Inlander 05/18/2023

BEING BEGGS

IS HE A REFORMER OR AN APPEASER? PAGE 8

DARNED SOCKS

INSIDE

VOL. 30, NO. 32 | COVER ILLUSTRATION: JEFF DREW

I SAW YOU GREEN ZONE BULLETIN BOARD

EDITOR’S NOTE

The scientific method is a wondrous thing. It begins with curiosity. It proceeds with skepticism, experimentation and observation. And it ends with analysis and prediction. It grapples with the unknown in an attempt to make it knowable.

We could use a little more scientific thinking in our world, which is increasingly under attack by ignorance and lies masquerading as fact. Humanity spent millennia in the dark, fumbling around in a confusing world. Well, now we know the mechanics of evolution, and how germs make us sick. We’ve sent probes into space to understand our universe. One of them — Voyager 1 — is nearly 15 billion miles away and still sending information back home, which takes more than 20 hours to reach us traveling at the speed of light. Our progress as a species is not dumb luck. We are intelligent and learn from our mistakes. A dogged, inquisitive people. Carl Sagan once said that “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” As this year’s collection of SCHOLASTIC FANTASTIC stories shows, regional scientists and researchers are doing much to help the cosmos know itself.

— NICHOLAS DESHAIS, editor

HARDEST WORKING MAN PAGE 36

WHAT IS EVIL? PAGE 6 GET OUT! PAGE 46

LAW AND ORDER MAYOR PAGE 14

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WHAT SCIENTIFIC INVENTION

WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE NEXT?

JESSICA JEWELL

More cost-effective training devices for students interested in developing clinical skills. Today, we’re actually hosting Ultrafest — it’s an ultrasound event where we had to build ultrasound trainers so students can learn how to do things like injections or aspirations. But to actually buy those devices is like $1,300, so a student can’t buy it.

DIANA TYUTYUNNYK

I find eyes absolutely fascinating. It would be cool if there was a contact lens that can kind of conform to your eye. It would be cool if you could see, like, visuals like a screen. That would be really sci-fi-esque.

Like Terminator? Where you can see, like ‘Target Located’ in your vision? Yeah. It would be cool to teleport ourselves too.

ELLIE BEADLE

They already do robotic surgeries, but I feel like developing robotic surgeries can be helpful.

What would be the next stage of improved robotic surgeries?

Like a ruptured spleen. More high-risk surger ies done quickly and efficiently.

MOHAMMAD KESHTKAR

We love the weather like this. It would be cool to have weather like this longer.

So like some sort of global weather control thing?

We could make the fire season a little bit less.

CARL HEINE

Perhaps in 10 years there will be a possibility that we can take your cancer cells, pull them out, sequence the genes for that, make an mRNA vaccine for that, give you back your mRNA vaccine to treat your cancer.

Rooting Out Hate

Unless good people stand up, hate directed at ‘others’ can metastasize — as seen in the KKK of the 1920s and again on Jan. 6, 2021

BY JOHN HAGNEY

When we do wrong, it’s usually not evil. We have ethical guardrails of conscience that prevent us from careening into darkness. We may pilfer office supplies from work, lie to our child about our past drug use or cop an unexpected Jackson from the ATM, but these ethical lapses are not evil.

We can rationalize these minor transgressions, yet our conscience corrects our course. On the other hand, if we causally normalize these moral misdemeanors, in times of duress what other ethical precepts of more consequence might we compromise?

We know from history and psychology that under pernicious conditions, our ethics are malleable and we may be impelled to act in ways that otherwise we would regard as unimaginably repellent, perhaps even evil. Evil is some belief or action that by ethical norms is morally reprehensible and does extreme harm to others; “ethical norms,” however, can be distorted to justify and even sanctify evil. Perhaps the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were outliers, aberrations of the body politic, yet many of us are capable of condoning if not engaging in comparable actions.

Before evil, there is hate. In Faces of the Enemy (1986), psychologist Sam Keen demonstrates how ordinary individuals could be incited to hate and harm those regarded as enemies:

First, the individual is affected by some adverse change in his status — economic, political, cultural — that he is impotent to remedy. Angry and searching to assign blame, this individual is susceptible to irrational suggestion.

Second, oft-repeated lies propagate fears that an insular, conspiratorial group controls and subverts institutions causing his insecurity.

Third, these others are stereotyped and depicted as evil; religion is often misappropriated to consecrate incipient hatred and opposition, even violence, framed as a righteous moral imperative. Thus evil mutates into an ethical good — even a sacred duty.

Finally, these others are dehumanized. This perverse thinking enabled the Nazis to depict

Hate reared its head at the deadly Unite the Right march in Charlottesville in 2017. ANTHONY CRIDER/CC BY 2.0 PHOTO

Jews as rats to be exterminated (see the Nazi film “Eternal Jew” on YouTube), and Trump to describe immigrants and a Black Manhattan district attorney as “animals.”

This is the Jekyll to Hyde psychology, which boils the blood and drives the drums of war transforming otherwise apathetic citizens into combatants. Normally a moral verboten, violence against others is thus legitimized, even necessitated by a perceived existential exigency. Some Germans witnessing early Nazi laws discriminating against Jews rationalized such as “necessary evils,” but most, like theologian Martin Niemöller, did nothing. Incrementally these “necessary evils” were promulgated as sufficiently necessary to the point that worse policies (i.e., the Holocaust) were believed to be no longer evil, but necessary, perhaps even good. That said, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, White Rose, and innumerable Jews courageously resisted Nazi evil and perished horrifically for their moral fortitude.

The way this hate manifests and metastasizes is when individuals with the same fears and grievances coalesce in a group. If these individuals feel abandoned by society, they are accepted by those similarly aggrieved. If there is individual residual aversion to violence — a cognitive dissonance — such is assuaged and rationalized through groupthink. Thus individuals subsume their conscience to the collective, be it of the political right or left. Human nature transcends ideology. It happened not only in Nazi Germany but in Stalin’s Soviet Union, and today it’s happening here and in Putin’s Russia. Recall the boys in Lord of the Flies (1954) who mutate from playfully normal to ferociously savage.

This process of moral inversion and rationalized violence targeting these despised “others” who allegedly connive to emasculate the alienated are often tolerated if not sanctioned by a charismatic authority (see Timothy Egan’s new book A Fever in the Heartland about the KKK in 1920s America).

Would the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” marchers howling anti-Semitic and racist screeds have been as toxic had Trump not polluted our politics with similar invectives? Or would Jan. 6 have been as barbaric had he not incited the mob? Or would the QAnon virus have infected a quarter of Republicans if Trump had not transmitted paranoid, conspiratorial rants?

If we think that our moral rectitude can resist such authoritarian entreaties to violence, consider Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram’s 1963 experiment determining how individuals are willing to obey evil dictates. In the experiment, men with diverse levels of education and occupations were instructed by an authority figure — a clinical psychologist — to perform acts that conflicted with their personal ethics.

Participants were told to administer electric shocks to an unseen “learner” in another room, ostensibly to assist the shocked subject’s learning. Participants did not know that there was no electricity, rather they believed the shocks were real. Milgram found that all participants were willing to fully obey the instructions to administer 300 volts with 65% delivering up to a potentially lethal 450 volts even as actors’ faux reactions increased from moans to screams. Cruelty lurks in our instincts.

Thus the Nazis at Nuremberg and the Bosnian Serb and Hutu soldiers in the 1990s would defend their atrocities as simply complying with the orders of an authority.

All such acts of mass violence were impossible without average civilians, like Turks becoming willing executioners against Armenians in 1915-17 and Cambodians against their own in the 1970s killing fields. And those who are silent are complicit to these evils. Hannah Arendt refers to this as “the banality of evil” (see her “Eichmann in Jerusalem”). If we were in their place, would we have the moral resolve to resist?

Usually we are decent and impervious to evil, yet our history and nature should caution that our better angels are fragile. n

John Hagney is a retired history teacher, spending 45 years at Lewis and Clark High School. He was named a U.S. Presidential Scholar Distinguished Teacher and published an oral history of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms that has been translated into six languages.

Sofa-Sleeper

Mattress Types

Sofa-Sleeper

A sofa-sleeper (also called a hide-a-bed, pullout sofa or sofa-bed) is a cushioned sofa that transforms into a bed.

See

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THE WAY OF THE TORTOISE

BY DANIEL

Spokane City Council President Breean Beggs plays the long game.

Before he was elected to the council in 2020, he was a police reformer. As the attorney for the family of Otto Zehm, who was beaten by police and died days later, Beggs pushed for the creation of an independent police ombudsman with investigative powers. That took seven years.

Once on the council dais, it took nearly six years for Beggs to get his landlord-tenant reform efforts to pass.

Slow and steady, the thinking goes, wins the race.

Now, his finish line might be moving up. He’s already announced he’s not running for re-election, but Beggs might not even complete the last year of his first term as the council’s leader.

“I am being considered for a judicial appointment locally. … The governor decides,” Beggs says about a court opening in July. “So that could be an earlier departure.”

That itself would create another political shake-up: Council President Pro Tem Lori Kinnear would move to

the council president role for her last six months in office, creating a temporary six-month vacancy for her seat.

But for Beggs, it means that he has a limited time to set into motion his bucket list of ordinances still left on the table, all while assessing whether his softer and more collaborative approach has been successful at accomplishing his agenda.

“One of my disappointments at City Council: I thought I would have way more impact on criminal justice reform,” Beggs says.

Some of that, of course, is just the nature of the role. Cities handle policing and misdemeanors, but felonies and jails are the domain of the county.

And yet, when the murder of George Floyd sparked upheaval across the nation in 2020, few leaders were as well positioned to bring about major reforms.

“Breean has been the best ally I’ve ever seen for criminal justice reform,” says Spokane NAACP President Kurtis Robinson.

Breean Beggs, who is leaving Spokane City Council this year, says he’s disappointed he didn’t have a bigger impact on criminal justice reform. DANIEL WALTERS PHOTO

Beggs, a constitutional law attorney, was best known for having sued the city following Zehm’s beating and death. He was “chief catalyst” at the Center for Justice, a legal advocacy group for low-income people. In 2020, he had a list of 24 police reform ideas. But instead of trying to push them through quickly, he tried to forge consensus.

Because while there’s Beggs the litigator — the kind who pushes for change — there’s also Beggs the mediator, who seeks to build something closer to consensus. That, he believes, is the key to ensuring lasting change.

For instance, he and Mayor Nadine Woodward’s administration launched a closed door roundtable about policing with members of the community, the police and the council. But that didn’t start until nearly a year after Floyd’s death, and participants quickly ran into what Beggs calls a “Lemony Snickety” series of unfortunate events.

“I was diagnosed with cancer in the middle of it,” he says. One of the facilitators also got cancer and eventually died. The head of the police union was shot.

CITY

As Spokane City Council president, Breean Beggs pursued his agenda slowly and steadily — but to what effect?

WALTERS

“THE WAY OF THE TORTOISE,” CONTINUED...

Little progress was being made and, in January 2023, the final meeting of the group was canceled. It was roundly considered a failure.

“People got frustrated. They kind of assumed that there was some person who was really in charge and could have fixed it,” Beggs says. “I don’t think I did a good job of really communicating with the participants about what was going on.”

Either way, Beggs says he doesn’t blame people who are upset that he tried to take the slow path and it didn’t work out.

“I don’t begrudge them that,” Beggs says. “Being willing to sacrifice short-term gain for a longer term gain… It’s a calculated risk. It’s a speculative bet.”

Some people survive cancer and are imbued with a kind of seize-the-day, every-moment-counts drive to accomplish all their ambitions. But for Beggs, it was the opposite. He says he became less task oriented.

“I think I became a little more philosophical about things,” Beggs says. “Less tied to outcomes and more the process and experience of things.”

So while ideologically Beggs is as progressive as his predecessor, Ben Stuckart, Stuckart was a lot more apt to show it with fiery speeches and aggressive gambits.

“Breean is more measured. A less reactive person,” says Kinnear. “He’s more thoughtful. He’s more collaborative.”

But while Kinnear doesn’t blame Beggs for how long the landlord-tenant ordinance took — that fell prey to COVID — she knows his tactic of seeking consensus means things sometimes get done more slowly.

“Overall, I think it’s a wonderful trait,” says Council

member Karen Stratton, before adding, “Sometimes that’s maddening. He knows that I get impatient.”

Council member Michael Cathcart, one of the two conservatives on the council, is a little less impressed with Beggs’ touted consensus building. He says that Beggs mostly tries to build consensus with his fellow progressives. Still, there are plenty of times when they’ve worked together, like on housing reform.

Beggs points to a 7-0 vote last year — including even traditionally development-skeptical council members — to remake Spokane’s housing code allowing anything up to fourplexes everywhere.

Beggs prides himself on his empathetic approach to building coalitions of allies. But he knows this approach has its drawbacks.

“I think some people confuse that with, ‘I’m their best friend,’” Beggs says. Or it can wrongly make people think he’s a pushover.

“He’s been just a gentle human being, and I love that about him,” Robinson says. “The fact is that a lot of people just read that the wrong way.”

That’s not to say he doesn’t occasionally get pissed off.

“The times that I’ve been the most angry: When I felt completely lied to by high-level people in the administration,” Beggs says.

the chance to engage in professional debate in search of ways to put the community first,” Woodward wrote in an emailed statement from her campaign.

Most recently, she cited the example of the unanimously supported ordinance restricting public drug use. Beggs had worked hard on this measure, but it was clear from his words before the vote that it was a painful victory. His father used to run a heroin addiction treatment program, and Beggs didn’t think that cracking down was the secret to success.

“This is about the third version of the war on drugs in my life, and there was always that same hope — that if we just pass the law, if we just say no, if we just let people know how much we care about them and want to avoid the damage — that somehow that will stop it,” Beggs says. “And I don’t think it will.”

But Beggs saw it as a temporary compromise meant to ward off even worse outcomes.

Last week, Beggs says, he got a message from a progressive “really pissed” about the vote.

“Like, ‘I’m really disappointed in you,’” Beggs says. “‘You’re going to hear about it publicly.’”

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Still, both the successes and the failures of the Woodward administration are inevitably tangled up with the council. Responding to questions for this article, Woodward stressed the ways they’d been able to find common ground on issues ranging from housing to criminal justice.

“While we fundamentally disagree at times, I meet with the Council President weekly and have appreciated

MEET THE DOCTOR NEXT DOOR

“Just because I might have an understanding of how I think best to deal with drug abuse doesn’t mean my community understands that yet. I have to stay within that,” Beggs says. “And that is my role as an elected City Council member.”

But Beggs knows that the political realities are limiting — tough words for fellow progressives.

“We could pass a bunch of laws on police reform. But the mayor is not going to follow them,” Beggs says.

AMY EDDY, M.D. UW School of Medicine ’10 Internal Medicine Residency Director, Spokane Teaching Health Clinic

Together, the University of Washington and Gonzaga University are growing the next generation of health-care professionals, rooted in our community — and here to stay.

But he’s never been the sort to give up. He lost his seat on the Spokane Regional Law and Justice Council, so he’s creating a “Municipal Law and Justice Council” instead.

He has criminal justice reforms that he wants to push in his remaining time on the council, including a plan to allow members of the public to sue police departments for policing practices. Officers who follow the procedures would still be protected, but the departments themselves wouldn’t.

“Right now, police departments don’t have a lot of incentive to change their training and policies that are causing injuries to community members,” Beggs says.

There’s a risk of going too slow. But Washington state showed what can happen if you pass reforms too quickly, without the buyin of key groups. The backlash to the Legislature’s 2021 police reforms — restricting when cops could chase cars or use force — sent politicians scrambling to reverse and clarify controversial and unclear elements of the new laws.

“This is just my deep core belief,” Beggs says. “If you want to do police reform, criminal justice reform, sustainability, equity and inclusion — all those things, you have to create deep change in people’s minds and hearts and the culture.”

As utopian as that sounds, he says it’s happened before: He points to his work with the Center for Justice to try to simply get people to care more about the Spokane River.

“Now almost everyone’s together on the river,” he says. That fight has been won.

Today, he has more power and resources, he says. So his tactics change. But his goals haven’t.

“Frankly, we need people protesting and marching in the streets. We need lawyers filing lawsuits. And we need people like myself,” Beggs says. “I still see myself as a change agent… That’s what I do. I’m good at that.”

danielw@inlander.com

Salary Snafu

Kootenai County judge tells commissioners to reinstate the assessor’s salary with pay bump

BY SAMANTHA WOHLFEIL

Kootenai County’s Board of Commissioners must reinstate the county assessor’s $90,000 salary, which they slashed in half last year in an attempt to force the current elected official out.

That decision came on May 4, when Kootenai County District Judge Susie Jensen found that the commissioners had wrongly cut the salary of Assessor Béla Kovacs.

Jensen noted that the court doesn’t have an opinion on what the assessor’s salary should be, but it needs to be based on reasonable compensation for the duties of that elected role.

“While the Board positions the reduction as a reaction to Kovacs’ failure to perform all the duties of the job,” Jensen wrote in her order, “the reality is that by changing the salary for the Assessor, the Board has essentially said that the full performance of the Assessor’s statutory duties and responsibilities is worth $45,000, not the original $90,000.”

Idaho case law shows that if the scope of a job changes, a salary reduction is OK. But if the responsibilities remain the same, even if Kovacs fails to fulfill them, dramatically cutting the pay “exceeds the bounds of reason, is arbitrary, and is an abuse of discretion,” Jensen’s order states.

Kovacs, who said he didn’t have time to respond to specific questions before our deadline, was first appointed to the role in

Shot Protects...

The Kootenai County assessor won his salary back in court. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

May 2020, after the death of the previous assessor.

Last year, his office missed key property assessment deadlines that help taxing districts determine their budgets. He tells the Inlander that the missed deadlines were not his fault and instead blamed the commissioners for extending the time they took to consider an unprecedented number of assessment appeals.

Staff have repeatedly complained to the board that Kovacs is difficult to work with. Half of the assessor’s 60-plus staff members asked him not to run for reelection in 2022, and 33 employees have quit or retired since he started.

The board and other elected officials asked Kovacs to step down last summer. After he declined, the commissioners, including Leslie Duncan, Bill Brooks and (at the time) Chris Fillios, voted in August to cut his salary in half.

Kovacs then asked for a judicial review. He was also reelected in November, facing no opponents on the ballot, though a write-in candidate who works in the office received 22.5 percent of the vote.

Although Jensen ruled in Kovacs’ favor, she did not award him attorney’s fees, as she didn’t find that the board acted “without a reasonable basis in fact or law.” Jensen directed the commissioners to reinstate his pay retroactively to Sept. 25, 2022, and to include a 6 percent cost of living increase that was given to other elected officials.

“We’re disappointed it didn’t go the way we thought it should go,” Commissioner Brooks says. “I’m still very dissatisfied with Béla Kovacs’ performance and his lack of ability to work positively with the staff.”

The commission has not yet scheduled a time to vote on Kovacs’ salary, which requires a resolution, according to the board’s spokesman Jonathan Gillham. n

samanthaw@inlander.com

Béla Kovacs

‘Who’s Not For Law And Order?’

Spokane Mayor Nadine Woodward says her challenger won’t keep the city safe but Lisa Brown disagrees

BY NATE SANFORD

Spokane Mayor Nadine Woodward keeps posting the same video on social media.

It’s an animated loop of a calendar counting how many days have passed since Lisa Brown announced that she was running to take Woodward’s job, with variations on the same message.

“Today is day #67 since Lisa Brown launched her campaign for mayor and she still has no plan for what she will do to keep our community safe,” a post last week read. “My record is crystal clear on this issue, we can’t afford for our city to become less safe this November.”

Woodward has been pushing public safety as a top campaign theme — referring to herself as a “law and order mayor,” closely allying herself with the police department and attacking Brown over the issue.

So on day 68 of her campaign, we called Brown to ask if she has a plan for public safety.

“I definitely am working on something more formal that I’ll put out relatively soon,” Brown says.

The former director of the state Commerce Department and state Senate majority leader says people can expect a detailed position statement in the next couple of weeks. She emphasizes that it won’t be a firm plan per se. More like: “Here’s what the problems look like, here’s what some potential solutions look like.”

“An actual plan, I believe, should be developed in conjunction with key affected communities,” Brown says. “They should be at the table helping to present and vet the recommendations. And that’s something I would work to achieve quickly, upon being elected, as part of a transition plan.”

As for her own plan for public safety, Woodward points to a list of first-term accomplishments that includes opening new police precincts, establishing a violent crimes task force, ordinances against camping and drug use in public, a behavioral health unit, and a hire-ahead program to make it easier for the police department to fill vacancies.

Going forward, Woodward says she plans to advocate for the state and federal governments to fund more mental health beds, more detox programs and more behavioral health units to work alongside police.

Both candidates are a little vague when asked if they think Spokane feels less safe than it did four years ago.

Brown says most people she talks to feel that way. She doesn’t personally feel less safe, but has observed an increase in people experiencing homelessness and behavioral health issues in public.

Woodward says Spokane is safe but has challenges just like any other city. She argues that the state Legislature has taken away many tools that helped officers do their jobs.

But does Woodward think most Spokane residents would think the city has gotten more or less safe?

“There’s always been a perception, and perception is reality over the years, but we are working on all those things,” Woodward says. “Public safety is our No. 1 priority.”

In the weeks since her announcement, Brown has met with business leaders, neighborhood groups and service providers. Notably, she’s also had meetings with Bart Logue, the police ombudsman, and the Spokane Police Guild.

Brown knows an endorsement from the guild is unlikely but says she still wanted to open the dialogue — and set the record straight ahead of any attack ads that “say I want to defund the police or something like that, which is certainly not true.”

Brown stresses that public safety is about much more than just police. As mayor, she would want to expand therapeutic courts and behavioral health services. She isn’t convinced by the county’s proposed plan to build a new jail, and she thinks money could be better spent on upstream investments that reduce recidivism.

Woodward says the jail issue should be decided by voters. She says therapeutic courts have been successful, and that the city is applying for grants to stand up a new drug court.

When it comes to Spokane’s police department, Brown identifies three main issues: staffing, accountability and community trust.

Brown and Woodward agree that Spokane needs more officers.

The department is budgeted for 356 commissioned officers. Woodward says Spokane needs about 90 more cops to reach the national average.

The department has also reported heavy workloads and burnout stemming from difficulty filling vacant positions.

Brown says she still needs to figure out how much of the department’s staffing woes are driven by recruit-

ment, retirement or retention problems. If the issue is recruitment, she thinks the city could reexamine pay and benefits. Brown also thinks the city could do a better job applying for police-related state and federal grants.

Woodward says she’s been advocating for funding for more police at a state and federal level, and will continue to do so if re-elected.

Woodward ties the department’s ongoing recruitment and retention issues to a national workforce shortage and a tough climate for law enforcement. She thinks a takehome vehicle policy is one tool that could help recruitment. Having a “law and order mayor” that supports police is also important, Woodward says.

For her part, Brown says she also supports law enforcement.

“I mean, who’s not for law and order? I don’t get that part,” Brown says. “Everybody cares about safety.”

When it comes to community trust, Brown criticizes the Woodward administration for the breakdown in “community conversations” between police and community groups earlier this year.

Asked about how to restore trust, Woodward says Police Chief Craig Meidl has done a great job building relationships with all communities, including communities of color. But she thinks there’s a small segment of the community that is “not supportive of police at all.”

“In fact, I think they would like to see police no longer in existence. I think they’re abolitionists,” Woodward says. “So I don’t think we’re going to find a lot of agreement there.”

On accountability, Brown thinks the police ombudsman needs more authority and support from the mayor’s office.

“The majority of people in Spokane clearly believe that you can have independent investigation and accountability and public safety. I don’t think there’s some kind of trade off there,” Brown says.

Woodward says there’s always room for improvement, but that she thinks the city is in a good space when it comes to oversight and accountability.

“I’m very, very proud of the evolution our police department has made over the last several years,” Woodward says. n nates@inlander.com

Both Mayor Nadine Woodward and Lisa Brown say Spokane needs more police officers.

DANIEL WALTERS PHOTO

YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

Filing Frenzy

The deadline to file for this year’s election is this week, and Spokane city races are hot. Plus, environmental advocates say the feds are slow-walking cleanup; and an NBA Hall of Famer continues his COVID tirade.

It’s campaign filing week, which means people planning to run for local office have until Friday to file with the local elections office. In the meantime, here’s a quick rundown on who’s filed so far in City Council District 3, which is shaping up to be one of the year’s most crowded fields. Council member Karen Stratton, who represents the district in northwest Spokane, is reaching her term limit. So far, the people running to replace her are: Esteban Herevia, who recently served as president and CEO of Spokane Pride; Kitty Klitzke, an environmental advocate and former regional director for land use nonprofit FutureWise; Randy McGlenn, former chair of the East Central Neighborhood council; Earl Moore, a retired health care worker and Republican activist who helped organize a pro-police rally outside City Hall earlier this month; and Christopher Savage, board president of Meals on Wheels Spokane who unsuccessfully ran for City Council in 2021. (NATE SANFORD)

CALLING FOR CLEANUP

A national nonprofit is concerned that the federal government isn’t working fast enough to address persistent chemical pollution at military installations. With 700 sites contaminated with chemicals such as PFAS (per- and polyfluorinated substances), including at Fairchild Air Force Base, the Defense Department faces more than $31 billion in cleanup work. The chemicals are linked to cancer and reproductive health problems. The nonprofit Environmental Working Group is concerned the Defense Department isn’t requesting enough money, noting that cleanup at Fairchild and other places could take more than 50 years at the current pace. The Pentagon requested $1.4 billion for cleanup in 2023, but Congress gave them $2.2 billion. Despite the increased support last year, Defense’s 2024 cleanup request — currently being debated — is for $1.5 billion. “The department’s funding requests keep disappointing communities that are impacted by PFAS,” says John Reeder, EWG vice president for federal affairs. “Our analysis shows Congress must give much more funding, or the problem will keep getting worse.” (SAMANTHA

WOHLFEIL)

CATCH AND PASS

Just because most vaccine and mask mandates have been lifted doesn’t mean those who hated them are done being upset about it. Like former NBA star John Stockton, who lost his Zag tickets for refusing to comply with basic COVID rules at his alma mater, Gonzaga University. Stockton is headlining a local panel called “COVID Betrayal — A Path Forward” about “the impact this issue has on the community” on May 20, and his bio for the event says he didn’t follow public health mandates because “he followed the science.” Stockton graduated from Gonzaga in 1984 with a bachelor’s in business administration. Other speakers include local firefighter — and mayoral candidate — Tim Archer and Dr. Ryan Cole, who’s been accused by the Washington Medical Commission of violating health care standards while treating COVID patients. The Idaho Capital Sun has reported that, as Cole was falsely claiming that COVID vaccines cause cancer, he falsely gave cancer diagnoses to multiple patients, including a woman who got a needless hysterectomy because of Cole’s bad advice. As of March, the death rate was still five times higher for the unvaccinated than the vaccinated.

Get the latest on Inlander.com

(DANIEL WALTERS)

Sew Sustainable

Spokane’s first Mend-It Cafe event encourages residents to repair damaged clothes in lieu of trashing them

BY CHEY SCOTT

Favorite shirt got a hole in it? Dress hem coming undone? Broken zipper on your jeans?

Organizers of Spokane’s first pop-up Mend-It Cafe invite people to “sew it, don’t throw it” by bringing clothing and other textiles in need of minor repairs to be fixed up by volunteer sewists.

A collaboration between Art Salvage Spokane and Spokane Zero Waste — both are nonprofits focused on sustainability and keeping usable materials out of the waste-stream — the Mend-It Cafe event is free to the public.

The process is simple: Show up any time during the four-hour event at the Shadle Park Library with an article of clothing or textile item needing repair. After checking in, you’ll be paired with one of five menders — all hobbyists with extensive and diverse sewing experience — based on what needs to be fixed. Then, watch and learn.

“The waste coming out of the fashion industry and the production of textiles in general is so resource-intensive, so it’s problematic on both ends,” says Elyse Hochstadt, executive director of Spokane Zero Waste.

“It just seems like a good place to make real change. And the whole repair model is about having agency over your things rather than having things own you, right?” she continues. “So

being able to teach people how to repair simple stuff — put in a new zipper, sew on a button, patch up a hole, or have some sort of personal imprint into what you’re wearing with visible mending — I think we’re starting to see a real trend of that happening.”

The Mend-It Cafe is partly the culmination of a workshop series that Art Salvage began late last year to teach basic sewing skills and simple alterations like hemming pants. During those workshops, some attendees brought specific items they wanted to learn how to fix. One session focused on visible mending, a technique employing colorful embroidery, decorative stitches, fabric patches, or other creative embellishments to repair holes, cover stains or fix other fabric damage.

A main goal of visible mending is to highlight — versus hide, as with invisible mending — an imperfection with the intent of celebrating a textile’s past life. While historically a necessity of the working class for centuries, visible mending has more recently reemerged as a counter to fast fashion, and a way to personalize one’s clothing. Among the many inspirations for visible mending is the traditional Japanese art of sashiko stitching used to strengthen, reinforce and patch worn clothing. Sashiko mending is usually done in white thread with repeating, geometric patterns

MEND-IT CAFE

The first pop-up is Sat, May 20 from 11 am-2 pm. It’s free to attend at Shadle Park Library, 2111 W. Wellesley Ave. For more info visit artsalvagespokane.com or spokanezerowaste.org

Spokane seamstress Beth LaBar teaches mending skills at Art Salvage. YOUNG KWAK PHOTOS

over a patched area, and today it is a method frequently used to repair denim. (For more stunning examples, check out the hashtag #visiblemending on Instagram.)

While time constraints of the Mend-It Cafe may not allow for detailed visible mending requests like these, Art Salvage executive director and founder Katie Patterson Larson says the event also showcases how to get creative with DIY mending.

“We’ll also have examples of mended items so there’s inspiration to get people thinking about the whole scope of repair and mending textiles, and things for people to do if they have to wait a little bit before they get to the mender,” Larson says.

Scraps of fabric, needles and thread will be on hand for experimentation at Mend-It. There will also be refreshments to go with the cafe theme.

To help menders know what to expect, those who plan to attend are encouraged to RSVP on the Facebook event page (find it by searching for Spokane Zero Waste or Mend-It Cafe). Attendees should bring only one item each. All are welcome to hang out and work on their own projects after being helped, too.

“One of the other things that we’re talking about at this particular cafe is clothing care,” Hochstadt says. “For helping it to last longer, but also to diminish the amount of microplastics that are shed. The No. 1 thing you can do is keep it out of the dryer, like most or all of your synthetics. And if you can, wash less often. We have this idea that we have to wash our clothes after we wear them every time, and that’s just too much [for most items].”

ExperienceBroadway’snewesthits,best-lovedclassics,biggest blockbustersandmore. Orderseasonticketstoreserveyourseats forFIVESHOWSandenjoyunforgettableentertainmentallyear!

Although the upcoming Mend-It Cafe is focused on textile repairs, Hochstadt hopes to see Spokane Zero Waste and other community partners team up to host future events centered around fixing all kinds of things.

Known as repair cafes, these public events — and in some cities, permanent spaces — are free resources promoting sustainability and the sharing of knowledge on how to repair things from appliances to electronics, clothing to small household items. A worldwide movement, the repair cafe concept started in Amsterdam in 2009.

“A lot of this is about community resilience and creating those connections with one another over being able to repair things, or make things,” Hochstadt says. “I think people sometimes are fearful about being creative and self-expressive, and these kinds of opportunities help to dissipate that and allow people agency to go ahead and do something.”

Funding for the Mend-It Cafe comes from a Renew Seed Grant through NextCycle Washington, a statewide nonprofit supporting efforts that reduce waste and encourage recycling and reuse.

For those who want to continue to explore sewing and mending techniques in a supportive, communal setting, Art Salvage hosts a regular drop-in sewing session called Sewcial Club, hosted by seamstress Beth LaBar. The next meeting is set for Saturday, July 8 at its West Central location, 1925 N. Ash St., and again on Sept. 9.

“It’s a drop-in group for anyone to come and participate for free,” Larson says. “We try to make it clear that it’s really about community and [we’re] not going to teach you, but it’s fun for people to come in and have that community and troubleshoot or ask questions and mend some things together.” n

Visible mending adds a personal touch to well-loved clothing.

Generational Talent

Painting lives in the hearts and souls of the Wyeth family.

While the paintings and illustrations of N.C. Wyeth stand out from the realistic works of his son Andrew and grandson Jamie, N. C. passed on his skills and deep passion for the artform to subsequent generations of the Wyeth family.

“My family has this mantra; it’s called ‘I paint my life,’” says Victoria Wyeth, Andrew’s granddaughter. “You paint what you know and what you love.”

A collection of 66 paintings now on display at the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture features art by N. C., Andrew and Jamie, plus several pieces by N. C.’s daughter Henriette and one from her husband, Peter Hurd.

N. C., whose full name was Newell Convers Wyeth, was born in 1882 and is best known for his book illustrations featuring bold colors, expressive characters and strong narrative elements.

“You feel like there’s something going on there and there’s a story there,” says Kayla Tackett, the MAC’s Director of Exhibitions and Collections. “Sometimes you can figure it out on your own, sometimes you can’t, but there’s a story going on.”

Throughout “The Wyeths: Three Generations” exhibit, viewers can see large-scale versions of N. C.’s illustrations paired with first-edition copies of the books they were made for, as well as the printing materials he used for some of the illustrations.

“He’d get the text, and then he would prefer to illustrate things that weren’t very clearly described in the book,” Tackett says. “He liked to kind of fill in that picture for the readers.”

To encourage people to donate blood during World War II, N. C. was commissioned by the U.S. government to paint his famous scene for Marines Landing on the Beach. Grandson Jamie followed a similar path when commissioned to create the cover for the New York Observer following 9/11.

In four paintings in the collection, Henriette Wyeth depicts her loved ones and surroundings — subject matter also found in her artist family members’ works.

“Henriette isn’t as well known, but as you can tell, no less accomplished than the rest of her family,” Tackett says.

Henriette’s husband, Peter Hurd, was a student of N. C.’s but also introduced the family to egg tempera paint. While N. C.’s signature was oil paint, Andrew and Jamie grew fond of egg tempera, along with watercolors, both of which became media they used frequently.

Many of Andrew’s paintings employ more subdued colors and provide a realist representation of his subjects. His Antler Crown, for example, depicts an ornate antler arrangement hanging above a pine tree with an outdoor scene in the background.

“He also has this interest in depicting things but manipulating them,” Tackett says. “It’s the kind of image that you look at and can walk past,

Three generations of art by the prolific Wyeth makes a summer stop at the MAC

BY SUMMER SANDSTROM

FROM TOP: N.C. Wyeth’s Eight Bells (1937), Andrew Wyeth’s On the Edge (2001) and Jamie Wyeth’s The Tempest, A Triptych (1999)

but the second you start looking at it more, you start to wonder, what am I looking at here?”

Many of Andrew’s works in the collection are seascapes of light, breezy East Coast settings.

“A lot of these seascapes really evoke summer travel,” Tackett says. “It makes you want to go to the beach.”

Andrew’s granddaughter Victoria was very close with him, and she notes the sense of tragedy and emotion he effortlessly weaved into his art. She says this is partly due to N. C.’s death in 1945, when he and his 3-year-old grandson were killed by a train colliding with their car.

“Andy had this very incredible ability to feel things powerfully but then communicate what he felt in a way that everybody else could feel it,” Victoria says. “The emotion that he captures is timeless.”

Jamie Wyeth is the only living artist represented in the exhibit. His father, Andrew, died in 2009, yet Jamie’s pieces also draw from the family’s mantra of painting lifelike scenes while incorporating experimental mediums, colors and styles that set him apart.

Consider Jamie’s painting The Church, which features vibrant yellows and greens against neutral whites and blacks. The Tempest is similar, with a use of saturated colors not often seen in many of his father or grandfather’s paintings. Many of Jamie’s realist pieces, meanwhile, capture the Wyeth family signatures.

A common motif for Jamie is animals, such as Number 86 of a brown-and-white spotted cow.

There’s also a jovial sense of humor present in much of his art, says Tackett. Two paintings, Warm Halloween and Pumpkinhead Visits the Lighthouse, feature pumpkins, another prevalent subject in much of Jamie’s art.

“I think Pumpkinhead is actually a stand-in for Jamie himself,” Tackett says. “There are other paintings of this Pumpkinhead character that represents him.”

To Tackett, there’s something familiar, relatable and striking about the Wyeths’ art that makes it so enthralling to many.

“With all three generations, there’s something for everybody,” Victoria says. “Someone that loves color and action is going to be drawn to N.C.’s illustrations. Someone that loves animals and humor and color is going to be really drawn to [Jamie’s] compositions. Some people really hate [Andrew’s] work, which I understand, but others really love it.”

Due to the Wyeths’ deep ties to the East Coast, Tackett says having this collection in Spokane is a really incredible opportunity.

“It’s really rare to have this many Wyeths’ in one place, especially here on the west side of the U.S.,” she says. n

The Wyeths: Three Generations • May 13Aug. 20, open Tue-Sun 10 am-5 pm, third Thursdays from 10 am-8 pm

• Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture

• 2316 W. First Ave. • northwestmuseum.org

• 509-456-3931

THE BEST NEW SCI-FI OF 2023 (SO FAR)

The year is off to a great start with new streaming sci-fi series of the non-Star Wars or Trek bent

BY BILL FROST

To paraphrase the classic Conan O’Brien bit, (falsetto melody) “In the year 2000 … and 23,” science-fiction TV is alive and well. Here are seven new series to prove it.

SLIP (THE ROKU CHANNEL)

Content-but-bored wife Mae (Slip creator and director Zoe Lister-Jones) has a one-night stand with a stranger, and then wakes up married to him in an alternate-butfamiliar reality — it’s Everything Everywhere All at Once with orgasms. Lister-Jones masterfully, and frequently nakedly, balances dimension-jumping absurdity with a heartbreaking longing to get back to her own reality, even if she has to have sex with multiple multiverse randos (including Schitt’s Creek’s Emily Hampshire) to get here. Slip is a smart indie sci-fi flick split into seven perfect episodes.

MRS. DAVIS (PEACOCK)

It’s been compared to Westworld, Preacher, Monty Python, vintage Chuck Jones cartoons, and show creator Damon Lindelof’s own Watchmen, but Mrs. Davis is its own, wholly original, thing. In a world obsessed with and enslaved to the AI program Mrs. Davis (basically a holy trinity of Siri, Alexa, and ChatGPT), nonabiding nun Sister Simone (Betty Gilpin) must find the Holy Grail to shut it down — oh, and Mrs. Davis sent her on this mission. It’s sometimes too clever and loony for its own good, but at least Mrs. Davis isn’t another re-re-reboot.

THE ARK (SYFY, PEACOCK)

Dean Devlin’s The Ark is as comfortable and lived-in as Mrs. Davis is wildly weird: With Earth on the edge of extinction (too soon — or, more realistically, too late), Ark 1 is on a planetary colonization mission that’s interrupted a year early by a mysterious, catastrophic event. The surviving crew — made up of the most really, really, really ridiculously good-looking people in

space — rally to continue the mission, but there are bad actors (and, spoiler, other Arks) in the mix. The Ark isn’t much more than a Lost in Space riff, but it works.

THE BIG DOOR PRIZE (APPLE TV+)

When a vending machine called Morpho mysteriously appears in a small-town grocery store, promising to dispense anyone’s “true destiny” for a buck, the townsfolk eagerly embrace their new life trajectories. Well, not all of them: Dusty (Chris O’Dowd), a newly 40 high school teacher prone to whistling, receives a Morpho card reading simply “Teacher/Whistler,” while his wife gets “Royalty.” There’s no Black Mirror hand of doom hanging over The Big Door Prize, just feel-good quirkiness in the vein of The Good Place.

THE POWER (PRIME VIDEO)

Teenage girls are scary enough — what if they all suddenly gained the power to electrocute you at will? That’s a game-changer to upend the balance of patriarchal power (see how the title works on two levels?) worldwide. The Power, based on Naomi Alderman’s bestseller, is lucky enough to star Toni Collette, an actress who can ground even the most out-there premise (see: United States of Tara), which is invaluable in a sci-fi series that opens with “Every revolution begins with a spark” (ugh). Big potential here that needs a second season.

CITADEL (PRIME VIDEO)

The Russo Brothers (Captain America: The Winter Soldier — and Avengers: Endgame, I guess) were given a budget nearly on par with Prime Video’s Lord of the Rings series and a star who’s been on the cusp of The Big Breakout for years (Priyanka Chopra Jonas). The result is Citadel, an international good vs. evil sci-fi spy thriller that delivers mad action, sexy intrigue and even Stanley Tucci (everything’s better with Tucci). The Bourne-ready flash and flare distracts well from meh co-lead Richard Madden (Game of Thrones), a.k.a. Dollar Store Armie Hammer. n

GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY

Spokanites love nothing more than to mark the anniversary of a major historic event, so you can bet that the EXPO ’74 50th CELEBRATION is going to be a big deal. It is a big deal, though, because a ton of the work done to make Spokane presentable for the environmentally themed Expo all those decades ago set the table for the growth and development our fair Lilac City has seen since, and continues to undergo. The two-month 50th anniversary

Along with a special T-shirt designed by the Great PNW, finishers of the 4-mile race also receive a Rosauers Supermarkets coupon. Those participating in the inaugural race’s fundraising VIP category ($500) get a Dan + Shay concert ticket, a meet-and-greet with the celebrity race starter and a limited edition race medal. Entry ($25 per person, event capped at 5,000 participants) is open now at boulevardrace.com. (MADISON

PEARSON)

THIS WEEK’S PLAYLIST

Noteworthy new music arriving in stores and online on May 19.

DAVE MATTHEWS BAND, WALK

AROUND THE MOON. DMB’s annual Labor Day residency at the Gorge will feature some new tuneage this year thanks to the release of the group’s 12th LP.

KESHA, GAG ORDER. The pop star still has to release her music via the label run by the producer she claims sexually assaulted her. Needless to say, the lyrical content is quite acidic.

ALEX LAHEY, THE ANSWER IS ALWAYS, YES. The melodic Aussie alt-rock singer-songwriter brings more witty observations that wrestle with her past relationships. (SETH SOMMERFELD)

The Big Door Prize hands out destiny.

Pond Dive

Gonzaga teams up with Whitworth and Oregon State to discover how ponds are being impacted by climate change

BY DANIEL WALTERS

There are vast seas of research out there about oceans, a torrent of studies about rivers, and deep fathoms of academic papers on lakes. But for the humble pond? The body of work on that type of body of water is surprisingly shallow.

Gonzaga biology and environmental science professor Betsy Bancroft is trying to change that.

“We don’t know very much about ponds in general,” Bancroft says. “Wetlands are really important for water storage and cleaning water. We just don’t study them as much as we should.”

That’s a huge problem, because the wildlife living in ponds are particularly vulnerable to the whims of climate change. Thanks to humans cutting down a lot of trees and vegetation along the edges of water bodies, some of the natural defense mechanisms cooling down bodies of water have been stripped away. A lack of plants sends the water’s oxygen levels plummeting and the fish’s stress level spiking. And now you crank up the heat? The fish start going belly-up.

“In lakes it’s usually big enough that animals can find a temperature that works for them. That’s not always the case for these smaller water bodies,” Bancroft says. “Since they tend to be shallow and small, they’re more susceptible to those big temperature changes.”

And what happens when temperatures spike for cold-blooded creatures like frogs, fish and insects? It fast-forwards their whole metabolism.

They can move faster, yeah, but they need more fuel to survive. In the tiny kingdom of a pond, that can have radical effects that reverberate up and down the food chain.

“All of those changes essentially impact each other,” Bancroft says. “I like to think of it like a Jenga tower.”

Start pulling pieces out, and even if the tower doesn’t collapse, sturdy blocks begin to loosen.

Figuring out exactly how those blocks loosen is what Bancroft and other academics in the region got a nearly $1 million grant to study

Across five years, Bancroft and her colleagues at Whitworth University and Oregon State University are analyzing ponds and wetlands across the Columbia River water system in Washington and Oregon, including the Willamette Valley, the Tri-Cities and Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge in Cheney.

The challenge is to try to figure out the interplay between a bunch of factors at the same time.

“That’s what we’re really studying,” Bancroft says. “We’re basically asking the question, ‘How does the Jenga tower change under climate change?’”

Bancroft has been interested in this kind of thing for a while. She “fell in love” with salamanders while doing an experiment with them in her animal physiology class as an undergrad.

“They’re really sort of charismatic and cute and fun to work with,” Bancroft says.

But you can’t study amphibians without studying the habitat they live in and the food they consume. That brought her to study freshwater bodies of water, some of the most threatened ecosystems on earth. And everything is connected.

Insects, for example, are plant fertilizers — as well as tasty treats to some animals and voracious predators to others.

“Some beetles will eat fish if the fish are small enough,” Bancroft says.

But insect populations have been declining

rapidly. Is it pesticides? Is it climate change?

Bancroft is examining the way that duos and trios of species interact. Just a few links on the food chain can tell you a lot about those relationships.

Teaming up with researchers from Whitworth, the scientists are looking into 12 ponds at Turnbull. Some are ponds that dry up in hot weather, some are full year-round, and some are more shallow wetlands.

The teams will examine species populations, diversity and species size — looking at plants, water temperatures, and even clouds of water plankton.

“Body size is really, really important,” Bancroft says. “How big you are determines whether you outcompete another individual for a resource or whether you get eaten by a predator.”

Being small can be an advantage too — you need less food and are more nimble.

At Oregon State’s Corvallis campus, researchers are building artificial outdoor ponds that let them control water temperatures, species diversity and other factors. They can simulate climate change explicitly.

From there it’s a simple matter of predicting the future.

“We can say, we know that under these types of conditions, these types of communities tend to emerge,” Bancroft says. “We know that these types of communities are less stable than this other type. Where might we see those on the landscape?”

It’s not just about learning new fun animal facts. It’s about finding the kind of valuable information about which ecological situations are stable and which are particularly fragile. As governments and nonprofits try to decide where to spend limited conservation resources, this kind of information can help save — if not the world — at least a few little freshwater civilizations living in it.

That’s where the theoretical becomes vitally practical.

“Where do we need to focus our management and conservation dollars?” Bancroft asks. n

BETSY BANCROFT

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JEFF DREW

At the Root of Mining

Researchers at the University of Idaho are developing cleaner, innovative mining alternatives

BY SUMMER SANDSTROM

Imagine a plant pulling not just water and soil nutrients up through its roots, but also raw materials for use in electric vehicles and high-intensity magnets.

While that might sound like something plucked from a science-fiction movie, researchers at the University of Idaho are working to make it a reality.

Called rare-earth elements, these minerals aren’t actually rare in quantity, but are difficult to locate and extract from soil and ore. They’re crucial components of many different technologies, particularly renewable energy alternatives.

“These elements have applications in clean energy like wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, cutting-edge technology like laptops and cellphones,” says Amin Mirkouei, an assistant professor who’s leading the project at UI’s College of Engineering.

Idaho has abundant reserves of these ele-

ments at several locations, including Lemhi Pass and Diamond Creek, Mirkouei says.

Rare-earth elements are also present in many electronics that have been added to landfills. According to a 2019 report by the United Nations, the world produces 50 million tons of electronic waste, of which only 20 percent is recycled.

Part of Mirkouei’s team’s research involves finding ways to extract rare-earth elements from these electronics to provide sustainable and costeffective methods to reduce both waste and environmental harm resulting from mining methods.

Current extraction methods are not only bad for the environment, but unsustainable. Most of the U.S. supply of rare-earth elements are imported from China, which produces over 80 percent of the world’s supply.

“The focus is on using Idaho resources, because Idaho has high reserves of some of these elements,” Mirkouei says. “We can use

local sources, create more jobs, and it addresses lots of national security concerns such as cyber security and energy security.”

The research, funded by the Idaho Global Entrepreneurial Mission through a $440,000 grant, focuses on two methods of extraction: Phytomining uses plants to extract and concentrate metals, while bioleaching is a process using bacteria or acids to extract rareearth elements from soil and ore.

At the University of Idaho, plants like nightshade, pokeweed, and brown mustard have been used to pull minerals from the soil.

Next the plants are harvested and processed to remove undesired minerals and byproducts from the rare-earth elements. Processing is primarily done through pyrolysis, or the heating of a material in the absence of oxygen, resulting in bio-ore or biochar from which the rare-earth elements can then be extracted.

The other process being researched is bioleaching, which is used when dissolving and extracting gold from ores.

Traditionally this method uses harmful chemicals like cyanide, while also producing hazardous waste that can have harmful health impacts for nearby residents if the materials and waste output are poorly handled and enter waterways.

Bioleaching serves a similar purpose to phytomining, but can be more effective at extracting minerals from low-grade ores, as well as from electronic and industrial waste.

Mirkouei’s team is mainly using gluconic acid, which comes from gluconic bacteria, to extract the elements. The acid oxidizes the metallic sulfides in ore or soil, producing sulfuric acid that contains high levels of rare-earth elements.

In addition to creating more domestic dependence for the production of these elements, the team is focusing on finding sustainable alternatives to traditional mining and to lower carbon emissions from such energy-intensive processes.

“We don’t want to do serious mining because it really costs a lot, so the focus is extracting from the surface,” he says.

The plants in phytomining also act as a decarbonization technology, simultaneously helping counter carbon emissions by collecting carbon from the air.

The research also seeks to reduce waste by providing scientists with ways to reuse existing waste materials.

“You can integrate both to produce more rare earth eventually, maybe in the future,” Mirkouei says. “But if you don’t have rare-earth-rich soil, we can probably recycle those electronic wastes using the same methods.”

After rare-earth elements are extracted through bioleaching and phytomining, they must undergo a process called metallurgy to separate each rare-earth element to produce desired metals.

Mirkouei says the next step is to research using molten salt or electrochemical processes for metallurgy. Once that concludes, a commercializable technology for the entire extraction process can be developed. He estimates it will be about 10 years until the research goes on the market.

“Some of those strategies for recycling the waste from traditional methods are not cost effective, that’s why they don’t practice it,” Mirkouei says. “But these are methods that need to be environmentally friendly.” n

AMIN MIRKOUEI

Ending the Silence

EWU’s Margo Hill fights for the voices of missing and murdered Indigenous women

BY NATE SANFORD

Indigenous women across America face disproportionate levels of violence.

It’s an epidemic — an often-underreported crisis centuries in the making — with a complex web of causes. Much of it comes down to jurisdictional issues, lack of data, generational trauma and an ambivalence on the part of authorities.

The crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women is something that Margo Hill, a member of the Spokane Tribe and an urban planning professor at Eastern Washington University, has spent years tirelessly advocating for more awareness of. She’s become a national expert on the topic — publishing research, improving data, training officials and pushing the state to fund a tribal liaison dedicated to the issue in Eastern Washington.

“All the work I do, it has to be work that matters,” Hill says. “I don’t do any research for the purpose of theory — I have to do work that helps my community.”

Hill began her advocacy and research work about five years ago, while working on a project to reduce traffic fatalities on reservation roads with a grant from the state Traffic Safety Commission. She soon saw that the way people travel on reservations was directly connected to the stories she’d heard of human trafficking and violence against Indigenous people.

The reservations that Indigenous people were forcibly relocated to are usually in rural areas, with long distances between jobs, health care and education. These vast open spaces are difficult for understaffed tribal police to patrol, and many young Indigenous

MARGO HILL

“All the work I do, it has to be work that matters. I don’t do any research for the purpose of theory — I have to do work that helps my community.”

YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

women don’t have cars, forcing them to rely on unreliable public transportation or hitchhiking.

On those roads, at isolated truck stops and bus stations, people are often most at risk, Hill says.

Hill has worked with graduate students to map those connections, showing how the geography of reservations and their relationship to major cities like Spokane can make Indigenous people vulnerable to trafficking and violence.

She’s also worked with agencies like the Washington State Patrol and Washington Department of Transportation to train employees and raise awareness about the danger.

Highway rest stops are often hot spots, so Hill will meet with maintenance workers to help educate them on what to look out for. Like a scared-looking young woman getting into a car, or a parked motorhome with men waiting to get in and out.

“Basically, if you see something, say something,” Hill says.

You don’t need to confront the trafficker yourself, Hill says. She recommends an app called “Truckers Against Traffickers” that anyone (not just truckers) can download to report suspicious activity.

Before coming to Eastern, Hill spent a decade working as an attorney for the Spokane Tribe. It was there that she saw how a tangled web of jurisdictions can create gaps and make it difficult to bring perpetrators to justice.

Tribal courts and police departments are limited by a Supreme Court ruling which held that tribal courts can’t prosecute non-Indigenous people for major crimes.

“So all these cases of murdered and missing Indigenous women, if they involve domestic violence or rape or homicide, tribes have their hands tied behind their back with no ability to go after these perpetrators,” Hill says.

As an attorney, Hill says she regularly received letters from the U.S. Attorney’s Office declining to prosecute cases — even for cases involving violence or molestation that had ample evidence. Things have slowly changed.

“Today, they’re stepping up and paying attention to those cases that are happening in Indian Country, because they get raked across the coals in Senate hearings in Washington, D.C.,” Hill says.

Efforts to address the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women have long been hampered by problems with data, Hill says. Various agencies have different methods for reporting, and basic information — like contact info, race and when the person was last seen — are often lost.

Hill says data collection has also improved significantly in Washington state. She recently worked with a graduate student to map data on missing Indigenous people by county, and the Washington State Patrol now publishes regular maps with the names of missing Indigenous people and contact information for the various agencies.

In early May, 142 Indigenous people were missing in Washington state. Ten people were missing in Spokane County.

Hill has also worked with leaders from the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians to secure funding for an Eastern Washington Tribal Liaison position with Washington State Patrol. The liaison works directly with families, sharing information, answering questions and helping coordinate across multiple law enforcement agencies.

Public and institutional awareness of the crisis has improved dramatically in recent years, Hill says. Politicians at the state and local level are talking about the issue and taking it seriously, and local law enforcement are increasingly engaged and looking to collaborate.

“When I do training for law enforcement, I can look them in the eye and say, ‘Thank you for working with our families,’” Hill says.

But there’s still a lot of work to do. Communication across jurisdictions needs to improve. Tribal law enforcement needs more resources. Tribal courts need greater authority. Drug and alcohol treatment needs to be expanded.

For her part, Hill plans to keep fighting.

“We’re not going to be silenced anymore,” Hill says. n

MAC ARTFEST

JUNE 2, 3 & 4

The 38th Annual ArtFest is a three-day celebration of art and fine craft and an Inland Northwest tradition for the entire family.

75 juried regional artists

Painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics, jewelry and more

Live music and Make it Art for kids

Food trucks and beer garden

artfestspokane.com

Hoopfest_VolunteerRegistration_032323_6S_KG

Dust to Devices

WSU research team shows how rock dust on Mars could be used to 3D-print needed materials

BY SAMANTHA WOHLFEIL

Imagine this: You’re an astronaut fresh off the 300 million-mile trip to Mars, eager to start your research and maintain your enclosed living space. And then something breaks.

While you probably loaded your ship with some backups, your packing list had to be light because it can cost more than $24,500 per pound to bring something via space shuttle. So what happens when you don’t have an extra and the closest store is seven months away on Earth?

You innovate, starting with what you have in front of you, which hopefully includes a fancy 3D printer that can melt metal and rock with a laser or some other heat source.

You scoop up some of the dust from the Martian surface, mix it with the titanium you have on hand (it’s commonly used in spacecrafts), and print out some nuts and bolts, or the specific tool you need.

Thanks to Washington State University’s Amit Bandyopadhyay and his team, we now know this can work.

“If you talk to any space agency, this is something on everybody’s mind,” Bandyopadhyay says. “The question is, ‘What are the best ways and the best materials we can use so we have backups?’”

Not only did Bandyopadhyay’s team prove that 3D-printed composites are possible, they showed that using just a little bit (around 5 percent) of makeshift Martian dust mixed with titanium resulted in an even stronger material than just using metal alone.

The team used rock from the Mojave desert to mimic Martian dust, as it appears to be made from similar elements.

Technically, they also showed you could print something using 100 percent Martian rock dust, but in practice, those pieces aren’t very strong unless you’re using the material for something simple like a landing pad, Bandyopadhyay says. The mix of metal and dust was much stronger.

“We’ve tried to show this composite material can be manufactured and show better results in terms of the mechanical performance,” he says.

The dust-metal mixture can be used for other applications, too.

“We can make a metal and coat it with Martian dust, and that can provide radiation protection,” he says. “Those are coatings like painting your car so it doesn’t corrode.”

The WSU team’s research was published in July 2022 in the International Journal of Applied Ceramic Technology

Bandyopadhyay, a professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, is no stranger to three-dimensional printing. He and his wife, researcher Susmita Bose, have been working with it since the mid-1990s, when few people had ever even heard of the concept.

Early on, he worked with ceramics, melting rock material to be printed instead of doing something like shaping a brick and firing it in a kiln.

The team also showed that medical devices like hip replacements can be printed.

“It’s a journey,” he says. “When we started with medical devices, nobody believed in it. In my lifetime, I’m seeing patients doing wonderfully well with 3D-printed parts.”

Space is the next exciting frontier for 3D printing. The idea of melting ceramics through a metal printing machine kicked off a project with NASA in 2010 to use makeshift moon dust to 3D-print some items. Bandyopadhyay’s team proved it worked, but there were still weaknesses.

“Think of your coffee mug — that’s a ceramic part — and think if by mistake you drop it, it shatters, it cracks,” Bandyopadhyay says. “When we talk about moon dust and Mars dust, they are ceramic. Even if we can make a shape out of it, there are few things we can do if it’s 100 percent out of those materials, if you’re talking about the tools you need to make.”

The key, they’ve found, is to make a hybrid of material from the lunar or Martian surface mixed with something people can bring with them from Earth, he says.

The printing research their team has done is just the beginning.

Perhaps someone will show that another metal works even better, or that more rock can be used in the composite, Bandyopadhyay says. Or maybe someone will prove that you can use the printer to patch or repair something, instead of printing a whole new part.

“If we want to think of a Mars mission, even if it’s 25 years out, we can’t send everything from here,” Bandyopadhyay says. “We have to think of some technological advancement we can use.” n

AMIT BANDYOPADHYAY

Honey, I Shrunk the Test

A Whitworth prof invents a smaller, cheaper way of manufacturing COVID tests — and it could be revolutionary

BY DANIEL WALTERS

COVID is technically still a thing, of course. But most of us have long since shed our masks. Mandates and shutdowns have faded into the distance. It’s been more than a year since we had a major spike in deaths. The pandemic — in the sense of the fundamental world-changing event — is over.

And yet, Whitworth University professor and inventor Philip Measor has been working on a way to reinvent the COVID test. Not the iffy rapid antigen test that you may have conducted at home, but the professional gold standard test that can take a long time to get results.

He thinks he can make that test smaller. And smaller means cheaper. Smaller means faster.

“They’ve shown already that you can use these types of devices to reduce the time to test from six hours to 30 minutes,” Measor says. “This is the general concept of the ‘lab on a chip,’

trying to miniaturize functionality that can be done in an entire lab on a small chip. There’s many, many different applications.”

In fact, they’ve already done it.

To be clear, Measor and his team of Whitworth students didn’t test actual COVID. It was synthetic, a completely inert version of DNA strands encoded with key pieces of the virus.

“We made probes that could detect all strains and subvariants of COVID-19,” he says.

But whereas a regular PCR (which stands for polymerase chain reaction) test takes place within a device about the size of a cubic foot, Measor’s device has been shrunk to less than a square inch. And the testing instrument itself? Less than 200 microns, or about the width of two human hairs.

It’s not the first time he’s experimented with such a thing.

“I’ve already done a startup company in 2010 and 2012, where I was trying to make something to address the H1N1 pandemic,” Measor says.

But back then, it was far too pricey to make the kinds of semiconductor chips he was using. But one thing changed that: 3D printing. Suddenly, the economics had been flipped.

“It would be 100 times cheaper and 100 times faster to make. This is the main competitive advantage that we can use to penetrate the market,” Measor says. “I could make small enough structures that I could actually make some useful devices. That’s when I started the microdevices lab at Whitworth.”

The smaller the testing instrument, counterintuitively, the faster the PCR test can run.

The way the PCR test works is that it uses reagents to amplify the sections of a genome that you want to study. But the more area the reagents have to work with, the longer it takes for the reagents to find the sections to amplify.

To oversimplify, imagine how long it takes an audience doing “the wave” to get around a stadium compared to how long it takes to get around a kitchen table. Or imagine how zombies can conquer a single bar much faster than an entire city.

But if you shrink the test enough, you can slash the testing time dramatically. Considering that these kinds of COVID tests were a lot more reliable than the kinds of tests you get in the mail, that could matter quite a bit. You make, say, testing outside of an important venue theoretically possible. And much more.

Here, of course, is the point where any skeptical journalist will be overcome with distraction about Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos and Bad Blood: The Silicon Valley woman who captured the heart of countless investors — and WalGreens — with the promise that just a drop of blood could be analyzed with a “MiniLab” and, within a short period of time, spit out an analysis of everything from potassium levels to Ebola.

But it was a fraud. The problem was not just that the technology was fictional, but effectively scientifically impossible — the sheer number of tests the company promised to do on a single drop of blood wasn’t workable.

What Theranos was pitching was trying to do too much with such a small sample size.

“If your volume is too low, you won’t have even one single copy of that virus in that sample,” Measor says. “You could get a false negative.”

What’s different here, Measor points out, is that he’s shrinking the lab size, not using less of the sample. The sample can be concentrated, but you still have the same amount of relevant material.

Even though COVID isn’t as big of a concern as it was three years ago, a sequel is inevitable.

“There will definitely be another pandemic,” Measor says. “It’s just a matter of when. So we should be better prepared.”

He already has a patent for the 3D-printed COVID test — and the other possibilities are endless.

“Not only can we detect viruses, we can detect bacteria, parasites,” Measor says “You can detect it in humans, detect it in animals, and detect it in water.” n

PHILIP MEASOR

Join us for the inaugural running of The Boulevard Race! The 4-mile race course will travel along Spokane’s best downtown streets and by your favorite city landmarks, all while raising money for the fight against cancer.

HEY, SISTER

New Kendall Yards restaurant Sorella serves Old World Italian flavors inside an elegant, contemporary setting

BY CHEY SCOTT

After nearly two decades in the hospitality industry, Lauren Blumenthal knows the way a restaurant makes guests feel is as crucial as how good the food is.

So for Sorella, her newly opened restaurant in Kendall Yards, Blumenthal created a space that’s chic and moody, but also relaxed and modern. It’s a setting that elegantly complements the traditional Italian fare served there.

Among Blumenthal’s many personal touches is an expansive gallery wall overlooking Sorella’s entrance and dining room. Stretching upward to the vaulted ceiling are hundreds of thrifted frames in varying sizes, all painted gold and each displaying a mix of art: pages from vintage cookbooks, retro alcohol advertisements, album and magazine covers, photos of Italian landmarks and more.

Plush velvet upholstery in a deep teal fabric — the exact hue was color-matched to extend to the walls and ceiling throughout the space — evokes the swanky vibe of a Manhattan hotel lounge, complete with contemporary crystal chandeliers and a backlit, mirror-covered bar.

“In Kendall Yards, we have so many great restaurants, but we really don’t have a big bar,” Blumenthal says. “And we had to have one. Especially because there are so many people walking around here, all different times of the day and night, who want to come in for a cocktail.”

Naturally, Sorella — which in Italian means sister, and is the name Blumenthal’s brother pitched for the eatery — serves a variety of Italian aperitifs and digestifs like amaro and vermouth. Bottles of red-orange Aperol and Campari liqueur line the bar’s topmost shelf, glowing in the light like liquid rubies and amber.

While the opulent color palette and fixtures, including a slab of Italian marble for the bar, give Sorella a high-end feel, Blumenthal also added homier, vintage touches with silverware, glassware and many of the plates used for service.

Blumenthal learned the nuances of running a successful restaurant from one of Italian cuisine’s Pacific Northwest greats, Mauro Golmarvi. Before opening Sorella, she worked the front of house at Golmarvi’s storied downtown Seattle eatery, Assaggio Ristorante, a fixture since 1993.

“He taught me pretty much everything I know about service,” she says. “He was my boss,

and then he ended up falling in love with my dad’s sister, and so now he’s my uncle.

“Trust me,” she adds, laughing, “He was not easy on me, but thank God, because he taught me a ton. He was the one who really provided me with an actual passion for it versus it being just a job.”

Even though running restaurants is now in the family, Blumenthal’s quick to say that she always wanted Sorella to be her own.

That vision started taking form in May 2018, when she met with Kendall Yards developers Jim and Joe Frank. The father-son team was immediately interested in bringing Sorella on as a tenant of the neighborhood’s east-end commercial area with a targeted opening of July 2020. Of course, that timeline didn’t pan out, and delays in construction further pushed Sorella’s opening out to early this May.

In the interim, and with renewed focus during the height of COVID, Blumenthal became a culinary student in her own kitchen, dreaming up and testing dishes she wanted to one day serve at Sorella, even cooking for family and friends as a side project.

“I cooked for the full three years of COVID, up until now,” she says. “I’ve always been a pretty good cook, I would say, but never in a restaurant or for large groups of people. My uncle told me when I said I was going to open my own place, ‘You need to cook for at least six to nine months!’”

More recent research involved trips to New York City, where she sampled more than 40 different Italian restaurants across the metropolis.

“Not only for visual research, but food research,” Blumenthal says. “Just seeing all the different kinds of Italian restaurants, there are so many different kinds. And we are not regional by any means, we serve cuisine from all over Italy. But in New York, there are restaurants that only do Roman fare and only Mediterranean and [only] Sicilian fare. It definitely inspired some of the items that we have on the menu.”

Crafting Sorella’s menu became a collaboration between Blumenthal and Justin Klauba, whom she brought on board as executive chef, and whose resume includes leading the kitchen at Honey Eatery & Social Club in Coeur d’Alene. Klauba’s fine-tuning resulted in a concise but varied collection of traditional antipasto courses — appetizers like whipped ricotta ($14), a salumi selection ($22) and bone marrow ($16) with black garlic — followed by salads, handmade pasta and protein-centric entrees.

Most of Sorella’s pasta sauces are made to order, the exception being those requiring a long, slow simmer like marinara and bolognese. Among the eight different pastas ($14-$26) is an inky black nero, zesty limone and a spicy-as-youlike vodka sauce. There’s also crab-stuffed ravioli, unctuous carbonara and lasagna.

Heartier entrees include osso buco ($42), veal or chicken parmigiana ($28/$32), and a porterhouse steak that serves two ($112). Shareable

Sorella’s nero pasta with squid ink, prawns, broccollini and cream. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

veggie sides ($10) for the table include mushrooms with leek fonduta, pistachio green beans, and broccolini with lemon and flake salt. One of Blumenthal’s favorites is the eggplant melanzane ($22), which is a vegetarian version of classic Italian parmigiana. It’s a dish she recommends to even those who don’t normally like eggplant. Each entree is heartily portioned, and family-style eating is encouraged at Sorella.

Winning Sips

Evans Brothers Coffee, Liberty Ciderworks land Good Food Awards; plus a roundup of more local culinary accolades

BY CHEY SCOTT

Residents of the Inland Northwest are fortunate to live in a place where food and beverage excellence abounds. On a nearweekly basis, the Inlander receives a press release (or two, or three) sharing the news that yet another local producer has been recognized as among the best of their kind in the nation. So for this week’s To-Go Box, we decided to share the recently bestowed accolades we’ve heard about.

Sandpoint-based EVANS BROTHERS COFFEE has been honored for the third consecutive year by the Good Food Awards, this time for its Costa Rica Finca Calle Lajas Natural coffee.

Hospitality category, becoming one of the region’s first restaurants to move on from the semifinalist to finalist stage of the prestigious awards.

Opened in 2009 by chef Nick Pitsilionis, the Black Cypress serves Greek and Mediterranean fare in a fine-dining format. Pitsilionis grew up in the restaurant business, even working for about a year at the esteemed French Laundry in Napa Valley.

Winners of the 2023 James Beard Awards are to be announced on June 5 at a ceremony in New York City. Among this year’s local semifinalists was chef Tony Brown, owner of Ruins and Hunt in downtown Spokane, for the Best Chef (Northwest) category.

In the beer-making realm, it’s a pretty big deal that Spokane’s BRICK WEST BREWING CO. took home a gold medal at the World Beer Cup, an event dubbed “the Olympics of beer.” Brick West’s Festbier, a German-style Oktoberfest beer, took home a gold medal in the category.

Billing itself as the most prestigious beer competition in the world, the World Beer Cup recognizes brews across 111 different categories. For the 2023 event, more than 2,300 breweries from 26 countries entered a total of 10,213 beers.

Leading Sorella’s bar is Josh Fejeran, who brings about two decades of experience.

“He has an elevated style of bartending,” Blumenthal says, adding that it took a fair amount of convincing to recruit Fejeran, who’d been working across the river at Wooden City.

“I was like, ‘OK, here it is, I have glassware, but you can choose whatever liquor you want back here. You can write all the cocktails yourself,’” she says.

While the drink menu is currently about half the length Blumenthal envisions, more cocktails ($12 each) and happy hour are on the way, as is patio seating.

The extensive Italian wine list, meanwhile, is Blumenthal’s purview.

“It was one of the things I did [working] in Seattle, and I relinquished a lot of control to the kitchen with the food, and all of the cocktails to Josh, but I really wanted to have my hands on the wine list. It’s really important to me,” she says.

Sorella’s wine list includes more than 65 bottles, with the majority imported from Italy.

“Obviously there are amazing Washington and Oregon producers, but I wanted to stick to wines that I really like on a personal level, and I wanted to use it as an opportunity to introduce people around here to Italian wine.”

With that in mind, Blumenthal added a QR code on the bottom of the wine list that diners can scan for personal recommendations. If you like merlot, she suggests barbera. If you’re familiar with sauvignon blanc, try Soave.

Even though “a varietal may sound foreign to you, it’s just like these other things that you may enjoy,” she says. “Knowledge is power, and I just want people to learn, whether they’re an employee or a guest.” n

Sorella • 1122 W. Summit Pkwy. • Open Tue-Sat 5-10 pm • sorellaspokane.com • 509-443-4023 •

Reservations via OpenTable

The Good Food Awards recognize social and environmental responsibility in food production as well as excellent taste and quality. More than 2,000 entries each year across all categories — coffee, cheese, beer, chocolate and more — are judged in a blind taste test.

Evans Brothers’ winning coffee comes from a third-generation coffee “micro” mill in Costa Rica, which the roastery has been working with for the past seven years.

“The Good Food Awards is the most important and prestigious award we have received. It has become increasingly competitive,” says co-owner Rick Evans. “To be honored as a GFA Winner for the third time is truly remarkable. We are inspired to continue pursuing our passion of connecting our customers, both wholesale and retail, to the producers and partners that put so much of their heart and soul into producing exceptional coffee that benefits all those involved.”

Another repeat, regional Good Food Award winner is Spokane’s LIBERTY CIDERWORKS, which was honored for its 55 Chain, an English-style cider, and Heirloom Series McIntosh. (Both of these ciders also received the award in 2021.) Liberty sources all of its apples from three small, family-run orchards in the region that specialize in growing cider-making apples, a process similar to producing wine grapes.

In other award-centric news, Pullman’s THE BLACK CYPRESS has been named a finalist for the 2023 James Beard Awards in the Outstanding

Adding yet another entry to its growing list of honors is NO-LI BREWHOUSE, which cracked the top 25 list of independent, family-owned breweries in the U.S., according to numbers tracked by the big consumer goods market analytics firm IRI.

No-Li also recently took home two gold medals at the National Craft Beer Marketing Awards for its new Asian export campaign, No-Li Worldwide Japan, and for the branding of 25 Days of Christmas, its annual event to raise money for local nonprofits. In wine news, Spokane Valley’s WINESCAPE WINERY has been named 2023’s Washington Winery to Watch by Great Northwest Wine, a magazine covering the wine across the Pacific Northwest. Winescape is owned by Phillip and Patricia Butterfield, who both left faculty positions at Washington State University’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine to launch their dream winery in 2017. Winescape mostly produces red wines from grapes sourced from among the top vineyards in the Columbia Valley.

THE COEUR D’ALENE CASINO has been recognized as a “Top Culinary Experience” by Club + Resort Chef magazine, joining a list of dozens of high-end clubs and resorts around the U.S., as judged by a panel of chefs. In Worley, Idaho, the resort has several eateries under its umbrella, including the Chinook Restaurant Crafted by Chef Adam Hegsted, which recently debuted its spring seasonal menu with dishes like wild sockeye salmon and a Northwest seafood alfredo. n

An expansive gallery wall is a focal point of Sorella’s dining room decor.

Once Upon a Timeline… in Hollywood

From superheroes to Oscar winners, cinematic multiverses don’t look to be a passing trend

There’s a beloved meme that’s been kicking around for the past 12 years featuring a frame from the 1967 Spider-Man animated series in which two identical friendly neighborhood web crawlers point at one another accusingly. It’s become so prevalent that it was faithfully recreated in a post-credits scene from Into the Spider-Verse. It also presaged the current glut of multiversal cinema — movies of all stripes and colors wherein it’s mandatory to expect multiple versions of characters sharing the screen.

Earlier this year at the Academy Awards, The Daniels’ gonzo, sincere and idiosyncratic genre-blending melodrama Everything Everywhere All at Once made Oscars representational history, overwhelming the ceremony like a tidal wave with seven wins, including Best Picture. In addition to being a landmark for diversity during awards season, it was also a feather in the cap for the newly ubiquitous genre of multiversal science fiction, which has exploded onto theater screens over the last few years. As the summer movie cycle revs up, this trend seems to be as prevalent as ever, with new superhero entrants in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and DC’s The Flash Pinpointing the origins of this movement is almost as tricky as keeping track of which universe’s Spider-Man or Flash we’re following at any given time and how or why they’re interacting. Geeks (like me) know that the idea of a multiverse first made pop culture landfall in the early ’60s in the pages of DC Comics’ “Flash of Two Worlds,” where the Flash of DC’s “Silver Age,” Barry Allen, accidentally finds himself on Earth-2, where he encounters the

BY JASON BAXTER

1940’s-era Flash Jay Garrick, resolving a contradiction in continuity. It paved the way for major comic book events like Crisis on Infinite Earths and Flashpoint (this summer’s The Flash appears to be borrowing heavily from the latter).

There are forebears in films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or the more recent LEGO films and Ready Player One, which gleefully collide intellectual properties like a kid playing with mismatched action figures. 2008’s acclaimed animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse — another multiversal Oscar winner — arguably kicked open the door with a vibrant, energetic and nonetheless comprehensible narrative centered on the Afro-Latino teen Miles Morales and no less than four other Spiderpeople (and one Spider-pig) from other worlds.

Capitalizing on that film’s breakthrough success, Marvel Studios got multiverse fever, as evidenced by subsequent entries like the Disney+ TV series Loki and Wanda Vision, as well as last year’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home used some magic mambo-jumbo to unite Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man from the Sam Raimi trilogy, Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker from his two reboot films, and the MCU’s current webslinger Tom Holland. What little we can glean from their upcoming slate indicates things are only going to get more complex and head-spinning in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including a second season of Loki that’s expected to arrive later this year.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which hits theaters on June 2, looks to double-down on the quantity of alternate arachnid heroes and antiheroes, adding Oscar Isaac, Issa

Rae, Daniel Kaluuya and more to its already colorful cast. Hot on the heels of Across the Spider-Verse, the aforementioned DC tentpole The Flash races into theaters on June 16. Based on the trailers and television spots, audiences should know to expect to see two Barry Allens (both portrayed by problematic tabloid fixture Ezra Miller), Ben Affleck’s final turn as Batman, and the return of Michael Keaton to the dark knight’s cape and cowl, 31 years after he last played the part in Batman Returns. There’s also going to be an alternate universe Supergirl, a revivified alien despot from Man of Steel, and, apparently, also Wonder Woman. When it comes to both of these potential blockbusters, call it the kitchen sink approach to superhero cinema.

Evidently, all of these Spider-Men-and-Women-andAnimals and Flashes are here to stay. And as Everything Everywhere All at Once’s financial and critical success proved, multiverse movies are a sensation with mainstream moviegoers as much as arthouse audiences. Perhaps we’ve collectively grown tired of the same characters toplining their franchises over the last 50 years, varied though their interpretations may have been. Or maybe we’ve all been so inundated with superhero media and hifalutin sci-fi that we’re primed for such ambitious storytelling within the genre. As The AV Club’s Matt Schimkowitz put it in his recent reaction to an unfinished screening of The Flash at Cinemacon 2023, “It’s staggering how many bizarre and obtuse plot mechanics Marvel has pushed into the public discourse in the past decade.”

No matter the reasons, filmgoers: It’s Hollywood’s multiverse, and we’re just living in it. n

The Flash and Spidey look to continue the box office multiverse boom this summer.

Running on Fumes

Fast X can be a lot of fun when Jason Momoa takes the wheel, but everything else is a slog

BY CHASE HUTCHINSON

This far into the Fast & Furious franchise, the best way to distinguish between each new entry is by its most bonkers action sequence. Each film has at least one and, outside of the repeated proclamations about family growled out by Vin Diesel’s Dom, they are what define the series. The fifth had the heist where an enormous vault was pulled down the streets. The seventh was the one where they dropped out of a plane in cars retrofitted with parachutes. The ninth involved the gang getting launched into space in a car with rockets strapped to it. Increasingly and joyously unrestrained by the laws of physics, there was still a sense that the series may soon run out of ideas. Now with its 10th film, the series has reached that breaking point.

Simply titled Fast X, the standout action piece is a chase sequence involving a bomb that rolls through the streets of Rome. This glorified hamster ball is the creation of Jason Momoa’s dastardly Dante who emerges as the highlight of the entire film. A villain whose desire for destruction is matched only by his downright goofy mannerisms, he carries with him a grudge that goes way back to the aforementioned events of the fifth entry. This is established via flashback that humorously makes it seem as though Dante was always right on the margins of the frame just hanging around. It ends up most recalling what became

a recurring gag of sorts in the Saw franchise where there always seemed to be another character lurking in the shadows. While this manner of storytelling is often a ploy to provide fodder for a new narrative, there can be something fun in seeing how ridiculous it gets. There are hints of this absurdist sensibility sprinkled throughout Fast X, but it is drowned out in what becomes a dreadfully painful slog rather than a spectacle.

Though the film is about Dante trying to get his vengeance on Dom (and all of the people he considers his family), there is so much other noise that proves to be tiresome rather than thrilling. After the opening action scene with the bomb pinballing around the streets of Rome, which ends in spectacularly silly fashion the film could have used more of, all the characters find themselves scattered across the globe. The remainder of the punishing 141-minute film plays out as less of an action-packed journey than a setup for the next two films that Diesel reportedly wants to make — Fast X: Part 2 and Fast X: Part 3. That would be fine and dandy if this one didn’t feel so lifeless. Both the array of returning characters and a few new ones go through the motions with increasing weariness rather than wackiness. Even with Momoa doing the absolute most, the rest of the film is left spinning its wheels.

The film is directed by Louis Le-

terrier of The Transporter films who stepped in for series director Justin Lin, who departed the shooting early over reported creative differences. However, it doesn’t feel like this one has any creative vision to its construction. It is less directed than it is assembled from hamfisted cameos and cringeworthy comedy that just drags everything to a crawl. Some moments feel potentially promising, like when a new character offers a brief monologue on Dom’s family that opens a door to what could have been a self-aware romp with more bite to it. Any such doors are slammed shut, making everything feel more exhausting than exhilarating as creative stunts and staging are subsumed by the rote cycling through of empty fights with no weight to them. Anyone can be resurrected, even as you ultimately wish the entire film itself would finally expire.

Despite flashes of fun at the beginning and toward the close, its already small spark gets completely smothered. By the time we get to the ending, which occurs with such abruptness that it is more of a hard stop than a fitting conclusion, any remaining energy is utterly extinguished. Though one could find something chaotically charming in prior entries, that is gone in Fast X. Not even family can save this one. n

ALSO OPENING

MASTER GARDENER MONICA

FAST X

Rated PG-13

Directed by Louis Leterrier Starring Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Jason Momoa

MASTER GARDENER

Writer/director Paul Schrader’s latest tense drama centers on a horticulturist (Joel Edgerton)

The Fast franchise is officially off its hinges.

Sweets By Sarah K was the winner of our People’s Choice Award at Chocolate &

THE HARDEST WORKING MAN

Why does Spokane singer-songwriter and cover artist Just Plain Darin play over 200 shows per year?

If you’ve spent any amount of time pursuing the Inlander’s concert listings over the years, there’s one name that remains ever-present: Just Plain Darin.

Most weeks we’ve got listings for at least four Just Plain Darin shows around town. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the 56-year-old, local singer-songwriter and one-man cover band plays over 200 concerts per year. And while that’s a flabbergasting total for most individuals, it’s just part of the job for Darin Hilderbrand.

When I enter the South Hill Grill on a recent Sunday evening, Hilderbrand is already plying his trade. He’s stationed in a little nook to the side of the bar, almost out of sight, but his sound keeps him from being out of mind. From the other corner of the restaurant you could probably mistake his music for the joint playing an interesting acoustic covers radio station.

Hilderbrand is festooned in the manner of a low-maintenance rock guy, sporting a casual look with a fedora and vest highlighting his ensemble. While certainly he doesn’t have the restaurant’s rapt attention, it’s clear he’s having a great time as he and his beloved Larrivee LV-10 acoustic guitar maneuver through covers of familiar tunes like Santana’s “Smooth” with the aid of some looping pedals, which can triple up his guitar work for more shredding solos and double his vocals to allow for harmonies.

Most Thursday nights, Just Plain Darin can be found playing at QQ Sushi & Kitchen in north Spokane,

BY SETH SOMMERFELD

most Fridays downtown at The Ridler Piano Bar, most Sundays at South Hill Grill, and then usually at least one other gig, often on Saturdays. It’s a rather breakneck pace, but playing that many shows — along with providing guitar lessons and teaching some music classes at East Valley School District — allows him to be a full-time professional musician without really touring much or needing to be in the cycle of putting out his own original music. And music remains his passion.

“I truly believe that music is what I was created to do,” Hilderbrand says. “I think it’s my purpose. And when I do it, it’s just confirmation. Because it fills me up.”

It’s not exactly the rock star dream to be playing restaurants as sort of the background sonic ambiance — sometimes with low turnouts or a general lack of attention from those in attendance — but that’s something Hilderbrand has learned to spin into a positive over the years.

“I deal with that quite frequently. And it used to frustrate me,” he says. “And I was talking with a musician friend of mine about that whole dynamic. And he was just like, ‘Dude, count your blessings. You’re getting paid to play music? Treat it as a paid rehearsal.’”

When in that sort of live rehearsal mode, Hilderbrand is free to explore his creativity. Although he hasn’t put out a new Just Plain Darin album since 2014’s My Heritage, he still mixes originals into his sets.

Just Plain Darin originals fall into the category of

heartfelt blues-y rock singer-songwriter tunes that go down very easy. He often finds it most beneficial to work out new songs live, almost like how a stand-up comedian has to work out their jokes on stage to perfect them. It’s one of many ways to keep live performance at the same venues over and over from growing stale.

“It’s a little bit more pressure, because you have to keep it fresh,” Hilderbrand says. “So I make a point to learn new songs frequently, so I’m not always playing the same songs.”

Aiding him in that freshness quest is his trusty iPad on a stand loaded with the OnSong app, which catalogs one’s chords and lyrics charts. With over 1,000 songs available with a few taps on the screen, calling Just Plain Darin’s repertoire robust would be an extreme understatement. He tries his best to judge the vibe on a given night and cater to the audience — maybe classic rock if the crowd’s older (Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd rank among his personal favorites to play) or more country if he’s playing out in the boonies — though admittedly he miscalculates reading the room at times.

There’s also a certain daring to the process — Just Plain Darin is sometimes willing to do requests of songs he’s never played before.

“Friday nights I do the Piano Bar. And it’s pretty much all requests. And so there’s a lot of times where they’ll request songs that I’ve never played. But if I’ve heard it

Darin Hilderbrand landed his first regular gig at the Laguna Cafe but now plays everywhere. ERICK DOXEY PHOTO

enough times, and if I can find the chord chart online, I can fake it,” Hilderbrand says with a laugh. “It’s pretty vulnerable, but I’ve discovered that they actually connect with you when you try and fail miserably because they hoop and holler and they love it.”

Like many a guitarist of his generation, Hilderbrand has a certain metal wizard to blame for sparking his musical desire. His revelation came one night in 1981 at the old Spokane Coliseum.

“I went to a concert in the old Boone Street Barn when I was like 14. It was a Van Halen concert,” he says. “I’d never played an instrument before, besides the recorder, but it just hit me. That’s what I want to do. And I came home from that concert with determination. I told my mom when I got home, ‘I need a guitar.’... So it’s Eddie’s fault.”

Born in Moscow, Idaho, and residing mostly in Spokane since he was a toddler, Hilderbrand’s musical journey wasn’t always a straight line. As an insecure young lad, he kept practicing his instrument but wasn’t in any bands during high school and essentially kept his skills private, not playing in front of people for about 10 years until one of his buddies hired him to play music at a hotel cocktail gathering. He served three years in the Army before using the GI Bill to study jazz and the business of music at Spokane Falls Community College. It was while in school that he finally started playing in bands — mostly jazz fusion and R&B. (His first band, years before The Office, was called That’s What She Said.)

It was through a woman in his school choir that Hilderbrand got hooked up with the melodic metal band Kidd Robin. The group’s singer had quit, and he stepped into that void, serving as the band’s singer and bassist for six years. They tried to make a go of it, but the timing was bad as grunge was just hitting and bands with sounds like Kidd Robin became old news. But that disappointment led Hilderbrand to his solo career.

Although he released his first album, Back to the Basics, in 2000, music was still his side hustle. But in 2002, he took the plunge and attempted to do music full time.

“I was like, ‘If I spent half the amount of time working on it as I do thinking about it, I might actually make it work,” he recalls.

He fully committed to having a business schedule for music, doing his own booking, practicing, lesson plans and more. At first, lessons were the primary source of income, but gigging eventually overtook that. Around 10 years ago he landed his first weekly gig at the (now defunct) Laguna Cafe and soon started seeking out more and more consistent gigs like that.

“I love being on stage. I love performing. If I could afford to leave all of the booking and all of the other stuff that I have to do to someone else and just practice and perform, I would,” Hilderbrand says. “So I’ve got to do all the other stuff that makes it a job. And like any job, there’s certain parts that you could live without, but it’s just part of the gig. Because there’s times I’ll just be, ‘[deep sigh] I don’t want to do this.’ And then as soon as I get going, it’s like this is what I was made for. All the other stuff falls away.”

In addition to being a therapeutic relief — his wife literally tells him to “go play your guitar for a while” when he’s in a rare sour mood — music also brings spiritual fulfillment. As if the other gigging wasn’t enough, he’s also an itinerant worship music leader at places like the Gathering House on Sundays. This spiritual connection to music further helps him avoid feelings of burnout.

There’s something comforting about the consistency of someone like Just Plain Darin. The larger Spokane music scene might ebb and flow. Bands start up and break up. Venues come and go. But for 50 or so weeks a year, Just Plain Darin is gonna be out there grinding and loving every moment of it.

“Just this weekend, I played Thursday, Friday, Saturday, twice on Sunday,” Hilderbrand says. “And I got home, I was just exhausted. And I thought, ‘I need to play my guitar!’ [laughs] I sat down and I played my electric for probably over an hour. I feel very fortunate to be able to do something that I love, and I still love.” n

To see Just Plain Darin’s extensive concert schedule visit justplaindarin.com.

HAWAIIAN U3

For U3, it’s not YOU-kulele, it’s ukule-WE The ukulele supergroup brings together YouTube standout singer-songwriter Cythia Lin, Berklee alumni Abe Lagrimas Jr. and the aptly portmanteau’d Ukulenny (Lenny San Jose) to create genre-blending music using Hawaii’s favorite four-stringed instrument. The group’s debut album In Waves mixes traditional Hawiian music, bossa nova, island reggae, jazz, and pop rock covers (“Message in a Bottle” and “Sweet Child O’ Mine”) with plenty of inventive ukulele sounds and also Lin’s gentle, sweet vocals, Ukulennny’s u-bass strumming and beatboxing, and Lagrimas adding vibraphone and other percussive elements. It all goes down as effortlessly as passing a summer day basking in rays on a sandy Pacific Ocean beach. Plus, definitionally, U3 is a superior band to U2. That’s just math.

— SETH SOMMERFELD

U3 • Thu, May 18 at 7 pm • $23-$38 • All ages • Bing Crosby Theater • 901 W. Sprague Ave. • bingcrosbytheater.com

COUNTRY KANE BROWN

Thursday, 5/18

J ADELO’S PIZZA, PASTA & PINTS, Brassless Chaps

J J BING CROSBY THEATER, U3

BOLO’S BAR & GRILL, Inland Empire Blues Society Monthly Boogie

CHAN’S RED DRAGON ON THIRD, Thursday Night Jam

CHECKERBOARD TAPROOM, Weathered Shepherds

J HISTORIC DAVENPORT HOTEL, Tom Pletscher

THE MASON JAR, Keva

NEATO BURRITO, King Ropes, BaLonely

J J QQ SUSHI & KITCHEN, Just Plain Darin

RED ROOM LOUNGE, Hip-Hop Night

J J SPOKANE ARENA, Kane Brown, Dustin Lynch, Locash ZOLA, Mister Sister

Friday, 5/19

BACKWOODS WHISKEY BAR, Conor Yarbrough

BARRISTER WINERY, Stagecoach

West

J THE BIG DIPPER, When The Broken Burn, In Your Grave, Midnight Drive

BIGFOOT PUB & EATERY, Eternal Jones

BOLO’S, Tamarack Ridge Band

CHAN’S RED DRAGON ON THIRD, Justyn Priest

CURLEY’S, Pastiche

THE DISTRICT BAR, Silver Treason, Touch of Evil

J HISTORIC DAVENPORT HOTEL, Tom Pletscher Trio

IRON HORSE (CDA), Haze

J LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, TS the Solution, Truehoods

MOOSE LOUNGE, Chasing Eos

MULLIGAN’S BAR & GRILLE, Son of Brad

NEATO BURRITO, DJ Ca$e , Normo

NIGHTHAWK LOUNGE (CDA CASINO), Rock Candy

J PEND D’OREILLE WINERY, The Cole Show

RED ROOM LOUNGE, Live DJs

J THE RIDLER PIANO BAR, Just Plain

Darin

ZOLA, Starcourt

Saturday, 5/20

BACKWOODS WHISKEY BAR, Redbooks

BIG BARN BREWING CO., Sidetrack

J

J THE BIG DIPPER, The Zenith Passage Age, of Nephilim,

No Living Witness, Odyssey

BIGFOOT PUB & EATERY, Eternal Jones

BOLO’S BAR & GRILL, Tamarack Ridge Band

THE BULL HEAD, The Coleman Underground

CHAN’S RED DRAGON ON THIRD, Kosta la Vista

CURLEY’S, Pastiche

J HISTORIC DAVENPORT HOTEL, Tom Pletscher Trio

J J HISTORIC DAVENPORT HOTEL, Sacha Boutros, Brent Edstrom Quartet

IRON HORSE (CDA), Haze

KNITTING FACTORY, Un Año Contigo: Bad Bunny Dance Night

Few viral sensations become legit superstars, but Kane Brown is an exception. The biracial megastar first got noticed for posting covers of country hits on Facebook in the mid-2010s that garnered millions of views, and within a couple of years he was topping the country charts with his self-titled debut. With a soulful voice and willingness to incorporate R&B beats and smoothness into his songs, he’s carved out his own niche in the pop country world. Having earned multiple platinum albums and five American Music Awards already in his short career, he’s established himself as a bona fide arena-headliner who’s sure to get all the country gals swooning when he hits the Spokane Arena stage.

— SETH SOMMERFELD

Kane Brown, Dustin Lynch, LoCash • Thu, May 18 at 7 pm • $55-$370 • All ages • Spokane Arena • 720 W. Mallon Ave. • spokanearena.com

LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, Strangerers, Avenue on York, Roderick Bambino

LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, Imagine Collective

MOOSE LOUNGE, Chasing Eos

NIGHTHAWK LOUNGE (CDA CASINO), Rock Candy

J PEND D’OREILLE WINERY, Bridges Home

RED ROOM LOUNGE, Live DJs

STOCKWELL’S CHILL N GRILL, Son of Brad

ZOLA, Blake Braley

Sunday, 5/21

CURLEY’S, Kosta la Vista

J HISTORIC DAVENPORT HOTEL, Michael Millham

HOGFISH, Open Mic

J THE KENWORTHY, Tango Del Cielo

J NORTHERN QUEST RESORT & CASINO, John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band

PANIDA THEATER, Jim Messina

J J SOUTH HILL GRILL, Just Plain Darin

Monday, 5/22

BIGFOOT PUB & EATERY, Karaoke with DJ Sterling

BRICK WEST BREWING, Live Karaoke

J EICHARDT’S PUB, Monday Night Blues Jam with John Firshi

RED ROOM LOUNGE, Open Mic Night

J = THE INLANDER RECOMMENDS THIS SHOW

J = ALL AGES SHOW

Wednesday, 5/24

CHAN’S RED DRAGON ON THIRD, Wednesday Night Jam

THE DRAFT ZONE, Open Mic

J HISTORIC DAVENPORT HOTEL, Dr. Don Goodwin

J JJ’S TAP & SMOKEHOUSE, Brassless Chaps

J PEND D’OREILLE WINERY, Jason Evans

RED ROOM LOUNGE, The Roomates

J SOUTH PERRY LANTERN, Howie King

J TWO SHOE BBQ, Karaoke Joe ZOLA, Brittany’s House

Coming Up ...

J THE BIG DIPPER, Ingested, Devourment, Extermination Dismemberment, Organectomy, Xingaia, May 25, 6:30 pm.

KNITTING FACTORY, Flatland Cavalry, Cobly Acuff, May 25, 8 pm.

J THE BIG DIPPER, No Soap Radio, Vika and the Velvets, May 26, 7:30 pm.

LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, Brick + Mortar, Jhariah, Pollyanna, May 26, 8 pm.

J J GORGE AMPHITHEATER, Illenium, May 27 and May 28.

J J PAVILION AT RIVERFRONT, Lord Huron, Allie Crow Buckley, May 27, 7 pm.

J THE BIG DIPPER, Chase the Sun, Day Shadow, Outer Resistance, May 27, 7:30 pm.

J J KNITTING FACTORY, Cali Calssic Tour: Mack 10, Warren G, DJ Quik, Amanda Perez, Kid Frost, Tha Dogg Pound, Suga Free, May 27, 7:30 pm.

LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, Shawn Stratte, Mads Simmons, May 27, 8 pm.

J THE BIG DIPPER, Moris Blak, Danny Blu, Eva X, Haex, May 28, 7:30 pm.

J KNITTING FACTORY, Stryper, Becoming Bristol, May 28, 8 pm.

J J KNITTING FACTORY, Monke Business, Slow Children at Play, Vika & the Velvets, June 2, 7:30-11 pm.

J J BLACK LABEL BREWING CO., The B Radicals Album Release Party, June 3, 6-10 pm.

J KNITTING FACTORY, Granger Smith, Earl Dibbles Jr., June 4, 8 pm.

LUCKY YOU LOUNGE, Big Richard, June 4, 8 pm.

MUSIC | VENUES

219 LOUNGE • 219 N. First Ave., Sandpoint • 208-263-5673

ARBOR CREST WINE CELLARS • 4705 N. Fruit Hill Rd., Spokane Valley • 509-927-9463

BABY BAR • 827 W. First Ave. • 509-847-1234

BARRISTER WINERY • 1213 W. Railroad Ave. • 509-465-3591

BEE’S KNEES WHISKY BAR • 1324 W. Lancaster Rd.., Hayden • 208-758-0558

BERSERK • 125 S. Stevens St. • 509-315-5101

THE BIG DIPPER • 171 S. Washington St. • 509-863-8098

BIGFOOT PUB • 9115 N. Division St. • 509-467-9638

BING CROSBY THEATER • 901 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-227-7638

BLACK DIAMOND • 9614 E. Sprague Ave. • 509891-8357

BOLO’S BAR & GRILL • 116 S. Best Rd., Spokane Valley • 509-891-8995

BOOMERS CLASSIC ROCK BAR • 18219 E. Appleway Ave., Spokane Valley • 509-368-9847

BUCER’S COFFEEHOUSE PUB • 201 S. Main St., Moscow • 208-596-0887

THE BULL HEAD • 10211 S. Electric St., Four Lakes • 509-838-9717

CHAN’S RED DRAGON • 1406 W. Third Ave. • 509-838-6688

COEUR D’ALENE CASINO • 37914 S. Nukwalqw St., Worley • 800-523-2464

COEUR D’ALENE CELLARS • 3890 N. Schreiber Way, Coeur d’Alene • 208-664-2336

CRUISERS BAR & GRILL • 6105 W Seltice Way, Post Falls • 208-446-7154

CURLEY’S HAUSER JUNCTION • 26433 W. Hwy. 53, Post Falls • 208-773-5816

EICHARDT’S PUB • 212 Cedar St., Sandpoint • 208-263-4005

FIRST INTERSTATE CENTER FOR THE ARTS • 334 W. Spokane Falls Blvd. • 509-279-7000

FOX THEATER • 1001 W. Sprague Ave. •

509-624-1200

IRON HORSE • 407 E. Sherman, Coeur d’Alene • 208-667-7314

IRON HORSE BAR & GRILL • 11105 E. Sprague Ave., Spokane Valley • 509-926-8411

JOHN’S ALLEY • 114 E. Sixth St., Moscow • 208-883-7662

KNITTING FACTORY • 911 W. Sprague Ave. •

509-244-3279

LEFTBANK WINE BAR • 108 N. Washington St. • 509-315-8623

LUCKY YOU LOUNGE • 1801 W. Sunset Blvd. •

509-474-0511

MARYHILL WINERY • 1303 W. Summit Pkwy. •

509-443-3832

THE MASON JAR • 101 F St., Cheney • 509-359-8052

MAX AT MIRABEAU • 1100 N. Sullivan Rd., Spokane Valley • 509-922-6252

MILLIE’S • 28441 Hwy 57, Priest Lake • 208-443-0510

MOOSE LOUNGE • 401 E. Sherman Ave., Coeur d’Alene • 208-664-7901

MOOTSY’S • 406 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-838-1570

NASHVILLE NORTH • 6361 W. Seltice Way, Post Falls • 208-457-9128

NORTHERN QUEST RESORT & CASINO • 100 N. Hayford Rd., Airway Heights • 877-871-6772

NYNE BAR & BISTRO • 232 W. Sprague Ave. • 509-474-1621

PEND D’OREILLE WINERY • 301 Cedar St., Sandpoint • 208-265-8545

THE PODIUM • 511 W. Dean Ave. • 509-279-7000

POST FALLS BREWING CO. • 112 N. Spokane St., Post Falls • 208-773-7301

RAZZLE’S BAR & GRILL • 10325 N. Government Way, Hayden • 208-635-5874

RED ROOM LOUNGE • 521 W. Sprague Ave. •

509-838-7613

THE RIDLER PIANO BAR • 718 W. Riverside Ave. • 509-822-7938

SEASONS OF COEUR D’ALENE

MUSIC SCHEDULE 2023

The Nest: Jason Perry, Frankie Ghee Adams Alley: Hunter Koss

The Nest: Pual Kessler, Christopher Anderson Adams Alley: Hunter Koss

The Nest: Jason Perry, Jona Gallegos Adams Alley: Jessica Haffner

The Nest: Hannah Siglin, Frankie Ghee Adams Alley: Bill Compher

The Nest: Micah Clay LÜbben, Ron Greene Adams Alley: David McRae

The Nest: Christopher Anderson, Jona Gallegos Adams Alley: Bill Compher

The Nest: David McRae, Hannah Siglin Adams Alley: Neil Doghouse Boyz

The Nest: Ron Greene, Gil Rivas Adams Alley: Michael Connelly

The Nest: Paul Kessler, Suhanna Jens Adams Alley: Jessica Haffner

The Nest: Micah Clay LÜbben, Jayson Orth Adams Alley: Hannah Boundy

The Nest: Bob Marlowe, Hannah Boundy Adams Alley: Brad Keeler

The Nest: Nalina McShane, Ben Clark Adams Alley: Tim Snodgrass

The Nest: Dario Ré, Jayson Orth Adams Alley: Jake Rozier

The Nest: Bob Marlowe, Ben Clark Adams Alley: Michael Connelly

The Nest: Tim Snodgrass, Gil Rivas Adams Alley: Brad Keeler

The Nest: Tim Snodgrass, Nalina McShane Adams Alley: Suhanna Jens

The Nest: Jake Rozier, Dario Ré Adams Alley: TBD

The Nest: TBD Adams Alley: TBD

FOOD & DRINK PARADE PREFUNK

While many regional brewfests have come and gone over the years, we hope this one is here to stay. Considering it’s tied to an 85-years-and-running community event, Spokane’s Lilac Festival, the odds look pretty good. For the second year, the Lilac Festival Brewfest unites a whopping 30 of the region’s beer and cider makers to showcase the region’s thriving brewing community. All of these local favorites converge in Riverfront Park under the welcoming shade of the Pavilion — the perfect way to spend a Saturday afternoon before packing up the camp chairs to set up along downtown’s sidewalks for the Armed Forces Torchlight Parade, which kicks off at 7:45 pm. Find the full participating brewery list at the link below, and buy tickets, which come with a tasting glass and 10, 5-ounce tasting tokens. Designated drivers can attend for free, but the event isn’t kid-friendly.

— CHEY SCOTT

WORDS BAD BRAINS

THEATER FEAR OR LOVE?

Spokane Lilac Festival Brewfest

• Sat, May 20 from 1-5 pm

•

• Riverfront Park Pavilion • 574 W. Howard St. • spokanelilacfestival.org

$30-$40 • 21+

As I’ve written plenty about in the pages of the Inlander, music can be a vital part of one’s mental health. Whether using it as a soothing tool or a cathartic way to expel the bad thoughts and feelings, different types of music can help different folks immensely. Canadian rock journalist Jason Schreurs is one such individual. After being diagnosed as bipolar in his 40s, he started reflecting on the way that the screaming release of punk rock was an element of his mental health. His book Scream Therapy (he also hosts a podcast with the same name) examines how a subculture like the punk scene can provide alternative methods to dealing with mental health issues for marginalized folks in our society. That said, please don’t mosh at Auntie’s.

— SETH SOMMERFELD

Though he’s most well known for his smash-hit musical Rent, Jonathan Larson wrote two other works in his lifetime: Superbia, which never received a full production, and Tick, Tick…Boom!, a semi-autobiographical musical that was recently adapted into a film starring Andrew Garfield as Larson. The musical tells the story of an aspiring composer named Jon who resides in New York City as he contemplates his life choices and tries to make it big in the theater scene without much luck. Larson was never able to see the impact of Rent or Tick, Tick…Boom! before he died in 1996, but this EWU Theatre production is a great introduction to Larson’s work and a reminder that love and perseverance will always prevail.

— MADISON PEARSON

Tick Tick…Boom! • May 19-21; Fri-Sat at 7:30 pm, Sun at 2 pm • $5-$10 • Eastern Washington University Theater Building, Cheney • ewu.edu/theatre • 509-359-2459

DEREK HARRISON PHOTO

GET LISTED!

VISUAL ARTS INDIGENEITY & FILM

Washington State University is unveiling a collection of films and experimental documentaries made by Indigenous artists. The nine films cover a wide array of topics that touch on Indigenous identity and presence in the face of a deep colonial history spanning across the continent and the world. The films incorporate poetry, beauty and community while also preserving the past and presenting ways of seeing the future in a different light. The collection was curated by MacArthur Fellow Sky Hopinka and features films from the artists and groups TJ Cuthand, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, James Luna, Caroline Monnet, and Jackson Polys.

— SUMMER SANDSTROM

What Was Always Yours and Never Lost • May 16-June 30, Tue-Fri 11 am-2 pm, Sat 10 am-4 pm • Free • Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU • 1535 NE Wilson Rd., Pullman • museum.wsu.edu • 509-335-1910

VISUAL ARTS A BRUSH WITH NATURE

At Brush on the Bluff, art intersects with nature to bring art lovers and creatives together in celebration of local talent, our beautiful city and community. Join dozens of professional artists as they set up easels along the bluff and draw inspiration from the natural beauty around them. While you’re walking the trail, chat with artists, observe their work and creative processes, make fun crafts, and participate in art workshops. This year, the Botanical Alchemists are hosting a community art project for attendees, therapist and artist Marit Fischer leads a nature journaling workshop, and local food trucks bring global cuisine for attendees to try as they enjoy this art-filled day on the bluff.

— MADISON PEARSON

Submit events online at Inlander.com/getlisted or email relevant details to getlisted@inlander.com. We need the details one week prior to our publication date. Federally insured

*Here’s the legal stuff: $500 in dividends is not guaranteed when opening a Bonus Checking account. In order to earn $500 or more in dividends, an account balance of at least $25,000 must be maintained and monthly qualifiers must be met for an entire calendar year.

Brush on the Bluff • Sat, May 20 from 11 am-6 pm • Free • Polly Judd Park • 1802 W. 14th Ave • friendsofthebluff.org/brushonthebluff

I SAW YOU

PETSMART CHECKER SAT. AFTERNOON I gave you a note I was rushed to write, and I’m sure i sounded like a moron. What it should have said is I find you quite beautiful and being I tend to be super shy it takes a lot for me to be moved enough to express myself but, though you kept your energy to yourself, I couldn’t help but notice your hidden demeanor and intellect. Also, how did your co-worker know what I was trying to do when I awkwardly dropped you the note with my number? Was I that obvious or do you have this kind of thing happen to you often? She was also extremely attractive... with my luck though it was because she is already in a relationship with you. Anyways though I allow that tiny spark of maybe I’ll get a response this time... I never have before. At least if you see this you’ll gain a better insight than “Hey, you’re really hot” hit me up from some weirdo in a leather...

POPE FRANCIS The vicar of Jesus Christ and the apostolic bishop of Rome received his Covid vaccination on Jan. 14, 2021. The pontiff said that ALL Catholics had a “moral obligation” to get vaccinated.

CHEERS

DONNIE NOT SURE Wasn’t sure on how to say thank you. I think your name was Donnie and you were with your friend at Northern Quest casino. Just wanted to thank you. You made my day. I hope you read this! Not sure if you even live in Spokane...

IN THE WORDS OF MARY CHAPIN

CARPENTER “We’re in big trouble, Doris — I really think I’ve fallen in love with you.”

~George Peters. “Shut Up And Kiss Me!”

~Mary Chapin Carpenter

BLOOMSDAY 2023Cheers to the organizers and volunteers for Bloomsday 2023! Once again, it was a spectacular event showing that there are some good things about Spokane, regardless of what others say. Thank you for placing those signs several places that indicated which side walkers are to be on. Many of the walkers didn’t pay attention (or can’t read), but thanks for trying anyhow. Besides having to zigzag around the walkers at some places the race was just amazing. Also, the finishers shirt was among the best in recent years. So, thank you to all, and wishing for many more like it. Cheers also to the runners in 2020 and 2021 who ran the course together anyhow when the event was only run virtual. Nobody got ill then either, just like this year. Imagine that!

BRAVO, MT SPOKANE I know it may be late, but a great year and great job by the staff at Mt. Spokane Ski Park. The daily shuttle service in the parking lot is a godsend, especially with kids, and everyone is so helpful. The moonlight skiing was a new experience our family will never forget. Thank you!

TRANS JOY FOR ALL AGES Cheers to Gov. Inslee and Rep. Marko Liias for passing SB 5599! As a trans woman living in Washington, my home is now a refuge for children that are escaping the wrath of unsupportive parents! Any age, honey you can come stay with Auntie Sam! Knowing that these parents will lie awake at night with no recourse to push their hate on these children makes my heart full and happy. Thank you, governor, for being the light that the state needs. Now children of all ages can find their TRUE family and explore their gender and sexuality in a comfortable environment free from hate!

THANK YOU, SPOKANE I am grateful to the city of Spokane for all you have given me during my time here. Thank you for the beautiful parks and green spaces! Thank you to the local artists for sharing your art with us. Thank you to the bus drivers and those on public transportation who have been so helpful to a fellow passenger. Thank you to the workers of Spokane for your humor, kindness and generosity. You are a lovely city! Thank you.

STA PARATRANSIT Cheers to the STA

Paratransit drivers, schedulers, dispatchers and supervisors! The Paratransit service is the only way that many people in Spokane can get around. They all do their best to get us where we need to go and to do it on time! Sometimes people are rude, unappreciative, and unkind to them and seem to think that they are the only ones that matter. Every single person that I have

JEERS

TO THE CITY OF SPOKANE So being a regular downtown you should be ashamed of the wasted tax dollars. You have spent two years redoing Riverside. Only you forgot to finish the last two blocks. But it seems too late to do that now that you have

RE: MORE COMMUNISM The word you were looking for was “fascism.” Fascism starts with banning books. Fascism is what is being nurtured in this country. The people with power are taking away education so the human capital can be controlled (lied to) more easily. Communism is when the working class and the oppressed take power back from the ruling class. Doing that

dealt with at Paratransit has done their very best to help me, even when they are short-staffed and working overtime. Please be kind! Especially to people that are doing their best to help customers with disabilities with their transportation. The people that work at Paratransit are some of the best people I have ever dealt with.

BIKING TO WORK-ERS Cheers to the folks riding their bikes to work during Bike To Work Week. The weather couldn’t be better for a morning commute on a bicycle. You deserve those free pancakes in Riverfront Park!

RECOGNITION Cheers to Inlander! Thanks for your journalistic professionalism which many publications and news media outlets lack today. This platform given to the common man/woman without censor is commendable. Everyone has a right to voice their opinion they hold dear to a public debate; this is how America was founded, not on canceling opinions even the ones you disagree with. And you have provided an easy way to do that. The main newspaper here in Spokane actually censored my letter to the editor/pubic peers that included the phrase “leave the damn dams alone.” It was a key phrase in the closing of my opinion. I was called and informed my choice of words was profane. I was told if my letter was to be printed I would need to change the wording and drop the word damn. I did agree. Yet in the next week’s Sunday paper a letter was printed from a TDS rant to letters to the editor containing the phrase “God damn Trump supporters.” On Sunday?... Anyway, thanks for letting thoughts be seen from the common person without partisan-censured propaganda on hypocritical display and WGAF people say damn on TV SMH

put your fancy line markers down. Then today, going downtown you are continuing to dig holes in that section so maybe it will take another two years to finish two blocks. What a waste!

FREE PARKING How can one run a topnotch retirement community but not provide parking for employees. They don’t care where your caregivers park. It’s a thinker... maybe the neighbors care?

FIRST RESPONDERS HAD LEAST CLASS Jeers to the group of four off-shift police or fire or ambulance workers talking about the sight and smell of dead bodies in Three Sisters Restaurant while other people are eating. I had to move across the dining room to avoid ruining my lunch. Where were you raised? In a barn? You really will eat lunch and not have the slightest care that you’re ruining other people’s lunch? You have not a touch of class, and God help the people who you’re supposed to be serving.

RE: NRA MYTH LOL! Tell that to the Taliban!

KAREN IN RED FORD SUV You parked in the handicapped spot in front of the doors at Northwest Seed and Pet on North Division. You made a big deal about making sure the doors were locked. When I pointed out that the rig was still running, your incredibly nasty response told me that you knew what you were doing was wrong. You leave your big red Ford SUV running while you shop cause the air conditioner doesn’t work well and you don’t want to get into a hot car. OMG woman, quit polluting the world, you snowflake. A good mechanic can fix that, for less than what you are spending on gas. Or you can do what the rest of us do to cool off our cars, roll down the window. Its only 70 degrees out. I hope your engine overheats and blows.

requires education, community, and action. Maybe you should read a few more banned books. You might learn that communism souds pretty good compared to our current capitalist, fascist death spiral. And before you come at me with “no food, vuvuzela, 100,000 dead” do some research on how many people the US has killed in the name of “democracy” and oil and sweatshop labor. Keep the books in the library. That’s how we start taking the power back.

PARKS ARE FOR THE PEOPLE No, absolutely not. Y’all can’t have the authority to arrest the average citizen on what is essentially their property. Man y’all wave that Gadsden flag until people start doing something you don’t like and it’s all, “We need to arrest more people.” Here’s an idea: Identify problem areas, have officers walk a beat in those areas at specific times, talk to people, get to know them, let your presence be known. That will do more to dissuade potential criminals without good decent citizens getting caught up for no reason. This is a great city, and one of the best things about our city is the parks and trails. Don’t get me wrong — I’m tired of foils and needles and trash. But giving the police license to arrest anyone for being in the park too late isn’t going to lead to change. n

NOTE: I Saw You/Cheers & Jeers is for adults 18 or older. The Inlander reserves the right to edit or reject any posting at any time at its sole discretion and assumes no responsibility for the content.

BENEFIT

SPOKANIMAL’S WOOFS & WHISKERS

This 3rd annual event features an online auction that benefits Spokanimal. Proceeds are used to provide care for animals in need. Through May 19, 5 pm-midnight. spokanimal.org (509-995-6010)

SPOKANE LILAC FESTIVAL PRESIDENT’S GALA A gala hosted by 2023 Festival President Sam Snow, welcoming municipal leaders and leadership from across the Pacific Northwest, with entertainment, a silent auction dancing and a keynote from the 2023 Parade Grand Marshal. May 19, 6:30-10 pm. $110. Historic Davenport Hotel, 10 S. Post St. spokanelilacfestival.org (800-899-1482)

CELEBRATE MENTAL HEALTH This silent auction benefits the Discovery Foundation’s services for mental health assessments, individual therapy, family therapy, grief counseling and more. May 21, 5:30-8:45 pm. $80. Arbor Crest Wine Cellars, 4705 N. Fruit Hill Rd. discoverycounseling.org (509-413-1193)

KYRS RECORD SHOW Buy, sell and trade records, tapes, posters and other music memorabilia. All proceeds go to KYRS Thin Air Community Radio. May 21, 12-4 pm. $2-$10. Central Library, 906 W. Main Ave. kyrs.org (509 638-4516)

SPOKANE HEART SPRING A fundraising event for the Humane Evacuation Animal Rescue Team, a nonprofit formed to provide disaster relief for animals. This event features a silent auction, dinner and live music by Jerry Lee Raines. May 22, 6-9 pm. $35. Craft & Gather, 4403 S. Dishman-Mica Rd. heartofspokane.org

SPEAKEASY Dress up for a night of dancing, drinking and fun while supporting the Coeur d’Alene Arts and Culture Alliance. May 25, 6-10 pm. $75-$80. Berkshire Hathaway Home Services, 1927 Riverstone Dr. artsandculturecda.org

COMEDY

GABRIEL IGLESIAS Iglesias is a standup comedian and actor, starring in his own movies as well as multiple animated movies. May 19-20. SOLD OUT. Spokane Comedy Club, 315 W. Sprague. spokanecomedyclub.com (509-318-9998)

TORY WARD The rising Portland comic, performs along with Julia Corral. 21+. May 19, 8-9:30 pm. $10. Bulldog’s Famous BBQ & Brews, 5002 N. Ferrall St. fb.me/e/3t0kiVOIU (509-315-8106)

TREY KENNEDY: GROW UP After his success on Vine, Instagram and TikTok,

Kennedy’s stand up tour supports his self-produced comedy special, Are You For Real? May 19, 7 pm. $29-$184. The Fox Theater, 1001 W. Sprague Ave. foxtheaterspokane.org (509-624-1200)

YOUR MAMA! An improvised show celebrating all the mom’s in our lives. Rated for audiences 16+. Reservations suggested May 19, 7:30-8:45 pm. $9. Blue Door Theatre, 815 W. Garland Ave. bluedoortheatre.com (5097477045)

COMMUNITY

NEW STORY SPOKANE FESTIVAL Learn about ordinary people who do extraordinary work in the local community. Festival topics include sustainable agriculture, shelter for all, social equity, cultural preservation and much more. May 19, 4-8:30 pm and May 20, 8 am-8 pm. $45. Gonzaga Hemmingson Center, 702 E. Desmet Ave. newstoryfestival.com/spokane

ROLE-PLAYING GAME DROP IN Improve your RPG skills by watching and participating in games. Fridays from 4-8 pm and Saturdays from 1-5 pm. Free. RPG Community Center, 101 N. Stone Street. rpgcenter.org

TRANQUILITY MEDITATION WORKSHOP Lama Lakshey, a Tibetan meditation teacher, delivers a workshop on tranquility and meditation. May 19, 6-7:30 pm. By donation. Community Building, 35 W. Main Ave. tsintamani.org

ARMED FORCES TORCHLIGHT PARADE

Celebrate the Lilac City with a parade featuring various floats, bands and organizations marching through the streets of downtown Spokane. May 20, 7:45 pm. Free. spokanelilacfestival.org/parade/

ARTISTS OF COLOR EXPO & SYMPOSIUM This two-day, community-curated program features art exhibits, live performances, presentations, workshops, film screenings, artist talks and more. Online and in person. See site for full schedule. May 20, 12-6:25 pm and May 21, 12-6:20 pm. Free. Gonzaga Urban Arts Center, 125 S. Stevens St. shunpike.org/aces

BLACKSMITHING AT THE LIBRARY

Learn the basics of blacksmithing from Columbia Fire & Iron. Registration required. This event also takes place at additional SCLD branches, see website for more info. May 20, 10-1 am & 2-5 pm. Free. Cheney Library, 610 First St. scld.org

CRUZIN’ THE FALLS CAR SHOW Check out vintage cars on Spokane Falls Blvd. before the Torchlight Parade. Awards presentation at 4 pm. May 20, 9 am-4 pm. Free. Downtown Spokane. spokanelilacfestival.org

MEND-IT CAFE Bring clothes or other textile goods to be repaired or repurposed. Menders can fix fallen hems, broken zippers, torn garments and do other simple alterations. May 20, 11 am-2 pm. Free. Shadle Library, 2111 W. Wellesley Ave. artsalvagespokane.com

NEWPORT REN FAIRE This second annual renaissance faire features medieval attractions, vendors, food and family friendly activities. May 20, 10 am-5 pm. Free. Newport City Park, First St. and Calispel Ave. pocld.org (800-366-3654)

COFFEE WITH SPOKANE PUBLIC

SCHOOLS Community members are invited to join Spokane Public Schools board members and district leadership for casual conversation over coffee. May 23, 8-10 am. Free. North Central High School, 1600 N. Howard St. spokaneschools.org/coffee (509-354-6000)

DEBT MANAGEMENT Participants explore common reasons why people find themselves in debt and compare various debt management solutions. May 24, 6-7 pm. Free. Hillyard Library, 4110 N. Cook St. spokanelibrary.org (444-5331)

NONSTOP LOCAL KHQ/WORKSOURCE

JOB FAIR This 10th annual event features employment opportunities from area businesses and includes commemorative gifts, free parking and a children’s activity room. May 25, 11 am-2 pm. Free. Spokane Convention Center, 334 W. Spokane Falls Blvd. jobfairspokane.com

FILM

KENWORTHY SILENT FILM FESTIVAL Showings The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (May 18) and Sherlock Jr. (May 25). All showings at 7 pm. $10-$50. The Kenworthy, 508 S. Main St. kenworthy.org

THURSDAY MOVIE MATINEE: SHADOW OF A DOUBT This Hitchcock classic follows Uncle Charlie as he visits his family in the quiet town of Santa Rosa. May 18, 1 pm. $7. The MAC, 2316 W. First Ave. northwestmuseum.org (509-456-3931)

THE WICKER MAN (1973) A puritan Police Sergeant arrives to a Scottish island village in search of a missing girl, who the Pagan locals claim never existed. May 20, 7-9 pm. $7. The Kenworthy, 508 S. Main St. .kenworthy.org (208-882-4127)

STRAIGHT LINE CRAZY: A STAGE TO SCREEN FILM An account of the life of Robert Moses, a master manipulator who created parks, beaches, bridges and 627 miles of expressway, forever transforming New York City through a mix of charm and intimidation. May 21, 2 pm. $20. Bing Crosby Theater, 901 W. Sprague Ave.

bingcrosbytheater.com (509-227-7638)

MEANINGFUL MOVIES SPOKANE: HOUSING & HELP A screening of episodes 1 and 5 of Housing and Help, a show discussing the housing challenges Spokanites face. May 24, 7:30-9:30 pm. Free. Unitarian Universalist, 4340 W. Whistalks Way. meaningfulmovies.org

OUTDOOR MOVIES AL FRESCO: THE ITALIAN JOB Watch The Italian Job outdoors while enjoying a menu of movierelated food by Commellini Estate chefs. May 24, 6:30-10:30 pm. Free. Commellini Estate, 14715 N. Dartford Dr. commellini. com/outdoor-movies (509-466-0667)

SUSPIRIA (1977) An American newcomer to a prestigious German ballet academy comes to realize that the school is a front for something sinister. May 24, 7-9 pm. $7. The Kenworthy, 508 S. Main St. kenworthy.org (208-882-4127)

THE BREAKDOWN: VIDEOGRAPHY Explore pre-production, shooting and editing a music video led by director Justin Frick and Wes Marvin. Registration required. Ages 14-25 May 25, 4-6 pm. Free. Spark Central, 1214 W. Summit Pkwy. spark-central.org (509-279-0299)

OUTLIVE FILM FESTIVAL A screening of short films telling stories of healing and courage, lived outdoors. Includes an exhibit by nature photographer and former Spokanite Craig Goodwin. May 25, 12-9 pm. $15. Washington Cracker Co. Building, 304 W. Pacific. outlivefilmfest.com

PACIFIC NORTHWEST FILM MAKER

SHOWCASE This third annual showcase features 16 short films from 2023’s 50Hour Slam event. May 25, 7-11 pm. Free. Auto Vue Drive-In Theater, 444 Auto View Rd. facebook.com/Auto-Vue-DriveIn-Theatre-120740527937813

WILD & SCENIC FILM FESTIVAL A collection of short, environmental films about water. Also includes a raffle to benefit the Spokane Riverkeeper. May 25, 5:30-9 pm. $15. Garland Theater, 924 W. Garland Ave. spokaneriverkeeper.com

FOOD & DRINK

SPOKANE LILAC FESTIVAL QUEEN’S

LUNCHEON This annual luncheon features appearances by the royal court, a message from the 2023 Parade Honorary Grand Marshal and lunch. May 19, 11:30 am-1 pm. $55. Historic Davenport Hotel, 10 S. Post St. spokanelilacfestival.org

SWING & SUPPER CLUB This event features a 45-minute vintage swing dance

class followed by a three-course handcrafted meal. May 19, 4 & 5:30 pm. $40. Commellini Estate, 14715 N. Dartford Dr. commellini.com (509-466-0667)

SUKIYAKI TAKE-OUT DINNER This 72nd take-out dinner features a bake sale, homemade crafts, inarizushi, senbei and Japanese collectibles. Cash/check only. May 20, 12-4:30 pm. $18. Highland Park United Methodist Church, 611 S. Garfield St. facebook.com/HighlandParkUnitedMethodistChurch (535-2687)

BEVERLY’S CULINARY DEMONSTRATION During this exclusive culinary demonstration, guests watch chefs in action as they create a four-course meal. May 20, 2-4 pm. $40. Beverly’s, 115 S. Second St. beverlyscda.com (208-292-5678)

SIP IDAHO NORTH An all-liquor tasting festival featuring local craft distilleries from the Pacific Northwest and beyond. May 20, 5-7:30 pm. $75-$100. Red Lion Hotel Templin’s on the River, 414 E. First Ave. SipIdahoEvent.com

SPOKANE LILAC FESTIVAL BREWFEST

Taste beers from over 30 local breweries. Included with each ticket are 10 tasting tokens and a special edition glass. May 20, 1-5 pm. $30-$40. Riverfront Park, 507 N. Howard St. spokanelilacfestival.org

AMARO COCKTAIL CLASS Hogwash

Whiskey Den master mixologist Simon Moorby guides you through the use of tools and techniques. Raising the Bar cocktail historian Renée Cebula tells stories behind the liquer. May 21, 3 pm. $75. Hogwash Whiskey Den, 304 W. Pacific Ave. raisingthebarnw.com

BOTTOMLESS(ISH) MIMOSA SUNDAY

BRUNCH This buffet-style brunch includes a mimosa bar. May 21, 10 am-2 pm. $25. Fête - A Nectar Co, 120 N. Stevens St. bit.ly/mimosa-brunch (509-951-2096)

DRAG BRUNCH The cast of Runway performs while guests enjoying breakfast and mimosas. Hosted by Savannah SoReal. Sundays from 10 am-2 pm. Globe Bar & Kitchen, 204 N. Division. globespokane.com (509-443-4014)

NOVA KAINE’S DON’T TELL MAMA

CABARET & DRAG BRUNCH Various Inland Northwest drag performers take the stage and perform pieces choreographed by Troy Nickerson. First and third Sunday of every month, 11 am. Free. Highball, 100 N. Hayford Rd. northernquest.com

RIVERFRONT EATS A food truck series on the Orange Howard St. Bridge i featuring live music. See website for list of food trucks. Tuesdays from 11 am-2 pm through Aug. 22. Riverfront Park, 507 N. Howard St. riverfrontspokane.com

Smarter Stoner Summer

How to navigate the rules and customs of summer as a cannabis consumer

BY WILL MAUPIN

It’s hot. It feels like summer.

This kind of weather conjures up dreams of road trips, camping excursions and getaways to the many cool lakes and rivers that our region blesses us with. It’s the season to not only get out there but to relax as well.

For many, relaxing means enjoying cannabis.

Cannabis may be legal in Washington, but it’s not legal everywhere in Washington. Even where it is, sparking up might not be smart. Consider this a sort of “know before you go” edition of Green Zone.

First, it’s important to remember that while cannabis is legal in Washington, it’s still controlled.

BE AWARE: Marijuana is legal for adults 21 and older under Washington State law (e.g., RCW 69.50, RCW 69.51A, HB0001 Initiative 502 and Senate Bill 5052). State law does not preempt federal law; possessing, using, distributing and selling marijuana remains illegal under federal law. In Washington state, consuming marijuana in public, driving while under the influence of marijuana and transporting marijuana across state lines are all illegal. Marijuana has intoxicating effects; there may be health risks associated with its consumption, and it may be habit-forming. It can also impair concentration, coordination and judgment. Do not operate a vehicle or machinery under the influence of this drug. Keep out of reach of children. For more information, consult the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board at www.liq.wa.gov.

Like with booze, you can’t keep an open container of cannabis in the passenger part of your car. The backseat isn’t good enough either.

If you have to hit the road with an open container, keep it locked away in the trunk. Just be aware that even there, any smell can draw suspicion. Sealed, unopened containers are best.

Second, just because it’s legal in Washington doesn’t mean it’s legal everywhere in Washington.

Roughly 30 percent of land in the state is owned by the federal government, and the feds consider cannabis to be as illegal as drugs like heroin or LSD. Their land, their rules. Even in our state.

On federal land — national parks, national forests, BLM land, etc. — cannabis remains illegal. Not only use, but simple possession could land someone in hot water in those areas.

Furthermore, it’s illegal by Washington law to use

cannabis in public. On the extreme, this includes a private home balcony if it is visible from a public area like the street. In practice, this means it’s illegal to spark a joint on a state park trail, for example.

Which brings me to my final point: be respectful.

If you’re going to get stoned in the woods this summer — and let’s not be naive, people bring booze where it’s not allowed so of course people will bring cannabis to those places as well — just don’t leave a trace. Pack out your waste and put out your embers. The joint you smoke on a trail might seem innocuous, or it might start the next big forest fire.

Think that’s unlikely? It was just over a year ago, in the very wet spring of 2022, that a brushfire was started on the West Plains between Spokane and Airway Heights by a man smoking THC oil. It happens. Maybe consider an edible, or any other nonflammable cannabis product, when you venture away from home this season. n

NOTE TO READERS

Be aware of the differences in the law between Idaho and Washington. It is illegal to possess, sell or transport cannabis in the State of Idaho. Possessing up to an ounce is a misdemeanor and can get you a year in jail and up to a $1,000 fine; more than three ounces is a felony that can carry a five-year sentence and fine of up to $10,000. Transporting marijuana across state lines, like from Washington into Idaho, is a felony under federal law.

Know before you go: federal land is a no toke zone.

WARNING: This product has intoxicating effects and may be habit forming. Cannabis can impair concentration, coordination, and judgment. Do not operate a vehicle or machinery under the influence of this drug. There may be health risks associated with consumption of this product. For use only by adults 21 and older. Keep out of the reach of children.

EVENTS | CALENDAR

MUSIC

KPBX KIDS’ CONCERT: MUSICFEST NORTHWEST Select young musicians from MusicFest Northwest perform live on the radio. Broadcasts May 17-19 at 10 am on KPBX 91.1 FM. Free. spokanepublicradio.org

DAVID ROGERS An evening of Spanish music. Rogers’ solo and ensemble performances have been broadcast on American National Public Radio. May 19, 6-9 pm. Free. One Tree Cider House, 111 S. Madison. davidrogersguitar.com

SPOKANE JAZZ ORCHESTRA The SJO performs the music of Bob Curnow. May 20, 7:30 pm. $32. Bing Crosby Theater, 901 W. Sprague. bingcrosbytheater.com

VILLA BLUES N’ JAZZ An evening of vintage blues, jazz and swing by vocalist Heather Villa. May 20, 7-9 pm. $20. Kelly’s Underground, 1301 W. 14th Ave. southhillmusicstudios.com

GIMME DAT OL’ TIME RELIGION The Manito UMC Choir and the Morningstar Baptist Church Choir perform old favorites, solos and choir pieces. May 21, noon. Free. Manito United Methodist Church, 3220 S. Grand Blvd. manitoumc.org/choir

MASTERS OF BRASS The Spokane British Brass Band presents a concert featuring local talent with conductor Chris Grant. May 21, 3-4:30 pm. Free. Spokane Falls Community College, 3410 W. Whistalks Way. sbbb.org

MUSIC OF THE LITURGICAL YEAR The Cathedral Choir and Schola Cantorum perform their favorite pieces from the past liturgical year including Palestrina’s “Sicut Cervus,” “Super Flumina Babylonis,” and “Alma Redemptoris Mater”. May 21, 2:30-3:45 pm. Free. Cathedral of Our Lady of Lourdes, 1115 W. Riverside Ave. dioceseofspokane.org (509-358-4290)

RACHMANINOFF: 150 YEARS St. John’s Music Series presents choral selections composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff 150 years after his birth. May 21, 3 pm. Free. St. John’s Cathedral, 127 E. 12th Ave. stjohns-cathedral.org (509-838-4277)

SPOKANE YOUTH SYMPHONY: OVATION Program TBA. May 21, 4 pm. $15$19. The Fox Theater, 1001 W. Sprague Ave. foxtheaterspokane.org

SPOKANE TAIKO The Japanese-style drumming group performs and invites attendees to try the drums. May 23, 5:306:30 pm. Free. Shadle Library, 2111 W. Wellesley Ave. spokanelibrary.org

LEAN ON ME GALA CONCERT Eastern Washington University music students, alumni, and faculty perform music from

films, movies and classic rock albums. May 25, 7:30-9:30 pm. $20. The Fox Theater, 1001 W. Sprague Ave. foxtheaterspokane.org (509-359-2241)

SPORTS & OUTDOORS

E-SPORTS CLUB Play games (League of Legends) and hang out with other local teens in the Teen Zone. Fridays from 4-5:30 pm through May 26. Free. Coeur d’Alene Public Library, 702 E. Front Ave. cdalibrary.org (208-769-2315)

DADS & DUDES NIGHT This event is about fathers and sons spending quality time together, having fun, deepening relationship and making positive memories. Opportunities for basketball, football soccer and more. May 20, 6-9 pm. $15. HUB Sports Center, 19619 E. Cataldo Ave. hubsportscenter.org

WALKING TOUR: HISTORIC BROWNE’S

ADDITION Hear the tales of the east side of historic Browne’s Addition. May 20, 1-3 pm, June 8, 1-3 pm, June 27, 6-8 pm and July 21, 9:30-11:30 am. $20. Browne’s Addition, West Spokane. FriendsOfCdAPark. org (509-850-0056)

GARDENING WITH PAT MUNTS: SEED PLANTING & BEYOND Master Gardener

Pat Munts discusses which vegetables are suitable to start from seeds, how to select from seeds and seedlings, and the difference between organic and heirloom seeds. May 20, 1-3 pm. Free. Shadle Library, 2111 W. Wellesley Ave. spokanelibrary.org (509-444-5390)

WSU SPOKANE COUNTY MASTER

GARDENERS PLANT CLINIC Get advice about plant selection, maintenance, environmentally friendly practices, pest management, effective landscaping practices and more. May 20, 11 am-3 pm. Free. Shadle Library, 2111 W. Wellesley Ave. spokanelibrary.org (509-444-5390)

BIRDS & BURRITOS Birding expert Rich Del Carlo leads an early morning bird walk at to help you learn to identify local and migrating birds by their sounds and appearances. Shade-grown coffee is provided by Evans Brothers and breakfast burritos are served. May 21, 6-9 am. $40. Pine Street Woods, 11915 W. Pine St., Sandpoint. kaniksu.org

SEED BOMBS Make seed bombs from clay, compost and local wildflower seeds. May 23, 4-5 pm. Free. Shadle Library, 2111 W. Wellesley Ave. spokanelibrary.org

SPOKANE INDIANS VS. VANCOUVER

CANADIANS Promos during the sixgame series include Storybook Princess

Night (May 27) and Dollars in Your Dog Day Game (May 28). May 23, 11:05 am, May 24, 6:35 pm, May 25, 6:35 pm, May 26, 6:35 pm, May 27, 5:09 pm and May 28, 1:05 pm. $8-$22. Avista Stadium, 602 N. Havana St. spokaneindians.com

THEATER

CLUE: THE MUSICAL A musical that brings the world’s best-known suspects to life and invites the audience to help solve the mystery. Thu-Sat at 7 pm, SatSun at 2 pm through May 28. $13-$15. TAC at the Lake, 22910 E. Appleway Ave. tacatthelake.com (509-432-1890)

STEEL MAGNOLIAS A staged reading of Herbert Ross’ classic comedy-drama set in a southern small-town beauty parlor as a group of women work through the trials of life together. May 18-20 at 7 pm. $20. The Art Spirit Gallery, 415 Sherman Ave. theartspiritgallery.com

BEAUTY & THE BEAST The classic story tells of Belle, a young woman in a provincial town, and the Beast, a young prince trapped under a spell. May 19-28; Fri-Sat at 7 pm, Sat-Sun at 3 pm. $15-$20. Kroc Center, 1765 W. Golf Course Rd. cytnorthidaho.org (208-667-1865)

INTO THE WOODS A story of how we get to “happily ever after” and more importantly, what happens after we make our dreams come true. Performed by the Lake Pend Oreille Repertory Theatre. May 12-20, Fri-Sat at 7 pm. $25. Panida Theater, 300 N. First Ave. panida.org

LOVE LETTERS The story of Melissa and Andy, who first meet as children. Their friendship lasts over 50 years and is told through their cards and letters. May 19, 7 pm, May 20, 6 pm and May 21, 2 pm.

$15. Chewelah Center for the Arts, 405 N. Third St. chewelahcenterforthearts.com

THE MUSIC MAN Fast-talking traveling salesman Harold Hill cons the people of River City, Iowa, into buying instruments and uniforms for a boys’ band he vows to organize. May 19-June 4; Fri at 7 pm, SatSun at 2 pm. $12-$16. Spokane Children’s Theatre, 2727 N. Madelia. spokanechildrenstheatre.org (509-328-4886)

TICK TICK...BOOM! This autobiographical musical by Jonathan Larson tells the story of a composer and the sacrifices that he made to achieve his big break in theatre. May 19-21; Fri-Sat at 7:30 pm, Sun at 2 pm. $5-$10. Eastern Washington University, 526 Fifth St. ewu.edu/theatre

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF JR. This adaptation follows a Jewish man and his five daughters in Russia around the year 1905. May 20, 5 & 7 pm and May 21, 2

pm. $5-$10. Music Conservatory of Sandpoint, 110 Main St. sandpointconservatory.org (208-265-4444)

VISUAL ARTS

FRANK S. MATSURA: NATIVE AMERICAN PORTRAITS FROM A NORTHWEST BORDERLAND This show features images from the studio archive of Washington-based Japanese photographer Frank Sakae Matsura which explore Indigenous representation through an artistic lens.

Tue-Sun from 10 am-5 pm through Nov.

26. $7-$12. The MAC, 2316 W. First Ave. northwestmuseum.org (509-456-3931)

IDYLLIC Eight regional female artists honor the idyllic of the natural world. Wed-Sun from 11 am-6 pm through May 28. Free. The Art Spirit Gallery, 415 Sherman Ave. theartspiritgallery.com

IMAGINALITY This show features paintings by Lindsey Johnson, Jenny Benoit, Christina Malm, Tricia Florence, Adam Roth and Cody Steele. Tue-Fri from 10 am-6 pm through June 2. Free. Emerge, 119 N. Second St. emergecda.com

MINIATURE LIBRARY Build a miniature library, complete with shelves and tiny books. Ages 10+. Registration required. May 18, 3:30-5 pm. Free. Hillyard Library, 4110 N. Cook St. spokanelibrary.org

PRECIOUS PANIC: 2023 BFA THESIS This exhibition includes the work of 11 BFA candidates working in a variety of media including painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture and video installation. May 18-June 9, Mon-Fri from 9 am-5 pm. Free. EWU Gallery of Art, 140 Art Building. ewu.edu/art

WHAT WAS ALWAYS YOURS AND NEV-

ER LOST This exhibition features recent works of video art by nine Indigenous film makers from throughout North America. Tue-Fri from 11 am-2 pm, Sat from 10 am-4 pm through June 30. Free. Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU, 1535 NE Wilson Rd. museum.wsu.edu

THE WYETHS: THREE GENERATIONS A collection of works by N. C. Wyeth, one of America’s finest illustrators; his son Andrew, an important realist painter; Andrew’s son Jamie, a popular portraitist; and extended family members. Tue-Sun from 10 am-5 pm through Aug. 20. $7$12. Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, 2316 W. First Ave. northwestmuseum.org

CELEBRATE SPRING ARTS & CRAFTS

SALE Browse jewelry, fine art, art prints, hand-carved wood and more. Refreshments provided. This sale takes place at 2720 E. Bruce Ave. May 19, 12-4 pm. Free. (509-325-4809)

MAKER FRIDAY Mel Hewitt, a local book artist/entrepreneur discusses her work, creative processes and performs live demonstrations. May 19, 10 am-1:30 pm. Free. Emerge, 119 N. Second St. emergecda.com (208-930-1876)

BRUSH ON THE BLUFF Twenty local artists set up their easels and draw inspiration from the natural beauty around them. Also includes nature bracelet making, painting gratitude rocks, an art hike and more. May 20, 11 am-6 pm. Free. Polly Judd Park, 1802 W. 14th Ave. friendsofthebluff.org/brushonthebluff

RESIN JEWELRY Participants learn how to adhere paper scrap images onto reused surfaces and place UV resin on top. May 20, 11 am-2 pm. $35-$38. Art Salvage Spokane, 1925 N. Ash St. artsalvagespokane.com

ROCK GARDEN PAINTING PARTY Share your creativity to help get the library’s rock garden started. May 20, 2-3 pm. Free. Airway Heights Library, 1213 S. Lundstrom St. scld.org (893-8250)

WORDS

LAURA READ: BUT SHE IS ALSO JANE

Former Spokane Poet Laureate Laura Read reads from her new, award-winning poetry collection. May 19, 7 pm. Free. Central Library, 906 W. Main Ave. auntiesbooks.com

OFFICE HOURS WITH SHARMA SHIELDS A two-hour drop-in session for local creatives to ask Sharma writingrelated questions. May 19, 10 am-noon. Free. Central Library, 906 W. Main Ave. spokanelibrary.org (509-444-5336)

PAJAMA STORYTIME: CELEBRATING

AA & NH/PI MONTH Join Spark Central’s Executive Director Melissa Bedford a she reads two of her favorite books: Eyes That Kiss in the Corners and Amy Wu and the Patchwork Dragon. May 20, 11 am-noon. Free. Spark Central, 1214 W. Summit Pkwy. spark-central.org POETRY PATH TO KINDNESS Write poetry while hanging out in North Idaho College’s rose garden. May 20, 1-2 pm and May 27, 1-2 pm. Free. North Idaho College, 1000 W. Garden Ave. kimemorgan.com (208-769-3300)

CARROLL MCINROE: DEATH CAME WITH THE POSTMAN A Vietnam-era, U.S. Army story of the hatred generated by the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. The author signs copies. May 21, 12-3 pm. Free. Auntie’s, 402 W. Main Ave. auntiesbooks.com (509-838-0206) n

1. 1999 documentary “____ Vista Social Club”

9. Keep the beat, in a way

15. Queen ____ lace

16. Bustle

17. Guarantee

18. Early February, roughly

20. Federer and Nadal, e.g.

21. Dinghy or dory

22. Delicacy with kabayaki sauce

23. Ward of “The Fugitive”

24. Acct. earnings

25. White-tailed shore bird

26. Sprint’s merging partner in 2020

30. Debate side

31. Yard trio

32. Social reformer Dorothea

33. “Bodak Yellow” rapper ____ B

36. Auto-Tune pioneer with the hit “Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’)”

38. Done, in Dijon

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39. Cause a social media storm ... or a direction to black squares in four areas of this puzzle?

42. Skedaddles

43. Zigs or zags

44. Taurus, Virgo, Libra, etc.

45. Site for trivia night

46. Shabu-shabu noodle, often

47. ____-free water bottle

48. Liqueur in an Alabama Slammer

50. Bird with a forked tail

52. “... need I go on?” abbr.

55. Cause of great annoyance

56. Whiz

57. Bad way to go

58. Summer ____

61. “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” co-director

63. Eva Perón’s maiden name

64. 68-Across, to fans

65. Put one’s John Hancock on

66. Possible candidate for a Razzie Award

67. W-2 collector

68. A 2022 World Cup photo of him set a record for most likes ever on Instagram

DOWN

1. Deer friend of Thumper

2. Labor organizer’s group

3. Wrap up by

4. Type of salamander

5. “____ live and breathe!”

6. Like some breakfast cereals

7. “Easy on Me” singer, 2021

8. Supporting

9. Place where people lived in “How the Other Half Lives”

10. Purchase at a real estate auction, perhaps

11. Cornerstone abbr.

12. Rum ____ Tugger (cat from “Cats”)

13. “Odds ____ ... “

14. “The tongue of the soul,” per Cervantes

19. Adopted son of Claudius

23. Oktoberfest containers

25. “Black Panther” villain Killmonger 27. Choosing from a lineup 28. Tablecloth fabric

29. Ramps up or down?

30. BlackBerrys and PalmPilots, for short

31. State ____

33. Legendary NYC club that helped launch punk rock 34. Typeface akin to Helvetica

35. Fashionably nostalgic

36. Mr. or Ms. Right

37. Hammer’s striking end

38. Cold, to Conchita

40. Meal for an inept cook

41. Channel for Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest

46. Lorre’s “Casablanca” character

47. “La ____” (NBC drama series)

49. Critic who finished his final blog post with “I’ll see you at the movies”

50. ____ Tots

51. Reverberations

52. Furry C-3PO worshipers

53. Their bark is silent

54. “Kinky Boots” lyricist Lauper

57. Juvenile

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