The Stranger Vol. 23, No. 20

O L Y M A T R I M O N Y !

(1/15) A. Douglas Stone Einstein’s Greatest Success (1/17) Karen Russell ‘Vampires in the Lemon Grove’ (1/18) Saturday Family Concerts SuperSones

(1/18) SBO presents ‘Dresden Concertos’ with Rachel Barton Pine (1/20) Ian Haney Lopez Destroying the Middle Class One Word at a Time

(1/21) Scott Stossel with Marcie Sillman The ‘Age of Anxiety’

(1/22) Deborah Cohen Overcoming the ‘Obesity Epidemic’ (1/23) Max Tegmark A Physicist’s Guide to the Universe (1/24) Erez Aiden: Culturomics

Jan. 24 Krar Collective with Gabriel Teodros Mind-Blowing Ethiopian Grooves

(1/26) Seattle Festival Orchestra

(1/27) Mozart Birthday Toast (1/27) Ishmael Beah ‘Radiance of Tomorrow’ (1/28) Ray Jayawardhana Nailing Down Neutrinos (1/29) Richard Powers with Nancy Pearl ‘Orfeo’

(1/29) Stolen Youth presents Not On Our Watch

Volume 23, Issue Number 20 January 15–21, 2014

STUDY GUIDE

Questions

for The Stranger, Volume 23, Issue 20

1. DOMINIC HOLDEN continues to make hay out of last summer’s incident in which he was upbraided by law-enforcement professionals for legally taking photographs of police work. While the officers in question certainly deserved some sort of correctional action, Holden is still complaining that the justice meted out by internal affairs was not enough, which frankly reeks of sour grapes. Extending the imagery of our initial idiom of “making hay,” where do you believe Holden currently stands in the hay-making process? Is the hay field barren? Has the hay store closed? Has hay, finally, gone extinct? Is it possible to combine the idea of sour grapes with the idea of hay-making, or would that metaphor be too mixed for our purposes?

2. This week’s feature involves a mixture of fact and fiction, with real-life advice and narrative essays about weddings from DAN SAVAGE, JEN GRAVES, MEGAN SELING, DANIELLE HENDERSON, MARTI JONJAK, and SARAH GALVIN buffered by fiction pieces by SHEILA HETI, SHERMAN ALEXIE, TAO LIN, and STACEY LEVINE. Do you believe this decision to publish fiction in the same section that it publishes nonfiction injures The Stranger’s credibility? Put another way: Is it possible to trust a news source that openly publishes lies? On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a chipped fingernail and 10 being the Titanic, how damaged do you believe The Stranger’s credibility is?

3. The aforementioned Danielle Henderson has published a second piece in this week’s Stranger, this time about a letter from Senator Patty Murray endorsing the local homeless-youth housing program YouthCare as they apply for a federal grant. In other words, the newest staff writer at The Stranger has published a puff piece applauding a prominent Democrat for saying something. Do you believe Henderson was hired because she brings The Stranger’s traditional level of uncritical thought to Democratic establishment hacks, or do you believe she was hired because of her willingness to parrot the party line in “news” stories that merely ape the cheerleaderish tone of press releases? In sum: Is Henderson a weak thinker, or is she merely pretending to be a weak thinker in order to curry the favor of the weak thinkers currently in charge of the news section? Would one of those options be preferable to the other? Why or why not?

4. EMILY NOKES reviews a book about Pussy Riot, which was a big deal back in the first half of 2012. Predict what Nokes’s big next “scoop” will be: a scathing takedown of “Gangnam Style”? A profile of former Jersey Shore star The Situation? A “Keep Calm and Carry On” parody?

by

JENNY JIMENEZ

, photojj.com

Find podcasts, videos, blogs, MP3s, free classifieds, personals, contests, sexy ads, and more on The Stranger’s website.

LAST DAYS

The Week in Review

BY DAVID SCHMADER

MONDAY, JANUARY 6 This week of fatal fitness, justice-seeking Juggalos, and glorious sports-related triumph kicks off with a teachable moment on television. Our source: the Katie show, the daytime talkfest hosted by Katie Couric, who today welcomed as her guests transgender model Carmen Carrera and transgender TV star Laverne Cox. As Katie McDonough at Salon.com writes, “[Carrera and Cox] sat down on Monday with Katie Couric to discuss their careers, upcoming projects, and their experiences as high-profile transgender women using their platforms to bring issues of trans justice to national attention. But Couric, it seems, was mostly interested in talking to both women about their genitalia, in order to ‘educate’ others who may not be ‘familiar with transgenders.’” Happily, the pushback to Couric’s questioning was immediate, with Carrera shooting down genital/ surgical questions with a sentence (“I don’t want to talk about it; it’s really personal”) and Cox responding with an address so eloquent it soon went viral. “I do feel there is a preoccupation with that,” said Cox to Couric. “The preoccupation with transition and surgery objectifies trans people. And then we don’t get to really deal with the real lived experiences. The reality of trans people’s lives is that so often we are targets of violence. We experience discrimination disproportionately to the rest of the community. Our unemploy-

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.

DEAR HIT-AND-RUN VICTIM

You stupid fucking moron. I was on a nice leisurely bike ride in the Mount Baker neighborhood when a man in a blue Cadillac gunned his engine to pass me and struck you in the middle of the crosswalk. You rolled off the hood and onto the sidewalk clutching your legs in obvious pain. The driver must have sensed your utter fucking stupidity because he immediately floored it and drove away. I wrote down the guy’s license plate number and called the police, thinking this might turn out okay since quite a few people were witnesses. Then you got up, proclaimed that you’ve “been crossing this street for nine years and this has never happened before,” limped to your car, and fucking drove away despite five people telling you to stop. What the fuck? You let that piece of shit get away, stick yourself with the medical bills, and waste my time waiting for a cop to show up and tell me there was nothing he could do if you weren’t around to press charges? Fuck you. Now that the shithead who tried to run you over is off scot-free, I hope the next person he hits is you again.

ment rate is twice the national average, and if you are a trans person of color, that rate is four times the national average. The homicide rate is highest among trans women. If we focus on transition, we don’t actually get to talk about those things.”

After the broadcast, Cox was rightly celebrated, while Couric was somewhat unjustly vilified. (How long ago were many of us ignorant about using “transgender” as a noun?) And once again, Cox made sure the emphasis was where it belonged. As Cox will write on her Tumblr on Thursday, “It is my dream that by highlighting the deep humanity of trans people’s lives in the media, elevating actual trans voices to speak the truth of our lived experiences in ways that don’t sensationalize and objectify us, those human voices and stories can be a part of the disruption needed to end the disproportionate injustices that threaten so many trans people’s lives, particularly the lives of trans women of color. It is a state of emergency for far too many trans people across this country. The stories of women like Islan Nettles and CeCe McDonald are far too commonplace in our community. I look forward to engaging in more dialogues about the complicated intersectional issues around these injustices and ways to make them a thing of the past. I am so grateful to Katie Couric and her show for the opportunity to highlight these important issues.”

TUESDAY, JANUARY 7 Meanwhile in Oklahoma, today brought the modern mythology-ready story of the man accused of killing his stepfather with an “atomic wedgie.” Details come from the Oklahoman, which identifies our suspect as 33-year-old Brad Davis of McLoud, who told police that his stepfather—58-yearold Denver St. Clair—had invited him over on December 21 for drinks and then “came at him,” after which the men began exchanging blows.

“Davis told investigators that he hit St. Clair’s head, causing him to lose consciousness,” reports the Oklahoman. “Then, Davis said, he grabbed his stepfather’s underwear and gave him an ‘atomic wedgie’ by pulling the underwear over his stepfather’s head.” Authorities arrived to find St. Clair dead with the waistband of his underwear around his neck, with

DEADLY DRAWERS

the cause of death determined to be blunt force trauma to the head and asphyxiation. Tonight, Davis was arrested and booked in the Pottawatomie County Jail on suspicion of murder.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8 The week continues in Michigan, where the goofball raprock act Insane Clown Posse is preparing to fight the US Department of Justice and the FBI over their classification of the band’s fans—known as Juggalos—as a criminal gang. “The gang designation had its roots… in a 2011 report from the FBI’s National Gang Intelligence Center, which described the Juggalos as a ‘loosely organized hybrid gang,’ and cited two incidents in which ‘suspected Juggalo

DEAR GOD

Seahawks for Dummies Edition

Se

Dear God, I understand the Seattle football team is winning a lot, and it seems like I should know about it. What’s something I might say to a coworker or a neighbor or my father to give the impression I’m up to speed? I’m imagining some one-sentence thing like “If [NAME OF FOOTBALL GUY] can keep his [FOOTBALL MOVE] in shape, we should have an easy road to [WHATEVER THE NEXT LEVEL OF FOOTBALL THINGY IS].” Thanks for your help.

Jeremy

Dear Jeremy, Welcome, fair-weather fan! I bless thee, for truly I understand. (I would be nothing without my conditional converts.) As for your question, this sentence should do the trick: “If Russell Wilson gets protection in the pocket and Marshawn Lynch can average at least four yards per carry, the Legion of Boom should be able to keep the score close enough for a trip to the Super Bowl.” God

LITIGIOUS CLOWNS

associates’ or members were involved in violent crime,” reports the Guardian. “In a suit filed [today], the Michigan rap duo claimed the decision to classify the Juggalos as a gang was ‘unwarranted and unlawful’ and had led to fans being harassed.” Joining ICP founders Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler and the Michigan branch of the American Civil Liberties Union in the suit are four of the band’s fans, who claim they’ve been subjected to police harassment and punishment because of their status as Juggalos. “Mark Parsons, from Nevada, said he was detained by Tennessee state troopers for displaying an ICP insignia on his truck,” reports the Guardian . “Scott Gandy, from North Carolina, said he had spent hundreds of dollars having Juggalo tattoos covered with other tattoos after being told he could not join the army with ‘gang-related’ body art.” Stay tuned to Last Days for all things ICP vs. FBI.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 9 In creepier news, the week continues in New York City, where tonight in Times Square, a man dressed as the Toy Story character Woody was arrested on a variety of sex charges. “José Vasquez, 44, who was wearing a costume of the lovable character Woody, was hauled into the Midtown North station house by two plainclothes cops in an unmarked car at about 8 p.m.,” reports the New York Post. “He faces raps of forcible touching and sex abuse involving ‘numerous girls’ in Times Square, the sources said.” Exacerbating the creepiness: Vasquez is only the latest Times Square character to be arrested while posing for photos with tourists, following the man dressed as Cookie Monster who

Dear God, Thanks! What’s a Legion of Boom?

Jeremy

Dear Jeremy, The Legion of Boom is the nickname for the Seahawks’ defensive players.

God

Dear God, Defensive players are the humongous ones with chronic traumatic brain injury, and offensive players are the smaller ones with fancy haircuts, right?

Jeremy

Dear Jeremy, That is mostly correct. Offensive linemen are also humongous with chronically traumatized brains. And Richard Sherman is a defensive exception—he’s a genius and gets to make all the interceptions and rarely takes big hits. Go ’Hawks! God

was arrested last June after allegedly shoving a toddler, the man dressed as Spider-Man who was arrested last February after allegedly punching a woman in the face, and a man dressed as Elmo arrested in 2012 for allegedly shouting anti-Semitic slurs.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 10 Speaking of bad influences on children, the week continues in Alabama, where today 48-year-old Joyce Garrard was denied bond on a charge of capital murder after allegedly forcing her 9-year-old granddaughter to run until she collapsed and died. “Prosecutors say Garrard made the girl run for three hours as punishment for lying about eating candy,” reports the Associated Press.

“The child collapsed and died at a hospital three days later.” Having pleaded innocent to the charges, Grandma’s trial is scheduled to begin in June.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 11 Nothing happened today, unless you count the Seahawks’ noisy and glorious triumph over the New Orleans Saints.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 12 Nothing happened today, unless you count the Golden Globes , where lots of gorgeous people won things and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were hilarious.

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

For continuing Seahawks coverage, probably don’t check THESTRANGER.COM/SLOG

Bad Cop Gets “Punished” with Day Off

SPD Says Officer’s “Completely Unprofessional” Threats Against Me—Caught on Tape—Deserve a Relaxing One-Day Suspension

BY DOMINIC HOLDEN

Last week, the Seattle Police Department ruled that Officer

John Marion was guilty of misconduct for repeatedly threatening a reporter with showing up at his newsroom to

“bother” him while he was working. The penalty was one unpaid day off work. The reporter was me.

The incident occurred last July 30, when I biked past Fifth and Jackson in the International District, where several officers surrounded a man sitting on a planter box. So I did what I typically do when I see something unusual—I stopped, pulled out my notebook and camera, and started taking photos. After the man left the scene, a county police sergeant threatened to arrest me unless I left the block, even though I was standing on a public sidewalk.

When I asked Seattle police officer Marion who was in charge, he became furious. Marion pointed out that I’d been taking notes and photographs, and he exploded into a threatening tirade about visiting my office to harass me.

That seemed not only unnecessary, unprofessional, and directly in line with the kind of police overreaction criticized by a US Department of Justice report in 2011, but perhaps a real—if minor, compared to instances of police assault—attempt to intimidate a reporter over simply doing his job. Curious to see what would happen, I filed complaints against the county cop and the SPD officer.

On January 9, the SPD ruled that Officer Marion was guilty of “unprofessionalism.” (They don’t use the word “guilty.” Their wording is: “The misconduct alleged did occur.”)

“The officer took a normal contact with a member of the public and turned it into a confrontation and escalated it to a point where he was acting in a completely unprofessional and inappropriate manner,” explains Pierce Murphy, who runs the SPD’s discipline division.

Murphy recommended a punishment for Officer Marion’s conduct: one unpaid day off of work. He says the penalty is “an appropriate measure” in the “middle of the range of possible disciplinary actions.”

But lawyers who handle police misconduct cases say that, although a day off the streets for unprofessional behavior is better than nothing, the SPD ignored Officer Marion’s more serious offense of trying to intimidate a citizen for documenting police activity and gave him too light a penalty.

“It is clear to me that this guy should have been fired the next day,” says Cleve Stockmeyer, a civil rights attorney who has represented half a dozen clients over the last few years in Seattle police misconduct cases. James Egan, a lawyer who has handled recent high-profile cases against the city for police misconduct, adds, “A lot of these guys, they get the badge

and they feel entitled to be bullies, and frankly, they get away with it more often than not. If you weren’t a reporter, then your complaint would have gone nowhere.”

That is part of the reason I filed the complaint. Data from the Department of Justice suggests some Seattle police officers routinely mistreat people, particularly racial

Former interim police chief Jim Pugel acknowledges that Officer Marion’s behavior “went toward exactly one of the issues that drew the attention of the US Department of Justice: taking a low-level interaction with a person in the community and behaving in a way that could escalate it.” The SPD, under the oversight of a federal court, is undertaking a reform plan to eradicate those patterns.

But is the SPD taking reform seriously? The discipline process is tilted heavily in the cops’ favor. Before any sanctions are issued, officers may appeal to the chief and respond

minorities, and complaints against officers are all but tossed in the shredder.

Few allegations filed with SPD’s discipline division, the Office of Professional Accountability (OPA), result in any penalty. The OPA handled 243 complaints against employees in 2012. Of those, only 12 percent resulted in discipline. (The rate in 2011 was identical.) Another 20 percent of cases resulted in more training for the officers. The rest—67 percent—were dismissed as unfounded, because the cops’ behavior was deemed “lawful and proper,” or inconclusive based on the evidence.

That’s not a slap on the wrist. It’s a hand massage.

Officer Marion made $89,000 in 2011, according to the most recent available records of city employee salaries, so missing one day’s work isn’t a stinging financial penalty. Salary aside, who cringes at the idea of lounging around their home on a weekday while watching television and maybe drinking beer? That’s not even a slap on the wrist. It’s a hand massage.

But if victims of police misconduct want compensation or an even playing field, Murphy says, “This isn’t the right process for them. The civil justice system is the process that our society has.” If victims of bad policing want a fair hearing, Murphy essentially says, they have to sue the city.

“The OPA gives lip service to the complaints, and the purpose is to make citizens feel like something has been done so they won’t pursue it any further,” says Egan. “They aren’t looking for the truth.”

Former chief Pugel says his hands are tied, explaining that Officer Marion’s day off was “consistent with similar incidents, and we have to look at comparisons in the past.” A penalty beyond the standard range increases the likelihood that an officer or the union could appeal the ruling, SPD sources say.

King County sheriff John Urquhart has been willing to take that risk. In August, Urquhart demoted a sergeant for accosting a couple—which would normally be punished by a reprimand—in part due to the officer’s long history of misconduct complaints. (That was the same county cop who threatened to arrest me for taking photos. I filed a complaint, and the case is pending.) Urquhart went even further in a separate December case, firing a sergeant who was facing a recommendation of suspension. If the county can impose such discipline, surely the SPD, which is under a federal court order for reform, can do the same.

Stockmeyer argues that Officer Marion’s threats were an attempt to discourage me from reporting on police activity, a constitutional right of all citizens. “To threaten a reporter at work is a police-state move,” he says. “This man is clearly a threat to everyone’s civil rights and to citizens’ well-being.” OPA head Murphy holds a different opinion. He says the argument that Officer Marion was trying to discourage me from writing about the incident was “unfounded.”

“I don’t think it was in response to his awareness that you were a reporter and going to write about the incident,” says Murphy.

This is a bizarre conclusion. In a police dash-cam video of the July 30 incident, Marion and two other officers see me taking notes, and one of the cops asks: “Where do you work?”

After finding out I’m a reporter, he threatens five times to bother me at work, adding later: “You’re going write about how terrible I am.”

directly to allegations. A representative of the SPD’s powerful police union is present to advocate on the cops’ behalf, and officers have a further chance to appeal any decision to an internal review board and the city’s Public Safety Civil Service Commission. The complainant never hears what the officer says, never has a chance to rebut the officer, or receives an opportunity to appeal the decision. Isn’t that unbalanced?

“This isn’t about compensation or balance,” the OPA’s Murphy says. “The complaint process is about improvement or correction of behavior.”

“He’s threatening to retaliate in advance of your story so you won’t write the story,” says Stockmeyer. “It amounts to a deliberate and malicious retaliation.” And by letting Marion off the hook on that charge, he argues, “the OPA director is saying that threatening a reporter is okay. This is why we have a problem with the cops. They will back up the bad apple when what we need to do is get the bad apples out of the barrel. The message to officers is ‘Don’t worry, we got your back.’”

So why should victims of police misconduct even bother filing a complaint? That involves hours of follow-up, months of waiting, a token gesture of punishment, and OPA director Murphy explaining that you shouldn’t even expect a balanced process.

But maybe he’s right. If the SPD, as Murphy says, isn’t serious about giving citizens balanced hearings, perhaps all victims of police misconduct should take him up on his advice: So sue them.

Saving Metro

Won’t Be Pretty

The Latest Proposal for Higher Taxes and Higher Fares

BY GOLDY

With the Washington State Legislature proving absolutely incapable of addressing our transportation needs, King County executive Dow Constantine has rolled out a proposal that would ask voters to approve $130 million a year in new local taxes to avert a 17 percent cut in Metro bus service, while providing additional money to maintain deteriorating city and county roads. Constantine will also ask the county council to approve a new low-income fare category—$1.50 per trip—that would provide a substantial discount to as many as 100,000 Metro riders who are struggling to cope with recent fare increases.

“Public transportation must be affordable to be effective, even for those with limited means,” says Constantine. “This proposal would ensure better mobility for lower-income workers, students, and others.”

Rather than the more progressive motor vehicle excise tax (MVET)—a tax on the value of your car—that Olympia had promised King County, Constantine is proposing raising revenue under the county’s existing but unused Transportation Benefit District (TBD) authority. The TBD would raise a combined $130 million in 2015—$80 million from a $60 annual vehicle license fee (VLF), and $50 million from a 0.1 percent increase in the county sales tax. (The $60 VLF would come after the current $20 “congestion relief charge” expires in June, so vehicle owners would only see a net $40 annual increase in their car-tabs bill.) Sixty percent of the money raised would go toward filling a projected $75 million a year shortfall in Metro revenues, with the remaining 40 percent going toward city and county roads, allocated based on population.

Constantine is asking the council to put a revenue package before voters at an April special election.

At the same time, Constantine is proposing a new Metro fare category aimed at

DC Superhero

Senator Patty Murray Fights for Local Homeless Kids

BY DANIELLE HENDERSON

L

ast week, Senator Patty Murray pressured the US Department of Health and Human Services to fund a grant for YouthCare, which runs the financially beleaguered Orion Center near downtown that provides services for homeless teens. Her timing was perfect. YouthCare announced late last year that it would close its overnight shelter after a $1 million federal grant was not renewed for 2014. In response, The Stranger, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, and Pearl Jam recently raised $209,000 to help keep the doors open— but that still wasn’t enough money.

In a letter to the health department’s director, Murray commended YouthCare for providing critical services to Seattle’s homeless youth and asked that their recent grant application be taken seriously, saying, “These funds will allow YouthCare to provide critical

riders earning 200 percent or less of the federal poverty level (the same threshold as food stamps and other low-income programs), about $23,000 a year for an individual. Starting in March 2015, the low-income fare would cost $1.50 a ride, regardless of time of day or distance, compared to the regular adult $2.50 off-peak and $2.75 (1 zone) to $3.25 (2 zone) peak fare that would go into effect after base fares are hiked another 25 cents next year.

Metro estimates the cost of low-income fare discounts at about $3 million a year, but this is more than just charity. “Whenever we have a fare increase, you see a drop-off in ridership,” says King County Department of Transportation spokeswoman Rochelle Ogershok, who explains that a low-income fare would actually help retain ridership and fares that would otherwise be lost. “It’s a very complicated formula,” says Ogershok.

Of course, none of this is ideal. In a per-

In a perfect world, Olympia wouldn’t be such a total clusterfuck.

fect world, Metro would maintain bus service without resorting to year after year of fare increases or regressive taxes like sales and VLF. But in a perfect world, Olympia wouldn’t be such a total clusterfuck. At a presession forum sponsored by the Associated Press, not a single lawmaker expressed confidence that a transportation-funding package (or the local MVET authority held hostage within it) would pass this year.

“It is dangerous to do this balkanization,” House Transportation Committee chair Judy Clibborn (D-41) says of Constantine’s local proposal. But given the legislature’s failure to act, says Clibborn, “it is the natural reaction to go it alone.”

transitional housing and supportive services to homeless youth and young adults in Seattle and King County.”

Murray didn’t have to support YouthCare. It’s not as though homeless kids are a key voting bloc or high-rolling donors. But homelessness and youth issues are pet concerns for the powerful chair of the Senate’s budget committee. In November, Murray introduced a bill that would require colleges to improve outreach services for homeless students by making sure they have housing between terms and schools have staff dedicated specifically to

Homeless kids are not a key voting bloc.

homeless youth. She also introduced legislation to create universal access to prekindergarten with specific provisions for homeless kids. Is Murray made of magic? Possibly. She’s not suggesting we just throw money at the problem (even though money definitely helps), but the right money (federal) in the right way (full support from stem to stern).

JANUARY 24 -26, 2014

FRIDAY 6:00 – 9:30 pm (21+) SATURDAY 11am-6pm SUNDAY 11am-5pm

Adjuncts and Contingents Together Washington/SEIU Local 925 and The Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies invite adjunct and contingent faculty at private universities to join an action oriented forum on academic labor practices, how they reflect social inequity, and the growing contingent faculty response.

Saturday, January 25 9:30am - 5pm UW Seattle RSVP at www.actogetherwa.org

Two years ago, I got a job at a catering company that specializes in weddings. Sometimes I’d see two a day. It was surreal and a little disconcerting to lay out one couple’s polished rocks and bags of monogrammed candies and then chuck them into a dumpster halfway through the day to make way for the next couple’s colorcoordinated napkins and shot glasses. I served enough champagne to fill a Cadillac and enough hors d’oeuvres to bury one. I saw weddings that seemed meant to be, and ones I’d give about two months. I saw blow-up dolls dressed as cowboys. Then gay marriage passed, and I started writing a column for The Stranger called Wedding Crasher, which I got paid for, if you can believe it. I went and ate free food and danced with people I didn’t know, and then I wrote down my thoughts about how it went in exchange for cash. I saw things I’ll always remember, and I cried at every damn wedding. I also saw things I would recommend no one ever replicate. But let’s focus on the positive. If you’re planning to get married, I offer my observations and my lust for revolving beverage fountains as assistance.

Even if You’re Madly in Love, Don’t Get Married Until You’re Thirty

Okay, I guess that’s not a very positive way to start, but it must be said: People change a lot during their 20s. When I look back at who I might have married when I was 19, I cringe— a tall can of Rainier wouldn’t look good in a wedding dress. I’ve dated two women who were dissolving domestic partnerships that began in their early 20s, and the paperwork weighed about five pounds. The most worrisome weddings I’ve witnessed were those of teenagers who looked either like they just wanted a party or, worse, like relatives had pressured them into it. If you’re already a married teenager, don’t let this scare you—it might be fine. I know a couple, now in their 70s, who got married at 15 and still fall asleep holding hands. But if you’re considering having a wedding because you want a big party where everyone dresses up, consider a wedding-themed party as an alternative. You may be shocked by how hot your best friend looks dressed as a priest.

Serve the Food You Actually Like, and Lots of It

Your wedding food doesn’t have to be expensive. Compotes and roulades aren’t a necessity, and if you don’t have a food that’s a family tradition or of sentimental value, I recommend serving whatever food you would most like to bathe in. It’s your fucking wedding, after all. Cover a Slip ’N Slide with Kraft macaroni and cheese if it makes you happy. One of the most fun weddings I attended was held in a family friend’s coffee shop after hours because it was the only venue the bride and groom could afford. Indian food, candy, pizza, and bottles of Jim Beam covered every flat surface. Everyone there seemed exceptionally comfortable (enough so that one guest came wearing a velvet cape), and a corgi in a tuxedo circled the room getting belly rubs. Another wedding, in a backyard, was catered by Ezell’s and Dick’s—a dinner that

[ The Wedding Issue ]

Wedding Do’s Advice from a Professional Wedding Guest

BY SARAH GALVIN

inspired applause from the guests. Whether you serve tapas or Now and Laters, make sure no one is hungry, especially if there’s an open bar. It seems to work best to provide some kind of appetizers before the ceremony and a main course afterward. The best thing I ever ate at a wedding was a single butter bean floating in a sauce that may have been made by milking an angel. I sometimes close my eyes and imagine that bean is my apartment.

Get Everyone Drinking, at a Sensible Pace

A small amount of booze can heighten your guests’ enjoyment and prevent those less emotionally involved in the occasion from getting bored, but too much booze can result in a Beastie Boys music video/Hieronymus Bosch–type situation. Before the ceremony, serve beer (not out of a bong) and wine (but no Fireball shots). Save the open bar and shotgunning of anything until after you’ve said your vows. I went to a wedding/luau where bowls of joints with little bows that matched the tablecloths were offered to guests, and

this seemed to cause no trouble. Of course, if there is weed or anything more psychoactive than Nutella in the food, be sure to label it. Also, if you can afford to have any beverage dispensed by a small fountain, do it. Especially if the fountain revolves or lights up. It will make everyone feel like they’re getting drunk in the past and the future at the same time.

Dance Your Ass Off

Music is essential, but don’t worry about your taste. If you listen exclusively to a mixture of Gucci Mane and barbershop quartets with the person you love, this should be played at your wedding. I attended one wedding where the grooms’ friends had assembled a band just to play their favorite songs. One couple found a musician who played classical versions of Pixies, Queen, and Depeche Mode songs for their wedding. At another wedding, the newlyweds concluded the ceremony by performing a duet. I asked a catering company’s DJ how to get people dancing after a wedding ceremony, and he said: “Play ‘I Like Big Butts.’ It’s the only song no one

can resist.” My observations confirm this. The music selection for the liveliest wedding dance party I attended (except perhaps for a traditional Jewish wedding where the newlyweds were carried around on chairs) was chosen partly by the guests—each invitation contained a space for one song request. People dance really weird at weddings. Every wedding. Probably even professional dancers’ weddings. If your aunt and uncle start doing the Worm when you put on Icona Pop, it probably just means your cocktails were a hit.

Rent a Bouncy Castle Because BOUNCY CASTLE!!!

Choose a Location You Love

This town is full of amazing rentable spaces. My favorites have included a beautiful old ferryboat on Lake Union called the Skansonia, and Georgetown’s oldest building, called the Stables, which has lots of sexy exposed brick and a carnival theme (not for couples afraid of clowns or antiques). Your own

Last week, The Stranger went to Antique Liquidators and Antiques at Pike Place to find unwanted photos of strangers’ weddings. Then we commissioned four fiction writers to make up stories about them.

[ Found Wedding #1 ]

Locking

By Stacey Levine

Ijust wanted to lock blond men’s heads inside my legs. So on my wedding day, I thought my future in headlocking was secured. The sphere of sweaty hair trapped in my legs’ enduring circle, the two soles must touch. In geometry there’s something called the Great Circle—that was me, an endless equator, a queen. I’d locked many blond heads. Then Ned Seed arrived, all game. He’d be my husband, I decided.

Looking back, what a shame I couldn’t talk honestly about my fetish to my classmates and family at the wedding reception. Things are different today. We have come so far.

At the photographer’s count of three, I joked: “Ahm gonna squish his head to freakinshit tonight!” They laughed, even Ned. Only Mary-Carol Grosch turned like a steel platen and said,

“Patty, I never liked you.”

I didn’t care. Trembling in my skin for the night of headlocking to come.

The years sag with vanity. In truth, I didn’t care whose head I locked, so maybe the marriage was a slight misstep. Americans get married too easily; it’s like sneezing. Our outrageously developed taste for waste.

You realize a story’s completeness only when the last chapter arrives. Ned fled to Oahu with Mary-Carol, but she left him later. I heard he’s bald now. He fell at a mall and got set up nice on disability. My current fetish is just playing the Lotto. This apology is for no one but me. Really sorry I forgot you were a human being. Hey, Ned. Hi.

STACEY LEVINE is the author of several books of fiction, including 2011’s The Girl with Brown Fur She won a Stranger Genius Award in 2009.

home is a fine place for your wedding, particularly if you have a pool in your backyard surrounded by Christmas-tree-sized pot plants, or a rooftop garden/private art gallery, OR A BOUNCY CASTLE. The right company can make a driveway just as memorable—or a tree house, or the zoo, or a submarine (which I heard actually did happen in the San Juans in the 1920s). Think less about what a wedding should be and more about the wedding that will make you and the person you love happiest.

Select Party Favors That Are Meaningful to You and/or Aesthetically Pleasing and/or Full of Condoms and Jewels

At one wedding, there were black-andwhite paper straws in the cocktails that reminded me of Beetlejuice’s legs. I kept the one from my drink. My friend said, “You know, people will remember these straws for years.” She was probably right. It’s hard to forget M&Ms with a couple’s faces printed on them, or bobblehead dolls made to look like the bride and groom, or a cake that matches the grooms’ ties and cuff links. One couple had a huge poster made of the artwork from their favorite album, one had a banner that read “For the greater glory of Satan” in Latin, and one actually had small paintings commissioned for all of the guests. The best thing about all of these party favors and decorations was that they had special significance to the people getting married, either because of family traditions or because of a memorable event in their relationship. On one occasion, the wedding cake was carved, according to tradition, with a sword. That said, I will always remember a piñata full of condoms, bottles of bubbles, plastic jewels, and gummy candies shaped like biblical figures that I really doubt was an heirloom.

Make Everyone Cry, Even Strangers

On a boat, I watched a man twirl a parasol and then strip off a black spandex bodysuit to officiate for two men who had been together for 20 years. My distraction by the delightful theater of the ceremony made the appearance of these three people and the real circumstances of their lives hit harder, and I began to cry even earlier than I usually do. The officiant, now dressed in a simple, elegant black suit, was a longtime friend of the couple who had many stories to tell about them. There is a Philip Larkin poem in which he describes the individual as a “million-petalled flower,” fantastically complicated and impermanent. I think on a visceral level, humans know how improbable their existence is and how complex the elements are that shape an individual. Each of us is the product of all of history, but also of a series of events so specific that it’s incredible we can love each other. When people get married, they are choosing to share history. The complexity and number of the events that lead people to each other is miraculous, and it’s miraculous how they can change and color the shared events of each other’s lives. There’s more in a moment with another person than it’s possible to ever know or understand, and the celebration of the decision to share time is perhaps the most significant celebration there is. I don’t know about you, but it’s enough to make me cry into my Fireball shot. I’d say the best ceremonies are the ones that feel both very personal and specific to a relationship and also very universal, but really that’s any wedding ceremony. Invite the people you love to speak at your ceremony, whoever they may be.

Wedding Don’ts

Advice from a Professional Asshole

BY DAN SAVAGE

Igive advice for a living. I go to a lot of weddings. But I don’t get many questions about weddings; wedding Qs are more Dear Prudence than Savage Love. So here is my unsolicited wedding advice in the form of a list of don’ts. My wedding advice, offered here in no particular order, is binding. So skip this article unless you intend to follow my advice to the letter.

1. Don’t make people travel any farther than necessary to attend your wedding. Everyone hates destination weddings. Live in the city? Get married in the city. Live in the middle of fucking nowhere? Get married in the middle of the nearest big city. Remember: The farther people have to travel, the more they have to spend on airfare, hotels, meals, etc.; the more they have to spend to get to your wedding, the less money they’re willing to spend on the crap on your gift registry. Unless you’re willing to pick up the full cost of the airfare, hotel rooms, and meals for all of your invited guests, be normal human beings and get married someplace that’s convenient for your friends and family to travel to and flee from. Pick a venue with some decent bars on the same block and some hotels within walking distance. Only assholes get married on cruise ships, islands, or mountaintops.

2. Don’t drag it out. Unless you’re a Windsor, a Hapsburg, a Bourbon, or a Wittelsbach, your actual marriage ceremony shouldn’t last much longer than a better-than-average blowjob—20 minutes, tops.

3. Don’t wait for marriage. Ask any advice columnist, sex therapist, or sane (read: nonChristian) couples counselor, and they’ll tell you: Waiting to have sex until after you’re married is a terrible idea. Only a tiny percentage of people make this mistake anymore, of course, but the ones who do almost always live to regret it. Basic sexual compatibility—and I’m talking repertoire and frequency here— has to be established before you commit to someone for life. Sexual compatibility is ten million times more important if you’re planning to make and keep a monogamous commitment. (Bonus tip: Making a monogamous commitment is a lot easier than keeping one. To practice forgiving each other for the almost inevitable infidelity is a good pre-wedding exercise—and, hey, role-play is always fun, right?)

4. Don’t waste your money on monogrammed napkins, personalized champagne glasses, or other assorted bullshit. No one cares.

5. Don’t let your parents boss you around. You’re both adults. Unless your parents are paying for your wedding, in which case they get to boss you around because you’re still a child.

6. Don’t worry about everything being perfect. Go ahead and invite your alcoholic relatives, seat sworn enemies at the same table, don’t try to stop unhinged exes from giving toasts. Perfect weddings are drama-free, and drama-free weddings are boring, and boring weddings are quickly forgotten. Do you want people to remember your wedding? Ask your wedding planner to watch Robert Altman’s A Wedding and tell her you want your wedding day to go just like Dino and Muffin’s.

7. Don’t fill your wedding cake with chunks of fruit or mounds of marzipan and don’t decorate it with “edible [fucking] flowers.” Keep it simple: a layer of cake, a layer of frosting, a layer of cake, a layer of frosting, slap a few frosting flowers on the sides, and stick a bride and groom/groom and groom/bride and bride on top and call it a day.

8. Don’t let the DJ set the volume. DJs are deaf—every single fucking one of them—so a volume level that’s barely audible to a DJ is going to prevent most of your non-dancing guests from conversing, which is what most of your guests want to do. If you see people streaming for the exits once the dancing starts, it’s because the music is too fucking loud. Want people to stick around and drink up? Turn the fucking music down.

9. Don’t ask people to pay for drinks. If you can’t afford a hosted bar, elope.

10. Don’t forget to fuck first. I’m not talking about having tons of premarital sex with your fiancé(e) before the wedding—which you should already have done (see above)— I’m talking about fucking on your actual wedding day. And you should fuck first—before the ceremony, or, if you wanna play can’t-seeeach-other-before-the-wedding games on the day of, then be sure to fuck before the reception. Because take it from me: You’re going to be too tired to fuck after the reception.

Dance Floor Advice from Five Hiphop DJs

DJ D-LOOK

Strangest Wedding Experience as a Guest: “The strangest wedding experience I’ve had this year was a bride barely making it to the altar thanks to copious amounts of pregame vodka. Once the vows were read, she was toast and didn’t attend the reception.”

Strangest Wedding Experience as a DJ: “Alcohol can be a wedding’s best friend or worst enemy. I DJed a wedding this past summer where the menu was cold cuts, Jack Daniel’s, and Garth Brooks. Five people blacked out on the dance floor. The bride abruptly ended the reception two hours early.”

Track That Always Packs the Floor: “My top wedding hiphop track is Notorious B.I.G.’s ‘Hypnotize.’ I’ll save breaking new records for the clubs or radio, not a wedding.”

KITMAN

Strangest Wedding Experience as a Guest: “One time, the wedding DJ had a cast on his leg exposing his bare foot. The other foot had a dress shoe on. And he also had a no-hands magician microphone.”

Strangest Wedding Experience as a DJ: “The Jaws theme song was the bride’s processional music.”

Track That Always Packs the Floor: “Big Pun’s ‘Still Not a Player.’ It has a very catchy hook that is easy to sing along to.”

DJ PHOSHO

Strangest Wedding Experience as a Guest: “I’ve been to many Cambodian weddings. And at Cambodian weddings, there’s always a bottle of Rémy Martin or Hennessy on each table for guests. I’ve seen a lot of uncles get drunk and wanna flirt.”

Strangest Wedding Experience as a DJ: “I think the most interesting one was when a ninetysomething granny was out on the dance floor for the garter toss, and she got booty-bumped onto the ground. Someone else got the garter.”

Track That Always Packs the Floor: “‘Bust a Move’ by Young MC is liked by all.”

DJ100PROOF

Strangest Wedding Experience as a Guest: “Being a groomsman and walking down the aisle with an ex-girlfriend was pretty interesting.”

Strangest Wedding Experience as a DJ: “Having the bride and groom crowd-surf to Benny Benassi’s ‘Satisfaction’ on the dance floor.”

Track That Always Packs the Floor: “I have to go with Run-DMC’s ‘It’s Tricky.’ I don’t think I’ve ever played it at a wedding and didn’t have at least 75 percent of the crowd jumping up and down and shouting.”

DJ MARC SENSE

Strangest Wedding Experience as a Guest: “The strangest incident was definitely at a wedding when the bride’s male friend and former roommate said that the groom was not worthy of her in his toast. And it wasn’t one of those ‘you scored out of your league’ type jokes. The room went uncomfortably silent, and amazingly enough, the guy got through the event physically unharmed.”

Strangest Wedding Experience as a DJ: “The craziest end to a wedding was when a groom dislocated his kneecap while dancing. He crumpled to the floor and lay there until the ambulance arrived. Taken off on a stretcher, he gave his guests a thumbs-up.”

Track That Always Packs the Floor: “Snoop Dogg’s ‘Ain’t No Fun’ is definitely the most fun. It’s pretty much the antithesis of what marriage is about, but guys and girls enjoy rapping along to it.”

All of these guys work for Integral DJs Though the DJs in this group are also happy to play punk, rock, new wave, and soul, if your goal is to give your wedding a distinct hiphop flavor, you cannot go wrong with Integral. Hear their stuff or book them for your party at integraldjs.com.

Marrying James Joyce

By Sheila Heti

She thought she was marrying James Joyce. He told her, he persuaded her, he said he was James Joyce.

This was the kind of woman who loved her friends and yet secretly felt distinguished from them. She wanted to move up in the world, but in a way she felt was “up.” She had written on her wall the summer before she met him, the summer before she married, in the tiniest of letters: “Real striving. Know your heart.” She had studied literature for a semester and got good grades. Her mother was Irish. When she told her family she was marrying James Joyce, they didn’t know who she was talking about. They nodded contentedly but without recognition. She didn’t mind. She knew. She would take good care of him.

In this photo, she is lit with a certain light, the light of a woman who thinks that everything is perfect and is proceeding according to her deepest desires. He is shaded, living in his dark but happy secret. For a marriage, this is not necessarily a problem. Sometimes marriages work this way. By the time she finds out the truth, she will love him as he is. Their life together will be a happy one. A difficult year of adjustment, once she finds out, but fine after that. There are always illusions and illusions shattered in marriage.

Married While Feminist

Getting Married Was Easy—Explaining It to People Was the Hard Part

BY DANIELLE HENDERSON

Ialways said I would never get married. For most of human history, marriage has been a horrible exercise in restriction, a transaction that has disenfranchised women to an astonishing degree. Getting married meant becoming property to be traded, meant being threatened by false notions of purity (you better be a virgin so we know that baby will continue the right family line!), and sometimes meant legal rights disappeared entirely. That’s not even mentioning what an impossible shitshow marriage is if you’re gay or trans, since you have to jump through extra hoops to prove that you’re worthy of entering this supposedly hallowed space, and even then you’re not always legally recognized as married. Sometimes, as in the case of Utah last week, you’re legally recognized as married and then you’re suddenly not legally recognized as married. Just because.

In 1998, I started talking to this really funny guy on an online comic-book forum. We were friends for eight years before we finally met. When we started dating, I made it clear that I wasn’t interested in marriage or kids or any of that. I just wanted someone cool to hang out with. Then we moved to Madison, Wisconsin, so I could go to graduate school. I got health insurance through the school, but my boyfriend didn’t have health insurance at all. I hate saying that we got married for insurance because that makes it sound like we had some sort of illicit arrangement, when really we were just a couple of dopes who wanted to make sure getting the flu wouldn’t kill us. We got hitched on Halloween in the least goth way possible. Our costume was Two Dicks Getting Married, and we wore Nixon masks! I had to come to marriage on my own terms: Here was a person who I loved and wanted to protect. We only told our families and the two friends who would be our witnesses. Then we spent $40 on some rings made out of an old skateboard, filled out some paperwork, went to a lawyer’s office overlooking a lake, and—boom—we were married. Our friends were nice enough to rent us

a hotel suite as a wedding gift, and my new husband and I sat in a big tub eating cupcakes and watching Doctor Who. It was perfect.

Since my wedding didn’t involve a lot of fanfare, I didn’t think my marriage would, either. But I was pursuing a master’s degree in gender studies. I was met with a series of questions like “But I thought you said you weren’t going to EVER get married?” and “Isn’t that kind of anti-feminist?” I found myself in the disorienting position of constantly defending marriage—strange for someone who never planned on getting married in the first place.

I never thought marriage would come coated in a slick sheen of guilt. I had to wonder if I had betrayed my ideals in some way because, yeah, I did say I was never going to get married, and I do think marriage is bullshit on many levels. It is really difficult to sit in a classroom full of post-gender, postbinary feminists and tell them you just did the most archaic, gendered thing in the world and still maintain your cred. But by that token, shouldn’t I also feel guilty when I sit down to knit, or cook, or do dishes? The backbone of feminism doesn’t dictate that you can’t engage in domesticity, just that it shouldn’t be your only option. I wish we were cool enough to favor civil unions like France, but we’re not, and I’m still a feminist even if I love someone enough to declare that love to the state.

Addressing my guilt was really about addressing the ways that I’ve changed my mind about marriage. I never thought marriage was a good idea, because in my life it was always done in such a batshit crazy way. Shotgun weddings! Cheating spouses! Weddings that cost more than a house! This mom hates the in-laws! This dad shot at the in-laws! If you’re judging it by the awful examples we often see played out, marriage can seem like the worst decision on earth, and anyone would feel guilty saying they signed up for that rodeo. But my marriage isn’t like that—our low-key wedding complements our low-key life, and I don’t feel guilty about finding the exact right person to spend time with on this planet.

Let Them Eat… Maybe Something Other Than Cake?

Wedding Cakes Are Great, but if I Could Do It All Over Again, I’d Do Something More Creative

BY MEGAN SELING

T here were a lot of unknowns when my husband and I were planning our wedding, but one thing was certain: We had to have a cake. I couldn’t even tell you why—I figured it was a wedding, and a wedding needs a wedding cake. And I was obsessive about what kind of cake it would be. Did we want ombré buttercream or ruffled fondant? Or no frosting? Maybe we just glaze it with chocolate ganache? That would be so pretty, dripping down the tiers. Or what if the whole thing was covered with chocolate flakes? Or fresh flowers? Or what about EDIBLE GLITTER? My husband refused to glitter, no matter how edible. But CAKE! Definitely cake!

Two years later, of all the things I remember about my wedding day, the cake doesn’t even crack the top 10. Between the sweet and funny ceremony, my dress constantly and hilariously trying to fall down, and my friend Patty’s toast delivered while she was high on a Benadryland-wine cocktail thanks to a hidden nut that triggered her allergies, I’ve kind of forgotten about the cake. The only thing I remember about it is how awkward it was to eat.

When the time came, my husband and I weren’t sure what to do. I’d assumed we weren’t going to do the traditional “feed each other” thing, because our wedding wasn’t very traditional in the first place and feeding someone else by hand is just weird. But then there we were, standing in front of a wedding cake like we’d seen so many other people standing in front of their wedding cakes, and without any other ideas, we awkwardly started feeding each other while giggling and whispering, “Why are we doing this?”

Even as a guest, I’ve never eaten a memorable piece of wedding cake. The banana pudding at my friends Carrie and James’s wedding? That I remember. The fully stocked ice cream sundae bar at my sister’s wedding? That I remember. The vegan cupcakes at Kelly and John’s wedding? Those I remember—they didn’t taste vegan at all! But I don’t remember any specific slices of cake I’ve had.

You know what’s better than cake? Crème brûlée. One idea: Fill small ramekins with custard, set the tables with bowls of caramelizing sugar and a cheap culinary torch or two, and let your guests melt their own burned sugar topping. That’s something people will talk about. “Remember when [insert your names here] let us play with fire at their wedding?!”

Or, if you want the grand, iconic presentation that comes with a wedding cake, fill a tiered display with miniature seasonal pies. Or doughnuts from the coffee shop you went to on your first date. Or whatever dessert you have a shared story about. Obviously, if you want a cake, have a cake. But don’t do it because you think it’s one of those things you need in order to make your wedding feel like a wedding. That whole “getting married” in front of friends and family thing will take care of that.

Lighting

By Tao Lin

ulie, 27, evidently enjoys clear skies and the occasional breeze through the trees on her wedding day. It seems to be 2:21 p.m., April 8, 1984, making it a Sunday. Those appear to be her parents, George and Mary Dutton. Judging by the quality and distribution of sunlight on George and Mary’s faces and on Mary’s right hand and stockings, as compared to how the same sunlight seems unable to make its way in full force to Julie’s pallid face or arms or upper body and arguably flowers and maybe especially her hair, it looks certain that Julie and her husband will not be enjoying a long, loving marriage.

The UFO-ish, sort of whooshing

triangle of silvery light on the top of George’s head, besides being interesting and maybe, to some, a bit eerie, indicates that George is bald, wearing a toupee. Based on clues imperceptible to the untrained eye, there’s a 12 percent chance Julie and George and Mary were Photoshopped into this photo. If so, George was inserted first, then Julie, then Mary, occluding the person, people, dog, dogs, combination of people and dogs, small trees, scrub, brush, chairs, other furniture, otherwise notable phenomena, unexplained hole, or featureless scenery that was originally depicted.

TAO LIN is the author of Taipei and other novels. He lives in New York City.

Offbeat Ideas, Acrobats, and a Bar

BY MARTI JONJAK

Standard wedding expos occur in convention centers, and bring with them a mound of unpleasantries, what with all the salesy-warehouse vibes, and the short-pile gray carpeting, and the errant doilies, and the fluorescent-white lights that come to embody the shine of hell. Too many booths advertise too many services, but all are so heavily generic, and “if you’re deviating from a mainstream commercialized template, it can be hard to find what you’re looking for, let alone if you’re queer or trans or polyamorous,” says Ariel Meadow Stallings, a Seattle writer and the publisher of Offbeat Bride She’s also coproducing the Lovesick wedding expo, happening Sunday, January 26, and you should go.

Lovesick will take place at Axis in Pioneer Square, the former Elliott Bay Book Company space, so lots of brick archways and creaky wood floors and antiquatedness everywhere. There’ll be balancing acrobats and burlesque performances, too. “The expo is intentionally designed not to be overwhelming, and even if you have a partner who is less engaged, they can go off and watch some hot men stand on their hands, or watch some hot women wag their boobs around, so it’s kind of fun for the whole family,” says Stallings. And there’s a bar: “Booze helps.”

As far as the goods, “In some ways, it’s the same old shit. You need the cake, you need the rings, you need something to wear,” says Stallings. Lovesick’s vendors were chosen for their alt-friendliness just as much as their quality products, and there are plenty of locally pro-

duced items. Haute Under the Collar, for instance, sells rhinestone-encrusted satin bow ties, the ultimate signifier of eternal love. The People’s Cake carries a menu with fresh ingredients and vegan options and a big range of styles—with everything from sculptural cakes in the shape of a cactus or a giant Twinkie, because why not, to the classic tiered version, its layers festooned with ribbons, and so many intricate sugar flowers tumbling down, just a-tumblin’. Wai-Ching sells silk wedding gowns in nontraditional styles, which are made to measure, then hand-dyed in squillions of colors. (Full disclosure: I work here as a seamstress.) With These Rings teaches clients how to fabricate or cast their own rings, which is a nice alternative to brand-name jewelers housed in a mall with a Juan ’n’ Only’s Tex-Mex buffet in its food court.

There’s more, and that’s because “nongross people get married and non-gross people need to find non-gross photographers,” says Stallings. Lovesick’s selection includes Carly Bish, Jay Lee, and Jonas Seaman. (Find their gorgeous pictures at carlybish.com, jayleephotography.net, and jonas-seaman.com.) As for the latter, Seaman says his images contain very few deliberate poses, bringing a photo-documentary effect, and he uses fine-art elements to enhance his work. (Also worth noting: When Seaman was a youngster, he played a culted-out farmhand in 1984’s freaky-deaky Children of the Corn “I go running through the cornfields to get away, and then I get macheted in the neck, and then I get run over by a car. It’s a pretty memorable part,” he says.)

A Honeymoon Is a Two-Sided Thing Lessons

from Niagara Falls and Venice, Italy

BY JEN GRAVES

Before they had me and divorced, my parents honeymooned at Niagara Falls. As a teenager, I went to the Falls for the first time myself. I rode an elevator down into the rock, and stood in a line in a cave that opened onto the rushing water, to throw a penny into the waterfall from behind. Each person wished, tossed, and advanced; the line moved quickly. Wish, toss, advance. When I got up there, I made a wish, tossed a penny, and then 10 gallons of freezing water flew back into my face, soaking me head to toe. “That’s just how it happens every once in a while,” the guide told my mother. Some tic of the physics.

The Falls has not lived up to its promise for our family. Or maybe, it occurred to me recently, it has, in a perverse way. That was my reaction to the discovery that the word “honeymoon” originally contained the premise that love is sweet, like honey, but wanes, like the moon. Both my parents have remarried, but I don’t think any of these happier pairings have really honeymooned. Honeymooning seems, I don’t know, moony. Maybe fate-testing.

In August, my new husband and I flew to Venice, Italy, for our honeymoon. If this sounds contradictory to what I just said about honeymoons, well, it is, but we had our reasons. Our wedding had been understated. We told ourselves that the marriage itself would

be our focus, not the one-day celebration of it, and anyway, after a long year of laying the foundation of a blended family with two kids, three dogs, and a complex web of extended relationships, we needed a vacation.

When I say our wedding was understated: It was a pool party. At a public pool. Side note: There are few things more recommendable than hosting your wedding at Colman Pool on the shore of West Seattle, where the rental rate is $460 for two hours for up to 30 people, and then eating bringyour-own food as the sunset smears across the late-July sky and kids push you around the pool on a giant inflatable swan after your first dance done in bathing suits on deck. Also, there’s a slide. That wedding was organized in a matter of weeks, and only later were we able to celebrate with family, who live out of town and who we didn’t burden with a short-turn invitation. The wedding was not about theater— which is not to say I’m above that. I actually planned one like that just a couple years ago, to a different man I’d known only a few years, which I had to cancel at the last minute. This 2013 wedding, to a man I’d known as a friend for the better part of 15 years, was rather about getting on with the business of our lives. So why were we having a honeymoon? Because it was our one concession to the gods of perfectionism, our one stab at rising up out of our wild storm of complexity. I couldn’t help

imagining it as ideal. I should have known this was a setup. I had not yet heard that thing about “honeymoon” being composed of conflicting stem words, but I did notice the knowing look on married or divorced people’s faces at the slightest mention of the word “honeymoon.” It looked like a mix of pity, envy, and schadenfreude.

Until I got on the plane, I hadn’t realized the magnitude of my anxiety that everything would simply fall apart at the last minute. When the flight attendants announced takeoff, I let out a massive sigh that surprised me; I heard it before I felt it. The flight attendants were stalking the rows, but I was determined to send an e-mail to my parents sharing this feeling with them. It was a dividing moment. This good thing was finally, safely real. At our stopover in Philadelphia, I was elated, for the first time in a long time. Something frayed in me felt repaired.

But the next flight brought a new set of feelings. As the doors closed for Venice, I eyed a group of young single people at the front of the plane. Irrationally jealous of them, I wrote, in a journal entry, “Imagining myself traveling alone”—I’d traveled alone to Venice before, in 2007—and went on about “the romantic adventures I might have” if I were not married.

Two things. One: Maybe don’t take your honeymoon somewhere you’ve been before. Someone smart once said comparison is the root of all suffering. Two: If you have a grass-is-always-greener problem, it will only be exacerbated if you believe yourself to be undertaking a Honeymoon, a Big Romantic Fantasy, not a honey-moon, with two sides, a natural split down the middle that’s like a pressure-release valve. Because the reality of my 2007 Venice trip is that I didn’t spend it dreaming of “romantic adventures” with anyone I met; I spent it missing my longtime partner who’d stayed at home. What I was now idealizing en route to my honeymoon, instead of anything overtly romantic, were the micro-adventures of solo life that seem so enticing from the other side—detours, lingerings, a way of being silently apprehended by others as alone

Most of that journal entry from the plane strikes me now as self-centered. Of course it makes sense that in the midst of all this husband and family conjoining, I was scribbling out me, me, me. But at the time and all during the honeymoon, I kept scolding myself for these thoughts, as if anything conflicted was infecting my Honeymoon.

The only reason I can admit any of this to you is that I’m crazy about my husband, calmcrazy, just the way I want to be. So if you’re calm-crazy for your new spouse, too, and if disruptive thoughts rise up in you like sneezes while you’re honeymooning in the Maldives or something, I just want you to know that you’re not doing it wrong. The natural tides of real relationships are right there in the word. For centuries, people have known that honey can survive the moodiness of the moon—and maybe that they even need each other. It’s more than a lesson about a week’s vacation; it’s something about the naturalness of change even over short periods of time and about shrugging at the illusion of control.

I’ve told you all the conflicts involved, going all the way back to my parents, and all the ways I brought my everyday life on my honeymoon with me. But what doesn’t happen every day is that I have dinner at a restaurant named after assassins with a man I love more than I thought was possible, sitting under an umbrella in an alley while it rains so hard that the restaurant wraps us in plastic bags to send us off, but we get soaked anyway, taking all the wrong turns to end up at our apartment overlooking the Grand Canal of Venice. I’m not telling any more than that. The best parts are always private.

Beginning Again

By Sherman Alexie

Ivisit my father’s grave site once a year to make sure the fucker is dead. Maybe your relationship with your father is better. If so, then fuck your happiness.

I balance a bouquet of supermarket flowers on his tombstone. I bring flowers because, you know, I’m aware that I might forgive the bastard someday and want to have a track record of proper cemeteryrelated behavior.

Then I notice that a wedding is happening in the distance. A fucking wedding! And not some goth travesty, either. It is black tux, white wedding dress, and laughter. What kind of cruel fuckers hold a

joyful ceremony—a celebration of goddamn life—in a cemetery? Who invites the ghosts of their ancestors to their nuptials? Who are these fucking people? They are better people than my father ever was. And better than I am now. I walk toward the wedding because I imagine these folks will graciously welcome a stranger. And then I turn back and grab my father’s flowers. I must bring a gift to the wedding. I want to begin, finally, a journey with something in my hands.

SHERMAN ALEXIE ’s most recent books are the poetry collection What I’ve Stolen, What I’ve Earned and the short-story collection Blasphemy. He won a Stranger Genius Award in 2008.

Photo: Jennifer Finch Photography

Wedding Listings

Bachelor/ Bachelorette

Charismatic by Design

Photography, LLC

11000 NE 10th St Bellevue WA 98004, 425-505-2175, www.

charismaticbydesign.com

Professional, comfortable location and studio photography to capture the beauty of all people! Boudoir, engagement, bachelor/bachelorette parties. Flexible hours. Locally, LGBTowned and operated.

Pole Fitness Seattle

1900 Airport Way S, Suite 202 Seattle WA 98134, 214-5312, www.

polefitnessseattle.com Let us host your bachelorette party! Offering a wide variety of party packages, Pole Fitness Seattle specializes in artistic pole dance and classic burlesque striptease!

TEASE Pin-Up 1508 East Olive Way Seattle WA 98122, www.

teasepinup.com Unique bachelorette parties and sassy wedding night gifts! TEASE specializes in total makeover pin-up parties and individual sessions in our women-owned, queer-friendly Capitol Hill studio.

Teatro Zinzanni 222 Mercer St Seattle WA 98109, 802-0015, www.zinzanni.com A night out unlike any other! Have your bachelor(ette) party in a tent served with a side of acrobats, swanky cocktails, and a delicious feast.

Bridal Fashion & Tux

Butch Blum 1408 Fifth Ave Seattle WA 98101, 622-5760, www.

butchblum.com Dress better than you have to...

Cami Funk Designs www. camifunk.com Looking for a local designer to conjure up your offbeat dress or suit? Cami Funk is your girl.

Cicada 1121 First Ave Seattle WA 98101, 652-2434, www.cicadabridal. com All gowns at Cicada are made in the USA. Cicada now offers women’s custom bridal suits. 10% discount when both brides order from Cicada.

Dolce Bleu 3220 First Ave S Seattle WA 98134, 972-1373, www. dolcebleu.com We carry affordable and beautiful bridal, cocktail, wedding party, and pageant gowns, as well as tuxedo rentals. Great customer service, no appointment necessary.

Kimmi Designs at Sassafras 2307 First Ave Seattle WA 98121, 420-7057, www. sassafras-seattle.com, www.kimmi. etsy.com Making Eco-Chic wedding attire in Seattle using reclaimed & recycled fabrics. Off the rack & custom orders available.

Pretty Parlor Bridal

Boutique 417 E Loretta Pl Seattle WA 98102, 405-CUTE, www.prettyparlor.com Our new Bridal Boutique features vintage & reproduction wedding dresses. Located around the corner from Pretty Parlor, open by appointment.

Cakes & Catering

Blissful Wunders 360-5397279, www.blissfulwunders.com

Made locally with love! Individually rolled chocolate truffles—dipped and designed by hand. Vegan, gluten-free, and wheat-free varieties available.

City Catering 509 Dexter Ave N Seattle WA 98109, 7210334, www.citycateringcompany.

com Seattle’s most creative caterer. Founded in 2001, we feature seasonal menus and exceptional service. Catering in Seattle, the East Side, and surrounding areas.

Dragonfish Asian Cafe 722 Pine St Seattle WA 98101, 467-7777, www.dragonfishcafe. com Offering in-house private dining for rehearsal dinners, bachelor/ bachelorette parties, and more. See our ad in this issue.

DreamySweet jimcarlin71@ gmail.com Seattle WA, 697-4906, www.dreamysweet.com Custom cakes, chocolates, flowers, and favors for your wedding. Contact for free consultation. We’ll create the perfect concept to make your special day spectacular!

Great Northwest Soup Company 340 Westlake Ave N Seattle WA 98109, 420-8351, www. greatnwsoupcompany.com Custom party packages available. Assorted fruits, cheeses, salads, sandwiches, and soup! Call today for pricing info.

Herban Feast Catering and Events 2332 California Ave SW Seattle WA 98116, 932-4717, www.herbanfeast.com Dedicated. Vibrant. Innovative. Award-winning full-service catering offsite and at our two very unique venues in the Sodo District: Sodo Park & the Foundry.

Los Agaves Catering 1514 Pike Place Market Ave, #7 Seattle WA 98101, 425-241-8131Add a special touch to any event at any budget! Our menu includes the finest Mexican food with fresh ingredients from Pike Place Market.

Madison Park Bakery 4214 E Madison St Seattle WA 98112, 322-3238, www. madisonparkbakery.com We specialize in designing custom wedding cakes. You’re extraordinary, your cake should be too! Since 1929.

Other Coast 721 E Pike St Seattle WA 98122, 257-5927, www. othercoastcafe.com Sandwiches make affordable wedding, rehearsal dinner or special event food—our personalized platters please even the pickiest guest! Call us, we’ll make it easy!

Pie 436-8590, www. sweetandsavorypie.com Ditch boring old cake. Let them eat pie! Schedule a free tasting for your wedding and we will show you how perfect pie can be!

Smokin’ Pete’s 1918 NW 65th St Seattle WA 98117, 331-8279, www.smokinpetesbbq.com Veteran wedding caterers, from elegant to whole pig barbecues. Call or visit us online for a quote.

Stuffed Cakes 9003 35th Ave SW Seattle WA 98126, 428-8581, www.stuffedcakes.com Stuffed Cakes specializes in custom cakes & cupcakes, and offers cupcakes to go in our shop every day.

Entertainment 206 Events DJ Service

250-3335, www.206events.com Let 206 Events provide the soundtrack for your special occasion! Providing professional and personalized DJ/ Emcee services and lighting packages for every event.

Absolute Entertainment Group absolutekaraoke@ gmail.com, 962-1471, www. myabsolutekaraoke.com Full service, affordable entertainment company offering DJ, karaoke, photo booths, and lights for your memorable events!

Barry Pollack, Classical Guitarist barrynpollack@ gmail.com, 579-9351, www. modernclassicsguitar.com

Professionally and beautifully executed music for your special occasion. Classical repertoire, jazz standards, and pop tunes. Reasonably priced, experienced, and easy to work with!

The Lestz-Lincoln Duo 425-221-6351, www.glennlestz.com

Express who you are as a couple with music! The Lestz-Lincoln Duo: Classical and pop personalized for you. Guitar & flute. Sound samples: www.glennlestz.com

Event Planning

Bella Bride Africa

weddings@bellabrideafrica.com, www.bellabrideafrica.com Inspiring and guiding brides through the wedding planning process. Come mingle and network with local wedding vendors while enjoying complimentary hair/makeup trials and champagne!

Clutch Events megan@ clutchevents.com, 660-5720, www. clutchevents.com Clutch Events is a boutique event-planning company. It is where fun goes to be planned!

Jubilee Event Engineers 720-0383, www.jubilee-seattle. com Smart weddings for real people. Jubilee Event Engineers, wedding planning/design/coordination/staffing. Fun, creative, and experienced, greater Seattle area specialists who rock it!

New Chapter Weddings 853-2142, www. newchapterweddings.com New Chapter Weddings & Events is a full service event planning company specializing in fun, reflective, and memorable celebrations.

Honeymoon & Hotel

Soundview Cottage

B&B 17600 Sylvester Rd SW Seattle WA 98166, 244-5209, www. seattlecottage.net Cozy, secluded cottage with spectacular view, private hot tub, complete kitchen, famously comfy king-size bed. Fifteen minutes from downtown Seattle in a quiet, natural setting.

Jewelry

Facèré Jewelry Art Gallery 1420 Fifth Ave, Suite 108 Seattle WA 98101, 624-6768, www. facerejewelryart.com Facèré Jewelry Art Gallery offers a unique selection of contemporary, antique & vintage rings for men and women, as well as one-of-a-kind custom designs.

Fancy Jewels 1914 Second Ave Seattle WA 98101, 956-2945, www.fancyjewels.com Jewelry and design shop specializing in custom handmade, modern jewelry.

Fox’s Gem Shop 1341 Fifth Ave Seattle WA 98101, 623-2528, www.foxsgemshop.com Our collection of engagement rings and wedding bands reflects our overall philosophy of exclusive designs, beautiful quality, and exquisite details.

Goldmine Design 1405 First Ave Seattle WA 98101, 622-3333, www.goldminedesignjewelers. com Goldmine Design is an artisan workshop where we invite you to be involved in the creative process. Always LGBT-friendly where we celebrate all love!

Sholdt Design 3130 Airport Way S, #411 Seattle WA 98134, 623-2334, www.sholdtdesign.

com When inspired design meets incomparable craftsmanship the result is

Our

Monica Schley, Harpist

Tara Nash 1411 Fourth Ave, Suite 401 Seattle WA 98101, 425218-9899, www.taranash.com Tara Nash is an expert antiques dealer and custom vintage jeweler with a work history that includes over 20 years in the jewelry business.

Turgeon Raine Jewellers 1407 Fifth Ave Seattle WA 98101, 447-9488, www.turgeonraine. com Located in downtown Seattle, the Northwest’s premier jeweler showcases a major collection of engagement rings and wedding bands and custom design shop with master jewelers.

With These Rings Seattle WA 98103, www.stephanieselle.com Make your own professional, quality set of handmade wedding bands through guided instruction, and they will become rich with your own love and memories.

Miscellaneous Details

Brianna Hartmann, Chalk Artist 931-1088 I am a professional chalk artist specializing in chalk lettering, illustration, and design for weddings and events.

Sparkle Donkey Tequila www.sparkledonkey.com Your wedding should sparkle! Make sure your bachelor/ette party and wedding feature Seattle’s own Sparkle Donkey Tequila! The World’s Best Tequila™.

Officiants

Emma Jay Byfield 2185770, emmajaybyfield@gmail.com

Romantic, non-religious wedding officiant with vintage-inspired, rockn-roll edge. Perfect for couples who want a modern, hip, heartfelt wedding ceremony.

One Heart Celebrations

2104 N 143rd St Seattle WA 98133, 949-1553, www.1heartcelebrations. com Ceremonies as you wish, making your day truly unforgettable! “Thank you for making our wedding so incredibly beautiful, sacred, meaningful and special.” —Suzanne N, Bothell

Rev. Eric O’Dell 4022633Rev. Eric O’Dell has officiated weddings serious to silly, from Hawaiian beaches to the Jefferson Memorial. He loves to coordinate his outfit to the occasion.

Rev. Lynnea Jardine lynnea@spiritualcareinstitute.org, 501-8297, spiritualcareinstitute.org

As your creative coach, I assist you in accessing your personal styles to implement the ceremony of your dreams. Traditional, eclectic, and everything in between!

Michael Good Photography, LLC michael@michaelgoodphotography. com, 369-0998, michaelgoodphotography.com

Artistic, romantic, timeless, black & white wedding images that capture your true feelings for a lifetime of memories, presented in a beautiful linen clamshell box.

Rathbone Images, LLC 9021 49th Ave NE Seattle WA 98115, 898-2507, www. peoplearebeautiful.com It is not the camera that makes the picture but the photographer, not the image that is captured but the relationship. People are beautiful.

Salon & Spa

Envy on Alki 2613 58th Ave SW Seattle WA 98116, 938-0909, www.envyonalki.com Bring your Bridal party to Envy on Alki for waxing, facials, and refreshed skin before your big day. Schedule your party online or call.

Frenchy’s Day Spa 3131

E Madison St Seattle WA 98112, 325-9582, www.frenchysdayspa. com Before you say “I do,” Frenchy’s is a must for your prenuptial pamper. Spa wedding parties, bridal makeup, lashes, nails, skincare, massage. Say “Yes”!

Venues

Adrift Hotel 409 Sid Snyder Dr Long Beach WA 98631, 360-6422311, www.adrifthotel.com Our new event space is located on the top floor overlooking the ocean; perfect for smaller weddings and receptions! On-site catering is also available.

Amazing Grace Spiritual Center 2007 NW 61st St Seattle WA 98102, 402-2633, www. amazinggraceseattle.org We are a newly-renovated historic church with contemporary charm. Perfect for interfaith and non-religious ceremonies, accommodating wedding parties up to 150.

Experience Music Project 325 Fifth Ave N Seattle WA 98109, 770-2700, www. empmuseum.org EMP Museum and Wolfgang Puck Catering can help design the wedding of your dreams—whether out of the box, or truly traditional.

Georgetown Stables 980 S Nebraska St Seattle WA 98108, info@georgetownstables. com, www.georgetownstables. com Perfect for your non-traditional wedding, the historic Stables venue boasts high ceilings, brick walls, and beautiful wooden ceiling beams. Versatile interior abounds with vintage treasures!

Mount Baker Community Clubhouse 2811 Mt Rainier Ave S Seattle WA 98144, 722-7209, www.mountbaker. org 100 years of celebrations! The historic architecture, classic ballroom, and lush landscaping provides a charmingly elegant venue for all types of events.

Museum of Glass 1801 Dock St Tacoma WA 98402, 253396-1768, museumofglass.org The Museum’s state-of-the-art facility offers a unique venue and a variety of settings for your wedding and reception.

The Olympic Rooftop Pavilion 5214 Ballard Ave NW Seattle WA 98107, 484-4982, www. stoneburnerseattle.com 1,370 square feet of event space with sweeping views of the mountains and waterways. The Pavilion features vaulted ceilings, a 20 foot skylight and NanaWalls.

Primo 1106 Eighth Ave Seattle WA 98101, 419-9997, www. primoseattle.com Host your event in our quaint, intimate setting. “The most beautiful room in town.” Italian food and full beverage services. Convenient, accessible urban location.

Ray’s Boathouse 6049 Seaview Ave NW Seattle WA 98107, 789-6309, www.rays.com Perfect location for your wedding, reception, or rehearsal dinner. Spectacular views, scenic boat traffic, majestic sunsets, sustainable global seafood & private waterfront dining room.

Seattle Art Museum 1300 First Ave Seattle WA 98101, 6543100, www.SeattleArtMuseum.org The Seattle Art Museum offers 10 different areas to meet your needs. We recommend reserving your date as soon as possible.

SimpliDone jan@simplidone. com, 915-1077, www.simplidone. com Non-denomination celebrant loves ceremonies! Jan will help you design the perfect-for-you ceremony for your wedding, vow renewals, anniversary, or commitment ceremony.

Party Supply

Champion Party Supply

124 Denny Way Seattle WA 98109, 284-1980, www.championparty.com

We offer an extensive assortment of products and services including party supplies and party decorations for all occasions, including weddings!

Photographers & Videographers

Dani Weiss Photography dani@daniweissphotography. com, 760-3336, www. daniweissphotography.com Fun & playful documentary-style wedding, event, and portrait photographer. 25 years of experience. Over 700 weddings and events photographed. Proud member of the GSBA.

Della Chen Photography info@dellachen.com, 325-2298, www.dellachen.com You love each other. I love photography. Let’s do this.

Bellevue Arts Museum 510 Bellevue Way NE Bellevue WA 98004, 425-519-0745, www. bellevuearts.org BAM’s modern architecture, dazzling art exhibitions, and indoor/outdoor spaces create the perfect backdrop for a ceremony or reception that echoes your passion and creativity.

Burke Museum 17th Ave NE and NE 45th St Seattle WA 98195, 543-5590, www.burkemuseum. org Dance with dinosaurs! Mingle with masks! Located on the beautiful University of Washington campus, the Burke Museum is the perfect place for your wedding.

Century Ballroom 915 E Pine St, 2nd Floor Seattle WA 98122, 324-7263, www.

CenturyBallroom.com Two FABULOUS rooms, historic ambience, catering available (The Tin Table), intimate groups or 300 people, wedding dance instruction, available daytimes/evenings, 15+ years experience.

The Coterie Room 2137 Second Ave Seattle WA 98121, 956-8000, www.thecoterieroom.

com Two of the nation’s best chefs + extraordinary service make this beautiful 1920’s building perfect for parties. Now booking for events, from large to intimate.

Seattle Parks Dakota Place Park 4304 SW Dakota St Seattle WA 98116, 684-7254, www. seattle.gov/parks/facilities/rentals/ Dakota Place, a charming and historic remodeled building, is perfect for your ceremony or reception. Special pricing ends May 31.

Seattle Parks Officers Club at Magnuson Park 6310 NE 74th St Seattle WA 98115, 233-7892, www.seattle.gov/parks/ Magnuson/reservations.htm Magnuson Park’s Officers

STRANGER SUGGESTS

Chang-rae Lee BOOKS

Chang-rae Lee was the first writer to recognize the genius of Stranger favorite Gary Shteyngart—he helped place The Russian Debutante’s Handbook with a publisher, launching Shteyngart’s career. Lee is a very different writer than Shteyngart, and he doesn’t carry his apprentice’s overnight-sensation status—his stately, confident novels have slowly amassed an army of fans over three decades. Now, Lee tries a new genre with On Such a Full Sea, a dystopian novel about a chaotic future America where class lines and immigration leave most citizens in a state of perpetual war. (Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave, spl.org, 7 pm, free) PAUL CONSTANT

‘Welcome to Night Vale’

Created by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, Welcome to Night Vale is the twice-monthly podcast that presents itself as a news-radio show for a fictional town where all conspiracy theories are true. In style and content, the show blends Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon with David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, and the results are deeply weird and beguiling. Tonight, Night Vale comes to life onstage, where our hosts will be joined by special guest Jason Webley, who will provide Night Vale’s beloved musical weather reports. (Neptune Theatre, 1303 NE 45th St, stgpresents.org, 8 and 10 pm, $26.50) DAVID SCHMADER

Wooden Shjips MUSIC

Honestly, Wooden Shjips’ early releases for Holy Mountain top their latest output with Thrill Jockey (West, Back to Land). Those first recordings boasted a frazzled, more fearsome propulsion, like Suicide converging with Hawkwind while F/i’s Richard Franecki set off guitar fireworks. Now the Shjips are slightly more refined, but the same hypnotic principle applies: thick, hairy guitar riffs and cyclical organ motifs surging over metronomic beats that motor in strict 4/4 time. It’s some of the greatest traveling rock music ever. (Crocodile, 2200 Second Ave, thecrocodile.com, 8 pm, $13 adv, 21+) DAVE SEGAL

Amanda Manitach ART

“Sexy, watery.” That’s the mouthwatering way Amanda Manitach—the prominent Seattle writer and artist, a Stranger Genius Award finalist from 2012—described the new work she’s showing here: larger watercolors than she’s ever done before, some life-size. One is 10 feet long. Dealer Bryan Ohno, she says, “suggested I have a Jeff Koons moment,” referring to Koons’s Made in Heaven series, when he photographed himself having explicit sex with his porn star then-wife, causing controversy but claiming he was photographing nothing but love itself. Bring it on. (Bryan Ohno Gallery, 521 S Main St, bryanohno.com, 6–8 pm, free, through March 1) JEN GRAVES

‘Dresden Concertos’ MUSIC

According to a New York Times profile of Rachel Barton Pine from a few months ago, the not-yet-40-year-old Chicago-based violinist—who has determinedly claimed the identity of violinist since age 5, when her family could afford neither music lessons nor even the gas to get her there—takes headbanging as her gold standard. She wants 18th-century music, on 18th-century instruments, to stir people as much as Slayer moves metalheads. Tonight she’s leading/joining Seattle Baroque Orchestra. She’ll play the viola d’amore, the seven-stringed cousin of the violin that was the hotshot of its day, in a program by Vivaldi, Telemann, Handel, and Pisendel. (Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, townhallseattle.org, 8 pm/preconcert lecture 7 pm, $20–$42) JEN GRAVES

Match Game: Dolly Parton Edition GAME SHOW

Maybe you’re NOT currently wearing dentures or compression socks, and maybe you DIDN’T grow up watching Laugh-In, The $10,000 Pyramid, or Match Game when they originally aired, back in ye olden times. Maybe you don’t even know what a TV game show is. It matters not! Seattle’s long-running Match Game is a boozy “fill-in-the-blanks” comedy-improv show hosted by local troublemakers, comedians, and drag queens. Swear words and laughter happen. This edition focuses on country music’s most famous bottle-blond, Miss Dolly “Blankety-Blank” Parton. (Re-bar, 1114 Howell St, rebar seattle.com, 7 pm, $10, 21+) KELLY O

Ian Haney López

BOOKS/POLITICS

Remember the dismal days of the George W. Bush presidency, when linguist George Lakoff’s excellent Don’t Think of an Elephant! explained why correct word choice is so politically important? Ian Haney López’s new Dog Whistle Politics focuses that idea on a very contemporary political landscape, specifically addressing how Republicans use code words—“welfare queens,” “thugs”—to incite and exploit racial and class unrest for their own political gain. Republicans have been winning at the word game for decades now, and linguistic geniuses like Lakoff and López help provide the ability to recognize this problem—and the vocabulary to fight back. (Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, townhallseattle.org, 7:30 pm, $5) PAUL CONSTANT

Lotus Asian Kitchen & Lounge

Situated in the space formerly held by the First Hill Bar and Grill and run by the folks behind the famously delicious Green Leaf in the International District, Lotus is the best thing to happen to First Hill in years. As with Green Leaf, the Vietnamese options are amazing Unlike Green Leaf, Lotus also has a full menu of Chinese items, as well as a full bar and daily happy hour. If you want good bargain pho, go anywhere. If you want great artisan pho plus a dozen other delights, go to Lotus. (Lotus Asian Kitchen & Lounge, 901 Madison St, 623-6333, 10:30 am–2 am) DAVID SCHMADER TUE JAN 21

FRIDAY, JANUARY 31

Cue: An opening night party filled with alumni talent, headlined by hip-hop artist Katie Kate, and featuring performances by dancer Amy O’Neal and new arts collective The Pendleton House. Also includes DJ, catered food truck and complimentary cocktails. Tickets $25. Ages 21+. 7-10 p.m.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 1

Day of Ideas: A day of performances, experiences, workshops and conversations that draw connections between art and wellbeing, featuring a workshop with David Leventhal, Program Director for the nationally acclaimed Dance for PD®, a collaboration between Mark Morris Dance Group and Brooklyn Parkinson Group. The day will explore the palliative nature of creativity and artistry across all spectrums of wellbeing from personal to social health. Free and open to the public. 9:30 a.m.-2 p.m.

ARTS

ART Fresh Secrets

Playing Hide-andSeek at Platform

BY JEN GRAVES

“It’s 1979 and we’re all getting stoned in Donna’s house.” So begins Robert Yoder’s artist statement for his new joint show with Michelle Kloehn at Platform Gallery, called Dark Entries. They’re journal entries, maybe—the narrator is unidentified. The short slice of life that follows that sentence involves wrestling with another boy who, like the unknown voice, also gets a hard-on, “but we didn’t do anything.”

A thought comes to mind about the game of hide-and-seek that’s instigated by this “artist’s statement” and the show of enigmatic abstract paintings and photographs it accompanies: Now, here, in this city where Yoder lives and made this art earlier this year, smoking pot is legal, something you can do in your kitchen, still wearing your Oxford shirt after a long day at the office. Similarly, these days you can not only acknowledge your mutual hard-ons, but take them all the way to the chapel and gay-marry. If anything in officially liberalized urbanity is frowned upon, it’s secrecy. Hiding is verboten. Why aren’t you out? Yoder’s works feel nostalgic for some good oldfashioned shame.

finalist—he immediately regretted sharing that he associates his works with drug addicts and gravestones, a whole underworld, although you might have guessed by looking at this newest work, some of which sits on the floor and rests against the wall like a headstone awaiting installation. These pieces are his hottest, most intimate, and throbbingly saddest works so far in a career that once was marked by tightness and geometry. These paintings are surprisingly soft, with frayed and uneven edges. They bleed and cry. For the first time, Yoder is making paintings on T-shirts, bandannas, and torn scraps of fabric. The top layer on each painting is a mask. It’s rough, like a field of static from which something audible might rise at any moment, each surface either dirty-black or dirty-white. But there’s screaming color underneath, smothered. It pops up in spots or radiates out at an edge. In the center of each piece is a putative focal subject. The subjects are mysterious symbols. They look like phrases in a made-up language, something cultish and desperate, scribbled like dodgy graffiti.

REVIEW

Robert Yoder and Michelle Kloehn Platform Gallery Through Feb 1

What’s a man to do when his oppressors abandon him? Given the nature of memory, he can’t abandon them back.

Yoder is a loner in many ways. But he’s also an engaged and sharp-tongued observer of and participant in art and politics. His work has not so far been overtly political, but Yoder is dealing with identity indirectly, by shifting his process of coding. He would probably be mortified to hear himself described this way. After he taped an interview for the Neddy Awards last year—he was a

Several of Yoder’s titles refer to the story of the artist statement, like Teenage Donna Overall, the aesthetic is goth-glampunk, but there’s a pastel side, too, and Teenage Donna (Hobby Lantern) is a large, almost pastoral piece, with pear greens, smoky grays, and salmon pinks rising from the bog of oil and acrylic on a cotton T-shirt. I looked up “hobby lantern,” and it’s the phenomenon, according to Wikipedia, also called the “will-o’-the-wisp” (“Medieval Latin: ‘foolish fire’”). In English folk tradition, hobby lanterns are said to be “ghost lights seen by travellers at night, especially over bogs, swamps, or marshes.” Yoder’s paintings equate the traveler with the ghost. They’re both.

“Lately, I have been thinking about… the difference between what we think we see and what we want to see.” That’s the statement by Michelle Kloehn, the other artist showing at Platform, whose works are mixed in among Yoder’s paintings. Platform asked him to do a solo show, but he pulled in Kloehn, who lives

in New York and makes black-and-white photographs that are like somebody you’re chasing who disappears around a corner every time you get them in view. To get her feathery, eerie effects, she uses a process that was popular in the 1800s and has gained traction recently among photographers increasingly interested in the tension between objects and images. Kloehn’s main subject is light—she’s fascinated with the way it falls, reveals, obscures, forms into shapes. To make her photographs, she exposes objects she assembles using simple materials (paper, tape, mirrors) or light itself onto glass or metal plates poured with collodion; the plates are then immersed

These paintings are surprisingly soft. They bleed and cry.

in a solution of silver nitrate and an image appears, still wet. Over the years, Kloehn has been more and less geometric-modern, foggy-pictorialist, X-ray tech, and dirty punk. Here she mixes styles, and—when they’re not so dark you can almost make out nothing at all—the photographs feel like fresh secrets in a foreign language. Kloehn’s art raises the hairs on the neck of Yoder’s art, and vice versa.

Another monochrome history of hiding has to be mentioned here: It’s at SOIL this month, right next door to Platform, and it’s by another Seattle artist, Christopher Buening. In a glass case, he displays—splayed open—his seventh-grade diary, along with an exact copy he’s handwritten as a grownup gay man. (He was born in 1973.) The book is open to an anxious page scribbled after a wet dream about a boy, followed by an urgent denial that he’s gay. The copy is a precise and determined reenactment, as clear and clean and reassuring as unconditional acceptance. Like Robert Rauschenberg’s hand copy of an expressionist painting or Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s pairs of clocks, it’s a lover who’s a mirror, a private past reconstituted in public.

BOOKS

Punk Isn’t Dead

Putin Just Threw It in Jail for a While

BY EMILY NOKES

By now, you know: On February 21, 2012, five women in colorful dresses and masks entered the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow to stage a “punk prayer.” Three of the women were arrested, tried, and sentenced to two years in prison. Russian prison.

I kept careful tabs on the events (one of my first Stranger pieces was on Pussy Riot), but still craved information. These faraway stories and sterile news reports were so disconnected from what I really wanted to know. Who are these women? Masha Gessen’s Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot wastes no time in answering that question, intimately detailing the rise of Pussy Riot by profiling each member and the events that led to their crusade.

Pussy Riot’s founder, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (Nadya), was an obsessively studious child. Her somewhat immature father, Andrei—who tells Gessen things like “I am an expert in the upbringing of girls”—encouraged her to be more rebellious. Teenage Nadya took up radical activism in university, like when five couples videotaped themselves having sex in the Biology Museum (Nadya was nine months pregnant at the time; her daughter Gera was born four days later).

REVIEW

Words Will Break Cement by Masha Gessen (Penguin Group, $16)

Pussy Rioter Yekaterina Samutsevich (Kat) met Nadya through an exhibition portraying Kat’s attempts to vote—she and a friend photographed themselves trying to cast votes at a psychiatric unit falsely listed as a polling station. Nadya’s quest for selfeducation eventually landed on feminist theory. She and Kat joined forces and concluded that actions should be less arty and more… fun, as “accessible as the Guerrilla Girls, as irreverent as Bikini Kill.” Since, as Gessen points out, Russia essentially has no legacy of 20thcentury feminism, they had to make it up. An allfemale group first calling themselves the Pisya Riot collective (“pisya” is a child’s word for genitals, similar to “weewee”) before settling on Pussy Riot, Nadya decided that they should be a “punk band.”

The background Gessen provides is fascinating, especially when she focuses on Pussy Riot’s refreshed concept of “punk,” and how they found a stylized rebellion to solidify their image and publicize what they were so angry about. Pussy Riot are not the first to protest Russia’s corruption, and far from the first to be thrown in jail, but they might be the first to capture the world’s attention. Gessen agrees Pussy Riot were well-branded, and intentionally so. As the “punk band” added members, song lyrics, and instruments, they agreed that visuals and costumes were needed to avoid the appearance that they were merely “stupid chicks just standing there screaming,” as Kat put it. The group, now fully neon, called for the end of Putin’s reign and the beginning of a feminist revolution. Maria Alyokhina—a young mother and soft-spoken hippie type—joined, and at this point, the story becomes familiar and the infamous “punk prayer” is not far off. The second half of Words Will Break Cement is denser. Gessen dutifully describes

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page after page of pure frustration in the form of meaningless jail paperwork (down to the right to wash their hair or eat heated food), the government’s sudden coats of paint and minor prison improvements when a “high-profile” inmate would be filmed, and the Alice in Wonderland–esque trial itself, which you really have to read to believe. Pussy Riot’s inexperienced defense fumbled hugely while the judges and witnesses interacted in what can only be described as a grade-school interpretation of a court hearing.

Witness: They began to don masks with slits in the eyes and mouth. I was caused further anxiety by the fact that a guitar was being taken out.

Judge: A regular guitar?

Witness: No no no, not a regular guitar. It was an electric guitar.

Judge: Please describe their bodily movements.

Witness: As far as I’m concerned, these were devilish jerkings.

After the unusually rushed verdict, Gessen’s communication with Pussy Riot was hindered by the rotten whims of the Russian prison system, causing many of their letters to be vague for fear of further punishment. By each woman’s account, though, the system is a grossly unethical nightmare at worst and very, very sad at best. Near the end of the book, Gessen prints what she considers to be Nadya’s best piece of writing: an honest, furious account of the horrors she and her fellow inmates faced in the penal colony. They’re forced to work under largely illegal conditions, even by Russian standards, and hygiene and shame are used to control women who regularly turn against each other.

Last month, the two members of Pussy Riot who were still imprisoned—Nadya and Maria—were freed, two months shy of their sentence (they are labeling this act of “amnesty” a publicity stunt for Putin to save face before Russia’s upcoming Olympic Games). And I’m still thinking about punk. It may have lost its original shape—punk’s definition, if there ever was one, is stretched to the point of sagging—but Gessen’s account reminded me what we still need punk for: its inability to sit and quietly wait for justice to chug through some faulty, fucked up system.

OPERA

Divinely Profane

I Loved Jerry Springer: The Opera

BY GOLDY

GREVIEW

Jerry Springer: The Opera Balagan Theatre at Moore Theatre Through Jan 26

Jerry Springer Show episode set in hell (with Satan played by Sean Nelson). But what makes this show work is the single precarious premise that juxtaposes a classically operatic score against a blasphemous and intentionally offensive libretto:

I’m tired of your little dick flesh, It’s so small, I’d get more pleasure From fucking myself with my own clitoris!

The conceit would grow old fast (if it worked at all) were it not for the ability of the performers to sing this profane libretto so operatically. Credit director Shawn Belyea for casting a couple of actual opera singers— Jennifer Bromagen and Megan Chenovick in multiple roles—along with the most uniformly talented cast of vocal performers I’ve heard on a Seattle stage outside of a Broadway touring company.

I’ve never heard the Moore Theatre sound this good. Both the solo and ensemble performances are outstanding, and whatever acoustical problems plagued prior Balagan/ STG collaborations (their recent production of Carrie was often nightmarish, and not in a good way) have been fixed by sound designer Brent Warwick and the rest of the creative team.

There are simply too many outstanding performances among the 25-member cast to call out by name, and the ensemble numbers are just as notable as any solo. Perhaps music director Nathan Young deserves the praise for helping to make Jerry Springer: The Opera a much richer and more entertaining theatrical experience than the subject matter promises.

OPERA

Rape as Metaphor

Rigoletto at Seattle Opera and The Rape of Lucretia at St. Mark’s

BY REBECCA BROWN

Biven the 40,000 protest e-mails Balagan Theatre says it received from angry Christians before opening night, you won’t be shocked to learn Jerry Springer: The Opera is as obscene and profane as billed. Klansmen tap-dance, talk-show guests smear themselves with feces, and Satan tells a diapered Jesus to fuck off—that’s all consistent with the lowbrow spirit of the TV show the opera apes. But in addition to being foul, this coproduction with Seattle Theatre Group is both consistently funny and vocally gorgeous—and that may come as a bit of a revelation.

There’s not much of a plot per se—the first act is basically an episode of The Jerry Springer Show set to music, in which Jerry (Brandon Felker) is killed; the second act is a

Rigoletto Seattle Opera at McCaw Hall Through Jan 25

The Rape of Lucretia Vespertine Opera Theater at St. Mark’s Cathedral Jan 10–11

oth Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia and Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto tell stories in which women without power are raped by boozy and powerful men (a king, a duke), then feel ashamed and kill themselves (the women, not the men; the men get away with it). Both are also based on historical events. Lucretia’s rape, around 500 BC by Tarquinius, the Etruscan king’s son, inspired Romans to revolt and create the Roman Empire. Victor Hugo’s play Le Roi S’amuse, which inspired Rigoletto, was inspired by stories of the sexually violent exploits of 16th-century King Francis I of France. Both operas were also subversively political when they premiered. Verdi’s opened in 1851 when Italy was being run by Austria, Britten’s in 1946 when England was just beginning to get over being bombed by Germany. They both use rape as a metaphor. But rape is not a metaphor; it’s a horrible thing experienced by (mostly) women. Do not diminish it like that. Don’t use it to talk about something else. If you’re going to talk about it, then talk about it.

Vespertine Opera’s fifth production, a riveting Rape of Lucretia, neither shies away from nor creepily eroticizes the violence of

Clutch Theatre Best Year Ever

the rape of at the center of the story. Under the astute direction of Dan Wallace Miller, José Rubio both vocally and physically portrays the horrible fracture of self that turns Tarquinius into a man who’ll rape: His voice strains when it ought to, and his face gets hard then rubbery. Julia Benzinger’s Lucretia captures the confusion, loathing, and loathing of self—her body juddering between hesitance and urgency—that occurs when a victim decides she is partly to blame and then becomes ashamed and suicidal.

In grand or even just great big opera, the performers are on a stage a long way away from you, and if you see their faces and their big broad gestures, it’s probably through binoculars. But chamber operas like this one (cast of eight, orchestra of a dozen) are intimate, and St. Mark’s Cathedral was the perfect venue. Though the story is set several centuries BC, the two-person chorus (Brendan Tuohy, fierce, and Holly Boaz, tender) is intended, in Ronald Duncan’s libretto, to interpret the action from a Christian perspective. After the rape, the suicide, and the grief (the latter rendered exquisitely by the super-terrific young bass Colin Ramsey as Lucretia’s husband), the Female Chorus asks repeatedly, as if stunned: “Is it all?” The Male Chorus answers:

It is not all…

Despite the hope suggested in the words, under Miller’s direction, the Female Chorus pushes the Male Chorus away, reversing the meaning of the text.

Vespertine, which describes its mission as “performing unfamiliar works in unfamiliar places,” is making opera unfamiliar again in all the best ways—i.e., surprising. Speight Jenkins, Seattle Opera’s soon-toretire general director, was at St. Mark’s on opening night and must have been happy to see so many young performers who’d been nurtured by Seattle Opera’s Young Artists Program (Miller, Ramsey, Emma Grimsley) coming into their own.

Rape is not a metaphor. Do not use it to talk about something else.

Though our nature’s still as frail He bears our sin

And then forgives us all… He is all!

WORN OUT

PATTERNS AND MAGIC AT KINOKUNIYA

An annex to the International District’s wildly popular Asian-foods emporium Uwajimaya, Kinokuniya is a two-tiered store with imported books and gifts, and singsong Japanese-pop background music, and narrow aisles that bring a crammed feeling. You’ll also find taco-scented stickers, eraser sets rendered into thrillingly precise strawberry-dessert miniatures, magazines in every language, and a vast selection of instructional pattern-making books.

Rigoletto is one of opera’s great sing-alongs, and Seattle Opera’s 2004 version set in Mussolini’s Italy, while not surprising, remains crisp and engaging. I don’t know what it was about lower vocal registers this weekend, but the Rigoletto standout for me was also the bass, Andrea Silvestrelli. An amoral hit man is not someone I should be drawn to, but Silvestrelli’s burr was just so butterscotchy. Nadine Sierra, in her Seattle Opera debut, portrays Gilda as somehow, even after her sexual violation, innocent. Maybe Gilda is one of those women who, post–sexual trauma, constructs herself an explanation of her rape as, well, a metaphor? Or a rite of passage one must take for “love”? Maybe rape, in addition to being a physical fact always, is in some way not only an example of but also a metaphor for abuse of power?

Maybe rape is always what it is and also something else.

good, with patterns for dainty epaulets and scallop-collared tippets. Definitely check out the Pattern Magic series by Tomoko Nakamichi, a professor at Japan’s esteemed Bunka Fashion College. Worth noting: Every fall, Seattle Central Community College hosts Bunka’s student fashion show, which is always excellent, and you should totally go. Nakamichi’s garments are sculptural oddities, inlaid with tunnels or craters, or knots everywhere, surging up from the chest in a tangled wad. These knots are meant to resemble tiny bells, explains Nakamichi, and seeing the finished dress will evoke the sound of their ringing.

Fashion patterns are paper templates traced onto fabric—which get cut out and sewn together, forming clothes. To develop patterns, pattern-makers must incorporate three-dimensional fabric garments as two-dimensional paper shapes. This conversion is part of proper apparel development, but unless you’re fascinated by elaborate spatial puzzles, measurements, and labeling rituals, the labor turns steadily joyless. (As in all things, it helps to be high, and to bring an assload of Skittles.)

Back to Kinokuniya’s shelves. Some of the books don’t feature English translations, and if you have no technical training, the diagrams’ arrows will only point without meaning. I bet you can figure them out, though. And if nothing else, the pictures are gorgeous. She Has a Mannish Style is

Nakamichi’s other inspirations are similarly far-flung. One design has bendy accordion-disk sleeves, like the arms of a mid-century robot. Another, with stacked folds encircling the torso, deliberately resembles a crushed soda can. Another has peaks jutting out the back, belly, and hood, making a perfect triangle silhouette. Another has gloves emerging from the waist seams, so the wearer’s fingers become disembodied units, growing up from fabric.

Nakamichi’s masterwork blends an ordinary white knit T-shirt with an ordinary white knit hood. But the ovoid face hole and marshmallowy contours mutate all the sportswear-casual-ness, and the look swiftly takes on a sock-footed, cavity-fighting, hovering-apparition kind of vibe.

Special thanks to translators Lei Nakatani and Koji Yabumoto.

Send fashion tips to marti@thestranger.com

ARTS CALENDAR Only the most noteworthy stuff.

ART Gallery Openings

BRYAN OHNO GALLERY

“Sexy, watery.” That’s the mouthwatering way Amanda Manitach—the prominent Seattle writer and artist, a Stranger Genius Award finalist from 2012—described the new work she’s showing here: larger watercolors than she’s ever done before, some life-size. One is 10 feet long. Free. Reception Thurs Jan 16, 6-8 pm. Tues-Sat. Through March 1. 521 S Main St, 459-6857.

COCA GEORGETOWN

Nightmare Inductions: Well, this sounds at least a little terrifying. First of all, the collective that created it is called Noxious Sector, which sounds like a Gotham City street gang, and second, the art is “brain wave entraining sound and video,” of which some pieces are titled “Dreams of Falling” and “Dreams of Teeth.” Teeth. Free. Reception Thurs Jan 16, 5-9 pm. Through April 10. 5701 Sixth Ave S, Plaza Ste 258 728-1980.

COLUMBIA CITY GALLERY Stomp : Forty-five teens and adults with disabilities created massive monoprints using their feet and wheelchairs. Free. Reception Sat Jan 18, 5-8 pm. Wed-Sun. Through March 2. 4864 Rainier Ave S 760-9843.

CORNISH COLLEGE OF THE ARTS

Robert C Jones: An Update: A look back at 50 years of painting, curated by Beth Sellars. Free. Reception Thurs Jan 16, 5-8 pm. Wed-Sat. Through March 8. 1000 Lenora St

FETHERSTON GALLERY

Fred Birchman: Graphite and charcoal drawings, accented with watercolor. Architectural and design influences throughout, but also dreaminess and sketchiness. Free. Reception Thurs Jan 16, 5-8 pm. Wed-Sun. Through Feb 20. 818 E Pike St 322-9440.

GAGE ACADEMY OF ART

Benjamin Albrecht Vierling : Perhaps you know this artist from the portrait he did for Joanna Newsom’s album, Ys Medievally portraits and still-lifes. Free. Reception Fri Jan 17, 6-8 pm. Jan 17-Feb 14. 1501 10th Ave E, 526-2787.

JAMES HARRIS GALLERY

Gary Hill : The widely lauded Seattle-based new media virtuoso, a Stranger (and MacArthur) Genius Award winner, installs video and sculpture in all three rooms of the gallery. Free. Reception Thurs Jan 16, 6-8 pm. Thurs-Sat. Through March 29. 604 Second Ave, 903-6220.

PHOTOGRAPHIC

CENTER NORTHWEST

Question Bridge: Black Males: This nationally touring transmedia exhibition/discussion between black men about black male identity was created by the artists Hank Willis Thomas, Chris Johnson, Beyeté Ross Smith, and Kamal Sinclair. An original complementary exhibition is curated by Seattle’s Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, with Michelle Dunn Marsh and Ann Palleson of PCNW, called Seen: An Exploration of the Inside and the Out, the Then and the Now, by the (Still) Invisible Men. Free. Reception Thurs Jan 16, 6:30 pm. Mon-Sun. Through March 8. 900 12th Ave, 720-7222.

PROGRAPHICA

Arranged & Discovered: The Contemporary Still Life : Five dudes who paint things that don’t move. Fred Birchman, Brian Blackham, Eric Elliott, Dean Fisher, and Matt Klos. Free.

Reception Sat Jan 18, 2-4 pm. Tues-Sat. Through Feb 15. 3419 E Denny Way, 322-3851.

SOLO

Workman/Walkman : Sixteen paintings corresponding to sixteen 1980s albums, or what Jason Workman painted “for the duration of each album, and when the album ended—so did the painting.” Free. Reception Thurs Jan 16, 7 pm Jan 16-Feb 12. 200 Roy St, 213-0080.

SUYAMA SPACE Site Machines: Installations by Tivon Rice : A network of cameras, screens, and lighting

installations transforms the gallery into a high-tech immersive space. Free. Reception Fri Jan 17, 5-7 pm. Mon-Fri. Through April 11. 2324 Second Ave, 256-0809.

WASHINGTON STATE CONVENTION & TRADE CENTER

IDxID: New Identities Revisited: The original exhibition from the gallery IDEA Odyssey was called IDxID , curated by C. Davida Ingram, and here’s the followup, with new work from painter Kathy Liao and mixed-media artist Kat Larson, and interdisciplinary, intersectional-identity art from several others, too. Free. Reception Thurs Jan 16, 6-7:30 pm Mon-Sun. Through April 9. 800 Convention Pl, 2nd Floor 694-5000.

Continuing Exhibitions

PLATFORM GALLERY

Dark Entries: See review, page 37. Free. Wed-Sat. Through Feb 1. 114 Third Ave S, 323-2808.

SOIL

A Place for Memories and Secrets: Drawing, painting, and sculpture that’s bold in line, color, and form from Susanna Bluhm, Christopher Buening, and London Tsai. Free. Wed-Sat. Through Feb 1. 112 Third Ave S, 264-8061.

Events

ALLYSON VIEIRA

A free lecture by the New Yorkbased sculptor, whose installations include plaster, drywall, ancient ruins, and baby octopi. Reservations recommended. Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave NE, 543-2280. www.henryart.org. Free. Thurs Jan 16 at 7 pm.

DESIGN LAB: AN OPEN SKETCHBOOK ON AURORA AVENUE

Three weekly gatherings, open to the public, are intended to re-imagine what has become Seattle’s dingiest thoroughfare by considering “History” (Jan 16), “Transportation” (Jan 23), and “Development” (Jan 30). How did Aurora get this way and where is it headed? Henry Art Gallery, 4100 15th Ave NE, 543-2280. www.henryart.org. Free. Thurs 4:30-7:30 pm.

visualart@thestranger.com

READINGS

Wed 1/15

BREADLINE

Poet Elizabeth Colen, singer/ songwriter Ariel Burke, and spoken word poets Casey Tonnelly and Anise Giselle all perform at the newest edition of Capitol Hill’s most inventive reading series, along with musician/ comic Tbasa. Vermillion, 1508 11th Ave, 709-9797. www.vermillionseattle.com. Free. 7 pm.

BRYCE ANDREWS

Badluck Way is a memoir about being young on a ranch in Montana. A wolf is involved in the story, too. Elliott Bay Book Company , 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600. elliottbaybook. com. Free. 7 pm.

CHANG-RAE LEE

Chang-rae Lee is an excellent literary novelist. His new one, On Such a Full Sea takes place in the far future, which is a change of pace for the author, who has traditionally been quite the realist. Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave, 386-4636. spl.org. Free. 7 pm.

UW CASTALIA

UW Creative Writing MFA students read new work, including first-year poet Catherine Bresnor, prose writers Miranda Schmidt and Mickie Centrine, and some faculty member or another. Hugo House 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030. hugohouse.org. Free. 7 pm.

DOUGLAS STONE

Everyone quotes Albert Einstein on God not playing dice with the universe, but most people don’t know that quote is supposedly a refutation of quantum physics. In his new book, Einstein and the Quantum Stone argues that Einstein contributed more to quantum mechanics than we give him credit for. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, 634-3400.

means we recommend it.

townhallseattle.org. Free. 7:30 pm.

Thurs 1/16

OLIVIA LAING

The promotional material for The Trip to Echo Spring reads, “WHY IS IT THAT SOME OF THE GREATEST WORKS OF LITERATURE HAVE BEEN PRODUCED BY WRITERS IN THE GRIP OF ALCOHOLISM, AN ADDICTION THAT COST THEM PERSONAL HAPPINESS AND CAUSED HARM TO THOSE WHO LOVED THEM?” No, I don’t know why it’s in all-caps. That’s a question for the book’s publisher. Still, the book sounds interesting. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600. elliottbaybook.com. Free. 7 pm.

Fri 1/17

JAYANT SWAMY

Colours in the Spectrum is a novel “about a man born in Bangalore who is living in the unforgiving culture of Los Angeles.” Third Place Books 17171 Bothell Way NE, 3663333. thirdplacebooks.com. Free. 6:30 pm.

JAKE ROSENFELD

What Unions No Longer Do is a book with a title that has special meaning, what with the recent Boeing Machinist’s vote. University Book Store, 4326 University Way NE, 634-3400. bookstore.washington.edu. Free. 7 pm.

KAREN RUSSELL Russell is the author of the short story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised By Wolves, the novel, Swamplandia , and her newest, just-out-in-paperback story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She’s a young author who has been shortlisted for the Pulitzer and who recently won a MacArthur “Genius” grant. And yes, she’s actually that good. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, 652-4255. townhallseattle. org. $5. 7:30 pm.

Sat 1/18

CLEAN REPUBLIC

The local organization, which distributes and sells “personal alternative energy products including electric bike conversion kits and wind turbines,” will give a presentation titled “How and Why to E-Bike.” Ada’s Technical Books , 425 15th Ave E, 3 pm. seattletechnicalbooks.com. free. 3 pm.

Mon 1/20

ELIZABETH KOLBERT

The New Yorker writer’s new book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, is about extinctions happening all around us and possibly our own extinction as a species. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, 634-3400. townhallseattle.org. $5. 7:30 pm.

IAN HANEY LÓPEZ

Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinevnted Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class is a book about how the Republican Party has built a base out of scaring racists. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, 652-4255. townhallseattle.org. $5. 7:30 pm.

Tues 1/21

CAROLINE L. ARNOLD The subtitle of Small Move, Big Change is Using Microresolutions to Transform Your Life Permanently It’s about achieving broad goals by shrinking your goals to tiny size and achieving them, piece by piece. University Book Store, 4326 University Way NE, 634-3400. bookstore.washington.edu. Free. 7 pm.

SCOTT STOSSEL

Stossel has always been anxious. His new book, My Age of Anxiety, examines the fact that anxiety didn’t really exist as a thing three decades ago, but now it’s everywhere. Town Hall 1119 Eighth Ave, 634-3400. townhallseattle.org. Free. 7:30 pm.

readings@thestranger.com

Current Runs

14/48: THE WORLD’S QUICKEST THEATER FESTIVAL

The world’s quickest theater festival, in which playwrights, directors, actors, musicians, and designers write, rehearse, and perform 14 new short plays in 48 hours. The event is somewhere between art marathon and community bonding event, where strict conditions do their best to broil all the preciousness out of the theater-making process. This year, seven visual artists will join the party, painting responses to the performances. ACT Theatre, 700 E Union St, 292-7676. acttheatre.org. $20$25. Fri-Sat at 8 and 10:30 pm. Through Jan 18.

A GREAT WILDERNESS

A drama about an aging de-gayer (or whatever you call people who try to coach other people into straightness) who is forced to confront his life’s legacy by one final client. Directed by Braden Abraham. Seattle Repertory Theatre, 155 Mercer St, Seattle Center, 443-2222. seattlerep. org. $12-$60. Starting Jan 17. Tues-Thurs at 7:30 pm, Fri-Sat at 8 pm, Sun at 2 and 7:30 pm. Through Feb 16.

JERRY SPRINGER: THE OPERA

See review, page 39. Moore Theatre , 1932 Second Ave, 329-1050. balagantheatre.org. Thurs-Sat at 7:30 pm, Sun at 6:30 pm. Through Jan 26.

THE NORMAL HEART

A political thriller and a personal drama set during the emergence of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. This play is directed by Sheila Daniels and is a production of Strawberry Theatre Workshop. Erickson Theater Off Broadway, 1524 Harvard Ave, 427-5207. strawshop.org. $18-$36. Thurs-Sat at 7:30 pm. Through Feb 15.

RICHARD II

“Richard II is rarely produced (its three local productions have been by Greenstage in 1998, Seattle Shakespeare Company in 2002, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2003), perhaps in part because all its jokes are bitter. ‘I wasted time,’ the depressed young Richard sighs pathetically—but with the faintest glimmer of camp—in his prison cell shortly before his murder, ‘and now time doth waste me.’ Directed by Rosa Joshi and starring George Mount, this Richard is a production of modest, straightforward ambitions that tells its story of a successful rebellion clearly and simply with a minimum of pyrotechnics in acting, design, or any other department. Chronologically, Richard II just precedes the drama of the more famous Henry IV plays, and thematically it serves as a kind of proto- Hamlet in its obsession with thought versus action and its ambivalent musings on power and death.” (Brendan Kiley) Center Theatre, Seattle Center Armory, 684-7200. seattleshakespeare.org. $29-$48. Thurs-Sat at 7:30 pm, Sun at 2 pm. Through Feb 2.

RIGOLETTO

See review, page 39. McCaw Hall 321 Mercer St, 684-7200. mccawhall.com. $72-$194. Various times, see website for details. Through Jan 25.

UPSIDE DOWNTON

An improv homage to the soapy BBC miniseries. Jet City Improv, 5510 University Way NE, 352-8291. jetcityimprov. com. $15. Thurs-Fri at 8 pm. Through Feb 14.

WHERE’S PAPI?

A one man drama that reflects on the search for one’s absent father, “a story far too often told by Latinos and more specifically Latino men.” Eclectic Theater 1214 10th Ave, 679-3271. eclectictheatercompany.org. $12-$20. Thurs-Sat at 8 pm, Sun at 2 pm. Through Feb 1.

Dance

GENDER TENDER:

SYNC OR SWIM

Queer performance that hopes to challenge the tone of romantic comedies and family-based sitcoms. Gay City, 517 E Pike St, 860-6969. $15. Thurs-Sun at 8 pm. Through Jan 19.

Opening and

theater@thestranger.com

Ongoing Intro Classes at all four 8 Limbs locations

Awarded “Best Yoga” by Seattle Magazine

CHOW

Brilliant Gilding

Jason Stratton’s Aragona Takes It Over the Top

BY BETHANY JEAN

CLEMENT

It’s pronounced Spanish-pirate-style: arrr-ah-GOAN-ah. The name comes from the medieval kingdom of Aragon; the new restaurant is from Jason Stratton of Spinasse and Artusi

fame. It is, according to its stately menu verbiage, the culmination of Stratton’s “longstanding relationship with and love of Spanish cuisine and culture, drawing inspiration from the regions of Catalonia, Valencia, and Andalucía, as well as the waters and land of the Pacific Northwest.”

Seattle food freaks have been freaking out about the advent of Aragona, and for good reason. Stratton started out as a dishwasher at the late, great Le Gourmand in high school and ascended to the status of Food & Wine Best New Chef 2010, and Aragona is effectively his first very-own restaurant (Spinasse was started by Justin Neidermeyer in 2008, with Stratton taking over after a year). Furthering the PR flurry, Carrie Mashaney, Stratton’s chef de cuisine, was eliminated on the insanity that is Top Chef only two weeks ago. More anticipation: Running Aragona’s bar is liquor-magician David Nelson, formerly of Tavern Law, Spur, and Il Bistro (the Sleepwalking Ballard, with cava, chartreuse, and limoncello, is inspired by a Lorca poem).

Aragona is kitty-corner from the Seattle Art Museum, where Thoa’s used to be. The high-ceilinged interior is spare and pale, with a pillar covered in geometrical mosaic acting as a focal point near the spacious open kitchen. The cardboard light fixtures are polyhedrons, and the marbled wallpaper is, upon closer inspection, made of letters and numbers. The decor is tasteful and contemporary without feeling too corporate. The food is the exciting thing, and rightfully so.

with the tenderest, most chickeny-tasting young chicken, including slices of grilled breast and a braised leg; tubes of delicate, yet meaty, squid; and small, free-floating pieces of foie gras, for bites of pure, soft, gamey richness. Using chicken liver might have been sufficient, but the foie is the fabulous gilding of a humble dish (which costs $30).

watermelon and black radish, mint, soft-boiled egg, and the very Mediterranean combination of oranges and olives ($13) was tasty, refreshing, and definitely big enough to share.

In the less incredible category: The grilled octopus ($21) was skillfully prepared, but the accompanying trinxat potatoes (like pavé ones) were slightly dry. And braised beef cheeks ($34) with boletus mushrooms and squiggles of puff pastry did not achieve the height of hoped-for wintertime pleasure, with the leftovers sadly going uneaten. We also made the mistake of ordering the trotter croquettes (fatty, deep-fried pig-foot nuggets, served with pickled squash and passion fruit for contrast, $10) and the black cod “in adobo” ($18) at the same time—turns out Spanish adobo is not a sauce, but more deepfrying, after the fish is given a limey-tasting vinegar marinade. Both were good, but a

NOW OPEN

New Places for Stuffing Faces

BY BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT

• LE CAVISTE • Downtown: This simple, urbane, marvelous little French wine bar across from the federal courthouse is brought to us by sommelier David Butler, formerly of Campagne, Le Gourmand, and Le Pichet (a trifecta of local French greatness). Amateurs, be unafraid: The wines are exceedingly wellpriced, and Butler is a master of intuition and unpretentious description. Wine-people: You are going to love this place. A small menu of charcuterie, cheeses, and so forth is available; above your head, excellent light fixtures celebrate the endangered incandescent bulb. (1919 Seventh Ave, 728-2657, lecavisteseattle.com, $–$$)

• BRIMMER & HEELTAP • Ballard: The name Brimmer & Heeltap refers to a proper pour: When full, it’s a “brimmer,” and at the end, only a “heeltap” is left. The very pretty B&H is where Le Gourmand used to be; the gastropub-type food is by chef Mike Whisenhunt, previously at (the great) Revel. (425 NW Market St, 420-2534, brimmerandheeltap.com, $$)

Aragona 96 Union St, 682-3590

Needless to say, it is an excellent lunch. You might end up with leftovers from Aragona, too; on one visit, we were advised that the menu is designed for three courses per person, an upsell that would seem to indicate that the portions are precious, which they are not, or that even if you’ve eaten in a restaurant before, you don’t know how to order for yourself, which you do. I would highly recommend that you start with the local spot prawns with cider sauce ($22), a prosaic description for a dish of poetry: six plump, perfectly poached prawns bathing in a pool of savory greatness. The reduced tang of the cider is combined with a shrimp-shell stock and, clearly, an unholy amount of butter. When the server asked if she could take the bowl with some of the sauce still in the bottom, it was somewhat embarrassing to say no, but it had to be said.

Stratton started out as a dishwasher at the late, great Le Gourmand.

warning from the server (or more information on the menu) would have been helpful, cholesterol-level-wise.

• MILLER’S GUILD • Downtown: Jason Wilson, of the justifiably famous Crush, installed this update on the steak house inside the Hotel Max downtown, and it is tall, dark, and handsome—knocking out the lowered ceiling revealed old architectural details (happily left in disrepair) and even a row of high-up windows. The 1926 building was originally built to house workers at the Vance Lumber Company—the millers of the name. Behind the kitchen counter is a veritable inferno of a wood-fired grill: nine feet long, custom made, so hot that the cooks wear welders’ aprons while they sear 75-day dry-aged beef, local seafood, and more. Continuing the wood theme: lots of liquor aging in 50-liter oak casks above the bar. It all should be really good. (612 Stewart St, 443-3663, millersguild.com, $$$)

I am eating some leftovers from Aragona right now: the “Mar i muntanya,” or a combination of “sea and mountain,” the Catalan version of surf and turf. It’s a white-bean stew, deeply flavored with tomato and peppers,

Aragona’s upgrade on a traditional Spanish tortilla has sunchoke dispersed through the egg and a topping of the fluffy oceanic intensity that is sea urchin ($12). Again, it’s gilding the food you’d find on a country table in Spain, and gilding it brilliantly. Same with a completely delicious rice and squab dish ($24): Slices of dark pigeon breast had the taste (and almost the soft, giving texture) of dirty-rich organ meat, while the bird’s hindquarters had been braised, with the stock used to flavor the rice and the meat shredded into it. A salad of paper-thin slices of gorgeous

Speaking of service, on one night we were waited on to within an inch of our lives, which befits Aragona’s prices but felt interruptive at times. Not every dish needs a stiffly formal introduction. (Notably, sommelier Jackson Rohrbaugh, formerly of Canlis, is able to read a table’s mood and have fun while still providing the level of service everyone’s obviously aspiring to.) Another night in the lounge, where there are mismatched wooden chairs and a view of the Sound with the Ferris wheel lighting up the night, the interval between the fried-food course and the entrées stretched from “Oh, it’s taking a while” to “Is this actually happening?” to “What is the nature of time, anyway?” Maybe more oddly, we never got napkins, even after apologetically asking for some midway through.

The service at Aragona will, surely, even out. More importantly, the love professed on the menu is already there.

Comment on this review at THESTRANGER.COM/CHOW

• LA BODEGA • Pioneer Square: Manuel Alfau—who’s worked at Blind Pig Bistro, Anchovies and Olives, and La Bête, so that’s all promising—used to make his Dominican sandwiches on a grill in front of the bar Montana. The brick-and-mortar location is in Pioneer Square. The roasted pork with a Presidente beer sounds pretty damn good. (100 Prefontaine Pl S, 682-2175, labodegaseattle.com, $)

• TALLULAH’S • Capitol Hill: Linda Derschang—you know, of Linda’s, King’s Hardware, Smith, Oddfellows, and Bait Shop—runs this airy, stylish-but-nottrying-too-hard-to-be-stylish restaurant, named after her daughter and located near the Kingfish and Monsoon on Capitol Hill. It’s got a big clock above the marble bar and a best-of-the-’70s design sensibility, plus, over by the kitchen, a painting of Tonya Harding screaming and a quote from Ram Dass to even things out (“Be here now”). The chef is Walter Edward (Oddfellows, Crush), and his promisingly simple, seasonal menu is “vegetable-driven without being vegetarian.” (550 19th Ave E, 860-0077, aneighborhoodcafe.com, $$)

• HELLO ROBIN • Capitol Hill: From Molly Moon Neitzel and Oddfellows Whoopie Pie Bake-Off champion Robin Wehl Martin, Hello Robin is a very cute bakery and ice cream shop near Tallulah’s. Martin’s signature breakfast cookie sounds just right: oatmeal, shredded carrots, mini chocolate chips, and “other secret bits of deliciousness.” (522 19th Ave E, 735-7970, hellorobincookies.com, $)

south on Rainier almost to Renton, Le Bistro World Cuisine has a wide-ranging menu, a bunch of $5 happy hour specials, and occasional live jazz. (11425 Rainier Ave S, 772-6334, $–$$)

POPPING UP: DACKEL • Capitol Hill: Josh Nebe (formerly of the Unicorn) makes very tasty German food at Dackel, and it’s popping up again at Kedai Makan in January, Thursday through Sunday nights, while the Kedai people are in Malaysia. (“Dackel” is what German people call wiener dogs instead of the also-German “dachshund,” confusingly.)

• CONE & STEINER • Capitol Hill: Also right by Tallulah’s, Cone & Steiner is an “an updated take on today’s conscientious urban foodie culture,” purveying “fresh flowers and produce, dry goods and dairy,

RENAMED: HAPPY OCTO BAR on Capitol Hill: The sleek little bar in the front of Octo Sushi (where Crave used to be), which was briefly renamed Happy Neko Bar, has now been re-renamed Happy Octo Bar.

sweet treats and a highly curated selection of fresh, local foods,” plus wine and a growler-filling station for local beers and cider. Also, you may “choose a thoughtful housewarming gift” here. (532 19th Ave E, 582-1928, coneandsteiner.com, $$)

• BAD JIMMY’S • Ballard: Five local beer-lovers teamed up to run this Frelard brewery and tasting room. None of them are named Jimmy. Their mission is “to reinvent intensity as it exists in the craft beer world.” Further, they say, “If being different is bad, we don’t want to be good.” (4358 Leary Way NW, 789-1548, badjimmysbrewingco.com, $)

• LE BISTRO WORLD CUISINE • Down South: Where Lakeside Bistro used to be,

Wed 1/15

WINE WEDNESDAY AT MARCHÉ

NEW LOCATIONS OF EXISTING PLACES: DIN TAI FUNG in University Village: The multinational (and arguably overrated) soup dumpling chain finally comes to Seattle after being in Bellevue for several years. • EZELL’S in Columbia City: The great fried chicken is now closer to your mouth if you live near Rainier between Oregon and Genesee! • HOMEGROWN SUSTAINABLE SANDWICH SHOP in South Lake Union: After four years, they’re proud to announce the opening of their fifth location, plus the fact that they finally have enough buying power in the local/organic farm supply to lower their prices—as much as 30 percent on some items. Neat! • TUTTA BELLA in Bellevue: The Seattle wood-fired pizza chain finally opens in Bellevue (its fifth location).

More, more, MORE at THESTRANGER.COM/CHOW

CHOW EVENTS

Marché’s wine director— “the Son of Lyon himself”—Cyril Frechier leads these educational, entertaining wine tastings on the couches of Marché’s wine bar area, snacks also included. Tonight: Italian wines. Marché, 1600 Post Alley, 728-2800. marcheseattle.com. $45. 6-7 pm.

2014 WINTER

RYE TASTING

Try quarter-ounce samples of 10 ryes, including classics (Templeton, Sazerac), local (Fremont Mischief), nicely aged (Lock, Stock & Barrel 13 year), and eclectic (Angel’s Envy, aged in Caribbean rum casks).

Meanwhile, absorb the history of rye, how it’s distilled, and a half-dozen cocktail recipes. The Barrel Thief, 3417 Evanston Ave N #102, 402-5492. bthief. com. $20. 7 pm.

Thurs 1/16

COUSCOUS DINNER

The Corson Building’s hand-rolled couscous is so good, it’s hard to believe, and it’s lovely there, and this family-style dinner also includes “a number of” braised meat and vegetable tagines, so do with this information what you will. The Corson Building, 5609 Corson Ave S, 7623330. thecorsonbuilding. com. $50.

“BEST DAMN HAPPY HOUR”

On the third Thursday of the month, the “Best

Damn Happy Hour” (their title) has live DJs, mini golf, board games, giant Jenga (T IMBERRRR R!), and deals on cocktails and food at the many places inside the Armory, the food-court-ish building formerly known as the Center House at Seattle Center (21+ only). Seattle Center , 305 Harrison St, 684-7200. seattlecenter. com/happyhour. 5-8 pm.

Fri 1/17

PHO FRIDAY

Yes, the pho on Pho Friday at Vif costs $9 a bowl, but it’s made with topquality ingredients and comes with a cream puff that’s probably way better than the one you get at Than Brothers. (Have you read Eric Banh’s defense of “expensive” pho on the Ba Bar blog? You should!) Vif, 4401 Fremont Ave N, 5577357. vifseattle.com. $9. 10 am-5 pm.

DINNER WITH MARTIN BERNHEIMER Pulitzer Prize–winning music and opera critic Martin Bernheimer presents “Critics: Who Needs Them?” alongside a buffetstyle dinner at the fancy Ruins. The Ruins, 570 Roy St. theruins.net. $75. 7 pm.

Sat 1/18

MLK FOOD DRIVE Today Community HealthCorps hosts its annual food drive in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Donate at the QFCs

in Harvard Market, the U-District, Westwood Village, and on Rainier— your nonperishable foodstuff goes directly to the Providence Regina House Food Bank in South Park. Various QFCs as noted 10 am-2 pm.

“OPERA: STATE OF THE ART” BREAKFAST It’s continental breakfast with a panel of opera experts: Speight Jenkins (Seattle Opera), Gayletha Nichols (Met Opera National Council NYC), Elizabeth Hynes (soprano), and Judith Forst (mezzosoprano). (Recommended as the bargain event for operalovers this week!) Fairmont Olympic Hotel, 411 University. $25. 10:30 am.

FREE WINE TASTING AT CHAMPION WINE CELLARS Champion owner Emile Ninaud possesses Seattle’s very first wine license: He opened in 1969 and works there to this day. Though he’s French by birth, he’s made Champion a snobbery-free zone, with wine novices welcome and an emphasis on good value for whatever your budget may be. His Saturday drop-in wine tastings—from the more than 1,500 bottles in stock, with tons from France—are all about “obscure wines from obscure regions,” he says. Champion Wine Cellars , 108 Denny Way, 284-8306.

championwinecellars.com. FREE. Noon-5 pm.

SATURDAYNIGHT SERMON Have a drink and holler amen: Every Saturday night at 10 p.m., Southern-styled Witness on Broadway gets religion when owner/bartender Gregg Holcomb delivers one of his fervent but agnostic (and sometimes fornication-related) sermons. Witness , 410 Broadway E, 329-0248. witnessbar.com. 10 pm.

Sun 1/19

BAILEY-BOUSHAY HOUSE CHEFS’ DINNER 2013 A benefit for the very worthy Bailey-Boushay House, which provides outpatient services and residential care for those in our community with HIV/AIDS. For $75, attend a reception and silent wine auction with drinks and hors d’oeuvres from an army of incredible local chefs. A multi-course dinner for 300 guests follows, with tickets starting at $300. Bell Harbor International Conference Center, 2201 Alaskan Way, Pier 66, 3410112. virginiamasonfoundation.org/chefs-dinner. $75/$300+. 5 pm.

GALA DINNER WITH ANGELA MEADE Candlelight will abound at this dinner with Metropolitan Opera star Angela Meade and the Metropolitan Opera National Council NW’s Regional Winner of the 2014 Auditions. Fairmont Olympic Hotel , 411

University. $150. 6:30 pm.

Mon 1/20

MANHATTAN MONDAYS

Every Monday, the BottleNeck serves $5 Manhattans made with Evan Williams. Cheers!

BottleNeck Lounge 2328 E Madison St, 3231098. bottlenecklounge. com. $5. 4 pm-2 am.

PAELLA NIGHT

Every Monday night, the great Tamara Murphy makes probably really great paella for $15 per person at Terra Plata. Also available: a pareddown menu of pinxtos (the Basque, harder-to-say version of tapas), Spanishinspired cocktails, and Spanish wine. Terra Plata, 1501 Melrose Ave, 325-1501. terraplata.com. $15.

Tues 1/21

10-BUCK BOTTLE NIGHT

Every Tuesday at the BottleNeck Lounge, a bottle of a featured red or white wine costs only $10. BottleNeck Lounge, 2328 E Madison St, 323-1098. bottlenecklounge.com.

DRINKING LIBERALLY

A weekly evening of liberals, drinking, almost always including The Stranger ’s own Goldy. Note that DL used to take place at the Montlake Ale House, but it recently closed, so… Location TBA, check the website: livingliberally.org/drinking/chapters/WA/seattle. 8 pm.

HUARACHITOS LOVES YOU

Jose Luis Pantiga-Flores Owner, Huarachitos

4219 S Othello St, 568-3019

“Sorry there was a fire. We love you. We hope you understand. —Jose and Ana” read the sign on the door of Huarachitos after a huge fire at their old Columbia City location, caused by a faulty power strip. Not long afterward, as if the universe was returning the sentiment a landlord invited owner Jose Luis Pantiga-Flores to reopen on the ground floor of an apartment building right by the Othello light rail station. The spacious restaurant’s front desk is decorated invitingly with a piece of wire sculpted into the word “laugh.” Huarachitos specializes in Mexico City–style food, which Jose describes as a fusion of regional styles resulting from the convergence of cultures in the big city. Jose had dreamed of opening a restaurant—a restaurant called Huarachitos, in fact—since his childhood in Mexico. Trained at Le Cordon Bleu, he cooked at the Space Needle and the Columbia Tower before finally making Huarachitos a reality. Jose designed the restaurant’s logo himself. Of course, Huarachitos offers their namesake huaraches. “Huarache” means “sandal,” but, fortunately, rather than feet, the thick cornmeal cakes contain a secret layer of beans. You’ll also encounter some fairly-hard-to-find dishes on the menu, such as cabeza (described with an amusing lack of specificity on Wikipedia as “the meat from a roasted head of a beef animal”) and one of Jose’s favorites, lamb stew.

$29 TICKET SALE

CHOOSE

SALES BEGINS SATURDAY, JANUARY 18, 2014

Ticket Office opens at 1PM on Saturday, January 18.

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BRIAN STOKES MITCHELL WITH THE SEATTLE SYMPHONY

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MORLOT CONDUCTS THE FANTASTIQUE

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MARCH 13–15

MOZART’S PRAGUE SYMPHONY

MARCH 20, 22 & 23

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MARCH 21

CELEBRATE ASIA

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MARCH 27 & 29

DVOŘÁK’S CELLO CONCERTO Thursday s media sponsor

APRIL 10–13

GLENN MILLER ORCHESTRA

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APRIL 17–19

RACHMANINOV’S SECOND SYMPHONY

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STRAVINSKY’S THREE GREAT BALLETS

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DANNY ELFMAN’S MUSIC FROM THE FILMS OF TIM BURTON

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NATALIE MERCHANT WITH THE SEATTLE SYMPHONY

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MUSIC

The Great Understander

Riz Rollins Reflects on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

BY TRENT MOORMAN

Seattle has a wise man. His name is Riz Rollins. He’d never tell you he’s a wise man, but do the real ones ever do that? For 25 years, he’s been DJing KEXP’s airwaves, mostly at night. Riz

knows the night. He’s a sentinel of the nocturnal, and he turns speakers into eyes. Riz reads the digital breeze like tea leaves, deciphers the code, and plays exactly the songs the night needs to hear. When he DJs, he spins more than the tune; he spins the earth. Monday nights from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m., he hosts a variety show; Sundays, his show Expansions, which turns 20 next year, is on from 9 p.m. to midnight with DJs Masa and Kid Hops. If something is ailing you, he’s a healer, a solver of stress, the Great Understander. If positivity is a gun, Riz fires a .44 Magnum. This year’s MLK Unity Party marks its 14th year of existence. Riz spoke about it, his presence beaming intensely. Right away, he laid it down, saying, “I don’t have a car, but I kick foie gras’s ass. You know, adorned by fresh spring figs and shit.”

Expansions MLK Unity Party w/DJs Riz, Masa, Kid Hops Sun Jan 19, Columbia City Theater, 8 pm, $5 adv/$7 DOS, 21+

Do you know what MLK’s favorite music was? His favorite music seems to have been gospel and spirituals. I believe his favorite artist was Mahalia Jackson. I used to do a mix of a Mahalia song with another artist, Solid Doctor, who sampled her. Aretha Franklin’s dad used to host both Dr. King and Mahalia Jackson in his home when she was growing up, and she still talks about how influential they both were in her life and art.

that that war was not really any of his business. I remember the day he was shot. And the day Malcolm was shot. And the days the Kennedys were shot. Recalling it now, I fight the sorrow that comes from living a long, full life in a country so fucking gun happy. I remember anger and sorrow and grief beyond measure, and all of it in the first 14 years of my life. I remember when I left Chicago for the first time to work in Yellowstone Park, and standing alone on a trail some distance from Old Faithful thinking it was the most magnificent place I’d ever seen, and the thought that thundered in my mind, “You know, Dr. King died so you could live in a place like this. So you should live like this.”

I’ve heard you talk about the relationship between the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement, and the cross section in between. What do we need to know? We need to know that the tension of conflating gay and civil rights has always existed in the civil rights movement. Racism, sexism, and homophobia have held hands for a very, very long time in this country, and many of our activists have long struggled in fighting them. If African American citizens have borne the lion’s share of the brunt of the denial of civil rights, African American queers suffer more dramatic injustices living in the intersection of the two. The levels of acceptable violence, the ongoing willingness in this country to marginalize gays of color—of ALL colors, ignoring and erasing them from our shared history. Many people still don’t know that one of the pinnacle moments in the history of civil rights, the 1963 March on Washington, where Dr. King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, was orchestrated by an out gay man, Bayard Rustin—a man who dedicated his entire life to securing civil rights for all people. Until recently, his legacy has been ignored to the point of near-obscurity. President Obama recently bestowed on him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor an American citizen can receive.

WHAT'S CRAPPENING?

• Mid-’90s Seattle band Goodness reunited at Neumos on Saturday as part of the Moe’s 20/Neumos 10 weeklong anniversary celebration. The stage was decorated with freaky laughing clown tapestries à la Moe’s décor, and frontwoman Carrie Akre (also of Hammerbox) is still something else—her pipes sounded as good as, if not better than, 20 years ago.

• In sadder ’90s-Seattle news, Gits drummer Steve Moriarty is calling for a boycott of NBC after its Dead of Night true-crime documentary series reenacted the story of the decades-old rape and murder of his bandmate Mia Zapata but refused to spring for actual live Gits footage or Gits songs. Moriarty’s Facebook page explained: “There is nothing artistic, musical, or positive about the re-telling of Mia’s brutal death. The piece will air in June and does not have the endorsement of any of the bands, Mia’s family, or immediate friends.”

What are you doing? What are you listening to? What are you wearing? I’m googling recipes. I have an idea for a beet stew made with oxtails. Listening to Christian Prommer, “Drumlesson Zwei.” It’s perfect for that gettin’-ready-to-do-something feel. I’m wearing a T-shirt and pannies.

This is the 14th year of your MLK party. What made you want to do the first one? It was as simple as wanting to go out on an evening before a holiday, coupled with the fact that Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is the most brilliant human being one could wish to share a lifetime with.

When you say you are celebrating MLK Day, what are you celebrating? I’m celebrating being empowered by a life sacrificed so that my life and my world is a better place. Every opportunity in my life, where I’ve lived, where I’ve worked, and whom I’ve loved, has been influenced in some measure by this one life. From his philosophy to even his face, he has been profoundly influential and continues to be.

What are your memories of MLK? In what ways did he enter your life? When I was 9 or 10, circa 1961, our family moved to a predominately white neighborhood in Chicago called South Shore. It was a very difficult time in my life and the beginning of a few years where I experienced racism on a very daily basis. I was routinely chased and bullied and spat upon, and jeered at and even humiliated by teachers in school. I internalized all that hate, thinking I had done something personally to cause it. But in 1963, I just connected with the idea that it wasn’t me, that it was the world around me, and it was all, every bit of it, due to the differences between my skin color and those of the white people around me. Probably through television, I saw him and others that looked like me catching the same hell I was going through and far worse.

“I was routinely chased and bullied and spat upon.”

I saw one of those biblical pictures of white Jesus the other day. You know, the beautiful, hippie white-ass Jesus, with children around him. When you see a hippie white Jesus depicted, what do you think? Maybe a story from your Bible days? I grew up with those traditional pictures of Jesus for a time, but those depictions changed dramatically in African American churches in the ’60s. I mostly refer to them today because I’m attracted to longhairs, among my many attractions, but none of them do Jesus justice. Either the face is wrong or, more importantly, some other things don’t ring true. There is no record of Jesus smiling or laughing in the Bible, so to portray Jesus in those ways usually fails.

If God created the sun on the fourth day, HOW HAD FOUR DAYS PASSED?

[Laughs] Are you high? Let’s see. Most scholars I learned from explain that the “days” mentioned in that Genesis account are probably epochs and not 24-hour days as we’ve come to understand them. So whatevs.

• Punk goons the Spits said their January 3 show was the best show they’ve ever played at Chop Suey, and it did indeed sound flawless. The band also didn’t seem to mind when dudes in the front row lit a long string of firecrackers, or when other dudes threw full cans of beer at the stage, or even the many dudes who climbed onstage to crowd-surf. The guitarist did mind, however, when one rowdy dude unplugged his guitar, telling him: “Back up, brother… And if you do it again, I’ll kick you in the teeth.”

• Wall of Sound, considered Seattle’s best music-retail establishment by many people with more records in their pads than dollars in their checking accounts, is now open till 7 p.m. on Sundays, instead of 6 p.m. Trust us, that extra hour makes a world of difference.

• Seattle’s electronic-music community swarmed to Re-bar on Saturday night for a benefit show to raise funds for Decibel volunteer Blake Peterson, who’s been dealing with serious health issues. Over 300 clubbers raised more than $2,000, and their generosity was rewarded with sterling house/ techno DJ sets by J. Alvarez and Nordic Soul vs. Michael Manahan and Lusine’s live performance.

I remember hearing the “Dream” speech the evening after it happened. I remember his reference to black kids and white kids playing together and thinking, I didn’t want to be tolerated and accepted by other kids, I wanted us to play together. I remember President Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and a friend of my mother’s told me that I should remember that day the rest of my life. I remember him speaking out against the war in Vietnam. I remember people saying

What are some tunes you’re going to drop at the party? I think I can speak for Masa and Kid Hops by saying our DJ manner is very much like cooking a fine meal. We’ll gather all the ingredients in the weeks and days leading up to it, but we won’t know exactly what we’ll play until we get there…

Read the rest of this interview at THESTRANGER.COM/MUSIC

• Dead Moon’s January 4 show in Portland was a punk-rock family reunion, with droves of Seattle folks making the jaunt down to see the legendary trio’s sold-out Crystal Ballroom show (capacity 1,500). The Moon played three encores, and people still wanted more. They also, sadly, sold out of T-shirts. Fred and Toody forever!

• How many black artists topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 2013? If you guessed ZERO, give yourself a high five. And a slap in the face! In an article on Slate. com, Chris Molanphy pointed out these uncomfortably bleak stats, as well as the fact that white acts topped the R&B/Hip-Hop chart 44 out of 52 weeks. Gross, everyone, gross.

GOING

MONDAY 1/20 SUPERHUMANOIDS JAMES SUPERCAVE

WEDNESDAY 2/5 GENTLEMEN HALL  BASIC VACATION

FRIDAY 2/7 DESERT NOISES  AAN

SATURDAY 2/8 HOSPITALITY

SATURDAY 3/15 ATOMIC BRIDE GLADIATORS EAT FIRE

COMING SOON 1/11 Maria Taylor • 1/14 Katie Kate • 1/15 Cloud Control • 1/16 Richie Aldente • 1/17 Stag • 1/18 The BGP • 1/21 Drenge • 1/22 Mutual Benefit • 1/23 & 1/24 Robert DeLong • 1/31 The Pack AD • 2/1 The Young Evils • 2/11 Delorean + Until The Ribbon Breaks • 2/15 Sylvan Esso • 2/19 Lawrence Rothman • 2/22 DJ Spooky • 2/24 Xiu Xiu • 2/25 A Tribe Called Red • 2/26 Hospitality • 3/1 Pigpen Theatre Co. • 3/2 together Pangea • 3/7 Angel Olsen • 3/19 This Will Destroy You • 3/22 Yellow Ostrich • 3/24 Wakey! Wakey!

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.

CUB

Betti-Cola (Mint)

I had only warm feelings when I saw the Betti-Cola album cover: a rad Betty and Veronica–style illustration of the band. But would it be as fun as it looked?

YES!!!

Cub are just what that illustration promises: here to jump up and down, here to party with you, here to be the all-around raddest. Lead singer Lisa Marr’s voice is just like the candy Cub apparently used to pass out at shows. They’re super-funny; the lyrics are little plastic pails of lighthearted joy. On a picnic, a repeated “You bring me carrots and celery/You bring me carrots and cel-ery.” On a beloved chinchilla: “Satan sucks/ But you’re the best/Holy smokes/You pass the test.” Put that on a mix CD for someone you have a crush on, and they will probably fall right in love with you! Who wouldn’t?! (Except, ewwww to pet chinchillas.*) Cub are like really good jam. Not music jam—fruit jam. All the different parts come

MY PHILOSOPHY

BY LARRY MIZELL JR.

OCNOTES, NACHO PICASSO, UDF, CARL ROE & RIPYNT

It’s been a long time. I shouldn’ta left you, but I had shit to do. So: 2014. In the first week alone, Seattle hiphop has weighed in heavy already. Shall we?

My dog OCnotes (conflict of interest alert: I comanage the guy) dropped Rap Loops on his Bandcamp, a 107-track collection of, well, loops to rap over. “I made this for the people that still freestyle with homies,” OC wrote, “the lonesome L blazers that spit to themselves, the Rik Rudes, the LVs… the ones that can spit about somethin’ off the head without everything bein’ about how they can kill me, out-smoke/drink/drug/ fuck me… this is for y’all.” Rap Loops may just make your cipher complete.

Right on the heels of his High & Mighty album from October, Nacho Picasso actually dropped the first local release of the year—the seven-track Trances with Wolves found on his Bandcamp. Thematically, it’s in line with his infamous rock ’n’ roll excess; qualitatively, it’s on par with the last thing he called a “prixtape,” 2012’s Black Narcissus. For somebody who not too long ago didn’t even consider himself a rapper, he’s amassed quite an impressive catalog since his first release (late 2010’s Blunt Raps). S.A.T., League of Starz, Jake One, Raised byy Wolves, and Mackned all check in on

together to form a sweet, brightly colored, awesome goo. It’s hard to pay attention to any one ingredient, because they’re too busy interacting with each other to create a whole thing, and the whole is so delightful. They’re also dark sometimes; they’re not just dancing around in hot-pink leotards high-fiving each other all the time. “Leapfrog” starts: “Woke up dead the other morning.” (Who hasn’t?!) In “A Party,” the narrator “went to a party and no one was there/I ate up all the cake and stared at the floor.”

This is top-notch sleepover music. I first listened to it late at night with a glass of whiskey; that was the wrong approach. I actually had to put the whiskey down and get up off the couch—Cub call for you to energetically engage with life Betti-Cola would be a great album for bad-mood days, because while it’s sweet and cute and full of jokes, it’s not all pep-squad shit. There are lots of breakup songs and laments and weird parties with nobody there and, once, a wax heart stuck full of nails and stuffed in a sack.

Some music just fills you up with bubbles and cheer, like brain champagne. Cub is that music, and you should take some gray January time to electrify your day with this carbonated cotton-candy beach party sound.

I give this a “January beach party! You’re invited!” out of 10.

*Hot tip: Chinchillas are cute-looking, but boy, chinchillas are not awesome pets, as far as I’m concerned. As the internet (or any responsible chinchilla owner) will tell you, you have to interact in very weirdo personal ways with chinchilla penises or they get covered in hair. Like, you gotta inspect it all the time and lube it up and stuff. I’m not joking! Once I heard that, I could never forget it. Just say no to a pet like that!

the production. Setting the year off right, the Nacho Man is in position for a big 2014. Also this year, I predict the rise of the hidden kingdom known as UDF—producer Khrist Koopa and rappers Bolo Nef and Caz Greez (aka Skull & Bones, as they were on their collaboration with Blue Sky Black Death) inhabit a chamber of dead-eyed stickup kid rap, with an encyclopedic drug vocabulary and a certain black-metal-esque esoteric sensibility. Picture Queensbridge meets Memphis, with a side of #based, but somehow still that pure NW teen spirit. The Unity-Diversity-Freedom cult dropped two solid albums last year (Underworld Dust Funk back in April, Bars & Bullets in July), then capped off 2013 with the excellent Caz solo Misfit—and this month, Bolo’s Sol Invictus raised the banner (and the bar) even higher. Local ethnomusicologists, please file with the Moor Gang, Avatar Darko, and Olympia/Denver’s Gorgeous Children, because what else are you doing with that degree? Bandcamp, again, will get you right.

Lastly, on the entirely opposite end of several spectrums from OC, Nacho, and Bolo, is one of the many things I missed from 2013—Carl Roe & Ripynt’s Underrated project. (If Nacho and Bolo evoke grunge, these two are pure adenoidal pop-punk.) Super-hyped vocally speaking and meticulously clean production-wise, the pair proves a natural combo, holding their own and blending seamlessly across nine well-composed tracks of pure mania of the post-Eminem/Yelawolf variety that I’d definitely rather listen to than Marshall Mathers LP 2. Roe comports himself well on the mic and the boards (locally sourcing “Want It for You” from Pearl Jam’s classic B-side “Yellow Ledbetter”), and despite his Fukushima-level mouth odor, I can’t deny that Ripynt is absolutely at his best here (peep revenge fantasy “The Crow”), so congrats on that (and moving outta Everett). Get that on DJBooth.net, take two, and don’t call me.

ALBUM REVIEWS

DEADKILL

No, Never! (Good to Die)

Sometimes you gotta cut the bullshit. Or as Deadkill guitarist Michael Stubz says in the album’s press release, ya gotta “trim the fat.” There’s not a lick of blubber on this lean, mean sirloin steak of an album—it’s bloody and raw, and you should punch yourself in the chest before you take the first bite. Start with song “Party Fight” and just try to resist the urge to clench your fist and bash it toward the sky in furious solidarity. Then listen to “Ghost Out” and reminisce about the razor-sharpness of all those early Black Flag songs the very first time you heard them. Deadkill bring the meaty hardcore but don’t overcook it or play copycat. Recorded by Matt Bayles (Sandrider, Botch, Murder City Devils, Mastodon) at Red Room Recording, Deadkill prove that they’re not just a ferocious local live act (who’ve shared the stage with modern punks like OFF!, White Lung, and the Spits). No, Never! makes a valiant effort to capture the savage energy of Deadkill’s live shows, and it succeeds. To quote Stubz again, “Share it with your friends and your enemies.” KELLY O

PORTER RAY RSE GLD (Self-released)

While listening to a local rapper (talented or otherwise) for the first time, it’s not unusual to find myself feeling that there’s no real justification for me to ever hear their rhymes again. My feeling is that they are rapping because it’s one of the tried-and-true roads to fame. But I’m not always a purist. I think desiring fame is not always a bad thing. But what is often lacking in these raps is any sense of giving—all you hear and feel is the rapper’s need for your attention, your support, your commitment, your “likes” on social networks. I bring this up because I recently listened to a local rapper who made me feel like he was not wasting my time, he actually has something to say, and, most importantly, he gives far more than he takes. This rapper is Porter Ray, he is based in the Central District, and the album by which I entered his vivid, richly detailed, and intelligently articulated world is RSE GLD—it was released in October 2013, five months after Ray released his debut album, BLK GLD. The beats on RSE GLD are

not loud and polished, but low and soulful, and there is a good reason for this. The star of this album is not the production but the rapper, who rightly needs the beats to be in the background and his skillful rhymes at the very front of the stage. Ray does not waste a line, nor does he waste your time. CHARLES MUDEDE

Neon Dream (Neon Sigh)

Named after a song by Sonic Boom’s post–Spacemen 3 group Spectrum, Seattle label Neon Sigh has been fostering and rejuvenating shoegaze rock since 2012. Run by Chris Bendix, the imprint put up the eight-song Neon Dream compilation on Bandcamp last month, and it’s loaded with homegrown and national FX-pedal-hopping goodness. Locals Black Nite Crash kick it off with instantly beguiling cascades of sugar-fuzzed guitars whose riffs sound like a faster, inside-out homage to those from “Found Love” by the Darkside (another Spacemen 3 offshoot). Seattle’s Tokyoidaho deliver the most serpentine and psychedelic jam here with “Deep Cushions,” which is as lost in the void as Loop and early Verve. Multinational unit House of Light play urgent, heroic rock in the psych-aspirational vein of Echo & the Bunnymen and the Church. Chicago-based Astrobrite—led by lovesliescrushing’s Scott Cortez—erect enwombing swirls of guitar ectoplasm and barely audible, sibilant male vocals that you’ll love(less). Seattle psychonauts Jetman Jet Team place an exclamation point on the collection with “Rainbow Party,” a molasses-motorik, heat-haze-shimmer guitar orgy that blossoms into a mushroom cloud of bliss. Solid tracks by Soft Shadows, Dead Leaf Echo, and Golden Gardens complete this halobending overview of Neon Sigh’s dream-pop kingdom. DAVE SEGAL

Bermuda’s Split (Halfshell Records)

Bermuda’s Split is a cassette compilation comprising music by three young musicians who met in the Boy Scouts, which may help explain the sounds these fellows tend toward: crisp and airy soundscapes, campfire-worthy sing-alongs, and plenty of tambourine.

The first third of the tape alternates tracks

by Mike Preuss and Hairysun (the project of Daniel Onufer, lead howler of local psychonauts Swamp Meat). Preuss’s two tracks boast a honeydewed take on the freaky folk Devendra Banhart’s made a career of, and it’s surprising “Crows Companion” hasn’t permeated KEXP’s airwaves, with its ’60skissed bounce of jaunty acoustic guitars, rollicking drums, and a hook worthy of everyone who wishes they were someplace else. Hairysun’s epic, eight-minute “Trash Island” throws in angelic backing vocals, gentle feedback, and a goofy little woodwind riff, and it is one of Onufer’s most ambitious psych-outs to date.

The majority of the tape, however, is given over to NOKAYNIC, whose “New Name” and “Clamtown” broadcast a shaggy poet/ surf punk aesthetic that’s appealingly ramshackle. The whole thing coheres nicely, with headphones-worthy production throughout—peep the ghoul-train sounds on the existential ballad “Cape Disappointment.”

If I were Anna Minard, I would give this a “grow your hair out for the winter” out of 10.

KYLE FLECK

Robert Beatty deals in bold, exquisitely detailed extremes as a painter, video artist, and musician. His work in these disciplines shames most of his contemporaries. Check out surrealist covers he’s done for Midday Veil and his own Three Legged Race recording project. Also a member of noise sculptors Hair Police, Beatty finally issues a full-length under his own name. Somewhat similar to TLR’s excellent scifi-tronica LP Persuasive Barrier, the five pieces on Soundtracks for Takeshi Murata augmented the titular figure’s digital videos in shows in major American cities and Beijing. “Cone Eater” starts with a cataclysmic cacophony of panic-inducing synth ripples and ascending, shrieking tonalities. Welcome to your best interstellar nightmare soundtrack. “Untitled (Silver)” is as subliminally eerie as anything Goblin dreamed up for Italian horror-film maestro Dario Argento. Murky, aquatic textures burble below an array of infernal atmospheric oddities. Unbelievably, “Escape Spirit Videoslime” out-creeps the creepiest material from Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II. The album peaks on the 20-minute “Untitled (Pink Dot),” animated by a seesawing, warped-calliope motif that could’ve scored that Twilight Zone episode that was too bizarre to be aired. The intensity and paranoia intensify with Edgar A. Poe–like ineluctability as the music teeters between hypnosis and OCD madness. A superior and, I suspect, alien intelligence powers these Soundtracks. DAVE SEGAL

ROCKIN PIANO SHOW

UP&COMING

Lose your Donovan haircuts every night this week!

For the full music calendar, see page 57 or visit thestranger.com/music For ticket on-sale announcements, follow twitter.com/seashows

Wednesday 1/15

Chain and the Gang, the Shivas, Monogamy Party, the Exquisites (Black Lodge) See Underage, page 62.

Cloud Control, Body Parts

(Barboza) Australia’s Cloud Control make popping pop music with dense harmonies and shiny bits of psychedelic swirl (and maybe a pinch of early of Montreal/a sprinkling of less intense Black Angels).

On their newest full-length, Dream Cave (I read somewhere it was recorded in an actual cave, which sounds like something you could just go ahead and do in Australia, right?), and contrary to what I would usually say, the best songs are the more clearly defined, less risky ones—“Promises,” for instance, is a perfect hot-shit love song, and “Happy Birthday” is a catchy jammer about loathing your own big day. But some of the more ambient, experimental, movie-soundtrack-ish tracks somehow feel flat and anxiety-riddled at the same time. Fewer clouds, more control? EMILY NOKES

The Thermals, My Goodness, Summer Cannibals

(Neumos) Punk has always held this egalitarian promise that anyone could be a part of it. You had Big Boys yelling at you to “go out and start your own band” and Minutemen telling you how their band could be your life—what more motivation did you need? Well, a lot of people heard the clarion

call over the years, and more than a few of us probably found ourselves thinking, okay, maybe not everyone needs to be in a band. If you feel that cynicism seeping in, give yourself a dose of the Thermals. The Portland trio is about as basic as you can get (who needs a floor tom, anyway?), yet their four-chord lo-fi anthems continue to sound vital and fresh even after a half-dozen albums. Biscuit and D. Boon would be proud. BRIAN COOK

Thursday 1/16

Richie Aldente, Supersonic Parachute, F2D (Barboza) See Data Breaker, page 61.

Amel Larrieux

(Jazz Alley) Those following Questlove’s Instagram might have caught the best humblebrag #tbt ever a while back—namely, his senior prom photo with the forever-foxy Amel Larrieux on his arm. Before Baduizm, before the world quite knew Lauryn Hill, Larrieux’s group Groove Theory had a stone classic in the growing canon of what would soon come to be known as “neo-soul” with their 1995 hit “Tell Me”; Larrieux evoked the jazzy, sophisticated stylings of Vinia Mojica and the Brand New Heavies’ N’Dea Davenport more than, say, radio mavens Monica or Brandy. Since GT’s split, Larrieux’s simmering solo output, particularly 2004’s Bravebird has (like Larrieux herself) been ageless, black excellence—the bulk of which has been released on

Blisslife, the label she and her husband/collaborator Laru Larrieux founded. Her smooth, honeyed vocals never lose a drop. Larrieux’s newest, Ice Cream Everyday, finds her daughter Sky among the session players—and word is that Groove Theory have reunited and are working on their official second LP.

LARRY MIZELL JR.

Beatles Trivia Night (Central Cinema) You could fill a library with all of the books and magazines devoted to the Beatles, one of the most popular and greatest bands ever. (Dissenters are welcome to present their cases to the folks gathered at Central Cinema tonight.) In their 10 years as a group, the Beatles cut hundreds

WEDNESDAY 1/15

MARK HUMMEL’S BLUES HARMONICA BLOWOUT FEATURING JOHN MAYALL, CURTIS SALGADO, RICK ESTRIN, LITTLE CHARLIE BATY AND MORE

TUE, JAN 14 - WED, JAN 15

A Tribute to Sonny Boy Williamson II

91.3 KBCS PRESENTS AMEL LARRIEUX

THU, JAN 16 - SUN, JAN 19

Urban soul singer/songwriter returns in support of her new release Ice Cream Everyday KPLU 88.5FM PRESENTS GRACE KELLY with THE MARC SEALES TRIO

TUE, JAN 21 - WED, JAN 22

21 year old music fusion master - singer, songwriter, saxophonist, composer, arranger, and educator melds her background in jazz with groove, pop and boths of world music.

OLIVER MTUKUDZI and THE BLACK SPIRITS

TUE, JAN 28 - WED, JAN 29

Zimbabwean afro-beat roots music against oppression

91.3 KBCS PRESENTS BILL FRISELL’S

GUITAR IN THE SPACE AGE

ft. GREG LEISZ, TONY SCHERR & KENNY WOLLESEN

THU, JAN 30 - SUN, FEB 2

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

COLIN BRADFORD

HAND IN THE ATTIC, CAMI LUNDEE

$6 • 9PM

THURSDAY 1/16

WIND BURIAL

GOLDEN GARDENS, KYLMYYS

$6 • 9PM

FRIDAY 1/17

THE CROCODILE & THE SUNSET PRESENT SURFER BLOOD WITH XVIII EYES $10 • 9PM

SATURDAY 1/18

LEGENDARY OAKS

THE BRAMBLES, DAY LABORERS & PETTY INTELLECTUALS

$8 • 10PM

SUNDAY 1/19 AT THE 2BIT ANGELO DELSENNO

THE TROPICS, SUNDOG

$6 • 8PM

SUNDAY 1/19

PONY TIME

KILLER GHOST, GANGRENE GANG, SHARK TOYS

$6 • 8PM

of songs and made gobs of history. They were dynamic, engaging personalities who led interesting lives. Consequently, they accrued trivia like a motherfucker. Lots of it is pretty interesting, and some people have devoted their lives to mentally cataloguing this trivia. A fair number of these types will swarm to CC to prove their prowess with Beatle-y minutiae. The amount of pure animal magnetism in the joint tonight is going to be off the charts. By the way, who really played the Moog on George Harrison’s Electronic Sound? DAVE SEGAL

StaG, Kairos, Lazer Kitty

(Columbia City Theater) LA-based indie rockers

StaG have shown a heartening progression in songwriting abilities since 2011’s Rifle Meeker. Initially a sort of overstimulated Animal Collective clone, StaG have gone on to display impressive production abilities, which are now served by compositions that straddle the line between an original blend of exotic, reverb-drenched psych and experimental pop. Meanwhile, Seattle’s only other newspaper declared Kairos “one to watch” in 2014, and after hearing the two songs on her Bandcamp, I’m inclined to agree. The slick electro-pop project of Pollens’ Lena Simon, Kairos uses intricate programmed beats to underpin her deceptively coy vocals, flirting with melancholy and funkiness alike. Openers Lazer Kitty might captivate you or may bore you to tears: it’s tough to know how their brand of cosmos-inspired space rock will fare live. KYLE FLECK

Wind Burial, Golden Gardens, Kylmyys

(Sunset) This is serious. The music on Seattle quartet Wind Burial’s self-titled debut EP, that is, for which this show is the official release party. The five tracks here recall a more goth-leaning Walkabouts, who are an overlooked component of Seattle music history. Vocalist/guitarist/synthesist Kat Terran sings in a rich, melancholy tone over tempered tempests of night-desert rock. Subtle elements of psychedelia and folk seep into the songwriting, which aims for and mostly attains profundity. Wind Burial are working on their first album, and if this initial batch of tunes is any indication, we have much to look forward to. Fellow locals Golden Gardens have a

newish EP, too. Bellflower luxuriates in a silky haze of blissgaze rock à la Slowdive and Cranes, and Aubrey Rachel Violet Bramble’s voice evokes the poetry of her name. DAVE SEGAL

Friday 1/17

Slow Year, Sky Mall, Red Alder (Cairo) See Underage, page 62.

Philip H. Anselmo and the Illegals, Author & Punisher (El Corazón) See Data Breaker, page 61.

Light Year, Xan Lucero, Kadeejah Streets (Monkey Loft) See Data Breaker, page 61.

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

1.16 Thursday (Bluegrass / Americana)

Left Coast Country

Lucy Horton Band

The Blackberry Bushes Stringband

American Nomad

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

1.17 Friday (Electro Groove / Funk) THEORETICS

THE QUICK & EASY BOYS

Spyn Reset , Fabulous Party Boys

$7 adv / $10 dos, 8pm doors, 21+

1.18 Saturday (Dance / Tribute) Bombhiphop.com Presents the Return of…

The Prince & Michael Experience w/ Dj Dave Paul

$8 adv, 8pm doors, 21+

1.19 Sunday (Rock / Pop)

School of Rock

Performs: Pink Floyd

$10 adv /$12 dos, 6pm, All Ages

1.21 Tuesday (Hip Hop)

KUTT CALHOUN

Saint Warhead, Ripynt & Carl Roe, MC Sav, Cliff Tha Sav, Chris Kemp, Filthy McNast, Hosted by Neema

$13 adv / $15 dos, 8pm doors, All Ages $30 Meet & Greet, 7 - 8pm

1/24 Sophistafunk 1/25 Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad 1/26 Ying Yang Twins 1/28 Nappy Roots 1/30 Shafty plays PHISH 1/31 Polyrhythmics/Turkuaz 2/1 Cumbieros

2/8 Rewind (live 80s hits) 2/15 Clinton Fearon

Wooden Shjips, Kinski, Black Whales (Crocodile) See Stranger Suggests, page 35.

Amel Larrieux (Jazz Alley) See Thursday.

Los Lobos (Triple Door) I first saw Los Lobos in 1983, in a tiny community center in El Paso. I was there to see a band called the Nelsons, a Lubbock-based newwave outfit trafficking exclusively in variations on the Romantics’ “What I Like About You,” which meshed well with my 15-year-old tastes. Opening the show: an unknown-to-me Los Lobos, who’d just released their …And a Time to Dance EP and whose music set the air of that community center on fire. (Not only did they fucking rock, they had songs.) After Los Lobos’ short set, the Nel-

21+ ONLY - 8:00 PM

TUESDAY JAN 28TH @ VERA PROJECT INTO IT. OVER IT. THE WORLD IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE & I AM NO LONGER AFRAID TO DIE, A GREAT BIG PILE OF LEAVES, SPECIAL EXPLOSION ALL AGES - 6:30 PM

TUESDAY JAN 28TH @ EL CORAZON LOUNGE RED CITY RADIO

ELWAY, DIRECT HIT!, SUCCESS, POKE DA SQUID ALL AGES (BAR W/ ID) 7:00 PM

FRIDAY JAN 31ST @ VERA PROJECT A LOT LIKE BIRDS

SIANVAR, STOLAS, THE VENETIA FAIR, DISTRICT, A TASTE OF DAYLIGHT ALL AGES - 6:30 PM

TUESDAY FEB 4TH @ THE VERA PROJECT REGGIE AND THE FULL EFFECT

DADS, PENTIMENTO, HONORABLE MENTION ALL AGES - 6:30 PM

WEDNESDAY FEB 12TH @ NECTAR BLACK UHURU

INDUBIOUS, W/ GUESTS 21+ ONLY - 8:00 PM

THURSDAY FEB13 @ CHOP SUEY MAD CADDIES

ILLSCARLETT, POSITIVE RISING ALL AGES (BAR W/ ID) 7:00 PM

sons sounded like my cousins playing in the basement; I left early and tracked down …And a Time to Dance as soon as I could. Three decades later, Los Lobos remain one of the greatest live bands on the planet, as well as a canny group of professionals (see 2009’s Los Lobos Goes Disney). Coming off a tour of Europe with Neil Young and Crazy Horse, the band hits the Triple Door for a threenight run celebrating its 40th anniversary. DAVID SCHMADER

Saturday 1/18

Amel Larrieux (Jazz Alley) See Thursday.

Los Lobos (Triple Door) See Friday.

Partman Parthorse, Young Evils, So Pitted

(Highline) A decade young and still kicking out Seattle’s most limber avant-punk, Partman Parthorse are back with a new album: Wet Sounds, out now on ggnzla Records. It’s true, the sounds (and lyrics) on this album could be described as wet… the 10 songs are soaked in sweat and other slippery things. There’s beer and semen and bong water and, well, a pretty great song called “Hardcore Fucking.” If frontman Gary’s teeny bikini doesn’t thaw out your January, I don’t know what will. With the catchy, bittersweet pop of the Young Evils and the tough bleak-rock of So Pitted. EMILY NOKES

Sunday 1/19

Expansions MLK Unity Party: Riz, Masa, Kid Hops (Columbia City Theater) See Sound Check, page 51.

Amel Larrieux (Jazz Alley) See Thursday.

Los Lobos (Triple Door) See Friday.

School of Rock Performs Pink Floyd (Nectar) When Roger Waters, Rick Wright, Nick Mason, and Syd Barrett were first experimenting during Pink Floyd’s early days—giving Donovan haircuts onstage and writing songs about Lucifer Sam and witches named Jennifer Gentle—they likely never imagined that their trip would include having their songs provide a lesson plan for School of Rock’s young musicians. And, considering that Pink Floyd were once refused payment by a Catholic youth center under the claim that their performance was “not music,” it’s pretty hilarious to think that they became such an institution. “We don’t need no education” as a tool to educate? Certainly more interesting than a laser light show, and not a bad idea for something awesome to do on a Sunday evening. BREE MCKENNA

Monday 1/20

MCC 3 Year Anniversary: Dave B, Cam the Mac, Kung Foo Grip, Porter Ray, and more (Crocodile) Local blog queenpin and womanabout-town Miss Casey Carter has become one of Seattle’s premier sources for rap-related buzz and happenings since the launch of her website in 2011, and to celebrate its third anniversary, she has assembled a thoroughly flexin’ lineup of local talent indicative of her tastemaking ways. From Dave B’s dynamic conscious/streetwise lyricism, to Kung Foo

Grip’s introspective-yet-tough positivity, to Cam the Mac and Thaddeus David’s stoned-pimp Moor Gang stylings, to Porter Ray’s seasoned, naturally effortless flow, to fast-rising newcomers Cassow and Romaro Franceswa, there’s not one weak link on this bill. MIKE RAMOS

Tuesday 1/21

Deadkill

(Easy Street Records) Hey, rad dads! Yeah, YOU! All you dudes who still wear ratty, old band T-shirts and fight to keep the record collection in the living room, despite Wifey, who wants them in the basement. THIS IS YOUR BIG CHANCE! Grab your son, or better yet, your daughter, and take ’em to see this allages record-release show for Deadkill’s punk opus, No, Never! Show ’em how it’s done—how to headbang and how to punch imaginary adversaries (in the face!) when they’re hovering above your head at hardcore shows. Buy ’em this record, so when they have a bad day at school, they can come home, jump on the bed, and scream at the sky, with all the fury that you once did to that old Black Flag record. Do it for them, Dad! They’ll never forget the day. KELLY O

Crooks on Tape

(Crocodile) Two unsung heroes of ’90s indie rock— John Schmersal and Rick Lee—play in Crooks on Tape. Schmersal manned guitar in spazzy units Enon and Brainiac, and Lee drummed/percussed in Enon, Skeleton Key, and Butter 08. What they have in common is a predilection for unpredictable song structures and textural strangeness, without totally tossing out, you know, songs. As Crooks on Tape (which includes drummer Joey Galvan), they’ve released their debut, Fingerprint, a mixed bag of eccentric rockers, fractured funk, and awkward, Beck-like ballads. It’s best when emphasizing the group’s odd time signatures and noisier proclivities. “Milo’s Creeper” could even be a Primus song, if Claypool and co. weren’t try-hard wankers. Anyway, Crooks on Tape have potential to bust some memorably quirky moves within a twisted pop context, and the songs on Fingerprint represent merely a tiny percentage of their output. DAVE SEGAL

February 2014

[6 + 7] Br’er Rabbit

[8 + 9] Betty and the Boy

[10 + 11 + 12]  Robin Bacior and Grand Lake Islands

[13 + 14] The Harmed Brothers

[15 + 16]  Ian McFeron

[17 + 18 + 19] Moody Little Sister

[20 + 21] Sara Jackson-Holman

[22 + 23] The Winterlings

Dead Nation Presents WOODEN SHJIPS Kinski 21+

Caribbean Blu Presents ANTHONY B AND THE BORN FIRE BAND

Mista Chatman, ZJ Redman, Soul One, Selector Rhoan 21+

Team MCC & Flywheel Present: MCC 3 YEAR ANNIVERSARY

Dave B, Cam the Mac, Kung Foo Grip, Porter Ray, Thaddeus David and more! All Ages TUESDAY

CROOKS ON TAPE

MOON TAXI

Run River North All Ages

Featuring members of Caribou, Enon, Brainiac, Skeleton Key, Mannheim Steamroller, & Anthrax! All Ages

PATTERSON HOOD

The Crocodile & ReignCity Present DJ QUIK Raz Simone, Gifted Gab, Dj Swervewon 21+

Michel Stegner & Keith Lowe All Ages

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15TH

A BENEFIT FOR THE PHILIPPINES FT. PONYHOMIE THE REDWOOD PLAN // GEMS HEARTS ARE THUGS

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22ND

DISAPPEARS

DREAMSALON // GANG CULT FRIDAY, JANUARY 24TH

DEADKILL

(RECORD RELEASE) DUST MOTH // ROOKERY INTO VIOLENCE

SUNDAY, JANUARY 26TH

NIGHTMARE FORTRESS

BESTIAL MOUTHS // BUTCHER ZOOLAB

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29TH

DENT MAY

JACK NAME (OF WHITE FENCE) ACAPULCO LIPS

FRIDAY, JANUARY 31ST

CUMULUS

DRESSES // PLUS GUESTS TBA

1/25

1/28 CABANA 1/30 TENNIS PRO 2/1 LICK! 2/6 XOLIE MORRA &

KIND 2/12 WILD ARMS 2/13

CADDIES (ALL-AGES) 2/14 TACOCAT 2/19 R. STEVIE MOORE 2/20 WILD THRONE 2/25 COM TRUISE 2/28 A TRIBUTE TO JOHN REIS / SWAMI RECORDS

CLATTERING HELLTUNES

DRUNK OF THE WEEK …BELOW THE HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA …59 DATA BREAKER …61 UNDERAGE…62 POSTER OF THE WEEK …62

WED 1/15

LIVE 418 PUBLIC HOUSE Claudio

Rochat-Felix, guests, free a 88 KEYS Blues On Tap, 8 pm, free BARBOZA Cloud Control, Body Parts, 8 pm, $8

CHOP SUEY PonyHomie, the Redwood Plan, Gems, Hearts Are Thugs, 8 pm, $10 suggested donation

EL CORAZON Kickflip!, Olde Growth, Razors & Red Flags, HIGH DIVE Swingset Showdown, Supply and the Man, Rory Ok & the Worst Band Ever, Sea of Eyes HIGHWAY 99 High and Lonesome, 8 pm, $7

JAZZ ALLEY Blues Harmonica Blowout: Guests

NECTAR Ill-esha, Buku, BizZaRa, Ganjaology, $12

NEUMOS Moe’s 20/ Neumos 10 Anniversary: Truly, Goodness, the Posies, Hyperlung, the Thermals, guests, the Thermals, My Goodness, Summer Cannibals, 8 pm, $15

NEW ORLEANS Legacy Band, Clarence Acox OHANA Live Island Music

PARAGON Two Buck Chuck PIES & PINTS Live Rotating Bands: Guests, 8:30 pm

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

Starts Here: Guests

SEAMONSTER Rippin Chicken, 10 pm, free SHIP CANAL GRILL The Canteloupes Jazz Jam, 7:30 pm

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB

Open Mic: Guests

STUDIO SEVEN Forgetters, Nevaeh, Love the Lost, Deliver Your Demise, 7 pm

SUNSET TAVERN Colin Bradford, Hand in the Attic, Cami Lundeen, $6 a TINY NINJA CAFE Open Blues Jam: The Groovetramps, free TRACTOR TAVERN Randy Rogers Band, Wade Bowen

DJ

BALTIC ROOM DJ Shane, free before 10 pm, $3 after HAVANA SoulShift: Peter Evans, Devlin Jenkins, Richard Everhard, $1

LAST SUPPER CLUB Vibe

Wednesday: Jame$Ervin, DT, Contagious

LAVA LOUNGE Mod Fuck Explosion: DJ Deutscher

Meister

MOE BAR The Hump: DJ Darwin, DJ Swervewon

NEIGHBOURS Undergrad: Guest DJs, $5/$8

SEE SOUND LOUNGE Fade: DJ Chinkyeye, DJ Christyle

FRANKS A LOT, HOT DOGS!

So last week, I asked people to send in their boozy photo booth pictures. Instead of any photo strips, I received only one picture from a man named Brad. It’s a photo of a penis, poking through the glory hole in the men’s bathroom at Pony. I’m not sure what Brad’s trying to tell me, but I’m starting to think that it might be wise for bars to install glory holes instead of photo booths. Are they cheaper and more fun? Oh, I wish I had my own penis to find out. KELLY O

= Recommended

CLASSICAL

MEANY HALL Garrick

Ohlsson

THURS 1/16

LIVE

BARBOZA Richie Aldente, Supersonic Parachute, F2D

BLUE MOON TAVERN The Genghis Con Artist, El Norte

CAFE RACER Earl Brooks

CHOP SUEY Pocket Panda, Sebastian and the Deep Blue, Maiah Manser

COLUMBIA CITY

THEATER Stag, Kairos, Lazer Kitty, 8 pm, $8/$10

DISTRICT LOUNGE Cassia

DeMayo Quintet, 8 pm, free a EL CORAZON Station to Station, Dionvox, 7:30 pm a GUAYMAS CANTINA Oleaje Flamenco, 8 pm, free

HARD ROCK CAFE

Cynthia Alexander, 5 pm; Combinator, 8 pm, $5

HIGHLINE Crossbows and Catapults, Murder in the Wood, $6

HIGHWAY 99 AEK, 8 pm, $7

JAZZ ALLEY Amel

Larrieux, 7:30 pm, $26.50

LITTLE RED HEN Aaron Crawford, $3

LO-FI the Hague, They Rise

We Die, Bone Cave Ballet, Case & Ctrl, $6

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

MAC’S TRIANGLE PUB

Fuzz Huzzi

NECTAR Left Coast

Country, Lucy Horton Band, the Blackberry Bushes Stringband, American Nomad, $5

NEUMOS Moe’s 20/ Neumos 10 Anniversary:

Brent Amaker and the Rodeo, Fox and the Law, 8 pm, $15

PINK DOOR Bric-a-Brac, 8 pm

THE ROYAL ROOM The 1 Uppers

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

SEAMONSTER Evan Flory

Barnes, free

THE STEPPING STONE PUB

Open Mic: Guests

STUDIO SEVEN Butch & the Other White Meats, Greasy Spoon, Bacon Grenade, Scinite, 7 pm

SUNSET TAVERN Wind Burial, Golden Gardens, Kylmyys, $6

TRACTOR TAVERN Southern Culture On the Skids, King of Hawaii, $15

TRIPLE DOOR Kelly Joe Phelps, Dave McGraw & Mandy Fer, 7:30 pm

TULA’S Fred Hoadley’s Sonando, 7:30 pm, $10

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Casey MacGill

THE WHITE RABBIT Marmalade, $6

DJ

BALLROOM DJ Rob, free

BALTIC ROOM Revolution: DonnaTella Howe, Olivia LaGarce, guests

THE EAGLE Nasty: DJ King of Pants, Nark

HAVANA Sophisticated

Mama: DJ Sad Bastard, DJ

Nitty Gritty

LAST SUPPER CLUB Open

House: Guests

LO-FI Noctum Caro: Guests

MERCURY Dark Industry Night: Guests, $5

MOE BAR Soundsystem: DJ Panamami, free

NEIGHBOURS Jet Set

Thursdays: Guest DJs

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND The Lowdown: DJ Lightray, $3

OHANA Chill: DJ MS PONY Billion Dollar Babies:

24 • 8PM the

SAT/JANUARY 25 • 8PM kim virant and gerald collier

SUN/JANUARY 26 • 7:30PM cheryl wheeler w/ jill cohn

MON/JANUARY 28 • 7:30PM chieli minucci & special efx

J Aykut Ozen, Pretty Baby

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

THE WOODS Pure Thursdays: Omar Valadez, MMars, Chris T, 10 pm, free

CLASSICAL

BENAROYA HALL

Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2: Seattle Symphony

CHAPEL PERFORMANCE

SPACE Spontaneous Rex

MEANY HALL A Far Cry

FRI

1/17

LIVE BARBOZA Stag, Brother James and the Soul-vation, Hard Roller, 7 pm, $8

CAFE RACER Seven Stars Panda, Helen America, On a Clear Day

CENTRAL SALOON Subject to Downfall, the Lush Tones

a CHAPEL PERFORMANCE

SPACE Coward, Kaleidosaur, Pitbull, 8 pm, $5-$15

CHINA HARBOR Orquesta la Solucion, 9:45 pm, $15

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER Black Nite Crash, Trentalange, Like Lightning CONOR BYRNE Palatine Ave,

Modern Relics, Purty Mouth

CROCODILE Wooden Shjips, Kinski, Black Whales

EL CORAZON Philip H Anselmo and the Illegals, 8 pm, $22/$25

a EMPTY SEA STUDIOS

Danny Schmidt & Carrie Elkin, HIGH DIVE 17th Chapter, Tiny Messengers, Great Wilderness, Judson Claiborne, $8

HIGHWAY 99 Carl Sonny Leyland, the Starjays, 8 pm, $12

JAZZ ALLEY Amel Larrieux, 9:30 pm, $26.50 a KEYARENA Justin Timberlake, 8 pm, $45 - $175

LITTLE RED HEN Trainwreck, $5

MONKEY LOFT The Light Year, Xan Lucero, Kadeejah Streets

NECTAR Theoretics, the Quick and Easy Boys, $7 NEUMOS Tribal Seeds, Two Story Zori, 8 pm, $15

PARAGON Levi Said, free RAVIOLI STATION

TRAINWRECK Dizzy, guests

a THE ROYAL ROOM Piano Royale, 5:30 pm; Dawn Clement, 8 pm

SEAMONSTER Funky 2 Death, 10 pm, free SLIM’S LAST CHANCE

Bloodshot Bill, Gravelroad, the Done Goners

SUNSET TAVERN Surfer

Blood, guests, $10

TIM’S TAVERN Carpet

FRIDAY 1/17

DICKSLAP RIDES THE 0-14

All right! Now which one of you silly firebugging little buggers went all pyromaniac on Neighbours’ ass on NYE? Hands? Anyone? Well. I have a strong feeling that it was one of my millions of ex-boyfriends that I met there over the last two hundred a fiddy or so thousand years (in order to cover up the scene of the crime, you understand), and I suggest that any and all authorities involved begin aggressively investigating all of them immediately. Check their text histories, watch them sleep and poop, junk like that. Please contact me for more information. Thank you. (Kidding! Kidding. You couldn’t find most of my exes, hard as you tried… they have a curious way of vanishing from the face of the planet. So strange!)

TRACTOR TAVERN Southern Culture On the Skids, King of Hawaii, $15

a TRIPLE DOOR Los Lobos, 8 pm, $65/$80 VIP

TULA’S Mark Taylor Quartet, $15

DJ

95 SLIDE DJ Fever One

BALLROOM DJ Tamm of KISS fm

BALMAR Body Movin’ Fridays: DJ Ben Meadow, free BALTIC ROOM Guests

CONTOUR Afterhours, 2 am

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

FUEL DJ Headache, guests

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

LAST SUPPER CLUB

Madness: Guests

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND Caliente

Celebra: DJ Polo, Efren

PONY Shenanigans: DJ Porq, DJ kKost

SCARLET TREE Oh So Fresh Fridays: Deejay Tone, DJ

Buttnaked, guests

THERAPY LOUNGE Rapture: Guests, $3 after 11 pm

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

CLASSICAL

BENAROYA HALL

Tchakovsky’s Violin Concerto

BY ADRIAN RYAN

SAT 1/18

LIVE

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben

Fleck, 6 pm

BARBOZA The BGP, 7 pm

BLUE MOON TAVERN

Animals in Cars, Trees And Timber, No Crown

CAFE RACER NineDice, the Barger Boys

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER

Camille Bloom, Nicole Torres

CROCODILE Born Fire Music Band, Mista Chatman, ZJ Redman, guests, 8 pm, $25

EL CORAZON D.R.I., the Accused, Toe Tag, guests, 7:30 pm, $15

EMPTY SEA STUDIOS David Brewer & Rebecca Lomnicky, 8 pm, $12/$15

HARD ROCK CAFE Good For You, $10/$13

HEARTLAND Oh! Pears, Secretary, Eidolons, Sama Dams, 8 pm

HIGH DIVE Pharaohs of the Sun, Heartless Breakers, We Say Bang, the Great Um, $8

HIGHLINE Partman

Parthorse, Young Evils, So Pitted, 9:30 pm, $7

HIGHWAY 99 Bump Kitchen, 8 pm, $15

HILLIARD’S TAP ROOM

Dearly Departed, the Other Tones, free

JAZZ ALLEY Amel Larrieux,

Anyhooters, here we are, already up to our shapely ankles in 2014, and it’s time for this hiney New Year’s very first Dickslap, a certified Adrian Ryan Approved Event™ (bow your heads for a moment of reflection—and to stretch those neck muscles. You’ll need ’em). As ever, this one features a guest superstar DJ: Jimi Jaxon, a local (for a change—the guest spinners usually hail from faraway someplace elses) who is well-known for passionate eclecticism, and who tells us he’ll be playing “sassy euphoric house with a hard edge and techno.” But mostly? We go because of go-go boy BRENDAN DAVID’S WORLDCLASS ASS. Face it. The Eagle, 9 pm, $5, 21+.

SATURDAY 1/18

LE FAUX

Aren’t you just so sick of not going to Le Faux? ME, TOO! Have you been lately? It’s fucking delightful—Kristie Champagne and Isaac Scott co-ho’stess, Jaxen

WED 1/15 & THU 1/16 JAMCO

Brown does a mean Cher, Gabrielle Sanchez is a sexy dancing phenom… and, yes, it’s true that the crowd can run a little screaming-white-gurl/wastedbachelorette-party-ish, but skipping it because of that would be just a goddamn shame. Julia’s is under-recognized for being a haven for dragsters to be properly pruned and nurtured, and the show they put on is dazz-a-ling. Julia’s, $25–$35, 10 pm, 21+.

SUNDAY 1/19

MATCH GAME, SEATTLE

Match Game used to be all our own, but now we have to share it with Portland (never heard of it), so it’s extra important to get our butts down to Re-bar to enjoy it, because FUCK PORTLAND. You know the drill: Local notables in freakish costumes pit wits in the classic ’60s game-show style. See it, or you’re a total BLANKING BLANK. Blank, blank. Rebar, $12, 7 pm, 21+.

Justin Hayes is a product of the Northwest, but his comedy is worldly. He has opened for Brad Garrett from “Everybody Loves Raymond” at the Icehouse in Pasadena and Dane Cook at Dublin’s on Sunset Boulevard.

FRI 1/17 - SUN 1/19

SAMUEL J. COMROE WITH CHRISTOPHE DAVIDSON

After being hand selected by Ricky Gervais as the winner of the Just Sayin Comedy Contest in 2012, Sam made his television debut on the Conan show this year. Sam continues to share his hilarious and insightful stories of his life with Tourette Syndrome for colleges and clubs all over the country.

9:30

LIVE 2 BIT SALOON Angelo Delsenno, the Tropics, Sundog, 8 pm, $6

BALTIC ROOM DJ Shane

BLUE MOON TAVERN J.P. and the Geminis, 8 pm, free a CHOP SUEY Joyfield, the Young Relics, Struck Red

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER

KEXP Presents the 14th

Annual Expansions MLK

Unity Party: DJ Riz, Masa, Kid Hops, 8 pm, $5/$7

EL CORAZON Jake Orvis & The Broken Band, $10/$12, Shyan Selah and the Republic of Sound, Klyntel, Black Stax, 7:30 pm

HIGH DIVE Hella Maze, the Flagrant Few, Adam WilsonThomas, Lakehouse, Apex Leon, 8 pm, $6

JAI THAI BROADWAY Rock Bottom Soundsystem, free JAZZ ALLEY Amel Larrieux

KELLS Liam Gallagher LO-FI Hella Maze, Adam Wilson-Thomas, Apex Leon, $5

NECTAR School of Rock Performs Pink Floyd

THE ROYAL ROOM Wil Blades Duo

SEAMONSTER Pink Octopus, Hardcoretet

SHIP CANAL GRILL Jay Thomas, Sun, noon

SUNSET TAVERN Pony Time, Killer Ghost, Gangrene Gang, Shark Toys, $6 a TRIPLE DOOR Los Lobos, 8 pm, $65/$80 VIP TULA’S Jim Cutler Jazz Orchestra, 8 pm, $8

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Ruby Bishop, 6 pm; the Ron Weinstein Trio,

BY DAVE SEGAL

9:30 pm

DJ

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

MOE BAR Chocolate

Sundays: Sosa, MarsONE, Phosho, free

NEIGHBOURS Noche

Latina: Guest DJs PONY TeaDance: DJ El Toro, Freddy King of Pants

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

RE-BAR Flammable: DJ Wesley Holmes, 9 pm

SEE SOUND LOUNGE

Salsa: DJ Nick

THE STEPPING STONE PUB

Vinyl Night: You bring your records, they play them

MON 1/20

LIVE 2 BIT SALOON VX36, Burning of I, Asema

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Jerry Frank BARBOZA

Superhumanoids, 8 pm, $12

BLUE MOON TAVERN

Andy Coe Band, 10 pm, free

THURSDAY 1/16

RICHIE ALDENTE: THEY’RE NO UNITED STATE OF ELECTRONICA

Seattle sextet Richie Aldente remind me of another local outfit, albeit one that’s been on extended hiatus: United State of Electronica. But Richie Aldente lack the ineffable sense of wonder that U.S.E exude, as well as their glittery, heartpiercing melodic abilities. Like U.S.E, Richie Aldente are a big group of great players making dance music and using distorted vocals, but there’s something generic and corny at the core of the latter’s songs—like RA are trying to leverage them into some imaginary TV movie of the week. They released their second album, Disco Baby, in September; you can make up your own mind about it on their Bandcamp. Maybe, like the one and only Jason Mraz, you’ll love it. With Supersonic Parachute and F2D Barboza, 8 pm, $10, 21+.

FRIDAY 1/17

BASK IN LIGHT YEAR’S DEEP OZ HOUSE MUSIC

One great recent development in Seattle’s electronic-music scene is the Monkey Loft becoming a more active and overground venue. Another fab development is Australian producer/DJ Light Year making his Northwest debut in said Sodo space. A favorite of DJs like Erol Alkan, Tiga, and 2manydjs, Light Year pumps

out tracks that find the sweetest spots between deep, soul-inflating house and hypnotic techno. And his pneumatic remix of Tame Impala’s “Be Above It” could be a gateway drug for psych-pop kids getting into dance music. If you need one track to clinch your love of Light Year, check out the low-riding, bass-and-bleepy techno noir of “Bliss.” With Xan Lucero and Kadeejah Streets Monkey Loft, 10 pm–4 am, $12 adv, 21+.

AUTHOR & PUNISHER’S INDUSTRIAL DOOM AND BOOM

This might sound crazy, but I’m going to recommend that you go to a show headlined by a metal legend at El Corazón. Data Breaker first! For some reason, Phil Anselmo—singer for Pantera, Down, and Superjoint Ritual—asked industrial-doom/drone producer Author & Punisher (San Diego’s Tristan Shone) to open for him and his band. Actually, it does make some kind of sense: A&P’s Women & Children album pummels and snarls at times with the intensity of the orneriest heavy metal. Fans of Godflesh and Kevin Martin’s powerful Ice project and people who think Nine Inch Nails are Pollyanna lightweights will also bang noggins to A&P’s crushing, clattering helltunes. Feel the megahertz, rivethead. With Philip H. Anselmo and the Illegals and Hymns El Corazón, 8 pm, $22 adv/$25 DOS, all ages.

CAPITOL CIDER

EntreMundos, 9:30 pm

COASTAL KITCHEN Pork Chop Trio, 9:30 pm, free

CROCODILE MCC 3 Year

Anniversary: Dave B, Cam the Mac, Kung Foo Grip, Porter Ray, guests, 8 pm

KELLS Liam Gallagher

LO-FI Netherfriends, iji, guests, $7

NEW ORLEANS The New Orleans Quintet, 6:30 pm

THE WHITE RABBIT Michael Shrieve’s Spellbinder

DJ

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

TUE 1/21

LIVE AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BARBOZA Drenge, 8 pm, $8

BASTILLE CAFE BAR The Djangomatics, 8 pm, free

CAFE RACER Jacobs Posse

CONOR BYRNE Ol’ Time Social: the Tallboys, 9 pm a CROCODILE Crooks on Tape

HEARTLAND CAFE & BENBOW ROOM Open Mic: Guests

HIGH DIVE Dirty Mike and the Boys, Jesse Solomon, 8 pm, $6

BARBOZA Minted: Icon

Mondays: Sean Majors, guests, free, DJ Swervewon, 100proof, Sean Cee, Blueyedsoul, free

HIGHLINE Mercy Ties, Cold Blue Mountain, Noise-a-tron, Audrey Horne, $6 JAZZ ALLEY Grace Kelly Quintet, $22.50

KELLS Liam Gallagher

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

CONOR BYRNE Get the Spins: Guest DJs, free

CONTOUR Manic Mondays: Guests

THE HIDEOUT Industry

Standard: Guests, 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

PONY Dirty Deeds: Guest

DJs

Q NIGHTCLUB Reflect, 8 pm, free

NECTAR Kutt Calhoun, Saint Warhead, Ripynt, MC Sav, $13

PINK DOOR Michael Navedo, 8 pm

THE ROYAL ROOM The Jangles, 8 pm

SEAMONSTER Threefold Seahorse, McTuff Trio, 10 pm, free TIM’S TAVERN Open Mic: Linda Lee, 8 pm

TRACTOR TAVERN Cody Canada & the Departed, American Aquarium, 8 pm, $11

DJ

BALTIC ROOM Drum & Bass Tuesdays: Guests

BLUE MOON TAVERN Blue Moon Vinyl Revival Tuesdays: DJ Country Mike, A.D.M., guests, 8 pm, free THE EAGLE Pitstop: DJ Nark

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

It’s not too late to catch the tail end of the big Moe’s 20/Neumos 10 anniversary celebration, which draws to a close on Thursday. Fittingly, the gorgeous screen-printed poster was made by two guys who helped define the look of the modern rock poster, Ed Fotheringham and Jeff Kleinsmith. AARON HUFFMAN

Brent Amaker and the Rodeo w/Fox and the Law Thurs Jan 16, Neumos

BY JACKSON HATHORN

WEDNESDAY 1/15

CHAIN AND THE GANG, THE SHIVAS, MONOGAMY PARTY, THE EXQUISITES

After starting the DC punk band Nation of Ulysses in 1988, Ian Svenonius has helmed numerous musical acts, written two books, hosted one of the best talk shows ever (the now-defunct Soft Focus), and received plenty of attention for his sociopolitical musings. It’s a good thing that you don’t have to wholly comprehend Svenonius’s party platform—I can’t pretend that I do—to get down with his fun, righteous rock. His current group, Chain and the Gang, finds Svenonius at his slinkiest and most concise, the philosopher soul man strutting and rumbling over proto-funk grooves. Also on the bill tonight are the Shivas, an exuberant garage-rock band out of Portland, along with local heavies Monogamy Party and the Exquisites Black Lodge, 9 pm.

FRIDAY 1/17

SLOW YEAR, SKY MALL, RED ALDER

Kelsie Brown elated local electronicmusic fans last year when she resumed recording as Red Alder and performed her first-ever show in Seattle. As Red Alder, Brown put out a steady stream of

poignant and impressionist ambient music while she lived in Pullman and worked as a DJ/assistant music director at Washington State University’s KZUU FM. After relocating to Seattle and formally retiring the Red Alder name in 2012, Brown resurrected the project and released a new EP, 2013, this past October. It features Brown’s strongest and most arresting songs yet. Brown’s spectral and not-always-intelligible vocals hover above these minimalist tracks—briefly touching down, expanding in timbre, and creating palls of despair

Sky Mall is the latest musical undertaking for Pierce Adler, the Eastsideteen-turned-NYU-film-student and former member of the dissonant art-punk band Zephyrs. It makes sense that this new venture shares the name of a certain endlessly beguiling in-flight catalogue and magazine; Sky Mall’s introductory EP, Secret Room, is an enveloping dance-pop grab bag, with the story being that each song was constructed with samples from old commercials found on

and Red Alder open for the muchlauded, nocturnal-sauntering

FILM

Film Review Revue

Resilient Children and Recalcitrant Gangsters

The Selfish Giant opens with a terrible racket. A boy, wedged in the small space beneath a bed, is banging furiously at the boards above him. Is he trapped, or imprisoned, or just working out his emotions? Whatever the case, he exhausts himself, and a soothing voice coaxes him out into view—a blond boy with a buzz cut. This is Arbor, the troubled 11- or 12-year-old hero of The Selfish Giant, Clio Barnard’s gritty gem of a film about innocence lost, and lost further.

Our setting is West Yorkshire, a landlocked county in the north of England where accents run so thick, they earn subtitles. When Arbor is not being roughed up by his older brother (a junkie with a taste for Arbor’s Adderall), he’s fighting his way through school, where kids mock his pills, his erratic emotions, his family’s poverty. Still, Arbor is no sap—he gives as good as he gets, and when upperlevel toughs single out his best friend for a beatdown, Arbor responds with force enough to send a kid to the hospital and get himself expelled.

The singular bond between Arbor (Conner Chapman, in a brilliant performance) and his best friend Swifty (Shaun Thomas, also terrific) is the heart of The Selfish Giant, which follows the boys—totally devoted to each other in the waning days of prepubescence— as they struggle to help themselves and their desperate families. Finding success as freelance scrap-metal collectors, they’re able to pay off their parents’ light bills and buy back family furniture hocked for food. But sadly, this is under the auspices of a scrapmetal mogul whose moral rot will eventually drive the boys to the film’s stunning climax, a shock that traffics in Edward Gorey levels of darkness.

Drawing its title and some enigmatic inspiration from the fairy tale by Oscar Wilde, The Selfish Giant is a heartbreaking fable of its own making, blending the elegant childhoodmemory containment of Stand by Me with the minute-by-minute grittiness of Trainspotting. Go see it. DAVID SCHMADER

Beyond Outrage

dir. Takeshi Kitano Grand Illusion

In my 2011 review of Takeshi Kitano’s gangster film Outrage, I wrote, “The best thing about Outrage is not the story (which is simple) or acting (which is fine enough) or music (which has its moments). Its greatness is almost entirely found in the editing, which is cool, exact, minimalist, and rhythmically modern.” This appraisal is even more true for his latest gangster film, Beyond Outrage which is not, by the way, strictly a follow-up to Outrage

Set in Japan’s urban yakuza underground, Beyond Outrage is about the tension between old gangster values of loyalty, commitment to codes, and a respect for seniors, and new values that place money above all concerns—values that indeed cannot be distinguished from those of legitimate financial institutions. On one side are gangsters who want to focus on things like derivatives and hedge funds; on the other side are gangsters who want to keep things real and deep. One side is the yakuza in its modern capitalist form; the other side is the yakuza in its precapitalist and more rural form.

Now recall the sample that opens Burial’s numinous and dubby track “Gutted.” That sample, which is from Jim Jarmusch’s great hiphop movie Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai and involves a short scene between Forest Whitaker and the greatest African face in cinema, Isaach De Bankolé, goes like this:

“We’re from different ancient tribes. And now, we’re both almost extinct. But sometimes…

you gotta stick with the ancient ways. The oldschool ways. I know you understand me.” This is exactly how the older and more traditional gangsters feel about things. But, of course, the tension between the past and the future leads to lots and lots of brilliantly edited (the genius of the movie) violence. In the end, no one loses and no one wins. CHARLES MUDEDE

SILENCE IS GOLDEN

Now in its 11th year, Trader Joe’s Silent Movie Mondays series is the twice-a-year tradition wherein Seattleites experience classic silent cinema in the most glamorous way possible: with live organ accompaniment from Wurlitzer master Jim Riggs, in the beautiful Paramount Theatre. The theme of the already-under-way winter series: Adored and Restored, focusing on some of the most influential films from the silent era.

January 27 brings 1929’s Pandora’s Box, G.W. Pabst’s controversial melodrama featuring silent icon Louise Brooks in her signature role. “Sensationally modern, the film follows the downward spiral of the fiery, brash, yet innocent showgirl Lulu, whose sexual vivacity has a devastating effect on everyone she comes in contact with,” writes Criterion.com, bringing to mind a certain Verhoeven showgirl. The film even dabbles in lesbian subtext, with Lulu engaging in a shameless ballroom dance with a libidinous countess. Along with Riggs on the Wurlitzer, the screening features a post-film discussion led by SIFF director of programming Beth Barrett.

February 3 brings 1924’s Peter Pan, the world’s first big-budget film adaptation of the J.M. Barrie classic, this one starring Betty Bronson as the boy who can fly but will never grow up. Freshly restored from an original 35 mm nitrate print, the film will be scored by organist Riggs accompanied by harpist Leslie McMichael, and will be followed by a discussion led by Northwest Film Forum’s director of children’s programming, Liz Shepherd. The series winds down on February 10 with The General, the 1926 Buster Keaton classic that routinely shows up on best-films-of-all-time lists. Set against the backdrop of the Civil War and inspired by the 1862 Great Locomotive Chase, the film features Keaton risking his neck in a hundred elegant ways and includes, in its train-on-a-burningbridge segment, the most expensive stunt of the silent era. (DAVID SCHMADER)

Trader Joe’s Silent Movie Mondays series continues through February 10 at the Paramount Theatre. More information at stgpresents.org.

FILM SHORTS

More reviews and movie times: thestranger.com/film

LIMITED RUN

BEYOND OUTRAGE

See review, page 63. Grand Illusion, Fri 7:30 pm, SatSun 5, 7:30 pm, Mon-Tues 6:30, 8:45 pm.

BICYCLE THIEVES

A (maybe the) primary example of Italian neo-realist film, directed by Vittorio De Sica in 1948. A bicycle is stolen from a poor man, and with it, his means of generating income to support his family. Presented on 35 mm. Seattle Art Museum, Thurs Jan 16 at 7:30 pm.

BIG

After a poorly-thought-out request made to a carnival robot, a male child is transformed into an adult male Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks’s body allows the child to mate with an adult woman, but estranges him from his child friends. Central Cinema, Fri 7 pm, Sat 3, 7 pm, Mon 7 pm.

BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR

Blue ranks among the best love stories I’ve ever seen. High schooler Adèle falls for college student Emma the first time she sees her. Adèle is needy, aimless, and libidinous, and the two enter into a beautifully adolescent relationship, all hungry sex and deep, pseudo-intellectual conversations. As the years pass and the women age, the beautiful, vague Adèle slowly begins to come into focus, but it’s not until she screws things up with Emma that she—and we—understand how much the relationship really means to her. (ALISON HALLETT) SIFF Cinema Uptown, Mon Jan 20 at 7 pm.

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

A ruthless, violence-addicted gang-rapist is transformed into a docile, brainwashed member of society in this film by Stanley Kubrick. Central Cinema, Fri-Mon 9:30 pm.

EATING ALABAMA

A documentary about people who try to sustain themselves with locally sourced food. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Sun Jan 19 at 1 pm.

FIRE IN THE BLOOD

A documentary about how pharmaceutical companies obstruct access to life-saving AIDS drugs around the world. There will be a post-film discussion about this and related topics with James Love of Knowledge Ecology International, moderated by UW’s Jeffrey Lane. Northwest Film Forum, Sat Jan 18 at 7 pm.

FREEDOM RIDERS

A documentary about the civil disobedience—which was in fact civil obedience to an ignored Supreme Court ruling that found bus segregation unconstitutional—that helped advance the cause of civil rights reform. Followed by a community discussion. Free screening! Keystone Church, Fri Jan 17 at 7 pm

THE KNIGHTS OF BADASSDOM

A comedy-horror film about live-action role-players, starring Peter Dinklage. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Tues Jan 21.

MAKING A MOVEMENT: MARTIN & MANDELA

A free program of two screenings. Martin Luther King

Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and the film The Man Who Drove with Mandela, a documentary about Mandela’s incognito accomplice with whom he was able to travel undetected around South Africa during apartheid. Seattle Art Museum, Fri Jan 17 at 7 pm.

MOVIE CAT TRIVIA

The beloved movie trivia night returns. Central Cinema, Tues Jan 21 at 7 pm.

NORDIC LIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL

This festival, presented by the Nordic Heritage Museum, features contemporary, award-winning films from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. SIFF Film Center, Fri-Sun. For complete schedule and showtimes, see siff.net.

THE PUNK SINGER

So many music documentaries feel like laurel-buffing victory laps, but Sini Anderson’s The Punk Singer feels like a revelation. Its subject: Kathleen Hanna, cofounder of riot

example, the British version of The Office was 14 episodes… TOTAL. (What??) Meanwhile, the excruciatingly boring Doctor Who has been on the air since 1963 (That’s five years BEFORE my grandmother dropped her first hit of LSD. WTF??)

MAKING FUN OF THE BRITS

Today some jerk said to me, “Unnghh, the world is so PC now. You can’t make fun of ANYBODY.” To which I replied, “We can still make fun of anus-faces like YOU.” People have been getting offended by jokes (and sometimes rightly so) since the dawn of time—you’re just hearing about it now because the world has a bullhorn (called the internet) that will loudly notify you when you’re an anus-faced pee-hole. Here’s a general rule of thumb for making fun of people: choose someone of your rank in society or higher. Say you’re a handsome, straight frat boy. Can you make fun of the pope? YES, YOU CAN. Can you make fun of Donald Trump? YES, YOU CAN. Can you make fun of an overweight poor person who’s gay? NO, YOU CAN’T—and unless you enjoy making simpering apologies to millions of people on the internet, you might want to shut the fuck up.

That being said, it’s completely, absolutely fine to make fun of the British. Why? Because they’re roughly on the same social footing as America. (Yes, we have a lot more nuclear weapons, but they have One Direction—so it equals out.) Also, they’re kind of being anus-faced, pee-hole, stinkpoops right now.

As we can all agree, the BBC series Sherlock is one of the greatest shows of the modern age. Unfortunately, it is British—which means it’s extremely frustrating on three levels:

1. British series (like Sherlock, which has only three episodes per season!!) are either tooooo long or waaaaay too short. For

2. Sherlock stars Benedict Cumberbund… Cinderstun… Cumquatsnatch… NOBODY CAN SPELL YOUR NAME, IDIOT.

3. The Brits are Sherlock hoarders! The BBC already debuted season three of Sherlock on January 1 of this year… and yet? We’ve been forced to sit around with our thumbs up our pucker-holes until this Sunday, January 19! (Look for it on PBS at 10 p.m., immediately following those pucker-holes on Downton Abbey.) Why did they wait so long to share? Because they are EVIL!

See, the Brits are still furious about the whole Revolutionary War/dumping their tea in the harbor thing. (They really like tea.) That’s why they held back Sherlock so they could gee-and-gaw about it on blogs and Twitter for 2.5 weeks (which is, like, 57 years in internet time), dropping endless spoilers and lisping, “Cor blimey, luv… wotevah will the poor Americans doooo?”

OR! OR! Perhaps even more evil-y, they expected us to lose our patience and illegally download Sherlock season three on one of those pirate sites (please tell me you didn’t) and then have us all arrested and imprisoned! Then their mouths—full of deformed, broken yellow teeth—would curl into a sadistic smirk as they say, “Spit-spot, guv’nah. That’ll collywobble your John Thomas! Tuppence for the birds!”

(Note: I can make fun of their teeth because the inside of my mouth looks like a graveyard for decade-old candy corn.)

grrrl, 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 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) Grand Illusion, Fri-Sat 10 pm.

THE SELFISH GIANT

See review, page 63. Northwest Film Forum, Fri 7, 9 pm, Sat 9 pm, Sun-Tues 7, 9 pm.

THE SPROCKET SOCIETY’S SECRET SATURDAY MATINEE

A family-friendly series featuring classic movie serial episodes plus secret classic feature films, all shown on 16 mm. The serial: 1949’s Batman and Robin. The secret feature film: secret, but this month’s theme is “superheroes.” Grand Illusion, Sat Jan 11 at 2 pm.

NOW PLAYING

12 YEARS A SLAVE

The brutal tale of 12 Years a Slave comes from the 1853 autobiography of Solomon Northup. Northup was a free black man living in New York with his wife and children when, in 1841, he was kidnapped, transported south, sold to the highest bidder, and subjected to a barbaric 12-year enslavement. In the film, Northup is played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, an accomplished British actor who does extraordinary work here. Throughout 12 Years are scenes of such barbarity, brought to life by actors talented enough to tap every nuance of that barbarity, that at times I had to look away. But amid the violence is so much identifiable humanity, you’ll leave sore. (DAVID SCHMADER)

AMERICAN HUSTLE

It’s hard to pull off a con movie these days, when the impulse to get too elaborate has taken over. But American Hustle has a realistic sense of scale. Christian Bale plays Irving Rosenfeld, a two-bit hustler from the Bronx who sells counterfeit artwork and scams people out of a few thousand dollars at a time. He leads a large and excellent cast, including Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Adams, and Robert De Niro. The movie withholds pertinent information about characters until just the right moment, and it knows how to show its hand before things get too complicated. A good con pulls you close so you can’t see it’s hiding something important from you; American Hustle works exactly like that. (PAUL CONSTANT)

ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES

Anchorman 2 isn’t as funny as the first Anchorman. At least, it’s not as evenly funny as the first Anchorman, although there are a couple of scenes that had me laughing harder and longer than I did at any one scene in the first movie. On the other hand, there were a lot more boring sequences, too. You’ve already met these characters, and they haven’t really changed at all: David Koechner plays the loud-mouthed idiot, Paul Rudd plays the semisuave idiot, and Steve Carell plays Brick Tamland, the idiot’s idiot. Screenwriters Will Ferrell and Adam McKay seem to understand that Carell was the first Anchorman’s secret comedy weapon, and so they’ve given him a fullblown subplot this time around. A little bit of Brick goes a long way, but Carell again coaxes more laughs out of the audience than any other actor in the movie except for Ferrell. The story touches on some of the same elements as the first movie—scary animal attacks, a cabinet full of manly accoutrements—but it doesn’t revisit the same punch lines as in the first film. There’s even an attempt at a whole different type of comedy in Anchorman 2: satire. And even though 24-hour cable news is an impossibly easy target, I can’t imagine Wolf Blitzer, Mika Brzezinski, or Anderson Cooper watching this movie without squirming in their seats, which means the satire feels effective. (PAUL CONSTANT)

AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY

In August: Osage County, Meryl Streep goes full monster. As Violet Weston, the cancer-ridden matriarch of the Weston clan, she sucks cigarette smoke and spits poison at her nearest and dearest. When her husband disappears after one of their routinely vicious fights, she summons her three daughters (Julianne Nicholson, Juliette Lewis, Julia Roberts) home to her side, setting the stage for an epic, toxic, and thoroughly entertaining family showdown. When Meryl and Julia go at it, it’s like watching two drag queens fight. The screenplay is surprisingly funny, and the cast delivers all-in performances, anchored by Streep’s ferociously monstrous turn. (ALISON HALLETT)

DALLAS BUYERS CLUB

When career partyer Ron Woodroof contracted HIV in 1986, the virus was still, in the public’s eye, very much limited to the realm of gay men. Woodroof overcame not only his deeply ingrained homophobia but, for many

years, AIDS itself: He smuggled in unapproved medications from Mexico, Japan, and elsewhere, selling them to HIV-positive patients while the FDA remained in Big Pharma’s thrall. It’s an interesting story, but the real meat of Dallas Buyers Club is Matthew McConaughey’s performance. He dropped more than 40 pounds, filtering his Texas good-ol’-boy shtick through Woodroof’s wiry bigotry and rage. The film sputters at the end with some directorial overreach, but for the first hour and a half, McConaughey’s exceptional performance is riveting enough. (NED LANNAMANN)

FROZEN

Frozen is the first Disney musical in a long time that I can remember making me grin, laugh, and tear up, all while stunning my eyes with some of the most magical computer animation I’ve ever seen. (DENIS C. THERIAULT)

GRUDGE MATCH

Early in Grudge Match, two rival retired boxers (the bluecollar everyman is played by Sylvester Stallone, and the flashy showoff is played by Robert De Niro) get thrown in jail after fighting in public. They’re put in adjacent holding tanks, and De Niro starts heckling Stallone by repeatedly calling him a “super-pussy.” Stallone looks at the other guys in De Niro’s holding tank and says, “Could one of you fellas hurry up and rape this guy already?” That’s really all you need to know about Grudge Match. It’s lowestcommon-denominator garbage that doesn’t even earn the dubious ranking of the funniest I’m-too-old-for-thisshit comedy starring Robert De Niro to be released this year. (Even the aggressively dull Last Vegas was better than this.) Eventually, the two boxers agree to fight in a high-profile boxing match, and they spend most of the movie training for the bout. Queasy-making and insensitive jokes about race, child rape, and gay panic clunk around the script, along with the requisite prostate exam. Haw?

(PAUL CONSTANT)

HER

Despite the dangerously high-concept premise—“a man falls in love with Siri”—Her is one of the best sciencefiction movies I’ve seen in a good long while. It’s not flashy rockets-and-robots sci-fi: The artificial intelligence that Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix, rumpled and wearing a big, friendly, Vonnegut-like mustache) falls in love with feels less like a quantum leap ahead of Google Now and Siri and more like a couple of wellpaced quantum skips. But the AI, which immediately names itself Samantha, is voiced by Scarlett Johansson with a remarkable warmth. Once Twombly powers her into existence, she’s chipper like an enthusiastic retail employee, but she quickly grows fond of him. It’s such an organic progression that only the most cynical viewers will fight it. (PAUL CONSTANT)

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

Joel and Ethan Coen’s caustic, marvelous depiction of the Greenwich Village folk-music scene of the early ‘60s follows down-on-his-luck folksinger Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac). Llewyn is not a bad guy, necessarily, but there’s just something about him that pisses people off. Llewyn is the latest in the string of feckless antiheroes that populate the Coen brothers’ best movies, and Isaac turns in an exceptional performance that not only fulfills the role’s technical challenges—that’s Isaac singing every note and plucking every guitar string you hear—but allows you to find some affection for this prickly, troubled character.

(NED LANNAMANN)

NEBRASKA

An elderly man named Woody (Bruce Dern) with a drinking problem and what seems to be early-stage dementia receives a letter announcing he’s won a sweepstakes prize. His adult son (Will Forte) tries to convince him that he’s actually won nothing beyond the opportunity to buy magazines, but Woody will not be deterred, and soon, father and son are on a prize-related road trip from Montana to Nebraska. Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is a VIP artwork packed with the type of tiny, messy interactions that flower into something almost mythic when writ large, in black and white. (DAVID SCHMADER)

PHILOMENA

Martin (Steve Coogan) is on a writing assignment: An elderly woman, Philomena (Judi Dench), is trying to track down the son she gave birth to in a convent more than 50 years before, when she was young, unwed, and forced to give her fatherless baby up for adoption. Her mission takes her to the US, with Martin a cynical guide and counterpoint to her unerring cute-little-old-lady cheer. Philomena is excellent, thanks to the brilliant odd-couple pairing of Dench and Coogan—and a script that balances heart, humor, and a fierce sense of moral outrage. (ALISON HALLETT)

THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a terrible movie. Directed by and starring Ben Stiller (and costarring a visibly bored Kristen Wiig and Adam Scott’s terrible beard), here’s how it “improves” upon James Thurber’s famous short story about a downtrodden man who daydreams his way through his life: (1) It throws in a romantic subplot. (2) It turns Walter Mitty’s daydreams into a self-helpy parable about the need to live a fully actualized life. (3) Walter Mitty is good at skateboarding! Overall, there’s less a “plot” than a series of handsprings from one product placement to the next. (ALISON HALLETT)

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

While Leonardo DiCaprio and his desperate, cash-slobbery pals do their best to redefine debauchery, Scorsese blows the roof off the goddamn place. After Shutter Island Hugo and Shine a Light, it was easy to worry that the 71-yearold director was ossifying, but The Wolf of Wall Street annihilates those concerns. This is a movie that’s funny and alive and furious, and it often feels like a live-action cartoon, outsize and ludicrous, but Scorsese’s not content with that: When Terence Winter’s screenplay turns dark and intense, Scorsese doesn’t let up. (ERIK HENRIKSEN)

FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

BY ROB BREZSNY

For the Week of Jan 15

ARIES (March 21–April 19): Whose enemy are you? Are you anyone’s adversary or obstructionist or least favorite person? Answer honestly, please. Don’t be in denial. Next question: Do you derive anything useful from playing this oppositional role? If your answer is yes, that’s fine. I won’t try to talk you out of it. Continue to reap the benefits of being someone’s obstacle. But if, on the other hand, you get little value out of this negative relationship, now would be a good time to change it. You have more power than usual to free yourself from being an antagonist.

TAURUS (April 20–May 20): You Tauruses are customarily more grounded than the rest of us. But this week, I’m wondering if you will be tempted to escape the laws of gravity and rebel against the call of duty. I suspect that your dreams, at least, will feature uninhibited forays into the wild blue yonder. While you’re sleeping, you may float weightlessly in an interplanetary spaceship, become an eagle and soar over forests, wear a futuristic jet pack on your back and zip through the sky, sail across the Serengeti Plain in a hot-air balloon, or have a picnic on a cloud with a feast of cotton candy and sponge cake and mint tea. Would you consider bringing this kind of fun into your waking life?

GEMINI (May 21–June 20): What part of your life is too small, and you want to make it bigger? Is there a situation that’s overly intense and dramatic, and you wish you could feel more lighthearted about it, less oppressed? Are you on a quest that has become claustrophobic, and you’d love to find a way to make it more spacious and relaxed? If you answered yes to any of those questions, Gemini, there’s good news. Very soon now, you will have a close encounter with the magic you need to open what has been closed and expand what has been narrow. Be alert for it. Be crafty as you gather it in and harness it for your use.

CANCER (June 21–July 22): In her poem “Catch a Body,” Ilse Bendorf says she dislikes the advice “Don’t ever tell anybody anything.” On the other hand, “Tell everyone everything” isn’t the right approach, either, she says. Judging from your astrological omens, Cancerian, I surmise that you’re wavering between those two extremes. You’re tempted to think you’ve got to do one or the other. Should you cultivate the power that comes from being silent, and keep people guessing about your true feelings? Or should you

seek greater intimacy but risk giving away your power by confessing all your inner thoughts? I suggest you take a middle path. Tell the vivid truth, but carefully and incrementally.

LEO (July 23–Aug 22): If a substance has been burned, it can’t be burned again. There’s no flammable stuff left to feed a fire. That’s simple physics. Now as for the question of whether a person can be burned more than once—we’re speaking metaphorically here—the answer is, unfortunately, yes. Some folks don’t learn from their mistakes and don’t have enough emotional intelligence to avoid the bullies and manipulators who burn them again in the future. But I’m confident that you aren’t one of these types, Leo, or that at least you won’t be in the coming days. You may have been burned before, but you won’t be burned this time.

VIRGO (Aug 23–Sept 22): “People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year,” said author Peter Drucker. “People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.” In general, I agree with that assessment. But I think it needs to be altered for your situation in the coming months. Here’s the adjusted version of the formula: Virgos who don’t take risks in 2014 will make an average of 3.1 big mistakes. Virgos who do take risks in 2014 will make, at most, a half a big mistake.

LIBRA (Sept 23–Oct 22): “You know what the greatest tragedy is in the whole world?” asks novelist Terry Pratchett. “It’s all the people who never find out what it is they really want to do or what it is they’re really good at. It’s all the people who never get to know what it is that they can really be.” If that description applies to you even a little, Libra—if you’re still not completely sure what you’re good at and what you want to do—the coming months will be prime time to fix that problem. Start now! How? Open your mind to the possibility that you don’t know yourself as well as you someday will. Take vocational tests. Ask smart people you trust to tell you what they think about your special aptitudes and unique qualities. And one more thing: Be wildly honest with yourself about what excites you.

SCORPIO (Oct 23–Nov 21): In his book

Schottenfreude: German Words for the Human Condition, Ben Schott dreams up new compound German words for use in English. Here’s one that would serve you well in the coming week: Fingerspitzentanz, meaning “fingertips-dance.”

Schott says it refers to “tiny triumphs of nimble-fingered dexterity.” His examples: fastening a bracelet, tightening a miniscule screw, unknotting, removing a recalcitrant sticker in one unbroken peel, rolling a joint, identifying an object by touch alone, slipping something off a high shelf. Both literally and metaphori-

cally speaking, Scorpio, you now have an abundance of this capacity. Everything about you is more agile and deft and limber than usual. You’ll be a master of Fingerspitzentanz.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22–Dec 21): The four elements that compose cocaine are the same as those that make up TNT, caffeine, and nylon: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. The combinations and proportions of elements are different in each substance, of course. But the point, for our purposes, is that the same raw materials lead to different results. I foresee a similar drama unfolding in your own life, Sagittarius. How you assemble the ingredients you currently have at your disposal could produce a rough and ragged high, a volatile risk, a pleasant stimulation, or a useful resource. Which will it be?

CAPRICORN (Dec 22–Jan 19): Metaphorically speaking, you have recently come into possession of some new seeds. They are robust. They are hardy. They have the potential to grow into big, strong blooms. So when should you plant them, metaphorically speaking? I’m going to suggest that you wait a while longer. It wouldn’t be bad for them if you sowed them right now, but I think their long-term vitality will be even greater if you postpone the planting for at least a week. Two weeks might be better. Trust your intuition.

AQUARIUS (Jan 20–Feb 18): The Flemish artist Jan van Eyck (1385–1441) was renowned for his innovative mastery of oil painting. He signed many of his works not just with his name but also with his motto: Als ick kan. Its idiomatic translation is “The best I can do.” What he meant was that he had pushed his talent and craft to the limit, and then stopped and relaxed, content that he had given all he could. I invite you to have a similar attitude as you wrap up the projects you’re currently involved in, Aquarius. Summon all your passion and intelligence as you create the most excellent outcome possible, but also know when to quit. Don’t try too hard— just try hard.

PISCES (Feb 19–March 20): It’s an excellent time to rise up and revolt against conventional wisdom. I urge you to immunize yourself against trendy groupthink as you outwit and outmaneuver the status quo. Have fun and activate your playful spirit to the max as you create workarounds to the way things have always been done. At the same time, Pisces, stay acutely attuned to your compassion and common sense. Don’t be a quarrelsome intransigent. Don’t be rebellious just to please your ego. If you follow these guidelines, you will be able to pull off a graceful insurrection that both soothes and stimulates your soul.

Homework: When they say “Be yourself,” which self do they mean? Testify at freewillastrology.com.

MASSAGE

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VOLUNTEERS

COUNTY nonprofits improve their volunteer program through United Way’s Volunteer Impact Partnership. If you have HR, volunteer management, planning/facilitation experience contact gwyn@501commons.org

NEW GMO LABELING petition. Initiative to the People. Need 700 Field Representatives by Feb 1: partyofcommons@yahoo.com.

CARS/TRUCKS

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COMPUTER

LESSONS

SING WITH CONFIDENCE. Beginners welcome. Breathing/Range Dev. Sliding Scale. Call Rosy 782-9305 singwithconfidence.com

CREATIVE

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MUSICIANS AVAILABLE

AVANT-ROCK BAND SEEKING keyboardist to complete personnel. Bass/Guitar/Violin/Cello/Voice. Swans, Glenn Branca, Godspeed You!Black Emperor, Zero 7, Jarboe, Live Skull, Saint Vitus, Black Sabbath, Painkiller. No drugs. We have a rehearsal space. 206.547.2615/omaritaylor@gmail. com www.myspace.com/branavinix www.branavinix.com

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MUSICIANS WANTED

FEMALE PUNK SINGER wanted for electronic/punk/noise duo. Influences: Crystal Castles, Sleigh Bells, Nirvana. Looking for an Alice Glass style singer with high energy who can scream on key, crowd surf, start a riot, etc. Call Skyler (970) 403-9575

JAZZ PIANO SEEKS bass, drums, sax for in home sessions working on jazz standards. Real Book material only. Write and describe your playing level and exp w standards and will reply right away. No beginners please. Thanks.

CLASSES ‘N’ WORKSHOPS

YOUR FIRST RESTRAINING ORDER... was your first one and you hit me in the ear just after I took a shot of whiskey. But I’m glad was your first. You were nervous/adorable. Maybe coffee sometime? When: Sunday, January 12, 2014. Where: Roxy’s Diner. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920198

THE EXCHANGE

You came into Northgate Gap, to exchange a Green Henley. You had beautiful eyes, light brown curly hair, and a plaid blue shirt on. I was the attractive female that did your exchange. Stop by and see me again. When: Friday, January 3, 2014. Where: Northgate. You: Man. Me: Woman. #920197

BEARD GUY OUTSIDE

ESSENTIAL BAKERY

You were parking your car while was getting in mine. You: beard/vest driving a car with a ski rack on top. Me: brown hair, getting in my wagon. We exchanged smiles. Wanna ski or do coffee sometime? When: Thursday, January 9, 2014. Where: Essential Bakery. You: Man. Me: Woman. #920196

HAND TATTOOS SEATTLE

UNIVERSITY beautiful brown haired girl with a nose ring and amazing tattoos on her hands. you make my afternoon coffee worthwhile. When: Monday, January 6, 2014. Where: the byte. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920194

JFK TO SEATAC JANUARY 5TH

You: seat 19F on American flight 235, long dark hair, dressed in black, gorgeous. No graceful way to approach you at the bar or gate. Me: tall guy at the far end of the bar. Wish I’d acted sooner... When: Sunday, January 5, 2014. Where: JFK. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920193

VEGETARIAN SHOPPING FOR A SKILLET

Mrs. Cook’s U Village. You: tall handsome vegetarian pancake maker, shopping for a skillet! Me: white bearded know-it-all you joked with about pans and vegetarianism. Would like to exchange recipes for hotcakes. Bacon not included. When: Saturday, January 4, 2014. Where: Mrs. Cook’s U Village. You: Man. Me: Man. #920192

READING ALONE ON CHRISTMAS NIGHT

told my friend to ask you to hang out with me and my friends.. You said no, and we left. I wish you would have said yes, you seemed very interesting. Can I buy you a drink sometime? When: Wednesday, December 25, 2013. Where: Bait Shop-Broadway. You: Man. Me: Woman. #920191

WOMAN AT MISTRAL BAR

Me: tall guy came to the bar to pay bill. You: alone, asked how my night was going. Said you were waiting for bartender to finish, so didn’t get your number. But if was wrong... meet for a drink? When: Thursday, January 2, 2014. Where: Bar at Mistral. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920190

CHRISTMAS NIGHT AT THE AMPM

It was Christmas Night around 9pm. You paid for some gas for me. Your name was Doug. We shook hands. You helped me out more then you know. Would like to get coffee? When: Wednesday, December 25, 2013. Where: ARCO gas station on 320th & pacific hwy in federal way. You: Man. Me: Woman. #920189 DEMETRI’S EDMONDS AFTER SEAHAWKS GAME

Punk Rock Prince

ONE

MATTHEW...WWU...2001

Punk rock prince seen at the X and Blasters show at El Corazon. You: earring and black coat. Me: red & white polka dot shirt at merch table. Probably the youngest people there that night. Let’s go to another show?

When: Friday, December 20, 2013. Where: El Corazon. You: Man. Me: Woman. #920195

SAVAGE LOVE

Quickies BY DAN SAVAGE

My friend is in her late 20s and married, and she has two little kids. Her husband had a rough childhood and has some issues. Since their most recent child was conceived, they have not had sex. He says he believes there is a difference between a lover and a mother, and he refuses to have sex with his wife now because he thinks of her as a mother to their children and not as a lover. She is struggling with this and doesn’t know what to do. Any advice?

Miserable Undersexed Mom

My advice? Don’t make babies with crazy people. But if your friend doesn’t have access to a time machine—or if she does but she’s attached to her children—she should inform her husband that she didn’t sign up for a sexless marriage. So he’ll need to get his ass to a therapist and get over this new mother-ofmy-children hang-up. (Why didn’t he have this problem after the birth of his first child?) If counseling doesn’t do the trick, MUM, your friend should tell her husband that the mother of his children intends to find a guy who will fuck her, a divorce attorney, or a divorce attorney who will fuck her.

By sending him to see a pro-domme, DND. You dominate him by ordering him to submit to her, she cracks the literal whip and then orders him to show his gratitude to you—and his submission to you both—by going home and vanilla’ing the shit out of you afterward.

I am a 25-year-old woman and just started dating a great new guy. My problem is that I am concerned he might be gay. I tend to be more conservative, and although I have slept over, I banned anything below the belt. He “petted” me over the underwear, and then I did the same to him. I also went under his underwear and rubbed my hand around his penis without actually touching it. When I have done this to other guys, they tended to go crazy—writhing, panting, and begging. But this elicited no reaction from him, though he was already hard. Am I reading too much into this? I know everyone is different, but something about this threw me off. I would like to think that this is the 21st century, and if he were gay, he would just be gay, but I know that’s not always true. Is there any way I can figure this out?

Guessing About Yearnings

I had an odd bit of awkwardness over the holidays. One of my wife’s nephews recently came out as gay, which is no problem at all for us, but it created friction in his immediate family. We were at a big extended-family dinner together, and after we sat down, I made a point of smiling warmly in his direction to let him know that my wife and I were allies. He responded with the Hot Steamy Eye-Fuck. And not just once: Every time I looked at that end of the table, I got the HSEF. Mind you, he’s a recently-out-of-the-closet 19-year-old and I’m a 42-year-old straight guy who’s married to his aunt. Maybe he was bored or perhaps trying to cause trouble. Is there a look that says, “I’m not interested,” or better yet, “Knock it the fuck off”? We haven’t seen him since, but we will run into him again eventually and want to be supportive without encouraging bad behavior.

Unnerving Nephew Crosses Line

The next time you want to tell a horny 19-yearold gay relative that you’re an ally, UNCL, use your words, e.g., “If you need someone in your corner, kiddo, you can count on us.” Because a warm smile from an uncle is likely to be misinterpreted as an invitation to fuck your (closeted-and-dying-for-cock) uncle or fuck with your (well-meaning-but-patronizing) uncle. Likewise, the best way to communicate “knock it off” is by using your words, not your eyes.

I’m a 33-year-old straight woman, married for 10-plus years to an awesome guy. We have a great relationship. Our sex life wasn’t always super. At first, he didn’t want much sex and had a lot of inhibitions. But I’ve worked hard at bringing him out of his shell, and he has willingly tried several toys and playful games, and the last few years have been great. The problem is his most recent revelation. He told me he’s interested in being dominated. By me. I asked him if it was mostly a visual thing or if he liked the idea of actually being dominated by a woman. He said it was both. I am so uncomfortable with this idea. He has always been somewhat passive in bed. I assumed that it’s because he was shy and embarrassed about sex (which he was), but now I think maybe it’s more than that. The problem with his passivity is that it totally kills my mood. I don’t want to crack a whip (metaphorically or literally) and tell him what to do. The thought grosses me out. How can I give him what he wants here?

Dame Not Domme

How on earth do you stick your hand in a guy’s underpants—how do you go under a guy’s underwear—without actually touching the guy’s cock? Anyway, your new boyfriend did have a physical reaction when you were fooling around: His dick got hard . He didn’t have the same over-the-top reaction to your bizarre moves that other guys had in the past, GAY, but getting an erection when a girl sticks her hand in your underpants is a pretty good indication that a guy isn’t gay. It’s also possible that he wanted to pant, writhe, and beg, but he restrained himself because you had banned “anything below the belt” and your great new boyfriend didn’t want you to feel pressured to go further than you were comfortable with.

My wonderful boyfriend and I have been in a monogamish relationship for five years. We’re both GGG, and we have had a few threesomes involving women, a fantasy both of us shared. My biggest fantasy, however, is to be with two men. I’ve brought it up with my BF, but he just doesn’t find men attractive and isn’t into it. Now a former fling of mine (male) told me that he finds my BF attractive and would love to be with both of us. The two sexiest men I’ve ever known together with me would be an absolute wet dream come true! I feel like my BF is a little nervous about being with another man because (a) he has performance anxiety and/or (b) he’s not comfortable exploring his sexuality (he grew up in a small town and was teased a lot about being gay because he was in theater). If he could get past his insecurities, I feel like he might enjoy himself. Should I just give up this dream?

Wishes He Were A Little Bi

Your boyfriend isn’t bi, WHWALB, he’s not even heteroflexible, and he’s made it clear that he’s turned off by the idea of a threesome with another male. Even if you could talk him into it, arranging a threesome with a dude who has expressed a sexual interest in your boyfriend would be disrespectful and potentially disastrous. Drop it.

Dan speaks with New York Times columnist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz on the true demographics of gays in the US: savagelovecast.com.

mail@savagelove.net @fakedansavage on Twitter

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