It's here! It's here! All the local news headlines you need to know about, delivered straight to your e-mail box and from there to your little grey brain.
Learn more about it here.
Sign up at the handy link below.
CLICK HERE to get on board with your very own MISCmedia MAIL subscription!
FOR THE UMPTEENTH CONSECUTIVE YEAR, this corner continues to refuse to hate the Seafair parade. Sorry, all ye conformist non-conformists out there; but I happen to like big crowds sharing in the celebration of the simple act of being alive on a late summer night.
This giant balloon represents an energy-saving home fluorescent bulb.
FINISHING OUR RECAP of scenes documented but not uploaded back in June, here at last is the open house at Seattle Opera’s new McCaw Hall. (Yep, a giant theater named for a family fortune earned from every theater manager’s #1 bane, cell phones.)
The joint’s not paid for yet, even though its makers saved a few bucks by keeping the structural frame of the old Civic Auditorium/Opera House. And there’s no way of telling when or how it’ll be paid for, since there aren’t any governments in the immediate proximity that have a bunch o’ spare cash laying around.
There are still two arts-related construction megaprojects in Seattle, the new downtown library and the Paul Allen-supported sculpture garden near Pier 70. It’s now time (or rather way past time) to turn our collective fiscal attention toward arts funding that emphasizes art and artists, rather than the more politically expedient route of huge building projects.
The place itself is, as you might have expected all along, a clean, retro-modern looking joint, but with its own touches. The Seattle Symphony’s Benaroya Hall looks like a modern urban Protestant church. McCaw looks like a new suburban mega-church.
In place of the old Opera House’s steak-house crimson wallpaper, McCaw’s all done up in what Ikea would consider to be “warm” designer colors. It’s all so laid back and mellow and formally informal. I’m not sure that’s the proper milieu for opera and ballet, which are (or ought to be) all about big passions. At least they kept all the public art from the old space, including the Mark Tobey mural.
CONTINUING OUR RECAPPING of events we’d documented but not uploaded during our early-summer bout of computerlessness, the Fremont Solstice Parade.
This “silent protest” just might’ve been inspired by our own photo series, Signifying Nothing.
Dr. Seuss’s Sneetches, those universal metaphors for self-titled hipsters and the futulity of exclusive scenes.
The now world-renowned body paint bicyclists and other public nudes have, for several years now, upstaged the parade’s more organized attractions. And for good reason. For two hours a year it’s quasi-legally-tolerated to appear naked on a public street, and to be seen by bystanders of all genders and ages.
Solstice Parade nudity isn’t overtly sexual. Nor is it the formally informal “natural” nudity of naturist camps and free beaches. It’s a whole other thang altogether. It’s a statement of freedom and pride, as much as anything at the Gay Pride parade the following week.
The essential message: We’ve all got bodies, and they’re all great. They’re fun to look at, and fun to live in. A simple and obvious message, but one us repressed Americans still need to hear regularly.
NEAL POLLACK sez it’s way past time Americans started fighting for their right to party:
“These are tense times. People want to loosen the steam valve a little bit. They want to participate in culture outside of the jurisdiction of federal ‘morality’ educators. We don’t want the government telling us how to spend our free time, sussing out and prosecuting casual drug users and harassing nightclub owners. And for heaven’s sake, give the kids some condoms. “Sex and drugs and live music make life great. These are the kinds of things that were outlawed in Taliban-run Afghanistan. If they can’t be legal and easy in America, then I don’t want to live here anymore. I want to live in a place where drugs and sex are tolerated, where the government provides a sane level of social services, where religion isn’t always threatening to take over the state.”
“These are tense times. People want to loosen the steam valve a little bit. They want to participate in culture outside of the jurisdiction of federal ‘morality’ educators. We don’t want the government telling us how to spend our free time, sussing out and prosecuting casual drug users and harassing nightclub owners. And for heaven’s sake, give the kids some condoms.
“Sex and drugs and live music make life great. These are the kinds of things that were outlawed in Taliban-run Afghanistan. If they can’t be legal and easy in America, then I don’t want to live here anymore. I want to live in a place where drugs and sex are tolerated, where the government provides a sane level of social services, where religion isn’t always threatening to take over the state.”
I heartily concur.
Down with the Republican sex police AND the Democrat music censors!
Proponents of pot legalization should give up their pious guises, admit they’re really out to legalize recreational toking, and take pride in that.
We should allow and even endorse such wholesome frolics as the Fremont Parade nudists. Even set aside a clothing-optional public beach or two.
The Seattle City Council shouldn’t just approve bigger parking lots for strip clubs, it should dump its decade-long moratorium against licensing any new strip clubs.
Let’s fess up and admit our teens (and adults) are gonna be gettin’ it on w/one another, and prepare ’em for the potential physical (and psychological) consequences.
And consentin’ adults of whatever gender oughta be able to get it on w/other consentin’ adults of whatever gender, even for material gifts, as long as they don’t keep the neighbors awake at night.
Hedonistically-related activities that do impunge on the well-being of others, such as stinky meth labs that could explode and take out the whole block any day now, could still be prosecuted under those reasons.
Heck, I’d even lower the drinking age a year or two, under certain circumstances and with certain driving-related caveats.
There. Now I’ve gone and ruined any chance of ever getting elected to the U.S. Senate.
Unless a bunch of us go out and do what Pollack asks–form a “Party Party” built around the right to live our own lives our own way.
As I’ve written in the past, Seattle’s civic history has always involved the dichotomy between sober civic-building and boistrous partying-for-fun-and-profit. (Frenchie theorist Jean Baudrillard would call it “production” vs. “seduction.”) The past decade of the hi-tech boom saw great public and private investment in the “production” half of the equation, but all that remains standing from much of that are monuments to the bureaucrat-acceptable parts of the “seduction” industries–sports and recreation sites, big comfy homes, museums, and performing-arts palaces. The newest of these, McCaw Hall (the revamped Opera House), has its open house this Sunday. (Yes, it’s a theater named for a family whose fortune was made in that bane of theater operators everywhere, cell phones.)
Las Vegas is realizing the economic value of fun. It’s time our regional (and national) leaders did likewise, or got replaced with other leaders who do.
(PS: I know the cyber-Libertarians would insist to me that they fully support the right to party. Alas, some of these dudes also support the right to pollute, the right to discriminate, the right to pay shit wages, and the right to bust unions.)
(PPS: Ex-Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg discusses some of this in his new book, Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit. Goldberg makes the supposedly provocative, but actually common-sensical, point that the Demos can’t successfully court what used to be known as “the youth vote” if they’re sucking up to censors and wallowing in baby-boomer bias.)
IN RESPONSE to many of your requests, we’re cutting down on the site’s ad volume (particularly those pop-ups nobody seems to buy anything from).
THURSDAY WAS A HUGE NEWS DAY LOCALLY. Here are just a few of the goings-down:
ALAS, our official Best Show On TV, CBC’s Zed, shuts down for the season Tuesday night (11:25 pm) after only 110 weeknight editions. (Still more than Carson showed up for in his last full year.) Starting Wednesday, its time slot will be occupied by hockey payoffs. Now we must wait until fall (or until any yet-unannounced summer reruns) for our fix of weird short films, avant-arts documentary segments, ambient-trance music, and ever-so-elegant host Sharon Lewis (if you’re reading this, Ms. Lewis, please consider becoming my green-card bride so I can live in a sane country).
Or you can go to Zed‘s giant website, where hundreds of films and musical performances from the show are archived. One of my personal favorites on the site is Violet, a complex, existential, and vigorous nine-minute dance short performed by the stunningly accomplished (and elegantly nude) Vancouver dancer Ziyian Kwan. Unfortunately, the site only has an info page (not the film itself) for Babyfilm, a darkly hilarious fake educational film encouraging new parents to become totally paranoid about anything that could possibly be unsafe for the baby. Neither would likely ever appear on PBS, let alone in a high-profile time slot.
It’s been about a month and a half since we last had a new photo essay on the site. So let’s get caught up, starting with the ever-fiscally-important day after Thanksgiving. This particular day started in downtown Seattle the way most days start, with men waiting for the temporary main library to open. Some of these men are homeless, seeking a place to sit indoors while the shelters are closed. Others are simply retired or unemployed, seeking a morning’s worth of free entertainment and/or learning.
The “Buy Nothing Day” kids were out in force, denouncing squaresville commercialism without positing any positive alternatives. The sign depicted above was made, and then defaced, by a fan of Adbusters magazine pretending to be a conservative.
(Left-wing parodies of right-wing attitudes almost always get it wrong—nobody on the right ever speaks specifically for such lefty-insult terms as “commodification ” or “patriarchy.” Right-wing parodists are, natch, just as errant about lefty attitudes, wrongly imagining that anybody would speak in favor of such righty-insult terms as “special rights” or “takings.”)
Outside the Bon Marche, a busy crew was handing out free samples of Krispy Kreme donuts (I refuse to use the more formal “doughnut” for such an informal snack food). The chain, which in recent years has generated media hype far beyond its size (still fewer than 150 branches nationally, concentrated in the south) has been ringing Seattle’s far suburbs and will open its first in-town branch next year.
No snack product could live up to Krispy Kreme’s hype. But it is an impressive product. Its lightness, fresh aroma, and melt-in-your-mouth texture all belie the massive sugar rush that hits you after six bites.
One lady did offer a proactive alternative to the bigtime shopping mania, and didn’t need Photoshop to make it.
Among those who didn’t heed, or didn’t see, that lady’s message: The nearly 100 who camped out in anticipation of the Adidas Store’s moonlight sale.
THE NIGHT OF DEC. 7 featured hundreds of holiday parties around town. The one I went to was the opening of 13 Fridas, 13 Years, 13 Days, at muralist James Crespinel’s studio-gallery in Belltown.
Crespinel has been painting his own impressions of Frida Klaho over the years, and displayed some of them as a tie-in to the movie and the Seattle Art Museum’s current Mexican-impressionism exhibit.
The opening was a stupendous gala with authentic Mexi-snacks, singers (including our ol’ pal Yva Las Vegas, above), and dancers (below).
Later that same night, a somewhat different tribute to strength and beauty was offered at the nearby Rendezvous by the Burning Hearts burlesque troupe. This is one of the seven ladies who paraded around in whimsical mini-attire for a surly drunken Santa.
Other St. Nicks of all assorted sizes, shapes, and demeanors cavorted about the greater downtown area as part of the annual NIght of 1,000 Santas spectacle, enacted in cities across North America.
…so you know we love this stie full of 20th-century Russian circus posters! You don’t need to know the Cyrillic alphabet to understand the classic spirit of rah-rah showmanship, bursting through Czarist/Soviet official grayness.
…indeed the best show on TV thus far in this decade.
The CBC’s Zed (named, of course, after the Great White North’s pronounciation of the alphabet’s last letter) is a magazine show of experimental video, animation, and performance art. That capsule description could apply to a dozen or more past shows on PBS and other Stateside channels. But the Vancouver-produced Zed is far different, and far better, than those. Some reasons:
Zed’s site doesn’t mention how many episodes are in its current first season. CBC series often have short production seasons. But Zed mostly consists of pre-existing (i.e., relatively cheap to acquire) material, so theoretically go on year-round (albeit with rerun weeks here and there).
My advice: If you’re capable of tuning in to it, watch as many Zed episodes as you can now. See what highbrow-arts TV can really become.
I love Seattle’s annual great all-you-can-eat buffet-O-culture; and this year’s version was better, overall, than those of the previous few.
A relative dearth of bigname touring rock acts (whose summer schedules are increasingly tied up in package tours) meant the spotlight shone a little higher on the locals, and on acts such as Wilco and Blonde Redhead that can draw and wow a crowd without having been on TRL.
A brief history of the Shoot: It began as an early ’70s free fest, designed to use all of Seattle Center for the first time since the World’s Fair a decade before. It started relatively small, but blossomed when national stars were added to the mix (necessitating a cover charge).
Early programming was heavy on the already-calcifying tastes of bland baby boomers; white blues bands and Ronstadtesque commercial balladeers predominated the main stages. Black performers younger than B.B. King were seldom booked. Rock n’ roll bands were mostly of the nostalgia-reunion variety.
By the late ’80s, somebody at One Reel (the former hippie-vaudeville production company that’s run the festival since almost the start) finally wizened up and started inviting new generations of performers to the main stages. That coincided with the rise of “alternative” rock (some of whose local legend-makers performed at the festival), alt-country, white hiphop, and even punk/new wave reunion tours.
But it also coincided with the rise of big corporate-rock arena tours, in which the likes of Sonic Youth were pushed onto stages previously reserved for acts of Rolling Stones-level popularity. As the ’90s progressed-regressed, the big acts became Bumbershoot’s main draw, causing ticket prices to go up every year and causing the phase-out of less-commercial costly fare (such as the Seattle Symphony).
Now, the tide might be turning again. This year’s B-shoot had more of a balance. Local and smaller national acts got more attention. The emphasis was less on getting that precious wristband and/or spot in line for the superstars, more on just being there, having fun, and exposing oneself to something new and intriguing. Which is how it oughta be.
My personal memories of this year’s fest: Kulture Shock’s rousing ethnic-melange at the EMP Sky Church (followed by Yva Las Vegas’s empassioned set in the same building’s open mike later that night). Ani DiFranco’s forceful anti-Bush rant in Memorial Stadium. An eight-woman klezmer band at one of the smaller outdoor stages. The welcome arrival of clammy skies on Monday, marking the all-but-official end of summer. And the ambient sounds heard passing through the gorunds late Monday night, especially those of the Fun Forest amusement rides winding down for the night.
…last Sunday, the 29th one in this town. This year’s was perhaps bigger and more outrageous than ever.
Certainly there’s a greater need for out-loud outness this year. Our appointed leaders have decreed that this nation must fight back against sectarian, authoritarian, intolerant murderers by becoming more sectarian, authoritarian, intolerant and murderous. Such a scenario would most certainly be unfriendly toward queer civil rights.
So out came the Outs, as forcefully outrageous as ever. There were the bar- and beer-company floats, the community-organization floats, the religious-tolerance marchers, the motorcycle lesbians, the drag-queen troupes, the performance artists, and the AIDS-awareness leafleters.
(Comparatively under-represented this year: Topless women; local politicians of any attire. Apparently absent: The tiny Gay AA delegation, which had always been vastly overwhelmed by the beer floats.)
Dan Savage used to say the Pride Parade ought to be at night, downtown, and more confrontative in nature.
But the Broadway, high-noon format is a more Seattle-style approach. It’s funky and quirky, silly and celebratory.
And yes, it’s assimilationist. It fetes the arrival of lesbians and gays as accepted and unthreatening members of the local affluent class.
Of course, it helps that the corporate-Democrat local power structure luuvvvs gay culture. More precisely, it loves a certain vision of gay culture that’s all about show tunes and interior decoration and anti-Republican political organizing, and only very understatedly about oral-genital contacts with persons of the same sex. The Pride Parade gays are sex-positive, but they know when to keep the curtains drawn.
LAST YEAR AT THIS TIME, we openly wondered in this space why nongays couldn’t have a sex-positive summer exhibition. SIlly us–we’d forgotten about the Fremont Solstice Parade, held (last year as this) just one week prior to the gay event.
Just as the gay parade isn’t exclusively gay, the Fremont parade is by no means exclusively straight. But it’s got a het aesthetic to it. Where the gay parade is about loudly and in many cases campily proclaiming one’s queerness (and one’s legal/social right to make such proclamations), the Fremont parade is about comfortably living in one’s oddness and intermixing with everyone else’s oddnesses.
The nude bicyclists, an unofficial part of the parade for over half a decade now, are only the most obvious incarnation of this aesthetic. Many, if not most, of the parade’s scheduled acts and icons involved zestful, vigorous depictions of masculine and feminine archetypes, both old (Pan, Pandora) and recent (loggers, businesswomen); sometimes in conflict with one another but all residing, however uneasily, in tghe same universe.
Heterosexuality, of course, is more likely to generate children. Such persons were in clear attendance at the gay parade, but were everywhere at the Fremont parade. They received candy, made chalk drawings, shook the hands of costume characters, were the chief audience of several floats and performers, and were the partial subject of the parade’s most intriguing float.
Based on the related topics of pregnancy and its avoidance, the float featured a traditional fertility goddess at the front, egg-and-sperm representations on the back, real-life moms-to-be, and real-life moms with their progeny (not visible in the shot). All around the float walked costume characters dressed up as assorted contraceptive devices. Possible implied meanings: Trying to get pregnant and trying not to get pregnant are merely different aspects of the whole shtick of being what gays used to call “a breeder;” sexual attraction, and the cycle of life of which it is a key part, are both to be joyously celebrated.
Self-help mogul Stephen Covey once wrote something about a “maturity continuum,” in which dependent children become independent adults, who eventually recognize their interdependence with each other. I’ll add that true heterosexuality is also about that, at least ideally–not about greedy conquests or individual preenings, but about connecting to another person (and indirectly, spiritually, to the whole of the species).
It’s also about getting over the fear, reaching beyond your own head, negotiating the stickier parts (literally and figuratively) of such interconnections. That’s certainly a skill the world needs to get better at, on all levels.
I’ve written previously that we live in “a MISC world,” filled with untold numbers of cultures, subcultures, sub-subcultures, ethinicities, religions, and sex/love proclivities. Real heterosexuality is a key, perhaps the key, toward making such a world work–learning not only to tolerate but to share enduring love with someone fundamentally different from yourself.
What some socio-philosophers call “pansexuality,” I call ultimate heterosexuality–one big motley melange of women and men, and also of gays, lesbians, bis, trannies, SM-ers, swingers, monogamists, celibates, exhibitionists, voyeurs/voyeuses, femmes, butches, fairies, studs, princesses, and folks who don’t know what the heck they are; all finding consensual mind-bending togetherness with whomever, all ssupporting one another in stumbling through this miasma known as human existence.
First came the highly unofficial Star Wars Un-Premiere Party, Thursday at the Rendezvous (which is still open despite a little kitchen fire last Tuesday, thank you). Singer Cheryl Serio was the most elegant hostess, accompanied by our ol’ friends DJ Superjew and DJ EZ-Action.
Among the audiovisual attractions displayed on the video projector: Mark Hamill’s appearance on The Muppet Show (above), the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special (a truly bizarre spectacle indeed), and something billed as a Turkish language version of the original film but was really a whole different movie (a hilarious sword-and-scandal adventure) that happened to incorporate SW spaceship shots, with the SW producers’ apparent authorization.
ON SATURDAY, the 22nd anniversary of the Mt. St. Helens blowup was celebrated by Cheryl Diane (above) and three other singer-songwriter acts in Diane’s fourth annual Eruptive Revival cabaret. As you may recall, last year’s edition was cut short by that nasty fire at the Speakeasy Cafe (still a charred-out ruin today). No such mishaps marred this year’s show at the Cafe Venus/Mars Bar, thankfully.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON, the University District Street Fair was underway again, as tired and worn-out as I’ve always remembered it being. The products displayed at the “crafts” booths were barely distinguishable from those displayed in the smarmiest tourist “fine art” stores of LaConner. The food concessions were no different from the elephant ears and kettle korn sold summer-long from Puyallup to Ellensburg. The assorted musical acts tried to grab passersby’s attention, but (at least the acts I saw) failed to overcome the cloudy-afternoon ennui in full smothering force.
And, of course, the booths only temporarily hid the dozen or more empty storefronts along the half-mile strip known to all as The Ave. The city thinks it knows just what to do about the retail ennui–a construction project. To the City of Seattle bureaucracy, every problem is solvable by a construction project.
But it’s hard to imagine anyone other than a bureaucrat imagining that wider sidewalks and prettier street lights will draw non-student shoppers back from the malls; not while the daily papers continue to smear The Ave as A Problem Place with Those Problem People.
And as long as there’s no money to do the right things for the throwaway teens (often banished by middle-class parents over not fitting a proper upstanding image) but plenty of money to do things against them (police harassment schemes that only make things worse), this situation won’t change.
ON A HAPPIER NOTE, Sunday evening brought two of my all-time fave cartoonists, ex-local Charles Burns and still-local Jim Woodring, to a singing session at Confounded Books/Hypno Video.
You’ve gotta check out Woodring’s newest, Trosper. Painted in bright pastel colors you can eat with a spoon, and printed just like an old Little Golden Book, it’s a wordless, utterly engrossing little tale of a cute little elephant who just wants to have fun, in a world seemingly bent on frustrating him. It even comes with a CD by one of our fave neo-improv artistes, the incomprable Bill Frisell.
…in the “Creative Age,” according to one commentator: Singles, gays, ethnic minorities, performance spaces, walkable neighborhoods, and rock bands! What doesn’t work: Subsidized sports arenas.
IT’S SIX DAYS N’ COUNTING to our next glam-filled live event, The Clark Show, Monday nite at the redone Rendezvous lounge in Belltown. Be there.
PASSAGE (Former ACT Theater boss Gordon Edelstein in the NY Times, on his return to the NY tri-state area): “[In Seattle] when the curtain rises on a play, the audience is open, but their tacit agreement is that life is pretty good, it’s important to be comfortable, and that human beings actually can be healthy…. The curtain rises on a New York audience, and everybody agrees we’re basically sick and we want redemption and we want a good time but we’re not made uncomfortable by deeply disturbing news about our psyches. In fact, that feels like the truth to us.”
COCA CLASSIC: Over a year since the demolition of the Center on Contemporary Art’s last exhibition space, the nearly 20-year-old anchor of Seattle’s “alternative” arts scene came roaring back to life this month. It opened a brand new headquarters in one of Capitol Hill’s last heretofore non-upscaled warehouse spaces, plentily conveniently situated for most of COCA’s longtime clique.
So there could be no more appropriate way to celebrate the end of the organization’s hiatus than by staging a massive party–at another, far more remote, location.
Thus, the opening fete for Black and Raw, the first show at the new COCA HQ, was mounted instead at the Big Building, a co-op studio space for iron artists and goth blacksmiths. Hundreds of past and present COCA friends had a smashing time in the big, drafty, beautifully dilapidated Big Building down in the Industrial District, beneath the Spokane Street Viaduct and across from the longshoremen’s union hall.
Among the evening’s delights were the Gothic Cheerleaders, doing their part to keep cartoony devil-worship alive…
… DJ (and fellow Stranger refugee) Riz Rollins…
…a skillful hula hoop demonstration…
…and the B-Hives, a (not only accurate but lively) B-52s cover band featuring, at left, longtime music-scene vet Alison Wonderland.
As was often the case at COCA’s previous incarnations, the party atmosphere outshouted the art on display. Those who noticed (and, yes, I was among them) saw a display of wrought-iron pieces, many by the metal artists who work in the Big Building. These ranged from the sublime (an orca’s tail) to the useful (a lot of candle holders) to the outlandish (fetish slave wear; the Henry Leinonen skull chandelier depicted here).
