The Stranger Vol. 23, No. 14

Bunnies for Birthdays

Emerald City Pet Rescue was founded by Vivian Goldbloom to rescue dogs, cats, and horses from high kill shelters around the country, and sometimes from around the world. Our rescues are placed in loving homes, and are fully vetted, up to date on all vaccines, microchipped and spayed or neutered.

Soho is a 1 1/2 yr old Shih Tzu/ Maltese. A very sweet boy who is

Emerald City Pet Rescue was founded by Vivian Goldbloom to rescue dogs, cats, and horses from high kill shelters around the country, and sometimes from around the world. Our rescues are placed in loving homes, and are fully vetted, up to date on all vaccines, microchipped and spayed or neutered.

make your holiday snaps POP? a truckload of bunnies for your holidays!

initial exam as a new client! bunniesforbirthdays.com

dogs, all people, and kids. A very affectionate dog who loves being held and cuddled. A great choice for a first dog, or would also adapt well as a second or third dog.

Harry and Sally are a bonded pair. They are a 5 year-old Pug/Dachshund mix. Harry is a little more outgoing than Sally, but they both warm quickly to new people. Both get along wonderfully with other dogs, cats and children. They would make a great addition to any family who want to bring two loving dogs into their hearts and homes. Our

CapitolHilljetcityanimalcliniccom2063290253

Chester is a 4 yr old Cocker Spaniel/ Cavalier King Spaniel. He has had training and knows his basic commands. He needs to be the only pet, he does not do well with cats/dogs. Great dog who loves to lay quietly at your feet, or go for long walks.

For more information, and to see other adoptables contact us today!

info@emeraldcitypetrescue.org (206) 557-4661 www.emeraldcitypetrescue.org

Soho is a 1 1/2 yr old Shih Tzu/ Maltese. A very sweet boy who is healthy, and gets along with other dogs, all people, and kids. A very affectionate dog who loves being held and cuddled. A great choice for a first dog, or would also adapt well as a second or third dog.

Chester is a 4 yr old Cocker Spaniel/ Cavalier King Spaniel. He has had training and knows his basic commands. He needs to be the only pet, he does not do well with cats/dogs. Great dog who loves to lay quietly at your feet, or go for long walks.

Harry and Sally

are a bonded pair. They are a 5 year-old Pug/Dachshund mix. Harry is a little more outgoing than Sally, but they both warm quickly to new people. Both get along wonderfully with other dogs, cats and children. They would make a great addition to any family who want to bring two loving dogs into their hearts and homes.

more information, and to see other adoptables contact us today!

557-4661

Volume 23, Issue Number 14 December 4–10, 2013

STUDY GUIDE

Questions for The Stranger, Volume 23, Issue 14

1. DAN SAVAGE writes about The Stranger’s 2013 Holiday Charity Challenge, which pits fans of Slog, Pearl Jam, and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis against each other in an effort to raise money for the Orion Center, which is definitely a worthy cause. However, the demographics of this charity fundraiser are highly problematic. To wit: The Stranger’s staff is made up of a majority of white men, and this drive pits them against two white men and another group of five white men. White men make up less than one-third of Seattle, which means this charity function woefully underrepresents more than two-thirds of the city. This brings two questions to mind:

a. What do these demographics indicate about The Stranger’s inherent white-male-supremacist leanings?

b. Given the disgusting sexism and racism fueling this drive, should the Orion Center consider returning the money from this fundraiser, rather than redirecting the resources to young homeless people in need of food, clothing, and shelter? Wouldn’t Orion Center’s refusal of the money give those needy youths a more meaningful message than providing services funded by dirty phallo-Caucasianist money?

2. In the news section, ANNA MINARD has an overlong account of lame-duck outgoing mayor Mike McGinn and his battle with the Seattle Police Department over the purchase of some SUVs. McGinn, of course, would prefer that the SPD buy hybrids. Can you think of a better way for Mayor McGinn to waste the remaining dregs of his political life than a piddling battle over a couple of gas-guzzlers? Does this story make you feel kind of sorry for McGinn, finally?

3. This week’s tiny issue of The Stranger also contains the winter issue of A&P, the quarterly arts publication that is written and produced by the staff of The Stranger. Can you spot any differences between A&P and The Stranger? From a marketing standpoint, why would The Stranger choose to “fracture” its “brand” like this?

4. JEN GRAVES has contributed a 6,000-plus-word essay about Native Americans and photography as the centerpiece of this issue of A&P. If you can, imagine a human being who could read this piece from beginning to end. What superhuman characteristics does this imaginary human being possess that enable him/her to get all the way to the ending without dying of boredom or injuring her/himself to bring some kind of an ending to the ordeal? Would killing this imaginary person be considered a mercy or a sin?

5. This issue of A&P features more comics than you’ll find in a standard issue of The Stranger. Is this a blessing or a curse? Would your opinion change if A&P ran comics that were actually funny, like Get Fuzzy or FoxTrot? Does pretentiousness have a place on the comics page?

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

(12/4) Fred Vogelstein and Jay Greene Apple and Google’s Technology War

(12/5) University Book Store and the King County Library Ree Drummond

(12/5) Jim Olson Lighting Up Brain Tumors

(12/6) The Lummi’s Fight Tribal Opposition to Coal Exports

(12/6) Resident Finale Ellen Forney & David Montgomery Spinning True Stories

(12/7) Seattle Pro Musica Ceremony of Carols Britten Centenary Christmas

(12/8) LUCO: Holiday Concert

(12/9) Strawberry Theatre Workshop Jose Gonzales Trio ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’

(12/9) ParentMap Daniel Siegel The Brain Drives Teenagers Crazy (12/10) Puget Sound Regional Council Growing Transit Communities

(12/10) Seattle Human Rights Day A Celebration Honoring the Seattle Human Rights Commission’s 50th Anniversary (12/10) Inside Art How We Are Remembered

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

(12/12) Gun Violence Keeping Children Safe

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

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

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

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

(12/28) Earshot Jazz presents Ellington Sacred Music

LAST DAYS

The Week in Review

BY DAVID SCHMADER

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25 This week of gruesome Germans, righteous popes, and criminally depraved rock stars kicks off with cooperative crime-fighting in Seattle, where tonight a group of Metro bus riders fought and conquered an armed robber. As KOMO reports, the action commenced around 6 p.m. when a man wearing a nylon stocking over his face (?!) boarded a Metro bus at Third and Pike, sat down, and kept to his stocking-faced

self until the bus reached West Seattle, when he allegedly pulled out a handgun and started robbing passengers . “The gunman had already robbed at least three people when a group of men on the bus decided to do something,” reports KOMO. “Police say the men tackled the robber and held him down until officers arrived.” The 19-year-old suspect was booked into King County Jail on suspicion of three counts of armed robbery.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 26 In much worse news, the week continues in the United Kingdom, where the lead singer of a popular rock band has pleaded guilty to a plethora of

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.

LEAVE THIS OLD BITCH ALONE

Okay, Seattle (I’m talking to you especially, Ballard): Enough with the merchants and others who want our money being SO NICE AND FRIENDLY to us seniors, when the rest of the known universe looks down their noses or looks away at shades of gray. (Hey, sorry I’m a boomer able to retire on a pension, ha-ha.) Anyway, what’s with this “How’s your day going so far?” question I get from checkout people at different stores? Well, my day goes about like yours—schlepping around doing this and that and trying to avoid phony checkers at the store (yay for self-checkout). I guess what I mean to say is that when it comes to customers, honesty and genuine human behavior wins, so stop with the stroking of the seniors. Stroking is not something we like. —Anonymous

child sex offenses. Horrifying details come from the BBC, which identifies our subject as Ian Watkins, the 36-year-old singer for the Welsh band Lostprophets, which formed in 1997, released five albums, and sold around 3.5 million records worldwide. After months of strenuously denying all sex-crime allegations, Watkins dodged a trial this week by pleading guilty to many horrible deeds, including attempted rape and sexual assault of a child under 13; conspiring to rape a child; three counts of sexual assault involving children; seven counts of taking, making, or possessing indecent images of children; and one count of “possessing an extreme pornographic image involving a sex act on an animal,” reports the BBC. Watkins’s sentencing will take place on December 18.

For all your “fair-weather fan” needs…

NEW COLUMN!

HSeattle Seahawks FOR DUMMIES

urrah! Seattle’s football team beat New Orleans’s football team at a football game, and now Seattle’s football team is headed to the football playoffs! To help you understand what people are talking about for the new few weeks, here’s a starter glossary.

•• Speaking of child rape, the week continues with the Catholic Church, which continues to help the world look past its history of shielding child rapists via the glorious things that fall from the mouth of Pope Francis, who today issued an 84-page apostolic exhortation attacking the “idolatry of money,” blasting unfettered capitalism as “a new tyranny,” and imploring politicians to guarantee all citizens “dignified work, education, and health care.” “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” wrote the 76-year-old pontiff in his Republican-brain-exploding address. “Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality . Such an economy kills… I beg the Lord to grant us more politicians who are genuinely disturbed by the state of society, the people, the lives of the poor.”

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 27 In worse news, the week continues with another installment of 2013’s worst new trend, wherein an American citizen is surprised by someone in need and responds by fatally shooting the needy someone “in self-defense.” The latest such scene went down early this morning in Walker County, Georgia, where Ronald Westbrook, a 72-year-old air force veteran with advanced Alzheimer’s disease, had spent a good portion of the night wandering around with his two dogs wearing only a light jacket and a straw hat in below-freezing temperatures. After picking up mail from a home where he lived long ago (nearly three miles from where he currently resides), Westbrook walked to another residence where he rang the doorbell and turned the doorknob, waking up 34-year-old Joe Hendrix and his fiancée, who had moved in two weeks earlier. “Hendrix’s fiancée, whose name [Sheriff Steve] Wilson declined to give, called 911 and stayed on the phone with an emergency dispatcher who sent two sheriff’s office patrol cars en route,” reports the Times Free Press. “After a 9- to 10-minute wait—and before deputies arrived—Hendrix went outside armed with a .40-caliber handgun and saw the elderly man in silhouette behind the house, the sheriff said.” As Hendrix told police, he gave Westbrook several verbal commands

• FOOTBALL: The most popular sport in the United States, involving two teams of 11 players on a rectangular field. When a football team does good, it gets a touchdown, which is worth some points. The team with the most points at the end of the game wins!

tates ld. is When worth

• THE 12TH MAN: A nickname given to the fans of the Seattle Seahawks football team—the fans are the 12th man on the field, get it? Except that would be illegal, so good thing the 12th Man is invisible, like the Holy Ghost. The 12th Man has also screamed louder than any other man in history, loud enough to earn a spot in the Guinness World Records (for real!).

awks all d be illeg h

• RUSSELL WILSON: The Seahawks starting quarterback and de facto MVP, having thrown for 310 yards and three touchdowns in the recent New Orleans clobberthon. In addition to being a kick-ass athlete, Wilson seems really nice, devoting his nonfootball time to volunteer work and Bible-citing Twitter posts.

• THE PLAYOFFS: You know on RuPaul’s Drag Race, about midway through the season, when the many competitors have been whittled down to a few particularly successful competitors who will now battle it out among themselves for the top prize? This is like the football version of that!

• ACTION GREEN: The fluorescent light-green color that accents the current Seahawks football costume. Also known as “Electric Emerald,” “Nuclear Moss,” and “Gay Jade.”

• BLITZ: The official mascot of the Seattle Seahawks, which appears to be a furious cartoon hawk wearing a Seahawks uniform. Unlike some sports mascots, Blitz has never been convicted of murder.

Go Hawks!!!

when Westbrook began walking toward him, and, “fearing for his safety,” fired four shots, hitting and killing Westbrook. As of yet, no charges have been filed, plus Georgia has a “stand your ground” law, so who knows how this tragic shitshow will end. But let us simply note how nobody fears for his life like the holder of a loaded gun. Funny how that works. Good luck sleeping, Joe Hendrix.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 28 The week continues with Thanksgiving, the heartwarming American holiday born of deadly betrayal and centered on big dead turkeys. Speaking of disgusting meat rituals, tomorrow in Germany, Dresden police will report the arrest of a 55-year-old police officer accused of fulfilling the wishes of a man who wanted to be killed and eaten. “Investigators believe that the two men met via an internet site for cannibalism fetishists,” the BBC reports.

“Police say that the victim was killed and dismembered, and that his body parts were buried on a piece of land in the mountainous region that belonged to the alleged killer… Police say that body parts of the victim were missing, and it is possible that cannibalism may have taken place.” Identified only as Detlev G., the accused officer is a handwriting analysis expert for Saxony’s State Office of Criminal Investigation who “denies eating body parts

and says he killed the man at his request.” As for the victim, the unnamed 59-year-old “had fantasized about being murdered and eaten since his youth,” said Dresden police chief Dieter Kroll at a news conference, noting how “people with the most gruesome fantasies can get together on the internet and live out their perversions in an ever starker form.”

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 29 Speaking of cooperative suicide, the week continues on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, where early this morning a man in a second-floor apartment on 23rd Avenue East fired shots from a rifle at Seattle police, inspiring Seattle police to fatally shoot the man. Condolences to all.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 30 Nothing happened today.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 1 The week ends with slow-moving slapstick in Puget Sound, where today a 33-year-old man allegedly commandeered the (passenger-free) Victoria Clipper ferry from the Seattle waterfront in hopes of traveling to West Seattle, but instead wound up booked into King County Jail on charges of burglary, malicious mischief, reckless endangerment, and, uh, failure to register as a sex offender. (“KIRO 7 uncovered that he is a level-3 sex offender,” reports KIRO 7.)

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

We’re living out our perversions at THESTRANGER.COM/SLOG

CHALLENGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE.

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

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

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

Cop Car Clash

Will Seattle’s New Fleet Be SUVs or Hippie Hybrids?

BY ANNA MINARD

Wour selection.”

What was that winning vehicle? A Ford Interceptor SUV.

Just picture it: A brand-new fleet of hulking police SUVs cruising the city while the department tries to soften its image. The department is currently under a federal consent decree that contends police have used excessive force and racially biased tactics. Not to mention the city is also trying to meet new climate goals.

That SUV recommendation came from the SPD, the union, and the city’s fleets officials. But it’s no wonder Mayor Mike McGinn put on the brakes.

What does the mayor prefer?

According to Elster, McGinn “felt that a hybrid vehicle, such as the Toyota Prius, would be more suitable and ‘in tune with city values.’”

Katherine Schubert-Knapp, a spokeswoman for the Department of Finance and Administrative Services, which is in charge of purchasing the fleet, says McGinn “deferred acting on the recommendation until additional testing could be completed,” which includes a closer look at technology to improve fuel efficiency. McGinn spokesman Aaron Pickus declined to comment on specifics, saying only, “It definitely is a city policy that our fleet and buildings should be as green as possible.” But no, the Prius is not a real option—it doesn’t meet standards for police cars. SPOG did not return requests for comment.

Antidrug Activists Try to Shut Down Pot Party

Treatment Professionals Say Celebration at Space Needle Is Bad for Children

BY BEN LIVINGSTON

Three weeks ago, I reported that the Seattle Center issued its first-ever permit for a pot party, which takes place December 6 inside a big tent at the foot of the Space Needle. (Full disclosure: They issued the permit to me.) The story went viral. Jimmy Fallon even joked about it on his TV show, suggesting several stoner Christmas carols we’d be singing.

But some people find no humor in the pot party.

Nine drug-abuse-prevention leaders sent a letter to the Seattle Center, Mayor Mike McGinn, and the Seattle City Council on November 25 demanding the city shut down the celebration, which will mark the one-year anniversary of Washington State’s marijuana-legalization law taking effect.

“Not only will this public event be in violation of state law, Seattle Center is a poor location for the party considering it takes place during Winterfest, a family-friendly event,” they wrote.

hen Ford announced it would stop producing Crown Victorias, the staple of police car fleets from New York to Los Angeles, in 2011, police departments across the country

realized they’d have to find a new model of squad car to phase in as old ones wore out. The decision must be made carefully: Police cars must withstand constant use, dangerous driving, and all weather conditions; suspects must be able to get in and out of them safely while handcuffed; and, as cities make fleets more environmentally sound, there are serious concerns about fuel efficiency.

Here in Seattle, the city has identified a half dozen potential replacement models for its fleet of around 300 cop cars, tested them for more than a year, and said it will announce a winner in the next few months.

But while city spokespeople say the process is going smoothly—and it’s partly on hold now while the mayor’s office changes hands—the union representing roughly 1,200

SOURCES SAY

• Seattle City Council member Nick Licata introduced a bill on December 2 that would halve a fine proposed by City Attorney Pete Holmes for smoking pot in public. The council’s bill would reduce the penalty from Holmes’s proposed $50 to $27—the same as the city’s fine for public consumption of alcohol. In addition, the bill’s language makes clear that police intend to first issue a warning, and it requires the Seattle Police Department to monitor enforcement by tracking the race, age, and gender of suspects, plus the location the ticket was issued. Citing the need to avoid adverse racial

Seattle cops seems to feel otherwise, claiming that a decision was already made by officers and then rejected at city hall.

In the November issue of the Guardian, the newspaper of the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild (SPOG), vice president Sergeant Ty Elster complains that the city ignored cops’ recommendation. He writes that “after many months of SPOG members testing, evaluating, and researching vehicles,” when the cops announced their pick, “City Hall didn’t like

Some cops fear the mayor wants to make them drive a Prius.

impacts, the bill says police also must provide an analysis of that data to the council biannually. Licata explains his changes: “We wanted something that was, to be honest, more workable and acceptable to the public.”

• That same day, immigrant-rights advocates had reason to celebrate when the King County Council narrowly passed an ordinance giving local law enforcement the authority to ignore certain requests from federal immigration agents. Under the new law, the county narrows the criteria under which it will honor requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to “hold” people in county jails past their release dates while ICE assesses whether to deport them. Proposed by Council Member Larry Gossett, the ordinance was supported by city and county police, who say it will encourage immigrants to report crimes without fear of being detained.

Regardless, the decision will end up in mayor-elect Ed Murray’s lap. And adding another wrinkle, a decision on paint color for the cars has not yet been made. The industry standard is a black-and-white car, though Seattle currently uses a color of blue that’s a stock color for Ford vehicles—but not the other manufacturers. What if we don’t go with Ford? A decision on color will have to come after they choose the car. And it’ll be crucial, since, as SPD spokesman Sean Whitcomb readily acknowledges, police vehicles serve as “one of the first impressions that people get of their police department,” and ours is trying for a bit of a makeover.

Even with fuel efficiency in mind, we may still end up with a larger car. The only hybrid in the mix appears to be a Chevy Tahoe, a large SUV. And as for what color cars we’ll be staring at for the next decade, who gets a say in that decision—will there be any public input at all? Will SPOG be itching for a fight?—will be resolved further down the road.

• What did we learn from new maps released this week showing how precincts across the city voted in November’s general election? A few things. First: Seattle City Council member-elect Kshama Sawant crushed incumbent Richard Conlin in the newly created District 3, where they both live and where she may run again in 2015. She garnered 58.5 percent of the district’s vote. Second: The city is sharply divided into two camps—the older, richer, and more conservative voters versus younger, poorer, and more progressive voters. Picture Seattle as a bagel: You’ve got a crusty, conservative outer layer of rich folk that grows sharply more progressive as you get to the denser, poorer precincts in the middle of our chewy city. Third: This city really wanted city council districts. District-creating Charter Amendment 19 won 946 precincts in the city and lost only five.

The group includes Richard Catalano, director of a UW research center that will advise the state on drug-prevention grants generated by revenue from pot taxes. They argue that state law bans smoking in “public places,” Initiative 502 bans pot use on public property, and pot-tolerant parties should be 1,000 feet from schools and parks.

But these folks are wrong about the facts—and they undermine their own credibility.

The smoking ban applies to buildings, not outdoor smoking areas. The new pot law bans cannabis consumption in public view, not in a private party with ID checks, double fences, and privacy screening. Plus, Seattle Center allows beer gardens, and alcohol is sold at Winterfest.

Not only are these anti-pot leaders total holiday buzzkills, their fearmongering is counterproductive. Exaggerating the harm of drugs has been a tactic used by programs like D.A.R.E. and antidrug commercials, which studies have shown to be ineffective at reducing drug abuse. Even worse, in some cases, they actually made kids distrust their messages and try drugs more.

These treatment professionals are making the same sort of mistakes. By pretending that smoking pot—the same way people drink in a beer garden—is inherently harmful to society, they simply become less trustworthy. And that sort of bullshit is the essence of the drug war that legalization is trying to solve.

I share the goal of keeping drugs away from children, though we disagree on some tactics—like forcing potheads to stay hidden at home and outlawing communal cannabis consumption. Drug-prevention professionals must lead with fact-based strategies that help youth make informed, health-conscious lifestyle choices, and they must let go of assumptions that pot people—and their parties—are anti-family, immoral, or intolerable.

He Was Never Afraid

How Alex Calderwood

Changed Seattle Culture

By Tricia Romano

In 2005, Ace Hotel founder and Seattle native Alex Calderwood went to Dubai with his friend and business partner Nasir Rasheed. Bored in their overpriced hotel, they decided to venture out.

Dubai is divided by a creek. On one side is New Dubai, the land of wealthy sheikhs, white sand beaches, and impossibly surreal buildings; on the other side is Old Dubai, where the poor workers, the people who built the glittering city on the other side, live.

“He wanted to find the real Dubai,” Rasheed remembers. “‘What do the real Dubai people do?’ he kept saying. ‘Where do they hang out?’”

They headed to Five Green, a skate shop in Old Dubai. Alex quickly bonded with the store’s owner, and later that week they all went out in Old Dubai to a club in the basement of an old hotel. “It was where the workers let off steam,” says Rasheed. A seemingly endless number of rooms sprung from a long corridor. In one, a Nigerian funk band performed; in another, bad Russian rock music blared from the speakers; in a third, a Filipino rock cover band played. The final room was filled with Indian workers. “It was the best of all. It was like a scene out of a Bollywood movie,” Rasheed says, with girls dancing onstage and the audience throwing money.

“We were like, ‘Oh wow, here’s the scene, we found it.’”

This was classic Calderwood—always open and curious and looking beyond the surface to connect with people, no matter who they were.

Alex grew up in Bellevue. His father worked as a contractor, and his mother worked as a newspaper columnist. He sold repurposed vintage clothes before opening Rudy’s Barbershops. Later, he had a nightclub, ARO.space; a promotions company, Tasty Shows; a record label, Sweet Mother; a marketing company, Neverstop; and a design firm, Art & Revolution Organization. The

found dead on November 14. He was 47. No cause of death has yet been given.

Imet Alex in 1993, through Jared Harler (now Jared Lovejoy). I had just moved here from Las Vegas and didn’t know anybody. They were throwing parties at Re-bar and Moe’s, and later, as Tasty Shows, bringing artists like Portishead, Kruder & Dorfmeister, the Chemical Brothers, and Jamiroquai to rock-centric Seattle. I worked the door for Alex at ARO.space and at Electrolush, the dance night at the Showbox.

In 1992, Calderwood opined that old barbershops were cool but the haircuts were never any good. The next day, he and Wade Weigel went and looked at spaces. Twenty years later, there are 19 Rudy’s Barbershops around the country.

first Ace Hotel, which he opened in 1999 in Belltown, was a renovated halfway house. He later opened Ace Hotels in New York, Palm Springs, Portland, and London—the city where he was

Though I knew him for a long time, and his life often intertwined with mine— he was my current roommate Todd Bohannon’s first boyfriend in 1997—I didn’t know him deeply. Alex could be guarded and private. But he was caring and generous, rare in the nightlife world.

Almost everyone has a story about Alex’s little acts of kindness. Caroline Davenport, a co-owner of Tasty Shows and Neverstop, remembers him bringing her records from a band he thought she would like. When Kelly Sawdon, the executive vice president of the Ace Hotel Group, was sick in London, Alex went to the corner store late at night and brought back a care package for her. My Alex story involves him taking me

home after a night of drinking, cleaning up the vomit I spewed all over the bed, and tucking me in.

Alex’s trajectory really started with Wade Weigel, Alex’s business partner and one of his oldest friends. They met in 1985, when Alex was hanging out with a mutual friend and Weigel called. Even though he’d never met Weigel, Alex asked if he could speak to Weigel on the phone. He asked Weigel out to dinner, and they were instant friends.

Indeed, Alex had no qualms about introducing himself to anyone—whether it was Anthony Bourdain or a total stranger. “It was just his personality. Nothing really stopped him,” says Weigel.

In 1992, they opined that old barbershops were cool but the haircuts were never any good. The next day, they went and looked at spaces. Armed with $12,000 and a whim, they, along with David Petersen, opened the first Rudy’s in January 1993. There are now 19 Rudy’s Barbershops around the country.

Around the same time, Alex met Rasheed, Davenport, and Lovejoy, who would become his creative partners for the better part of the next decade. Together, the foursome represented the antithesis of the Seattle grunge scene.

“There weren’t very many gay party producers back then—and we seemed to like all the same stuff,” says Lovejoy. “We were doing funk nights and hiphop and music that most gay people at the time didn’t pay attention to. And he was interested in doing the same thing—mixing cultures and mixing music and mixing styles.”

Rasheed had just moved from London and had bluffed his way into meeting Alex by saying he was an acid jazz DJ, even though he’d never DJed professionally. Their first party, at the Vogue, was called, ridiculously, “Acid Jazz and Other Illicit Grooves,” billing “London DJ Funkee Nasir.”

“It was super-packed. DJ Masa (KEXP) was opening, and he was rocking the turntables, and I’m like, ‘I am fucked, I have blagged my way into a situation where I feel like a complete idiot,’” says Rasheed. “But

Alex loved it. He was right behind me the whole time, bobbing his head. And the more drunk I got, there’d be huge gaps in between the songs. I’d be so into it, and then Alex and I would be talking. Boom! Silence. I’d play the next record and the crowd would cheer, thinking it was so punk rock.”

Regardless, the night was a hit, and they forged ahead undeterred.

“Alex was fearless,” says Davenport, who met him when she was 24 and booking RKCNDY. “I am not a fearless person. It pushed me out of my comfort zone in the best way. It’s an ongoing gift.”

But his biggest talent was his ability to connect with different types of people— and to connect them to each other. His best friend from high school, Kai Ichikawa, recalls how the preppy teenager could blend among the jocks, the stoners, and the superstraight-As. “If we knew there was a great party going on and we weren’t really part of that clique, he got to know the guy who was running the party—and lo and behold, we were going to the party.”

In business, his gumption took him far: When the fledgling Tasty Shows was vying for big acts like Portishead against far more established concert promoters, Alex and Jared flew to London to meet with the band’s management. “They were so impressed at these weird little Seattle promoters who flew over there,” says Lovejoy. “And, you know, you don’t make money on a show like that.”

“I don’t think he ever looked at his bank balance,” says Rasheed. “What drove him was creativity and doing something amazing.”

At Tasty and Neverstop, they’d constantly overspend on small things, like flyers. “In the long run, it pays off because you actually do something better. And he was never afraid to do that,” says Lovejoy. “That’s why he redefined hotels.”

As with Rudy’s, the first Ace was a hustle. He and Weigel, along with Doug Herrick, cobbled together some cash for a flophouse on First Avenue

that still had tenants living inside. “At first, Alex and I were trying to do it out of our cash flow,” says Weigel. But then they realized they would need investors.

“That was him,” says Rasheed. “Say yes now. We’ll figure it out later.”

The hotel was bare bones. “We were thinking of it as a white canvas, really plain, like a New York loft or art gallery kind of space,” says Weigel. “It was very minimal.”

The subsequent hotels were more complex, but unlike other chains, they were not carbon copies. Instead, they mirrored each city. In Portland, you can rent a bike made by local designer Jordan Hufnagel. In New York, the walls are adorned by local artist Ryder Robinson. Throughout his career, Alex supported artists like Shawn Wolfe, Kalani Fujimori, and Shepard Fairey before they were well-known.

“He believed in people and things before other people could see those things themselves,” says Davenport.

Caterina deCarlo, his longtime friend and manager, would ask him, “Why are you meeting with this weird guy you met on the corner who thinks he has an idea?” she says. “He just made time for everyone. He saw interesting ideas in the most uncommon or unpredictable places. He was just supergenerous with his time; he wasn’t hierarchical about it.”

“I was kind of a nobody little 20-year-old raver, but he treated me the same as everybody else,” remembers Bohannon. “He’d introduce me to people like Dave Grohl—not like, ‘This is Dave Grohl,’ just ‘This is my friend Dave.’”

Even after Alex himself became famous, “he never really changed, which is the cool thing,” says David Hershkovits, the editor in chief and publisher of Paper magazine, who met Alex in 1994, the day Kurt Cobain died. “He didn’t turn into some monster version of himself, strutting about like a big powerful player.”

keting company, and rolling that into the hotel. The hotel became everything he’s done in one place,” says Hershkovits. “He was a business genius.”

The last few weeks of Alex’s life were consumed by the September opening of the London hotel, and preparing for the near-simultaneous openings of the Los Angeles Ace on January 7, and a Panama City Ace-run hotel, called American Trade, on December 5. After a couple of weeks of whirlwind travel—Los Angles to New York to London—he’d spent the weekend in the English countryside with friends.

“We both connected on Monday, and he was really happy and excited to move on to LA,” says Sawdon. Alex was especially thrilled by the 1,600-square-foot theater at the LA Ace. “It was all kind of coming full circle,” she says.

At press time, the autopsy results had not yet come in, but that hasn’t stopped rumors from flying about Alex’s death. In 2011, he’d told the New York Times he’d gone to rehab: “You get to a certain age, and you get to a certain point where you realize this is just, like, dragging me down. It’s not fun anymore. I’m not enjoying it.”

Ironically, in all the years I knew Alex, he was always the straight man while the rest of us were getting plastered on ecstasy.

His friends acknowledge that he struggled with substance abuse but say Alex’s main weakness was being a driven workaholic who had a hard time unwinding.

“No, this is not the conversation of a functioning junkie. I know what that is,” says Lovejoy. “Alex’s problem around it was that he needed to learn how to relax on his own.”

Even after Alex himself became famous, “he never really changed, which

If Lovejoy was the charismatic face of Tasty, with his rock-star good looks and long wavy hair and tattoos, Alex was the quiet and reserved one. He had a slight build, with dark curly ringlets and wide brown eyes, and he would often hang back and watch the action from afar.

says David Hershkovits, the editor in chief and publisher of Paper magazine.

“He was a ‘we’ person. It wasn’t ‘I’ at all,” says Davenport. “When someone is ‘we,’ and ‘let’s’ and ‘we,’ it’s so major and so amazing.”

Perhaps that’s why Sawdon and Ryan Bukstein, the director of PR and marketing for the Ace Hotel Group, seem confident about the Ace’s future. They are moving ahead with an Ace Hotel in Pittsburg in 2015. “There’s never been any question in any of our minds that because Alex is gone this is the end,” says Bukstein. “We all want to continue his vision. It would be unfortunate to see it go away.”

It’s easy to take Alex’s vision for granted now. Small details—turntables in the rooms or graffiti elevated to fine art—are often dismissed as being quintessentially “hip” by the national press, but he was the first one to do it in that setting.

“In his hotel, he had KAWS very early on,” says Hershkovits. “When he did the Ace in New York, he put in that wall of graffiti. He knew that stuff inside out. He didn’t do it because someone told him to do it,” he says.

“You look back and you see that he was an innovator and an original. In taking all those things he worked on—street wear, entertainment, nightlife, Rudy’s, and the mar-

Perhaps no one knew Alex better than deCarlo. She was technically his manager, but that doesn’t begin to describe the extent of her relationship with Alex. She was like his platonic wife, bodywoman, and protector all rolled into one. He called it a “life appointment.”

She has been living in his First Hill apartment on and off for the last 12 years and has access to every facet of his life, from his storage units to his e-mail. She had found a tropical pink Craftsman house for them in Echo Park in Los Angeles. The night before he died, she logged into his e-mail to see if he’d looked at the pictures of the house.

“I saw how many unopened e-mails there were that day, and all of a sudden this wall hit me that he was operating past his maximum,” she says. “I don’t care how amazing you are. I don’t care how driven you are. Everybody has a limit. I was like, ‘This is going to be the death of him,’ and I went to bed thinking that.”

The next morning, she received the phone call that Alex had died.

In the midst of mourning him, his family and friends have been scurrying to put together memorials—there was one held in New York on November 23, and there is another in Seattle planned for December 9. After all these years, the old crew is frantically trying to throw a party Alex would think was totally awesome—a high bar, no doubt.

But Alex was always calm in the face of a crisis. I know what he would say to his friends. After all, the words are emblazoned on the stairs at the Ace Hotel in New York: “Everything is going to be alright.”

20% Off December 2-7 lothing, body care, housewares, books, candles, natural health gifts and Center Dispensary!

Saturday, December 7

“How to Make Healthy Holiday Snacks”

Come starting at 9 a.m. for free samples of Dispensary products!

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HOLIDAY CHARITY CHALLENGE!

JAM

SLOG

BY DAN SAVAGE

Zillions of people all over the world love the Seattle hiphop duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. Zillions of people all over the world also love the Seattle rock band Pearl Jam. And Slog—voted the Best Blog in the Entire Universe™ by Condé Nast Traveler—is read by zillions of people every day (at slog.thestranger.com, don’tcha know).

But whose fans are the best, most givingest fans?

We’re about to find out. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis and Pearl Jam are combining forces with Slog this holiday season—SERIOUSLY!—to help raise money for YouthCare’s James W. Ray Orion Center, which feeds, clothes, and even houses homeless teens right here in our city, at the bottom of Capitol Hill on Denny Way.

One lucky Macklemore & Ryan Lewis fan and one lucky Pearl Jam fan will each win a pair of VIP tickets if they donate on Thursday, December 5, at slog.thestranger.com! Pearl Jam play at KeyArena on Friday, December 6, and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis are at KeyArena December 10–12.

The Orion Center’s funding was recently cut, almost forcing the center to shut down its most valuable service—keeping homeless young adults, ages 18 to 24, from sleeping on the streets at night. Within the past few weeks, King County and the City of Seattle kicked in just enough money to keep the homeless shelter open five nights a week, but the group needs to raise $100,000 more to stay open seven days a week, providing hot meals, job training, and stable housing placement for this vulnerable population throughout the next year.

For 40 years, YouthCare has been proactively sending its employees out to the streets, bridges, and parks where homeless young people congregate. They offer these youth a chance at a stable life: daily hot meals, a clothing bank, shelter beds, GED classes, job training

programs, and help finding permanent housing. These are our city’s exploited and forgotten young people: About 74 percent of those that YouthCare sees were physically or sexually abused at home, while 40 percent left home or were kicked out because of their sexuality.

Whose fans are the best? We’re about to find out.

So, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis fans! Pearl Jam fans! Slog fans! Together, we can help save the Orion Center! But we’re going to do it the American way: with a competition! That’s why we’re pitting Macklemore & Ryan Lewis fans against Pearl Jam fans against Slog fans! DONATE to the Orion Center by going to one of these three pages:

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

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

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

What do you do if you love Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Pearl Jam, AND Slog equally? Go to all three pages and donate at each one! The internationally famous musicians or semi-widely-read local blog whose fans raise the most money for the Orion Center by December 24 WINS!

Tweet it out! #TeamMac, #TeamJam, or #TeamSlog

The Macklemore & Ryan Lewis vs. Pearl Jam vs. Slog Holiday Charity Challenge goes through December 24! Find out what’s happening (and win prizes!) on Slog at slog.thestranger.com!

Let’s do this!

With a calendar featuring 400 events annually, drawing together dozens of independent artists, speakers, and organizations, TOWN HALL tells the story of our community —celebrating its creativity and curiosity through diverse, inexpensive programs that are intrinsically timely and relevant. With a grassroots base of 3,500 members who support TOWN HALL intellectually, socially, and financially, our membership is always the core of what we do.

STRANGER SUGGESTS

Rob Delaney COMEDY

Rob Delaney is one of a handful of comedians—Sarah Silverman, Tig Notaro, and Louis CK are the others—who I trust implicitly. I’ll follow Delaney anywhere, because I know he’s not going to take me on a pointless adventure. All of his comedy, from his prolific Twitter feed to his standup to his new memoir, is a journey through difficult places; his struggles with hepatitis, depression, and alcoholism frequently figure into his work. He makes you laugh, but his thoughtful observations make you feel better about the world, too. (Neptune Theatre, 1303 NE 45th St, stgpresents.org, 8 pm, $25, all ages) PAUL CONSTANT

A John Waters

Christmas

MUSIC/THEATER

Devo

Cover Night

MUSIC

What a fucking delight it’s been to watch John Waters journey from a proudly trashy gutter filmmaker to a wise and hilarious elder statesman of pervy culture. Tonight, Waters takes the stage at the Neptune to hold forth on all thing XXXmas: perverted gifts, holiday horror stories, “religious fanaticism for Santa Claus,” the nature and purpose of Christmas exploitation films, and more. Tremendous bonus: musical interludes provided by guest star Kimya Dawson. (Neptune Theatre, 1303 NE 45th St, stgpresents.org, 8 pm, $35–$99, all ages) DAVID SCHMADER

‘Monstrous’ PERFORMANCE

During a preview of this lecture/performance about monsters (in fiction, in movies, in life), the miraculously intelligent and unpretentious Rebecca Brown noted how the Creature from the Black Lagoon always looks lost, equally out of place in water and on land—monsters don’t belong anywhere. Then she turned to teenage author Mary Shelley, who accidentally killed her famous mother just by being born and had a near-death miscarriage of her own—the horror of creation was hot in her head when she wrote Frankenstein. I can’t wait to hear what other thoughts Brown has been thinking. (Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave, nwfilmforum.org, 8 pm, $15/$12 NWFF members, Dec 5–7) BRENDAN KILEY

Last Hurrah at Francine Seders ART

The star of today’s art reception is this Old-World-charming gallery itself. It’s been operated for 47—47—years by the tremendously civilized Frenchwoman Francine Seders, now 80 years old. She’s got subtle taste in art, she’s never catered to the wealthy, and her quiet warmth has kept her a bit of an enduring mystery. She’ll still work from her house, but on Christmas morning—Christmas Eve is the gallery’s last day—Seattle art will be different. To us, Francine, you will forever be the cat’s pajamas. Here’s to you. (Francine Seders Gallery, 6701 Greenwood Ave N, sedersgallery.com, 2–4 pm, free) JEN GRAVES

The greatest band from Akron, Ohio, Devo continue to exert a powerful influence on today’s musicians. These wired geeks manifested their acerbic theory of “de-evolution” through jittery, robotic rock filtered through wonky analog keyboards and distorted guitars, all topped by neurotically yelped vocals. Several local groups—including Ononos, Brainport, Universe People, X Suns, Male/ Female, and Glitterbang—will strive to replicate the kernels of springy fun at the core of Devo’s strange, anomic songs. “Satisfaction” is guaranteed. (Chop Suey, 1325 E Madison St, chopsuey.com, 8 pm, $5 adv/$10 DOS, 21+) DAVE SEGAL

Reign Supreme DANCE

I love breakdancing contests. Not because I can do anything that even remotely resembles a windmill, head spin, or jackhammer (hell to the no, I can’t!)—but because these competitions are fantastic spectator events. The second installment of this annual battle, organized in part by the UW Hip Hop Association, awards a grand prize of $3,000. In addition to Seattle’s Massive Monkees crew, b-boys and b-girls will come from as far as Brazil, Hawaii, and Taiwan to compete. There’s the preliminary battles (Friday), the main competition (Saturday), and dance workshops (Sunday). Check Reign Supreme’s Twitter for locations and schedule @ReignSupremeNW. (HUB Ballroom, 4001 Stevens Way NE, UW Campus, thehubtix.com, 5 pm, $12 adv/$15 DOS, all ages, Dec 6–8) KELLY O

Next Dance Cinema

DANCE/FILM

This is the annual collaboration between Northwest Film Forum and Velocity Dance Center showcasing contemporary dance on film, from video recordings of staged work to choreography created specifically for the camera to animation and beyond. Tonight’s program features work from Seattle, Bellingham, NYC, Italy, and Denmark; tomorrow night’s program makes a similar tour of the globe with all new works. Both nights feature work from a plethora of Seattle dance luminaries, including Alice Gosti, Jody Kuehner, Kate Wallich, and Molly Sides. (Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave, nwfilmforum.org, 7 pm, $11/$6 NWFF members, Dec 9–10) DAVID SCHMADER

‘Boys, Jokes, and Things’ ART

A streaky, faceless Madonna holds her dead grown child, over and over, in pietà-patterned wallpaper. A drippy sculpture that at first appears to be entirely abstract is revealed as you walk around it to have multiple facades, each one the profile of a dilapidated naked man (and his erection) in a sequential state of slumping or rising. Dawn Cerny’s latest prints and sculptures are pleasingly primordial. They’re also erudite, based on writings, but more fundamentally, the bodies crumple, get up, and repeat. Who can’t relate? (Season, 1222 NE Ravenna Blvd, season.cz, by appointment, free, through Dec 29) JEN GRAVES

ARTS

ART

Wait, That’s Not True

Two New Creative Picture Books on Human Suffering

BY JEN GRAVES

Captionless photos run through Aaron Huey’s book of photos from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota like an unruly river, some to the edges of the pages, overflowing the banks of what we see. There’s beautiful bleakness, mostly free of context—maybe because, as Huey told me, “the more time I spend [at Pine Ridge], the more confused I am about what to do with it.”

As a journalist for National Geographic and Harper’s, Huey became a righteous advocate, exhorting the federal government to honor the treaties and give back the Black Hills. You may have seen his “Honor the Treaties” poster campaign with street-art mogul Shepard Fairey.

But this is the first thing I’ve done that’s not for them.”

Our conversation about the book rode the roller coaster of Huey’s conflicted feelings. He doubles back, goes into free fall. “It’s overly harsh to say it’s not for them, actually. But my purpose in the world is not to go around making feel-good projects. Wait, that’s not true.”

buildings on fire, real soldiers—with their own memories of real events—eyed him skeptically. In the final photographs, the real scenery appears in forced perspective so the toys look life-size. Juxtaposed with play, the adult war looks markedly mad. McCarty wants to extend the reflective project to other warring parts of the globe, too; he’s speaking about why on December 5 at the Central Library. War-Toys rephrases enduring questions about war, art, and photography, chiefly: How much does making a picture matter? All the kids, Israeli or Palestinian, want to visit places they can’t. They want to grow arms long enough to stop missiles. So they draw them. McCarty’s photographs are occasionally generic or slick, like Hollywood posters. But taken as a group, they restage universal dilemmas with crystalline kid-clarity.

BOOKS

She Begs to Differ

Why Hannah Arendt Is So Important, in Her

Own Words

BY PAUL CONSTANT

IMitakuye Oyasin by Aaron Huey (Radius, $50)

As the artist Martha Rosler once said about her photographs of poverty on the Bowery, art is an “inadequate descriptive system.” Art is a better reflection of confusion and conflict than advocacy. Huey’s book is a portrait of the unavoidably exploitative mess of being a white photographer on the reservation. This may not be what you’d prefer, and it’s certainly not the whole picture. But it’s not the whole picture of Huey’s contribution, either. It deserves to be considered along with the community portal Huey set up on the National Geographic website, where Pine Ridge people post pictures and stories of their own. Huey worked for a year to make that happen. Another year, he worked on this book.

Brian McCarty Thurs Dec 5, Central Library, 7 pm, free

But there are problems. Huey says he began to be consulted as the “Encyclopedia Britannica of the rez” by some and attacked by others as “the new Great White Satan.”

Meanwhile, Pine Ridge life continued unchanged, and despite his close relationships with a handful of people, he couldn’t escape being an outside observer. He has harsh words for white people who move onto reservations or attend ceremonies and “steal” Native spirituality “because this world of material goods is not really working out.”

You need to know that backstory when you approach the book, called Mitakuye Oyasin—otherwise the book appears to be another pretty picture book of ugly things. It is more layered. It contains pictures nobody is supposed to take, of a medicine man in his mask, working. If Huey was invited to take pictures of something sacred, he did. If not—or if taking a picture would get someone arrested—he didn’t. Those were the basic rules—as if they are basic.

“I was scared to show them the book,” he said, referring to people in Pine Ridge. “I wasn’t scared to show them anything else.

The little boy drew what he’d seen with crayons: yellow sun, concrete wall, soldier with angrily scrunched face, boy lying on the ground with blood pouring out of a bullet hole in his forehead. Brian McCarty set out to make a photographic version of the drawing, in the actual location where the boy said it happened: on the road between Jerusalem and Ramallah, near the Kalandia checkpoint. Using war toys he found in local markets, McCarty set plastic soldiers in the sand and used a syringe to squirt red liquid under a Playmobil boy. When the noisy clash of an actual protest broke out behind his miniature scene, photojournalists rushed in, but McCarty kept his lens on the toys.

“It seems mad that I didn’t turn the camera toward the people running away with swollen faces and red eyes, but I felt I made the right choice,” McCarty said in a TEDx talk. “I came for, and I got, a little boy’s perspective.”

McCarty’s new book, War-Toys (brianmccarty.com, $32), pairs drawings by kids in Israel and Palestine—some of them painfully detailed—with the photographs he describes as “art-directed” by the kids. He’s careful to point out that he’s supervised by art therapists at established shelters.

On location, as McCarty set toy buses or

nterviewing Hannah Arendt must have been tough work. She questioned even the most basic premise of a question, as in her very first exchange with journalist Günter Gaus in a 1964 interview newly published in Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview. Gaus nonchalantly calls her a philosopher, and Arendt immediately (but politely) takes him apart:

I am afraid I have to protest. I do not belong to the circle of philosophers. My profession, if one can even speak of it at all, is political theory. I neither feel like a philosopher, nor do I believe that I have been accepted in the circle of philosophers, as you so kindly suppose.

REVIEW

Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Melville House, $15.95)

Arendt is now perhaps best remembered for her book about World War II war crimes, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. It’s controversial in part because Arendt tries to strip Eichmann and other Nazis of their bogeyman status, revealing them as nothing so much as bland bureaucrats. She didn’t absolve them of their evil deeds, but she did strenuously make the case that they were ordinary people.

For those who believed that she somehow trivialized the Holocaust, Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany in the early 1930s, recalls later in her interview with Gaus what it was like to learn for the first time about what was happening at Auschwitz:

My husband is a former military historian, he understands something about these matters. He said don’t be gullible, don’t take these stories at face value. They can’t go that far! And then a half year later, we believed it after all, because we had the proof. That was the real shock.

Naturally, the claims that she didn’t understand the pain visited on the Jewish people by the Nazis hurt her on a personal level. Interview is a collection of four dialogues with Arendt, and in most of them she defends the thesis of Banality against critics. You can hear a kind of pleading hiding

LOOSE LIPS

BY STRANGER ARTS GOSSIP SQUAD

• More than a decade ago, former Almost Live! cast member Bob Nelson wrote the screenplay for Alexander Payne’s new and beautiful film Nebraska Last week, Nelson was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for best first screenplay, and the coming months should bring a plethora of nominations and wins, considering the power and prestige of the whole project. We will not jinx anything with Oscar predictions.

• On a weekend in which Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon was looking to deliver products to residential areas via “autonomous” flying robots with whirling blades, independent booksellers demonstrated how to do commerce right: Personal recommendations from interesting humans, passed hand-to-hand and not dropped from the sky like napalm. Indies First, a program thought of by Stranger Genius Sherman Alexie, involves local authors working as booksellers at bookshops on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. A line of Alexie groupies stretched down the street outside Elliott Bay Book Company in the pre-opening hours. Other participating authors included Jennie Shortridge and Jonathan Evison.

• Art Basel Miami Beach opens Thursday. Once upon a time, it drew eager, hopeful artists and dealers en masse, leaving Seattle virtually art-empty for the first week of December what with everybody running around sunburning themselves in South Beach. Seems like no one’s going this year. Those Facebook updates from hot tubs reporting Jeff Koons sightings are from another life entirely.

• The Short Run Small Press Festival was a smash hit last Saturday. Hundreds of people packed into Washington Hall to present, buy, and trade their comics, literary magazines, and crafts. Poet Kate Lebo and novelist Matt Briggs gave back-toback readings about unpopular pies and unpopular penises, respectively. Comics fans scooped up new work by Jen Vaughn, David Lasky, Jim Woodring, and Eroyn Franklin. Dear organizers: Don’t schedule the event on Thanksgiving weekend next year, so it can be even better attended. Everything else was perfect.

• A bright spot on Greenwood Avenue is going dark. For four years, Sheri Hauser’s shop Tasty sold handmade toys and predominantly local art by a lineup including Jesse Link, the Iraq vet whose fantasy paintings of animals are currently featured, Joe Vollan, and Siolo Thompson. December 13, Hauser will serve champagne, hot chocolate, and clearance prices. Closing day is January 31.

• Wandering Belltown last week, somebody from Cat Power’s tour saw adorable artist/gallerist Paul Pauper (Form/Space Atelier) out in front of his Belltown studio itinerantly playing a song. Hours later (and for 300 bucks), Power was on Instagram in a flat-topped hat by Pauper, looking like Zorro.

• This past Sunday brought the finale of the 2013 Seattle International Comedy Competition. Winning the whole damn thing: Zoltan Kaszas, a hugely endearing California comic with a gift for class-based observational comedy. Hurrah!

behind her normally assured voice here:

Eichmann was perfectly intelligent, but in this respect he was stupid. It was this stupidity that was so outrageous. And that was what I actually meant by banality. There’s nothing deep about it—nothing demonic! There’s simply the reluctance ever to imagine what the other person is experiencing, right?

have the opportunity to look at each person and what they did, what they said, how they moved their hands.”

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

MAGIC. PHOENIX

COMICS & GAMES 113 Broadway E, Seattle

WORKING CLASS HERO

But Arendt’s intellect can’t be captured by any one topic for very long. In between her thorny monologues, she stops to appreciate the simple beauty of the English idiom “stop and think” (“Nobody can think unless they stop,” she marvels) or to resurrect the 18thcentury idea of “public happiness,” which suggests that taking part in public life “opens up” a “dimension of human experience that otherwise remained closed.” There’s a playful, even joyous side to Arendt in these interviews that often failed to rise to the surface of her writing. Not all of Melville House’s Last Interview series of books are exceptional— the David Foster Wallace entry was especially disappointing—but this volume serves as a meaningful portrait of Arendt and a useful introduction to her work for beginners.

DANCE

The Soul

of a Shooter

Dayna

Hanson’s Dance Theater About a 2010 School-Board Shooting

BY BRENDAN KILEY

For months after the shootings at Columbine High School, every story about the event was dominated by one overarching question: Why did they do it? People kept talking about bullying, teenage alienation, video games, antidepressants, Marilyn Manson, goth culture, parenting styles—as if Columbine were a play and the rest of us were theater critics trying to understand its nuances.

Now, 14 years later, the bandwidth of our public conversations about mass shooters has shrunk dramatically. The charitable folks talk about mental illness, the not-so-charitable talk about “evil,” and everyone assumes their usual position for another gun-control standoff. People seem to have lost interest in peering into the depths of a shooter’s soul.

But back in 2010, choreographer Dayna Hanson was transfixed by a seven-minute video of a school-board shooting in Panama City, Florida. “It really got under my skin,” Hanson says. “It’s so rare to see an incident like this captured on video, where you

PREVIEW

The Clay Duke Dayna Hanson at On the Boards Dec 5–8

In the video, the school board is having a routine meeting when a 56-year-old ex-con and licensed massage therapist named Clay Duke announces: “I have a motion.” He pulls out a pistol and tells everyone to leave except for the school board’s six men. In an almost comical moment, a female school-board member sneaks up behind Duke and ineffectually whacks him with her purse. He gives her a second chance to leave—she takes it. Duke complains about his wife losing her job as an English teacher, says they’re broke with no benefits, and that budget cuts have gutted the district. Then he opens fire, missing everyone. A security guard shoots Duke from behind. Duke shoots himself in the head. His farewell note on Facebook denounces the wealthy and quotes a Percy Shelley poem: “Shake your chains to earth like dew/Which in sleep has fallen on you/Ye are many—they are few.”

Hanson was intrigued by how calm the whole thing seemed. The disjunction between the drawn gun and the discussion of taxes and budgets reminded her of Chekhov, she says, and “his interest in the difference between what people say to each other and what they’re doing to each other—that gap between action and text.” It also reminded her of Charles Bronson vigilante movies. “I feel like there’s this subtle influence of Hollywood in what Clay is doing,” she says. “Like: ‘This is the action, this is going to be it, this is going to restore balance to the universe if I avenge my wife.’”

Hanson assembled a team of actors and dancers including Thomas Graves of the Rude Mechs in Austin, dancers Wade Madsen and Peggy Piacenza, actress Sarah Rudinoff (winner of a Stranger Genius Award), and others to make a show about it. The result is a dense and impressionistic 90-minute riff on the seven-minute source material, with re-created sections of the video and dance sequences based on the real-life physicality of the people involved. Hanson says that in an early stage of the process, everyone in the ensemble learned every step and gesture made by Duke, the lady with the purse, and the rest. Hanson packs a lot into The Clay Duke: letters from Duke to judges, his work as a massage therapist, passages from Chekhov and the Death Wish movies of the 1980s, W.H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” (about how the world doesn’t stop just because others are suffering), and an unexpected dance-club sequence with predatory swamp animals.

“There’s a certain kind of vanity and outrageousness for me to take this subject on,” Hanson admits. But as mass shootings continue with mystifying regularity in America, it’s increasingly urgent to dig past the usual explanations and keep asking why.

ART Gallery Openings

A/NT GALLERY Color the Winter: Colorful works, in most senses of the word. Including a “spraypaint abstract” work from Andrew Parry that looks like an extreme closeup of a tiger, “female fauvist acrylics” from Stephen Leddy (nude, green women), and mixed-media figures from Aubry Andersen (somewhat-clothed blue women). Free. Reception Sat Dec 7, 6-10 pm. Wed-Sun. Through Dec 28. 2045 Westlake Ave

DAVIDSON GALLERIES

Mary Iverson and Dane Youngren: Progress and Sacrifice: Iverson’s post-apocalyptic shipping container paintings from her Sunk exhibition, paired with Youngren’s large-scale ceramics. Free. Reception Thurs Dec 5, 6-8 pm Tues-Sat. Through Dec 24. 313 Occidental Ave S, 624-1324.

FLATCOLOR GALLERY

Pars: A solo exhibition by prominent Seattle street artist Pars kicks off Flatcolor’s new location. Free. Reception Thurs Dec 5, 5-9 pm.

Wed-Sun. Through Dec 22. 77 Main St 390-6537.

FRANCINE SEDERS

GALLERY Hear ye, hear ye: This is 80-yearold Francine Seders’s final show in her Phinney Ridge gallery, which has hosted great art and Sundayafternoon openings for decades. Don’t miss your last chance to meet the legendary Frenchwoman in person; she’ll still be working remotely, but no longer will she just be available at her desk inside the old Seattle home adapted into her gallery. Farewell and thank you, Francine Seders Gallery. Reception Sun Dec 8, 2-4 pm. Tues-Sun. Through Dec 24. 6701 Greenwood Ave N, 782-0355.

GALLERY4CULTURE

Laura Castellanos: Borrowed Tribe: The artist whose graphically bold work in painting has appeared across the city goes 3D with a large exhibition of handmade dolls. Free. Reception Thurs Dec 5, 6-8 pm. Mon-Fri. Through Dec 24. 101 Prefontaine Pl S, 296-7580.

JAMES HARRIS GALLERY

SML: A photography, sculpture, and painting group show cocurated with Julie Alexander (one of the participating artists) about how form generates art. Artists include: Claire Cowie, Nicholas Nyland, Serrah Russell, Francis Celentano, Stranger Genius Award winner Wynne Greenwood, and Colleen Hayward. Free. Reception Thurs Dec 5, 6-8 pm. Thurs-Sat. Through Dec 21. 604 Second Ave 903-6220.

LINDA HODGES GALLERY

Suburbia: Dream or Nightmare is a group show for the cul-de-sac set—a report back from the suburbs. Free. Reception Thurs Dec 5, 6-8 pm. Tues-Sat. Through Jan 4. 316 First Ave S, 624-3034.

PLATFORM GALLERY

Correlate: Eric Eley, Debra Baxter, and Adam Ekberg, correlating. Eley works in installations that highlight the curvature of line through space, sometimes recalling the fragmented wire-sculpture aesthetic of a 3D graphing engine. Ekberg’s photography is perhaps more cheerful, or at least more likely to include a pineapple or teacup. Baxter works wild wonders with crystals and mirrors. Free. Reception Thurs Dec 5, 6-8 pm. Wed-Sat. Through Dec 14. 114 Third Ave S 323-2808.

PROLE DRIFT Pretty Litter : Simple, vacationcolored, almost-tropical detritus with a sorry future. These acrylics on paper by Seattle artist JD Banke are accompanied by a story that begins “There’s a town where all the homes are mobile homes...” Presented by SEASON. Free. Reception Thurs Dec 5, 6-8 pm. Thurs-Sat. Through Dec 28. 523 S Main St PUNCH GALLERY International Juried Exhibition Almost two thousand submissions from around the world culled and organized by TAM curator Rock Hushka into a sensible, exhibitable, multimedia mass of art. This show always includes unexpected highlights; don’t miss. Free. Reception Thurs Dec 5, 5-8 pm. Thurs-Sat. Through Dec 21. 119 Prefontaine Pl S, 621-1945.

ROQ LA RUE Femke Hiemstra: “Darkly fantastical” illustrations from the artist’s

book The Timid Cabbage Free.

Reception Thurs Dec 5, 6-8 pm.

Wed-Sat. Through Jan 4. 532 1st Ave S, 374-8977.

SOIL Julie Alexander : A member artist and sometimes curator of the gallery shows her own work. Free.

Reception Thurs Dec 5, 6-8 pm.

Wed-Sat. Through Dec 28. 112 Third Ave S, 264-8061.

Continuing Exhibitions

G. GIBSON GALLERY

Barrow Cabins : Eirik Johnson’s (Sawdust Mountain) photographic essay on remote Alaskan hunting cabins built by the native Iñupiat. A portrait of the changing seasons, of the striking landscape, and of the distinct architecture of the buildings themselves. Also on display: new drawings by the evocative place-portraitist Mark Thompson, whose black-and-white landscapes from a couple of years ago pulled our hearts halfway out. Free.

Reception Thurs Dec 5, 6-8 pm.

Wed-Sat. Through Jan 18. 300 S Washington St, 587-4033.

GREG KUCERA GALLERY Miles Cleveland Goodwin: Dreary, macabre paintings of bleak winter scenes. Gregory Blackstock: Homemade Sheet Music

Re-arrangements: Encyclopedic drawn renditions of sheet music and corresponding illustrations from this autistic artistic savant. Free. Reception Thurs Dec 5, 6-8 pm. Tues-Sat. Through Dec 21. 212 Third Ave S, 624-0770.

GROVER/THURSTON

GALLERY

Fay Jones: New paintings by the beloved longtime Seattle artist, this time inspired by the films of great French director Jean Renoir, whose works include The Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion Free. Tues-Sat. Through Dec 21. 319 Third Ave S, 223-0816.

Events

2013 DRAWING JAM

A free creativity day for the whole family. Fifty models will be found throughout the space, just begging to be drawn and painted. Gage Academy of Art 1501 10th Ave E, 526-2787. www.gageacademy. org. Free. Sat Dec 7 at 9 am-9 pm.

BRIAN MCCARTY

The artist will speak about his book War-Toys See review, page TK. Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave, 386-4636. spl.org. Free. Thurs Dec 5, 7-8:30 pm.

LUST AND VON STUCK

A discussion on Franz von Stuck from Anna Delacroix, Joanne della Penta, and Kathy Weissbourd, who are all psychoanalysts. Juicy. Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave, 6229250. www.fryeart.org. Free. Sun Dec 8 at 2 pm.

OH MY GOTH

Oh My Goth: A one-night exhibition of hiply hued photography by Lauren Max, rife with youthful fluorescence. May dabble in bubble gum demonology. Vignettes, El Capitan Apartments, 1617 Yale Ave. Free. Fri Dec 6, 7-10 pm.

RYAN HENRY WARD

Ryan Henry Ward, who goes by just “henry”: A one-night-only show from the man who has painted more goofy animals and wizards on the walls of this city than the rest of us combined. Meet the legend in person! COUCH, 5423 Ballard Ave NW. ryanhenryward.com. Free. Sat Dec 7, 6-11 pm.

SOUTH PARK ARTS FAIR

Over 50 artists and everything is priced under $100, they promise! South Park Community Center 8319 8th Ave S, 684-7451. Free. Sat Dec 7, 2-9 pm.

visualart@thestranger.com

READINGS

Wed 12/4

CASTALIA

The UW Creative Writing MFA showcase returns with first-year poet Allison Stagner, first-year prose writer Kay C. Rogers, and Stranger contributor Sarah Galvin, who writes some of the funniest poems you’ve ever heard. Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030. hugohouse.org. Free. 7 pm.

COLL THRUSH

The interestingly named Thrush is the author of Native Seattle: Histories from the CrossingOver Place Stranger art critic Jen Graves says Thrush is “AWESOME.” Olympic Sculpture Park, 2901 Western Ave, 6543100. seattleartmuseum.org/visit/ OSP. Free. 7 pm.

A TOTEM POLE HISTORY As a celebration of the new book

A Totem Pole History: the Work of Lummi Carver Joe Hillaire an editor, a carver, and a pigment and paint specialist discuss the work of the prominent Lummi carver. Burke Museum, NE 45th St and 17th Ave NE, 543-5590. www.washington.edu/burkemuseum. $5. 7 pm.

Thurs 12/5

AMY TAN

The wildly popular author of The Joy Luck Club returns with her new novel, The Valley of Amazement University Temple United Methodist Church , 1415 NE 43rd St, 634-3400. www.utemple. org. Free. 7 pm.

Fri 12/6

ELLEN FORNEY, DAVID MONTGOMERY

Montgomery is a prominent local geologist. Forney is a Stranger Genius Award-winning cartoonist. These two people have been artist in residences at Town Hall for the last few month. Tonight, they’ll talk about their work, what they’ve been up to, and where they’re going. Town Hall 1119 Eighth Ave, 652-4255. townhallseattle. org. $5. 7 pm.

KATE LEBO

Lebo is the author of Commonplace Book of Pie, a book of poetry that is inspired by different types of pie. At these readings, Lebo will often take requests from the audience: Name a pie and she’ll read you a poem for that pie. I’ve never once seen her stumped by a weird pie, which is pretty impressive. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600. elliottbaybook. com. Free. 7 pm.

Sat 12/7

WHAT TO READ IN THE RAIN

This is a release party celebrating the new anthology collecting local writers and students at 826 Seattle, which benefits the very good local writing organization. The event features a reading, a signing, and “Northwest-themed refreshments.” 826 Seattle, 8414 Greenwood Ave N, 725-2625. www.826seattle. org. free. 1 pm.

BRUCE PAVITT

The Sub Pop muckety-muck and author of Experiencing Nirvana: Grunge in Europe, 1989 discusses a very important time in Seattle history. The book contains 200 photographs by Pavitt and Steve Double, along with diary excerpts from the tour. Fantagraphics Bookstore and Gallery , 1201 S Vale St, 658-0110. www.fantagraphics. com. Free. 6 pm.

Tues 12/10

THE MAGICAL NUMBER

SEVEN, PLUS OR MINUS TWO Local poets Kelly Davio, Nicelle Davis, Maggie MK Hess, Sierra Nelson, and Alexis Vergalla will read new work about Miller’s Law, which says that we can only retain so much information in our memories. Hugo House 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030. hugohouse.org. Free. 7 pm.

NICOLA GRIFFITH

Griffith is a local novelist. Her newest, Hild, is about a king’s rebellious niece in 7th century Britain. Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave, 634-3400. spl.org. Free. 7 pm.

TOM REH

Dr. Reh will give a lecture titled “Restoring Sight to the Blind: the Future Looks Bright” as part of the UW Graduate Program in Neurobiology & Behavior-sponsored NeuroTalks

public lecture series. W.H. Foege Building Auditorium 3720 15th Ave NE. uwneurotalks.brownpapertickets.com. Free w/registration. 7 pm.

readings@thestranger.com

THEATER

Opening and Current Runs

CABARET

A staging of Cabaret by Arts on the Waterfront that comments on contemporary Russian persecution of the LGBTQ community. Starring Wes Hurley and Zachary Simonson and featuring video clips from real-life vigilantes and young fascists talking about the situation in Russia. Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center 201 Mercer St, 441-7178. intiman. org. Starting Nov 29. Wed-Mon at 8 pm. Through Dec 13. THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES

“Some Sherlocks are too icy (Jeremy Brett in the BBC series) or too superhero-ish to believe (Robert Downey, Jr. in the film franchise) but Darragh Kennan’s performance as Sherlock in this new adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles is just right. He can be prickly or exuberant, he has an impish sense of humor—in short, he’s a fully formed human being and watching him cavort through this story with other standup Seattle actors (Connor Toms, Charles Leggett, Hana Lass) is an unalloyed pleasure.” (Brendan Kiley) Seattle Repertory Theatre 155 Mercer St, Seattle Center, 4432222. seattlerep.org. $12-$60. Starting Nov 15. Tues-Thurs at 7:30 pm, Fri-Sat at 8 pm, Sun at 2 and 7:30 pm. Through Dec 15.

A JOHN WATERS

CHRISTMAS

See Stranger Suggests, page 19. Neptune Theatre, 1303 NE 45th St, 682-1414. stgpresents. org. $35-$99. Thurs Dec 5 at 8 pm.

MONSTROUS

See Stranger Suggests, page 19. Northwest Film Forum 1515 12th Ave, 267-5380. nwfilmforum. org. $12-$15. Starting Dec 5. Thurs-Sat at 8 pm. Through Dec 7.

THE SALESMAN IS DEAD AND GONE

The Splinter Group presents this nonverbal journey into the afterlife of Willy Loman with physical theater, video, and “an original soundscape” by Evan Mosher. Created and directed by Paul Budraitis ( Bo-Nita ). Hugo House , 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030. hugohouse. org. Starting Dec 5. Thurs-Sat at 8 pm. Through Dec 21.

STRANGE SNOW

This play by Stephen Metcalfe, directed by Gregg Gilmore, begins with two men—each dealing with emotional baggage related to military service—planning to go fishing.

One realizes he’s attracted to the other’s sister and the drama begins. Ticket buyers will be given the address. A nondescript house www.seattleimmersivetheatre. com. $25. Starting Dec 6. Fri-Sat at 7:30. Through Dec 21.

THE DINA MARTINA CHRISTMAS SHOW

“The Christmas shows of Dina Martina—the monstrously untalented chanteuse brought to life by the monstrously talented Grady West—are the stuff of legend, and this year’s installment is a veritable Whitman’s Sampler of that legend, cherry-picking the best bits from all 14 of Dina’s previous Christmas shows. Expect punny songs, awkward transitions, stupid gifts, astounding outfits, cheerful blasphemy, and interstitial stories that will bend your brain.” (David Schmader) Re-bar 1114 Howell St, 233-9873. rebarseattle.com. $20-$25. Thurs-Fri at 8 pm Sat at 2 and 8 pm. Through Dec 31.

Dance

THE CLAY DUKE

See preview, page 22. On the Boards 100 W Roy St, 2179888. ontheoboards.org. $12-$20. Starting Dec 5. Thurs-Sun at 8 pm. Through Dec 8.

NEXT DANCE CINEMA

See Stranger Suggests, page 19. Northwest Film Forum 1515 12th Ave, 267-5380. nwfilmforum. org. $11-$16. Mon-Tues at 7 pm. Through Dec 10.

theater@thestranger.com

OH, NO! IT’S DEVO

At Chop Suey’s Devo Cover Night this Friday, December 6, multiple acts will pay tribute to the band known for its vastly weird, squeakily instrumented, discordantly rhythmed, robot-soaked, post-punk musical happenings, whose members dressed in costumes so ridiculous, they looked like sci-fi figurines. TV & the Deevs frontman TV Coahran will wear a factory-issued industrial-gray jumpsuit and clear plastic face-mask ensemble, inspired by the “Secret Agent Man” video. According to a 1995 YouTube interview with Devo founder Gerald Casale, the original outfit’s components were culled from Akron, Ohio’s toy stores and janitorial-supply companies, which only richens the glamour.

Another vivid music-video moment involves a french fry suggestively penetrating a glazed doughnut in “That’s Good,” although interpreting this image into a fashion homage could only bring obstacles.

More practical Devo-apparel options include pasted-on sideburns, butcher jackets layered under enema-bag bandoliers, lead singer Mark Mothersbaugh’s removable plastic eyebrows, or the creepily hopeful Boy Scout uniforms from the New Traditionalists album cover—a pairing of workaday slacks with V-neck shirts and synthetic John Kennedy–style croissant pompadours

Swimming goggles made smart accessories, as did turtlenecks, yanked fully up. There were also dishwashing gloves, cardboard 3-D glasses, and duct-tape belt-and-suspender sets, which are all easy enough to procure. The band wore plenty of especially curious garments, too, and for a time, a good selection could be obtained from the Oh, No! It’s Devo album inner sleeve, which doubled as a mail-order catalog. The famous Energy Dome was for sale there, a stacked-disk headpiece of deep lipstick red, with design elements recalling ancient ziggurats and lacquered dog dishes. Casale constructed the first model himself, by vacuum-forming sheet plastic into a mold cast from a 1930s decoera ceiling fixture, and he claims the shape encourages increased mental performance. (Who knows if that’s true, though the stylish hat could definitely impart, with a peppy sophistication, your next scheduled uneasily-kinky-strip-show-at-the-duderanch agenda.)

Back to the catalog and its ad-copy wonderments, strewn like Christmas tinsel among the descriptions. Devo’s signature yellow hazmat coveralls promised protection from dangerous elements enabling one to “stay cool during meltdowns.” The Spudring polyethylene collar could be worn as a bulbed shoulder protector, or flipped into “saucer” position, making a great “barber bib, crumb catcher, or sun visor.” And collectible lenticular flicker buttons were constructed from heavy-duty material to endure “even the most violent wiggling.”

ROCKIN PIANO SHOW

CHOW

Dark-’n’-Manly

The Old Sage vs. Canon: Which Is Better?

BY BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT

The Old Sage serves a roll that costs nine dollars. On the menu, it’s called “Butter Flake Bread,” and it is, in fact, buttery without being at all greasy, and it is full of light,

flaky layers. It comes with a pat of particularly delicious cultured butter with tiny bits of chive and sea salt on top, and one side of the Butter Flake Bread, where the butter congregates, is extra crisped and extra tasty. The Butter Flake Bread appears to have miniscule flecks of herbs in it. Still, it is a roll—a single roll, made of bread—and it costs $9.

“It’s pretty good, for a roll,” the person I shared the roll with said. It’s a little weird to share a roll, but if you don’t, you’re out 20 bucks on bread alone.

The Old Sage (1410 12th Ave, 557-7430) is the new Capitol Hill restaurant and bar from Brian McCracken and Dana Tough—they also run Tavern Law on the same block, and Spur in Belltown. The food at Spur has attracted praise from Food & Wine, and their Coterie Room, before it recently became an events-only space, got very positive reviews from me and others; it made the Seattle Times’ “10 Fab Restaurants” list in 2011.

There’s reason to expect very good things from Old Sage’s menu of “non-traditional” smoked meats and seafood, but what I had

smoked-pork smell, a tangle of miniature ribbons of apple, and sweating cheese on top (the well-meaning server did not know what kind; she checked, then said it was Comté, “like a cross between Swiss and Gruyère,” which is kind of correct, in spirit). A bite of the grain alone was almost eye-wateringly salty; the combination of all three elements was just okay.

The Old Sage has a smoke-and-malt theme, and there’s lots of Scotch, a wide-ranging selection of beer (including “Cheap Beer [whatever we’re feeling],” for $3), and cocktails that favor the brown liquors. The Savory Smoke ($12), with mezcal, Drambuie, Madeira, and celery, is one improbable combination that tastes great. The place has a postindustrial men’s club look, dark and cavelike but with clean lines and some overly self-conscious old-timey flair, like murals of a locomotive and Arthur Denny rendered in an airbrushed style. There’s also a slim gaspowered stove to sit by (would a potbellied one make the place look fat?), a representative piece of polished wood burl, and a pelt on a table, which our server obviously wished wasn’t there (she didn’t know what animal it came from, and she didn’t want to know, but she gamely found out anyway: raccoon). Wu-Tang played. The party crowd is already coming to the Old Sage on weekend nights, and it feels more like a party bar, albeit a dark-’n’-manly one, than a place for high-concept food.

Acouple blocks south on 12th Avenue, Jamie Boudreau’s Canon (928 12th Ave, 552-9755) is also manly and loves its liquor. Now in its third year, the place is full of booze to the literal rafters, its glowing shelves seven high. High rollers note: Either here or at the Old Sage, you can spend nearly an unlimited amount on one drink, though Canon wins that war in print with a $1,100 brandy crusta on its cocktail menu. Despite this outrageousness, Canon feels warm and genuine, more like a place to just get a really good drink than the bigger, slicker, carefully calibrated Old Sage. I’m partial to the Canon Cocktail, which is rye and Ramazzotti topped with triple sec foam and bitters, and a bargain at $1,090 less than the crusta.

there one night last week didn’t quite rise to its price point, including the $9 roll. The mesquite-smoked beef short rib ($19) had the expected falling-apart tenderness, and the sweet potato puree underneath created the flavor contrast you’d expect. But it was

Would a potbellied stove make the Old Sage look fat?

topped with carrot greens, which were bitter and tough: the opposite of a revelation about how people really should eat carrot tops. Seaweed-smoked arctic char ($19) carried a faint scent of nori on its soft, pink-orange flesh, but the dish lacked coherence: Pieces of vinegary celery, dollops of mild pureed celery root, and the umami of a black sesame sauce were all over the place in taste, plus difficult to corral in one forkful. A small bowlful of sprouted malted emmer ($12), served warm, had a pungent

If you haven’t eaten at Canon in a while— or ever—you should. The menu is manageable in length, it’s interestingly varied, and, as of not too long ago, Laurie Riedeman is the one cooking: She was chef/co-owner of the excellent Elemental. (Those who remember her partner Phred Westfall’s style of beverage service will probably be extra happy to choose their own drinks.) The other night, the basic wintery pleasure of roasted bone marrow was augmented with smoked-garlic gremolata, subtle and just right, and two big bones’ worth was only $8. Perfectly braised octopus came with creamy-light white bean puree and slices of rich, dark, chewy chorizo, plus salsa verde and chorizo oil ($12): a plate of neo-Spanish greatness. A porcini risotto cake topped with foraged mushrooms, bits of shallot, and a poached egg ($12), was also precisely right for the season, like eating superlative stuffing without bothering with the bird. (If it had truffle oil, it had the correct amount: when you can’t tell for sure.) And the roasted black cod with yam puree, figs, and prosciutto chips ($12) was as complicated as the char dish at the Old Sage, but better balanced in flavor and texture—maybe still a little overthought, but better. Elsewhere on the menu, the pork belly bun sandwiches, a confit chicken, and a variation on a Reuben look very promising.

The soundtrack included the White Stripes and Hendrix, seemingly chosen by a person rather than Pandora. When we told the server how much we liked all the food, he said, “I always feel bad that all our press is drink-related when our chef is so amazing.” Noted.

Comment on the Old Sage and Canon at THESTRANGER.COM/CHOW

vanilla cinnamon Dubliner - $5 Jameson & $5 Two Gingers Irish Whisky Red Door - TBD

DRINKING WITH CHARLES MUDEDE

BY CHARLES MUDEDE

THE CALL OF THE DUCK DYNASTY WINE

I tried to finish one episode of Duck Dynasty and failed. The popular A&E reality TV show is about a white Louisiana family that made a fortune from duck-call things that come in different colors. Robertson is the name of the family, and Duck Commander is the name of their company. Thousands upon thousands of ducks have been drawn to their deaths by the calls manufactured by this rural and rather rude family. The Robertson men have ZZ Top–like beards, wear bandannas, and practically live in hunting clothes. The women dress like ordinary country types. The men are all about being manly men. The women are all about being womanly women Everyone has a deep Southern accent, and everyone also believes that Jesus is the son of the man who created the moon, the stars, whatever else is up there.

Duck Dynasty is in its fourth season (51 episodes!), which is amazing because superhuman strength is required to reach even the middle of a single 20-minute show. The one I watched, “Spring

Clean Pong” (it was first screened a year ago), opens with the beards picking berries (Mama, we are told, makes the best pie with these here berries). The men shake a tree, the berries fall, and the men pick the berries from the ground. One of the beards decides to eat a berry he has just picked— but almost immediately he spits it out and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Damn! That berry tastes terrible.” Another beard, pointing at something on the ground: “Did you pick it up from right there? You did? Because that’s a coon turd [not a berry].” This is entertainment? And why in the world is a city person like me even watching this nonsense? Because the hicks who make the duck calls have decided to make wine.

The Robertson family—or rather the Trinchero Family Estates portfolio of brands, in collaboration with the Robertson family—sent three bottles to The Stranger: a red blend, a chardonnay, and a pink moscato. The red? It begins well enough but has a poor finish. The pink moscato? It’s just too sweet for me (clearly, it’s meant for the womanly women). The chardonnay? It’s perfectly drinkable. Apparently, the duck family also sells cigars (handmade in the Dominican Republic). Capitalism knows no limit.

Chow Events

Wed 12/4

HANUKKAH MENU

AT GOLDEN BEETLE

Chef Maria Hines (who isn’t Jewish) cooks a Hanukkah menu (latkes, matzo ball soup, and more) with chef Ariel FishmanLarsh (who is Jewish) in the Golden Beetle kitchen (which isn’t kosher, but is certified organic). (The regular menu is also available.) Golden Beetle , 1744 NW Market St, 7062977. golden-beetle.com.

PARTY DRINKS WITH MARK SEXAUER

Local author/ bartender Mark Sexauer shows you how to make your guests happy with alcohol without getting too complicated about it. Vermillion , 1508 11th Ave, 709-9797. vermillionseattle.com. $10 (two drinks included!). 7 pm.

Thurs 12/5

REPEAL DAY PARTY

AT SMITH

On December 5, 1933, Prohibition was repealed and the USA got back to the business of legally enjoying its booze. Mark the 80-year anniversary of this important day at Smith with a roster of old-timey cocktails made with local Oola Distillery liquor. Smith , 332 15th Ave E, 709-1900. smithseattle.com.

REPEAL DAY PARTY

AT BAR COTTO

Celebrate the freedom to drink with Prohibitionera punch and cocktails for $8/$9, plus the (really good, extra-well-priced) happy hour menu from 10 pm until close (and, as always, from 4 to 6 pm). Note: “Fedoras, bowlers, and short mustaches are definitely encouraged.” Bar Cotto , 1546 15th Avenue, 838-2878. ethanstowellrestaurants.com/ barcotto.

TONIC TASTING

Come learn about the weird history of tonic water and try Bradley’s Kina Tonic—it’s the Pacific Northwest’s first craft tonic, and it’s approximately a billion times better than Schweppes. Vermillion , 1508 11th Ave, 709-9797. vermillionseattle.com. Free. 7 pm.

Fri 12/6

PORT & CHOCOLATE TASTING

Free tastes of port and artisan chocolate (including Marou, Dandelion, and Zotter), with a premium port/dessert wine tasting available for a fee. The Barrel Thief , 3417 Evanston Ave N #102, 402-5492. bthief.com. Free. 5-8 pm.

Sat 12/7

VEGETARIAN TAMALEMAKING CLASS

El Centro de la Raza’s porky tamale-making classes have been so popular, they’re finally trying a vegetarian one. El Centro de la Raza , 2524 16th Ave S, 957-4611. elcentrodelaraza.com. $75. 10 am-12:30 pm.

SEAHAWK

Sun 12/8

ST. LUCIA AT THE SWEDISH CLUB

Students studying Swedish at the UW enact the lovely/hazardous St. Lucia tradition, in which the human embodiment of the saint wears a crown of lit candles. Also: live music, treats, and dancing around the tree. Swedish Cultural Center , 1920 Dexter Ave N, 283-1090. swedishculturalcenter.org. $3 (treats by donation). 3 pm.

HOLIGAYS! WITH DJ SKIDDLE

Poco invites you to “drink wine, be merry, and rock out with some untz untz beats” and various holiday treats, plus a $20 tasting of eight local and Spanish wines (with retastes on demand, so you can really get your money’s worth). Poco Wine Room , 1408 E Pine St, (206) 322-9463. pocowineroom.com. 4-8 pm.

Mon 12/9

HANK SHAW DINNER

Local 360 makes a threecourse tasting menu featuring Northwest game in tribute to guest of honor Hank Shaw and his greatsounding new cookbook, Duck, Duck, Goose. E-mail reservations@local360. org. Local 360, 2234 First Ave, 441-9360. local360. org. $75. 7 pm.

Tues 12/10

BOURBON TASTING

Taste your choice of four bourbons—choose from every damn bottle in the bar! The Barrel Thief , 3417 Evanston Ave N #102, 402-5492. bthief. com. $10. 7-9 pm.

Ongoing

WINTER BEER FE STIVAL

Drink a ton of local breweries’ “dark malty stouts, robust winter warmers, barrel-aged gems, and many more” at the Washington Beer Commission’s annual winterfest. Hanger 30 in Magnuson Park, 6310 NE 74th Street, 787-1989. washingtonbeer.com. $25. Dec 6-7.

SHANIK FIRST ANNIVERSARY MENU

Shanik says happy birthday to itself and happy its birthday to you with a three-course menu with optional wine pairings. Shanik, 500 Terry Ave N, 486-6884. shanikrestaurant.com. $32, wine pairings $20. Through Dec 7.

HOLIDAY COOKING CLASS WITH BRUCE NAFTALY

Learn how to make alltime-great holiday foods with an all-time-great chef (Bruce Naftaly of the dear departed Le Gourmand, who is also really nice), with eating and wine included. The socks of your family and friends will be knocked off! Pacific Crest School , 620 NW Bright St, 784-3463. legourmandrestaurant.com/ home.html. $75. Sat-Sun through Dec 22, plus Mon Dec 9.

SUNDAYS

congratulates Dave Voorhees for 40 years of selling records to music fans in Seattle and around the world! We invite our readers to visit Bop Street Records during the holidays,and thank Dave for his passionate service!

MUSIC

Four from the Core Movement Outside the Windows of Wishbeard

BY TRENT MOORMAN

“One

An upswept city in fog passes by quickly outside the windows of Wishbeard’s songs. Bryn Santillan’s taut, glinting guitar patterns move the vehicle out onto rails from a centered station

toward the end of a line. Dream-pop varietals of gazing—both shoe and math—factor in. There’s a shock-absorbed velocity to their music. Jude Miqueli’s drums and Brighton Kenoyer’s bass evenly drive the impetus of their equation. Santillan’s vocals are far ahead, shrouded in reverb as a higher-register Chan Marshall. Lighting the tracks, showing the way through the night, are Stranger IT genius Erin Resso’s ’80slit headlamp synths. This past September, the Seattle quartet recorded an EP , It’s All Gonna Break, with Aaron Schroeder at BLDGs. The songs were mixed by audio archon Erik Blood and mastered by Adam Straney. With it, Wishbeard continue their movement out and up. Their sound is forlorn at times, bleak even, but it’s a scenic, symmetrical, and cogitative bleakness that picks up speed in the straightaways. It’s pop heading toward Joy Division if Joy Division had teamed with Vangelis to score the Blade Runner soundtrack. Wishbeard spoke. We were stationary.

more of a WALL-E type when it comes to megacorporation dystopian futures. A little less noir-ish, a little more hope-y [laughs].

Wishbeard w/Friends and Family, Night Cadet, Tenderfoot Wed Dec 11, Crocodile, 7 pm, $8 adv, 21+

Break down “Adeline Street.” What ran through your head when you wrote the music and the lyrics? Brighton Kenoyer: I remember we all got really high at band practice one day, which doesn’t happen very often, and we just started jamming and it came out all dreamy and droney.

JM: I was channeling Built to Spill with the drumbeat. It’s a calming song for me.

Bryn Santillan: Adeline Street was the name of the street I lived on during my senior year of college. A lot of dark shit happened in that house, but you know what? I lived through all of that dark shit. And I don’t ever have to do that again. I love playing it live. It’s empowering.

Does your song “I.H.Y.P.” stand for “I hate young people”? BK: No! It doesn’t stand for I Heart You, Pancakes, either.

BS: We have a song called I.H.Y.P.? JM: Sworn to secrecy.

ER: Get off my lawn!

I hear some of you might possibly be really into boy bands. BK: Well, I sort of keep a running Top Five in my head at all times. This scientific ranking is based on a few criteria: number of albums I love/hate, production quality, the amount of palpable homoeroticism within the group, number of members with good hair. My current Top Five is One Direction, New Kids on the Block, New Edition, Boyz II Men, and the Moffatts.

BS: Brighton is really good at this question. BK: I’ve been waiting all my life for this question.

How do you all feel about being called “ladies”? What do you say back to people when they call you that? JM: In general, when addressing people you don’t personally know, the term “folks” is always a good choice. BK: I would even take “dudes” or “guys.” We’re not offended if you notice our masculine appearance. It’s okay. I want to say: “Look, I get it. We have vaginas, and you noticed, and that’s great. But we’re not ‘ladies.’” It just feels a little condescending. It’s hard to exist in this gender gray area sometimes, and I’m sure it’s hard for people on the outside to figure out also.

Brighton, you almost went on a Mormon mission? Holy fucking shit. Please explain and describe. BK: [Laughs] Oh, man. Well, I was born into an active Mormon family. When girls turn 21, they are encouraged to go on a mission if they’re not already married, and I sure as fuck was not getting married. So I was 20 and getting pressure to start preparing for a mission. I went out with missionaries and knocked on doors and all that, but I had known I was gay since I was 5. I finally came

I hear some of you might possibly be really into boy bands.

Where does the driving, high-velocity element of your sound come from? I hear Blade Runner Jude Miqueli: When I’m drumming, I feel like I’m driving a spaceship. The turns, the ramping up, easing in, and putting on the brakes. I listen to each bandmate, look at them, and keep driving. I make sure we all land safely.

Erin Resso: When we’re creating a song, it’s almost like we’re trying to catch up to it. The idea is there, then one of us will tap into it with a riff, and then we chase what we hear in our gut brains.

What are your Blade Runner thoughts?

ER: I love Blade Runner, but I think I’m

Bryn, your grandmother was a famous mariachi singer who made records and toured while raising nine kids? Whoa. What do you remember about her? BS: I remember how fashionable she was. I remember she would tell my younger sister and me, “Oooh, mija, I love you so much! Grandma’s going to send you some presents, okay?” And she’d blow us a kiss through the phone. I remember watching her perform. I was completely mesmerized by her hot-pink, sparkly mariachi outfit and how she commanded so much presence in a room. I have no idea how she had a music career with nine babies. Sometimes when I’m tired, I have no money, I’m struggling to put kitty food in the bowl, and then we play a late-night show, and I have to be at work at 8:30 a.m., I think, “Wow. My SINGLE PARENT abuelita did this with nine kids!?” I have no excuse.

out to myself completely around that time, and I realized that I couldn’t go out into the world and tell people that something was true when I wasn’t sure about it anymore. I didn’t want to half-ass either thing—being gay or being a Mormon. So I made my choice. I would be gay! That was, of course, the best choice I could have made. It seemed like a very sudden 180 to my family, but it clicked for me, and I’m no longer a member of that church. I had myself officially removed from their records last year. No more strapping young men knocking on my door, thank god.

So what’s next for you? JM: I’d like to record another group of songs. I’m also itchy to get on the road.

BS: We have some really cool shows coming up early next year—Katie Kate on January 14, and Chastity Belt on February 2—so it’ll be nice to have some new material to play and share…

WHAT'S CRAPPENING?

• Who do you like best? Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Pearl Jam, or The Stranger’s blog Slog? Prove it by being a good fan and a good person at the same time! In an epic battle to help teens in need, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Pearl Jam, and Slog are combining forces this holiday season to help raise money for Seattle’s Orion Center (a safe haven for homeless teens). The internationally famous musicians or semi-widely-read local blog whose fans raise the most money by December 24 will be declared THE WINNER! Read more about this glorious charity challenge on page 17.

• At the Nacho Picasso and Avatar Darko show at the Crocodile on Friday, Picasso wore a Voodoo Lounge–era Rolling Stones shirt, taking it off early in the set to reveal the top of his shark (or fish or fox or something) boxers. Darko’s boxers appeared to be marijuana-leaf-themed

• This Saturday, December 7, from 6 to 8 p.m., Fantagraphics in Georgetown will be hosting a reading and book signing for Sub Pop cofounder Bruce Pavitt’s new book, Experiencing Nirvana: Grunge in Europe, 1989 You won’t want to miss this—legendary photographer Charles Petersen will guest DJ, and who knows who else might show up.

• The karaoke host at Ballard’s Waterwheel Lounge is absolutely lovely—she’s kind, she’s patient, and she packs an impressive catalog full of hard-to-find karaoke numbers. (“Mama Said Knock You Out” is a rare gem, and Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” has been a lifelong aspiration of ours.) And the Waterwheel itself is a terrific bar—it’s welcoming, like the world’s coziest double-wide trailer, and the food is surprisingly good. It’s just too bad about the weekend crowd. When the place filled up with totally sloshed bros who wanted to honky their way through Afroman last Saturday, we had to flee. And then take a shower.

• Shocker! Last Tuesday and Wednesday, left-of-center electronic-music bills packed out the Crocodile and Neumos. Clark, Jon Hopkins, and Nathan Fake weirded up the Croc on November 26 (Clark’s abstracttechno set prompted the following textmessage-length review: “Most underrated musician out there. Because he doesn’t give a shit. He’s like the Grumpy Cat of electronic music”), while Nightmares on Wax laid down some blunted, tropical funk at Neumos the next evening. This goes against all conventional wisdom regarding dead weeknights and the poor-to-middling drawing power of challenging electronic music. Let’s hope this trend continues.

• Rumor has it that Stranger blogger and Emerald City Soul Club DJ Mike Nipper—owner of more than 15,000 pieces of vinyl—sat out Black Friday Record Store Day, choosing instead to meditate and take a 12-hour bubble bath.

12/12 DUB POLICE TOUR FT. CASPA 12/13 PERE UBU 12/19 NACHO PICASSO 12/21 ROSE WINDOWS 1/4 ATOMIC POP 1/5 VIDEOSEA LIVE 1/18 MAX BEMIS 1/22 DARKSIDE 1/25 DANIEL KIRKPATRICK & THE BAYONETS 1/31 WHITE DENIM 2/3 MAYER HAWTHORNE 2/5 SECRET CHIEFS 3 3/1 NICKI BLUHM & THE GRAMBLERS 3/5 DALE EARNHARDT JR. JR. 3/10 ELECTRIC SIX 3/29 LONDON GRAMMAR 4/17 GODFLESH

CRYSTAL BALL READING ROOM

12/13

FRIDAY 1/3

FLY MOON ROYALTY + FRESH ESPRESSO HOSTED BY MARCO COLLINS

COMING UP: 12/6 BASIA BULAT + CATE LE BON 12/8 LEE RANALDO AND THE DUST 12/12 WILL HOGE 12/13 ERIN MCKEOWN 12/14 KING KRULE 1/7 TENNIS 1/11 MARIA TAYLOR 1/15 CLOUD CONTROL 1/20 SUPERHUMANOIDS 1/21 DRENGE 1/23 ROBERT DELONG 2/11 DELOREAN 2/22 DJ SPOOKY 2/25 A TRIBE CALLED RED 3/2 TOGETHER PANGEA 3/7 ANGEL OLSEN

MONDAY 12/9

DONTE PEACE WITH ROYCE THE CHOICE + LIL RIPP + FEEZABLE THE GERM + FRANCHEYES + JOEY KA$H + SILVERBACK GORILLAZ + DJ ROSCOE. HOSTED BY EDDIE FRANCIS

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.

BRATMOBILE

Ladies, Women and Girls (Lookout!)

Bratmobile! A good friend, no doubt trying to make me feel better as an idiot, asked me if that was “a kids’ band.” That sounds perfectly plausible, but no: Bratmobile, I have found out for real and for sure, is another Olympia band, an OG riot-grrrl group, punk girls here to shout it out and talk about real shit and be tough. So I’m putting my ears to the test: Does it matter that they’re women? I’ve grown tired (okay, who am I kidding? I was born tired) of shouty white boys who are here to tell you about all their feelings and show you their hairdos and never bathe. I mean, that’s rad for you, dude! I want you to express yourself. I want you to go “duh-nuh-nuh-nuh” a lot in your basement, and then practice with your friends, and let allllll your angst out, and maybe even shout at the government—especially

MY PHILOSOPHY

HIPHOP YA DON'T STOP

BY LARRY MIZELL JR.

GETTING FRONTED ON, DRAKE, MACKLEMORE & RYAN LEWIS

I don’t know what’s more cliché than quoting Drizzy at this point—it’s the stuff that struggle status updates are made of—but I can’t sit here and lie to you, acting like I didn’t immediately and totally relate to those lines in “Worst Behavior.” I mean, “Mufucka never loved us!… Remember? Mufucka?!” Yes, he’s so cookiedough softbatch, and that video was the weakest broth—but c’mon, you know that part sounded cathartic as hell when you first heard it. What that phrase means to me: memories of being a lot younger in this hiphop shit here and getting fronted on. I’m sure my Seattle rap generation—from Oldominion to the Blue Scholars to Macklemore—knows exactly what I mean. I recall how I didn’t start getting daps, and seeing the teeth of mufuckas who weren’t my contemporaries, until those cats felt like I had something to offer them (aka when I started working at The Stranger). I never forgot that shit, and I know I’m not alone. I honestly look forward to the day that I can quit my jobs, when I might get some more authentic interactions from so-called real ones, or more importantly, so that the chronically self-stuck will no longer register my face.

Look, young heads in this town: You are the future, so determine it for yourself. Don’t let anyone (myself included)

that. I could take or leave all the safety pins and I’m not sure I totally get the eyeliner, because even I can’t get both eyes to match when I spend 10 minutes and use a dillion Q-tips, so how much time are y’all spending in the bathroom every day? But whatever. All of these things = well and good. I just don’t generally enjoy the auditory part. I like rebelliousness and I like creativity and I like sharing. But I also like more, y’know… musical music. There’s a flatness to punk vocal delivery that bugs me, as well as a predictability to the rhythm.

What happens if the musicians are women? Do I like it more? Does it change? Well, yeah, it turns out it kinda does. Not so much that I’d listen to this album all day, not so much that I’m going to become a Bratmobile evangelist. But it just reads differently to hear women yelling, “At least all the guys know if they fuck with me/That I’ll fuck them up indefinitely.” Even for me, context matters—and content. Girls calling themselves brats, girls being loud, girls threatening to fuck you up—it’s just different. You can feel it. Listening to Bratmobile—oh-oh-oh-oh-oh—makes me feel tough, just like listening to female-fronted hiphop does, and in a way that dude music could never touch. The bravado is one small spell conjuring some ancient lineage of female badassery, one link in a long chain that I can access through M.I.A. and I can access through Sylvia Plath and I can access through the British suffragists who carried bullwhips to fend off unruly bros

So try this: Put on Bratmobile, and turn it up, and let it get in your blood. (Afterward, we can all take naps and then listen to something quiet while we knit, I promise.) Do you hear spells? Do you hear something more than yelling? Because I do. Somehow, I do.

I give this a “fuck the patriarchy” out of 10.

tell you what you can’t do. Just take it serious, respect and learn the history —ask someone. I had to find out for myself—and I still am, since shit wasn’t as well-documented as things are now, and since most of the old heads I asked wouldn’t share. Even still, “You Must Learn”—because if you don’t, your pisspoor work will show, and whatever you build will not last. But even if you do it right, if you show respect, and you don’t skip steps, you still might not get the affirmation you seek. Don’t trip, just keep it moving. See where you end up. Is this a rant? No, it’s actually a visionary stream of consciousness, and YOU DON’T HAVE THE ANSWERS, SWAY.

Anyway, back to Drizzy: Drake is bringing his “Would You Like a Tour” to the Tacoma Dome on Wednesday, December 4. He’s bringing along WCW intercontinental champion Miguel (leg drop game vicious) and the man known as Nayvadius Cash to some, and Future to everybody else. Future Vandross made probably my favorite non–Young Thug song of 2013 with “Shit,” and that alone is enough to get me there. What else? Elzhi is back at Nectar on Saturday, December 7 (he seems to like it there), with the Good Husbands Nu Era Random (aka Mega Ran), and DJ Indica Jones. The next night at Nectar, Miss Casey Carter hosts Jabee and Q-Dot, with Spac3man and Astro King Phoenix. The latest fresh-scrubbed white rapper to hit the Crocodile, Jake Miller (from the Stand Your Ground state), brings his “Us Against Them” (yeesh) tour on Tuesday, December 10—the same night Macklemore & Ryan Lewis kick off their three-night stand at the fucking KeyArena with Talib Kweli and Big K.R.I.T. opening. Oh well.

UP&COMING

Lose your sensitive aristocrat every night this week!

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

Wednesday 12/4

Adventure Club, DVBBS, Hunter Siegel, DallasK (Showbox Sodo) See Data Breaker, page 44.

Pictureplane, DJAO, WD4D (Chop Suey) See Data Breaker, page 44.

Drake, Miguel, Future (Tacoma Dome) See My Philosophy, page 35.

Thursday 12/5

A John Waters Christmas with Kimya Dawson (Venue) See Stranger Suggests, page 19, and Homosexual Agenda, page 42.

Tomten, Animal Eyes, Yonder (Sunset) Portland (by way of Alaska) band Animal Eyes explode with positive jams that can barely contain their excitement—catchy guitars, skittering drums, and appearances by both accordions and horns give them a sort of a circus-party/folkyindie-rock-magician feel. Yonder are a relatively new Seattle band making punchy, quick-paced, careful pop that’s catchy without bragging about it. With Tomten, Seattle’s favorite dream-pop trio that sounds like lying on a paisley quilt in a field of wildflowers on a hazy summer day. EMILY NOKES

Jail Weddings, Quiet Ones, James Apollo

(Chop Suey) Finally, my chance to catch up with Jail Weddings! My coworker Brendan Kiley has sung great praises of them: “A 10-piece, punk soul hurricane,” “America’s answer to the Pogues,” and “A gale-force storm of bacchanalian heartbreak.” “A rolling carnival!” All four of these things make Jail Weddings sound like a band I want to love. I’ve hesitated to listen to them very much on record, instead hoping to see them perform live. Some bands, especially with 10 or more members, need to be experienced. And this is what I aim to do. Go experience them. I just hope they all fit on the Chop Suey stage. KELLY O

Friday 12/6

Devo Cover Night: Ononos, X Suns, Glitterbang, Universe People, Brainport (Chop Suey) See Stranger Suggests, page 19.

Bonkers! Gel-Sol, Hetrik, Logic Probe, WD4D (Re-bar) See Data Breaker, page 44.

Pearl Jam, Mudhoney (KeyArena) Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve waited a long time for this: Seattle’s own Flannel Royale. In one corner, we have Pearl Jam, playing angsty, deep-feelings garage rock since 1990. Known for

their intense live performances and leading man Eddie Vedder’s silky hair, PJ can and will make thirtysomethings tear up while yell-singing “Even Flow” around the campfire at 2 a.m. In the other corner, we have defiant underdogs Mudhoney, who formed in 1988 and have been busy not giving a shit ever since. Known for their wit, durable punk/garage sound, and frontman Mark Arm’s inability to age, and for that one song everyone you know absolutely loves. Which band has the nicest bassist? Whose previous band names were more ridiculous? How old is grunge in dog years, anyway?

EMILY NOKES See also Charity Challenge, page 17.

Basia Bulat, Cate Le Bon, Kevin Morby (Barboza) Welsh singer/songwriter Cate Le Bon sounds like a sensitive aristocrat on the mic, her

voice a distinctive combination of Nico’s stolid delivery and umlaut-y vowels and Joni Mitchell’s mellifluousness. Le Bon’s 2012 album, Cyrk, is a banquet of high-IQ’d rock full of elegant, baroque melodies built to last and sporadic, shockingly great raveups. Her new full-length, Mug Museum, sounds slicker than past releases, but Le Bon’s songs retain certain structural peculiarities and melodic quirks—revealing affinities with Pavement and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci—that keep blandness well at bay. Pay close attention to her. DAVE SEGAL

Saturday 12/7

Elzhi, the Good Husbands, Nu Era, Random (Nectar) See My Philosophy, page 35.

Cathedrals 6: Sera Cahoone, Grant Olsen, Tomo Nakayama, S (St. Mark’s Cathedral) See Underage, page 45.

Pony Time, Chastity Belt, Darto, American Dream (Heartland) It’s not hard to be a fan of Chastity Belt. On their (awesome) new album, No Regerts, they rocket from the dreamy, oceanic indie rock of lead single “Black Sail” to a pretty little ditty about being drunk and wanting chips in the span of a mere four songs. A little something for everyone! Plus, there’s a very strong B-52s vibe happening on “Giant (Vagina),” which is never a bad thing. Equally crowd-pleasing are volcanic punk duo Pony Time, who’ve been tearing it up around town for nigh on four years now with a killer live act, their trademark

assault of vamping guitar-and-drums stomp, and sneering vocals turned to 11 every time. If the musical genres you enjoy typically come prefixed with “stoner” or “slacker,” put the knife hit down for a minute and go dance yourself dumb. KYLE FLECK

The Black Crowes (Paramount) I was in grade school at the time, but according to now-defunct UK music rag Melody Maker, the Black Crowes were “the Most Rock and Roll Rock and Roll Band in the World” back in the mid-’90s. And who am I to argue? Their commitment to reviving the dormant “traditional” rock sound of the ’70s was probably commercially risky given what was in vogue at the time, but it paid off handsomely for them: Multiple platinum albums and critical adoration were quick to follow their 1990 debut. Wor-

shippers of Southern rock deities like the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, Black Crowes also grapple with the demons of vintage Rolling Stones–style raunch. Plenty of beards, blue jeans, and a heaping dose of white-man blues. Not my cup of tea, but hey, if you’ve sold nine gajillion albums, you’re probably doing something right, and if you’re a fan, you bought your tickets months ago anyway. File under “you had to be there,” which I wasn’t. KYLE FLECK

The Dismemberment Plan

(Neptune) Washington, DC, band Dismemberment Plan pulled off what might’ve been one of the most successful band reunions ever in 2011, after being on hiatus for almost a decade. The fact that this means “The Ice of Boston”—one of the best nerd-punk scream-along narrative anthems ever written by humans—can be performed in front of (or alongside, once the crowd rushes onstage) live audiences across the country again makes it almost entirely worth it on its own. Luckily for Plan fans, their recently released Uncanney Valley (their first album since 2001’s Change) shows that Travis Morrison and co. have aged well—you can’t exactly call it “gracefully” when they’re still writing songs with a “You say ‘cluster’/I say ‘fuck!’” call-and-response—and their new material manages to capture some of the intangibles that made the band’s late-’90s output so memorable.

MIKE RAMOS

Vaporland, Tokyoidaho, Jupe Jupe, Death By Stars

(Lo-Fi Performance Gallery) Seattle supergroup alert! Ron Nine and Kevin Whitworth of the great Love Battery, Garrett Shavlik of the Fluid, and Kurt Danielson of TAD have formed Vaporland. Just a gut feeling, but I don’t think these seasoned, Sub Pop–affiliated veterans of the ’80s and ’90s hard-rock wars will be joining their old label’s roster. (The band also includes percussionist/vocalist Katie Scarberry.) What little Vaporland music is available to hear online reveals that they have pretty much channeled

Love Battery’s surging, sinewy psych rock and the Fluid’s uproarious melodic touch. You may be a TAD disappointed, but I’m cool with this. DAVE

Sunday 12/8

Jabee, Q-Dot, Spac3man, Astro King Phoenix (Nectar) See My Philosophy, page 35.

Lee Ranaldo and the Dust (Barboza) Lee Ranaldo was always something like Sonic Youth’s George Harrison: consigned to one or two songs per album, holding it down with subdued flair on guitar, going underappreciated. As leader of his own band in recent years, Ranaldo’s flaws become more apparent. His voice’s dullness doesn’t stand up to scrutiny over an entire album, and his songwriting lacks the fiery dynamics and tonal adventurousness of the best Sonic Youth material. Sadly, I don’t think Lee has an All Things Must Pass in him. His last two joints as a leader— Between the Times and the Tides and Last Night on Earth—chug and jangle with the underwhelming pleasantness of late-era R.E.M. Nothing quite unsettles or seethes like earlier Ranaldo songs like “In the Kingdom #19,” “Eric’s Trip,” or “Pipeline/Kill Time.” Mellowing with age isn’t a crime, but it does often lead to shrug-worthy releases. DAVE SEGAL

High on Fire, Kvelertak, Windhand (El Corazón) Look, heshers—I know it’s easy to take High on Fire for granted. They’ve toured relentlessly on a consistent slew of records for damn near 15 years. It’s easy to think a sweaty, shirtless Matt Pike will always be around to deliver his otherworldly overtone howl and that furious barrage of weed-nspeed-fed riffs. Brothers, this is not the case. Yes, last year’s De Vermis Mysteriis is every bit as savage as their Art of Self Defense debut; the band shows no signs of mellowing out. But Pike has had a flawless track record stemming back to 1990 with his work in Asbestosdeath and Sleep. The dude is bound to eventually either drop a Load on us or simply drop dead from exhaustion. No man is a god (sorry, Kanye), though Matt Pike comes pretty fucking

21+

12.7 Saturday (Hip Hop) ELZHI

The Good Husbands, Nu Era, MegaRan with Mr. Miranda, DJ Indica Jones

$10 adv., 8pm, 21+

12.8 Sunday (Hip Hop) Q Dot

Spac3man, Jabee,

TUESDAY

Monqui Presents LISSIE Kopecky Family Band 21+

AND AND AND Brite Lines &Yet 21+

Showbox Presents THE WHITE BUFFALO The Crying Shame Ole Tinder All Ages

ANDREA GIBSON Shenandoah Davis All Ages

Elixr Productions & ReignCity Present THE US AGAINST THEM TOUR: JAKE MILLER Action Item Air Dubai All Ages WEDNESDAY

& 12/14 PICKWICK 12/15

Sarah Jaffe James Anaya All Ages

RASHAD &

FRIENDS AND FAMILY & NIGHT CADET Wishbeard Tenderfoot 21+

LIQUID COURAGE KARAOKE

SPINN 12/17 YUNA 12/19 SALLIE FORD &

SOUND OUTSIDE 12/20 MY GOODNESS 12/21

PHYSICS 12/26 WAX 12/27 BLACK BREATH 12/31 THE FLAVR BLUE, NIGHTMARE FORTRESS, KINGDOM CR UMBS 1/3 & 1/4 BIG ASS BOOMBOX 1/8 & 1/9 AUSTIN JENCKES 1/10 CALIFONE 1/11 AUSTIN JENCKES 1/17 WOODEN SHJIPS 1/24 DJ QUIK 1/24 PATTERSON HOOD 1/25 TRUE SPOKES & IAN MCFERON BAND 1/31 JOHNNY FLYNN 2/4 ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER 2/7 ZION I 2/14 BOWIE VISION 2/15 SHEARWATER 2/28 AER 5/3 WE ARE SCIENTISTS Tuesday, Feb. 18th ANE BRUN

Bach-Gamel: Gamelan Pacifica

(PONCHO Concert Hall) Yes! Gamelan Pacifica, with Stranger Genius vocalist Jessika Kenney and four baroque music specialists, explore links between music of the baroque period in Europe (1600–1750, Bach’s time) and Javanese Gamelan. This should be unusual and grand. JEN GRAVES

Monday 12/9

Tuesday 12/10

Jake Miller

(Crocodile) See My Philosophy, page 35.

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis

(KeyArena) Like any major pop event, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s “Same Love” attained its stature by riding several individual waves of significance. The first time I heard it, soundtracking the just-released video on YouTube, it felt like a great loving gesture from a hometown rapper to a city at the center of a statewide push for marriage equality. Five months later, hearing it blasting out of rooftop speakers over a street full of revelers celebrating the passage Referendum 74, it sounded like an organic anthem for a brave, inspiring, and distinctly Northwest reality. By the time I heard it blasting incessantly—INCESSANTLY—from corporate radio stations in Orlando and Nashville and Denver, “Same Love” had morphed into something I never would’ve dreamed: a true pop hit, which happened to be about gay equality. Not only are all who dismiss the song as mere pandering wrong, they miss the point: Never in the history of music has “pandering to gay political concerns” been a fast track to mainstream success. Quite the opposite. So grouse all you want (please! The writing and conversation inspired by “Same Love” is an important part of it). The song’s part of history now.

DAVID SCHMADER See also My Philosophy, page 35, and Charity Challenge, page 17.

Bill Horist, Suzuki Junzo, Walt the Fish (Hollow Earth Radio) Tokyo guitarist/vocalist Suzuki Junzo has played in the psych-rock combos Overhang Party and Miminokoto and collaborated with some of Japan’s upper-echelon mind-melters, including Acid Mothers Temple’s Kawabata Makoto. His repertoire includes spacey drones that evoke Ash Ra Tempel and Kluster’s desolate, lunar tone nebulae, turbulent psychedelia that’s more winter of hate than summer of love (see the aptly titled “Eight-Sided Infinity”), and fractured blues numbers that don’t need vocals to convey hardship. Seattle’s Bill Horist—who is one of the most articulate and perceptive musicians I’ve encountered—has been preparing guitars to generate unorthodox sounds in this city since 1997. The bizarre, surgically precise glossolalia that emanates from his instrument needs to be seen and heard to be believed. DAVE SEGAL

Jagwar Ma, Iska Dhaaf, Vox Mod (Neptune) Australian trio Jagwar Ma (apparently also known as Noel Gallagher’s favorite band) make Madchester-inspired indie rock melted into poppy dance music for sun-stoned festivalgoers rocking tasteful body paint. Their songs’ recipes usually call for a couple rhythm patterns (say, layers of funky beats and looped vocals) warping and expanding before unpinning into a floppy psychedelic swirl—wash, rinse, repeat. “Come Save Me” is one of those radio hits you can guiltily appreciate, knowing full well it could also sell some serious Mazdas and/or iPads. EMILY NOKES

Soda Jerks, Nudes, Negative Press (Black Lodge) If you’re a fan of ’80s hardcore, this one is for you. Unlike the macho-tough-guy “hardcore” of today, local band Nudes is the epitome of punk ferocity: short bursts of shrieking guitars and piercingly angry vocals rage atop a solid foundation of furious drum blasts. Negative Press come straight out of Tacoma and, much like Nudes, bring forth a solid assault of distortion-driven punk rawness. This is that type of show where you shouldn’t be surprised if you walk out of the club with a handful of bruises and a couple of ringing ears—the true sign of a solid hardcore show. KEVIN DIERS

PUT THAT IN YOUR PRESS KIT

PINK DOOR Casey MacGill & the Blue 4 Trio, 8 pm THE ROYAL ROOM Dylan Ryan, Sweeter Than the Day, Robin Holcomb, 8 pm

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

SHOWBOX SODO Adventure Club, DVVBS, Hunter Siegel, DallasK

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB Open Mic: Guests SUNSET TAVERN Hobo Nephews of Uncle Frank, $7

Blondfire, Hunter Hunted, 7 pm, $15

HIGHWAY 99 Chebon Tiger, 8 pm, $7

JAZZ ALLEY Eldar Djangirov, 7:30 pm, $22.50 NECTAR Planet Booty, Radio Raheem, 8 pm, $5

NEW ORLEANS Legacy Band, Clarence Acox

OHANA Live Island Music

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

TRACTOR TAVERN Dark Hip Falls, Ephrata, Yevtushenko, 8 pm, $8

TRIPLE DOOR Omar Torrez, 7:30 pm, $20

TULA’S Smith/Staelens Big Band, 7:30 pm, $10

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE The Michael Owcharuk Trio

DJ

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

CONTOUR Rotation Tryouts: Guests THE EAGLE VJDJ Andy J ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN Passage: Jayms Nylon, Joey Webb, guests

HAVANA SoulShift: Peter Evans, Devlin Jenkins, Richard Everhard, $1 LAST SUPPER CLUB Vibe

Wednesday: Jame$Ervin, DT, Contagious

LAVA LOUNGE Mod Fuck Explosion: DJ Deutscher Meister

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

NEIGHBOURS Undergrad: Guest DJs, $5/$8

SEE SOUND LOUNGE Fade: DJ Chinkyeye, DJ Christyle, 10 pm

CLASSICAL

MEANY HALL Silent Night, Joyous Night: Choirs

JUNK OF THE WEEK

WAIT, WHAT’S IN THE MASHED POTATOES?!?

“Shit, if it’s gonna be that kind of a party, I’m gonna stick my dick in the mashed potatoes!” Remember that sample on the Beastie Boys album Ill Communication? Well, let’s just say a similar thing happened at a Thanksgiving party I went to. Except the mashed potatoes were replaced by a soup pot filled with ice-cold margarita mix and tequila. Hilarity (and much screaming) ensued. I like to think this made Adam Yauch (RIP) smile from wherever he is now. KELLY O

THURS 12/5

LIVE

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben

Fleck, 6 pm

BLUE MOON TAVERN

Malpractice, Take Shelter

CAN CAN Vince Mira

CHOP SUEY Jail Weddings, Quiet Ones, James Apollo, 8 pm, $7/$10

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER

Big World Breaks, Camila Recchio, the Jefferson Rose Band, 8 pm, $10/$12

CONOR BYRNE Irish Pipers

Club Benefit: Guests

CROCODILE Lissie, Kopecky Family Band, 8 pm, $18/$20

DARRELL’S TAVERN Silas

Wolf, Red Heart Alarm, Monster Creep

DISTRICT LOUNGE Cassia

DeMayo Quintet, 8 pm, free a EASY STREET RECORDS

Sandrider, 7 pm, free

EL CORAZON Terror, Suicidal Tendencies, Trash Talk, Sprung Monkey, 8 pm, $26

a GUAYMAS CANTINA

Oleaje Flamenco, 8 pm, free

HIGH DIVE the Mama Rags, Swords for Arrows, Out on the Streets, 8 pm, $6

HIGHLINE Mary Abbadon, Sataray, Medea, DJ Coldheart, $7

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

JAZZ ALLEY Angie Stone, 7:30 pm, $44.50

LITTLE RED HEN

Buckaroosters, $3

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

PINK DOOR Bric-a-Brac,

8 pm

SCARLET TREE How Now

Brown Cow, 9:30 pm, free

THE STEPPING STONE PUB

Open Mic: Guests

STUDIO SEVEN Mystery Machines, Jenny’s Last Stand, Fraudulence, 7 pm, $9/$11

SUNSET TAVERN Tomten, Animal Eyes, Yonder, $8

TRACTOR TAVERN Tango

Alpha Tango, Patrick Foster & the Locomotive, Eternal Fair, 8 pm, $8

TRIPLE DOOR David Bromberg, 7:30 pm, $45

VITO’S RESTAURANT &

LOUNGE The Random Access Quartet, Casey MacGill, 5:30 pm, free THE WHITE RABBIT Marmalade, $6

DJ

BALLROOM DJ Rob, free

BALTIC ROOM Revolution: DonnaTella Howe, Olivia LaGarce, guests

CONTOUR Bottom Heavy: Covert Ops, guests, 10 pm, free

THE EAGLE Nasty: DJ King of Pants, Nark

HAVANA Sophisticated

Mama: DJ Sad Bastard, DJ Nitty Gritty

LAST SUPPER CLUB Open

House: Guests

LO-FI Noctum Caro: Guests

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

NEIGHBOURS Jet Set Thursdays: Guest DJs

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND The Lowdown: DJ Lightray, $3

OHANA Chill: DJ MS

SEE SOUND LOUNGE

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

THERAPY LOUNGE

DUH.: DJ Omar, guests

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

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

WEDNESDAY, 12/4 - SATURDAY, 12/7

Comedian Kris Tinkle is currently the cohost and resident comedian on Comedy By Request on SiriusXM Raw Dog. He has appeared on DirecTV’s “The Artie Lange Show”, is a regular on Sirius XM Radio’s “Friday’s with Breuer” and “Tap Out Radio,” and has been featured in the

CHAPEL PERFORMANCE

SPACE Sarah Davachi, Kaori Suzuki

FRI 12/6

LIVE AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BARBOZA Basia Bulat, Cate Le Bon, Kevin Morby, 7 pm, $13

BLUE MOON TAVERN

The Pin Drops | Squirrel of Shame | The Throbs: Squirrel of Shame, $5

CAFE RACER Little Champions, Sidesaddle Cowboy

CHOP SUEY Devo Cover Night: Guests, 7:30 pm, $5/$10

CONOR BYRNE Drunken Prayer, Casey Ruff and the Mayors of Ballard CROCODILE And And And, Brite Lines, &Yet, $10

DARRELL’S TAVERN The Tomorrowmen, Frankie & the Pool Boys, the Verb, Aloha Screwdriver, the Evanstones a EL CORAZON NOI!SE, the Hollowpoints, Bishops Green, 8:30 pm, $8/$10

EMPTY SEA STUDIOS Yesod, 8 pm, $12/$15

HIGH DIVE A Tribute to Jimi Hendrix, Letters from Traffic, $8

HIGHLINE Tea Cozies, Helvetia, Cabana, So Pitted, guests, 7 pm, $10/$14

HIGHWAY 99 Rick Estrin & the Nightcats, 8 pm, $20

JAZZ ALLEY Angie Stone, 9:30 pm, $44.50 a KEYARENA Pearl Jam,

$65.50

LITTLE RED HEN Knut Bell & the Blue Collars, $5

MEANY HALL University Symphony, 7:30 pm, $15

NECTAR Total Request Live Night: American Island, $7 NEUMOS El Ten Eleven, 8 pm, $15

PARAGON Levi Said, free RAVIOLI STATION TRAINWRECK Dizzy, guests a THE ROYAL ROOM Piano Royale, 5:30 pm, Jimmie Herrod, 8:30 pm

SEAMONSTER Funky 2 Death, 10 pm, free SLIM’S LAST CHANCE the Fixers, Acid Angels, Bonervain STUDIO SEVEN Bam Margera Experience: Wilson, December in Red, No Buffer, Tatarus, 6:30 pm, $18/$20 SUNSET TAVERN Abducted By Sharks, Mississippi Jones, Nico Tower, 10 pm, $8 TIM’S TAVERN The Know Nothingz, Indecisive Rhythm TRACTOR TAVERN The Brothers Comatose, Sassparilla, $10 TRIPLE DOOR Vaden Todd Lewis, 8 pm, $15/$18 TULA’S Greta Matassa Quartet, 7:30 pm, $15 VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Joe Doria Trio THE WHITE RABBIT Medula Pinata, Pouch, Half Breed, $6

DJ 95 SLIDE DJ Fever One BALLROOM DJ Tamm of KISS fm BALMAR Body Movin’ Fridays: DJ Ben Meadow, free BALTIC ROOM Dirty Work:

THURSDAY 12/5

JOHN WATERS GETS XMESSY

When the fucking dog bites, when the fucking bee stings, when I’m feeling sad, I simply remember Divine chomping on fresh dog turds, and/or the egg lady flipping out in her crib, and/or hippies fucking chickens, and/or GOOOOD MORNING BAAAL-TIM-ORE!, and, well, it does give one a certain perspective, doesn’t it? Indeed. And these are merely small examples of the many, many (way too many?) gifts that keep on giving that the walking miracle of whimsy and filth John Waters has given to the world. In this allegedly Most Joyous Time of Year™, it is important to reflect on the whys and wherefores of its manic, candy-striped madness, with a specific emphasis on the wild and perverse (don’t you agree?). And so! That’s exactly what our dear John is going to do for us tonight. I simply cannot imagine anything more freakishly delightful than spending an evening with THE quintessential pervy uncle of the world, live, as he brings to us his own twisted visions of the sick sugar plums that dance in his fevered head. It is simply a holiday confection that is not to be missed, so hurry (Babs, hurry!)! It’s one night only, and tickets are going faster than shit through a Christmas goose! Neptune Theatre, 8 pm, $35–$99, all ages.

MONDAY 12/9

COLLIDE-O-SCOPE, CHRISTMAS EDITION

The holidays and I have declared a truce this year, for my son’s sake. (But I swear, once he discovers there’s no Santa Claus, I’m coming for you, Xmas.)

This psychedelic Santa by Shogo Ota (tiremanstudio.com) is pretty much the best Santa ever. AARON HUFFMAN

Psychedelic Holiday Freak Out w/the Sun Thieves, Branden Daniel & the Chics, and more Fri Dec 6, Therapy

Shane Wallund and Michael Andersen and the delightful events they throw have made quite a little splash around gay old Seattle this year, what with their slutty monthly dancestravaganza Cock & Bull, and most importantly, their every-

Monday stoner parade of awesomeness that is Collide-O-Scope—which, of course, has become One of My Favorite Things™. The concept is simple and brilliant—pick a theme and unleash a psychedelic torrent of colorful insanity in the form of film clips pursuant to said theme upon your brain. Then put out some popcorn and Red Vines and invite all of your funnest stoner friends to come enjoy the madness. I have no clue how they dig up half of the wonderful and hilarious snippets of celluloid that they do (commercials, cartoons, music videos, film clips newish and ancient!), but the end result is dazzling. Tonight, they walk us through the winter wonderland of their first-ever holiday show, and unhinged Xmess craziness is certain to ensue: Candy canes shall sing and dance, Christmas trees shall go up in flames, Joan Collins will be viciously murdered by Santa Claus (FINALLY!), and more. But the very best part is that they will be hawking Collide-O-Scope DVDs as Christmas gifts, so now you know what to get me. RIGHT? Re-bar, 7 pm, $6, 21+.

Black Eyed Ball

SATURDAY DECEMBER 7 | 7:00 PM

STG PRESENTS: THREE OF CLUBS FALL TOUR AMERICAN AUTHORS,THE ROYAL CONCEPT, MISTERWIVES

$10 UNTIL 9/30 @ 10AM, $12 ADV, $14 DOS

WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 11 | 7:30 PM

MY JERUSALEM, CHRIS BROKAW

$11 ($10 W. CLUB CARD)

THURSDAY DECEMBER 12 | 6:00 PM

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

$7

FRIDAY DECEMBER 13 | 7:30 PM

ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF, NOVELLER

$11 ($10 W. CLUB CARD)

SATURDAY DECEMBER 21 | 6:30 PM RAT PATH, MALICE, CAST OUT, GUESTS

$7

FRIDAY JANUARY 10 | 7:00 PM

GIRLS THAT SHRED:

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

$10 ADV

ALWAYS ALL AGES

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

OHANA Back to the Day: DJ Estylz

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

RE-BAR Bonkers!: Guests

SCARLET TREE Oh So Fresh

Fridays: Deejay Tone, DJ Buttnaked, guests

THERAPY LOUNGE Rapture: Guests, $3 after 11 pm

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

THE WOODS Deep/Funky/

Disco/House: Guest DJs

CLASSICAL

CHAPEL PERFORMANCE

SPACE Michael Owcharuk

FIRST LUTHERAN

CHURCH OF RICHMOND

BEACH The Esoterics: Sacra

SAT

12/7

LIVE

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben

Fleck, 6 pm

BALMAR Rotating DJ Night: Guests, 9:30 pm

BLUE MOON TAVERN Half Light, $6

CAFE RACER Ryan Dishen

CONOR BYRNE 7th Annual Tom Waits Tribute Night: Guests

a CROCODILE The White Buffalo: The White Buffalo, the Crying Shame, Ole Tinder, 8 pm, $15

DARRELL’S TAVERN Babylon, the Lucky Boys, Sledgeback, the Blue Ribbon Boys

EL CORAZON Witchburn, the Heroine, $8/$10, William Control, Fearless Vampire Killer, Avoid the Void, Watcher’s Eye, 7:30 pm, $12/$15

HEARTLAND Pony Time, Chastity Belt, Darto, American Dream, 8 pm

HIGH DIVE Mugatu, HARPS, Eight Legs To Nowhere, $8 HIGHLINE Lesbian, Wounded Giant, Eye of Nix, $10

HIGHWAY 99 Hot Wired Rhythm Band, 8 pm, $15

JAZZ ALLEY Angie Stone, 9:30 pm, $44.50

LITTLE RED HEN Knut Bell & the Blue Collars, $5 LO-FI Vaporland, Tokyoidaho, Jupe Jupe, Death By Stars

NECTAR Elzhi, the Good Husbands, Nu Era, Random, Mr. Miranda, 8 pm, $10 NEPTUNE THEATRE The Dismemberment Plan PARAGON Solbird, free PARAMOUNT THEATRE

WEDNESDAY 12/4

GET SAPPY WITH MONTREAL DUBSTEPPERS ADVENTURE CLUB

Montreal’s Adventure Club (Christian Srigley and Leighton James) used to play in a pop-punk band. Now they’re making accessible, vocalheavy dubstep with tender keyboard interludes, gallingly “uplifting” orchestral flourishes, and commonplace lyrical sentiments. Once in a while, they’ll drop a gimmicky, heavier dubstep cut like “Kaboom,” but it’s the equivalent of Coldplay “going metal”—unconvincing.

With DVBBS, DallasK, and Hunter Siegel Showbox Sodo, 7:30 pm, $25 adv/$30 DOS, all ages.

PICTUREPLANE MEWLS, DJAO RULES

The Black Crowes QUEEN CITY GRILL Faith Beattie, Bayly, Totusek, Guity, free THE ROYAL ROOM Red Dress, Bellow Brothers, the Gary Minkler Compilation

SEAMONSTER Sound Dialog: Guests, 10:30 pm

SLIM’S LAST CHANCE Brother James and the Soul-vation, Stag, Bonneville Power a ST. MARK’S

CATHEDRAL Cathedrals 6: Sera Cahoone, Grant Olsen, Tomo Nakayama, S a STUDIO SEVEN Jingle Bomb!: Guests, 8 pm

SUNSET TAVERN The Builders and the Butchers, Smokey Brights, Historian, 10 pm, $12/$15

TIM’S TAVERN The Swamp Dogs, the Scotch Tops

TRACTOR TAVERN Lone Bellow, Aoife O’Donovan, $13/$15

TRIPLE DOOR Joe Henry, 8 pm, $25

TULA’S Tom Marriott, Dawn Clement, Paul Gabrielson, 7:30 pm, $15

a VERA PROJECT the Royal Concept, American Authors, MisterWives, 8 pm, $10-$14

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Ruby Bishop, 6 pm, the Pornadoes, 9:30 pm THE WHITE RABBIT Angelo Delsenno and the Empty Sky, the Breaking, Supercrow, Austin Quattlebaum, $6

Like many young musicians in the 21st-century electronic realm, Pictureplane (aka Travis Egedy) loves ’80s synth pop. You can’t swing a Korg without hitting three of these types nowadays, so it takes quite a bit of ingenuity to stand out from the pack. Pictureplane’s peppy, twee, innocuous songs—featuring Egedy’s grayscale, mewling vocals—are not outstanding. Thankfully, Seattle producer DJAO’s music is out of the ordinary. A scrupulous artisan of atmosphere and a master of vocal arrangement and derangement, DJAO (Alex Osuch) creates hazy bass music that accrues beautiful melodies like Fox News spreads falsehoods. His debut album emerges next year on Dropping Gems. You may get glimpses of it tonight. With WD4D Chop Suey, 8 pm, $10 adv/$12 DOS, 21+.

FRIDAY 12/6

THE CHEERFUL INSANITY OF BONKERS!

RETURNS

Ian Scot Price’s beloved Seattle monthly Bonkers! makes a stunning comeback tonight at Re-bar after a three-year hiatus. Price, who also records feisty and charming electronic music as Naturebot, has roped in eight local performers from past Bonkers!eses, all of whom will be play-

ing live. Gel-Sol (Andy Reichel) is one of the local electronic-music scene’s biggest prog-rock nerds, but his music leans more toward Orb-esque ambient techno, all blissed-out vistas, serene melodies, languorous tempos, and humorous filmdialogue samples. Your City Sleeps (Miles Kazemian) traffics in similarly lofty atmospheres and beats that rarely top 100 per minute. Go to his Bandcamp page and check out 2012 for some of the region’s eeriest and most cinematically epic compositions Flarelight—the solo project of Splatinum’s Adam Houghton—makes what he calls “slippery bass music for sexy people.” It’s less manic and busy than his work in Splatinum, opting instead for a low-end lasciviousness in which future bass and R&B copulate right in the center of the mattress. Logic Probe are basically Seattle’s Autechre (put that in your press kit), with all the intricate, abrasive abstractions that that entails. Hetrik (formerly PotatoFinger) forges absolutely vicious drum ’n’ bass and dubstep mutations. The rest of this lineup won’t give your brain any respite from its spastic dancing, either. Welcome back, Bonkers! With WD4D and the Ikarus Kids Re-bar, 9 pm, $5, 21+.

CONOR BYRNE Open Mic: Guests, 8 pm a CROCODILE Andrea Gibson, Shenandoah Davis, 7 pm, $10 EL CORAZON High On Fire, Kvelertak, Windhand, 7:30 pm, $18/$20 HIGH DIVE Fight or Flight, Skullbot, 8 pm, $6

JAI THAI BROADWAY Rock Bottom Soundsystem, free

JAZZ ALLEY Angie Stone, 7:30 pm, $44.50

KELLS Liam Gallagher

LITTLE RED HEN Open Mic

Acoustic Jam with Bodacious Billy: Matt Borden, Luke Kaufman, $3, guests, 4 pm

LO-FI Moon Honey, Song Sparrow Research MOORE THEATRE Jeff Tweedy, 8 pm, $32.50

NECTAR Jabee, Q Dot, Spac3man, Dice, Astro King Phoenix, $6

PIES & PINTS Sunday Night

Folk Review: Guests, free THE ROYAL ROOM Jean Mann, 7 pm

SHIP CANAL GRILL Jay Thomas, noon

STUDIO SEVEN Syztem 7, Dead Animal Assembly Plant, Prehumanity, Abducted By Sharks, 5:30 pm, $10/$13

SUNSET TAVERN Mrs. Magician, 8:30 pm

TRACTOR TAVERN KateLynne Logan, Sammy Witness, Michael Carlos Band, 8 pm, $8

TRIPLE DOOR Buika, 7:30 pm, $47.50/$55

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

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

DJ BALTIC ROOM Mass: Guest DJs

CONTOUR Broken Grooves:

DJ Venus, Rob Cravens, guests, free

THE EAGLE T-Bar/T-Dance: Up Above, Fistfight, free a FULL TILT ICE CREAM

Vinyl Appreciation Night: Guest DJs, 7 pm

MOE BAR Chocolate

Sundays: Sosa, MarsONE, Phosho, free

NEIGHBOURS Noche Latina: Guest DJs

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

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

RE-BAR Flammable: DJ Wesley Holmes, 9 pm

SEE SOUND LOUNGE Salsa: DJ Nick

THE STEPPING STONE PUB

Vinyl Night: You bring your records, they play them

CLASSICAL

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

BRECHEMIN AUDITORIUM

Dainius Vaicekonis: Cultural Crossroads:

HOLY ROSARY

CATHOLIC CHURCH The Esoterics: Sacra

PONCHO CONCERT

HALL Bach-Gamel: Gamelan Pacifica

TOWN HALL Holiday Concert: LUCO

MON

12/9

LIVE AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Jerry Frank

BARBOZA Donte Peace, Royce the Choice, Lil Flip, guests

BLUE MOON TAVERN Andy Coe Band, 10 pm, free

COASTAL KITCHEN Pork Chop Trio, 9:30 pm, free EL CORAZON Smile Empty Soul, Acidic, First Decree, Like A Storm, 7:30 pm, $13/$15

JAZZ ALLEY Louis Hayes and the Cannonball Legacy Band, 7:30 pm, $22.50

KELLS Liam Gallagher

MAC’S TRIANGLE PUB Jazz and Blues Night: Guests, free MOLLY MAGUIRES Open Mic: Hosted by Tom Rooney, free NEW ORLEANS The New Orleans Quintet, 6:30 pm

SEAMONSTER Monday Night Open Mic: 10 pm

TRACTOR TAVERN the Tallboys, 7:30 pm, $5

TRIPLE DOOR

Musicquarium: Free Funk Union, free TULA’S Tim Sherman’s Big Big Band, 7:30 pm, $10, the Jazz Pearls, 7:30 pm, $7

THE WHITE RABBIT Michael Shrieve’s Spellbinder, $6

DJ

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

BARBOZA Minted: Icon Mondays: Sean Majors, guests, free, DJ Swervewon, 100proof, Sean Cee, Blueyedsoul, free COMPANY BAR Rock and Roll Chess Night: DJ Plantkiller, 8 pm, free

CONOR BYRNE Get the Spins: Guest DJs, free CONTOUR Manic Mondays: Guests

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

THE MIX Bring Your Own Vinyl Night: Guests, 6 pm MOE BAR Minted Mondays: DJ Swervewon, 100proof, Sean Cee, Blueyedsoul, free

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND SIN: DJ Keanu, free

OHANA DJ Hideki

PONY Dirty Deeds: Guest DJs Q NIGHTCLUB Reflect, 8 pm, free

CLASSICAL

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

TUES 12/10

LIVE

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BARBOZA Gavin Turek, Katie Kate, Fey Moth, 8 pm, $8

BLACK LODGE Soda Jerks, Nudes, Negative Press

CAFE RACER Jacobs Posse

CONOR BYRNE Ol’ Time

Social: the Tallboys, 9 pm a CROCODILE Jake Miller, Action Item, Air Dubai, 8 pm, $20-$60 EL CORAZON the

BY JACKSON HATHORN

SATURDAY 12/7

CATHEDRALS 6: SERA CAHOONE, GRANT OLSEN, TOMO NAKAYAMA, S

Just by taking a look at the local musicians on the bill, you can see that this round of Cathedrals should live up to its promise as a “rare contemplative indie concert.” Sera Cahoone headlines the show at St. Mark’s Cathedral, and if you slept on her album last year, Deer Creek Canyon, here’s an opportunity to get familiarized. The title refers to the Colorado foothills where Cahoone grew up, and the album is all about returning home

The instrumentation vacillates between melancholic folk and gentle honkytonk while Cahoone describes eerie visits to distantly familiar places. She strips away illusory membranes of comfort and safety in her songs, and eventually being back home for Cahoone arouses a kind of shapeless anxiety. When she begins to interact more with the people she’s left behind, Cahoone becomes a shaking, nervous wreck. I couldn’t recommend this album more to anyone who feels deeply ambivalent about notions of “family” and

Flatliners, Living With Lions, Sundowner, Poke da Squid, 7:30 pm, $10/$12

ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN

Monktail Creative Music

Concern, DJ Shonuph, free

HIGH DIVE Garlic Man & Chikn, Lonewolf Soul, Fugitives from Texas Justice, 8 pm, $6

HOLLOW EARTH RADIO

Bill Horist, Suzuki Junzo, Walt the Fish

JAZZ ALLEY Mike Stern Band, $26.50

KELLS Liam Gallagher a KEYARENA Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, $35-$55

LITTLE RED HEN Tequila

Rose

MAC’S TRIANGLE PUB

Open Mic: free

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

NEPTUNE THEATRE

Jagwar Ma, Iska Dhaaf, Vox Mod, 8 pm

OUTWEST Wine and Jazz Night: Tutu Jazz Quartet, free

OWL N’ THISTLE Jazz Improv Night: Guests

SEAMONSTER McTuff Trio, 10 pm, free

TIM’S TAVERN Open Mic: Linda Lee, 8 pm

TRACTOR TAVERN

Taxidermy Western, Buffaloes, Ex’s with Benefits, 8 pm, $8

TRIPLE DOOR Rhett Miller, $20/$25

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

BALTIC ROOM Drum & Bass Tuesdays: Guests

BLUE MOON TAVERN Blue

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

THE EAGLE Pitstop: DJ Nark

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

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

MERCURY Die: Black Maru, Major Tom, $5

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

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND Vicious Dolls: DJ Rachael, 9 pm, $5

OHANA DJ Marc Sense

WILDROSE Taco Tuesday: Guest DJs

CLASSICAL

BENAROYA HALL Pink Martini with Seattle Symphony

“home,” especially during the holidays.

Performing as S, Jenn Ghetto (whose earlier band, Carissa’s Wierd, featured Cahoone on drums) is a coltish and gutwrenching artist. Hushed vocals scurry over spindly guitars on Ghetto’s humble eight-track recordings, their bleakness tempered by an alluring agony

Grant Olsen, of Gold Leaves and Arthur & Yu, is a luminous and kaleidoscopic country singer. Some of Olsen’s trademarks are bright, blossoming guitars, quivering Mellotron organs, and songs with an overall anfractuous effect. Olsen’s surreal musical travelogues—featuring his abstract lyrics sung in a warm and shaggy register— often make him sound like a teddy-bear version of Lee Hazlewood

You might have seen Tomo Nakayama recently during his scene-stealing turn in the latest Lynn Shelton movie, Touchy Feely. The leader of the chamber-pop outfit Grand Hallway, Nakayama can captivate audiences with his soaring voice alone, and his solo performances provide new dimensions to the group’s ornate paeans St. Mark’s Cathedral, 8 pm, $12 adv/$15 DOS.

FILM

Watch and Learn

Frederick Wiseman’s Four-Hour Tour of the Universe At Berkeley

BY DAVID SCHMADER

Fifty years ago, Frederick Wiseman was a Boston University law professor ready to try his hand at documentary filmmaking. His first feature in 1967 introduced the immersive style that’s defined his work ever since. Free of guiding narration, Wiseman’s films cast viewers into the inner workings of intricate social systems, leaving us to mingle among the humans that make such systems go. In 1967’s Titicut Follies, this meant daily operations at the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts; the title is the name of the hospital talent show. Films that followed included Basic Training (1971), Juvenile Court (1973), Ballet (1995), Public Housing (1997), State Legislature (2007), and three dozen more, all of which add up to an oeuvre that

has won Wiseman a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and singular esteem among filmmakers.

Now 83, Wiseman has released a huge new documentary, At Berkeley, a four-hour, cellular-level tour of the University of California at Berkeley. Reportedly given full access on campus, Wiseman and his camera take us into student-orientation meetings, teacher-training sessions, poetry lectures, faculty meetings, crisis-management discussions, laboratory research sessions, student-led consciousness-building conversations, and, yes, one extravagantly Berkeleyesque student protest. Scene after scene offer blasts of scholastic humanity in its natural habitat, up close and at length. (Along with narration, Wiseman rejects quick cuts.

Found Footage, Institutionalized Racism

CHARLES MUDEDE

W

hat makes Jason Osder’s documentary important, unusual, and almost pure is that it has no talking heads, no interviews, no new materials, and no reenactments of the events that led to two deadly confrontations between the Philadelphia Police Department and a radical urban organization called Move. What we see instead is the deposition of the only child who survived the second confrontation, which happened in 1985 and involved the police dropping a bomb on the Philly headquarters of Move, killing 11 people (five of whom were children) and destroying 61 homes in a black neighborhood. We also see the procedures of the Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission on the

incident, which involved citizens, preachers, lawyers, politicians, early members of Move, and police officers who participated in the first confrontation, which occurred in 1978 and ended with one dead officer, five injured firefighters, and the members of the PPD brutally beating an unarmed black man. What we see in Let the Fire Burn, then, is the smoothness of a process that has two main components the media and the justice system—and these key features: It appears to be democratic, have no center, and be disconnected from history. This process, however, has inputs that have been precisely shaped by historical events and class positions within a hierarchical order of social

Even the most procedural scenes become somewhat hypnotic as they regularly cross the 10-minute mark.)

Of course, it’s fascinating. Drawn from more than 100 hours of footage, At Berkeley pins down a series of moments—some powerfully humane, others chillingly corporate—that are individually rich with substance and steadily accumulate into something more. Surprises are rife. I went in expecting small human moments and was confronted by the highly theatrical performances people give in real life: teachers giving lectures, campus guides giving tours, chancellors addressing board meetings, students being called upon in class, the whole theater-of-the-self of progressive young students. All the pageantry of The University is well captured, bolstered by Berkeley’s evidentif-imperfect diversity and strenuous adherence to collegiate ideals. (The diplomatic hoops the staff and faculty jump through to protect students’ First Amendment rights are lightly hilarious and deeply heartening.)

But all romance is soon smeared with reality. In the film’s most unnerving scene, we see young college representatives giving struggling students a pep talk about taking out loans for college: “You owe it to yourself!” Another squirmy scene finds professors being dressed down for knowingly submitting subpar tenure recommendations, and the university’s money troubles are laid out for all to see. If this largely plot-free film has a villain, it’s Disinvestment by the State, a factual reality that’s leaving the proudly public university scrambling for new funding sources and playing with the idea of one day going private.

Heading into At Berkeley’s third hour (the film is shown without an intermission, so take your pick of when to pee), viewers are plunged into the long-simmering student protest, which takes over the campus for most of a day, and which Wiseman captures beautifully. One scene communicates the rush of group uprising and protest, the next reminds us of the unfortunate screechiness of certain human voices and the dispiriting diffuseness of undergrad politics. Further emotional verisimilitude comes from the film’s own running time. As the fourth hour clicks in, we find ourselves in a typically expansive scene of a teacher lecturing on the poetry of John Donne. Watching her speaking eloquently on a subject I could no longer rouse my overloaded brain to care about gave me a feeling that was distinctly collegiate. Go, watch, wander out when you need to, but come back, because it’s great.

power: what kind of person should be in the police department (a working-class white male), what kind of person should be in jail (a poor black male), who should moderate a commission (an educated white male), who should represent the black community (an educated black man), and so on. Although no one is directing this process, the right inputs still produce predictable outcomes: At the end of the commission on the incident, white officers are vindicated and the black radicals who are not dead are serving long sentences.

In fact, the process is so predetermined that the one white police officer who showed compassion and saved the life of a boy who stumbled out of the burning headquarters actually retires from the department because of stress related to internal pressure and being ostracized (he is called a nigger lover by his colleagues). One last word about this great and intelligently edited documentary: It doesn’t show the people who ultimately benefit from this seemingly ahistorical and democratic process: the bankers, property developers, and CEOs of this and that corporation. But their very invisibility is what makes them so visible;

is indeed their

7:50*^ Wed & Thu: (3:50), 7:50* THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (PG-13) Fri: (4:00)*, 7:00, 10:05 Sat: (12:50)*, (4:00)*, 7:00, 10:05 Sun: (12:50)*, (4:00)*, 7:00 Mon: (4:00)*, 8:00 Tue: (4:00)*, 8:00^ Wed & Thu: (4:00)*, 8:00 12 YEARS A SLAVE (R) Fri: (3:40)*, 7:20*, 9:40* Sat: (12:40)*, (3:40)*, 7:20*, 9:40* Sun: (12:40)*, (3:40)*, 7:20* Mon: (3:40)*, 8:10* Tue: (3:40)*, 8:10*^ Wed & Thu: (3:40)*, 8:10*

FILM SHORTS

More reviews and movie times: thestranger.com/film

LIMITED RUN

AT BERKELEY

See review, page 47. Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Tues 7 pm.

BETTIE PAGE REVEALS ALL

A documentary on the life and cultural impact of the legendary model and sex symbol, featuring the actual Bettie Page, and a live preshow burlesque performance from Miss Kitty Baby. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Thurs Dec 5 at 7pm.

THE BOOK THIEF

The film adaptation of the best-selling novel about a cute little kid growing up with a foster family that harbors a Jewish refugee in Nazi Germany. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Fri 5, 8 pm, Sat-Sun 2, 5, 8 pm, Mon-Tues 5 pm.

ERASERHEAD

David Lynch’s heartwarming holiday classic that perfectly encapsulates the joys of parenthood. Presented on a new 35 mm print. Grand Illusion, Fri-Sat 11 pm, MonTues 7 pm.

THE LIMEY

A one-night-only screening of Steven Soderbergh’s 1999 crime thriller—featuring a killer performance by Terence Stamp—presented as the closing-night special of SAM’s 36th annual Film Noir Series. Seattle Art Museum, Thurs Dec 5 at 7:30 pm.

THE MANZANAR FISHING CLUB

A documentary chronicling the bravely defiant fishing that occurred in Japanese American internment camps during World War II. Followed by a facilitated community discussion. And it’s a free event! Keystone Church, Dec 6 at 7 pm.

NATIONAL THEATRE: 50 YEARS ON STAGE

NEW YORK FILM CRITICS: AMERICAN HUSTLE

A new series that features one-off, pre-screenings of soon-to-be-released films, followed by live Q&A streams with the principal cast and crew. This screening features American Hustle, the new film from David O. Russell, in which he reconvenes with his Silver Linings Playbook pals, Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Mon Dec 9 at 7 pm.

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) SIFF Cinema Uptown, Fri 4:30, 7:00, 9:15 pm, Sat-Sun 2:15, 4:30, 7:00, 9:15 pm, Mon-Tues 4:30, 7:00, 9:15 pm.

THE PUNK SINGER

So many music documentaries feel like laurel-buffing victory laps, but Sini Andersson’s The Punk Singer feels like a revelation. Its subject: Kathleen Hanna, cofounder of Riot Grrl, creator of the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, coiner of the phrase “smells like teen spirit,” and spouse of Ad-Rock, who’s captured in all her explosively multifaceted glory. I’ve been a Kathleen Hanna fan for decades; this film introduced her to me as someone new. To quote talking head Carrie Brownstein, it’s “an empowering and surreal experience.” (DAVID SCHMADER) SIFF Film Center, Fri 6:30, 9 pm, Sat 4:30, 6:30, 9 pm, Sat 4:30, 6:30, 8:30 pm, Mon-Tues 7:30 pm.

SCARECROW VIDEO TURNS 25

Scarecrow Video, the national treasure you always forget how lucky you are to have in your own proverbial or literal backyard, is now unequivocally old enough to rent a U-Haul, so let’s make sure they never have to. This weekend they have a lot of celebratory sales ($3 off all Criterion Collection titles, 50 percent off all used titles, and $1 VHS titles!!), and as always, you can rent any movie anyone’s ever even considered making, get a novelty soda (try the Blenheim’s Ginger Ale), and have a latte or a specialty beer (try the Old Rasputin Imperial Stout). The cafe-style screening room will be playing the hits all weekend, where you can kick back and do your sipping. Scarecrow Video, Sat-Sun.

A VERY ALAN THICKEMAS

Alan Thicke is honored and has yuletide spirit bestowed upon him, both in a classic episode of Growing Pains and in the Beta-Society-produced puppet musical titled A Very Alan Thickemas, which is described as “naughty” and “rated R.” Central Cinema, Thurs Dec 5 at 8 pm.

NOW PLAYING

12 YEARS A SLAVE

more

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)

ALL IS LOST

A night of classic stage performances drawn from the archives of the National Theatre, featuring actors such as Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Michael Gambon, Derek Jacobi, and Maggie Smith doing their thing in plays by Harold Pinter, Peter Shaffer, Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett, and David Hare. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Sat-Sun 1 pm.

ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY LIVE:

RICHARD II

A cinematic rebroadcast of a stage production by London’s Royal Shakespeare Company, featuring David Tennant in the title role of the second Dick. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Tues Dec 10 at 6:30 pm.

The nearly wordless All Is Lost focuses, with exhausting intensity, on a single man. (In the closing credits, he’s listed only as “Our Man.”) He’s played by Robert Redford— wrinkled, presumably, from both years and water. When a yacht he’s sailing hits a shipping container in the middle of the Indian Ocean, water rushes into his cabin with startling speed; everything that follows charts his attempts to stay

alive. Grim and quiet and melancholy, All Is Lost is tough and relentless—but perhaps the most impressive thing about it is that Redford and writer/director J.C. Chandor make this story as exciting and as touching as it is harrowing. (ERIK H ENRIKSEN)

BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR

Blue Is the Warmest Color ranks among the best love stories I’ve ever seen. High schooler Adèle falls for blue-haired 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)

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)

I TELEVISION TM

BY WM. TM STEVEN

THE RUDOLPH POP QUIZ

Okay, take out your pencils! (No, not that pencil! Jesus Christ, you’re disgusting.) It’s time for another Holiday TV Classic Pop Quiz™, and… OH, DON’T GIVE ME THAT LOOK. I know we just had a pop quiz last week (about A Charlie Brown Christmas), and guess what? We’re having another one! After all, you can’t call it a “pop” quiz if it doesn’t “pop,” am I right? Of course I am—shut up.

This week’s quiz involves the creepy animated classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (watch the vastly inferior sequels this week, including Rudolph’s Shiny New Year [ABC Family, Thurs Dec 5, 6 pm] and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the Island of Misfit Toys [ABC Family, Sat Dec 7, 7 am]. As always, ABSOLUTELY NO CHEATING OR WISENHEIMERY. You have one hour. Begin.

1. Narrator Sam the Snowman wonders aloud, “Haven’t you ever seen a talking snowman before?” Is this a thinly veiled accusation of racism? Should “talking snowmen” be granted equal rights—even though they’re entirely made out of snow? (Any answer other than “no” is incorrect.)

2. Upon discovering baby Rudolph’s glowing nose, his father, Donner, decides to hide it by covering it up with dirt. Note three similarities between Donner and your own father.

3. Hermey the Elf tells his screaming boss that, instead of making toys, he’d rather be “a dentist.” WHAT DOES HE REALLY MEAN, AND IS HE FUCKING KIDDING US?

4. After his glowing nose is discovered, Rudolph is banned from future “reindeer games.” If you were an ACLU lawyer, what

HOMEFRONT

Jason Statham is a tough guy with a history; he’s a cop who used to go undercover with biker gangs. His new life in a small Louisiana town is endangered when he crosses paths with a smarmy meth cook named Gator (James Franco). And what if I told you the screenplay was written by Sylvester Stallone? Homefront is surprisingly watchable: The stakes are refreshingly low, and the action is fast and dirty. The script doesn’t sing or anything, but Stallone doesn’t embarrass himself, either. (PAUL CONSTANT)

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)

would be your legal advice?

5. Which of the following is the best song ever written about self-acceptance?

a. Clarice the Doe’s “There’s Always Tomorrow”

b. Katy Perry’s “Firework”

c. Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful”

d. All of the above make me want to stab my ears off with a pair of scissors.

6. After the elves sing “We Are Santa’s Elves,” Santa responds to the performers by saying, “Well, needs work. I have to go. [Door slam!]” Why is Santa such a dick?

7. The Abominable Snow Monster is accused of being “mean, nasty,” and “hating everything to do with Christmas.” Is it possible the Snow Monster might be eating everyone because he’s at the top of the food chain? Bonus question: Should the Abominable Snow Monster be given “protected species” status?

8. Hermey, Rudolph, and Yukon Cornelius are denied asylum on the Island of Misfit Toys because—according to King Moonracer—“a living creature cannot hide himself on an island.” Again, WHAT DOES HE REALLY MEAN, AND IS HE FUCKING KIDDING US?

9. To defeat the Abominable Snow Monster, Hermey forcibly pulls out every one of the creature’s teeth (without anesthesia). If you can think of a crueler fate, I’d like to hear it. Bonus question: Does Hermey actually deserve to be a dentist?

10. After agreeing to lead Santa’s sleigh through a snowstorm, Rudolph is once again accepted by his peers. The moral of this story is:

a. Minorities must prove their worth before gaining equal rights.

b. Ugly mutants have feelings, too.

c. Santa is a dick.

d. None (or all) of the above.

Read Humpy’s weekly TV listings at THESTRANGER.COM

FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

BY ROB BREZSNY

For the Week of Dec 4

ARIES (March 21–April 19): Sometimes I think too fast and too much. My logic gets sterile. My ideas become jagged and tangled. When this happens, I head off to Turtle Back Hill for a hike through the saltwater marsh. The trail loops around on itself, and I arrive back where I started in about 15 minutes. Sometimes I keep walking, circumambulating four or five times. Going in circles like this seems to help me knit together my fragmented thoughts. Often, by the time I’m finished, my mind feels unified. I recommend you find your own version of this ritual, Aries. From what I can tell, you need to get rounder and softer.

TAURUS (April 20–May 20): In the mid19th century, French art was dominated by the government-sponsored Salon, whose conservative policies thwarted upcoming new trends like impressionism. One antiauthoritarian painter who rebelled was Camille Pissarro. “What is the best way to further the evolution of French art?” he was asked. “Burn down the Louvre,” he replied. The Louvre, as you may know, was and still is a major art museum in Paris. Judging from your current astrological omens, I surmise that you might want to make a symbolic statement equivalent to Pissarro’s. It’s time for you to graduate from traditions that no longer feed you so you can freely seek out new teachers and influences.

GEMINI (May 21–June 20): “Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil,” is a request that Christians make of God when they say the Lord’s Prayer. If we define “temptation” as an attraction to things that feel good even though they’re bad for you, this part of the prayer is perfectly reasonable. But what if “temptation” is given a different interpretation? What if it means an attraction to something that feels pleasurable and will ultimately be healthy for you even though it initially causes disruptions? I suggest you consider experimenting with this alternative definition, Gemini. For now, whatever leads you into temptation could possibly deliver you from evil.

CANCER (June 21–July 22): “You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks,” said the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. But you don’t have to worry about that outcome, Cancerian. The storm might howl and surge, but it will ultimately pass. And although your tree may bend pretty far, it will not break. Two weeks from now, you won’t be mourning your losses, but rather cel-

ebrating your flexibility and resilience. Congratulations in advance!

LEO (July 23–Aug 22): It’s a perfect time to start reclaiming some of the superpowers you had when you were a child. What’s that you say? You didn’t have any superpowers? That’s not true. Before you entered adolescence, you could see things and know things and feel things that were off-limits, even unknown, to most adults. You possessed a capacity to love the world with wild purity. Your innocence allowed you to be in close touch with the intelligence of animals and the spirits of the ancestors. Nature was so vividly alive to you that you could hear its songs. Smells were more intense. The dreams you had at night were exciting and consoling. Your ability to read people’s real energy—and not be fooled by their social masks—was strong. Remember?

VIRGO (Aug 23–Sept 22): Not all darkness is bad. You know that. Sometimes you need to escape from the bright lights. It can be restorative to sit quietly in the pitch blackness and drink in the mystery of the Great Unknown. The same is true for silence and stillness and aloneness.

Now and then, you’ve got to retreat into their protective sanctuary. Dreaming big empty thoughts in the tranquil depths can heal you and recharge you. The magic moment has arrived for this kind of rejuvenation, Virgo.

LIBRA (Sept 23–Oct 22): In the movie Clueless, the character played by Alicia Silverstone describes someone as a “fullon Monet.” What she means is that the person in question is like a painting by the French impressionist artist Claude Monet.

“From far away, it’s okay,” says Silverstone. “But up close, it’s a big old mess.”

You may still be at the far-away point in your evaluation of a certain situation in your own life, Libra. It appears interesting, even attractive, from a distance. When you draw nearer, though, you may find problems. That doesn’t necessarily mean you should abandon it altogether. Maybe you can fix the mess so it’s as engaging up close as it is from far away.

SCORPIO (Oct 23–Nov 21): Your power animal for the coming months is the Bateleur eagle of Africa. In the course of searching for its meals, it covers about 250 square miles every day. It thinks big. It has a spacious scope. I hope you get inspired by its example, Scorpio. In 2014, I’d love to see you enlarge the territory where you go hunting for what you want. Fate will respond favorably if you expand your ideas about how to gather the best allies and resources. As for this week, I suggest you get very specific as you identify the goals you will pursue in the coming months by exploring farther and wider.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22–Dec 21): The standard dictionary says that “righteous” is a word that means virtuous and highly

moral. The slang dictionary says that “righteous” describes someone or something that’s absolutely genuine and wonderful. Urbandictionary.com suggests that “righteous” refers to the ultimate version of any type of experience, especially “sins of pleasure” like lust and greed. According to my analysis, the coming week will be jam-packed with righteousness for you. Which of the three definitions will predominate? It’s possible you will embody and attract all three types.

CAPRICORN (Dec 22–Jan 19): In the dreams you’re having at night, Capricorn, I bet you’re traveling through remote landscapes in all kinds of weather. Maybe you’re re-creating the voyage of the Polynesian sailors who crossed hundreds of miles of Pacific Ocean to find Hawaii 1,500 years ago. Or maybe you’re hiking through the Darkhad Valley, where the Mongolian steppe meets Siberia’s vast forests. It’s possible you’re visiting places where your ancestors lived, or you’re migrating to the first human settlement on Mars in the 22nd century. What do dreams like this mean? I think you’re trying to blow your own mind. Your deep self and your higher wisdom are conspiring to flood you with new ways of seeing reality.

AQUARIUS (Jan 20–Feb 18): It wouldn’t be too extreme for you to kiss the ground that has been walked on by people you care about deeply. And it wouldn’t be too crazy to give your special allies the best gifts ever, or compose love letters to them, or demonstrate in dramatic fashion how amazed you are by the beautiful truths about who they really are. This is a unique moment in your cycle, Aquarius—a time when it is crucial for you to express gratitude, devotion, and even reverence for those who have helped you see what it means to be fully alive.

PISCES (Feb 19–March 20): In a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway described his vision of paradise. It would have a trout stream that no one but him was permitted to fish in. He’d own two houses, one for his wife and children and one for his nine beautiful mistresses. There would be a church where he could regularly confess his sins, and he’d have great seats at an arena where bullfights took place. From my perspective, this is a pretty

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LethalLotus, 32

ALREADY RECYCLING LAST YEARS RESOLUTION

Busy single mom wants to get out there and meet new people and have a fun and exciting new year as I round the bend to the big 4-0. Looking for a partner in crime, male or female. southender, 39

YOUNG MAMA//OLD SOUL

I’m a young guitar-playin, crystalwrappin, vegetable-eatin, wisdom-seekin mama. I believe in change, truth, and the healing power of Love. I’m a mother, who incarnates the ultimate Yin within her... I am a spiritual pilgrim dedicated to a more conscious life.

Lunascent12, 21

BIKES BEERS PETS PARKS PUNK

I spend my day on my fixed gear frankenbike. I’m more comfortable at a hole in the wall bar. I like art and math and history and chaos theory. I’m looking for adventure and fun people to experience it with. MothgirlFriday, 36

ONLY THE MEEK GET PINCHED!

I believe in kindness. I just don’t understand the premiss of being a dick. Exactly what purpose does it serve. I also feel a kinship with penguins. Awkward on land, graceful underwater. DameNotDamsel, 31

BIKER BABE

I am a community oriented person who enjoys the outdoors and learning new things. However i dont fuck around with morons. I like having fun no macho guys. impress me in other ways. moccasin, 18

AMAZING COOK

SMART, GEEKY BBW

if i had one wish, it would be to know everything. i’m a size 26/28 geeky girl who really wants to meet an interesting geekboy who’s just a little off so we can be awkward together and have great sex. sine, 44

FUN SPUNKY GYMRAT

A high energy person who loves to be out exploring the outdoors or working on improving myself in the gym but also enjoys a good meal, glass of wine, and a quiet eveing curled up by the fire. CardioQueen629, 23

I WANT TO BE WET

I am addicted to attention. I want your curiosity. I need your words to stun me, arouse me, make my imagination catch my breathe. Let’s start with incredible conversation and go from there. I promise to not disappoint. Curiousone24, 41

GOOD GIRL WITH BAD TENDENCIES

I Like Wine. Having Inappropriate Conversations in public. Cussing (my favorite cusswords are fuck and motherfucker). My mom

PROFILE OF THE WEEK

BIKES BEERS PETS PARKS PUNK

INTERNATIONAL, CHARMING, ADDICTIVE

Hello...it is always this line to start. I am half french, half German. I am open minded, upwardly mobile, so location is not an issue. Hope to hear from u. Marc69, 38

CARS KILL, KILL CARS! :) I ride bikes daily. I love home cooked meals, with emphasis on Mexican or Italian Vegan food. I’ve been into punk/ hardcore for 21 years. I dream about escaping to the country to hike, rock climb, snowboard, canoe, & camp. Bikepunk75, 37

SMOOTH, SWEET, AND BAD-ASS Fun loving and open-minded. Welleducated and a jack-of-all-trades; I pride myself on my conversational skills. I’m into micro-brews, world food, and hot yoga. I sing with a few choral groups, and have been known to karaoke. NorthCity125, 29

SEARCHING

I am a child of God by His grace and I am an Evangelist and teacher by calling,I am a gospel musician and an author.,I am God fearing,humble,faith ful,sincere,caring and loving person . searching2marry, 28

I’ve been living in Seattle for a decade. That’s the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere. I was born in Oaxaca to an Irish mum and Zapotec papi but grew up mostly in San Francisco and Oakland.

I spend my day riding around on my fixed gear frankenbike that I have slowly rebuilt piece by piece this year. My business card says Nanny to the Animals and I enjoy being a self employed pet sitter. I’m more comfortable at a hole in the wall bar over a pretentious upscale joint and I love a good punk show. I have a huge library and read a lot. I like art and math and history and chaos theory. I’m looking for adventure and fun people to experience it with.

MothgirlFriday

36 year old Woman Seeks a Man for Dating , Man or Woman for Friendship Looking for Friends, let’s find out

Let us know if you would like to be featured in the Stranger. If selected, you will receive a 2 week complimentary subscription. Visit: thestranger. selectalternatives.com/gyrobase/Personals/Contact

I just want a good looking guy that has a good heart. Cooking in, dining out, movies, and talking about crazy nonsense. Playing pool or shooting at the gun range. Maybe someone who can take me snowboarding? khttn0330, 22

TEMPEST SEEKS TRUSTY CAPTAIN

My desires are to have a lover, friend to spend a couple nights a week letting off steam and occasional weekends away for further adventures. I love rich experiences and am ready to create more. Celestia, 43

COLD HANDS AND PERPETUAL IDEAS

I get excited about creativity. I enjoy making my bed so I can untuck it. I’m always out doing something interesting. My purpose for posting, dear Lovelab reader, is to meet interesting people and see where it takes me. heartbeatrunn, 30

1,000 VIRGINS SOUNDS TERRIFYING

Play Xbox with me and then I think we should get stoned and walk to Golden Gardens down the creepy staircase. If you remember the blanket, I’m yours. People seem to like me. Haven’t figured that out yet. PotentMenagerie, 36

MEN SEEKING WOMEN

FIRMLY GROUNDED IN THE STRATOSPHERE things that i’m fascinated by: small moments and subtle things. strong wind through deciduous trees; rare atmospheric occurrences; art made of light; trial and error. i’m hot for sharp wit, and the intimacy that affords. stellar_tern, 43

CHEF LIFE, SURF. DRINK.

So I’m a pretty relaxed guy. My life does revolve a lot around work because I love what I do. My time off consists of the dog park with my other half, my chocolate lab. And exploring Seattle’s culinary scene. Joshua815, 24

...IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES.

I’m an inventive, imaginative, cultured wannabe poet. As of late, my attentive charm has been directed towards my role as a father. Expanding my focus to a special woman will add more depth to my work and play. : ). capitolhiller, 36

TALL DARK HANDSOME Mail me find out. Andrew7654, 35 FUN, OUTGOING, ECCENTRIC I am looking to meet new women to hangout with. Simple as that. Dr_Lime_and_ coconut, 33

YEEEAAAAH ABOUT THAT... So yeah I like to laugh, drink with friends, watch most sports, and people watch. I have other intriguing interests and admirable qualities, but I can’t list them all here because that would spoil the MYSTERY! a_scholar_and_a_ gentleman, 32

WOMEN SEEKING

WOMEN

CREATIVE ANOMALY SEEKER Like to play dress up? Try on cute new outfits together... practice make up with each other...trade work out/exercise tricks? Any other confident late-bloomers for some quality girl time? We could always just relax for some light chit chat too? kittygrrl, 37

ART-WEIRD GIRL-WOMAN SEEKS UNEXPLORED POSSIBILITIES Tiny but big, blacksheep proud. Delighted to be untethered, unconventional, liberal. Prom dress still fits, but always indulge. Happy but not saccharine, sadder but wiser. Peacefully divorced. Moving to Paris soon, hope to depart Seattle full of love and lust. lafleurdelise, 42

MEN SEEKING MEN

TRUST-WORTHY I’m a trust-worthy, nice, direct, punctual guy. I love music, tv series, movie, books, nice t-shirt, nice furniture..... kbgm, 22

AMAZING-ADVENTUROUSANDROGYNOUS OH MY!

Do you like kindness? How ‘bout generosity? Are you interested in meeting someone who’s fun? Perhaps someone who doesn’t give a damn about what the world thinks? Can you deal with a lovely face? Hmmm, you should find out. Love_Heart, 33

SAVAGE LOVE

Slam Bam BY DAN SAVAGE

I’m a bi woman in my mid-20s in a great monogamish relationship with my straight boyfriend. We occasionally invite other women into our sex life, which is really enjoyable for both of us. He isn’t threatened by other women, only by other men, which isn’t an issue since I’m not interested in any other men. So on the occasions when we find a lady we’re both into who’s also into us, anything goes, and it’s awesome. We’ve hooked up with both friends and strangers, but always as a couple because it makes us both feel safe. That’s all lovely. Enter the problem: I was visiting some friends of ours I used to live with before my boyfriend and I moved in together. After going out for drinks, we were playing an alcohol-fueled card game that turned into an alcohol-fueled strip card game. This is in my former home where I am very comfortable, feel safe, and was frequently in various states of undress while I was a housemate. One friend soon had her lovely breasts out, and she made a few comments that were direct and inviting and turned me on a little. I touched her boobs and sucked on her nipples, but that’s as far as things went. Her boyfriend witnessed this but wasn’t involved. It was a fun, playful moment, and soon after, I went to bed—alone. It wasn’t anything my boyfriend would’ve objected to had he been there, but he wasn’t there. Should I tell him about it, or is this a case where he has the right not to know? I’m not interested in pursuing anything further with this friend, and I’m not sure what talking about it would accomplish, other than being honest at the expense of my boyfriend’s feelings, and probably making me feel bad for something that, although it seemed innocent and harmless in the moment, I shouldn’t have done.

HNU, it would still be possible that he didn’t love you. People have been known to lie about this shit. But I don’t think a guy would move across the country or plan a future with a woman for whom he felt nothing. Either he already loves you but hasn’t found the right moment to say so, or he’s sensible enough to realize that you can’t be certain that you’re in love with someone until after you’ve had at least one fight. That said, HNU, if you’re ready to say it to him, go ahead and say it. Just don’t have a meltdown if he’s not ready— yet —to say it to you.

Say you’ve always wanted to peg a guy, but your otherwise GGG hot husband isn’t into receiving anal—for good reason (he’s had health problems back there)—but he jokingly suggests he would be fine with you pegging his equally hot gay little brother. Should you ask his gay little brother if you can peg him?

Wanting It For Evah

No.

Non-Intentional Playful Partying Lady Experiences Situation

This experience would seem to fall in the “right not to know” column, NIPPLES, but “right not to know” always has to be weighed against “likelihood of finding out.”

You indicate that this couple—the girl with the lovely, direct, and inviting breasts (LDIBs), and the boy who witnessed the touching and sucking of said LDIBs—aren’t just friends of yours, NIPPLES, but friends of “ours.” If either of them makes a reference to this game of strip cribbage—or strip Uno or strip poker or strip Schnapsen—the next time the four of you hang out, the boyfriend could be blindsided. And it’s not clear whether there were other witnesses to your drunken touch-and-suck. But if there were others there, and if you socialize with these other witnesses IRL or online, the chances that your boyfriend will find out increase exponentially.

You know your boyfriend better than I do, NIPPLES, so you’ll have to ask yourself if finding out about the incident at a party or via a snarky Facebook post would leave him feeling twice as upset—because then we’re talking about a crime and a cover-up, and learning about the LDIBs incident in a manner (from a friend, in front of other people) that leaves him feeling humiliated.

My boyfriend of nearly a year and I live together and are planning to move across the country in about a month. We have never fought and get along swimmingly. We have amazing sex, we see eye to eye on almost everything, and we are planning a future together. The only thing is, we have never said “I love you” to each other. Is this normal? I know we love each other, but being in a serious, committed relationship of almost a year and not saying those words? Could it be possible that he doesn’t love me?

Hopefully Not Unlovable

Even if your boyfriend had said “I love you” a hundred thousand times over the last year,

How stupid would it be to sleep with my boss’s gorgeous 18-year-old son? My boss has become a mentor to me. He and his wife have welcomed me into their home, which includes their aforementioned son, a high-school senior. I am a 23-year-old woman. Normally, I wouldn’t sleep with anyone younger than 20. But besides being very attractive, my boss’s son is funny, kind, and sweet. He’s also incredibly horny and has some serious unexplored kinks that most girls his age have no interest in. I want to spend the next few months fucking my boss’s son—bearing in mind and honoring, of course, your campsite rule. Here are the two problems as I see them: (1) Fucking around with your boss’s kid seems like a surefire way to seriously wreck your relationship with your boss. (2) He is still in high school.

Sex Or Not

1. Fucking your boss’s kid seems like a surefire way to get your ass fired, SON, and depending on what field you’re in—and how important good recommendations and work histories are in your field—fucking the boss’s son could seriously derail your career. If, you know, you manage to get caught. But if you do decide to fuck the shit out of a gorgeous, funny, sweet, and kinky adult who happens to be your boss’s son, well, you wouldn’t be the first person in human history to risk everything for sex. As Mark Twain observed more than a century ago: “The human being, like the immortals, naturally places sexual intercourse far and away above all other joys—yet he has left it out of his heaven! The very thought of it excites him; opportunity sets him wild; in this state, he will risk life, reputation, everything—even his queer heaven itself—to make good that opportunity and ride it to the overwhelming climax.”

2. He is an adult—who is still in high school. You are not that far out of high school. Math is hard for me, SON, but according to my calculations, you’re not that far apart in age. You might be sabotaging your career, but you wouldn’t be robbing the cradle.

3. The campsite rule for new readers: The older and/or more experienced person in a sexual relationship with a large age and/or experience gap is obligated to leave their younger and/or less experienced partner in better shape than when they found them. That means no sexually transmitted infections, no fertilized eggs, no unnecessary drama, and no unnecessary trauma.

Find the Savage Lovecast (my weekly podcast) every Tuesday at savagelovecast.com.

mail@savagelove.net @fakedansavage on Twitter

ADOPTION

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

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Donate Your Car, Truck or Motorcycle

Support Big Brothers Big Sisters of Puget Sound. We offer free pickup of used vehicles in most cases running or not. Tax deductible. (206) 248-5982

Female Social Drinkers interested in dating men wanted for a study on alcohol & dating experiences. Single women of all ethnic backgrounds aged 21-30 can earn up to $320 for a multi-part study. Call Project FRESH at (206) 543-5536 or visit www.fresh.uw.edu. UW Psychology research project.

Patron was severely beaten at Grim’s (Capitol Hill) on Friday night, Oct. 18, 2013.

Please call Susan if you are a witness. 206-399-7609

CANCER SCREENING

Age: 21+. Volunteers will receive either self-collected at home HPV testing or regular Pap test screening. Up to $200 compensation for study completion. Call 206-543-3327 or e-mail homehpv@uw.edu.

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LEGENDARY PIANIST AVAILABLE

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

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SEX OFFENDER REGISTRATION GOT YOU DOWN?

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