I have nothing else to say, really–walked out this morning, it’s a little windy but not too cold, leaves coating the ground–just feels like a touch football day.
Monthly Archives: October 2009
Glimpses: "center for wooden boats – docked"
Jeff Blucher returns to our photo of the day feature with a frankly kind of haunting picture of the Center for Wooden Boats. No wind, no sailors, no color … brr. (From the SunBreak Flickr pool.)
Get Heavy at the Croc Tonight
Like everyone with half a brain, I will be avoiding Belltown this Halloween even more than regular weekends. But might I interest you in braving the prematurely-dressed Sexy Falcon Heenes and Zombie Billy Mays tonight? I know, I know, but what if there existed a band to make it worth your while?
England’s The Heavy combines classic funk with r&b and straight-up rock. They love rusty horns and hard-hitting drums and a bass groove, and from the sounds of it, they also have a thing for James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, and Isaac Hayes. Their debut Great Vengeance and Furious Fire got accolades up the wazoo in the British press, and with new release The House That Dirt Built (out earlier this month), they’re hoping to explode on this side of the pond as well. Check out the video for single “How You Like Me Now” above, and head to the Croc to see them tonight.
- The Heavy plays the Croc Friday with openers Thee Emergency. $10 adv, $12 at the door, 21+.
Eerie Act of God Gives Lightning Strike Goosebumps
In the U.S., your chances of being struck by lightning are 1 in 280,000. The odds of winning the Washington Lotto are 1 in 6,991,908. So you’re 25 times more likely to regret going out in that thunderstorm.
Opening October 30 at SIFF Cinema at McCaw Hall, the lightning-strike documentary Act of God (through November 5, tickets: $10) is directed Jennifer Baichwal, who earlier gave us Manufactured Landscapes. That may be enough to get plenty of you into the theater, but the movie’s combination of sheer visual spectacle, heartbreak, and existential questioning makes it unique.
I’m not saying you can’t miss it, but if you go, I think there’s a good chance you’ll be surprised at the intensity of your response. You leave the theater feeling a bit singed and hallucinating the smell of freshly formed ozone.
There’s no narrator as such–Baichwal moves from interview to interview, with astonishing visuals of lightning strikes intercut with the series of “talking heads.” Some have won this lottery–whether they were hit themselves or survived while someone just next to them didn’t. And while many of them refuse to call it an “act of God”–the hand of fate–the experience is life-changing.
For the novelist Paul Auster, who seems to remember the moment at camp as if it were yesterday, there is a profoundly contingent side to life. He was 14, the camp kids were running through a rain storm, and one second there was a boy next to him, the next…not.
Near Grenoble, France, Baichwal visited with a man who runs a lightning museum–he’s something of a storm chaser and the results are awesome. In Vegas, she filmed a former Marine who was struck by lightning and was clinically dead for almost half an hour.
Baichwal also juxtaposes “wild” lightning with that found in guitarist Fred Frith’s brain scans (his psychologist brother is curious what goes on in there), and visits with people who worship Santeria’s god of lightning. This feels more like familiar documentary territory, providing “perspectives.”
What is terrible about the survivor’s stories is that there is no perspectival distance to speak of. It’s immediate, before them. Parents second-guess letting a child go to church. A man runs blindly through a forest. Paul Auster turns to look at the barb-wire fence.
Houston/Seattle Playoff Battles of the Past #1: Overtime Football, 1988
Tonight the Houston Dynamo travel to Seattle as the Sounders’ first-ever MLS playoff opponent. This battle will stretch out over the next two weeks, for the MLS quarterfinals are a home-and-home affair. The Sounders face Houston again one week from Sunday. Will this battle be as epic as the three Houston/Seattle postseason matchups that have preceded it?
To wit:
–The 1988 Wild Card Playoff, a.k.a. the Fredd Young phantom interception game.
–The 1993 NBA Western Conference semifinals, which stretched to seven games.
–The 1996 “Houston You Have a Problem” Western Conference semifinals sweep.
Let’s take each in turn, shall we? Today’s edition…
Houston 23, Seattle 20 (OT), January 3, 1988. [box]
The 9-7 Seahawks finished 2nd in the AFC West, and had to travel to Houston’s Astrodome for this Wild Card game. Husky legend Warren Moon led the Oilers’ run-and-shoot attack, predicated on short passing. But he heaved a deep one early that the Seahawks’ Melvin Jenkins intercepted. Dave Krieg hit Steve Largent with a 20-yard TD pass and the good guys led 7-0. From there, Houston’s offense dominated, rolling up 437 yards and four scoring drives. The Seahawks got just two field goals, and the game stood 20-13 with less than two minutes left.
But the Hawks managed an 80-yard, 10-play touchdown drive, with Krieg connecting with Largent on another TD pass with just 26 seconds left.
The Seahawks got the ball first in overtime, but their drive stalled.
NOTE: The Seahawks have been involved in three sudden death overtime playoff games. They have won the coin toss and received the ball first all three times — yet they’ve LOST ALL THREE GAMES! HOW THE HELL IS THAT POSSIBLE! /endrant
Houston got the ball back. On the third play of their drive, Seahawks linebacker Fredd Young dove for a batted pass and appeared to catch it before it hit the ground. The refs said no. Replay, then in its first halting incarnation, did not show conclusive evidence. The Oilers kept the ball and marched down the field for the winning score.
Seahawks coach Chuck Knox told the P-I after the game: “”I was proud the way our players battled. We just weren’t good enough to win today. It was that simple.”
The Oilers lost to Denver 34-10 one week later, with the Broncos advancing to the Super Bowl. The Seahawks got a rematch with the Oilers the next year at the Kingdome with the Hawks getting the winning field goal this time — Norm Johnson hit a 46-yarder with one second left for the win.
Greil Marcus Explains American Culture Tonight at Central Library
Tonight at 7 p.m., Greil Marcus, one of the country’s most astute cultural critics and music journalists, stops by Seattle Central Public Library to speak about his new work: A New Literary History of America (Harvard Univ. Press, $49.95), a doorstop anthology of work by the best and brightest in American letters, edited by Marcus.
The book is somewhere between pop culture compendium and Comp. Lit. wet dream: clocking in at over a thousand pages and featuring essays by everyone from Camille Paglia to Ishmael Reed, it ranges widely over the bric-a-brac of American culture. “Literature” is a bit of a misnomer, as the cultural products explored include everything from jazz to Mickey Mouse to war memorials, stretching from the Founding to Obama’s election.
Marcus, a long-time music journalist who started his career in the early days of Rolling Stone before moving on to the Village Voice and others, has long since established himself as one of the most insightful writers in the country. He did more than most any other journalist to establish pop music writing as a serious endeavor, and has long since expanded his purview to everything from visual art to political culture. So even if the thought of dropping nearly fifty bucks for his book is a bit of a stretch, the talk along is worth hitting.