The Stranger Vol. 23, No. 15

BLACK

Volume 23, Issue Number 15 December 11–17, 2013

STUDY GUIDE

Questions

for The Stranger, Volume 23, Issue 15

1. GOLDY is apparently a grown man. He’s been writing for well over a decade now, and the various personal anecdotes he cannot refrain from spilling throughout his writing would indicate that he’s been on this earth for at least four, maybe five decades. Why, then, would a man who’s so firmly entrenched in midlife write a news story with the headline “Fuck the State” that accuses state legislators of terrorism? In another “news” story in this very issue, Goldy complains about the price of fast food. Explain in a brief essay exactly what is wrong with Goldy. Examples of a useful diagnosis include: He’s suffered an embolism that has impaired his judgment, he recently lived through a personal loss that inspired him to act irresponsibly as an attention-getting measure, or the name “Goldy” is simply a pseudonym that is passed from Stranger writer to Stranger writer, with the most recent owner of the sobriquet being a teenage boy.

2. Speaking of teenagers, DAVID SCHMADER wastes nearly a thousand words on Morrissey’s new autobiography, ultimately concluding that perhaps Morrissey is not very bright. Rather than appearing in the music section, where this kind of puerile diatribe is the norm, it’s instead published in the books section. If you can, identify any literary merit in Schmader’s review. Use a microscope if necessary.

3. DOMINIC HOLDEN crows about the end of the Seattle City Council as we know it. Unfortunately, the city council is still going to be around in its current iteration for two more years, which means that Holden is essentially burning a bridge before he crosses it. Imagine if you were to hold an “intervention” of sorts for Mr. Holden. Which of his self-destructive behaviors would you bring up first?

4. Did you read CHARLES MUDEDE’s article about Black Weirdos? Why?

5. In the theater section, CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE gleefully rips apart 5th Avenue Theatre’s staging of Oliver! This “review” is as pretentious as it is wrongheaded, failing to appreciate the play’s deft use of child actors and its willingness to choose crowd-pleasing over the too-theatrical. Similarly, in the chow section, BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT denounces a sandwich-and-teriyaki shop on the grounds that it is merely good enough for the neighborhood in which it exists. Shouldn’t The Stranger utilize a positive worldview and encourage the city’s arts and business communities instead of constantly running them down? (Submit your answer to this question as a comment on any article on The Stranger’s website.)

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LAST DAYS

The Week in Review BY

DAVID SCHMADER

WIN BLOCK PARTY PASSES &

MONDAY, DECEMBER 2 This week of rodent rain, Twitter tragedy, and good people gone to the great beyond kicks off with a Florida love story for the ages. Our principals: 22-year-old Justin Holt and 20-year-old Erin Steele of Pompano Beach, who met last year and quickly became inseparable. “They met and then that was it, they were together,” said Justin Holt’s mother, Maria, to the SunSentinel. “From day one—day one—he was in love with her.” Which brings us to last night, when Holt and Steele were hanging out at an apartment with friends. “One of them, Joshua Henry, brought a pistol and showed it off to the group,” reports the Sun-Sentinel. “They passed it around and practiced firing it without the bullets inside. Then, Henry reloaded the pistol and set it on the counter.” Some time later, Erin Steele picked up the gun, pointed it at Justin Holt’s chest, and pulled the trigger. “The 911 call… came just before 11 p.m.,” reports the Sun-Sentinel , adding that Holt was rushed to Delray Medical Center where he was soon pronounced dead. As of now, no charges have been filed against Steele, and Holt’s family heroically hopes it stays that way. “We have a lot of compassion for her,” said Holt’s 82-year-old grandfather, Michael DiFiore. “She’s got to live with that, no matter

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.

POST-MUSHROOM REMORSE

what she does, for the rest of her life.”

&

To the young lady in the Starbucks men’s room: I would like to apologize if I caused you to feel uncomfortable, disgusted, and/or whatever else you may have felt when I found you washing your hands. After my initial shock of wondering how I had just wandered into the women’s restroom, you kindly said, “You’re all good,” assuring me that I was indeed in the men’s room. I thought nothing of just walking toward the sink to put cold tap water into my coffee to cool it down. I was high on mushrooms, and since I wasn’t there to unload a #1 or #2, I thought I was still “all good.” I failed to take into account that even though I’m one of the good guys, I probably do look pretty devious, and walking in there with you by yourself and letting the door close behind me was not “all good” but was pretty rude and insensitive. It didn’t even dawn on me until I was on my way home to eat my watermelon and pistachios. I don’t remember what you look like, so I’ll never be able to apologize in person. I just don’t want to be seen by you as “That Creep from the Men’s Room.” I don’t know if what I did was unforgivable, but rest assured that I do feel like an asshole.

SNAKE KILLER

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3 In more predictable news, the week continues with a rain of drugged mice falling on the US territory of Guam. Details come from NBC News, which identifies the cause of Guam’s drugged-mouse rain as the brown tree snake, an invasive species that “likely arrived in an inadequately inspected cargo shipment sometime in the 1950s” and has since grown into an expensive, slithery nuisance. In addition to feasting on the region’s exotic birds, the estimated two million brown tree snakes in Guam routinely cause trouble for the island’s industrial complexes, which are “regularly bedeviled by power failures caused when the snakes wriggle their way into electric substations—an average of 80 a year, costing as much as $4 million in annual repair costs and lost productivity,” reports NBC. Lucky for Guam, brown tree snakes “have an Achilles’ heel”: acetaminophen, with onesixth of a standard Tylenol pill containing enough to kill a brown tree snake. Which brings us to the aforementioned rain of mice, each one of which was stuffed with a deadly dose of acetaminophen, tied to a cardboard parachute, then dropped from a low-flying helicopter, with roughly 2,000 such mice rained down on the forested areas of Andersen Air Force Base this past Sunday. As you read this, snakes are OD’ing all over Guam. Let this be a lesson to us all to adequately inspect our cargo shipments.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 4 In worse news, the week continues in Washington State, where today a Vancouver woman endured a distinctly 21st-century horror—unknowingly live-tweeting the traffic-collision death of a man who was soon confirmed as her husband. As KGW News reports, “A 47-year-old Vancouver man was killed in a collision on Interstate 205 northbound Wednesday afternoon. The man’s wife, who follows scanner traffic with her Twitter account, happened to be live-tweeting about the crash.” After quoting a tweet from the Columbian—“One confirmed fatality in I-205 accident says @wspd5pio”—the woman began a series of her own tweets: “I’m trying not to panic, but my husband left work early and he drives 205 to get home. he’s not answering his phone.”

“i just called 911 and they transferred me after I gave them his license number and told me that they will call me back. wtf?”

“it’s him. he died.”

“Thank you all so much for the prayers and thoughts. I’ll reply to everyone later tonight.”

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5 Speaking of people who died and the amazing people they left behind, the week continues with Nelson Mandela , the South African anti-apartheid revolutionary who became South Africa’s first black president, serving from 1994 to 1999. Today, after an impossibly dramatic, profound,

LEWIS PEARL JAM HOLIDAY CHARITY CHALLENGE! VS.SLOG

Hey there! Seattle’s very best hometown heroes—that’s Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Pearl Jam, and The Stranger’s elf-powered blog, Slog—have joined forces this holiday season to raise money for YouthCare’s Orion Center. Whose fans will do the most to help homeless youth right here in Seattle? As of press time, we’ve raised almost $60,000 in just over one week! And as of press time, the fans of Macklemore & Ryan Lewis have donated WAY MORE than Pearl Jam or Slog fans. Want to turn that around?

DONATE to YouthCare’s Orion Center now:

• Macklemore & Ryan Lewis fans: GO TO youthcare.org/Macklemore TO DONATE!

• Pearl Jam fans: GO TO youthcare.org/PearlJam TO DONATE!

• Slog fans: GO TO youthcare.org/Slog TO DONATE!

Annnnd, if you donate right away, you could win a pair of three-day passes to the 2014 Capitol Hill Block Party PLUS two nights at the Hotel Monaco! Are you getting this?! That’s you and your bestie seeing every damn band that plays, and then resting your sunburned heads on the cushy pillows of a top-rated Seattle hotel. Just donate by noon on Friday, December 13 (any amount counts!), then forward your receipt to charity@ thestranger.com and tell us in 100 words or less why you want to party at the Block Party and what you plan to do in your hotel room after. The best reason wins! The winner will be announced Friday afternoon on Slog!

Remember, YouthCare and the Orion Center help our city’s homeless young people by providing daily hot meals, clothing, and a safe indoor place to sleep, plus help with GEDs, jobs, and permanent housing. About 74 percent of those that YouthCare sees were physically or sexually abused at home, while 40 percent left home or were kicked out because of their sexuality. These kids deserve every bit of help we can possibly give. Our goal is to raise $100,000 to keep the Orion Center fully funded for the next calendar year. Let’s do this! The Holiday Charity Challenge goes through December 24! Check slog.thestranger.com for updates!

and inspirational life, the 95-year-old Mandela died, with the man’s unavoidable passing greatly mitigated by the eloquent outpouring that rose to fill the void. The basics, summed up by the New Yorker ’s William Finnegan: “He was the last of the twentieth century’s national liberators… He led his beloved, tormented country from the howling darkness of apartheid to the promised land of democracy with shrewdness, courage, and visionary determination.” The man’s ultimate meaning, summed up by writer and friend Nadine Gordimer, also in the New Yorker: “Mandela: not a figure carved in stone but a tall man, of flesh and blood, whose suffering had made him not vengeful but still more human—even toward the people who had created the prison that was apartheid.” And finally, some words from the man himself, spoken during an interview in the 1996 documentary Mandela: “Death is something inevitable. When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace. I believe I have made that effort and that is, therefore, why I will sleep for the eternity.”

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6 Nothing happened today, unless you count the roughly 800 marijuana appreciators who gathered at Seattle Center in freezing temperatures to celebrate the one-year anniversary of legal weed in Washington State. Meanwhile, thousands of other marijuana appreciators celebrated by staying home and getting baked in their well-heated living rooms.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7 Nothing happened today, unless you count another day of cold-ass weather and another, more profound gathering at Seattle Center, this one a candlelight vigil and public memorial honoring Nelson Mandela. “He was a great

leader,” said attendee Phetheni Ndhlovu, a former South African now living in Everett, to the Seattle Times. “He asked for nothing from God but wisdom and taught us to pray for peace and reconciliation.”

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8 The week ends with another memorial, this one for a Northwest mainstay: Richard Henry Schmidt , a lifelong artist and a beloved fixture at Pike Place Market, where he spent the past 30 years selling his handmade flutes and ocarinas. He passed away peacefully in his sleep on November 29 at age 61. “He made a million best friends, brought out smiles from every baby, and affected the whole Market community,” reads Schmidt’s obituary, forwarded to Last Days by Schmidt’s daughter Sarah. “He was also a progressive liberal, fought for social justice and equality for people of every background and ability, and made all his relationships personal.” On a quirkier note, Sarah writes, “My dad loved The Stranger and has read every single edition since day one. The funny thing about him is that he always counted down the pile ‘1, 2…’ and took the third one down. And if he sent any one of us to get The Stranger, he would say, ‘Get the third one down!’ We will never know why.” RIP , Richard Schmidt.

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

Starring Jerick Hoffer aka Jinkx Monsoon

TOWN HALL IS SEATTLE

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(12/11) Reclaiming Prosperity Jared Bernstein & Heather McGhee Patchwork Politics or Prosperity?

(12/12) Gun Violence Keeping Children Safe

(12/13) Seattle Radio Theatre It’s a Wonderful Life

(12/14) Seattle Girls’ Choir 31st Annual Holiday Concert

(12/14) Magical Strings 35th Annual Seattle Celtic Yuletide Concert

(12/15) Christmas with The Salvation Army Brass Band & Breath of Aire Choir

(12/21) Hempfest presents Medical Marijuana A Rally for Patient Rights

Was It Worth It, Seattle City Council?

You Put On a Great Show, but the Voters Were Not Amused

BY DOMINIC HOLDEN

The Seattle City Council is screwed. And it screwed itself. The council’s moderate/conservatish majority gained collective security over the last four years by circling

their wagons. Consensus was their religion, and by sticking together, they made themselves immune to most criticism and challenges. Together they detested the mayor, shoved through expensive freeway projects, and deferred urgent transit planning. As the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission reported in 2012, these incumbent politicians also amassed so much money from the same small circle of lobbyists that they intimidated challengers from even running against them.

But in two years, most of those council members will be pitted against each other, flushed from office, or pushed into early retirement.

Voters went nuclear on them, passing a district-elections system last month that changed all the rules, drawing pairs of current council members into the same districts and requiring all of them to run for reelection in 2015. Many of them will be forced to face each other or fight for just two at-large positions.

Of the city’s 952 voting precincts, a whopping 946 voted for this new districting system. Overall, voters approved it by a 32-point gulf—a vote that can only be read as a referendum on city hall. “Clearly, there is frustration out there about the council,” says John Wyble, a consultant for Winpower Strategies, who points out the council’s unpopular numbers. According to a SurveyUSA poll in October, only 28 percent of voters approved of the council’s job performance, which was eight points lower than the mayor who was just defeated.

Wyble describes the council’s atlarge system as “a dinosaur” that was “designed to keep people in power by controlling the money in a citywide election.” He adds, “Those days are over.”

this year, Clark stoked preelection fears of a downtown crime wave that was exaggerated beyond reality and pinned the problem on the mayor. The list goes on: The council stymied homeless shelters, homeless encampments, and

“They don’t feel heard, and they are right,” says Toby Thaler, a leader of the districts campaign. “Every day, people experience these frustrations and see the council as insular; they never see the council members.”

Not surprisingly, Sandeep Kaushik, a consultant who ran communications for Ed Murray’s soft-focus mayoral campaign, has a slightly different take. He believes voters rejected all the acrimony at city hall, tossing out the mayor and council alike. “Like it or not, Seattle is a city that still genuinely values a consensual, communitarian approach to politics and governance,” Kaushik says. “The voters didn’t think they were getting that kind of responsive, no-drama government over the last few years, and it fueled their discontent.”

That may be partly true. But I’d contend that voters will tolerate political spats in exchange for measurable accomplishments. And the council strategy of obstructing the mayor and conforming to the agenda of their top donors didn’t rack up big accomplishments.

$2 billion to fund Seattle’s side of the project. Meanwhile, the council has no concrete plan to accelerate construction of light rail faster than the lethargic regional timeline, which could take a century.

The next big issue is raising the minimum wage. The council got that one backward: Conlin opposed it and lost his reelection to an outsider socialist, Kshama Sawant, who made it the centerpiece of her campaign. That’s the sort of controversial issue most of the council had been fleeing.

There are some hot-button exceptions, places the council has made its mark, policy-wise: paid sick leave, a plastic bag ban, rental inspections, and election-finance reform (that now prevents council members from stockpiling war chests to chase off challengers). But those bills actually came from the two most progressive members of the council, Nick Licata and Mike O’Brien, who weren’t part of the moderate/conservative cabal. They were the liberals who’d been typically shut out of council priorities. And if you want proof that voters will swallow controversy in exchange for an accomplishment: Licata and O’Brien were just reelected by overwhelming margins. Back to Council President Clark’s predicament. She and Council Member Bruce Harrell live in the newly drawn District 2, where Clark would almost undoubtedly lose to Harrell, a mixed-race man who says he intends to run in the city’s most diverse district. That would require Clark to run citywide or retire. Known for equivocating rather than having a point of view, Clark’s chances of winning citywide seem unlikely if she’s facing a decisive conservative like Tim Burgess or a renowned progressive like Licata. So Clark is probably out (or Burgess is out if he chooses to retire). In her 80s, Jean Godden is expected to retire, too, leaving an opening in District 4. And District 5 is entirely unrepresented now, so that will be at least one new face on the council. Long story short: Their reign is over. Of the six members in the council’s moderate/conservative majority, only three members (Sally Bagshaw, Tom Rasmussen, and Burgess) seem likely to hang on after 2015. That means Sawant, O’Brien, Licata, and Harrell will have a four-person progressive bloc that needs only one more vote for a majority. With two seats up in the air, hell, the liberals could win a majority on the council.

Council President Sally Clark exemplifies the council’s mess. Along with former council ringleader Richard Conlin, who got chased out by a long-shot socialist in the same election, Clark was responsible for the divisive, obstructionist tactics that wound up turning off voters. Clark was unfailingly reactive to Mayor Mike McGinn, picking the opposite side from the mayor on virtually every major issue. If McGinn liked something, Clark and most of the council worked to stop it, regardless of whether McGinn had a bad idea (to be fair, he had some awful ideas) or a great idea (to be fair, he had many of those, too). McGinn wanted a resolution against Russia’s antigay violence in a direct response to an inquiry from the Russian consul. But in a transparent political move, Clark blocked a resolution in order to refuse McGinn a victory. After she endorsed McGinn’s opponent

transit projects in predictable counterbalance to whatever the mayor supported. They backed a replacement 520 bridge and a deep-bore tunnel that the mayor opposed.

This had short-term benefits: As the council pounced to marginalize the mayor (or give the mayor enough rope to marginalize himself), council members became more relevant to lobbyists and political players. This meant that the types enthralled with insider politics were enthralled with them. Flush donors flocked to their campaigns. The council’s comfort came from the chestnut that they were the “adults in the room” and from their own closed ranks, placing a higher priority on their unity than passing useful policies. But regular voters?

Only 28 percent of voters approve of the council’s job performance.

When they weren’t being knee-jerks, the council generally performed housekeeping tasks that amounted to doodling in the margins of the city budget, making perfunctory zoning adjustments, and keeping civilian commissions stocked with appointments. As for the big freeway projects, they were state projects, meaning someone put that work on the plate for them. What about the municipal milestones from recent years?

The SPD has a reform plan, but it lacks fingerprints from the council (three of them walked out on talks with the mayor). The deep-bore tunnel is being dug right now, but the council never made a plan for the roughly 60,000 vehicles a day that won’t use it. The 520 bridge construction has begun, but there’s still no

So for all the cleverness of the conservatish bloc, they could soon have little power. Worse, they’ll have no real legacy. Most of what they’ll leave behind will be unfinished business: incomplete highway projects, unresolved questions about homeless encampments, and the problems of rising rents and stagnant transit that they shirked. Ironically, their very tactics—obstructing the mayor, being obsessed with unity rather than taking risks to do anything great for Seattle—may be what undid them. Voters had no reason to love them. The council never really had a vision. If they were truly the adults in the room, they would have hashed out an agenda with the mayor and done something memorable. In the end, they helped beat McGinn, but they beat themselves, too. It was a Pyrrhic victory.

So was it worth it, Seattle City Council?

Fast Food Is Artificially Cheap

Seattle Can Raise the Minimum Wage to $15 an Hour While Barely Raising the Price of Your Burger

BY GOLDY

Of all the stoopid, stoopid arguments against raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, by far the most stoopidest is the claim that higher wages would price fast food beyond the means of low-wage workers. “It would definitely hurt the consumer,” International Franchise Association president Stephen J. Caldeira recently told the New York Times

So how unaffordable might your favorite fast-food burger become should restaurants be forced to pay their employees a living wage? Caldeira warns that prices could rise by as much as 50 percent.

But that is bullshit.

pay a little bit more for their burgers. In the end, it’s not the cost of a fast-food burger that is breaking the bank for Seattle’s low-wage workers, but our city’s skyrocketing housing costs. According to the real-estate tracking website Zillow, buying or renting a home in Seattle costs nearly twice as much as in Spokane, and yet minimum-wage workers will earn the same $9.33 an hour here in 2013 that they’ll earn in much more affordable parts of the state. For the same reasons that Washington needs a higher minimum wage than neighboring Idaho, high-cost Seattle needs a higher minimum wage than much of the rest of Washington.

Fuck the State

Seattle’s Secret Plan to Save Metro Bus Service

BY GOLDY

TFifteen dollars would represent a 60 percent premium above Washington State’s 2013 inflation-indexed $9.33 an hour minimum wage, but the fast-food industry estimates that labor accounts for only one-third of its total costs. One-third of 60 percent equals a 20 percent hike in operating costs.

But fast food is already incredibly cheap. I walked into the McDonald’s on Madison Street last week to be confronted with a plethora of Dollar Menu and Extra Value Meal choices. Two bucks plus tax bought me a burger and a coffee. The coffee was actually good.

here’s only one way to describe the $12.3 billion transportation funding package state senate Republicans have proposed: economic terrorism. Funded by a regressive 11.5-cent hike in the gas tax, 73 percent of the proposed spending would go to building new roads. Only 20 percent goes to road maintenance and safety, while a bare 4 percent goes to transit, bicycle, and pedestrian improvements combined. Only 4 percent! That’s not just the opposite of what Seattle wants, it’s an intentional insult. And Olympia insiders tell me that Republicans have refused to budge on transit funding.

So even given a worst-case scenario in which the entire cost of higher wages is passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices, Seattleites would still only pay a far-from-wallet-busting $1.20 for an iconic McDonald’s hamburger. That’s 20 percent more than the current Dollar Menu price, but—adjusted for inflation—about 20 percent less than the same burger cost when McDonald’s first opened back in 1948.

And again, that’s just a worst-case scenario. The highly profitable fast-food industry might choose to narrow its margins rather than pass on the full cost of a wage hike to consumers. At the same time, higher wages should also lead to higher productivity, lower turnover, and other cost savings.

And that 60 percent wage premium over the state rate assumes that Seattle’s minimum wage jumps to $15 all at once. More likely, it will be phased in over several years before being indexed to inflation (probably by the end of mayor-elect Ed Murray’s first four-year term). By then, inflation will have

“Ha-ha, fuck you, Seattle,” the Republicans are laughing. They think that Seattle is so desperate to save Metro bus service, we’ll approve any package that includes a Metro deal. In particular, many Democratic lawmakers are seeking the authority for King County to approve a motor vehicle excise tax (MVET) of up to 1.5 percent on the value of vehicles to shore up bus funding, thereby dodging a 17 percent transit cut. “You’re so desperate for your Metro-saving MVET that you’ll accept anything!” the GOP seems to be saying. So how should Seattle reply?

“We don’t negotiate with terrorists.” That’s the message Seattle-area legislators and voters need to send to Republicans in Olympia.

Sure, the Republican proposal contains the taxing authority we asked for, but they would require it to go to voters (instead of the county council). Which means if this gas-tax hike has to go to the ballot next November, the soonest we could go to King County voters for approval would be the spring of 2015. Meanwhile, Metro is going to start slashing service by June of 2014.

eaten away at the proposed $15 an hour rate to lower Seattle’s wage premium below 50 percent. So adjusted for inflation, that $1.20 burger would actually be a few cents cheaper.

Will prices go up? Sure. Maybe 16 percent. Some economists—such as Ken Jacobs, chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center—estimate as little as 10 percent. It’s a small price to pay to lift tens of thousands of Seattleites out of poverty.

And considering that, adjusted for inflation, the same 15 cents that bought you a McDonald’s hamburger back in 1948 buys you a $1.49 double cheeseburger today, it’s hard to argue that consumers can’t afford to

“The people of King County cannot be held hostage,” King County executive Dow Constantine warned at a November 21 press conference in which he introduced the county’s “plan B” to stave off a looming 17 percent cut in Metro bus service. “We recognize that this plan B would be imperfect,” admitted Constantine, “but in the absence of any action by the state, an imperfect local option will be necessary.”

Plan B is imperfect because it would be more regressive than a local MVET option, utilizing the county’s existing Transportation Benefit District authority to raise the sales tax 0.2 cents and levy a flat car-tab fee of up to $100 per vehicle. But plan B is also imperfect because these less popular taxes would be harder to push past county voters.

Senate Republicans are counting on this imperfection to force us to accept their roadheavy/transit-poor transportation proposal. If it goes to the ballot (and history tells us it will),

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overwhelming support in tax-happy Seattle. The gamble is that Seattle voters will accept any proposal that allows them to save Metro bus service.

But the Republicans weren’t counting on plan C: Seattle’s secret backup plan to King County’s plan B.

City officials have been quietly exploring options to “buy back” in-city Metro bus service cuts in the event that all other options fail. Seattle has unused Transportation Benefit District authority of its own (sales tax and car tab fee) that could yield up to $51 million in new revenue a year if approved by a simple majority of Seattle voters. Officials are also exploring a $25 million property tax levy “lid lift” that would also require a simple majority at the polls. Meanwhile, there’s another $50 million in new revenue available to the council without voter approval, via a hike in the city’s commercial parking tax, and a reinstatement of the controversial head tax, a per-employee tax on city businesses.

Ben Schiendelman of Seattle Transit Blog estimates that $25 million a year would be enough to buy back projected service cuts on all Metro bus routes that run 80 percent or more of their service hours within Seattle city limits. That would restore about a third of Metro’s projected cuts, though it wouldn’t help a lot of riders commuting into the city. “If they don’t live in Seattle, they don’t pay taxes in Seattle,” Schiendelman points out. But however imperfect these plans might be, they both have the virtue of flipping the table on Olympia. Once we take care of our own transit needs, we’re the ones who will be holding the state transportation plan hostage, rather than the other way around. And that’s a “fuck you” the senate Republicans heartily deserve.

A Good Cop Is Hard to Find— in Seattle

New Rule Would Allow High-Ranking Officers to Join from Other Cities

BY ANNA MINARD

The City of Seattle is about to embark on a search for a new police chief, and if the city council has its way, there will be one less roadblock to fielding the best candidates in the country. Currently, a Seattle ordinance from the 1970s limits who a chief can hire for his or her senior staff—the assistant chiefs who are the highest-ranking members of the department. Seattle law says they must

be promoted from within the Seattle Police Department.

And this, according to Seattle City Council member Tim Burgess, has posed a problem in the past. When Seattle sought a police chief in 2009 and 2010, says Burgess, “people were surprised at the lack of depth and strength in the candidate pool.” Burgess says he’s heard the same thing from members of the city’s search committee, firms that execute searches like that one, and others in what he calls “national policing circles”: This hiring restriction blocks some top candidates from considering a move to Seattle.

It doesn’t seem so crazy; what chief hired away from another city wouldn’t want to bring along assistants they knew and trusted to Seattle, especially when they’d be reforming a department under a consent decree due to a history of excessive force and biased policing?

• Sergeant Rich O’Neill collects an annual $109,703 salary from Seattle taxpayers, even though he hasn’t worked a day on the beat since 2006. Instead, he’s served as president of Seattle’s conservative, anti-reform police union, the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild. But watch out: In the December issue of the union’s newspaper, the Guardian, O’Neill cites the Byrds song “Turn! Turn! Turn!” as invoking messages in the Bible, and then announces he will step aside and start a new assignment with the SPD on March 1. “I have decided not to seek reelection for a fourth term as your SPOG president,” O’Neill writes.

A report in mid-November from the federal oversight monitor called out senior staff specifically as part of the entrenched resistance to reform and a hurdle to the department’s compliance with its settlement agreement; two assistant chiefs were subsequently demoted.

So Burgess and Council Member Bruce Harrell have cosponsored legislation to lift the restriction and allow a new chief to consider whomever they want for those positions—including outsiders from other cities.

But now the city’s police unions are crying foul.

“We believe this is a mandatory subject of bargaining,” says Seattle Police Management Association president Eric Sano. “We don’t want to be obstructionists, but we do want to negotiate this because it’s a promotion opportunity for one of our members… If you change that law, you are changing our working conditions.” Both the SPMA and the other police union, the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild, have given the city official notice that they believe this would be a violation of their contracts and thus subject to a legal challenge.

Harrell, for his part, is considering ways to allow these outside hires but throw a bone to the unhappy unions. Among them: allowing a chief just one outside hire, or half the senior staff instead of all of it. He’ll present a proposal in mid-January.

The next question is: Are the unions going to protect their employees at the potential cost of stymieing reform at the highest levels of SPD?

• Speaking of Seattle police, they’ve just launched a blog on Tumblr called spdunredacted.tumblr.com, replete with animated GIFs of bomb-sniffing dogs. Even though the blog is called Unredacted, the SPD admits that’s misleading: “Sometimes we may post documents with names or other info redacted in order to protect crime victims,” the Tumblog says.

• Bertha, the world’s widest tunnel-boring machine at more than 57 feet in diameter, has been stuck beneath downtown Seattle since last Friday after encountering a mysterious obstruction, says KaDeena Yerkan of the Washington State Department of Transportation. Yerkan says officials don’t know if the path-blocking object is “manmade or natural.” There’s also no timeline to restarting the digger, which is approximately two months behind schedule Cop

TIGER HEALTH CLINIC

Why Black Weirdos Are Real and a Postracial Society Is Not

THEESatisfaction Provide a New Socially Meaningful Way of Thinking About Race in Our Times

BY CHARLES MUDEDE

The idea that we live in a postracial society became popular when America elected its first black president, and it died on the day George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black youth. Before this acquittal, many thought that Barack Obama was clear evidence that the old and massive institution of racism had finally been demolished. How was it possible for a racist society to place a black man

in the highest political office in the world? Clearly, skin color no longer mattered. What counted instead was the content of a person’s character. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream had reached the promised land. America patted itself on the back and began looking for other examples to reinforce this perception of postraciality: There was the popularity of the first lady; there was Lady Gaga, a huge white pop star managed by a

black man, Troy Carter, a venture capitalist, who, like Paul Allen, invested in Silicon Valley start-ups; and there was Django Unchained, a box-office hit about a rebellious black slave who is granted the amazing power to kill white slave owners, a film directed by the father of the postracial aesthetic, Quentin Tarantino.

The feeling at the core of the postracial moment was that the slate had been cleaned,

history no longer exerted the painful influence that it once did, and those ugly little incidents that occasionally appear in the papers—like when the white officer arrested Henry Louis Gates, a prominent black scholar, for trying to enter his own house—were nothing more than glitches or bugs in the new cultural software. There was also the feeling that black Americans were no longer confined to their socially assigned categories (professional basketball or football, rap or R&B music, comedy TV shows or movies). In the postracial moment, a black man or woman could lead an indie rock band or be a skateboarder, or ice skater, or golfer, or CEO of a major corporation. The opposite was also seen as true for white men and women—they could be rappers and R&B singers, live in the hood, and freely participate in the invention and elaboration of black English expressions. Then Zimmerman killed Martin for no other reason than he looked like trouble, and trouble looked like it had always looked in this society: a young black man wearing a hoodie. This incident, and the ensuing acquittal of the killer, exposed once and for all the actual status of postraciality: It is a myth.

“The aftermath of the Zimmerman trial shattered any lingering notion—especially for younger generations who missed out on the civil rights era—that we are living

in a postracial America where racial divisions have become a nonfactor in society,” wrote Jordan Fabian on Fusion.net. “Almost every step of the trial was tinged with some of America’s oldest and deepest racial taboos. There’s evidence that many parents, especially white ones, try to avoid conversations about sensitive racial matters with their kids to raise awareness of these issues. But others decided that this was as good a time as any to have that talk.”

But here is the thing: As a culture, black Americans have not been static; they have undergone big and important changes, such as a notable increase in the adoption and remixing of a variety of regional and international cultural practices. And some of these practices have even been traditionally coded as being specific to white American culture. In this regard, I’m reminded of a story that our paper’s hiphop critic, Larry Mizell Jr., once told/posted about how his deep admiration for the very white punk band Black Flag surprised a white woman who worked at the Queen Anne Trader Joe’s. What was surprising was precisely her surprise. What planet did she live on? That’s how white Queen Anne must be—the people there are so culturally isolated that they are still trying to wrap their heads around the idea that a black person just might prefer Kurt Cobain to MC Hammer. True, there was a time when black punk bands like Bad Brains were complete freaks of nature. But in our time, such bands are just cool. So we have a situation where blackness is culturally more open than ever, and yet the prison of racism operates night and day. Postracial thinking can only provide some explanation for the former but none for the latter. What is the solution to this state of things? I offer Black Weirdo.

Cat and Stas

Black Weirdo began as the name of the parties and events produced by the hiphop duo THEESatisfaction—Stasia “Stas” Irons and Catherine “Cat” Harris-White—in Seattle and Brooklyn. “It was a gathering where we played music that we liked or had DJs that we liked,” explains Cat over the phone. “That’s pretty much how it started, in our apartments. But then our apartments got too small, and so we moved these parties to larger venues. Our first big one happened in Brooklyn in the summer of 2012. It sold out. A 400-capacity space in Brooklyn completely sold out. And ever since then [be it in Seattle or Brooklyn], they have sold out.”

During the first half of this year, Black Weirdo also became a series, “Black Weirdo of the Week,” on the blog run by Stas and Cat. And it is in this series that we find a more meaningful framework for thinking about our moment than postraciality. The series profiles artists who are seen as exemplifying Black Weirdness. Some of the artists are musicians (John E Daise), or art historians (Kimberly Drew), or filmmakers (Terence Nance). Some are famous; some are not. Some live in Seattle, some live in other parts of the US, some live in other countries. What unifies them is that Stas and Cat admire what they do and how they express themselves. “What the blog is about is giving people we like an opportunity to be themselves… We are not Donald Trump. We are not billionaires or millionaires or some other number. We can’t imagine doing things that way,” says Cat, who with Stas makes a very unique form of hiphop that combines low-tech (or unadorned) singing and rapping with beats that are to catchy soul tunes what punk is to catchy rock. “This is how we do our own thing… Now, first of all, we don’t care for a limited definition of blackness. Ours is very broad. There are a lot of blacks doing very different things. There is a lot of variety. And all of this creativity is not

new. It’s been around for a long time.”

One of the questions that Stas and Cat ask their Black Weirdos is: “Why do you consider yourself a Black Weirdo?” One answer, Terence Nance’s, is: “I come from and operate within the vast and infinite Universe that is Blackness, and a wise and beautiful goddess I used to date once told me that the first word in the definition of ‘Weird’ in the OED is ‘Magical,’ and Art-Making is nothing if not Magic.” Anyone who has watched Nance’s movie An Oversimplification of Her Beauty or his video/short film for Cody Chesnutt’s “’Til I Met Thee” knows that he is all about the vastness of blackness. Anything can go into it and anything can come out of it. For him, and all other Weirdos of this kind, being black also means being unlimited.

So Black Weirdo captures the black openness that so surprised the white Queen Anne woman. But, and this is very important (and precisely where it departs with the notion of

As a culture, black Americans have not been static; they have undergone big and important changes. So we have a situation where blackness is culturally more open than ever, and yet the prison of racism operates night and day. For Weirdos, being black means being unlimited.

postracialism), it also does not forget the racism of the past or miss the racism of today. “There is no postracial society,” Cat states with no hesitation or ambiguity. “It might exist somewhere, but this society is not it. I’m still categorized by the amount of melanin in my skin. Because of that, there still has to be a racial existence.”

Erik Blood

Erik Blood, a local producer who has worked with the Moondoggies, Shabazz Palaces, and THEESatisfaction, and also released his own albums, thinks of the phrase “postracial” as the “desire for white liberals to somehow overcome history, the negative portions of it, and particularly the treatment of African Americans and Africans. But what’s funny to me is Obama gets elected and it has a huge historical implication, it’s an important event. But when something wonderful happens for the black community, it does not erase history.” Blood’s own albums, by the way, have almost nothing in common with his hiphop work for Shabazz Palaces and others, and a lot in common with the gorgeous late-rock of My Bloody Valentine and early 1990s post-punk. (I rate his most recent album, Touch Screens, an indie rock masterpiece.) Blood is “Black Weirdo of the Week 5.” Our talk happens in a crowded cafe, Pettirosso. “It’s funny that the postracial thing often means we are free to make racist jokes. It’s an odd sentiment. But even if it were true, even if we were all equal, it’s strange that for these people, equality means putting other people down.”

Erik Blood’s Black Weirdness is in some ways a resolution to a racially complicated (or racially rich) upbringing in Tacoma. He grew up a light-skinned black kid who was seen as odd by white kids and seen as notblack by black kids. At first, he embraced his blackness, wore African medallions, and read Elijah Muhammad. But he never found a home in Afrocentrism. “When you are an adolescent seeking a place in the greater society, and also throw in the fact that you are gay, you might end up in the place I’m in now, which is something like a ghost. I float around like a ghost.”

Asia Catherine Clarke

“Hells-no we do not live in a postracial society. I feel that anyone suggesting so either has the privilege not to notice or be affected by it, or is using things like… interracial marriage or Barack Obama as an excuse to put tape over the mouths of people fighting for true equality and justice. There are unjust power structures and institutions with deep roots for generations back in our society to be removed before a true postracial society is possible.” This is the Toronto-based jewelry artist Asia Catherine Clarke speaking. We are communicating on Facebook Messenger. She is “Black Weirdo of the Week 2.” She holds a BA in environmental studies. Her enterprise, called Wild Moon Jewelry, makes and distributes necklaces, earrings, rings that not so much recall the past but a kind futuristic communalism, a future where the simplicities of village life in the past are reunited with the complexities of our urban present. At the time of our exchange, she is visiting Dominica. To my question “What does Black Weirdo mean to you?” Asia provides an answer that captures the Black Weirdo sense of being socially, historically, biologically black and yet not being confined by it as an artist.

“I first look at what it means to me to be black. The best way I can describe what I feel on a spiritual level is that I am proud to be born with skin that absorbs the sun’s powerful rays, that it complements my surroundings, and that it allows me to belong in such beautiful communities all around the world through diasporas. And when I look at other black people, especially in the dark, I feel that there is magic before me. Our shared pain of racial violence is not the only thing that being black means to me, but I feel it important to note because I do feel emotionally affected by racism and the examples of racially motivated contempt and disrespect to black bodies. I would say I am a Weirdo because I am. I make jewelry my own way, talk my own way, express myself without inhibition, I trust my intuition, and I take risks.”

A Black Constellation

What Black Weirdo finally exposes is that the whole postracial thing was not really about black people. It was about white people, and particularly those on the liberal side of the political spectrum. Postracialism represented their feelings for the kind of society they wanted to live in but did not exist. The danger of this well-meaning feeling is that, in content, it became for white liberals what the dismantling of affirmative action was to whites on the right: a denial of the persistence of racism in this society. Black Weirdos, on the other hand, are about black people and the black experience, and they celebrate their differences. They are a differentiated unity, a black constellation. Like Orion in the sky, they occupy the same cultural place, but they’re different stars.

Magic: the Gathering Mondays and Fridays from 6 p m

when you bring in last year’s gently used prom/holiday dresses, to be donated to The Ruby Room. Help a high school girl create memories while making room in your closet for your own.

Table lamps are an easy way to bring personality to your room. These stylish choices introduce color and texture at an outstanding value.

STRANGER SUGGESTS

Sherman Alexie

BOOKS

Sherman Alexie is the best reason in the world to cram yourself into a bookstore basement with the entire population of Seattle. He’s funny as hell—“like a standup comedian,” I’ve heard Alexie virgins exclaim—and he understands that readings are performance. An Alexie reading is not just about communication, it’s about empathy—making a room full of people feel the exact same emotion at the exact same time. Tonight, he’s debuting his new book of poetry, What I’ve Stolen, What I’ve Earned, and he’ll autograph copies for the perfect Seattle-centric Christmas gift. (Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, elliottbaybook.com, 7 pm, free) PAUL CONSTANT

Brazil Novo

MUSIC

The great thing about living in a big city (and this is indeed the definition of a great city) is that you have access to other cities, worlds, and times. Brazil Novo, a band that frequently performs at Vito’s and the Sorrento Hotel, provides Seattle with access to the city of Rio de Janeiro in the ’50s and ’60s, the peak years of bossa nova (João Gilberto, Tom Jobim, Caetano Veloso, and more). To ensure the authenticity of this access, and to provide Seattle with a close-to-real sense of Rio—its colors, its mid-century moods, its lovers on the beach—Brazil Novo’s vocalist, Michel Navedo, sings in Portuguese. (Vito’s, 927 Ninth Ave, vitosseattle.com, 9 pm, free, 21+) CHARLES MUDEDE

Bar Sermon

LIQUOR/RELIGION

Ferocious Memories

Neighbours hosts a one-night-only megaparty exploding with international entertainment. From the UK, there’s Bright Light Bright Light, the dreamy queer singer-songwriter who’ll perform a live set. From Baltimore, there’s the M.I.A.affiliated, widely beloved rapper Rye Rye, who’ll do the same. And from NYC, there’s Amanda Lepore, the model, performance artist, and transgender icon who’ll serve as the bash’s VIP host. Plus go-go dancers, drag queens, and DJs galore. (Neighbours, 1509 Broadway, 8 pm, strangertickets.com, $17/$35 VIP, 21+ until 2 am, then 18+)

DAVID SCHMADER

‘Homo

for the Holidays’

On Saturday night at 10 p.m., Witness on Broadway gets religion. Well, sort of—the Southern-styled bar is run by local veteran bartender Gregg Holcomb, and his sermons are fervent but agnostic. The very first one was about fornication (pro!). The second was on a woman’s place (anywhere, asshat!). The third had a carpe diem theme (especially when it comes to fornication!). Sometimes they’re more serious, about acting ethically or death. The book that Pastor Holcomb waves as he paces the place, sometimes shouting, is his leather-bound journal. Have a drink and holler amen. (Witness, 410 Broadway E, witnessbar.com, 10 pm) BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT

Capitol Cider

Art Copies

ART/CIDER

THEATER/COMEDY

People have all sorts of holiday traditions— making cookies, throwing colorful lights up around houses, drinking a pint of peppermint schnapps and watching Bad Santa on TV where the curse words are all messed up… you know. Another tradition you need to add is going to the annual dance-drag-cabaret-burlesque-magical-fun-time that is Homo for the Holidays. The all-star cast (including drag superstars Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme) not only put the fruit in the cake, they will put a glorious smile on the face of even your bah-humbuggiest gay uncle. (Odd Fellows West Hall, 915 E Pine St, strangertickets.com, 7 and 10 pm, $25 adv/$30 DOS, 21+, Dec 12–24) KELLY O

‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ THEATER

Some Sherlocks are too icy (Jeremy Brett in the BBC series) or too superhero-ish to believe (Robert Downey Jr. in the film franchise), but Darragh Kennan’s performance as Sherlock Holmes in this new adaptation of Baskervilles is just right. He can be prickly or exuberant, he has an impish sense of humor—in short, he’s a fully formed human being, and watching him cavort through this story with other stand-up Seattle actors (Connor Toms, Charles Leggett, Hana Lass) is an unalloyed pleasure. (Seattle Repertory Theatre, 155 Mercer St, seattlerep.org, $12–$60, 2 pm, through Dec 15) BRENDAN KILEY

Wherever you direct your gaze at Capitol Cider, fusty old oil paintings glower over you. One on its own would be gloomy, but the whole lot together turns this newish gluten-free-food-and-cider joint into a masterpiece amusement park. Baudrillard would pee himself. An illustrated menu provides an explanation for it all: “Created by artists from the Aristides Atelier at Gage Academy of Art, Capitol Hill.” Gainsborough, Homer, Stuart, they’re all here. Sort of. The copies are quite good. Grilled quail with wilted cabbage and roasted grapes sounds good, too. (Capitol Cider, 818 E Pike St, seattleciderbar.com, 4 pm–2 am) JEN GRAVES

Scottish producer Rustie is a maximalist audio surrealist whose future-bass/posthiphop tracks are as complex as calculus and as texturally rich as Cher’s wardrobe. On releases like Bad Science and Glass Swords, Rustie creates gleaming, serpentine puzzles out of rhythm and melody. His music’s a kind of prog funk that jitters and snakes in unpredictable patterns, reveling in an excess of ideas per track that’s ecstatically exhausting. Your legs—and neurons—are in for one helluva workout. (Neumos, 925 E Pike St, neumos .com, 8 pm, $16 adv, all ages) DAVE SEGAL

tic playhouse, the toy replacing the real thing, its playful colors all gone, winter-bleached to white windows on white walls with a white roof, all the whites slightly different, and the sky another white, too. Christo wraps buildings as his art; Johnson lets Barrow wrap and unwrap itself.

The Forecast

Photographs of Alaskan Hunting Shelters and the Plans of Children

BY JEN GRAVES

When Sofie Knijff asks children in remote areas of Mali and Greenland to dress up as whatever they want to be when they grow up, the props are just a prompt to train their focus. The kids don’t smile in these portraits. Growing up is serious, and has to do with pride. Each photograph has the same rich black backdrop, so each child appears like a royal in an Old Master Dutch painting—Knijff is Dutch—and, in an exhibition at M.I.A Gallery, the portraits are alternated with Knijff’s photos of the local landscapes. A howling wolf is eclipsed by an arctic whiteout. Hardscrabble scrub brush juts out of the desert. These are tough places to live. Knijff’s velvety black backdrop is dreamland.

Knijff calls her series Translations, implying the doubleness between and within the pictures: child and adult, present and future, reality and fiction, portrait and landscape, individual and type.

Like Knijff, the Seattle photographer Eirik Johnson traveled to a faraway place— Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost city in the United States—to take double portraits. He went in the summer of 2010, creating images that sparkle with color, shot under the midnight sun. Then he went back, in winter 2012, to the same places, during the few hours of daylight, completely blanketed in snow, “like a positive erasure,” he says.

REVIEWS

Sofie Knijff: Translations

M.I.A Gallery Through Dec 14

Eirik Johnson: Barrow Cabins

G. Gibson Gallery Through Jan 18

The Malian boy who wears thick-rimmed black glasses and paints a blue blazer onto his naked chest wants to be a journalist. The title of his portrait is not his name, just Journalist (2010); he is transformed. The Malian girl in a soiled, pretty, cream-colored dress is Student (2010). She wears colorful bracelets. Her eyes are huge. She is hungry for many things. She has sores near her mouth, and her expression comes from someplace unbreakable inside her. It’s not only the fur-clad boy with plans to be a hunter who’s hunting the future—every child looks more determined than the last. These dreams may turn out to be impossible. But for the moment the shutter was open, they came true. The children are doing their part by wanting

Johnson’s double portraits are not of people, they’re of buildings that look like people. Each 16-by-20-inch photograph—the size is just right; big enough to read from a distance but small enough that you have to get closer to do any discerning—has a building in the center. Each building is a makeshift cabin with its own persona, handbuilt by Inupiats to stay in during hunting season, when they go out for whales and waterfowl. They scavenge their materials from a nearby decommissioned naval base: chairs, barrels, basketball hoops, bed frames, pallets, plywood, old metal swing sets.

Then, everything goes under cover of snow. With the change of season comes a complete shift in perspective. The curling grains

of the plywoods and the streaking rust on the metals are gone. Everything is shapes, reflections, and shades. Each diptych is a spotthe-differences game that goes on for several minutes. Charm and dilapidation are each lost and found again in new ways.

Time has also passed: two years. Whole cabins have disappeared or been reduced to bones. In one spot, all that remains is a plas-

THEATER

Consider Yourself Warned

Oliver! at the 5th Avenue Theatre Is Not Up to the 5th Avenue’s Standards

BY CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE

It’s hard to think of a musical more suited to the current moment than Oliver! First of all, it’s snowy and showy and Londony, so it’s suited for the holidays. More deeply, it’s about the excesses of a free market and the ways it corrupts and deforms people. There’s the corpulent headmaster of an orphanage, Mr. Bumble, who horrifyingly sells off one of the kids in his care, Oliver Twist, because the little guy annoys him by saying that he’s hungry; there’s an undertaker and his wife, who can only be described as morbid entrepreneurs, who buy the kid; and there’s a den of thieves profiting from the spoils of the industrial revolution by picking the pockets of the wealthier classes, their operation presided over by a venal, gold-hoarding criminal named Fagin who takes financial advantage of his boys while pretending to take care of them. Probably the best encapsulation of the velvet-black richness of this material is in the number “That’s Your Funeral,” the song the undertaker and his wife sing when they buy Oliver. Staring at the silent, terrified boy, the undertaker sings:

He’s a born undertaker’s mute. I can see him in his black silk suit. Following behind the funeral procession with his features fixed in a suitable expression. There’ll be horses with tall black plumes to escort us to the family tombs, with mourners in all corners who’ve been taught to weep in tune.

By the time the undertaker and his wife get to “We will not reduce our prices/Keep your vices usual,” you realize Oliver! is a linguistically sneaky comedy wrapped around the business of death. The business of bodies. The business of people and what they’re worth. Not a bad choice for a musical when, outside the theater, low-wage workers are revolting and socialists are winning elections.

But “That’s Your Funeral” has been cut from this 5th Avenue Theatre production. It’s one of many decisions by director David Armstrong I just don’t understand. (And not just because it leaves Allen Fitzpatrick, a talented Broadway veteran who plays the undertaker, underutilized. Psst, David—if you need to cut something, please, for the love of God, cut the tedious “Boy for Sale.”) Armstrong is also the artistic director of the 5th Avenue, a job he’s brilliant at: He gives great local actors lots of work, he hosts fantastic out-of-town productions (the recent touring production of Anything Goes was phenomenal), he develops new musicals and sends them to Broadway, and by all accounts he’s steered the theater well through the economically turbulent last few years. But his directing choices are another matter. Judging from the set for Oli-

LOOSE LIPS

• It’s official! Seattle drag star BenDeLaCreme will compete on RuPaul’s Drag Race starting in February Last year’s RPDR was won by Jinkx Monsoon. Can Seattle queens snatch the crown two years in a row? Why the hell not? Go see both of them in Homo for the Holidays, December 12–24 at Odd Fellows West Hall.

• One little stairwell made a fine spectacle at last week’s art walk in Pioneer Square. It’s a gallery called Martyr Sauce (equal parts “White Privilege, Black Rage”), leading up to the apartment of Tariqa and Ryan Waters. Up now: paintings by Seattle’s Elizabeth Lopez and a giant portrait of Andrew Jackson wearing a slave collar by Tariqa, who moved to Seattle a year ago from Atlanta. Ryan is a guitarist; he plays with Sade. It’s open by appointment: martyrsauce.com.

• Topics covered during Rob Delaney’s standup at the Neptune last Wednesday included the minimum possible size of his penis (“a greasy almond”), his hatred of street harassment, and which groups it’s okay to be racist against (Russians, which inspired one woman to lose her shit). Most refreshingly: Delaney demonstrated that it’s possible for a male standup comedian to be profane, funny, and feminist.

• Seattle’s Eirik Johnson has been working on Mushroom Hunters, a photo series on itinerant foragers in the Cascades. Now he’s won a grant from Art Matters to go to Japan to capture the auctions where mushrooms are sold, for hundreds of dollars, within 48 hours of being picked. How the other half of the mushroom lives, man.

• Dayna Hanson’s The Clay Duke, a kaleidoscopic reenactment of a real school board shooting, blew people’s minds at On the Boards last weekend. Wade Madsen and Thomas Graves were outright eerie as the shooter (yes, two men playing one, often standing right next to each other). Among other odd/riveting parts: Sarah Rudinoff in bureaucratic drag, Peggy Piacenza elaborating the contents of a purse, and a whole animal-mask thing.

• In 1990s Seattle, Christopher Evan Welch was an omnipresent force for good, dazzling audiences at Seattle Rep and ACT, and fronting the band the Ottoman Bigwigs. His talents took him to NY, where he won an Obie as Mitch in a Streetcar revival and, in TV and film, played the narrator in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona and roles on The Sopranos and Law & Order Last week, Welch, 48, passed away after battling cancer. This is incredibly sad news.

• Rumor has it that the small Photo Center NW recently cut one position (education director) and reduced three others to part-time (marketing director, gallery director, gallery assistant). When new ED Michelle Dunn Marsh was contacted to confirm or deny, all she would say is: “[PCNW] is restructuring so that it can better serve the community.” “Restructuring”: loved by CEOs, feared by employees.

• Just like 2009’s Humpday and 2013’s Touchy Feely, Lynn Shelton’s latest feature, Laggies, will have its world premiere at Sundance in January. Wahoo!

ver!, you’d never guess the theater is doing well financially. London has never looked cleaner or so cheaply made—and orchestra tickets run as high as $150. (“That set looked like a kindergarten made it,” said a Cornish theater graduate after the show.) Nor do I understand what Armstrong sees in choreographer Bob Richard, who contributed undistinguished choreography to last season’s The Music Man and returns this time with even more heavily hand-gesture-based choreography. (There are legions of children in this production, but that doesn’t explain why Richard doesn’t give the adult dancers more interesting things to do.)

The orchestra, conducted by Joel Fram, is flawless—that’s something the 5th Avenue always gets right. But the principal actors singing over the orchestrations (Merideth Kaye Clark as Nancy and David Pichette as Fagin) convey the sense that they got no attention from their director and really don’t know what they should be doing with themselves. Only two performances are really good: Hans Altwies plays Bill Sikes, the oldest of Fagin’s thieves, with an icy brilliance, underplaying the role to creepy effect, even managing to get applause halfway through his one solo song by tricking the audience into thinking it’s over, which is such a Bill Sikes thing to do. And then there’s a breathtaking stunt Altwies performs at the end of act two— a startling piece of stagecraft, even if you know it’s coming. The other exceptional performance is Jack Fleischmann as Oliver. (At least, he played Oliver on opening night; an alternate actor plays Oliver in some performances.) A sixth grader at Seattle Academy, Fleischmann is charming, pitch-perfect, and blameless. But two performances only go so far. Many audience members bolted for the exits at the start of the curtain call.

THEATER

Spoiler Alert: He Dies at the Beginning

The Splinter Group Imagines Willy Loman’s Afterlife

BY BRENDAN KILEY

The Salesman Is Dead and Gone is audacious—an experimental, mostly nonverbal sequel to Death of a Salesman Who would even try that? “I have this bad habit of wanting to add hope to the end of classical tragedies,” says director Paul Budraitis. The Salesman Is Dead and Gone, he explains, began with a conversation years ago about how we, as a culture, have characters we love to ritually sacrifice: Hamlet, Lear, Loman. “Why do we kill these guys over and over again?” Budraitis asks. “And what kind of effect does the sacrifice have on the sacrificers?” Now, after having directed recent productions of Hamlet and Lear, Budraitis decided to try and free Willy.

Arthur Miller’s 1949 classic ends with Lo-

THE SALESMAN IS DEAD AND GONE A mostly nonverbal sequel to Death of a Salesman

no melodic guitar jangle to contextualize the moans, Morrissey comes off as intractably, revoltingly dour.

In the world of Morrissey, there are no smells, only stenches; when he looks at a newborn, he sees a future corpse. Even childhood trips to the candy store are cause for lament, with Morrissey recalling “crumbling and cluttered corner shops wheezing their last goodbyes to an indifferent world, their elderly and bluntly rude shopkeepers plagued and tormented by the lengthy time it takes my sister and I to methodically choose our sweets.” The bleak perspective is relentless, and hobbles the whole experience: How much value can we place on the impressions of a writer this monochromatic and myopic?

REVIEW

The Salesman Is Dead and Gone

The Splinter Group at Hugo House Through Dec 21

man committing suicide by car crash, hoping his son Biff will take the insurance money and open a business. This 2013 sequel begins with Loman sitting up in a coffin filled with dirt, holding a steering wheel and looking confused. The stage is dim and saturated in brown (dirt, coffin, a leather suitcase): a drab afterlife for a drab soul. The theater thrums with a barely perceptible but increasingly aggravating noise that sounds like the white hum of an empty airport being piped into a deep concrete well with us sitting at the bottom. The first thing Loman does after stepping out of his coffin and into this disorienting cosmic mystery? He’s still thinking like a salesman—he shines his shoes. This is one of the few powerful moments in Dead and Gone’s ritual of purification, which is mostly told via design and the facial expressions of actor Mark Waldstein. The project’s audaciousness is admirable, and it has a few sharp moments—the shining of the shoes, Loman failing to dance with a vision of his wife—but it mostly feels undercooked and still searching for its center of gravity. Dead and Gone has not yet arrived.

BOOKS

His Kampf

Morrissey’s Wonderful and Horrible Autobiography

BY DAVID SCHMADER

Don’t judge a book by its cover, but is it cool to judge a book by its imprint? The first and most fascinating fact of Morrissey’s Autobiography is its inaugural publisher: Penguin Classics, the de facto library of the Western canon, inclusion in which is typically an honor earned over a book’s lifetime, signifying century-spanning significance. Notable Penguin Classics include Plato’s Republic, Homer’s The Odyssey, Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and hundreds more, including, now, in the first straight-to-classic printing in the imprint’s history, Morrissey’s Autobiography. Defenders of the canon have blasted the UK branch of Penguin Classics for defiling a noble imprint with a stunt, while defenders of Morrissey (this one, at least) hail the stunt as one of the best of the man’s career. As a prolific artist and eloquent art-lover,

Morrissey has long championed the power of transgressive art to upend power structures and rewrite rules, and his finagling of his seemingly unedited life story onto a shelf with the life’s work of Homer and Plato feels like the richest “fuck you”—simultaneously self-aggrandizing and status-quo-annihilating, as ever—of his life. (After the UK edition became the fastest-selling Penguin Classic in history, Morrissey’s Autobiography found its American publisher: Putnam Adult, a move that takes the book—in the United States, at least—out of the canon and onto the cart alongside Amy Tan and Nora Roberts.)

Whatever the publisher, a serious, if not exactly instantly classic, book written by Morrissey has long seemed plausible. Hitting the British music scene in 1983, leading the legendary rock band the Smiths, Morrissey presented himself as a distinctly literary creature—posing with Oscar Wilde volumes and bookworm spectacles in promo shots, namechecking Keats and Yeats, and fitting Smiths songs with writerly lyrics: “Why pamper life’s complexity when the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat?” he mused in the Smiths’ second single, “This Charming Man,” a sexual coming-of-age anthem that opens with eloquent scene-setting: “Punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate/Will nature make a man of me yet?”

As the Smiths progressed, Morrissey turned away from the Lou Reed ideal of lyrics as poetry and became an ace pop sloganeer, showcasing his wit, self-deprecating sense of humor, and facility with words in small, selfconscious nuggets. Since 1988, Morrissey has been a solo act, releasing a dozen-plus albums packed with wordy-ifnot-revelatory lyrics that secured his reputation as one of the most literate pop stars—like Bob Dylan and Patti Smith—who might very well have made his name in literature, if he hadn’t been seduced by music.

REVIEW

Autobiography by Morrissey (Putnam, $30)

Anyone expecting a work on par with Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One or Smith’s Just Kids will be disappointed by Morrissey’s Autobiography. Where those works are carefully conceived, expertly wrought works of literature, Morrissey’s Autobiography is a chapterless ramble that announces its limited literary ambition in its first pages. There’s no way around it: Morrissey is, by and large, a whiny jerk, whose eyes seek out things to abhor like plants seek sunlight. In the world of pop music, Morrissey’s glasshalf-empty-with-fetid-water worldview played as mordant comedy. On paper, with

Still, scattered among Autobiography’s ocean of unilluminated grievances are islands of delight. He’s at his best holding forth on the art he loves: the New York Dolls, whose riotous erotic aggression made “everyone else suddenly seem like a traveling salesman”; Nico (“Her singing voice is the sound of a body falling downstairs”); and Lypsinka, the drag star who inspires Morrissey to a chapter-length rapture: “The erotic sensitivity of a Lypsinka show tests every paradox; the stage moves are Flamingo show dancer of 1958, the steps are Cyd Charisse perfect, the recall is genius.”

For many fans, Morrissey’s greatest achievement remains his work with the Smiths, an opinion for which he offers generous and eloquent support, describing his experience hearing the band’s earliest demos: “The Smiths sound rockets with meteoric progression; bomb-burst drumming, explosive chords, combative bass-lines, and over it all I am as free as a hawk to paint the canvas as I wish. It is a gift from Jesus.” Elsewhere,

With no melodic guitar jangle to contextualize the moans, Morrissey comes off as intractably, revoltingly dour.

Morrissey recounts zanier professional doings, such as his afternoon spent accompanying Elaine Stritch to a taping of Third Rock from the Sun. He also confirms his participation in a human sexual relationship, with a man named Jake, who one day “steps inside [Morrissey’s home] and stays for two years.”

(Apparently, Morrissey’s account of this time has been edited down in the US version, suggesting tantalizing tidbits withdrawn by a wary author. But aside from that initial step inside and a photo shoot in which Morrissey somewhat controversially rests his head on Jake’s bare stomach, the “full unedited version” is almost totally elliptical, and the hoopla over the cuts feels like a promotional stunt.) The book’s nadir: an endless account of the lawsuit brought by Smiths drummer Mike Joyce against Morrissey for unpaid royalties, all told in Morrissey’s unreliable overstatement. You get the sense he’d have been just as happy to release a 700-page book called Mike Joyce Is a Treasonous Viper Whose Heart Pumps Garbage.

More than anything, Autobiography solidifies the cartoonish Morrissey persona, the repugnance of which is not lost on its creator and beneficiary. “I knew [when the Smiths started performing] that a lot of people found me hard to take, and for the most part I understood why,” writes Morrissey. “Although a passably human creature on the outside, the swirling soul within seemed to speak up for the most awkward people on the planet. Somewhere deep within, my only pleasure was to out-endure people’s patience.”

ARTS CALENDAR

ART

Museums

BELLEVUE ARTS

MUSEUM

Telling Tales: Narrative Works by Nate Steigenga, Cappy Thompson, and Anna Torma : Steigenga uses bedsheets and pillow covers as a medium for conveying charmed scenes of myth and fantasy; Thompson’s blown-glass urns depict Hindu gods with vibrant energy; and Torma’s work is a collage of textiles, patchwork, and doodling embroidery. Through Jan 19. Rick Araluce: The Minutes, the Hours, the Days: Araluce constructs teeny, tiny, immaculately detailed spaces that look to have been abandoned five minutes ago or five years ago. In either case, there will be feelings of invasion and loneliness. $10. Tues-Sun. Through Feb 2. 510 Bellevue Way NE, Bellevue, 425-519-0770.

SEATTLE ART MUSEUM

LaToya Ruby Frazier is the 2013 winner of Seattle Art Museum’s Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight Prize, given to black artists who’ve been working for less than 10 years. Frazier is from Braddock, Pennsylvania, a mining town that she’s gone back to mine for her own highly personal yet broadly relevant photo and media work. It’s been shown and praised at Brooklyn Museum and the New Museum, the New York Times describing it as “preternaturally mature... arresting black-and-white photographs that sometimes look like studio portraits or social documentaries but aren’t fully at home in either category.” $15 suggested. Wed-Sun. Through Jun 22. 1300 First Ave, 625-8900.

Gallery Openings

BLINDFOLD GALLERY

Possible Places : New works from Sam King, Leanne Grimes, and Chris Roberts in varying degrees of abstraction. King will speak at the gallery Sat Dec 14 at 3 pm. Free. Reception Thurs Dec 12, 6-9 pm. Wed-Sun. Through Jan 4. 1718 E Olive Way, Ste A, 328-5100.

FORM/SPACE ATELIER

Sam Birchman: Large-scale oil paintings. Don’t miss the one with a fat man, sitting on a telephone pole with what appears to be a baguette thrust into, and drawing blood from, the heaping fat rolls of his bare back. Free. Reception Fri Dec 13, 6-9 pm. Wed-Sat. Through Jan 4. 2407 1st Ave 349-2509.

LXWXH

Cristin Ford: Planar Visions : Folded-paper sculptures that evoke topography using a gradient of tones and the geometry of interlocking creases. Free. Reception Sat Dec 14, 6-9 pm. Sat. Through Jan 4. 6007 12th Ave S

Continuing Exhibitions

G. GIBSON GALLERY

Barrow Cabins : See review, page 20. Free. Wed-Sat. Through Jan 18. 300 S Washington St 587-4033.

MIA GALLERY

Sofie Knijff: Translations: See review, page 20. Free. Tues-Sat. Through Dec 14. 1203A 2nd Ave, 467-4927.

Events

ART UP PH INNEYWOOD

Both Francine Seders Gallery and Sheri Hauser’s gallery, Tasty, will be closing soon, so come check them out, as well as galleries that are sticking around, like Echo Echo, Warlock Labs, and Bherd! Phinney Ridge and Greenwood, various venues. Free. Fri Dec 13, 6-9 pm.

BLITZ

The monthly art walk, this time featuring Possible Places at Blindfold, Cancer Mouth at Rare Medium, some cool Star Wars art at LTD, and The Laurelton: No Place Like Home at Vermillion. Capitol Hill, various venues. Free. Thurs Dec 19, 5-9 pm. Second Thurs.

GEORGETOWN

ART ATTACK

Once a month, all the art

in the tiny airport hamlet of Georgetown will attack all passersby. In more literal terms, it’s the day when all the galleries in Georgetown have their opening receptions. Eight and Sand Gallery, Fantagraphics, Krab Jab, and many others. Georgetown various venues. Free. Sat Dec 14, 6-9 pm.

REOPENING

A sparkling reopening party for the gallery that used to be up the block but is now nestled in SAM’s gift shop. Some people say they wish it hadn’t moved. What do you think? SAM Gallery, Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, 343-1101. www.seattleartmuseum.org/ Visit/visitRSG.asp. Free. Thurs Dec 12 at 5 pm. THE SECOND ANNUAL AFFORDABLE ART SHOW

For the second year in a row, affordable art is made available to you, the potential buyer. To quantify the term “affordable” a bit, the precise phrasing employed is “many items under $100.” Georgetown Arts and Cultural Center , 5809 1/2 Airport Way S, 851-1538. georgetownartcenter.org. Free. Sat Dec 14, 6-9 pm. visualart@thestranger.com

READINGS

Wed 12/11

SAMUEL WASSER Conservation Canines is about dogs that help conservation efforts, often by locating scat in the woods. (I am not joking about that.) University Book Store 4326 University Way NE, 634-3400. bookstore.washington.edu. Free. 7 pm.

SHER MAN ALEXIE Sherman Alexie is the best reason in the world to cram yourself into a bookstore basement with the entire population of Seattle. He’s funny as hell—“like a standup comedian,” I’ve heard Alexie virgins exclaim—and he understands that readings are performance. An Alexie reading is not just about communication, it’s about empathy—making a room full of people feel the exact same emotion at the exact same time. Tonight, he’s debuting his new book of poetry, What I’ve Stolen, What I’ve Earned, and he’ll autograph copies for the perfect Seattle-centric Christmas gift. Elliott Bay Book Company 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600. elliottbaybook. com. free. 7 pm.

Thurs 12/12

BRIAN MCDONALD

Ink Spots is reportedly “a collection of brief but powerful essays on writing, story structure, and filmmaking by award winning writer/director/producer Brian McDonald.” Third Place Books, 17171 Bothell Way NE, 366-3333. thirdplacebooks. com. Free. 7 pm.

JACK LEVISON

Inspired: The Holy Spirit and the Mind of Faith is a book by a man Eugene Peterson calls “the clearest writer on the Holy Spirit that have known.” This atheist is busy biting his tongue so hard that he might be breaking skin. Elliott Bay Book Company 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600. elliottbaybook.com. Free. 7 pm.

LIT FIX 4 The booze-and-books-andmusic series continues with Corinne Manning, Harold Taw, Indu Sundaresan, and Jason Kirk, along with musical guest Lana McMullen. Proceeds benefit HopeLink Adult Education. Jewelbox Theater , 2322 Second Ave. $5. 7 pm.

Fri 12/13

TAMI PARR In her new book, “Parr shows how regional cheesemaking found its way back to the farm.” Third Place Books , 17171 Bothell Way NE, 366-3333. thirdplacebooks.com. 6:30 pm.

GROUP READING

A dozen poets from the literary magazine Raven Chronicles will read. Press materials urge you to “Bring food to share” to this reading. Jack Straw New Media Gallery , 4261 Roosevelt Way NE, 941-2955.

ravenchronicles.org. Free. 7 pm. Sat 12/14

CAROLA DUNN Dunn’s Heirs of the Body is about a lord who enlists his cousin in the search for the “heirs to the viscountcy.” Seattle Mystery Bookshop , 117 Cherry St, 587- 5737. seattlemystery.com. free. noon.

ROB KETCHERSIDE

Ketcherside’s Lost Seattle looks at all the Seattle landmarks that have been lost. Central Library 1000 Fourth Ave, 386-4636. spl.org. Free. 2 pm.

JEFF RENNER

The beloved local television meteorologist will discuss the 2014 Western Washington Weather Calendar, which features photographs and Northwest climate information. University Book Store, 4326 University Way NE, 634-3400. bookstore.washington.edu. Free. 3 pm.

readings@thestranger.com

THEATER

Opening and Current Runs

CHRISTMAS: B-SIDES AND RARITIES

A one-night variety show celebrating the grimmer side of Christmas with storytelling from Jennifer Jasper, “theatrical bits” by Daniel Tarker and others, buffoonery from Christine and Lyam White (of UMO), and ukuleles. West of Lenin, 203 N 36th St, westoflenin.com. westoflenin. com. $15. Mon Dec 16 at 7:30 pm.

DICK WHITTINGTON AND HIS CAT A new British panto (a traditional genre in which kids are welcome, as is shouting at the stage) about a boy and his cat and the fantastical adventures they have. Featuring the Fremont Players and the Fremont Philharmonic Orchestra. Hale’s Palladium, 4301 Leary Way NW, 800-838-3600. fremontplayers.com. $7-$13. Sat at 4 and 7:30 pm, Sun at 1 and 4 pm. Through Jan 5. HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH

“How did some slip of a girly boy from communist East Berlin become the internationally ignored song stylist barely standing before you?” The return of Jerick Hoffer (aka Jinkx Monsoon) to the role of Hedwig, as directed by Ian Bell. A coproduction of Balagan Theatre and Seattle Theatre Group. Moore Theatre , 1932 Second Ave, 812-3284. balagantheatre.org. $15. Starting Dec 17. Tues-Thurs at 7:30 pm, Fri-Sat at 7:30 and 10 pm, Sun at 2 and 7:30 pm. Through Dec 22.

HOLIDAY OF ERRORS (OR MUCH ADO ABOUT STOCKINGS) A Shakespearean holiday mash-up (by Sound Theatre Company and One Lump or Two Productions) that boasts a boatload of historical inaccuracies. Center Theatre, Seattle Center Armory, 856-5520. soundtheatrecompany.org. $25. Thurs-Sat at 7:30 pm. Through Dec 21.

HOMO FOR THE HOLIDAYS You could call Homo for the Holidays a holiday-themed burlesque revue, but that would be like calling the virgin birth an unintended pregnancy. A merrily profane satire-ball wrapped in glitter and false eyelashes, Homo pulls in some of Seattle’s best drag/dance/queer performance talents: Kitten LaRue, Cherdonna Shinatra, Lou Henry Hoover, Inge Ingenue, Faggedy Randy (of the Can Can Castaways), Jinkx Monsoon, and tons more. Odd Fellows Hall 915 E Pine St, Ste 200, 3247263. strangertickets.com. $25. Starting Dec 12. Wed-Thurs at 8 pm, Fri-Sat at 7 and 10 pm, Mon Dec 23 and Tues Dec 24 at 7 and 10 pm. Through Dec 24. THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES “Some Sherlocks are too icy (Jeremy Brett in the BBC series) or too superhero-ish to believe (Robert Downey, Jr. in the film

franchise) but Darragh Kennan’s performance as Sherlock in this new adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles is just right. He can be prickly or exuberant, he has an impish sense of humor—in short, he’s a fully formed human being and watching him cavort through this story with other stand-up Seattle actors (Connor Toms, Charles Leggett, Hana Lass) is an unalloyed pleasure.” (Brendan Kiley) Seattle Repertory Theatre 155 Mercer St, Seattle Center, 443-2222. seattlerep.org. $12$60. Tues-Thurs at 7:30 pm, FriSat at 8 pm, Sun at 2 and 7:30 pm. Through Dec 15. IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE A stage adaptation of the Capra classic by Theater Anonymous. This

begins with two men—each dealing with emotional baggage related to military service—planning to go fishing. One realizes he’s attracted to the other’s sister and the drama begins. Ticket buyers will be given the address. A nondescript house, www. seattleimmersivetheatre.com. $25. Fri-Sat at 7:30. Through Dec 21. THE DINA MARTINA CHRISTMAS SHOW “The Christmas shows of Dina Martina—the monstrously untalented chanteuse brought to life by the monstrously talented Grady West—are the stuff of legend, and this year’s installment is a veritable Whitman’s Sampler of that legend, cherrypicking the best bits from all 14 of Dina’s previous Christmas shows. Expect punny songs, awkward transitions, stupid gifts, astounding outfits, cheerful blasphemy, and interstitial stories that will bend your brain.” (David Schmader) Re-bar 1114 Howell St, 233-9873. rebarseattle.com. $20-$25. Thurs-Fri at 8 pm Sat at 2 and 8 pm. Through Dec 31.

Dance

LAND OF THE SWEETS: THE BURLESQUE NUTCRACKER Lily Verlaine, Jasper McCann, and the rest of their gang return with this holiday spectacle of “ecdysiastic pageantry.” Triple Door, 216 Union St, 838-4333. landofsweets.com. $32-$58. Starting Dec 12. Mon-Thurs at 7 and 10 pm, Fri-Sat at 7 and 10:30 pm, Sun at 2, 6, and 9 pm. Through Dec 24. NEXT FEST NW Contemporary dance and new works from GENDER TENDER, Coleman Pester/ Tectonic Marrow Society, Nathan Blackwell, Dylan Ward, and others. If you’re wondering what’s about to come around the corner for new dance in Seattle, this is the place to look. Velocity Dance Center, 1621 12th Ave, 325-8773. velocitydancecenter. org. $12-$18. Fri-Sun at 8 pm. Through Dec 15.

theater@thestranger.com

CHOW

Okay, All Right, and Good Great Expectations for Blind Pig at Eastlake Teriyaki

BY BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT

Blind Pig at Eastlake Teriyaki is the kind of place that the Seattle Times calls “a welcome addition to the neighborhood.” And it’s true—BPET is an addition, insofar as the

Blind Pig Bistro took over the teriyaki place next door, and while the sign still reads “EASTLAKE TERIYAKI,” they’re making not only teriyaki but sandwiches, soups, vegetable sides, kimchi fried rice, and daily specials. Additions have been made! And it’s welcome, insofar as what was a just-okay teriyaki place now has the aforementioned additions (though some people probably do not welcome the teriyaki’s new price of $9.50, like the older woman who came in looking tired with paint all over her clothes, asked if they still had teriyaki, received an answer I couldn’t hear, then walked back out, still looking tired and without any food). And it is definitely in a neighborhood—namely Eastlake, which is also a neighborhood with a dearth of food options, so any addition is, indeed, welcome.

fed, and antibiotic-free, which your $5.99 teriyaki special isn’t going to be. And the teriyaki is… good. The skin is burnished and crackly-glossy, the meat is not dry, and it’s an identifiable section of a whole bird, bone still in, instead of bits and pieces. The order I had could’ve used more teriyaki sauce, in order to hit that chicken-and-syrup sweet spot that makes you crave teriyaki every so often.

“But then, any taquito would be amazing if you were high.”

The sandwiches are… okay. A pork belly cemita ($7.50)—a Mexican sandwich with red chili sauce, grilled onion, and a lot of mild, melted Oaxacan cheese—was rich and pliant on its squishy Macrina sesame seed bun, but didn’t have much porky or chili flavor. A falafel sandwich ($6.50) was on a thicker Macrina potato roll, and the bread dominated, which was too bad; the falafel was nutty and toasty-tasting on its own, and the yogurt and tahini sauce had bits of fresh herbs and not too much red onion. A thin, panko-breaded fish fillet ($8.50) was even more overpowered by the potato roll; the fish needed to be twice as thick, the pineapple mustard wasn’t very pineappley, and the cabbage and green apple slaw was scanty.

Only the sloppy joe ($7.50) was a sandwich to go out of your way for: Piled high, with the classic sloppy joe taste augmented with pickled Fresno chili and crunchy tempura onions, it had an appropriate amount of orange grease on the bottom, and the Macrina sesame seed bun held up to the meat assault. I shared this sandwich with Stranger books editor and sandwich expert Paul Constant, who said, “My favorite part of a sloppy joe is eating the little bits of meat that fall to the side after the sandwich is done—any excuse to shove meat in my mouth by hand—and there was plenty of that here… I’m a fan of homemade sloppy joes every once in a while, but I’ve never thought to pay money for a sloppy joe at a restaurant. This one, I’d actually pay for.”

But the “welcome addition” thing is euphemistic. It means: Sure, if you live or work nearby, you’re happy to have another lunch option or a place to pick up something quick on a cold night. But if it’s not in your neighborhood, well, carry on.

Blind Pig at Eastlake Teriyaki

2236 Eastlake Ave E, 323-7531 blindpigbistro.com

You’d be forgiven for having greater expectations for Blind Pig at Eastlake Teriyaki. The Blind Pig Bistro, open for two years now, occupies the space where Sitka & Spruce used to be, and chef/owner Charles Walpole has carried forth the local, seasonal, unfussy-butalways-interesting ideal with very tasty results. The sourcing for the regular Pig and next door are the same—while the painting woman might not want to pay $9.50 for her teriyaki, the chicken is from Draper Valley Farms, so it’s humanely raised, vegetarian

Paul also tried one day’s pork taquito special ($7.50), and we agreed that they were just average. “It’s just a taquito,” he said. “If you were high, this would be amazing. But then, any taquito would be amazing if you were high.” We both liked the especially creamy, extra limey guacamole, though, and I kind of bogarted the refried beans, which were clearly homemade—pleasingly only semi-mashed, well salted, tasting like high-quality lard.

The vegetable dishes at the Blind Pig Bistro are, in my experience, particularly great, but the ones next door didn’t stand out ($3 each). Roasted beets had a little creamy horseradish, which nicely brought out the sweet of the beets; braised collards had the right tang and texture, not falling apart but not tough, and their cup contained ample buttery, drinkable broth. A potato salad, though, was just all right—same with miso broccoli and a quinoa salad.

They haven’t done much with the interior of the place—it’s kind of comically bare bones, with the lowered ceiling and paneled lighting of the teriyaki place remaining, and the paint job is violently red and black. One lunchtime, doom metal played while the silent flat-screen TV showed Betty Boop cartoons, which went surprisingly well together. Lunch was all right.

Add-A-Ball

The

de fugo, back door gin & tonics, & back door toddys Ballroom - $5 cover & $5 jameson shots

High Dive - no cover

9 mil - $5 jameson shots & $5 Bailys vanilla cinnamon Dubliner - $5 Jameson & $5 Two Gingers Irish Whisky

Red Door - $4 Elf Fu!kers

$4 Mrs. Claus’s Medicine & $4 blitzen blast

NOW OPEN

New Places for Stuffing Faces

BY BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT

• ARAGONA • downtown: From acclaimed chef Jason Stratton (Spinasse, Artusi), it’s an extremely hotly anticipated restaurant focusing on the foods of Spain, with the acclaimed David Nelson (Tavern Law, Spur, Il Bistro) in charge of the bar. Aragona is kitty-corner from the Seattle Art Museum, in the neato space where Thoa’s used to be. (96 Union St, 682-3590, aragonaseattle.com, $$–$$$)

• ALTSTADT BIERHALLE & BRATHAUS • Pioneer Square: Brendan McGill, chef/owner of the well-liked Hitchcock on Bainbridge Island (and winner of Food & Wine’s “People’s Best New Chef”) runs this greatlooking old-school beer hall—big long tables, exposed brick walls, house-made bratwurst and pretzels, house-fermented sauerkraut, and big ol’ steins of beer. “Altstadt” means “old town” in German, as befits its Pioneer Square location. (209 First Ave S, 602-6442, altstadtseattle.com, $$)

• HUARACHITOS • Rainier Valley: This family-owned Mexican place is especially beloved for its namesake huaraches corn cake “sandals” smeared with beans and topped with cheese, meat, and veggies. The original Huarachitos on MLK closed due to a fire in June 2011; a homemade pink sign on site said, heartbreakingly, “Sorry there was a fire. We love you. We hope you understand. —Jose and Ana.” The second incarnation is at the Othello light rail station, with Mexico City native/Cordon Bleu–educated chef Jose Luis PantigaFlores once again in the kitchen, and Ana ready to welcome you. (4219 S Othello St, 568-3019, huarachitos.com, $$)

• BODRUM BISTRO • Wallingford: It’s a Turkish restaurant from the chef/owner of the much-loved Cafe Paloma in Pioneer Square, Sedat Uysal. It’s where the (also much-loved) Golden Olive used to be. (1712 N 45th St, no phone, $$)

• RESTAURANT ROUX • Fremont: Restaurant Roux is the sit-down place from Where Ya at Matt’s Matthew Lewis, named after the combination of hot butter and flour that starts out lots of recipes in his native New Orleans. At Roux, which is where the Buckaroo Tavern used to be, you can expect the same food that made Matt’s truck famous—from jambalaya and gumbo to beignets and pecan pie—plus some fancier French Creole–inspired stuff. Chef Mikey Robertshaw came from Local 360, where his work got good reviews until he was reportedly fired for being too loud in the open kitchen. Lewis indicated he’d look into sound-dampening, but also seems philosophical about chefs being shouty (4201 Fremont Ave N, 547-5420, restaurantroux.com, $$)

• LOULAY • downtown: Thierry Rautureau, aka the Chef in the Hat, formerly of Rover’s and still of Luc, runs this 4,000-square-foot French restaurant where Alvin Goldfarb Jeweler used to be. “There is something to be said about the beautiful thing about (having) a small tiny restaurant, it’s great that you can do everything yourself, blabbity blah blah,” he told the Seattle Times, “but believe me, that gets old.” The Seattle Times further calls Loulay “a casually elegant oasis” with “classy but whimsical touches.” (600 Union St, 4024588, thechefinthehat.com/loulay, $$–$$$)

• LOTUS THAI • Central District: Lotus is next to Catfish Corner. The inside is all tangerine-colored, a nice trip to somewhere less dark and cold. (2724 E Cherry St, 323-9445, $)

• BYEN BAKERI • Lower Queen Anne: This pretty bakery makes Scandinavian treats like boller, and it all sounds really good. The name means, prosaically, “Town Bakery.” (15 Nickerson St, Suite D, 218-1000, byenbakeri.com, $)

• THE HOLLYWOOD TAVERN • Woodinville: Joshua Henderson of Skillet/ Westward renown renovated this roadside tavern near all the Woodinville wineries. He promises “wine country farm cuisine together with whiskey and cheeseburgers, roasted meats, fresh pastas, and, most importantly, house-made soft serve ice cream,” all made with fresh, local ingredients. The chef is Angie Roberts, most recently executive chef at the flashy, pricey, but less-than-totally-great BOKA (14508 Woodinville Redmond Rd NE, Woodinville, 425-610-7730, thehollywoodtavern.com, $$)

• LIAM’S • University Village: Kurt Beecher Dammeier (of Beecher’s Cheese fame, as well as Bennett’s and Maximus Minimus) runs this restaurant “where sophisticated food is served up in a comfortable, contemporary space” in the marvel of contemporary capitalism that is Uni-

Restaurant Roux seems philosophical about chefs being shouty.

versity Village. Liam’s is named for one of Dammeier’s sons. (University Village, Store 161, 527-6089, liamsbistro.com, $$–$$$)

• SHAWN O’DONNELL’S • Pioneer Square: A favorite in Everett for years, O’Donnell’s Seattle location is at the base of the Smith Tower, ready to fulfill your every Irish pub/American grill expectation (Shawn Jr. is the one you’ll see there). (508 Second Ave, 602-6380, shawnodonnells.com, $$)

• STOUP BREWING • Ballard: “Stoup” is old-timey English for a beverage container. Stoup Brewing is a friends-and-familyrun craft brewery in Ballard. Stop by their neat-looking tasting room and try out their beers. (1108 NW 52nd St, 4575524, stoupbrewing.com, $)

• JUICEBOX • Capitol Hill: Juicebox was a stand at the Broadway farmers market and a pop-up at La Bête before reaching fruition/vegetation as an all-organic cafe and juice bar near Northwest Film Forum. The owners were formerly cooks at Staple & Fancy and La Bête; in addition to their fresh juices, they make seasonal salads, pickles, soups, yogurt, and more. Lest it all seem too good for you, there’s fermented grape juice (aka wine), too. (1517 12th Ave, 607-7866, juiceboxseattle.com, $)

• KAISHO • Bellevue: Where Boom Noodle in Bellevue Square used to be (and brought to you by the Boom Noodle/Blue C Sushi people), it’s “a modern, high-end interpretation of an izakaya.” (504 Bellevue Way NE, Bellevue, no phone at press time, $$–$$$)

• CONTINUED with

Pacific Inn Pub

on

more brand-new restaurants at thestranger.com/chow

MUSIC

Krule Fall

How King Krule’s 6 Feet Beneath the Moon Helped a Few People Through a Difficult Season

BY MIKE RAMOS

I. “Easy Easy”

Just a week ago, she got laid off from her dead-end job that had been eating away at her life. Five minutes late, one too many times. They didn’t offer her a severance package, and the unemployment office denied her benefits.

When she wasn’t sleeping or crying or watching Netflix or infinite-scrolling through her cesspool of a Tumblr dashboard, she scoured Craigslist for jobs, and to more interesting effect, gigs. She found one that didn’t require nudity or a headshot; she only had to show up and participate in some consulting agency’s focus group in the South End, and she’d get an easy $100.

She didn’t have a car, so it took her one bus ride to get downtown and another on the number 7—the only bus route in Seattle to have an article written about it in the city newspaper (“A Colorful Part of Daily Life for Riders,” the honky-ass headline said)—to get to the Orcas Street stop on Rainier Avenue. She didn’t have a smartphone, so she couldn’t tell she was walking in the opposite direction for 12 blocks.

More than 3,000 miles from her hometown with a Seattle fall approaching, a court case pending, and the feeling that she would never “grow up” or amount to shit taking hold, she collapsed on the curb across the street from Brighton Elementary School and cried.

was too tired to make it. Nine minutes later, he remembered that one asshole’s shitty punk band had a show in town that night. As suspicion and paranoia crept in, the song playing on-air began to fade out. Snapping out of his building rage, he grabbed the CD on top of the stack closest to him, threw it into the tray, and flipped to a random song to avoid the cardinal sin of dead air.

The album was King Krule’s 6 Feet Beneath the Moon; the song was “A Lizard State”—a dynamic change of pace on the record, one of

WHAT'S CRAPPENING?

• Unhinged Seattle noise-rock duo MTNS are collaborating with Olympia-based madgenius vocalist/bass clarinetist Arrington de Dionyso (Malakait dan Singa), with a release tentatively slated for spring on K Records. Great fellow K artist Angelo Spencer is also involved in this project. If all goes according to plan, MTNS and de Dionyso will tour next summer.

• The Blue Moon in the U-District was packed last Friday night with happy fans of Malpractice, a countrified band made up mostly of UW medical students. They started a bit late—so sue them.

Hard. Harder than she had cried in years.

She might’ve stayed there for hours, crippled by frustration and self-loathing, if she didn’t have her earbuds in when 6 Feet Beneath the Moon started playing from the old broken-screen iPod in her coat pocket for the first time.

Sparse, palm-muted guitar notes gave way to a thickly accented voice so pained, it seemed to put things in perspective. It assured her: “When positivity seems hard to reach/I keep my head down and my mouth shut/’Cause if you’re going through hell/You just keep going.”

She picked herself up off the curb, put her head down, retraced her steps, and somehow found a town house with an address matching the one she had earlier scrawled on the back of a Safeway receipt. She was more than an hour late, but they still let her participate.

XIII. “A Lizard State”

He was about two and a half hours into his five-hour Saturday-night radio graveyard shift, which meant every bar in the city was closed. She told him earlier that she would come by the station when she left her girlfriend’s birthday thing—to hang out, help pick music, maybe do something unprintable during a 15-minute DJ Screw song—but she hadn’t texted all night. Fourteen minutes later, the text came saying she

the only songs featuring horns and crash cymbals, the kind of song that bands like Arctic Monkeys have been trying to write for five albums now.

“In my head, I’m getting dead tired of this shit you’ve caused, you fucking bitch/ You don’t know when to stop… Well I’ve got myself trapped in the black of your heart/And now I’m gonna fuck things over ’cause that’s a start.”

He wouldn’t find much solace or consolation from the conversations about this evening in the days or weeks to come, but playing a song so appropriate that contained a paintpeeling storm of swear words on the radio in the middle of the night gave him a childish sort of comfort and satisfaction.

XI. “Neptune Estate” “Can’t you bear just one more night?” the stereo repeated. They nervously glanced at each other, then away, half-chuckling at how stupidly pertinent their favorite song on the tape had suddenly become. The tape he brought home as a gift for her when they were so fucked for rent that he had to sell half of his already-picked-over record collection. At the time, he was proud he’d convinced the shop owner to throw it in with the $250 cash, and at the time, him coming home with a present when they had no money was everything to her (expectations were low, though—he always sucked at picking stuff out for her unless it somehow involved music).

He eyed her swollen duffel bag and suitcase near the door and thought about the last few years. She leaned into his chest and sighed, watching the cassette reels turn as the little equalizer-level lights rose and fell with the foggy thump-kick of the programmed beat. They both wanted to say something to take the focus away from the music, but didn’t.

“Can we lose our emotions and still live well?/Can you tell that this faith is changed?/ This heart, brain, pain, two separate ways/ Can you tell that this face is changed?”

As she drifted off in his arms, the tape played on, then stopped. The audible greens and reds of the cassette deck display disappeared, and he sat in the sudden silence. He looked over at the closed laptop on his desk, now the only light in the room, and watched it slowly glow brighter, dimmer, back and forth in a hypnotic pulse. He thought about Jay Gatsby looking at Daisy’s minute and faraway green light, cursed himself for being so damn narcissistic, and fell asleep.

Comment on this story at THESTRANGER.COM/MUSIC

• The Recording Academy has nominated Macklemore & Ryan Lewis for seven Grammy Awards, including album of the year for The Heist, song of the year for “Same Love,” and best new artist for Ryan Lewis’s beautiful eyes.

• Macaulay Culkin, who currently looks a lot like Kid Rock and that guy from Sons of Anarchy, has formed a pizza-themed Velvet Underground tribute band called— are you sitting down?—the Pizza Underground. Their Bandcamp offers nine songs, titled “Papa John Says,” “I’m Beginning to Eat the Slice,” “Pizza,” “I’m Waiting for Delivery Man,” “Cheese Days,” Pizza Day,” “All the Pizza Parties,” “Pizza Gal,” and “Take a Bite of the Wild Side.”

• Pearl Jam played their first hometown show in years at KeyArena on Friday, shredding through more than 35 songs in three hours. An animated Eddie Vedder entertained the crowd with stories of some of the songs’ backstories, urged his fans to donate more than Macklemore’s fans to the Orion Center, and swung from a giant lightbulb. Around the 25th encore, Vedder invited Mudhoney’s (the opening band of this highly Seattle show) Mark Arm and Steve Turner with Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil to play “Search and Destroy.” And then the Space Needle held hands with the Pike Place Market sign while they shared a pumpkin-spice Starbucks.

• Rumor has it that a local and emerging rap group received an e-mail from a prominent grocery chain that rhymes with Gator Bro’s that threatened legal action for the use of one of their stores in a music video. The rap group promptly removed the video from the interwebs.

• Money king Jay-Z announced via his blog last week that on December 3 (the day before his 44th birthday) he and Beyoncé would adopt a vegan diet for 22 days, explaining, confusingly, “There’s something spiritual to me about it being my 44th birthday and the serendipity behind the number of days in this challenge; 22 (2+2=4) coupled with the fact that the challenge ends on Christmas day… It just feels right!” We’d wish them good luck, but come on, with enough money and a private chef, you could convert to an allcat-food diet pretty easily.

CRYSTAL BALL READING ROOM

12/12 DUB POLICE TOUR FT. CASPA 12/13 PERE UBU 1/4 ATOMIC POP 1/5

VIDEOSEA LIVE 1/12 TRULY 1/16 BRENT AMAKER & THE RODEO 1/18 MAX BEMIS 1/22 DARKSIDE 1/25 DANIEL KIRKPATRICK & THE BAYONETS 1/31 WHITE DENIM 2/3 MAYER HAWTHORNE 2/4 PURE BATHING CULTURE 2/5 SECRET CHIEFS 3 2/7 AUGUSTINES 3/1 NICKI BLUHM & THE GRAMBLERS 3/5 DALE EARNHARDT JR. JR. 3/10 ELECTRIC SIX 3/22 DANIEL ROSSEN (OF GRIZZLY BEAR) 3/29 LONDON GRAMMAR 4/5 DUM DUM GIRLS 4/17 GODFLESH 5/6 MONO

FRIDAY 1/3

FLY MOON ROYALTY + FRESH ESPRESSO HOSTED BY MARCO COLLINS

THURSDAY 1/9

TELEKINESIS WILD ONES

THE THERMALS

COMING UP: 12/12 WILL HOGE 12/13 ERIN MCKEOWN 12/14 KING KRULE 1/11 MARIA TAYLOR 1/15 CLOUD CONTROL 1/20 SUPERHUMANOIDS 1/21 DRENGE 1/22 MUTUAL BENEFIT 1/23 ROBERT DELONG 2/19 LAWRENCE ROTHMAN 2/22 DJ SPOOKY 2/24 XIU XIU 2/25 A TRIBE CALLED RED 3/2 TOGETHER PANGEA 3/7 ANGEL OLSEN

FRIDAY 12/20

TIBURONA MOOSE PORTRAIT + NOT FROM BROOKLYN

SOUND CHECK

BY TRENT MOORMAN

BUILT TO SPILL, DEEP-SEA MOUNTAIN JOURNEYERS

Built to Spill

Thurs–Sat Dec 26–28, Neumos, 8 pm, $25, 21+

Seeing Built to Spill live is like being lured into the light of a deep-sea anglerfish. Doug Martsch’s guitar sounds are oceanic; they pull you in. What’s that light? Is it the anglerfish’s luminescent growth (called an esca) coming out of its head? Or is it Martsch’s wily, agile, lunar-tide-pull playing? You’re hundreds of feet down in pitch-black depths—the esca light is a soft, beckoning glow. You swim to it, and surprise, the anglerfish swallows you, just as Built to Spill change keys and modulate the riff. But instead of chewing you up and sending you through its digestive track, it turns out this anglerfish is a state-of-the-art submersible with sleeping compartments, highly receptive sonar, and fluffy sky-blue carpeting. For more than 20 years, Built to Spill have been morphing their music this way, giving their songs new faces and turns. Live, the grand indie concertos begin, as you once knew them, then unexpectedly reroute themselves. It’s music with a mind of its own. The Boise-based, mainstay mountain journeyers are no-frills in their approach—Martsch hangs from the mobile of his tunes with hard and earnest head twitches. Regally he sings, gently raking his voice into the music. Watch out for the light of his esca, though—not all glows turn into futuristic submarines. BTS guitar player and original member Brett Netson spoke. We were on land.

You all were doing some recording before, and the material wasn’t making Doug so excited. Some of the album in progress was scrapped? What’s the status? Doug is really focusing now on writing and arranging with the new rhythm section. No set dates for anything. He seems extremely absorbed and excited about it now. Jim Roth and I will come in later to write and learn parts.

fabric just one time. She was really good. I was honored to see such a demonstration.

I believe you’ve worked with the great producer Phil Ek. How does Phil work? He works his ass off, and he is good with jokes and comedy bits. Happy guy, like a masterful doctor from old times.

I thought it would be cool to get you to talk about Doug’s guitar sounds. I read things about it, but it’s all just objective and opinionated. As someone who plays with him, how do you describe his playing? I’d say his playing is odd, bizarre, funny—sometimes sweet and beautiful. He makes use of what he has, mostly. He does lots of inventive, weird chords and bits. He’s benefitted greatly from writing songs first and learning guitar technique second. I’ve always heard lots of Devo, Talking Heads, and Bowie-era Robert Fripp in his playing. Some Joe Strummer as of late. I guess he hadn’t been playing long when I met him. I already had lots of blues and classic-rock baggage when we started BTS, so it’s been a great place to try different things. For me, that’s what it’s all about.

How have you noticed his playing change over the years? He’s gotten really good [laughs]. There may have been things that he needed me to do at one time, but at this point, he could probably approximate anything I do. Doug, Jim, and I are all growing and learning things. I hope so at least.

You are Brett Netson. There is a Brett Nelson who used to play with Built to Spill. What are the chances? Doug and Brett Nelson did the Electronic Anthology Project, rerecording BTS songs in the form of a 1980s synth-pop band. “Age I Felt” is the cut, speaking of Devo. Brett loves ’80s synth-pop and new wave. He’s an expert and a fine person. I support what he does.

Built to Spill is a touring band, a live band. Has anything ever happened to you in Florida? Seems like things are always happening in Florida. There was a girl in Florida who insisted on doing an aerial performance on a tree in the back of a venue one time. She had a friend drive her back there with a ladder. She had on a costume and there were props. [Laughs] I got the feeling she knew what she was doing, but Doug walked up and was sort of mortified. He was like, “Please no!”

Was there twirling? She got me to help with the ladder, and just as we got it all set up and ready, the Florida police rolled up. We tried to explain, and the cops were somewhat tolerant of the situation. They seemed to appreciate the absurdity of what was happening. The girl got to come down on those big pieces of

You all get to places where songs become something other than songs. I see anglerfish. Or Isaac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage. Have you ever seen an anglerfish? I learned to play guitar by jamming my days away with various groups of people. I feel most natural then. It takes a lot of patience and trust to improv. I like to play supportively. There comes a time when someone has to make a move to guide the thing, and sometimes taking the liberty and getting up above everyone is the supportive thing to do. But usually I try to avoid the Clapton clinic wankfest. I really have no idea what the others think. Sometimes it all makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t…

THURSDAY

Sarah Jaffe James Anaya All Ages SUNDAY

THURSDAY 19 DECEMBER

THURSDAY

COFFEE, SPIRITS, AND MUSIC

Decibel Proudly Presents: DJ RASHAD & DJ SPINN “OFFICIAL AFTER PARTY FOR CHANCE THE RAPPER” Jimi Jaxon All Ages

The Crocodile, ReignCity, & KEXP Present YUNA

Susy Sun, Jus Moni All Ages

KEXP & The Crocodile Present: SALLIE FORD & THE SOUND OUTSIDE And the Kids, Red Jacket Mine All Ages

18 Individual Eyes Duke Evers 21+

Friday, Jan. 24th DJ QUIK, RAZ SIMONE, GIFTED GAB

WED 12/11 ABSOLUTE KARAOKE  THU 12/12 MARMALADE

FRI 12/13 BRENDAN SHEA BAND W/ LONELY MOUNTAIN LOVERS, IAN JONES AND THE FREMONT WHISKEY TEAM & SARAH PASILLAS

SAT 12/14 DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE WITH SUPERCOMMUTER, DEATH*STAR, DUAL CORE, BEEFY

SUN 12/15 ACOUSTIC ARMAGEDDON! #5 MON 12/16 MICHAEL SHRIEVE’S SPELLBINDER

TUE 12/17 FOLLIES & VICES WITH KYLMYYS, TRUENO & INTRODUCING PROJECT DIESLOW

The Crocodile & ReignCity Present THE PHYSICS DIGITAL WILDLIFE ALBUM RELEASE

Dave B, Tangerine, Shelton Harris & Tyler Dopps, DJ Nick Beeba All Ages

ReignCity & Dead Nation Present WAX

Dumbfoundead, EOM, Anderson Paak All Ages

Wednesday, Mar. 26th LOST IN THE TREES UP & COMING EVERY TUESDAY LIQUID COURAGE KARAOKE

12/13 & 12/14 SOLD OUT PICKWICK 12/27 BLACK BREATH 12/31 THE FLAVR BLUE, NIGHTMARE FORTRESS, KINGDOM CRUMBS 1/3 & 1/4 BIG ASS BOOMBOX

1/8 & 1/9 AUSTIN JENCKES 1/10 CALIFONE 1/11 AUSTIN JENCKES 1/17 WOODEN SHJIPS

1/21 CROOKS ON TAPE 1/24 PATTERSON HOOD 1/25 TRUE SPOKES & IAN MCFERON BAND

1/31 JOHNNY FLYNN 2/4 ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER 2/7 ZION I 2/8 PASSAFIRE & BALLYHOO!

2/14 BOWIE VISION 2/15 SHEARWATER 2/18 ANE BRUN 2/28 AER 5/3 WE ARE SCIENTISTS

MY PHILOSOPHY

BYRDIE LIVES

Last week, we lost a real one—Seattle hiphop artist Jesse “Byrdie” Watson succumbed to complications from a long bout of cancer. If you were checking out what was shaking and baking in the Seattle scene in the early 2000s, there was no missing Pretty Byrdie, a big brother with a smile and a heart to match. Byrdie came into prominence via the Street Level Records group Full Time Soldiers. FTS and SLR’s brand of g-rap, including acts that hailed from the Soufend to the North End, sold out of local shops and kept mail orders ringing throughout the country—they were unquestionably some of the most popular local product in the late 1990s to early 2000s, and Byrdie was probably the most popular voice among them. He broke out on his own with 2001’s Poetic Epidemic, which featured everybody from his SLR comrades to Source of Labor’s Wordsayer. Byrdie’s “Player’s Policy Pt. 2” was one of the first local cuts I knew of that got regular rotation on KUBE—at the time, and probably now, this was a big deal. (The other ones I remember: Mobb Tyght Hustlers’ “Let’s Get Toasted” and Unexpected Arrival’s “Take Control (Remix),” which featured Byrdie.) All this feels like fucking ages ago— I know it wasn’t, really, but just listen to the intro of “Dirty Politics,” where Byrdie spits: “Man, I’m so sick and tired of these rappers in Seattle, these so-called MCs. Everybody wants to be divided! There is no rap scene in Seattle! There is no hiphop community! I built a bridge, but y’all burnt it down.” At the time, nobody I knew would’ve argued with this. Though it’s been only about 10 years, it feels like double that—we’ve come a long way.

A couple years later, Byrdie would release his N Flight album, his most polished work yet, and that radio love just increased, and he was on big stages rocking. I remember the joint video-release party for his “B.Y.R.D.I.E.” and the Blue Scholars’ first video (“Freewheelin”) at the old Vera in 2004.

Byrdie was born the same year I was, and he was one of the first bright lights I knew of from what I identify as my particular generation of this town’s hiphop artists. I would see the dude around my old neighborhood, not far from the Canterbury on 15th, maybe smoke, but always we’d have a good chop. He was unfailingly cool, quick with a smile or a good word—just massively supportive and genuine. This was simply not the default mode of Seattle hiphop back then.

Look, a lot of people I know are fucked up over this one. We’ll miss you, Byrd. I know your spirit is in flight. Love and thoughts out to his fam—if you’d care to help alleviate his medical/funeral costs, go to byrdie206.com and donate.

RIP to another real one: the late Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela the South African revolutionary turned prisoner tuned president. The dismantler of the evil named apartheid. A great, great man, deserving of better words than these. Good-bye, Madiba.

Wed. 12/11

SEATTLE’S BEST OPEN MIC 9PM 21+ FREE Thurs. 12/12

BENEFIT NIGHT FOR THE YEV FREE PERFORMANCES BY: The Yev, Wildlife Indoors, Nitrogen Lion Society, Muscle Beach Wrecking Crew

$1 FROM EVERY DRINK DONATED. 8PM 21+ Fri 12/13

THE FINGER GUNS

Post Adolescence, The Hardcount DOORS AT 8PM 21+ $7 Sat 12/14

DEMOLITION KINGS

Vigilante Justice, Zombie Jihad DOORS AT 8PM 21+ $7 Sun 12/15

THE BEAUTIFUL FREAKS, Stain Mon 12/16

MONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL The Yev 10PM 21+ FREE Tues 12/17

BABY KETTEN KARAOKE 9PM 21+ FREE Wed

WWW.FACEBOOK.COM/TAKEWARNINGPRESENTS TWITTER @TAKEWARNINGSEA

TICKETS @ WWW.TICKETFLY.COM

*TICKETS GOING FAST!*  SAT DEC 14 @ EL CORAZON

TAKE WARNING & KGRG 89.9 FM PRESENT:

(GIVE UP THE GHOST)

HEIRESS, YOUNG TURKS, CRUTCHES ALL AGES (BAR W/ ID) - 7:00 PM TICKETS @ ELCORAZONSEATTLE.COM OR EL CORAZON BOX OFFICE.

*NEXT WEEKEND!* FRI DEC 20 & SAT DEC 21  @ EL CORAZON

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12/17

HIGH DIVE PRESENTS: INDIE/AMERICANA DARK FEATURES ANGELO DELSENNO & THE EMPTY SKY COLIN BRADFORD $6/8PM

21+ ONLY 7:00 PM TICKETS @ ELCORAZONSEATTLE.COM, EL CORAZON BOX

1/25 THE MAD CONDUCTOR @ 2BIT, 1/28 INTO IT. OVER IT. @ VERA PROJECT, 1/31 A LOT LIKE BIRDS @ VERA PROJECT, 2/4 REGGIE & THE FULL EFFECT @ VERA PROJECT, 2/13 MAD CADDIES @ CHOP SUEY, 2/20 PETER BRADLEY ADAMS @ HIGH DIVE

HEARD OF ’EM

BY ANNA MINARD

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

STEREOLAB

Emperor Tomato Ketchup (Elektra)

I can’t figure out yet why it’s so hard for me to form words about Stereolab. I like ’em! And they have soooooo many sounds But when I try to set it down on paper, nothing happens. Here’s the kind of notes I have to work with:

• charming French blah blah blah

• has a beat

• computer farts—the good kind

• horse breath

• repetitive sometimes (title song)

• zizzle zoozle

And on and on like that. It’s hard, somehow, to really make jokes or try to describe Stereolab. The music shows up, and even if you don’t usually like electronic music or this kind of layered, collagelike music-making, it just makes sense. It’s a weird pile of music built on a framework of normal pop songs. Like it starts with an outline of a song that some pop music machine guy wrote and workshopped for ease of consumption, and then Stereolab took that song out to a dark room and beat it up and then sprinkled glitter on it and told it a joke and touched it in its special area and then… wham! Out comes a song that sounds a little bit normal but also totally wackadoo—a Christmas tree of normality covered in deformed decorations and with some limbs artfully sawed off.

So that’s all this is, an artful pile. Papiermâché music. It has some symphonic strings, a lot of wow-wow-wow and zoozle computery sounds, but plenty of recognizable rock instruments, too. There’s good buildup—when should you keep going with that theme? And when should you make it louder? And at what point do you really blow it out and call it done? Stereolab know the answers to those questions. I decided to look them up and figure out what that might teach me.

They’re a British band from the 1990s who have been called post-rock. They’re well loved but not hugely commercially successful. There are a lot of French vocals; those come from Lætitia Sadier, who is so completely French that she has to make up new vowels. (“Lætitia” is French for “come eat this croissant.”) Along with bilingual lyricism, Sadier apparently plays keyboards, guitar, and trombone, among other things. Any tromboner is good in my book! Another Stereolab vocalist and guitarist, Mary Hansen, was tragically hit and killed by a truck while she was riding her bicycle.

But what is so good about Stereolab? I don’t know that I can say. I tried! I said some word things. But somehow, Stereolab is for ears and listening. Trying to parse it just doesn’t work.

I give this a “put it in your ears yourself” out of 10.

UP&COMING

Lose your pernicious sort of nostalgia every night this week!

For the full music calendar, see page 41 or visit thestranger.com/music For ticket on-sale announcements, follow twitter.com/seashows

Wednesday 12/11

Friends and Family, Night Cadet, Wishbeard, Tenderfoot

(Crocodile) Though I haven’t seen them live yet, light internet stalking of Friends and Family (the band, not my actual friends and family, btdt) hints that this many-membered band’s live shows might include, to my absolute delight: costumes, themes, dancing, theatrics. Their 2013 self-released record, Happy, GoodLooking, and In Love (mixed by the one and only Erik Blood) whisks you away into an intriguing pop drama of driving strings and drums, glamorous synth bursts, and happy horns, with sprinklings of early Arcade Fire and of Montreal–ish storytelling flair. And sequins. This show will also feature the dreamy spacegaze of Wishbeard, the swoony twilight pop of Night Cadet, and the heart-shaped folk of Tenderfoot. EMILY NOKES

Thursday 12/12

Brazil Novo, Casey MacGill (Vito’s) See Stranger Suggests, page 19.

Caspa, Trolley Snatcha, J:Kenzo (Neumos) See Data Breaker, page 45.

Triptet (Chapel Performance Space) That the three gents who make up Triptet met as members of a Sun Ra tribute band should be the first clue as to the sonic environment in which they operate. A few rhythmic motifs are thrown down as the loosest of loose guideposts for jams to meander over and around, never settling in one place for long. Horns skronk and wail like wounded animals, while a fretless guitar hangs back

and provides the low end. Occasionally, “cheap electronics” (their words) can be heard mutating sound shapes in the negative space. Like much free jazz, traditional melody is pretty much beside the point: Triptet are all about creating an atmosphere and the interplay of the instrumentalists, weaving and bobbing into and out of eerie, deconstructed grooves. KYLE FLECK

Friday 12/13

Pill Wonder, iji, Landlines, San Onofre Lizards (Heartland) See Underage, page 46.

Christian Mistress, Occult SS, Paralyzer (Black Lodge) See Underage, page 46.

Black Hat, White Boy Scream + Viviane James, Bat (Teatro de la Psychomachia) See Underage, page 46.

Anna von Hausswolff, Noveller (Vera) Swedish pianist/vocalist Anna von Hausswolff creates stately pipe-organ-powered chamber pop of considerable grandeur, over which she sings with bold poise. (She is the daughter of noted minimalist composer Carl Michael Von Hausswolff—Papa has passed on some of his love of sonic severity to his offspring.) Ms. von Hausswolff sounds like a less bombastic Zola Jesus, skillfully balancing melancholy and radiant elements in her songs. Noveller (Brooklyn guitarist Sarah Lipstate, who has experience with minimalism herself, as stints with Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca attest), is supporting her new album of instrumentals, No Dreams. It’s her most ambitious work to date, displaying the sort of emotionally resonant compositions

and wide range of moods that hint at a fruitful career in film scoring—especially serious art-house movies set in places of natural beauty. DAVE SEGAL

Pere Ubu, Monogamy Party (Neumos) Thirty years on, there’s still never been a band like Pere Ubu. Blasting of out Cleveland as leaders of the American post-punk scene in the mid ’70s, this experimental rock band full of guys who look like substitute teachers were even great when they tried to sell out. (See 1989’s not-beloved-enough Cloudland). In the 21st century, Pere Ubu means longtime leader David Thomas plus backing band, but reviews of the recent tour—in support of the new record Lady from Shanghai—praise a fierce four-piece that’s not afraid to get weird, with a set list covering the band’s 35-year history. Opening the show: jagged Seattle art punks Monogamy Party. DAVID SCHMADER

A Tribute to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music: Greg Vandy, Fox and the Law, Hannalee, and more (Columbia City Theater) Harry Smith’s legendary sixalbum compilation of folk dating from the late ’20s to the early ’30s is widely regarded as a primary influence on the generation of singer-songwriters who came to prominence in the ’60s, including a certain Mr. Dylan. But when you’re listening to the anthology itself, the cultural significance takes a backseat to the pure beauty of these sepia-toned recordings. They’re simple songs humbly played, about true loves, reli-

gion, farming, butchers, drunks, and death. Perfect for sitting on the porch as the sun goes down with a little mason jar of moonshine, the whole collection’s filled with that peculiarly American mixture of melancholy and hope. Tonight, a slew of local musicians, including Fox and the Law, Br’er Rabbit, Vikesh Kapoor, and Pepper Proud take a crack at recapturing some of that old-time(less) magic. KYLE FLECK

Saturday 12/14

King Krule, Willis Earl Beal (Barboza) See preview, page 27.

Allen Stone, the Helio Sequence, the Lonely Forest, Shelby Earl (Showbox at the Market) Come on, this show is going to be good. And just in time for the holidays! Allen Stone will do his charming organ dance pop thing, and the Lonely Forest are gonna make that certain tone of rock and roll that makes the moment you’re in feel like a music video about your life—that song about Seattle? Listen to it on your way in or out of town sometime, and try not to cry a little bit. I dare you! Helio Sequence are probably cooler than both of those people and I’m just not hip enough to know it, and Shelby Earl is endorsed by all lovely humans and has a voice like a sexy bird. This is just such a solid, local bill to enjoy and go home feeling satisfied by.

ANNA MINARD

Dancer and Prancer, Chastity Belt, Bad Motivators

(Sunset) Going to see Dancer and Prancer, at least once a holiday, is becoming almost as much of a Seattle tradition as buying a ticket to see Dina Martina over at “The Re-bar’s Place” [sic]. Sure, some people get sick of hearing Christmas songs, especially when they start force-feeding them to us in October—but what if these same songs were played, instrumental-only, with a sunny, jinglejangly surf-rock twist? What if they were played by four dudes who wear cheery holiday sweaters and reportedly keep a cold keg of eggnog in their practice space? What if “Frosty the Snowman” or “Little Drummer Boy” were sped way up, and suddenly

danceable? Dancer and Prancer are the answer to all of these questions. KELLY O

Holograms, TV Ghost, Atomic Birds (Chop Suey) Holograms are about as far as you can get from the cheery, neon-and-sparkle cartoon-heroine posse band of Jem and the Holograms. The Swedish four-piece play seriously dark, synthy post punk— grim, gritty songs that tell tales of industrialization, being broke and broken and alienated and alone. On their recently released second album, Forever, Holograms weave in and out of desperate, fast chord progressions—complemented by the dark vocals of guitarist Anton Spetze and bassist Andreas Lagerström. Combining raw rock ’n’ roll with the cold sounds of the early Factory Records/the Warsaw days of Joy Division, Holograms create jarring images of coarse, dirty isolation through percussive, grating vocals and disjointed post-punk dynamics. The aptly paired TV Ghost will open with their brand of goth punk, which will please all the Bauhaus and New Order fans who will surely be attending. BREE MCKENNA

The Moondoggies, the Maldives (Neumos) Some things I’ll never understand: intelligent people who smoke cigarettes; folks who take Sarah Palin seriously; how anyone can convert the 7–10 split; and the bubbly enthusiasm many Northwesterners have for the bland country rock of the Moondoggies and the Maldives. These Seattle bands are not bad, by any means, but they’re honor-bound to a tradition mired in aesthetic conservativism. Sure, they’re great players and singers who seem sincere in their appreciation for this dusty, twangy, wistful music, and they’re probably nice people who vote, recycle, and pay their bills on time. But the Moondoggies and the Maldives represent to this listener a pernicious sort of nostalgia for a musical style that was never thrilling to begin with. Most bands bear influences and draw inspiration from the past, obviously, but it’s what music you absorb and how you assimilate and combine your influences that sets the interesting, exciting artists apart from the well-meaning but dull epigones. The Moondoggies and the Maldives fall into the latter category. We don’t need another Poco, y’all. DAVE SEGAL

Sunday 12/15

DJ Rashad, DJ Spinn, Jimi Jaxon

(Crocodile) See Data Breaker, page 45.

Chance the Rapper

(Showbox at the Market) Though he’s been on the radar of more internet-savvy heads since his 2012 debut, 10 Day, Chicago’s Chance the Rapper blew up this year thanks to his earnest and soulful yet pained and nostalgic Acid Rap mixtape. Over beats ranging from forward-thinking takes on footwork/juke to classic sample-based boom bap, the squawk-voiced Chance offers a perspective distinctly separate from the turnt-up, ultraviolent “drill” sound that has emerged from the city so crime-torn some residents call it “Chiraq.” And though his style is often tagged with that c-word (conscious), his heartfelt lyrics and dynamic, oddball delivery keep his songs sounding fresh and forward-thinking. MIKE RAMOS

Seacats, New Lungs, Candysound, Sibling Rivalry

(Crocodile) Seacats are the project of Kelso, Washington, brothers Mike and Josh Davis, who have been in the band (with a rotating cast of players) since high school/2009. They were signed to Ballard’s Fin Records and released their second (selftitled) LP this year—it’s a genuine pop journey through growing up and/or not growing up that has the ’cats nailing the delicate balance between sincere and hilarious. One of the tags on their Bandcamp is “sounds just like Weezer,” but for my money, they’re more like the Rentals with even more hooks and way better album covers. EMILY NOKES

Rappin’ 4-Tay, Deadly Poets, Jailbird and Scott Free

(Studio Seven) I got hip to Anthony “Rappin’ 4-Tay” Forté one fall day years back, walking up Alaska from Rainier Avenue, a funeral home on one side of the street, a library on the other. “It’s the dank season,” he rapped, “for 1994”—which it certainly was. 4-Tay’s Fillmore fly shit was vetted by no less a personage than Too Short, when he debuted on

the 1988 classic Life Is… Too Short. 4-Tay’s brightest light came in ’94, when he suavely flexed that he was “just working [his] toes on a mink rug” on the Bay Area classic “Playaz Club”—on which even Seattle got a shout. Gold herringbones, pressedout curls, crisp fedoras—this was just pimp shit as I knew it even since I was a kid, hanging by the bar while my mother poured drinks for cats named “Shug,” “Joe T,” and “Eddie Chin, the ho’s best friend.” LARRY MIZELL JR.

OCnotes, Hightek Lowlives, Bobcatt (Vermillion) Tonight, yours truly delivers a talk called “What to Do with Free Time,” which concerns the strange situation of living in a society that is very rich but puts limits on the availability of what should be abundant and meaningful for all its citizens: free time. We need a politics of free time. We also need to enjoy the massive music of the local hiphop producer OCnotes (Secret Society, Moldavite), who performs after my talk. But here is some news that should make your heart beat with happiness: The great Erik Blood is producing OCnotes’s next album. Just the sheer thought of this work, which will be released next year, has already made it my favorite album of 2014. CHARLES MUDEDE

Monday 12/16

Loulogy: The Lou Reed Memorial (Waid’s) Legendary rocker Lou Reed was set free from earthly concerns in late October, but the mourning and tribute nights continue unabated. Tonight, at the cleverly named Loulogy, several Seattle musicians honor the Velvet Underground songwriting innovator and New York City icon with cover songs from his nearly five decades of output and film appearances. Participants include Kill Your Songs, Marc and Amanda Laurick, Black Nite Crash’s Jim Biggs, and Brother James & the Soul-Vation’s James Burdyshaw. But will anyone cover “The Original Wrapper,” side C of Metal Machine Music, or anything from Hudson River Wind Meditations? (Proceeds from this event go to YouthCare.) DAVE SEGAL

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

Tuesday 12/17

Rustie, Dutty Wilderness (Neumos) See page 19 and page 45. Dearly Departed, Zoë Wick, Kimo Muraki (Sunset) This has to be one of the stranger bills around town this year. Since their inception in 2001, headliners Dearly Departed have released a total of two albums and an EP of post-emo “rock,” somehow managing to sound comically bombastic yet whiny and anemic at the same time. What brings them to town more than a half decade since their last record is a bit of a mystery. Zoë Wick, on the other hand, is a local singer-songwriter favoring crisp arrangements and understatedly catchy indie pop. She does a nice folksy rendition of the heartbreak ode “Love Ain’t” by hiphop crew the CunninLynguists that comes off sincere and affecting, not ironic and affected (lookin’ at you Ben Folds). And finally, opener Kimo Muraki is a banjo-toting troubadour who can be found on YouTube serenading Doe Bay weekenders with a twangy take on Prince’s “Purple Rain.” Come early for the earnest six-stringers; the rest is up to you.

KYLE FLECK

Follies and Vices, Kylmyys, Trueno, Project DieSlow

(White Rabbit) My intro to Kylmyys was a chance encounter in May at Vermillion Gallery during Second Thursday, Capitol Hill's art walk. They were set up in the back area, wearing bird masks and robes while hunched over synthesizers. The Seattle duo—Brian Kidd and Jason Chamberlain, who claim Oslo, Norway, as their hometown, but that may be misdirection—emitted an array of enigmatic keyboard washes and cryptic twitterings that evoked the malevolent majesty of Igor Wakhévitch and the sinister tonalities of Mort Garson’s classic Black Mass LP under the Lucifer pseudonym. Their 2012 album, The Ice Breaks at Dawn, bears a Nordic frigidness that’s at once unsettling and grandiosely beautiful. Kylmyys bring a new, bracing gravity to the term “chillout music”—as exemplified by their distorto-voiced cover of Joy Division’s glacial “The Eternal.” DAVE SEGAL

MIKE STERN BAND feat.

RANDY BRECKER, ANTHONY JACKSON, AND KEITH CARLOCK

TUE, DEC 10 - WED, DEC 11

Jazz fusion all-star band

AVERAGE WHITE BAND

THU, DEC 12 - SUN, DEC 15

“The greatest purveyors of Scottish soul funk in the world!” -BBC

JOEY DEFRANCESCO TRIO

TUE, DEC 17 - WED, DEC 18

The finest jazz organist on the planet!

THE GYPSY ALLSTAR feat.

GIPSY KINGS FAMILY MARIO

REYES and GEORGE REYES

THU, DEC 19 - SUN, DEC 22

The Indo-gypsy fusion project returns by popular demand! An All-Star global sound featuring Gipsy Kings family Mario Reyes and George Reyes

PONCHO SANCHEZ

AND HIS LATIN JAZZ BAND

FRI, DEC 27 - TUE, DEC 31

NYE CELEBRATION 4 PACKAGE OPTIONS

Grammy-winning Master Conguero Poncho Sanchez and his legendary 7-piece firey Latin jazz band

2033 6th Ave. | 206.441.9729

all ages | free parking full schedule at jazzalley.com

12.12 Thursday (Electronic) Nectar, Starborne, & Bassdrop present: PHUTUREPRIMITIVE

Unlimited Gravity, Sonny Chiba vs Bizarra, HZ Donut

$12 adv. $15 Doors, 8pm, 21+

12.13 Friday (Electro-Funk Jam) ACORN PROJECT

Juno What?!, Richie Aldente

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

12.14 Saturday (Country / Americana) CALEB KLAUDER BAND SUGARCANE

Home Sweet Home

$10 adv / $12 dos, 8pm Doors, 21+

12.15 Sunday (Funk / Party Blues) ANDY FRASCO and the U.N.

Rippin Chicken

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

12.18 Wednesday (Rock / Pop) POVERTY BAY

Pyramid Lake, Rebelmart, Variations

$5 adv. $7 Doors, 8pm, 21+

12.19 Thursday (Holiday Bluegrass)

DAROL ANGER & THE CASCADIA ALL-STARS

“Keep-It-In-The-Fam Holiday Show”

$15 adv / $20 dos, 7pm, ALL AGES w/ 21+ bar

12.20 Little Big Band Ft. Bernie

Ho! Masquerade

You’re invited to ring in the New Year with the Seattle Symphony Featuring Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue

DECEMBER 31

L udovic M orlot, conductor

Jeff Tyzik, conductor

B enjamin L ulich, clarinet Ko-ichiro Yamamoto, trombone

Jon K imura Parker, piano S eattle Symphony

Hear both traditional and jazzy excerpts of Tchaikovsky’s beloved Nutcracker, Gershwin’s famous Rhapsody in Blue with Canadian pianist Jon Kimura Parker, music from Star Wars and much more. Then, count down to midnight at a post-concert party in Benaroya Hall’s beautiful Grand Lobby, all decked out for the holidays.

Tickets: $52

206.215.4747

January 2014

[2 + 3]  Kathryn Claire

[4 + 5]  Western Haunts

[8]  Will Kimbrough

[9 + 10] Naomi Hooley and Rob

[11 + 12] James Coates

[13 + 14 + 15] Will West

[16 + 17]  The Weather Machine

[18 + 19] Shannon Stephens

[20 + 21 + 22] Three for Silver

[23 + 24] Lotte Kestner and Kevin Long

[25 + 26] Jeffrey Martin & Anna and the Underbelly

[27th + 28] Lindsay Lou & the Flatbelly's

[30 + 31]  Bradford Loomis

BIGGER-BUDGETSOUNDING

DRUNK OF THE WEEK …BELOW THE HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA …42 DATA BREAKER …45

UNDERAGE…46 POSTER OF THE WEEK …46

WED 12/11

LIVE BOAT STREET CAFE The Djangomatics, 6:30 pm, free CROCODILE Friends and Family, Night Cadet, Wishbeard, Tenderfoot, 7 pm, $8

EL CORAZON People Get Ready, 7:30 pm

HIGH DIVE Good Touching, Ned Collette, 8 pm, $6

HIGHLINE Blood of Kings, Dimesland, Spacebag, Guns of Barisal, $6

JAZZ ALLEY Mike Stern Band, $26.50 a KEYARENA Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, $35-$55

NEW ORLEANS Legacy Band, Clarence Acox

PINK DOOR Casey MacGill & the Blue 4 Trio, 8 pm THE ROYAL ROOM Alchymeia, 8 pm

SEAMONSTER Eric Hullander Jazz, the Unsinkable Heavies

SHIP CANAL GRILL The Canteloupes Jazz Jam

STUDIO SEVEN Winds of Plague, Impending Doom, No Bragging Rights, guests SUNSET TAVERN French

Letters, Death By Steamship

TRACTOR TAVERN Hallstrom, Western Haunts, Ben Fisher, 8 pm, $8

TRIPLE DOOR The Bayous

TULA’S Purple Passion Swing Band, 7:30 pm, $7 a VERA PROJECT My Jerusalem, Chris Brokaw, 7:30 pm, $11

VERMILLION Dancer and Prancer, $5

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Jerry Zimmerman DJ

BALTIC ROOM Crunk: DJ Henski, Marty Mar, Blue Eyed Soul, Bgeezy, guests

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

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

LAVA LOUNGE DJ Deutscher Meister

MOE BAR The Hump: DJ Darwin, DJ Swervewon

NEIGHBOURS Undergrad: Guest DJs, $5/$8

Q NIGHTCLUB Robot Romantic, R-Pal, D’Nelski, DJ HoJo, 8 pm

WILDROSE 2nd Hand: Mother Church, Pavone, free

CLASSICAL

BENAROYA HALL Pink Martini with Seattle Symphony

THURS 12/12

LIVE

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BARBOZA Will Hoge, Red Wanting Blue, 8 pm, $15

BLUE MOON TAVERN Koldun, Red Sea

CAN CAN Vince Mira

CHAPEL PERFORMANCE

SPACE Triptet

CHOP SUEY the Family Curse, Constant Lovers, Bali Girls, 8 pm, $7

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER The Royal Oui, Pretty Broken Things, Elk and Boar, 8 pm, $8/$10

CROCODILE Midlake, Sarah Jaffe, James Anaya

DARRELL’S TAVERN Ian Jones, Andrew Norsworthy a GUAYMAS CANTINA Oleaje Flamenco, 8 pm, free

HARD ROCK CAFE

Liquidrive, Awfully Sudden, Po’ Brothers, 8 pm, $5

HEARTLAND Lou Reed Tribute Night: Posse, iji,

DRUNK OF THE WEEK

HIS NAME IS “OLY” (LIKE THE BEER)

What did I say to this guy Oly to get him to recoil from me in horror? (A) I’m broke, will you buy me a drink? (B) Do you like tuna fish sandwiches? Or (C) My new all-girl gang “Love Town” is gonna run your “Hate City” gang right outta town, BITCH!

Read more about love (and hate) at thestranger.com/drunkoftheweek. KELLY O

Punishment, guests, 7:30

pm

HIGH DIVE Butchers 4

Butterflies, Will Wakefield & the Congress Hotel

HIGHLINE Acapulco Lips, the Crap, Lindseys, Sexdrug, Urine Idiot

HIGHWAY 99 James King & the Southsiders, 8 pm, $7

HOLLOW EARTH RADIO

Corey J. Brewer, Elissa Ball, Militant Child, Knifecream

JAZZ ALLEY Average White Band, 7:30 pm, $28.50

KELLS Stevie Morris

a KEYARENA

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, $35-$55

LITTLE RED HEN Country

Lips, $3

LUCID The Hang: Caffeine, 9:30 pm, free; Casa Noir, 10 pm

NECTAR Phutureprimitive,

Unlimited Gravity, HZ Donut a NEUMOS Caspa, Trolley Snatcha, J.Kenzo, 8 pm, $20

NEW ORLEANS Lonnie Williams, 7:30 pm

a PARAMOUNT THEATRE

Jackie Evancho, 7:30 pm, $45 - $125

PINK DOOR Bric-a-Brac

THE ROYAL ROOM Elnah Jordan, 8 pm

SCARLET TREE How Now Brown Cow, 9:30 pm, free

SLIM’S LAST CHANCE

Carolyn Mark

STUDIO SEVEN The Babies

SUNSET TAVERN Ben

Darwish, the Shook Twins

TIM’S TAVERN P:E-O/P;L,E

TRACTOR TAVERN Charlie Hunter, Scott Amendola

TRIPLE DOOR Tekla Waterfield, Tofte

TULA’S Woody Herman Centennial Celebration

a VERA PROJECT Ill Intent, Power, GAG, Clarity, guests

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Brazil Novo, Casey MacGill, 5:30 pm, free

THE WHITE RABBIT Marmalade, $6

DJ

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

UNDERGROUND The Lowdown: DJ Lightray, $3

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

THERAPY LOUNGE

DUH.: DJ Omar, guests

TRINITY Space Thursdays: Rise Over Run, DJ Christyle, Johnny Fever, DJ Nicon, Sean Majors, B Geezy, guests, free THE WOODS Pure Thursdays: Omar Valadez, MMars, Chris T, 10 pm, free

FRI

12/13

LIVE

2 BIT SALOON The Twangshifters, Western Tilt

BARBOZA Erin McKeown

BLACK LODGE Christian Mistress, Occult SS, Paralyzer

BLUE MOON TAVERN PonyHomie, Lazer Kitty, Gems, $5

CAFE RACER the Snap, John Lee Spectre

COLUMBIA CITY

THEATER A Tribute to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music: Guests

CONOR BYRNE Leanne Wilkins, Aaron Zig, guests a CROCODILE Pickwick,

THURSDAY, 12/12 - FRIDAY, 12/13

ZOLTAN KASZAS

with Bob Bledsoe

WINNER! 2013 SEATTLE INTERNATIONAL COMEDY COMPETITION! Zoltan Kaszas was born in Budapest Hungary in the late 80’s to Gyongyi Hering (his mom’s name). On July 4th 1991, they moved to great US and 15 years later on August 10th 2006, Zoltan got on stage to perform stand-up comedy for the first time... He bombed. From that day forward, he dedicated himself to perfecting his comedic art. Once he found his unique storytelling style, his budding career was off and running. In early 2011 he released his first CD entitled “Naked Cartwheels”, which he hopes will stand the test of time or at least until CDs are completely obsolete.

WEDNESDAY 12/11

FRENCH

$6 • 9PM

THURSDAY 12/12

Prism Tats, $17

DARRELL’S TAVERN the F-Holes, Kid Dynamite, Norma Beach

Zepparella, 11 pm, $25

TULA’S Rich Pellegrin Quintet, 7:30 pm, $15

BLACK LODGE Diesto, Same-sex Dictator, Big Trughk, Greenriver Thrillers

Tomb of Ligeia

SLIM’S LAST CHANCE

Sledgeback, Pinned Red, the Grindy Low, Repo-zest

WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 11 | 7:30 PM

MY JERUSALEM, CHRIS BROKAW

$11 ($10 W. CLUB CARD)

THURSDAY DECEMBER 12 | 6:00 PM

MORNING RITUAL FEAT:

$8

FRIDAY 12/13 GAYTHEIST

ILL INTENT, POWER, GAG, CLARITY, CROOKS TO KINGS, DEAD WEIGHT

$7

FRIDAY DECEMBER 13 | 7:30 PM

ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF, NOVELLER

$11 ($10 W. CLUB CARD)

SATURDAY DECEMBER 21 | 6:30 PM

RAT PATH, MALICE, CAST OUT, GUESTS

$7

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 28 | 7:30 PM

THE WORKDAY RELEASE, SLEEP FOR SLEEPERS, ABOUT THE AUTHOR

$11/$10 (W. CLUB CARD)

a EL CORAZON Metalachi, Stay Tuned, $12/$15; Tommy and the High Pilots, Rare Monk, Oh Mercy, American Island, 7:30 pm, $8/$10

GROUND ZERO (BELLEVUE)

Thee Samedi, guests, 7 pm

HEARTLAND iji, Pill Wonder, Landlines, San Onofre Lizards, 8 pm

HIGH DIVE Ed Wang, Spanish for 100, Exohxo, the Salt Riot, $8

HIGHLINE Murmurs, Dead Bars, Sharkpact, Bad Future

HIGHWAY 99 Nick Vigarino & Meantown Blues, Sammy Eubanks Band, 8 pm, $15

JAZZ ALLEY Average White Band, 9:30 pm, $28.50

JOSEPHINE Key Of Solomon, Lomen Markos, Guns of Barisal, 8 pm

LITTLE RED HEN Highway 9, $5

LO-FI Tapwater, Trio Subtonic, $10

THE MIX Crooked Smile, Combinator, $8

NECTAR Acorn Project, Juno

What?!, Richie Aldente, 8 pm, $10

NEUMOS Pere Ubu, Monogamy Party, 8 pm, $15

NEW ORLEANS Brian Lee & the Orbiters, 8 pm

VERA PROJECT Anna Von Hausswolff, Noveller

VICTORY LOUNGE

Pony Time, Wimps, Pelvis

Wrestlies, Criminal Code

THE WHITE RABBIT

Brendan Shea, Each & All, Ian Jones & The Fremont Whiskey Team, Sarah Pasillas, $6

DJ

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

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

ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN

Digging Deep: Ramiro, Jeromy Nail, Derrick Deepvibez

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

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND Caliente

Celebra: DJ Polo, Efren

SCARLET TREE Oh So Fresh Fridays: Deejay Tone, DJ Buttnaked, guests

THERAPY LOUNGE Rapture: Guests, $3 after 11 pm

BLUE MOON TAVERN Beachdick, Uh Oh Eskimo, Something in the Trees, $5

CAFE RACER Hillary Susz, Nicole Zapel, Waxing Hearts

CENTRAL SALOON Micah James, Jackie Pock, free CHOP SUEY Holograms, TV Ghost, Atomic Bird

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER The Bushwick Book Club Presents Music Inspired by David Byrne’s “How Music Works”: Guests, $6-$12

CONOR BYRNE Western Bluebirds, Joy Mills Band, the Rainieros a CROCODILE Pickwick, Prism Tats, $17

DARRELL’S TAVERN NighTrain, Blacktop Deciever, Stafford and the Bentz Brothers a EL CORAZON American Nightmare, Heiress, Young Turks, Crutches

EMPTY SEA STUDIOS Chris Luquette, Steve Blanchard, 8 pm, $15/$18

HIGH DIVE Esitu, Lucky Machete, Devils Hunt Me Down, 9:30 pm, $8

HIGHLINE Dreadful Children, the Witches Titties, Klondike Kate, Noel Austin’s Phreaks, $10

STUDIO SEVEN Fates Warning, Artizan, the People Now, Custom, Graphic Light Theory, 6 pm

SUNSET TAVERN Dancer and Prancer, Chastity Belt, Bad Motivators, 9:30 pm, $8

TIM’S TAVERN The Ill Legitimates, Dragontail Peak

TRACTOR TAVERN Howie Day, Tyler Hilton, Anna Rose, $17/$20

TRIPLE DOOR Theoretics

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

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Ruby Bishop, 6 pm, Prom Queen, 9:30 pm THE WHITE RABBIT Supercommuter, Death*Star, Dual Core, Beefy, $8/$10

$8

$6

MONDAY

FRIDAY JANUARY 10 | 7:00 PM

GIRLS THAT SHRED:

A BENEFIT FOR SKATE LIKE A GIRL CHASTITY BELT, TACOCAT, ATOMIC BRIDE, SUMMER BABES, LURES

$10 ADV

ALWAYS ALL AGES

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB The Hardcount, Finger Guns

SLIM’S LAST CHANCE The Daemon Lovers, DT’s, Dead Man

STUDIO SEVEN Blood On The Dance Floor, Farewell My Love, the Relapse Symphony, Haley Rose, Beneath the Spin Light, 6 pm

SUNSET TAVERN Glose, Gaytheist, Cougar, Blood Drugs, $8

TEATRO DE LA

PSYCHOMACHIA Black Hat, White Boy Scream, Bat, Viviane James

TIM’S TAVERN Mrs. Howl, the Aimlows, Fatal Butterfly, the Panty Snatchers

TRACTOR TAVERN

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

CLASSICAL

BENAROYA HALL Symphony

Untuxed: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons

CHAPEL PERFORMANCE SPACE Yesod SAT

12/14

LIVE

2 BIT SALOON Stafford and the Bentz Bros., Angie And The Car Wrecks, Knuck, the Donner Vixens

BARBOZA King Krule, 8 pm, $12

HIGHWAY 99 Kim Field and the Mighty Titans of Tone, the Emerald City Horns, Orville Johnson, 8 pm, $15

JAZZ ALLEY Average White Band, 9:30 pm, $28.50

JOSEPHINE Lunamoth, Gems, Piano Piano, 8 pm NECTAR Caleb Klauder Country Band, Sugarcane, Home Sweet Home, 8 pm, $10

NEUMOS The Moondoggies, the Maldives, $15

SHIP CANAL GRILL Kelley Johnson, 8 pm

SHOWBOX AT THE MARKET Allen Stone, the Helio Sequence, the Lonely Forest, Shelby Earl

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB

BY ADRIAN RYAN

SINGER/SONGWRITER

$15 ~ 7pm

THURSDAY 12/12

$8 ~ 8pm

Thu Dec 19 FOLK SINGER/SONGWRITER DISMAL TIDE

KEATON COLLECTIVE LANFORD BLACK

$8 ~ 8pm

Fri Dec 20

LOCAL POP & INDIE ROCK THE COMETTES THE YOUNG EVILS THE HOOT HOOTS

$8 ~ 9pm

Tickets also available at Sonic Boom Records

HOMO FOR THE HOLIDAYS I know! You were so damn worried. What with Kitten LaRue and Lou Henry Hoover all gay married and up and moved away to New York City, and with Jinkx and Major Scales doing their own equally New Yorky Christmas show, it seemed as if this year’s Homo for the Holidays would suffer along without these luminous luminaries and become quite a different show indeed. But the great Gods of Gayness are good, and somehow most of the mad scheduling conflicts and huge distances worked themselves out. This means that My Favorite Holiday Show Ever™ (yes, my very favorite—sorry, Dina and Ham!) will open tonight as fabulously as ever. (However, Scott Shoemaker will be filling in for Jinkx from December 18 to 22, please to note.) This is a wonderful, heartwarming holiday jewel, and if you’ve seen it, you hunger and ache to

see it again (it’s like the law or something), and if you haven’t? Well. COAL FOR YOU. It’s hosted as ever by the magical BenDeLaCreme (star of the next RuPaul’s Drag Race season, premiering in February, don’tcha know) and features Faggedy Randy, Ilves Strauss, and the amazing Cherdonna Shinatra. DO NOT MISS THIS SHOW, Miss Thang. Odd Fellows West Hall, 8 pm, $25 adv/$30 DOS, 21+.

FRIDAY 12/13

FEROCIOUS MEMORIES

I’ve been waiting months for this one, for one bodacious, big-lipped reason: NYC’s inimitable Amanda Lepore! Of course, hunka-burning-hottie Bright Light Bright Light all the way from London will be performing, so that’s good, as will Rye Rye and our own ArtStar, and Aleksa Manila and Mama Tits will be guest hosting, which is all lovely, of course, however! For me? All I wanna do is bounce up and down on Amanda’s trademark cartoon lips. Boing, boing! Neighbours, 10 pm, $17/$35 VIP, 21+.

SUNDAY 12/15

JINKX MONSOON: UNWRAPPED! So you know that Christmas show I just mentioned that Jinkx and the Major are doing off Broadway? Well. There are three crucial things you must know: (a) It’s called Unwrapped, (b) it’s going to be fucking amazing beyond the telling of it, and (c) they are bringing the fabulous em-effer to us today for two shows only! Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center, 2 and 7 pm, $25/$45 adv VIP, 21+.

P R E S E N T S

JANUARY 9 TO 16 2014 TH TH

JOIN US IN CELEBRATION

1/9 TELEKINESIS

W/WILD ONES

1/10 THE POSIES

W/ALCOHOL FUNNYCAR + RUSTY WILLOUGHBY +POPSICKLE

1/11 GOODNESS

W/THESE STREETS (SELENE VIGIL FROM 7 YEAR BITCH) + LUCKY ME

1/12 TRULY

W/BALI GIRLS + SAGE + HYPERLUNG

1/13 HEY MARSEILLES

W/CATALDO

1/15 THE THERMALS

1/16 BRENT AMAKER & THE RODEO AND MORE!

SUN 12/15

free CAFE RACER The Racer Sessions

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER

Hope for the Philippines| Benefit Concert and Silent Auction: Shelley Casey,

Operadisiac, Ken Sabalza, guests, 6 pm, $8/$10

CROCODILE Seacats, New Lungs, Candysound, Sibling Rivalry, 8 pm, $5 a EL CORAZON Walter & the Conqueror, 8:30 pm, $8/$10 HIGH DIVE Pink Camel, Released from Quiet, Philip Earle, 8 pm, $6 JAZZ ALLEY Average White Band, 7:30 pm, $28.50

JOSEPHINE Northfolk,

BY DAVE SEGAL

THURSDAY 12/12

CASPA AND TROLLEY SNATCHA’S

DUBSTEP POWER MOVES

The Dub Police North American Tour powers into Seattle tonight, led by London DJ/producer Caspa, the selfproclaimed “dopest ghost in town.” On 2009’s Everybody’s Talking, Nobody’s Listening, Caspa combines ruffneck beats and vivid textures with deft dynamics and brazen tunes that stick in your noggin. It’s a nice balance of mainstream and underground elements. This year’s Alpha Omega boasts a bigger-budget-sounding wallop in the beat department, so those kids in the upper deck can headbang to it with more authority. It’s a more accessible collection of stadium-friendly anthems; Caspa smelled all that filthy EDM lucre and couldn’t resist fattening up/dumbing down things. Fellow London producer Trolley Snatcha peddles pummeling dubstep whose evil vibrations are so over-the-top, they make Skrillex jealous. With Subscape and J:Kenzo Neumos, 8 pm, $20, all ages.

SUNDAY 12/15

FOOTWORK IT OUT TO DJ RASHAD, DJ SPINN, JIMI JAXON

DJs Rashad and Spinn are dominant forces in Chicago’s footwork scene (footwork’s an accelerated elaboration on that city’s ghetto-house genre). Their hyperkinetic, fidgety rhythms and repetitive, staccato R&B vocal samples converge into frenetic workouts for body and soul. Check out Rashad’s “Drums Please” from his Rollin’ EP or “Double Cup” from the album of the same name for stellar examples of footwork’s trademark speedy and intricate beat programming. This music is stripped way the hell down and so ready for action. Seattle DJ/producer Jimi Jaxon has shown impeccable taste in the DJ sets I’ve seen him do, including opening for Spinn and Ikonika at this year’s Decibel Festival and for Bok Bok in May. His left-field, bass-centric, rapid-rhythm selections make him a perfect opener for this bill. Crocodile, 9 pm, $10 adv, all ages.

TUESDAY 12/17

RUSTIE’S BYZANTINE SONIC SURREALISM

Glasgow, Scotland, producer Rustie cranks out some of the world’s most byzantine sonic surrealism. Working in the hectic nexus between avant-hiphop and future-bass music, Rustie creates tracks that somehow reference Squarepusher and ELP, OutKast and Amon Tobin

On the 2011 album Glass Swords, Rustie surfeits your pleasure principles, building each track into a 17-layer cake of sparkling synth textures and origami beat configurations. It’s luxurious and kind of taxing, like having sex while trying to solve a difficult trigonometry equation. With Dutty Wilderness Neumos, 8 pm, $16 adv, all ages.

Jed C., Codependency, Zen Seminar Disruptor, Pentaglam, 8 pm

LITTLE RED HEN Open Mic

Acoustic Jam with Bodacious Billy: Davanos, $3, guests, 4 pm

NECTAR Andy Frasco, Rippin Chicken, 8 pm, $5 SHOWBOX AT THE MARKET Chance the Rapper

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB Beautiful Freaks, Stain, 4 pm

STUDIO SEVEN Rappin

4-Tay, Deadly Poets, Jailbird and Scott Free, guests, 7 pm

SUNSET TAVERN Soft Hills, Fen Wik Ren, 8 pm, $6

TRACTOR TAVERN El Vez, Rosie Flores, 8 pm, $20

TULA’S Jay Thomas Big Band, 4 pm, $5, Jim Cutler Jazz Orchestra, 8 pm, $8

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

DJ

BALTIC ROOM Mass: Guest DJs

CONTOUR Broken Grooves: DJ Venus, Rob Cravens, guests, free THE EAGLE T-Bar/T-Dance: Up Above, Fistfight, free MOE BAR Chocolate Sundays: Sosa, MarsONE, Phosho, free

NEIGHBOURS Noche Latina: Guest DJs

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

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

RE-BAR Flammable: DJ Wesley Holmes, 9 pm

CLASSICAL

BENAROYA HALL Play it Again, Santa: Seattle Men’s Chorus

FIRST FREE METHODIST

CHURCH Handel’s Messiah: Seattle Chamber Singers

MON

12/16

LIVE

2 BIT SALOON Progenitor, Thou Shall Kill, Eroder, $5 BARBOZA Mega Evers, Fatal Lucciauno, $10

BLUE MOON TAVERN Andy Coe Band, 10 pm, free CHOP SUEY Don Peyote, Blood Drugs, Sashay, 8 pm, $6

COASTAL KITCHEN Pork Chop Trio, 9:30 pm, free DARRELL’S TAVERN JP and the LP’s

a EL CORAZON The Fallen Among Us, the Ludovico Treatment, Promethean Eulogy, 7:30 pm, $8/$10

NEW ORLEANS The New Orleans Quintet, 6:30 pm

THE ROYAL ROOM The Royal Room Collective Music Ensemble, 8 pm

STUDIO SEVEN Late Nite Reading, 7 Minutes in Heaven, Jocelyn, Big Time, 6:30 pm

TRACTOR TAVERN The Honky Tonkers, 7:30 pm, $5

TULA’S Greta Matassa Quartet, 7 pm, $10

WAID’S Lou-logy: Lou Reed Tribute: Guests

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 HAVANA Manic Mondays: DJ Jay Battle, free LO-FI Jam Jam: Zion’s Gate, Sound Selecta, Element, Mista Chatman, $5 THE MIX Bring Your Own Vinyl Night: Guests, 6 pm MOE BAR Minted Mondays: DJ Swervewon, 100proof, Sean Cee, Blueyedsoul, free

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND SIN: DJ Keanu, free OHANA DJ Hideki PONY Dirty Deeds: Guest DJs

Q NIGHTCLUB Reflect, 8 pm, free

CLASSICAL

BENAROYA HALL Play it

Again, Santa: Seattle Men’s Chorus

TUES 12/17

LIVE

BASTILLE CAFE BAR The Djangomatics, 8 pm, free CONOR BYRNE Ol’ Time

Social: the Tallboys, 9 pm a CROCODILE Yuna, Susy Sun, Jus Moni, 8 pm, $5 EGAN’S JAM HOUSE Terry Holder, Carrie Duncan, 7

Shogo Ota’s Tireman Studio has so many great posters on the streets right now that I had to share another one with you this week. Also, check out his poster for Rose Windows at tiremanstudio.com. AARON HUFFMAN

Pere Ubu w/Monogamy Party Fri Dec 13, Neumos

pm, $10

HIGH DIVE Dark Features, Angelo Delsenno and the Empty Sky, Colin Bradford, 8 pm, $6

JAZZ ALLEY Joey DeFrancesco Trio, 7:30 pm, $22.50

THE MIX Jazz Night: Don Mock, Steve Kim, Jacques Willis, 8 pm a NEUMOS Rustie, Dutty Wilderness, 8 pm, $16 OUTWEST Wine and Jazz Night: Tutu Jazz Quartet, free OWL N’ THISTLE Jazz Improv Night: Guests PARAGON Queen Anne Sessions: Guests, free THE ROYAL ROOM VJ Band SEAMONSTER McTuff Trio, 10 pm, free

BY BRITTNIE FULLER

FRIDAY

12/13

BLACK HAT, WHITE BOY SCREAM + VIVIANE JAMES, BAT

Freak fests of this caliber are a rarity, and tonight’s lineup should send experimentalmusic heads spinning into a frenzy of sheer decapitated excitement. Black Hat (Nelson Bean) conjures a melodic machine takeover through primordially ambient IDM. His latest EP, Covalence (Field Hymns Records), pulsates with warbled, mountainous textures, a gritty industrial electronic fun-house tour that distorts perception in freakier-than-expected ways. As White Boy Scream, Micaela Tobin’s gorgeous, classically trained opera voice mutates into Auto-Tuned Satan, with hiccuping, reverberating synths beneath. New Cairo music curator/longtime awesome person Viviane James (Footwork, Wet Paint DMM) will be adding to her set with performance art that may make you even more uncomfortable, as the best performance art does. With Bat, solo project of local noise-punk force Health Problems’ Ian Kurtis Crist, a wild descent into post-punk experimentation Teatro de la Psychomachia, 9 pm.

LANDLINES, SAN ONOFRE LIZARDS, IJI, PILL WONDER

Pill Wonder’s 2010 LP Jungle/Surf was the first album I ever preordered (d’aww), and

SUNSET TAVERN Dearly Departed, Zoe Wick, Kimo Muraki, $6

TRACTOR TAVERN Robbie Fulks, Purty Mouth, 7 pm, $15

TULA’S Roadside Attraction Big Band, $8

THE WHITE RABBIT Follies and Vices, Kylmyys, Trueno, Project DieSlow, $5 DJ

95 SLIDE Chicken & Waffles: Supreme La Rock, DJ Rev, free BALTIC ROOM Drum & Bass Tuesdays: Guests

LINDA’S TAVERN Distortions: DJ Explorateur, DJ Veins LO-FI Stop Biting: Introcut, guests, $5

since that under-heralded local classic, the pervasive pop sensibility of bandleader Will Murdoch has taken plenty of different forms, but always to delightfully hook-laden effect. Seattle’s neon-infused bedroom-pop standbys iji will bring forth endlessly sunshiny keyboard pop perfect for mellow Jazzercise or making out in a closet, while Portland indie-rock ensemble Landlines are doing the slacker thing (their latest release: the Loserly EP), slightly dazed and (shoe)gazed. From the evocatively reptilian San Onofre Lizards, expect psychhued “caveman rock ’n’ roll” with members of the Family Stoned and Dana Jewel Lo-fi-pop-elujah! Heartland, 8 pm.

CHRISTIAN MISTRESS, OCCULT SS, PARALYZER

As the current occupants of Olympia’s throwback ’80s British heavy-metal throne, Christian Mistress reign with powerfully punk authority. Led by the powerhouse vocals of Christine Davis, the brutalitarian four-piece crusades through a furiously retro, arena-sized brand of heavy metal. Adding to the night’s destruction, Occult SS will drag you by the ear into their crust-lined hellfire of putrid punk with charming ditties like “Heathen Blood” and “The Final Hammer.” Raise your blood-encrusted goblets! Black Lodge, 9 pm.

FILM

Noam Chomsky’s

Almost Spotless Mind

Michel Gondry’s Animated Documentary Finds a Beautiful Crack in the Philosopher’s Stone

BY CHARLES MUDEDE

You only need to watch the documentary Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?: An Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky for 10 minutes to realize that Chomsky’s 1971 debate with

Michel Foucault on Dutch TV will not be registered in the history books as his strangest encounter with a famous Frenchman. That honor, at this point in time, goes to Michel Gondry, the director and interviewer of An Animated Conversation. The things that Gondry and Chomsky have in common are exhausted soon after one numbers their membership in the human race, the color of their skin, their sex, and their sexuality. Gondry makes films and videos that draw heavily from the European surrealist tradition and are accessible to the basic American consumer (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Green Hornet). Chomsky is a philosopher/linguist who subjects this or that aspect of language to careful and very rational analysis and writes books that are understood only by professionals in his field (Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory).

Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?: An Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky dir. Michel Gondry Sundance Cinema

ideas? Can he explain reincarnation? And so on and so on. And Chomsky answers his questions as if all of this is totally normal, as if the day before he was interviewed by the director of The Avengers, and tomorrow it will be the director of The Amazing Spider-Man, but today it’s the director of The Green Hornet (a superhero film that made almost a quarter of a billion dollars at the box office).

his dead wife, Carol. The suddenness of the hurt caught in the philosopher’s throat makes it clear that he would completely collapse if they talked about her. It’s better to take the conversation in another direction. Chomsky is willing to talk about everything on earth but the woman he married at 21, had three children with, and watched die in 2008. That’s how much he loves her.

True, Chomsky is a public intellectual, but this role, which is linked to his work as a leading critic of American capitalism and imperialism, is barely mentioned in the documentary. Gondry instead focuses on what is as far from him—his world, his thinking, his art—as possible: Chomsky’s role as the creator of a major 20th-century concept, universal grammar. Though dealing with a very complicated intellectual, Gondry tries to keep the questions simple: How did he become Chomsky? What was his first memory? What was his childhood like? What was his father like? When did he become interested in

Chomsky answers Gondry with the certainty of an old and huge computer printer. Questions are punched into the processor, and the answers beat out with no stops or errors. To make some lightness out of Chomsky’s academic heaviness, Gondry decorates the responses with whimsical animations. When Chomsky explains, for example, the way a child learns a language, we see the animation of a big baby receiving light rays of words from a mother or family members or society and then processing these rays in its own big and doodly head. The more academic Chomsky becomes, the more whimsical Gondry’s drawings become. This, I think, is the second-best thing about Animated Conversation

Chomsky does, however, mention that he no longer goes to the movies or to restaurants. He has lost interest in the pleasures of life. All color has been drained from his social world. This is a man whose whole being is now facing the end, the other void, the nothingness of personal extinction. Also, this is a man whose career and ideas are no longer fashionable. His sun rose in the late ’50s, when he revolutionized linguistics and overthrew the leading school of that time, B.F. Skinner’s behaviorist psychology. The behaviorists basically placed many of their eggs into the basket marked “experience.” A young Chomsky came along and convincingly argued that language was not learned by experience but built into the human mind. Chomsky then went on to dominate his field for a good three decades. But eventually his theories became old hat, and people turned more and more to an evolutionary perspective of language and mind. Some critics even argued that his refusal to accept the new evolutionary ideas, and his dogged commitment to the theories that made him world-famous long ago, actually did harm to the progress of the field.

Chomsky answers Gondry with the certainty of an old and huge computer printer.

The best thing about the documentary is the one and only time Chomsky cracks, the only time the human warmth Gondry is searching for in his doodles appears in the philosopher’s voice. This is the moment when the interviewer asks the interviewee about

One quibble: Gondry seems totally unaware of Chomsky’s decline as a linguist and the growing disinterest in his concepts about the human brain and language; he seems to have no idea that he is talking to a man who long ago ceased to make waves. The linguist who displaced Skinner has, too, been displaced. His career and the big ideas he expresses in this documentary are not startling or amazing or shaking the foundations of the intellectual world anymore, but are deep in the twilight years. Chomsky’s politics, however, are still alive and kicking.

FILM SHORTS

More reviews and movie times: thestranger.com/film

LIMITED RUN

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE

For the 43rd year in a row, the Grand Illusion ends the year with an extended run of Frank Capra’s ode to being a good person. Presented on 35 mm. Grand Illusion, Fri 7:30 pm, Sat 5 pm, Tues 6, 8:30 pm.

THE LAST OCEAN

As if there weren’t enough environmental disasters to despair over, The Last Ocean documents the plight of the Ross Sea, whose fragile Antarctic ecosystem has come under assault from industrial fishing vessels cashing in on the world’s insatiable appetite for Antarctic toothfish, sold as “Chilean sea bass.” A compelling case is made for closing the fishery, and the sweeping shots of stark Antarctic landscapes are beautiful in that way that Antarctic nature documentaries always are. But however worthy the cause, the clumsily one-sided advocacy of the film makes it feel more like a 90-minute infomercial than an independent documentary. (GOLDY) Keystone Church, Fri Dec 13 at 7:30 pm.

MAGIC LANTERN: THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED

Curated and hosted by film critic Robert Horton, this series takes a look at art and film and artful film. This film is an hour-long German silhouette animation fairy tale from 1927. Frye Art Museum, Sun Dec 5 at 2 pm.

MS. 45

Director Abel Ferrara—best known for his macho, violent, cult-worshipped exploitation flicks about the mean streets of NYC (Driller Killer, King of New York, Bad Lieutenant)— has a creepy cameo in Ms. 45. Five minutes into the film, Ferrara, looking perfectly “street thug” and wearing a shiny plastic mask on his face, jumps out of an alley and attacks a mute woman named Thana (played by doe-eyed actress Zoe Lund) who’s walking home from work. He rapes her in broad daylight and sends her on down the sidewalk. After some silent sobbing (she’s mute, remember!), Thana wearily returns home to her apartment, only to (zoinks!) find a robber hiding inside. When the robber discovers Thana doesn’t have any cash (or a voice to scream with), he, too, decides to rape her (double-triple-zoinks!). Even in the older, meaner, pre-Giuliani New York, it’s hard to believe that some shy ghost of a woman could be raped by two different creeps in just one afternoon. It’s even harder to believe that she could crack the rapey-robber-dude in the head with an iron so hard that

it would kill him (or that she’d have the balls to cut him into pieces in her bathtub using just a bread knife). BUT! In an exploitation flick, you must believe the unbelievable. Made in 1981, Ferrara’s “feminist” take on a vengeful, vigilante murder spree has recently been restored and released for 2013. Can a modern audience survive Thana’s rape scene(s) or all the wailing saxophone music? Or will they simply be satiated with her much-deserved vengeance (and/or how sexy she looks in a nun’s habit)? Gotta go see for yourself. (KELLY O) Grand Illusion, Fri-Sat 10 pm.

THE PRINCESS BRIDE QUOTE

ALONG

Watch Inigo Montoya fight for his father’s legacy with an legion of Princess Bride fans carrying fake swords. (Word on the street: Rodents of Unusual Size may be lurking around the auditorium!) SIFF Cinema Uptown, Fri 7:30 pm, Sat 5, 7:30 pm, Sun 2:30, 7:30 pm, Mon 6, 8:15 pm.

THE PUNK SINGER

So many music documentaries feel like laurel-buffing victory laps, but Sini Andersson’s The Punk Singer feels like a revelation. Its subject: Kathleen Hanna, cofounder of Riot Grrl, creator of the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, coiner of the phrase “smells like teen spirit,” and spouse of Ad-Rock, who’s captured in all her explosively multifaceted glory. I’ve been a Kathleen Hanna fan for decades; this film introduced her to me as someone new. To quote talking head Carrie Brownstein, it’s “an empowering and surreal experience.” (DAVID SCHMADER) SIFF Cinema Uptown, Fri-Sun 9:45 pm.

THE ROYAL OPERA HOUSE: LES VEPRES

SICILIENNES

A major new production of the Verdi opera, filmed earlier this year. Guild 45th, Thurs 5 pm, Sun 11 am.

SCARECROW SCREENING ROOM

Highlights from this week’s schedule at the Scarecrow Video screening room include VHSXMAS on Friday, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians on Saturday, and Meet Me in St. Louis on Monday. And they sell fancy beers and sodas here. Scarecrow Video, for complete schedule and showtimes, see scarecrow.com

SCREEN STYLE

A three-day series of films showcasing fashion and personal

aesthetics in film, as selected by Seattle aesthetes, including SAM curator Chiyo Ishikawa (who’ll host a screening of Hal Ashby’s Shampoo) and garment artist Mark Mitchell (who’ll host a screening of the 1931 Marlene Dietrich film The Devil Is a Woman). Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Sun. For complete schedules and showtimes, see nwfilmforum.org

TV DINNER: CHRISTMAS SPECIALS Rudolph and Charlie Brown at 7 p.m., followed by the eternally miraculous Pee-wee Herman’s Christmas Special at 9 p.m. Central Cinema, Wed 7, 9 pm.

VHSXMAS III

This compilation of VHS clips, sourced from the mighty Scarecrow Video, celebrates the high holy day of the American retail and television industries, Christmas. Grand Illusion, Sat Dec 14 at 8 pm.

WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

The fantastic—and fantastically creepy!—’70s classic returns to the big screen in appropriately fantastic fashion. Guests will receive goody bags filled with sights, sounds, and smells (!!!) that will enhance all journeys to Wonkaland. Bring the kids! SIFF Cinema Uptown, Fri-Sat 12, 2:30 pm, Sun 12, 5 pm.

NOW PLAYING

BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR Blue Is the Warmest Color ranks among the best love

based on their work, but if you ask me, everything about The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is 100 percent straight-up baller. To be honest, now that I’ve seen it, I’m a little embarrassed by my book! All I ever wanted to do was write a fairy story for children who had Asperger’s. But after seeing what Peter Jackson did to my book, it’s just… man. Not even close. Dude nailed it!! And there’s so much stuff I don’t remember writing! Like that part when Gandalf went to a haunted house, or that part when the dwarves set up a Mouse-Trap-style trap for that dragon, or that part when Legolas pulled out his bow and arrow and was all FWOOSH! FWOOSH! FWOOSH! and shot like a billion orcs! TWAANNGG! RIGHT IN THE KISSER!

I TELEVISION TM

BY WM. TM STEVEN HUMPHREY

THE GRINCH POP QUIZ

“Oh, for the love of… ANOTHER GD HOLIDAY TV POP QUIZ?!?” That’s right! Another GD Holiday TV Pop Quiz—but this is absolutely the last one (until maybe next week). However! You only have yourselves to blame for this recent upswing of surprise tests (which included quizzes about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and A Charlie Brown Christmas). Your knowledge of classic holiday TV shows is woeful—so put down the bong, pothead, and pick up a number 2 pencil… because this week’s quiz is all about the 1966 cartoony classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (TBS, Dec 13, 8 pm). As always, NO CHEATING OR WISENHEIMERY! You have one hour. Begin.

1. How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is actually an allegory—but about what or whom?

a. Nazis! (Everything is an allegory for Nazis.)

b. The commercialization of Christmas (which Dr. Seuss capitalized on commercially… IRONY).

c. Green hermits who steal Christmas presents

d. Former vice president Dick Cheney.

2. Why did the Grinch hate Christmas?

a. His shoes were too tight.

b. His head wasn’t screwed on just right.

c. His heart was two sizes too small.

d. He was a classic narcissist with delusions of grandeur mixed with misanthropic tendencies and suffering from bipolar disorder.

3. Is it possible for someone with a “heart two sizes too small” to exist without life support—much less rob an entire town in one night? Support your answer with medical documentation.

Back when I was writing The Hobbit, I kept things pretty simple. (“Maybe a story about some hairy midgets?” I recall scribbling in a margin late one night as I toiled on A Middle English Vocabulary at the University of Leeds. “Perhaps they are sad because they are small.”) So I never even thought of putting in the smoke monster from Lost, or that hobo who lets birds live in his hat, or those pugs. Ahhh! Those pugs! How cute were they, right?! In conclusion, I give The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug two thumbs up and five stars. You should totally go, and you won’t at all be reminded of what a richer, fuller, more dramatically rewarding time you could have had if you’d just stayed at home and watched Game of Thrones. (J.R.R. TOLKIEN)

4. The Whos of Whoville are not human, and yet they celebrate Christmas. How come? (Possible theories: They’re an alien culture who mimic earth habits and kidnap dogs named Max. Or perhaps they’re apocalypse survivors/mutants who desperately cling to human traditions Or maybe they live on an alternate-reality earth where Jesus Christ was a Who named Whosis Christ. OH! Or what about this?

The Grinch’s Whoville is the same Whoville in Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who… which is a microscopic world on a speck of dust! Whoaaaa. I need to smoke some dope and think about that.)

5. Is the Whoville song lyric “Fahoo fores, dahoo dores” actually a coded transmission used by Al Qaeda to pass along secret messages to sleeper agents? (Answer: Definitely.)

6. Which statement best describes the Grinch?

a. A bad banana with a greasy black peel.

b. The sweetness of a seasick crocodile

c. A triple-decker sauerkraut and toadstool sandwich with arsenic sauce.

d. “He’s terrific! Send him to Congress!” —the Tea Party.

7. Under what circumstances would you forgive someone who robbed an ENTIRE TOWN (on Christmas!) while they slept? Would you similarly forgive the Grinch for sneaking into the children’s bedroom and leering at sleeping Cindy Lou Who? (Ummm… CREEPY!) And even if you could forgive this person and not press charges, WHY ON EARTH would you invite him to stay for dinner and “carve the roast beast”??? Are you insane?? He’s a goddamn psychopath and he’s going to TAKE THAT KNIFE AND STAB, STAB, STAB YOU IN THE FACE!! RUNNNNNN!!!

8. Um, is there a doctor in the house? (This isn’t on the test… my heart just shrank two sizes, and I think I need a hospital.)

Read Humpy’s weekly TV listings at THESTRANGER.COM

FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

BY ROB BREZSNY

For the Week of Dec 11

ARIES (March 21–April 19): Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president of the United States four times, more than any other president. We can conclude that he was one of the most popular American leaders ever. And yet he never won a majority of the votes cast by the citizens of his home county in New York. I foresee the possibility of a comparable development in your life. You may be more successful working on the big picture than you are in your immediate situation. It could be easier for you to maneuver when you’re not dealing with familiar, up-close matters. What’s outside your circle might be more attracted to your influence than what’s nearer to home.

TAURUS (April 20–May 20): In 2009, actress Sandra Bullock starred in three films, two of which earned her major recognition. For her performance in All About Steve, she was given a Golden Raspberry Award for worst actress. Her work in The Blind Side, on the other hand, won her an Oscar for best actress. I’m thinking that you may experience a similar paradox in the coming days, Taurus. Some of your efforts might be denigrated, while others are praised. It may even be the case that you’re criticized and applauded for the same damn thing. How to respond? Learn from Bullock’s example. She gave gracious acceptance speeches at the award ceremonies for both the Golden Raspberry and the Oscar.

GEMINI (May 21–June 20): Almost 2,000 years ago, a Roman doctor named Scribonius Largus developed recipes for three different kinds of toothpaste. One contained the ashes of burned-up deer antler, aromatic resin from an evergreen shrub known as mastic, and a rare mineral called sal ammoniac. His second toothpaste was a mix of barley flour, vinegar, honey, and rock salt. Then there was the third: sun-dried radish blended with finely ground glass. Let’s get a bit rowdy here and propose that these three toothpastes have metaphorical resemblances to the life choices in front of you right now. I’m going to suggest you go with the second option. At the very least, avoid the third.

CANCER (June 21–July 22): Are you feeling a bit pinched, parched, and prickly? Given the limitations you’ve had to wrestle with lately, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were. Even though you have passed some of the sneaky tests and solved some of the itchy riddles you’ve been compelled to deal with, they have no doubt contributed to the pinched,

parched prickliness. Now what can be done to help you recover your verve? I’m thinking that all you will have to do is respond smartly to the succulent temptations that life will bring your way in the coming weeks.

LEO (July 23–Aug 22): Have you ever situated yourself between two big bonfires on a beach and basked in the primal power? Was there a special moment in your past when you found yourself sitting between two charismatic people you loved and admired, soaking up the life-giving radiance they exuded? Did you ever read a book that filled you with exaltation as you listened to music that thrilled your soul? These are the kinds of experiences I hope you seek out in the coming week. I’d love to see you get nourished stereophonically by rich sources of excitement.

VIRGO (Aug 23–Sept 22): Mythically speaking, this would be a propitious time for you to make an offering to the sea goddess. In dreams or meditations or fantasies, I suggest you dive down into the depths, find the supreme feminine power in her natural habitat, and give her a special gift. Show her how smart you are in the way you express love, or tell her exactly how you will honor her wisdom in the future. If she is receptive, you may even ask her for a favor. Maybe she’ll be willing to assist you in accessing the deep feelings that haven’t been fully available to you. Or perhaps she will teach you how to make conscious the secrets you have been keeping from yourself.

LIBRA (Sept 23–Oct 22): Don’t linger in a doorway, Libra. Don’t camp out in a threshold or get stuck in the middle of anything. I understand your caution, considering the fact that life is presenting you with such paradoxical clues. But if you remain ambivalent too much longer, you may obstruct the influx of more definitive information. The best way to generate the clarity and attract the help you need will be to make a decisive move—either in or out, either forward or backward, either up or down.

SCORPIO (Oct 23–Nov 21): “It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear,” said TV talkshow host Dick Cavett. I will love it if you make yourself one of those rare types in the coming week, Scorpio. Can you bring yourself to be receptive to truths that might be disruptive? Are you willing to send out an invitation to the world, asking to be shown revelations that contradict your fixed theories and foregone conclusions? If you do this hard work, I promise that you will be granted a brainstorm and a breakthrough. You might also be given a new reason to brag.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22–Dec 21): There are pregnant truths I could reveal to you right now that I’ve decided not to dis-

close. I don’t think you’re prepared to hear them yet. If I told you what they are, you wouldn’t be receptive or able to register their full meaning; you might even misinterpret them. It is possible, however, that you could evolve rather quickly in the next two weeks. So let’s see if I can nudge you in the direction of getting the experiences necessary to become ready. Meditate on what parts of you are immature or underdeveloped—aspects that may one day be skilled and gracious, but are not yet. I bet that once you identify what needs ripening, you will expedite the ripening. And then you will become ready to welcome the pregnant truths.

CAPRICORN (Dec 22–Jan 19): “Finifugal” is a rarely used English adjective that I need to invoke in order to provide you with the proper horoscope. It refers to someone who avoids or dislikes endings—like a child who doesn’t want a bedtime story to conclude, or an adult who’s in denial about how it’s finally time to wrap up long-unfinished business. You can’t afford to be finifugal in the coming days, Capricorn. This is the tail end of your cycle. It won’t be healthy for you to shun climaxes and denouements. Neither will it be wise to merely tolerate them. Somehow, you’ve got to find a way to love and embrace them. (P.S. That’s the best strategy for ensuring the slow-motion eruption of vibrant beginnings after your birthday.)

AQUARIUS (Jan 20–Feb 18): According to 20th-century British author John Cowper Powys, “A bookshop is a dynamite shed, a drugstore of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens.” He didn’t mean that literally, of course. He was referring to the fact that the words contained in books can inflame and enthrall the imagination. I think you will be wise to seek out that level of arousal in the coming weeks, Aquarius. Your thoughts need to be aired out and rearranged. Your feelings are crying out for strenuous exercise, including some pure, primal catharses. Do whatever it takes to make sure that happens.

PISCES (Feb 19–March 20): “I am not fearless,” says Mexican journalist and women’s-rights advocate Lydia Cacho, “but I’m not overtaken by fear. Fear is quite an interesting animal. It’s like a pet. If you mistreat it, it will bite, but if you understand it and accept it in your house, it might protect you.” This is an excellent time to work on transforming your fright reflexes, Pisces. You have just the right kind of power over them: strong and crafty and dynamic, but not grandiose or cocky or delusional. You’re ready to make your fears serve you, not drain you.

Homework: What holiday gifts do you want? Express your outrageous demands and humble requests at freewillastrology. com.

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KING COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT, STATE OF WASHINGTON

SAMRAWIT GHEBREHIWET, Petitioner, v. DAVID LAMON YOUNG, Respondent. No. 13-3-11166-1SEA.

SUMMONS The State of Washington to DAVID LAMON YOUNG, Respondent: You are hereby summoned to appear within of this summons, to wit, within sixty days after the 6th day of November 2013 and defendtioner SAMRAWIT GHEBREHIWET, and serve -

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60’S GIRL TRIBUTE Band w 4 PC backing group is seeking singers(must have the look) Ronettes,Supremes,Lesley Gore etc.$ gigs Seattle area...contact 206-799-4856 Call Murphy @ 206 860 3534.

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MYSTERIOUS URBAN OUTFITTERS EMPLOYEE

Tried more items then necessary so could go back to the dressing rooms and see you, you remembered my name! Me with messy brown hair. Boy with the beanie and pretty eyes, I hope I see you again soon! When: Saturday, November 30, 2013. Where: Urban Outfitters on the Ave. You: Man. Me: Woman. #920150

YOSHI IN SEARCH OF WONKA

I told you that you were cute, and we talked about dogs, Renton, and our jobs. You thought it was awesome that I work at Nintendo, while you work at a chocolate factory. Coffee/tea sometime? When: Friday, November 22, 2013. Where: Renton. You: Man. Me: Woman. #920149

11/16 COSTCO4THAVE: YES!! WANT BITE!!

You: (50’s) ANGEL darling guy-Madras Bermuda Shorts!! Pale green glasses!! Costco food court. Me: useless dumb thing on mind that afternoon-spaced--accent said “no” to gelato bite offer. Changed Mind!! will eat both scoops!!! ~you have been on mind ever since!!! When: Saturday, November 16, 2013. Where: Costco 4th ave. You: Man. Me: Woman. #920147

BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN DOC MARTINS

I saw you on third and pike around 5:30. I was the guy with the large plugs and the leather jacket that said he liked your boots. If you find this hit me up. Lets get coffee. When: Friday, November 29, 2013. Where: 3rd and pike. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920146

LYFT DRIVER THANKSGIVING MORNING

WORK AT SPUR? This is the drunk girl you met Friday night in Belltown, we went back to your place but you left to rescue a friend and I didn’t get your number. If you see this, you can see drunk girl sober. When: Friday, November 22, 2013. Where: Belltown. You: Man. Me: Woman. #920138

RECORD STORE BABE helped you with your oingo boingo and nirvana purchase, while we laughed about the woman on acid rearranging the entire store. I hope you enjoyed your Polica show and were able to wear your hat inside. Coffee/ whiskey soon? When: Saturday, November 23, 2013. Where: Seattle. You: Man. Me: Woman. #920137

FLIGHT HOME FROM AMSTERDAM

The lights went out as we boarded, said to turn cell phones off. A long ride home with little to do but watch movies. If up for discussing your European experience, reply, and we’ll go grab a drink somewhere. When: Saturday, November 23, 2013. Where: Amsterdam. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920136

WALKING AROUND

WOODLAND PARK

I was walking my dog with my friend. You had lighter hair and glasses--so cute I got distracted. As we passed on the trail on the north side, we smiled at each other. Would love to meet you over coffee! When: Saturday, November 16, 2013. Where: Woodland Park Zoo trails - North side. You: Man. Me: Woman. #920132

GTA6 ON QA

Among other things, you appear to have stolen a new compact sedan. Despite your new disguise you remain unmistakably brilliant. How about you make it Federal & kidnap a fella some time? When: Monday, November 18, 2013. Where: Queen Anne. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920131

PANAMA RED

We always end up riding the 26 or 28 together. You call me “darlin’”. Dirty thoughts about you kept me happy all the way home. You: male, Me: Curvy redhead with glasses. What kind of trouble can we stir up? When: Monday, November 18, 2013. Where: Downtown. You: Man. Me: Woman. #920130

Self-Checkout Girl at Greenwood Freddy’s

PURPLE BEANIE POLKA DOT BACKPACK We both saw each other on the bus 2 this afternoon. You were wearing a

Place Your Legal Notice Here! Call 206-323-7101 or email thestranger.com/classifieds

Capitol Hill Housing (CHH) will close the Section 8 waiting lists at the 18TH AVENUE APARTMENTS, 412 APARTMENTS, ELIZABETH JAMES HOUSE, HAZEL PLAZA, HELEN V APARTMENTS, AND MARY RUTH MANOR effective December 31, 2013.

CHH will NOT accept any NEW applications for these waiting lists on or after this date. When our waiting list becomes longer than the amount of people we can service within two‚ three years we stop taking applications. Because we have very little vacancies, we expect it will take a long time before we can assist applicants already on the waiting list. Therefore, we have no plans to reopen the wait list in the near future.

The closure is effective December 31, 2013 and shall remain in effect until further notice. No applications will be accepted while the wait list is closed. When CHH is prepared to re-open these waiting lists, an announcement will be posted on our website and in the local newspaper.

While CHH will not be taking new applications during the time the waiting list is closed, staff will continue to process those currently on the list and make unit offers as vacancies occur. You are still required to update your personal information by submitting changes in writing.

You: Chris- a charming gent; you let me vent & provided a genuine smile when I was stressed out. Me: sad lady postrough night; thankful for your warmth and sincerity during the ride. Thank you, again. You made my day! When: Thursday, November 28, 2013. Where: Driving for Lyft. You: Man. Me: Woman. #920145

I’LL NEVER FORGET YOU, BLAKE!

OK ok. know that’s not really your name, but called you that anyway, Saturday at the Highline. You made my night more fun. Sorry we didn’t exchange numbers. Dare to reunite for beers and cheap arcade games? When: Saturday, November 23, 2013. Where: Highline. You: Man. Me: Woman. #920143

GERALDINES - LUNCH ON FRIDAY

You were the asian gal with your back to the door. I was seated in the opposite corner. Did I detect a nervous smile as I headed out? Next time, let’s sit at the same table... When: Friday, November 22, 2013. Where: Geraldine’s. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920142

JON HOPKINS AT THE CROCODILE

Your name is Liz, you ride a big, black... bike. My name is Pete and you admired my quiet-loud sweater and my Kestrel. For my part, really enjoyed your company and wish you hadn’t scurried off without saying goodbye. When: Tuesday, November 26, 2013. Where: The Crocodile. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920141

LESS THAN JAKE SHOW

You are a cute redhead that had some other random guy follow you all night. I was in the gray hoodie and exchanging smiles with you. Was right that you wanted to be talking to me instead? When: Wednesday, November 27, 2013. Where: Showbox. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920140

YOUR NAME IS A FLOWER But you don’t use it in its full glory. used to see you at your work downtown but now you’re gone. Wish I would have been more courageous and said something like “you are gorgeous can smell you”? When: Friday, November 1, 2013. Where: Downtown. You: Woman. Me: Woman. #920139

You snuck up beside me while I was scanning my things and told me not to mind you, you were interested in my Christmas tree. I should have taken the chance to strike up a real conversation. Lets try again?

When: Monday, December 2, 2013.

Where: Greenwood Fred Meyer. You: Woman. Me: Man.

#920151

FATE ON BUS 101/102

TENDING BAR AT BARBOZA

You were adorably tending bar

We shard two encounters on the 101/102 bus. You’re a beautiful blonde bombshell with tattoos, and I’m the red head. We talked about all kinds of stuff but your dui stands out...lol. You’re funny, charismatic, and you tickle my fancy.... When: Wednesday, October 23, 2013. Where: On the 101/102 bus Renton to Seattle on a Wednesday. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920135

BANK OF AMERICA

WEDNESDAY

Girl in line with beanie and cowboy boots at counter, then seated waiting for teller/banker. I saw you on my way out. Wowser, you are a gorgeous mystery lady! When: Wednesday, November 20, 2013. Where: bank. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920134

SUPER CUTE BRUNETTE GREY COAT waiting at bus stop and on D Line sitting across from each other. You had on a grey coat and jeans with an orange Seattle “hospital” messenger bag. I was in black coat with metropolitan market bag. When: Friday, November 22, 2013. Where: bus. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920133

Woman. Me: Man. #920129

THE ROCKET TO MY BARNACLE. We shared a moment at Alki, staring at the city skyline. Then again, saying goodbye at SeaTac. It’s been a month and I haven’t stopped thinking

Saturday, November 9, 2013. Where: The Pig Bar, Olympia. You: Man. Me: Woman. #920121

BALLARD BAUHAUS BEARD You: White male with brown beard at Bauhaus. Me: blond wearing black boots and black hoodie. I asked if

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SAVAGE LOVE

I’m a straight woman who loves my boyfriend, but sex isn’t a priority for me. His sex drive, on the other hand, is ridiculous. He gets very upset when I don’t have sex with him and accuses me of not being interested in him anymore, which isn’t the case. I just can’t fuck on demand! Most people would probably say that my boyfriend is an insensitive asshole for pressuring me for sex. Except this was a switcheroo exercise: I, the girlfriend, want more sex. He, my boyfriend, doesn’t see sex as a priority. When we first started dating, we had sex every day—it was incredible—but around the four-month mark, something changed. I’ve had to beg for it ever since—and I mean beg. I give him space, I take care of things on my own for as long as I can, and right around the time when I feel myself start to get really anxious, I ask for sex. And I am rejected. Only when I’m so hurt that I’m literally sobbing on the floor is he suddenly interested in having sex with me. Right then, right there. It happens about twice a month. I don’t know what to do. I love him so much and would be a fool to leave him. Other than the sex, everything is wonderful. He is the best and most thoughtful boyfriend ever, but he says he likes being the one who’s controlling the sex. Maybe I am just being a colossal asshole? My problem sounds mundane, I know, but it’s killing me.

how fortunate we feel!—I’d like to get right to my plea for support. I want freedom. I want the freedom in my life that I’ve always wanted for you, Dan: to be able to live and love and talk about your actual life without being afraid that it could cost you your job, your kids, your family. Having to live in the closet is difficult. I cannot say that it is as difficult for us as it is for someone who is LGBT. I did not know I was “poly” as a kid. I never felt like I didn’t fit in for that reason growing up—and I agree with you that this is a relationship structure rather than a sexual orientation. But it doesn’t matter. This isn’t a contest about who suffers more or where these things come from. Instead, I think we should ask ourselves if we stand for the same things and if we can become part of a movement toward freedom and equality for everyone, even if some of the ways we live and love are choices and some are not. The progress we have made together toward a more tolerant world for gay people gives me hope that we could be next. I don’t think you are the emperor of acronyms, Dan, but you should be, and that is why I am starting with you. So can we be added to the acronym, please? Perhaps we can honor the differences between our experience and the LGBT experience with an ampersand. What do you think of LGBT&P? Privately Polyamorous Person

Sexless And Depressed

Sorry, SAD, but relationship graveyards around the world are crowded with tombstones that read, “Everything was great… other than the sex.”

And this isn’t your mundane, run-of-themill mismatched libido problem, which is bad enough. (And, as I’ve written until my fingers are bleeding, reason enough to end a relationship.) You’re dating a guy who can get it up only when he sees his girlfriend sobbing on the floor —that’s apparently what it takes to make his dick hard—and this sobbing-on-the-floor shit goes down twice a month. I can only conclude that this is how your boyfriend likes it, SAD. He’s turned on only when you’re not just miserable but pushed past the breaking point. DTMFA.

Frequency is not a problem that improves with time, SAD. A boyfriend who wants sex only twice a month at four months into a relationship—and then only when his girlfriend is sobbing—won’t want sex once a week five or ten years in. You know what else doesn’t improve with time? Assholery. I promise you that the “wonderful” and “thoughtful” will diminish as the years fly by, and the emotionally abusive games that cause you so much pain—pain that, again, seems to give him pleasure—will metastasize, spreading from your sex life to other areas of your life. The more difficult extricating yourself from this relationship becomes, SAD, the less wonderful and thoughtful he’ll become. End it now.

I recently ended things with a guy I liked because he wanted to stop using condoms, but he balked when I said we should both get tested for sexually transmitted infections. He said he felt I didn’t trust him. I tried to explain that trust has nothing to do with it, and that if he didn’t care whether I felt safe, I shouldn’t trust him. That was the end of it. I’m not seeing this guy anymore. But what do you say to someone who conflates a request for STI testing with a lack of trust?

Seeking Truthful Insight

“Bye.”

My husband and I have been married for 20 years, and we both also share our lives with additional partners. Rather than spend a lot of time dishing about who and how we love—and

You haven’t been keeping up, PPP. We are no longer the LGBT community. We are the LGBTQLFTSQIA community, aka the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, leather/fetish, two-spirit, questioning, intersex, and asexual community/communities. I don’t see why we can’t slap a “P” onto the end of our acronym, so say it with me now: “I’m proud to be a member of the LGBTQLFTSQIAP community/communities!”

But I have to draw the line at the ampersand. Because if we give poly folks a punctuation mark, PPP, then soon everybody is gonna want a punctuation mark, and our ever-metastasizing acronym is an unwieldy, sprawling enough mess already. So no special punctuation mark rights for you guys, PPP.

And why should poly folks be held at arm’s length with an ampersand? Because most poly folks are straight? Lots of leather/fetish folks are straight, and they’re covered in the acronym. Lots of trans men and trans women are straight, and they’re covered. David Jay, founder of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, “is in a romantic relationship with an asexual girlfriend and hopes to adopt a child,” according to his Wiki page, and he’s covered. If the Ts and LFs and As aren’t being held with a pair of punctuational tongs, PPP, why should poly folks be? You’re a sexual minority, too, and poly people sometimes face discrimination, bigotry, and oppression. So welcome to the club, PPP. Congrats!

And here’s the best part of putting poly folks in the acronym: It brings us one step closer to seizing control of the entire alphabet. While religious conservatives are fighting a losing battle to “take back the rainbow” from the gays—a movement led by a fundamentalist preacher in Washington State—we’ve been making off with the alphabet one letter at a time. Pretty soon, angry religious conservatives will have to post their hateful screeds in hieroglyphics because using the alphabet will be just as gay as putting a rainbow bumper sticker on your car.

So… gee… maybe I ought to let you have your ampersand. Why not steal punctuation marks from the haters, too?

On the Savage Lovecast, hear the tale of a college slut-shaming intervention: savagelovecast.com.

mail@savagelove.net @fakedansavage on

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