES FROM THE FAR SIDE

Two rarely screened animated TV specials spun off from Gary Larson’s iconic comic strip. Scarecrow Video, Fri Oct 4 at 8 pm.

THE WIZARD

A video game competition leads some kids across the country in this adventure comedy starring Fred Savage, Jenny Lewis (now an indie folk star), and the Nintendo Power Glove. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Tues Oct 8 at 7 pm. NOW PLAYING

DON JON

L’AVVENTURA (1960)

“Antonioni is the only important director I have nothing good to say about. He bores me; he’s so solemn and humorless,” yawned Francois Truffaut, but this solemn, humorless two-and-a-half-hour-long film from the Italian director also created what the 1960 Cannes jury called “a new language of cinema.” Presented on 35 mm. Northwest Film Forum, Fri 7 pm, Sat-Sun 4, 7 pm, Mon-Tues 7 pm.

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN

Cornel Wilde hooks up with Gene Tierney, who wreaks havoc on both their lives in this entrancingly lurid Technicolor noir. Presented on 35 mm. Seattle Art Museum, Thurs Oct 3 at 7:30 pm.

MUMIA: LONG DISTANCE REVOLUTIONARY

Mumia Abu-Jamal is an activist and journalist who was convicted of killing a police officer in 1982 and has spent 30 years on death row. This documentary is not an examination of Abu-Jamal’s conviction—it implies that his innocence or guilt should be viewed in the context of racial politics, and, more importantly, that his culpability is a moot point. Film and audio of Abu-Jamal is electrifying, but in between are weird cartoons and live-action dramatizations of his writings. Viewers who read up on the case beforehand will have a better chance of navigating the film. (JOCELYN MACDONALD) Keystone Church, Fri Oct 4 at 7 pm.

MUSICWOOD

This documentary follows a handful of eco-conscious guitar manufacturers who travel into the rain forest to lobby for

I’ll concede that Joseph Gordon-Levitt has earned the right to direct a modest, low-stakes indie flick, and that’s precisely what Don Jon is: the story of a simple, pornaddicted Jersey guido (JG-L), who thinks he’s found love in the club with a calculating, narcissistic guidette (Scarlett Johansson) who isn’t crazy about his extracurriculars. (Think Steve McQueen’s Shame with jerk-off jokes.) As writer, director, and star of Don Jon, Gordon-Levitt’s auteur ambitions here are evident—and while the film isn’t a total disaster (the acting and direction are both serviceable), it’s clear that his hollow, cavernous eyes are significantly bigger than his stomach. With a condescending script that shows a complete lack of sympathy for (or even interest in) its characters, Gordon-Levitt seems almost contemptuous of the petty and monotonous lives he’s created. An underused Julianne Moore, reprising her time-honored role as Oedipal Complex Personified, is the only emotionally relatable character the film musters—and even she’s basically a two-dimensional plot device. (ZAC PENNINGTON) ENOUGH SAID

All of Nicole Holofcener’s films involve the same building blocks: They’re about self-deception and unhappiness and relationships and how to be a good person. Catherine Keener is always in them. But from this toolbox of feelings and Catherine Keeners, Holofcener consistently constructs perceptive, emotionally acute films that are clear-eyed about human frailty. And while it doesn’t let any of the characters off the hook for their bullshit—it wouldn’t be a Holofcener joint if it did—Enough Said is her warmest movie to date, thanks to the insanely likable Julia LouisDreyfus and a great turn from James Gandolfini, in his last performance. (ALISON HALLET)

RUSH I went into Rush, the based-on-a-true-story Formula One racing movie, with a closed mind. But I’m pleased to report that Rush won me over anyway. James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) is all charm and gorgeousness—the kind of genetically gifted rogue who’s infuriating as hell until the exact moment he needs to pull his shit together, and then he’s a hero. (PAUL CONSTANT)

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VOLUNTEERS

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LEGENDARY PIANIST AVAILABLE

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MUSICIANS WANTED

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AUXILIARY PERCUSSIONIST

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EXPERIMENTAL ROCK BAND seeking keyboardist/soundscape artist. Swans, Big Black, Neurosis, Black Flag, Killing Joke, Throbbing Gristle, Laibach, SPK, Coil, Godflesh, Savage Republic, Pigface, Jarboe, Diamanda Galas, Head of David. No drugs. Bass/drums/guitar. 206.547.2615/ omaritaylor@hotmail.com /www.rendingsinew.com

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

BY ROB BREZSNY

stronger than we were before we got broken.

For the Week of Oct 2

ARIES (March 21–April 19): Are you good at haggling? Do you maybe even enjoy the challenge of negotiating for a better price, of angling for a fairer deal? The coming week will be a favorable time to make extensive use of this skill. According to my analysis of the astrological omens, you will thrive on having friendly arguments with just about everyone, from your buddies to your significant other to your mommy to God Herself. Everywhere you go, I encourage you to engage in lively discussions as you hammer out compromises that will serve you well. Be cheerful and adaptable and forceful.

TAURUS (April 20–May 20): In David Markson’s experimental novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress, the protagonist fantasizes about the winter she lived at the Louvre Museum in Paris. She says that to keep warm, she made big fires and burned some of the museum’s precious artifacts. I’m hoping you won’t do anything remotely resembling that mythic event in the coming week, Taurus. I understand that you may be going through a cold spell—a time when you’re longing for more heat and light. But I beg you not to sacrifice enduring beauty in order to ameliorate your temporary discomfort. This, too, shall pass.

GEMINI (May 21–June 20): “Don’t say you want love,” writes San Francisco author Stephen Sparks. “Say you want the morning light through a paint-flecked window; say you want a gust of wind scraping leaves along the pavement and hills rolling toward the sea; say you want to notice, in a tree you walk past every day, the ruins of a nest exposed as the leaves fall away; a slow afternoon of conversation in a shadowy bar; the smell of bread baking.” That’s exactly the oracle I want to give you, Gemini. In my opinion, you can’t afford to be generic or blank in your requests for love. You must be highly specific. You’ve got to ask for the exact feelings and experiences that will boost the intensity of your lust for life. (Here’s Sparks’s Tumblr page: invisiblestories. tumblr.com.)

CANCER (June 21–July 22): “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are stronger in the broken places,” wrote Cancerian writer Ernest Hemingway. By my estimation, my fellow Crabs, we are now entering a phase of our astrological cycle when we can make dramatic progress in healing the broken places in ourselves. But even better than that: As we deal dynamically with the touchy issues that caused our wounds, we will become

LEO (July 23–Aug 22): Let’s hope you have given deep thought to understanding who you are at this moment of your life. Let’s also hope that you have developed a clear vision of the person you would like to become in, say, three years. How do you feel about the gap between the current YOU and the future YOU? Does it oppress you? Does it motivate you? Maybe a little of both? I’ll offer you the perspective of actress Tracee Ellis Ross. “I am learning every day,” she told Uptown magazine “to allow the space between where I am and where I want to be to inspire me and not terrify me.”

VIRGO (Aug 23–Sept 22): Do the words “purity” and “purify” have any useful purpose? Or have they been so twisted by religious fundamentalists and mocked by decadent cynics that they’re mostly just farcical? I propose that you take them seriously in the coming week. Give them your own spin. For instance, you could decide to purify yourself of petty attitudes and trivial desires that aren’t in alignment with your highest values. You might purify yourself of self-deceptions that have gotten you into trouble and purify yourself of resentments that have blocked your creative energy. At the very least, Virgo, cleanse your body with extrahealthy food, good sleep, massage, exercise, and sacred sex.

LIBRA (Sept 23–Oct 22): I periodically hike alone into the serene hills north of San Francisco and perform a set of my songs for the birds, insects, squirrels, and trees. Recently, I discovered that British comedian Milton Jones tried a similar experiment. He did his standup act for a herd of cows on a farm in Hertfordshire. I can’t speak for Jones’s motivations, but one of the reasons I do my nature shows is because they bring out my wild, innocent, generous spirit. Now is a good time for you to do something similar for yourself, Libra. What adventures can you undertake that will fully activate your wild, innocent, generous spirit?

SCORPIO (Oct 23–Nov 21): Are you anxious and agitated, afraid that you’re careening out of control? Is there a flustered voice in your head moaning, “Stop the insanity!”? Well, relax, dear Scorpio. I promise you that you no longer have to worry about going cray-cray. Why? Because you have already gone cray-cray, my friend. That is correct. You slipped over the threshold a few days ago and have been living in Bonkersville ever since. And since you are obviously still alive and functioning, I think it’s obvious that the danger has passed. Here’s the new truth: If you surrender to the uproar, if you let it teach you all it has to teach you, you will find a lively and intriguing kind of peace.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22–Dec 21): To give you the oracle that best matches your cur-

rent astrological omens, I’ve borrowed from “Sweetness,” a poem by Stephen Dunn. I urge you to memorize it or write it on a piece of paper that you will carry around with you everywhere you go. Say Dunn’s words as if they were your own: “Often a sweetness comes / as if on loan, stays just long enough / to make sense of what it means to be alive, / then returns to its dark / source. As for me, I don’t care / where it’s been, or what bitter road / it’s traveled / to come so far, to taste so good.”

CAPRICORN (Dec 22–Jan 19): In her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard apologizes to God and Santa Claus and a nice but eccentric older woman named Miss White, whom she knew as a child. “I am sorry I ran from you,” she writes to them. “I am still running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain.” Judging from your current astrological omens, Capricorn, I’d say that now would be a good time for you to do something similar: Take an inventory of the beauty and love and power you have sought to escape and may still be trying to avoid. You’re finally ready to stop running and embrace at least some of that good stuff.

AQUARIUS (Jan 20–Feb 18): The Dragon Lives Again is a 1977 film that tells the story of martial arts legend Bruce Lee fighting bad guys in the underworld. Among the villains he defeats are Dracula, James Bond, the Godfather, Clint Eastwood, and the Exorcist. I urge you to use this as inspiration, Aquarius. Create an imaginary movie in your mind’s eye. You’re the hero, of course. Give yourself a few superpowers, and assemble a cast of scoundrels from your past—anyone who has done you wrong. Then watch the epic tale unfold as you do with them what Bruce Lee did to Dracula and company. Yes, it’s only pretend. But you may be surprised at how much this helps you put your past behind you. Think of it as a purgative meditation that will free you to move in the direction of the best possible future.

PISCES (Feb 19–March 20): After studying the myths and stories of many cultures throughout history, Joseph Campbell arrived at a few conclusions about the nature of the human quest. Here’s one that’s apropos for you right now: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” He came up with several variations on this idea, including this one: “The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.” I urge you to consider making this your operative hypothesis for the coming weeks, Pisces.

Homework: Name 10 personal possessions that you’d put in a time capsule to be dug up by your descendants in 500 years. Testify at freewillastrology.com.

SAVAGE LOVE

Flat-Footed BY DAN SAVAGE

I am a straight male , 30, in a long-term monogamous relationship. I love my wife, we have good sex, and often. When we first got together, I had a mild foot fetish, and she has gorgeous pedis. We have done and still do foot play on occasion. But my fetish has grown stronger as time has passed, and I have grown thirstier for her appendages. They are all I can think about. I am still willing to do everything with my partner and make sure she is satisfied. I don’t want anyone else, and the relationship is wonderful other than this issue. It’s just that she is not much into foot play and is rarely willing to partake. When she does partake, it is brief, and then we are on to the next. How can I relate to her my insatiable desire for her lovely appendages without sounding like an absolute freak? Is it fair for me to ask for this after being together so long without the same need?

Fighting Extreme Erotic Tension

I didn’t run your letter the first ten thousand times you sent it, FEET, because any regular reader of my column—and someone who e-mails me on a daily basis for three years is presumed to be a regular reader—would know what my advice would be in a case like yours: Level with your fucking wife about your boring fucking foot fetish already, you fucking coward. You downplayed your kink at the start of your relationship, and you haven’t opened up to your wife about how your kink has grown in intensity over the years. So she may think those brief-and-on-to-the-next foot sessions are enough to satisfy what you’ve allowed her to believe is a mild foot fetish. Would those sessions be longer, more intense, and freakier if she knew how central this was to your sexuality? There’s only one way to find out, FEET: Stop worrying about sounding like an “absolute freak” and come out to your partner as the absolute freak that you are. (“My darling, for years I’ve pretended that my thing for feet is mild, but it’s actually an all-consuming passion, and I need to spend more time licking, kissing, and whatever-the-fucking your lovely appendages or I shall go mad blah blah blah.”)

While your dilemma is stupid and your spamming is annoying (and your wife potentially fictitious), FEET, I chose to run your letter because this is actually a pretty good hypothetical: “Is it fair for me to ask for this after being together so long without the same need?”

Sexual boredom is a huge problem in many long-term monogamous relationships. We humans are wired—male, female, and everything in between; gay, straight, and ditto—to seek some degree of novelty and variety in everything we do. Two people who agree not to seek sexual novelty or variety outside of their relationship have to work at creating some of both inside the relationship or risk watching their sexual connection wither and die. (That’s not always fatal—there are plenty of happy and sexless marriages out there—but a dead sexual connection can go gangrenous and poison a relationship.) So one partner asking another to explore a newfound sexual interest—or one partner coming clean about a suppressed or downplayed kink—can be a very good thing.

There is risk in disclosing: What if one partner’s “new need” is another partner’s libido killer, i.e., something that makes it difficult or impossible for the disclosee to connect sexually with the discloser ever again? But I would argue, based on the mail I receive (a skewed sample, yes, but a pretty massive sample), that sexual boredom poses a much bigger threat to a relationship or marriage than coming clean about an old or new kink ever could.

I’m a straight woman who has been married for 10 years. We’ve been in a rut, emotionally and sexually, for a few years. My closest girlfriends

think we’re bored. Neither of us has done anything to harm or sabotage our marriage. We are very good together, and the love we have for one another is huge. I have plenty of male friends, but there is one that I’ve been getting to know— a colleague—and he is a stellar human being. We really connect. He kissed me a few weeks ago. I liked it. I like him. The impact on my marriage has been strangely great. I disclosed everything to my husband. He said, “I couldn’t get in the way of your happiness. Is this something you need to explore?” This is the nonthreatened response of someone who truly loves me. We’re communicating better now, our sex life is off the freakin’ chain, and it is evident that we’re committed to working through things as a couple. So why can’t I stop thinking of my colleague?

I think of him all day long. I think of him when I’m making love to my husband. I don’t plan on seeing him anymore. He is a distraction to my marriage. But what on earth do you do to get someone out of your head?

Wanting It Forever

If you feel like spending time with your colleague is a genuine threat to your marriage, and if protecting your marriage from genuine threats is a priority (and it should be), then keep doing what you’re doing: Keep fucking your husband, keep avoiding your colleague, keep feeling your feelings (because what other choice do you have?), and with enough time and fucking and feeling, your crush on your colleague should wither away.

But that said…

So far, it would appear that this affair—this emotional affair—has had a positive impact on your marriage. Far from threatening your marriage, your feelings for your colleague dislodged something that reinvigorated your marriage. (You’re out of that rut now, right?) So if your colleague knew you were married and didn’t ask you to leave your husband, and if your husband didn’t threaten to divorce you, but asked if this—meaning something more than friendship with this colleague—was “something you need to explore,” you might be able to have a relationship with your colleague without having to end your marriage. Love isn’t always a zero-sum game.

If a random guy hands a girl his number—unsolicited—on a piece of paper without even talking to the girl first, is it wrong for the girl’s boyfriend to send this random guy a picture of his shit? I think it’s okay to send a picture. Others seem to think it’s abhorrent. Also, I think worse things have happened to people who ask out girls with protective and insecure boyfriends.

Butthole King

Asshole move, BK, but it’s not really Random Guy to whom you’re being an asshole. RG is just gonna delete the pic and get on with his life. So it’s not really RG that you’re trying to intimidate or humiliate with your shit pics. It’s your girlfriend. You’re telling her that she’s stuck with a guy who regards her as his property and will react like a huge asshole whenever someone else expresses the least interest in her—even if she didn’t invite it.

And you shouldn’t act like an asshole even if she did invite it. Sometimes partnered people engage in a little innocent flirting because it makes them feel attractive and alive—and then, all cranked up, they go home and fuck the shit out of their partners—and if you can’t chill the fuck out about it, BK, sooner or later, your girlfriend is gonna get sick of your shit and delete you.

On the Savage Lovecast, Dan and fashionista Simon Doonan talk fashion and get real bitchy at savagelovecast.com.

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