The Stranger Vol. 23, No. 11

SALE

Thursday, Nov. 14th • 7:30pm

Joe Sacco with Steve Sher: “The Great War” Town Hall

Friday, Nov. 15th • 7:30pm

Hugo Literary Series:

Dorothy Allison, Stephen Elliott, Kristen Lunstrum, Levi Fuller Richard Hugo House

Friday, Nov. 15th • 8pm

Industrial Revelation: Overton Berry The Royal Room

Saturday, Nov. 16th • 7 & 9:30pm

ChiChi! Feat. The Can Can Castaways The Can Can

Saturday, Nov. 16th • 8pm

Viva Havana! Havana

Sunday, Nov. 17th • 1pm

Mimosas with Mama Unicorn/Narwhal

Sunday, Nov. 17th • 7:30pm

Moregasm: Babelands Guide to Mind Blowing Sex Babeland

Sunday, Nov. 17th • 8pm

DarkPine Record Release Chop Suey 1000’s More Great Local

Volume 23, Issue Number 11 November 13–19, 2013

STUDY GUIDE

Questions for The Stranger, Volume 23, Issue 11

1. Now that The Stranger’s favored mayoral candidate has suffered a crushing defeat, the time has come to try to mend bridges that have been burned to ashes. In this case, The Stranger’s shriveled olive branch is titled “The Smartest People in Seattle Politics,” and it’s a puff-piece listicle celebrating those who are supposedly doing good political work.

a. Do you believe the word “disingenuous” is used too often these days? Is it applicable here?

b. Some people use a vulgar slang term for fellatio to describe this kind of unwaveringly positive reportage. Bearing that in mind, is one instance of fellatio enough to make up for a solid six months of whining, cajoling, biased rantings, and relentless negative campaigning?

c. Can you ever trust The Stranger again? If yes, how many staffers would have to be fired before that could occur?

2a. The increasingly irrelevant PAUL CONSTANT turns in a restaurant review that wastes the first third of its column inches mocking the life and work of Ayn Rand. What, if anything, does Ayn Rand have to do with smoked meat? Why does Constant persist in his “battle” against a penny-ante “philosopher” that only 18-year-old white boys find compelling?

2b. Write a Constantesque essay of 1,000 words or fewer that begins with something entirely off-topic and then tenuously ties the opening passage in with the ostensible subject of the essay. Did you make any more sense than Constant? Is it possible to not make more sense than Constant?

3. BEN LIVINGSTON answers the completely inessential question “Can you smoke pot downtown?” A better question might be: “Can you walk one block downtown nowadays without being engulfed in a cloud of marijuana smoke?” Based on textual evidence, do you believe that Livingston is himself “high”? Why or why not?

4. In the books section, BRENDAN KILEY reviews a book that has no words in it. Why bother?

5. Making a rare trip from the unintelligible morass of the visual art section into the populist drivel of the music section, JEN GRAVES opens a preview of a Kronos Quartet show by writing, “This concert is once-in-alifetime fairy-tale stuff, man.” Can you find a more painful attempt to sound “hip” in this week’s issue of The Stranger? Remember to support your argument with evidence!

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

(11/13) King County Mental Health & Substance Abuse Legislative Forum

Double Feature! (11/13) Peter Baker The Real Bush/Cheney Dynamic (11/13) David Folkenflik ‘Murdoch’s World’

Double Feature! (11/14) Peggy Kelsey Conversations with Afghan Women (11/14) Joe Sacco: ‘The Great War’

(11/14) Seattle Public Library presents ‘StillCrazy(Good)AfterAllTheseYears’ (11/15) Joshua Greene Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

(11/15)SimpleMeasures:CelloDivasII (11/16) Saturday Family Concerts Christian Swenson

(11/16) Early Music Guild presents Lucidarium: Una Festa Ebraica

(11/17) Early Music Discovery presents Discovering the Music of Medieval Italy with Ensemble Lucidarium (11/17) Thalia Symphony Orchestra ‘Struggle and Triumph’ (11/17) Earshot Jazz Festival presents CharlesLloyd&FriendswithBillFrisell (11/18) Chris Matthews ‘Tip and the Gipper’

(11/19) Inside Art Local Artists on Imagery & Art

(11/19)SeattleArts&Lecturespresents An Evening with Madhur Jaffrey (11/20) Ignite Seattle!

(11/20) Rebecca Sive A Woman’s Guide to Winning Any Office (11/21) Uri Gneezy The Hidden Power of the Economics of Everyday Life

(11/21)AnnPatchettwithNancyPearl ‘This is the Story of a Happy Marriage’ (11/22) JP Jofre Hard Tango Chamber Band

(11/23) Puget Sound Symphony Orchs

LAST DAYS

The Week in Review BY

DAVID SCHMADER

Last week, former state GOP chair Kirby Wilbur lit up Twitter by expressing his regret at missing the pro-immigration-reform protests at Washington State Republican Party headquarters, where all the “left-wing witches and hags” looked “so old and ugly”!

This week, Kirby Wilbur reprises his role as connoisseur of female witchery and hagginess, in our…

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4

This week of hardcore horror broken only by one stupid story involving frat boys’ balls kicks off in Washington State with the tragic story of Michael Saffioti, the 22-year-old man who turned himself in to Snohomish County Jail on a charge of misdemeanor marijuana possession and wound up dead

As KIRO 7 reports today, the tragedy transpired last July, when Michael Saffioti reported to Snohomish County Jail on the outstanding pot charge. Crucial detail from KIRO: “Saffioti suffered from extreme dairy allergies and took regular pains to protect himself. Because he had been at the Snohomish County Jail once before, guards had a medical file on him.” Despite this medical file and video that appears to show Saffioti asking a guard and servers about his food, he was served a jailhouse breakfast of oatmeal and soon died. “Video obtained by KIRO 7 through a public records request shows [Saf-

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.

UNDER YOUR WHEELS

My son Joseph and his girlfriend, Nicole, asked me to watch their dogs, Haley and Moose, a mother-daughter twosome, to give their landlord time to make fence repairs. They arrived a little late; they had already managed to get themselves pregnant. Mom had 10, and daughter had 12! My son and his girlfriend did great in finding homes for 20 puppies! There were two “runts” in Moose’s litter, with the smaller of the two looking half the size of its siblings. The bottle-feeding we gave her saved her life, but she looked pretty homely and wasn’t getting adopted. I ended up keeping both the runts—sisters. The bottle-fed runt was homely indeed, and I wanted her to feel pretty, so I named her Tiffany. Her sister I called Emma. Grown, Tiff sometimes stands as if she’s posing in a Mr. Universe competition. She would stand in front of a grizzly bear for me; she’d get taken out by one swipe, but she would do it. They were born on Dale Earnhardt Sr.’s birthday: April 29. Tiff may yet see her ninth birthday; Emma will not. She was killed by a cold, selfish, no-conscience-having, chicken-shit coward hit-and-run driver. You kept going, but you were seen. Pray you are NEVER seen by me, you FUCK. Anonymous

fioti] questioning the breakfast he was fed,” reports KIRO. “The camera first captured Saffioti at the guard’s desk, holding his tray… Eventually, he took a few bites… Within a few minutes, Saffioti was back at the guard desk, using his inhaler.” According to a $10 million legal claim filed by his mother, Saffoti “asked to see a nurse. Instead, he was sent to his cell.”

Half an hour later, Saffioti was found unconscious, rushed to a hospital, and pronounced dead. “Our theory is that they absolutely knew about Michael’s medical needs,” said attorney Cheryl Snow, who’s representing Saffioti’s mother in her claim against the county. “This video shows Michael clearly made his needs apparent, that his needs were ignored.”

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5 Speaking of heartbreaking victims, the week continues in California’s Bay Area, where 18-year-old Sasha Fleischman is a senior at Berkeley’s Maybeck High School. “My son considers himself agender,” Sasha’s mother, Debbie Fleischman, told the Oakland Tribune. “He likes to wear a skirt. It’s his statement. That’s how he feels comfortable dressing.” According to Mom, her non-gender-conforming son has ridden the bus from their Berkeley home to East Oakland for a year without incident—until yesterday. “Police said the attack happened about 5:20 p.m. Monday on an AC Transit 57 line bus with at least a dozen passengers on board,” reports the Tribune . “Police said it appears the suspect, a junior at Oakland High School, boarded the bus near the school and saw Fleischman sleeping in a rear seat and lit his skirt on fire.” As Fleischman awoke in flames, other passengers rushed to his aid, eventually extinguishing the fire that would leave his legs covered in second- and thirddegree burns. Today, the 16-year-old suspected fire-starter was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, while Sasha Flesichman remains in stable condition at the St. Francis Memorial Hospital burn unit, where he’ll undergo “massive skin grafting.” Today, his cousin launched a fundraising page to help cover Sasha’s medical expenses, which you can find at fundly.com/helping-sasha-fleischmanhave-a-speedy-recovery.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6 In even worse news, the week continues in Detroit, where friends and family of Renisha McBride are agonizing over how the 19-year-old McBride went from seeking help after a car crash to being fatally shot in the head. The basics: Early last Saturday, after crashing her car and finding herself with a dead cell phone battery, Renisha McBride—a recent graduate of Southfield High School who worked at Ford Motor Company—made her way to a nearby home, presumably to ask for help. Instead, she was fatally shot in the head by the homeowner, who, the Detroit Free Press will report tomorrow, apparently believed McBride was breaking into his home when his shotgun discharged accidentally. Today, family and friends held a vigil for McBride in advance of her memorial service on Friday, while Dearborn Heights police asked the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office to issue a warrant for the resident behind the fatal shooting—a request the prosecutor’s office will deny pending further investigation.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7 In stupider news, the week continues in Wilmington, Ohio, where police are investigating a college fraternity hazing incident that necessitated

new column! Kirby Wilbur’s Hagwatch!

Notable women, as classified by former state GOP chair Kirby Wilbur

Hello, Stranger-reading uggos! You think I was just talking out of my rear when I called last week’s protesters witches and hags? Like all men, I have the ability to detect and differentiate between witches and hags at 50 paces. Unlike most men, I’m not scared to share this God-given power. So let’s get to it.

Eleanor Roosevelt: HAG!

Hillary Rodham Clinton: WITCH!

Oprah Winfrey: WITCHY HAG!

Ellen DeGeneres: HAGGY WITCH!

Anne Frank: Hag, hag, HAG!

Mother Teresa: WITCH!

Mindy Kaling: Both a WITCH and a HAG!

RuPaul: Not a lady, still a HAG!

Katy Perry: Haggy wannabe WITCH!

Senator Wendy Davis: WITCH!

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark: WITCH!

Catherine Keener: HAG!

the amputation of a pledge’s testicle. Details come from the ridiculously lurid police reports published today by the Smoking Gun. Our protagonists: three Wilmington College students hoping to join the Gamma Phi Gamma fraternity, who were allegedly subjected to a highly ritualized battering. Among the deeds allegedly enacted on the pledges (who were naked except for blindfolds): the application of an Icy Hot–like substance to their nipples, buttocks, and scrotums; the stuffing of Limburger cheese in their mouths; and the striking of their arms and legs with “‘towels and shirts that had the ends balled up in knots’ or which had ‘items tied inside them to inflict pain,’” reports the Smoking Gun. “Pledge Tyler Lawrence, 19, was struck in the testicles with ‘a towel fashioned as a weapon,’ according to an affidavit sworn by Wilmington Police Department Detective Brian Kratzer. Lawrence ‘went to the ground immediately in pain and was clutching himself in the groin.’ Frat members eventually got Lawrence to his feet so they could conclude the hazing by stuffing vinegar-soaked bananas into the mouths of the three men (who were told the item was ‘poop or shit’).” Once the violent naked pageant of brotherhood was concluded, Lawrence was taken to a local hospital, where one of his testicles was found to be so damaged, it had to be surgically removed. Police are investigating, and the frat has been suspended.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8 Nothing happened today, unless you count the aforementioned memorial service for Renisha McBride in Detroit, or the world-historically awful

super typhoon that slammed into the Philippines, which we’ll deal with on Sunday, when we have more information. (Meanwhile in Los Angeles, Young Lee, the 49-year-old cofounder of the frozen yogurt chain Pinkberry, was today found guilty of beating a homeless panhandler with a tire iron, for which he faces up to seven years in prison.)

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9 Nothing happened today, unless you count the employee at an Oregon wildcat sanctuary who was killed by a wildcat, or an amazing night of dance ( Crystal Pite! ) staged at Pacific Northwest Ballet, which you can read about on page 21.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 10

The week ends with a heart-crushing update on the super typhoon that hit the central Philippines on Friday. Now being called one of the most powerful storms ever recorded, Typhoon Haiyan swept away villages and killed many, many, many people

“We had a meeting last night with the governor and the other officials,” said Elmer Soria, police chief superintendent of the Leyte province, to Reuters. “The governor said, based on their estimate, 10,000 died .” As we type this, large swaths of the Philippines are attempting to survive hell on earth. To help, visit redcross.org/charitabledonations.

Send hot tips to lastdays@thestranger.com, and follow me on Twitter @davidschmader. More bad news every day at THESTRANGER.COM/SLOG

Kshama Sawant Pushes Ahead of Conlin

The

Socialist Insurgent Is Now Beating the Incumbent—Who Already

BY GOLDY

Declared Victory

Oops! One week after 16-year Seattle City Council incumbent Richard Conlin claimed an election night victory with a seemingly invincible 7.5 percent margin, his socialist

challenger, Kshama Sawant, stunningly grabbed the lead. When The Stranger went to press Tuesday night, Sawant was narrowly leading Conlin by 41 votes, 49.91 percent to 49.88 percent.

Conlin’s 6,136-vote election night cushion had been dwindling all week as late ballots trended hard in Sawant’s favor: Sawant won 49.9 percent of the batch of ballots counted on Wednesday, 54.2 percent of Thursday’s batch, and 56.5 percent of Friday’s. The Tuesday, November 12, batch continued the trend, going 57.4 percent in Sawant’s favor.

With about 12 percent of the ballots still left to count, the margin is too narrow to call the race. But I’m calling it anyway: Sawant wins!

To understand my confidence, you need to understand the way ballots are counted in our all-vote-by-mail elections. Ballots are processed over a six-week period, from the day ballots are mailed, which is three weeks before Election Day, until certification three weeks after. Ballots are generally processed in the order in which they arrive, but with two-thirds of voters procrastinating until the last minute, King County Elections (KCE) eventually falls far behind.

That’s why KCE’s election night results generally consist of only those ballots that had arrived by the previous Friday, plus a portion of those that arrived Monday. Later batches reflect results from later arriving ballots. So if an election breaks hard for one candidate in the final days, we should see that trend in the later tallies.

And that’s exactly what happened in the

You Can’t Smoke It in Public

But You Can on December 6 at a Special Event in Seattle Center

BY BEN LIVINGSTON

When state-licensed pot stores open in six months, Seattle will face a conundrum: how to deal with tourists who buy pot but have nowhere to legally smoke it. State

Conlin-Sawant race, where late voters proved more liberal and discontented with the status quo than their early-voting counterparts.

Part of that has to do with demographics; younger voters tend to vote late and more lefty. Part of it has to do with hard work; Sawant’s impressive grassroots campaign had a couple hundred volunteers calling voters and knocking on doors to get out her vote, while Conlin had little ground game at all. And part of it has to do with momentum; voter preferences shift over time, and her surprisingly strong campaign clearly moved support in Sawant’s favor.

But whatever the reasons, voters simply broke hard for Sawant, and there’s no reason to expect the remaining ballots to break hard the other way.

As The Stranger went to press, Sawant was leading by 41 votes.

Yes, a disproportionate chunk of the uncounted ballots are those that need further processing due to damage or voter error (wrong color pen, stray marks, failure to fill in circles). But these are predominantly late ballots, too. And about 2 percent of ballots were challenged due to missing or mismatched signatures; as these are “cured,” they get pulled into the tally in no particular order.

But in both cases, these ballots are likely to lean toward Sawant, who drew support from younger, poorer, immigrant, and first-time

law prohibits using marijuana in public. Folks also can’t smoke inside the retail pot stores, meaning cannabis will have no tavern equivalent (like Amsterdam-style coffee shops).

Seattle also lacks pot-friendly hotel accommodations. Earlier this year, I tried to persuade NORML to hold its annual pot conference here, but the plan fell through because Seattle hotels aren’t cool with pot smoking—even in designated smoking rooms.

City leaders have been discussing the cannabis consumption quandary since Initiative 502 passed, and they have issued permits to a very few events that explicitly applied for pot-smoking permission. Last May, Seattle’s annual marijuana march received a permit for a weed tent at Westlake Park, and High Times magazine held a huge hash oil free-forall in September with the city’s blessing.

But that pot tolerance may not extend to indoor establishments. Last month, Seattle &

voters—all groups that tend to have a little more difficulty filling out ballots. (It’s the same reason Democrats tend to pick up votes in recounts.) And of the two candidates, only Sawant has recruited hundreds of volunteers to do “ballot rehabilitation.”

KCE notifies voters with challenged ballots to fill out and return a signed affidavit so their ballots can be counted. But only about half of challenged voters normally comply. That would leave about 1 percent of voters— nearly 2,200 in Seattle this election—with ballots that will not be counted.

Campaigns can request lists of challenged voters from KCE, but only Sawant has the people power (about 200 volunteers, the campaign tells me) to knock on doors, ask if they voted for Sawant, and then collect the signed affidavit necessary to count the vote. The Sawant campaign says it collected 150 affidavits after three days of canvassing. The Conlin campaign merely sent out an e-mail asking supporters to check to see if their ballots had been counted.

That’s already a 150-vote advantage for Sawant in results to come. And while subsequent batches may not trend as hard toward

King County Public Health fined six hookah bars for violating the state’s indoor smoking ban. Those businesses claimed exemption as “private clubs,” but health inspectors allege they were open to the public or had employees.

“The smoking ban is the biggest hurdle” to coffee shops, says Assistant City Attorney Matthew York. “We have to live within the dynamics of the Clean Air Act.”

The city has permitted a smoking tent.

Last week, the state liquor board filed proposed rules to ban all cannabis consumption—including eating it—in private clubs that are licensed to serve alcohol to members. One such place exists in Seattle: the Mercury,

Sawant as her initial post-election surge, there is no reason to expect the final count to swing back in Conlin’s favor.

But even a narrow loss would prove a stunning turnaround for Sawant and a shocking disruption to Seattle’s staid political establishment. Between Conlin’s apparent defeat at the hands of a socialist and the landslide win for district elections, “the world has been turned upside down on the second floor,” one city hall insider told me. District elections will put all nine council members up for reelection in two years, while potentially pitting three pairs of incumbents against each other. And facing the prospect of a rematch against Sawant in District 3, which includes the lefty neighborhoods of Capitol Hill and the Central District, Conlin, then the presumptive winner, announced a day after the election that he would not seek another term.

Now it looks like his retirement could begin two years early. The election will be certified November 25.

We’re watching this race like crazy at THESTRANGER.COM/SLOG

a members-only club on Capitol Hill that serves liquor and lets folks smoke cigarettes. But on the first Monday of the month, tobacco is eschewed for cannabis. If the liquor board has its way, the club will be forced to stop. So where can a law-abiding tourist get high in this marijuana mecca? I found an answer, at least for one day of the year.

On December 6, Seattle Center will be the venue for a first-anniversary celebration of legalized cannabis in America. Last year, Seattle stoners spontaneously convened on the Space Needle lawn to celebrate legal pot, and this year, the event is actually permitted by the city, with privacy fencing and a smoking area.

The I-502 Anniversary Celebration is Fri Dec 6, 3–11 pm, Seattle Center Next 50 Pavilion, 21+, ID required. Admission is free and possession is legal. More info at www.420.sc.

THE SMARTEST PEOPLE IN SEATTLE POLITICS

They’re Obsessed with Smart Policy, Not Power

By Dominic Holden, Cienna Madrid, Anna Minard, Ansel Herz, Jen Graves, and Paul Constant

Having political smarts isn’t about brokering power. True political geniuses are bringing policy to the table and suturing it to the flesh and bones of our city. They’re working, usually behind the curtain, to change conversations about what’s possible.

Seattle is wealthy. It’s educated. And the voters are liberal. We’ve got everything it takes to become a national model for building mass transit, closing achievement gaps in schools, innovating environmental policy, and treating everyone equitably.

But way too often, the same cast of self-satisfied schmucks hogs the limelight while settling for a career of unmemorable civic housekeeping. For instance, the Seattle City Council lacks a vision for a citywide light-rail system while instead making noisy fanfare over largely inconsequential tweaks to the city budget. The politicians, consultants, and donors who keep city hall buzzing are not the geniuses in this town. Not that we are, either. Just like most of the brain-dead TV news shows and stenographers in the Seattle Times newsroom, The Stranger obsesses too much over pasty politicians and beats our head against the wall when they do stupid shit.

Here, we want to focus on the people who are making this city better—the people talking about substance. They’re the smartest people in town.

Lisa Daugaard

Like some sort of social alchemist, Lisa Daugaard turns crackheads into functioning members of society. How? By persuading cops to divert offenders to human services instead of jailing them. “You can rack up hundreds or thousands of arrests, convictions, and jail days, at a dreadful cost, while accomplishing nothing except employing a lot of lawyers,” she says. Sure, that sounds simple now. But diversion used to be considered questionable theory—stop arresting crackheads to make downtown safer?—and Daugaard has made a data-driven argument to make it a publicly funded practice. Daugaard, the deputy director of public defense firm the Defender Association, has played a central role in the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, which ran a pilot project in Belltown. Cops, neighborhood watchers, and business leaders laud the program for keeping low-level offenders off the street, and it’s also put Seattle at the national vanguard of sensible drug enforcement. A behind-the-scenes mastermind for more than a decade, she is essentially sidestepping the drug war without changing any

laws. It’s genius. Daugaard also led a project that measured racial disparity of policing and has fought to change onerous antitrespassing rules. Some may find her ideas incendiary, but her coalitions are powerful, and she stays cool as a cucumber. She is now attempting to muscle through a $1.7 million expansion of the diversion program to cover all of downtown, seeking funding from the Seattle City Council. “We intend to win this,” she says.

Sahar Fathi

Sahar Fathi is not yet 30 years old. But in the last three years, she’s founded the country’s first Middle Eastern law clinic and helped Council Member Mike O’Brien start Seattle’s wildly successful Safe Parking program—which connects people living in their cars with safe places to park, church bathrooms, and stable housing. Fathi now works for the city’s newly formed Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs. In this new role, Fathi says she realized that local ethnic media outlets are vital resources for our city’s non-native English speakers, so she tweaked city outreach contracts to require that city

consultants making more than $100,000 engage with ethnic media. Fathi is also helping the Seattle Police Department diversify its force: She identified ethnic newspapers with readerships that spoke English well enough to take the police officer test, and then found officers from each population’s home country, bought an ad featuring that officer, and had them interviewed by the newspaper. Thanks in part to Fathi’s work, 30 percent more people of color applied for police officer jobs in 2013 than in 2012.

Nick Hanauer

The morning after the election, NPR’s national news began with initiatives—specifically, the $15-an-hour minimum wage initiative in SeaTac, a story that included US Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s plans to raise the national minimum wage. Nick Hanauer, a local venture capitalist, was a leading force behind SeaTac’s initiative, and his goal, even if the measure loses, was to change the national conversation about worker pay. Obviously, it worked. Hanauer says this is a pivotal stop in reframing the national dialogue on wealth—one that liberal and conservative businesspeople alike should embrace: “People need to understand that if workers earn more, then business makes more. Then it’s a prosperity-based argument, and you are not saying, ‘We want to pay you a living wage because we feel sorry for you,’ but because it’s good for everybody.” Now there’s talk of running a similar initiative in Seattle next year. This is just one of Hanauer’s game-changers. He founded the group running an initiative to require background checks on guns, which, if it passes in 2014, shifts the national gun-control narrative that says the NRA always wins. We hate some stuff Hanauer does, too: He funded

deceptive ads that essentially blamed Mayor Mike McGinn for domestic-violence crimes, and he was a backer of charter schools. But what can we say? He successfully defeated McGinn and legalized charter schools. Hanauer is shaping this town. It helps that he’s rich, sure, but there are lots of rich folks who do nothing—so we’ll take the thoughtful, innovative rich guys any day!

Rahwa Habte

When Rahwa Habte was co-owner of Hidmo, the Central District restaurant became a venue for social justice organizing and independent art—which is just the beginning of Habte’s incredibly cool work. She now has a number of irons in the fire: She conducts outreach on behalf of the immigrant advocacy group OneAmerica, runs a new Hidmo—now a coalition of artists and activists—out of the historic Washington Hall community center, and is helping start a multilingual low-power FM radio station for immigrants and refugees. Her latest victory: getting funding to rehab Washington Hall into drafts of the city’s budget. Her next project is changing the composition of government. Getting younger, less wealthy, more diverse people to run for office is “a personal mission of mine,” she says, and she’s building a framework to do it. Habte’s genius is in bridging a host of disparate communities: often-isolated immigrants and refugees, the arts and culture scene, and mainstream government.

Ben Schiendelman

According to an October SurveyUSA poll, 68 percent of Seattle voters said they were “very” concerned about traffic and transportation, thereby making mobility the city’s top concern (more than support for or opposition to any politician). But still, the few light-rail lines we’ve approved are piecemeal—and there’s been little urgency for a citywide rail network. That is, until Seattle Subway came along, an advocacy group led by Ben Schiendelman (who also writes

for Seattle Transit Blog). Schiendelman mapped an inspiring complete light-rail network that could get folks from the South End to Ballard in less than 20 minutes at rush hour. It’s based on the city’s unfulfilled Transit Master Plan. Thanks to Schiendelman, the new transit goal is a comprehensive mass transit system built within one generation, not a century. “Instead of frustrated or checked out, a lot of people are excited,” Schiendelman says. His next steps: working with the legislature to authorize new funding sources that city voters can approve, and then, he says, “pass[ing] a ballot measure for expansion.”

Dorli Rainey

Eighty-seven-year-old Dorli Rainey rocketed to fame during Occupy Seattle, when a photograph of her pepper-sprayed in the face by police went viral, but she’s been a progressive rabble-rouser for decades. “I’ve done much better things than getting pepper-sprayed in my life,” she says, reminiscing about demonstrations in the 1970s that kept schools open and created bike paths.

Rainey is a principled, prescient voice. She’ll explain how the Occupy movement paved the way for Kshama Sawant’s socialist city council campaign, then, unprompted, switch gears and argue that Washington needs to get rid of its nuclear missiles. That said, Rainey acknowledges that the police treat her with kid gloves now, and she’s taking tactical advantage: She was (gingerly) arrested twice in recent months for protesting an unjust home foreclosure. After a lifetime of activist work, she’s honed herself into a progressive weapon, ready and willing to use herself as an icon to highlight institutional hypocrisies. She’s a local treasure.

Caroline Durocher

A soft-spoken 22-year-old, Caroline Durocher has become a leading local organizer in fast-food strikes that are getting national attention. Durocher says she worked in the low-wage industry because she couldn’t afford college, and after walkouts began, she even got arrested while demonstrating with Good Jobs Seattle. “It’s so much fun, I love it,” she says of recruiting other fast-food workers. “When I go to a store and talk to a worker, they’re experiencing the same things that I’m experiencing. And I get to help them find ways to be empowered and fight back.”

Melissa Westbrook

The best school watchdog in town handsdown is Melissa Westbrook, who runs the Seattle Schools Community Forum blog with cowriter Charlie Mas. Few citizen journalists operate with the tenacity of Westbrook, who practically submits public disclosure requests in her sleep. She has a telescopic picture of the school district, state, and country, from new curriculum standards to hazing incidents to the growing political influence of corporate education reformers. If she says to keep an eye on something—like folks spending big bucks in school board races—said thing is about to explode. Her next project: focusing on the mounting data collection by school districts on their students, which is the hip new thing in education, and means that reams of personally identifiable data—like adoption and discipline records—could be in the hands of outside contractors working with school districts. “These are children who have no way to protect themselves,” she says, namechecking the NSA. “Once you start down this road, I think that it’s going to get more and more tricky. Who’s going to see it? What are they going to use it for?”

Reuven Carlyle

Reuven Carlyle has heard enough goddamn whining from Republicans about taxes. These teabagging fucks say Seattle is the welfare queen, sucking money from the hardworking teats of country folk. Bullshit, says state representative Carlyle (he didn’t actually say “bullshit”). He’s been requesting data from the state’s Office of Financial Management for years. He’s revealed that socialistic, diverse, urban King County is a net contributor to the state while white-ass Republican counties, by and large, are siphoning our money. (King County only gets 62 cents back for every dollar it sends the state.) “The lack of open data about how taxes travel… creates a lowest common denominator sentiment that all taxes are too high, all services too low, all government too inefficient,” Carlyle wrote on his blog this summer. Now Carlyle and other lawmakers are working to chip away at undeserved corporate tax breaks and pass new revenue for schools, so hopefully the next generation is educated enough to ignore divisive right-wing bullshit about taxes.

Joe Fugere

With four restaurants and 180 employees, Tutta Bella owner Joe Fugere proves that taking care of your staff doesn’t hurt business. He was an early supporter of Seattle’s paid sick leave legislation—in fact, he’s voluntarily embraced paid time off at both his Issaquah and upcoming Bellevue locations. After talking to an employee about her worm bin, Fugere launched a food-composting program, which became the model for Seattle’s restaurant composting program. What’s next? Fugere can’t say. “Ninety percent of decisions we make, in terms of enhancing the work environment, don’t come from me,” Fugere says. “My biggest job most days is listening to my employees.”

Marsha Botzer

Marsha Botzer founded the Ingersoll Gender Center in 1977, when trans issues were in the dark. “Transgender is no longer unknown, alone, hidden. We live in the open world, with support and with real futures,” she says. In her tenure, Botzer has been involved in virtually every change in city and state law to help LGBT people. Antidiscrimination, antibullying, domestic partnership, marriage equality—all of it. “The great and real difference in my understanding is that now people do not fear gender-identity issues as being different, or dangerous, as they used to,” she reflects. “Of course, there are those that oppose, but they must do it willfully and with intent, for the evidence-based research and the real-world experience of trans clearly proclaim that transgender identity is simply one part of human diversity.”

Got Green

This Southeast Seattle group parks at the intersection where social justice meets the environment. They created two of the coolest projects ever to fly under your radar: (1) a program to match food stamp money dollar-for-dollar when it’s spent on fresh produce at farmers markets, and (2) a localhire program to guarantee some work in city contracts for local folks hardest hit in a divided economy. Thanks to their work, both projects now appear in drafts of the city budget. Next up: an as-yet-unannounced “Young Workers in the Green Economy” project. Expect to see whatever issues they raise to be seriously considered by estab-

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

PHOENIX

WETHINKCAPITOLHILLCOULDUSEMOREMAGIC.

COMICS & GAMES 113 Broadway E, Seattle

lishment politicians within a year.

Kathleen Taylor

You’re probably a Kathleen Taylor fanboy even if you don’t know it. Legal pot? Gay marriage? Police reform? All roads lead back to Taylor, who has led the ACLU of Washington since the 1970s and deploys her powerhouse to define political priorities. She led the effort to pass Initiative 502, which legalized marijuana, was among the quarterbacks working to pass marriage equality, and was the chief signatory of the letter that requested the US Department of Justice to probe the Seattle Police Department for misconduct. A mastermind and field marshal in her office, Taylor is essentially a regular activist wearing a superhero cape. “There is nothing more fun than reading a story of outrageous injustice in the paper in the morning, and then going to work and saying, ‘We are going to do something about that!’” she says. Her motto: “Read, fume, act.” Tackling overzealous surveillance, keeping Catholic morals out of hospitals, and stopping racial bias in schools are her next projects. Does that sound like more than one person can tackle? Maybe if it weren’t Kathleen Taylor.

Sean Whitcomb

Who has the shittiest job in town? The dude in charge of public relations for our minoritybeating, now-obeying-a-federal-court-orderthat-makes-them-cut-it-the-fuck-out police department. That dude is Sergeant Sean Whitcomb, who owns up to the department’s mistakes—“Public trust in the Seattle Police Department has eroded significantly,” he concedes—while showcasing the good cops (like the ones catching runaway murderers in less than a day). Also under Whitcomb’s watch: that hilarious, nationally recognized Twitter feed, an enthusiasm for pot legalization that included handing out Doritos at Hempfest, and a snappy crime blog. He’s a true diplomat between a disturbed bureaucracy and a skeptical public—and he’s mending very old wounds with honesty and humor. What’s next for Whitcomb? “More innovation in communication. More transparency and access. More Harry Potter memes.”

Sandra Jackson-Dumont

“If you wanna be involved, be involved,” says Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Seattle’s busiest ninja at the intersection of art, social justice, and education. “Policy is about people doing things.” Spreading a gospel of engagement and the tactics of what she calls “covert curriculum,” Jackson-Dumont teaches youth, convenes panels of thinkers in policy-influencing circles, and provides stages for artists of color. Her main posts: head of education at Seattle Art Museum, chair of education at the Seattle Arts Commission, and board president of the Central District Forum for Arts & Ideas. Her main goal: “To create more policy workers.”

Sightline Institute

Name the topic, and the sharpest environmental talking points can be traced to the Seattle-based Sightline Institute. The 20-year-old think tank excels at meticulously thought-out, well-researched arguments. This 11-person brain trust came up with the idea behind Walk Score, which rates neighborhoods based on the amenities within walking distance. They helped make car-sharing legal in Washington State and drafted the state’s neighborhood safe streets legislation, which allows cities to set their own speed limits. Their book Tax Shift inspired British Columbia to institute the most aggressive carbon taxing policy in the world. And then there’s their work documenting the potential environmental, economic, and cultural ramifications of coal trains running through the Pacific Northwest, which contributed to the state Department of Ecology’s decision

to study an array of environmental impacts before granting permits to a coal export terminal outside of Bellingham. “People who are concerned about these issues need to have more than just talking points—they need really good facts,” explains Clark WilliamsDerry, Sightline’s program director. “We’re the nerdy kids in the back of the room whispering the answers to our friends—or anyone who’ll listen.” Next up? Tackling the affordable housing crisis. (They literally just wrote the book on it—Unlocking Homes.) “Housing rules are standing in the way of affordable housing,” Clark says, citing microhousing, mother-in-law apartments, backyard cottages, and Seattle’s onerous roommate rules. “One way to make housing affordable is to make affordable housing legal.”

Tim Harris

The newspaper industry is thriving—at least in the world of Tim Harris, founding director of the homeless advocacy newspaper Real Change. The struggling paper vendors keep some of the proceeds, and the buyers get a dose of perspective from Seattle’s streets. In running this operation, Harris does a staggering number of things at the same time: providing social services, running a media outlet—a newspaper that is growing steadily—while most newspapers are shrinking and closing, and parlaying that into a political body that converts the most downand-out scapegoats in society into a virtually unassailable constituency. In November, vendors started selling in Kitsap County and East King County, and in January, the newspaper will also go digital. “We’ve been working with a team of volunteer developers at Google, who are creating an app for iPhone and Android,” Harris explains.

Kate Joncas

Nobody represents Seattle’s moneyed establishment more than Kate Joncas—and we can’t imagine anyone doing it more effectively. As president of the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA), a conservative business lobby and neighborhood association, Joncas operates some city council members like remotecontrol toys and makes certain news reporters transcribe her group’s agenda in print, all to the effect of making downtown more appealing to her members (and shoppers). For instance, she started an alarming meme about downtown crime rising when, in fact, it’s mostly down. (Those are the basics for business lobbies.) But Joncas’s true brilliance is getting her members to think outside the box. Two decades into her role, Joncas is uniquely positioned to green-light progressive experiments that initially scare constituents, such as a wet house where chronic alcoholics could drink. “The board said we may not like our tax dollars being spent this way, but let’s give it a shot,” she recalls. But once it was implemented, downtown inebriation dropped. The DSA has ultimately given the nod to plenty of controversial programs, including a needle exchange for junkies, a hygiene center close to the symphony hall, and a program that diverts chronic drug offenders into treatment instead of jail. “When you can get over the assumptions—and I think that goes both ways—about what the other side is like, you can find things to talk about,” she says. Joncas says raising red flags about downtown crime got the result she wanted: an innovative Center City Initiative roundtable, which includes Joncas and historical rivals, to collaborate on programs like the ones mentioned above. “You don’t have to agree with somebody on ev-

erything, but at the end of the day, we have the same vision for the people involved and for the neighborhood.”

Lisa Herbold

Nobody—absolutely nobody—knows more about the Seattle City Council than Lisa Herbold. She’s the senior staffer for Council Member Nick Licata, and she’s encyclopedic on every policy from protecting tenants and to helping the poor, to serving the homeless and balancing the budget. You name it. She knows it. Which policies does she shape? Virtually anything progressive passed in our city has Herbold’s fingerprints on it.

Randy Engstrom

Nobody paid much mind to the city’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs in recent years— unless you count snoozing as an art form— but that changed when Randy Engstrom was named director last year. Engstrom has saved and improved arts education, established a program to preserve and create spaces for artists in neighborhoods, and is working on building a single coherent cultural plan for Seattle for the first time in two decades. Engstrom’s revitalized the office by increasing the visibility of its programs and slickly rebranding the organization as the much-less-clunky Office of Arts and Culture. Engstrom does this job like he was born for it.

NARAL Pro-Choice Washington

The ladies of NARAL canvass rural Washington educating women on crisis pregnancy centers (religious anti-abortion clinics masquerading as medical clinics). They run an abortion access network that connects red state and rural women, who must come to Seattle for abortions, with volunteers offering housing, emotional support, and transportation. And right now, they’re helping combat Catholic hospital mergers—which could restrict women’s access to things like birth control, tubal ligations, and abortion—by working on an interactive map of all Washington hospitals showing exactly what procedures they provide. Kick-ass.

Seattle Solidarity Network

The City of Seattle has rarely bothered to enforce laws against bosses stealing wages from workers (e.g., withholding paychecks, forcing employees to work off the clock, or refusing to pay overtime), a crime that primarily affects low-wage earners and people of color. But since 2007, Seattle Solidarity Network, abbreviated SeaSol, has been responding to calls to their hotline about precisely that sort of crime. Aggrieved workers attend SeaSol meetings, deliver a demand to the party that wronged them, and help organize escalating direct actions—pickets, phone blasts, and more—until justice is served. For example, this year the group won back $11,140 in unpaid wages owed to two undocumented immigrants who weren’t getting state-required breaks or earning the minimum wage in food service jobs. If the city council is serious about protecting workers’ rights, it should look to SeaSol’s example.

Monisha Harrell

After years of behind-the-scenes political work, such as running her uncle Bruce’s two successful bids for city council and organizing a Central District community group to lobby for affordable housing, this year Monisha Harrell elevated her profile as the new chair of the LGBTQ advocacy group Equal Rights Washington. The 38-year-old small-business owner plans on using her platform to help home-

less gay youth. “Approximately 40 percent of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ,” Harrell says. “I’d love for these kids’ biggest worry to be whether or not they can get married. Instead, they’re worried about basic needs like sleeping under a roof.” Harrell and the ERW are throwing their weight behind a $750,000 King County Council proposal that would pay for facilities and services—including counseling and work training—to help these kids out.

Hollis Wong-Wear

Hollis Wong-Wear, a young artist and woman of color, is bedrock, not decoration. Her band the Flavr Blue opened Bumbershoot this year, and she had a voice backstage on the Bumbershoot advisory commission. “I’m firmly anti-oppression,” she says, whether working as a poetry slam coach, on the board of directors at 4Culture, on the Seattle Center advisory commission, as a hiphop/dance/ jazz/soul/improvisational performer, or singing the hook on Macklemore’s “White Walls.” Macklemore credits her with inspiring him to write the song in the first place. In other words, powerful dudes actually listen to her. She says, “In the conversations that happen in higher civic circles, people just need to chill, and listen, and bring more people to the table—and forego the table, and be humbly welcomed into other people’s tables.”

Tenants Union of Washington State

A full 52 percent Seattle’s residents are renters, yet state law treats property owners like demigods and renters like serfs. So the Tenants Union, a membership-based organization, has been scrapping to shift that power balance since 1977. Executive director Jon Grant says that they’re behind “every tenant protection bill that’s been passed in Seattle” since they opened (like the rental housing inspection bill that took five years to pass and, finally, makes landlords responsible for keeping property up to code). Hurrah!

Joel Connelly

Seattle had a journalism genocide a few years back, and lots of veteran reporters were laid off while wet-behind-the-ears baby reporters kept their jobs. What the fuck? Reporters still had to report—but they also had to tweet, blog, write persuasive essays, and post on Facebook at the same time (for less pay!). One old-guard veteran, Joel Connelly, took to it like a reporter to whiskey. Now at Seattlepi.com, Connelly might seem politically stodgy (everything reminds him of an anecdote from 1972), but he’s got encyclopedic knowledge of Seattle history (that anecdote from 1972 is surprisingly incisive). Blogging, posting on Twitter, and engaging in Facebook wars, he’s been particularly dogged on supporting social justice and environmental policy—and getting attention from Washington, DC. Connelly recounts a recent battle: “I brought up the proposed San Juan Islands National Monument on every Obama fundraising visit. The irritation of the White House at being criticized for the president’s ‘cash and dash’ visits was palpable. Seattlepi.com was blackballed from all press pools. Still… by God, Obama did eventually designate the monument.” And he’s not quitting: “I’m not ready to hang it up. I cherish the work, I cherish my workmates. I cherish working in a not-yet-used-up corner of America. It’s a place that sets social trends for the rest of the country.”

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STRANGER SUGGESTS

Point Break at Add-a-Ball

GAMES

This place is fucking magic! For one thing, it’s invisible to douche-bros. Even on the Saturday before Halloween, when the entirety of Fremont was choked with Axe body spray and racist costumes and terrifying shit-facedness, Add-a-Ball was its usual chilled-out happy nest. For another, they just opened up a huge back room named Point Break, with a whole wall of diner-booth tables so you can hang out forever and a shit-ton of new games—including the weirdest/awesomest pinball I’ve ever seen: the gravity-defying Orbitor. Bring your laundry quarters! (Add-a-Ball, 315 N 36th St #2B, add-a-ball.com, 4 pm–1 am, 21+) ANNA MINARD

Joe Sacco BOOKS

We at The Stranger are huge fans of Joe Sacco’s fearless comic-book journalism. In locations like Palestine and Sarajevo, Sacco has interviewed the kinds of people—ordinary kids having fun at a dance club, hit men who’ve seen too much—that traditional journalists ignore. His new historical book, The Great War, consists of a single, wordless scroll of paper depicting a panoramic view of the Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916. It’s a narrative unlike any you’ve ever seen, a chance to get as close as you’ll ever want to the front lines of World War I. (Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, townhallseattle.org, 7:30 pm, $5) PAUL CONSTANT

Screaming Females, Upset

MUSIC

Sick show alert! As in siiiiick, not like the endless cold everyone in Seattle has. Speaking of everyone in Seattle, I think I can safely say we’re all excited for this show! But if you’re from Bellevue, let me explain: It’s the first tour for grunge-tinted poppunk trio Upset (Ali Koehler from Vivian Girls/Best Coast, Patty Schemel from Hole, Jenn Prince from La Sera), and we’ve all got their debut, She’s Gone, on repeat. We’ve also missed New Jersey trio Screaming Females, who still find ways to make rock music squirm with shredded heaps of tension and intriguing melody. (Black Lodge, 9 pm, all ages) EMILY NOKES

Thundercat

The Habit

THEATER

There are only two types of people in the world: those who have seen the Habit and those who need to see the Habit. This crew—which includes Stranger Genius John Osebold, theater impresario Mark Siano, and the too-seldom-seen but painfully hilarious David Swidler—writes fast, tightly woven, brain-vivifying comedy shows. Their sketches, some only a few seconds long, hook and loop into each other in ingenious ways, collectively amplifying the effect of any given joke. The Habit is silly, but it’s dexterous silliness. (Bathhouse Theater, 7312 W Green Lake Dr N, brownpapertickets.com, 8 pm, $19, through Dec 1) BRENDAN KILEY

‘Peru’ Community Day ART

With gold, ceramics, paintings, photography, and more, Peru: Kingdoms of the Sun and Moon is about as big as art exhibitions get. It starts with ancient material, hits the Spanish colonial period hard in a room that will blow your eyes out, and stretches all the way to the 20th-century indigenismo movement. Today, SAM is hosting a free celebration of native arts—Robert Davidson, a Haida artist, is featured in a separate exhibition—with tours, performances, workshops, and hands-on art-making across the whole place. Get there early and you don’t have to pay. (Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, seattleartmuseum.org, 10 am–3 pm, entry to Peru free to first 500 people, then $19.50) JEN GRAVES

The former bassist for Suicidal Tendencies makes some of the country’s most advanced electronic music? Huh? But Stephen Bruner has made that unlikely transition with aplomb, releasing two stellar albums for Flying Lotus’s renowned Brainfeeder label. Thundercat recontextualizes the flamboyant virtuosity of fusion phenoms like Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke for the Low End Theory crowd. His soulful, falsetto vocals pirouette over complex yet sensuous bass lines and beats, creating a bizarrely romantic strain of progressive electronica Return to forever—again. (Barboza, 925 E Pike St, thebarboza.com, 8 pm, $15 adv, 21+) DAVE SEGAL

‘God Loves Uganda’ FILM

Roger Ross Williams’s documentary charts some terrifying cross-global cause and effect. In America, Christian extremists send young missionaries to Uganda, to spread the gospel of God’s antigay love. Meanwhile, antigay extremist Scott Lively inflames the Ugandan parliament with tales of how gays caused the Holocaust and warns of the worldwide homosexual takeover endorsed by Barack Obama. The result: Ugandans show their love of Christ and moral disdain for the West by executing their gay brothers and sisters. This is happening. As I type this, Scott Lively is facing a federal court for crimes against humanity. Go see God Loves Uganda. (SIFF Film Center, Seattle Center, siff.net, 6:30 pm, $11, Nov 15–20) DAVID SCHMADER

Vin Expresse

Vin Presse is the in-house wine shop of the French cafe/civic treasure that is Café Presse, which means you can get their carefully chosen, high-value wines to go at even lower prices than to stay. And Vin Expresse is Café Presse’s happy hour, which means that from 4 to 6 p.m. every day, you may enjoy the wine in-house at to-go prices—that’s from $8 to $14 a bottle—with treats like $1.50 oysters on the half shell or a snack version of a croque monsieur. The goodness of this needs no further explanation. (Café Presse, 1117 12th Ave, cafepresseseattle.com, daily 4–6 pm) BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT

ARTS

Bombed into pulp…below Amadeus on acid …22 Fuckhead…22

“I was thinking of it as a mass event,” he said. Instead of highlighting the consequences for individuals, “I was thinking of the species as a whole in this context—the context of war.” But every inch of the densely inked, 24-foot scroll contains a little anecdote of individuality: soldiers brushing and feeding the cavalry horses, standing in line for some soup and a roll, napping, contemplatively smoking pipes and cigarettes, writing what might be the last letter, shitting in trench latrines, shirtless and sweating in the summer heat as they haul around heavy equipment, loading shells into howitzers, smiling and doffing their helmets at a camera as they march to the trenches in the afternoon, trying to sleep in the trenches the night before the battle

“I’m not an objective journalist—I’m an honest one.”

(some were so crammed in they had to sleep standing up), smiling naively while chugging their rum rations just before the charge, climbing over the trenches and into the field.

BOOKS

Slaughterhouse One

Joe Sacco’s Intricate Panorama of the Bloodiest Day in British Military History

BY BRENDAN KILEY

Two years ago, local cartoonist Eroyn Franklin published Detained, a 26-foot, single-pane scroll about immigrants stuck in the confusing, indefinite limbo of an immigrant detention center. Detained folds up like an accordion—it can fit on a bookshelf or a bedside table—but hits hardest when it’s fully unfurled, one long document about living behind bricks and bars, feeling stranded, frustrated, and bored.

Shortly after it was published, Franklin told me she chose that format to communicate the interminability of life in a detention center— the physical presence of the “book,” stretching across a reader’s living-room floor and into the next room, made the story land harder. Last week, W.W. Norton published a similar experiment by Portland-based cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco. The Great War: July 1, 1916 (Norton, $35) is a 24-foot narrative panorama of the first 24 hours of the Battle of the Somme. It was the bloodiest day in British military history, with 60,000 killed or wounded, many of them young men who’d never seen combat and had no idea what they were walking into. “I’m interested in flesh meeting the machine,” Sacco said in an interview last week. “That’s what the Battle of the Somme epitomizes.”

Douglas Haig ordered an ocean of young men to climb out of their trenches, run across a field, and finish off the few Germans left alive. Things didn’t turn out that way. Many German soldiers survived, as did their machine guns, which opened fire on the British, turning the field into a slaughterhouse. But even after it was clear that there had been a miscalculation, with 30,000 casualties in the first hour—almost twice as many British soldiers were killed in that hour as all the American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined—British officers wouldn’t pull the plug. Soldiers kept charging in waves and falling in piles.

Sacco poured months into studying photographs and oral accounts of the battle, trying to get the historical details just right—the bridles on the horses, the configuration of the latrines, just how the soldiers climbed up and out of the trenches (they used ladders). But his densely drawn scroll, teeming with bodies, has a surprising degree of human intimacy, giving The Great War the feeling of a grand Shakespearean tragedy. We know how it ends, but it’s easy to get swept away in the telling and in the minutiae of each small step toward an awful inevitability.

Sacco has built a career out of chronicling armed conflicts and the human suffering that follows when governments and economies get into serious fights with each other. He’s reported from and drawn about Palestine, Bosnia, Iraq, enclaves of African immigrants that washed up on the shores of Malta (where he grew up), and some of the most economically devastated places in the United States, including Camden, New Jersey, and the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

PREVIEW

Joe Sacco

Thurs Nov 14, Town Hall, 7:30 pm, $5

That day—which some consider the bloody baptism of modern warfare—is infamous for its hideous mistakes. The British army in northern France had been pounding the German front with artillery for days. In a companion essay to The Great War, historian and journalist Adam Hochschild writes that gunners’ ears began to bleed, and “the rumble could be heard as far away as Hampstead Heath in London.” Confident that the enemy had been bombed into pulp, British general

Sacco uses drawing—which shows some early influence from R. Crumb, but is tighter, riding the line between expressive and photo-realistic—to tell richer, more detailed stories than most journalists can. A newspaper might report that X number of people are living in a refugee camp, but Sacco shows us the shapes of their eyes and ears, their clothes, their kids, their cookware—he makes people seem like people.

Sacco rejects the myth of objective journalism, but doesn’t call himself an advocacy journalist, either—he’s just a journalist who admits that he has opinions. “If I’m sympathetic to a subject,” he said, “I’ll still see their warts and show their warts. I’m not an objective journalist—I’m an honest one.” The Great War, he said, was an attempt to switch gears toward something more remote.

Then comes the carnage, which Sacco depicts with stark white space for smoke and pointillist explosions vaporizing dirt and body parts. Eight feet and a few inches later, we see the field hospital with its lines of stretchers holding mangled men. One of them sits up, his entire face wrapped in a bandage, with his arms straight in front of him like he’s trying to fend off an invisible enemy. Nearby, tucked away behind an ambulance, a man leans against a tree and vomits. The final image is of men with their shirtsleeves rolled up, digging mass graves, while a chaplain looks on with a blank expression.

The intense detail of The Great War, all those individual expressions and gestures in that mass of soldiers, seems like homage. A friend, who’s also an illustrator, said it reminded her of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC—long, winding, crammed with visual reminders that every soldier, killed by every other solider, is somebody’s kid.

Sacco explained the detail as “showing the organization, the amount of work that goes into a battle like this. You get to the front, go over the top, and all the orderliness becomes chaos, breaking over the machine of war.”

DANCE

Mass Movement

Crystal Pite’s Bug Ballet and Jiri Kylian’s Classical Comedy

BY MELODY DATZ

IREVIEW

Kylian + Pite

Pacific Northwest Ballet at McCaw Hall Through Nov 17

n the opening seconds of Crystal Pite’s Emergence, a dancer lies on the floor, twitching and arching her shoulder blades in the throes of some struggle. Is she hatching? Or dying? Her male partner hovers over her delicate body, eventually helping her up and guiding her toward a brightly lit tube cut into the upstage wall, just big enough for two bodies to squeeze through. They disappear into nothingness—out of the hatchery and into the hive? Out of the hive and into the void?— their sinews and arms shuddering.

That is one of the few moments in Emergence, the final piece in Pacific Northwest

LOOSE LIPS

ARTS GOSSIP, ETC. BY WHISTLER’S MOTHER

• Last Saturday, 80-year-old electronic-music innovator Morton Subotnick and visual artist Lillevan filled Town Hall with a panoply of otherworldly Buchla synthesizer emanations and surreal digital imagery. It was the best show anyone’s ever seen. But an altercation erupted between two white males with a lot of gray hair, one of them—wearing a Utilikilt—taking issue with the other’s shooting video of the performance. They took their fight outside, where police broke it up.

• Jason Lajeunesse and David Meinert have signed a lease for the Comet and plan to reopen it early next year, with live music, pool tables, pinball, karaoke, and, for the first time ever, food. They also co-own Big Mario’s and Lost Lake. If these guys can turn a gay bathhouse into a diner, they can probably get the Comet clean enough to serve food.

• The best-selling local artist at this past weekend’s Affordable Art Fair at Seattle Center was relative unknown Joe Rudko. His ($300ish) transformations of old photographs into graphic puzzles kept disappearing from the shelves like missing teeth. They were displayed with Jared Bender’s wall sculptures made of wood and pressed denim, also lovely, at Sharon Arnold’s “Recent Grads” booth. Dealers overall gave mixed reports, some celebrating, others glumly calculating losses. Hearts broke to see lingering unsold art by Jeffry Mitchell (puppy painting!), Claire Cowie, Emily Gherard, and Timea Tihanyi, while lesser stuff was carried off. Then again, if you want justice, don’t go to an art fair.

• Congratulations to local author G. Willow Wilson, who in one week managed to win a World Fantasy Award for her debut novel, Alif the Unseen, and also set the internet ablaze with the news that she’s creating a teenage girl Muslim superhero for Marvel Comics.

• Stranger managing editor Bethany Jean Clement has an essay in the just-published Best Food Writing 2013 that originally appeared in A&P, our art and performance quarterly, about the increasingly obsolete cloak-and-dagger conventions of restaurant reviewing. It begins, “Long ago, in a time before Facebook, anonymous restaurant reviewers roamed the earth,” and it contains the saddest scene of a restaurant employee trying to mix a tableside Caesar salad ever committed to paper. This is the fifth year Clement’s work has been selected for Best Food Writing

• A fire last month in an apartment above C Art Gallery—the anchor tenant in the Artspace Hiawatha Lofts—activated the gallery’s sprinklers and dumped tons of water, damaging art and forcing the gallery to close. Gallery director Cheryl Shaw hopes to restore the space, reopen in January, and reimburse the artists for lost work; donate to the cause by searching for C Art Gallery on indiegogo.com.

• Throughout the city, emerging artists continued to emerge. From public restrooms, from elevators, from hot tubs. From large, green, speckled eggs nestled below freeway overpasses. From fog and from alleyways and sometimes straight from the ether, they emerged.

By William Shakespeare

Directed by George Mount

Ballet’s current program, that highlights individuals. As the pair fades into the blackness, 19 female dancers swarm the stage with bourrées—miniscule steps on pointe that make it look as though they are hovering. The collective tapping of their hard pointe shoes creates an eerie buzzing sound, like a hive of bees. Some of the dancers are faceless in black hoods, the women costumed in black leotards with winglike ruffles hanging from their backsides, and the men in tight black pants, topless except for lines of paint, like the veins of wings, on their arms and shoulders.

Pite, who is based in Vancouver and whose work has been seen at On the Boards, says the piece was inspired by Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by popular-science author Steven Johnson. The choreography is based in classical ballet, but with lots of dramatic arms that sometimes flail upward and sometimes curl into claws, as one might make when imitating a dying cockroach. The cast is huge,

with as many as 38 dancers on the stage at any given time, but they perform different steps in small clusters, heightening the hive imagery as groups complete their tasks to the same rhythm of Owen Belton’s score, an ethereal electronic composition of clicking percussion and slow, sweeping melodies. The finale is gigantic, all 38 dancers reaching their arms up and out together while whispering the counts of the music in a group hiss—they are a swarm, a family, an illustration of every society in the animal kingdom.

The previous three pieces of the evening’s program—two of them PNB audience favorites—are by Czech choreographer Jiri Kylian, the artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theater. Set to Mozart, Petite Mort and Sechs Tänze bring out the passion and chutzpah in their dancers while playing with themes of gender, reverence, and rule breaking, sometimes to the point of slapstick. Petite Mort begins with six shirtless men in high-waisted underpants holding fencing foils. They manipulate the foils around their bodies before collapsing on the floor facedown, backs arched in exaggerated subservience. They run upstage, grab a huge dark drape, then run downstage and back up again, sweeping the enormous cloth like a cape to reveal the crouched bodies of six female dancers. What follows is a delicate ballet with occasionally surprising, very un-balletic movements. Men grab their partners by the waist while the women flail their legs around, knees bent like captured frogs. In the middle of graceful pas de deux, partners take turns swinging each other between their legs, bearing the other’s weight in a break from the typical man-sup-

ports-woman role.

Sechs Tänze is a parody of classical culture: Shirtless male dancers cower under powdered wigs, and women are bound in corsets and long white skirts—basically, 18thcentury underwear. Framed period-style dresses roll around the stage in both pieces and are alternately used as costumes, props, dance partners, or standing homage to unnecessary, outdated opulence. After the high jinks of the first two pieces, Kylian’s Forgotten Land brings a precipitous drop in energy, despite the dramatic backdrop painting of a stormy horizon over a muted landscape. Set to Benjamin Britten’s ominous Sinfonia da Requiem, six couples begin with their backs to the audience, stepping slowly upstage, toward what seems like their inevitable demise in the looming ocean. Occasionally, one of them looks back toward the audience, fighting the flow of the group’s movement, and they begin a long series of sweeping pas de deux. Their skirts and blouses billow through the air, but these baroque and virtuosic gestures are not as thrilling as Kylian’s wittier Amadeus-on-acid pieces. Still, Pite’s swallowing up of individuality within her frantic and repetitive study of group uniformity is the most thrilling of all.

THEATER

He Stoops to Conquer

The Unnerving Junkie Comedy of Jesus’ Son

BY BRENDAN KILEY

Junkie writers—or at least those who write openly about being junkies—tend to share a particular sense of humor. Early William S. Burroughs, Lou Reed, Denis Johnson, and the others often tell their harrowing stories with a flatness, a deadpan way of revealing details that puts the mundane (the color of a car’s upholstery, for example) on the same emotional plane as the extraordinary (the man bleeding to death in the backseat). That staunch refusal to let any fact or emotion rise above any other, that calm insensitivity, creates an unnerving kind of comedy.

REVIEW

Jesus’ Son

Book-It Repertory Theatre at West of Lenin Through Nov 24

For the most part, Book-It’s stage adaptation of Jesus’ Son—Johnson’s 1992 collection of quasi-autobiographical fragments—hits that chord precisely. In one scene, our scruffy narrator Fuckhead (Scott Ward Abernethy) and his big lug of a pal Georgie (Zach Adair) are working the night shift in an emergency room. They sort files, mop floors, and eat all the pills they can steal. Early one morning, a guy with a knife sticking out of his eye (Kevin McKeon) strolls in. The doctors and nurses are aghast, but the druggies and the patient are incongruously mellow. “We’d better get you lying down!” one of the nurses exclaims. “Okay,” the man sighs, “I’m certainly ready for something like that.”

The eight-person cast, directed by Josh Aaseng, plays this sad parade of losers with glimmers of human decency, if faint ones, in their criminally negligent hearts. Though Jesus’ Son occasionally succumbs to overeager theatricality—with a few colorful descriptions delivered in that overemphatic slampoetry way that sometimes happens when actors speak prose—it mostly does right by Johnson’s short, plainspoken, and difficult cult classic.

This is dark, dirty, strange Symbolism with Art Nouveau flourishes—we’re talking Satan and hellfire and naked ladies and beautiful, swirling patterns. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth and the 120th anniversary of his American debut, Munich Secession cofounder Franz von Stuck—the painter of Sin finally gets his due in his first monographic exhibition in the United States. Free. Tues-Sun. Through Feb 2. 704 Terry Ave 622-9250.

HENRY ART GALLERY David Hartt: Stray Light: The photographer David Hartt got inside the iconic 1971 headquarters of Johnson Publishing in Chicago—the launching pad for Jet and Ebony magazines— right before the building was sold. The photographs, pictures, and sculptures he created are deadpan memorial documents of a specific time of pride and purpose. Through Jan 5. Haegue Yang: Anachronistic Layers of Dispersion: South Korean–born artist Haegue Yang grew up in an environment where you closed the blinds when company came over, just in case the government was watching. Now, she makes installations entirely out of artfully arranged, dangling Venetian blinds. They’re swaying constellations of pretty surveillance. Through Jan 9. Jason Dodge’s sculptures are stories. They are: what’s left after 19 farm animals spend time in the galleries, pillows slept on only by ornithologists, pillows slept on only by acrobats, linens from a local hotel linen service changed weekly, and rolls of newsprint that will become actual pages of the Seattle Times during the run of the exhibition. Through Jan 26. $10 suggested. Wed-Sun. 4100 15th Ave NE, 543-2280.

Gallery Openings

BLINDFOLD GALLERY

Sue Danielson : A solo show from the Seattle painter who previously contributed to this gallery’s group show Water Free. Artist talk Fri Nov 21, 7 pm. Wed-Sun. Through Dec 7. 1718 E Olive Way, Ste A 328-5100. FACÉRÈ JEWELRY ART GALLERY Holiday Show : Gems and stones on rings and earrings. Also, there are Lego earrings. Free. Reception Wed Dec 4, 5 pm. Mon-Sat. Through Dec 31. 1420 Fifth Ave, Suite #108 624-6768.

RADAR HAIR & RECORDS Super Kaleid : A group show that includes screenprints, paintings, and photography. It describes itself as “a modern look at psychedelia and general creepiness.” With video and performance pieces that will only be on view during the opening. Free. Reception Sat Nov 16, 6 pm. Nov 16- Jan 31. 2724 1st Ave S, Ste A, 402-4549.

TWILIGHT GALLERY Holiday Miniature Art

Extravaganza: Forty artists and jewelers have created pieces and things that are small. Small enough to buy and give as gifts. The event will happen in parallel at Ghost Gallery on Denny, and at All City Coffee in Georgetown. Free. Reception Thurs Nov 14, 6-9 pm. Mon-Wed-Sun. Through Jan 6. 4306 SW Alaska St. Events

21ST CENTURY: 21ST ANNUAL ART MARATHON AND AUCTION

Twenty-four hours of solid artmaking, with a few hours of partying thrown in for good measure. Participating artists include Curtis Ashby, Jessica Dodge, Ronald Hall, and several others. Auction to follow. CoCA Ballard , 6413 Seaview Ave NW, 728-1980. cocaseattle.org. Free. Marathon 9 am Thurs Nov 14-9 am Fri Nov 15; party Thurs Nov 14, 7-9 pm; gala Fri Nov 15, 5:30-9 pm. Thurs Nov 14. ARTIST AS ENTREPRENEUR A conversation led by John Boylan about how entrepreneurialism affects artists and

art. Vermillion, 1508 11th Ave, 709-9797. vermillionseattle.com. Free. Tues Nov 19 at 7 pm.

BLITZ

The monthly art walk, this time featuring Steven Miller’s Wild Boys at Vermillion, Holly Andres at the Photo Center Northwest, A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words at LTD., Brittany Kusa at Cupcake Royale, and the holiday miniatures show at Ghost. Capitol Hill, Capitol Hill. Free. Thurs Nov 14, 5-9 pm.. Second Thurs.

DREAMLAND

SINKHOLE 3

A night of improvisational performance and visual art—a “controlled demolition of mediums using a wrecking ball of improv”—by Graham Downing and Ian Schempp, in another artist’s Beacon Hill home–based gallery. Also including artists Jana Brevick, Doug Newman, Robert Hardgrave, and Taylor Pinton. Andralamusya, 4831 47th Ave S. Free. Wed Nov 13 at 7 pm.

INSIDE ART

Barbara Earl Thomas, painter, is also a mesmerizing storyteller. You’ll hear from her, encaustic painter Stephanie Hargrave, and poet/artist Alan Lau, on the subjects of “Imagery & Art.” Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, 652-4255. townhallseattle.org. $5. Tues Nov 19 at 7:30 pm.

visualart@thestranger.com

READINGS

Wed 11/13

PETER BAKER

Baker’s new book is a biography of the relationship between George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. It’s nonfiction, so there’s no sex stuff. If you want to read Bush/Cheney slash fiction, I’m selling an erotica book titled Heartless Big Daddy and the Ruination of Little Boy that I’m willing to let go for cheap. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, 634-3400. townhallseattle.org. $5. 6 pm.

ALLIE BROSH

Brosh’s MS Paint comics are funny, sad, and true. Her new book Hyperbole and a Half collects many of the best comics that have appeared on her blog of the same name, and adds a few new ones, too. University Temple United Methodist Church 1415 NE 43rd St, 632-5163. utemple.org. $16.99. 7 pm.

NICOLA GRIFFITH

Local author Griffith’s Hild is a novel about a young woman who rises to meet her destiny. It should appeal to you Game of Thrones/Lord of the Rings fans. Hugo House 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030. Free. 7 pm.

DAVID FOLKENFLIK

Murdoch’s World is a biography of News Corp and of Rupert Murdoch, both of which are living demonstrations of the old saw about how there’s a sucker born every minute. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, 652-4255. townhallseattle.org. $5. 7:30 pm.

Thurs 11/14

PEGGY KELSEY

A photogrpapher interviewed women in one of the worst places of the world and wrote about her experiences in Gathering Strength: Conversations With Afghan Women Town Hall , 1119 Eighth Ave, 652-4255. townhallseattle.org. $5. 6 pm.

RICHARD KURIN

Kurin’s beautiful new book chooses 101 objects—from “George Washington’s sword to the Enola Gay bomber”—that exemplify American history. This is a fun way to approach a broad subject. University Book Store, 4326 University Way NE, 634-3400. bookstore.washington.edu. Free. 7 pm.

JOE SACCO

See review, page 21. Town Hall , 1119 Eighth Ave, 6524255. townhallseattle.org. $5. 7:30 pm.

Fri 11/15

THE PAPER CHASE

This entry in the Hugo Literary Series features two big names on the national literary scene (Dorothy Allison and Stephen

Elliott), one up-and-coming local author (Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum), and a fancy musician (Levi Fuller) on the theme of paper chases. Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 322-7030. $25. 7:30 pm.

Mon 11/18

REBECCA SIVE

Are you sick of idiots bitching about how they can’t make political change because the system is rigged? Sive’s Every Day is Election Day is about how to win political battles, especially for women. UW School of Law UW Campus, 634-3400. Free. 3:30 pm.

JONATHAN MILES

Miles’s novel Dear American Airlines was a cult success. His new novel begins on Thanksgiving Day and it includes a freegan couple and a trophy wife. University Book Store, 4326 University Way NE, 6343400. bookstore.washington. edu. Free. 7 pm.

CHRIS MATTHEWS

The host of the MSNBC TV show Hardball, whose over-obvious, sycophantic commentary grates on my every last nerve, will read from his new book about Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan. It’s titled Tip and the Gipper and it’s supposed to be about bipartisanship, but I find it hard to believe that Matthews has a worthwhile thought in his whole giant head. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave, 652-4255. townhallseattle.org. $5. 7:30 pm.

Tues 11/19

KEVIN SAMPSELL, JAMES GENDRON Sampsell’s novel This Is Between Us is an excellent, very funny and very creepy story of a relationship. It’s narrated by a man who’s telling the story to his girlfriend, who the book’s about. This is the sort of book you should clear out an afternoon for, because you’ll want to read the whole thing all at once. Gendron is a poet with a new book titled Sex Boats, according to press materials. That’s nice. Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, 624-6600. Free. 7 pm.

MADHUR JAFFREY

The popular cookbook author, who has inspired tens of thousands of Americans to try cooking Indian food, discusses topics covered in her books, including her most recent, Madhur Jaffrey’s Curry Nation. This is part of Seattle Arts and Lectures 2013–2014 lecture series. Town Hall 1119 Eighth Ave, 652-4255. townhallseattle.org. $15. 7:30 pm. readings@thestranger.com

THEATER

Opening and Current Runs

BO-NITA

“In this world-premiere play by Elizabeth Heffron, the title character—a 13 year-old American girl—tells us an epic, winding story about what happened when her mom’s exhusband was trying to beat her, and perhaps to rape her, and then had a heart attack. On its face, the story is a gallowscomedy, body-disposal caper, not unlike something from a Quentin Tarantino film. But as she drops small details about what her life is like, Bo-nita also becomes a study in the vulnerability and survival of a girl living on the margins.” (Brendan Kiley) Seattle Repertory Theatre, 155 Mercer St, Seattle Center, 443-2222. seattlerep.org. $12$60. Wed-Thurs at 7:30 pm, FriSat at 8 pm, Sun at 2 and 7:30 pm. Through Nov 17. CLARA

This play is based on the life of Clara Schumann, one of the most virtuosic pianists of the Romantic era, and the wife of the troubled composer Robert Schumann. Eclectic Theater, 1214 10th Ave, 679-3271. eclectictheatercompany.org. $12-$25. Thurs-Sat at 8 pm, Sunday at 2 pm. Through Nov 24.

THE HABIT 13

Thematically woven, fast-paced

comedy by David Swidler, Mark Siano, Stranger Genius Awardwinner John Osebold, and the rest of the gang. Bathhouse Theater, 7312 W Green Lake Dr N, 524-1300. brownpapertickets.com. $17. Fri-Sun at 8 pm. Through Dec 1.

HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES

Sherlock Holmes attempts to outwit a large dog in this most famous of Conan Doyle stories, adapted for the stage by David Pichette and R. Hamilton Wright. Seattle Repertory Theatre, 155 Mercer St, Seattle Center, 443-2222. seattlerep.org. $12$60. Tues-Thurs at 7:30 pm, FriSat at 8 pm, Sun at 2 and 7:30 pm. Through Dec 15.

JESUS’ SON

See review, page 22. Book-It

Repertory Theater at West of Lenin 203 N 36th St, 2160833. book-it.org. $23-$38. Wed-Sat at 7:30 pm. Through Nov 24.

THE LUXURIA CYCLE

A satirical play by Jimmie Galaites, set in the dystopian near-future of corporate-run online dating. Annex Theatre, 1100 E Pike St, 728-0933. annextheatre.org. $5-$20. TuesWed at 8 pm. Through Nov 13.

PLAY

The Satori Group gives us a peek at three new scripts (by Mallery Avidon, Martyna Majok, and Spike Friedman) with some durational performance art before and after each reading, curated by dancer/choreographer Alice Gosti. An installation of melting ice will be involved. Inscape, 815 Airport Way S. satori-group.com. $5. ThursSun. Through Nov 17.

SEX DRUGS DEATH DISCO:

THE MICHAEL ALIG STORY

A dramatization of the life and times of ‘90s club promoter and convicted killer Michael Alig. Costumes encouraged. Written by Vincent Kovar, directed by Gary Zinter and Rodney Shrader. Re-bar, 1114 Howell St, 2339873. brownpapertickets.com. $15-$18. Fri-Sat at 7:30 pm. Through Nov 23.

TWO GENTLEMEN OF LEBOWSKI

In case the title didn’t make it abundantly clear, this is a Shakespearean re-imagining of The Big Lebowski. Directed by Samantha Hecker and featuring a cast of nine. Rendezvous 2322 2nd Ave. $8. Wed Nov 13 at 8 pm.

Dance

CÉDRIC ANDRIEUX

A one-man autobiographical performance from master dancer

Cédric Andrieux, who tells a story of his career punctuated by corresponding samples of dance. Choreography by Jérôme Bel. On the Boards, 100 W Roy St, 217-9888. ontheoboards.org. $12-$20. Thurs-Sat at 8 pm, Sun at 4 pm. Through Oct 17.

DEGENERATE ART

ENSEMBLE WITH THE KRONOS QUARTET

The legendary Kronos Quartet, known for bringing erudition to their explorations of pop and folk genres, and for bringing a sense of play and liveliness to musical esoterica, pairs up with Seattle’s Degenerate Art Ensemble, which smashes together original compositions, Butoh-inflected dance, and an installation-art sensibility to their sets. This show will be a meeting of the minds—expect sparks. Neptune Theatre , 1303 NE 45th St, 1-877-7844849. stgpresents.org. $44. Sat Nov 16 at 8 pm.

KYLIAN + PITE

See review, page 21. McCaw Hall 321 Mercer St, 441-2424. pnb.org. $28-$120. Fri at 7:30 pm, Sat at 2 and 7:30 pm. Through Nov 17.

SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE?

Do you think you can dance?

These people do and America has validated that conviction. Half of dancing is thinking you can dance. Starring Amy Yakima, “Fik-Shun,” Jenna Johnson, and some others. Paramount Theatre , 911 Pine St, 6821414. stgpresents.org. $35$65. Tues Nov 19 at 7:30 pm.

theater@thestranger.com

THREE COURSE SEASONAL MENUS SERVED AT FIFTY LOCAL FAVORITES

$30 DINNER // $15 LUNCH // SUNDAYS-THURSDAYS

PRESENTS

NOVEMBER 3-27

DINE AROUND SEATTLE .ORG

CHOW

Temple of Smoking

Martino’s Steak Sandwich Would Make Ayn Rand Weep with Joy

BY PAUL CONSTANT

Of the many flaws in the philosophy of Ayn Rand, one of the simplest but most damning is this: Rand argues that no human should be forced to work for the will of others.

In Rand’s perfect society, every human would find the one thing they love, and do that thing with passion and without compromise. Here’s where the counterargument comes in: Rand’s books are full of passionate captains of industry and architects and engineers, but no human being ever born on this planet truly wants to be an uncompromising, passionate janitor above all else, or a mailman, or a line cook. In real life, you often have to buckle down and do your work because it’s a matter of survival and because the job needs to be done.

Tucked away in the middle of Atlas Shrugged, Rand mounts a tiny defense against this argument when her protagonist, Dagny Taggart, eats at an out-of-the-way diner. “Dagny sat at the end of the counter,” Rand writes, “eating a hamburger sandwich. It was the best-cooked food she had ever tasted, the product of simple ingredients and of an unusual skill.” She looks at the chef, who wears “a cook’s white jacket as if it were a full-dress suit. There was an expert competence in his manner of working; his movements were easy, intelligently economical.” When he tells Dagny he’s thinking of leaving the fry cook business, she scolds him: “You’re too good at your job to change it. You shouldn’t want to be anything but a cook.”

writer; like much of her writing, her description of the “hamburger sandwich” reads like a matter-of-fact account of a pap smear that went surprisingly well. But here’s the point I’ve been working toward with all this: I just ate the Santa Maria tri-tip sandwich ($10) at Martino’s Smoked Meats & Neighborhood Eatery in Phinney Ridge, and I think it’s the kind of Ideal Sandwich that Dagny was enthusing about in Atlas Shrugged

Martino’s 7410 Greenwood Ave N, 397-4689 martinosseattle.com

at her own face—it was an “all-vegan shoe and chocolate boutique,” of all the second-hander, compromise-filled concepts.)

Obviously, Ayn Rand was a terrible food

First up, we’ve got the “simple ingredients,” consisting of juicy chunks of smoked tri-tip steak doused in chimichurri and mixed with a tomato-and-onion salsa, then crammed inside a crispy, chewy Macrina roll. And then we’ve got the “unusual skill,” which pervades every step of the creation of this sandwich: The steak is smoky without being overwhelming, and it’s so tender and juicy that you could probably tear it apart with your fingers if you wanted to. I’m not usually the kind of man who wants to praise one part of a sandwich above all others—they’re constructed to be enjoyed as a unit, after all— but biting into this steak almost brought tears to my eyes. If you’re one of those no-carb freaks, the same incredible steak (it’s grass-fed beef) comes on top of a crisp salad loaded with blue cheese, shallots, and smoked tomato ($11). The salad is delicious, too, but the chimichurri and the salsa really do bring something out in

the steak, adding a robust herb-and-vegetable freshness that complements the earthy smokeand-beef flavor. Whoever devised this steak sandwich really shouldn’t want to be anything but a meat-maker.

Martino’s itself adheres to the same ethos as that steak sandwich: It’s perfectly designed to be simple. It’s a small space with big windows. There are a few wooden counters and a pair of tables, and the walls and floors are plain white tile, so clean you could see yourself in it. All the meats are smoked on-site with red oak, hickory, or cherry wood, but the restaurant doesn’t smell of smoke at all. The sandwiches are served on Macrina bread. There are only a few decorations, including a large photo mural of some anonymous butcher standing proudly over his case, a pair of framed butcher knives, a meat grinder with an old-fashioned incandescent lightbulb poking out of the top, and a menu painted grandly across the whole of one wall. It’s a simple menu— five sandwiches, two salads, a daily special, and four sides—that was clearly built around the Randian concept that it’s better to master a few simple items than to do a mediocre job with a binder full of entrees.

CThe idea, Martino explains, was not to just open another “barbecue joint,” but to create a menu that treats smoke as one ingredient out of many, rather than the dominant flavor. The steak on the Santa Maria tri-tip, he says, is smoked for just an hour or two with red oak before it’s removed and seared. Only when someone orders a sandwich is the steak roasted the rest of the way and served. Smoke is a step in a journey, not a destination in itself. Martino’s other sandwiches can’t match up with the glory of the Santa Maria tri-tip, but they’re excellent in their own ways. The Bar-B-Cuban ($9) is probably the next best item, featuring thin medallions of Carlton Farms pork loin topped with balsamic onion jam, Gruyère, and a mustard barbecue sauce. It’s not the sloppy mess you’re picturing; this is a conceptually elaborate but tidy riff on the classic ham-and-cheese sandwich. Like most good sandwich joints, the menu here consists of odes to the classic love affair between meat and cheese on bread. The Smoke Club ($9) features the works: thick chicken breast topped with Havarti, lettuce, tomato, aioli, and slices of house-made ham and strips of crispy bacon. The Big Italian ($9), with its pork butt, grilled onions and peppers, aioli, and smoked mozzarella, is maybe the least satisfying of the lot, if only because it doesn’t taste very Italian; some garlic or tomato or parsley might help. (There’s a Caprese sandwich for the non-carnivores who accidentally wander into Martino’s, but I didn’t try it. This is a temple to meat; would you walk into a Christian Science Reading Room and ask for a copy of God Is Not Great? Martino admits that it’s the lowest seller of the five. “We have a pig in our logo,” he says, so “you know what it’s about.”) Like the tri-tip sandwich, the best side on the menu, the Central Coast black beans ($5 large, $3 small), has a Mexican tinge: The roasted poblano peppers balance out the bacon-festooned beans, and the smoky homemade barbecue sauce brings a common ground to both flavors. But like the Big Italian, Martino’s chili ($5 large, $3 small) doesn’t quite live up to its name. It’s a satisfying bowl of bean soup, and it’s thick with smoked chicken and pork, but it doesn’t come close to some of the better bowls of chili in town, because it doesn’t quite fit in the genre of chili. There’s not enough spicy heat, not enough of an edge, to warrant the name.

But I can’t rave enough about that steak sandwich, which I’m already craving again. Really, all the smoked meats at Martino’s are a cause for celebration.

Obviously, Ayn Rand was a terrible food writer.

The Chrises toyed with the idea of including a deli case—there was even a chocolate display case left over from the old vegan shoe shop—but with less than 700 square feet, they had to focus on service. But Martino’s is happy to help where they can: “If you wanted to buy some tri-tip for a dinner party,” Martino explains, “if you gave us a call, we could certainly accommodate you.”

hris Martino’s resume would make Ayn Rand proud. “My background is cooking. I’ve cooked pretty much my whole life,” he says over the phone. With his longtime business partner Chris Gerke, he opened the Nickerson Street Saloon, and after the pair started experimenting with a smoker there, they paired with Chris Navarra—the owner of Prost! and a co-owner of Phinney pizza restaurant the Ridge with Martino and Gerke—to open a small temple to the art of smoking. (The previous occupant of the Martino’s space would make Ayn Rand screech with disgust and claw

But the sandwiches are the star. After eating a Martino’s creation, a faint tinge of wood smoke lingers on you for the rest of the day, on your breath, at the tips of your fingers, making you feel warm and safe. It’s not oppressive the way a night spent around a bonfire can be. Instead, the smoke scent lingers at the bottom of your throat, making you feel like you’re concealing a tiny campfire in the pit of your belly. It makes you feel powerful, somehow, as though you could breathe fire at any moment like an angry dragon.

THE MAGIC MIRRORS OF SOME RANDOM BAR

We have just arrived and taken a spot near the door. Outside, cold rain falls on busy and dark Belltown. This is Some Random Bar, right next to Black Bottle, and it is small, simple, and altogether comfortable. After surprising us with a complimentary plate of chocolate-coated bacon (it’s free at happy hour), the waitress does something that’s not unusual: She asks if we need more time to select food and drinks. I quickly look at the drink menu, find a bunch of “random cocktails,” and decide not to change my ways: “Your house white wine.” A moment later, I’m served an oaky sauvignon blanc, which actually goes well with the chocolate bacon. The stereo is playing indie rock from the late ’80s and ’90s. A handsome woman in a red dress sits at the bar with someone she clearly wants to fuck. The french fries, which appear during my second glass of wine, are crispy. Randomness is not my thing. I love order, stability, and the predictable motions of the planets in our solar system. I love the words inscribed on Immanuel Kant’s tombstone: “The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” (Those stars are not wandering, but steady and obedient to the laws of gravity.) I also love mirrors, many of which hang on the south wall of Some Random Bar. Some of the mirrors are plain; others are fancy and almost magical. When I take a sip from

my third glass of wine, my mind suddenly slides all the way back to the distant day when I first noticed my real self in a mirror. This happened around 1978, in the bathroom of an apartment in Washington, DC. I was 9, and I had just finished brushing my teeth and looked up at the mirror, and instead of me, found an animal. I saw that its eyes had evolved to make sense of light, its teeth had evolved to break food down into digestible matter, its nose had evolved to capture interesting molecules floating through the air. This was not Charles, the son of Ebenezer and Tracy. This was just a living, breathing, heartbeating thing in a universe that has no purpose, no designer, no beginning or end.

Chow Events

Wed 11/13

EXCLUSIVE(-ISH)

WATERS WINERY TASTING

Poco says, “We wouldn’t call Jerry ‘reclusive,’ but doing tastings isn’t usually his thing. That said, there are always exceptions, and Poco is one of those exceptions. Woo!” They promise generous tasting pours and new tapas to try. Poco Wine Room, 1408 E Pine St, 3229463. pocowineroom.com.

$10. 6-9 pm.

WINE

WEDNESDAY AT MARCHÉ

Marché’s wine director— ”the Son of Lyon himself”—Cyril Frechier leads three educational, entertaining wine tastings on the couches of Marché’s wine bar area, snacks also included. November 13: Rhones; December 18: bubbles; January 15: Italians. Marché , 1600 Post Alley, 728-2800. marcheseattle.com. $45/class, $120/all three. 6-7 pm.

Thurs 11/14

SCOTCH DINNER

The Old Sage (from the makers of Spur and Tavern Law) pours the coastal region Scotches of Talisker and Oban on November 21, then Islay on December 12, with a three-course dinner to go along with for $40. Sounds like a good deal. The Old Sage, 1410 12th Ave, 557-7430. theoldsageseattle.com. $40. 6:30 pm.

VEGETARIAN DINNER AT THE CORSON BUILDING

The Corson Building is great, and they’re making a local/organic/seasonal/etc. vegetarian dinner that will in all likelihood also be great, so do with this information what you will. The Corson Building , 5609 Corson Ave S, 762-3330. thecorsonbuilding.com. $40.

CANNING 101

Learn how to can it with Amy Pennington, author of Apples: From Harvest to Table, with snacks and wine included, plus take home your own preserves, a recipe, a four-pack of Cupcake Royale cupcakes, and the know-how to can forever after. Cupcake Royale 1935 Queen Anne Ave, 285-1447. cupcakeroyale. com. $30. Thurs Nov 14, 6:30-8:30 pm.

DRINKING SPELLING BEE

This Drinking Spelling Bee is a fundraiser for the baseball team the Northwest Honkers. Starred because DRINKING SPELLING BEE. Re-bar, 1114 Howell St, 233-9873. rebarseattle. com. $5/$10 cover. 7 pm.

Sat 11/16

TAMALE-MAKING CLASS

Embrace the pork lard and learn the secrets: You’ll take home a dozen tamales of your own making at the end, plus the ability to make tamales for the rest of your natural life. Class fees support Centro de la Raza’s Senior Wellness Program. El Centro de la Raza, 2524 16th Ave S, 957-4611. elcentrodelaraza. com. $75. 10 am-12:30 pm.

Sun 11/17

WINTER MOBILE FEAST

The Mobile Food Rodeo does its annual wintertime

thing with tons of food trucks, etc., at the Fremont Sunday Market. Fremont mobilefoodrodeo.wordpress.com. Free admission, food/drink prices vary.

ETHAN STOWELL’S MACARONI AND CHEESE COOK-OFF

Ethan Stowell (you know) hosts a charity cook-off in which you get to try 117-ish kinds of macaroni and cheese made by pro chefs and notable amateurs, plus lots of beer. Proceeds benefit the Fetal Hope Foundation. Tavolata , 2323 Second Ave, 838-8008. ethanstowellrestaurants.com. $50. 6 pm.

NORMANDY DINNER

The Normans of France experience the same soulsucking fall weather as Seattleites; they remedy the situation with lots of cream, apples, meat, and calvados. Boat Street’s annual Normandy Dinner starts with oysters fireside on the patio; it’s pricey but bound to be great, with all the good French wine you can drink. Boat Street Cafe, 3131 Western Ave, 632-4602. boatstreetcafe. com. $95. 6 pm.

SEATTLE APPRECIATION PARTY

Seattle Tattoo Emporium wants to say “thanks, Seattle, for all the good years, and party as we welcome in the holidays,” with “sweet prizes from local businesses”—including a free tattoo—plus free pizza from Big Mario’s and a DJ. STILL Liquor, 1524 Minor Ave, 467-4075. stillliquor. com. 7 pm.

Mon 11/18

PELLEGRINI

DINING SOCIETY

On the third Monday of each month, there’s wine, conversation, and a six-course dinner inspired by the writings of Angelo Pellegrini at Cafe Lago. Organizer Jon Rowley is a local food hero, ditto Pelligrini, and Cafe Lago has been making beloved Italian food in Montlake for 1,000 years. Cafe Lago 2305 24th Ave E, 3298005. cafelago.com. $75. 6:30 pm.

HARVEST BREWMASTER’S DINNER

Hale’s makes a four-course dinner paired with ales to match, including “some that will never be publicly released!” Hale’s Ales Brewery & Pub, 4301 Leary Way NW, 782-0737. halesbrewery.com. $45. 7 pm.

Ongoing

DINE AROUND SEATTLE

Sundays through Thursdays all this month, it’s $30 prixfixe dinner (and some $15 prix-fixe lunches) at more than 40 local restaurants. Is this a great opportunity to try out new places, or a gimmick wherein you don’t get to choose what you eat and don’t necessarily save money? In any case, dine-arounders can text a donation to the Rainier Valley Food Bank or other causes, which is nice. Various locations. dinearoundseattle.org. $30/$15. Through Nov 28.

MUSIC

A SÉANCE Degenerate

Ensemble—that’s

The Ultimate Collaboration

Kronos Quartet Celebrates 40 Years of Innovation with DAE

BY JEN GRAVES

This concert is once-in-a-lifetime fairy-tale stuff, man. Kronos Quartet, based in San Francisco since 1978, is the best, most adventurous, most famous string quartet in the world. They play

old music with new energy, and they’ve also supported an entire generation of composers by commissioning 750-plus pieces. They’ve collaborated with poets and painters and jazz players, gypsy musicians and opera singers and yodelers, baroquers and Bollywooders. They have a rule: They never play the same program twice. To show for themselves, they have approximately one trillion recordings, the respect of the entire universe, and things like Grammys.

pitched him a draft of this piece.”

Kronos Quartet w/Degenerate Art Ensemble Sat Nov 16, Neptune Theatre, 8 pm, $44, all ages

Few people realize that their first concert was not in San Francisco, but in Seattle. It took place in November of 1973, exactly 40 years ago. This weekend, they come back to celebrate, while, of course, making something entirely unprecedented happen: Their performance on Saturday culminates with a dance/vocal/quartet/video production cocreated with Seattle’s Degenerate Art Ensemble, led by dancer Haruko Nishimura and composer Joshua Kohl.

“David [Harrington, Kronos founder/violinist] said when he watched our video, that if he had known us in 1973, we would be doing a show together in 1973,” Kohl says, and at that point, Kohl could die happy.

“They’ve been my heroes since I was a kid,” he says. He’d tried to get Harrington’s attention for years, “sending messages through all the channels I could find.” Finally, Kronos members tuned in to a webcast of Kohl conducting a piece by Seattle composer (and Stranger Genius Award finalist) Jherek Bischoff at Lincoln Center, and during their Seattle stand at the Neptune last year, Kohl got an e-mail from Harrington, which was followed by a breakfast at Sound View Cafe at Pike Place Market— “an instant nerdfest,” Kohl describes. “I

Kohl was at PCC shopping for groceries when Harrington called to deliver an hourand-a-half critique. He suggested new areas of research, and structural and conceptual changes. Kohl was thrilled: “I mean, I can’t imagine another person I’d rather have a critique from.”

The final piece is about 20 minutes long. It’s called Warrior, and it’s a chapter in an ongoing DAE series called Predator’s Songstress

The first chapter premiered last year in a dark loading dock behind the formal stages of Seattle Center. It was based on Gracie Hansen, controversial creator of the “Sin Alley” burlesque revue that became the popular underbelly of the 1962 fair.

(A few years later, she ran for governor of Oregon, declaring, “I’ve had my eye on [Governor]

Tom McCall’s seat for a long time,” coming in third in the Democratic primary.) That first chapter was a collaboration with Olson Kundig Architects, and the entire project is supported by Nishimura’s Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. DAE hopes to finish Predator’s Songstress in the next two years: On their website, there’s a photograph of a fierce-looking Nishimura facing down a bonfire of burning books under the title “next anti-heroine creation in-progress: The Dictator.” Watch out.

In the Kronos collaboration, Warrior, the “anti-heroine” is Joan of Arc. She’s reimagined as an indigenous woman fighting

riot police, trying to take back the land for her people. She’s danced by Nishimura, with music by Kohl and Kronos, and with a “stark, ceremonial” set, “like a séance, with chalk and candles” and video and lighting installations by Seattle artists Lilienthal|Zamora. Six costumed singers with microphones stand at the edges of the chalk lines on the floor, each wearing a strapped-on speaker that projects their live voices as well as prerecorded sounds.

The concert is produced by Seattle Theatre Group, better known for bringing Broadway shows and hit acts to the Paramount.

“Because of the Broadway stuff, it may not be as apparent how adventurous they are,” Kohl says. STG, he remembers, is the reason Bischoff got his first orchestral commission. It was 2005, and STG was willing to take a chance on producing DAE to commission local composers. STG has hosted DAE on its season four times since then. (Kronos premiered a piece of Bischoff’s at Lincoln Center in July, and may play one this weekend at the Neptune.) “STG are some of the most amazing, open-minded producers to work with,” Kohl says.

DAE and Kronos have been writing back and forth and rehearsing on their own, but together, they get just one rehearsal—the night before the performance. Nishimura’s dancing space is only 10 by 20 feet, “and the piece is very athletic, very intense,” Kohl says. “She doesn’t want to take out a Stradivarius or anything.”

How did the creative process work at such a distance? For instance, what did Harrington say during that grocerystore critique?

“What he told me was, ‘I think the ending you wrote for this piece is so beautiful, but I think you should throw it away,’” Kohl says. “‘I think it needs to be beautiful and as innovative as the rest of the piece.’”

Harrington gave Kohl an image to guide him, as an idea. The image was when a child lets a helium balloon go, and it floats off and up into the air. That image, translated into music, is the new ending.

Comment on this story at THESTRANGER.COM/MUSIC

WELCOMES rokia

FRI/NOVEMBER 22 • 7PM & 9:30PM

45s w/ jack geary & the owl n’ thistle band SAT/NOVEMBER 23 • 8PM STG PRESENTS brett dennen w/ grizfolk SUN/NOVEMBER 24 • 7:30PM chris hillman & herb pedersen w/ mary gauthier

SOUND CHECK

INTERVIEWS BY TRENT MOORMAN

THUNDERCAT AND THE FUTURITY OF NOW

Thundercat

w/Kingdom Crumbs Sun Nov 17, Barboza, 8 pm, $15 adv, 21+

Futurity. It means a time to come, the quality or state of being futuristic. Thundercat (Stephen Bruner), the LA-based bassist/songwriter/vocalist, contains heaping amounts of that quality. He’s the futurity of now, housed in faculties that play with throwback homage. His music flies many planes, from jazz-funk fusion to electronic psych to a beat-spliced ambrosia made for the sound deities convened on Lando Calrissian’s Cloud City. Thundercat’s second full-length Brainfeeder Records release, Apocalypse, hovers majorly with technical aspects, while being governed by emotion. Bruner’s voice rounds out rich as a tenor. He sings in auspicious R&B sheens and harmonies with a falsetto that’s true. Enter Apocalypse’s executive producer, Flying Lotus, the astrophysical one. (Speaking of sound deities.) Lotus successfully moves and morphs Apocalypse through stages of Thundercat’s surgeon-like bass virtuosity. “Oh Sheit It’s X” bubbles with olderschooled funk. “Seven” carves abstractly, dripping with Lotus’s astral-picked beats. “Heartbreaks + Setbacks” hopes with young love from a roller rink in the year 2055. “A Message for Austin,” Apocalypse’s conclusion, is a solemn string-and-horn-accompanied dedication/sky march for Thundercat’s friend and collaborator, Austin Peralta, who passed away almost a year ago. Thundercat spoke from a car in LA on his way to see Flying Lotus. He answered his phone by saying, “Hello, yes, this is Bell Biv Devoe.”

That’s not fair, I was going to say I was Bell Biv Devoe. Well, then I’ll be Devoe Bell Biv.

Congrats on “Poison.” The bootyclap 808 solo in there is like a steakcircus. Whap, whap-whap-whap-whapwhap WHAP! Thank you [laughs]. That song was a lotta hard work, know what I’m sayin’? The other guys didn’t think it would sell. I was like, “Trust me on this one.” We were actually thinking about calling the song “The Bitch Owes Me Money,” but that was a little ahead of its time, so we just went with “Poison.”

From “Poison” to Apocalypse. Is your music more a technical or emotional thing for you? The way you and Flying Lotus paint is technical. You have that virtuoso thing. But the album leaves me emotional. How is that? I don’t know. It came from lots of dumb jokes when I was a kid. The term virtuoso freaks me out, so I don’t know how to respond when someone asks me something like that. Between Lotus and I, our working relationship is a magical thing because of the fact that we don’t tie each other down to anything at all. We just float off. And we try to stay there. It’s like an engine. Once we get it started, man—and the rate we can generate stuff, coupled with the emotion that we’re putting behind it. We’re trying to make sure that it’s the best we can do, every time. I feel like it’s a cool bond. We may play some Grand Theft Auto as well.

Do you listen to stuff together? How do you start the engine? There’s listening, but we keep it moving. We’re just moving forward all the time. There’s so

much that gets done, even within a day, not to mention a week. There’s like 15 albums’ worth of stuff, already done.

What are y’all working on today? We actually just rented an RV. We’ll be driving out to Bakersfield to cook crystal meth. We’re trying to expand our business.

FlyLo-Thundercat Meth will be a fine meth. Runnin’ real deep in these streets, you know? Get yourself a team, some ninja swords and guns [laughs]. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this in an interview. We’re not really doing that. For the record, neither Flying Lotus nor myself are cooking crystal meth. We’re working on a whole lot, though—music! I’m working on a new album. Lotus is working on an album.

You’ve recorded two albums with Flying Lotus now. Did you all do things differently the second time around for Apocalypse? Personally, both of those albums feel like one thing. I look at them both in the same light. To me, it’s a whole story—there’s not really a break in it. The names are kind of a play on that, although there are separate meanings. I actually feel like there’s more emotional content on the first album, due to the fact that Austin is playing on it, so those two albums are one long story piece. The only thing that trips me out is how I’m singing more on the second one—I never really expected to be singing, things have just translated that way. I feel a little more comfortable singing now, so that’s

the one thing that’s changed the most from the first to the second album. I was happy to find out people didn’t think my voice was terrible. You know, your friends are acting all weird, like “Somebody’s gotta tell him he sucks.” Luckily, that hasn’t happened yet, so I’ll keep singing.

“Heartbreaks + Setbacks” is such a cut. A throwback, with a future touch. Gives me memories I haven’t made yet. Roller-rink love from the future. It has this hope to it. You sing, “First we’ll find our hearts.” How did these lyrics come about? It’s a story everyone shares. “Heartbreaks, setbacks, breakups, makeups.” How fast things move. Sometimes you feel like you’re in this cycle that keeps repeating itself, and after a while, you look up and think, “What am I doing?” But when you’re going through that process, you forget why. And it’s to get to a point. I think that’s the main point of the song. “Baby, we’ll figure out where we’re supposed to be.” Are you going to stop looking for something just because you can’t find it? That’s what it’s about. For something that’s actually worth something, you keep looking…

11/5 DUB POLICE 11/22 MONSTER MAGNET 12/13 PERE UBU 12/14 THE MOONDOGGIES + THE MALDIVES 12/17 RUSTIE 12/20 DEEP SEA DIVER 12/21 ROSE WINDOWS 12/27 & 12/28 BUILT TO SPILL 12/30 & 12/31 STRFKR 1/3 FLY MOON ROYALTY 1/17 TRIBAL SEEDS 1/22 DARKSIDE 1/23 RYAN HEMSWORTH 1/24 YUCK 1/25 DANIEL KIRKPATRICK & THE BAYONETS 1/31 WHITE DENIM 3/1 NICKI BLUHM & THE GRAMBLERS 4/17 GODFLESH

COMING UP: 11/15 THOSE DARLINS 11/18 DALEY 11/19 PAPA 11/21

EARTH 11/22 SHELBY EARL 11/23 PAWS 11/24 MIKEY DAVIS 11/29 PINK BEAD 11/30 NOVEL NATURE 12/1 BRENDAN CANNING 12/3 KID SMPL 12/6 BASIA BULAT + CATE LE BON 12/8 LEE RANALDO AND THE DUST 12/9 DONTE PEACE 12/10 GAVIN TUREK 12/12 WILL HOGE 12/13 ERIN MCKEOWN 12/14 KING KRULE (SOLD OUT) 2/11 DELOREAN

HODGY BEATS, DOMO GENESIS AND LEFT BRAIN OF ODD FUTURE SLOW DANCE + GIFT UH GAB ALL AGES SUNDAY 11/17

SATURDAY 11/23

DRILL: SEATTLE FT. WIRE CHASTITY BELT + VESTALS + THE PINKFLAG ORCHESTRA

THUNDERCAT KINGDOM CRUMBS

MY PHILOSOPHY

RITTZ, TURQUOISE JEEP, RA SCION, KEYBOARD KID, LATYRX

Every week, shows happen and I hear people say, “Why didn’t anybody tell me about this?” God knows I don’t get to ’em all, but right here’s a good place to start. Just remember, if you see me around, don’t ask me—as soon as I write about it, I fuckin’ forget it. So then:

Yelawolf’s hirsute homeboy Rittz, the “White Jesus” (no Kanye) of Strange Music, returns to Seattle—at Nectar on November 13—with LA’s Snow tha Product, Jarren Benton, and your host Neema (with DJ Gerze); special guests AD, Dirtay, and Jay Barz pad the bill out with perhaps more raps than you know what to do with. Speaking of, what with rap becoming such a formulaic joke, it’s only right that novelty crews like the Lonely Island can spoof it to great success and acclaim—and as long as the shit’s actually, certifiably, like, non–Dane Cook funny, I’m all for it. Turquoise Jeep—not just a bunch of dicks, but a label and crew à la some weirdo-world Bad Boy Records—totally fit that bill, and they will be back at the Crocodile (with ass-kicking local sista act NighTraiN) on November 14.

RA Scion has a history of albumlength collaborations with producers like Sabzi (Common Market), MTK (Victor Shade), and Todd Sykes (uh, RA Scion and Todd Sykes)—his latest, and perhaps boldest, sonic move is his newest album (The Sickle and the Sword) with New York–based producer Rodney Hazard. Hazard’s gauzy, vaporous cloud-work suits the spirituality in RA’s devotional bars. The album release show (November 14 at Neumos) features the return of Idol’s Blake Lewis, the Tempers, Romaro Franceswa, and Mike Giacolino, with DJ Chocolate Chuck and hosts Tilson and Barfly—whoa! Kung Foo Grip are still Growing Up in the Future, still some of the scene’s livest young-lifes doin’ it, and November 15 at the Vera Project, they get it in with Keyboard Kid Latyrx, the Staxx Brothers, and Portland trailblazer Tope all do the Crocodile on November 16, the returned-to-us Deltron 3030 (aka Del the Funkee Homosapien and Dan the Automator) and the mad genius Kid Koala fall through the Showbox at the Market on November 17, Odd Futurians Mellowhigh (being the Def Jam–backed combo of MellowHype’s Left Brain and Hodgy Beats with Domo Genesis) join Mooress Gift Uh Gab at Neumos on November 18, and lastly, the chairman of the Chicago Department of Kicking Knowledge, Mr. Lupe Fiasco, hits the Showbox Sodo on November 19. Also, welcome to our new progressive mayor, no relation to the last progressive mayor. Progress will continue to manifest in the form of higher rents, higher condos, more hostile police, and more hostile policelike people in general. From its streets to its schools, Seattle’s really going places—without us. And just like before, before that, and the time before that—when we’re finally gone, they’ll remember to forget we were ever here. Until they find themselves surrounded.

Marcus

Staxx Brothers, Tope, DJ Funkscribe 21+

ReignCity & Showbox Proudly Present An Intimate Evening With DELTRON 3030: EVENT 2 TOUR Del the Funky Homosapien, Dan the Automator, Kid Koala All Ages

THE MEAT PUPPETS

The World Takes (DJ Bonebrake from X) All Ages

Wire with The Crocodile, KEXP and STG present DRILL: Seattle HELMET FF All Ages

November 16 & 17 OVER THE RHINE WITH NOAH GUNDERSEN

Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall

Don’t miss out as Over the Rhine bring their unique sound to Benaroya Hall. TICKETS going fast!

November 22 & 23

CASA PATAS FLAMENCO FOUNDATION PRESENTS TEMPLANZA

Illsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall

Join Casa Patas Flamenco, featuring dancers Isabel Rodríguez and José Jurado, for fiery footwork and live flamenco music. TICKETS FROM: $39

December 12

HEART AND FRIENDS HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS

S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium

Recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

inductees Ann and Nancy Wilson are behind some of rock’s most iconic hits.

Don’t miss their return to the Benaroya Hall stage as they perform with special guests at this hometown holiday concert. TICKETS GOING FAST!

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.

ANNETTE PEACOCK

I’m the One (RCA; reissued by Light in the Attic)

Pretend you’re me for a second. Okay, we’ve never met, but I mean just musically. Despite your best intentions, your ears are impatient and finicky; they’re childish. You’ve been drowning them in new things for close to two years—but all the years before that were spent fumbling around in a kind of felted darkness during which you asked for little help and were often afraid to adventure.

It’s weird to go around the world and this musical city like this, to work in an office where you immediately rented a bunch of what you thought were cool-kid CDs from the library the minute you got hired. It’s in that environment and head space that I want you to get out Annette Peacock. Put it on a decent stereo. Press play. If it’s too hard to project, I’ll tell you the first thing that happens. You say out loud without even meaning to, “Oh shit.” What you mean is that this is some jazz-dude explosion, a jizz wave of smart instrument people noodling around. About a minute and a half into that first track (it opens mid–jam session), something’s going to happen that makes your eyes get big. You can’t help it; your eyebrows just pull ’em way up. “I’m the one,” commands Peacock’s low syrup voice. “You don’t have to look any further—I’m the one.”

What is it in the one or two seconds it takes for her to say it that demonstrates immediately that you should pay attention? Who knows? Some humans can just do that. From that moment on, “rapt” is the appropriate adjective for your attention and behavior. Her voice scratches and yowls, sometimes seducing, sometimes mourning. Track two is immediately different. Carole King’s even sexier, even sadder older sister is singing about how long someone’s been gone. “Won’t you please come home?” How can she do the strut so well in the first song—you can just hear heavy-lidded eyes and serious hips and then do this sad flower-child torch song? She’s so lonely. Tough, but lonely. And maybe the toughness is a show?

At times, listening to music is a party, a ruckus, a soundtrack to connection and liveliness. Other times, the alone-ness of someone’s voice matching your alone-ness multiplies it somehow. It’s a comfort, but it’s not enough. Sometimes, Peacock makes your alone-ness too big. (Don’t listen to this alone in the dark too much.)

You can get out of my head now! Sorry! I just wanted to give you a tour, there. And, hey, you’re not me! You can love Annette Peacock in a whole different, even more complicated way. But you will love her. I give this a “BRB, building her a shrine” out of 10.

COCKTAILS, BURRITOS & TACOS

& 10pm-12am

Get Your Football Fix at Norm’s!

UP&COMING

Lose your serviceable tough-dude rock and roll 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 11/13

Rittz, Snow tha Product, Jarren Benton (Nectar) See My Philosophy, page 33.

Crypts, Pop. 1280, Haunted Horses, Clayface (Chop Suey) “Two dogs fucking,” begins “Burn the Worm” off The Horror, the 2012 album from degenerate Brooklyn “cyberpunks” Pop. 1280. Named after the Jim Thompson crime novel, these synth-punk miscreants released one of last year’s most frightening albums. With deadpan vocal antagonism, slanderous Birthday Party–esque bass, and violent synths, their latest LP, Imps of Perversion (on Sacred Bones), is still grosser than whatever feeds your nightmares (e.g., unlabeled GMOs, post–nuclear apocalypse dog sex), but with added tribal-electronic/industrial vibes and less apocalyptic grime than The Horror Opening tonight’s dread-filled post-filth-fest is Clayface from Olympia, whose set I enjoyed at one of the last Healthy Times Fun Club shows two years/forever ago; expect a deeply sprawled, Chameleons UK–inspired goth haze dramaturgically lurching into a sax-spaced dirge. Local support also comes from blown-out industrial weirdos Crypts and noise-rock trio/casual exorcists Haunted Horses.

BRITTNIE FULLER

Earshot Jazz Festival: The Music of Bud Powell (Royal Room) Tonight local jazz pianists Marc Seales, Sumi Tonooka, Gus Carns, and Tim Kennedy celebrate the music of the jazz god Bud Powell. From Powell, we get Bill Evans, and from Evans, we get Herbie Hancock. That line of jazz piano, jazz thinking, jazz feeling, is inexhaustible. If you

have never heard of Powell, I recommend beginning with The Genius of Bud Powell, which contains three brilliant takes of “Tea for Two,” and his somber but lyrical “Parisian Thoroughfare.” When you listen to these and other pieces, be aware of the sad fact that Powell spent much of his career in and out of mental institutions (some believe we have police brutality to thank for that). Those recordings capture the moments, the days when he was sane and able to function. CHARLES MUDEDE

Thursday 11/14

Kenny Dope, DJ Supreme La Rock, Wesley Holmes, Blueyedsoul (Q Nightclub) See Data Breaker, page 45.

Ra Scion, Rodney Hazard, Blake Lewis, the Tempers, Romaro Franceswa (Neumos) On his new record, The Sickle and the Sword (his second LP of the year—the first is Adding to the Extra), local rapper and former Common Market member RA Scion joined forces with New York City–based Rodney Hazard to create a very large, very wide, and very bold work of 21st-century hiphop. RA’s raps are on the philosophical tip, as Hazard generates what feels like an endless stream of dreamy beats. Listening to this mostly excellent record—it has a couple of failures, but brilliant failures are the best failures of all—is like getting a glimpse of that eternal Buddhist web of jewels. I will have more to say about The Sickle and the Sword in the near future. CHARLES MUDEDE See also My Philosophy, page 33.

Turquoise Jeep, NighTraiN

(Crocodile) Whoa, the Turquoise Jeep guys have

WEDNESDAY 11/13

Ravenna Woods Saturday 11/16 at Neumos

been busy! Last I checked in with goofball rappers Flynt Flossy, Yung Humma, and crew, way back in 2010, they were still talking about wanting to “smang” it. That’s “smash it and bang,” the chorus to their first hit, “Lemme Smang It.” I figured they were a solid novelty act and wrote them off. However, a quick YouTube search reveals they’ve followed that internet smash (11-million-plus views!) with a new clutch of bangers like “Naughty Farmer” and “Treat Me Like a Pirate” (which features the most absurdly obvious puns about “walking the plank” and “show[ing] me your treasure” I’ve ever heard). Your enjoyment of these guys hinges on your tolerance for over-the-top surrealist rap parody, and, to be honest, on the right day I’m a sucker for it. KYLE FLECK See also My Philosophy, page 33.

Gabriel Mindel Saloman, Mamiffer, Dull Knife, LA Lungs (Highline) You may remember Gabriel Mindel Saloman from his richly rewarding tenure in Portland noise/drone sojourners Yellow Swans. After that group split following the release of 2010’s majestic Going Places, with its steel-wool clouds of static and whirring, Saloman moved to Vancouver, BC, and concentrated on his solo career. He’s a prolific musician, and I’ve not heard all of his output, but tracks that I have caught, like “Riots Just Don’t Happen,” brood and soar with a stately melancholy that sounds downright liturgical. 2012’s Adhere showcases Saloman’s command of chilling atmospheres that patiently unspool and swell with stoic grandeur. Our man’s music has become refined,

AAN WITH GOTHIC TROPIC AND HEARTS ARE THUGS

$6 • 9PM

THURSDAY 11/14

NIGHTLANDS

WITH USF AND DARK FEATURES

$8 • 9PM

FRIDAY 11/15

STAG (ALBUM RELEASE SHOW)

WITH JACK ENDINO’S EARTHWORM AND ROAMING HERDS OF BUFFALO

$8 • 10PM

SATURDAY 11/16

DEER TRACKS

WITH VERLAINE AND HALF KINGDOM

$8 ADV • 10PM

SUNDAY 11/17

ZARNI

WITH FAN FICTION AND TUCKER JAMESON

$6 • 6PM

SUNDAY 11/17

WHITE MYSTERY

WITH FOX AND THE LAW AND SPECIAL GUEST

$8 • 9PM

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

11.14 Thursday (Bluegrass) HEAD FOR THE HILLS (2007 NWSS Band Competition Winner) Lil’ Smokies & Steep Ravine (2013 NWSS Band Competition Winners)

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

11.15 Friday (Hip-Hop / Trip-Hop) DJ VADIM, DJ ABILITIES Jel, Serengeti, B. Durazzo

$8 adv / $12 dos, 8pm doors, 21+

11.16 Saturday (Electronic / Bass) LYNX, NATASHA KMETO Spyn Reset, Gangaology

$8 adv, Happy Hour 7-9pm, Show 9pm, 21+

11.19 Tuesday (and EVERY TUESDAY!!)

KARAOKEGRASS: Free Live Band Karaoke! 7pm doors, 21+

11.22 Friday Red Bull Music Academy presents LUNICE, ROCKIE FRESH, B. BRAVO

$10 adv. / $15 dos, 8pm doors, 9pm show 18+ plus bar with ID,

11.23 Indubious 11.27 Polyrhythmics 11.29 World’s Finest 11.30 Hanukkah Party 12.4 Planet

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 15 | 7:00 PM

NOVA BEATS COMMITTEE BENEFIT

KUNG FOO GRIP

KEYBOARD KID, VERY, SPECIAL GUESTS, TELLEZ THA FORMULA, STREET LOGIC, YOSEPH AMARE

$10

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 22 | 7:30 PM

TAKE WARNING & THE VERA PROJECT PRESENTS

POLAR BEAR CLUB, CITIZEN, DIAMOND YOUTH, SAINTHOOD REPS

7:00 PM DOORS

$12 ADV / $14 DOS

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 23 | 7:30 PM

CAM THE MAC, MACK NED, CASSOW

DJ MATLOCK

$5 ADV

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 27 | 7:30 PM

TINA HENDRIX PRESENTS

JIMI HENDRIX TRIBUTE CONCERT

$20

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

ALWAYS ALL AGES

and it suits him well. Makers of subtle horror films should seek out Saloman’s talents. DAVE SEGAL

XVIII Eyes, Ships, Blue Light Curtain

(Chop Suey) Because there hasn’t been enough great new music released this fall (seriously, you guys, SLOW DOWN), tonight Seattle’s own XVIII Eyes (formerly known as Eighteen Individual Eyes) are also celebrating the release of their new album, I’ll Keep You. If you’re trying to prioritize the overwhelming list of records awaiting your attention, it’d be wise to bump XVIII Eyes up the list a few spots. The band’s fluid, chilly rock is as cool and smooth as a just-Zambonied sheet of ice, perfect to enjoy on these cold November nights. Ships and Blue Light Curtain are playing, too, so don’t be the jerk who shows up just for the headliner. MEGAN SELING

Fruit Bats, the Donkeys

(Neptune) It’s been 10 years since Fruit Bats’ Eric Johnson released Mouthfuls, the electronics-laced folk masterpiece that many believe to be the group’s peak. At the time, Fruit Bats included Johnson’s then-girlfriend Gillian Lisée. The songwriting was as good as their gilded vocal harmonies, and what ensued was one of the more consistent, fully realized folk records of the early ’00s. Tonight, Johnson et al. will play Mouthfuls start to finish, and while Lisée has long since left the band, if Johnson can recreate just some of the alchemy found on that album, we’re in for a solid night of nostalgia. GRANT BRISSEY

Friday 11/15

Screaming Females, Upset, Darto, Big Crux (Black Lodge) See Stranger Suggests, page 19, and Underage, page 44.

Kung Foo Grip, Keyboard Kid (Vera) See My Philosophy, page 33.

DJ Vadim, DJ Abilities, Jel (Nectar) See Data Breaker, page 45.

Obits, Survival Knife, Dreamsalon (Neumos) Survival Knife have one of the more apropos band names I’ve seen in a while: Their angsty post-hardcore has some seriously sharp edges and an appealing air of desperation. Featuring former members of ’90s feedback fiends Unwound, this Olympia-based quartet has been making waves around town for the better part of a year, releasing singles on Sub Pop and Kill Rock Stars and reportedly slaying at live shows. The only question now is: Where’s the album? Also be sure to catch openers Dreamsalon, who bash out a particularly potent strain of nerve-jangling garage rock, with guitars soaked in reverb and drumming like a coked-up heartbeat. Headliner Obits make perfectly serviceable tough-dude rock and roll, if you’re into that. KYLE FLECK

Saturday 11/16

Kronos Quartet with Degenerate Art Ensemble

(Neptune) See preview, page 29.

Latyrx, Staxx Brothers, Tope (Crocodile) See My Philosophy, page 33.

Jel Friday 11/15 at Nectar

Dreamsalon, TJ Max, Underworld Scum, DJ Explorateur, DJ Veins (Radar Hair and Records) A night filled with music AND art! (And conflicts of interest, so hold on tight!) Make it to Radar tonight for Super Kaleid: a group show including screen prints, paintings, and photography, self-described as “a modern look at psychedelia and general creepiness.” Speaking of creepy, if you missed Underworld Scum, Seattle’s most brutal Misfits cover band (featuring local musicians Eric Randall, Pete Capponi, Dan Paulus, and Stranger contributor Derek Erdman) on their three-day Halloween rampage, then you have another chance to grease up that devil-lock and make it count! With ominous post-punks Dreamsalon, atmospheric duo TJ Max, and the deep cuts (so deep you’ll need stitches) of DJ Explorateur (Valerie Calano) and DJ Veins (The Stranger’s own Dave “Tintinnabulation Tapestries” Segal). EMILY NOKES See also Data Breaker, page 45.

Ravenna Woods, Campfire OK, Vox Mod (Neumos) Halloween is over, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to enjoy Ravenna Woods’ creepy new record, The Jackals. Their guitar-heavy folk rock goes beyond just being dark—it’s downright scary. In the song “Live Alone,” singer Chris Cunningham warns you to “lock the doors, there’s something terrible happening,” but he sings it with a taunting smile, as though he’s enjoying the promise of someone else’s demise. Eek! For an extra fright, visit ravennawoods.net to watch the taxidermy-filled video for the song “Border Animals,” which makes the band look like members of the Addams Family. Joining them for tonight’s album release show are two more bands we’re lucky to call locals—Campfire OK (who released a new record of their own not too far back) and the always wonderfully weird Vox Mod. MEGAN SELING

Earshot Jazz Festival: Peter Brötzmann & Paal Nilssen-Love (Royal Room) This is a big one—if not the big one for Earshot attendees: Peter Brötzmann and Paal Nilssen-Love. As any reader of The Wire and other highbrow publications knows, Brötzmann is the legendary German saxophonist lauded for his monstrous lung power, ruptured, rapturous timbres, and heavy yet limber free-jazz pyrotechnics. He’s been renting asunder prim-and-proper jazzspace for at least 46 years with Last Exit and in numerous permutations as leader and sideman with elite avant-gardists. Brötzmann’s Machine Gun LP from 1968—with his world-beating octet—still sounds like the apocalypse in a horn. For this date, Brötzmann—who’s a robust 72 years old—will blow out eardrums with Norwegian drummer NilssenLove (Scorch Trio, the Thing), whose remarkably kinetic and inventive style complements his partner’s high-wire runs. DAVE SEGAL

White Mystery

(Black Lodge) It takes an intangible something— spirit, fieriness, recklessness, bravado—to thrive as a garage-rock band in the 21st century. The genre’s been around for nearly 50 years, so it requires heroic energy and creativity to make it sound interesting at this late date. Chicago’s White Mystery— redheaded dynamos Miss Alex White and Francis Scott Key White—harness those intangibles and write catchy, gnarly tunes that don’t reek of Nuggets box sets or graying pudding-bowl haircuts. The duo’s newest album, Telepathic, actually possesses more Pussy Galore/Blues Explosion–like DNA in its buzz-and-howl attack than it does the Seeds or the Standells. However the hell they’re managing to accomplish it, White Mystery have those special ingredients that make their garage rock not sound museum-y. DAVE SEGAL

R. Andrew Lee: November (Chapel Performance Space) Pay attention, because Nonsequitur and The Box Is Empty are only presenting this experience for one night. It’s R. Andrew Lee performing Dennis Johnson’s “5-hour, nearly lost proto-minimalist masterpiece, November, for solo piano.” Johnson, who lives off-grid in the Bay Area and hasn’t been involved in music since around 1962, wrote this piece in 1959, and it only recently resurfaced. Given its stylistic firsts, it may well be the first piece of minimalism, and it was a wellspring of inspiration for La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano of 1964. Lee is responsible for its premiere recording, so he probably knows it better

than just about anyone not living in a shack off the grid in the Bay Area these days. JEN GRAVES

Sunday 11/17

Thundercat, Kingdom Crumbs (Barboza) See Sound Check, page 31, and Stranger Suggests, page 19.

Deltron 3030, Kid Koala (Showbox at the Market) See My Philosophy, page 33.

The Casualties, Negative Approach (El Corazón) Of all the reunited hardcore bands on the modern touring circuit, Negative Approach are one of the few groups that actually retain the urgency, anger, and desperation of their original incarnation. What makes the Detroit legends’ reunion seem far more alive than the standard exhumed band’s victory lap? Maybe it’s the low-key nature of the comeback. Maybe it’s the distinct lack of commercialism attached their tours. Maybe it’s singer John Brannon’s continued legacy with the vociferous bluesy squall of Laughing Hyenas. Maybe it’s simply the fact that Negative Approach created the template of raging discontentment that every hardcore band in their wake has tried to live up to. Thirty years after their initial breakup, they still exude more palpable fury than nearly any group in the genre they helped create.

BRIAN COOK

Monday 11/18

Mellowhigh, Gift Uh Gab (Neumos) See My Philosophy, page 33.

Thomas Dolby

(Showbox at the Market) After writing and producing some of the most beautiful pop of the 1980s (his own The Flat Earth, Prefab Sprout’s Two Wheels Good) and touring the world as an electronic-music guru, Thomas Dolby returns to the stage with an ambitious new multimedia work. Described as “part film, part concert, part transmedia event,” The Invisible Lighthouse features Dolby performing a live narration and musical score in front of the titular film, which was shot and edited by Dolby, and evocatively chronicles an island lighthouse in Britain. Additional drama will be supplied by Foley artist/musician/sound designer Blake Leyh. DAVID SCHMADER

Audacity, the Hunters, Big Eyes, So Pitted

(Black Lodge) If you’re slipping into hibernation mode, this is your best bet for a wild Monday! Fullerton fun punks Audacity make solid, joyful garage rock with a level of creativity that seems to stem from the foursome’s lifelong friendship and nine-plus years as a band. Hunters put on a frenetic show, they say (I have yet to see them, but the lion’s share of reviews I encounter on the duo—Brooklyn’s Isabel Almeida and Derek Watson—obsess over their live-show intensity). That doesn’t necessarily come through in the alternative-flavored, 1990-era Sonic Youthfulness of their recordings, but there’s nothing wrong with a band making the most sense when eyeballs are involved, too. Locals groups Big Eyes and So Pitted can also be counted on to bring the heavy power pop and scuzzy party punk, respectively. EMILY NOKES

Tuesday 11/19

Lupe Fiasco

(Showbox Sodo) See My Philosophy, page 33. Big Freedia

(Neumos) Last time Big Freedia graced the Neumos stage, she pulled a 12-foot work ladder out on the stage, and used it to keep her balance while she twerked, “wiggle-wobbled,” and booty-bounced the crowd into a pure frenzy. Since the Seattle ladder incident, Freedia, aka the Queeniest Diva, has been the star of her own reality TV show on FUSE TV called Big Freedia: Queen of Bounce, traveled all over the United States of Her’merica on tour, and set a new Guinness world record in NYC for “Most People Twerking Simultaneously.” Freedia is on an unstoppable mission. And she’s fast becoming the Pied Piper of New Orleans–style, ass-shaking fun. KELLY O

THE FUZZIEST POTBELLY

Rochat-Felix,

Fiction, For the Foxes, Echosmith, 7 pm, $13/$15

HIGHLINE 100%, Hot Hoodoo, $6 HIGHWAY 99 High and Lonesome, 8 pm, $7

JAZZ ALLEY Jeff Kashiwa, 7:30 pm, $10

NECTAR Rittz, Snow Tha Product, 8 pm, $40

NEW ORLEANS Legacy Band, Clarence Acox OHANA Live Island Music

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

PINK DOOR Casey MacGill & the Blue 4 Trio, 8 pm

a THE ROYAL ROOM

Earshot Jazz Festival: The Music of Bud Powell: Guests, 8 pm, $6-$12

SEAMONSTER Scott Pemberton Band

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

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB Open Mic: Guests

STUDIO SEVEN Faster

Pussycat, Red Light Saints, Late September Dogs guests, 7 pm, $12/$15

SUNSET TAVERN Aan, Gothic Tropic, Hearts Are Thugs , $6

TRACTOR TAVERN The Strange Kind, Secretary , James Anaya, 8 pm, $8

TULA’S John Hansen, 7:30 pm, $12

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Jerry Zimmerman, 8 pm 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, 18+, $5/$8

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

WILDROSE 2nd Hand: Mother Church, Pavone, free

THURS 11/14

LIVE

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BARBOZA Cataldo, Night Cadet, Silver Torches, 8 pm, $10

BLUE MOON TAVERN Banks, Wild Berries, Sir Coyler

BRECHEMIN AUDITORIUM Matthew Bengtson, 7:30 pm, $15

CAN CAN Vince Mira

CHOP SUEY XVIII Eyes, Ships , Blue Light Curtain , $6

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER Mutiny Mutiny, Stars at Your Feet, Cryptobebelem, 8 pm, $6/$8

CONOR BYRNE Puddlestompers, Flannel Attractions a CROCODILE Turquoise Jeep, NighTrain, 8 pm, $10

DARRELL’S TAVERN The Juice Band, $6

DISTRICT LOUNGE Cassia

DeMayo Quintet, 8 pm, free

EL CORAZON The Fleshtones, the Split Squad, guests, 8:30 pm, $12/$15

a EMP MUSEUM Earshot Jazz Festival: NEXT Collective, 8 pm, $11-$22

a GUAYMAS CANTINA Oleaje Flamenco, 8 pm, free

HIGH DIVE the Western Red Penguins, NTNT, Goose Vargis , 8 pm, $6

HIGHLINE Gabriel Saloman, Mamiffer, Dull

Knife, LA Lungs, $7

JAZZ ALLEY Steve Tyrell, 7:30 pm, $30.50

LITTLE RED HEN

Buckaroosters, $3

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

MEANY HALL Music of Today: Electro-Acoustic Compositions: University of Washington’s School of Music, 7:30 pm, $20

NECTAR Head for the Hills,

Li’l Smokies, Steep Ravine, 7 pm, $7/$10

NEPTUNE THEATRE Fruit

Bats, the Donkeys, 8 pm, $16.50/$18

a NEUMOS RA Scion, Blake Lewis, Rodney Hazard, the Tempers Romaro Franceswa, Mike Giacolino , $12

PINK DOOR Bric-a-Brac, 8 pm

RENDEZVOUS Crime Drama, Boogie Comedian, Brian Connolly, 10 pm

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

a SEATTLE ART MUSEUM

Earshot Jazz Festival: Bill Anschell Quartet, 5:30 pm, free

SLIM’S LAST CHANCE Pete Anderson

THE STEPPING STONE PUB

Open Mic: Guests a STUDIO SEVEN Verdant Mile, Dead Sea Symphony, Beneath the Spin Light, 7 pm, $10/$12

SUNSET TAVERN Nightlands, USF, $8

TRACTOR TAVERN Motopony , Bigfoot

Wallace & His Wicked Sons, Big Sur, 8 pm, $15

TULA’S Rachel Gavaletz Band, 7:30 pm, $10

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Rik Wright, Casey

MacGill, 5:30 pm, free

THE WHITE RABBIT Marmalade, $6

DJ

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

THE EAGLE Nasty: DJ King of Pants, Nark

HAVANA Sophisticated

Mama: DJ Sad Bastard, DJ Nitty Gritty

LAST SUPPER CLUB Open House: Guests

LAVA LOUNGE Rock DJs: Guests

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

LOVELY LYNETTE: A QUIZ

Which of the following should be outlawed in 2013? (A) Baggy men’s jeans with oversize pockets and ornate stitching, (B) wearing sunglasses at night, (C) sucking down so many Jell-O shots at the Unicorn that you feel compelled to do somersaults outside on the dirty sidewalk, or (D) sending a fax. Find the correct answer at thestranger.com/drunkoftheweek! KELLY O KELLY O

wednesday, november 20 - 8pm

FRI NOV 22 @ THE VERA PROJECT POLAR BEAR CLUB CITIZEN, DIAMOND YOUTH, SAINTHOOD REPS, AFTERWORDS ALL AGES - 7:00 PM

FRI NOV 22 @ THE SUNSET @DADBONER (AKA KARL WELZEIN) W/ SPECIAL GUESTS MATT BRAUNGER, BRETT HAMIL, MARCO COLLINS 21+ ONLY - 9:30 PM

TUE DEC 10 @ EL CORAZON LOUNGE THE FLATLINERS

LIVING WITH LIONS, SUNDOWNER (CHRIS FROM THE LAWRENCE ARMS), POKE DA SQUID ALL AGES (BAR W/ ID) 7:00 PM SAT DEC 14 @ EL CORAZON TAKE WARNING & KGRG 89.9 FM PRESENT: AMERICAN NIGHTMARE (GIVE UP THE GHOST)

HEIRESS, YOUNG TURKS, CRUTCHES

FRI DEC 20 & SAT DEC 21 @ EL CORAZON

QUARTET KRONOS

Krzysztof

FRIDAY,

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND The Lowdown: DJ Lightray, $3 OHANA Chill: DJ MS

Q NIGHTCLUB Kenny Dope, DJ Supreme La Rock, Wesley Holmes, Blueyedsoul

SEE SOUND LOUNGE

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

THERAPY LOUNGE DUH.: DJ Omar, guests

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

11/15

LIVE a 20/20 CYCLE the Hive Dwellers, Chastity Belt, Cool Ghouls, 8:30 pm

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BARBOZA Those Darlins, Diane Coffee, 7 pm, $12

a BLACK LODGE Screaming Females, Upset, Darto, Big Crux

BLUE MOON TAVERN Po’ Brothers, Taxidermy Western, $6, Po’ Brothers, the Mama Rags, Taxidermy Western, $6

CAFE RACER Two Sided Trio

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER

Ladies Club 2: Shannon Stephens, Whitney Lyman, Debbie Neigher, Lotte Kestner, guests, 8 pm, $10/$12

a CROCODILE The Polish Ambassador, Splatinum Wildlight, 8 pm, $13.50

DARRELL’S TAVERN The Gum, the Plastards, Mystery Ship, $8

a EASY STREET RECORDS

Those Darlins, 6 pm, free

a EL CORAZON Anthony Green, Dave Davison, 8 pm, $15/$18, Ezra Furman, Carson Allen, Ashtree, 8 pm, $10/$12

HARD ROCK CAFE Will Wakefield and the Congress Hotel $10/$13

a HEARTLAND Thousands, Ever Ending

Kicks, Stephen Steinbrink, Julie Byrne

HIGH DIVE Mealfrog

Airport Way , $10

HIGHLINE Cleric, Heiress, LB.!, Czar, UN, 8 pm, $10

HIGHWAY 99 Lisa Mann and Her Really Good Band, 8 pm, $14

JAZZ ALLEY Steve Tyrell, 9:30 pm, $30.50

a KEYARENA Michael Bublé, $54.50-$110

LITTLE RED HEN Bucking Horse, $5

LO-FI Black Nite Crash

New Weather, Brain Fruit, Lou Lou Hernandez, $7 a MOORE THEATRE

Switchfoot, 7 pm, $25 - $40 a NEPTUNE THEATRE

Jessie Ware, the Invisible, 8 pm, $25

NEUMOS Obits, Survival Knife, Dreamsalon, $12

PARAGON Levi Said, free RAVIOLI STATION TRAINWRECK Dizzy, guests a THE ROYAL ROOM Earshot Jazz Festival: Piano Royale, 5:30 pm, Overton Berry, 8 pm, $6-$12

SEAMONSTER Funky 2 Death, 10 pm, free

SHOWBOX SODO Morgan Page, Beltek, Topher Jones, 8 pm

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB

Half Rushmore, Trees And Timber , 8 pm, $7

SLIM’S LAST CHANCE White City Graves , Hellephant, Hondo II, Trentalange

SONIC BOOM RECORDS

Jessie Ware, 6 pm, free SUNSET TAVERN Stag, Jack Endino’s Earthworm, Roaming Herds of Buffalo, 10 pm, $8

TIM’S TAVERN The Wordsmith, IDF

TRACTOR TAVERN The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band, Chris Shiflett, Spoonshine, 9:30 pm, $14/$16

TULA’S Dave Peck Trio, 7:30 pm, $15

a VERA PROJECT Kung Foo Grip , Keyboard Kid, guests, 7 pm, $10

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Johnny Astro

THE WHITE RABBIT Moose Portrait, the Spider Ferns, guests, free

DJ 95 SLIDE DJ Fever One

BALLROOM DJ Tamm of KISS fm

BALMAR Body Movin’

Fridays: DJ Ben Meadow, free

BALTIC ROOM Dirty Work:

Rotating DJs including Sean Majors, BGeezy, Mikey Mars, Sir Kuts, guests

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

CONTOUR Afterhours, 2 am

CUFF C&W Dancing: DJ

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

ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN All

Ours: D-t3ch, Mikey V, Jason Curtis, the Architects, 10 pm, $10

FUEL DJ Headache, guests

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

LAST SUPPER CLUB Madness: Guests

LAVA LOUNGE DJ David James

NECTAR DJ Vadim, DJ Abilities, Jel, 8 pm, $8

NEIGHBOURS UNDERGROUND Caliente

Celebra: DJ Polo, Efren

OHANA Back to the Day: DJ Estylz

PONY Shenanigans: DJ Porq, DJ kKost

Q NIGHTCLUB Bobina

SCARLET TREE Oh So Fresh Fridays: Deejay Tone, DJ

Buttnaked, guests

THERAPY LOUNGE Rapture: Guests, $3 after 11 pm

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

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

SAT

11/16

LIVE

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BALMAR Rotating DJ Night: Guests, 9:30 pm

BARBOZA Sean Nelson, Ruler, Matty and Mikey, 7 pm, $10

BLACK LODGE White Mystery, guests BLUE MOON TAVERN

BY ADRIAN RYAN

FRIDAY 11/15

A TRAILER TRASHY HO SHOW

It’s an inescapable fact of life that Jinkx (Monsoon, duh) and Ben (DeLaCreme, duh) and Dina (MARTINA! DUH!) and a scattered smattering of other Seattle queens seem to hog up all the glory and adulation around here. In the luminous face of such illustrious queens, you can see how easy it is for zillions of other hard-twerking drag queens and drag artists and drag performers and drag everything-else-ers to get swept under the beaded rug. So unfair! Unjust! Unconscionable! And therefore, let us spare a moment to consider one of our lesser celebrated—yet no less delightful— queens: the disreputable trailer-trash whore with the fuzziest potbelly in show business, who is known to the locals as Miss Honey Bucket Honey Bucket (pronounced “Bouquet,” thank-you-very-much) claims lots of things, most of them outright lies. Among these: She was born in Las Vegas. (A likely story!) She claims to have grown up there, proper-whore-style, in a trailer park on Boulder Highway. As an ostensible little girl, she did things like dance around sluttishly to the dulcet strains of Solid Gold (her favorite!) and appear in Las Vegas Strip shows for little hos. (There is no God.) By high school (a miracle!), she started blowjobbing for a living, but mercilessly hoovered up all her profits (or so she says). One

Deception Past, the Swearengens, $6

CAFE RACER Mobius Jones

a CHAPEL

PERFORMANCE SPACE

November: R. Andrew Lee

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER Pigs on the Wing, $12/$15

CONOR BYRNE Pufferfish

Town Forest, Damiso Sun, $7

CROCODILE Latyrx, the Staxx Brothers , 8 pm, $15

a EL CORAZON Alestorm, TrollFest, Gypsyhawk, 7:30 pm, $17/$20

HEARTLAND Paleo, Love in Mind, Whitney Ballen , 8 pm

HIGHLINE Tragedy, Agrimonia, TOAD, Deathraid, 10 pm, $13

HIGHWAY 99 Candye Kane, 8 pm, $17

JAZZ ALLEY Steve Tyrell, 9:30 pm, $30.50

LITTLE RED HEN Bullet Creek, $5

NECTAR Lynx, Natasha Kmeto, 8 pm, $8 a NEPTUNE THEATRE

40 Anniversary Celebration: Kronos Quartet, Degenerate Art Ensemble , $44

NEUMOS Ravenna Woods , Campfire Ok, Vox Mod, 8 pm, $10

PARAGON Solbird, free

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

RADAR HAIR & RECORDS

Dreamsalon, TJ Max, Underworld Scum, DJ Explorateur, DJ Veins

THE ROYAL ROOM

Earshot Jazz Festival: Peter Brotzmann Trio, Paal Nilssen, 7 pm, $9-$18

SEAMONSTER Steven Roth, 6 Demon Bag

SHIP CANAL GRILL Eugenie Jones, 8 pm

SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB

Branden Daniel and the Chics, Timbre Barons, Panama Gold, 8 pm, $7

SLIM’S LAST CHANCE Suitcase, Finger Guns, Stereo Creeps

STUDIO SEVEN Dave Lombardo, Ozzy, Princess, Antitheus, guests, 7 pm, $15/$18

SUNSET TAVERN the Deer Tracks, Verlaine, Half Kingdom, 10 pm, $8/$10

thing led to another, as one thing will, and she decided that the pristine Pacific Northwest was the change she needed (and, well, didn’t we all?). Tonight, this “part-time Aurora ho and part-time ghetto-white-trash rap queen” and her belly fuzz and big, thick ho ’fro (plus special guests Cherry Sur Bête and Sashay Supernova) bring us a trash-stravaganza of live hiphop, R&B, soul, and abject depravity. “All I want out of life,” she says, “is bears, weed, PBR tallboys, and an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement!” And, of course, for you to come see her show. One night only! Trash guaranteed. Re-bar, 10 pm, $12, 21+.

SEE JAKE SLAP DICK—SLAP, JAKE, SLAP!

I’ve decided that Jake Shears is my new rock-star boyfriend, and we’re pretty serious, so don’t even TRY to lay one pink pinky on his bounce-a-quarteroff-this ass tonight or I’ll kill you where you stand. He’s guest DJing with Kevin Kauer (you know, DJ Nark) at tonight’s Dickslap, and, I mean, you can come LOOK at him and dance and have Jell-O shots and everything, I guess, but BE WARNED: He’s profoundly, insanely in love with me, so don’t EVEN work my nerves. DON’T I DESERVE A FUCKING ROCK-STAR BOYFRIEND? DON’T I NEED LOVE LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE? Jesus Christ. The Eagle, 9 pm, $7–$10 (early arrival encouraged), 21+.

TIM’S TAVERN Black Beast Revival, guests

TRACTOR TAVERN Alejandro

Escovedo, Amy Cook, $20

TULA’S Dave Peck Trio, 7:30 pm, $15

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Ruby Bishop, 6 pm, Prom Queen, 9:30 pm

THE WHITE RABBIT Combinator, Radio Raheem , Kissing Potion , $6

DJ

BALLROOM DJ Warren

BALTIC ROOM Good Saturdays: Guest DJs

BARBOZA Inferno: Guests, 10:30 pm, free before 11:30 pm/$5 after CONTOUR Europa Night: Misha Grin, Gil CUFF Gear Night: DJ Mattstands, This is a fetish themed event, with demonstrations at 9pm., no cover if wearing fetish gear, otherwise $5 for men and $15 for women

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

HAZLEWOOD Gayzlewood: DJ Tanner, guests, free LAVA LOUNGE DJ Matt

NEIGHBOURS Powermix: DJ Randy Schlager

NEIGHBOURS

UNDERGROUND Club

Vogue: DJ Chance, DJ Eternal Darkness

OHANA Funk House: DJ Bean One

PONY Meat: Amateur Youth , Dee Jay Jack

RE-BAR Ceremony: DJ Evan Blackstone, guests, 10 pm, $5

SEE SOUND LOUNGE Guest DJs

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

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

SUN 11/17

LIVE

AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BARBOZA Thundercat, Kingdom Crumbs, 8 pm, $15

BLUE MOON TAVERN J.P. and the Geminis, 8 pm, free

BRECHEMIN AUDITORIUM University of Washington’s School of Music, 2 pm, $15

CAFE RACER The Racer Sessions

CHOP SUEY Darkpine, Us on Roofs , 8 pm, $7

COLUMBIA CITY THEATER Moonface, 8 pm, $10/$12

CONOR BYRNE Open Mic: Guests, 8 pm a EL CORAZON The Casualties, Negative Approach, 8 pm, $18/$20 a EMPTY SEA STUDIOS Cahalen Morrison, Greg Spatz, 7 pm, $12/$15 HIGH DIVE Sundog, Blackburn, the Jalapenos, 8 pm, $6

HIGHLINE Skelator, Last Bastion, ThacO, Fallen Angels, $5 JAI THAI BROADWAY Rock Bottom Soundsystem, free JAZZ ALLEY Steve Tyrell, 7:30 pm, $30.50

KELL’S Liam Gallagher

LITTLE RED HEN Open Mic Acoustic Jam with Bodacious Billy: Guests, 4 pm; Jukehouse Hounds, 9 pm, $3

MEANY HALL University Chorale, 2 pm a NEUMOS Cults, SACCO, Mood Rings, 8 pm, $18

PIES & PINTS Sunday Night Folk Review: Guests, free THE ROYAL ROOM Shumba, 7:30 pm

SEAMONSTER Eric Hullander Jazz

SHIP CANAL GRILL Jay Thomas, Sun, noon a SHOWBOX AT THE

MARKET Deltron 3030, 8 pm, $22.50/$25

a SKYLARK CAFE & CLUB Roy Kauffman, Jeff Severson, 7 pm, free a SONIC BOOM RECORDS Mood Rings, 3 pm, free

SUNSET TAVERN Zarni, Tucker Jameson, $6

a TOWN HALL Earshot Jazz Festival: Charles Lloyd, Bill Frisell, 8 pm, $14-$35

TRACTOR TAVERN No Crown , Radio Telescope , Buffalo Tongue, 8 pm, $8 a TRIPLE DOOR Michael Kaeshammer, 7:30 pm, $20/$25 a TULA’S Earshot Jazz Festival: McTuff , 7:30 pm, $8-$16; Jim Cutler Jazz Orchestra, 8 pm, $8

VITO’S RESTAURANT & LOUNGE Ruby Bishop, 6 pm; the Ron Weinstein Trio, 9:30 pm THE WHITE RABBIT Aisle of View, Midnight Mindstate, Argonian, $5

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 LAVA LOUNGE No

BY BRITTNIE FULLER

FRIDAY 11/15

SCREAMING FEMALES’ ECSTATIC SHREDGASMS

with equal parts big guitar solos and indie-rock earnestness.

Sharing some of Screaming Females’ tour dates this time around are Upset, a super-sweet supergroup of garage/ grunge ladies Patty Schemel of Hole, Jennifer Prince, and Ali Koehler of Vivian Girls. She’s Gone, released October 29 via Don Giovanni Records, is a whimsical pop-punk debut that should translate into a fun live set. Continuing a lineup to distress button-ups are Eastside postrockers Darto, who get diabolically emo on their debut LP, In Difference. Dosed with cerebral, Slint-obsessed qualities,

Anyone who’s ever thought, “Punk rock is bullshit,” there is a show for you tonight. Get down to Black Lodge, where New Jersey’s irrepressibly fun and crafty basement-punk phenoms Screaming Females will shred their ecstatic guitar jams. Having played together since 2006, the trio has five full-lengths and manifold tours under their (studded) belt, and their most recent single, a split with Wisconsin punk trio Tenement, is the soundtrack for haters to disarm to. The Screamales’ full-bodied sludgeguitar swirl is wellpolished on “Ancient Civilization,” but in a way that also doesn’t sacrifice its raw immediacy. Last year’s indie rock epic/Steve Albini–produced album Ugly set the band up to transcend DIY punk into the world of NPR dads, for the universal reason that Screaming Females rule. But if you need additional convincing, vocalist/ lead Screamale Marissa Paternoster is also BFFs with ’90s alt rocker Shirley Manson; right before collaborating on Patti Smith’s “Because the Night” onstage, the Garbage frontwoman praised Paternoster for being one of the “girls who don’t want to get sexed up in their videos and show their tits.” They have since recorded the cover in the studio

their sound wanders in a half-comatose state, with driving riffs occasionally imploding into noise crests of trancelike sublimity. Local punks Big Crux should also convert anyone with ears, if their latest EP, Nature Cruising (Iron Lung), is any indication. Fans of Minutemen and Big Boys will have lots to revel in here; prepare for a wildly energetic funk-punk groove attack. Black Lodge, 9 pm.

LOUNGE Psych/Blues: Bobby Malvestuto

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

NEIGHBOURS

UNDERGROUND SIN: DJ Keanu, 18+, free

OHANA DJ Hideki

PONY Dirty Deeds: Guest

DJs Q NIGHTCLUB Reflect, 8 pm, free TUES 11/19

LIVE AQUA BY EL GAUCHO Ben Fleck, 6 pm

BARBOZA Papa, Waters, 8 pm, $12

CAFE RACER Jacobs Posse

CHOP SUEY Lures, Bigfoot Wallace, Albatross, White Garden, 8 pm, $8

CONOR BYRNE Ol’ Time

Social: The Tallboys , 9 pm

a EL CORAZON The Devil Wears Prada, the Ghost Inside, Volumes, Texas In July, 7 pm, $22/$25

ELECTRIC TEA GARDEN Monktail Creative Music Concern, DJ Shonuph, free HIGH DIVE the Dark Blue, Paper Machete , Compass Points North, 8 pm, $6

JAZZ ALLEY The Four Freshmen, 7:30 pm, $26.50

KELL’S Liam Gallagher

LITTLE RED HEN Tequila

Rose, free MAC’S TRIANGLE PUB Open Mic: free

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

NEUMOS Big Freedia, $15

OUTWEST Wine and Jazz Night: Tutu Jazz Quartet, free OWL N’ THISTLE Jazz Improv Night: Guests

SEAMONSTER McTuff Trio, 10 pm, free

SHOWBOX AT THE MARKET

Kimie’ a SHOWBOX SODO Lupe Fiasco, 8 pm, $32.50/$36

SUNSET TAVERN Ramblin’ Years, the Lonely Mountain Lovers, guests, 8 pm, $6

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

TRACTOR TAVERN The Honky Tonkers, 7:30 pm, $5 a TRIPLE DOOR Rokia Traore, 9:30 pm, $30/$32

TULA’S Roadside Attraction Big Band, 7:30 pm, $8; Dawn Clement, Laura Welland Group, 7:30 pm, $15

WAID’S The Spider Ferns, Myrmidon, $5

THE WHITE RABBIT Internal Error, the Mama Rags, the Plastic Arts, $5

DJ

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

BALTIC ROOM Drum & Bass Tuesdays: Guests

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

THE EAGLE Pitstop: DJ Nark

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

Is self-hypnosis a thing? Because I think I might have just done it while staring at this lovely geometric design by Irene Barber of XVIII Eyes.

AARON HUFFMAN

XVIII Eyes

w/Ships, Blue Light Curtain Thurs Nov 14, Chop Suey

LAVA LOUNGE Metal: Doctor Jonze 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

BY DAVE SEGAL

THURSDAY 11/14

WITNESS HOUSE/FUNK MASTER AT WORK KENNY DOPE

New York City–based DJ/producer Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez is best known among house heads for his collaborations with Louie Vega in Masters at Work and Nuyorican Soul, in which they laid down some of the richest, most soulful house anthems ever to make people’s temperatures rise (go hear the 20-yearold “Blood Vibes” and Nuyorican Soul’s cover of Rotary Connection’s “I Am the Black Gold of the Sun” posthaste). On top of his bulletproof house credentials and tracks under the Bucketheads alias, Mr. Dope is a skilled turntablist with deep knowledge of funk and hiphop. Your party aspirations are safe in his dexterous hands. With DJ Supreme La Rock, Wesley Holmes, and Blueyedsoul Q Nightclub, 9 pm, $8, 21+.

FRIDAY 11/15

COSMOPOLITAN PRODUCER DJ VADIM AND DESTABILIZED FUNKATEER JEL

Russian percussion master DJ Vadim has been one of hiphop’s most adventurous, cosmopolitan producers since the mid ’90s, including his work as Andre Gurov and his 1999 project with Antipop Consortium members under the Isolationist handle. While Vadim’s texturally inventive hiphop has been gradually trailing off after 2002’s The Art of Listening, his output since then has been eclectic and never less than interesting. His last two albums—Life Is Moving (as the Electric) and Don’t Be Scared—find Vadim using more guest vocalists and getting more hook-conscious. Anticon Records fixture Jel (Jeffrey Logan) is one of underground hiphop’s great eccentrics. He’s orchestrated records for genre-scrambling subversives Themselves, Subtle,

TAJ MAHAL TRIO

FRI, NOV 22 - SUN, DEC 1

and Deep Puddle Dynamics, and his solo material bursts with unpredictable dynamics and destabilized funk. Live, Jel dazzles with his light-speed punching of his MPC, giving sweaty seminars on the niceties of intricate beat-making. With DJ Abilities, Serengeti, and B. Durazzo Nectar, 8 pm, $8, 21+.

SATURDAY 11/16

JUST HOW DEEP IS TJ MAX’S COSMIC DISCO?

Time to get excited, y’all. TJ Max dropped their debut album September 24 on local underground-music stronghold Debacle Records while you weren’t paying attention (it somehow slipped by me, too). Titled Wrong to Run, the six-track LP by Midday Veil moonlighters Jayson Kochan (aka Airport) and Timm Mason (aka Mood Organ) doles out high-fiber slices of dark, smart cosmic disco. If Daft Punk sounded as cool and sinister as they looked, it might come off like Wrong to Run. TJ Max put a lot of heaven and hell into every cut, and there’s enough depth in the astral and gritty textures to get lost in for eons. With Dreamsalon and Underworld Scum Radar Hair and Records, 6 pm, donations accepted for the Betsy Hanson cancer fund, all ages.

(CLOSED ON MON, NOV 25TH & THANKSGIVING) Composer and multi-instrumentalist, Mahal is a two-time Grammy winner and one of the most influential America blues and roots artists of the past half-century.

ELDAR

TUE, DEC 3 - WED, DEC 4

“He’s a (piano) genius beyond most young people I’ve heard.” - Dave Brubeck

ANGIE STONE

THU, DEC 5 - SUN, DEC 8

Neo-soul singer/songwriter with over 5 million albums sold worldwide and ten singles on the R&B charts

LOUIS HAYES and THE CANNONBALL LEGACY BAND MON, DEC 9

For more than 40 years, Hayes has been a catalyst for energetic swing, straight ahead post-bop, and modern jazz. Joining Mr. Hayes: Vincent Herring, Jeremy Pelt, Rick Germanson, and Dezron Douglas

MIKE STERN BAND feat. RANDY BRECKER, ANTHONY JACKSON, AND KEITH CARLOCK

TUE, DEC 10 - WED, DEC 11 Jazz fusion all-star

BASTARDS A recession-hit Paris collapses into madness.

Claire Denis’s

Bastards Is a Movie About a Real Bastard

The New Film by the Great French Director

BY CHARLES MUDEDE

After a man commits suicide on a dark, rainy night, a beautiful young woman wearing only high heels walks down a wet city street. She has a blank expression on her face, her steps are a little

unsteady, and her body, which is slender, seems soulless or guided by some evil external force. This is the opening of Claire Denis’s latest feature film, Bastards. Set in Paris, it concerns the captain of a supertanker, Marco Silvestri (Vincent Lindon), and his younger sister Sandra (Julie Bataille), who also happens to be the mother of the naked ambulator, Justine (Lola Créton), and the wife of the man who committed suicide. The captain returns to Paris to investigate the mysterious link between the suicide and

Bastards dir. Claire Denis Northwest Film Forum

the public nudity. The captain’s dead brother-in-law was, it turns out, in deep debt and in the process of losing a factory that made cheap high heels. As for the niece, her body and her mind were destroyed by shadowy and sadistic figures in some underworld sex society. The clue to solving the mystery is an old and very powerful capitalist, Michel Subor (Edouard Laporte).

Bastards is Denis’s first crime thriller, and in certain respects it’s close to her only horror film, Trouble Every Day. But as the horror

film had no ghosts or demons or zombies, her first crime thriller has no police officers making inquiries or detectives following clues, nor is the ship captain a hero on a mission to reveal the truth and bring criminals to justice. Though he moves into an apartment above the capitalist’s mistress, Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni), instead of working hard to piece the parts of the mystery together (tailing the capitalist’s

The movie’s center is the moment the captain fucks the capitalist’s mistress in her apartment.

black automobile, bugging the mistress’s apartment, taking pictures with a powerful zoom lens), he ends up seducing Raphaëlle, and spends much of the film dealing with his growing obsession with her body. The center of this movie is not a revelation that connects the suicide, the shoe factory, and the shoes on the nude woman on the streets, but the moment the captain fucks the capitalist’s mistress in her apartment. It is a tense moment. The two are so hungry for real passion that they do not so much kiss as eat each other—open mouths, hands in mouths, teeth on fingers, teeth on lips and cheeks, tongues desperately darting for throats. And, as with Denis’s 2002 Friday Night—a film that also stars Vincent Lindon—the camera, handled once again by Denis’s right-hand woman, Agnès Godard, explores the sensual planet of human flesh (muscles tensing, skin smoothing, bones protruding). After the needy, breathy, hungry fuck, the captain’s life, piece by piece, starts falling apart.

Bastards is not Denis’s best film (that honor is still held by Beau Travail), but it adds another part to her universe, which exists between two points: France’s former African colonies and the financial and political center of French postcolonial domination, Paris. In Denis’s previous film, White Material, we watched a politically unstable black African country descend into war; in Bastards, we watch a recession-hit Paris collapse into madness, prostitution, and urban violence. The film ends with an erectile dysfunctional man holding a dry and hard corncob.

Life, Death, and Dinner

Three Restaurants and Their Incredible Stories

BY BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT

WSpinning Plates

dir. Joseph Levy

Varsity

hat do a temple of modernist cuisine in Chicago, a 150-year-old country restaurant in Iowa, and a brand-new Mexican place struggling to survive in Tucson have in common? The answer—beyond the obvious common denominator, food—varies from nearly nil to more than you’d expect, depending on the angle of observation taken in the documentary Spinning Plates. And if the comparisons and contrasts sometimes feel forced as the film alternates among the three, it hardly matters: Spinning Plates is full of twists and turns, life and death, families and fires. Food may be the foundation, but these are profiles in determination, disaster, and devotion. You can’t write stuff like this.

The restaurant-obsessed will guess that the tippy-top high-end place here is Alinea, and they’ll already know the twist involving chef Grant Achatz. Anyone and everyone will find his take on his rarefied role in the world of food honest, funny, and a little freaky; he freely admits that it’s “absurd,” the lengths to which he and his staff go in preparing two-bite courses for Alinea’s 25-course dinners. It’s more absurd juxtaposed with the simple hard work of the almost unbearably charming Francisco and Gabby Martinez, the new Tucson restaurateurs whose foreclosed-upon house hangs in the balance. The crystalline, nonjudgmental cinematography assigns the same beauty and gravity to a smear of masa going across a corn husk for the Martinezes’ tamales as it does to Alinea’s food artists/ scientists assembling dishes with tweezers and furrowed brows. When the film effortfully locates common ground between these two diametrically opposed, very American stories, it’s hard for it to ring true. And do they—can they, should they—have the same value to you?

The third establishment in Spinning Plates is Breitbach’s Country Dining, in Balltown, Iowa, a place that’s wholeheartedly a part of its community in a way the Martinezes aspire to and Alinea definitively does not. The oldfashioned kindness that endures through this family’s tribulations will hurt your heart—but then so, in different ways, will the perseverance of both Achatz and the Martinezes. Spinning Plates is less about food, more about life.

FILM SHORTS

More reviews and movie times: thestranger.com/film

LIMITED RUN

ANNIE HALL

Watching Annie Hall again, I was most struck by how totally sex-obsessed it is. But it’s adult sex, people with analysts and intimacy issues and orgasm trouble. It’s easily the most adult sex comedy ever made. Alvy (Allen’s character) is a horny little devil, but he’s only interested in grown-ups. And they’re really interesting grown-ups—the movie is packed with real, funky-looking, adult women. It’s one of the movie’s best traits. (DAVID SCHMADER) Central Cinema, Fri-Tues 7 pm.

BASTARDS

See review, page 47. The new film by the great Claire Denis. Northwest Film Forum, Fri 7:15, 9:15 pm, Sat 5:15 pm, Sun 5:15, 7:15, 9:15 pm, Mon-Tues 7:15, 9:15 pm.

CINEMA ITALIAN STYLE

Seven days of seven contemporary Italian films, including the 2013 Palme d’Or–nominated La Grande Bellezza, about the reflections of an aging party animal. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Thurs-Tues. For complete schedule and showtimes, see siff.net.

DIE HARD

This is a Christmas movie in which Bruce Willis plays Santa Claus and Alan Rickman plays a Satanic, communist, Christmas-denying terrorist. Central Cinema, Fri-Tues 9:30 pm.

FEMALE TROUBLE

Divine stars as Dawn Davenport, a good girl gone bad, in John Waters’s 1974 masterpiece of modern feminism. Grand Illusion, Fri-Sat 10 pm.

FILM COURT: SEX AND THE CITY 2

Sex and the City 2 is on trial at Central Cinema. The prosecutor is former Stranger film editor Lindy West, and the attorney for the defense is Jet City Improv’s Douglas Willott. The audience members, of course, will be the jury. Central Cinema, Thurs Nov 14 at 8 pm.

FLOWER BOY DRAMA CLUB

A Korean TV melodrama following a handsome playboy who hires a girl to play his gay lover so his parents will stop trying to make him get married. (But then they probably actually fall in love.) Northwest Film Forum, Thurs Nov 14 at 9 pm.

GOD LOVES UGANDA

See Stranger Suggests, page 19. SIFF Film Center, Fri 6:30, 8:30 pm, Sat-Sun 3:30, 5:30, 7:30 pm, MonTues 6:30 pm.

I AM DIVINE

Directed by Jeffrey Schwarz, I Am Divine covers all its biopic bases well. Kicking off with the premiere of Hairspray—Divine and John Waters’s 1988 mainstream breakthrough—the film tracks back to Glenn Milstead’s privileged but lonely childhood in Baltimore, carries us through the birth and reign of Divine, and gathers voluminous evidence of Divine’s star power to make his premature death land as it should. (“I still can’t believe he’s dead,” says Waters, with love and light bafflement.) Beyond the basics, Schwarz shines plenty of light into lessinvestigated corners of the story: Divine’s love life (robust!), pot habit (robust!), and career beyond the John Waters

universe (from off-Broadway plays to international disco hits). Bookending the film are stories from Divine’s highdrama family saga, which I won’t spoil for you here, but which will muss much mascara among audiences. (Bring a tissue.) But the most powerful moments of I Am Divine are the most powerful moments of Divine on film, racing on the insane chemistry she enjoyed with John Waters. In his early works—Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble—Divine attacked the world like no one before, coming on like a one-man Never Mind the Bollocks a half-decade before the invention of the Sex Pistols. Go, cheer, cry, gape in awe. (DAVID SCHMADER) Grand Illusion, Fri 8 pm, Sat-Sun 4, 6, 8 pm, Mon-Tues 7, 9 pm.

INDIGENOUS SHOWCASE

Copresented by Longhouse Media and featuring works by Native American filmmakers, the series continues with a spotlight on the films of indigenous Hawaiians. The first screening is Haku Inoa, a documentary about the importance of one’s name, and the second is The Haumana, a drama concerning the learning of traditional hula dancing. Northwest Film Forum, Fri 5:30, 8 pm.

THE LAST UNICORN

A delightfully dreary animated classic with a gothic style that’s the perfect antidote to today’s Pixar bubblegum, featuring the voices of Mia Farrow, Jeff Bridges, and Alan Arkin! Author Peter S. Beagle will be in attendance for signings and such before the screenings. Cinerama, Sat 1 pm, Mon 7:30 pm.

MUSIC CRAFT: DAVID BOWIE

Part of an ongoing series highlighting outstanding live concert footage from musicians, this entry is a screening of the BBC documentary David Bowie and the Story of Ziggy Stardust Northwest Film Forum, Thurs Nov 14 at 7 pm.

NOSTALGHIA

Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky’s very slow-paced (MEDITATIVE!!!) film about a Russian expatriate poet living in Tuscany and yearning full-time. Presented on 35 mm! Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Tues 7, 9:15 pm.

RUSH TO JUDGMENT

Fifty years after Kennedy’s assassination, a screening of this self-produced documentary from 1967 that takes a skeptical look at the conclusions and the thoroughness of the Warren Commission. Keystone Church, Fri Nov 15 at 7 pm.

A SHIELD FOR MURDER

A noir from 1954 about a crooked cop who uses his job on the force as a shield... a shield for murder. Seattle Art Museum, Thurs Nov 14 at 7:30 pm.

SPINNING PLATES

See review, page 47. Varsity, Fri 5, 7:30, 9:40 pm, SatSun 2:30, 5, 7:30, 9:40 pm, Mon-Tues 5, 7:30, 9:40 pm.

SUPER GOLDEN HAPPY HOUR

It’s happy hour at Central Cinema (they have drinks and food, remember) accompanied by classic footage of Bea Arthur and her gang of shoulder-padded blue-hairs. Central Cinema, Wed Nov 13 at 5:30 pm.

THE ULTIMATE SMACKDOWN SING ALONG Sing along with music videos from virtually every pop star

NOW SHOWING 11/15 - 11/21

THOR: THE DARK WORLD (PG-13) Fri: (4:25), 7:10*, 9:50* Sat: (1:30)*, (4:25), 7:10*, 9:50 Sun: (1:30)*, (4:25), 7:10* Mon: (4:45), 7:50* • Tue: (4:45), 7:50*^ Wed: (4:45), 7:50* • Thu: 7:25 PM* 12 YEARS A SLAVE (R) Thu: (4:15)*, 8:00* Fri: (4:15)*, 7:00, 10:00* Sat: (1:20), (4:15)*, 7:00, 10:00* Sun: (1:20), (4:15)*, 7:00 Mon: (4:15)*, 8:00 • Tue: (4:15)*, 8:00^ Wed: (4:15)*, 8:00

INEQUALITY FOR ALL (PG) Fri: (4:45)*, 7:20* Sat: (1:45)*, (4:45)*, 7:20*, 9:40* Sun: (1:45)*, (4:45)*, 7:20* Mon - Wed: (4:55)*, 8:10* Thu: (4:55 PM)* THE HUNGER GAMES DOUBLE FEATURE (PG-13) Thu 11/21: 5:00 PM - THE HUNGER GAMES 10:00 PM* - CATCHING FIRE

that popped between 1980 and today. Central Cinema, Wed Nov 13 at 8 pm.

NOW PLAYING

12 YEARS A SLAVE

The brutal tale of 12 Years a Slave comes from the 1853 autobiography of Solomon Northup. Northup was a free black man living in New York with his wife and children when, in 1841, he was kidnapped, transported south, sold to the highest bidder, and subjected to a barbaric 12-year enslavement. In the film, Northup is played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, an accomplished British actor who does extraordinary work here. Throughout 12 Years are scenes of such barbarity, brought to life by actors talented enough

I TELEVISION TM

BY WM. TM STEVEN HUMPHREY

ROBOT-PAPER-SCISSORS

LOOK. I GET IT. Robots are going to steal our jobs, ultimately overthrow humanity, turn us into slaves, and eventually squash our noggins beneath their clanking metallic feet. I’ve accepted this fact, and I can live with it. BUT! While I still have a few years left of relative freedom from our robotic overlords, can I make one teensy-weensy request? Can we PUH-LEEZE stop inventing robots that can beat us at rock-paper-scissors?

According to a report from the BBC, “a robot developed by Japanese scientists is so fast it can ‘win’ the rock-paper-scissors game against a human every single time.” Apparently, it uses “high-speed recognition and reaction” rather than predicting your moves—or, in other words, IT CHEATS!!! Watch a video of this cheating bastard robot right here (bit.ly/1fforaj), and then try to tell me that Japanese scientists aren’t trying to murder us all! Oh, surrrrre. They’re playing rock-paper-scissors NOW. But guess what they’ll be doing with their superfast fingers next? Out-drawing us in gun duels, snatching knives out of the air (that were expertly thrown at their servo panels), and eventually? Finger-banging our significant others before we can get our digits up in there! (Actually, that might save all us a lot of work.)

REGARDLESS! The last thing I need right now is a goddamn robot destroying my self-confidence (aka “megalomaniacal tendencies,” according to my quack shrink). That being said, I’m still looking forward to FOX’s new robot show debuting this week, Almost Human (Sun Nov 17, 8 pm; time

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

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

slot debut, Mon Nov 18, 8 pm).

Set in crime-ridden LA circa 2048, Almost Human tells the story of a gruff cop, Detective John Kennex (Karl Urban, best known as Bones from the Star Trek reboot), who’s teamed up with plastic-looking androids to help him bust bad guys. HOWEVER! When an arrest goes particularly bad, Kennex is nearly killed and loses a leg—so he’s in no hurry to rejoin the force. And when he does return, he’s partnered with a total a-hole robot who, like, only wants to follow rules and stuff! So an “accident” happens (heh, heh, hehhhh), and until Kennex can be provided with a brand-new robot, he’s stuck with an older model: one with actual feelings!

The decommissioned droid, named Dorian (played by an extremely likable Michael Ealy), actually looks and acts human—which is a real problem for a police department that would prefer if their cops killed and tortured criminals without remorse. After a bumpy start, Kennex and Dorian hit it off, and futuristic buddy-cop hijinks and action sequences ensue! But don’t get it twisted: Almost Human isn’t just a robot Lethal Weapon—the premiere episode has some impressive Blade Runner–esque special effects, exciting shoot-’em-ups, snappy banter, and a terrific performance from Ealy, who might be the most likable robot since Next Generation’s Data. (Plus, he’s so cute, I almost wouldn’t mind him squashing my skull beneath his clanking foot.)

Almost Human comes courtesy of Lost’s J.J. Abrams and Fringe’s Joel Wyman, so the pedigree is there to produce a fun, longrunning sci-fi show—as long as the words “rock-paper-scissors” are never uttered! (Seriously, if we’re gonna have speedy-fingered robots? Forget playing these baby games and let’s get right to the finger-banging!)

Read Humpy’s weekly TV listings at THESTRANGER.COM

J.C. Chandor make this story as exciting and as touching as it is harrowing. (ERIK HENRIKSEN)

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS

Captain Phillips should be mass-market sap. But it’s the opposite of that: Lean and smart and intense, it’s a film that’s happy to kick you in the stomach to make a point. The broad strokes: Tom Hanks plays Richard Phillips, who captained the shipping vessel Maersk Alabama in 2009 on what was supposed to be a routine trip around the Horn of Africa. It wasn’t routine: Somali pirates took the ship, then took Phillips as a hostage. And in Captain Phillips, it’s in the details where things get interesting and blurry. Not satisfied with telling the story from Phillips’s white, American perspective, the story also follows the life and the motives of Muse (Barkhad Abdi, excellent), who hijacks the Alabama with a tiny crew and desperate determination. (ERIK HENRIKSEN)

CHARLIE COUNTRYMAN

How does Shia LaBeouf continue to land starring roles? In just about every movie he’s been in, from sugary blockbusters to lowly indie dramas, he’s proven that he’s not relatable as an everyman. Still, LaBeouf is hardly the worst thing about the inept and uninteresting Charlie Countryman. It’s yet another movie about a passive young white guy who suffers a trauma (his mother dies) and undertakes a quest to become whole again (his mother’s ghost tells him to go to Bucharest, where he gets swept up in a smarmy mob drama) while falling in love. Countryman wastes most of an interesting supporting cast—Aubrey Plaza is in it for about two seconds, Vincent D’Onofrio has less than two minutes of screen time—and offers interesting showcase roles to a few other actors. Rupert Grint tries to cast off boy-wizard typecasting as an aspiring porn star, Mads Mikkelsen does a cheaper grade of Eurotrash than his Casino Royale bad guy, and Evan Rachel Wood salvages an uninteresting manic-pixie-dream-girl role with her relentless sulkiness as a Romanian cellist. But at the center of it all is cow-eyed LaBeouf, who can’t manage to elevate a relatively dull and uninspired script. (PAUL CONSTANT)

DALLAS BUYERS CLUB

When career partier Ron Woodroof contracted AIDS in 1986, the disease was still, in the public’s eye, very much limited to the realm of gay men. Woodroof overcame not only his deeply ingrained homophobia but, for many years, the disease itself: He smuggled in unapproved medications from Mexico, Japan, and elsewhere, selling them to HIVpositive patients while the FDA remained in Big Pharma’s thrall. It’s an interesting story, but the real meat of Dallas Buyers Club is Matthew McConaughey’s performance. He dropped 50 pounds, filtering his Texas good-ol’-boy schtick through Woodroof’s wiry bigotry and rage. The film sputters at the end with some directorial overreach, but for the first hour and a half, McConaughey’s exceptional performance is riveting enough. (NED LANNAMANN)

DIANA

If you love, love, LOVE Princess Diana—no judgment—you will want to see Diana, and you will probably enjoy it, and you will cry at the end. Naomi Watts’s lack of resemblance in the title role is distracting at first, but she gets the chin-down smile just right, and she’s graceful and—sorry, super-fans—appropriately, essentially boring. The movie concerns the last few years of Diana’s life; the fairy-tale wedding is long past, and the princess is lonely in her palace, as established by her waking alone in her fancy

bed, jogging alone across the manicured grounds, and making toast alone in an echoing kitchen. She has any material thing she could possibly want (including a billion gilt picture frames), but she rarely gets to see her children. Enter a handsome heart surgeon (Naveen Andrews, of Lost fame); even though he smokes cigarettes and eats junk food, he is highly principled, we know, because he repeatedly says so. Also, he likes jazz; as he and Diana fall in love, the lines about jazz are among the film’s most painful (it’s about improvisation). Diana slowly marches to its forgone conclusion, with German director Oliver Hirschbiegel maintaining a formal style that allows for only the most hackneyed version of romance. Still, it’s terribly sad, these cutout characters and what they are put through. Even if you don’t love Diana, you might cry, too. (BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT)

ENDER’S GAME

What we have here is an adaptation that can’t quite comprehend the moral grays of its source material, but it’s also a movie that’s willing to bring up some uncomfortable truths that other CGI-heavy blockbusters refuse to discuss at all. If you’re not familiar with the plot by now, you’re simply not paying attention: Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) is a brilliant young man who is recruited to the upper echelons of the Earth’s defense corps, participating in an increasingly difficult series of combat simulations to prove his readiness to battle the insectoid aliens who attacked us the first time. Harrison Ford is Colonel Graff, the man who sees a tactical genius in Wiggin just waiting to burst forth. Wiggin’s fellow soldiers Bernard, Dink, Bean, Bonzo, and, most notably, Petra (Hailee Steinfeld) all figure into the shaping of Wiggin in one way or another. Only a couple of the actors are terrible (Abigail Breslin’s Valentine is the biggest stinker), but nobody is especially great, either. Ford’s gruff old man routine is beyond threadbare these days, and Butterfield doesn’t seem to find either the child or the sociopath inside Wiggin. (PAUL CONSTANT)

KILL YOUR DARLINGS

While Harry Potter losing his butt-virginity does offer a certain fascination, there’s little else to recommend Kill Your Darlings, the generally terrible new film from first-time director John Krokidas that describes a pivotal event in the formation of the Beat movement. In 1944, a Columbia undergrad named Lucien Carr murdered his former Boy Scout leader, 33-year-old David Kammerer, and then dumped the body in the Hudson River, claiming self-defense against a violent pederast. Before going to police, Carr told his friends Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs about the crime; they were subsequently arrested as accessories. It’s an incredible story (check out the 2012 New York Times article “Where Death Shaped the Beats” for the full account), but here it’s rewritten as fan fiction in which handsome, brilliant young men yawp barbarically all over Manhattan. Kill Your Darlings juxtaposes Carr’s crimes against the early days of the Beats, blaring jazz while Ginsberg, Carr, Kerouac, and Burroughs sweat out the details of a bold new aesthetic philosophy. Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) is nervous, closeted, and utterly in thrall to Carr (Dane DeHaan), a handsome Slytherin with a cool disregard for authority who charms Ginsberg by jumping on a table in the middle of the Columbia University library and reciting Henry Miller. There’s an embarrassingly besotted quality to Kill Your Darlings; filmmaker Krokidas tries to pin down youth’s pretty butterflies, and ends up a sweaty lepidopterist with dusty thumbprints on his glasses. (ALISON HALLETT)

FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

BY ROB BREZSNY

For the Week of Nov 13

ARIES (March 21–April 19): There’s something resembling a big red snake slithering around in your mind these days. I don’t mean that literally, of course. I’m talking about a big red imaginary snake. But it’s still quite potent. While it’s not poisonous, neither is it a pure embodiment of sweetness and light. Whether it ends up having a disorienting or benevolent influence on your life all depends on how you handle your relationship with it. I suggest you treat it with respect, but also let it know that you’re the boss. Give it guidelines and a clear mandate so that it serves your noble ambitions and not your chaotic desires. If you do that, your big red snake will heal and uplift you.

TAURUS (April 20–May 20): In my astrological opinion, almost nothing can keep you from getting the love you need in the coming days. Here’s the only potential problem: You might have a mistaken or incomplete understanding about the love you need, and that could interfere with you recognizing and welcoming the real thing. So here’s my prescription: Keep an open mind about the true nature of the love that you actually need most, and stay alert for the perhaps unexpected ways it might make itself available.

GEMINI (May 21–June 20): “People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind,” asserts novelist Chuck Palahniuk. Your assignment, Gemini, is to work your ass off to fall out of love with your pain. As if you were talking to a child, explain to your subconscious mind that the suffering it has gotten so accustomed to has outlived its usefulness. Tell your deep self that you no longer want the ancient ache to be a cornerstone of your identity. To aid the banishment, I recommend that you conduct a ritual of severing. Tie one side of a ribbon to a symbol of your pain and tie the other side around your waist. Then cut the ribbon in half and bury the symbol in the dirt.

CANCER (June 21–July 22): “You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again,” said painter Joan Miró. “You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life,” he added. The coming days are likely to bring you none of the former kind of experiences and several of the latter, Cancerian. It’s a numinous time in your long-term cycle: a phase when you’re likely to encounter beauty that enchants you and mysteries that titillate your sense of wonder for a long time. In other words, the eternal is coming to visit you in very concrete ways. How do you like

your epiphanies? Hot and wild? Cool and soaring? Comical and lyrical? Hot and soaring and comical and wild and cool and lyrical?

LEO (July 23–Aug 22): There’s a new genre of erotic literature: dinosaur porn. E-books like In the Velociraptor’s Nest and Ravished by the Triceratops tell tall tales about encounters between people and prehistoric reptiles. I don’t recommend you read this stuff, though. While I do believe that now is a good time to add new twists to your sexual repertoire and explore the frontiers of pleasure, I think you should remain rooted in the real world, even in your fantasy life. It’s also important to be safe as you experiment. You really don’t want to explore the frontiers of pleasure with cold-blooded beasts. Either travel alone, or round up a warmblooded compassion specialist who has a few skills in the arts of intimacy.

VIRGO (Aug 23–Sept 22): The saxifrage is a small plant with white flowers. It grows best in subarctic regions and cooler parts of the Northern Hemisphere. The word “saxifrage” is derived from the Latin word saxifraga, whose literal meaning is “stone-breaker.” Indeed, the plant does often appear in the clefts of stones and boulders. In his poem “A Sort of a Song,”

William Carlos Williams celebrates its strength: “Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.” I nominate this darling little dynamo to be your metaphorical power object of the week, Virgo. May it inspire you to crack through blocks and barriers with subtle force.

LIBRA (Sept 23–Oct 22): You’re not being swept along in a flood of meaningless distractions and irrelevant information and trivial wishes, right? I’m hoping that you have a sixth sense about which few stimuli are useful and meaningful to you, and which thousands of stimuli are not. But if you are experiencing a bit of trouble staying well-grounded in the midst of the frenzied babble, now would be a good time to take strenuous action. The universe will conspire to help you become extra stable and secure if you resolve to eliminate as much nonsense from your life as you can.

SCORPIO (Oct 23–Nov 21): Sweetness is good. Sweetness is desirable. To be healthy, you need to give and receive sweetness on a regular basis. But you can’t flourish on sweetness alone. In fact, too much of it may be oppressive or numbing. I’m speaking both literally and metaphorically: To be balanced, you need all of the other tastes, including saltiness, sourness, bitterness, and savoriness. From what I understand, you are headed into a phase when you’ll thrive on more bitterness and savoriness than usual. To get an idea of what I mean, meditate on what the emotional equivalents might be for bitter tastes like coffee, beer, and olives, and for savory tastes like mushrooms, cheese, spinach, and green tea.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22–Dec 21): When you procrastinate, you avoid doing an important task. Instead, you goof off, doing something fun or simply puttering around wasting time. But what if there were a higher form of procrastination? What if you could avoid an important task by doing other tasks that were somewhat less important but still quite valuable? Here’s what that might look like for you right now: You could postpone your search for the key to everything by throwing yourself into a project that will give you the key to one small part of everything.

CAPRICORN (Dec 22–Jan 19): In his utopian novel Looking Backward, American author Edward Bellamy wrote a passage that I suspect applies to you right now: “It is under what may be called unnatural, in the sense of extraordinary, circumstances that people behave most naturally, for the reason that such circumstances banish artificiality.” Think of the relief and release that await you, Capricorn: an end to pretending, a dissolution of deception, the fall of fakery. As you weave you way through extraordinary circumstances, you will be moved to act with brave authenticity. Take full advantage.

AQUARIUS (Jan 20–Feb 18): “I have your back” is an American expression that could also be rendered as “I’m right behind you, ready to help and defend you” or “I’m ready to support you whenever you’ve got a problem.” Is there anyone in the world who feels that way about you? If not, now would be an excellent time to work on getting such an ally. Cosmic conditions are ripe for bringing greater levels of assistance and collaboration into your life. And if you already do have confederates of that caliber, I suggest you take this opportunity to deepen your symbiotic connection even further.

PISCES (Feb 19–March 20): More than a hundred countries around the world celebrate a holiday called Independence Day, memorializing a time when they broke away from another nation and formed a separate state. I encourage you to create your own personal version of this festival. It could commemorate a breakthrough moment in the past when you escaped an oppressive situation, a turning point when you achieved a higher level of autonomy, or a taboo-busting transition when you started expressing your own thoughts and making your own decisions with more authority. By the way, a fresh opportunity to take this kind of action is available

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SUPERIOR COURT OF WASHINGTON COUNTY OF KING

In re the Parentage of: Callie Jean Sutton, Child, Jeffrey Fosie, Petitioner And Respondent: Cori J. Sutton, Mother TO THE RESPONDENT: CORI J. SUTTON

1. The petitioner has started an action in the above court requesting that there be a determination of parentage. Additional requests, if any, are stated in the petition, a copy of which is attached.

2. You must respond to this summons and petition by filing a written response with the clerk of the court and by serving a copy of your response on the person signing this summons.

If you do not file and serve your written response within 20 days (60 days if you are served outside of the state of Washington) after the date this summons was served on you, exclusive of the date of service, the court may, without further notice to you, enter a default judgment against you ordering the relief requested in the petition. If you serve a notice of appearance on the undersigned person, you are entitled to notice before an order of default may be entered.

3. Your written response to the summons and petition must be on form WPF PS 01.0300, Response to Petition for Establishment of Parentage (RSP). Information about how to get this form may be obtained by contacting the clerk of the court, by contacting the Administrative Office of the Courts at (360) 705-5328, or from the Internet at the Washington State Courts homepage: http://www.courts.wa.gov/forms

4. If this action has not been filed with the court, you may demand that the petitioner file this action with the court. If you do so, the demand must be in writing and must be served upon the person signing this summons. Within 14 days after you serve the demand, the petitioner must file this action with the court, or the service on you of this summons will be void.

5. If you wish to seek the advice of an attorney in this matter, you should do so promptly so that your written response, if any, may be served on time.

6. One method of serving a copy of your response on the petitioner is to send it by certified mail with return receipt requested.

This summons is issued pursuant to RCW 4.28.100 and Superior Court Civil Rule 4.1 of the state of Washington.

Dated: Pro Se Jeffrey Fosie Signature of Petitioner or Lawyer/WSBA No.

File original of your response with the clerk of the court at: Clerk of the Court

PINK LEGGINGS ON THE 8

DOWNTOWN OLY CAFE

You bought a coconut water and tipped me $5. You have a great smile that piqued my curiosity. Wanna hang out sometime? When: Sunday, November 10, 2013. Where: Olympia. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920115

JOURNAL ENTRY. NOV2. THE AVE

GORGEOUS RED HEAD AT TARGET

LOVELY EASTLAKE LADY

You:

THE BEAUTIFULLEST BARISTA/LOCKSMITHSTRESS I left the key locked in the bathroom. Asked you if it happens often. You said you do it sometimes. Plus you were wearing my favorite color so we totally have a shitload of shit in common. Lettuce getta drank? When: Thursday, November 7, 2013. Where: Victrola on Pike. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920111

I FORGOT MY BATMAN THESIS

We shared a very fun evening together: you, me, and the earpiece that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. We had a great time on our hidden camera show. Wanted to ask you on a second date. Lucrezia says hello. When: Wednesday, November 6, 2013. Where: Capitol Hill. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920110

ZEBRA ON THE LOOSE

You: Simply a Zebra. Me: I think maybe some Sounders gear. We met at Adams place and I never made it your way after the match. Would love to finish our conversation next time I’m in town. Stay stripy! When: Saturday, November 2, 2013. Where: Seattle, wa. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920109

DARK CURLS AT DUSK

South Jackson & 2nd Ave South. We locked eyes for a heartbeat. Just wanted you to know how stunning you looked. You: Dark curls, dark coat, dark eyes. Me: Blue rain shell, walking fast. When: Tuesday, November 5, 2013. Where: S Jackson St, across from Zeitgeist. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920108

PINE ST. STUMPTOWN

HOTTIE GIANT

You: tall, gentle giant, running shoes, perfectly coifed hair, double hottie barista. Me: Male customer who secretly crushes on you. You: How’s you’re day? Me: Guhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh PLEASE BE GAY AND SINGLE!!!!

When: Tuesday, November 5, 2013. Where: PINE STREET STUMPTOWN. You: Man. Me: Man. #920107

LOVELY PIRATE

We shared a table all too briefly before you had to flee. A shame that we couldn’t have simply chatted a bit longer. I think that would have been really quite lovely. When: Thursday, October 31, 2013. Where: Back Door At Roxy’s. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920106

GOODWILL HUNTING

I’ve never written a personal, nor reached out to someone randomly, but would just like to say how remarkably striking you are! A lasting impression of beauty, wisdom, experience, style, and humor. Hope you found what you were looking for. When: Sunday, November 3, 2013. Where: SE Mill St. Goodwill. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920105

CUTE LADY SKELETON SAMS TAVERN

On Halloween night your friend stopped me so she could take a photo of us together. We talked briefly before I had to use the bathroom. When came out, you were gone. I looked all over for you. When: Thursday, October 31, 2013. Where: Sams Tavern. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920104

CHARMING SUPERMAN OUTSIDE OF KING’S I was awkwardly waiting for my friends in my Holly Golightly costume when you challenged me to a thumb war. was intrigued, but didn’t have my game face on. Rematch? When: Thursday, October 31, 2013. Where: King’s. You: Man. Me: Woman. #920103

Dwelling on attractive people i’ll never see again, again. A strange blonde girl with a bf called me pretty right to my face without even stopping on the sidewalk. Typical, now look at the state i’m in. When: Saturday, November 2, 2013. Where: The Ave, u dist. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920098

HALLOWEEN AT WHITE

RABBIT Me: Bearded nun Boat builder... You: Modern day midwife...Super interesting...Super cute... Drinks???... Dinner??? When: Thursday, October 31, 2013. Where: white rabbit. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920097

LIKE AN EGYPTIAN saw you a long time ago. You were buying sunglasses. You asked for my opinion for a pair that would be good in Egypt, not capitol hill. You live here and were visiting home. Bald. Just curious about you. When: Thursday, May 12, 2011. Where: Broadway. You: Man. Me: Woman. #920096

Cute 420 girl

Tall beautiful woman Met you outside the Wildrose. Can’t Stop thinking about your sexy voice. Would love to take you out for a drink or two. Give me a second chance to make an impression?

When: Saturday, November 9, 2013. Where: Wildrose. You: Woman. Me: Woman.

#920113

GORGEOUS BRUNETTE AT HUMP on our way out , we locked eyes ,I made my way over to you and we talked about best film, lost you in the crowd ,really wanted to ask for info you’re gorgeous,me glasses and Goatee guy When: Saturday, November 2, 2013. Where: HUMP 4PM showing. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920102

ALLURING SYMPHONY AT BENAROYA HALL

I’m 31, purple shirt and coat, stood on corner of Benaroya Hall after Baroque&Wine performance. You walked by and gave me the most beautiful smile I’ve never seen and were gone before I woke up from dreams... Second chance? When: Friday, November 1, 2013. Where: 3rd Ave & University, Benaroya Hall. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920101

BLUE HAIRED FREAKAZOID Heather, we were gettin down and downer at the LO-FI the Sat befor Halloween. You were caught in a spider web I wish was weavin’. Lets dance! yours trues Fluorescently Footed Disco Dude. When: Saturday, October 26, 2013. Where: Lo-FI. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920099

WHAT’S YOUR COSTUME? asked. You then dangled your watch and said you were my girlfriend from the future. I liked your go-getter attitude so I asked for your name and number. You then angrily slapped me for forgetting and disappeared. Coffee sometime? When: Thursday, October 31, 2013. Where: The Cockpit. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920095

ALLURING SYMPHONY stood in front of Benaroya Hall, right after Baroque & Wine performance, you walked by and gave me the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen, but you were gone before I woke up from my dreams... When: Friday, November 1, 2013. Where: 3rd Ave & University, Benaroya Hall. You: Woman. Me: Man. #920094

MICHAEL FROM THE HOPVINE

You said you thought maybe we knew each other from the Hopvine, but I have been coming by off and on, and haven’t found you yet. What does a guy have to do to find your smiling brown eyes again?Jim When: Thursday, October 10, 2013. Where: Capitol Hill. You: Man. Me: Man. #920093

GEIDI

Why am I such a slut?

Are you such a slut?

SAVAGE LOVE

Sluts and Such BY

DAN SAVAGE

Girl, Corrupted

Or are you a woman who loves sex, has a high libido, and has consensual sex with a lot of willing and grateful partners? Those are traits a sex-negative/ misogynist culture conspires to make you feel conflicted about, GC, and then cons you into slapping a pejorative label on yourself—a label you wouldn’t feel a need to slap on yourself if you were a dude, gay or straight. Don’t buy into the sexist double standards, GC. So long as your sex life isn’t negatively impacting your relationship(s), your health, your classwork, or your career, GC, you aren’t doing anything wrong. Don’t let shitty, sexist people make you feel like you have to slap a shitty, sexist label on yourself for the crime of enjoying sex while female.

Have fun out there, GC, be thoughtful, be safe, be considerate. And remember: What works for you now —slutting around in the sexpositive/reclaiming-the-shit-out-of-that-word sense—may not work for you always . Don’t look back on this part of your life with shame or regret if or when you elect to downsize your sex life, i.e., less sex, fewer sex partners/more sex, one sex partner. Do what’s right for you, eliminate risks that can be eliminated, mitigate risks that can’t be eliminated, and don’t worry about what other people think.

I am a 24-year-old gay man living in a major urban center. My question has to do with etiquette. One of my good friends—call him Jerry—helped me out of a huge jam. I received notice that I had to vacate my apartment while I was overseas, and Jerry volunteered to pack up my stuff and put it into storage. Needless to say, I am extremely grateful, as Jerry has saved me a huge amount of money and hassle. Recently, though, while house-sitting for Jerry, I found some intimate items of mine—a cock ring and a bottle of lube—that I thought had been lost in the move. In the interest of full disclosure, we have fooled around before, but I find the fact that he took these items very strange. Do I confront Jerry or just leave them as “payment” for helping me move? Or should I just take them back without saying anything?

Unsure In Canada

P.S. Your work is one of the reasons I was able to come out in eighth grade. Just wanted to thank you.

Two gay men living in the same city could wind up owning two identical bottles of lube and a pair of identical cock rings. It’s unlikely, of course, and it’s even less likely that Jerry owns the exact same lube and cock ring as the lube and cock ring of yours that went missing when Jerry packed your place up. But seeing as Jerry helped you out of a jam, UIC, you should repay his kindness by either giving him the benefit of the doubt or turning a blind eye to what amounts to a little harmless perving. Lube isn’t that expensive, and that cock ring wasn’t from Tiffany—or was it?—so replacing them isn’t going to ruin you.

P.S. Thanks for the sweet postscript!

P.P.S. Assuming Jerry didn’t leave your intimate items out in plain view, UIC, that means you snooped. Why not admit to your snooping, and have a laugh about it? And then put the lube and cock ring to good use? Or leave him a cheeky note in the drawer where you found your intimate items: “I see you’ve got my cock ring. Let me know if you want my cock.”

I’ve been reading your column for years, and I feel like I should know your answer by now, but I’m stumped. I’m a man. Recently I discovered

Omegle, the online chat site that allows you to “talk to strangers,” and I’ve had some fun posing as a lesbian. I would talk to women my own age (mid-20s) about life, love, and, of course, sex. Many times, like 99 percent of the time, these chats included role play or sexy chat. We would both be masturbating on our respective ends, and from what I can tell, I am pretty good at writing this stuff. I want to be clear that this was just chatting. I wouldn’t trade pics, since I’m missing the goods the women I’m chatting with are interested in, and it’s certainly not fair for me to accept pics without being able to provide them. I don’t keep in touch with my chat partners after our chat is over, and I am pretty sure everyone is satisfied.

Here is my question: Am I an asshole for doing this? I made a post on Reddit to some real lesbians, and they clearly feel like I am an asshole. One woman told me I need help. So, believe it or not, I stopped. I do not like being an asshole. But I can’t help but wonder: Was this really that bad? It’s the internet, for goodness’ sake, and for all I know I am chatting with other straight dudes who are pretending to be lesbians. Isn’t some lying to be expected? And if I’m not trying to pursue these women in real life, where’s the harm?

Don’t You Know Everything, Savage?

Loath as I am to contradict the Lesbians of Reddit—which sounds like the title of a ’50s lesbian pulp-fiction novel—I don’t think you’re an asshole, DYKES.

If you created fake personal ads, if you actively misled lesbians who contacted you, if you sent women pics that weren’t yours in an effort to trick them into believing that you were an actual lesbian, if you strung lesbians along via e-mail for weeks or months—if you were doing any of that shit—then you would be an asshole. But spinning out a few masturbatory fantasies on a site designed to facilitate one-on-one conversations between people who are never going to meet? That’s not asshole behavior. You found a way to enjoy your wannabe-lesbian fantasies without doing harm to any actual flesh-and-vulva lesbians.

And yes, DYKES, most of the “lesbians” you chatted with on Omegle were other straight dudes.

Is drag done by cisgender straight men for “humor” problematic? I thought drag was mostly about humor. I am acquainted with a bi trans woman who thinks this is offensive, and at risk of further offending her, I haven’t asked why. Maybe you know? Haven’t we come a long way if straight men are comfortable enough with their sexuality to dress as women? Not Feeling Offended

“Freedom means freedom for everyone,” as a huge asshole once said. That means straight guys who want to do drag are free to do drag, NFO, and bi trans women who want to take offense are free to take offense.

For the record: Good/funny/subversive drag is a burlesque on what it means to be male, not a denigration of what it means to be female. And while gay men seem to have an innate affinity for drag, there are straight guys out there who do it and do it well. Instead of arguing with a bi trans friend who wants to police the freedom and gender expression of others, get your hands on the DVDs of An Audience with Dame Edna , and invite your bi trans friend over to watch.

This week on the Savage Lovecast, Dan speaks with Daniel Bergner about foot fetish shame—savagelovecast.com.

mail@savagelove.net @fakedansavage on Twitter

Transgender Day of Remembrance 2013

On Wednesday, November 20, 2013 caring members of the Seattle Community will gather at the Ravenna United Methodist Church to remember all the transgender persons who were murdered in 2013 simply for being who they were.

Music will be provided by the Wallingford United Methodist Church Choir, the names of each victim will be read, and refreshments offered at the conclusion of the service.

Where: Ravenna United Methodist Church 5751 33rd Avenue, N.E. Seattle, WA 98105

When: Wednesday, November 20, 2013 at 7:00 p.m.

This special event will be a non-religious memorial sponsored by The Emerald City Club and Social Outreach Seattle with the support of the people of faith at the Ravenna U.M.C. and the Wallingford U.M.C.

There will be no-charge and all visitors are welcome

For additional information contact: Melissa at: TDORSeattle@centuryLink.net