DECEMBER 31, 2014-JANUARY 6, 2015 I VOLUME 39 I NUMBER 53
SEATTLEWEEKLY.COM I FREE
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SEATTLE WEEKLY • DECEMBER 31, 2014 — JANUARY 6, 2015
inside» Dec. 31, 2014 – Jan . 6, 2015 VOLUME 39 | NUMBER 53
» SEATTLEWEEKLY.COM
See the zoo brighter thaN ever
»7
news&comment 5
OUR TOP 6 STORIES OF 2014 BY MATT DRISCOLL | From Bertha
to the Hawks, Mars Hill to Kshama Sawant. Plus: A profile of protester Queen Pearl.
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PUNK ROCK IS NOT BULLSHIT
BY KELTON SEARS | A passionate defense of a much-maligned musical genre. 14 | FILM CALENDAR
food&drink
13 FOOD FINANCING
BY JASON PRICE | Why 2014 was the
year of crowdfunding. 13 | THE BEST & WORST OF 2014
14 CHINESE REDUX
BY JAY FRIEDMAN | Suddenly the old
culinary standby is new again.
15 THE BEST OF 2014
BY SW CRITICS | Our favorite moments
on stage, in the concert halls, and beyond. 17 | PERFORMANCE
18 FILM
THE BEST MOVIES OF 2014 | Robert
Horton and Brian Miller offer their lists. 20 | OPENING THIS WEEK | Depression in Latvia, politics in Italy, and ennui in Turkey. 21 | FILM CALENDAR
22 MUSIC
2014’S BEST LOCAL ALBUMS | BY SW CRITICS | From Perfume Genius to
Shabazz Palaces. 23 | LADIES FIRST | Our new hip-hop
column! 24 | NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS |
Local musicians make their vows for 2015. 25 | THE WEEK AHEAD
odds&ends 31 | CLASSIFIEDS
»cover credits
ILLUSTRATION BY DARIN SHULER
»18
Wild animals and wild places recreated in thousands of sparkling LED lights!
Editor-in-Chief Mark Baumgarten EDITORIAL
Get your tickets online at:
zoo.org/wildlights
Senior Editor Nina Shapiro Food Editor Nicole Sprinkle Arts Editor Brian Miller Music Editor Gwendolyn Elliott
.4 an Ce! J gh n
Editorial Operations Manager Gavin Borchert Staff Writers Ellis E. Conklin, Matt Driscoll, Kelton Sears Contributing Writers Rick Anderson, Sean Axmaker, James Ballinger, Michael Berry, Roger Downey, Alyssa Dyksterhouse, Jay Friedman, Margaret Friedman, Zach Geballe, Chason Gordon, Dusty Henry, Rhiannon Fionn, Robert Horton, Patrick Hutchison, Seth Kolloen, Sandra Kurtz, Dave Lake, Terra Clarke Olsen, Kevin Phinney, Jason Price, Keegan Prosser, Mark Rahner, Tiffany Ran, Michael Stusser, Jacob Uitti
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news&comment Six Moments That Changed Seattle Forever in 2014
Profiles in Protest: Queen Pearl BY PATRICK HUTCHISON
I
A look back at the year that was.
BY MATT DRISCOLL
T
PATRICK HUTCHISON
hings happened in 2014. Lots of them, in fact. But let’s be honest: Some of them were important, some of them . . . well, not so much. And remembering all those important things can be tricky, because you’re busy, weed is legal, blah blah blah. We totally get it. And luckily we’re here for you. To be certain, the Seattle that enters 2015 is decidedly different than it was a year ago. We’ve got new laws, new faces, new accomplishments, and new problems. And by and large, all of these can be traced to a defining moment of the past 12 months that changed us forever, for better or worse. To put it mildly, 2014 was quite a year. In that spirit, let’s ring in 2015 with a look back . . . The Minimum-Wage Law Becomes Reality
Kshama Sawant and 15Now had a big year. Seattle Celebrates Its Super Bowl Victory
JOSHUA BESSEX
The Long Road to Kathleen O’Toole
The important thing, we suppose, is that Mayor Ed Murray and the Seattle Police Department eventually found Kathleen O’Toole, who has ably held the Police Chief gig since her
appointment in May and City Council confirmation in June. By all indications, the former commissioner of the Boston Police Department quickly got to solid work upon arrival, pointing SPD in the much-needed direction of reform. But the path to identifying and hiring O’Toole wasn’t always graceful. Never was this more apparent than during the disastrous (albeit brief ) Harry C. Bailey Era. Bailey, you may recall, was named top cop in early January, just days after Murray took office. The retired former assistant chief was chosen by the new mayor to replace interim Chief Jim Pugel, who—for reasons that remain baffling—was removed from power and soon found himself relegated to a basement office in an old narcotics facility on Airport Way (that’s not a joke). Pugel—who had earned an international reputation for innovative policing practices during his career—would eventually be forced into early retirement from SPD, while Bailey, Murray’s hand-chosen man for the temporary job, would quickly display his remarkable incompetence for the task. That was on full display at a Feb. 24 press conference, as Bailey tried to explain a ridiculous chain of events surrounding his surprise removal of misconduct findings against SPD officer John Marion. Though the man tasked with leading Seattle’s Finest apologized before the press, calling his decision “a
» CONTINUED ON PAGE 6
JEREMY DWYER-LINDGREN
déjà vu » Road To The Super Bowl Goes Through Seattle ... Again On Sunday the Seahawks secured the team’s second straight division title and home-field advantage throughout the NFC playoffs. As you’d expect, many key members of the team took to Twitter to celebrate: “Back to back Division Champs!! Can’t wait to get back out there already! #ChampionshipMindset #GoHawks” – Jermaine Kearse
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“Feels great to be a champ! .. Where is there a better place to play
•
football other than CenturyLink?! #StayinHome” – Robert Turbin “NFC West Champs Again!!!” – Russell Wilson “Champions!! We’ve got a long ways to go but we are so grateful! We can’t wait to be back home in 2 weeks! We love you #12s!!” – Pete Carroll
Do you think recent protests, like Occupy, were easier because they weren’t targeted at law enforcement? Maybe, but even that didn’t
make a big enough change. How so? As a black female, I still have government issues, I still have housing issues. My housing situation hasn’t changed. [Pearl lives in subsidized housing.] The Occupy movement is over, but the problems and the pain still occupy me. What would make these protests more effective? First, I don’t think there are enough
black participants. I don’t know why they aren’t out, but the numbers just aren’t there. It could be that our black community simply isn’t as large; but I look at demonstrations in places like Oakland and New York, and I think that having a strong black presence at the protests helps their cause. Second, we need leaders like we used to have. We need people to lead and organize to make change, just like Dr. King and Malcolm X did. If people back then didn’t have strong leaders, I’m not sure the changes they brought on would have occurred. E
news@seattleweekly.com
Portraits in Protest is an ongoing series spotlighting local activists involved in the Black Lives Matter protests.
SEATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 31, 2014 — JAN UARY 6, 2015
It was bitter cold on Wednesday, February 5— but not in the streets of downtown, which hundreds of thousands of Seahawks fans crammed to celebrate their team’s first-ever Super Bowl victory. Only three days earlier, the Seahawks had put a decisive licking on Peyton Manning and the favored Denver Broncos, 43-8, securing the Lombardi trophy for Seattle and a place in history for its team. Now it was time to celebrate with the 12th Man. “We are just getting warmed up, if you know what I’m talking about,” coach Pete Carroll boasted to the crowd once the parade—highlighted by Marshawn Lynch drinking celebratory Fireball from the hood of a Ride the Ducks amphibious vehicle—made its way to CenturyLink field. Carroll’s implication was obvious: This wouldn’t be Seattle’s last Super Bowl parade. And while we hope that proves to be true, the first is always the sweetest. “This is a historical event, once in a lifetime,” 36-year-old Jesse Lake, a carpenter from Port Orchard, told the Associated Press amid the overflowing revelry. “To not show up would be blasphemy.”
JOSHUA BESSEX
In early January, SEIU 775 vice-president Sterling Harders was one of a dayful of speakers to address a fiery crowd packed into downtown’s Labor Temple. At the time, Seattle Weekly’s Nina Shapiro described the organization behind the rally, 15Now, as “a new group pushing for a $15-an-hour minimum wage.” It was hard then to foresee the impact 15Now would have on life in Seattle in 2014, but it proved significant. Emboldened by the recent election of Socialist Alternative candidate Kshama Sawant to the City Council, Harders told the crowd that they’d reached this point because of “heat in the street,” going on to say that much more of that heat would be necessary to make a $15-an-hour minimum wage a reality. Harders, of course, was right, and the crowd erupted in solidarity to what Shapiro painted as a “ferocious energy” from the podium. Six months later, in June, with new mayor Ed Murray and the City Council having been firmly swayed by the “heat” generated by Sawant and the 15Now movement, Seattle passed its historic $15-an-hour minimum-wage law.
f you’ve been to a protest in Seattle, chances are you’ve seen Queen Pearl. Born and raised here, Pearl comes from a long line of activists. Her aunt took part in civil-rights marches in D.C.; and as a child, she remembers going to community meetings and protestmarches. Now, at 59, Pearl’s a good deal older than the average protestor in Westlake Park, prompting one fellow protestor to recently remark that she reminded him of his grandmother. While her fights typically place her at community meetings, they can also bring her to the streets—as on a Monday-night protest earlier this month. When she arrived, she admitted she was a bit late. “But,” she added, “better late than never.” Why are you out here, Pearl? Solidarity. Like any movement, you need solidarity. You can’t be lackadaisical. You have to keep moving, keep the ideas and your voices flowing. You have to keep going until you reach a conclusion. And what conclusion would that be? It’s difficult because we’re dealing with law enforcement. Why does that make it more difficult? Well, with any change, there are layers. There are commissions and councils and groups whose entire job it is to create and enact changes in our policies in government. If you want change, you have to go through them, you have to play by their rules. And when the police are involved, it only makes it more difficult, because those groups have relationships with the police. Even our community leaders are embedded in relationships with the police forces.
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news&comment» » FROM PAGE 5
‘The MosT Purely enjoyable nighT of The year’ NEW YORK TIMES
SEATTLE WEEKLY • DECEMBER 31, 2014 — JANUARY 6, 2015
MORGEN SCHULER
Seattle City Hall made national headlines in October when the City Council voted unanimously to replace Columbus Day with the new Indigenous Peoples’ Day, an overdue acknowledgment of the region’s original inhabitants and a too-little, too-late recognition of the wrongs inflicted for so many generations. The decision, of course, was not without controversy. Most nota-
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bly, a surprising number of Italian-Americans came out of the woodwork, arguing that Columbus Day was a celebration of Italian heritage and the city’s decision to replace it constituted a slap in the face. After the unanimous Council vote, a political action group looking to “save Columbus Day” was even created, placing in The Seattle Times an ad—featuring the likes of Columbus, Bank of America founder A.P. Giannini, and famed football coach Vince Lombardi—intended to highlight the perceived injustice. In the face of this outcry, however, liberal Seattle refused to waver. “We are not reveling in the pain of our past, but rejoicing in the celebration of a triumph—the voice of the indigenous people who are saying ‘We are still here. We have been here hundreds of years before you and will be here hundreds of years after you,’” councilmember Bruce Harrell said to cheers in Council Chambers the day the resolution was passed. “This is what makes Seattle so special, in all honesty—that we are bold enough to admit the shortcomings of our history in order to realize the hopes of our dreams.”
January 15-18 The Moore TheaTre ‘i alMosT asPhyxiaTed Myself wiTh laughTer’ THE DAILY EXPRESS
Mark Driscoll Resigns and Mars Hill Dissolves
‘raZor sharP brillianCe’ THE AUSTRALIAN
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Long plagued by allegations of plagiarism, chauvinism, meatheadedness, and downright despicableness, 2014 was the year that Mars Hill rock-star pastor Mark Driscoll, and the megachurch he founded, finally came undone. On October 15, during what was supposed to be a self-imposed six-week leave while church elders investigated charges that he’d abused his power, Driscoll decided enough was enough, officially resigning. Though the investigation into his alleged abuse of powers had just concluded— determining that he was guilty of only “arrogance, responding to conflict with a quick temper and harsh speech, and leading the staff and elders in a domineering manner,” according to the
official findings—Driscoll’s decision nonetheless caught many off guard. “Indeed, we were surprised to receive his resignation letter,” the Mars Hill board of overseers would write. “By God’s grace I have pastored Mars Hill Church for 18 years. Today, also by God’s grace, and with the full support of my wife Grace, I resign my position as a pastor and elder of Mars Hill,” Driscoll’s Oct. 15 letter, which started the dominoes falling, read in part. “I do so with profound sadness, but also with complete peace.” Two weeks later, Mars Hill officials would decide to disband the multichurch organization altogether, allowing the 13 satellite locations to continue independently or shut their doors.
JOSHUA BOULET
Seattle Sends Columbus Sailing for Indigenous Peoples’ Day
TWITTER/@PASTORMARK
mistake,” he couldn’t answer the simple question posed by the press corps of whether Marion would face the punishment initially imposed on him. “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” a flustered Bailey flailed from the podium. Meanwhile, City Hall fumed with embarrassment.
The Bertha Boondoggle
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse for Bertha, Seattle’s stuck, broken, and disgraced deep-bore tunneling machine, it did. In December came unsettling news that— thanks to efforts to rescue the $80 million contraption that’s been stranded underground for a full calendar year—businesses in Pioneer Square were literally sinking, streets were literally cracking, and no one knew for certain just how safe the still-standing Viaduct even was. Naturally, members of the Seattle City Council began to lose confidence in the massive undertaking, with councilmember Nick Licata telling Seattle Weekly, “This is like a nightmare you don’t wake up from.” None of this, however, stopped WSDOT Secretary Lynn Peterson from telling the Council on Dec. 15 that “the vast majority of the replacement of the Viaduct is complete—in fact 70 percent done and on the ground.” That’s complete garbage, of course, considering that Bertha has dug only 1,000 feet of a two-mile tunnel and is now stuck underground with no certain rescue date in sight. Perhaps 2015 will be Bertha’s year. E
mdriscoll@seattleweekly.com
T
Roderick, as the 40-something lead singer of indie rock band the Long Winters, has watched a generation of punks mature. As is made clear in his essay, he doesn’t like what he’s seen:
For those of us who grew up in the shadow of the baby boom, force-fed the misremembered vainglory of Woodstock long after most hippies had become coked-out, craven yuppies on their way to becoming paranoid neo-cons, punk rock provided a corrective dose of hard truth [ . . . ] But over time punk swelled into a Stalinistic doctrine of self-denial that stunted us. The yuppies kept sucking, but by clinging to punk we started to suck too. I have friends in their mid-
40s who don’t even have a savings account because ‘saving money’ never seemed punk rock. But I did not grow up in the shadow of the baby boom. Neither did the majority of the Northwest punks I admire who made noise in 2014. We grew up in the shadow of the Great Recession. We grew up in the shadow of unchecked climate change caused by unchecked capitalism. And now, in Seattle, we’re growing up in the shadow of Amazon beneath an army of construction cranes that are squeezing out art spaces and affordable housing. Not only is the music industry on the wane—the ecological systems that sustain the whole goddamned planet are collapsing. And of course we don’t have savings accounts—70 percent of us are still paying off our historically high student loans and struggling to pay our historically high rents. Perhaps Roderick’s punk was bullshit. But this isn’t the UK circa 1976. This is Seattle and it’s the dawn of 2015. Our “punk,” or whatever you want to call it, isn’t bullshit. It’s not a dude with a Mohawk, a swastika tattoo, and a safety pin through his lip spitting on the audience because he thinks nihilism is the only truth. That dude just sounds like an asshole. Our “punk” is, as Luempert very simply explains it, a space: a way of situating yourself in a world that in the 21st century is figuratively and literally overflowing with lots of real bullshit. It’s one of the few tools or frameworks that marginalized artists without bountiful 20th-century resources have to help us wade through that bullshit and find some sense of meaning and agency. To those living it, it feels like anything but a Stalinistic doctrine of self-denial; it just feels like a natural, biological reaction to the environment we find ourselves in. “Everything is shit and garbage and we live in a trash world,” Coster suddenly blurts out. “Everything that is romantic is basically a joke and garbage, and you can either deny that or accept that. You can sift through the trash, and I think that’s more interesting.” This outlook, I suppose, would explain Naomi Punk’s songs “Trashworld” and “Rodeo Trash Pit.” What Coster is saying really isn’t melodramatic or radical. As we sit in this dark bar in Olympia, an enormous patch of garbage— roughly the size of Texas, some researchers estimate—floats in a vortex in the Pacific Ocean. The microplastic fragments in this ecosystem of trash outweigh the surface zooplankton six to one. Thanks to “biomagnification” up the food chain, by the time we humans eat fish that have fed in the North Pacific, there’s a very good chance that fish has eaten a lot of plastic. To put it in slightly more poetic terms: On planet Earth, humans are literally eating their own trash. So, scientifically speaking, Coster isn’t exaggerating when he says “everything is shit and garbage.” He continues. “The world has been destroyed. It’s kind of fucked our generation. I’m pretty into embracing the garbage. Making bad riffs and forcing them to be good when they are bad.” Naomi Punk’s particular style of punk certainly sounds like it’s cobbled out of some castoff hunks of plastic from that huge swirling gyre in the Pacific—brutish, neo-primitive pop riffs warbling out of an old broken VHS player.
SEATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 31, 2014 — JAN UARY 6, 2015
PHOTO: MORGEN SCHULER, ILLUSTRATIONS: DARREN SHULER
ravis Coster, Naomi Punk’s singer and guitarist, is stressed out. He scratches his half bleached-blond head of hair and starts rubbing his temples. “Man, I guess I don’t even know if punk is important,” he says. “That’s why I was kind of nervous about meeting.” He sits silently for a moment, mouth agape, fiddling with his glass of Olympia beer before throwing his hands up. “Maybe it is important . . . but I don’t even know. Punk is super-important to me, I love punk music, I connect with it and I love its conventions, but it’s also sort of besides the point. Like—I honestly love the new Taylor Swift album. It’s not like I’m trying to hold up punk as this noble thing . . . but I guess I do kind of identify that way.” I’m here in Olympia on Naomi Punk’s home turf on a fool’s errand. I’m trying to figure out what punk means. I’ve asked a bunch of local punk bands, “Why is punk important to you in 2014?” This approach has proven more difficult than I anticipated. I’ve quickly learned that nothing is more nebulous than the word “punk.” There is nothing less punk than talking about punk. Punk operates like a quantum particle: As soon as you try to measure its properties, it disappears and reappears somewhere else in spacetime. It is Schrödinger’s cat—paradoxically both alive and dead as long as the outside observer doesn’t open the box. But here I am in Olympia, sitting down with Naomi Punk in a dimly lit goth bar, opening the box anyway. John Roderick believes he possesses the answers to these questions—or at least he did when, on March 6, 2013, Seattle Weekly published his cover story “Punk Rock Is Bullshit.” When it came out, I remember incredulously reading it on my smartphone in a tour van, passing it around to my bandmates and asking “Can you believe this shit?” Ironically, four months later I was hired as a staff writer for the Weekly. At that moment I made a blood oath to myself that if I was going to work here, one day I would rebut that monstrosity. So here I am. After about 40 minutes of my vain, awkward attempts to coax out what’s inside Naomi’s Schrödinger Punk box, the band’s mop-haired drummer, Nick Luempert, decides to take a different approach. He attempts to explain the qualities of the box itself. “So, punk as a concept, it’s less what it’s about . . . it’s more just a space,” he says. “It seems like it’s a response to the mainstream. A big record company isn’t trying to carve out a space, it’s trying to consume and take in anything it can. In carving out this space, ‘punk’ or whatever you want to call it, it’s kind of the opposite: You’re trying to situate in this very specific spot and figure out how you can exist within that limited space instead of just absorbing everything.” Now we’re getting somewhere.
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SEATTLE WEEKLY • DECEMBER 31, 2014 — JANUARY 6, 2015
» FROM PAGE 7
Only by supporting new ideas by local artists, bands, and record labels can the U.S. expect any kind of dynamic social/cultural change in the 1980s. This is because the mass homogenization of our culture is due to the claustrophobic centralization of our culture. We need diverse, regionalized, localized approaches to all forms of art, music, and politics. Tomorrow’s pop is being realized today on small decentralized record labels that are interested in taking risks, not making money. This passage is from “New Pop! Manifesto” by then-Evergreen State College student Bruce Pavitt, published in issue #1 of his scrappy zine, Subterranean Pop. Pavitt would go on to turn the underground music fanzine into Sub Pop, the label that made Seattle the music city it is today. If it weren’t for that punk manifesto, I doubt John Roderick would even be here making music. Without Sub Pop’s support of the unique Northwest punk community, there would be no Barsuk Records. And without Barsuk Records, Roderick’s band The Long Winters might not have had a music career. Without Northwest punk, Roderick might not even have his savings account. Fancy that. The head of a bass drum is hanging from the
tree outside of Bree McKenna’s house in Seattle. Someone has, for whatever reason, impaled it on a branch. I can hear her and her bandmates in the all-lady feminist punk group Childbirth laughing on the porch, bathed in the iridescent glow of some weather-worn Christmas lights. Grimy old plastic cups and bits of trash are strewn at their feet. Their good pal, Robin Edwards, who goes by “Lisa Prank” in her own one-woman pop-punk project, is enthusiastically musing aloud on the merits of Sheryl Crow.
» CONTINUED ON PAGE 10
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SEATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 31, 2014 — JAN UARY 6, 2015
Their newest record, Television Man, released in August, even has a song entitled “Plastic World no. 6.” The band’s website, the one beacon in its nearly nonexistent web presence, is purposefully constructed to be a confusing HTML mess, a disorienting bit of web trash that you as a human have to physically stop and untangle in order to proceed and harvest what scant information resides inside. When you watch the band live—Luempert in his ill-fitting XL T-shirt pounding the drums like a child while Neil Gregerson and Coster awkwardly scissor their hands across their brokensounding guitars—it’s like witnessing a gang of kids traipsing through some post-apocalyptic wasteland and making the most of it. As heavy as the music gets, it’s often triumphant: music to slay concrete dragons by. “This trash vibe, this idea of sifting through things that have already been used up, that’s punk to me,” Luempert says. “The trash is used up, and punk’s been used up— but you can still use the trash around you in the world as a medium to explore things for yourself. It’s ultimately this optimistic thing. You don’t need to ask permission or have x and y resources or talents to do something new and meaningful, you can just sort of . . . rearrange the trash until you find some sense of personal transcendence.” It’s an approach that’s gained the band a following, taking it from the Northwest DIY underground to elite Brooklyn record label Captured Tracks. But before jumping to Captured Tracks, Naomi Punk released its debut, The Feeling, on Couple Skate, a small Seattle-based record label that started as a way for its co-founder, Andrew McKibben, to release music from his own band and the music of the friends he made growing up in Seattle’s all-ages DIY punk scene. When we sit down at The Twilight Exit in the Central District, he’s just gotten back from CMJ. He also starts talking about trash—or rather, the overflow of garbage music in the world. “It’s funny about CMJ, or things like SXSW— there’s so many bands and there’s so much bullshit,” he says. “There’s an immense fucking ton of music in the world I’ll never listen to. There are a lot of record labels that have this faceless sort of blog filter and they sign whatever Pitchfork says. There’s no story or narrative behind it. That’s one of the really important things that sets us apart— we’re coming from a very specific place and are telling a story about a community. I feel very connected and rooted in the community here. To me the point of all this is to give back to my friends and this place that fostered me.” McKibben sweeps back his long hair. “I run a fucking small indie label in 2014. Nobody’s making any money off this. The only reason to do it is to have fun and help your friends function as a band. For me, the thing about punk and the label, I’m just doing it because it’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”
The point, from a punk perspective, has always been about supporting your fellow freaks in your community amid the cultural garbage surrounding you. Couple Skate signees Weed, an incredible Vancouver, B.C.-based punk band, values that community above all else. Out of the comic shop he works at, Weed’s front man Will Anderson began printing his own monthly newszine, Dunk, intended to provide an all-ages calendar on the back page. “It was my attempt to unite these scenes in Vancouver and bring these communities together,” he says. “When you’re on your deathbed looking up, it’s like, what are you going to think about? I don’t want Weed to be another fucking buzz story and look back and go ‘We made x amount of money and saw the green rooms of America.’ I don’t care. My goal in Weed is not to expose as many people in the world to Weed as I can. I just want to put out cool records and play cool shows.” Perhaps unwittingly, what Couple Skate and Anderson are attempting to do is nothing new. The concept stretches all the way back to at least 1980—to the dawn of the Pacific Northwest’s unique punk history, which coincidentally also started in a zine.
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The group waves as I walk up their staircase. It’s coated in Sharpie drawings of trolls, smiley faces, emoticons, and the myriad fleeting thoughts of the countless Seattle punk bands who have claimed this home over the past 10 years, such as: “1-800-YOLO-LOL” “I am a Catholic witch, I have sooooooo much guilt” “RAD SKANK COOL SLUT FRigiD WhoRe.” “It’s kind of a piece of shit, but I love it,” McKenna says, inviting me up to Edwards’ room for our interview. “It’s super-cheap. Everybody complains about rent in Seattle, but we’ve found a way to deal with it so we can be in a band and make art.” Stacy Peck, t h e b a n d ’s drummer, is still figuring out a way to deal with it. “I’m moving out of my apartment right now,” she says. “They’re lowincome apartments, but I’m moving out because even those are too expensive now; I can’t afford it. I’ve always done low-income apartments, but even the very bottom is too much for what I make at my job, which is really depressing—it’s just not a thing you can do while you play in two bands and do art. I wish Seattle appreciated art more.” She stops and thinks for a moment. “Seattle’s not cool because of Amazon.” The offhanded remark reminds Julia Shapiro, Childbirth’s frontwoman, of a conversation she just had with Lisa Orth, an amazing local tattoo artist perhaps most famous for designing Nirvana’s logo for Sub Pop in 1989. Apparently, Orth told Shapiro she had met an HR person from Amazon who had personally hired 12,000 people in the past three months, many of whom are living in hotels, waiting for those cranes to finish building housing for them. That combination of housing demand and new building has drastically, and quickly, changed the landscape for all Seattleites. Average monthly rent on a onebedroom apartment has climbed from $1284 to $1400 in the past six months alone. “It’s fucked. It’s capitalism that’s fucking everything up, you know?” Shapiro grimaces. Capitalism did not stop Childbirth, however. The band released a 17-minute cassette in January 2014, entitled It’s a Girl, that they “only spent $100 on and five hours recording,” Peck says, laughing. “We didn’t take it super-seriously, but then I made a video for our song ‘I Only Fucked You as a Joke,’ and it went viral.” The song is exactly what it sounds like: a punk song about fucking someone as a joke, and regretting it, but not really giving a shit anyway because “I can’t make good decisions everyday,” as the lyrics go. In the gloriously low-budget video, the band pelvic-thrusts on various statues around town—Isamu Noguchi’s Black Sun in Volunteer Park, the Jimi Hendrix statue on Broadway. “We don’t have PR, we put out a cassette tape,” McKenna says. “It ended up on Pitchfork and we didn’t even do anything.” It ended up a lot of places, actually. Spin called “I Only Fucked You as a Joke” the #9 song of 2014, beating out Drake and Katy Perry.
Stereogum named it the #1 Song of the Week. Bust and Brooklyn Vegan spotlighted the group (the latter of which resulted in some extremely unfortunate rape threats and overt sexism in the comment section), and soon—most perplexingly to the band—a number of long, in-depth essays analyzing the cassette’s meaning and political/ sociocultural context started popping up online. Whether or not they realize it, the ladies in Childbirth are direct descendants of “New Pop! Manifesto”—proof you don’t need money to make change or make people think. You just need to think a little differently. “It’s funny—we weren’t trying to be political, we were just singing about what made each other laugh and what we felt,” McKenna says. “I think that maybe when we write songs, it’s about what we want to see. It’s like, I didn’t identify with the sexist bro punks I was hanging around, so we made our own scene. That’s why all the women in the punk scene here are so awesome; they foster each other’s stuff. We hang out with feminist women, feminist men, and we make our own reality in music right now. It was just a natural thing, but I guess people noticed.” McKenna is right. The local punk scene in 2014 was dominated by women. Lady-led bands like Tacocat, Wimps, Chastity Belt, Lisa Prank, Vexx, Hysterics (R.I.P.), Darto, Vats, Stickers, The Witches Titties, and Childbirth put out some of this year’s best music and put on some of its best shows. Peck says that the special punk community here was a natural reaction to “that bullshit” that McKenna and Shapiro were describing earlier. It’s a community that offers vital support by going to each others’ shows and even getting each other jobs—as Peck did for Shapiro when she moved here from Walla Walla a couple of years ago, securing her a gig at Capitol Hill bar Redwood. This is all warm and fuzzy and great, but as Peck also makes very clear to me, the city’s sudden influx of affluence is undeniably changing the Seattle she loves. Redwood just announced that it’s closing next year, leaving Shapiro and Peck without a job—just one in a long line of beloved, funky businesses folding in the wake of city’s hyper-development. Artists can’t afford to live here anymore. The city is attempting to address the situation—Capitol Hill has officially been deemed an “Arts District” and the 12th Ave. Arts complex was recently built to provide affordable housing to people in the area. But for many artists, it was too little too late. “The community here is the tightest it’s ever been, though,” Peck says, “probably because it’s so hard sometimes.” While Roderick might criticize Childbirth’s members for their lack of savings accounts and unwillingness to play into capitalism, the band defines success differently. “Sometimes I do wonder if I’m actually, like, a fuck-up,” Shapiro says. “A lot of people would be like, ‘That girl is just fucking around. She’s working at a bar and fucking around and playing music.’ But I love Seattle, and everyone in bands in Seattle is doing so much more than just fucking around—they’re making really good music. To the people in this scene, none of us are failures, we are all doing really well.”
Before tonight’s show, Nathan Rodriguez dyed
his formerly soft-pink hair “Electric Lizard,” a radioactive, glow-in-the-dark shade of green. The black lights strobing across his band, So Pitted, are turning his recently recolored head into a radiant, luminescent beacon. Liam Downey, the group’s drummer, has rigged a portion of his hair straight up using pipe cleaner. Imagine the antenna-like hairdos of the Whos from Dr. Seuss’ Whoville. Rodriguez’s face contorts into a cartoonishly evil The Grinch Who Stole Christmas sneer. “I’m living in a box, but you know what, I’m cool,” he seethes into the microphone before Jeannine Koewler rips the song in half with her crushing guitar. She sighs a languid wordless melody into the microphone for the chorus as Rodriguez howls—the veins in his neck look ready to pop. The kids in the room immediately flip out— moshing and screaming and laughing until the song ends. “Oh my God, I have no idea who this is but it’s amazing,” a young gothy girl in front of me says to her friend as the piercing distortion from
the band’s idling guitars rumble the room. “It’s like punk music from outer space.” I’m at Cairo, an all ages boutique/gallery that hosts some of Seattle’s most interesting, bizarre shows. In the lobby tonight, an art show entitled “We’re Still Standing” is hanging, themed around the Capitol Hill arts community’s struggle to remain in the neighborhood. In many ways, Cairo is the spiritual successor to Roscoe Louie, the art gallery and music venue that Fantagraphics co-founder Larry Reid ran back in the ’80s—a place that Bruce Pavitt described as one of Seattle’s most important spaces in that fateful issue of Subterranean Pop #1: “Roscoe Louie, an art gallery, has done a forceful job of supporting a number of abrasive young visionaries. They also hold very crowded concerts and occasional fashion shows.” I would venture to call So Pitted “abrasive young visionaries,” and the crowd at Cairo very obviously feels the same. Most of So Pitted’s songs are about feeling the opposite, though. “I write mostly about feeling doomed,” Rodriguez tells me. “In lots of different ways I’ve been disappointed
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understand and value through his sister’s initially harsh “negative” act might have subconsciously been what saved So Pitted from its doomed origins as “some angry dudes yelling,” as he sourly describes it. When Rodriguez asked Koewler to join the band, she almost immediately revolutionized it. Not knowing how to play guitar at first, she plugged her instrument into a bass amp one day, instantly redefining So Pitted’s sound by adding the metallic low-end scuzz that has come to define the group. “I think that a lot of female artists have very different perspectives on art and music and just everything because no one ever expected them to play music,” Koewler says. “It wasn’t something that was OK. Nobody encouraged us to learn guitar or start bands or do anything. Finally now I feel like people are starting to be like ‘You shouldn’t be ashamed to be a woman or have femininity.’ There are so many more girls in the scene here now. I think that this band has changed so much. Not even because of me, but I guess just having a female influence.” Rodriguez and Downey emphatically agree: Koewler’s perspective has made So Pitted far richer than it ever had been. Even her simple suggestion that they add mood lighting in their practice space has completely changed their songwriting. “I think with younger people in general, we’re ready to see the future,” Downey says, “and the future is more feminine—or really, it’s genderfluid. Gender shouldn’t be this A and B thing, and I think part of this ‘punk’ scene or whatever is us wanting to see that; we aren’t afraid of that and it becomes part of the music.” In 2014, especially in the Northwest, it was easy
to pat oneself on the back for perceived progressive leaps and bounds—same-sex weddings, marijuana legalization, a $15 minimum wage. But in reality, power systems still shove large swaths of humanity and their voices to the margins. After Ferguson and the Eric Garner case, the country looked a lot more like 1964 than 2014. While punk is one tool to wade through that bullshit, it’s also powerful because it offers a way to threaten it. “Any marginalized person that is banging on a drum or has an incredibly loud amp or a really sick synthesizer—their identity and them expressing themselves is such a fucking threat,”
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in myself. In some pretty obvious and typical ways. The ways people measure success in our society. Personally, socially, professionally. Everything sometimes can be a downer.” The trio of friends that make up So Pitted all worked together at Capitol Hill thrift shop Red Light until recently. Like Redwood, the neighborhood staple recently announced it would be closing. “I guess our music is also about the pride in negativity,” Rodriguez says. “I’m inspired and grow with the people around me in this community who share that perspective.” One of the core powers of punk is its ability to derive strength from negation. So Pitted in many ways embodies that—lyrically, performatively, even bodily. Roderick decries punk’s power of negation as a historically “slow-acting venom [...] neutering our taste by sneering at new flavors until every expression of actual individualism is corralled and expunged in favor of group-think conformity.” But for So Pitted’s singer, it’s much more complicated than that. Rodriguez has the words “Fuck You” tattooed on his arm, but that profanity is not a curse on “new flavors.” It’s actually a loving tribute to his sister. She carved the same words into her arm with a box cutter when she was 12—rubbing in pink glitter ink to make it permanent. “I was 14 at the time, and I was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ I was so freaked out,” Rodriguez says. “I definitely thought my sister was bad. It’s taken me a long time, but I can recognize a lot of the more sexist things I’ve thought throughout my entire life. Like for whatever reason I felt like everything I had learned up until that point had taught me that my sister was crazy and bad, and as I’ve grown up I’ve only been more and more wrong. I love my sister so much, and my tattoo is a celebration of that. I’ve never regretted it.” His sister’s tattoo has come to define Rodriguez’s own nuanced understanding of punk—negativity’s power to flip your perspective into something positive and progressive. During our conversation, the band doesn’t “sneer at new flavors” at all. “The old punk had more rules, the new punk has no rules. You can listen to Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears and be called So Pitted,” Downey says. The feminine perspective Rodriguez learned to
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says Ashley of Celibacy Now, a Seattle-based
duoPR that’s OMasked O TImeONtoSwithhold EV ENTdoom-punk S their last names. “It’s really empowering and
amazing. Marginalized identities are literally silenced. Making that visible is so important.” This summer, the band performed at Shout Back! Fest in Vancouver, B.C., an intentionally radical, queer, DIY punk festival with a lineup they say is the most diverse they’ve ever seen. The festival standouts for them? A “sludge-metal trans/drag queer band,” its name forgotten, that they say they haven’t been able to stop raving about months and months later. The festival hosted workshops on the detriment of capitalism’s profit motive; making visible the voices of people of color and the trans community; and the fact that British Columbia sits on colonized Salish territory. “It’s hilarious to try to tie the stoned, selfabsorbed incomprehension of the world that characterized the dawn of punk to some larger narrative of a self-aware political art movement with an objective and a plan,” Roderick writes in his essay. Well, Shout Back! Fest seems like a pretty self-aware political art movement. So does Celibacy Now. It formed by uniting around a shared conceptual basis—a unique reclaiming of the word “celibacy” to refer to a freedom of spirit that allows an individual to reach for transcendence by abstaining from the influence of dominant systems, all in an effort to achieve “personal growth and empowerment.” As their “Manifesta” zine outlines, they stand in opposition to patriarchy, heteronormativity, sexism, capitalism, and indigenous and religious oppression. “It’s such a challenge for me to do anything in front of someone because I just feel so uncomfortable doing it, just taking up space,” says Ann, Celibacy Now’s drummer. Before Shout Back! Fest, she had never screamed in public. “I’m so used to apologizing for my existence. It’s so empowering to go up to a microphone and say anything, especially things I care about.” Agatha, a queer punk band split between Olympia and Seattle, sprang out of a similar intentional space, forming around a group called “For Crying Out Loud,” an organization of punks, anarchists, and weirdos who wanted to confront, talk about, and address sexual violence in the punk and radical community. By supporting victims of sexual assault, the group acted as an inherent threat to patriarchy and the systems that make those assaults happen. Singer Kaelen Quintero and guitarist Karl Mylin quickly bonded over the support they were able to offer each other, finding refuge in their similar experiences. “It’s like we don’t go around saying ‘Hi! My gender is freaky and weird!’ to people because that’s not a very comfortable thing to do,” Mylin says, “but we could say it this way in the band and feel empowered, which is something that
A R T S A ND ENTER TA I NM EN T
I think about a lot as I grow older and consider what ‘punk’ actually means for me.” Touring the country, Agatha says punk’s ability to forge shared spaces where there weren’t any manifests itself all the time—in fact, it’s one of the most rewarding parts of the whole thing. At shows, queer youth still come up to them, bewildered that “queercore” even exists. “When a 19-year-old dyke comes up and is just like, ‘What the fuck? What is this? This is fucking cool!’ and you can say, ‘There are people just like you,’ that’s part of the point,” Quintero says. “You create the scene you want to be in, you create your own communities, and even though it’s ultimately personal and not always explicitly political, that’s inherently a threat to privilege.” Jenn Govola, wearing a pair of pink Doc Martens, grins at me from behind a cup of coffee. ”Kids are the ultimate lie detectors,” she says fiendishly. “They pick up when you’re trying to bullshit them. I can see that when kids come to shows—they mostly come to punk shows.” Govola is entrenched in the local punk scene. She plays in her own band, Mysterious Skin; DJs on KEXP’s punk program Sonic Reducer; books shows without pay at underground DIY spaces across the city; and works at Ground Zero, Bellevue’s all-ages teen center. She also just went back to college to get her degree. She’s a busy lady. Govola says the kids at Ground Zero are what have kept her into punk after all these years. Even though “jaded old punks” like the ones Roderick describes definitely do get on her nerves, it’s ultimately about the kids for her. Although I’m only 24, I often find myself worrying about the future of the kids and grandkids I don’t yet have. I imagine them growing up in a barren desert world straight out of Dune—Naomi Punk’s “Trashworld” multiplied by 10. When I’m feeling especially fatalistic, I look around and find myself already living in that world. Thank God Govola is here to tell me I’m being dramatic. “At Ground Zero, you see all these young kids from different socioeconomic backgrounds, and they just want to come and play music,” she says, “but especially punk music, I’ve noticed. All these diverse kids communicating in this specific way, it’s amazing.” Bruce Pavitt might agree—if there’s one thing that will save the planet, it’s going to be a diverse group of kids willing to work to do things differently by communicating in a different way than society does now. In silly millennial trend pieces, our generation is often called “narcissistic” and “lazy,” but from my perspective, we’re working our asses off in the face of some of the greatest adversity the entire planet has ever seen. We’re getting paid zero for it. And despite that, we’re having fun. “He just sounded like a dad,” Govola laughs when Roderick’s article comes up. “Like, ‘You lazy kids!’ I think some of the most non-lazy people I know are in punk bands that haven’t reached what my mom or dad would call success, because that’s not the point.” I ask Govola what punk means to her. “On top of all the music stuff, I have a regular job and I just finished a fucking math degree, I’m 27. That shit was hard. Man, that’s pretty fucking punk in 2014.” I couldn’t agree more. E
ksears@seattleweekly.com
food&drink
The New Bank for Food Businesses
The 2014 Seattle Culinary Ticker Tape A look back at what we loved, loathed, and lost.
Crowdfunding rises in 2014.
BY NICOLE SPRINKLE
BY JASON PRICE
NATE WATTERS
SEATTLE WEEKLY/KICKSTARTER
COURTESY LISA NAKAMURA
food@seattleweekly.com
BITE SQUAD
The use of crowdfunding platforms as marketing tools to engage the community prior to opening a restaurant is also an evolving trend. Given that many pop-up and mobile food businesses have already built large followings through social networking, it seems natural for them to eschew traditional partnerships and financing. In many cases, these networks are key—leveraging your nation of food followers and tapping into their networks help fund your move into the big time. No loan applications, no schmoozing investment partners—just engaging with your faithful customers may be enough to raise the funds you need. Lisa Nakamura (formerly of Allium on Orcas Island) recently ran an Indiegogo campaign to help fund her new venture, Gnocchi Bar. She chose that platform over CSC for two reasons: She hasn’t yet secured the bar’s location, which is required for CSC; and with Indiegogo you get to retain the majority of your funds even if you don’t reach your target goal. While the campaign didn’t hit its overall target, Nakamura did see some positive impact from a marketing perspective: “I was expecting friends to step up to the plate, and they did. But it was also
really cool and encouraging to see others come out of the woodwork. I didn’t know them, but they had heard about me—and they thought I had a worthy cause. Every dollar people contributed was a dollar towards a marketing campaign. It helped get the word out about the project. It was the most valuable thing about running the campaign—it brought Gnocchi Bar to a wider audience.” To be fair, not every crowdfunding campaign is successful. In some estimates, nearly two-thirds of all campaigns fail to meet their financial goals. And while it may seem like a simple way to raise capital, in reality it’s anything but. Scott Heimendinger, inventor of the Sansaire immersion circulator, once told me that running his Kickstarter campaign was akin to “having a baby.” Asked about her process, Nakamura said, “We did six revisions of our video, and I learned that you really need to sell your story—not just what you’re doing, but why. Why is it so important? What makes it worthwhile? Why you? It was a great exercise to start asking yourself those questions and really clarify your business plan.” The question for aspiring food-business owners is: Has crowdfunding become the primary way for both aspiring and veteran restaurateurs to raise capital? For those with a dream and a following who want to avoid the arduous process of bank financing, it certainly seems to be. E
nsprinkle@seattleweekly.com
SEATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 31, 2014 — JAN UARY 6, 2015
the people who invested are getting their money back, and at the end of the day I know that I’ve worked for every ounce of this restaurant.”
Fans love Gnocchi Bar.
MORGEN SCHULER
SAMATHA WAGNER
Pizza at Gabbiano, funded by CSC.
Paseo closes • Pioneer Square explosion • Pizza: Roman-style, deepdish, by the slice, vegan! • Restaurants with ampersands (&) in their name • Aragona too ambitious? Too expensive? Gone! • Rachel Coyle finally finds B&M location • Central Co-op sells edible bugs • Frelard becomes foodie fringe neighborhood • Jason Franey leaves Canlis! • Book Bindery closes, becomes Hommage • Ethan Stowell opens 9th restaurant • Murray Stenson and crew ditch Elysian • Mixed-use food spaces on the rise • Cocktail bars abound • Desserts still suck • Brussels sprouts, sprouted • Foie gras fetish • Uni • Sous vide • Coffee pour-overs • Kraken Congee gets famous funding for real restaurant • Tarik Abdullah wins over Anthony Bourdain! • Pot-infused coffee and hot chocolate • $15 minimum-wage for waiters and back staff • Barrel cocktails • Wine on tap • Veggies! • Offal over? • Sour beers • Mezcal • Bye-bye Bill the Butcher • Overpriced small plates • Fooddelivery-service saturation • Rachel’s Ginger Beer • Rye whiskey • Amaro • Kickstarter • Ramen • Pop-ups • Coffee beers • Wood-fired food • Farmers market menus • Happy hours! • Themed dinners • Breweries! • Indie coffee shops • BBQ • Sunday suppers • Kurtwood Farms fromage • Ingredient-inspired dishes • Seasonal • Desperately seeking good Italian • Shiro leaves Shiro’s • Willows Inn chef wins James Beard Award • Good fries on the rise (finally) E
JAY FRIEDMAN
A
t this point in your life, you’ve likely either heard of or been invited to participate in a crowdfunding campaign. It could be a friend, a relative, or some unknown with a cool idea—the use of the Internet to raise venture capital has gone from quirky to bona fide. Worldwide, crowdfunding platforms have grown from $530 million in 2009 to a whopping $5.1 billion in 2013. And they show no sign of slowing. 2014 saw a rapid rise in the use of platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo to fund everything from the infamous $55,000 potato-salad prank to your favorite food pop-up or truck moving into a brick-and-mortar space. Restaurants are even using crowdfunding to support specific portions of their business—such as the soon-to-be-opened Mammoth on Eastlake, which is raising capital for its growler system. In Seattle, many have become armchair venture capitalists by funding several notable local food businesses: Mike Easton’s Pizzeria Gabbiano; Big Chickie and Tin Umbrella Coffee in Hillman City; the soon-to-be-opened Coyle’s Bakeshop in Greenwood; Culture Club on Capitol Hill. There was even a Kickstarter attempt to save our beloved Paseo. There are now platforms dedicated solely to food-related startups: Barnraiser.us, Foodstart, EquityEats, IconPark. In general, crowdfunding takes two forms—donors receive either some type of reward from the entrepreneur, such as a product or service, or equity in the venture. The Puget Sound Business Journal reported in November 2013 that steakhouse Miller’s Guild, founded by veteran restaurant owner Kurt Huffman, was funded largely by nine partners who kicked in $500K total. But an additional $41K—$13K more than their goal—was raised via Kickstarter. Why did they use Kickstarter? Commercial lenders are hesitant to put funds into unique restaurants without a track record. Mike Easton experienced this firsthand when seeking funding for Roman-style Pizzeria Gabbiano in Pioneer Square. Even though Easton’s Il Corvo is wildly successful, it had been in business just under two years when he and his wife were looking for funds for Gabbiano. This basically kept the couple from leveraging commercial banking, so they instead chose to work with Community Sourced Capital (CSC), a local organization that crowdfunds small businesses via zero-interest microloans made $50 at a time by individuals. Asked about his choice to work with CSC versus Kickstarter or traditional banking or partnership models, Easton said, “There’s something about asking for a gift of money from people I don’t even know that doesn’t sit well with me. I feel like there’s a certain entitlement involved, which I didn’t want to be obligated to fulfill. I felt better about using CSC for our loan. All
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An influx of new Chinese restaurants sweeps Seattle.
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014 was an exciting year for Chinese food in Seattle, with more in store for 2015. A number of new restaurants broke the boundaries of the staid Cantonese food scene (OK, we do have some good Sichuanese restaurants), serving hot pots, noodles, and dumplings that made this longtime Chinesefood skeptic finally swoon. Clearly I’m not alone. For starters, look at the long lines at Boiling Point, which this year opened in the International District’s Uwajimaya Village. This California import offers a wide variety of Taiwanese-style individual hot pots (I’m partial to the mouth-burning Taiwanese Spicy with stinky tofu added), which include various ingredients for those who want a meal without doing any work. In contrast, just a stone’s throw away, Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot (an import from China) provides an interactive all-you-can-eat experience: Servers bring trays of ingredients by request from a large menu, and you cook them yourself in the bubbling broths. Both Boiling Point and Little Sheep expanded from original Bellevue locations, as did Din Tai Fung, which opened this year in University Village. This Taiwan-based chain is best known for its xiao long bao (soup dumplings), but don’t overlook the shrimp and pork shumai. Giving Din Tai Fung a run for the money is Dough Zone in Bellevue’s Crossroads Mall (opening a second spot in Overlake early 2015). At this casual restaurant,the reasonably priced xiao long bao and the crispy shengjian bao are the way to go. Also delicious at Dough Zone are lovely little bowls of delicate noodles, especially the ones with green onions and soy sauce. Spokesperson Ding Xia says that Dough Zone is “looking to serve the Chinese population and beyond, preparing snacklike portions of the Northern-style cuisine that we eat at home, often for breakfast: noodles, dumplings, crepes, and soy milk.” Miah Young, owner of Biang! in Edmonds (where business boomed this past year after its late-2013 opening), says her restaurant has a similar mission: “Each day we prepare five types of dough for our noodles and dumplings and bread so that customers can enjoy our homestyle cooking.” The difference: The namesake biang-
Isla Manila’s Chineseinspired “flip-sum.”
biang noodles (from Xi’an province) are long and wide, assertively chewy, and addictively delicious— especially when topped with oil-seared chili flakes. Seattle’s resurgent love of Chinese food extends
to dim sum, but with a twist, applying the concept most interestingly at non-Chinese places. You can choose Asian-fusion food from a cart (or a tray) at the new Tray Kitchen in Fremont (think kung pao corned beef tongue and kimchi falafel), or go to Isla Manila Bar & Grill in Northgate for an intriguing foray into Filipino food via a “flip sum” meal where adobo, dinuguan, and the like are served in steamer baskets. Hopefully as quality Chinese food continues to trend in Seattle, the quality of traditional Chinese dim sum will improve before long, too. Also in the “Chinese with a twist” category are two new places on Capitol Hill. Just open is Zhu Dang, where chef Pat Chang says “We’re cooking Seattle-style Chinese food, using Chinese technique with as much local, seasonal ingredients as possible.” Owner Steve Cheng adds that there’s a “focus on flavor over tradition.” At Zhu Dang, dishes like Mongolian beef tartare and General Tso’s veal sweetbreads will likely appeal to Capitol Hill’s cocktail-sipping clientele. Not far away, watch for the mid-year opening of Lionhead from Poppy (and former Herbfarm) chef Jerry Traunfeld. Inspired by a recent food tour of China (he’s a longtime fan of Chinese food), Traunfeld says that Lionhead’s emphasis will be Sichuanese dishes: “My mission is to cook Chinese food using high-quality ingredients that people in Seattle will love, not to recreate dishes as authentically as possible. There will be a degree of creativity in my menu, but more importantly I’m trying to come up with what I think is the best version of each dish with flavors that are true to the cuisine.” Traunfeld adds that “Sichuanese food is exciting and addicting, but I think the flavors are still undiscovered by many people here.” That view is far from limited to Sichuanese food. The good news: New Chinese restaurants in Seattle helped us discover new flavors in 2014, and hopefully 2015 will be just as propitious. E
food@seattleweekly.com
arts&culture The Best of 2014
Across all disciplines, our critics list their faves from the past year. BY SW CRITICS
Dance by Sandra Kurtz
Opposing Forces: Brysen “JustBe” Angeles (left) and Fever One.
Vergara Jr., Brysen “JustBe” Angeles, Fever One, Mozeslateef, Michael O’Neal Jr., and WD4D) for this program that both draws from and extends hip-hop dancing. (October, On the Boards.)
Visual Arts
By Brian Miller and Kelton Sears SAM’s summer exhibit Modernism in the
Pacific Northwest: The Mythic and the Mystical leaned most heavily on Mark Tobey, Morris
The Frye presented two spring shows with a transpacific theme: Isamu Noguchi and Qi Baishi: Beijing 1930 and Mark Tobey and Teng Baiye: Seattle/Shanghai. Together they offered a terrific educational primer on the currents of Asian art that washed onto these shores with such force in the prewar years. For sheer visual pleasure, however, it’s hard to top the large series of
calligraphy-brush paintings by Isamu Noguchi, a anomaly in his long career a sculptor. Just simple black-on-white figure studies, really, they reduce the human form—compassionately and playfully—in a thoroughly modern direction. BRM A Japanese artist based in Hawaii, Yumiko Glover showed sad yet bright colored paintings in Moe: Elements of the Floating World at Bryan Ohno Gallery this fall. Her almost gaudy acrylic paintings look back uneasily on a native culture saturated with anime imagery, sex, video games, schoolgirl fetishes, naive folklore, and the whole kawaii industry. Moe is a slang shorthand for idealized youth and femininity, where the creepy meets the innocent— usually from a male perspective. Glover’s girls push back against the orb-eyed pixies and too-short plaid skirts so common in manga. BRM Suyama Space is a great gallery because it allows artists a sense of scale that’s not available elsewhere. Lillienthal|Zamora’s enormous fall
installation Never Finished, with its spider webs of dangling power cords and cascading fluorescent light tubes, filled the space not just with its physicality, but its light. KS Local artist Dan Webb is known mainly as a carver of wood, and much of that material was on view in Fragile Fortress at BAM this spring. How he hews a dandelion, say, from a solid block of old timber is fairly amazing. But I loved an earlier work made from his days not long out of Cornish: a medieval suit of armor, like something you’d expect to see at the Met in New York, only it’s constructed out of silvery duct tape. It wouldn’t stop a lance or an arrow, and the piece—as other Webb creations often do—somewhat humorously alludes to its own humble material. BRM Prior to his June show at Gallery4Culture (Our Alley), Scott Kolbo recruited his kids and their pals to stage playful scenes in a lawless, enchanted alley inspired by his own Spokane childhood. He videotaped those scenes, added effects, then traced over them by hand, creating a busy lattice of pencil outlines and gestures. In glowing light boxes, those overlaid drawings and the videotaped source characters gradually converged or settled into new compositions within the same frame. Childhood was put on pause, repeatedly, revealing new facets of play. BRM SAAM’s summer show Deco Japan —entirely sourced from Florida collectors Robert and Mary Levenson—was an odd mélange of stuff: posters, kimonos, postcards, ashtrays, furniture, vases, etc. At the same time, it was fascinatingly specific, covering the years 1920-45, when Japan was rapidly industrializing and opening itself to the West. This was a time of luxury, speed, and streamlining for the urban elite; and most of the items in Deco Japan felt like artifacts, not art. Yet I loved the glimpses into an ephemeral, hedonistic demimonde. The sheet-music covers and matchboxes reveal bare legs, high heels, neon glimmers, bobbed hair, martini glasses, and cigarettes—once forbidden frivolity soon to be snuffed out war and the atomic bomb. BRM Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Nicholas Galanin, and Nep Sidhu’s effortlessly cool, transcendental work managed to confront racism and colonialism while somehow maintaining a sense of humor. Represented in the Frye’s summer exhibit Your Feast Has Ended, these artists are making new myths for the modern age. One of the most thought-provoking shows of the year. KS Seattle photographer Matika Wilbur earned a solo show, her first, at TAM this summer. In it she presented about 50 portraits from her Project 562, which seeks to portray members from each federally recognized tribe in the U.S. Wilbur’s portraits reflect the preferred self-image of her subjects: If they want to wear traditional costumes, fine; if they favor golf shirts and baseball caps, that’s also fine. Wilbur aims to capture each individual at their dignified best, but her images aren’t the romantic depictions of an out-
SEATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 31, 2014 — JAN UARY 6, 2015
Noguchi’s Ye Kau Jong, seen at the Frye.
NOGUCHI MUSEUM
Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson, though the survey extended to their artistic heirs. For me, the real revelation—among some important new gifts from Marshall and Helen Hatch—was a few Seattle street scenes from Tobey, made before his “white writing” breakthrough. They have the same pulsing, teeming energy—a kind of Whitmanesque I-among-themany quality. They’re both ashcan-prosaic on the one hand and deeply spiritual on the other. BRM Seen at G. Gibson Gallery early this spring, Cable Griffith’s paintings in Quest push past the “Are video games art?” debate and the schlocky glut of fan art flooding the city by taking game-inspired environments and turning them into brilliant, massive landscapes of their own. Makes sense for an artist who cites the Elder Scrolls series and The Legend of Zelda as some of his main inspirations. KS Though I didn’t have time to write about the photos of Daniel Joseph Martinez at James Harris Gallery this fall, they really stuck with me. To the desolate, empty storefronts of his South L.A. neighborhood, Martinez adds political text (“Thank You, Mr. Bush”). Then there were the hunchback portraits: The artist using prosthetics and makeup, head covered with masks or adorned with a bishop’s hat, prayers from different creeds inked on his naked, contorted torso. Faith becomes ugly and twisted. In Reflections From a Damaged Life, there’s a sense of wreckage both spiritual and physical. BRM
NATE WATTERS
Olivier Wevers has been developing into a skilled and thoughtful choreographer with his company Whim W’him. But when he works with material that comes from his ballet background, he stretches just a bit further. In January at Cornish Playhouse, his witty take on Les Sylphides translated the moonlight and poetry of the Fokine original into a hipster dinner party. It was as smart as it was silly. Performed in February at Bellevue’s Meydenbauer Center, Chop Shop has become an annual valentine to contemporary dance, rounding up a generous program of local and national artists. Director Eva Stone has upped the ante every year, and this edition was packed with kinetic energy. Carl Orff ’s cantata Carmina Burana is a staple of the choral repertory, and has been fertile material for several choreographers, who usually go with its bawdy medieval text. Spectrum Dance Theater’s Donald Byrd, who loves to switch things around, took a different pathway and in March staged this workshop Carmina as a revival meeting. (He’s supposed to come out with a full version in 2015.) Lewis Carroll wrote stories that were as much for adults as they were for children, and burlesque artist Lily Verlaine took full advantage of every opportunity in April’s zestful Burlesque Alice in Wonderland, seen at the Triple Door. Seattle Dance Project was created to give mature dancers a place to explore new options. Yet after almost six years of thoughtful work, the artists involved have come to another bend in the road and folded up the ensemble. They left us with a lovely final program in May at Broadway Performance Hall, including Want, a new work by Wade Madsen that featured each performer, combining their kinetic skills with their human resonance. Pacific Northwest Ballet continues to burnish its loving restoration of the Romantic-era classic Giselle. In 2011, PNB staged a version that brought back all the nuances from the original choreography. This May, it commissioned new sets and costumes to match that period feel. A beautiful production looked even better. There are over 17,000 islands in the Indonesian archipelago, and there is at least one distinct dance for each of them. With July’s performance by Malam Budaya at Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, we saw a handful of those works, up close and in exquisite detail, with a small ensemble led by Astrid Vinje. There are as many kinds of virtuosity as there are performers in the Men in Dance festival (which returned to Broadway Performance Hall in September). Highlights this year included Aaron Loux in a revival of Mark Morris’ folkinflected I Love You Dearly and sometime Seattleite Bill Evans, in a beautiful tap solo, organizing multiple rhythms with his feet. Choreographer Amy O’Neal deserves all the attention she got for Opposing Forces, along with her phenomenal performers (Alfredo “Free”
» CONTINUED ON PAGE 16 15
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sider (like Edward S. Curtis). They also served as a welcome prelude, if not rebuttal, to TAM’s new Haub Family Collection of art from the Old West. BRM Running through January 11at SAM, Pop Departures features the expected big names— Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, and company, who so thoroughly disrupted the art scene of the 1960s. The first part of the show (i.e. the big names) is better than the back nine, as we pass through the ’80s to the present day. There’s also not enough of any one artist, a problem inherent to any group history show. Case in point: The word paintings of Ed Ruscha; I could look at them all day. There’s irony and humor to his work (as in America Her Best Product), but also the bygone appeal of crisply executed ads and slogans that no longer sell to us. BRM
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TOWN HALL
CIVICS
SCIENCE
by Margaret Friedman, Brian Miller, and Kevin Phinney In Arthur Miller’s The Price, staged by ACT in June, Charles Leggett plays a demoralized cop revisiting his parents’ apartment to sell the furniture. Alone, he turns on the Victrola and laughter erupts from the 1930s vinyl (or whatever records were made from back then). We watch his character catch the ha-ha’s, a divine affliction so endearing it almost vindicates the online-dating cliché “loves to laugh.” MF
ARTS & CULTURE
June’s production of The Hunchback of Seville by Washington Ensemble Theatre may have been too shrill for its own good, but don’t say you weren’t warned: Chambermaid Espanta (Rose Cano) appeared every few minutes to provide some new dire prediction, while carefully riding the edge between comic understatement and scene-stealing. Brilliant. KP During Book-It’s June production of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, amid dozens of über-cool cartoon-inspired visuals, the ice storm—simulated with strobe lights and a rickety plane in an arctic landscape—remains seared in memory. Kavalier flies on a vigilante revenge mission for which the raging, blinding blizzard constitutes a near-perfect metaphor. MF No matter whether he’s playing Ebenezer Scrooge, Sherlock Holmes, or the emasculated husband in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at Seattle Rep last April, R. Hamilton Wright is Seattle’s jackof-all-trades. He’s terrific in a lead role, knows when and how to pick his moments as a supporting cast member, and directs with a rapier-like clarity. Miss nothing he ever does, and you’re sure to believe Seattle is a world-class theater town. KP All the Way/The Great Society (ending Sunday at the Rep). So many moments that hit you in the chest: LBJ swiping Dixiecrat Senator Dick Russell’s gravy at table; the ghost of a cop-murdered black man infusing MLK with resolve; LBJ, ensconced in the burned rubble encroaching upon his White House living room, agonizing over the Vietnam War condolence letters he must write. MF
COMMUNITY
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(1/6) Matt Taibbi The Growth of ‘American Injustice’ (1/7) First Hill Public Realm Action Plan (1/7) Aaron Glass and Barb Cranmer with Feliks Banel Edward Curtis and ‘The Making of Modern Cinema’ (1/8) Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe Volcanic Legacies, Lessons (1/10) Early Music Guild and Seattle Baroque Orchestra: A ‘Twelfth Night’ Celebration with Julie Andrijeski
Tuesday’s
Wednesday’s
(1/12) Town Music Third Coast Percussion TOWN HALL
CIVICS
SCIENCE
ARTS & CULTURE
COMMUNITY
(1/13) Debate: Daniel DiSalvo WWW.TOWNHALLSEATTLE.ORG and Michael McCann ‘The Power of Public Unions’ (1/14) Marin Katusa The Future of the
JENNY GRAHAM
SEATTLE WEEKLY • DECEMBER 31, 2014 — JANUARY 6, 2015
(1/6) Springer & The Story Collider: Springer Storytellers: Stories About Science
Willis as LBJ. Little Shop of Horrors is where Alan Menken—the tunesmith behind so many animated Disney classics—first found acclaim by pairing jukebox jingles with Space Age sci-fi. In March, this 5th Avenue/ACT co-production hit all the high notes, adding a few flourishes that even the original Off-Broadway show missed. Fun for the whole family, if you excuse the carnivorous plant at center stage. KP The night before his death, as envisioned in The Price , MLK (Reginald André Jackson) spends a flirtatious, slightly putrid, and very human evening with angelic chamber maid Camae (Brianne A. Hill), who ultimately leads him through a dazzling multimedia retrospective of civil rights struggles, fortitude, abuses, and beauty. The Götterdämmerung orchestrated this September in ArtsWest’s intimate theater came at the viewer from all directions, with screens on every wall—a maelstrom of meaning en route to tragedy. MF
Jack Willis, playing a titanic LBJ in The Great Society (and All the Way), gets a huge laugh about Medicaid, of all things. How could anyone be against expanding Medicaid, so popular when President Johnson introduced the program in 1965? Yet today Seattle theatergoers have seen how Republican governors of Southern states oppose Medicaid expansion because it would help ... those people. Yesterday’s dull social program becomes today’s punch line. That’s political progress, I guess. (Also: in All the Way, the exhuming of a slain civil-rights activist’s corpse from a center-stage grave while the play’s action continues around it.) BRM Although this fall’s Seattle Shakespeare Co. production of Twelfth Night didn’t produce much mirth, it did yield some surreal images that illuminated truths about the inner psyche of the play. To wit, when heroine Viola rifles through a shipwrecked treasure chest and finds a man in tuxedo within it, presaging her own walk on the male side. And later,
cross-dressed as a man, she hallucinates her male twin (Sebastian) in female drag. Uncanny! MF I wasn’t crazy about the spring revival of King Lear (also by Seattle Shakes). I disliked Lear’s wheeling Cordelia’s dead body out to us on a trolley cart. Yet now I must admit that that particular image has lodged permanently in my mind. Less sentimental than his carrying her in his arms, it may be a more plausible, character-revealing (if chaste and mercantile) directorial choice on Sheila Daniels’ part than I gave credit for. MF
Classical by Gavin Borchert
stage@seattleweekly.com
CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF THE CLASSIC FILM
OPENINGS & EVENTS
CAPTAIN ROYALE REDUX A burlesque salute (starring
Violet DeVille, Artemis Lark, Cherry Tart, and many others) to great heroes of fiction. Re-bar, 1114 Howell St., purple devilproductions.com. $18–$35. 7:30 p.m. Sat., Jan. 3. THE EDGE Bainbridge Island’s own improv troupe. Bainbridge Performing Arts, 200 Madison Ave. N., Bainbridge Island, 842-8569, theedgeimprov.com. $12–$16. 7:30 p.m. Sat., Jan. 3. A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE Stella, Stanley, and Blanche go at it again. New City Theatre, 1410 18th Ave., 800-838-3006, brownpapertickets.com. $10–$15. Opens Jan. 2. 7:30 p.m. Thurs.–Sat., 2 p.m. Sun. Ends Jan. 25.
CURRENT RUNS
• ALL THE WAY Seattle playwright Robert Schenkkan’s
broad, bustling Tony winner reframes our view of the Lone Star magician/politician Lyndon B. Johnson, played by the excellent Jack Willis and his scramble to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964—all the while consolidating power for his passion project, the War on Poverty. That effort, and the Vietnam War, will fill LBJ’s tumultuous four-year term in Schenkkan’s The Great Society, which alternates with All the Way. MARGARET FRIEDMAN Seattle Repertory Theatre, 155 Mercer St. (Seattle Center), 443-2222. $17– $150. 7:30 p.m. Tues.–Sun., plus Wed. and weekend matinees; see seattlerep.org for exact schedule. Ends Jan. 4. A CHRISTMAS STORY If you missed it on TBS’ 24-hour broadcast, see the musical version onstage! 5th Avenue Theatre, 1308 Fifth Ave., 625-1900, 5thavenue.org. $29 and up. Ends 7:30 p.m. Wed., Dec. 31. THE DINA MARTINA CHRISTMAS SHOW An all-new show from the adored, tireless, must-be-seen-to-bebelieved entertaineress, with Chris Jeffries on keyboard. Re-bar, 1114 Howell St., 800-838-3006, brown papertickets.com. Ends 8 p.m. Wed., Dec. 31. THE GREAT SOCIETY In the second of Robert Schenkkan’s two extraordinary history plays, there’s nary a spare moment in its four-year span to notice the deep structure; it’s pure, breathtaking entertainment. The newly elected LBJ (Jack Willis) mocks any potential indignation about political means and ends: “‘Oh my God, he’s lying!’ Like that’s never happened before in the history of the Republic.” While the audience chuckles, the subject of lying ricochets past the growing tally of Vietnam War dead—projected above the incrementally crumbling set—and lands in Martin Luther King’s strategy room, where LBJ’s procrastination on voting rights feels like a lie. Expertly directed by Bill Rauch, at least a dozen stories interweave then converge at the pernicious maw of the Vietnam War (most actors perform multiple roles). The three hours pass speedily, fueled by myriad political and social parallels with today: police violence against blacks, the perfect as the enemy of the good, people voting against their interest (if at all), racial privilege, and the cost of a foreign war versus domestic spending. This is what theater was invented for. Don’t miss it. MARGARET FRIEDMAN Seattle Repertory Theatre, 155 Mercer St. (Seattle Center), 443-2222. $17–$150. 7:30 p.m. Tues.–Sun., plus Wed. and weekend matinees; see seattlerep.org for exact schedule. Ends Jan. 4. MARY POPPINS After little Jane and Michael Banks turn and burn a string of governesses, an Edwardian version of Super Nanny appears to transform the naughty kids and their unhappy elders with alchemy and adventure. In the title role, Cayman Ilika finds a Julie Andrews-esque balance of cool and compassion. ALYSSA DYKSTERHOUSE Village Theatre, 303 Front St. N., Issaquah, 425-392-2202. $40–$72. Runs Tues.–Sun.; see villagetheatre.org for exact schedule. Ends Jan 4. (Runs at the Everett PAC Jan. 9–Feb. 8.) TEATRO ZINZANNI: HACIENDA HOLIDAY Showbiz couple Vivian Beaumount and Clifton Caswell (Christine Deaver and Kevin Kent) return to a swanky hotel to renew their vows, in a romantic tale as spicy as the Southwestinspired menu. 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.
MAKES A GREAT GIFT!
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Classical, Etc.
SEATTLE SYMPHONY The traditional Beethoven’s Ninth
for the new year, with Mozart’s Symphony no. 31 as a rich hors-d’oeuvre. Benaroya Hall, Third Ave. & Union St., 2154747, seattlesymphony.org. 9 p.m. Wed., Dec. 31 ($52 and up, with post-concert party); 8 p.m. Fri., Jan. 2 & Sat., Jan. 3; 2 p.m. Sun., Jan. 4 ($28 and up). 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
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Six Grammy nominations; a Pulitzer prize for a piece ( John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean) it commissioned and premiered; a Carnegie Hall concert (built around Adams’ piece) that was the toast of NYC’s Spring for Music festival, preceded by a no-less-fascinating chamber concert at hipster epicenter Le Poisson Rouge; and a viral video with Sir Mix-A-Lot that outraged everyone in the classical-pundit world who deserved to be outraged—the Seattle Symphony could hardly have had a more triumphant year. The tinderbox of identity politics brought picketers and nationwide media coverage to—Gilbert and Sullivan? (Perhaps not so incongruous when you remember that Gilbert satirized Victorian England in practically every lyric he wrote; up-tothe-minute controversy is in the operettas’ DNA.) The Seattle G&S Society’s July production of The Mikado led to an air-clearing (and, thankfully, nottoo-show-trially) roundtable at Seattle Rep on the intersection of race and theater. Though the Society does traditionalist productions of G&S nearly as well as they can be done, if this leads them to think a bit further outside the box from now on (and if they watch the eye makeup next time), the result of the clash will have been positive all the way around. At Cornish College, British pianist Jonathan Powell devoted eight hours (with two intermissions) to the 1949 Sequentia cyclica super Dies irae by Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892–1988), an Amazon-jungle profusion of contrapuntal and harmonic complexity on top of its epic length. About 50 listeners showed up for part one, 20 for part two; but the six of us who remained for part three will likely never forget it. And in two concerto performances, pianist Mark Salman reminded me of the special thrill of orchestral performances in intimate spaces: a thunderous Liszt Totentanz with Orchestra Seattle; and a rousing, dance-in-your-seat reading of Shostakovich’s manic Concerto no. 1 with trumpeter Brian Chen and the North Corner Chamber Orchestra. Only one thing distracted me during November’s enrapturing first concert (Handel, Britten, Shostakovich, and a very tasty premiere by Roupen Shakarian) by the conductorless North Corner Chamber Orchestra: I couldn’t stop thinking of all the repertory I can’t wait to hear them do in the future. Though Seattle Opera had an otherwise notable year—welcoming its new general director Aidan Lang and the return of the International Wagner Competition—the music theater that’s really stuck with me happened elsewhere: an audaciously gasp-inducing Jerry Springer: the Opera at the Moore and a sparkling and heartfelt A Little Night Music at SecondStory Theater. (Stuck with me, I mean, in a positive sense: I have no trouble recalling what I felt as I walked out of SO’s performance of Menotti’s enragingly exploitative and fraudulent The Consul in March.) E
Stage
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arts&culture» Film SHOWTIMES
JANUARY 2 - 8
THE JERK
FRI - TUES @ 7:00PM / SAT - SUN @ 3:00PM
The 10 Best Films of 2014 Including a tie and one cheat from the year to come. BY ROBERT HORTON
THE LION’S MAIN ART COLLECTIVE
A NIGHT OF QUEER AND TRANS SHORT FILMS
SEATTLE WEEKLY • DECEMBER 31, 2014 — JANUARY 6, 2015
THURSDAY @ 8:00PM
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and Tilda Swinton as immortals lounging around Detroit. The movie makes decadence look pretty good, as the vampires cling to music and books (and regular doses of hospital plasma) while the rest of society declines into barbarism. 3 Under the Skin Good movies create their own worlds, and my top three are all about that. None is more alarming than what we see in this film, in which a mysterious visitor (Scarlett Johansson) lures men to their horrifying ends. Director Jonathan Glazer keeps us guessing right up to the unexpectedly touching conclusion, and composer Mica Levi’s music will give you nightmares. 4 Two Days, One Night I’m looking ahead on this one, because although it counts as a 2014 release, it doesn’t open around here until January 30. But it’s great: Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard plays a factory worker who must go around convincing her fellow employees not to vote her out of a job. The simplicity of the setup is heartwringing, and Belgian filmmaking duo JeanPierre and Luc Dardenne (The Kid With a Bike) have created one of their best. 5 Boyhood This is the film Richard Linklater and his cast took 12 years to make—allowing the realistic aging of its youthful protagonist (Ellar Coltrane, who goes from age 6 to 18). Linklater leaves out the three-act story arc in favor of the gentle unfolding of childhood experiences; that they don’t seem to build to Something Big is part of the point. It’s not a masterpiece—I don’t think it wants to be—but it’s a special movie. 6 Blue Ruin and The Rover (tie). Two action movies with a twist. Ruin is a loopy revenge picture that takes it for granted that revenge is an absurd exercise; leading man Macon Blair gives a heroic performance. Rover is a grim Aussie film, mildly post-apocalyptic, in which Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson make an uneasy duo. Director David Michod strips everything down so that all details matter—including the payoff of the last 60 seconds. 8 Force Majeure A Swedish film that delivered the searing view of marriage that Gone Girl supposedly contained. A husband has a weak moment during a brief crisis; his wife won’t let him forget it.
Director Ruben Östlund keeps the temperature on simmer for the remainder of the film. 9 The Homesman Tommy Lee Jones directed and stars in a Western about a frontier lady (Hilary Swank) guiding a wagon full of deranged women. It has some odd shifts from comedy to drama, but the overall mood is haunting.
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riting a year-end movie wrapup is a useful way of acknowledging quality, but it’s also a handy method for capturing what’s in the air at any given moment. Check lists from 1967 or 1985, and you can tell a lot about the temper of the times. This year, anybody who filed an annual thinkpiece before mid-December missed the movie story of 2014. The film in question, of course, is The Interview—pulled from wide release by its studio, but still the recipient of more press than all the other big holiday movies combined. Seth Rogen’s North Korean assassination-com got Sony hacked and cast a chill across Hollywood. (Anyone care to make a political satire now about Putin’s Russia? Oh, right: Andrey Zvyagintsev already did with Leviathan, due here in February.) Whatever The Interview’s merits—it’s playing the Ark Lodge; see our website for full review—it eclipsed a movie year that was already very mixed. Big Hollywood films disappointed, although the delightful Guardians of the Galaxy—sure to be the year’s top-grossing picture—sent a message that a movie could be wildly popular and still be hugely quirky. And it wasn’t a sequel or a remake. There was encouraging news in the lowerbudgeted ranks, where some filmmakers took fascinating chances. An entire movie about a guy in a car? Steven Knight’s Locke gave Tom Hardy a bravura one-man show. A comedy about abortion? Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child created a risky blend of the thoughtful and the profane, and launched Jenny Slate as a leading lady. And how can we describe Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin—a revenge movie with a Home Alone homage? Maybe the most reassuring sign of the year was the continued health of indie-film stalwarts. Directors like Richard Linklater and Wes Anderson hit high notes, and Jim Jarmusch found new life. John Sayles’ little-seen Go for Sisters (released here in January) was his best in years. Who were the year’s losers? Well, Sony Pictures head Amy Pascal had a hard time of it, as you may have heard. And anyone who ever sent an e-mail in Hollywood is feeling nervous right now. We might also note that the swordand-sandals picture failed to make a comeback: Remember Pompeii, The Legend of Hercules, or just plain Hercules? Neither does anybody else. The holiday-season soft opening of Exodus: Gods and Kings might be the last gasp on that score. But let’s survey the best of 2014, and imagine what all this might tell us about ourselves when we look back in 10 years. A pink box of sugary confections from Mendl’s Bakery to the following: 1 The Grand Budapest Hotel Both hotel and movie seem to spring from a vanished era—but such is the pleasure of Wes Anderson’s wonderful comedy about a fussy hotel manager (Ralph Fiennes) and his way of doing things just so. “His world had vanished long before he ever entered it, but . . . he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.” That’s a description of Fiennes’ Monsieur Gustave, but also of Anderson’s moviemaking method. 2 Only Lovers Left Alive Jim Jarmusch directed this stylish vampire movie, with Tom Hiddleston
Edge of Tomorrow 10 Edge of Tomorrow This sci-fi variation on Groundhog Day was considered a box-office disappointment, but it’s an ingenious piece of big-canvas Hollywood moviemaking. Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt play futuristic warriors navigating a crease in the time-space continuum, in which new lessons must be learned with every repetition of the same day. Many good films jockey for runner-up position. I liked Joanna Hogg’s British mood piece, Exhibition; Kelly Reichardt’s low-key look at ecoterrorists, Night Moves; Roman Polanski’s finely calibrated Venus in Fur; and John Curran’s Aussie walkabout, Tracks. Strong genre pictures were led by Jennifer Kent’s storybook tale The Babadook, Bong Joon-ho’s crazed sci-fi flick Snowpiercer, and—you bet—James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Make room for Ira Sachs’ Love Is Strange, which gave great roles to John Lithgow and Alfred Molina, and the adolescent punk rockers of Lukas Moodysson’s We Are the Best! And there were quite a few good documentaries, but Finding Vivian Maier deserves special note for its poignant profile of an artist who remained completely and utterly unknown—until now. Missed/on my Scarecrow list: Coherence, Jodor-
owsky’s Dune, Lucy. E
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n a filmgoing year that—turning my sourpuss-meter slightly to the right of Robert Horton’s—was less mixed than outright disappointing, Birdman was for me the most purely enjoyable flick of 2014. (Inherent Vice runs a close second, but it doesn’t arrive here until next week.) I won’t say the seamless ribbon of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s backstage shenanigans amounts to anything new or profound, and I don’t buy the magical-realist ending, but Birdman represents bravura, heartfelt filmmaking of the first order. 2 Boyhood, as Horton says, doesn’t aspire to be capital-I-important, but it’s a humanist triumph of time and patience on the part of Richard Linklater and company. And for the audience, we feel invested in its 12-year span like no other film project since the 7 Up series. 3 Released to little fanfare in June, Pawel Pawlikowski’s postwar consideration of the Holocaust in ’60s Poland is now on the foreignlanguage Oscar shortlist—as Ida fully deserves to be. An 18-year-old Catholic novitiate discovers she’s a Jewish foundling from the war. Before taking her vows, a homestead journey with her troubled, unsuspected aunt reveals the limits of piety, forgiveness, and “closure.” Young Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska) shows the courage to turn her back on history. 4 It’s a given that J.K. Simmons will win the Supporting Actor Oscar for his tyrannical turn as the jazz conservatory band leader in Damian Chazelle’s Whiplash, but it also happens to be a terrific film by a bold new talent. I wish this aggressive contest of wills—between Simmons’ teacher and Miles Teller’s young drummer—had been released later in the year, instead of October, to put some muscle and rancor into this bland, virtuous holiday movie season. Whiplash is a brutal, thrilling film about the obsessive pursuit of musical excellence— which, thankfully, has nothing to do with being a good person. 5 Musicians of a different stripe fill the oddball English comedy Frank, which actually has some factual basis in journalist Jon Ronson’s early years in a struggling band led by a psycho genius. The gimmick, supposedly, was to put Michael Fassbender inside a giant papier-mâché head, but the real pathos beneath the comedy lies in the unseen, unfathomable nature of talent. Why do some people have it (despite their other oddities), while
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Michael Keaton’s actor is haunted by his past in Birdman.
other normal souls lack the spark? For all the slapstick orchestrated by director Lenny Abrahamson, Frank is written in a somber, lingering minor key. It respects the final enigma of its hero and his resistance to fame. 6 The only reason I don’t rank The Grand Budapest Hotel higher is because I still think Moonrise Kingdom is a much better Wes Anderson movie. And these year-end lists are, for me, all about discovery and innovation. Grand Budapest is sad, funny, and exquisitely crafted—but that’s also exactly what I expected going in. 7 Force Majeure /Gone Girl (tie). As Horton says, Force Majeure is the superior movie, but Gone Girl is the best crafted American studio product on my list. (Also the only such title on my list; but then I missed Guardians of the Galaxy…) The collaboration between novelist Gillian Flynn and director David Fincher yielded not only a bona fide hit ($164 million and counting), but also a vindication of the audience. It shows that filmgoers don’t demand cheerful, anodyne movies with sympathetic characters. Give us more, please. 8 Art is the putative subject of Frederick Wiseman’s three-hour documentary National Gallery, which I very much wanted to dislike for the simple reason that I’ve seen too many long, narration-free Wiseman docs in the past. Yet it won me over for its sheer immersion in process: the curators’ dilemma of how to sell something old in the age of Instagram and Twitter. (Finding Vivian Maier, which could be a tie here, was a story I already knew; but the two mark fascinating poles between the obscure and the renowned in the art world.) 9 A crazy, comic-inspired parable of class warfare and environmental ruin, Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer is set aboard a train, the movies’ greatest metonym for forward narrative momentum. As the rabble revolt against Tilda Swinton and her corrupt cohort, Bong posits a pulpy conflict that’s both inevitable and futile. Capitalism and cannibalism are one and the same—“zero sum,” as they say. 10 Why isn’t Tommy Lee Jones’ backwards Western The Homesman doing better in theaters? Like Horton, I admire its jolts of comedy and horror. I also think its cussed, ornery, and contrarian view of our precious frontier mythology is what puts it so defiantly out of step with the national mood. The Homesman is about retreat—and even defeat—with honor. And I’ll be curious to see how Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, due January 16, echoes or rebuts that theme.
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arts&culture» Film Rocks in My Pockets: Depression is like lifting a whale?
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The first minutes of Rocks in My Pockets unfold in standard-issue animation of the European variety: cutesy (yet grown-up) drawings, whimsically surreal images, black-comic storytelling. Before long, though, the movie begins traveling in ever-darker spirals, as director-animator Signe Baumane spins a personal tale of family disturbance and depression. The Latvian-born filmmaker reaches back to the story of her grandmother to discover why the women in her family seem inexorably drawn to suicide. (The title refers to family lore about grandma being discovered standing in a river, trying to drown herself—but lacking the weight of rocks that might help her sink to the bottom.) The grandmother, Anna, provides the most colorful part of the saga. She was an educated young woman—evidently uncommon in interwar Latvia—whose career plans changed when she ran off with her married boss, had eight children, and then weathered World War II and the Soviet years that followed. Her disappointment and Job-like burden is captured in the repeated image of her gathering 40 buckets of water every day to keep the family farm going. Baumane animates the film in a mix of papier-mâché objects and simple drawings, an effective way to keep everything personal and handmade. As Baumane explores the instability and suicidal feelings that afflict the women of her family, the film gets a little more scattered. But the fact that Baumane explores her own struggles with depression makes Rocks anything but a distanced, clear-headed examination of an issue. It’s a rare movie that makes you want to check in on how the filmmaker is doing since completing the project. She also narrates the film, in a broadlyaccented, looping voice that never ceases for the entire hour-and-a-half running time. Baumane’s a very funny, slightly unhinged actress; she’d be a spellbinding raconteur at a dinner party. While watching the images, though, I couldn’t shake the thought that her nonstop chattering actually detracts from the power of her quirky visual art—more than once I wished she’d pipe down for a while so I could watch the pictures tell the story. I confess the movie wore me out a little, but it certainly is unusual. There aren’t many first-person cartoon memoirs out there that tie together the history of Latvia with inherited depression, so sheer novelty carries the day. ROBERT HORTON
Viva la Libertà OPENS FRI., JAN. 2 AT SEVEN GABLES. NOT RATED. 94 MINUTES.
I am sure, when Roberto Andò published his novel in 2012, that Italian critics cited Being There and Dave as likely influences. Now directing its adaptation, Andò strikes a lightly comic, wistful tone as identical twin brothers (played by Toni Servillo, from The Great Beauty and Il Divo) shake up the nation’s politics with a role swap. Estranged for 25 years, Enrico is
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the weary, antidepressant-pill-popping leader of Italy’s opposition left (though cozy with the ruling right); while philosopher Giovanni has evidently published a few books, but lives carefree and contentedly in a no-security mental asylum (where he’s also been practicing his tango moves). Enrico is married yet childless, still pining for the one great love of his past: Danielle (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), now a married mother in Paris. Enrico’s political party and globe-trotting wife seem equally bored with him; the nation’s politics are in perpetual gridlock; so one morning he simply disappears—leaving loyal lieutenant Andrea (Valerio Mastandrea) to deal with the crisis. Predictably, this is where the movie brightens up, thanks chiefly to Servillo’s unhinged zeal. Wearing his brother’s elegant suits and glasses, yet with hair inexplicably gone gray, the imposter bursts onto an ossified political scene, spouting philosophy and jokes. He’s a man of the people: hugging factory workers and scolding the press. He plays hide-and-seek with the confounded Prime Minister and, with a female factotum, puts those tango skills to good use. The polls are rising thanks to this truth-telling, seemingly reanimated old pol! Hardworking Andrea suddenly looks like a genius, and the false Enrico actually treats him like a friend— even a son. Everything’s sunny in Italy, while the actual Enrico’s adventures in wintry Paris don’t carry such satiric spark. Danielle allows Enrico to hide with her family, even gets him a film-set job moving props (thereby mixing with the proles), but an affair is out of the question. Her movie director husband and cute daughter don’t do much for the plot, other than humanize Enrico in all the expected ways. We know Enrico will eventually return to power in Rome; the question is only when. Given the boring range of choices available to us in American politics—professorial Obama, cautious Hillary, ersatz populists on the right— Andò’s gentle comedy ought to resonate more. But Italy itself is gradually emerging from the colorful corruption and bling of the Berlusconi years. The notion that a boldly unscripted and unfiltered leader could shake the nation out of its torpor is attractive, but not the correct comedic remedy. (Also, where are the actual voters here? They exist only as poll numbers, not people, notwithstanding Giovanni’s final invocation of Brecht.) Viva la Libertà offers a tame political fantasia where more lacerating laughs are needed. BRIAN MILLER
Winter Sleep RUNS FRI., JAN. 2-THURS., JAN. 8 AT GRAND ILLUSION. NOT RATED. 196 MINUTES.
The rustic hotel at the heart of Winter Sleep is a strikingly unfamiliar place: Located somewhere in Turkey’s Anatolian countryside, perched on a rocky slope, the buildings seem to emerge directly from the stone of the hillside itself. The cave-like setting might suggest we have not evolved very far from our primitive ancestors, an implication supported by the film’s portrait of psychological cruelty and selfish behavior. In the course of 196 slow minutes, we discover the world of Aydin (Haluk Bilginer, from Rosewater), who inherited the inn and is now running it after working as an actor for many years. He also inherited a bunch of local rental properties, the income from which allows him to sit around penning op-ed newspaper essays while washing his hands of the economic woes of his tenants. Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s previous film was Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), one of the best movies of the decade thus far. Although Winter Sleep won the top prize at Cannes this year, Ceylan isn’t quite at that level in this outing. He does retain his uncanny eye for landscapes, a rich talent for getting the most out of actors, and a novelist’s grasp of how small incidents can open up an entire world—in this case, the small incident is a child throwing a rock at Aydin’s truck. The rock breaks some window glass, but it also begins the process of cracking apart Aydin’s arrogant sense of life. The kid isn’t around much, but he witnesses some of the film’s most devastating moments, including the humiliation of his responsible uncle (Serhat Kiliç) because of the family’s debt to landlord Aydin. After a brilliant opening hour, Ceylan falls out of rhythm—he has cited the influence of Chekhov on this film, but Chekhov kept the drumbeat and the humor going. Two extremely long and talky sequences dominate the middle of Winter Sleep: Aydin and his sister (Demet Akbag) calmly engaging in a duel of mutual laceration; and Aydin and his younger wife (the superb Melisa Sözen) arguing over her charity work—he insists on “helping” her with things she desperately needs to do herself. Those scenes are precise and well observed, but the film has a hard time finding its stride again. If it fails to finish as strongly as it began, Winter Sleep nevertheless collects a series of haunting moments and unflinching exchanges. It’s not as great as it wants to be, but it doesn’t miss by much. ROBERT HORTON E
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Local & Repertory THE JERK/THE RUNNING MAN Steve Martin stars
in the former, from 1979 and not his finest work. The latter, from 1987, features Arnold Schwarzenegger in a sci-fi adaptation of a Stephen King novel. (R) Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684. $7-$9. Fri.-Weds. See central-cinema.com for showtimes. THE HANGOVER The 2009 bro-com made stars of Zach Galifianakis, Bradley Cooper, and company. This is a “hecklevision” presentation, meaning you send your texts up on the big screen. (R) Central Cinema, $10$10. 8 p.m. Thurs. IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE Times are tough in Frank Capra’s 1946 holiday classic. Banks are failing. People are losing their homes. Veterans are returning from a bloody war abroad. Families are falling apart. And all these stresses converge during the holidays, when there may not even be enough money in the household to buy any presents. Sound familiar? In the GI’s 44th-annual screening of this seasonal classic, the distressed town of Bedford Falls could today be Anytown, USA. And beleaguered banker James Stewart could be any small businessman struggling to remain solvent. If It’s a Wonderful Life is arguably the best Christmas movie ever made, that’s because it’s certainly one of the most depressing Christmas movies ever made. Yet amazingly, 68 years later, it preserves the power to inspire hope for better days ahead. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935, grandillusioncinema.org. $5-$9. Ends Thurs., Jan. 1.
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THE PRINCESS BRIDE/WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY Two family favorites are
running on a complicated weekend schedule through New Year’s Day. The 1987 Bride is being screened as a quote-along presentation (“My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die” etc.) while the 1971 Wonka features “Smell-O-Vision,” so be warned if you’re fragrance-intolerent. (NR) SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), 324-9996, $7-$12. See siff.net for showtimes. Ends Thurs., Jan. 1.
Ongoing
BIG EYES The pancake-eyed-waif portraits of Walter and
Tatum), who won gold in the 1984 Olympic Games, isn’t very bright. He’s got a puppy-dog earnestness; his ears have turned to cauliflowers after so much time on the mat; he’s accustomed to taking orders from his older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), who also won gold in ’84. Yet Mark is suddenly on his own when he accepts the patronage of the eccentric multimillionaire John E. du Pont (Steve Carell). In Bennett Miller’s clinically chilly true-crime tale, the murderous outcome is never in doubt. One brother will perish and du Pont go to jail (where he died in 2010). There was the same kind of underlying criminal inevitability to Miller’s 2005 Capote, where the surprise lay in how a talented, frivolous writer created his unlikely masterpiece. Here, I’m sorry to say, there’s no such consolation. Foxcatcher is uniformly well crafted and acted, though Carell playing the villain isn’t really the selling point. With his birdlike prosthetic nose, craned neck, and opaque, upper-toothed smile, Carrell’s du Pont remains a mystery, but not an interesting mystery. (R) B.R.M. Sundance, Meridian, Lincoln Square, others THE GAMBLER This movie has its roots in Dostoyevsky and a thoughtful, near-classic ’70s film by James Toback (James Caan was the the star). The lead role is a failed novelist and university professor, whose gambling problem and apparent death wish is at the crux of the story. Not a Mark Wahlberg role, in short. But he plays it, and he’s terrific. Wahlberg’s Jim has a great deal to feel burned out about. He’s disgusted with his career as a writer, he insults his students, and he asks his mother (Jessica Lange) for enormous amounts of money. Badly in debt, Jim has one talented student (Brie Larson, the gifted actress from Short Term 12) who knows about his gambling. Written by William Monahan and directed by Rupert Wyatt, The Gambler isn’t too interested in psychological digging, although there’s something intriguing about Jim’s assertions that he isn’t actually a gambler. (Maybe he just really wants to lose, in every sense.) But sometimes plot can carry the day, and the strands of The Gambler—Jim parlaying his various debts against each other, and betting on a basketball game—are skillfully played. (R) R.H. Sundance, Pacific Place, Thornton Place, Lincoln Square, Cinebarre, others THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES
Peter Jackson’s crowded final film of the J.R.R. Tolkien universe begins in mid-breath. Fiery breath: The flying dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) was loosed at the end of Part Two, and his flaming rampage is in full swing as Five Armies commences. With no memory-refreshing from the previous chapters, we launch into a dozen or so plotlines: all those names and all those creatures, plus cameo appearances from LOTR cast members. The hubbub renders nominal hero Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) a team player rather than a true protagonist. The second half of the picture is overwhelmed by a giant battle (there may be five armies involved, but I’m a little vague on that), which ping-pongs between thousands of computergenerated soldiers and clever hand-to-hand combat involving the principals. Jackson is as resourceful as ever at exploiting cool locations—crumbling bridges and iced-over lakes—for cartoony stunts. (PG-13) R.H. Cinerama, Meridian, Pacific Science Center IMAX, Ark Lodge, Majestic Bay, Lincoln Square, Thornton Palce, others THE IMITATION GAME A ripping true story can survive even the Oscar-bait effect. Benedict Cumberbatch plays the brilliant English code-breaker Alan Turing as a borderline-autistic personality, a rude brainiac who during World War II fiddles with his big computing machine while his colleagues stand around scratching their heads. Turing’s homosexuality only gradually enters the picture, and even when he proposes marriage to fellow code-breaker Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), it isn’t treated as a really big deal. Even if the movie sketches simplistic conflicts among its principal characters, the wartime world is so meticulously re-created and the stakes so compelling that it emits plenty of movie-movie sparks. (Morten Tyldum, of the ridiculously entertaining Headhunters, directs.) But the real reason to like this movie is that it’s so diligently pro-weirdo. Especially in Cumberbatch’s truly eccentric hands, Turing stays defiantly what he is: an oddball who uses rationality to solve problems. The film suggests that Turing does not have to become a nicer person—he beat the Germans’ Enigma code and won WWII, so let him be. (PG-13) R.H. SIFF Cinema Egyptian, Sundance, Lincoln Square, Thornton Place, others
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Margaret Keane became inexplicably popular during the ’60s. For director Tim Burton, at least, they still hold a kitschy fascination. As we see in this lighthearted, factually inspired account, the Keanes’ success was born from the beatnik Bay Area of the late ’50s, reversed at the 1964 World’s Fair, and collapsed during the Nixon end of the ’70s. The nation turned more cynical during that span, or developed more sophistication, but Burton isn’t interested in diagnosing the American mood or deciding why the Keanes’ art had its appeal. Big Eyes is a simple comedy of female vindication, and it’s enjoyable as such. Any film with Amy Adams (as the naive painter Margaret), Christoph Waltz (as her creditstealing husband Walter), and Terence Stamp (as the New York Times critic who calls them out) is a film I want to see. Because of Waltz’s lupine charm, Walter’s decision to slap his name on Margaret’s art doesn’t seem so implausible. (“People don’t buy lady art,” he says, and it’s true during this sexist Mad Men era.) Burton’s been down this road before with Ed Wood, also written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. Yet if Margaret is a less colorful figure than Wood, and if we can laugh about her art today, we can never mock her. (PG-13) B.R.M. Pacific Place, Sundance, Lincoln Square, Oak Tree, others 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). Birdman serves so many heady moments it qualifies as a bona fide happening. And 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, SIFF Cinema Uptown, Pacific Place, others
FOXCATCHER The wrestler Mark Schultz (Channing
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arts&culture» Local Music
Our Favorite Local Albums of the Year Seattle Weekly scribes wax on what we loved in 2014. BY SW STAFF
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SEATTLE WEEKLY • DECEMBER 31, 2014 — JANUARY 6, 2015
s we reflect on the past 364 days of 2014, we can only hope 2015 is as productive, yielding more homegrown tunes like those we’ve compiled for you here. In alphabetical order, these are the regional releases we loved this year.
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Childbirth, It’s a Girl! (Help Yourself Records) It bears repeating that this punky 17-minute cassette tape full of songs about menopause and lesbian sex—which only cost $100 to record—beat out Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and Katy Perry on Spin’s “101 Best Songs of 2014” list with a song titled “I Only Fucked You as a Joke.” God bless Childbirth. Seriously. As long as these three ladies keep shredding while sporting maternity gowns, there’s hope for humanity. KELTON SEARS Chimurenga Renaissance, riZe vadZimu riZe (Brick Lane) Ish might get all the attention in Shabazz Palaces, but Tendai Maraire’s incredible musicianship is what buoys the duo’s unique brand of avant-rap. That’s why this haunting, joyous, and inventive album is such a treat. Featuring Maraire’s impressive skills front and center, riZe deftly fuses the artist’s Zimbabwean roots with his hip-hop-fueled upbringing for an entirely original sound. Dude, thank you for showing all of us that mbira and ngoma sound great with rumbling synth bass behind it. KS Deep Sea Diver, Always Waiting EP (selfreleased) I became a die-hard fan of this band in under 20 minutes. Having never heard Deep Sea Diver before, I was completely blown away by this four-song outpouring of intricate ambient-pop. Always Waiting hits hard with tasteful guitar shredding, unique synthesized percussion, compelling lyrics, and the hauntingly beautiful vocals of front woman/songwriter Jessica Dobson.
STIRLING MYLES
FF, Lord (Couple Skate) In its review, The Seattle Times claims that “Seattle’s FF needs to do some soul searching,” alleging that the band is a simple My Bloody Valentine/Sonic Youth ripoff. I think the Times needs to do some closer listening, because Lord is anything but a reboot—it’s a collection of brilliantly written earworm punk songs that possess a distinctly modern Northwestern fury and some of the best guitar tones I’ve heard all year. Sure, there aren’t many bells and whistles, but the raw energy in songs like “Dusted” and “Caught in a Dream” hit way harder because of it. My Bloody Valentine doesn’t make me headbang like FF. KS Goodbye Heart, Restless Nights EP (selfreleased) There’s a simplicity to this atmospheric album that makes it nearly irresistible. Over just two synths, a guitar, and a drum machine, Sam Ford and Nila K Leigh pair their husky and pristine voices (respectively) to blend the dreamy and
dark sides of electro-pop and rock, especially on “Wish.” AZARIA C. PODPLESKY Damien Jurado, Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son (Secretly Canadian) Time and again, Jurado proves that all you need are four chords to convey a powerful message. Known best for his bare-bones approach to folk, he went a bit off the rails with this one, venturing into a haze of a psychedelia. His strong lyricism remains the same, just with welcome experimentation. SM Kairos, self-titled EP (Fin Records) This band is a staple for all space-grunge goddesses. The six-track EP from Lena Simon (La Luz, Pollens) ebbs and flows between groovy and smoldering, bringing the listening experience an ethereal quality. What’s most impressive is that Simon performed every instrument on the record herself. DIANA M. LE
Luluc, Passerby (Sub Pop) I was moved by this tender wisp of an album immediately after the first few gentle strums of opening track “Small Window.” Folky, acoustic records are a dime a dozen, but here there’s not a trace of the insincerity or zealotry evoked by so many of them. Like Beth Gibbons, vocalist Zoe Randell has a centered, contemplative style, interpreting lyrics that seem to magically hover around these 10 lightly embellished songs. The album’s existential shadow grounds it in reality, culminating in a bittersweet balance. Very pretty music. GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT
Lusine, Arterial EP (Ghostly International) For more than a decade, Seattle producer Lusine (aka Jeff McIlwain) has seduced listeners with airy, warm synths spiraling over glitched beats. On this EP, Lusine’s rich textures grow even deeper. McIlwain’s masterful chopping and dicing of vocal treatments percolate throughout Arterial ’s lush rhythms, resulting in one of the year’s most exciting electronic releases. DAVE EINMO My Goodness, Shiver + Shake (Votiv Music) This album is like an onion: The more you listen, the more layers are revealed. Guitarist/ vocalist Joel Schneider and drummer Andy Lum are pros at creating solid blues-rock jams, but their knack for infusing that foundation with assorted country, folk, and garage- and indierock influences makes this one a standout. ACP Naomi Punk, Television Man (Captured Tracks) Olympia’s Naomi Punk is all about tension and
release. Jagged guitar riffs and staccato vocals will drone on forever, engulfing listeners in noisy monotony. Then they finally let up, allowing vocals to elongate and chords to ring out. The reward isn’t immediate, but when it hits, it’s a beautiful and engrossing experience. DUSTY HENRY
Odesza, In Return (Counter Records) Dance music can be art. Odesza embraces this idea throughout its sophomore record, showing a mastery of popular trends like vocal samples and bass drops, contorting them into moody and atmospheric soundscapes. Tracks like “For Us” bridge the gap between mainstream club bangers and underground synth-pop. DH Perfume Genius, Too Bright (Matador) I’m totally in love with Perfume Genius, and with the new, incredibly strange video for “Fool,” my admiration has just deepened. Mike Hadreas does things his own way; whether it’s what people expect or don’t understand, he honestly doesn’t seem to care, as long as it rings true. MORGEN SCHULER Porter Ray, Fundamentals (self-released) This album sits at the top of the heap of strong rap releases that dropped in the second half of 2014. The MC’s ability to paint such vivid pictures with words alone is unmatched. Pair that with his subdued delivery and some hazy beats, and it’s no wonder Sub Pop signed him. MICHAEL F. BERRY Posse, Soft Opening (Beating a Dead Horse) Posse’s latest record is full of beautiful bummers. Vocalists Sacha Maxim and Paul Wittmann-Todd sing seemingly unaffectedly, subtly fluctuating in and out of monotone. Yet that unattached feeling is what makes Soft Opening feel so emotional. Underscored by lush guitars and methodical drumming, the record becomes a dreamy ode to despondency. What it lacks in flash, it makes up in smart lyricism and thoughtful wallowing. DH Shabazz Palaces, Lese Majesty (Sub Pop) Expectations can suffocate an artist. The pressure of living up to a debut as critically acclaimed as Black Up (2011) could have crushed most groups. Instead, Shabazz Palaces’ 2014 sophomore release affirms the duo’s seat at the table of new hip-hop royalty. The album’s dreamy, sonic exploration serves as a challenge to mainstream rappers to up their game. DE Shaprece, Molting EP (self-released via Noisetrade) 2014 was the year of the vibe, and
Shaprece tapped directly into it. A scant six songs long, Molting follows its own groove, pairing the singer’s lyrical voice with gorgeous strings, ambient synths, and crisp, eclectic soul. With collaborators like Phil Peterson and producer IG88, expect big things from the forthcoming full-length album. GE Sisters, Diamonds of Gold EP (self-released) In my September review of this release, I noted that while I liked each song individually, the album felt disjointed. What I didn’t say was, “So what?” Andrew Vait and Emily Westman are playfully experimenting, pairing textures like the electro-pop of “Green” with the plucky piano of “Chickens Fatten.” Sisters is breathing new life into the scene with their singular style, and we need it. MS Tacocat, NVM (Hardly Art) It’s appropriate that the artwork for Tacocat’s sophomore album is covered in gumballs. Every song feels like a pop-rock confection, each more tantalizing than the last. Whereas other garage-rock revivalists like Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees have put a focus on fuzz and mayhem, Tacocat centers its lively tracks in a clean mix and strong pop melodies. When all the bleak news becomes too much to bear, Tacocat is Seattle’s very own “Bridge to Hawaii.” DH Thumpers, Galore (Sub Pop) It’s difficult to name a 2014 record more uplifting than this debut from the London-based duo of Marcus Pepperell and John Hamson Jr. The album is full of bright keys and big choruses, especially on lead single “Unkinder (A Tougher Love”), and group vocals add a sense of community. There are more reflective moments, but overall Galore is a musical pep talk. ACP Chad VanGaalen, Shrink Dust (Sub Pop) Chad VanGaalen started out animating bumpers for MTV, so it makes sense that his music also exists in a similar wiggly cartoon world. Shrink Dust is partially a score to his yet-unreleased feature-length animated sci-fi Western film, and appropriately it’s got a spacey country vibe. While the stylistic break might have jarred early VanGaalen fans who latched on to his bedroom-pop sound, it’s hard to deny the man plays a real mean pedal steel. Who knew? KS Naomi Wachira, self-titled (self-released) Since hearing this Damien Jurado–produced folk album in February, it’s been my go-to when I feel a little lost. The Kenyan-American sings with such fierce conviction about what she wants for herself and what she hopes to see from others that it’s hard not to feel more self-assured after listening. Wachira’s Sade-like vocals add a delicate feel, but don’t dilute her message. ACP E
music@seattleweekly.com
Ladies First
In their inaugural monthly column, Cat and Stas of THEESatisfaction discuss their top moments of 2014. BY CATHERINE HARRIS-WHITE AND STASIA IRONS
KING TEXAS
Stasia Irons (left) and Catherine Harris-White.
Editor’s note: A few months ago, we asked Catherine Harris-White and Stasia Irons, better known as hip-hop R&B duo THEESatisfaction, if they would be interested in writing a regular column for us. To our delight, they accepted. With a nod to hip-hop’s legacy of strong female voices, we’ve titled the column “Ladies First,” and you can look for it on the last Wednesday of every month. THEESatisfaction will release their second full-length album, EarthEE, on Sub Pop Records in February. This is their first piece for Seattle Weekly, in which they consider the standout events in a past year full of pop scandals and global tragedies.
Stasia’s Picks
in This Bring T And ge n o p Cou Tizer e p p A one 2 oFF! For 1/
2033 6th Avenue (206) 441-9729 jazzalley.com
Cat’s Picks
’90s R&B Returns: As flat tops, dookie braids, and bright fluorescent outfits made a comeback, I was quietly waiting for my favorites artists to do the same. I was quite pleased with Brandy’s BET Hip-Hop Awards performance of “I Wanna Be Down (Remix)” with Yo-Yo, MC Lyte, and (my crush) Queen Latifah. A fly representation of black women in hip-hop making good music and good decisions. D’Angelo released Black Messiah, and for that we can all thank Big Black Baby Jesus. The album includes some groovy hypnotic feels (“Really Love”), mixed with an array of straightforward funk (“Sugah Daddy”). An instant classic with only more fans to gain as time goes on. Strong, Soulful Music: 2014 brought forth a multitude of revitalizing soulful releases. Tunes like Eric Lau’s collaboration with Gwen Bunn (“Without a Doubt”) and KING’s “Mister Chameleon” made the world seem like a dreamier place, while Little Dragon and Frank Ocean dropped heavyweighted, trippy songs with darker pop appeal. Overall, deep soul is making a strong resurgence, with a message of thick feelings and emotions. Legendary Performances and Talks: One of my New Year’s resolutions was simple: Cherish each experience. I saw Bootsy Collins and Mavis Staples at Bumbershoot, Herbie Hancock at the Oregon Symphony, Lisa Fischer at Jazz Alley, and Stevie Wonder at KeyArena. Bizarrely enough, I witnessed Neil DeGrasse Tyson in his element (at a tech conference) as well as Philip Bailey outside of his element (at a book signing). These are all examples of Black Excellence, exploring life and
» CONTINUED ON PAGE 24
JAZZ ALLEY IS A SUPPER CLUB
PONCHO SANCHEZ LATIN JAZZ BAND WED, DEC 31, NYE!! Legendary Latin jazz master conguero and his 7-piece band ring in 2015 (4 package options available for NYE. Visit JazzAlley.com for details)
PEARL DJANGO WITH SPECIAL GUEST GAIL PETTIS (EARSHOT MAGAZINE’S 2010 NORTHWEST VOCALIST OF THE YEAR)
FRI, JAN 2 - SUN, JAN 4
“The gypsy jazz of Django Reinhardt done to perfection!” - Paul de Barros, The Seattle Times
MARTIN TAYLOR TUES, JAN 6 - WED, JAN 7
Multi-award winning guitarist. Acoustic Guitar Magazine calls him ‘THE Acoustic Guitarist of his Generation.’
MARK HUMMEL’S BLUES HARMONICA BLOWOUT THUR, JAN 8 - SUN, JAN 11
Bluebird Records Tribute with Billy Boy Arnold, Rick Estrin, Little Charlie Baty, Steve Guyger, Rich Yescalis, Bob Welsh, RW Risby and June Core. Legendary performers of the West Coast blues!
all ages | free parking | full schedule at jazzalley.com
SEATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 31, 2014 — JAN UARY 6, 2015
Gifted Gab had an astonishing year beginning in January when she was featured on City Arts’ “Future List.” In March, she dropped Girl Rap, one of the best hip-hop projects of the year. She’s got a seriously nostalgic, rapid-fire golden flow that we’ve been missing in our lives, and she was placed among legends when she opened for Cam’ron and Rakim. She is the first and only lady of Moor Gang, but she holds her own. This was an excellent and terrible year for young god Bobby Shmurda. He became famous through Vine and YouTube with “Shmoney Dance,” which resembled something my uncles used to do back in the ’70s listening to Shalamar. Everyone was doing the Shmoney, from Beyoncé to animals to grandmas. His song “Hot Nigga” was the hip-hop banger of the year. He got signed to Epic Records but before the ink dried, he got arrested. About a week ago, he was sentenced to a shminimum of five years for a murder conspiracy and possession of narcotics. It’s sad to see young heads becoming victims of this deleterious system. The Great, White, Fancy Heist: Macklemore and Ryan Lewis admitted they “robbed” accolades from folks they deemed more deserving when the Grammys awarded The Heist Best Rap Album of the Year. Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” was number one on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart for six weeks. It’s evident that the faces of hip-hop and rap music are changing very quickly and powerfully. G-Eazy, Action Bronson, and Riff Raff have been making a
killing on tours. Yes, some folks are happy for their success, and the rest of y’all are “haters.” However, there is a very thin line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation. There is an even thinner line between cultural enhancement and cultural exploitation. Sub Hop: Hip-hop at Sub Pop Records is becoming a staple. Hiring the legendary Ishmael Butler on as A&R was a wise move. His first signee was rap artist Porter Ray, a smooth wordsmith from Central Seattle. Los Angeles experimental hip-hop group clipping. was also added to the roster. Shabazz Palaces heated up the summer by dropping their second album, Lese Majesty. All of these acts carry traditions of the genre, but also lean heavily in other directions of sound. I’m waiting on the Sub Hop T-shirts. Ferguson: The killing of unarmed black teen Mike Brown has been the catalyst to worldwide protests. Some MCs like Talib Kweli, Q-Tip, and Nas have been very vocal on social media and in the streets. J Cole, Killer Mike, and David Banner have been on the radio speaking truths on underlying facts as to why these murders are happening. Some rappers have used their art to help heal the wounds. The Game rallied up a posse cut for the song “Don’t Shoot,” while Lauryn Hill expressed “Black Rage.” Hip-hop has never really had any love for the po-po, and this year was no different.
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arts&culture» Music
mainstage WED/DECEMBER 31 • 7PM & 10:30PM A NEW YEAR’S EVE CELEBRATION!
leroy bell & his only friends FRI/JANUARY 2 • 8PM
hannah weeks w/ cassie correlle SAT/JANUARY 3 • 8PM - 91.3 KBCS WELCOMES
cahalen morrison & eli west
w/ ethan jodziewicz and tatiana hargreaves WED/JANUARY 7 • 7:30PM
midge ure w/ angela sheik THU/JANUARY 8 • 7:30PM - AN EVENING WITH
david lindley FRI/JANUARY 9 • 8PM SEATTLE WEEKLY • DECEMBER 31, 2014 — JANUARY 6, 2015
anna coogan / carrie akre
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Local bands tell us their dreams for 2015. BY KELTON SEARS
I
f you want to get your ya-ya’s out while you ring in 2015, you’ve got a lot of options in Seattle. There’s a bounty of high-quality local shows to pop your champagne to this New Year’s Eve, and we reached out to a few bands playing some of them to find out what their resolutions are. Judging by their responses, 2015 is going to be a very interesting, weird year for local music.
Beat Connection, collectively: “Beat Connection is going to refuse to accept a broken and biased establishment that makes anyone feel unvalued. Beat Connection is gonna call you out. Beat Connection is gonna keep it moving along. Beat Connection is gonna make their own lane if they have to. Beat Connection is gonna be a mirror and make sure you know you can do it too.” (With CUSTOMS Crew, Manatee Commune, Pillar Point, K o m o n o, Dec. 31, Neumos) The Fucking Eagles, Greg Rodriguez, harp, vocals: “I’m going to try and stop repeating the same stories when I’ve been drinking. It’s more of a service to others, I guess.” Owen Atkins, guitar, vocals: “I resolve to only drink while awake.” Stu Linkert, vocals, drums: “To stop treating wine as some kind of health tonic. Or stop substituting alcohol for sleep. Or vice-versa.” Jesse Serles, guitar, vocals: “I’ll think of something.” (With Young Fresh Fellows, Less Than Equals, Dec. 31, The Sunset Tavern) Rose Windows, Chris Cheveyo, guitar: “Our
SAT/JANUARY 10 • 7PM & 9:30PM - CAN CAN PRESENTS
elvis alive with vince mira
next • 1/11 korby lenker • 1/14 sean watkins w/ lauren shera • 1/15 tom paxton w/ kate power and steve einhorn • 1/16 curtis salgado • 1/17 joey jewell, a tribute to sinatra • 1/18 tomo nakayama w/ eric johnson of fruit bats • 1/21 jill cohn w/ hereward • 1/22 the kingston trio • 1/23 brazilian nights! tribute to tom jobim • 1/24 martha davis & the motels • 1/25 casey abrams • 1/27 zach fleury & friends
happy hour every day • 12/31 new year’s eve party! w/ junior on the prowl • 1/1 closed for the holiday • 1/2 supersones / billy brandt w/ the thing & stuff jazz band • 1/3 afrocop • 1/4 closed for a private event • 1/5 crossrhythm sessions • 1/6 singer-songwriter showcase featuring: katie kuffel, raine and kristina valencia • 1/7 paul benoit trio TO ENSURE THE BEST EXPERIENCE · PLEASE ARRIVE EARLY DOORS OPEN 1.5 HOURS PRIOR TO FIRST SHOW · ALL-AGES (BEFORE 9:30PM)
thetripledoor.net
216 UNION STREET, SEATTLE · 206.838.4333
Tendai Maraire has his eyes set on the new year.
New Year’s resolution is to shit right for one whole tour. Just one. I’m talking regular 9 a.m. long fibrous brown logs that neither sink too fast or float too long. The stuff health and happiness are made of.” Veronica Dye, flute: “It’s a metaphor for successful touring, I guess.” (With Reignwolf, Thunderpussy, Dec. 31, The Showbox)
Shabazz Palaces, Tendai Maraire, various instruments: “Work with Beyoncé.” (With OC Notes, Porter Ray, THEESatisfaction, Dec. 31, The Neptune)
Ladies First » FROM PAGE 23 the creative range.
New Black Wave: Black music is an everchanging art form, constantly pushing the boundaries in which it was created. Flying Lotus’ You’re Dead! and Shabazz Palaces’ Lese Majesty both provided haunting, majestic perspectives, challenging us to rearrange our ideas of expression. Other musicians like Iman Omari, FKA Twigs, and Kendrick Lamar continue to advance this concept, and I only expect 2015 to continue it. With the grace of a modern-day Diana Ross,
CHARLIE SCHUCK
dinner & show
Poop, Beyoncé, and Liquor-sicles
THEESatisfaction, collectively: “Our New Year’s resolution is to play shows with Shabazz Palaces, Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, Janelle Monae, and other greats. As well as spread the good news of our new record EarthEE out in February. Amen.” (With OC Notes, Porter Ray, Shabazz Palaces, Dec. 31, The Neptune) Thunderpussy, Whitney Petty, guitar: “I resolve to double my efforts on the ukulele, buy more music, and keep pursuing the precision art of bullwhipping.” Lena Simon, drums: “Figure out how to make liquor-sicles.” Petty: “Can we have a liquor sponsor for our life?” Molly Sides, vocals: “Read more, write more, dance more, sing more, and perform more. No sleep, not now, not never!” Leah Julius, bassist: “Learn how to play bass. Also known as practicing. But mostly, I just want Thunderpussy to get a Juju Joint sponsorship. Juju, if you’re reading, please? Who wants to sponsor some pussy?” (With Reignwolf, Rose Windows, Dec. 31, The Showbox) E
we have watched Beyoncé bloom. Her release of Beyoncé featured an array of videos for every track, while providing an intimate look into the diva’s personal life. A standout track was “Flawless,” which included a speech from an invigorating TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Even at the Met Ball, where younger sister Solange was not only flinging limbs but also saliva at her hubby Jay Z, she kept it classy. She was the highlight of the On the Run tour, released collaborations with Nicki Minaj, and filmed a GoPro video (“7/11”) that put many filmmakers to shame. All I gotta say is: Way to “Bey.” E
music@seattleweekly.com
TheWeekAhead Friday, January 2 There’s no reason why BIG ASS BOOMBOX attendees shouldn’t walk away from the two-day fest with at least one new musician and/or writer to tell their friends about. Spread across three venues (two of which are all-ages), the event features an eclectic lineup of homegrown talent, either music or literary, and is free. Representing the city’s wide array of musicians are acts like Ever So Android, the Hoot Hoots, Detective Agency, iji, Trees and Timber, Yonder, Wind Burial, Werebearcat, Fruit Juice, Jigsaw Puzzle Glue, and GreenhornBluehorn. Readers include Spike Friedman, Piper Daniels, Connie Jenson, Matt Muth, Lillian Ruth Nickerson, Montreux Rotholtz, and more. Through Saturday. The Crocodile, 2200 Second Ave., 441-4618, thecrocodile.com. 7 p.m. Free. All ages. The Upstairs, 2209 Second Ave., 4414013, theupstairsseattle.com. 21 and over. 2312 Gallery, 2312 Second Ave., 2312seattle.tumblr.com. All ages. Before it shares the Big Ass Boombox stage with other local talent on Saturday, BRANDEN DANIEL & THE CHICS will kick off the weekend with a show of its own. The psych-rock trio (vocalist/bassist Daniel, drummer Matt Winter, and Nate Kruz on keys) has gone through a few lineup and stylistic changes over the years, but it seems to have settled into its groove with the release of the twosong EP In Light. Daniel’s Bowie-like vocals fit its spacey ‘60s rock well. With Signal Flags, the Snakebites. High Dive, 513 N. 36th St., 632-0212, highdiveseattle.com. 9:30 p.m. $8. 21 and over. Sharper Tool; Bigger Weapon, the latest from rapper RA SCION, aka Ryan Abeo, half of hip-hop duo Common Market, is a long time coming. The album began as The Sickle & the Sword, a project with producer Rodney Hazard, which was released in November 2013. Shortly thereafter, a dispute over an unsigned contract forced Scion to stop selling the album. The rapper then reached out to producer Vox Mod to re-release the album as Sharper Tool; Bigger Weapon in March. Despite the delay, the album hits as hard as one would expect from a Scion release. Appearances from the likes of DJ Indica Jones, Blake Lewis, and Romaro Franceswa only add to the intensity. With Slightly Flagrant, L. Hammond, Jesse James, Ill Writers Guild, Magesty. Nectar Lounge, 412 N. 36th St., 632-2020. 8 p.m. $8 adv./$12 DOS. 21 and over. Bruce Springsteen is as American as apple pie. Throughout the New Jersey native’s career, he’s written songs that bring awareness to the plight of the blue-collar worker, but his critique of the struggles soldiers face upon returning home from war, the anthemic “Born in the U.S.A.,” solidified his status as a working-class hero in the ’80s. OK, that album cover of him in jeans in front of the American flag probably helped, too. At this BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN TRIBUTE NIGHT, Country Lips, Duke Evers, Mikey and Matty, Silver Torches, Ephrata, and American Island will bring some of the Boss’s biggest hits to life. Neumos, 925 E. Pike St., 709-9442, neumos. com. 8 p.m. $5 adv. 21 and over.
eventual suicide put a hold on the band’s momentum. Its third album, Congratulations I’m Sorry, featured the hit “Follow You Down,” but the band broke up the year after it was released. After spending time in other bands, the members reunited in 2002 and are making up for lost time. They’ve released two albums, most recently in 2010 with No Chocolate Cake, and have been touring steadily over the years. Snoqualmie Casino, 37500 S.E. North Bend Way, 425888-1234, snocasino.com. 8 p.m. $15 and up. 21 and over. No matter your feelings about country music, it’s hard not to like HANNAH WEEKS. The Seattle-born, Nashvillebased singer’s self-titled album is a collection of incredibly relatable twangy tunes. Weeks has an especially good day on “Good Hair Day,” embraces her free spirit on “Wild Pony,” realizes she might be in love on “I Think I Am,” cuts loose a significant other on “I Broke Up With You First,” and reflects on the ups and downs of life on “Life’s a Drama.” This down-home vibe makes Weeks seem like the friend you can call up day or night just to chat or for a real heart-to-heart. With Cassie Correlle. Triple Door, 216 Union St., 838-4333, tripledoor.com. 8 p.m. $12. All ages.
E V E N T S
W E D N E S D A Y, D E C E M B E R 3 1 S T
After ringing in the New Year with his band, the Cave Singers, at Tractor Tavern, singer PETER QUIRK will hit the stage for a solo performance. Quirk’s distinct voice is the focal point of the quartet’s latest, Naomi, at various points yearning, crooning, and even howling over an indie-rock base. Quirk is rolling solo tonight, but with as versatile a voice as his, the audience should have no trouble staying interested. With S, Finch Wolfe, Corey J Brewer (Dragon Lounge). Chop Suey, 1325 E. Madison St., 324-8005, chopsuey.com. 8 p.m. $5. 21 and over. Depending on the song, THE JAYHAWKS are a little bit folk, a little bit country, or a little bit rock & roll. And on some songs, the Minneapolis quintet behind “Waiting for the Sun” and “Save It for a Rainy Day” is a combination of all three. The band gained fame with this blend after forming in 1985, but member departures and hiatuses have slowed its rise. The Jayhawks are still at it, though. In 2014, the 1997 lineup (Gary Louris, Marc Perlman, Tim O’Reagan, Karen Grotberg, and Kraig Johnson) reunited for a tour in support of the reissues of its fifth, sixth, and seventh releases: Sound of Lies, Smile, and Rainy Day Music. With Trapper Schoepp. The Neptune, 1303 N.E. 45th St. 6821414, stgpresents.org. 8 p.m. $26.50. All ages. 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.
SATURD AYS
TH URSD AYS
JUSTIN JAY + A ARON JACK SON MIGUEL MIGS + MARQUES W YATT ANTHONY ATTALL A + WEISS ANJUNADEEP TOUR GOLDROOM HUXLE Y MIKE MAGO
01/08/15 01/15/15
EEKKOO KILL FRENZY ARTIC MOON
01/24/15 01/31/15 02/07/15
01/22/15 01/29/15 02/05/15 02/12/15 02/19/15
W ED N ESD AYS
AUTOGR AF BRENMAR + PROMNITE S A LVA
01/14/15 02/11/15 02/18/15
TICKETS AVAIL ABLE AT W W W.QNIGHTCLUB.COM 1426 Broadway - Seattle, WA
El Corazon www.elcorazonseattle.com
109 Eastlake Ave East • Seattle, WA 98109 Booking and Info: 206.262.0482
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 31ST NEW YEAR’S EVE WITH:
JEREMY ENIGK (Sunny Day Real Estate) with Jen Wood, The Bend Doors at 8:00PM / Show at 9:00 21+. $15 ADV / $20 DOS
THURSDAY, JANUARY 1ST
SUNDAY, JANUARY 4TH CHAINBANGERS DISC GOLF SHOP PRESENTS:
IPL @ THE EL INDOOR PUTTING LEAGUE PS3 Disc Golf * Prizes * Ping Pong * Mini Putting Challenges * Drinks * Food Doors at 6:00PM / Event at 6:00 21+. $10 Singles / $5 Doubles ($10 per team)
SUNDAY, JANUARY 4TH
ERYN WOODS
THE LION IN WINTER
FRIDAY, JANUARY 2ND
TUESDAY, JANUARY 6TH
I DECLARE WAR
THE FRAIDIES
with Furniture Girls, Liquid Drive Lounge Show. Doors at 7:30PM / Show at 8:00 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $8 ADV / $10 DOS
with Prometheus, Autumn Tragedy, Hermosa, Isles Lounge Show. Doors at 7:00PM / Show at 7:30 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $10 ADV / $12 DOS
SATURDAY, JANUARY 3RD COLOSSAL FEST 2015 DUAL STAGE MULTI GENRE MUSIC FEST FEATURING:
BROOKLYNN SHAYDES
with Transcendentalists, Beneath The Spin Light, Grand Arson, Onesimus, From The Future, Riley Thomas, Sprism, Hold Fast, AFTER-PARTY WITH CLIFFORD (DJ Set)
Doors at 6:00PM / Show at 6:30 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $10 ADV / $15 DOS
with Forsaken By Wolves, The Idle Tyrant Lounge Show. Doors at 7:00PM / Show at 7:30 ALL AGES/BAR W/ID. $6 ADV / $8 DOS
with Babel Echo, Plus Guests Lounge Show. Doors at 8:00PM / Show at 8:30 21+. $6 ADV / $8 DOS
FRIDAY, JANUARY 9TH
GERN BLANSTON (Record Re-Release Show)
Plus Special Guests Doors at 8:00PM / Show at 9:00 21+. $8 ADV / $10 DOS
JUST ANNOUNCED 1/13 LOUNGE - CAR SEAT HEADREST 5/1 LOUNGE - DESIGN THE SKYLINE UP & COMING 1/9 LOUNGE - NO BRAGGING RIGHTS
1/10 - PIG DESTROYER 1/11 - INDOOR PUTTING LEAGUE 1/15 LOUNGE - NEW PSYCHEDELICS 1/16 - SCHOOL OF ROCK PRESENTS: BLACK SABBATH 1/17 - ZEKE / THE DERELICTS 1/18 - INDOOR PUTTING LEAGUE 1/18 LOUNGE - CONVEYER 1/20 LOUNGE - THE RAMONAS 1/22 LOUNGE - GRAYSON ERHARD 1/23 - DARK TRANQUILITY 1/24 - POWERMAN 5000 1/25 - SILVERSTEIN 1/26 - JAKE E. LEE’S RED DRAGON CARTEL 1/26 LOUNGE - CALABRESE 1/27 - MAYHEM / WATAIN 1/28 - PERIPHERY 1/29 - SKULL FIST 1/29 LOUNGE - THE TOASTERS 1/30 - THE FALL OF TROY 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
The EL CORAZON VIP PROGRAM: see details at www.elcorazon.com/vip.html and for an application email us at info@elcorazonseattle.com
SEATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 31, 2014 — JAN UARY 6, 2015
It doesn’t matter how “cool” you are; when DOWN NORTH starts playing, you’re shaking your tail feathers on the dance floor with everyone else. The funk-rock quartet mixes a little of James Brown’s stage presence with Hendrix-like guitar riffs to create a sound that’s downright impossible to resist; think a funkier Bad Rabbits with the retro feel of Bruno Mars. Front man Anthony Briscoe knows how to command an audience’s attention, and the band is able to keep them interested with that signature blend of funk and rock. Down North has been known to add a few brass musicians to its live show, so if you’re lucky, things could get real funky. With the Fabulous Party Boys, Graig Markel and the 88th St. Band, Megan Wilde. Neumos. 8 p.m. $12 adv. 21 and over. PRIMUS & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY is so crazy an idea, it’s hard to believe that it actually works. For starters, the project, which features the Fungi Ensemble, is exactly what it sounds like: Primus interpreting tunes from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Yes, it’s odd to hear Les Claypool celebrate after finding a Golden Ticket and sing the Oompa Loompa theme, while guitarist Larry LaLonde channels his inner Veruca Salt on the spoiledbrat anthem “I Want It Now,” but the band is spot-on with its interpretations. The group warps lyrics and music to make already unnerving songs even creepier, but their whimsy remains. The Paramount, 911 Pine St., 682-1414. 8 p.m. $35.75 and up. All ages. Though NOREY can easily be labeled as folk-rock, hints of its global makeup give its sound a little diversity. Singer and acoustic guitarist Alejandro Garcia is from Bogota, Colombia; singer Vicky Bowes and brothers Dave (bass) and Mike (percussion, vocals) Swallow all hail from England; and electric guitarist Nick Nanry is from Detroit. The band formed in California, but now call Seattle home. On NoRey’s second album, Untie Your Arms, Garcia and Bowes’ accents come through just enough in their vocal harmonies to make an impact, and Nanry’s electric guitar adds a bit of rock-&-roll grit. It’s an eclectic sound to match the eclectic lineup. With The Horde and the Harem, Fredd Luongo. Sunset Tavern, 5433 Ballard Ave. N.W., 7844880, sunsettavern.com. 9 p.m. $8. 21 and over.
STEPHEN GERE
After more than 20 years together, it would be easy for any band to release a greatest-hits collection and call it a day. But Boise-based indie-rock quintet BUILT TO SPILL is still interested in seeing how it can grow as a band. After more than three years of writing and recording, the group released its seventh full-length, There Is No Enemy, in 2009. The album is not completely unexpected from the indie-rock vets, but with it, the band continues to experiment with flourishes like the slide guitar on “Nowhere Lullaby” and the punk drive of a song like “Pat.” The Showbox, 1426 First Ave., 628-3151, showboxpresents. com. With Brett Netson & Snakes, the Delusions. Through Saturday. 9 p.m. $25 adv./$30 DOS. All ages; Saturday’s show is 21 and over. GIN BLOSSOMS peaked well before it reached its full potential. The pop-rock band’s 1992 breakthrough, New Miserable Experience, produced several singles (“Hey Jealousy,” “Found Out About You,” and “Allison Road”), but the group’s original lead guitarist’s alcoholism and
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Washington Real Estate For Sale TONASKET
20 FLAT ACRES. Tired of paying utility bills? Water, sewer, garbage and electricity getting too expensive? Own your own Off-The-Grid Power Solar panel, well, septic all installed. 2 BR, 2 BA, fenced. 24’x56’ dbl wide mobile. Plumbed to propane. 15 min to Tonasket $35,000 (cash) 206.619.9674.
SEATTLE WEEKLY • DECEMBER 31, 2014 — JANUARY 6, 2015
Announcements
26
HADOPTION: H At-Home Mom, LOVE, FinanciallySecure Family, Laughter, Art, Music awaits 1st baby. H Melanie H H Expenses paid H H1-866-757-5199 H Real Estate for Sale San Juan County EASTSOUND, 98245.
Real Estate for Sale Jefferson County Custom built home, $409,000 Master bd + 2 bonus rooms Pleasant Tides Community Deep water Marina, WF park Prudential NW Real Estate MLS # 634050, 360-250-3308
Real Estate for Rent King County AUBURN, 98049.
FULLY FURNISHED 1 Bedroom with all utilities and cable paid! Private entrance. Full kitchen. One person only. Non smoker. No pets. $700 / month and $400 deposit. Call Bob 253-906-0410 or 253-939-3199. WA Misc. Rentals Rooms for Rent Greenlake/WestSeattle $400 & up Utilities included! busline, some with private bathrooms • Please call Anna between 10am & 8pm • 206-790-5342
U-DISTRICT $450-$550 All Utilities Included! Call Peir for more info (206) 458-0169
Announcements
NORTHEND MASSAGE FOR YOUR HEALTH LAURIE LMP #MA00014267 (206) 919-2180
3.98 AC IN PARADISE Well, septic & garage on site. Perfect site for establishing a 3 BR, 2 BA residence $200000 Harriet 360-317-5745
Professional Services Music Lessons GUITAR LESSONS Exp’d, Patient Teacher. BFA/MM Brian Oates (206) 434-1942
Employment General ART DIRECTOR Seattle Weekly, one of Seattle’s most respected publications and a division of Sound Publishing, Inc. has an immediate opening for an experienced editorial art director. The art director is responsible for the overall design quality and integrity of the publication. He/she must be able to conceptualize and produce modern, sophisticated, and vibrant design for covers, features, and editorial pages. This individual must be an exceptionally creative designer who has experience commissioning high-quality photography and illustration, negotiating fees, clearing rights and managing a budget. The art director will work with and manage other designers in a fast-paced, deadline-driven environment so will need the ability to balance strong leadership with strong collaboration in order to thrive in a team environment. Applicants must have a superior understanding of typography and expert-level skills in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat. Editorial design experience is a plus. The successful candidate will possess excellent communication and organizational skills and the ability to juggle several projects at once. Knowledge of PDF and postscript technology is beneficial. Other talents such as illustration or photography are desirable, but not required. Sound Publishing offers competitive salaries and benefits including healthcare, 401K, paid holidays, vacation and sick time. Qualified applicants should send a resume, cover letter, and a few samples of your work to: hreast@soundpublishing.com Be sure to note ATTN: HR/ADSEA in your subject line. Sound Publishing, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer (EOE) and strongly supports diversity in the workplace. Visit our website at: www.soundpublishing.com to find out more about us!
Employment General CALENDAR ASSISTANT Seattle Weekly Seattle Weekly, one of Seattle’s most respected publications and a division of Sound Publishing, Inc. has an immediate opening for a calendar assistant. This is a Part-Time position, working approximately 16 hours over 3 days per week. The calendar assistant will assist both the arts and music editors in the creation and upkeep of Seattle Weekly’s extensive events listings. He/she must be detail oriented, able to comb press releases and online calendars and manually transcribe mind-numbing information with great accuracy and gusto. A proven ability to write succinct, lively copy is a must, as is a working knowledge of most art forms and familiarity with Seattle’s arts and music scenes, from the high-art institutions to the thriving underground. Obsessive knowledge about one or two particular disciplines (Appalachian folk songs and Kabuki, say) is not required, but is definitely a plus. If you have trouble meeting deadlines, don’t apply. Applicants must have a working knowledge of Microsoft Office. The successful candidate will possess excellent communication and organizational skills and the ability to juggle several projects at once. Qualified applicants should send a resume, cover letter, and a few samples of your writing to: hreast@soundpublishing.com Be sure to note ATTN: HR/CASEA in your subject line. Sound Publishing, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer (EOE) and strongly supports diversity in the workplace. Visit our website at: www.soundpublishing.com to find out more about us!
Be a part of the largest community news organization in Washington! Do you have a proven track record of success in sales and enjoy managing your own territory? Are you competitive and thrive in an energetic environment? Do you desire to work in an environment which offers uncapped earning opportunities? Are you interested in a fast paced, creative atmosphere where you can use your sales expertise to provide consultative print and digital solutions? If you answered YES to the above, then we are looking for you! Seattle Weekly, one of Seattle’s most respected publications and a division of Sound Publishing, Inc. is looking for self-motivated, resultsdriven people interested in a multi-media sales career. This position will be responsible for print and digital advertising sales to an eclectic and exciting group of clients. As part of our sales team you are expected to maintain and grow existing client relationships, as well as develop new client relationships. The successful candidate will also be goal oriented, have organizational skills that enable you to manage multiple deadlines, provide great consultative sales and excellent customer service. This position receives a base salary plus commission; and a benefits package including health insurance, paid time off, and 401K. Position requires use of your personal cell phone and vehicle, possession of valid WA State Driver’s License and proof of active vehicle insurance. Sales experience necessary; Media experience is a definite asset. Must be computer-proficient. If you have these skills, and enjoy playing a proactive part in impacting your local businesses’ financial success with advertising solutions, please email your resume and cover letter to: hreast@sound publishing.com ATTN: SEA. Sound Publishing is an Equal Opportunity Employee (EOE) and strongly supports diversity in the workplace. Visit our website to learn more about us! www.soundpublishing.com hreast@soundpublishing.com
Employment General DONT SETTLE FOR SEASONAL WORK YEAR-ROUND We are looking for motivated, independent, individuals who don’t mind talking to people. No sales involved just short conversations face to face with home owners. Work outdoors around your own schedule. Earn $500-$750 per week/ top reps make $1200+ Allowances for Cell phone, travel, medical compensation can be earned Company provides all market areas, apparel & training. Vehicle, DL, Cell phone & Internet access req. Email resume to recruiting@evergreentlc.com or apply online at www.tlc4homesnw.com Dentist: perform general dentist duties such as removing decay, fill cavities, examine x-rays, and repair teeth. Applicant must have a DDS or DMD and a valid Washington state dental license. Mail your resume to John T Kim DDS PS at 18920 Bothell Way NE Ste 202, Bothell, WA 98011 Attn: Dr. Kim.
GUARANTEED INTERVIEWS!! The new Home2 Suites by Hilton is opening soon in Tukwila and needs Full Time and PT
Room Attendants, Front Desk Agents, House Persons/ Shuttle Drivers, Maintenance Techs, Sales Admins, Laundry Attendants, Night Auditors. Job Fair on January 6th 2pm to 7pm and January 7th, 10am – 3pm at 1035 Andover Park West, Suite 200, in Tukwila. Seasonal Job Ending? Now’s the time to start applying! RGIS Inventory takers needed! Starting pay $10.75/hr. Regular part time work. Paid Training. Promotion opportunities. Regular wage reviews. No Experience Needed. Must have access to reliable transportation. EEO Employer/Veteran/Disabled. Apply online at www.rgis.com. Job # INV00240 Tree Climber/ Trimmers Experienced Tree Climbers Wanted Full Time/ Year Round Work. Must have own Gear & Climb Saw Reliable Transportation & Driver’s License req. Email Work Exp. to recruiting@evergreentlc.com 800-684-8733
Employment Services COMPUTER PROBLEMS? First Choice Tech Support. Get help with your PC today! Mention this ad for free remote diagnostic. 1-844-868-9180 WANTS TO purchase minerals and other oil & gas interests. Send details to P.O. Box 13557, Denver, Co 80201
Employment Career Services THE OCEAN Corp. 10840 Rockley Road, Houston, Texas 77099. Train for a new career. *Underwater Welder. Commercial Diver. *NDT/Weld Inspector. Job Placement Assistance. Financial Aid avail for those who qualify 1.800.321.0298
Employment Social Services VISITING ANGELS Certified Caregivers needed. Minimum 3 years experience. Must live in Seattle area. Weekend & live-in positions available. Call 206-439-2458 • 877-271-2601
Employment Volunteers Needed
SPEAK UP FOR A CHILD! Be a Volunteer Court Appointed Special Advocate Children in Dependency/CPS Cases. Children in High Conflict Family Law Cases.
YOU can be a voice for a child! Volunteer * Donate Tell a Friend 206.296.1120 beacasa@kingcounty.gov 206.748.9700 admin@familylawcasa.org 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
Appliances REPO REFRIGERATOR Custom deluxe 22 cu. ft. sideby-side, ice & water disp., color panels available
UNDER WARRANTY!
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
%206-244-6966% Firewood, Fuel & Stoves
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 agr.wa.gov/inspection/WeightsMeasures/Firewoodinformation.aspx
Home Furnishings
ENTERTAIN THIS YEAR W/ YOUR RETRO DINING ROOM Solid Maple table, beautiful sideboard and 6 padded chairs. Sleek design from the late 1960’s. Clean lines. Very good cond.! $450. Call for details.
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“Seattle Stu”
Jazz Trio or Quartet for Hire Available for Parties & Restaurants (TOPPS!) Please Call: (206) 223-1110 from 1pm -7pm E-mail: sinison@comcast.net Severe Allergies or Autoimmune Disease? Earn $200 - Donate Plasma plasmalab.com 425-258-3653
Do you have PTSD and alcohol problems? Seeking free treatment? Paid research opportunity. Call the APT Study at
206-764-2458.
Singing Lessons
FreeTheVoiceWithin.com Janet Kidder 206-781-5062
DINING
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$100 TO $1000
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On-Line Verification Available Providing Authorizations in Accordance with RCW 69.51A
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SEATTLE WEEKLY • DECEM BER 31, 2014 — JAN UARY 6, 2015
MEDICINE MAN WELLNESS CENTER
The choice WEEKLY is yours MUSIC ... ... choose to succeed!
CAREER TRAINING
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SEATTLE WEEKLY • DECEMBER 31, 2014 — JANUARY 6, 2015
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