NOVEMBER 5-11, 2014 I VOLUME 39 I NUMBER 45
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with amazon publishing, JEFF BEZOS is beckoning authors to a new business model. but what, exactly, is he offering?
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news&comment 5
WEED WARS?
BY MATT DRISCOLL | If Oregon
legalizes pot, what’ll happen to our state’s nascent industry? Also: oil trains under fire.
7
KINDLING A FLAME BY NINA SHAPIRO | Not content just
selling books, Amazon has been publishing them—and antagonizing the old guard. But is it helping or hurting authors?
food&drink
15 APPLE CORPS
BY CHASON GORDON | Meet the
pioneers of single-varietal apple juice. 15 | FOOD NEWS/THE WEEKLY DISH 16 | CITIZEN FOOD
arts&culture 21 SAM GOES POP!
BY BRIAN MILLER | The museum
contrasts Warhol and his supposed heirs. 21 | THE PICK LIST 23 | OPENING NIGHTS | A bloodthirsty
countess and a surrealist spin on Shakespeare. 24 26 27
| PERFORMANCE/EAR SUPPLY | VISUAL ARTS | BOOKS
28 FILM
epic, Interstellar, devours its own long tail.
29 | OPENING THIS WEEK | Nazis in
Paris, an ex-con turned filmmaker, and Brazilian boys in love. 32 | FILM CALENDAR
33 MUSIC
BY DAVE LAKE | That ’80s show: Synth-pop makes a comeback. Plus: Hiss Golden Messenger reveals all. 35 | THE WEEK AHEAD 37 | CD REVIEW
Editor-in-Chief Mark Baumgarten EDITORIAL Senior Editor Nina Shapiro Food Editor Nicole Sprinkle Arts Editor Brian Miller Entertainment Editor Gwendolyn Elliott Editorial Operations Manager Gavin Borchert Staff Writers Ellis E. Conklin, Matt Driscoll, Kelton Sears Editorial Intern Jeanny Rhee, Abby Searight Contributing Writers Rick Anderson, Sean Axmaker, James Ballinger, Michael Berry, Roger Downey, Jay Friedman, Margaret Friedman, Zach Geballe, Chason Gordon, Dusty Henry, Rhiannon Fionn, Megan Hill, Robert Horton, Patrick Hutchison, Seth Kolloen, Sandra Kurtz, Dave Lake, Jessie McKenna, Jenna Nand, Terra Clarke Olsen, Brian Palmer, Kevin Phinney, Jason Price, Keegan Prosser, Mark Rahner, Tiffany Ran, Michael Stusser, Jacob Uitti PRODUCTION Production Manager Sharon Adjiri Art Director Samantha Wagner Graphic Designer Nate Bullis, Brennan Moring Staff Photographer/Web Developer Morgen Schuler
17 | BEER PAGES
38 | CLASSIFIEDS
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news&comment
Puff, Puff, Take
How legal weed in Oregon could impact Washington’s marijuana market.
Ghost of Industry Attends Oil-Train Meetings
BY MATT DRISCOLL
BY RHIANNON FIONN
U.S. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
P
L
reports that nearly $14 million in weed was sold in just the first two months of legal sales here. None of these numbers, of course, take into account a neighboring state selling legalized marijuana more cheaply. But according to Carpenter, it’s way too early to start jumping to conclusions. “The system’s not even up and running yet,” he says. “In terms of [how legalized marijuana in Oregon might affect] our own revenue projections . . . there’s still work to be done here before we can contemplate that. We’re focused on us right now.” Alison Holcomb, the ACLU lawyer largely
credited with legalizing marijuana in Washington, isn’t above looking into the future. She’s a Measure 91 supporter, to no great surprise, and told Seattle Weekly in the days leading up to this year’s election that based on the polling data, she was “98 percent sure” it would pass. She also says that the tax structure included in Measure 91, which proposes a straightforward one-time tax to producers of $35 an ounce for flowers, $10 an ounce for leaves, and $5 for every plant sold—is an “interesting strategy” that “ultimately might be preferable” to Washington’s multiple taxation levels. However, Holcomb also says that she believes that the high pot prices we’ve seen so far in Washington are due to limited availability and not necessarily to a faulty tax structure implemented by I-502, and warns against any hasty decisions if Oregon does vote to legalize pot. “The first thing that comes to my mind is if
the legislature reacts too strongly,” Holcomb says when asked about possible negative impact on Washington if Oregon legalizes marijuana. “I think what we do need to do is give Oregon’s market a chance to come online before we start adjusting Washington’s too significantly.” If we’ve learned anything from the legalization of marijuana here, it’s how quickly people will line up to profit from it. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that businesses that have attempted to make money off legal weed in our state are interested in doing the same in Oregon. Brendan Kennedy, the CEO of Privateer Holdings—a Seattle-based private-equity firm that he says is trying to “bring a mainstream perspective” to the pot business—has thrown money behind a number of endeavors, including Leafly, an online marijuana information and review database, and Tilray, a Canadian medical-marijuana producer. Kennedy says he’s personally written checks in support of Oregon’s Measure 91, as has his company. And for obvious reasons. “I wouldn’t have dedicated the last four and a half years of my life to this if I didn’t see the inevitability of the end of prohibition, and I say that for both medical and adult consumption,” Kennedy says of his chosen career path. “It’s a mainstream belief, and it’s a mainstream product.” Even if Kennedy was proven wrong at the polls in Oregon, the promise and threat of legal weed continues; California is on track to vote on a marijuana-legalization initiative in 2016. E
mdriscoll@seattleweekly.com
groper files » The Wrench Clown Rises
Seattle has a new tool in the fight against pervy gropers. Wrench Clown—literally a wrench-wielding clown—recently came to the defense of a female partygoer in the Maple Leaf neighborhood who had been violated by a drunk male who was trying to “rub up on” her. Seattle Weekly readers welcomed the news. “We should pass an initiative, grope someone, and get hit with a wrench by a clown.” — thebriang, via seattleweekly.com “Good christ I could not like this any more than I do right now . . . unless you told me the clown was a lady.” —Sally McNoodlecrumbs III, via seattleweekly.com “Yay! I love superheroes!!” —Brian A Stevens, via Facebook
•
•
ast week, the Washington Department of Ecology held public meetings in Spokane and Olympia. An estimated 900 attended and 200 signed up to comment on the department’s preliminary “Marine and Rail Oil Transportation Study,” which was fast-tracked by the governor with a final report expected in March 2015. The message from commenters was clear: Keep volatile oil (and coal) trains out of Washington. They’re too dangerous, activists contend; any mishaps will affect environmental and human health, and cleanups will be paid for by taxpayers. While the meetings were ostensibly about oil, dozens of attendees wore red Sierra Club “Beyond Coal Trains” shirts. The two fossil fuels are linked because of their impact on not only the environment, but also on the rails. Both are considered dangerous and flammable—a derailment could lead to deaths and serious pollution. So when they come down the line, all other trains have to stop and let them pass, including passenger trains. Prior to 2012, few oil trains traversed Washington. Now nine percent of imported oil arrives via rail, and that traffic is expected to triple within a few years. For this reason and others, there were many calls for a moratorium. King County executive Dow Constantine flew to Spokane for the Oct. 28 meeting. In addition to concerns about overall rail capacity and fires, he said, “Oil trains are a bad deal for our people, and they’re also a bad deal for our economy.” Since it was Halloween week, it was no surprise to see protesters dressed as hunks of coal or the Statue of Liberty, and the heavy police presence added to the fear factor. But the most haunting aspect of the meetings was the ghost of industry. The usual line from industry, when they speak up, is that oil and coal trains mean jobs—in the oil fields in Canada and Idaho, that is, and for railroad and port workers. But industry didn’t make that point at the meeting. The oil being transported through Washington is highly volatile Bakken oil. Its volatility could be reduced, but no one from industry explained that, either. Citizens and firefighters alike expressed their concerns that, should an oil train derail and a fire ensue, the capacity of any fire district in the state would be quickly exhausted. In the state’s $300,000 oil-train study, it’s made clear that derailment disasters are expected. But, again, no one from industry said one word to calm fears, or vowed, “We’ll pay if we make a mistake.” E
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SEATT LE W EEKLY • NOVEMBER 5 — 11, 2014
eter Zuckerman, a spokesperson for the campaign to legalize recreational marijuana use for adults in Oregon, bristles at the notion that it’s only a matter of time before voters legalize pot in his state like they have in Washington. But the fact is there’s a chance that by the time you read this, they’ll have done just that. “People seem to think it’s inevitable. The fact of the matter is it doesn’t happen unless we step up,” Zuckerman told Seattle Weekly four days before the election. “I think there’s a very good chance that Oregonians will vote yes and do the right thing, but it’s not going to happen on its own. Marijuana doesn’t legalize itself.” Similar to what Washington’s Initiative 502 accomplished two years ago, the aim of Oregon’s Measure 91 is to create a legal recreational pot market in the state for adults 21 and older. While there are technical differences between the two—including significant differences in tax structure—one thing they seem to have in common is public support. I-502 passed with roughly 56 percent of the vote in November 2012, and a SurveyUSA poll released Oct. 28 sponsored by KATU-TV in Portland showed that 52 percent of likely Oregon voters planned to vote in favor of Measure 91 on Tuesday. (Alaska also voted on a marijuana-legalization initiative on Tuesday.) What’s certain is that legalized pot in Oregon will impact Washington, and some potential repercussions are obvious. Since Washington’s pot stores opened for business in early July, prices have been high and supply limited. If Oregon manages to bring its marijuana market online quickly and offers weed more cheaply than Washington, we’re likely to see Washingtonians in border cities like Vancouver head to Oregon to take advantage. While our state’s law forbids the large-scale importation of pot across state lines, everyone seems to agree that preventing border crossings will be nearly impossible. “You could see something similar to alcohol, where people go across the border,” says Mikhail Carpenter, a spokesperson for the Washington State Liquor Control Board. “The law says you can’t, but for the individual user, we really don’t have any enforcement for that.” At this point it’s impossible to say what effect that might have on Washington’s pot-related finances, not to mention the state’s hypothetical pot-tourism market. State economists have estimated that legal pot could up Washington’s tax revenue by $25 million by next year, and add somewhere in the ballpark of $200 million by mid-2017. The state Liquor Control Board
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ing books that languished on bookstore shelves, caught in what she believed was a “vicious cycle” common to the publishing world. She had sold her first book to Hachette, which saw enough promise in the work to give her a big advance. The book sold poorly, though, and the publisher paid for a smaller print run the next time around, according to Chance. Those numbers weren’t great either. After that, she says, Hachette “was done.” She moved on to another publisher, where the downward spiral continued. She was ready again for a new publisher with Bone River, but the New York publishers she approached didn’t bite. “Come back to us when you have better numbers,” she recalls being told. Amid the cavernous space at Amazon, the team of editors, marketers, and publicists assembled for the meeting gave her a markedly different reception. “We don’t care,” Chance says they declared in reference to her previous sales figures. “What we do has nothing to do with traditional publishers. We can get your books into the hands of the people who want to read them.” Chance signed up. And the Amazon team— bolstered by free access to prominent placement on Amazon’s website, strategic use of the enor-
mous amount of consumer data at its disposal, and clever e-mail and Kindle marketing campaigns—made good on its promise. Bone River sold roughly 70,000 copies—a sevenfold increase over her previous best-selling book. Another book she released in August through Amazon, Inamorata, has already sold 120,000 copies, according to Chance. “Having a readership after so many years of not having one has been a joy and a blessing,” she says. Chance has had to give up some things, however. She can’t, by and large, see her books in stores. Most won’t carry Amazon titles because they’re fed up with being undercut by the Seattle behemoth, which they believe is out to destroy them. She is also sacrificing prestige in the traditional, New York-based literary world, and some amount of recognition in the world at large. Amazon has created a new model of publishing that is almost entirely self-contained. It sells “a majority” of its titles as e-books, usually publishing them exclusively on the company’s own Kindle platform, according to Amazon spokesperson Katie Finch. It also draws many authors from its popular selfpublishing platform, Kindle Direct. Amazon
SEATT LE W EEKLY • NOVEMBER 5 — 11, 2014
O
ne day in 2012, Megan Chance, a historical-fiction writer from the Kitsap Peninsula, arrived at Amazon.com’s South Lake Union headquarters for a meeting. The retail giant’s sleek new campus was bustling with software engineers of various nationalities, marketing mavens, and MBAs. The floor Chance visited, though, was practically empty. “There were, like, four people there,” Chance recalls. “It was bizarre.” The two-decade-old online retailer was still getting a relatively new and little-understood division going—one devoted not only to selling books on the vast digital platform it had created, but also to publishing them. With the frenetic speed of a start-up, Amazon Publishing had in a few years launched a series of imprints devoted to different niches: mystery, romance, historical fiction, science fiction, and more. Now, the company’s fledgling imprint devoted to her genre, Lake Union Publishing, wanted to publish Chance’s latest work, Bone River, a novel about a 19th-century ethnologist who develops a mystical connection to a mummy. Chance, in her early 50s, was at a low point in her career. She had spent two decades writ-
Amid a boycott and bicoastal culture clash, Amazon has created a new model of publishing. Where does that leave authors?
then promotes its titles on its website and the Kindle. And the company sells the books primarily through one vendor: Amazon. It is not exactly the model to which Amazon once aspired, which is why the rap on the company’s imprints in New York is that they are, as author and Amazon critic Douglas Preston has heard it, “a dismal failure.” The company has signed few big names, produced little that critics have felt compelled to review, and rarely propelled its titles onto The New York Times’ best-seller lists. Yet the model has proved surprisingly profitable for a certain kind of midlist author left behind by big publishing houses. For instance, Los Angeles suspense writer Deborah Reed has sold more than 100,000 copies of her Amazon titles. “It’s crazy,” she muses, “because it seems like nobody has ever heard of me.” Sales figures like these can look attractive even to better-known writers. Robert Dugoni, a New York Times best-selling author of legal mysteries, came out with his latest book, My Sister’s Grave, this month. The publisher: Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer imprint. “I’m a working guy” is how Dugoni explains his choice of publisher and the economics behind it. “I have two kids who go to private school, who hopefully someday will go to college.” If that sounds like Amazon is a path to certain riches as an author, it isn’t. Some find themselves working for almost nothing. And the hurdles to success, especially in the self-publishing market, are getting harder by the day. In May, Aaron Shepard, who has written three how-to books on Kindle self-publishing, blogged that he owed it to his readers to deliver this message: “The party’s over.” Enriched or not, the self-published authors seem to be serving the greater Amazon universe, which of course is preoccupied with selling not only low-cost books but electronics, clothes, kitchenware, movies, and more. Whether that universe is a habitable place for even established authors is an ongoing concern. Take the company’s current fight with Hachette, believed to be about the terms by which the veteran publishing house will supply its books to Seattle’s mega-retailer. Amazon has flexed its muscles in such an aggressive way—through delaying shipping, pulling buy buttons, and throwing up other roadblocks on its site to buying Hachette titles—that roughly 1,000 authors signed two open letters since August protesting what they see as a threat to their livelihood. Now the Authors Guild and a Preston-led group known as Authors United are seeking recourse from the U.S. Department of Justice, which they are hoping will launch an antitrust investigation. “Amazon Must Be Stopped,” concurred Franklin Foer in The New Republic last month, adding to a growing chorus of voices branding Amazon a “monopoly.” And that’s the polite way of putting it. “It’s a rapacious, awful company,” one local bookseller told me, speaking on condition that his name not be used. Amazon is feared, in some circles, as much as it is hated. Yet hundreds of writers have risen to defend Amazon too, some signing a Change.org petition that grandly claims that the company has “granted more authors their independence than we’ve had at any other time in human history.” Behind the petition is one of self-publishing’s biggest stars, Hugh Howey. “I see authors being divided against each other— basically choosing up teams,” observes popular
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“Everything I wrote after that, for, like, 10 years, was rejected,” Jourdan recalls. She had shifted from writing straight memoir to humorous science-fiction writer Greg Bear, who lives in Lynnwood. He doesn’t like it, nor does he think it serves vignettes of Appalachian life. The vignettes, sometimes only a sentence long, were too “short,” she authors’ interests to get involved in a fight between says she was told. Also “too ethnic, too quirky, and two giant companies. He says the only thing he’s too religious.” She quips, in her self-declared “hillinterested in is what helps writers the most. billy” twang, “I mean, that’s just the culture here.” When it comes to Amazon, that tale is still She accumulated what she calls “this big slush unfolding. pile of manuscripts.” For money, she relied upon a job with a marketing company that contracted As some Amazon skeptics are eager to point with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. out, self-publishing is not exactly new. In 1843, And then, two years ago, at age 58, she got laid off. Charles Dickens, mad at his publisher and wantShe turned to her slush pile. “Let’s see if this ing a greater share of profits from his writing, selfAmazon thing is for real,” she says she thought. published A Christmas Carol. Yet the success of She uploaded Medicine Men: Extreme Appalathe famous Christmas fable, by an already famous chian Doctoring in one day, without even giving author, was long the exception to the rule. it another read. She didn’t charge anything for “You may recall it was called vanity publishit. “There was no thinking going on. It was pure ing,” says Mike Shatzkin, a veteran publishing hysteria,” she says. consultant and blogger. “You got 1,000 books Within days, more than 20,000 people had in your garage and good luck to you. . . . The downloaded her book, she says. In a few months, idea that you could make a lot of money self100,000 people had. “Well, that worked,” she says publishing was preposterous. Amazon made she thought. She has since self-published five that possible single-handedly.” more books and stopped giving away her work for It did so with its introduction of the Kindle in free. Able to set her own price, she now charges 2007. That year, Amazon released Kindle Direct $9.99 for Medicine Men—three or four times the Publishing. (Authors can also publish print copprice of many self-published books. ies through Amazon’s CreateSpace program.) She’s not above taking advantage of Amazon’s promotional gimmicks to drum up sales, though. For a week last month, she sold Medicine Men for 99 cents as a “Kindle Countdown Deal.” A clock, counting down the number of days, hours, minutes, and seconds that remain, convey the impression of a barn-burner sale. Five days in, she tells me she has sold 7,000 copies and earned about $4,600. Given her success, Algonquin has Megan Chance outside Amazon headquarters. expressed new interest in her work. She says she might submit something that could use editDue to far lower production costs, e-books have ing. But she’s not planning a wholesale return to allowed for a new type of self-publishing. With traditional publishing. “I can’t afford it,” she says. Kindle Direct, authors don’t pay any up-front So far, Amazon’s imprints haven’t come callcosts to Amazon. The company takes a cut—30 ing. But Jourdan is the kind of author the compercent—once the book is earning money. That leaves writers with a 70 percent royalty rate, pany went after in 2009 when it noticed that some of the books released though Kindle Direct far higher than the typical 10 to 15 percent offered were attracting a sizable audience. “We started in traditional print publishing. That’s why a select to read those books and we were impressed,” number of self-publishing stars have been able to Amazon Publishing vice-president Jeff Belle tells earn an income of more than $100,000 a year. Seattle Weekly one day last month. “Well over $100,000—which is like a million “We reached out to those authors and we kept dollars here,” deadpans Kindle Direct author hearing the same thing.” The authors had been Carolyn Jourdan, speaking by phone one day getting rejection letters, “but they were encourlast month from her home in the Appalachian aging rejection letters,” Belle says. Agents and countryside of east Tennessee. A former Conpublishers liked the writers’ manuscripts, but for gressional lawyer, Jourdan started writing after her mother’s heart attack brought her home and whatever reason didn’t think they could sell them. Amazon, which has made a science of selling, did. she ended up helping out in her dad’s smallAnd so the company launched its first imprint town medical practice. Her funny, heartfelt in 2009, Amazon Encore, targeted specifically account of that time, days that stretched into at publishing writers discovered through the years, became a manuscript. It attracted a presself-published market. That mission expanded to tigious publisher, Algonquin Books, who pubrepublishing out-of-print books, drawing in part lished Heart in the Right Place in 2008. It went on to become a Wall Street Journal best-seller. » CONTINUED ON PAGE 11
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SEATTLE WEEKLY • NOVEM BER 5 — 11, 2 014
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Cents & Sensibility Talking now, Belle downplays the significance of the New York office his publishing division opened in 2011. As it moved into full-blown editing and book development, Amazon Publishing was hearing from more and more agents with manuscripts to sell, he says. It only made sense to have an office in the heart of the publishing world, so agents and other literary types could drop in for meetings. Other insiders, however, depict a grander ambition. The goal, says one former employee with knowledge of Amazon Publishing strategy and its execution, was to bid for “big books. We were going to compete with major publishers.” That seemed obvious from the man Amazon picked to run the New York office: Larry Kirshbaum, a former CEO of the Time Warner Book Group and discoverer of such literary luminaries as James Patterson and Nicholas Sparks. His defection to Amazon, as it was seen, was big news in the literary world—as were the six-figure advances he started handing out. Kirshbaum signed a few well-known names—
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SEATT LE W EEKLY • NOVEMBER 5 — 11, 2014
on a series of “rediscoveries” by Seattle’s famed former librarian Nancy Pearl, who took considerable heat within the literary world for her Amazon deal. “What are our other opportunities?” Belle says his staff then asked. Perusing Amazon’s websites around the world, he says they realized that a lot of great books in other languages weren’t making it into English. The translations imprint Amazon Crossing was born. An early hit was German author Oliver Pötzsch’s historical thriller about 17th-century witch-hunting, The Hangman’s Daughter. “We’ve sold about one-half million copies of that,” Belle says. A flurry of imprints followed—12 in all, with the latest, Christian-oriented Waterfall Press, launching just this year. Altogether, the imprints have published some 5,000 books over the past five years, according to Belle. From his home overlooking Lynnwood’s Lake Martha, Greg Bear describes how he came to be published by Amazon imprint 47North. Bear has worked with a variety of publishers, including his current, Hachette. And, yes, the current dispute endangers sales of the book he released last month, War Dogs, which is why he signed both of the recent protest letters against Amazon. Yet he talks appreciatively of his experience with the company’s publishing arm. The story begins, oddly enough, with swordfighting. As a writer interested in long-ago worlds, he liked to practice the medieval art. He did so regularly at a circus school in Georgetown, along with renowned Seattle science-fiction author Neal Stephenson, a few swordmakers, and other friends and science-fiction fans. Afterward, Dugoni with they’d sit around “talking story,” Robert his Amazon-published as Bear puts it. Jointly, they crebook, My Sister’s Grave. ated a tale about a 13th-century fight against a Mongolian khan bent on destroying self-help guru Timothy Ferriss, actress Penny Europe. Eventually it became a collaboratively Marshall, singer Billy Ray Cyrus. But the books written manuscript of half a million words. did far worse than expected. A work of that length written by seven authors, Although Amazon had partnered with Houghmany of them unknown, did not fit the traditional ton Mifflin Harcourt to release print versions of publishing model. “New York just couldn’t seem to these and other titles, many bookstores simply get it,” Bear says. Genre publishing has been hamwouldn’t sell them. Barnes & Noble announced mered over the past two decades by the decimaits boycott in January 2012, casting the move as a tion of the mass market—the cheap paperbacks, retaliatory strike against Amazon’s actions in the once seen in great variety in grocery stores and e-book market. Amazon was pushing publishers, airports, which are no longer as plentiful due to a agents, and authors into making their titles availcomplex set of factors linked to the consolidation able only on the Kindle, thereby undermining of distributors. Publishers eyeing The Mongoliad Barnes & Noble’s rival e-reader, the Nook. Other were not in the mood for risk. booksellers followed suit, angered in particular by Amazon, however, was eager both to try new a price-check app Amazon developed for the 2011 things and create a new mass market. In 2012, its Christmas season that encouraged consumers to 47North imprint launched a Mongoliad series of use stores as showrooms before buying online. books, promoting them at Comicon conventions “He was really fighting with one hand and the Experience Music Project Museum, behind his back,” consultant Shatzkin says of where it staged a swordfighting contest.“We sold Kirshbaum. The big names he signed—Marhundreds of thousands of copies,” Bear says. shall, Cyrus, and Ferriss—all wrote nonfiction Still, he notes that in the traditional literary books, and those were hard to sell in the e-book world, it was as if the books did not exist. “Nothmarket alone. As the former staffer explains, ing Amazon and 47North does is of any interest “The nonfiction buyer is more studious, more to New York.” reluctant to take a chance”—the kind of person It was in New York, in fact, that Amazon Pub- who wants to see a book before buying it. lishing began to seem like a flop. » CONTINUED ON PAGE 12
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Joi n u s i n c el ebrat ing
Veter ans Appreciation Week Nov. 3–11, 2014 TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 4 ROTC Open House 1–3 p.m. Clark Hall, UW Experience a tour of Clark Hall, the fourth oldest building on campus and home to the UW’s celebrated ROTC programs. UW Bothell Veterans Open House 4–6 p.m. UW Bothell Plaza Join UW Bothell Chancellor and U.S. Navy veteran Dr. Wolf Yeigh for a hosted reception in recognition of the important role that UW Bothell student, staff, faculty and alumni veterans play in campus life. WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 5 UW Tacoma Veterans Appreciation Day 12:30–1:30 p.m. William W. Phillip Hall, UW Tacoma
SEATTLE WEEKLY • NOVEM BER 5 — 11, 2 014
History Lecture Series: The Great War and the Modern World Domination, Integration and Betrayal 7–8:30 p.m. Kane Hall 130, UW
12
UW history professor Raymond Jonas discusses how European power rivalries and geopolitical thinking informed the Great War, leading to national and racial intolerances that would shape the continent for decades to come. This series is sold out. For more information, visit UWalum.com/history
With more than 40 years of public service, former US Senator Olympia Snowe chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee Subcommittee on Seapower, which oversees the Navy and Marine Corps. Join us for an enlightening talk from one of America’s most respected leaders. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8 UW vs. UCLA “Our Heroes” football game Husky Stadium, UW Join the Huskies as they honor veterans and recognize the 2014 Distinguished Alumni Veteran Award recipient on the field.
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 11 UW Veterans Day 2014 11 a.m. Ceremony Medal of Honor Memorial, Memorial Way, UW 11:30 a.m. Reception Walker Ames Room, Kane Hall, upper lobby, UW Please join the University of Washington community on the Seattle campus for Veterans Day 2014, when we honor men and women throughout our region for their dedication and service in our U.S. Armed Forces. The ceremony will include recognition of the recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Veteran Award, speakers, presentation of the colors and a performance by the Husky Band.
INFORMATION AND REGISTRATION
UWalum.com/veter ans 206-543-0540
VETERANS APPRECIATION WEEK IS A CAMPUSWIDE UW COMMUNIT Y INITIATIVE COORDINATED BY THE UW ALUMNI ASSOCIATION.
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The bookstore ban affected Amazon Publishing’s ability to sign up authors too. “As an author, seeing your book in bookstores, that’s like the holy grail,” says Megan Chance. Despite being an Amazon author, she has convinced a couple of local bookstores to carry her titles. She held a reading for Inamorata at Third Place Books in August. (Managing partner Robert Sindelar says the store evaluates Amazon titles on a case-by-case basis and tries to support local authors. Robert Dugoni is scheduled to read there this week, one of a handful of local appearances for My Sister’s Grave.) Mainly, though, Chance got over that authorial obsession. Going into bookstores had become like “self-torture” anyway, she says. With her bad luck with traditional publishers, she’d often find few copies on the shelves, or they’d be in the wrong place. For other authors, particularly big names used to seeing prominent stacks of their work, the inability to get into stores was a non-starter. Even Amazon Publishing’s unusual solicitousness toward writers—sending flowers and chocolates on publication day, designating “author relations” staffers to keep writers happy—could not overcome this handicap. Last year, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ wife MacKenzie, a novelist, came out with a new book. Her choice of publisher: Knopf Doubleday. It has not helped Amazon Publishing that most of its authors have been unable to get on The New York Times’ best-seller lists. While the Times tracks e-books, it does not look at titles “available exclusively from a single vendor,” according to its written policy. It is presumed that’s because the Times does not trust Amazon to report sales figures on its own titles without independent verification. Within a year of the New York office opening, Amazon decided that the original strategy was not going to work, according to the ex-staffer. The new mandate: Forget big names. Forget bookstores. And refocus on the Kindle, both in terms of publishing e-books and of skimming off the cream of writers self-publishing through Kindle Direct. “Now about one-half of the books we acquire and publish originate on the selfpublishing side,” says Belle. What works particularly well on the Kindle is genre fiction. “A lot of genre readers are gluttons,” Shatzkin explains. “They read lots and lots of books.” So one thing that’s important to them is price. They want cheap more than they want well-known. And cheap is famously one thing that Amazon delivers, particularly on the Kindle, where many books sell for under $5, even under $2. Internally, the new direction made heads spin. “The East Coast editors were sort of whipsawed,” the former employee recalls. Not only did Amazon ask them to change the type of authors they were looking for, but the company insisted upon a different way of evaluating them. Going with your gut was out. Data was in. What kind of track record does the author have? The category of books? What type of people bought them? The former staffer describes it as a “consumerbrand approach that would not be unfamiliar at P&G [Procter & Gamble],” and also as a “West
Coast” one. (Wait, isn’t the West Coast supposed to be laid-back and freewheeling, not corporate and data-obsessed? Such is the power of Amazon that it’s giving the entire coast a different hue.) “The politics were tense,” affirms a second former Amazon staffer, describing the same culture clash and changing sense of direction. Turnover was high. In January, Kirshbaum himself left and joined a New York literary agency. Internally, he had been considered no longer the right fit. Asked if he was happy with the job Kirshbaum did, Belle says: “I’m not unhappy with the job he did.” “It was difficult for me to understand what they were thinking,” says veteran New York agent Jane Dystel, daughter of a legendary publishing figure who once headed Bantam Books. Amid the churn came a lot of people “who didn’t have traditional publishing experience,” she says. Amazon moves employees around so that a person hired for her film experience, for example, might end up marketing books or toasters or children’s puzzles. For Dystel’s clients, the outcome has been mixed. On the one hand, she says, some of the authors whose work she sold to Amazon have had an “extraordinary” experience. They include the London-based Helen Bryan, whose novel
Lisa Brunette holds a kindle displaying her e-book, Cat in the Flock.
“Books have always been a loss leader for Amazon, a way to attract customers.”
about romance during World War II, War Brides, was first published in Britain. Dystel estimates the book sold about 7,500 copies there. Amazon acquired and republished the book in 2012. The marketing campaign, Dystel says, was “brilliant,” entailing “lots of online promotion.” Amazon has “daily deals” and “monthly deals” in addition to countdown deals. It has its own “editors’ picks” and best-seller lists. All these regularly feature Amazon titles. Consumers who buy a certain type of book through Amazon, say a romance, will immediately get recommendations for similar books. Amazon Publishing romances are likely to be among them. Those who buy one will get an e-mail the next time its author comes out with a book. Like politicians who feel the press has betrayed them and want to bypass conventional means to get their message out, Amazon is largely bypassing
MORGEN SCHULER
The UW Tacoma community gathers to pay tribute to university and regional veterans and military personnel.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6 Jessie and John Danz Endowed Lecture presents Senator Olympia Snowe 6:30 p.m. Kane Hall 130, UW
» FROM PAGE 11
impressive,” Valterra says. (The change actually took about three weeks, Brunette later says.) “We’re looking at it as a business,” Brunette says, adding that it is one she expects to build over time. If her novel resonates with people and she continues to release more books—Cat in the Flock is intended to launch a series—then she could very well have a new career as an author, she says. Underscoring their professionalism, the couple registered as an LLC with the state, printed promotional cards with the book’s cover image, and paid $800 to create a video book trailer that they posted to YouTube. When we talk again, in October, Brunette has “big exciting news”—a favorable write-up from Kirkus Reviews, the venerable book-reviewing publication and website whose blessing is considered essential by many authors and publishers. “A mystery with an unusual twist and quirky settings; an enjoyable surprise for fans of the genre,” the review trills. She had to pay for it, though. Kirkus has an “indie team” that will review a self-published work for $425 ($575 for express service), with no guarantee of the outcome. “To me, it’s worth it,” Brunette says. “You want that validation.” She plans to use the review in ads on the Kirkus website and magazine. Her overall marketing strategy is morph-
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ing, though. She and Valterra had talked about throwing a book party when they publish the print version through Amazon’s CreateSpace program, which is currently planned for later this month. They also planned a social-media campaign including e-mail blasts. Now they’re mulling a more targeted “grassroots” approach, Brunette says. She might, for instance, do a reading at the Jubilee Women’s Center, a Seattle refuge for women facing homelessness and poverty, to which she has pledged a portion of her book revenues. “We’re pretty exhausted at this point,” Brunette explains. “We’ve been working every weekend, every night.” They can’t exactly stop now, though, not if they want Cat in the Flock to distinguish itself among the self-publishing heap. Three months in, Brunette estimates, her authorial debut has sold somewhere over 60 copies. With a 70 percent royalty rate, that translates into revenue of under $150. Brunette takes sustenance from the positive reaction she has gotten from readers. “I’m building a fanbase and already feel pressure to finish the next book,” she enthuses. Financially, though, Hugh Howey-like profits—in fact, any profits—are far away. E
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Lisa Brunette first learned about Kindle Direct Publishing at a Pacific Northwest Writers Association conference last year. “There was an entire day of presentations,” Brunette remembers. The room was “packed. There was a lot of excitement.” She heard about the 70 percent royalty rate, the autonomy offered by self-publishing, and the success of Kindle Direct stars like Hugh Howey, who went on to sell his science-fiction series Wool to Simon and Schuster. Brunette, who had been working on a mystery manuscript for years, was torn. She saw an appealing “Seattle ethos of DIY” in self-publishing. The 43-year-old has long made her home here, working as a freelance journalist and editor for the online news site Crosscut, then getting into the gaming industry. She currently writes stories for the company Big Fish, whose femaleoriented games have a mystery bent. Even with her extensive writing experience, the odds of finding a traditional publisher seemed long. She had shopped around her manuscript, but hadn’t heard anything back. Yet she saw the Amazon route as “enormously risky.” How would she be perceived in the liter-
ary world? Would her reputation suffer from an association with an entity so disliked? “I would hate for everyone to malign me,” she says. In some ways, it would be an odd pairing, since she says she loves small bookstores and worries about Amazon’s effect on them too. She faced another challenge: what she calls “discoverability.” She knew she couldn’t get into bookstores, so she would have to devise another way to get the word out about her book, Cat in the Flock—a much harder task than it would have been five or six years ago. The problem, says Aaron Shepard, elaborating upon his “party’s over” blog post, is competition: There’s an enormous amount, given how easy it is to upload a book onto the Kindle. Even a niche that seems specialized—like soapmaking, the subject of a self-published book by Shepard’s wife, Anne Watson—faces dozens of competing Kindle titles. Meanwhile, Shepard says, Amazon has conditioned readers to pay next to nothing for books. “You need enough books to compensate for the lousy payoff. And of course, that’s a perpetual invitation to produce a lot at a lower level of quality. It’s a treadmill . . . What they [authors] generally don’t realize is that their treadmill is actually a generator, and it’s mostly for powering Amazon.” He explains: “Books have always been a loss leader for Amazon, a way to attract customers for more profitable items. So it suits Amazon very well to have an army of self-publishing authors, mostly working for pennies per hour, supplying Amazon with dirt-cheap content to keep customers coming to the site.” Dystel agrees with the comment about lower quality. Like many in the traditional publishing world, she keeps an eye out for best-sellers on Kindle Direct, hoping to find new talent. She also helps some of her authors self-publish, sometimes to revive a backlist. Yet she says she’s seeing “more and more garbage.” It’s cheap garbage, and that attracts an audience, she says. But then readers see that they’ve probably overpaid for their 99-cent book, and they stop buying self-published works. The bad stuff, she contends, is “ruining the market.” Brunette nevertheless chose to give it a try, and she is upbeat when we meet in her Ballard apartment in August. With the help of her then-fiance, now husband, Anthony Valterra, she had uploaded Cat in the Flock onto the Kindle the month before. It had taken a while to get to that point. They had to format the book for the Kindle, design the cover, and come up with a price. They settled on $2.99, which Brunette says was “psychologically hard” but in tune with the low pricing prevalent on the Kindle. Once they did all that, though, all it took to “publish” the book was to go to the Kindle Direct site and click on a button. Somewhat amusingly, Amazon then identified a category for the book: “cozy mystery animal.” This was because of the Cat in the title, which refers not to a furry, fourlegged creature but to the protagonist, a woman who goes undercover inside a megachurch to find a mother and daughter on the run. “If Hunger Games had been uploaded, it might have been put in ‘teen eating disorder,’ ” jokes Valterra, a former Wizards of the Coast manager now working for North Seattle College. They contacted Amazon’s customer-service department about refining the category, and received assurance that it would be changed within two days. “Which actually is pretty
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traditional advertising and promotion that relies upon media and bookstores. “We’re focused on customers we can talk to directly,” Belle says. And Amazon will talk to its customers again and again about a particular book, making for a more prolonged marketing campaign than is common in traditional publishing, where a new title often gets just an initial blast of publicity. “I have had special promotions for my books a year after their release,” says Chance. This strategy has worked particularly well with War Brides. It has sold over 500,000 copies, according to Belle; after Amazon published a second Bryan book, says company spokesperson Finch, the author’s sales now total more than a million copies. Belle cites a number of Amazon authors who have hit that mark, including romance writer Catherine Bybee and women’s-fiction author Karen McQuestion. Amazon Publishing, he insists, is both successful and profitable. That’s hard to confirm because Amazon, whose secrecy is legendary, does not generally release sales figures. “Nobody ever asks about the quality of the books,” Belle laments. He mentions a shortstory collection, Godforsaken Idaho, by author Shawn Vestal, which last month won the PEN/ Robert Bingham award for debut fiction. It was put out by a literary imprint, Little A, which Amazon maintains in its New York office. Dystel, though, has represented other authors who have had far less success with Amazon. In such cases, the company’s marketing methods fell flat. In its haste to get a lot of books out quickly, Amazon “might not have understood the market,” she says. “Or the market might not have been as easily defined.” And when that happened, Amazon let the data make its next decision: It passed on the author’s next book. “All publishers do this,” Dystel acknowledges, “but they aren’t usually so aggressive in seeking out authors, building them up, and then almost spitting them out.” Meanwhile, the days of six-figure Amazon advances are gone. “We’re seeing advances somewhere in the range of $10,000 or $20,000,” Dystel says. You might say those who even get an advance are lucky. Amazon relies on many authors to start their careers without any advance at all.
Cents & Sensibility
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food&drink
Attention, Apple Connoisseurs! Prosser-based ’Tude could revolutionize the cutthroat apple-juice industry.
S
The semi-annual Dine Around Seattle program, which focuses on small neighborhood restaurants, kicked off this week. From Sunday through Thursday throughout November, you can get three courses for $18 at lunch and $33 at dinner.
amber stuff, but no, apple juice can really be—” He interrupts himself. “We don’t even call it apple juice, we call it juice from an apple,” which is fine, though I really want to know what apple juice can be. He sort of leaves me hanging. (Wine?) Milton and Chastenet initially purchased specialized juicing machines that they thought would fit their needs. Their first attempt at production unfortunately left them with an empty factory full of pipes and hanging wires.
and Chastenet’s positive “Life is good” attitude. (Though according to scrabblefinder. com, at least 43 other words end with “-tude,” like decrepitude, solitude, and servitude. Those probably wouldn’t have made sense.) A Metropolitan Market in Seattle was the duo’s first customer, and now the juice is sold in 40 states through Whole Foods and other retailers. The product line has expanded into hybrid juices that use apple as the base, including marionberry, blueberry, ginger and turmeric, and lemonade, among others. They even sell an old-fashioned apple juice that combines different apples. “Which apples do you use for that blend?” I ask. “That’s proprietary,” says Milton, laughing. “I don’t want to give my recipe away.” ’Tude’s most popular flavors are Fuji and Granny Smith, at opposite ends of the taste spectrum. “People either love or hate the Granny Smith,” says Milton, which I can appreciate, because its tartness, accurately capturing the apple’s flavor, is striking. (Drinking it, I was reminded of that scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory when Gene Wilder is instructing the kids to lick the fruity wallpaper: “The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozzberries taste like snozzberries.” Anyway.) Milton has no immediate plans to take the single-varietal approach to other fruits, like oranges or snozzberries, but he does have a research and development department, and is looking into it. For now, it remains to be seen what effect ’Tude will have on the cutthroat apple-juice industry. The original approach to flavor is certain to make waves, amber-colored waves. “I’ve noticed a couple companies that have come out with varietal juices,” says Milton. “Now, I can’t lay any claim that we got that going, but it clearly has piqued some interest in apple circles.” “Apple circles?” I ask. “There are circles for everything.” E food@seattleweekly.com
morningfoodnews@gmail.com
TheWeeklyDish An Autumn Menu From Sunday Suppers BY NICOLE SPRINKLE
I love fall for many reasons, one of which is the abundance of new cookbooks from great authors and publishers. Inspired by one of the most recent, Sunday Suppers by Karen Mordechai (Clarkson Potter) of the Brooklyn communal cooking center and website, I decided to take a stab at cooking (for dinner guests) an entire autumn menu from the book, one provided by Blue Hill Farm in New York: corned beef with root vegetables; braised purple cabbage; sesame and salt pretzels with brown beer mustard; and apple and olive-oil cake. I’d never corned my own brisket (a five-day brining affair), and learned that curing salt is supposedly what turns it that pretty reddish shade we associate with corned beef on St. Patrick’s Day. However, the three tablespoons called for didn’t actually do the trick. Still, it tasted like corned beef, and the beautiful purple and yellow carrots and the pink-topped turnips provided a pop of color—as did the purple, slightly vinegary cabbage. The biggest win was the soft pretzels, which my daughter helped form. Though I intended to serve them with the meal, all 12 were scarfed down as hors d’oeuvres. The finale, the dessert, was delicious—kind of like a lemony pound cake, with the apples only as garnish on top. However, there’s a major caveat: This recipe yields two cakes, not one, as it claims. I’ve sent word to the author! But there are worse things than having two yummy cakes . . . Visit sunday-suppers.com for more info on the book and recipes. E
nsprinkle@seattleweekly.com
SEATT LE W EEKLY • NOVEMBER 5 — 11, 2014
“We were kind of naive,” says Milton. “We tried for three months to get the juicing machines to work to our liking, and it didn’t work, so all of a sudden the money that we took out of retirement and put towards this project was in the balance.” They eventually managed to acquire new equipment and find the formulation they liked, “and then we were kind of in the business of making juice.”
The “ ’Tude” in ’Tude Juice is short for Milton
For $50, attend a Chocolate Cook-Off on November 9 at Ethan Stowell’s Tavolàta to benefit the Children’s Hospital Uncompensated Care Fund. Pastry chef Dionne Himmelfarb hosts the event, with 12 Northwest chefs competing, including Autumn Martin of Hot Cakes, Roger Martinho of Ba Bar, Nica Falcon from Chocolopolis, and Laura Pyles of Parchment. For reservations, call 838-8008. E
NICOLE SPRINKLE
PHOTOS COURTESY OF ‘TUDE JUICE
Top: Pink apple juice. Bottom: Two guys with ’tude.
BY JASON PRICE
Chef Maria Hines has been selected by America Cooks With Chefs to battle five other James Beard Award–winning chefs in a seven-episode healthycooking competition series on Ora.TV, culminating in a live cooking challenge at the Clinton Health Matters Initiative in January.
BY CHASON GORDON tudents don’t give their teachers apples anymore, but if they gave one to Andy Milton, he’d probably juice it. Milton is a co-founder of ’Tude Juice, a Prosser, Wash.-based juice company that has deconstructed the very idea of apple juice. Who knew that was possible? Instead of the standard, lovable clear amber liquid or the brown apple montage you find at farmers markets, ’Tude features the flavors of single varietal apples, including Gala, Fuji, Honeycrisp, Granny Smith, and Cripps Pink. That’s probably why it costs a little more, and tastes a little better, than others. “We knew people have a favorite apple,” says Milton. “You talk with someone: ‘I love Granny Smith apples. Honeycrisps are my favorite.’ So let’s give a connoisseur the true taste of what that apple tastes like in liquid form.” He adds, “I’ve had tons of people say to me, ‘I will never go back to regular apple juice.’ ” The reaction is understandable. I will sometimes go back to regular, non-postmodern apple juice— mostly when I need plenty of it to brine pork. A former schoolteacher, Milton found himself looking for a change, and became friends with Cedric Chastenet, a condiment and olive importer who luckily was also looking for a change. Usually in this situation, a band is formed. That’s not the case here. One day, Chastenet was at Milton’s place, watching him press some juice from a Granny Smith apple. “He said, ‘This is really good. Have you ever seen a green-apple juice on the market?’ ” Milton hadn’t. “And that precipitated a conversation,” says Milton. Over the next few months, the two learned a great deal about apples and varieties, as well as the high-pressure processing technology that avoids heat, which is said to preserve nutrients and flavor. “We thought how unique it would be to have an apple juice that was varietal-driven,” says Milton. “Washington has such a great history with apples. Everyone thinks of apple juice as the clear
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Bean Box’s co-founders.
W
hat do two local software guys who have a passion for coffee and aspire to work in an industry with more tangible personal impact do? They create a company focused on bringing coffee roasted here in Seattle to your home—one box at a time. Step 1: Get yourself a small box. Step 2: Put your beans in the box. Meet the Bean Box boys: Co-founders Ryan Fritzky and Matthew Berk bucked the trend of launching yet another technology startup by focusing on common ground (literally)—coffee. They realized the links that coffee made for them in both their professional and personal lives; whether talking to customers about products, engineers about software design, or friends about new experiences, these conversations were always held over a cup of joe. Buying holiday gifts for customers, they’d always go to ETG in Fremont. All the dots were connecting—and that’s when the idea struck for Bean Box. I met Fritzky and Berk at one of my favorite cafes in Seattle, Milstead and Co., to talk coffee beans. Asked how they were making the coffeeof-the-month-club concept different, their answer was simple: Seattle roasters all have interesting personal stories and unique roasting processes. They don’t follow a generic methodology, using the same green beans to create the same roast. Each roaster has a different style, just as a cabernet from adjacent vineyards can taste completely different once a winemaker has plied his trade. Roasting is a nuanced process that evokes varying flavors from a bean based on technique. Fritzky says, “We want to bring people in, help them appreciate the art of roasting, and make these different styles accessible to customers.” Their mission with Bean Box centers on three key concepts: discovery (helping people find great coffee and changing the culture of coffee as a convenience and habit for most), freshness (as a rule in the U.S., coffee isn’t fresh; all roasters have a window when their product is fresh, and often what we drink is past its flavor peak), and accessibility (helping people explore what we take for granted in Seattle). The evolving roaster roster for Bean Box currently includes Kuma, Lighthouse, Herkimer,
Seven, Ladro, Broadcast, Tin Umbrella, and—this month’s feature—Keala’s, which uses beans from Hawaii. More roasters are being added frequently. Before starting Bean Box, the pair developed and patented a mobile app as a “recommendation exchange.” They found that people avidly use the platform to share their experiences with coffee, brewing equipment, roasters, and cafes. Berk adds, “Generally, people don’t have palates developed for coffee, and we can help them. People gather over coffee and it brings them together. They also want to share their experience, and we give coffee mavens the platform to do so.” Here’s what you get when
you order from Bean Box: four 1.7-ounce sample bags of each roast, with the roast date noted, for $20 a month. Roasts range from dark to light and give the customer different flavor profiles for comparison. Each box contains an insert that tells about each roaster, with tasting notes and comments on the coffee. Every month you get four new varieties from different Seattle-based roasters. Also, customers can reorder 12-ounce bags of any roast they love. What else makes Bean Box different from other subscription coffee services? Freshness. The beans they ship are always roasted just the day before. Normally there’s a 14-day lag getting beans to customers after they’ve been roasted and then shipped to a warehouse. “Double shipping just kills the beans and flavors,” says Berk. Apparently there is a large market for the product; Bean Box did a “soft launch” in midSeptember and shipped to 34 states and two Canadian provinces. Customers include those who want to experience Seattle coffee culture, locals shipping beans to their friends from afar, and those who have left Seattle and want a taste of home. (For more information, see beanbox.co or facebook.com/beanboxgourmetcoffee.) E
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By Geoff Kaiser
W
10pm. This will mark the 27th year they’ve held this event, which will feature winter ales from 30+ breweries. Participating breweries include long-time favorites like Boundary Bay Brewing and Elysian Brewing, as well as smaller breweries such as Lantern Brewing and NW Peaks. Tickets are $35 for the general public ($25 for PNA members) and include 10 tastes. The largest festival of the season is the Winter Beer Fest, which is hosted by the Washington Brewers Guild and is held at Hanger 30 in Magnuson Park on December 5th & 6th. This festival exclusively features beers from Washington breweries. Last year they had 51 breweries pouring more than 140 beers, like Mocha Death, a strong ale brewed with espresso from Iron Horse Brewery in Ellensburg. It is a festive event that takes place over 3 sessions. Tickets are $25 in advance ($30 at the door) and include six 5oz beer tastes; more tastes can be purchased for $1.50/EA. One of my favorite festivals is Big Wood, which will kick off at Brouwer’s Café in Fremont on Thursday, December 4. This festival is dedicated to the art of wood-aged beers and features some special brews from around the country and world. At Big Wood, you can expect to see stouts, sour beer, barleywines, and more. This is a truly special event where there are sure to be beers pouring that you’d have a hard time finding anywhere else in town. It will be packed on the first day of the festival, so if you don’t like big crowds I’d suggest coming back on Friday to see what is left. Road Trip - Portland One of my favorite things about living in Seattle is the endless amount of road trips you can choose from on any given weekend. When it comes to beer, one of the first places I look to for a weekend trip is our friends down Continued on page 18
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hile winter doesn’t officially start until December 21, turning back the clocks for Daylight Saving Time this past weekend is the true kickoff for the “dark season” here in the Northwest. I don’t just mean the lack of daylight, either. With breweries releasing their seasonal beers earlier every year, we’ve seen some winter releases hitting shelves for several weeks already. In general, breweries lean towards darker, heavier beers as their styles of choice for winter releases. The annual release of Jolly Roger Christmas Ale from Maritime Pacific Brewing in Ballard is one of the most popular local winter releases. Weighing at 9% ABV, Jolly Roger is an English-style strong ale with a rich malt focus that is certain to warm you up. Some people shy away from beers with the word “Christmas” in the name, fearing that all of these beers are loaded up with spices & such that will make it taste like your Grandma’s fruitcake. That is definitely a misnomer, as beers like Jolly Roger are anything but overloaded with spices. This year’s batch will be released at their taproom on Tuesday, November 11, and alongside the new release they will have last year’s vintage, as well as 3 very special barrel-aged casks on the bar. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Sierra Nevada Brewing’s Celebration Ale is a winter seasonal that is made for the hopheads. First brewed back in 1981, this IPA features Cascade, Centennial and Chinook hops from the recent hop harvest. It is truly a great IPA that is also one of the best values you can find; in recent years I’ve seen six-packs on sale for as low as $6.99 at local grocers. The best place to try a wide selection of winter seasonal beers is at one of the beer festivals that take place in Seattle this time of year. First up is the Winter Beer Taste at the Phinney Neighborhood Association, which is happening this Saturday, November 8, from 7pm to
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south in Portland, OR. Appropriately known as “Beervana”, Portland boasts more breweries within city limits than any other city in the world. Aside from the sheer number of breweries, though, the quality of offerings and the fact that you don’t need a car to get around makes it the perfect spot for beer touring. Winter is a great time to go, as rates at prime downtown hotels drop after the summer season. The Southeast section of Portland is where I spend much of my time, with some of the city’s best breweries and bars laid out perfectly for walking. One place not to miss is the Cascade Brewing Barrel House, which is dedicated to barrel-aged sour beers. If you are new to these types of beers, you can try a selection of offerings in small taster sizes. Not far from Cascade, a stop for a sandwich at Lardo is the perfect way to prepare for more beer, and you’ll
find something worthy to wash it down with from their well-curated list of 16 taps. The perfect time to plan a trip would be for the annual Holiday Ale Festival, which is held in downtown Portland from December 3rd to 7th. Taking place under a huge clear top tent fixed with gas heaters, the festival features more than 50 truly special beers from mostly NW breweries. Almost all of these beers, like “The Twerking Elf ”, a 7.2% ABV sour brown ale from Stickmen Brewery in Lake Oswego, OR, are brewed solely for this festival and you won’t find them anywhere else. Regardless of when you visit Portland, I guarantee you won’t have a problem finding plenty of great beer and food to keep you busy. Geoff Kaiser enjoys writing about and drinking beer in Seattle. Check out his website at http://seattlebeernews.com.
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Singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile returns to Benaroya Hall for three highly anticipated concerts with her hometown Seattle Symphony over Thanksgiving weekend.
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arts&culture
What Was Art Like in the Old Days, Pop?
ThisWeek’s PickList WEDNESDAY, NOV. 5
SAM’s 50-year survey show makes you nostalgic for an era that was anything but.
Sebastian Junger
BY BRIAN MILLER
during her October visit: “It’s like a shop window.” The difference is that Warhol, back during his pre-fame commercial-art days, wanted shop windows to be beautiful and inviting. Meckseper’s diorama is intentionally full of gaudy, vulgar trinkets—in keeping with what Manchanda calls “the tinge of strangeness, surrealness, or discomfort” that artists today feel about such crass commercial displays. You can’t simply enjoy the representation of a Campbell’s Soup can for its elegant red-andwhite label; here Meckseper’s mirrors mean “the viewer cannot escape their own image while looking at it,” she says. Warhol had no use for reflecting ugly, ordinary people like us—mere shoppers or museumgoers. Meckseper, born in the Pop era, is of a generation that now directly implicates our consumer desire—younger than Kruger and Prince, but no less politicized. And there’s one thing you can say about Pop during the Ike–JFK ’60s: It wasn’t political. Does anyone remember what Warhol had to say about Vietnam? No—because he had no such views. He was concerned with images and objects that contained their own ideas, requiring none from the artist; hence his famous quip about wanting to be a machine. Pop was a retreat from or reaction against the intense psychology of the postwar moment: Freud and Pollock and the couch trip and all that. Things didn’t mean. Things just were. Manchanda wisely brings in some other voices to her catalog—chiefly critics and a few artists
And that returns us to the atavistic allure of
Warhol, Lichtenstein, and, for me especially, Ruscha. His word paintings are sometimes dismissed as random fusions of typography and color (“free word association,” Manchanda calls them), the text as meaningful—or meaningless—as a Zen koan. I love them. Along with the works of Warhol and Lichtenstein here, I’d like to see a whole lot more of them. There’s irony and humor in Ruscha (as in America Her Best Product), but also the bygone appeal of ads and slogans that no longer sell to us. Who buys Brillo anymore, or gasoline at Standard filling stations? Yet they still look great, in part because they’re divorced from the current economy. At a museum exhibition 50 years hence, no one will want to be reminded of the pop-up ads and screen clutter of today’s Internet. But the Google doodle? I think maybe that’s Pop. E
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SEATTLE ART MUSEUM 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $12.50–$19.50. 10 a.m.–9 p.m. Thurs., 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Wed. & Fri.–Sun. Ends Jan. 11.
Junger and his crew duck a train.
The author (The Perfect Storm) turned film director (Korengal and Restrepo) has now made his third documentary about the war in Afghanistan, though it takes place on East Coast railway lines and in the Allegheny Mountains. Produced for HBO, The Last Patrol documents Junger’s 300mile trek, originally planned for his filmmaking partner Tim Hetherington, the famed photojournalist who was killed covering the Libyan revolution. Joining him instead are a couple of war vets (including Brendan O’Byrne from Restrepo) on a hobo-style march along an active railway line. Why take that route from New York to Washington, D.C.? Junger has said that “the railroad tracks go straight through the middle of everything—ghettos, suburbs, crumbling industry, farms, and swamps. You see America from the inside out.” The trek becomes the basis for Junger’s reporting on this forlorn corridor and the people he encounters along the way. It’s not without its dangers, but at least no one is shooting at his small company of hikers. The film debuts Nov. 10 on HBO. Junger will appear for a post-film Q&A tonight with local actor Tom Skerritt, founder of The Red Badge Project, which supports wounded vets. SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., 324-9996. Free, but RSVP at siff.net. 7 p.m. BRIAN MILLER THURSDAY, NOV. 6
Ron Dakron
Tokyo is burning, and Devilfish is laughing. He’s a kaiju, one of those fake-looking rubber monsters running amok—a giant blue manta ray, in this instance—and the very amusing narrator of Dakron’s Hello Devilfish! (Three Rooms Press, $15.95). Devilfish claims to be an enemy not just of Tokyo, where he gleefully topples power lines and elevated trains, munching on their passengers, but also of the novel itself. “Join us in plotmaiming fun!” he exclaims in Manglish, a comic lexicon made up of odd advertising slogans, poorly translated Japanese, LOL-speak, and I Can Has Cheezburger grammar. Destruction is this manta ray’s mantra. Yet the more his stingtailed protagonist inveighs against Big Lit, local writer Dakron begins to sneak in some structure and literary mischief. Devilfish has an unwanted paramour in pursuit of him: another kaiju he calls Squidra, a giant pink kraken with tentacles and
SEATT LE W EEKLY • NOVEMBER 5 — 11, 2014
non-ironic Pop celebration has curdled. “Consumerism today is alive and well on a global scale, but no longer tinged with that happy optimism,” she writes in the show’s catalog. Thus we detect a growing sense of irony and criticism as we proceed through later examples of borrowed imagery, including Richard Prince’s cigarette-ad cowboys and Barbara Kruger’s framing of Warhol’s own iconic face (a decade after his 1987 death). Jeff Koons’ gilded kitsch further collapses notions of high and low culture (even while commanding very high price tags). Moving past the millennium, Manchanda sees “the foregrounding of a culture of display,” more engagement with the market and commodification. Notable among recent works is the German artist Josephine Meckseper’s none-too-subtly named American Mall, a mirrored display of consumer items. It nods to Warhol’s early career as a window dresser, of course, and Meckseper said as much
© ESTATE OF ROY LICHTENSTEIN/EDUADRO CALDERON
Yet for Manchanda, at least, the original spirit of
Lichtenstein’s 1961 On.
from the show (Meckseper included). But the money quote, as always, comes from Warhol: “The Pop artist did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second— comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles—all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.” All the great modern things, from Marilyn to Mao, Brillo boxes to gas station signs. And they still look great—so clean and uncluttered, their meaning honed and refined by copywriters and photo retouchers, perfect encapsulations of the consumer zeitgeist. Manchanda writes that “Warhol glamorized the object,” but there’s more to it than that. If not political in an anticapitalistic sense (a dangerous stance at the time, let’s remember), Pop winked at its sources. Pop Art isn’t naive, as Manchanda sometimes seems to suggest; its sources were naive. Lichtenstein is quoted to that effect in the catalog, writing “I want my images to be as critical, as threatening, and as insistent as possible.” Though it can now seem decorative, like background art that blurs into advertising (part of what makes it so enduringly subversive), Pop was never meant to be cute. Its early, eye-pleasing qualities disguise its unsettling and often satirical intent. But the Departees had to distinguish themselves from Old Uncle Andy, and that is why—as you cycle through this show—most all of the later work rejects any lingering notions of beauty. That’s not to say it’s is bad or ugly; it just doesn’t earn repeated viewings. The inherent concept—consumer critique or whatever—outshines the vessel. You get it, or don’t, and move on.
HBO
S
eattle Art Museum director Kimerly Rorschach was hedging her language during last month’s press launch for its awkwardly divided new show. Pop Departures, mostly sourced from SAM’s own collection, isn’t purely devoted to Pop Art—meaning Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, and company, who so thoroughly disrupted the art scene of the 1960s. Instead, said Rorschach, the show “is tracing a lineage” from those old, white elders of Pop to their heirs of the ’80s and beyond—call them the Departees, perhaps? Everything fit for a poster or tote bag—see the gift shop, please—comes first in the chronological show of over 100 works by 28 artists. The grabby images are all there, mixing roadside iconography (Ed Ruscha), Hollywood faces (Warhol), comic-book panels (Lichtenstein), and even familiar plates of diner food (Oldenburg’s sculptures, which haven’t aged well). They still have the power of their simple graphic clarity, their appropriation of the commercial lexicon of advertising, signage, and celebrity. You could do an entire show on each of the Pop elders—you want to see more of the big names—but this show also insists on the importance of the next two generations of Departees. “Pop Art doesn’t feel to me like a closed chapter,” says SAM curator Catharina Manchanda, who organized the exhibit. (She’ll give a talk on it at 11 a.m. Fri., Nov. 7.) Her catalog thesis is essentially that Pop never really died, which fits with my own uncertainty about the movement’s demise. Did Minimalism or Conceptualism eclipse it, or was it simply absorbed into the bright, readymade universe of symbols and logos? Did borrowing and appropriation ever play themselves out? Look outside your window (or your computer screen, home of the image grab), and the answer is clearly no.
» CONTINUED ON PAGE 22 21
arts&culture
“THE LETTER THAT JOHNNY WALKER READ”
ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL
THUR | NOV 13 | 8PM
TRIBUTE TO FRANK, DEAN, AND SAMMY
THE PACK
NOV 20 - 22 | 8PM
NASA/CHRIS HADFIELD
Cuba and Florida, seen from space.
lowing last year’s zero-G cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” which dropped on YouTube shortly before he came down from the International Space Station, Hadfield retired and began writing books: first an autobiography, now his You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes: Photographs From the International Space Station (Little Brown, $26). Aboard the ISS, apart from music, he did everything he could to evangelize for science and space exploration, and his new volume continues that noble mission. In a dumbed-down era of “I’m not a scientist” and teach-the-controversy subterfuge, Hadfield wants you—and your kids— to look at the Earth more seriously. The winking oil-well flares, the retreating glaciers, the spreading deserts, the cyclonic whirls of typhoons that bring devastation (and life-giving rain)—these are what he documented from high above our fragile planet. His book contains some 150 images from his 2,500 orbits, some of which he’ll discuss this evening. (Advance registration is strongly urged.) Also, he’s made mustaches cool again—here and throughout the galaxy. University Book Store,
The Pick List » FROM PAGE 21 laser beams that shoot from her eyes. So there’s a bit of a love story in Hello Devilfish!, and a chase through the city’s smoldering rubble, an abrupt transformation (hello, Doug!), and flourishes of humor that recall Mark Leyner. Quoth the Devilfish, “I spit on realism and all its cunning henchmen!” Here’s a creature intending not to enter the literary canon but to destroy the library. Elliott Bay
Book Co., 1521 10th Ave., 624-6600, elliottbay book.com. Free. 7 p.m. BRIAN MILLER FRIDAY, NOV. 7
Director’s Choice
35TH ANNUAL
SEATTLE INTERNATIONAL COMEDY COMPETITION SEMI-FINALS
4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, bookstore. washington.edu. Free. 6 p.m. BRIAN MILLER
SUN | NOV 23 | 7PM
TUESDAY, NOV. 11
Lindsi Dec (foreground) and Lesley Rausch in A Million Kisses to My Skin.
QUEENSRYCHE FRI | DEC 5 | 8PM
TICKETS: SNOCASINO.COM OR THE SNOQUALMIE CASINO BOX OFFICE SEATTLE’S CLOSEST CASINO | I-90 E, EXIT 27
Pacific Northwest Ballet’s November production is usually designed as a contrast to the familyfriendly sweetness of its Nutcracker, which comes right after, and this program fits that need. David Dawson’s neoclassical powerhouse A Million Kisses to My Skin, Nacho Duato’s Haitian-inspired Rassemblement, and a new-to-us duet by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa join a world premiere by rising star Justin Peck, recently named the resident choreographer at New York City Ballet. There’s not a sugarplum among them. (Ends Nov. 16.) McCaw Hall, 321 Mercer St. (Seattle Center), 441-2424, pnb.org. $28 and up. 7:30 p.m. SANDRA KURTZ
SATURDAY, NOV. 8
/Snocasino
Chris Hadfield
He went into space a distinguished Canadian pilot and astronaut; he came back an international— one hesitates to say interplanetary—star. Fol-
© ANGELA STERLING
22
GRAMMY NOMINATED
:
SEATTLE WEEKLY • NOVEM BER 5 — 11, 2 014
Fidelio Trio
“While the tonal system, in an atrophied or vestigial form, is still used today in popular and commercial music, and even occasionally in the works of backward-looking serious composers, it is no longer employed by serious composers of the mainstream. It has been replaced or succeeded by the 12-tone system.” This imperious admonition earned composer Charles Wuorinen no friends when he dropped it on the first page of the first chapter of his 1979 textbook Simple Composition. For decades (he’s 76), Wuorinen has held aloft the banner of modernism at its most uncompromising and cantankerous. What does his own music sound like? Well, the 1983 Piano Trio—which the Fidelio Trio is playing tonight—is as gnarly as the above edict suggests, but nowhere near as dry. Dazzling rather than recondite, its 10 minutes sweep along with an exhilarating rhythmic life; the violin, cello, and piano seem to sideswipe and strike sparks off one another as they hurtle forward. Sponsored by the Washington Composers Forum, the Fidelio will also play music by Johannes Maria Staud, Donnacha Dennehy, and John Harbison. Chapel
Performance Space, 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N., washingtoncomposersforum.org. $5–$15. 8 p.m. GAVIN BORCHERT E
arts&culture» Stage
Opening Nights
mances and a wacky, Wikipedia-confirmed bite of Hungarian history make the Bathory vein a worthwhile draught. MARGARET FRIEDMAN
Twelfth Night
PBlood Countess
CENTER HOUSE THEATRE (SEATTLE CENTER), 733-8222. $30–$39. SEE SEATTLESHAKESPEARE. ORG FOR SCHEDULE. ENDS NOV. 16.
ANNEX THEATRE, 1110 PIKE ST., 728-0933, ANNEXTHEATRE.ORG. $5–$20. 8 P.M. THURS.– SAT. PLUS MON., NOV. 10. ENDS NOV. 22.
Performing Stardust, a hip-hop-inflected coming-of-age story Nov 20-22
Jon Kimura Parker Pianist explores the fantasia, from Beethoven to Wizard of Oz
Cranial inquiry? From left, Neddersen, David Quicksall (as Malvolio), and Dooly.
stage@seattleweekly.com
Touré-Raichel Collective featuring Vieux Farka Touré Idan Raichel Souleymane Kane Uri Kleinman
Masterworks of collaboration and improvisation
Nov 15
Miró Quartet Works by Haydn, Beethoven and Schuller
Nov 18
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SEATT LE W EEKLY • NOVEMBER 5 — 11, 2014
Given the surreal setting, plausibility is not Kretzu’s goal. The clowning of Sir Toby Belch (Mike Dooly) and his buddies—George Mount’s Sir Andrew is particularly good—relies on swami garb and prop gags, but gets stale rather quickly. Musical interludes by the fool (Conner Neddersen) are downright dismal blues numbers nearly as excruciating as the eyeball-cutting scene in Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou. Andrea Bryn Bush’s Magritte-like set features floating umbrellas and a backdrop of ruched mens’ business shirts. Like the rest of the production, it’s cleverly conceived but emotionally unsettling. However, a few exceptional moments work little wonders—most notably at the outset, when Viola rifles through a chest of linens, clearly symbolizing her psyche, and finds a full-clothed man inside, whom she stuffs back down into it. Later, she and Orsino are interrupted by a ghostly Sebastian (Christopher Morson), somnambulating downstage in drag and parasol, representing her other half both in genes and in gender. Olivia (Elinor Gunn), the noblewoman who falls for her manservant Cesario, is portrayed as a glamorous but screechy hysteric. Her neurotic outbursts do signal some of the repressed passions that link surrealism and Kretzu’s interpretation of the text. They do not, however, make the attenuated three-hour run time any more liquid. MARGARET FRIEDMAN E
Nov 14
The
JOHN ULMAN
Feeling anemic? Luckily it’s easy to take ironsupplement pills these days. Back at the turn of the 16th century, one had to be more creative for a cure—like drinking virgins’ blood, which Hungarian countess Elizabeth Bathory allegedly did by quaffing from 600 young women. In Kelleen Conway Blanchard’s stage version of Bathory’s life, the countess first starts killing as a means to sexual arousal, then later to stay young and beautiful, like a Dorian Gray vampire. Though it suffers from the episodic nature of many history-based bio plays, Blood Countess is a lot of fun. As the countess, Terri Weagant’s unconventional looks and excellent expressive range are riveting—until you realize that she’s just not that scary. Director Bret Fetzer has her focus more on the black comedy than on freezing your blood. Indeed, two other characters in her entourage are far more freaky: a deranged, id-like provocateur named Fitzco, played with nearly boundless perversity by Erin Stewart; and a priest, played with chilling, sexualized placidity (and heavy eye makeup) by Martyn G. Krouse. Bathory’s violenceloving libertine husband Ferenc ( James Weidman) is another unctuous delight. In Bathory’s grim castle (a simple, black-walled, portrait-adorned set by Susannah Anderson), victims progress from birds to a parade of neighborhood girls (all winningly portrayed by Sarah Windsor). This entertaining Halloween show is studded with graphically vulgar details (like boar-blood enemas and dismal congenital diseases), but there’s a trifle too much of it. At 140 minutes including intermission, the play has a good half-hour of adipose that could’ve profitably been trimmed and fed to Fitzco. No one cares much when the countess meets her inevitable demise; in today’s context, the vain, youth-craving Bathory could more responsibly serve her obsessions at Sephora and the plastic surgeon’s office. But canny perfor-
DANGERPANTS PHOTOGRAPHY
Malicious mistress and servant: Weagant (foreground) and Stewart.
The prewar surrealists fused dream and reality via startling, illogical juxtapositions, tinged with notions of Freud and the fractured self. It’s not a bad choice of milieu for Twelfth Night, where twins Viola and Sebastian are separated by shipwreck and pine for reunion like cleaved halves of one being. In theory, this is an inspired setting for Shakespeare’s durable comedy, full of crossdressing and mistaken identity, yet my watch ran slower than one of Dalí’s dripping timepieces. As Viola, 16-year-old Allie Pratt is a short, chicly shorn, comfortably androgynous powerhouse when masquerading as Cesario. These qualities abet her resemblance to Sebastian, but undercut Viola’s core femininity and internal conflict. Likely at the behest of director Jon Kretzu, the scenes with her romantic quarry/employer Duke Orsino ( Jay Myers) yield no sexuality whatsoever, homo or hetero, which neuters their final union.
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arts&culture» Performance Stage OPENINGS & EVENTS
BROADCAST BURLESQUE Relive radio drama of
yore with Lesbian: PI and Bolt Action, Moon Mayor! Rendezvous Theater at the Jewelbox, 2322 Second Ave., scarlettohairdye.com. $12–$25. 8 p.m. Sat., Nov. 8. FANGS The premiere of Jim Moran’s dark comedy about an anti-abortion senator. Eclectic Theater, 1214 10th Ave., eclectictheatercompany.org. $20–$25. Previews Nov. 7–9, opens Nov. 13. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat., 2 p.m. Sun. Ends Dec. 6. FIDDLER ON THE ROOF Seattle Musical Theatre at Magnuson Park, 7120 62nd Ave. N.E., Building 47, 800-8383006, seattlemusicaltheatre.org. $20–$35. Opens Nov. 7. 7:30 p.m. Fri.–Sat., 2 p.m. Sun. Ends Nov. 23. THE FIERCE URGENCY OF NOW Arouet premieres Doug DeVita’s play about the advertising world. Stone Soup Downstage Theatre, 4029 Stone Way N., 800838-3006, arouet.us. $12–$40. Opens Nov. 7. 7:30 p.m. Thurs.–Sat., plus 2 p.m. Sun., Nov. 9 and 7:30 p.m. Mon., Nov. 17. Ends Nov. 22. OPEN CARRY Wild animals stand in metaphorically for firearms in Scot Augustson’s new play for Seattle Public Theater’s Youth Program. Bathhouse Theater on Green Lake, 7312 West Green Lake Dr. N., seattlepublictheater. org. Donation. 2 p.m. Sat., Nov. 8, 4 p.m. Sun., Nov. 9. QUESTIONABLE CONTENT A topical panel quiz show. Theater Schmeater, 2125 Third Ave., schmeater.org. Pay what you will. 11 p.m. Fri., Nov. 7–Sat., Nov. 8. SATURDAY MORNING CARTOONS Fond recollections of our pajamas-and-cereal youth inspired these new plays. Pocket Theater, 8312 Greenwood Ave. N., the1448projects.org. $5–$14. Opens Nov. 8. 10:30 a.m. Sat. Ends Nov. 22. SEATTLE INTERNATIONAL COMEDY COMPETITION
A high energy performAnce by northwest Artists celebrAting rich culturAl music And dAnce trAditions feAturing AfricAn, mexicAn, sAmoAn, tongAn, filipino, hip hop And more!
34 aspiring stand-ups go into a comedy club; one comes out. Various area venues, Nov. 5–30; see seattle comedycompetition.org for full info. TICK, TICK . . . BOOM! Jonathan Larson’s semi-memoirish precursor to Rent tells of a young composer of musicals. SecondStory Repertory, 16587 N.E. 74th St., Redmond, 425-881-6777. secondstoryrep.org. Opens Nov. 7. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat. Ends Nov. 22. VISIT TO A SMALL PLANET The Endangered Species Project reads Gore Vidal’s satire of ’50s America. ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., endangeredspeciesproject. org. $10–$15. 7 p.m. Mon., Nov. 10. WONDERLAND The Can Can’s fantastical winter cabaret. The Can Can, 94 Pike St. $40–$100. Preview Nov. 6, opens Nov. 7. Runs Wed.–Sun.; see thecancan.com for exact schedule. Ends Dec. 28.
CURRENT RUNS
AFTERLIFE An improv look at The Big Question.
Unexpected Productions’ Market Theater, 1428 Post Alley, unexpectedproductions.org. $12–$15. 8:30 p.m. Fri.–Sat. Ends Nov. 22.
ALEXANDER AND THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY Judith Viorst herself wrote
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the book and lyrics for this musical adaptation of her popular kids’ book. SecondStory Repertory, 16587 N.E. 74th St., 425-881-6777, secondstoryrep.org. $10. 1 & 3 p.m. Sat.–Sun. Ends Nov. 23. BLOOD COUNTESS SEE REVIEW, PAGE 23. CLUES Jet City’s board-game-based improv murder mystery. Jet City Improv, 5510 University Way N.E., 352-8291, jet cityimprov.org. $12–$15. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Fri. Ends Nov. 21. DISASTER MOVIE An improv take on one of Hollywood’s most spoofable genres. Unexpected Productions’ Market Theater, 1428 Post Alley, unexpected productions.org. $7. 8:30 p.m. Sun. Ends Nov. 23. DOGFIGHT The title of this musical—based on the affecting 1991 movie—refers to a hideous sort of male-bonding competition among a group of Vietnam-bound Marines the night before they ship out of San Francisco in 1963: Whoever brings the ugliest woman to a party wins. But Eddie (Kody Bringman) ends up falling for Rose (Devon Busswood), the shy aspiring singer/songwriter he’d intended to humiliate, and they spend an increasingly tender night together. The show sounds promising enough, but it’s doomed by the misogynist party scene, which is played for laughs, broad ones at the women’s expense, and it got them. I’m not sure whether this approach was the intention of the book writer, Peter Duchan, or the brilliant idea of director Mathew Wright. In either case, I’ve never seen a more staggeringly misguided, profoundly offensive misreading of artistic intent. The party scene is a specific problem; Dogfight’s overall problem is that it evokes next to nothing of the film’s peculiar bleak bittersweetness. Eddie, Rose, and Vietnam all deserve a deeper treatment than what is basically a Very Special Episode of Glee. GAVIN BORCHERT ArtsWest, 4711 California Ave. S.W., 938-0339, artswest.org. $5–$37. 7:30 p.m. Wed.–Sat., 3 p.m. Sun. Ends Nov. 22.
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ENDGAME/NDGM Beckett’s theater-of-the-absurd classic
is paired with Blood Ensemble’s reimagining of Beckett’s themes. Ballard Underground, 2220 N.W. Market St., ghostlighttheatricals.org. $18–$20. 7:30 p.m. Fri.–Sat. plus Thurs., Nov. 13 & 20; also 2 p.m. Sun., Nov. 9. Ends Nov. 22. FAST COMPANY “Meet the Kwans: a Chinese-American family of expert con artists” in Carla Ching’s comic crime caper. Theatre Off Jackson, 409 Seventh Ave. S., 800-8383006, porkfilled.com. $12–$18. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat., plus 8 p.m. Mon., Nov. 10 and 2 p.m. Sun., Nov. 16. Ends Nov. 22. 5 BY BECKETT Act Without Words I and II, Rough for Theatre I and II, and Catastrophe, presented by Sound Theatre Company as part of the Seattle Beckett Festival. ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., 292-7676, acttheatre.org. $15–$25. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat., 2 p.m. Sun. Ends Nov. 9. THE GARDEN OF RIKKI TIKKI TAVI Friendship and cooperation are the messages in this adaptation of a classic Kipling tale. Seattle Children’s Theatre, Seattle Center, 441-3322. $15–$36. Runs Thurs.–Sun.; see sct. org for exact schedule. Ends Nov. 9. HAMLET The prodigiously pliable Mary Ewald stars as young Hamlet, shedding decades off her impressive odometer with astutely formulated adolescent smoldering. Under the unambiguous direction of John Kazanjian, the play’s twists and shadows have never been more comprehensible to me. There are also many gems among the supporting performances. A svelte Peter Crook scrumptiously deadpans Polonius’ insouciant hot air. Tim Gouran’s Laertes self-detonates as only Gouran can. And the various lesser characters played by Brandon Simmons and Scott Ward Abernethy manifest more secret personality than many a principal character in other productions. Quibbles? Kristen Kosmas seems too mature for Ophelia, Todd Jefferson Moore’s wide-eyed, doddering Claudius too broad. Kazanjian stages the famous bedroom scene between Hamlet and Queen Gertrude (Elizabeth Kenny) with zero Oedipal tension, and the fight choreography is a bit tentative. Still, I found myself riveted by this tiny yet immersive production, where Nina Moser’s set evokes a compact, creepy Elsinore with candlelight and brick. MARGARET FRIEDMAN New City Theater, 1406 18th Ave., brownpaper tickets.com. $15–$20. 7:30 p.m. Thurs.–Sat. Ends Nov. 15. HORSE GIRLS Did you go through a horse phase growing up? The ladies in Jenny Rachel Weiner’s play did. Annex Theatre, 1100 E. Pike St., annextheatre.org. $5–$10. 8 p.m. Tues.–Wed. Ends Nov. 19. I NEVER BETRAYED THE REVOLUTION Christopher Danowski’s play sends up Soviet history. West of Lenin (get it?), 203 N. 36th St., 800-838-3006, westoflenin.com. $15–$20. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat., 2 p.m. Sun., plus 8 p.m. Mon., Nov. 10. Ends Nov. 23. LEAR Shakespeare’s family saga rethought for Seattle Public Theater’s Youth Program. Bathhouse Theater on Green Lake, 7312 West Green Lake Dr. N., seattlepublic theater.org. Donation. 7 p.m. Fri., Nov. 7–Sat., Nov. 8. OR, THE WHALE A call-center employee shares Moby-Dick over the phone in this extrapolation of Melville. Stage One Theater, North Seattle College, 9600 College Way N., ponyworld.org. $16. 8 p.m. Thurs.–Sat. Ends Nov. 15. SPLIT SECOND IMPROV Second Story’s improv competition. SecondStory Repertory, 16587 N.E. 74th St., Redmond, 425-881-6777, secondstoryrep.org. $20. Two shows each Sat.: 7 p.m. for families, 8 p.m. could get naughtier. Ends Dec. 13. SUPRALIMINAL Seattle Immersive Theatre’s interactive tale about the paranormal, both set in and staged at the Georgetown Steam Plant. Meet at South Seattle College, 6000 16th Ave. S.W., and you’ll be bused there. seattle immersivetheatre.org. $50. 7:30 p.m. Fri.–Sat. EXTENDED through Nov. 15. TEATRO ZINZANNI: HACIENDA HOLIDAY TZZ’s new show keeps its dinner-cabaret formula fresh with acts that mash up entertainment skills in pairs: aerial plus dance en pointe by PNB alumna Ariana Lallone; trapeze plus contortion with Duo Rose; juggling plus the speed and aesthetic of thrash metal by Gamal David Garcia; and ballroom dance plus pole work by the astounding Vertical Tango. All this is organized by just the lightest spritz of storyline: Vivian Beaumount and Clifton Caswell (Christine Deaver and Kevin Kent) return to a swanky hotel to renew their vows. By the end, the gender-melding is complete— Beaumount and Caswell reconcile, each adopting at least two sexes, maybe more. It’s a romantic finale as spicy as the Southwest-inspired menu. GAVIN BORCHERT Teatro ZinZanni, 222 Mercer St., 802-0015. $99 and up. Runs Thurs.–Sun. plus some Wed.; see zinzanni.com/seattle for exact schedule. Ends Jan. 31. THREE SISTERS To accompany Christopher Durang’s comic take on Chekhov at ACT, here’s the original. Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center, 800-838-3006, cornish.edu. $5–$17. 8 p.m. Fri., 2 & 8 p.m. Sat. Ends Nov. 8. THE TIGER LILLIES Music and black humor combine to make “anarchic Brechtian street opera.” Teatro ZinZanni, 222 Mercer St., 802-0015, zinzanni.com/seattle. $32–$42. 7:30 p.m. Wed., Nov. 5.
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TWELFTH NIGHT SEE REVIEW, PAGE 23. VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE Vanya
(R. Hamilton Wright) and Sonia (Marianne Owen) are unmarried 50-something siblings who cared for their dying parents and still live in their childhood home. Their sister Masha (Pamela Reed), an aging starlet, funds their bleak lives (someone has to); then she arrives for a visit, towing her boy-toy Spike (the excessively bare-chested William Poole) with the intent of selling the house, a misfortune foretold by Cassandra the housekeeper (the gregarious Cynthia Jones). The specter of Chekhov hangs over Christopher Durang’s Tony-winning comedy, though you sometimes feel you’re watching a clever yet contrived sitcom. Neighbors visit, siblings bicker, compliments are undone by criticism, schemes are uncovered, and parties end in disaster. Durang further adds amusing references to Pirandello, Greek tragedy, and even Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. His characters can seem flat, though his themes are resoundingly heartfelt. Director Kurt Beattie mixes the absurdist levity with a whirlwind of bittersweet emotions; the effect is often frustrating but also satisfying. IRFAN SHARIFF ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., 292-7676. $55 and up. Runs Tues.– Sun; see acttheatre.org for exact schedule. Ends Nov. 16.
Dance
THE THREE YELLS Moon Falling is Veronica Lee-Baik’s
Ulysses-(among other things)-based new work. Velocity Dance Center, 1621 12th Ave., 800-838-3006, velocity dancecenter.org. $20. 8 p.m. Fri., Nov. 7–Sat., Nov. 8, 7:30 p.m. Sun., Nov. 9.
PACIFIC NORTHWEST BALLET: DIRECTOR’S CHOICE
SEE THE PICKLIST, PAGE 22.
4045 University Way N.E., 543-4880, music.washington. edu. $10–$15. 7:30 p.m. Thurs., Nov. 6. SEATTLE SYMPHONY SEE EAR SUPPLY, BELOW. SEATTLE COMPOSERS SALON A new-music openmike night, curated by John Teske, with music by Jacob Zimmerman, Nat Evans, Keith Eisenbrey, and S. Eric Scribner. Chapel Performance Space, 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N., composersalon.com. $5–$15. 8 p.m. Fri., Nov. 7. CLUB SHOSTAKOVICH In November 1964, the composer’s ninth and 10th string quartets were premiered; tonight’s performance marks their 50th anniversary (with the eighth also on the bill, just to make it more festive). The Royal Room, 5000 Rainier Ave. S., triopardalote.com. Donation. 8 p.m. Fri. Nov. 7. PACIFIC MUSICWORKS Monteverdi madrigals in “Songs of Love and War.” Benaroya Recital Hall, Third Ave. and Union St., 708-6003, pacificmusicworks.org. $10–$40. 8 p.m. Fri., Nov. 7. BAINBRIDGE SYMPHONY Stirring Russian crowdpleasers by Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, and Kalinnikov. Bainbrdge Performing Arts, 200 Madison Ave. N., 8428569, bainbridgeperformingarts.org. $16–$19. 7:30 p.m. Sat., Nov. 8, 3 p.m. Sun., Nov. 9.
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Classical, Etc.
• NOW ENSEMBLE Music by Judd Greenstein and
Derek Bermel Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave., townhall seattle.org. $5–$25. 7:30 p.m. Wed., Nov. 5. INVERTED SPACE UW’s new-music ensemble plays Steve Reich, Alvin Lucier, and more. Jones Playhouse,
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Hello Goodbye
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SEATTLE/SEATTLE CHAMBER • ORCHESTRA Beethoven’s Ninth, plus Joseph Schwantner’s SINGERS
MLK-based New Morning for the World. First Free Methodist Church, 3200 Third Ave. W., 800-838-3006, osscs.org. $10–$25. 3 p.m. Sun., Nov. 9. MUSIC OF REMEMBRANCE Spectrum Dance Theater premieres new dances set to Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. Benaroya Hall, Third Ave. and Union St., 365-7770, musicofremembrance.org. $30–$40. 4 p.m. Sun., Nov. 9. NORTH CORNER CHAMBER ORCHESTRA Seattle’s newest group plays Britten, Handel, and more to preview (and fundraise for) their official Nov. 23–24 debut. The Royal Room, 5000 Rainier Ave. S., 616-606-3246, nocco.org. $75–$150 (includes dinner). 7 p.m. Sun., Nov. 9. FIDELIO TRIO SEE THE PICKLIST, PAGE 22.
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EARSUPPLY
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B Y G AV I N B O R C H E R T
Send events to stage@seattleweekly.com, dance@seattleweekly.com, or classical@seattleweekly.com See seattleweekly.com for full listings. = Recommended
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So how does Koh interpret this concerto? “I think it had to with his leaving L.A.,” she says. Both a daunting showpiece and an emotionally compelling testimonial, the concerto was premiered during Salonen’s final week as the Philharmonic’s music director. In the first movement, “Mirage,” the perpetual-motion violin solo rides between and over broadly heaving waves rising from the depths of the orchestra, vibraphone and high winds adding glints of light. The two central movements, “Pulse 1” and “Pulse 2,” both use relentless percussion underpinning to very different effect: The first is moody and cinematic, as mysterious colors waft in and out over an ominous timpani throb, while the second is a manic urban dance, like something from West Side Story reset in a future dystopia. The finale is racked with angst, both from the soloist and from the orchestra in full cry; that Salonen titled it “Adieu” is bound to raise questions, especially since he refers in program notes to the concerto’s “strong, internal private narrative.” The questioning, actually, seems to come from the searching, climbing violin line in the work’s final two minutes, while the orchestra at last calms down. Resignedly? Sleepily? Grievingly? Your call. Benaroya Hall, Third Ave. & Union St., 2154747, seattle symphony.org. $20–$120. 7:30 p.m. Thurs., Nov. 6, 8 p.m. Sat., Nov. 8. COURTESY OF JENNIFER KOH
NOVEMBER 7 I 8 PM I THE PARAMOUNT THEATRE
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Of the two dozen or so pieces violinist Jennifer Koh has premiered, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s 2009 Violin Concerto is not one. Her performances with the Seattle Symphony this weekend will be her first of the work. But the two have collaborated often as BY GAVIN BORCHERT soloist and conductor, with Salonen on the podium of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Perhaps surprisingly, since conducting consists essentially of telling other musicians what to do, when it comes to his own composition he’s pretty hands-off, Koh reports. “He knows me, knows my playing; he trusts me as a performer,” she says. “He likes performers taking his pieces and doing something different with them . . . he wants people to feel free to interpret it the way they feel it.”
YEARS
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DIDIK NINI THOWOK This Javanese master of tra-
ditional cross-gender dance performs. Brechemin Auditorium, School of Music, UW campus, 685-8384. Free. 7:30 p.m. Mon., Nov. 10.
CELEBRATING
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The YWCA of Seattle-King CountySnohomish County seeks a
General Maintenance Person
to serve its downtown Seattle properties. The primary focus of this position is day-to-day repairs and maintenance as well as room turnovers. Employee spends most of the time at one location. Performs general maintenance and repair of YWCA properties, related fixtures and equipment. Work requires practical skill and knowledge, but not journey-level skill, in two or more trades such as: painting, plumbing, plastering, carpentry, masonry, tile setting, and electrical work. The employee may occasionally perform general grounds maintenance and basic custodial work.
Full time, 40 hrs/wk. Rate $16.35/hr. Respond to dohiring@ywcaworks.org Details @ www.ywcaworks.org
FRIDAY, NOV 14, 8PM First Free Methodist Church
BACH ELGAR MOZART Orchestral Suite No. 1
Openings & Events ALFREDO ARREGUIN Pioneering a detail-oriented
patterned style of painting, the Mexican-born Seattleite showcases his brilliantly colored and borderline psychedelic oil on canvas work. First Thursday opening reception, 6-8 p.m. Linda Hodges Gallery, 316 First Ave. S. 624-3034, lindahodgesgallery.com. 10:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Tues.-Sat. Ends Nov. 29. DEBORAH BELL Using paint and mixed media, Bell explores biological and feminine themes, often connecting the two in her work. First Thursday opening reception, 6-8 p.m. Gallery I|M|A, 123 S. Jackson St., 625-0055, galleryima.com. 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tues.Sat. Ends Nov. 29. BORDERLANDS Julie Alpert, Susanna Bluhm, Cynthia Camlin, Elise Richman, and Katy Stone unite for a group show exploring the concept of borders and boundaries, both conceptually and formally. First Thursday opening reception, 6-8 p.m. SOIL Gallery, 112 Third Ave. S. (Tashiro Kaplan Building), 264-8061, soilart.org. Noon-5 p.m. Thu.-Sun. Ends Nov. 29. ALLISON COLLINS The painter shows her quilt-like take on landscape art. First Thursday opening reception, 6-8 p.m. Foster/White Gallery, 220 Third Ave S., 622-2833, fosterwhite.com. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sat. Ends Nov. 29. CELESTE COONING & ALLYCE WOOD Shear/ Moment combines both artists’ penchant for quiet, geometric gestures into one show, showcasing Cooning’s cut-paper sculptures and Wood’s botanical illustrations. First Thursday opening reception, 5-9 p.m. Axis Pioneer Square, 308 First Ave. S., 681-9316, axispioneersquare.com. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Thurs. Ends Dec. 1. CRACKED EMERALD James Cicatko and John Radtke combine forces for a show featuring illustrations of historical figures with horrifically disfigured faces, plus steel sculpture. First Thursday opening reception, 5:30-8 p.m. Prole Drift, 523 S. Main St., proledrift.com, 1-7 p.m. Fri.-Sat. Ends Nov. 8. PATRICE DONOHUE In off plumb, the artist shows textural work made with wax, clay, ink, pigment, cloth, thread and newspaper. First Thursday opening reception, 5-8 p.m. Shift Gallery, 312 S. Washington St. (Tashiro Kaplan Building), shiftgallery.org. Noon-5 p.m. Fri.-Sat. Ends Nov. 29. JURIED EXHIBITION Local art trio SuttonBeresCuller waded through 1,902 submissions to pick out the top of the crop for this show. First Thursday opening reception, 5-8 p.m. Punch Gallery, 119 Prefontaine Pl. S. (Tashiro Kaplan Building), 621-1945, punchgallery. org. Noon-5 p.m. Thurs.-Sat. Ends Dec. 20. DAKOTA GEARHEART The artist turns her love for creating immersive environments and mixed media into a meditation on the “psychology of a cage” in When We Get There. First Thursday opening reception, 6-8 p.m. Gallery4Culture, 101 Prefontaine Pl. S. (Tashiro Kaplan Building), galleries.4culture.org. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri. Ends Dec. 6. GEORGETOWN ART ATTACK This month’s Art Attack features feminist paintings with gothic themes, blacksmithing, film noir posters, “paintoons” (painted cartoons), Dungeons & Dragons art, and more. Venues include Fantagraphics, All City Coffee, Krab Jab Studios, and LxWxH Gallery. Airport Way S. between Lucile Ave. S. & Bailey Ave. S. georgetownartattack.com. 6-9 p.m. Sat., Nov. 8. TRACY TAYLOR GRUBBS A collection of paintings featuring abstract renderings of nature’s majesty. First Thursday opening reception, 5-8 p.m. Hall|Spassov Gallery, 319 Third Ave. S., 453-3244. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tues.-Sat. Ends Nov. 30. CHRIS HARRIS This 20-year retrospective highlight’s the local photographer, who made a name using handmade pinhole cameras. First Thursday opening reception, 6-8 p.m. Lisa Harris Gallery, 1922 Pike Place, lisaharrisgallery.com, 443-3315. 10 a.m.- 5:30 p.m. Mon.-Sat. Ends Nov. 30. SOL HASHEMI & CAMERON MARTIN Martin shows a new series of monochromatic, white-and-gray landscapes. Hashemi’s more colorful show finds him displaying his photos with added, unusual flare: sticking plants, vanilla beans, cinnamon sticks and suctions cups on the frames. First Thursday opening reception, 6-8 p.m. James Harris Gallery, 604 Second Ave., 9036220, jamesharrisgallery.com. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.Sat. Ends Dec. 17.
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Geoffrey Larson, Music Director
• Tickets: $15 General Admission $10 Students & Seniors Available now at www.BrownPaperTickets.com
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SHERRY LOESER & HARRY CALDWELL Loeser
presents her new photography. Caldwell displays his engravings on coins. First Thursday opening reception, 6-9 p.m. Core Gallery, 117 Prefontaine Pl. S. (Tashiro Kaplan Building), 467-4444, coregallery.com. Noon-6 p.m. Wed.-Sat. Ends Nov. 29. SAM REMIX DJ’s will spin records and chefs will feed you as you peruse SAM’s Pop Departures exhibit, create pop art with Troy Gua, and listen to comedian Yogi Paliwal. Sun, Nov. 7, 8 p.m. Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, 654-3151, seattleartmuseum.org, $25. MICHAEL SCHULTHEIS Dreams of Pythagoras pays homage to the famous Greek philopspher and triangle expert by painting what the artist imagines the inside of Pythagoras’ mind looked like. Opening reception 6-8 p.m. Wed., Nov. 5. Winston Wächter Fine Art, 203 Dexter Ave. N., 652-5855, winstonwachter.com. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Sat. Ends Dec. 23. UN-WEDGED 2014 A juried collection of 21 contemporary ceramic works. Opening reception Sat., Nov. 8, 6-8 p.m. Pottery Northwest, 226 First Avenue North, 285-4421, potterynorthwest.com, 11 a.m. - 5 p.m., Tues. - Fri. WELL READ: VISUAL EXPLORATIONS OF THE BOOK Remember books? Those heavy things made
of paper and words that you used to carry around for school? For this group show, photographers offer their artistic interpretations of “the book” as a unique form, in light of its odd place as an object in today’s expanding digital world. First Thursday opening, Noon-9 p.m. Photo Center NW, 900 12th Ave., 720-7222, pcnw.org. Noon-9 p.m. Mon.-Sat. Ends Dec. 20.
•
Sospiri for Organ, Harp, and Strings
Symphony No. 35 “Haffner”
» Visual Arts
DAVID HAUGHTON & EMMANUEL MONZON
Haughton shows his paintings of Vancouver, BC and Seattle harbors at nightime. Morzon’s photo series explores the sparsely inhabited outskirts of cities. First Thursday opening reception, 6-8 p.m. Gallery 110, 110 Third Ave. (Tashiro Kaplan Building), 624-9336, gallery110.com. Noon-5 p.m. Wed.-Sat. Ends Nov. 29.
Ongoing
• AHTSIK’NUK (GOOD WITH THE HANDS) A col-
lection of “rare and unusual” carvings from the Nuucha-nulth Nations of BC and Washington. Steinbrueck Native Gallery, 2030 Western Ave., 441-3821, steinbruecknativegallery.com. Mon.-Sun., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Through December. JULIE BLACKMON AND HEIDI KIRKPATRICK Two photographers show their series side-by-side, one focusing on newly born humans and their growth, the other attempting to give new life to old found objects. G. Gibson Gallery, 300 S. Washington St. (Tashiro Kaplan Building), 587-4033, ggibsongallery.com. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sat. Ends Nov. 29. CITY DWELLERS A dozen contemporary Indian artists are represented in this show organized by SAM and originating entirely from the private local collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy (a Microsoft millionaire) and wife Malini Balakrishnan. Scenes and icons from Mumbai to New Delhi are represented via photography and sculpture, from an all-native perspective. As tourists know, India is ridiculously photogenic, from its colorful idols and deities to the slums and beggars. It all depends on what you want to see. Photographer Dhruv Malhotra, for instance, takes large color images of people sleeping in public places—some because they’re poor, others because they simply feel like taking a nap. Nandini Valli Muthiah opts for more stage-managed scenes, posing a costumed actor as the blue-skinned Hindu god Krishna in contemporary settings; in one shot I love, he sits in a hotel suite, like a tired business traveler awaiting a conference call on Skype. BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $12–$19. Weds.Sun. Ends Feb. 15. ANN HAMILTON The famed artist has created new commissioned art for the Henry that she invites viewers to interact with through touch—elements of the show can be ripped off the wall and kept for later. Henry Art Gallery (UW campus), 543-2280, henryart. org. $6-$10. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Weds., Sat. & Sun. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Thurs. & Sat. Ends April 26. #SOCIAL MEDIUM The Frye is proudly calling this its first “crowd-curated” exhibit, selected in August from 232 museum-nominated paintings by 4,468 online voters. Now 41 works are on view through January 4, with their likes tallied and selected online comments appended. The top five vote-getters are displayed up front, with the following 35 bridesmaids arrayed more by curator’s eye. The elect group is led by the obscure—to me, anyway—Julius Scheuerer and his 1907 Peacock, which earned 3,525 likes on Tumblr. BRIAN MILLER Frye Art Museum 704 Terry Ave., 622-9250, fryemuseum. org. Free. 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Tues.–Sun. (11 a.m.–7 p.m. Thurs.) Ends Jan. 4.
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Founders’ Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln. Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave., 652-4255, townhallseattle.org. $5. 7:30 p.m. Wed., Nov. 5. JAMES COLE His new illustrated maritime history is Drawing on Our History: Fishing Vessels of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Third Place Books, 17171 Bothell Way N.E., 366-3333, thirdplacebooks.com. 7 p.m. Wed., Nov. 5. JANA HARRIS Her new poetry volume, researched in the archives, is You Haven’t Asked About My Wedding or What I Wore: Poems of Courtship on the American Frontier. University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, bookstore.washington.edu. 7 p.m. Wed., Nov. 5. CHARLES JOHNSON The UW professor discusses his new Taming the Ox: Buddhist Stories and Reflections on Politics, Race, Culture, and Spiritual Practice with David Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars). Northwest African American Museum, 2300 S. Massachusetts St., 5186000, naamnw.org. $5-$7. 7 p.m. Wed., Nov. 5. KOBOLD GUIDE TO COMBAT Contributors to this computer gaming design book include Janna Silverstein, Wolfgang Baur, Jeff Grubb, Chris Pramas, John A. Pitts, and Steve Winter, who’ll participate in a roundtable discussion. University Book Store, 7 p.m. Wed., Nov. 5. JAMES LENFESTEY His travel memoir, interlaced with poetry and philosophy, is Seeking the Cave: A Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain. Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect St. (Volunteer Park), 6543100, seattleartmuseum.org. 7 p.m. Wed., Nov. 5. MOLLY TENENBAUM Her poetry and art book Exercises to Free the Tongue draws inspiration from her grandparents, who were vaudeville ventriloquists. Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave., 322-7030, hugohouse. org. Free. 7 p.m. Wed., Nov. 5. DAVID BOSWORTH He goes back to the ’50s to explain the global financial crisis of 2008 in The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America: The Moral Origins of the Great Recession. University Book Store, 7 p.m. Thu., Nov. 6. ROBERT DUGONI My Sister’s Grave is his new locally set crime thriller. Third Place, 7 p.m. Thu., Nov. 6. GRACE LIN In Kane Hall, Room 220, she’ll discuss her children’s book Where the Mountain Meets the Moon. UW Campus, 634-3400, bookstore.washington.edu. Free, 7 p.m. Thu., Nov. 6. • MARTIN MEREDITH Blessed with riches, cursed with riches: that’s the continental dilemma he addresses in Fortunes of Africa. Town Hall, $5. 7:30 p.m. Thu., Nov. 6. OLYMPIA SNOWE The former U.S Senator (Maine, R) conveniently overlooks her own GOP obstructionism in Fighting for Common Ground: How We Can Fix the Stalemate in Congress. There is absolutely no reason to respect anything this woman has to say. Her talk is delivered in Kane Hall, Room 130. UW Campus, Free with RSVP at grad.washington.edu/lectures. 7:30 p.m. Thu., Nov. 6. GARTH STEIN AND LYNN BRUNELLE Stein’s new novel A Sudden Light concerns the fading fortunes of a local timber dynasty. Brunelle’s memoir is Eagle Harbor Books, 157 Winslow Way E. (Bainbridge Island), 8425332, eagleharborbooks.com. 6 p.m. Sat., Nov. 6. MATT BARRETO Secure the borders? Not according to the author of Latino America: How Americas Most Dynamic Population is Poised to Transform the Politics of the Nation. Town Hall, $5. 7:30 p.m. Fri., Nov. 7. BRIAN BENSON His travel memoir is Going Somewhere: A Bicycle Journey Across America. Third Place, 7 p.m. Fri., Nov. 7. KAREN GAUDETTE BREWER She shares from Seafood Lover’s Pacific Northwest: Restaurants, Markets, Recipes & Traditions. University Book Store, 7 p.m. Fri., Nov. 7. SARAH ALISABETH FOX Our state, specifically Hanford, figures in her Downwind: A People’s History of the Nuclear West. Elliott Bay, 7 p.m. Fri., Nov. 7. and wildlife photog• ART WOLFE The local nature rapher shows images from his Earth Is My Witness. Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., 386-4636, spl.org. 7 p.m. Fri., Nov. 7. CRISTIN O’KEEFE APTOWICZ Her new biography is Dr. Mütter’s Marvels: a True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine. Elliott Bay, 7 p.m. Sat., Nov. 8. HARRIET ARKLEY She’s written The Good News Chair: A Simple Tool for Shaping a Child’s Positive Behavior & Self Image. Third Place, 6:30 p.m. Sat., Nov. 8.
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Bend It Like Einstein
Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar folds itself into a cosmic burrito of dust, tears, forgiveness, and awe. BY BRIAN MILLER
E
instein is the screenwriter’s crutch. At least in the case of Christopher Nolan (writing with his brother Jonathan), the bending of space and the relativity of time—to say nothing of nasty black holes, hostile planets, and murderous astronauts—means that anything goes in Interstellar, plot-wise. Really, Einstein turns out to be the perfect collaborator with Nolan, fond as he is of puzzle pictures and inversions of our normally regulated world. In Following, Memento, and Insomnia, the riddles were smaller and more human-scaled. Nolan’s ambitions grew with his hit Batman trilogy, and Inception twisted itself into a leaden, insoluble pretzel: a monument to its own solemn inscrutability. Should it be any surprise, then, that the indigestible, almost circular Interstellar takes itself so seriously? Reaching about 90 years forward from its start in a near-future dystopia, where ignorance reigns on our neo–Dust Bowl planet, the movie commits itself both to a father/ daughter reunion and the salvation of mankind. Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper—first name never given; could it be Gary?—blasts off from Earth after a ponderous first half-hour, sent on a mission to plunge into a wormhole near Saturn because Michael Caine tells him to. And no one in a Chris Nolan movie can say no to Michael Caine, here playing a professor named Brand who also sends along his scientist daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway) with Cooper and two others. (The latter duo might as well be wearing the red jerseys in a Star Trek episode; we know from the start they’re doomed.) What’s wrong with Earth? Why is it so parched and exhausted? Was it something we said? Nolan has little time for such questions in a movie that lasts almost three hours. He takes a few swipes at the “I’m not a scientist” types and anti-vax crowd, this being a film that venerates books, learning, and bold intellectual ventures. Cooper and his precocious daughter Murph (played by three actresses at different ages) are relentlessly high-minded and noble in comparison to the defeated “caretakers” in charge of the planet. He’s a widowed (of course) former NASA pilot; she’s a future scientist, a teary 10-year-old when he heads to space. Maybe we’ll be the same age when I come back, he tells Murph, because of Einstein and other stuff we slept through in AP physics. The two ceremoniously synchronize their watches, sure to figure later—two hours for us, rather more for them—in the story. The quiet, awesome void of space comes as
a relief after all the tiresome preliminaries and terrestrial clue-settings. Nolan is smart enough to avoid the obvious Kubrickian 2001 homages, but he’s necessarily working in the same cinematic universe. Rather than staging balletic space-station dockings to Strauss, he’s content to contrast the razor-edged rings of Saturn— filling the frame in IMAX format—with puny plinks on a piano (in an otherwise overbearing score by Hans Zimmer) to accompany Coo-
Skeptics in space: McConaughey and Hathaway.
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per’s frail ship. (It’s called the Endurance, surely a nod to Shackleton.) If Earth is all corn blight and dust storms (where the gaunt McConaughey could easily pass for a displaced Okie in a John Ford movie), Nolan renders the galaxy in familiar shades of terror. Cooper and company must pass through a rattling, carnival-lighted wormhole to a fresh galaxy, where they investigate possible planets for colonization (scouted in advance by other astronauts). One is water, the other ice, and both prove quite lethal. After Cooper and Amelia briefly survey one possible haven, they return to their craft where a colleague has aged 23 years relative to them (again: Einstein). Video messages from Earth likewise reveal curious little Murph now grown into genius astrophysicist Jessica Chastain, bitter and aggrieved that her father has seemingly abandoned her. Yes, there’s the torment of loneliness and isolation to space travel, but it’s a plastic surgeon’s dream: no aging! Cooper, looking the part, demonstrates some Right Stuff–style piloting skills, but what Nolan really wants his team to do is talk about relativity, gravity, the fifth dimension, and quantum data (the latter requiring a visit to a black hole). Correspondingly, there’s not a lot of action in Interstellar—just a few narrow escapes, a tussle on the ice, an explosion or two, and a really big wave. (Anyone else remember McConaughey in Surfer, Dude?) After about 90 minutes, Nolan does start cross-cutting between space and Earth, which helps the pace somewhat. Still, the frequent recitations of Dylan Thomas poetry and the grown Murph stabbing chalky equations on a blackboard can make the movie feel like an undergraduate seminar in space. Interstellar’s temple is the book-lined study in Cooper’s farmhouse, to which Murph is repeatedly,
intuitively drawn. There’s talk of ghosts and a cosmic “they” who chose Cooper for his long mission. Even Amelia says of the convenient wormhole that could save our species, “Someone placed it there,” as if it were a donut left out on the conference-room table. Skepticism inevitably gives way to sentiment, and Newton is trumped by love— “the one thing that transcends time and space,” says Dr. Amelia. (Funny, but I don’t remember that being a correct answer on the SATs.) Ever the craftsman, Nolan consulted a physi-
cist during the writing and filming of Interstellar; like most viewers without a Ph.D., I’m not going to quibble with their deviations from textbook astronomy. The movie—being screened in three different formats—certainly looks great in its wide cosmic vistas. It doesn’t scream sci-fi; the technology and human behavior could, for all we know, be just a few election cycles away (NASA funding ever in doubt). McConaughey, Hathaway, and Chastain don’t have to work that hard to sell what are basic emotions (loss, grief, longing, etc.); these prevent the movie from floating entirely into the mystical (where Nolan appears to be writing his own new textbook). Freighted with plot and porch-chair aphorisms, Interstellar isn’t half the movie that Gravity was (though twice its length). Admittedly, Gravity’s was a far more economical story, and maybe that’s the next great challenge for Nolan: lighten up. E bmiller@seattleweekly.com
INTERSTELLAR Opens Tues., Nov. 4 at Pacific Science Center IMAX, SIFF Cinema Uptown, SIFF Cinema Egyptian, and others. Opens Thurs., Nov. 6 at Majestic Bay, Ark Lodge, Varsity, Admiral, and others. Rated PG-13. 168 minutes.
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Arestrup as undecided Nazi.
Opening ThisWeek Diplomacy OPENS FRI., NOV. 7 AT VARSITY. NOT RATED. 85 MINUTES.
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ROBERT HORTON
PEvolution of a Criminal RUNS FRI., NOV. 7–THURS., NOV. 13 AT GRAND ILLUSION. NOT RATED. 81 MINUTES.
RELATIVE NOISE
Monroe as a child, with his mother Sigrid.
Plenty of Hollywood filmmakers have fallen into crime—DUIs, drugs, and underage sex cases. But how many felons have reversed that career trajectory? In his documentary reconstruction of a mid-’90s armed robbery, which he instigated as a teenager to help his struggling family, Darius Clark Monroe manages that unlikely feat. There are gaps in his story, narrow in scope, but this is a fairly remarkable tale of redemption. Raised poor in Houston, Monroe matter-offactly describes the hardships and privations that had him stealing from a big-box store where he clerked as a teen. His own home had been burglarized during boyhood, which he cites as a traumatic trigger—taking with it any sense of justice. (Losing the VCR, that font of family entertainment, was a particular blow—and perhaps the harbinger of his future vocation.) In his present-day narration, Monroe recalls an attitude that “I was doing something honorable.” So he recruited two high-school pals, gathered some masks and an empty shotgun, and robbed a
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SEATT LE W EEKLY • NOVEMBER 5 — 11, 2014
Paris was not destroyed by the retreating Germans during World War II, so the outcome of Diplomacy is not in question. That is, unless some Inglourious Basterds–style historical embroidery were to break out. But director Volker Schlöndorff is no Quentin Tarantino, and Diplomacy plays as a minimalist dialogue on the nature of ethics and responsibility. Most of it takes place in a room at the Hotel Meurice in August 1944, the headquarters of General Dietrich von Choltitz (Niels Arestrup). Von Choltitz has been military governor here for less than a month; with the Allies already pounding at the outskirts of town, he’s doomed to eventually surrender the city. But Hitler has charged him with destroying the riches of Paris—bridges, Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower—before capitulation. The film, adapted from Cyril Gely’s popular recent play, pits von Choltitz in a long tête-à-tête with Swedish diplomat Raoul Nordling (André Dussollier). Nordling, a staunch Parisian, is there to argue against detonating the already-rigged explosives. As a by-the-rules military man, von Choltitz already has plenty of blood on his hands, including the liquidation of Jews in Russia. And there’s another reason he might hesitate to disobey the Führer’s orders, which Gely’s script withholds until late in the discussion. This encounter is fictionalized, and historians still dispute the details of how Paris was saved. Nordling was only one of a number of voices imploring von Choltitz to refuse the order, and the Resistance had something to do with it, too. (The mid-’60s novel and movie Is Paris Burning? previously explored the question, and also gave the world a melodic Maurice Jarre anthem nearly as stirring as the “Marseillaise.”) Diplomacy might not be solid history, but Schlöndorff—the veteran German filmmaker still best known for The Tin Drum—understands the theatrical possibilities here. This is a chance to bat around lofty ideas, spoken by two articulate adversaries who
embody the “But for this foolish war we might have been comrades” school of drama. In that sense, Diplomacy has its roots in the civilized enemies of Jean Renoir’s classic The Grand Illusion. The two actors are key to making that work: Old pro Dussollier carries an aristocratic twinkle, while Arestrup (the prison godfather in A Prophet) moves like a battered former boxer, worn down by battle but still lethal in the clinches. Their full-to-bursting presence is enough to give weight to this conversational chamber drama.
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On Any Sunday: The Next Chapter OPENS FRI., NOV. 7 AT MERIDIAN AND LINCOLN SQUARE. RATED PG. 90 MINUTES.
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“You have to be crazy to do this,” according to—oh, let’s face it, this could have been said by anybody in this movie. On Any Sunday: The Next Chapter is crammed with people who ride motorcycles too fast: These vehicles travel across flat tracks, dirt roads, and sometimes the air, with alarming amounts of space between bike and ground. The documentary world is full of thrilling sports videos, but few have the authentic life-anddeath stakes of high speed on two wheels. The movie’s distinguished pedigree sets it apart, too. Its title reminds us of the hit 1971 doc On Any Sunday, a classic from The Endless Summer director Bruce Brown. His son Dana, who also specializes in surf-’n’-dirt movies (Step Into Liquid among the former), directs and narrates this one. The ’71 picture had the advantage of featuring Steve McQueen—a biking devotee—in the action; and while The Next Chapter has no equivalent star power, it does present some genuine maniacs along the way. Brown leads off with Robbie Maddison, who follows closely in the treadmarks of daredevil/bone-breaker Evel Knievel. Maddison’s stunts, which include jumping his bike from the top of the Arc de Triomphe and soaring off an Austrian ski jump, will likely have you shouting things out loud to the screen—at least that’s the effect they had on me. Brown looks in on an international MotoGP racing circuit, paying special attention to two Spanish riders, Marc
PThe Way He Looks OPENS FRI., NOV. 7 AT SUNDANCE CINEMAS. NOT RATED. 95 MINUTES.
Lobo as Leo (with Audi’s Gabriel seated behind).
Leo, from São Paulo, is 15-ish, and has the usual 15-ish worries to deal with. In ascending order of frustration: social drinking, bullying classmates, finding his first kiss, and craving more independence from his overprotective parents, even to the point of looking into exchange-student programs. He’s blind, which complicates things, but not half as much as the arrival of new student Gabriel, a curly-haired, Belle-and-Sebastian-loving DJ who inspires crushes right and left and even gets between Leo and his BFF Giovana. The drama in The Way He Looks is all about Who Likes Who; the momentousness of the shifting hints, misunderstandings, revelations, and traumas are written (by director Daniel Ribeiro) and played in a way that feels true to (what I recall of ) 15-itude. Also perfectly plausible is the gradual development of Leo and Gabriel’s relationship; unlike a lot of gay coming-of-age dramas, it doesn’t at all read like a kind of wish-fulfillment retro-fantasy of how the filmmaker wanted his own comingout romance to have played out. Actor Ghilherme Lobo is apparently not blind, but thoroughly convinced me; he plays Leo without an atom of camp, nor does Fabio Audi as Gabriel. Most fun of all in this charmer, Brazil’s nominee for the 2014 Foreign-Language Oscar: The soundtrack, from Bowie’s “Modern Love” to Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im spiegel, is delicious. I have no idea how Ribeiro got ahold of my iPod. GAVIN BORCHERT E
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INTERSTELLAR
branch bank of $140,000. (Monroe uses actors to re-create these scenes.) Teenagers being teenagers, their secret soon spilled, and the trio were arrested within weeks. How long Monroe spent in prison, where he earned a GED, is part of a chronology that ought to be more detailed here. Monroe has seen enough movies to understand the proven story arc of sin, repentance, and forgiveness. As he goes back years later to apologize to customers he terrified at the bank, we also learn where he got his filmmaking education (NYU, impressively) and see how his family didn’t exactly provide a shining moral example during his youth. Monroe’s interviews further extend to his robbery crew and the prosecutor who put them away. This is documentary-as-memoir, intimate and confessional, though shying away from any larger social context (e.g., the national incarceration rate for African-Americans). And the racial divide is stark: Black bank customers at the robbery seem more forgiving of the grown Monroe than their white counterparts do. The white prosecutor, stepped out of a Rick Perry campaign ad, tells Monroe she’s suspicious of his film project: “I’m afraid of being scammed.” To this viewer, at least, Monroe’s contrition seems quite sincere. And like last year’s Fruitvale Station, also grounded in fact, Evolution of a Criminal sadly demonstrates how a broken social contract can doom individuals to a tragic path. Yet Monroe fully admits to his misdeeds. Instead of the usual tough-on-crime rhetoric, here is a criminal who’s tough on himself.
Márquez and Dani Pedrosa, as they battle for position over the course of a season. But the movie’s not chained to competition, and Brown makes time for quirky individuals and beautiful locations. The latter include British Columbia and a loopy competition in the snow of Alberta; there’s also a trip to the Bonneville Salt Flats, where gearheads are still trying to set new speed records. The narration is not as jokey as in his father’s films, but Dana Brown hits the right cheerful-cornball tone throughout, and he even keeps an open mind about electric bikes (oh, what a relief they would be). There are lots of crashes, of course, because Brown understands how these movies work, but mostly the footage conveys flat-out, incredible speed. With tiny cameras that can fit anywhere, and the razor-sharp 4K digital pictures that result, a clever filmmaker can create eye-popping images. It’s much better than actually doing this stuff, unless you’re crazy. ROBERT HORTON
WINNER “T -A.O. H Scott, R THE I NEW L LYORK I TIMES N G.” G R A N D J U RY P R I Z E A U D I E N C E AWA R D
SUNDANCE 2014
206.324.9996 SIFF.net
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NOW PLAYING Fri Nov 7 – Thu Nov 13
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Nov 7–15
DAMIEN CHAZELLE
NT LIVE: SKYLIGHT
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in 35mm
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Artist: Heather Emmett
Steve
Sat Nov 8 | Education Workshop
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT NEWSLETTER Find out about upcoming ART APPROVED performances,AEexhibitions, APPROVED andAPPROVED special Jane openings CLIENT events. Deadline:
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WALKING THE CAMINO Continuing:
VIEW THE TRAILER AT WWW.WHIPLASHMOVIE.COM
DUE MON 5PM
Nov 11 | Director In Attendance
TEACHING CHILDREN FILM CRITICISM For Teachers & Parents
Now Playing | SIFF Cinema Uptown and SIFF Cinema Egyptian UPTOWN 511 Queen Anne Ave N
THE 78 PROJECT MOVIE Tue Nov 11 | MOOLAADÉ COMING SOON
SIFF Cinema Locations
EGYPTIAN 805 E Pine St
Mon Nov 10 | Recent Raves
FILM CENTER Seattle Center
November 13–20
CINEMA ITALIAN STYLE
AR T S A N D E NTE R TAIN ME N T
‘‘brilliant on so many levels.’’ betsy sharkey,
‘‘sensational! not quite like anything you’ve seen at the movies.” steven j. snyder,
‘‘michael keaton delivers the
crowning performance of his career.’’
richard roeper,
STARTS FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7 AT CHECK THEATRES EVERYWHERE! DIRECTORIES FOR SHOWTIMES • NO PASSES ACCEPTED SEATTLE WEEKLY
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arts&culture» Film
"Its images, its shape, its tone, and its implications make it a terrific movie, as well as the birth of an artist." The New Yorker
Local & Repertory • BRAZIL Terry Gilliam’s grim, near-great Orwellian sat-
evolution of a criminal
NOV � – ��
NOV � & �
32,000 FANS AND COUNTING
AmRep/Noise founder Tom Hazelmyer in attendance!
GR ANDILLUSIONCINEMA.ORG ���� NE ��TH STREET | ���-����
• facebook.com/seattleweekly FROM THE CREATORS OF SPIRITED AWAY, MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO AND THE WIND RISES
T H E TA L E O F
THE PRINCESS KAGUYA A FILM BY ISAO TAKAHATA
“THE BEST ANIMATED MOVIE OF THE YEAR!” “A STAGGERING MASTERPIECE!”
SEATTLE WEEKLY • NOVEM BER 5 — 11, 2 014
- AV Club
32
- RogerEbert.com
“A VISIONARY TOUR-DE-FORCE!” “STUNNING! SUBLIME!” “EXTRAORDINARY!
As beautiful and imaginative as anything Studio Ghibli has yet created!” - The Telegraph
© 2013 Hatake Jimusho - GNDHDDTK
ire from 1985 stars Jonathan Pryce as the meek clerk who becomes an unlikely and reluctant resistance fighter in a fascist future. A big, messy, angry, and wildly inventive picture, Brazil didn’t win a popular following during the fat Reagan-Thatcher years. It argues that revolution is often accidental, and repression constant. And happiness may lie only in the memory of an old show tune. With Kim Greist as the girl of Pryce’s dreams and Robert De Niro as his more dashing comrade in arms. (R) Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 6866684, central-cinema.com. $6-$8. 9:30 p.m. Fri.-Wed. THE COLOR OF NOISE The punk rock scene of the ’80s and ’90s is chronicled in this new doc by Eric Robel, who’ll conduct Q&As following the screenings. Musician Tom Hazelmyer will also perform. (NR) Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935, grandillusioncinema.org. $5–$10. 9 p.m. Fri. 2 p.m. Sat. LIVE BY NIGHT From 1950, 711 Ocean Drive has a telephone repairman (Edmond O’Brien) learn to use his skills for ill, leading him into the company of dangerous hoodlums! (NR) Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $63–$68 series. $8 individual. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Dec. 18. MOONSTRUCK Playwright John Patrick Shanley wrote the script for this winning 1987 rom-com, which did wonders for the careers of both Cher and a young Nicolas Cage. All parties were helped, of course, by veteran director Norman Jewison, who further stacked his deck with an all-star roster of New York stage talent: Vincent Gardenia, Danny Aiello, John Mahoney, and Olympia Dukakis, who earned an Oscar for her role (as did Cher for hers). (PG) Central Cinema, $6-$8. 7 p.m. Fri.-Tue. (plus 3 p.m. matinee on Sat.) THELMA SCHOONMAKER The legendary editor, winner of three Oscars for her collaborations with Martin Scorsese, visits town to introduce two films. Wednesday is Raging Bull, no introduction needed. Also note that the ever-gracious Schoonmaker will appear at Scarecrow Video (2 p.m. Weds.). (NR) Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $10-$18. 7:30 p.m. Weds. SEATTLE ROMANIAN FILM FESTIVAL See the festival website for schedule. (NR) SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), seattleromanianfilmfest.com. Fri.-Sun. SEATTLE SOUTH ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL Titles range from India to Nepal to Pakistan, with subjects including a champion deaf wrestler, bungling filmmakers, crime melodrama, romantic comedy, and caste-based discrimination. Two dozen features will be screened, along with panel discussions and related events, most of them concentrated south of Seattle. See tasveer. org for tickets, schedule, and information. (NR) Renton Pavilion Event Center (233 Burnett Ave. S.) and other venues. 8 p.m. Fri., Oct. 31. Ends Sun., Nov. 9. THE 78 PROJECT MOVIE As profiled in The New York Times, Lavinia Jones Wright and Alex Steyermark have been roaming the country recording musicians on a direct-to-acetate machine from the 1930s, basically the same technology Alan Lomax used during that same period. This new documentary, made by Steyermark during their travels, includes performances by Victoria Williams, John Doe, Tom Brosseau, and other indie stalwarts. (NR) SIFF Film Center, 324-9996, siff.net. $7-$12. 7 p.m. Mon. MISTY UPHAM MEMORIAL SCREENINGS The late local actress, her life tragically cut short, is remembered with presentations of Frozen River and (following) August: Osage County. (R) Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380, nwfilmforum. org. Free. 6 & 8:30 p.m. Sat.
NOW PLAYING
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HARVARD EXIT THEATER
807 EAST ROY AT HARVARD SEATTLE • (206) 323-0587 www.ThePrincessKaguya.com
Seattle Weekly 11/5 2 col (4.83”) x 7”
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Ongoing
• BIRDMAN A movie star in a career skid since he
stopped playing a masked superhero named Birdman back in the ’90s, Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) is preparing his big comeback in a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver stories, funded and directed by himself. Obstacles abound: Riggan’s co-star (Andrea Riseborough) announces she’s pregnant with his child; his grown daughter (Emma Stone) is his assistant, and not his biggest fan; a critic plans to destroy the play. And, in the movie’s funniest headache, Riggan must endure a popular but insufferable stage actor (Edward Norton, doing a wonderful self-parody) who’s involved with the play’s other actress (Naomi Watts). This is all going on while Riggan maintains a tenuous hold on his own sanity—he hears Birdman’s voice in his head, for one thing. To create Riggan’s world, director Alejandro González Iñárritu and Gravity cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki present the film as a continuous unbroken shot (disguised with artful digital
seams). Keaton—the former Batman, of course—is a splendidly weathered, human presence. Ironically or not, he keeps the film grounded. (R) ROBERT HORTON Guild 45th, Pacific Place, Lincoln Square, Thornton Place, Kirkland, others CITIZENFOUR Fugitive leaker Edward Snowden has invited documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (The Oath) and The Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald into his Hong Kong hotel room. In this absorbing character study, they debate how and when to spill the information he took from his job at the National Security Agency. Clicking the SEND button carries as much weight as Bob Woodward meeting Deep Throat in All the President’s Men. This straightforward documentary may be smaller-scaled than a political thriller, but it has similar suspense: Everybody in the room realizes the stakes—and the dangers—of exposing a whistleblower to public scrutiny. One man’s whistleblower is another man’s traitor, a debate that Poitras doesn’t pause to consider, so confident is she of Snowden’s cause. Having this access to Snowden in the exact hours he went from being a nonentity with top-secret clearance to a hero/pariah is a rare chance to see a now-historical character in the moment of truth. (NR) R.H. SIFF Cinema Uptown DEAR WHITE PEOPLE Justin Simien’s smart new college satire forthrightly addresses race, and it feels like a follow-up—though not a rebuttal—to Spike Lee’s School Daze, made a generation ago. Like Lee, though with a lighter comic touch, Simien is interested in the stereotypes that black and mixed-race kids apply to themselves. The movie’s title comes from the provocative campus radio show hosted by Sam (Tessa Thompson), who calls out all races for their shallow assumptions. In her orbit are a seemingly perfect high achiever, a savvy, sexy social-media queen, and the nappy-haired freshman nerd Lionel (Tyler James Williams, from Everybody Hates Chris) who’s trying to navigate his way among cliques and not-so-coded expectations of What It Means to Be Black. In his debut feature, Simien stuffs the plot with rather more stock elements than needed. But Dear White People reminds you how lazy most American comedies are. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance, Ark Lodge, others NIGHTCRAWLER Titled and released as if it were a Halloween horror flick, Dan Gilroy’s dark media fable has more in common with Network than Nosferatu. Lou (the politely creepy Jake Gyllenhaal) is identified as an earnest, calculating criminal in the opening minutes; he’s never less than transparent about his motives, most of which appear to have been gleaned from self-help books and inspirational Internet sites. He’s an amoral American hustler, a type descended from Dale Carnegie and Sammy Glick. A career in stolen scrap metal soon gives way to freelance videography at L.A. car wrecks and crime scenes, and Lou’s basest impulses are naturally encouraged by a ratingsstarved TV station. (Rene Russo is amusingly aroused as the station’s “vampire shift” manager—a venal Mrs. Robinson who mentors eager Lou.) Nightcrawler is more a parable of unfettered capitalism—there’s your horror—than realistic media satire. Lou’s swift progress in TMZ-land brings him a rival (Bill Paxton) and a naïve protégée (English actor Riz Ahmed), but no one here has—or needs—much depth. Lou has no history, no family, only his hollow aphorisms of success. Nightcrawler never quite settles on a satisfactory tone between squeamish laughter and a smarter, Chayefskian disgust, but Lou you remember—a creature for these craven times, prospering from our need to see the worst. (R) B.R.M. Sundance, Kirkland, Bainbridge, Thornton Place, Lincoln Square, Pacific Place, Cinebarre, others WHIPLASH Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) is an unbridled asshole for art’s sake, a petty Stalin figure inside the Juilliard-like music academy that greets the innocent Andrew (Miles Teller). Andrew has fled Long Island and his kindly, weak mensch of a father (Paul Reiser) to be the best drummer in the best studio band at the best school in the country. That means pleasing the imperious, bullying Fletcher, a man who seems endlessly displeased with the world’s lax standards. (The Oscar-worthy Simmons originated this role in writer/director Damien Chazelle’s prior short.) How Andrew responds to such abuse—quite calculated, as we shall learn—is the heart of this thrillingly propulsive drama, an intense, brutal, and often comical tale of mentorship gone amok. (R) B.R.M. Pacific Place, Guild 45th, Lincoln Square
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BY B R IA N M I LLE R
Send events to film@seattleweekly.com See seattleweekly.com for full listings = Recommended
•
» Music
Synth City
New records from Bleachers and Electric Youth highlight a synth-pop revival.
dinner & show
BY DAVE LAKE
U
ntil recently, it seemed that most music from the 1980s would be forever relegated to the dustbin of history—a musical purgatory where vapid hair metal and Flock of Seagulls haircuts sat disgraced alongside disco and rapmetal. But over the past few years, synth-pop has had a major renaissance, thanks in part to major artists like Kesha and Lady Gaga incorporating synthesizers into their pop sounds, resuscitating a genre that seemingly disappeared with cassettes and the Walkman. Full-fledged synth-pop acts began to surface in response, and rather than simply including keyboards as part of their sound, bands like Bleachers and Electric Youth, who both play Seattle this week, offer new takes on the genre with debut albums that summon the sound and spirit of Duran Duran, Thompson Twins, and The Human League.
A pair of local acts are exploring synth-pop from a like-minded perspective. The members of both bands were born in the ’80s, but don’t aim to recreate the sounds of their youth so much as use them as inspiration. Hollis WongWear, who sings the hook on Macklemore’s “White Walls” and who fronts The Flavr Blue, said that synth-pop is embedded in her musical DNA, even though she was young during the genre’s heyday. “It’s more of a reflective, nostalgic understanding,” she says. “It’s part of our identity as ’80s babies. We came from hip-hop, we came from the rise of New Wave, we came from the reign of Michael Jackson. These are things that we refer back to once we have a more developed musical consciousness, and that informs our taste moving forward.” Sam Ford of Goodbye Heart, another local band with a fondness for synthesizers, put it thus: “When I was a very young kid in the ’80s, [synth-pop] was very sensory. I connect to it in the same way that probably Keith Richards would connect to hearing Howlin’ Wolf.” As such, Ford doesn’t spend his time searching Craigslist for vintage Yamaha and Korg synths, but instead focuses on the limitless sonic capabilities of today’s gear. What moved him about synth-pop initially were the sounds that began to take shape in those songs that he had never heard before. This is what most excites him about the genre: possibility.
mainstage WED/NOVEMBER 5 • 7:30PM
emily asher’s garden party THU/NOVEMBER 6 • 7:30PM
bill carter w/ baby gramps FRI/NOVEMBER 7 & SAT/NOVEMBER 8 • 8PM
over the rhine acoustic duo SUN/OCTOBER 9 • 7:30PM
adrian belew power trio w/ saul zonana
MON/NOVEMBER 10 • 7:30PM
rhett miller w/ salim nourallah TUE/NOVEMBER 11 • 7:30PM
w/ penny & sparrow WED/NOVEMBER 12 • 7PM & 10PM
southern soul assembly
Electric Youth
This is also true for Bleachers, which will tour as a full band, featuring not only several synth-players but also two drummers. “I see the live show like an E Street Band with synths,” Antonoff told Rolling Stone. “Everyone will probably have synths and live drums, and I want it to be a playground of all those things.” E
music@seattleweekly.com
ELECTRIC YOUTH With Midnight Faces, Ever So Android. The Crocodile, 2200 Second Ave., 441-4618, thecrocodile.com. $12. 8 p.m. Thurs., Nov. 6.
next • 11/14 hypnotikon two w/ martin rev, bitchin bajas, food pyramid, midday veil • 11/15 hypnotikon two w/ rain parade, master musicians of bukkake, tjutjuna, residual echoes • 11/16 martin hayes and dennis cahill • 11/17 keola beamer w/ geoffrey keezer • 11/18 richard shindell w/ daniel champagne • 11/19 thanksgiving vs christmas w/ molly lewis • 11/21 & 22 the atomic bombshells in cake! a decade of decadent dazzle
happy hour every day • 11/5 the chaz lipp group • 11/6 first thursday art opening w/ chuck tuck / smoke and honey • 11/7 supersones / jelly rollers • 11/8 the hot mcgandhis • 11/9 hwy 99 blues presents sam pierce/leif totusek • 11/10 crossrhythm sessions • 11/11 earshot jazz festival wrap up party • 11/12 jd hobson TO ENSURE THE BEST EXPERIENCE · PLEASE ARRIVE EARLY DOORS OPEN 1.5 HOURS PRIOR TO FIRST SHOW · ALL-AGES (BEFORE 9:30PM)
BLEACHERS With Wild Cub. The Showbox, 1426 First Ave., 628-3151, showboxpresents.com. $22–$25. 8:30 p.m. Sun., Nov. 9.
thetripledoor.net
216 UNION STREET, SEATTLE · 206.838.4333
SEATT LE W EEKLY • NOVEMBER 5 — 11, 2014
w/ jj grey, marc broussard, anders osborne, and luther dickinson VANESSA HEINS
For his one-man band Bleachers, fun.’s Jack Antonoff took inspiration from the decade of his birth. Strange Desire’s soaring choruses and youthful energy draw heavily on synth-pop and New Wave influences, from Modern English to ABC. But rather than fetishizing the genre as a cover band would, Antonoff adds a pinch of modernity to keep the record sounding contemporary. “When I was working in the studio,” he told BuzzFeed earlier this year, “the song would have an ’80s John Hughes movie feel, but we didn’t want it to seem nostalgic and retro. so I’d program the beat on it, or throw in some weird samples, or put sounds through filters that didn’t exist then.” Toronto duo Austin Garrick and Bronwyn Griffin, aka Electric Youth, whose debut Innerworld was partially produced by synth-pop pioneer Vince Clarke of Erasure and Yaz (who also contributed to Bleachers’ debut), take a similar approach to modern electro-pop. The pair’s music was introduced to audiences via the film Drive, which twice features their track with College, “A Real Hero.” “The thought of recreating the past with music is not interesting to us,” Garrick told Rolling Stone about their sound. “The reality is, we’re much more interested in creating things for the future than things from the past.”
drew holcomb & the neighbors
RCA RECORDS
Jack Antonoff of Bleachers.
33
El Corazon www.elcorazonseattle.com
109 Eastlake Ave East • Seattle, WA 98109 Booking and Info: 206.262.0482
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 5TH
TOARN
with Hermosa, Esoson, Plus Guests Lounge Show. Doors at 7:00PM / Show at 7:30 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $8 ADV / $10 DOS
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6TH
“THE WASTED LIFE TOUR”
featuring Insvrgence, Triumph Over Shipwreck, Jenny’s Last Stand, Plus Guests Lounge Show. Doors at 7:00PM / Show at 7:30 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $8 ADV / $10 DOS
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10TH THE ORIGINAL LIVE BAND KARAOKE SENSATION
ROCKARAOKE
“You Sing, We Play!”
Lounge Show. Doors at 8:00PM / Show at 9:00 21+ $3
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8TH
FEBRUARY 2 S E AT T L E , WA
nd
THE PANCAKES & BOOZE ART SHOW with Over 50 Local Emerging Artists Exhibiting!!! Live Body
Painting!!! All-U-Can-Eat Pancake Bar!!! Live Audio & Visual Performances!!!
Doors at 7:30PM 21+. $5
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 9TH
ROSEDALE
Plus Guests Lounge Show. Doors at 7:00PM / Show at 7:30 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $8 ADV / $10 DOS
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 11TH MIKE THRASHER PRESENTS:
MARIACHI EL BRONX
with Tijuana Panthers, Pounded By The Surf, Plus Guests Doors at 7:00PM / Show at 8:00 21+. $15ADV / $18 DOS
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 11TH
DRAGON FLY
with Dakota Badlands, Rego, Folletto Manitou, Plus Guests LOUNGE SHOW. Doors at 7:00PM / Show at 7:30 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $8 ADV / $10 DOS
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 4TH MIKE THRASHER PRESENTS:
LAGWAGON
with Swingin’ Utters, This Legend, Success! Doors at 7:00PM / Show at 7:15 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $20 ADV / $22 DOS The Lagwagon After Show Party featuring live music from:
HURRY UP AND DIE FREE 21+.Music begins at the conclusion of the Lagwagon show in the main room.
JUST ANNOUNCED 11/18 LOUNGE - MATT BORDEN 11/20 LOUNGE - THE DECOYS 11/26 LOUNGE - THE WALK OF SHAME COMEDY TOUR 12/13 LOUNGE - SMOKE SEASON 12/14 - STICK TO YOUR GUNS 1/20 LOUNGE - THE RAMONAS 1/25 - SILVERSTEIN 1/28 - PERIPHERY 1/31 LOUNGE - BOATS 2/3 - KARMA TO BURN 3/27 - METALACHI UP & COMING 11/13 LOUNGE - ALEXZ JOHNSON 11/14 - DYLAN JAKOBSEN 11/14 LOUNGE - MELANIE MARTINEZ 11/15 - SYMMETRY 11/16 LOUNGE - SELF DEFENSE FUND 11/17 LOUNGE - THE BOTS 11/19 - THE GHOST INSIDE / EVERY TIME I DIE 11/21 - EMERY 11/21 LOUNGE - FOXING 11/22 - ISSUES 11/23 LOUNGE - THE PETEBOX 11/25 LOUNGE - LORD DYING Tickets now available at cascadetickets.com - No per order fees for online purchases. Our on-site Box Office is open 1pm-5pm weekdays in our office and all nights we are open in the club - $2 service charge per ticket Charge by Phone at 1.800.514.3849. Online at www.cascadetickets.com - Tickets are subject to service charge
SEATTLE WEEKLY • NOVEM BER 5 — 11, 2 014
The EL CORAZON VIP PROGRAM: see details at www.elcorazon.com/vip.html and for an application email us at info@elcorazonseattle.com
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arts&culture» Music
QN I G H T C L U B U P C O M I N G
TheWeekAhead Wednesday, Nov. 5
For Event 2, DELTRON 3030’s second concept album set in a dystopian future, the alt-hip-hop trio of Dan the Automator, Del the Funky Homosapien, and Kid Koala brought together a hodgepodge of featured artists. Actors David Cross, Amber Tamblyn, Joseph GordonLevitt, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead (with whom Dan the Automator collaborates as part of jazz-pop duo Got a Girl); musicians including AWOLNATION’s Aaron Bruno, Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha, singer/multi-instrumentalist Emily Wells, and rapper Black Rob; and chef David Chang all contribute to the album’s futuristic feel, some through skits, others through vocals. Released 13 years after the trio’s self-titled debut, Event 2 is just as sonically epic as its predecessor. The Showbox, 1426 First Ave., 628-3151, showboxpresents.com. 9 p.m. $29.50 adv./$35. All ages.
Friday, Nov. 7
There’s a delightfully childlike quality to the music of JULIA MASSEY & THE FIVE FINGER DISCOUNT. Front woman/keyboardist Massey, bassist Geoff B. Gibbs, and drummer Dominic Cortese (The Jesus Rehab) mix pianodriven tunes with more mature lyrics to create music that carefully walks the line between youth and wisdom. For instance, “Nuclear Disarmament” (which will appear on A.L.I.T.E., the band’s upcoming fourth full-length, and was recently included on Ball of Wax 38) is a protest song built on a marimba-like riff. At this release show, fans will get a first listen to that song and the rest of A.L.I.T.E. With Roaming Herds of Buffalo, Honey Noble. Conor Byrne Pub. 9 p.m. $8. 21 and over. At first listen, it’s the sci-fi feel of the beats that GRAYSKUL raps over that sets the local hip-hop trio (JFK, Onry Ozzborn, and Rob Castro) apart from other artists. But the group’s lyrics are more grounded in everyday topics. On its latest, Zenith, the trio tackles everything from addiction recovery (the title track) to club culture (“Clubs”) to school shootings, nodding to Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” in “There Is No Edge.” Featuring the likes of Raekwon, Reva DeVito, Katie Kate, and Aesop Rock,
F R I D A Y, N O V E M B E R 1 3 T H
SATURD AYS
TH URSD AYS
JOY ORBISON & BEN UFO MANIK CL AUDE VONSTROKE L ANE 8 CA JMERE
Tuesday, Nov. 11
11/13/14 11/20/14 12/04/14 12/11/14 12/18/14
TORO Y MOI DJ PROJECT
LES SINS WUKI R AV E O F T H R O N E S T O U R
HODOR
11/15/14 11/29/14 12/06/14
DRAMA FRID AYS
Shovels & Rope W ED N ESD AYS
SAINT PEPSI
11/12/14
J. ESPINOZ A PHASE S TE V E1DER
11/14/14 11/21/14 12/12/14
TICKETS AVAIL ABLE AT W W W.QNIGHTCLUB.COM 1426 Broadway - Seattle, WA
Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst, the married couple in country-rock duo SHOVELS & ROPE, live on an island in South Carolina, so it makes sense that their latest, Swimmin’ Time, has an aquatic theme. On “Fish Assassin,” they sing about a fisherman hoping his catch will woo his lady after an argument; on “Stono River Blues,” Trent and Hearst namedrop a handful of S.C. rivers and creeks and, with a fantastic twang, wax poetic on life down by the river: “You don’t need much to be happy/ The boat cost money, but the shrimp is free.” With Willie Watson. The Neptune. 8 p.m. $22 adv./$25 DOS. All ages. On their latest, Heartthrob, TEGAN AND SARA traded indie-rock riffs for a synth-heavy pop sound. This more polished approach surely shocked some fans, but listening to the lyrics, Heartthrob is very obviously a product of the Quin sisters. The Canadian duo explores the joy and heartache different stages of a relationship can bring. On lead single “Closer,” the twins sing about wanting someone they’re sweet on to move in nearer, and on “How Come You Don’t Want Me,” they ask an ex why he wasn’t willing to try harder to save the relationship. Heartthrob is sugary sweet, but doesn’t lack any of the Tegan and Sara substance. With Waters, the Courtneys. The Paramount. 7:30 p.m. $31.25 and up. All ages. HARD WORKING AMERICANS is the alt-country supergroup to end them all. The Americana band features Dave Schools of Widespread Panic on bass; singer/ guitarist Neal Casal of Cardinals and The Chris Robinson Brotherhood; keyboardist Chad Staehly of Great American Taxi; and Duane Trucks (brother of Derek) of King Lincoln on drums, with vocalist/songwriter Todd Snider and singer/guitarist Jesse Aycock. Their talent is showcased on HWA’s self-titled debut, a collection of 11 covers. From Hayes Carll’s “Stomp and Holler” and Drivin’ ’N’ Cryin’s “Straight to Hell” to David Rawlings and Gillian Welch’s ‘Wrecking Ball,” the band’s mastery of the blue-collar anthem runs true to its name. With The Congress. The Showbox. 8:30 p.m. $25 adv./$28. 21 and over. BY A Z AR IA C . P O D P LE S K Y
Send events to music@seattleweekly.com. See seattleweekly.com for more listings.
SEATT LE W EEKLY • NOVEMBER 5 — 11, 2014
Saturday, Nov. 8
E V E N T S
LESLIE RYAN MCKELLAR
Though his career was cut short by an overdose at just 26, Gram Parsons made a huge impact on the worlds of both country and rock. His ability to combine folk lyricism with rock-&-roll energy and the emotion of country and blues was practically unparalleled. On this GRAM PARSONS TRIBUTE NIGHT, local musicians, including Country Dave & the New Fallen Angels, Hart Kingsbery, Gaye Winsor, and Caitlin Sherman, honor Parsons for his musical contributions. The set list will include songs from all Parsons’ bands—including International Submarine Band, the Byrds, and the Flying Burrito Brothers—and both his solo releases, GP and Grievous Angel, played in their entirety. Also with Aaron Harmonson, Jesse Harmonson, Bob Knetzger, John Olufs, Hamilton Boyce, Kim Field, Jon Hyde, Fredd Luongo, Trevor Pendras, David Russell. Conor Byrne Pub, 5140 Ballard Ave. N.W., 7843640, conorbyrnepub.com. 9 p.m. $10. 21 and over. Country and electronic music seem to be at the extremes of the spectrum: one is mostly based on guitar, bass, and percussion, the other is built on layers of digital sound. This makes ANDROID AMAKER—Brent Amaker, of Brent Amaker and the Rodeo, and Vox Mod, aka Scot Porter—an unlikely pairing. The duo’s selftitled debut full-length, which was produced by Fresh Espresso’s P Smoov, finds Mod creating an intergalactic foundation over which Amaker, in a Southern drawl, tells the story of man becoming machine. This show is booked as the unusual duo’s only performance ever, so don’t miss your chance to see them live. With Fresh Espresso, The Fame Riot. Neumos, 925 E. Pike St., 7099442, neumos.com. 8 p.m. $10 adv. 21 and over. After more than 20 years, singer/guitarist/keyboardist Linford Detweiler and singer/guitarist Karin Bergquist, known as husband-and-wife folk duo OVER THE RHINE, are still writing some of the most honest songs around. The Ohiobased couple’s latest, Meet Me at the Edge of the World, is a double album full of tracks detailing the triumphs and tragedies of everyday life. There’s an essence of effortlessness to disc one, Sacred Ground, and disc two, Blue Jean Sky, both of which were tracked live. Its length—19 songs, including a cover of The Band’s “It Makes No Difference”—make it an ambitious effort, but Detweiler and Bergquist pull it off with ease. Through Saturday. The Triple Door, 216 Union St., 838-4333, thetripledoor.com. 8 p.m. $35 and up. All ages.
Zenith is massive in both length (17 songs) and breadth. But a variety of lyrical content and futuristic beats keep things interesting. With Thaddeus David, Bad Tenants, DJ Graves 33. High Dive, 513 N. 36th St., 632-0212, highdive seattle.com. 9 p.m. $8 adv./$10 DOS. 21 and over. Given the full-on alt-rock nature of its previous release, Penny Sparkle, the minimalistic Barragán came as a surprise to many BLONDE REDHEAD fans. Singer/ guitarist Kazu Makino’s trancelike voice is as present as ever, as are singer/guitarist Amadeo Pace’s accompaniment and drummer Simone Pace’s steady beat. But for the band’s ninth full-length, the trio turned the rock-&-roll energy down a few notches, doing away with everything it deemed unnecessary. The result is something more abstract: part alt-rock, part art-rock, part dream-pop, part shoegaze. Barragán’s shimmering quality adds another facet to Blonde Redhead’s ever-evolving sound. With Hungry Ghost. Neumos. 8 p.m. $20 adv. 21 and over. Stoner rock and world music collide on Feng Shui Capital of the World, the latest from Bainbridge Island’s WEEED. The trio—bassist/vocalist Gabriel Seaver, drummer John Goodhue, and guitarist Mitch Fosnaugh—combine Middle Eastern guitar riffs with ones that are just plain heavy, and Seaver alternates between distorted singing and a mix of wailing and chanting, bringing the album an even worldlier feel. Feng Shui’s running time conceals the fact that it includes only six songs; multiple jams, including the one that ends the 14-minute epic closing track, “Falling Into the Earth,” give the band plenty of room to roam. With All Them Witches, Something Kurly, The Well. Sunset Tavern, 5433 Ballard Ave. N.W., 7844880, sunsettavern.com. 9 p.m. $8. 21 and over.
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arts&culture» Music Hiss Golden Interview: M.C. Taylor on Process BY STIRLING MYLES
REMEDY CO.
I
SW: How did you evolve as a musician?
SEATTLE WEEKLY • NOVEM BER 5 — 11, 2 014
How are you handling the transition from having HGM as a personal project to it being a very public entity?
I’m trying to be realistic about what my obligations are. I won’t do more than a two-week stretch. It has to be productive. There has to be money to contribute to the family pot. It has to be worthwhile. I don’t love being on the road so much. My music is about home. I have to really Bold words: Cutline here remind easy to be seduced with a cutlinemyself. here It’s cutline here month of shows. Even now I have to be focused about what I can do. I’m lucky to have a crew around me that all know that we have to be really thoughtful about what we put together. Part of this journey of mine has been putting together a thoughtful group of people that are friends and are willing to work with my limitations. What does success look like for you?
n his fifth offering, The Lateness of Dancers, North Carolina’s M.C. Taylor, who performs with Scott Hirsch as Hiss Golden Messenger, presents a wide spectrum of musics, from folk and barroom rock to traditional country. It’s a sweeping canvas upon which he paints seeking, searching lyricism about life, love, and family. Back in August at Pickathon, I sat on a pile of dirt with the California native and recent Merge records signee and we chatted about his punk period, working as a P.E. teacher, and his sense of home. (This interview has been edited for space constraints.)
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question I ask myself: Could I do this myself? More and more these days, it’s not possible.
Taylor: You grow and evolve with a subtle touch. When I started this band called the Court & Spark . . . I was coming out of noise and hardcore. The band that I had with Scott [Hirsch] was called Ex-Ignota, we made records for this label Ebullition. The big thing with us is that we were stoners, into Sonic Youth. We weren’t into the Dead yet . . . I was just learning how to play. We learned that there was a whole emotional palette that you could access. That was a time that we were hearing the first Tortoise record, The Sea and Cake—music by people [who] could really play, [and spent] a lot of time with their instruments. It was a period of turmoil. We needed to grow, we were only 18 . . . I was just starting to learn how to exist with an instrument in front of people. For me, that was so valuable. There are certain things that I still carry with me, like the DIY spirit. [After that], we all dispersed. I moved back to my parent’s in Southern Cal. I was working as a P.E. teacher, if you can imagine that. That was not fun. I honestly cannot remember how I got that job, or how they hired me. At the time I had really long hair, and a really long beard. I don’t know the rules to any sports. That was a lonely time, a time that I was lost. I was really digging into the whole range of music, that’s when I started playing acoustic guitar a lot. I bought a banjo. I remember showing back up with my friends with long hair and a banjo. Scott was like, “What the hell?” What is punk DIY ethics to you?
I can only speak in the perspective of music. Doing as much as I can. I understand how much labor goes into everything. If I am working with a record label now like Merge, I’m doing it because I’m comfortable with sacrificing whatever income to let them do the heavy lifting on that side. I’m always going to think that way. One
As I started Hiss Golden Messenger, no one was listening to what I was making, [but] I still felt value in what I was making. [My music] is a way to engage with the world in an emotional and visceral way, and [to me] success is gauged in that way. These records are so personal. I make these records for me and my family. The fact that other people are listening is amazing. [It’s] the ability to interface with my own feelings, to deal with my demons in a productive way. You don’t need to be on the road six months a year to find that success. I have a full time job. I work for Duke University, the Center of Documentary Studies. It allows me to define success on a different level. I can say no to everything. It’s so liberating. The turning point was Bad Debt. At the time I wasn’t thinking about making another record . . . I was writing these songs, but they were so personal. I didn’t even think my wife would hear them. I would put [my son] Elijah to sleep and I would record on this little tape recorder. It took two weeks to make. Wrote and recorded one song a day. I was basically done with my public life as a musician, that was an amazing experience. I had written a set of songs, thinking, “These songs I can stand behind. I don’t care if anyone hears them. I’ve finally hit a music that’s mine. I discovered a way of singing, playing guitar, something that’s mine.” In the midst of that process, I sent some of that to a buddy of mine in England who said, “This is a really intense collection of songs. This could be a record.” I said,“I think that you’re right.” They weren’t even demos. I scraped 500 bucks together, pressed 100, people all of a sudden . . . got enthusiastic. The more personal it is, the more universal it is. That’s why people thought it was compelling. Tell me about home, about Durham.
It’s been very cosmic, the connections I’ve made. There’s a confluence of people doing amazing work. People aren’t competitive there. An amazing food scene that bleeds into the music scene, a lot of writers. A fantasy day in Durham? I’d wake up, hang out with my kids, go to the farmers market. Listen to some music. Go play music with some people. It’s pretty no-frills. I’m a homebody. I’m an introvert—it doesn’t mean that I’m shy, ’cause I like to be around people. I continue to struggle to be Hiss Golden Messenger. Getting up on stage and entertain. It’s a job that I’m willing to learn. E music@seattleweekly.com
HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER With Phil Cook. Barboza, 925 E. Pike St., 709-9442, thebarboza.com. $12. 21 and over. 8 p.m. Thurs., Nov. 6.
2033 6th Avenue (206) 441-9729 jazzalley.com
LocaLReLeases
Various artists, All Your Friend’s Friends (Nov. 11,
JAZZ ALLEY IS A SUPPER CLUB
JASON MARSALIS VIBES QUARTET
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Swinging jazz vibraphonist touring in support of his new release In a World of Mallets
EUGE GROOVE
THURS, NOV 6 - SUN, NOV 9
Contemporary jazz saxman and musical chameleon
OMAHA DINER WITH CHARLIE HUNTER, BOBBY PREVITE, SKERIK & STEVE BERNSTEIN
TUES, NOV 11 - WED, NOV 12
Four storied musicians attempting to re-define TOP 40!
HERB ALPERT AND LANI HALL
THURS, NOV 13 - SUN, NOV 16
Legendary Grammy-winning music icons!
JECONTE AND THE MALI ALLSTARS
MON, NOV 17
Soulful blend of traditional Malian blues and NorCal/ New Orleans harmonica-based blues rock.
in This Bring T And ge n o p Cou Tizer e p p A one 2 oFF! For 1/
LEO KOTTKE
TUES, NOV 18 - THURS, NOV 20
Acoustic contemporary folk guitar virtuoso known for his unique fingerpicking style
all ages | free parking | full schedule at jazzalley.com
SEATT LE W EEKLY • NOVEMBER 5 — 11, 2014
K Records, krecs.com) K Records is not known for its hip-hop releases, but they are there throughout the Olympia label’s 30-year history. Speckled among better-known albums by Beat Happening, Built to Spill, The Microphones, The Blow, The Gossip, and Mirah are releases by artists and bands like Black Anger, Silent Lambs Project, Tilson, and, most recently, Eprhyme. It’s a largely ignored canon, overshadowed by the lo-fi, DIY, twee pop and punk that has helped the label earn its international reputation. And yet the marrying of this better-known naive bedroom sensibility with a more beat-driven urban sound has become the lifelong project of K founder Calvin Johnson, who prefers to describe his label as trading in “classic lo-fi garage soul.” So All Your Friend’s Friends is not the oddity that it might first appear. In fact, the 18-track compilation might be the purest expression to date of Johnson’s aims. The project is helmed by Oldominion producer Smoke M2D6, who was given access to the K Records vault and left to pull samples from its vast catalog of full-lengths and singles. Out of these indie-pop scraps he would produce the tracks and invite Northwest MCs to contribute a few bars each. If the concept seems novel, the results are decidedly not. The samples chosen by the producer show his talents as a selector while revealing some moments of genius from K’s artists. In particular, the Smoke M2D6 has an affinity for British popsmith Jeremy Jay, whose indelible hooks are found on four tracks here—the most impactful on “Evolve Away,” a propulsive rave built from the heartbeat and finger-snaps of Jay’s “Gallop.” Other favorites include The Microphones, whose plaintive wail from “The Glow Part II” haunts the absurdist “Pizza Chef,” and Mirah, whose strings and aching alto soften a suite of powerful, emotional tracks near the end of the collection. But this is hip-hop that does not lean on its source material. Rather, it finds strength in the individual performances of its producer and its MCs. Free Whiskey is a weirdo-rap revelation, and Heddie Leone, the collection’s only female artist, delivers a seductive performance that slips comfortably over the beat of Calvin Johnson’s minimalist come-on “I Am Without.” XPerience shines brightest, delivering verse on four tracks and, whether inciting a party or in deep spiritual contemplation, hitting the pocket. Overall the collection is bold and effusive, sounding at its greatest moments like a party. In particular, “Evolve Away” and “Jump Kick the Legs,” which features a dozen dizzying, rapidfire performances, are churning, exclamatory productions that make a convincing argument that the Northwest is as much a hip-hop hotbed now as it was a punk hub in the ’80s. (Album release party with Onry Ozzborn, Xperience, Wildcard, Candidt, Everybody Weekend, and Calvin Johnson, Thurs., Nov. 13, Rendezvous) MARK BAUMGARTEN
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NOTICE Washington State law requires wood sellers to provide an invoice (receipt) that shows the seller’s and buyer’s name and address and the date delivered. The invoice should also state the price, the quantity delivered and the quantity upon which the price is based. There should be a statement on the type and quality of the wood. When you buy firewood write the seller’s phone number and the license plate number of the delivery vehicle. The legal measure for firewood in Washington is the cord or a fraction of a cord. Estimate a cord by visualizing a four-foot by eight-foot space filled with wood to a height of four feet. Most long bed pickup trucks have beds that are close to the four-foot by 8-foot dimension. To make a firewood complaint, call 360-9021857. agr.wa.gov/inspection/ WeightsMeasures/Fire woodinformation.aspx
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WATERFRONT APT. Fully furnished. Newly remodeled w/ spectacular views of the water from every window. Separate entrance. Quiet location at the end of the lane, water only 30’ away! Makes this a hiker, kayaker or bird watchers paradise. Eagles and Otters are part of the local crowd. Comfortable w/ heated floors & lots of windows. Newly painted. Granite tile bath with jacuzzi tub. Large bedroom with large closet & king bed. All new kitchen. Open dining & living areas. Laundry available. No smoking or pets. Includes utilities, wi-fi, cable TV, phone, $1300/mo (year-round). 360-378-8332.
U-DISTRICT $450-$550 All Utilities Included! Call Peir for more info (206) 458-0169
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NORTHEND MASSAGE FOR YOUR HEALTH LAURIE LMP #MA00014267 (206) 919-2180 Appliances AMANA RANGE Deluxe 30” Glasstop Range self clean, auto clock & timer ExtraLarge oven & storage *UNDER WARRANTY* Over $800. new. Pay off balance of $193 or make payments of $14 per month. Credit Dept. 206-244-6966
KENMORE FREEZER
Repo Sears deluxe 20cu.ft. freezer 4 fast freeze shelves, defrost drain,
interior light *UNDER WARRANTY* Make $15 monthly payments or pay off balance of $293. Credit Dept. 206-244-6966
KENMORE REPO Heavy duty washer & dryer, deluxe, large cap. w/normal, perm-press & gentle cycles. * Under Warranty! * Balance left owing $272 or make payments of $25. Call credit dept. 206-244-6966
NEW APPLIANCES UP TO 70% OFF All Manufacturer Small Ding’s, Dents, Scratches and Factory Imperfections *Under Warranty* For Inquiries, Call or Visit Appliance Distributors @ 14639 Tukwila Intl. Blvd. 206-244-6966
REPO REFRIGERATOR Custom deluxe 22 cu. ft. sideby-side, ice & water disp., color panels available
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was over $1200 new, now only payoff bal. of $473 or make pmts of only $15 per mo. Credit Dept. 206-244-6966
STACK LAUNDRY Deluxe front loading washer & dryer. Energy efficient, 8 cycles. Like new condition * Under Warranty * Over $1,200 new, now only $578 or make payments of $25 per month
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Abandoned Vehicle Auction
11/12/14 at 11:00AM
Viewing: 9:30-11:00am 1999 Chrysler 300 2003 Cadillac Seville 1993 Ford Ranger 1993 Ford Taurus As Is, Where Is. Cash Only 17611 NE 70th St, Lot #5, Redmond, WA 98052
425-747-3191 For a List & Pictures visit eastsidetow.com
Garage/Moving Sales King County RENTON, 98056.
#1 HOLIDAY BAZAAR Fri-Sat Nov 7th-8th, 9am-5pm. Holiday gifts, crafts, jewlery, bakery goods, etc. Coffee and refreshments. At Houser Terrace, 3151 NE 16th St., Highland area. Off Sunset. Follow green signs Bazaars/Craft Fairs
BOTHELL
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A LOVELY HOLIDAY Waterfront Apt available weekly or monthly. Fully furnished w/ spectacular views of the water from all windows. Quiet location at the end of the lane, water only 30’ away! Makes this a hiker, kayaker or bird watchers paradise. Eagles, seals, foxs & otters are part of the local crowd. Comfortable w/ heated floors & lots of windows. Granite tile bath with jacuzzi tub, seperate shower. Large bedroom w/ spacious closet & king bed. All new kitchen. Open dining and living areas. Laundry avail. No smoking or pets. Includes utilities, wi-fi, cable TV, phone. $750/ week or $2500/mo 360-378-8332
MY FRIENDS & MORE Holiday Bazaar! Join us to Celebrate our 15th Anniversary of Community Fun with Fabulous Local Artisans! Saturday, November 15th, 10am to 5pm, one block North of Home Depot (18701 120th Ave NE). Santa arrives at 1pm! Parents bring your Camera for Free Photos with Santa! Pets Welcome! Free Admission, Free Parking, Free Refreshments and Free Children’s Craft and Play Area Provided! Tour Buses Welcome. Full Wheelchair and Stroller Access. www.craftybug.com
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Join in the Fun & Excitement! Win Prizes at the Clubhouse in Timberlane during our Annual Holiday Gift and Craft Bazaar. Saturday, November 8th, 9am to 4pm, 19300 SE 267th Street, Covington. See you there! Vendors, contact Patti at 253-797-9240 or Tracey at 425-891-6779 or by email at Tracey_Thompson@Tim berlanehoa.org Auto Events/ Auctions
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Chiropractor: Diagnose, treat patients by manipulation of spine and musculoskeletal system. Doctor of Chiropractic & Chiropractor license in WA State Req’d. Resume to Total Care Chiropractic, Inc. 3715 Factoria Blvd. SE Ste.B, Bellevue, WA 98006 DIRECTV is currently recruiting for the following position in Lynnwood: Designated System Trainer If you are not able to access our website, DIRECTV.com, mail your resume and salary requirements to: DIRECTV, Attn: Talent Acquisition, 161 Inverness Drive West, Englewood, CO 80112. To apply online, visit: www.directv.com/careers. EOE.
PUBLISHER/AD MANAGER Sound Publishing is seeking a dynamic Publisher to lead and build a group of newspapers and digital news sites based in Aberdeen, WA. The Daily World (Aberdeen) publishes in print three times a week while The Vidette (Montesano), The South Beach Bulletin (Westport) and The North Coast News (Ocean Shores) are community weekly newspapers. We want a proven leader with the entrepreneurial skills to build on the solid growth of these publications. Ideally, the publisher will have a good understanding of all facets of newspaper operations with emphasis on sales, marketing, financial management, and an appreciation for quality journalism. The ideal candidate will be well versed in leading and developing sales teams and culture on all media platforms. The publisher should have excellent communication skills and be innovative and agile in responding to changing business and audience needs. Minimum qualifications include at least five years in a related industry, with at least three of those years in management; This position receives a base salary plus bonus; and a benefits package including health insurance, paid time off, and 401k. Qualified applicants should email a cover letter and resume to Tim Bullock, Director of Human Resources, at tbullock@soundpublishing.com Sound Publishing is the largest provider of community news in the Northwest, with over 40 daily, weekly and monthly publications reaching more than 1.5 million print and digital readers every week. We are located throughout the Puget Sound, North Olympic Peninsula and Grays Harbor regions. Visit our website to learn more about us! www.soundpublishing.com Sound Publishing is an Equal Opportunity Employer
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As the world leader in next generation mobile technologies, Qualcomm is focused on accelerating mobility around the world. Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm,has the following positions available in Bellevue, WA:
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Multiple openings avail. Mail resume w/job code to QUALCOMM, P.O. Box 919013, San Diego, CA, 92191-9013. EEO employer: including race, gender, disability & veterans status
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Employment General
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W W W. S E AT T L E W E E K LY. C O M / S I G N U P
@seattleweekly
Classified
Call
@ 206-623-6231, to place an ad HomeWell Senior Care Franchising is growing! Recession proof business. Only 8 available territories in Western Washington. $85K Initial investment includes Franchise Fee. Next Step: Visit www.HomeWell.biz
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327 NE 91st St. Seattle (206) 227-9912
Sharonardellesdancestudio.com
Paid research opportunity. Call the APT Study at
206-764-2458.
Temporary, Temporary-to-Hire & Direct Hire Do you have administrative experience? We place: Receptionists
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Bookkeepers
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Administrative Assistants
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Executive Assistants
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Office Support Specialists
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Legal Assistants
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Office Managers
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Accounting Assistants
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Data Entry Personnel
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Marketing Assistants
SEATTLE WEEKLY • NOVEM BER 5 — 11, 2 014
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NEVER A FEE TO YOU! Apply Online: www.tyiseattle.com
MEDICINE MAN WELLNESS CENTER
Or call today — we’re here for you!
206.386.5400
Temporarily Yours Staffing
720 3rd Ave. Ste. 1420 - Seattle, WA 98104
Walk-ins Welcome
On-Line Verification Available Providing Authorizations in Accordance with RCW 69.51A
$99 includes Authorization and Card
“The friendliest and preferred agency”
SAT. NOV. 8 9AM-6PM
SUN. NOV. 9 10AM-5PM
Doctors available Tuesday 2 - 6 • Thursday 11 - 3, Friday 11 - 6
Also Open Sunday 12 - 4
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STATE FAIR EVENTS CENTER PUYALLUP
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