The Stranger Vol. 23, No. 6

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OCT. 10 - OCT. 13

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STUDY GUIDE

QUESTIONS FOR THE STRANGER , VOLUME 23, ISSUE 6

1. In what could be the most unfortunate return to political commentary since G. Gordon Liddy, PAUL CONSTANT writes about the government shutdown without once mentioning the words sequester, default, or bipartisan. Instead, he employs a litany of cusses, in addition to the words “orangutan,” “popsicle stand,” and “fart joke.” Two can play at this game: Write a Constantesque nonsense story about the government shutdown that employs the following randomly selected words: tonsillectomy, chartreuse, mongoloid.

2. Compare and contrast CIENNA MADRID’s news story about a bike-share program that isn’t receiving support from local businesses with Constant’s creative-writing-project-turned-political-screed. Here’s an example of a comparative statement: While it’s true that Ms. Madrid’s story only affects a tiny sliver of a fringe population of Seattle, at least her essay is awash in (possibly too many) facts and figures, unlike Mr. Constant’s made-up mishmash of memoir and liberal pot-banging.

3. BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT complains about Capitol Hill’s many themed

bars in a funny, well-timed rant, but she then proceeds to swoon over a Southern-themed Capitol Hill bar called Witness. Does Ms. Clement understand the definition of the word “hypocrisy,” do you think?

4. In a dour, death-obsessed visual art review, JEN GRAVES writes, “The clothes interact newly and complexly with the paintings.” Is “complexly” actually a word? Should it be?

5. In the film section, DAVID SCHMADER reviews several films in this year’s Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. Do you believe that niche film festivals like this should be graded on a curve? Do you think that film reviews containing the phrase “an erect wang ejaculates” should be taken seriously? Why or why not?

6. MELODY DATZ opens her dance review with a discussion of a penis flapping in the breeze. Can you find a more obvious attempt to draw readers into a stultifying subject with the promise of sexual content in this week’s Stranger? Support your claims with textual proof.

TICKET SUPPORT DEVELOPER Rick Miller

Information Technology

SUPERHERO Erin Resso

Circulation

CIRCULATION

CIRCULATION

LAST DAYS

The Week in Review

BY DAVID SCHMADER

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 This week of pixelation protests, fatal hugs, and a whole bunch of insane doings in Washington, DC, kicks off with this amazing sentence from the Guardian: “A television show funded by the National Rifle Association has been canceled after the host of the program shot an elephant in the face and then compared his critics to Adolf Hitler.” The trouble began last Tuesday, when the NBC Sports Network aired a new episode of Under Wild Skies, an NRA-funded hunting show hosted by NRA strategist Tony Makris, who spent the episode stalking an elephant in Botswana with a .577 rifle he said was “made to shoot ivory.” “Makris and a guide got within around 20 feet of the elephant before shooting it in the face,” reports the Guardian “Both men posed with the dead animal before toasting the hunt with champagne .” Unsurprisingly, the episode drew protests from

To submit an unsigned confession or accusation, send an e-mail to ianonymous@thestranger.com. Please remember to change the names of the innocent and guilty.

THE THINGS YOU SAY MAKE YOU AWFUL

I can’t help but take it personally when you talk about how horrified you are at the weight you might gain if you eat more than your allotted two tablespoons of hummus for lunch or skip a workout at the gym. When you spit out words of disgust at the sight of a person who is heavy, I’m honestly shocked at why it is such an affront to you personally. You are so convinced that you possess an above-average intelligence, so it cannot slip your notice that I am fat when you make these comments in front of me. It pisses me off that your bigoted, shallow attitude puts me on the defensive and I feel compelled to silently list my attributes as proof that I’m indeed a person of value and substance. Meanwhile, you’re a sad, shallow person. The evidence that supports this conclusion: You have no old friends or long-lasting friendships, your relationships with men are abysmal failures, and other than an obligatory holiday visit every two and half years, you have no relationship with your own family. Here’s a tip for free from a fatty: If you stopped obsessing over your BMI and started working on what’s on the inside, you could have real friendships with quality people, and you might cultivate enough genuine warmth so that you don’t repel every decent man with your reptilian coldness.

BENEFICIARY OF ANIMAL RACISM?

animal-rights groups and other people who don’t like watching elephants get fatally shot in the face, which only egged on Makris. “[Animal activists] go, well nobody should shoot an elephant,” Makris told NRA News. “I said, why? And they go they’re so big and kind and gentle and smart and I said, okay, let me ask you a question. Should I be able to shoot birds? Well, I guess that’s okay. Ducks? Yeah. Pigeons? Oh, they’re flying rats, okay… Do you realize that if you subscribe to that philosophy you are committing a very unique form of animal racism?… And they said but they’re so big and special and they’re smarter. And I went, you know, Hitler would have said the same thing.” Which brings us to today, when “NBC Sports Network confirmed that the show would be pulled from its programming,” reports the Guardian. “The network cited the behavior of the show’s host as a key factor in the decision.”

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1 Speaking of gunanigans, the week continues in Phoenix, where today a 24-year-old woman gave her boyfriend a hug and wound up fatally shot by the gun in his waistband. Details come from KPHO News, which tells the story in three sentences: “[Police] said the woman and her 18-year-old boyfriend were hugging when she became uncomfortable with a gun in his waistband… The man was in the process of removing the gun when it discharged and shot the woman. Officials say the woman was taken to a nearby hospital where she later died.” Believed to be accidental, the fatal shooting will be reviewed by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.

•• Also today, a relatively small band of far-right US congresspeople forced the shutdown of the federal government , putting 800,000 federal employees on indefinite unpaid furlough and requiring another 1.3 million federal employees to work without pay until our elected officials figure this shit out.

•• Also also today: Happy birthday to human treasures Julie Andrews (born on this day in 1935), Youssou N’Dour (1959), and Zach Galifianakis (1969), as well as cuckoo garbage human Randy Quaid (1950).

NEW COLUMN!

P.S. Heavy people are battling their own demons, and they sure as fuck don’t need a trashy booze-swilling bitch like you making things worse. Thank god my brother got the fuck away from you.

—Anonymous

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2 In stupider news, the week continues in the fevered brainspace of the seven or so Iowa housewives behind One Million Moms, the “pro-family” organization that’s made headlines protesting everything from JC Penney’s hiring of Ellen DeGeneres as a spokesperson to the ABC Family show The Fosters, which dares to show a lesbian couple living a normal life, free of flaming rain and corrective rape. OMM’s latest target: the restaurant chain Ruby Tuesday, which the Moms blasted this week for subjecting families to offensive pixelation. “Ruby Tuesday’s new pretzel

WHOSE BUTT IS TOOTIN’? BY VLADIMIR PUTIN

Privet, dumb Americans! It is I, Russian president Vladimir Putin, and… sniff SNIFF, SNIFF What’s that smell? It smell like… someone’s butt is tootin’! And it smell like… it come from the bottom of your Republican Congress!

Ohhhhhh, yes! You Americans are soooo “exceptional”! (I am—how you stupid Americans say—“making with the sarcasm.”) I tell you what… I have deal. Let us agree that you never, ever advise Russia on how to run country as long as you have Republican idiot like Ted Cruz making your laws. He the one doing filibuster, nyet? More like filibustering your American BALLS, am I right, HAR-HAR-HARRRRR. Ohhhhhh, you Americans are “exceptional,” all right. Exceptional at electing the hillbilly who knows nothing about governing and has the stinky bottom that goes “toot!” I hear you elect the Texas Republican congressman Randy Neugebauer, who helped cause government shutdown. After vote, he yell at furloughed park ranger (who was not getting paid right now because of Neugebauer) for refusing to let him into a World War II memorial that was closed—because of shutdown caused by Neugebauer! HAR-HAR-HARRRRR!! Proud of yourselves, stinky toot Americans? Oh how exceptional you are… in the area of bottom toots! HAR-HAR-HARRRRR!! Toot!

HAR-HAR-HARRRRR!! Toot!

HAR-HAR-HARRRRR!! Tooooooooooot!

HAR-HAR-HARRRRR!!

I see you next week, idiots.

burger ‘Fun Between the Buns’ ad campaign is tasteless, blurring everything in the middle of the burger similar to an advertisement that reveals inappropriate images,” reads OMM’s official statement. “Everything between the top and bottom hamburger buns is pixelated, including condiments, meat, cheese, and other toppings. This should only be done when trying to protect someone’s privacy and should not be tolerated when unnecessary in any other form of media. Marketing campaigns using sexual innuendos are never appropriate, especially when advertising food for a family restaurant. Offensive ads cause parents to lose their appetites and their respect for a company.” First, thank you for this, One Million Moms. Second, shame on you, Ruby Tuesday. Even a pro-pixelation sodomite like Last Days can agree that the slogan “Fun Between the Buns” is blet-worthy.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 3 In much worse news, the week continues with Miriam Carey, the 34-year-old dental hygienist who today attempted to drive through a White House security checkpoint, struck a Secret Service officer, and led authorities on a two-mile, threeminute chase down Pennsylvania Avenue before she was fatally shot by cops. “[Carey] had been suffering from mental health issues… and a troubling fixation on President Obama,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “Miriam Carey’s declining mental stability… developed into a belief that the president was ‘controlling’ her life.” Condolences to all, especially Carey’s 1-year-old daughter, who was in the car throughout the fatal freak-out and, amazingly, was not hurt. (Bonus sentence from the Times: “Lawmakers on Capitol Hill used Thursday’s incident to press for an agreement to end the government shutdown, noting that the Capitol police who responded are not being paid.”)

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4 Speaking of fatal mayhem in the nation’s capital, the week continues with John Constantino, the 64-year-old New Jersey man who today visited the touristpacked National Mall in Washington, DC, where he doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire. “Bystanders used their shirts to tamp down the flames on the man,” reports Reuters, but it was no use, with the self-immolating Constantino being pronounced dead at a DC hospital by day’s end.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 5 Nothing happened today, unless you count an astounding story out of Oklahoma, where a zoo worker stuck her arm into a tiger’s cage and soon found her arm in the mouth of a tiger. “The woman, who was not identified, was reported in stable condition, Joe Schreibvogel, owner of the Garold Wayne Interactive Zoological Park in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, said in a statement posted on the zoo’s Facebook page,” reports Reuters. “Schreibvogel said the tiger would not be destroyed.”

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 6 Nothing happened today (unless you count the millions of people who didn’t put their arms in tiger cages and were not bitten by tigers).

Send hot tips to lastdays@thestranger.com, and follow me on Twitter @davidschmader.

We blog all day long from tiger cages at THESTRANGER.COM/SLOG

LOCALLY OWNED

THU " OCTOBER 10

CREATURE FEATURE SCREENING: THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS {1960} THIS CULT CLASSIC STARS A CLUMSY YOUNG SHOPKEEPER INTENT ON CARING FOR A BLOOD-SUCKING PLANT—NO MATTER WHAT THE COST.

SAT " OCTOBER 12

BOWIE INVADES: FASHIONABLY UNDEAD BASH COSTUME CONTESTS, STELLAR HAIR AND MAKEUP BY VAIN, GALLERY TOURS, DRINK SPECIALS, AND MUSIC BY THE BAND WHO FELL TO EARTH {BOWIE COVER BAND} AND DJ SEVERED HANS. 21+

MON

OCTOBER

WED " OCTOBER 16

HAUNTED BONUS ROUND: LUIGI’S MANSION VACUUM UP GHOSTS AND OTHER CREEPY CREATURES WITH LUIGI’S MANSION ON EMP’S SKY CHURCH

The Good News and the Bad News About Bike Share

The Project Will Be Useless in the Neighborhoods Where It’s Needed Most if Businesses Don’t Step Up Soon

BY CIENNA MADRID

Let’s say you work in Pioneer Square and want to meet up with an Amazon-employed friend to sample South Lake Union’s famous fleet of lunchtime food trucks. Or you live

in South Lake Union and want to hit up Pike Place Market for fresh produce. Here’s the problem: Two-mile distances like these are too far to walk for quick trips, busing isn’t direct, and parking in popular areas is a hassle. All of these factors discourage people from branching out of their neighborhoods for short jaunts.

But Puget Sound Bike Share (PSBS) could change the way we navigate through our city. By May 2014, PSBS hopes to open 50 bike stands stocked with 500 bikes throughout downtown, Pioneer Square, Capitol Hill, South Lake Union, and the University District.

Here’s how it would work: Bikes would be available to rent for either a small monthly fee or an annual fee (around $85) or a 24-hour membership of around $9. Don’t carry a helmet around with you? No problem—the bike stands will rent those for around $3. Imagine grabbing a bike from a stand blocks from your home or office and biking downtown for a work meeting or to the weekend farmers market in the University District. Wherever you end up, you’ll find another PSBS bike stand within a few blocks of your destination to check that bike in. No bike locks necessary, no parking hassles, no long bus waits. When you’re ready to go home, check out another bike and ride home (or take the bus). This is the future of Seattle and, eventually, of Puget Sound.

At least, it should be. But there’s a problem. PSBS was developed as a countywide

SOURCES SAY

public-private partnership, yet the business community isn’t stepping up to help fund it.

“We’ve seen a lot of initial excitement with little follow-through,” says Holly Houser, director of PSBS, who’s been in talks with the region’s largest companies to sponsor the program since last fall. While Seattle Children’s Hospital has stepped in with a $500,000 donation, Houser says that companies like Amazon, Starbucks, Vulcan, Alaska Airlines, Capitol One, BECU, Cambia (Blue Cross/ Blue Shield), and Microsoft have declined to sponsor PSBS, or have simply ignored their inquiries. (I contacted each of these businesses for comment. Only a representative for Vulcan responded, saying, “Your info is off—PSBS has not discussed sponsorship opportunities for that event with Vulcan.” Houser insists otherwise.)

Meanwhile, Seattle’s politicians have embraced bike share. In early September, the Seattle City Council passed an ordinance allowing bike share in the public right-of-way.

But as it now stands, PSBS only has $1.75 million in federal and state grant money to open 12 stations in the University District and 17 stations in South Lake Union. Which means that if bike share doesn’t find a company willing to commit to investing $1.5 million annually for five years by mid-November, the scope of the program will be cut to 29 stations and 290 bikes and limited to the South Lake Union and University District neighborhoods. In other words, this new, smaller bike share would be virtually useless to most of the city.

easy access to medical cannabis continues, the goals and potential of Initiative 502 [which legalized marijuana for recreational use] will be undermined.” But activists argue the council is violating voter intent. The initiative to legalize recreational pot last fall was not supposed to reduce patients’ access to medical marijuana. As longtime medical marijuana activist Philip Dawdy told the council, “You are going to be punishing patients if they get shut down.”

Eliminating 21 bike-share stations (and 210 bikes) from the densest neighborhoods— Capitol Hill, Belltown, Pioneer Square, and downtown, according to 2008 estimates from the Department of Planning and Development—would effectively downgrade a useful commuting tool to a barely useful novelty for University District and South Lake Union employees. You know, kinda like the South Lake Union streetcar.

“It’s been really frustrating—especially dealing with Amazon,” adds Houser, because South Lake Union is destined to get bikeshare stations around the Amazon campus regardless of the rest of the city. “It’s going to serve their employees,” Houser says, “but so far, they’re not willing to support it.”

Title sponsorship isn’t an altruistic venture—it comes with the boon of picking the name and color of the bikes, and having their brand paraded around Seattle. Think Starbikes. Amazoom. Alaska Airbikes. By the end of 2014, more than 30 cities in North America will have bike share. It’s just hitting the West Coast—San Francisco, Vancouver, and Portland are all working to launch their own bike-share programs—but it’s been successfully implemented in big cities like Chicago and Washington, DC. Citigroup

found the state senator leading incumbent Mike McGinn 52 percent to 28 percent in the race for Seattle mayor. There are a ton of nits that could be picked with the cross tabs, by there’s zero good news here for McGinn, so it’s not really worth the effort.

the governor on September 30, “If relatively

• A new poll conducted by PPP on behalf of Washington Conservation Voters, which backs Ed Murray’s mayoral campaign, has

• “The poll is bullshit,” counters McGinn campaign consultant John Wyble on Slog. “The Murray camp has Murray up 12. On the mayor’s side, our calling shows us down 7. We have three debates, tv ads, and the best ground game in the history of Seattle. This will be close.”

WHERE YOU WILL BE ABLE TO RENT A BIKE

The yellow areas will have bikes, but the orange areas, in the middle of Seattle, may not.

invested $45 million in NYC’s “Citi Bike” program, the nation’s largest bike-share program, which launched last May with 6,000 bikes. It was quickly branded a “marketing triumph” by advertising firms. In the bike share’s first month alone, the number of riders doubled expectations. In four months, New Yorkers have taken 3.3 million rides covering more than seven million miles—each mile serving as a traveling billboard for the bank.

“With all the brands we have in Puget Sound, it’s shocking that no one has stepped up,” says Eddie Rehfeldt, creative director for the public relations firm Waggener Edstrom Worldwide.

“For us, supporting this was a no-brainer,” says Paulo Nunes-Ueno, director of transportation and sustainability for Seattle Children’s Hospital, the only local business to invest a large sum of money in PSBS. “The experience in other cities is really clear, there’s so much unmet demand for bike share… We see sponsoring bike share as part of our commitment to being kind, responsible neighbors and good stewards of the planet.”

We’re equally biased on our blog! THESTRANGER.COM/SLOG

• On Thursday, October 3, Council President Sally Clark banned Sam Bellomio from speaking before the council for two weeks after he called Council Member Tim Burgess “a dick.” Bellomio, who is running for Sally Bagshaw’s council seat, routinely uses his twominute public testimony to yell at top volume and call the council members “crooks.” At Monday’s council meeting, Clark announced that they’ll be updating rules regarding public comment so that repeatedly disruptive commenters suffer consequences. Despite Thursday’s commenting ban, Bellomio was allowed to speak during the meeting. “This is worse than Nazi Germany!” he said.

Culture Shakti

Cops Gone Wild!

and then barked this screed:

Video Catches Seattle’s Finest Threatening to Harass Me at Work

BY DOMINIC HOLDEN

Two months ago, I wrote a cover story about what happened after I photographed a crowd of cops downtown surrounding a man. At the time, I recounted most of my story from memory and a few handwritten notes.

As I reported then, King County sergeant Patrick “K.C.” Saulet threatened to arrest me if I didn’t leave the city sidewalk and nearby county transit plaza (even though standing on that public property and taking photos of officers is legal). Afterward, I approached three officers leaving the scene to ask which officer was in charge (also legal). In response, Seattle Police Department officer John Marion exploded in a threatening tirade.

What I didn’t know at the time was that a nearby police van’s video system captured Officer Marion’s tantrum (unfortunately, there is no video of my exchange with Sergeant Saulet).

The video, which I obtained through a public records request, shows that Officer Marion

“I’m going to come to The Stranger and bother you at work and see how you like it, how about that?” he began. “I’m going to come there on my time and come bother you at work. Okay, give me a business card, and I’ll come bother you while you are trying to do your job and see how you like that. M’kay? Oh, he’s going to write about it some more.” I’d taken my notepad out to jot down his comments. “I’ll just come to The Stranger and find out—and come bother you at work. I’m sure your boss will love it when I just come in there and bother you while you’re trying to write your newspaper.”

This was a direct, unambiguous, and repeated threat from an armed man to track me down expressly to harass me on private property.

Officer Marion also demonstrated a skewed perception of what was happening. He said that taking pictures of the cops was “getting involved” and “confront[ing]” officers (in fact, Sergeant Saulet had approached me). Officer Marion indicated that asking who was in charge amounted to “harassing” officers. Finally, he claimed taking photos of cops and writing about the incident amounted to “threatening” them.

I did not harass or threaten cops. But the recording proves Marion has little credibility; he claimed twice that the sidewalk near the transit station is private property—it’s absolutely public property.

repeatedly claimed that the King County Metro transit plaza and adjoining sidewalk were private property, even though that is demonstrably false, and that he insisted numerous times that he planned to visit The Stranger’s offices for the sole purpose of harassing me.

A microphone attached to Officer Marion also reveals that, before I even approached him, cops were talking about the incident. In particular, it sounds like Officer Marion was concerned with me taking photos. “He is trying to take a picture of you…” it sounds like he tells Sergeant Saulet. Marion then adds that Saulet shouldn’t worry because the photo would be poor quality. “Don’t worry, the picture of your badge is going to be blurred.” The recording also reveals Officer Marion mocking me (saying I was “pouting” after I’d been threatened with arrest), officers laughing at me, and one of them ridiculing my statement that the sidewalk was public property.

Then the video shows me approaching Officer Marion and other officers to ask who the commanding officer was, which is when Officer Marion demanded to know where I worked

“You’re on private property here,” he claimed. “It’s private property,” which he then called “the truth.”

Admittedly, my incident wasn’t physical like recent incidents that involved Seattle cops kicking, punching, and shooting people. But cops escalating normal incidents like this one is still serious—it erodes a yearslong effort to build trust between citizens and the officers who are supposed to protect (and respect) them, and it undermines the good work that most cops do on a daily basis. The Feds warned that escalation was part of SPD’s problem with excessive force, which resulted in a court decree last year that puts SPD under control of a federal judge. That’s why I’ve filed a complaint against Officer Marion. The initial investigation is complete and is currently under review by SPD brass. (The county is conducting a separate investigation of Sergeant Saulet.)

I doubt Officer Marion will be fired. But if I lied at my job repeatedly, particularly if I lied about the law, I would be fired. And cops shouldn’t be held to a lower standard than regular people—they should be held to a higher standard. If the SPD deems this to be a matter of “rudeness,” as the chief suggested, then they have failed to protect the public from problem cops, failed to build bridges with their community, and failed in their duty to reform the police department. Officer

Do Districts Have a Race Problem?

Would-Be Supporters Are Holding Back

BY ANNA MINARD

See that map down there? It’s what the districts for future Seattle City Council elections would look like if Charter Amendment 19 passes this November. One council member would represent each district, and two more would be voted on at-large by the whole city. The proponents of the plan

a citywide legislator represents so many people, it’s increasingly rare to see a viable grassroots campaign or a real challenge to entrenched incumbents. So we end up with downtown-business-backed candidates over and over, or incumbents who stay on forever and end up answering only to their donors.

But while powerful progressive and socialjustice organizations have flocked to support the other election-reform measure on the fall ballot—that’s Proposition 1, which creates a public-finance system for city council elections—the Seattle Districts Now endorsement list is almost entirely individual citizens, with a handful of politicians and organizations.

If district elections are about giving more people a voice, why is the campaign running without support from any major progressive groups?

The answer seems to lie right there in that map—in the lower right corner, in particular.

District 2 would be the only district representing a majority of people of color.

“We as a coalition are definitely in favor of districted elections in general,” says Dana Laurent, executive director of Win/Win Network, a coalition of progressive and labor groups. “But only when maps are drawn to increase the participation for people of color and underrepresented communities.” This map? “This is not a map we can get behind.”

Her coalition members had proposed a nine-district map that included “two majority people of color districts and close to three influence districts, where people of color would be represented at 30 percent and above,” says Laurent. But districting proposals have failed before, and Seattle Districts Now thought a hybrid system with two at-large seats stood a better chance of winning at the polls.

Critics are concerned that District 2 is the only district with a majority population of racial minorities.

say their goal is to make the council more responsive to citizens’ concerns and more representative of the city—right now, it’s so expensive to run citywide elections, and

Lawyers Still Can’t Smoke Pot

Local Attorneys Ask for Changes to Ethics Rules

BY BEN LIVINGSTON

I

n the 1976 anthem “Legalize It,” Peter Tosh sings this phrase: “Judges smoke it/ Even the lawyer too/Legalize it.”

But even though we legalized it last fall, lawyers are still out of luck.

Last week, the King County Bar Association asked the Washington State Supreme Court to let attorneys use marijuana without punishment and to advise pot businesses that may violate federal law.

State rules disallow attorneys from committing a “criminal act,” and despite voters passing Initiative 502, cannabis remains illegal federally—even the smallest puff crosses that federal line. The KCBA proposal would add language clarifying that attorneys do not violate state ethics rules if their federal transgressions are specifically permitted under state law.

“KCBA remains greatly concerned that over 14,000 attorneys in King County, as well

The district campaign’s sponsor, Faye Garneau, calls claims that this map disenfranchises people of color “garbage” and says voters want some at-large representation. And as campaign spokesman Eugene Wasserman said earlier this year when we first reported on this split, “We think we have a great map.” He also argued that having a so-called “majority minority” district doesn’t automatically result in diverse candidates—he name-checked Adam Smith, the representative from the diverse 9th Congressional District: “You can’t get any whiter than him.”

But Laurent says a different map could have gained broader support.

as all attorneys in our state, are caught in a ‘catch-22’ situation without changes to our state’s Rules of Professional Responsibility,” wrote KCBA president Anne Daly. The proposal asks for a speedy judgment on the matter, noting that the state is less than two months away from implementing legal pot rules, while attorneys have no clear guidance on the matter.

The Washington State Bar Association is also considering the issue, but in July declined an invitation to join a work group, saying it would refer the issue to an ethics committee meeting next week. But the county bar didn’t want to wait—Daly says the Supreme Court’s Rules Committee meets later this month and change requests must be filed by October 15— so they proceeded on their own.

Earlier this year, KCBA filed a similar proposal with the American Bar Association, but withdrew the motion when the state bar refused to support it. “We did not believe that was the appropriate venue,” says state bar spokeswoman Debra Carnes. She says WSBA has a unique role as a regulatory agency.

At next week’s ethics meeting, the state bar will decide whether to work on an advisory opinion on the pot topic. And if the Supreme Court publishes KCBA’s proposed rule for public comment, Carnes says, “That’s when we would weigh in, review, and comment.”

SEATTLE

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

OUTRAGE QUEENS UTRAG

If You Don’t Let Republicans Get Their Way, They’re Going to Kill This Orangutan

BY PAUL CONSTANT

There’s this story I heard once from a homeless veteran I’ll call James. He had a pinched face and a smoky voice and huge, square glasses and the kind of wicked alcoholism that accelerated from zero to knife-fight in about half a sip of beer. I was working the night shift in a coffee shop, and James, who at the time was sober and taking a computer programming class, was keeping me company. He told me about this thing he used to do, back in Vietnam.

On those days when he didn’t have to be anywhere, James would go out into the jungle. His friends used to go into town to pick up some prostitutes, but James was in one of his religious phases, and so he didn’t tag along. Instead, he’d hollow out a coconut, put his gold watch inside of it, and leave it on the jungle floor. Then he’d go hide, and wait. If he was lucky, an orangutan would come along and notice the watch gleaming inside the coconut. It would reach inside to see what the shiny thing was. James would fashion the hole in such a way that an open hand could get into the coconut, but a closed fist was too big to get out. The orangutan couldn’t figure this out, and it didn’t want to let go of the shiny thing, so its hand would be stuck inside.

The orangutan couldn’t seem to make the connection between its hand being stuck and letting go of the watch. Those two problems—the stuck hand and the wanting the thing inside the coconut—were hurtling forward through its ape brain on parallel tracks, and they seemed unsolvable. And so the orangutan started to get agitated. It was at that point that James would jump out of the shadows, he told me, and quickly beat the confused orangutan to death with the butt of his gun.

James clearly loved telling the story, and I loved it, too: It seemed to have so many meanings. If we’re the orangutan in the story, we don’t understand that the simple solution to our predicament would be obvious if we could just let go of the thing we want. If we’re James in the story, we’re unknowingly acting out the cruelty and the pointlessness of the Vietnam War on a tiny scale, for recreation, even as the larger war is playing out all around us. I’ve been thinking a lot about James’s story since the government shut down on October 1. I’ll tell you why in a minute. But first, I want to talk about the internet.

The internet is an engine powered by outrage. You sit at your desk dying to escape from your job, and so you visit one of your favorite blogs, or Twitter. What do you find there? Posts written solely with the intent of making you feel outraged, because outrage is the cheapest way to get a response out of a human being. A celebrity rubbed her clothed ass into another celebrity’s clothed groin. Outrageous! Some Christian busybody banned a book that you love from a school library because of a

sexual reference. How dare she? This person is arguing that a sports team name might be racist toward Native Americans. Time to leave a comment complaining about the political correctness police! And, say, why isn’t there a White History Month, anyway?

It now takes so much to outrage the American public into action that we’re really unshockable. That’s why America keeps cutting itself, in the hopes that it’ll feel something. Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the last week’s worth of events. On October 1, congressional Republicans decided to shut the government down. Let’s put it another way: The party controlling half of one of our three branches of government has decided to hold the entire nation’s well-being hostage. So-called “nonessential” government services, which include food and shelter for impoverished mothers and children, treatments for kids with cancer, educational aid, and the front lines of scientific research, are closed until further notice. Also closed: more than half of health and human services, all food inspection, the Environmental Protection Agency, and NASA. The NSA is still spying on you during the shutdown, but because of the shutdown, you can’t file a Freedom of Information Act request to find out what they know. Oh well. At least the plush congressional gyms— featuring saunas, swimming pools, a steam room, and paddleball courts—are still open, so poor Paul Ryan won’t have to skip leg day.

Republicans say they’re doing this because they want Obamacare repealed. They’ve voted 41 times to repeal Obamacare. Never mind that Obamacare was voted into law by Congress, signed into law by President Barack Obama, and approved by the Supreme Court, meaning it’s survived every one of the checks and balances that the founding fathers wrote into the Constitution. Never mind that President Obama won—twice! Never mind that health-care costs are choking America to death, and so any sort of a solution—even one as essentially conservative as Obamacare, which Mitt Romney basically wrote—is necessary to save the middle and lower classes of this country. This is apparently a dictatorship, and the dictators of half of one-third of the government don’t want it. So they’ll stop the whole fucking show until they get their way.

In another time, maybe before CNN punctured our skulls with its fangs and feasted on our outrage glands, we’d be protesting in the streets. As it is, if anyone’s even paying attention, they’re observing this whole thing like it’s a game, where the “team” with the most “points” wins the “news cycle,” whatever the fuck that is. And it won’t be over until enough Republicans cave to reality and decide to end the shutdown.

Or, no wait. Based on just about everyone’s count, there are enough Republican votes to end the shutdown. But Speaker of

the House John Boehner refuses to bring it to a vote, because he’s scared of the antigovernment Tea Party Republicans. In lieu of winning in real life, Republicans have cornered the market on outrage. It’s not a bad instinct, because outrage is still the currency by which you can most easily seize the public’s attention. Every time they make a public appearance, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are trying to crest a wave of outrage that they can parlay into a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

They’re not alone. Two days after voting for the shutdown, Texas congressman Randy Neugebauer tried to lead a group of teabaggy veterans into the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC, but it was closed, because the WWII Memorial is a federal park. When a Park Service employee tried to stop Congressman Neugebauer, whose American flag on a dowel stuck into his breast pocket gave him the appearance of a burger served in a TGI Fridays on the Fourth of July, he lost his shit on her: “How do you look at them… and deny them access?” Neugebauer said, indicating the veterans. High on the fumes of his own hypocritical outrage, he added, “The Park Service should be ashamed of themselves.”

The employee responded, “I’m not ashamed.”

Neugebauer replied, “You should be.”

Those fumes must be some good shit. These guys are in a daze. After Indiana congressman Marlin Stutzman told the Washington Examiner that his fellow Republicans in Congress are “not going to be disrespected” by President Obama and the Democrats, he elaborated, bizarrely, “We have to get something out of this [shutdown], and I don’t know what that even is.”

Then, of course, there’s Arkansas congressman Tim Griffin, whose response to the car chase and shoot-out at the White House and the Capitol on October 3 was to hole up in his congressional coat closet, presumably pissing himself, while tweeting hypocritical outrage: “Stop the violent rhetoric President Obama, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. #Disgusting.” The NRA-loving Griffin, who has voted against gun-control legislation at every opportunity, later explained that he “tweeted out of emotion” when he tried to blame the shooting on Democrats who wanted to keep the government open. Meanwhile, the Capitol police who put their lives on the line to protect the congressmen were working without any promise of being paid.

At least President Obama—who has had, let’s face it, a terrible year—hasn’t played along with the outrage game. He and congressional Democrats haven’t taken any of this bait; they’ve smartly decided to let Republicans flame out on their own. Obama’s shutdown press conference on Tuesday was exhaustive in length, confident in tone, and dense with facts. In other words, it was just the sort of thing that makes modern Republicans shriek and arch their backs.

On Sunday, Boehner threatened to ex-

Testosterone & Insulin Sensitivity Study

tend the government shutdown into next week’s debt limit increase vote. The last time House Republicans fought with President Obama over the debt ceiling, our financial standing internationally took a beating, our credit rating got the shiv, and the economy lagged. A one-two dickslap of the shutdown followed by (or, worse yet, running concurrently with) a debt-ceiling battle could plunge us back into a recession.

Of course, shutdowns can’t last forever. Maybe even now, as you’re reading this sentence, the shutdown is over. When it ends, cable’s talking heads will distribute “points” to each “side” based on public perception. Polls will be taken. Wrists will be slapped. Victory speeches will be given. But the shutdown isn’t even the real story. The truth is so much worse.

The real story is that the teabaggers have already won. This shutdown thing is just the fart joke to keep you from noticing the heist going on in the background. On the very first day of the shutdown, Derek Thompson revealed in the Atlantic that our perception of “normal” has been fundamentally shifted to the right. The budget that the Senate and the House are fighting over? It’s almost 20 percent smaller than the budget President Obama proposed five years ago, or the one that Democrats proposed four years ago. Hell, the Senate’s budget is actually 10 percent smaller than the budget that Paul Ryan proposed three years ago, the one that Democrats swore up and down was going to transform America into an Ayn Rand–y hellscape of libertarianism. In the last five years, Republicans have successfully starved the government to death.

I’m not talking here about class war or revolution. I’m talking about the American way. When he was president, Dwight Eisenhower pushed the tax rate for the richest Americans down to 91 percent. If Eisenhowerera tax rates were still in effect, the Waltons would still have nine billion dollars, and we’d have government-funded health care like the rest of the civilized world.

After this shutdown, you tell me who’s won and who’s lost.

And the thing about that orangutan story James told me? Yeah, that was obviously bullshit. There are no orangutans in Vietnam, or any large primates other than humans. I knew the story was bullshit when he told me, but I didn’t challenge it. It was a good story, and he told it well. We both knew it was a lie, but so what?

The shutdown is the fart joke to keep you from noticing the heist going on in the background.

The top 1 percent of all earners in the United States earned 19.3 percent of all household income in the US last year. That’s the highest economic disparity this country has seen in one hundred years. The 1 percent has recovered from the Great Recession of 2008, while everyone else has pretty much given up ever seeing that kind of prosperity ever again. The American dream—a fair wage, a decent retirement, a sturdy safety net—has slowly been robbed from us. And now that we have a shot at getting some reasonably (or at least slightly less insanely) priced health care in online exchanges without fear of preexisting conditions barring us from insurance, the Republican Congress is threatening to burn the whole fucking popsicle stand to the ground.

You know what we should be fighting for right now, if we lived in a country with any sense of justice? A single-payer health plan. How would we fund that? The same way we’d fund all those social services programs that would help single mothers get good educations. The same way we’d provide outreach for people in need of mental health care, rather than waiting for them to blow out a synapse and drive a car at the White House with a screaming 1-year-old child in the backseat so we can just shoot them to death.

How would we do all that? By taxing the fuck out of the rich.

The Waltons, America’s richest family, are worth more than a hundred billion dollars. This is a failure of capitalism. Nobody needs a hundred billion dollars. Nobody is worth a hundred billion dollars. Nobody works a hundred billion dollars harder than someone who makes minimum wage. It’s impossible. It’s wrong. It’s evil. The Walton family are bad citizens. They’re un-American.

People tell stories for two reasons: Either they’re trying to convince you of something, or they’re trying to convince themselves of something. So either James did some awful things in Vietnam and he was trying to smooth his past over by turning it into a still-batshit-but-somewhat-more-sociallyacceptable story about beating an orangutan to death, or he was trying to shock me into thinking he was a badass motherfucker who did crazy-awesome stuff all the time. Maybe both. I’ve been thinking of the story so much lately because James reminds me of the Republicans, trying desperately to tap into America’s chewed-up outrage receptors in the hopes of getting a reaction. Maybe they desperately want to convince themselves that they’re pure and good warriors for truth. Or maybe they want us to think they’re crazy sons of bitches who’ll nuke everything so we won’t cross them again. Maybe the answer is somewhere in the middle.

No matter what really happened in Vietnam, the truth about James is that a couple weeks later, he showed up at my coffee shop with formaldehyde breath and bloodshot eyes one morning at 7 a.m., asking for 20 bucks. He was kicked out of the veterans’ shelter, he said, because they were all a bunch of assholes. When I refused, he told me to go fuck myself and then he just stood there swearing at me until I told him I’d call the cops. He left. I never saw him again. I’d like to think he eventually got clean, but every cell in my body knows that’s not what happened to James. He’d made his decision about the way his life was going to go long before I’d met him—just like the teabaggers who really don’t care who they hurt on their way out and down.

As for the analogy: The shutdown isn’t the orangutan. The American people aren’t the watch. The shutdown is making me think of James’s story because the shutdown is serving the same purpose as James’s story. Republicans think the shutdown is the story they’re telling to explain why government is evil. Democrats think the shutdown is the story they’re telling to explain why Republicans are crazy. But really it’s the story we’re all telling ourselves to keep from seeing that the whole fucking thing—our internet-based, outrage-fueled, 1-percentfavoring society—has burst into flames and rolled over onto its side. If we can’t outrage ourselves anymore, at least we can keep distracting ourselves with lies for a little bit longer.

STRANGER SUGGESTS

‘Enough Said’ FILM

All of Nicole Holofcener’s films involve the same building blocks: 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 Louis-Dreyfus and a great turn from James Gandolfini in one of his final performances. (See Movie Times: thestranger.com/film.) ALISON HALLETT

Jhumpa Lahiri

BOOKS

‘Sweet Angels’ POLAROID ART

The language in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Chekhovian short stories may as well be crafted from diamond—if you can find one word out of place in a Lahiri story, you’ve got a keener eye than me—and her The Namesake is one of the best books I’ve read this century. Like Namesake, The Lowland is also a novel about India, immigration, and America, but its central conflict— a good son marries his dead brother’s pregnant wife—promises to be Lahiri’s most delicious subject matter yet. I’m setting your expectations high, but if any author deserves high expectations, it’s Lahiri. (Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, townhall seattle.org, 7 pm, free) PAUL CONSTANT

‘Tre’ DANCE

The full title of this show by Adrien Leavitt is Sweet Angels— You Have Made Me No Longer Afraid of Death. Leavitt, a photographer who publishes an excellent local photo zine called #1 must have, makes thoughtful and empowering images that celebrate the richness and diversity of nonmainstream queerness. Sweet Angels is a showing of Leavitt’s more personal work, never included in the zine, shot on real film with a Polaroid land camera. If tonight’s exhibit is anything like the past couple months of showings at Hard L Gallery, presented by mostly women and queer artists, you will walk away feeling nothing less than inspired. (Hard L Gallery, 1216 10th Ave, 6–10 pm, free, 21+) KELLY O

Hypnotikon: Seattle Psych Fest MUSIC

Psychedelic rock is enjoying a resurgence nationally and locally, and that phenomenon is manifested on the opening night of Hypnotikon (the legendary Silver Apples headline Saturday’s edition). Cave and Lumerians scale the peaks of propulsive, trance-inducing space rock, while Midday Veil and Fungal Abyss rank among Seattle’s farthest-out and most infernal conjurers of cosmic rock. In the Musicquarium (entry: $0), Ecstatic Cosmic Union, Tokyoidaho, and several DJs radiate yet more hues from psychedelia’s rainbow. (Disclosure: I helped curate this event.) (Triple Door, 216 Union St, thetripledoor.net, 8 pm, $25, 21+, Oct 11–12) DAVE SEGAL

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. (InScape Arts, 815 Seattle Blvd S, brown papertickets.com, 8 pm, $15) BRENDAN KILEY

Earshot Jazz Festival

At this point, the first third of the Northwest’s most prestigious jazz festival is in the past. You have missed Keith Jarrett and Industrial Revelation, but you can still catch the genius pianist Brad Mehldau (he actually plays on Wednesday night, October 16), Marc Seales Group (Seales is UW’s jazz piano professor), Paul Kikuchi’s performance of “Bat of No Bird Island,” a tribute to Dave Brubeck by Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra, Wayne Horvitz Trio doing the avant-garde thing, and Philip Glass as Philip Glass. But the best thing about this festival is often found not in the names you know, but in those you don’t know. So check out the calendar, and take a chance on a name that draws a blank. (See earshot.org for details, through Nov 17) CHARLES MUDEDE

‘The Modern American Chicken’

CHOW/THEATER

Cafe Nordo revives its original 2009 meta-dinnertheater production: a five-course tragicomedy about the life and death of a chicken, from egg to chick to bloody mess to your plate. While the conceit of the (fake) mercurial chef Nordo Lefesczki was heavy-handed, the food of TMAC was some of Cafe Nordo’s best, and the acting has improved with time. New with this remount: Vegetarians will be accommodated (the Nordoians will “toast your discipline while we lick chicken grease off our fingers”). (Washington Hall, 153 14th Ave, cafenordo.com, $65–$90, Oct 11–Nov 24) BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT

Hockey at Angry Beaver

SPORTS Hockey season has begun! And there’s no better way to celebrate than to head to Seattle’s only hockey bar, the Angry Beaver, and pig out on poutine, fried cheese curds, Canadian beer, and locally brewed root beer while simultaneously screaming at the TV about icing, off-sides, and the fifth hole. The Angry Beaver has tons of TVs, and they always show as many games as possible, which might be hard today, since there are a dozen (!) games happening, including Vancouver versus Philadelphia and Nashville versus Florida (go Preds!).

(Angry Beaver, 8412 Greenwood Ave N, 782-6044, 3 pm–2 am, see nhl.com for game schedule) MEGAN SELING

ARTS

BETWEEN THE LIVING AND THE DEAD Mark Mitchell’s clothes.

ART

Don’t Die

The Horizontal and the Vertical of Mark Mitchell’s Burial Clothing

BY JEN GRAVES

It started out as a funeral procession at the museum on a blustery September night. There was a hush in the gallery, even as a thousand people streamed through. No one had died, but people were still crying, and, exiting through the same door they’d gone in, acting like they’d seen ghosts.

In the final room at the end of the line were nine models laid out on coffin-length mirrors on the floor, surrounded by walls crowded with old paintings reflected in the mirrors. The models had their eyes closed and tried to lie still. In their discomfort, they would occasionally jerk and twist like they were having nightmares. One or two of the models never moved an inch—they seemed even further from this realm.

Ostensibly, the subject of the exhibition was the clothing they wore. Mark Mitchell created the clothes specifically for burial. His gowns and jackets and pants were every shade of soft, creamy cream, with macabre details. Ivory flowers of silk sprouted from the bottoms of slippers that would never be walked on. Every material used was chosen for its beauty, and its ability to decompose along with the body it adorns. All this rococo cream is for the worms.

already received his first commission from someone planning for death. He will undertake (ba-dum-bum) that work in addition to all the sewing he does for the special occasions of the living, from custom-designed wedding dresses to stage costumes for performers whose identities are staked on their appearance, such as Seattle’s brilliant, Juilliard-trained, queer burlesque dancer/actor Waxie Moon.

But back to the museum, where the living death of Burial caused the past and present to switch places. Visitors couldn’t stop remarking that the old paintings on the walls— the Frye’s always-on-view founding collection—have never felt more alive.

“This is life,” an older woman exclaimed. She was pointing at the paintings. “This is the good-bye,” she continued, pointing to Mitchell’s clothing. She had not been there during the funeral procession—she came later. For all the power of that rainy night, Burial did not end there.

REVIEW

Mark Mitchell: Burial Frye Art Museum Through Oct 20

But first, the museum. Besieged by paintings and staged by live models on mirror biers, Mitchell’s Burial line became a fullfledged art installation. True, it’s an installation that blends the concerns of art, a realm always once removed, with fashion, which can come so close to the everyday body. Does fashion have to pass through death to become art? Does everything have to pass through some kind of death to become art?

Mitchell does not have time for such questions. In the few weeks since the opening of the museum show, the Seattle designer has

That night, after the mourners were gone, and after the stiff models reversed their death trance and lumbered up and out, the museum locked the doors and transferred the clothing onto standing mannequins. They’d been built expressly to match the models’ bodies, since Mitchell had created each ensemble specifically for that model’s personality and dimensions. Death may be universal, but each dead body was just one person, after all. So in a ghoulish twist on the story of the velveteen rabbit that longs to be real, these mannequins had undergone surgery to become real, rather than ideal, shapes. There were mastectomies and butt augmentations and all kinds of alterations made to proportions in order to emulate the dramatically curved, utterly nonuniform, in some cases transgender bodies of Mitchell’s models, an assortment of his closest and dearest.

(I ask, indelicately: “What if one of them were to die today?” “God forbid,” Mitchell says, adding that there are no arrangements in place, but that he’d be inclined to offer the ensembles regardless of the fact that none of his poor artist friends could ever afford them.)

This is not the first time death has been the life of the Frye. In 2008, visiting artist Dario Robleto, haunted by the collection and imagery of founders Charles and Emma Frye,

created post-Victorian arrangements and creations including wreaths of human hair, tumbles and tumbles of black paper flowers, groupings of paintings owned by the Fryes of dead children—they never had children—and even death gowns. Those dresses were made for mourners, those living in shade. Not the dead.

Great black curtains like waiting graves hang on either end of the gallery containing Burial. Curator Scott Lawrimore installed the curtains as a tribute to the Fryes’ old habit of using large curtains to hide and unveil acquisitions in their gallery/home on First Hill. Archival photographs of the Seattle meatpacking couple—she died in 1934, he died in 1940—lurk all over the museum grounds, in offices, meeting rooms, and hallways, not to mention in large, imposing oil portraits. Ev-

All this rococo cream is for the worms.

ery curator at the Frye gets a little haunted.

None of the models in Burial was elderly. They were all too young to die, and one of them, smack in the middle of the three rows of three like the final move in a tic-tac-toe game, was a child. Not so many years ago, Mitchell was a young man surrounded by young people dying of AIDS.

But the truth of Mitchell’s Burial collection is that it’s a protest by someone who feels most alive—a protest against being pulled away from this place forever. If Mitchell, like so many others, was ever so haunted that he shambled carelessly on the edge of being here, that time is over.

On the insides of his garments, he embroidered patterns and messages, final tattoos that will continue to speak to the wearers— but may never be seen by anyone else—after all else is silent, six feet under. One imagines the embellishments there in the dark, coaxing out life after death, a kind of heaven, as the long rows of Mitchell’s hand-built wooden, silk-covered buttons stay firmly, obsessively, buttoned: holding on until they actually disintegrate.

Each mannequin stands in a different place on its mirror. They’re individual but unified, upright but stiffly posed. The child mannequin at the center is the first thing

LOOSE LIPS

• Sherman Alexie’s fiction backlist will finally be available in e-book format, starting October 15. (Alexie has famously held back from publishing e-books for years.)

In a video announcement, Alexie admitted that he still has problems “with the politics and economic philosophies involved,” but that he has to reach out to a younger, “tech-addicted” audience. He also said he is “very excited about the aesthetics and artistic possibilities,” which makes us drool just thinking about an Alexie e-book experiment.

• Closing night of the 2013 Local Sightings Film Festival included a screening of 2013 Stranger Genius finalist Zach Weintraub’s brand-new You Make Me Feel So Young, plus farewells to Northwest Film Forum program director Adam Sekuler and studio director Dave Hanagan. Both have done seriously important work for NWFF and the whole regional film scene. Best of luck to them, as well as to incoming program director (and former NWFF intern!) Courtney Sheehan

• Hearts all over the city are breaking with the news that Demarre McGill may leave Seattle Symphony Orchestra. The remarkable young flutist was Ludovic Morlot’s first principal-player hire in spring 2011, and he’s been snapped up by Dallas Symphony Orchestra. This year, he’s on leave from Seattle. Will he decamp to Dallas entirely? How can we influence your decision, sir?! Hear him play at UW’s Brechemin Auditorium on Sunday, October 13, at 3 pm.

• The Seattle Great Wheel held a contest Saturday in which participants were challenged to eat a “Big Burro” burrito, a pulled pork sandwich, a 10-inch pepperoni pizza, three pieces of fried cod, a cup of clam chowder, a cheeseburger, fries, and a 21-ounce drink in one hour. Contestants who experienced “Reverse Fortune” within 20 minutes were reportedly disqualified (they did not have to ride the wheel). In a contest like this, no one wins

• Clyde Petersen, the Seattle artist who showed last month at Gallery4Culture and who works with youth making gender/ queer-conscious media at Reel Grrls, documented this recent occurrence: “Someone just came to the door at [Reel Grrls], an older white male, dancing like he was perhaps stripping on a stage, and asked me, ‘CAN I GET A REAL GIRL?’ as he kept dancing. Then he got to the point of quickly asking if we made porn here. When I said no, he said, ‘I’m just asking honest questions and trying to get some answers.’”

• The Thurber Prize, which calls itself “the nation’s highest recognition of the art of humor writing,” was founded in 1996. No woman has ever won the Thurber Prize. That is bullshit.

• Nicholas Sparks, author of The Notebook and several other books based on office supplies, enjoyed a Diet Mountain Dew while stroking his ego in front of millions of adoring fans at Seattle’s Town Hall last Tuesday.

• Chase Bank announced plans to buy the Space Needle and turn it into a Chase Bank. With every account you open, you will be stabbed.

Shakti Dance

DeLuxe Bar & Grill

Plum Market

you see, turned to face you dead-on when you walk in, while the others face other ways. Now vertical, the clothes interact newly and complexly with the paintings. The mannequin double of the model Maikoiyo AlleyBarnes, an artist and a black man whose body was once brutalized by Seattle police, whose bruises were once splashed in photomural form on city streets, now stands facing the Frye’s paintings of soft, molting ducks and hard, crashing waves. The mannequin is draped, voluminously, in Mitchell’s defiant but buttery death jacket and pants. The mannequin’s chest is protected by knitting in place of chain mail. His hood is up. An entire chain of associations begins, which may be the real embroidery here.

Before Burial, Mitchell already was known for making exquisite clothing. The installation is more than that. “To live is to defend a form,” claimed poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Burial is for survivors surviving even that one last time. Being able to afford it, as usual, has nothing to do with the art.

ART

A Blizzard, Ash, Bloody Meat

Emily Gherard Is Possessed by Unreal Pictures

BY JEN GRAVES

Eof scaly, living wall. The last way to look is from the side. The sides are red! This big untitled thing on the wall is bloody in the middle, like meat, or maybe it was burned and now it’s charred, like wood that could break to ash at any point. Whatever this is, it is completely imaginary and keeps morphing.

Near the exit of the gallery, Gherard is talking in a video. She’s youthful, freckled, and sweet, not serious, tombstoney, and monumental. It sounds like she is as taken in by her weird unrealities as anyone else can be. She says she stops making them when they don’t want anything from her anymore, which makes her sad. Then she’ll look at them, finished, and ask herself, “I did that? Why did I do that? It doesn’t look like something I would do.”

BOOKS

Great American Novelist

Forget Franzen—Jhumpa Lahiri Is Just About the Best There Is

BY PAUL CONSTANT

TREVIEW

Emily Gherard

Francine Seders Gallery Through Oct 12

mily Gherard makes paintings and drawings of things that emphasize the special shallowness of two-dimensional space. She loves to conjure these almost-flat stages on the surfaces of paper or canvas, where there is only imaginary air and a limited amount of room, where there is “weird flatness, weird unreality,” as she calls it. Whatever happens here happens in your eye-brain, when color, shading, and shape interact to entrance you into reading a picture where there are only marks. Most often, Gherard uses subjects that might otherwise block seeing past a shallow depth of field: walls and large rocks. In a contemporary art world awash with ideas about social engagement, this quietly emergent Seattle artist’s relatively esoteric pictures are reengagements with oldfashioned visuality, fresh workouts of forgotten muscles.

Cornish College of the Arts Main Gallery Through Oct 19 PREVIEW

Jhumpa Lahiri Thurs Oct 10, Town Hall, 7 pm, free

This month, Gherard has eight graphite drawings at Francine Seders Gallery. She has three paintings at Cornish College of the Arts (she’s a finalist for this year’s Neddy at Cornish award). She’s shown at Francine Seders since 2008; in 2004, she got her MFA from the University of Washington after earning a BFA at Rhode Island School of Design in 2002.

Her largest painting at Cornish is completely, mesmerizingly queer, a scaly thing, untitled, dated 2013, measuring 80 inches high by 60 inches wide. It is the kind of painting an entire book could be written about. Something big and dark is looming in the lower right of the picture like a rock, but it’s not solid; dark halos radiate from its edges. It tilts forward. It feels like suddenly coming upon a leaning old tombstone in a blizzard. The surface texture is a thick grid: a wall of bricks. But these bricks are smooth and shiny, sanded down, with iridescent swirls in the places most sanded down. So many layers

his is not the kind of book review where you have to wait in suspense for a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. The fact is, Jhumpa Lahiri is one of the very best American writers at work right now. It is a great injustice that Jonathan Franzen peered myopically out from the cover of Time magazine three years ago with the headline “GREAT AMERICAN NOVELIST” slapped on top of him when we live in a country where Lahiri is publishing novels. Her books are more relevant to the American experience than Franzen’s, her characters are more alive than Franzen’s have ever been, and everything about Lahiri’s novels feels sturdier than Franzen’s novels. Unlike The Corrections, which is already fading from popular memory like an embarrassing five-year-old summer jam, people will still be reading Lahiri’s The Namesake a decade—two decades, five decades—from now. Lahiri is the closest thing to an American Chekhov that I’ve ever seen. This is partly due to the elegant frameworks that her stories are built on, and partly because Lahiri’s voice is as unornamented and assured as a Russian master.

If you need evidence of that claim, look no further than Lahiri’s latest novel, The Lowland (Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95). It starts with the simple structure of a fairy tale. Two brothers grow up together in Calcutta; because their births are separated by a little more than a year, they enjoy the closeness of best friends and the bonds of family in a way that very few children get to experience. Subhash is the more classically smart one, the good son who wants to travel to America and get the best education possible. Udayan is the rebellious one, the one whose intellect can’t be constrained by rules; in fact, his is the kind of intelligence that can only be developed by continual chafing. A lesser writer would make The Lowland about the dynamic between the two boys, but Lahiri under-

eSe Oro: Classics from the Golden Age of Spain with a Twist! Oct 11 & 12

Take a historical and cultural journey, taverna style, with wine, cheese, barmaids, and flamenco music.

Red Light Winter & 25 Saints Oct 23-Nov 24

Seattle theatre company Azeotrope is excited to bring two powerful shows on

Represent! Nov 12-17 A Multicultural Playwrights Festival featuring eSe Teatro, SIS Productions, Pratidhwani, and The Hansberry Project.

CLOSES//SUNDAY

stands that no true opposites can spring from the same womb:

In spite of their differences one was perpetually confused with the other, so that when either name was called both were conditioned to answer. And sometimes it was difficult to know who had answered, given that their voices were nearly indistinguishable. Sitting over the chessboard they were mirror images: one leg bent, the other splayed out, chins propped on their knees.

Subhash goes to Rhode Island to study. Udayan stays home and joins the revolutionary Naxalite movement that tore India apart in the 1960s. They write letters, but their DNA-deep closeness is tested by distance and by ideology. Udayan writes Subhash to tell him he has taken a wife named Gauri. Then word comes that Udayan has died. Subhash, returning home, learns that Gauri is pregnant. Her situation in India is unpleasant, maybe even life-threatening, and so Subhash, ever the dutiful one, marries Gauri, brings her to the United States, and becomes father to Bela, her daughter with Udayan.

Theirs is not a marriage that ever concerns itself with love. When Gauri arrives at the airport, she looks at Subhash—“her brother-in-law, her husband”—and she sees him as “a milder version” of her beloved Udayan: “Compared to Udayan’s, his face was like the slightly flawed impression the man at Immigration had just stamped into her passport, indicating her arrival, stamped over a second time for emphasis.” Gauri is told by a smugly self-satisfied American professor: “With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before.” But that is proven to be a lie; she and Subhash engage in a silent war over Bela’s affections, tripping over the child’s twisted roots with every interaction.

The narrative in The Lowland skips along the passage of time like a smooth stone. Bela is born, then she’s a toddler, then a preteen, then an adult. Lahiri pulls back her scope until we see entire life spans, demonstrating how the decisions we make build, one on top of the other, until we become the people we are. When Bela is 4, Lahiri writes that she is “developing a memory. The word yesterday entered her vocabulary, though its meaning was elastic, synonymous with whatever was no longer the case.” Part of Bela’s trouble with yesterday is that the equivalent word in Bengali, kal, is “also the word for tomorrow. In Bengali, one needed an adjective, or relied on the tense of a verb to distinguish what had already happened.” The Lowlands is a novel of both yesterday and kal. Sometimes only a well-placed word or two can prevent us from believing the future is as immutable as the past. Where we’re from is incredibly important to us, but it doesn’t have to dictate where we’re going. You can leave the door open just a crack, in the hopes that change will come in.

BOOKS

Doug Nufer and the Band Names

Lounge Acts Is a Boozy Trawl Through Poetic Repetition

BY PAUL CONSTANT

consist of hundreds of fictional lounge-act band names. All these band names are made from the same construction: Blank and the Blanks (real life examples: King Khan and the Shrines, Fitz and the Tantrums). And the whole thing reeks of booze: Rob Roy and the Nightcaps, Butch Mills and the Rocks, Gar Nish and the Twists, Ray Near and the Shots. (Those examples are all from the very first page of the very first poem.)

Some of these names are puns (June Nip and the Pur), some of them are plays on famous names (Carl Isle and the Brandy), and some of them are just plain groan-inducing (Dinty Moore and the Stew). Lounge Acts works best as a spoken-word piece, and Insert Blanc Press is selling a 38-minute MP3 of a performance of the book by Nufer and great local saxophonist Wally Shoup on its site for $1.99. But if you read the poems aloud, you can approximate Nufer’s boundless sense of play.

PREVIEW

Doug Nufer, Vanessa Place, Matthew Timmons, Greg Curtis Sat Oct 12, Hedreen Gallery, 7 pm, free

The human brain is hardwired for pattern recognition, and when we’re looking at words, the pattern we’re trying to recognize is a narrative. A lot of experimental poets are too precious to give us a narrative; Nufer isn’t. One poem mashes up a bunch of holiday-named lead singers (Marty Grah, Hal Aween, Jill Lyeforth, etc.) with a series of alcoholically named backing bands (the Hangover, the Cheers, the Midnight Service). Each stanza mixes up a holiday with a different band, creating what amounts to a decade’s worth of hard drinking in a couple pages. The book reads like that, with the kind of you-had-to-be-there humor of a long night at the bar with friends when you’re batting a few lame jokes around until they become knee-slappingly funny. In the sober light of day, the whole thing seems a little suspect, but you also kind of want to go out and do it all over again immediately.

PERFORMANCE

The Infernal Beauty of Vaudeville

How the Dead Haunt Us in The Walworth Farce and Tre

BY BRENDAN KILEY

You’re either going to love tireless local word-explorer Doug Nufer’s new book or you’re going to hate it. Lounge Acts (Insert Blanc Press, $11) is full of poems that

I

n the final moments of the first act of The Walworth Farce, three Irishmen—a demented father and his two adult sons who never leave home except to go to the grocery store—have to answer the front door. They live in a tiny apartment with crappy brown carpet, a grease-spattered kitchen, lath peeking through the busted plaster on the walls, and five deadbolts on the door to protect them from the outside world that, the father warns his sons, is full of “bad people” who want to hurt them. They’ve been living this way for 20 years.

When the doorbell rings, one of the brothers grabs a knife and, shaking with fear, unlocks the five deadbolts. The visitor is just a young South London woman from the nearby grocery store who has come to deliver some bags the other brother left behind that morn-

ing. Like all good, smiling innocents in gothic horror stories, she has no idea what she’s walking into—but the audience knows just enough to be afraid.

This 2009 play by Enda Walsh, who was born in Ireland but lives in London, fits snugly in the lineage of dire tragicomedies— disturbing, funny, disturbingly funny—by other Irish writers in voluntary exile. Like stories by James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Martin McDonagh, and Shane MacGowan, The Walworth Farce is fueled by caustic and self-loathing humor, as well as the engulfing horror of mundane people repeating inane and destructive patterns to distract themselves from their own existential dread. It’s vaudeville from hell—and their clowning reveals the contours of their sadness.

REVIEW

The Walworth Farce New Century Theater Company at New City Theater Through Oct 27

Tre The New Animals at InScape Through Oct 12

Each day, the father (played by Peter Crook with the frightening, manic zest of Jack Nicholson in The Shining) and his sons (Darragh Kennan and Peter Dylan O’Connor, both excellent as the confused and terrorized shut-ins) pathologically re-perform a “play” in their apartment that explains why the father had to flee from Ireland 20 years ago and how he’s definitely not responsible for the bloody death of his brother and some other family members back in Cork. When the Farce characters are “in character” for their play-within-a-play, they perform clichéd, minstrel-show versions of themselves—Irish bumpkins with exaggerated accents and drinking habits. Their daily performance ritual includes two brothers drinking lager at their mother’s wake, the Clancy Brothers’ old Irish-nationalist song “A Nation Once Again,” and one of the caricatures saying to another: “You’re on your knees, Paddy.” “So I am!” he replies. “But sure, isn’t every Irishman! ERIN GO BRAGH!” Then he flops onto the floor, dead. The story they keep performing for themselves is so complicated, with so many subplots, characters, and machinations, it’s not worth parsing. Their real lives, by contrast, are brutally simple—the three men are so spiritually disfigured with confusion, shame, and grief, they’ve become monsters.

Despite itself, Farce can be funny. In another passage, one character in the playwithin-a-play asks another if he’s embarrassed by his own kin: “Embarrassed of my own little brother?” he responds. “A brother so ugly that when he was born, the doctors thought our mother had pushed out her perforated poisoned liver? A man who, as a boy, was so unpopular that even his imaginary friends would beat him up? A brother so stupid that for 20 years he thought that Irish dancing was a running event for people who were afraid to travel?” Even when it’s joking, Farce hurts.

Allison Strickland as the visitor who appears at the end of act one is the audience’s surrogate—laughing at the antics of these three goofballs, then slowly realizing she’s walked into a homemade mental asylum where the sickest patient (the father) is calling all the shots. Her performance is appropriately astringent. She’s bracingly clear and sane, the barometer that reminds us not to get too comfortable with the family’s violent slapstick—and a reminder that sometimes we all need an outside observer to tell us when our daily routines are getting the better of our sanity.

Death and grief have more somber reverberations in Tre, a world premiere by the dance company the New Animals. Five years ago, the company’s cofounder,

Magic: the Gathering Mondays and Fridays from 6 p m to midnight.

WETHINKCAPITOLHILLCOULDUSEMORE

MAGIC. PHOENIX

COMICS & GAMES 113 Broadway E, Seattle

THEATRE OFF JACKSON 409 7th Ave S WRITTEN BY Scot “Sgt Rigsby” Augustson

(10/9) Jill Lepore Benjamin Franklin’s Sister (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) Seattle Speaks Wage Worries @NEWHOLLY GATHERING PLACE (10/11) Sim Van der Ryn with Jason McLennan ‘Design for an Empathic World’ (10/11) Andre Dubus III & Nicole Hardy with Claire Dederer (10/12) SBO presents: ‘Musica Transalpina’ with Elizabeth Blumenstock (10/14) Tom Standage Social Media: The First 2,000 Years (10/14) Alexis Ohanian and Todd Bishop ‘Without Their Permission’ (10/14) Jesse Bering The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (10/15) Wenonah Hauter GMO Labeling

(10/15) Imaginary Food Systems The Art & Science of Bees, Flight, & Agriculture (10/15) Inside Art Local Artists on Inspiration (10/16) Jay Harman How Nature Inspires Innovation (10/16) World Affairs Council and Mercy Corps present Syria: Close-Up of a Crisis

a student at Cornish College of the Arts named Joe Sodd III, was stabbed to death in his hometown of Minneapolis. Now the Animals, led in part by choreographer Markeith Wiley, are ready to share a piece about it. Tre begins with dozens of red plastic cups (the kind often seen at college parties) with a little bit of brown liquor in each sitting on the stage. Audience members are encouraged to take one and hold onto it until the four dancers walk into the theater to toast the crowd and each other.

That opening gesture is indicative of Tre as a whole, which is part party and part wake. In some segments, Wiley and the rest perform hybrid b-boy movements, spinning in slow, muted circles on the floor and twisting their spines in corkscrew shapes. In others, they quietly hold each other in a four-person knot of hugging and (at least on opening night) sniffling. During one passage, the dancers sit in four corners of the room while recorded recollections of Sodd play over speakers, too many at once to understand what any single one of them is saying. The jumble of voices seems to indicate that no matter how many words—eulogies, stories, reminiscences—we throw at grief, we can never fill its void.

Dance (and dance theater) about personal loss can be a tough sell to an audience of people who do not personally know the deceased or the bereaved—and at times, Tre feels more like a private ritual with an invited audience than a dance work that was made for the general public. But it also has an atmosphere of urgency and necessity and, on opening night, moved some audience members to tears. For better and for worse, Tre is a little less like a typical dance performance and a little more like church.

DANCE

Flapping in the Breeze

Cheerleading, Nudity, and Corporate Sponsorship

BY MELODY DATZ

It’s intense, watching a penis flap in the breeze just a few feet away from your face during a tour jeté. You might think that four dancers performing in the nude would be terminally distracting, but choreographer Heather Kravas makes it work in the quartet with her mature, subtle choreography and daringly deep commentary about the dynamic between an individual and a group. In contemporary dance, the combination of minimalist aesthetics and sociological inquiry

could be dangerously dull, falling into the trap of being either hyperbolic or dorky. Not this time.

For the quartet, Kravas has arranged the seating Little League–style, with bleachers on two sides of the stage. Sitting down to watch a rehearsal last Sunday night, I thought this raw and intimate closeness would only highlight the discomfort of watching dancers in the nude. Instead, the various levels of nakedness (the dancers sometimes wore clothes) were more like a series of costumes, worn in different ways to match the arc of the work. This nudity is trying to teach us something.

PREVIEW the quartet On the Boards Through Oct 13

The quartet begins with four dancers who enter one by one between the two sets of bleachers. They recline on the floor in a square, bodies touching but with pointedly distant expressions on their faces. They lie there for a really long time, forcing the audience to stare at them or look away or look around—the choice is ours, forcing us to pay attention to what we choose to look at and how, exactly, dance can be its own vehicle for sexual objectification. Kravas, however, plays this objectification like a musical instrument.

As the dancers abruptly get up and move toward neatly folded piles of clothing, which they put on in various combinations (leather booties, underpants, socks, sweat suits), the haunting live score by guitarist Dana Wachs (also known as Vorhees) changes tempo. The group moves mostly en masse, sometimes with decidedly balletic moves and sometimes with dramatic marching, reminiscent of Soviet-era militaristic propaganda. Eventually, they end up in a tight diamond formation, completely naked again, except each dancer has a black, Nike-like swoosh pasted onto one side of one foot. They begin a cheerleading routine—cheering, counting, lifting one another high in the air with the precision of a seasoned squad. When watching a cheerleading routine at a football game, our attention is drawn to the sculpted thighs, flashy white smiles, and passionately hopeful (sometimes falsely hopeful) demeanors. Kravas’s dancers expertly execute a similar spectacle—but without the smiles and without the clothes. It’s as if cheerleading culture has been stripped down to its most precious foundations: timing, trust, physical perfection, and corporate sponsorship.

Among a bunch of other research undertaken by Kravas and her dancers in preparation for this piece, they received a private tutorial by the University of Washington cheerleading team, and it shows. Nothing in this dance about ballet, cheerleading, and cultural assimilation is half-assed. Lots of it is bare-assed. All of it (at least what I saw at the rehearsal) is good.

ART Gallery Openings

THE BELLTOWN

COLLECTIVE

Interstitial Theatre: This is the opening of a large new space dedicated to video, sound, and new-media installations, and the issues pertaining to those mediums within Seattle. (There are also weekly yoga classes with video art—Tuesdays at 7.)

Hours may vary. Free. Reception Fri Oct 11, 6-9 pm. Oct 11-Dec 31. 2231 First Ave

BHERD STUDIOS

Introductions : A preview of what’s coming this year, from “ornate oils by Chris Sheridan and Crystal Barbre to neondrenched cityscapes by Greg Boudreau and Kate Protage, Kellie Talbot’s photorealism, Ryan Molenkamp’s atmospheric abstracts, and John Osgood’s endlessly metamorphosing imagery.” Free. Wed-Fri. Reception Fri Oct 11, 6-9:30 pm. Through Nov 1. 312 N 85th St, 234-8348.

BLINDFOLD GALLERY

Kathy Gore-Fuss: This Olympiabased painter made strong work for years, then returned to school for a BFA in painting and has been coming back even stronger. Her abstracted landscapes abstracted are something like Peter Scherrer’s wildnesses crossed with David Hockney’s vision experiments. Free. Reception Thurs Oct 10, 6-9 pm. Wed-Sun. Through Nov 9. 1718 E Olive Way, Ste A, 328-5100.

FANTAGRAPHICS

BOOKSTORE AND GALLERY

Jim Woodring: Fran : The Stranger Genius Award winner for literature reveals his newest creation, Fran, a female analogue of Frank, whom you should know by now. Free. Reception Sat Oct 12, 6-9 pm. Oct 12-Nov 7. 1201 S Vale St 658-0110.

HEDREEN GALLERY, SEATTLE UNIVERSITY

Medium Medium: Multimedia, video, performance. A 3D printer, a sax, “lounge acts.” Doug Nufer, Vanessa Place, Matthew Timmons/Greg Curtis. The subtitle of the show is “Language in the Age of Digital Reproducibility.” Free. Reception Sat Oct 12, 7-9 pm. Wed-Sat. Through Nov 9. 901 12th Ave, 296-2244.

JOE BAR

Ben Hirschkoff: Clouds and Exhaust: Colorful translucent vinyl tape on vellum by the Seattle artist—the ongoing translations of a dreamer trying to make concrete constructions. Free. Oct 10-Nov 12. 810 E Roy St, 324-0407.

LXWXH

Kyle Jorgensen: Kinetic Theories: Geometrically patterned drawings and paintings with the clean, pleasing look of an infographic or video game. Free. Sat. Reception Sat Oct 12, 6-9 pm. Through Nov 2. 6007 12th Ave S

in Landscape at Ltd., Adrien Leavitt’s Polaroids at Hard L, Ben Hirschkoff at Joe Bar, Matthew Offenbacher at Lather Daddy (yes! the laundromat), and the Northwest focus show at the Photo Center Northwest. Capitol Hill, various venues. Free. Thurs Oct 10, 5-9 pm.

GEORGETOWN

ART ATTACK

Much to bewitch you this month: Aaron Murray at All City Coffee, THUNDERCLOUD at Calamity Jane’s, the Georgetown Trailer Park Mall, and a divinationrelated group show at Krab Jab. Georgetown, various venues. Free. Saturday Oct 12, 5-9 pm.

INSIDE ART

Town Hall and The Project Room introduce a new series: Inside Art, curated by the wonderful Seattle painter Juan Alonso. Each event is a moderated conversation with three artists on a given theme. For this night’s event, Laura Castellanos, Dan Webb, and Sharon Arnold talk about inspiration with Sarah Rudinoff. Town Hall 1119 Eighth Ave, 652-4255. townhallseattle.org. $5. Tues Oct 15 at 7:30 pm.

SPACE OPEN HOUSE

After many years of work, artists finally have a secure SPACE for studios at Magnuson Park, and this is its grand opening. We hear it’s beautiful. Celebrate with live music, performances, and noshings. Hanger 30 in Magnuson Park 6310 NE 74th St. Free. Fri Oct 11, 5-7 pm. visualart@thestranger.com

READINGS

Wed 10/9

ALICE MCDERMOTT

McDermott’s funereal novel

Charming Billy was a breakout sensation of a book more than a decade ago. Someone is supposed to detail a woman’s life in full, which sounds happily Woolfian. We should all try for a little Woolf every once in a while. Central Library 1000 Fourth Ave, 386-4636. Free. 7 pm.

ALLAN GURGANUS

Gurganus’s new collection of novellas intends to bring “Flannery O’Connor kicking into our new century.” That’s a tall order, right there. Elliott Bay Book Company 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600. elliottbaybook. com. Free. 7 pm.

JESMYN WARD

Jesmyn Ward has won the National Book Award for her book Salvage the Bones. She’s especially interested in discussing topics of race in a frank, intelligent way. The inspiration for her new book, Men We Reaped, came when five young men in Ward’s life died, by way of drugs, accidents, and suicide. Town Hall 1119 Eighth Ave, 634-3400. townhallseattle.org. $5. 7:30 pm.

JILL LEPORE

World: Reconnecting People, Nature, and Self Town Hall 1119 Eighth Ave, 624-6600. townhallseattle.org. $5. 6 pm.

ANDREW DUBUS III, NICOLE HARDY Dubus is a popular novelist and memoirist. He’ll be in conversation with Hardy, whose new memoir, Confessions of a Latter-day Virgin was released at the end of the summer. Town Hall 1119 Eighth Ave, 652-4255. townhallseattle.org. $5. 7:30 pm.

CAROL GUESS

X Marks the Dress: A Registry is a collection of narrative prose poems cowritten by Carol Guess and another author, who will not be in attendance at this reading and is therefore dead to us. Open Books, 2414 N 45th St, 633-0811. openpoetrybooks. com. Free. 7:30 pm.

MALCOLM GLADWELL Oh, God. Him again? Town Hall 1119 Eighth Ave, 652-4255. townhallseattle.org. $5-$50. 7:30 pm.

Sat 10/12

JACK MCLEOD The North Cascades Highway: A Roadside Guide to America’s Alps is a slender but pretty book. Third Place Books , 17171 Bothell Way NE, 366-3333. thirdplacebooks.com. Free. 6:30 pm.

MEDIUM MEDIUM: LANGUAGE IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL REPRODUCEABILITY

To kick off a new monthlong exhibition, authors Vanessa Place, Doug Nufer, and Matthew Timmons & Greg Curtis will read new work. This is also a great opportunity to explore the exhibit in the Hedreen, which will display videos of readings and other text-based delights. Hedreen Gallery, Seattle University 901 12th Ave, 296-2244. Free. 7 pm.

Mon 10/14

JESSE BERING In Bering’s new book Perv, the limits of sexual deviance are explored, and we learn how freaky everyday people can get. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, 652-4255. townhallseattle.org. $5. 7:30 pm.

Tues 10/15

ROBERTA WINTER Winter will explain our fuckedup health care system in an appearance in support of her book Unraveling U.S. Healthcare Seattle Public Library, 1000 Fourth Avenue, 634-3400. Free. 6 pm.

PETER ORULLIAN, BRENT WEEKS, GREG BEAR Local science fiction and fantasy authors give a group reading at a bar, with a few of their outof-town friends. Wilde Rover 111 Central Way, 634-3400. wilderover.com. Free. 7 pm.

ghosts and ruminating about the meaning of life. Directed by Michael Place, starring Mike Dooly as the tiger, Ali el-Gasseir as Uday Hussein, Ryan Higgins as an American soldier, and others. Washington Ensemble Theatre, 608 19th Ave E, 3255105. washingtonensemble.org. $15-$25. Thurs-Mon at 7:30 pm. Through Oct 12.

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 CurtisNewton, 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.

CARRIE Pig blood with a side of songs. Balagan remounts the notorious Broadway flop that was based on a novel and a movie that were so popular, they’ve worked their way into America’s cultural DNA. Moore Theatre, 1932 Second Ave, 329-1050. balagantheatre. org. Thurs-Sat at 8 pm, Sun at 2 pm. Through Oct 26. ESE ORO Excerpts from Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Rojas, and Cabeza de Vaca featuing English, Spanish, and bilingual sections as well as live flamenco music. eSe Teatro at ACT Theatre, 700 E Union St, 292-7676. acttheatre.org. $25$30. Fri-Sat at 7 pm. Through Oct 12.

HELLO DARLIN’S: MOM’S GOT SOMETHING TO TELL YOU!

“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.” (Brendan Kiley) Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, 104 17th Ave S, 6844758. langstoninstitute.org. $10$20. Thurs-Fri at 7 pm, Sat-Sun at 2 and 7 pm. Through Oct 26. THE MODERN AMERICAN CHICKEN

SCHMANCY

Plush You!: Fifty plush artists ranging in work and prices, including a very, very oversized version of the cartridge for the old video game PITFALL! Goodness gracious, this is a whole lotta soft all in one place. Free. Tues-Sat. Reception Fri Oct 11, 5-9 pm. Through Nov 1. 1932 Second Ave, 728-8008.

STREAM REAL ESTATE

Lamps Meninas : Always-wry Seattle artist Jenny Zwick this time offers an interpretation of Velazquez’s classic painting Las Meninas using entirely light fixtures for the characters. It’s happening in the spot where Chutney’s used to be, which is now part of the Storefronts Seattle program. Free. Reception Thurs Oct 10, 5-8 pm. Oct 10-Dec 31. 605 15th Ave E

Continuing Exhibitions

FRANCINE SEDERS

GALLERY

Emily Gherard: See review, page 23. Free. Tues-Sun. Through Oct 12. 6701 Greenwood Ave N, 782-0355.

Events

BLITZ

Some of the highlights of Capitol Hill’s monthly walk this time around: Siolo Thompson’s Girl

Lepore is a historian. Her new book is titled Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin. It’s a biography of Ben Franklin’s little sister. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, 624-6600. townhallseattle.org. $5. 7:30 pm.

Thurs 10/10

AARON DIXON

My People Are Rising is a memoir by the founder of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panthers. HUB Bookstore, UW Campus, 634-3400. Free. 6 pm.

CATHERINE S MYKA

Smyka is an award-winning storyteller, the cofounder of T/ OUR Magazine, and the social media coordinator here at The Stranger, which means she’s a coworker of mine. Which makes it a little awkward, but I’ve seen Smyka read, and I assure you that this will be a good time and you’ll enjoy the story a whole lot. Hollow Earth Radio, 2018A E Union St, 588-5437. Free. 7 pm.

JHUMPA LAHIRI

See Stranger Suggests, page 19, and review, page 23. Town Hall 1119 Eighth Ave, 652-4255. townhallseattle.org. $5. 7:30 pm.

Fri 10/11

SIM VAN DER RYN

Van der Ryn is a big name in green architecture. His new book is Design for an Empathic

SPARTAN LIT PARTY The magazine Spartan, which you can find online at spartanlit. com, bills itself with the tagline “Minimalist Prose. No Strays.” It’s about as straightforward a literary magazine as you’ll find: a few good pieces of writing, carefully chosen. Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030. Free. 7 pm. readings@thestranger.com

THEATER

Opening and Current Runs

THE BACCHAE

As part of its “Hard Bard” series, Green Stage presents The Bacchae, a bloody Greek tragedy in which Dionysius extracts extremely gory revenge on mortals who don’t worship him, including creating the Maenads, wild women who have drunken dance parties in the woods and tear interlopers limb from limb. North Seattle Community College, 9600 College Way N, 526-7791. brownpapertickets. com. Free. Thurs-Sun at 7:30 pm. Through Nov 2.

BENGAL TIGER AT THE BAGHDAD ZOO

The ghost of a large tiger, shot to death by American soldiers, roams the war-torn streets of Baghdad while meeting other

“Cafe Nordo revives its original 2009 meta-dinner-theater production: a five-course tragicomedy about the life and death of a chicken, from egg to chick to bloody mess to your plate. While the conceit of the (fake) mercurial chef Nordo Lefesczki was heavyhanded, the food of TMAC was some of Cafe Nordo’s best. If you like what they do and missed this the first time around, you’ll want to be there. New with this remount: Vegetarians will be accommodated (the

WORN OUT

MARTI JONJAK

MARK MITCHELL’S BURIAL ENSEMBLES

Showcasing a collection of ensembles to clothe the dead, the gorgeous and unreal opening ceremony for Mark Mitchell: Burial happened at the Frye Art Museum on a recent dark, cold, hard-raining Friday. Cellist Lori Goldston filled the gallery with a wandering, haunted song, while nine muse-models were strewn like jewels across the floor, lying prone on mirror panels. Among the bodies, the visitors stood transfixed—some cried, some whispered thoughtfully, and others just drifted, as if passing through a sad dream.

Each of Mitchell’s works blends impeccable technique with masterful design, and he and his team used natural materials to ensure full biodegradation during “life’s ultimate appointment,” as he describes it, whatever one’s preference: cremation,

SACRED QUALITIES

land burial, burial at sea. Along with goatskin and wool, the garments contain every variety of silk you could imagine—taffeta, crepe, habutai, chiffon, organza, gauze, bouclé—all of it kept impossibly white and draped into flowing pools, or densely wadded into crimping ruffles resembling barnacles, or cut in petal shapes, then carefully steamed and molded and arranged into bouquets.

Mitchell’s collection upends funereal protocol, and we need it to. Today’s standard looks are both bland and unnerving, what with the bouffant hair, the heavily rouged cheeks, the traditional Sunday best suits. (Commercial burial jackets have the same appearance, but the center back seam is left open, so it can be more efficiently eased on, and the sleeves are cut longer, so cuffs rest properly at wrists when arms are folded into casket position.) Women’s burial fashions tend toward prim nightgowninspired silhouettes with synthetic pastel fabrics and piles of cheap lace, bringing a culty dollhouse-bordello look.

In contrast, Burial honors the profound intimacy of death. Mitchell embellished every outfit with tons of laborious hand-stitched finishes, and there’s always one secret detail. Perhaps it’s a hidden pocket for a cherished trinket, or a message embroidered into the lining. Only the musemodel will ever know. Traits like these recall the sacred qualities of burial wear from earlier eras and different regions, when the dead wore bridal gowns, or black silk robes, or were left naked and tucked into an envelope of animal hides, or when their ears were dusted with gold powder, or lips with ashes, or mouths were stowed with pearls. (For more information about Mark Mitchell: Burial, visit fryemuseum.org.)

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CHOW

Southern Hospitality

Get Yourself Some at a Place Called Witness

BY BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT

Capitol Hill’s got bars with “concepts.” There are two upscale Mexican places (Barrio with its wall of candles, Poquitos with its 14,000 hand-painted tiles), at least two “speakeasies”

(one behind the fake safe at Tavern Law, one behind a text-message-reservation system at Knee High Stocking Company), an automechanic-themed sports bar (Auto Battery), a Cuban-esque nightclub (Havana), a steampunk something-or-other (Grim’s), a faux Bavarian beer hall (Von Trapp’s), a carnivalstyle bar with rampant stripes (the Unicorn), a gluten-free cider pub (Capitol Cider, which is also old-timey because… just because). The Old West taxidermy of Linda’s and even the medieval shabbiness of the Canterbury look practically authentic now, just by virtue of being more than a couple years old. It’s like the goddamn Disneyland of drinking up here.

Maybe a Southern bar was inevitable? In any case, Capitol Hill got two of them—they opened approximately a week apart—last month: Witness on Broadway (where the UPS Store used to be) and Bar Sue on 14th (near Chop Suey, in the space where Lucky 8’s recently failed to thrive).

parts. “Southern hospitality” is not the first thing that occurs to folks around here.

WWitness 410 Broadway E, 329-0248 witnessbar.com

But what the hell is a Southern bar? Tell people in Seattle that you’re going to check out two new ones, and watch the jokes about Stars and Bars, etc. begin—then watch them descend precipitously into the worst of the cultural baggage attached to the USA’s lower

tastes of the syrups she stayed up late making; one’s beet and ginger and tarragon, another’s pumpkin. They’re working on the new fall drink menu, and it’s a staffwide endeavor, with everyone contributing and critiquing and, by all accounts, having an excellent time doing so. The bartender is especially excited about a colleague’s roasted-pear and mezcal cocktail that may be on the way. Meanwhile, her concoction the Jonathan Edwards ($12), named

The Jonathan Edwards cocktail is made with bitters and “wrath.”

after a fire-and-brimstone preacher whose photo hangs with an inspirational quote in the back—along with Frederick Douglass and a couple more—is made with Angostura bitters, cognac, Cointreau, lemon, sugar, egg white, and “wrath.” The Son of a Preacher Man ($8) tastes like a hot toddy on ice, cooling and soothing with bourbon, lemon, honey syrup, and black pekoe tea.

NOW CLOSED

Recent

Restaurant RIPs BY BETHANY

JEAN CLEMENT

• THE COTERIE ROOM • Belltown: Brian McCracken and Dana Tough (Spur, Tavern Law, and the new Old Sage) took over the space from Restaurant Zoe, betting they could make a go of a fancy Belltown spot after Zoe decamped to Capitol Hill. Now, after just two years, they’ve made it private events only, calling it “exciting news” (though they’re probably actually less than thrilled).

• VESSEL • downtown: Vessel was one of the first Seattle craft cocktail spots when it opened in 2006. The location near the 5th Avenue Theatre closed in 2010, and just a year ago, Vessel was reincarnated at Seventh and Olive. Now it’s already gone. Owner and ace bartender Jim Romdall says, “Business was fine, but we had a lot of debt that was difficult to pay off We thought everything was very stable, but then many things happened that were beyond our control that forced us to close down. Sad, but life goes on!”

itness on Broadway is the old-fashioned American South as viewed through nicely liquored-up, rose-colored glasses. (We will leave for another time the consideration of Bar Sue.) Owner/barkeep/ preacher-man Gregg Holcomb—formerly of Knee High Etc.—has installed a set piece that combines sitting on the front porch (complete with clapboard walls and a slatted dropped ceiling over the bar) with sitting in an actively anti-teetotalism church (glowing stained-glass windows, carved pews for booths). The bucolic painting behind the bar shows the romantic mind’s-eye view from here, best gazed at with an expertly made mint julep in hand: rolling fields, a stately home, trees with Spanish moss that looks almost 3-D. Holcomb grew up in San Diego, but he comes by his idealized version of the past honestly: His mother is from New Orleans, his father, North Carolina. Asked about Witness’s Southern thing, a bartender with a welcoming manner and a sparkling smile says, “It’s tongue-in-cheek, without too much thumb-in-the-eye.” Get to talking to her, and she’ll soon be giving you

The food at Witness is also American Southern with a twist. Dixie poutine ($8) has bacon-cream gravy and pimento cheese, ending up like a slightly spicy Velveeta concoction. The stand-up shrimp and grits ($13) also contains a pool of gravy, in case it wasn’t creamy-rich enough for you already. A corn and smoked cherry tomato salad ($9), probably off the menu by the time you read this, tasted like a nostalgia-tinged good-bye to summer. At brunch, I tried the croque’d toad ($10), a croque madame crossed with toad-inthe-hole, topped with a pleasantly lightweight hollandaise (which wanted a bit more lemon); it could become a favorite. And two big bricks of biscuits were on the heavy side, but had very tasty house-made sausage gravy with an edge of cayenne ($8). Also at brunch: the stroke of genius of a Pimm’s cup loaded with bits of strawberry ($8), plus the return of bestever server Rodney Bradshaw, whose gentility and understated wit you may recall from the days of Cafe Septieme. Witness had a special card made up for that required-by-local-law note about eating raw or undercooked food; it’s got a drawing of a hunched figure gesticulating over an out-held book. “Here’s a food menu, and drinks, and a dire warning from the health department,” Bradshaw said dryly.

The most remarkable thing about Witness, however, is indubitably Gregg Holcomb’s weekly sermon, delivered on Saturday nights at 10. I had heard tell of a literal soapbox; instead, at the appointed hour, he promenaded up and down the space, waving his leather-bound journal, shouting for everyone’s attention, and threatening jovially to eject anyone who didn’t shut up. In the crowded bar, it worked miraculously well; in under a minute, he had everyone rapt. His first sermon, he explained, had been about fornication (“Because you should do it!”). He’d done another about a woman’s place (anywhere the hell she wants to be). The sermon I witnessed had a somewhat confusing but rousing carpe-diem theme, including a true tale of group sex functioning as allegory. “Do more!” Holcomb exhorted. “There may not be another lifetime!” Could he get an amen? He certainly could, the whole bar hollering back on cue. It felt transformative and communal and just plain weird, like Witness itself.

Comment on Witness at THESTRANGER.COM/CHOW

• BAUHAUS and THE CAPITOL CLUB • Capitol Hill: Linda Derschang opened the Capitol Club in 1997, making it old enough to count as Capitol Hill history. Now the space will become the temporary home of beloved Bauhaus—even more historical, open since 1993—which itself just closed, too, to make way for redevelopment. Bauhaus plans to move in by early November.

The Capitol Club space will become the temporary home of Bauhaus in early November.

• CARMELITA • Greenwood: After almost 17 years, the upscale vegetarian standby is done. “Well, it’s just time,” they said, noting that the “outpouring of love and appreciation” from their fans was completely reciprocated. The space will become Vecino, a Mexican restaurant from the owners of Prost!, the Ridge, Nickerson Saloon, and Little Water Cantina.

• ALLIUM • Orcas Island: Chef Lisa Nakamura, who trained in the kitchens of Thomas Keller and the Herbfarm, considered it “an honor and a privilege” to run this restaurant on Orcas Island, but now she’s ready to be back in Seattle. Is there another food venture in her future? “YES, and the hows and whys are being worked on.”

• PEAKS FROZEN CUSTARD • Ravenna: The owners say they had fun, but their lease is up and it’s time to move on. They “could not be more grateful to all of you amazing custardmers.”

• MED MIX • Central District: Is the northeast corner of 23rd and Union cursed? As the restaurant space has changed hands, two previous owners have been murdered there (not including the most recent occupant, Beehive Bakery, whose owner only had the misfortune of running a short-lived kosher bakery in an apparently cursed location). Then the building was set on fire by an arsonist. Med Mix owner Otmane Bezzaz plans to rebuild,

and his original location in Pioneer Square remains open.

• O’SHAN SUSHI • Ballard: According to My Ballard, the owner/head chef wanted to retire; now his daughter is running Kimchi House, a Korean deli, in the same spot.

• BUENOS AIRES GRILL and THE CORNER BAR • Belltown: No word on why they closed, but the longtime Argentine steakhouse may be moving to a spot a few blocks away, according to Eater Seattle. The Corner Bar used to be the Whisky Bar, which moved to a spot a few blocks away a while back.

• BADA BISTRO • West Seattle: Bada—a “beachside bistro, Seattle in flavor, with a definite Pacific Rim influence”—only made it from March until summer on Alki. The space is going to become the first Fatburger in Seattle. A Slog poll revealed that 39 percent of respondents were excited about this, 46 percent were not, and 15 percent had more nuanced, complicated feelings that you may read about in comments on that post.

• MONTE CRISTO • on the road: This truck drove its gourmet grilled cheese on down to Portland.

COLD BREW AND ADVENTURE AT TIN UMBRELLA COFFEE

Ave S, 743-8802

Joya Iverson had just bought a one-way ticket to Ethiopia when an accident tore the passenger side off her car and gave her a nasty concussion. It made the move impossible. “I just sat on the couch, playing the ukulele with my eye mask on,” she says. Undaunted, she decided to start a business in her own neighborhood, Hillman City (south of Columbia City along Rainier), incorporating as many things she loves as possible. Thus, Tin Umbrella Coffee came to be.

“It’s not really a moneymaking venture,” Iverson says, “but it’s a really fun adventure.” It might be both—the first three days the cafe was open, there were lines out the door and they sold out of coffee. Built in the ’20s, the space that houses Tin Umbrella was formerly a furniture shop, then a gambling den. One of the giant, weathered carpentry tables from the space’s early days now serves as a cream and sugar station. The cafe offers boozy miniature pies from It’s

Life (you will want seven of them) and soft biscotti from Chilelli Foods. They’re also sponsoring a storm drain through the city’s Adopt-a-Drain program, which they’ve named Dwayne the Drain. Iverson plans to start her own roastery, and deploy bike couriers with beans and bandoliers of Tin Umbrella’s already-popular cold brew. SARAH GALVIN

• NOC NOC • downtown: I stopped into this goth bar once with Charles Mudede. He was wearing a striped shirt and I was wearing an abstract print sundress. Never have two people been more out of place, but it was a great time and everyone there was very nice. RIP, Noc Noc.

• RESTAURANT BEA • Madrona: The lovely Crémant had a troubled run in the same space. The subsequent tenant, a restaurant called June, did not last very long. Restaurant Bea changed chefs soon after opening and apparently just never caught on. It’s all too bad; the Roy McMakin–designed space is just great.

• HEY PAISON • Burien: The cheesesteak treasure closed down some months back. Owner Ronnie Santone said: “Well, paisans… After seven years of trying to make it work we just couldn’t do it. Hey Paison has shut its doors for good. It has been very emotional for me, I have made friends and met a lot of good people. I want to thank each and every one of you for your continued support… This breaks my heart. I wish you all well and happiness.” Sad!

• KIKU TEMPURA HOUSE • U-District: Stranger online commenter Riley DeWiley says that this place “was mostly distinguished by being a longtime Ave survivor among little Asian eateries that come and go.”

Find reviews of places that are still open at THESTRANGER.COM/CHOW

Chow Events

Wed 10/9

PHABULOUS PHINNEYWOOD PIG OUT

Today 30 neighborhood restaurants, bars, and cafes—like Red Mill, Bluebird, Prost!, and Oliver’s Twist—donate part of their sales to the nonprofit Phinney Neighborhood Association’s Hot Meal Program. You are urged to “Pig out all day long”! Various locations . phinneycenter.org/pigout.

Thurs 10/10–

Sun 10/13

A TASTE OF ICELAND

As part of an annual Iceland promo-thing, head chef Thrainn Freyr Vigfusson of LAVA Restaurant takes over the kitchen at the Dahlia Lounge with a menu including Arctic char, torched langoustine, and wild-caught Icelandic cod. Also: a neat-sounding free concert at Neumos on Saturday the 12th. Dahlia Lounge , 2001 Fourth Ave, 789-1200. icelandnaturally.com.

19TH & DELICIOUS BLOCK PARTY

The forthcoming Tallulah’s (from Linda Derschang) and Hello Robin (which includes Molly Moon’s) give out free snacks and sweets, along with Fuel/High 5 Pies; the Kingfish has Proletariat Wine specials; plus live music from Night Cadet and more. Bring canned

food, clothing, or cash to donate to Jubilee Women’s Center. 19th Ave E and E Mercer St. Noon-5 pm.

WASHINGTON ARTISAN CHEESEMAKERS FESTIVAL

Learn firsthand from dozens of Washington cheesemakers about their craft while sampling the fruit (dairy?) of their labors. Admission includes infinity cheese samples plus three beer/ wine/hard cider tastes, as well as bites of locally made bread, crackers, honey, and jam. It all benefits the Cascade Harvest Coalition. CHEESE.

Seattle Design Center 5701 Sixth Ave S. washingtonartisancheese.com. $35/adv, $40/door, 21+.

Sun 10/13–Thurs 10/24

SEATTLE RESTAURANT WEEK

It’s a two-week “week” that comes twice a year: Sunday through Thursday, 150-plus restaurants offer set-menu, three-course dinners for $28 (and some $15 lunches). How much do you save? Depends, but generally, it’s like getting dessert free (and not getting to choose from the whole menu). If you go, tip well—these things are hell for servers. Various locations . seattletimes.com/ seattlerestaurantweek.

MEANS WE RECOMMEND

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chow@thestranger.com

MUSIC

Healthy Fun Times

After Being Dumped by the Majors, the Lonely Forest Write Their Own Happy Ending

BY MEGAN SELING

Last September, the Lonely Forest got fired.

“I have the termination letter framed,” the band’s guitarist, Tony Ruland, says with a laugh. His bandmates—singer/guitarist

John Van Deusen, bassist Eric Sturgeon, and drummer Braydn Krueger—chuckle along with him. “I printed it out and framed it. I just thought it was so funny. It starts ‘Dear Gentleman,’ and at the end it says, ‘Sincerely yours, Atlantic Records.’”

The band can laugh about it now, but that letter—the letter officially informing them that they’d been canned by Atlantic Records—was a bittersweet ending to a tedious, draining process. By the time that letter arrived, it was more a relief than a disappointment.

It wasn’t the ending anyone saw coming more than three years ago, when the Lonely Forest excitedly announced that they were the first band to sign to Trans-Records, the new Atlantic subsidiary started by Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla. At the time, as the band continued to sell out venues in Seattle and gain more critical acclaim, signing to Trans- and possibly joining the Atlantic family felt like the most logical step.

Their contract with Trans- had an upstream option, meaning if they sold a certain amount of “units,” they would automatically be signed to the major label. But that never happened. After the Lonely Forest released Arrows in 2011, “a Russian billionaire” bought Atlantic, and in the shake-up of new ownership, Trans- was dropped from Atlantic’s roster, making it Walla’s own independent label, and the Lonely Forest’s contract became void. They were label-less. But Atlantic wasn’t done with them yet— while the band still had a healthy relationship

with Walla, and could’ve possibly re-signed with Trans- right then, Atlantic said that they were still interested in putting out the band’s follow-up to Arrows, and so began months and months of sorting through more than 70 demos, sending the songs back and forth via e-mail, to see if the label liked anything they heard. “Which is a really uncomfortable process,” Ruland adds.

Unfortunately, in the end, the Lonely Forest just didn’t sound enough like Lena Dunham’s boyfriend’s band to be, in Atlantic’s opinion, commercially viable. “At the

In 2011, “a Russian billionaire” bought Atlantic, and the Lonely Forest’s contract became void.

time we were trading demos, that fun. song ‘We Are Young’ had come out. It was huge,” says Van Deusen. “And I don’t know who it was who said it, maybe it was a boss telling another boss to tell our A&R agent to ask us, ‘Could you guys try this?’ It’s just like, ‘Dude, who do you think we are?’” Van Deusen continues. “Even if we tried to be fun., we couldn’t do it.”

“There’s a reason stereotypes exist about major labels,” adds Ruland. “But they’re looking for their thing—they will ask you for that specific thing, and you have to decide

if you want to sacrifice that part of you or not.” The Lonely Forest did not, so they got dumped. “The interesting thing was, we went from that termination letter to talking with another major label, RCA,” says Van Deusen. “And RCA was like, ‘You guys are good, but you’re not gonna sell us records.’

“That was when we realized that Walla was the girl next door who was there, waiting for us all along,” he continues. “It’s sweet and it’s true. He believed in the next record enough to be like, ‘I want to re-sign with you guys.’ We would not have made this record had Walla not believed in the band.”

The name of their new record, Adding Up the Wasted Hours, is a direct commentary on all the time the band spent waiting, getting tugged back and forth, and being told, in order to sell records, they’d have to sound more like this or that. And even though Atlantic and RCA decided the Lonely Forest wasn’t a moneymaker, the result of that tumultuous courtship is the band’s best record to date. If 2009’s We Sing the Body Electric! was, as the band says, too claustrophobic, Arrows was, comparatively, too sparse. Wasted Hours, though, is just right. It’s the perfect balance of the band’s inclination to layer songs with lush instrumentation (you’ll hear Karl Blau on saxophone), but each dimension is given room to breathe thanks to Walla’s expert and nuanced production.

Being back with Walla and the now completely independent Trans-Records rejuvenated an excitement that the Lonely Forest hadn’t felt for nearly a year while being dragged through major-label limbo. “It

WHAT'S CRAPPENING?

• Last Wednesday, grimy mainstay the Comet Tavern unexpectedly closed its doors for what was supposed to be, according to the venue’s booker, Michelle Smith, a temporary period of one or two weeks to sort out their “water bill/lease issues.” Wednesday evening, capitolhill seattle.com reported that court records revealed the venue’s owner of six years, Brian Balodis, is facing serious financial trouble with both the venue and his own condo. On Sunday evening, Smith posted an update on Facebook alleging, “The Comet owner secretly removed the sound system and other items of value from the venue. So it looks like we are kaput unless another owner decides to lease the place from the building owner and maintain it as The Comet Tavern.” Since the debacle, Smith has been receiving offers to book shows at other Seattle venues. She will soon be looking to set up gigs at Waid’s and Lo-Fi Performance Gallery preferably jazz at the former and garage rock and soul at the latter. The Highline has also reached out to Smith to possibly book some nights at that Capitol Hill spot. Find updates on the Comet’s murky future at lineout.thestranger.com

• In more Bummertown, USA, news, Capitol Hill’s avant-rock/electronic/free-jazz venue Electric Tea Garden has announced its plans to close by the end of October. The closure, according to the venue’s owner, Bruce Mason, is simply due to “classic gentrification of the neighborhood,” and he reported plans to redevelop the property.

• Okay, Saturday was really fun, though! At the hopefully now annual Macefield Music Festival (the fest formerly known as Reverb), the Intelligence guitarist Dave Hernandez was dismayed when he and drummer Pete Capponi arrived at the Tractor Tavern wearing almost identical polka-dot shirts. The jury is still out on “who wore it best.”

• Also during Macefield, Tacoma rappers ILLFIGHTYOU killed the Sunset Tavern with their energetic set (see: going super hard while standing on a speaker and punching a disco ball). Overheard outside the Ballard venue from a blond tube-topper: “I mean, I love gangster rap, but this might be too gangster.”

• Ian Judd—guitarist for the defunct band Stephanie, show booker for Cairo, and boss of Couple Skate Records—is moving to New York City at the end of October. Judd did a fantastic job organizing some of the city’s farthest-out undergroundmusic gigs at the tiny Capitol Hill boutique and helping to manifest Cairo’s annual EXPO festival. He has been a vital part of Seattle’s all-ages music ecology for the last several years, and he’ll be missed.

• In hawt celeb news for the bored and the boring, zzzzzzzzzz wrote an open letter responding to zzzzzzzz’s open letter to [yawn] something whatever omg who cares good night.

felt like we were getting healthy and pushing all these unnecessary things away from us,” says Van Deusen. Ruland adds, “And it was also a total permission slip to go make the record we wanted to make.”

In the past, the Lonely Forest have been very guitar-driven—Van Deusen calls it “meat and potatoes rock”—but on Wasted Hours, Ruland’s guitar parts are much more sparkly and romantic, with a twist of new wave. “When I was writing all my guitar parts, I would watch Big, Pretty in Pink, Breakfast Club, Fast Times at Ridgemont High… I would watch all these ’80s movies,” he says, also citing both Johnny Marr and Porl Thompson as influences.

The romantic guitar riffs perfectly complement Van Deusen’s lyrics, which are, as always, vulnerable, even if more cryptic this time around. Lyrically, he’s always been very open about his emotions, his addictive personality, or his distaste for disingenuous hipsters. But on Wasted Hours, he holds himself back, revealing just enough about a situation to make the moments he’s describing feel eerily familiar without giving everything away, which he admits is a new approach. “It’s funny, I don’t really want to explain the songs because, for the first time, I want people to just listen to it, relate to it, figure out what it means to them,” he says. “But the songs, almost all of them, are coming out of a time where there’s a lot of relationship confusion—that is so applicable to all these different scenarios, whether it be me personally, the band, the band and the label—it’s cool to see how relatable it is.”

ending to difficult personal and professional transitions. Van Deusen calls it a breakup record, but it’s more than that—it’s the record that comes from the strength that’s gained by surviving the breakup.

Trans- is flourishing, too—just weeks ago, the label also released Cumulus’s fantastic debut full-length, I Never Meant It to Be Like This, and Cumulus and the Lonely Forest are currently on the road together.

“You have to be dumb to want to ‘make it’ as a musician. It’s the most illogical thing you could ever do as a human.”

Oh, and there is one more thing. The band is, technically, back on another major label subsidiary. Once Wasted Hours was wrapped, Alexandra Patsavas of Chop Shop Records, which is affiliated with Universal Republic, liked the album so much that Chop Shop signed on to co-release it. As a music supervisor, Patsavas has done the soundtracks for several movies and TV shows, including the Twilight series, Gossip Girl, and Mad Men. She could, no doubt, help the Lonely Forest’s career.

So the Lonely Forest, in a way, took a very long route to get back to where they started three years ago. Are they worried they could get burned again? Yes, obviously—but it’s a chance they’re willing to take. “We’re too dumb to stop,” says Ruland. “I think you have to be dumb to want to ‘make it’ as a musician. It’s the most illogical thing you could ever do as a human. It’s like, ‘I’m gonna make music for a living.’”

“Yeah, it can be applied in so many ways,” Ruland adds. He gets sheepish for a minute. “For example, between the release of Arrows and the release of this record, I have been married and now divorced. I’ve slowly related to the songs more and more and more. It’s almost been creepy to me.”

Wasted Hours sounds like the happy

“I look at it like this,” says Sturgeon. “It’s a really silly analogy, but it’s as if we’re building a boat. You don’t build a boat for years and years and years thinking the thing is not gonna float.” Van Deusen interjects with a laugh, “It usually doesn’t, in our case.”

“But you keep getting in the fuckin’ lake, don’t ya?” I ask. He grins and straightens up his posture. “Yup!”

Comment on Lena Dunham’s boyfriend’s band to be at THESTRANGER.COM/MUSIC

COMING UP: 110/24 GODFLESH 10/27 AU REVOIR SIMONE 10/28 BERNHOFT 10/30 CHARLI XCX 11/2 AYRON JONES AND THE WAY + SIR MIX-A-LOT 11/4 SEPULTURA 11/6 OF MONTREAL 11/7 RADIATION CITY 11/9 BARSUK 15 11/10 A$AP FERG 11/15 OBITS 11/16 RAVENNA WOODS 11/17 CULTS 11/18 MELLOWHIGH 11/19 BIG FREEDIA 11/20 BILL CALLAHAN 11/22 MONSTER MAGNET 11/27 NIGHTMARES ON WAX 11/30 SANDRIDER 12/6 EL TEN ELEVEN 12/20 DEEP SEA DIVER 12/27 & 12/28 BUILT TO SPILL 12/30 & 12/31 STRFKR

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

COMING UP: 10/9 JACCO GARDNER 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 11/12 CROCODILES 11/13 JILLETTE JOHNSON

SATURDAY 10/12

KITHKIN + VOX MOD + KAYLEE COLE

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.

JON HASSELL

Dream Theory in Malaya: Fourth World Volume Two (E.G.)

This is some weird shit, once again! But the good part is it’s not incomprehensible, especially the more you listen. Jon Hassell is some dude I know not of, as usual, and I will only google him to explain him to you after I listen some more with virgin ears, so gimme a second.

Dream Theory in Malaya is a lush jungle of sound—if I were a real music writer, I believe this would be the appropriate moment for the word “tapestry,” no? (Don’t worry, the only music tapestry I’ll ever talk about is Carole King’s.) Hassell makes a strange garden inside what, in my head, is a curved soundstage, like one of those children’s picture books where a kid’s playful imagination slowly populates their bedroom with wildness. There are edges of artifice— this can’t all be sticks and buckets and real horns, can it?—but they’re hard to find precisely. Some of this is surely manipulated. But it also sounds honest, which is most of what I ask of any music.

Inside the bare white walls of this imaginary room, Hassell drags (1) a signal of some kind, a bleeping beacon. (2) Backward trumpets. (3) Farts—I’m just being honest, it’s kinda farty. Sorry! (4) Tropical birds, seabirds, ducks. (5) Clapping hands. (6) That guy who drums on upturned buckets, cloned a couple times. (7) An ancient bugle battle cry, blown through a mesh of cheesecloth and cotton balls. (8) The rhyming exhales of strange beings. (9) Musical elephants. (10) The sound a rainbow would make if you could hear it—I know that sounds cheesy. But it’s just true! It is! Go to track three, “Dream Theory.” Bam! Rainbow sound.

Hey, you know what’s weird? This music makes me want to use the word “sonic” all of a sudden, a word I never use. It’s like listening to too much out-there music actually drives you toward those music-writer words. I finally see where you’re coming from, Dave “Sonic Tapestry” Segal! You can’t help it! What a breakthrough.

After googling the fellow, I can tell you dude’s a “composer/trumpeter” who calls his genre “Fourth World.” It’s a “mysterious, unique hybrid of musics that unfolds between the polarities of ancient and digital, composed and improvised, Eastern and Western,” says he.

I say: Sometimes it’s like a monster made of bells starting to hyperventilate while bored flutists try to distract him, and other times it’s like a coyote choir in a canyon playing one big theremin. Oh, also, there’s some water. A lot of water, actually. (And some of that fluting sucks. Sorry again!)

I give this a “make plural what you will, bro” out of 10.

MY PHILOSOPHY

DANNY BROWN’S OLD

“Hipster by heart, but I can tell you how the streets feel.”

—Daniel Dewan Sewell, “Lonely”

This time of year is a tough transition: It’s getting dark as fuck (weather- and otherwise), it’s cold, everybody’s getting sick—but a bunch of music starts dropping, too, encouraging you to warm your ears within some headphones. Yes, I’m still Drake’n on the low, Doris still smashes, and Yeezus is still Yeezus (aside from his newly neutered “inside voice,” the fuck bro?)— but as I start to compile my best-of-2013 list (fart noise), I am definitely giving heavy thought on where to fit the newest album from Danny Brown Old Brown is 32, which is basically AARP status rap-wise, but that’s not what he’s talking about with his album title—“They want that old Danny Brown,” he grumbles on opener “Side A,” which revisits the set pieces of his rep-making Detroit State of Mind mixtape era. Not quite resentful at getting boxed back in, he knowingly obliges with a harrowing tour through those same shitty houses, steak-sauce-colored Cutlass Supremes, and of course, the endless transactions with desperate fiends. (It’s those bits that stick out, jagged and elbowsnagging, reminding me of sad stories I heard from my closest relations about “the life”—ranging from the mundane to comical to descriptions of degradation, heartbreaking to civilian ears, but related in the same dead tone as the rest.) On “Torture,” Brown

accurately identifies with a prisoner of war— PTSD is in the hood like cheap sodas—as he relays a litany of urban horrors he’s known all his life: freezing in his own house, up-close murders in the park, a crack-addict uncle burning his face up. “Mind would drift off/Wish it was what I seen on TV/I snapped outta that—unc’ beating on my auntie.”

All of which points to his funny-coiffed and fitted future—as in my experience, there’s no hipster quite as adamant as the ghetto kid who wants to see another side of life. Danny Brown knows who the fuck you came for—the adenoidal “Adderall Admiral,” the molly-hoovering party rapper, insatiable sex fiend and cunning linguist. He’s definitely in the building, notably beginning with “Side B (Dope Song),” and in prime form on tracks like “Dip,” “Smokin & Drinkin,” “Break It (Go),” and “Handstand.” First though, thankfully, Brown insists that you hear about the emotional/chemical toll that it all takes, and the psychic scars that led him there in the first place—a toofamiliar speedball of depression, guilt, and emptiness smolders on mournful, perfect tracks like “Lonely” and “Clean Up.” This is what’s called “due diligence,” and it’s what most rappers just don’t do, which is why only a few can break above the din.

Old is Brown’s Aquemini (a favorite of his, as it should be to anybody that draws breath), a reconciliation of all his thought-to-be-disparate aspects, from subject matter to sounds. It even has a second track (“The Return,” featuring the gangsta rapper’s gangsta rapper Freddie Gibbs) modeled after “Return of the G,” ’Kast’s warning not to get shit twisted. Is it similarly classic? Well, genius, that’s something established over time—not blog-years, either. I can say that it’s by far Brown’s most inspired, complete work, which means it’s easily among the year’s best. Check, please.

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

Square Peg Presents THE WINERY DOGS STARING: RICHIE KOTZEN, BILLY SHEEHAN & MIKE PORTNOY SixxiS 21+

LA LUZ “IT’S ALIVE” RECORD RELEASE PARTY!

Dude York, DJ Gold Van Man, The Oogga Booga Boogie Down By The Sound Beach Bash & Dance Off All Ages

The Crocodile & ReignCity present: The Soul Spectacular Tour KARL DENSON’S TINY UNIVERSE PRESENT: A RAY CHARLES BOOGALOO DANCE PARTY Zach Deputy All Ages

LEAF Brian Wright All Ages

SOUND CHECK

MARKY RAMONE, TOURING WITH HIS OWN BLITZKRIEG

Two words are about to appear before you. Those words are PUNK and ROCK. When you see those words, one of the first thoughts that will undoubtedly flash into your head is the Ramones. The Sex Pistols, the Clash, and the Damned may also flash, along with Richard Hell, or Sid Vicious. You might think about heroin. Or maybe you think punk rock is dead. The reason the Ramones appear among these initial thoughts is they are that formative, significant, and influential to the punk sound and movement. To 1978 we go, to Manhattan—315 Bowery at Bleecker Street, CBGB, where Dee Dee Ramone asked drummer Marc Bell to join the Ramones. Marc said yes, became Marky Ramone, and would go on to be the Ramones’ mainstay drummer until their end in 1996 (with a break from ’83 to ’87). As the only surviving member of their iconic lineup, Marky is touring with a band fronted by Andrew W.K. and playing a set of more than 30 Ramones songs. He spoke from his home in New York with a sturdy, down-to-business Brooklyn accent. I didn’t expect him to be so sincere and courteous.

know he shot off guns with other people.

The Ramones hung out with Stephen King when you all did the song “Pet Sematary” for the movie based on his book? Yeah, we got to hang out with him for a day and a night in Maine, where he lives. He was extremely hospitable. He brought us down to his basement that looked like a horror-movie set, and we sat around and ate dinner. He gave Dee Dee the book to read. Dee Dee took it home, read it, and then wrote the song in something like 40 minutes. He taught Johnny how to play the guitar on it.

Is “Beat on the Brat” about a specific brat? Do you know? Joey wrote that one. He was an unusual specimen, physically. As a kid, he got taunted and goofed on and teased a lot. After a while, that can get to you, so he wrote that song, “Beat on the brat, with a baseball bat.” [Laughs]

Ramone’s Blitzkrieg w/FIGO, Loud Eyes Thurs Oct 10, Neumos, 8 pm, $25 adv, 21+

I was glad when you and Joey made up on The Howard Stern Show We laughed about that. We knew we had Howard going. When we went down in the elevator after the fight, we cracked up. And then we went back on to make up. But really, it was good to make up, because Joey did die of cancer, and I was able to do the solo album he always wanted to do. Family squabbles are going to happen—we were like brothers.

TOM WAITS COcktail

club

at HOSTED BY DJ ANDRAS JONES

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 10TH 8-11PM

How did Andrew W.K. become involved with this current tour and band? He was suggested by a friend who used to help run Studio 54, and he was interested. I gave him the set list that I wanted to do, and he rehearsed it on his own. Then he came to a rehearsal, and it worked. I didn’t want a clone of any of the Ramones; I wanted a guy who could do it his way, engage the audience—he really pulls it off. So far, we’ve been to 12 different countries together.

Which of the songs in this current set are you finding yourself most excited about? These were all my favorite Ramones songs I picked out of the whole repertoire. I do the ones that got the most reaction when I was playing with Johnny, Joey, and Dee Dee. I always remembered.

But if you had to say, which song makes you go “Fuck yeah” the most? Okay, okay, let’s see. I love “Rock ’n’ Roll High School.” But I also love “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker,” “I Wanna Be Sedated,” “Blitzkrieg Bop” [laughs]. It’s too hard to just choose one.

Of the Ramones albums you were involved in, which was the hardest to record? We rehearsed a lot, so we were very quick in the studio. The album that took the longest was the one produced by Phil Spector: End of the Century. We usually made our albums in three to four weeks, but with Phil, it took five months. We weren’t there that long; it was the mixing that took all the time. It wasn’t rough making it, but there was just a lot of adventure going on in that studio.

So the whole Phil Spector holding you guys at gunpoint thing is a myth? But I want to believe. Sorry, that was just some story. It’s a good one. I would let it ride [laughs], but it’s not true. He had a license to carry, but he never pointed them at us. Guns can get heavy, so he would take the guns off and put them on the recording console. I

I spoke with Glenn Danzig, and he said punk is dead and new bands calling themselves punk aren’t punk. Danzig was more into the horror stuff. I don’t know if he’s really a punk spokesman. I think there absolutely are good, new punk bands. I have a radio show on SiriusXM, and I hear a lot of great new punk stuff—Gallows out of London are really good, so are Riverboat Gamblers. I also like the Loved Ones. You gotta keep your ears open, you know? They mix it up and put their own spin on it.

Any hints you can drop about your upcoming book? It’s about everything: the New York scene, playing with the Clash, and with Richard Hell and the Voidoids on that tour in 1977. Going to England and playing there, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and what went down there, getting the Grammy. Making the Rock ’n’ Roll High School movie. The real reality of working with Phil Spector. Hanging out with Sid Vicious when he moved to the Chelsea Hotel. Lots of stuff.

I’ve spoken to a couple girls recently who I think have retro rock crushes on Dee Dee. A lot of girls had crushes on Dee Dee [laughs]. Lots of crazy stories about Dee Dee are in the book, and I don’t have to bullshit them. They’re all real. The book is pretty informative [laughs]. Tell those girls they’ll enjoy it…

In conjunction with Blitz Capitol Hill Art Walk Curated Cocktails Cocktails and Camarderie 1703 E. OLIVE WAY 206.323.4866 WWW.TOMMYGUNSEATTLE.COM

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

NORTHWEST FAMILY LIFE BENEFIT SHOW

MON, OCT 21 PRE-SALE SHOW

“Advocate and Celebrate” GINGER BAKER’S JAZZ CONFUSION

TUE, OCT 22 - WED, OCT 23

Ft. Pee Wee Ellis, Alec Dankworth, Abass Dodoo

ROY HARGROVE QUINTET

THU, OCT 24 - SUN, OCT 27

Grammy winning jazz trumpeter traverses from straight ahead to swing to funk.

2033 6th Ave. | 206.441.9729 all ages | free parking full schedule at jazzalley.com

UP&COMING

Get pop-punk shin splints every night this week! For the full music calendar, see page 46 or visit thestranger.com/music For ticket on-sale announcements, follow twitter.com/seashows

Wednesday 10/9

Disclosure, T.Williams (Showbox Sodo) See Data Breaker, page 46. Jacco Gardner, Parson Red Heads, Ephrata (Barboza) Dutch singer/songwriter Jacco Gardner sure has nailed that baroque psych-pop aura made obscurely famous by the likes of the Left Banke, Kaleidoscope (the UK one), the Millennium, and Billy Nicholls. Using flute, strings, harpsichord, and other traditionally non-rock instruments to augment his delicate, attractively morose compositions, Gardner erects a glittering simulacrum of a rarely glimpsed corner of the pop-rock spectrum. It really is pitchperfect. This year’s Cabinet of Curiosities will trigger paisley-shaped tears of joy among those partial to this sort of authentic replication. Seattle quartet Ephrata—featuring the up-and-coming filmmaker Brady Hall of Scrapper fame—create magisterial, heart-fluttering dream pop that’ll shiver the neck hairs of Lush and Slowdive fans. DAVE SEGAL

Tjutjuna, Geist and the Sacred Ensemble, Kingdom of the Holy Sun (Chop Suey) Denver five-piece Tjutjuna have bestowed to us Westerner, one of the most transcendent space-rock releases of the last 10 years—at least. Without an iota of stuffy academicism, they’ve integrated the formal elements of minimalist composers like Terry Riley and La Monte Young into a celestial, propulsive rock context. As a result, Tjutjuna’s tracks take you higher off the mundane plane on which you exist than almost any other groups’. And with “Songer Dance,” they’ve

matched Spiritualized at their “Electric Mainline” peak. Seattle’s Kingdom of the Holy Sun have taken inspiration from the Doors’ “When the Music’s Over” and “The End” in order to forge their own serpentine, hashish-dream rock epics. Check out their new, mojo-risin’ full-length, Surya’s Smile, for proof. DAVE SEGAL

Delorean

(Neumos) Spanish indie dance-pop quartet Delorean’s 2010 Subiza was a collection of shimmering, sample-filled grooves as breezy and coastal as Zarautz, the town where the band was formed. One of the only knocks against it was that it sounded a little thin, a little too breezy in some parts. For the band’s fourth full-length, Apar (which apparently is a Basque word for froth or foam), they attempt to bolster their formula by ditching the samples for guest vocals, boosting the production values, and slightly darkening the lyrics for a bigger, fuller, and ultimately realer end result. Even with these slight changes, Apar is still the kind of sunny, up-tempo stuff more suited for a Balearic vacation than fall in Seattle, and this Neumos set should offer an escape from the chilly outdoors via blissful dance-floorready pop jams. MIKE RAMOS

Thursday 10/10

Marky Ramone’s Blitzkrieg with Andrew W.K., Figo (Neumos) See Sound Check, page 41.

Loscil, Minamo, Marcus Fischer (Chapel Performance Space) See Data Breaker, page 46.

Heatwarmer, Slashed Tires, Ursula, Erin Tanner (Heartland) Slashed Tires is the experimental oddpop project of one Kenneth Piekarski—former Stranger music intern and all-ages hero—and this show, I’m told, will be the first Slashed Tires set with a backing band (featuring Claire Buss of Peeping Tomboys on bass, Andrew Hall of Dude York on keys, and Peter Richards on guitar/bass). Slashed Tires’ recordings range from funked-out, vaguely tropical party grooves to off-kilter loops of space noise, so the live versions with more hands on deck should be something to see. With the epic/awe-

some wackiness of Heatwarmer, and

I’ve heard

EMILY

be a

Fucked Up, Terror (El Corazón) Do not miss this chance to see Fucked Up. Do not. The Toronto-based punk band puts on one of the best, most insane, but also most fun live shows you’ll ever experience. Singer Damian Abraham, who’s basically a hardcore teddy bear, can’t keep his shirt on as he dives from the stage to the crowd over and over again while the band blasts

through guitar-driven hardcore songs with a beat faster than the mosh pit’s pulse. Go. Get sweaty, crazy, and deliriously happy. MEGAN SELING

Friday 10/11

The Waterboys, Freddie Stevenson (Neptune Theatre) See Underage, page 49.

Hypnotikon: Seattle Psych Fest: CAVE, Lumerians, Midday Veil, Fungal Abyss, Tokyoidaho, Ecstatic Cosmic Union

(Triple Door) Many modern-day aural explorers flagrantly take cues from the krautrock bands of the ’60s and ’70s, but few bands manage to retrace those transdimensional journeys quite like Chicago’s CAVE. Harnessing Neu!’s compacted and deliberate grooves, Irmin Schmidt’s hallucinatory keyboard treatments, and Amon Düül II’s playfully sinister psychedelia, CAVE skillfully pay homage to a bunch of German acid-heads who managed to make music that, even 40 years later, still sounds like it’s channeled from the future. Oakland’s Lumerians are similarly adept at capturing the hypnotic power of Köln and Düsseldorf’s finest exports, while also culling from the best of British post-punk, Italian prog, and Nigerian Afrobeat. While tonight’s two top acts follow in the path of visionaries from across the Atlantic, the entire lineup’s sights are ultimately set on territories more cosmic than international. BRIAN COOK See also Stranger Suggests, page 19.

Quintron and Miss Pussycat, ZZZ, the Trashies (Tractor) When people travel to Seattle, Washington (to BALLARD, even!), all the way from New Orleans, Louisiana, you should do yourself a kindness and go and see them perform. Quintron and Miss Pussycat’s hard-to-define brand of “swamp-tech”—their weirdo-electro-dance-rock-soul-boogie (that usually comes complete with a puppet show)—is in a nutty world of its own. They’re the kind of band that can make sense in either an art museum or strip club. Oh, and did I mention there’s a puppet show? KELLY O

Saturday 10/12

Sleigh Bells, Doldrums (Showbox at the Market) See Underage, page 49.

Hypnotikon: Seattle Psych Fest: Silver Apples, Cloudland Canyon, Night Beats, Jetman Jet Team, Brain Fruit, Karnak Temples

(Triple Door) The second night of this inaugural festival features proto-electronic-rock legends Silver Apples, whose first two vastly influential late-’60s albums abound with weirdly catchy, sample-wor-

thy, analog-synth peregrinations. Leader Simeon’s inventive, hippie-fried oscillator manipulations and poignantly fragile vocals continue to evoke a uniquely moving man/machine interface. Cloudland Canyon have transitioned from drone connoisseurs to krautrock worshippers to high-flying shoegaze rockers to kosmische-disco sun-touchers—a magnificent metamorphosis. The rest of the lineup’s packed with homegrown talent: Night Beats’ wired garagepsych, Jetman Jet Team’s freewheeling krautgaze, Brain Fruit’s interstellar improvisations, and Karnak Temples’ arboreal guitar soliloquies. (Disclosure: I helped to curate this event.) DAVE SEGAL See also Stranger Suggests, page 19.

Nik Turner’s Space Ritual, Master Musicians of Bukkake, Hedersleben (Chop Suey) From 1969 to 1976, Nik Turner played a crucial role in helping Britain’s Hawkwind to become one of the catalysts of space rock. A saxophonist, vocalist, and percussionist, Turner wrote or cowrote some of Hawkwind’s most thrilling songs, including “Brainstorm,” “Master of the Universe,” “You Shouldn’t Do That,” and “D-Rider.” Now 73, he’s shown a propensity for introducing trance-inducing riffs and artful chaos into tracks, stretching them into bizarre shapes while retaining their essential “rockness.” Recent footage of his large Space Ritual group reveals that Turner and his seven cohorts are pretty much keeping Hawkwind’s science-fictional sonic and lyrical nature in rude health.

DAVE SEGAL

Orange Goblin, Holy Grail, Lazer/Wulf

(Highline) Riffs on riffs on riffs on riffs. Expect nothing less from UK groove gods Orange Goblin. For 18 years now, these lords of sleaze have been releasing heavy yet catchy stoner rock with a cosmic flare. Their latest effort, A Eulogy for the Damned, is no exception, as it proved the Goblin can still rage after five years away from the studio. It’s that kind of band where preshow bong hits are a requirement. Support comes from Holy Grail, a cheese-tastic power-metal band from California that obviously overdosed at a young age on Iron Maiden and Judas Priest singles. KEVIN DIERS

Sunday 10/13

Hypnotikon’s over. Might as well go to church.

Monday 10/14

Earshot Jazz Festival (Various venues) See Stranger Suggests, page 19. Runs through Nov 17.

10.10 Thursday (Bluegrass / Jam)

POOR MAN’S WHISKEY performs “Old And In The Way” Spare Rib and the Bluegrass Sauce, Big E & Friends

$10 adv / $15 dos, 7pm doors, 21+

10.11 Friday (Hip-Hop)

Gift of Gab (of Blackalicious) The Good Husbands, The Hooky’s, Vursatyl (Of Lifesavas), DJ Indica Jones

$10 adv. $15 doors, 8pm, 21+

10.12 Saturday (Female Fronted Electro-Pop)

ELECTRIC BABES FROM OUTER

SPACE feat: DIONVOX

Purr Gato, Feverton, Screens

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

10.13 Sunday (Hip Hop)

MotaMouth Jones, Marciz SikkStlyz, NEna Kapone, JustinSayne N8V, Kidd Kaliko, King Scrub, Tom Hutch, YakNasty ThatNNilla, Prano ThaDon, OnlyOne Wizer, Deadly Poets, Archie Bellz

$5 adv / $8 dos, 7pm doors, 21+

10.15 Tuesday (Dancehall / Hip-Hop)

BABY CHAM with 3J Million, DJ Jigsy

$25 adv. $30 Doors, 8pm,

Thee Oh Sees, OBN Ills, The Blind Shake

(Crocodile) There’s something comforting in the prolific pile of gnarly wonder that is Thee Oh Sees—their new albums roll out on John Dwyer’s freaky conveyor belt at a pace that puts most bands to shame; each slab of springy, WOO!heavy, chugging reverb is as consistently enjoyable as the last. Thee Oh Sees’ “sound” ranges from sharp garage catchiness to paranoid layers of psychedelic thrash (with the sweetest ghostly backup vocals you ever did hear), and a gruesome easiness ties them all together. On tour with Stones-washed punks OBN Ills and left-brained garage rockers the Blind Shake. Dance until your head falls off. EMILY NOKES

Coliseum, Red Hare, Heiress, Deadkill

(Highline) If you’re already going to tonight’s show to see Coliseum, here’s a tip: Show up on time to see Deadkill. I know, I know, they’re the first act on a four-band bill and the Highline stopped serving their BBQ nuggs, so why would you get there early? Because Deadkill fuckin’ slay, dudes, that’s why. Their punk rock is blistering and snotty, and their songs usually last no more than three minutes (sometimes less than two). Plus, singer Bryan Krieger has the best crazy eyes in all of Seattle. When he stares into the crowd and spits out, “Oh, God help you,” you’ll be wondering if, in fact, you really should start hoping there’s some kind of higher power on your side. MEGAN SELING

Tuesday 10/15

page 46.

dedly over the PA of an Urban Outfitters. They’re like a less dull and annoying Interpol, cheekily channeling monochrome UK groups like Joy Division, Jesus and Mary Chain, and Felt for people who weren’t alive during those bands’ heydays. (Crystal Stilts’ 2011 album title, In Love with Oblivion, perfectly captures JD and JAMC’s gestalts.) The Stilts are supporting their new album, Nature Noir, loaded with more of Brad Hargett’s lugubrious-guy vocals and slightly brighter guitar textures. There’s even one freaky tune (“Darken the Door”) that’s in waltz time.

DAVE SEGAL

Emerson String Quartet

(Meany Hall) The mighty Emerson has had its first roster change in 34 years: the departure of cellist David Finckel, replaced by Paul Watkins. The quartet earned a double standing ovation in Washington, DC, in May, with Watkins onstage, and Pulitzer-winning critic Philip Kennicott wrote in the Washington Post that the Emerson is still, as always, pretty much “the professor at the party who refuses to dance”: “They will never smother the music with love, but they always treat it and the audience with profound respect.” UW prof and favorite Seattle pianist Craig Sheppard will join them for Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G minor.

JEN GRAVES

Real Friends, Mixtapes, Forever

Came Calling, Pentimento

Crystal Stilts, Zachary Cale, the

Men

Crystal Stilts live in New York City and record for Sacred Bones, which makes them ripe fodder for a VICE magazine feature and sneering accusations of being a “hipster” band. And one can imagine hearing Crystal Stilts brooding heavy-lid-

(Vera) Three things you must do before leaving the house for tonight’s Mixtapes show: (1) Warm up your pogo muscles. Stretch your calves, do a couple of quick sprints. You don’t want to get pop-punk shin splints while bouncing along. (2) Do plenty of vocal warm-ups, too. You’ll most certainly be singing along to Mixtapes’ undeniably catchy harmonies, and your pogo-pit neighbors would really appreciate it if you at least tried being on key. (3) Make sure you invite your crush! When the band launches into “Cheapness,” grab their hand, rush the stage, and make eye contact while Maura Weaver sings “The world doesn’t give a damn/But now I find that comforting/We’ll dance while the rest of them sleep.” Guaranteed postshow makeout sessions! MEGAN SELING

The NFL Sunday Ticket Here In Hi-Def

Near the Center of the Universe at the Corner of 35th. and Stone Way N. 206-547-2967

THURSDAY OCTOBER 10 | 7:00 PM

RADICAL SOMETHING DOWN WITH WEBSTER

$16 GENERAL ADMISSION

SUNDAY OCTOBER 13 | 7:30 PM

D PRYDE $11

TUESDAY OCTOBER 15 | 6:30 PM

TAKE WARNING & THE VERA PROJECT PRESENT: REAL FRIENDS, MIXTAPES

$10 ADVANCE

THURSDAY OCTOBER 17 | 6 PM

TAKE WARNING & THE VERA PROJECT PRESENT GHOST TOWN, HER BRIGHT SKIES

$12 ADV

FRIDAY OCTOBER 18TH | 7:30 PM

TAKE WARNING & THE VERA PROJECT PRESENT TWIN FORKS

MATRIMONY,PLUS GUESTS

$12 ADV

SATURDAY OCTOBER 19 | 7:30 PM

ELEMENTS OF MELODY: EVERFREE’S ETERNAL NIGHT, THE OVERPONES BLOO, MAESTRO SCHERZO AND BRIGHT SIDE, TARBY, DONN, DEVORE AND THE CUTIE MARKS, VICTOR MALICE, DJ EVERFREE

$9 ADV $11 DOS

ALWAYS ALL AGES

VULGAR VIGNETTES

WED 10/9

LIVE

BARBOZA Jacco Gardner, Parson Red Heads, Ephrata, 8 pm, $10

CHOP SUEY Tjutjuna, Geist and the Sacred Ensemble, Kingdom of the Holy Sun 8 pm, $8/$10

a CROCODILE Jojo, Leah LaBelle, 8 pm, $14-$35

a EL CORAZON Icon for Hire, 7 pm, $15/$18

HIGH DIVE The Strange Nails, Matt Goodwin, Zach Lombardo, 8 pm, $6

HIGHLINE Benefit for Comet Tavern Employees: Smashie Smashie, Skullbot , Seminars, $6

HIGHWAY 99 High and Lonesome, $7

JAZZ ALLEY Dave Holland, Kevin Eubanks, Craig Taborn, Eric Harland, $26.50

NECTAR Fox Street All Stars, Rippin’ Chicken, guests, 7 pm, $6/$10

a NEPTUNE THEATRE Shovels & Rope, Denver, 8 pm, $16.50/$18

NEUMOS Delorean, guests, 8 pm, $14

NEW ORLEANS Legacy Band, Clarence Acox

PIES & PINTS Live Rotating Bands: Guests, 8:30 pm

PINK DOOR Casey MacGill

& the Blue 4 Trio, 8 pm

THE ROYAL ROOM A Tribute to John Lennon: Cracker Factory , Tiny Messengers, C-Leb & the Kettle Black , Spoonshine, guests

SEAMONSTER The Unsinkable Heavies

SHIP CANAL GRILL The Canteloupes Jazz Jam

a SHOWBOX SODO Disclosure, T.Williams, $25

STUDIO SEVEN Diamond Head, Raven, Above Ground, 6:30 pm, $15/$18 SUNSET TAVERN Deep Dark Woods, Daniel Romano

TRACTOR TAVERN Ha Ha Tonka, Samantha Crain, Modern Relics, $12 a TRIPLE DOOR Dave Simonett, Ark Life

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Jerry Zimmerman

DJ BALTIC ROOM Crunk: DJ Henski, Marty Mar, Blue Eyed Soul, Bgeezy, guests CONTOUR Rotation Tryouts: Guests THE EAGLE VJDJ Andy J ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN Passage: Jayms Nylon, Joey Webb, guests FOUNDATION Vaski, Just One, Keano, Matt Waters HAVANA SoulShift: Peter Evans, Devlin Jenkins, Richard Everhard, $1 LAST SUPPER CLUB Vibe Wednesday: Jame$Ervin,

BY DAVE SEGAL

WEDNESDAY 10/9

DISCLOSURE ARE VERY YOUNG AND POPULAR

Disclosure—British brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence, who are 22 and 19, respectively—have blown the hell up this year with the album Settle and a host of singles, including “You & Me,” with Eliza Doolittle on brassy, pop-R&B vocals, and “White Noise,” featuring the sassy, pop-R&B voice of AlunaGeorge (Disclosure’s popularity has forced this gig to move from Showbox at the Market to Showbox Sodo, which is unfortunate for audiophiles.) Settle is a beneficiary of EDM’s (spit) ascendance in the mainstream mind-set, and as popular dance music goes, it’s a relatively classy affair, with serious craft put into the lustrous textures and housey beats, buttressed by humans who can sing without aid from AutoTune. Don’t be surprised to see Disclosure opening for Daft Punk when they deign to hit the road. With T.Williams Showbox Sodo, 8:30 pm, $25, all ages, sold out.

THURSDAY 10/10

LOSCIL AND MINAMO GENTLY

MASSAGE YOUR CARES AWAY

Japanese quartet Minamo operate in the intimate juncture where ambient music, minimalist improvisation, and ECM-ish jazz intersect. If you ever warmed to early Múm or Shuttle358, you’ll treasure Minamo’s adorable miniatures. With Marcus Fischer Chapel Performance Space, 8 pm, $5–$15 sliding scale, all ages.

TUESDAY 10/15

HOLY GHOST!’S SLICK DISCO FOR TEEN-ROMANCE FLICKS

For the last 12 years, Loscil (Vancouver producer Scott Morgan) has been one of the world’s most consistently great purveyors of tranquil, massage-therapistfriendly ambient music. Recent albums like Endless Falls and Sketches from New Brighton show that Loscil continues to refine his ability to forge passages of subaquatic intrigue and ethereal grandeur. He remains almost unparalleled for creating music that captures a paradoxically comforting sense of isolation

Brooklyn duo Holy Ghost! are the DFA label’s slickest disco ambassadors. Their impeccably arranged, glossily produced, and melodically pretty tracks straddle the line between club functionality and home-listening euphony. Multi-instrumentalist members Nick Millhiser (drums, bass, guitar, programming) and Alex Frankel (vocals, keyboards) honed their chops as session musicians for various DFA productions and remixes, and their music has a pro sheen of which I’m not overly fond, but there’s no denying the skill involved. Their new album, Dynamics, has plenty of potential teen-romance-movie jams. Fans of !!!, Junior Boys, and Hercules & Love Affair should resole their dancing shoes for this one. With Midnight Magic Neumos, 8 pm, $18 adv, 21+.

a CROCODILE Little Green Cars, Kris Orlowski

DARRELL’S TAVERN Snowdrift, guests, $5

a EASY STREET RECORDS

Lucius, 7 pm, free

EGAN’S JAM HOUSE

Christopher Brant Anderson and Carolyn Cruso, 7 pm

a EL CORAZON Fucked

Up, Terror, 7 pm, $15; Hugh Cornwell, Brothers of Brazil, 8 pm, $13/$15

HARD ROCK CAFE Victory Swig, Kylan Johnson, Miss Lopez & the Wandering Few

a HEARTLAND Heatwarmer, Slashed Tires Ursula, Erin

Tanner

HIGH DIVE Skullbot , Haircuts that Hurt, the Lonely Drivers, 8 pm, $6

HIGHLINE The Dark Blue, Hollow Boys, Frog Flag, $5

HIGHWAY 99 James King and the Southsiders

J&M CAFE Noah Peterson , guests, 8 pm, $10

JAZZ ALLEY Pat Martino Trio with James Carter, $26.50

LITTLE RED HEN Copper & Coal, $3

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

NARWHAL Curse of the North , Tacos!, Princess, Witch Ripper, Sioux, guests, free

NECTAR Poor Man’s Whiskey, Spare Rib and the Bluegrass Sauce, guests, 7 pm, $10/$15

a NEPTUNE THEATRE

Langhorne Slim & the Law, 8 pm, $16.50/$20

NEUMOS Marky Ramone’s Blitzkrieg with Andrew WK, Figo, 8 pm, $25

PINK DOOR Bric-a-Brac

RENDEZVOUS The Spider Ferns, Tiburon, Richie Dagger’s Crime, Moose Portrait, 10 pm THE ROYAL ROOM Maiah Manser, China Davis, Bradley Wik & The Charlatans

SCARLET TREE How Now Brown Cow , 9:30 pm, free SHOWBOX AT THE MARKET

Laidback Luke, D.O.D., 8 pm

SHOWBOX SODO Wolfgang Gartner, 8 pm

SUNSET TAVERN Sturgill Simpson, the Swearengens

TRACTOR TAVERN Hurray for the Riff Raff, Spiritual Family Reunion, the Deslondes, $12/$15

TRIPLE DOOR Wendy Ho, 8 pm, $20

TULA’S Diana Page, 7:30 pm, $10

a VERA PROJECT Radical Something, Down With Webster, guests, 7:30 pm, $15/$16

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Brazil Novo, Casey MacGill, 5:30 pm, free THE WHITE RABBIT Marmalade, $6 DJ

BALLROOM DJ Rob, free BALTIC ROOM Revolution: DonnaTella Howe, Olivia LaGarce, guests

THE EAGLE Nasty: DJ King of Pants, Nark

HAVANA Sophisticated Mama: DJ Sad Bastard, DJ Nitty Gritty

MOE BAR Saucy: DJ Rad’em, DJ 100 Proof, free NEIGHBOURS Jet Set Thursdays: Guest DJs

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND The Lowdown: DJ Lightray, $3

Q NIGHTCLUB JT Donaldson, Supreme, Xan, Blueyedsoul, $5

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

FRI

10/11

LIVE

2 BIT SALOON Dodgy

Mountain Men

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

BARBOZA Sir Sly, the Chain Gang of 1974, Ben Heir, 7 pm, $10

BLUE MOON TAVERN

Pipsisewah, West Coast Improvement Company, Sons of Huns, Crag Dweller, $6 CAFE RACER Bonneville Power, Thankless Refuzors

CENTRAL SALOON Black City Blues

FRIDAY 10/11

THE WATERBOYS, FREDDIE STEVENSON

CHAPEL PERFORMANCE

SPACE Fisher Ensemble

CHOP SUEY Mark Pickerel and His Praying Hands, Evening Bell, $10/$12

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER Lucius, Great Wilderness

CONOR BYRNE Barton Carroll, the Wayfinders, Tripwires

CROCODILE Richie Kotzen, Billy Sheehan, Mike Portnoy

DARRELL’S TAVERN The Industry People, the King County Queens, Jo Jo Jupiter, $6

a EL CORAZON The Maine, Anberlin, Lydia, From Indian Lakes, 7:30 pm, $23/$25

a EVERYDAY MUSIC Night Beats , 7 pm, free HARD ROCK CAFE Whitney Monge, 5 pm; Arisen From Nothing , guests, 9 pm, $10/$13

a HEARTLAND

SuperProjection, Seacats, Special Explosion

HIGH DIVE Falling Blind Otis Heat, Moss Mantis , 9:30 pm, $8

HIGHLINE Worms of the Earth, Venal Colony, Sataray

HIGHWAY 99 Nearly Dan, 8 pm, $15

J&M CAFE Noah Peterson

JAZZ ALLEY Pat Martino Trio with James Carter, $26.50

LITTLE RED HEN Trainwreck , $5

LO-FI Redwood Plan, LAZER_KITTY, Jupe Jupe

THE MIX Wildlife Indoors, Mrs. Howl, Sean Downey

NECTAR Gift of Gab, the Good Husbands a NEPTUNE THEATRE Waterboys, $35

NEUMOS Overseas, Radar Brothers, 8 pm, $15

PARAGON Levi Said, free

Q NIGHTCLUB Ashley Wallbridge, guests

RENDEZVOUS Rocky Glover, Props, Dafugadaheer, 10 pm a THE ROYAL ROOM The Westerlies, guests, Piano Royale, 5:30 pm

SEAMONSTER Funky 2 Death, 10 pm, free

SHOWARE CENTER Heart by Heart, 8 pm

a SHOWBOX SODO Gwar, Whitechapel, Iron Reagan, A Band of Orcs, 7:30 pm, $18/$20

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB Charms , Bigfoot Wallace &

BY JACKSON HATHORN

In an era of big music, big hair, big everything, the Waterboys were truly momentous. From 1983 to 1988, bandleader Mike Scott brought a wall-of-sound approach to electric folk balladry If Lou Reed studied up on Celtic mysticism, and then tried to make a record that sounded like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, the finished product might come close to replicating the Waterboys, whose early work forges a balance between being massive and graceful. Scott’s lyrics often recall an ancient and verdant past, with the instrumentation emulating his favorite imagery. A serenade about early English paganism can become ritualistic and enchanting, and a love song will surge with the passion of an overflowing river meeting the sea. In the years since the original band dissolved, Scott has occasionally taken up the Waterboys mantle, and his most recent album contains lyrics composed entirely from the poetry of William Butler Yeats. But as a somewhat new Waterboys fan who is still obsessed with their first few albums, I find myself singing along to one song in particular: It begins, “I have heard the big music, and I’ll never be the same.” Neptune Theatre, 9 pm, $35.

His Wicked Sons, Dead Bars, 8 pm, $7

SLIM’S LAST CHANCE

Sweet Kiss Mama, True

Holland

STUDIO SEVEN Hedon, Among the Mayans, Enclosures, Belladonna

SUNSET TAVERN The Valley , Summer Babes, Sleepcapsule, the Springboards , 10 pm, $10

TIM’S TAVERN Servants of the Rich

TRACTOR TAVERN Quintron & Miss Pussycat, ZZZ, the Trashies, 9:30 pm, $10/$12

TRIPLE DOOR

Hyponotikon: Cave, Lumerians, Midday Veil , Fungal Abyss, 8 pm, $25

TULA’S Milo Petersen, 7:30 pm, $15

THE WHITE RABBIT Verdant Mile, Honor Hall, DXL, Metaphoria $4

DJ

95 SLIDE DJ Fever One

BALLROOM DJ Tamm of KISS fm

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

CENTURY BALLROOM

Century Tango: DJ Anton, 9 pm, $10

CONTOUR Afterhours, 2 am

CUFF C&W Dancing: DJ

Harmonix, DJ Stacey, 7 pm; TGIF: Guest DJs, 11 pm, $5

ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN

Digging Deep: Ramiro, Jeromy Nail, Derrick

Deepvibez

FOUNDATION Foundation’s

One-Year Anniversary: Tyler Brown, Ian Powers, Bryan Furious, guests

FUEL DJ Headache, guests

HAVANA Rotating DJs: DV One, Soul One, Curtis, Nostalgia B, Sean Cee, $5

LAST SUPPER CLUB

Madness: Guests

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND Caliente

Celebra: DJ Polo, Efren

SCARLET TREE Oh So Fresh

Fridays: Deejay Tone, DJ

Buttnaked, guests

SEE SOUND LOUNGE Crush: Guest DJs, free

Fall, football and feathers!

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 COASTSWINGBACHATAWALTZTAPLINDYHOP

SATURDAY

10/12

SLEIGH BELLS, DOLDRUMS

Sleigh Bells have always been a mercurial band for me. When Alexis Krauss’s buoyant and gauzy vocals combine with Derek Miller’s blown-out, tommy-gunstyle guitar playing, it’s a hard-charging match made in heaven. But for every irresistibly catchy song they have, there is another one that features Krauss petulantly shouting her lyrics or Miller jumping headfirst into goofball metal-shredding territory. Sometimes I feel like I’d have trouble telling certain Sleigh Bells songs apart from the horrendous musical crimes on Punk Goes Crunk. Take their album from last year, Reign of Terror, which opens with “live” audience chatter that sounds about as authentic as what you’ll hear on a level of Guitar Hero, before Krauss eventually yells, “I wanna see all your fucking hands in the air!” while Miller engages in some macho riff posturing. Even though it sounds ridiculous and canned when it’s coming out of your phone or laptop, it isn’t going to be at all out of place in an actual live setting. Sleigh Bells are breakneck rockers, best experienced in person. Expect a lot of material from their newly released record, Bitter Rivals, at tonight’s show. Showbox at the Market, 9 pm, $24 adv/$26 DOS.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18TH

THERAPY LOUNGE Rapture: Guests, $3 after 11 pm

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

WILDROSE Lezbro: L.A. Kendall, Tony Burns, 9 pm, $3

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

SAT

10/12

LIVE

2 BIT SALOON

Cryptobebelem, Gibraltar, Prat Attack

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BALMAR Rotating DJ Night: Guests, 9:30 pm

BARBOZA Tim Kasher, Laura Stevenson, 7 pm, $12

BLUE MOON TAVERN

Bad Love, Gunn, the Magic Mirrors, $6

CAFE RACER Spontaneous Rex, the Workday Release, Daniel Moir

CENTRAL SALOON The Lounge Vultures, the Unoriginals

CHAPEL PERFORMANCE

SPACE Adrienne Varner

CHOP SUEY Space Ritual, Master Musicians of Bukkake, Hedersieben, $10/$13

CONOR BYRNE Buster Blue, Julia Massey & the 5 Finger Discount, $8

CROCODILE La Luz, Dude York, DJ Gold Van Man

DARRELL’S TAVERN The Hardcount , Country Sex, Devilwood, $7

EL CORAZON Zeke, Antiseen, the Load Levelers, Millhous , $10/$15; the Spittin’ Cobras, Zero Down , Dreadful Children, 8 pm, $10

ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN

Drop: Phil Western, Manos, Kadeejah Streets, Rhines, Night Train, $10 after 10:30

pm a

EMPTY SEA STUDIOS

Hanz Araki, Kathryn Claire, 8 pm, $15/$18

HIGH DIVE Whyte Out ,

Swingset Showdown , Eight Legs To Nowhere 9:30 pm, $8

HIGHLINE Orange Goblin, Holy Grail, Lazer/Wulf, 8 pm, $15

JAZZ ALLEY Pat Martino Trio with James Carter, $26.50

THE KRAKEN BAR & LOUNGE Stab Me Kill Me, Born Loser, Bottlenose Koffins, Benedict Awesome

LITTLE RED HEN Trainwreck $5

THE MIX Fred Roth Revue , Rhodes Fortune, Brad Yaeger

NECTAR Electric Babes from Outerspace, Dionvox, Purr Gato, guests, 8 pm, $6

NEUMOS Reykjavik

Calling: Sin Fang, Hermigervill, Borko, Kithkin, Vox Mod, Kaylee Cole, 8 pm, free

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

RENDEZVOUS Sumi & Phaedrus

a THE ROYAL ROOM The Cumbieros, 6 pm

SHIP CANAL GRILL Kelley Johnson , 8 pm

a SHOWBOX AT THE MARKET Sleigh Bells, Doldrums, 8 pm, $24/$26

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB Euro Dance Party USA, the Debaucherauntes, 8 pm, $7

SLIM’S LAST CHANCE Thee SGT Major, Unnatural Helpers, John Lee Spectre a STUDIO SEVEN Koffin Kats, Hot Roddin Romeos, guests, 7 pm, $10/$13

SUNSET TAVERN Feral Children , Case Studies, Friends and Family , $7/$8

TIM’S TAVERN Bad Koala, Kevin White Band, Kid Dynamite

TRACTOR TAVERN The Grizzled Mighty, Motopony , Lonesome Shack , $10/$12

TRIPLE DOOR

Hypnotikon: Silver Apples, Cloudland Canyon, Night Beats , Jetman Jet Team ,

THURSDAY 10/10

THE HO, FO SHO

$25

TULA’S Susan Pascal Quartet, 7:30 pm, $15

a VERA PROJECT Red Paintings, guests, 7:30 pm, $8/$10

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Prom Queen, Ruby Bishop, 6 pm

THE WHITE RABBIT The Bog Hoppers, Clearly Beloved Finn Doxie, 8:30 pm, $6

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 Sensorium: DJ Almond Brown

FOUNDATION Gareth Emery, Johnny Monsoon, Randall Glenn, DJ Gotek

HAVANA Rotating DJs: DV One, Soul One, Curtis, Nostalgia B, Sean Cee, $5

HEARTLAND CAFE & BENBOW ROOM Candylandia: DJ Cotton Candy, DJ Christophett, DJ Deep Parris, free LO-FI Emerald City Soul Club: Kenny Mac, Gene Balk, Marc Muller, Alvin Mangosing, Mike Chrietzberg, Brian Everett, George Gell, Mike “MP3s Forever” Nipper, 9 pm, $10

MOE BAR Panther Down: DJ N8,

BY ADRIAN RYAN

She’s a low-down dirty diva, is what. She’s what the kids these days are calling “a flipping YouTube sensation!” In fact, that’s how I discovered Wendy—a close friend of mine/kid these days flipped all out, “OMIGAWD, WENDY HO is coming! OMG OMG OMGz!” Of course, my curiosity got a big boner, and I was avocationally obliged to delve into the issue. Who and/or what is a Wendy Ho? What does she want? Where does she come from? What is her business? Who are her people? Where are her manners? Three zillion YouTube views and a conversation with Miss Ho later, this:

Jared Logan will appear this year on John Oliver’s New York Stand-up Show and Comedy Central’s Mash-up. He was a delegate for Comedy Central’s Indecision 2012 and a warm-up comedian for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. You may have also seen him on Live at Gotham or Last Comic Standing. He lives in New York City but is originally from Morgantown, WV. Appearing in the northwest only at the Comedy Underground.

at

Mrs. Ho (yes, the Ho is a fine upstanding married lady) is based in LA. She has worked with Vicky Vox and other bigname drag artists in clubs and cabarets, but it is crucial to note for our purposes that—no!—SHE IS NOT A DRAG QUEEN! (I repeat: NOT a drag queen! Crazy, right?) By way of comparison, she could be called a ghetto-mouthed Lady Rizo with a finely honed sense of poop humor, or like an attractive Peaches: all glamour, glitter, scat, vagina, and sass. (Sounds much like a drag queen, sans the vajeen—I KNOW!—but trust me on this, kitten.)

Her songs are bouncy and funny and vulgar vignettes: potty jokes and sex jokes rapped to a bouncy beat (“When I shit my pants? I just shake it out the leg.” Chorus: “Shake it out the leg! Shake it out the leg!”) It’s a silly and sickening sort of magic that makes your heart blossom with naughty glee—you just can’t help grinning your face off. Of

course, Wendy will be singing her “not suitable for anywhere” hits, including the ratchet-assed “Bitch, I Stole Yo Purse,” the cautionary tale “Poop Noodle,” the often interpreted, never duplicated “Fuck Me,” and her newest single, “Public Place.” (Oh! And Mizz Ho tells me she might even have a new Miley Cyrus parody to test out, so if lolling tongues gross you out or you have a phobia of big foam fingers, perhaps you should avert your delicate eyes.)

Even though Wendy is definitely not a queen (I KNOW!), a gaggling peck of local drag talent is set to accompany her: the eternally trashy Honey Bucket, Sashay Supernova, towering Mama Tits, Lady Chablis, and DonnaTella Howe, along with EmpeROAR Fabulous, James Majesty-St. James, and Kiara Leviathan. Mrs. Ho promises that she’ll have us “queefing with delight” (quite a challenge), and tells us, “YOU BETTA LUBE!!” Always fantastic advice. Triple Door, 8 pm, $20, 21+.

a SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB

Sit Ubu Sit, Verbal Tip, 4 pm, $5

SUNSET TAVERN Adam Arcuragi, Cheyenne Mize, 8:30 pm, $10

TRACTOR TAVERN

Houndmouth, Andrew Combs, 8 pm, $12/$15

a TRIPLE DOOR Greg Brown, Love Over Gold, guests, 7:30 pm, $40/$45

TULA’S Jazz Police Big Band, 3 pm, $5; Jim Cutler Jazz Orchestra, 8 pm, $8, Jim Cutler Jazz Orchestra, 8 pm, $8

a VERA PROJECT D Pryde, guests, 7:30 pm, $10/$11

VICTORY LOUNGE Buck Biloxi and the Fucks, Warning Danger!, Sir Coyler and His Asthmatic Band, the Lucky Boys, $6 VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Ruby Bishop, 6 pm; The Ron Weinstein Trio, 9:30 pm

BALTIC ROOM Mass: Guest DJs CONTOUR

Stepdad, MVSCLES, 7:30 pm, $10/$12; the Maxies, the Beat, Success, the Waywards, 8:30 pm, $10/$12

HIGHLINE Coliseum, Red Hare, Heiress, Deadkill, 8 pm, $10

KELL’S Liam Gallagher

NEUMOS Palma Violets, Skaters, 8 pm, $15

NEW ORLEANS The New Orleans Quintet, 6:30 pm THE ROYAL ROOM Bella Sala Trio, Brandon Vance

TRACTOR TAVERN The Tallboys , 7:30 pm, $6

TRIPLE DOOR

Musicquarium: Free Funk Union, free

TULA’S Dave Marriott Big Band, 7:30 pm, $5

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, 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

HAVANA Manic Mondays: DJ

Jay Battle, free THE HIDEOUT Introcut, guests, free LO-FI Jam Jam: Zion’s Gate, Sound Selecta, Element, Mista Chatman , $5

MOE BAR Minted Mondays: DJ Swervewon, 100proof, Sean Cee, Blueyedsoul, free NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND SIN: DJ

Keanu, 18+, free PONY Dirty Deeds: Guest DJs

Q NIGHTCLUB Reflect, 8 pm, free

This week we have Mike Klay’s appropriately trippy, ’60s-inspired poster for Hypnotikon, a three-color print featuring metallic purple ink and a silvery varnish. See more of Mike’s work at powerslidedesign.com. AARON

HUFFMAN

Hypnotikon: Seattle Psych Fest w/Cave, Lumerians, Midday Veil, and more Fri–Sat Oct 11–12, Triple Door

TUES 10/15

LIVE AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm BARBOZA Crystal Stilts, Zachary Cale and the Woolen Men, 8 pm, $10 CAFE RACER Jacobs Posse CONOR BYRNE Ol’ Time Social: the Tallboys , 9 pm a CROCODILE Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe Presents: A Ray Charles Boogaloo Dance Party with Zach Deputy, 8 pm, $20 a EL CORAZON Pretty Reckless, Heaven’s Basement, Louna, 8 pm,

MILEY AND AMANDA AT LICK!

O MG, you guys! Miley Cyrus and Amanda Bynes showed up at one of Seattle’s most fun, most queer, most long-running-est dance nights, LICK!, on Saturday night. They were kind of obnoxious (and DRRR’RUNK), but I got some autographs anyway. Miley wrote: “I’m a grown-ass woman now, I do what I want! Miley.” And Amanda wrote: “Have you seen Drake? My vagina needs to be murdered. —Amanda B.” KELLY O

$15/$18

ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN

Monktail Creative Music Concern, DJ Shonuph, free

HIGH DIVE Rogue Valley, Brenda Xu, Brian James, 8 pm, $6

JAZZ ALLEY Halie Loren, $20.50

KELL’S Liam Gallagher a KEYARENA Paramore, $25.50-$45.50

LITTLE RED HEN Marlin

James Trio

LO-FI Stop Biting: Introcut, guests, $5

THE MIX Jazz Night: Don Mock, Steve Kim, Jacques Willis, 8 pm

NECTAR Baby Cham, 3J Million, 8 pm, $25

NEUMOS Holy Ghost!, Midnight Magic, DJ Nark, 8 pm, $18

PARAMOUNT THEATRE Jack Johnson, 6:30 pm, $69.90

THE ROYAL ROOM Fresh Coast Soul

SEAMONSTER McTuff Trio, 10 pm, free

SLIM’S LAST CHANCE Dewey Farmer a SONIC BOOM

RECORDS La Luz, 6 pm, free SUNSET TAVERN Weatherbox, Restorations, the Trouble Starts , 8:30 pm, $10/$12

TRACTOR TAVERN Lucy Rose, Dresses, Sophia Duccini, 8 pm, $12/$15

TULA’S Roadside Attraction Big Band, 7:30 pm, $8

a VERA PROJECT Real Friends, Mixtapes, Forever Came Calling, Pentimento, 6:30 pm, $10/$12

THE WHITE RABBIT Cutlass

Supreme, the Deadless, Phil Berkowitz & the Dirty Cats, 7:30 pm, $5

DJ

95 SLIDE Chicken & Waffles: Supreme La Rock, DJ Rev, free

BALTIC ROOM Drum & Bass Tuesdays: Guests

BLUE MOON TAVERN Blue

Moon Vinyl Revival Tuesdays: DJ Country Mike, A.D.M., guests, 8 pm, free

THE EAGLE Pitstop: DJ Nark

HAVANA Word Is Bond: Hoot and Howl, $3 after 11 pm

LINDA’S TAVERN Distortions: DJ Explorateur, DJ Veins

MERCURY Die: Black Maru, Major Tom, $5

MOE BAR Cool.: DJ Cory Alfano, DJ Cody Votolato, free

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND Vicious

Dolls: DJ Rachael, 9 pm, $5

WILDROSE Taco Tuesday: Guest DJs

FILM

Divine, Elizabeth Bishop, and Actual Spooge

The 18th Annual Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival

BY DAVID SCHMADER

It’s 2013. Same-sex couples can get married in Washington State. Jennifer Lopez is executive producer of a show about a pair of lesbians raising a big mixed family that airs on ABC Family. Films on LGBTQ issues can be seen all over, from SIFF to Netflix. In this age of ever-growing mainstream acceptance, how can LGBTQ-specific film festivals remain relevant?

Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival’s answer: Stock your queer-identified film festival with a ton of great films that people would be happy to see at SIFF or in general release, with a spotlight on the queer pioneers who fought for their lives long before anyone in the larger culture was on their side. For a full rundown on the films and performances featured in SLGFF 2013, visit threedollarbillcinema.org. For reviews of a select few, keep reading.

I Am Divine dir. Jeffrey Schwarz

OSeattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival Oct 10–20, threedollarbillcinema.org

one of America’s great movie stars. Directed by Jeffrey Schwarz, whose documentary Vito was one of the highlights of the 2011 fest, I Am Divine covers all its biopic bases well. Kicking off with the premiere of Hairspray—Divine and John Waters’s 1988 mainstream breakthrough—the film tracks back to Milstead’s privileged but lonely childhood in Baltimore, carries us through the birth and reign of Divine, and gathers voluminous evidence of Divine’s star power to make his premature death land as it should.

(“I still can’t believe he’s dead,” says Waters, with love and light bafflement.) Beyond the basics, Schwarz shines plenty of light into lessinvestigated corners of the story: Divine’s love life (robust!), pot habit (robust!), and career beyond the John Waters universe (from offBroadway plays to international disco hits). Bookending the film are stories from Divine’s high-drama family saga, which I won’t spoil for you here, but which will muss much mascara among audiences. (Bring a tissue.)

an erect wang ejaculates) with a brilliantly black heart. The story: At a lakeside cruising spot, Franck, a cute twentysomething gay man, makes two new connections. One is a schlumpy older guy who never swims, never cruises, just sits and waits for his friendly daily chat with Franck. The other is a sexy cruiser with a Magnum P.I. mustache and a passion for compartmentalized sex (he’ll fuck Franck in the lakeside’s tall grasses, but forget about dinner, sleepovers, etc.). Before long, a body is found in the lake, an investigator starts snooping around, and Stranger by the Lake turns into something deep and terrifying, dealing both literally and conceptually with notions of sex, risk, danger, and the moral apathy of the horny.

Reaching for the Moon

dir. Bruno Barreto

Elizabeth Bishop is the American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (the only American of any gender to do so) before her death in 1979. Bruno Barreto’s Reaching for the Moon covers but a fraction of Bishop’s life—focusing on her glorious, ruinous love affair with the Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares—but from this extended episode, Barreto extracts a complicated portrait of the artist as a high-functioning alcoholic lesbian blessed with otherworldly talent. Miranda Otto is excellent as the fragile, passive-aggressively ferocious Bishop, and Brazilian TV star Gloria Pires nails her role as the powerful Don Juanita left powerless by what she loves and cannot keep.

R/Evolve

dir. Billie Rain and Basil Shadid

Bne of the many revelatory elements of I Am Divine—the new documentary about the legendary drag-queen performance artist and the opening-night film of SLGFF 2013—is the careful parsing of credit in Divine’s creation. Makeup artist Van Smith is the one who shaved back Divine’s hairline, creating a vast expanse for explosively dramatic eyebrow situations. Filmmaker John Waters is the one who urged his friend Glenn Milstead to channel his anger—over daily beatings in high school, over being a fat queer kid rotting in Baltimore— into the character of Divine. But beyond this, it was all Divine creating Divine, a fearless gender warrior who means as much to the history of punk as the history of drag, and

But the most powerful moments of I Am Divine are the most powerful moments of Divine on film, racing on the insane chemistry she enjoyed with John Waters. In his early works—Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble Divine attacked the world like no one before, coming on like a one-man Never Mind the Bollocks a half-decade before the invention of the Sex Pistols. Go, cheer, cry, gape in awe.

Stranger by the Lake dir. Alain Guiraudie

Winner of the best director award at Cannes 2013, Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake is a slow, lovely, exceedingly sexy movie (nude men abound,

illie Rain and Basil Shadid are the creative team behind Heart Breaks Open, the small, scrappy, emotionally powerful film about a young man’s HIV seroconversion (and the complicated queer community in which he must process it) that proved to be one of the most interesting films screened at the 2011 SLGFF. Two years later, here’s R/Evolve, which again finds Rain and Shadid mining visual poetry and emotional truth from Seattle’s young queer community. Unfortunately, this small world of truth and poetry is submerged in a larger film that aims to tackle big, important ideas with paper-thin characters and cartoonish stereotypes. The gist: A burgeoning queer activist collides with the world of corporate influence, “Pink Money,” and assimilationist politics via the drive for marriage equality in Washington State. This premise could power a very good movie—maybe a dozen very good movies—but R/Evolve refuses to be one of them. After the depth of humanity in Heart Breaks Open (and in Raccoon’s scenes in R/Evolve), it’s a shock to encounter the witless machinations of R/Evolve’s plot, which is fleshed out with cartoon caricatures on the level of Snidely Whiplash. (“You must pay the gay-assimilationist rent!”) When Shadid and Rain are willing to bestow a similar humanity on both heroes and villains, they’ll have something to say.

Find info on every last film and performance event happening at the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival—including Jinkx Monsoon and Peaches Christ’s live extravaganza Return to Grey Gardens, Ian Bell’s Reading Rainbow (featuring a staged reading of John Waters’s unproduced Pink Flamingos sequel Flamingos Forever), a live version of Clyde Petersen’s interview series Boating with Clyde, the Scream Club documentary And You Belong, and Valencia, the experimental film version of Michelle Tea’s beloved autobiography—at threedollarbillcinema.org.

OCT 14 at 730pm

Plus Robert K Elder Best Film You’ve Never Seen book signing & director Skype Q&A

OCT 15 at 8pm

OCT 16 & 17 at 8pm

FILM SHORTS

More reviews and movie times: thestranger.com/film

LIMITED RUN

DEAD ALIVE

Peter Jackson’s early effort about zombies and diseased apes. Central Cinema, Thurs Oct 10 at 8 pm.

DEAD RECKONING

A Bogie-and-Bacall noir where Lizabeth Scott plays the Bacall. Presented on 35 mm. Seattle Art Museum, Thurs Oct 10 at 7:30 pm.

DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN

Every man is desperate to have Susan. One woman is desperate to be Susan. Madonna plays Susan, in the best movie she’ll ever make (if you don’t count Truth or Dare). SIFF Cinema Uptown, Tues Oct 15 at 7 pm.

A FIERCE GREEN FIRE

A documentary in five parts, A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet looks at the history of the environmental movement. It has great interviews with people who are involved with all facets of the struggle, and it has some amazing footage. I don’t think the film is supposed to make you feel so demoralized that you want to give up on trying anything, but that’s the effect it has. While there are plenty of grassroots movements fighting to protect the environment, the film shows they have little top-down support. Governments won’t join international environmental treaties (ahem, United States), many citizens are apathetic, and leaders don’t want to impinge on “business,” even if it means destroying our planet. (GILLIAN ANDERSON) Keystone Church, Fri Oct 18 at 7 pm.

IRISH REELS FILM FESTIVAL

The 16th annual festival of features, shorts, and documentaries by independent Irish filmmakers. SIFF Film Center, Fri 6 pm, Sat 4, 7 pm, Sun 12:30, 7:30 pm. For complete schedule, see irishreels.org.

KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE

Chicago Sun-Times editor Robert K. Elder stops by the Grand Illusion with his book, The Best Film You’ve Never Seen, which is a list, created by notable directors and critics, of films which they believe to have been overlooked. The event includes a 35 mm screening of the horror comedy Killer Klowns from Outer Space, one of the films that made the list. Grand Illusion, Mon Oct 14 at 7:30 pm.

LOST HIGHWAY

One of the noirest of David Lynch’s noirs, and almost as hard to follow as The Big Sleep, but definitely spookier. Harvard Exit, Sat Oct 12 at midnight.

NATIONAL THEATRE LIVE: THE AUDIENCE

Helen Mirren, once again, goes Full QEII in this rebroadcast of a stage production by London’s National Theatre, which imagines a series of pivotal meetings between numerous Prime Ministers and the Queen. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Wed Oct 9 at 6:30 pm.

NOT MY LIFE

A documentary about the current state of child human trafficking, with a post-film panel discussion. SIFF Film Center, Thurs Oct 10 at 7 pm.

PET SEMETARY

A horribly misspelled cemetery leaks bad vibes onto the family living next to it in this Stephen King adaptation. Central Cinema, Fri-Sat, Mon 7 pm.

SAMURAI REBELLION

Toshirô Mifune slices and dices his way back to his kidnapped, ex-concubine daughter-in-law. Contains fullfrontal male feudalism. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Mon Oct 14 at 7 pm.

SEATTLE LESBIAN & GAY FILM FESTIVAL

See review, page 53. Various locations, Thurs-Tues. For complete schedule and showtimes, see threedollarbillcinema.org.

SEATTLE LATINO FILM FESTIVAL

The festival continues through the weekend, featuring the national cinema of Cuba. Various locations, Wed-Sun. For complete schedule and showtimes, see slff.org.

SEATTLE POLISH FILM FESTIVAL

See Festive, this page. SIFF Cinema Uptown, FriTues. For complete schedule and showtimes, see polishfilms.org.

SEATTLE SOUTH ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL

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. Various locations, Wed-Sun. For complete schedule and showtimes, see tasveer.org.

THE SHINING

Central Cinema, Fri-Mon 9:30 pm.

SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN: GRAND ILLUSION

FUNDRAISER

The Grand Illusion, a completely volunteer-run, nonprofit institution, is one of Seattle’s best cinemas. At its fourth annual fundraiser, you can enjoy a special 35 mm presentation of Singin’ in the Rain and do other fundraiser things, like eat, drink, auction, and raffle. Tickets are a mere $25, approximately the same price as seeing Gravity in 3-D and buying a small soda at the Regal Meridian 16 downtown. Grand Illusion, Sun Oct 13 at 5, 8 pm.

SOCIAL JUSTICE FILM FESTIVAL

See Festive, this page. A weekend of films dedicated to highlighting work being done to battle global inequity. Various locations, Thurs-Sun. For complete schedule and showtimes, see socialjusticefilmfestival.org.

VALLEY GIRL

Nicolas Cage plays a tough guy from Hollywood courting a—you guessed it!—valley girl in the best film he’s ever made (if you don’t count Moonstruck or Leaving Las Vegas or maybe even Face/Off). SIFF Cinema Uptown, Tues Oct 15 at 9:15 pm.

WALKING DEAD ZOMBIE FEST

A live improvised zombie film by Blood Squad and the season premiere of The Walking Dead Central Cinema, Sun Oct 13 at 7 pm.

NOW PLAYING

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS

Captain Phillips shouldn’t be as good as it is. It’s a big studio picture, based on an inspirational true story, starring one of the world’s hugest movie stars, directed by a guy most famous for his Bourne movies: Broken into pieces, Captain Phillips should be mass-market sap. But it’s the opposite of that: Lean and smart and intense, it’s a film that’s happy to kick you in the stomach to make a point.

The broad strokes: Tom Hanks plays Richard Phillips, who captained the shipping vessel Maersk Alabama in 2009 on what was supposed to be a routine trip around

FESTIVE

SOCIAL JUSTICE, CELEBRITY ACTIVISTS, POLISH FILM

Sponsored by Seattle’s great Books to Prisoners— the all-volunteer organization that mails 15,000 packages of reading materials to prisoners each year—the Social Justice Film Festival packs 60 films exploring racism, criminal justice, and global human rights into four days of screenings all over town (from downtown’s Cinerama and Market Theater to Ballard’s Majestic Bay to the Rainier Valley Cultural Center). This year’s official focus: prisoner justice , with a sub-focus on prestigious guests.

Among the highlights: Mothers of Bedford Jenifer McShane’s festival-opening documentary following the lives of five women (all mothers with young children) incarcerated in the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Tula the Revolt, a high-drama action film about a historical slave uprising in Curacao (with star and social activist Danny Glover in attendance for a post-film Q&A!). Invisible Young, Steve Keller’s documentary following four young adults who were all homeless teens on the streets of Seattle. And The Central Park Five with Sister Helen Prejean, featuring Ken Burns’s brilliant documentary about the five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem who were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in New York City’s Central Park in 1989, followed by a talk by Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking and tireless social justice activist, who will speak about the death penalty and her work to promote prisoner justice.

Meanwhile, SIFF Cinema Uptown welcomes the 21st annual Seattle Polish Film Festival, offering six days of Polish cinematic goodness with English subtitles. This year’s opening night film: Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir, a documentary examining the artist’s troubled history, which will be immediately followed by Polanski’s 1962 classic Knife in the Water, the psychodrama that introduced Polanski to the world and earned an Oscar nomination. Other films include You Are God, a documentary on the underground Polish hiphop group Paktofonika, and Tumult Over Lodz, an experimental film painting a portrait of the city of Lodz via stock footage, archival news broadcasts, film clips, and much, much more.

(DAVID SCHMADER)

The Social Justice Film Festival runs Oct 10–13 at various locations; view the schedule at socialjustice filmfestival.org. The Seattle Polish Film Festival runs Oct 11–13 and 18–20 at SIFF Cinema Uptown; find full info at polishfilms.org.

GRAVITY IN 2D (PG-13) Fri - Sat: (12:20*), (2:40)*, (4:55)*, 7:10*, 9:25* Sun: (12:20*), (2:40)*, (4:55)*, 7:10* Mon: (4:55)*, 7:10* Tue: (4:55)*, 7:10*^ Wed & Thu: (4:55)*, 7:10* CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 2 IN 2D (PG) Fri - Sat: (12:00), (2:20), (4:35), 7:20*, 9:35* Sun: (12:00), (2:20), (4:35), 7:20* Mon: (4:35), 7:20* Tue: (4:35), 7:20*^ Wed & Thu: (4:35), 7:20* ENOUGH SAID (PG-13) Fri: (12:10)*, (4:45)*, 7:00, 9:15 Sat: (12:10)*, (2:30)*, (4:45)*, 7:00, 9:15 Sun: (12:10)*, (2:30)*, 7:00 Mon: (4:45)*, 7:00 Tue: (4:45)*, 7:00^ Wed & Thu: (4:45)*, 7:00

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18TH

the Horn of Africa. It wasn’t routine: Somali pirates took the ship, then took Phillips as a hostage. And in Captain Phillips, it’s in the details where things get interesting and blurry. Not satisfied with telling the story from Phillips’s white, American perspective, the story also follows the life and the motives of Muse (Barkhad Abdi, excellent), who hijacks the Alabama with a tiny crew and desperate determination. Considering Captain Phillips is based on Phillips’s memoir, it’s hardly surprising he comes off well here—overwhelmed and outgunned, he’s still clever and determined to do whatever he can to save his crew. It’s to Hanks’s credit, though, that Phillips also comes across as vulnerable and scared: He’s a man handling a terrifying situation as best he can, and who’s also aware that his best won’t be good enough. Both Phillips and Muse are strong men, and ones standing in stark opposition to each other—but both are also subject to the guns pointed at them, to the brutally unpredictable effects of globalization and racism, to the twitchy reflexes of their lizard brains. On the surface, the film tracks, with jarring intensity, the hijacking of the Alabama and the capture of Phillips. But more than anything, it’s about consequences. The hijacking is a consequence. Every action of Phillips and Muse has consequences. And when the time comes, the director doesn’t cut away when Hollywood usually does: Captain Phillips doesn’t end until we’ve seen the consequences.

(ERIK HENRIKSEN)

DON JON

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. 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. (ZAC P ENNINGTON)

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 Louis-Dreyfus

I TELEVISION TM

BY WM. TM STEVEN HUMPHREY

CHOOSE MY HALLOWEEN COSTUME

Well? Where is it? (Pause) Ummm… HELLO! Today is the deadline for your “Halloween Costume for Humpy” suggestions—and wait. This is weird! I DON’T SEE A SINGLE ONE IN MY E-MAIL. Seriously, guys—I don’t ask much. I’d like you to occasionally read my column, I’d like you occasionally send me a complimentary e-mail, and if it’s not too much of a bother, I’d like you to occasionally give me a blow-pop. (That’s where you blow, and I pop.)

AND I’D ALSO LIKE IT IF YOU WOULD FOLLOW MY INSTRUCTIONS TO GIVE ME SOME FREAKING HALLOWEEN COSTUME IDEAS!!! Why does it always have to be left up to ME to come up with ways to clothe myself on Halloween? All I’m asking for is a few non-terrible ideas that must also include the following constraints: ONE! I must be able to unleash my genitalia within six seconds (for reasons that should be obvious). TWO! It must be alcohol and cocaine absorbent. (Again, obvious.) And THREE—and most importantly—it must be saxy-saxy-SAAAAXY!

Last year, I was “Sexy Parking Garage Attendant” and the year before that I was “Sexy Uncooperative Customer Service Agent.” The year before that I was “Sexy Darth Vader Centaur” and the year before that I was “Sexy Escher Drawing of Weird Upside-Down Staircases.” The year before that I was “Sexy Holly Farms Cheese Sampler Basket” and the year before that I was “Sexy Channing Tatum”—but everybody thought I was “Sexy Bar of Ivory

and a great turn from James Gandolfini, in one of his last performances. (ALISON HALLET)

GRAVITY

Parts of Gravity are so incredibly beautiful that I couldn’t do anything but watch with my mouth hanging open, blown away by the amazing spectacle. It opens in the soundless void of outer space. A new, somewhat reluctant astronaut named Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and a seasoned space walker (George Clooney) are repairing a satellite. Gravity follows Stone as her shuttle (and contact with Mission Control) is destroyed by space debris and she’s forced to try to find a way to safety. Bullock is outstanding, and I say this as someone who doesn’t generally enjoy her work. She’s on-screen for almost the whole movie, and she’s riveting to watch. (PAUL CONSTANT)

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. What should be an interesting and hunger-inducing story winds up flat as a crepe.

(GILLIAN ANDERSON)

WE ARE WHAT WE ARE

The question of whether you’ll enjoy We Are What We Are hinges on your appreciation for wild tonal shifts in movies. We Are begins as a slow burner about the Parkers, a religious family with strange customs and an intolerance for outsiders; at first, it feels more akin to Martha Marcy May Marlene than a slasher flick. But as we learn more about the family, the movie slowly loses its mind in spectacular fashion. It’s a well-constructed film. The soundtrack is top-notch. Julia Garner, Ambyr Childers, and Jack Gore are all excellent as the uncomfortably aloof Parker children. As the man who’s slowly making a connection between a series of missing girls and the Parker clan, Michael Parks brings a bemused gravitas that nicely pairs with Bill Sage’s insane Grizzly-Adamsmeets-Fred-Phelps paterfamilias. But everything about the movie undergoes a huge transformation partway through. Even the cinematography opens with some pretty, ponderous indie-movie shots of rain falling on leaves before the camera’s growing taste for dead flesh—starting with cuts of pork in a meat grinder, but quickly escalating to a series of dead and dying bodies—pushes things into Grand Guignol territory. (PAUL CONSTANT)

Soap” (which was actually better).

So as you can see… I’M OUT OF IDEAS. So please. Please. PLEASE. PLEASE, PUHLEEEEEZE get off your lazy ass and e-mail me your best Halloween costume idea. The winning suggestion will receive a blow-pop. Now! Here’s what you should watch on TV this week:

The Tomorrow People (CW, Wed Oct 9, 9 pm). Want to hang out with genetically engineered mutants? (BOOOOO!!) What if they’re young and impossibly hot? (YAAAAY!!) Hot mutant Stephen can’t figure out why he keeps waking up in strange places and hearing voices in his head. Unlike me, he’s not a schizophrenic drunk—he’s got awesome teleportation powers, and those voices are other hot teen mutants inviting him to join their hot teen mutant team and battle the evil forces of “Ultra”—which I believe is the name of a laundry detergent.

American Horror Story: Coven (FX, Wed Oct 9, 10 pm). After a fantastic first season in a sexed-up haunted house, and a crappy confusing second season in an unsexy insane asylum, American Horror Story returns with a far more preferable “sexy school witch” theme. Set in New Orleans, a school for witches clashes with the school for voodoo across town. (Kind of like Revenge of the Nerds except with short skirts and people being burned at the stake.)

The Walking Dead (AMC, Sun Oct 13, 9 pm). The gang is back for season four, and—what’s this? They don’t like the fact that zombies are overrunning their prison home? THAT’S RACISM, YO! Expect more examinations of group dynamics, moral ambiguity, and sweet, sweet split-open zombie skulls. (And NO, I don’t want to dress up like a “sexy split-open zombie skull” this year! That’s GROSS.)

Read Humpy’s weekly TV listings at THESTRANGER.COM

FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

BY ROB BREZSNY

For the Week of October 9

ARIES (March 21–April 19): Sometimes you quit games too early, Aries. You run away and dive into a new amusement before you have gotten all the benefits you can out of the old amusement. But I don’t think that will be your problem in the coming days. You seem more committed than usual to the ongoing process. You’re not going to bolt. That’s a good thing. This process is worth your devotion. But I also believe that right now you may need to say no to a small part of it. You’ve got to be clear that there’s something about it you don’t like and want to change. If you fail to deal with this doubt now, you might suddenly quit and run away somewhere down the line. Be proactive now, and you won’t be rash later.

TAURUS (April 20–May 20): Jugaad is a Hindi-Urdu word that can be translated as “frugal innovation.” People in India and Pakistan use it a lot. It’s the art of coming up with a creative workaround to a problem despite having to deal with logistical and financial barriers. Masters of jugaad call on ingenuity and improvisation to make up for sparse resources. I see this as your specialty right now, Taurus. Although you may not have abundant access to VIPs and filthy riches, you’ve nevertheless got the resourcefulness necessary to come up with novel solutions. What you produce may even turn out better than if you’d had more assets to draw on.

GEMINI (May 21–June 20): In accordance with your current astrological omens, I authorize you to be like a bird in the coming week—specifically, like a bird as described by the zoologist Norman J. Berrill: “To be a bird is to be more intensely alive than any other living creature… Birds have hotter blood, brighter colors, stronger emotions. They live in a world that is always present, mostly full of joy.” Take total advantage of the soaring grace period ahead of you, Gemini. Sing, chirp, hop around, swoop, glide, love the wind, see great vistas, travel everywhere, be attracted to hundreds of beautiful things, and do everything.

CANCER (June 21–July 22): “The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired,” wrote Nikos Kazantzakis in his book Report to Greco. I’m hoping that when you read that statement, Cancerian, you will feel a jolt of melancholy. I’m hoping you will get a vision of an exciting experience that you have always wanted but have not yet managed to bring into

your life. Maybe this provocation will goad you into finally conjuring up the more intense desire you would need to actually make your dream come true.

LEO (July 23–Aug. 22): “It is truly strange how long it takes to get to know oneself,” wrote the prominent 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. “I am now 62 years old, yet just one moment ago I realized that I love lightly toasted bread and loath bread when it is heavily toasted. For over 60 years, and quite unconsciously, I have been experiencing inner joy or total despair at my relationship with grilled bread.” Your assignment, Leo, is to engage in an intense phase of self-discovery like Wittgenstein’s. It’s time for you to become fully conscious of all the small likes and dislikes that together shape your identity.

VIRGO (Aug 23–Sept 22): “I’d rather be in the mountains thinking of God than in church thinking about the mountains,” said the naturalist John Muir. Let that serve as your inspiration, Virgo. These days, you need to be at the heart of the hot action, not floating in a cloud of abstract thoughts. The dream has to be fully embodied and vividly unfolding all around you, not exiled to wistful fantasies that flit through your mind’s eye when you’re lonely or tired or trying too hard. The only version of God that’s meaningful to you right now is the one that feeds your lust for life in the here and now.

LIBRA (Sept 23–Oct 22): The advice I’m about to dispense may have never before been given to Libras in the history of horoscopes. It might also be at odds with the elegance and decorum you like to express. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it is the proper counsel. I believe it will help you make the most out of the highly original impulses that are erupting and flowing through you right now. It will inspire you to generate a mess of fertile chaos that will lead to invigorating long-term innovations. Ready? The message comes from Do the Work, a book by Steven Pressfield: “Stay primitive. The creative act is primitive. Its principles are of birth and genesis.”

SCORPIO (Oct 23–Nov 21): Two years ago, a British man named Sean Murphy decided he had suffered enough from the painful wart on his middle finger. So he drank a few beers to steel his nerves and tried to blast the offending blemish off with a gun. The operation was a success in the sense that he got rid of the wart. It was less than a total victory, though, because he also annihilated most of his finger. May I suggest that you not follow Murphy’s lead, Scorpio? Now is a good time to part ways with a hurtful burden, but I’m sure you can do it without causing a lot of collateral damage.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22–Dec 21): Grace has been trickling into your life lately, but I suspect that it may soon start to flood. A spate of interesting coincidences seems imminent. There’s a good chance that an abundance of tricky luck will provide you with the leverage and audacity you need to pull off minor miracles. How much slack is available to you? Probably as much as you want. So ask for it! Given all these blessings, you are in an excellent position to expunge any cynical attitudes or jaded theories you may have been harboring. For now, at least, it’s realistic to be optimistic.

CAPRICORN (Dec 22-Jan 19): Capricorn innovator Jeff Bezos built Amazon. com from the ground up. He now owns the Washington Post, one of America’s leading newspapers. It’s safe to say he might have something to teach us about translating big dreams into practical realities. “We are stubborn on vision,” he says about his team. “We are flexible in details.” In other words, he knows exactly what he wants to create, but is willing to change his mind and be adaptable as he carries out the specific work that fulfills his goals. That’s excellent advice for you, Capricorn, as you enter the next phase of implementing your master plan.

AQUARIUS (Jan 20–Feb 18): Here’s the horoscope I would like to be able to write for you by the first week of December: “Congratulations, Aquarius! Your quest for freedom has begun to bear tangible results. You have escaped a habit that had subtly undermined you for a long time. You are less enslaved to the limiting expectations that people push on you. Even your monkey mind has eased up on its chatter, and your inner critic has at least partially stopped berating you. And the result of all this good work? You are as close as you have ever come to living your own life—as opposed to the life that other people think you should live.”

PISCES (Feb 19–March 20): “It’s an unbearable thought that roses were not invented by me,” wrote Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. You’re not as egotistical as Mayakovsky, Pisces, so I doubt you’ve ever had a similar “unbearable thought.” And it is due in part to your lack of rampaging egotism that I predict you will invent something almost as good as roses in the coming weeks. It may also be almost as good as salt and amber and mist and moss; almost as good as kisses and dusk and honey and singing. Your ability to conjure up long-lasting beauty will be at a peak. Your creative powers will synergize with your aptitude for love to bring a new marvel into the world.

Homework: What good old thing could you give up in order to attract a great new thing into your life? Testify at Freewillastrology.com.

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NEED

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MASSAGE

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OTHER

A HOLISTIC APPROACH to Tarot > Pineal Connection, Energy Work, Guidance and Tarot. Contact Ambrosia - 206.673.7363 noone.seraphine@gmail.com

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MUSIC INSTRUCTION & SERVICES

BASSIST SEEKING FEMALE vocalist for avant-rock band. Angels of Light, Swans, My Bloody Valentine, Live Skull, Jarboe, Autumn Fair, Dangerous Birds, Amber Asylum, Godspeed You!Black Emperor, Black Sabbath, Body Lovers, Zero 7. No drugs. 206.547.2615/ omaritaylor@hotmail.com/ www.myspace.com/branavinix

CONFIDENT, SEASONED FUN SINGER/S.WRITER.WITH A KNOWLEDGE OF THEORY. SEEK AUDITIONS FOR STUDIO WORK,ETC. CAN SING VOCAL HARMONIES/ JAZZ-BLUES VIBES. A “NATURAL” NO ALCOHOL OR DRUGS NEEDED TO MAKE THIS CHICK WAIL... (206)8506777/(206)600.1157 (MSG.)

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SEATTLE VOCALIST AVAILABLE:

EMAIL ME AT murphy.thomas8@gmail. com SEND INFO ON YOUR BAND. THANKS.

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LEGENDARY PIANIST AVAILABLE

Opened for Jeff Bridges! I’m Richard Peterson, 65 year old composer, arranger, and pianist. I’m available to play parties, weddings, clubs, shows, etc. $200/gig. Covers and originals. Please call 206-325-5271, Thank You! CD available. Must have a piano.

MUSICIANS WANTED

BASSIST WANTED FOR an experimental rock band. Swans, Black Flag, Godflesh, Arsenal, Big Black, Killing Joke, Pigface, Tad, Fudge Tunnel, Savage Republic, Unsane, Black Sabbath, Head of David, Throbbing Gristle. No drugs. 206.547.2615/ omaritaylor@hotmail.com/www.rendingsinew.com

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ELECTRONIC MUSICIANS AND DJS-I’m looking to put together an act that features musicians, dancers, DJs and vocalists: I sing, write and play synth. Email me a murphy.thomas8@ gmail.com Thanks

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MY NAME IS Kenneth Lockard Specializing in - R&B - Funk/JazzGospel - Reggae - Soul - & More! M: 202-627-9440

PUNK/METAL/GROOVE/NOISE

BAND LOOKING for singer/vocalist. We are in our late 30s , practice space in Fremont. no egos, No rockstars. http://splitskins.band camp.com/

SICK OF ME - looking for bass guitar drums keyboard and vocals for a goth/rock/metal/grunge sound. Email: M3t4ldood@gmail.com and check out my tunes at http://www.soundclick. com/sickofme

TOURING/RECORDING SINGER-

SONGWRITER GUITARIST & cellist seeking violinist and vocal harmonies for future gigs/recording. Email petergallaghermusic@gmail.com. Must be serious about practicing and gigging regularly, sing tight harmonies and/ or clean strings. Also, good vibes is essential! :)

ZEPPELIN SINGER WANTED Local

Zeppelin Tribute needs new singer. We have paying gigs and a solid line-up. Must know the material. We strive to deliver the sacred Zeppelin material with exact accuracy. Call for audition (253)312-3033

RECORDING/REHEARSAL

ONE SHARED REHEARSAL room @ $220/month including 36hr/month & private closet. Visit wildersoundstudios.com. Located in SODO Seattle. Contact Samantha 425-445-9165. s.wilder@wildersoundstudios.com

KINKOS PRINTING PROB-

I SAW U

End of the World, SIFF

I took myself on a movie date and I kinda wanted you to join me. You’re blond and have a cute laugh. I’m the brunette in the polka dot scarf who could barely choke out ‘hi’ before running away.

THIRD AVE I

When: Thursday, October 3, 2013. Where: SIFF Cinema Uptown. You: Man. Me: Woman. #920050

SMOKELESS IN

rays and the calming water around. find me. When: Wednesday, September 25, 2013. Where: Waterfront Park right before entrance to Public Market Place. You: Man. Me: Woman. #920043

THE FITTEST BOY EVER i saw this boy while checking people out online.he

Testosterone & Insulin Sensitivity Study

SAVAGE LOVE

The

Coast BY DAN SAVAGE

I visited Halifax, Nova Scotia, last week to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Coast, Halifax’s kick-ass alternative weekly newspaper. The paper brought me to town to do Savage Love Live. I took questions for two hours in the auditorium of a brand-new Halifax high school that has a full bar. (First you have socialized medicine, and then marriage equality, and now bars in high schools—what’s not to love about Canada? Oh, right: Stephen Harper.) Things got dirty. Here’s a selection of Halifax’s questions and my answers…

Current celebrity crush?

Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

My boyfriend broke up with me 10 times over the last two years. But this time, he says he’s committed. Am I stupid?

attentions are (1) torture for him but (2) harder and harder to resist, do him, his wife, and your karma a favor and go fuck someone else.

What ground rules should be set for a friendswith-benefits situation?

You may or may not be stupid (impossible to tell from a question on a green index card), but you do meet a popular-if-annoying-but-sometimes-accurate definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again—doing this boyfriend of yours over and over again—and expecting different results. Tell him this chance is his last, and don’t take him back a 12th time.

My partner is obsessed with Shania. He’s gay. Is this normal?

It’s gay normal. Sometimes it’s a Shania, sometimes it’s a Cher, sometimes it’s a Gaga. My gay husband is currently obsessed with a Katy Perry. Maybe we should start a support group?

Anal rose budding videos—your reaction?

O_o

Married straight lady. My husband told me he is bi. I couldn’t imagine something hotter! But he is also EXTREMELY monogamous. Suggestions? I want to have fun with this!

Strap-ons—like the ones they sell at Venus Envy, Halifax’s education-oriented sex shop and bookstore—are fun. Or, hey, you could push your husband to adopt the “gay normal” definition of monogamy: Have threesomes only with each other and one additional hot bi guy, and all your threesomes will be EXTREMELY monogamous.

I’m a kinky, poly guy who meets awesome kinky, poly girls on the internet. Everything is great, except I never know when or if to go in for a first kiss. Thanks!

None of the kinky, poly girls I’ve met in Seattle, New York, SF, Toronto, Chicago, etc. are what you would call shy. So I bet if you told the kinky, poly girls of Halifax during your pre-meeting internet chats that you prefer to let KPGs make the first move—including going in for that first kiss—you’ll be set.

Will you tell us about your first sexual experience?

Nope.

Is it weird that I, the girl, want to have sex more than my boyfriend?

Nope.

Is it inappropriate for me to flirt and attempt to have an affair with a married coworker?

Yep. Be considerate. Maybe this guy is dying to cheat on his wife, maybe he’s looking for someone to cheat with, but if you sense that he really, really wants to stay faithful and your flirtatious

The most important ground rule: Be friends Too many people are pointedly unfriendly to their FWBs because they don’t want their FWBs “getting the wrong idea,” i.e., they don’t want their FWBs to think they might be interested in something more serious. The result? FWB situations that are all B and no F. No friendly gestures (friends sometimes give each other gifts), no friendly assistance (friends sometimes help each other move), no friendly concern (friends are there for each other). Don’t want your FWB to get the wrong idea? Use your words to tell your FWB that a serious romance isn’t in the cards. Then be a friend to your FWB.

How can I go about financial domination in a smart way? (I’m a 19-year-old girl and I’m looking to Dom.)

Most men who submit to financial domination—making cash gifts to a Dom—expect a little something in return: some attention, some pictures, maybe a Skype session now and then. Be warned: Once your images are out there, they’re out there. And an angry, vindictive “sub” might post your pictures online, or a careless sub could lose his computer and someone else could steal and post your photos.

Any plans to retire?

They’ll have to pry my column from my cold, dead hands just like they pried Ann Landers’s column from hers.

How do I make cum taste better?

“Cum” is not a word. We don’t have three-letter alternate spellings for other four-letter words that have double meanings. You wouldn’t write “I know this guy who sucks and he’s a mean dick, but he’s so fucking hot, I want to suk his dik.” The proper spelling of “come” works just fine too. But in answer to your question: Come is an acquired taste. No one likes Guinness the first time they drink it, right? But soon you’re happily knocking back pints of the stuff.

My partner is a neat freak and a control freak in everyday life, but in bed she’s a whore. Is this normal?

Nope, but it sounds awesome—dirty sex is always more fun in a spotlessly clean apartment.

Is it true that some men like a finger in the butt during a blowjob?

Yes, some men like a finger in the butt during a blowjob. Some men like two, some like more. How to determine if the man you’re blowing likes a finger in the butt? Take his dick out of your mouth and ask.

What’s the best place to make love?

In the butt. (Individual results may vary.)

Thanks, Halifax, for such a great evening. And congrats to Kyle and Christine and everyone at the Coast on 20 great years!

The new Savage Lovecast season starts October 22 at savagelovecast.com.

mail@savagelove.net @fakedansavage on Twitter

ADOPTION

Devoted, nurturing, loving gay couple looking to adopt first baby into a family offering education, fun, travel, laughter, and unconditional love and support. Call, TEXT, or email anytime about Kyle & Adrian; 971-238-9651 or kyleandadrianfamily@ gmail.com or visit kyleandadrianadoption.com

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Donate Your Car, Truck or Motorcycle

Support Big Brothers Big Sisters of Puget Sound.

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GrowRa~ All You Need is a Seed

The first 20 GrowRa’s sold will be $300 OFF the regular price. This is a complete grow system see our website for more details. www.GrowRa.com

LAW (206)

Law Office of Scott F. Goodrich PLLC

LEGENDARY PIANIST AVAILABLE

Opened for Jeff Bridges! Clubs, Weddings, Parties

I’m Richard Peterson, 64 year old composer, arranger, and pianist. I’m available to play parties, weddings, clubs, shows, etc. $200/gig. Covers and originals. Please call 206-325-5271, Thank You! CD available. Must have piano!|

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SEX OFFENDER REGISTRATION GOT YOU DOWN?

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crows, owls,