At long last, Columbia City is getting its movie house mojo back, with the opening of Ark Lodge Cinemas this weekend. The three-screen theater has been upgraded to Barco digital projectors, and proudly offers a fire-safety sprinkler system (it’s a long story).
That’s all to the good, because equipment is certainly going to heat up during the Lord of the Rings-athon that new owner David McRae has planned–yes, that’s the full director’s cut of each film, coming in at almost eleven-and-a-half hours. It’ll be shown on two screens (starting at 10 and 11 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday, December 8 and 9); the third, upstairs salle is still under reconstruction, to open in the new year. A little Middle Earth gold will help with that.
Each film in the marathon will be followed by a concession break; after the second film, there will be pizza. Tickets to the series (no à la carte viewing) go for $25. An all-you-can-eat concession-stand offer (pop, popcorn, and pizza) goes for $20.
Also, attendees of the Lord of the Rings get first dibs on next weekend’s showings of The Hobbit, opening Friday, December 14. Moira McDonald already checked, and they’ll be showing the 2D, 24 fps version of Bilbo and friends. (Peter Jackson shot the 3D version at 48 fps, which some viewers complain looks like “soap opera-scope.” The film is also being released in a 24 fps 3D version.)
UPDATE: McRae filled us in on a few questions we had. Ark Lodge Cinemas was going to launch after the new year, but decided a holiday opening would be more fun, so all is not exactly as it will be when things are finished. Currently, the Barco projectors offer 2K lines resolution, but they’ll be upgraded. The third salle’s delayed opening is in part due to an agreement with the city to make sure the whole theater’s sprinkler system can be tested before it’s filled up with filmgoers. And regular ticket prices will be in line with other city theaters, “about $10 or $10.50,” since Ark Lodge will be showing first-run films for the delectation of locals. Interested in a visit? Take light rail. But maybe not to the LOTR-athon, because the last light rail train leaves SeaTac at 12:10 a.m.
Next NW 2012: Real/Time is this weekend, December 7 to 9, only (at Velocity Dance Center; tickets), and brings you, as Velocity often does, a collection of new experiments from an intriguing cross-section of the dance scene. The festival continues, on screen, at Next Dance Cinema on Monday, December 10 (at Northwest Film Forum; tickets), with even more participants, including the irrepressible Alice Gosti. (A kick-off party-slash-benefit, Velocity Is Burning, is December 6.)
On the choreographer side for Next NW, you have Shannon Stewart, thefeath3rtheory (Raja Kelly), Babette McGeady, Erica Badgeley, Molly Sides, Sarah Butler, and Paris Hurley + Markeith Wiley’s The New Animals. They’re collaborating with a host of composers and visual artists, such as Tito Ramsey, Benjamin Marx, William Hayes, Barry Sebastian, Derek Ghormley, Jeff Huston, and Adam Sekuler and John Niekrasz.
I’d had a chance to see one of Stewart’s collaborations with Huston and Sekuler, “An Inner Place That Has No Place,” in April, and its appeal has only grown in my memory. (That work is returning to Velocity in April 2013, as Stewart’s part in the SCUBA tour.) By way of a preview, I met up with her at rehearsals at Velocity, to discuss what her new work would explore, in 12 minutes or less. It turned out to be David Lynch’s Fire Walk With Me.
Rehearsal featured Stewart talking to her dancers about how to act when “the narrative of what we’re doing starts to disintegrate,” and teaching them how to be creepy Northwest trees. “It’s the air moving your branches,” she told them, and they practiced feeling gnarled.
A cold November rain had the Kawasaki studio’s skylight sounding like a snare drum, and that and a 4 p.m. twilight conspired to bring back in a rush what was so eerie about Twin Peaks, as Stewart and her dancers took on the characters of FBI agents drinking coffee, stern and glaring older women, a traumatized high school girl. A wordless chorus smoked languorously, put a hand up in self-defense, retreated.
It’s not at all an accident that so much of the dance reads like Lynch’s movie, because, as Stewart explained, when she saw it years ago, she made a a visceral connection to Lynch’s project — here was something so like dance, unable or unwilling to put itself into words precisely, but instead of courting the audience’s interest, it piled mystery upon mystery. It met small town melodrama, and murder, with a cool distance, less an investigation than an improvisation, a provocation. The dance was with your expectations.
A blurry Shannon Stewart in rehearsal (Photo: MvB)
Stewart was struck particularly by the way Lynch reversed foreground and background — the Northwest gloom, its emotional textures, became a character, and the characters became the scenery. Taking Lynch, or what she knows about him, as a starting point, she began to ask herself what his process would be like. In the event, she’s borrowed his movement vocabulary from the first 30 minutes, and made something new.
(At the same time, Stewart, who studied with Deborah Hay over the summer, is working on developing another piece — or not, leaving room for honorable failure — that arises from following Hay’s practice daily. Giving herself over to these two influences, she hopes, will help advance her discovery of her personal choreographic style.)
The drum solo that the dancers had to learn went 6 beats, 5 beats, 8, 6, 13, 7, 3. People kept visibly slipping into a trance surprised by that fleeting coda. “Complicated counting,” supposed Stewart, is her way on contrasting cold on hot, not letting the audience find a safe “place” to observe.
In the film that she and Sekuler have in Next Dance Cinema, 1922, a Steadicam roves through an empty old house; it’s an observer and dancer, creating a space from its single vantage point. Stewart says something about how the audience will “metabolize” what it sees. It’s also about memory, its rewards and ruts, and about how to move from one space into another. “The challenge of contemporary work,” she mused, partly to herself, “is to push forward. A finished style isn’t helpful.”
“Early start may mean bad flu season ahead,” reads the headline in the Seattle Times, but so far the news in Washington is good — that’s a national wire story. The CDC’s flu map shows the worst outbreaks occurring on the East Coast — and Alaska. Here in Washington State, the flu is rated “sporadic,” below epidemic levels and tracking closely with the rate of the past two years at this time.
Still, the turning point may come as early as four to five weeks, as it did two years ago. Levels of immunity and good behavior (i.e., not passing the flu along to the office) can make all the difference.
On that note, more good news. The majority of confirmed cases, nationally and in Washington, are of the influenza A H3 variety, and the head of the CDC, Dr. Thomas Frieden, says this year’s flu shot is protecting well against those strains of the bug. (So far, the incidence of pertussis remains low, too.) Thanks to the state’s childhood vaccine program, a shot is free for anyone under 19 years old. (This map will list the vaccination providers near you.)
There’s still time to get a jump on the prevention; Accuweather’s flu forecast for Seattle claims this cool, rainy pattern doesn’t impact flu risk.
Did you know Seattle has an indoor beach volleyball facility in Georgetown called The Sandbox? Neither did we? It also appears to boast a unique mural that Photocoyote captured over the summer and shared in our Flickr pool recently.
Today the Seattle City Council is weighing a pilot Car2Go program for Seattle, again. The point-to-point car-share service has already set up shop in Vancouver, B.C., and Portland, but Car2Go’s introduction to the Seattle City Council, back in October, raised a series of questions that led to revisions in the proposed service.
[UPDATE: The City Council’s Transportation Committee approved the Car2Go program. One interesting note: Car2Go drivers will be cleared to park in public parking even in the “Husky game day” restricted zone around Husky stadium.]
Car2Go planned to launch with 350 Fortwo Smart cars, and they have been cooped up in a parking lot since then. (Fortwo’s sold like hotcakes the first year, then sales plummeted: the two-seaters have room for two people and not much else, they’re too small for comfort for freeway driving, and the transmission is said to be lurchy. Quick, in-city, car-share trips are their sweet spot.)
Publicola reported on the initial Council pushback:
Opponents on the council, however, objected that the new service would allow cars to take up parking spaces that could otherwise be occupied by cars owned by homeowners who live nearby, or patrons of neighborhood businesses. They also questioned whether shared cars might threaten taxi drivers’ business. And they argued that the boundaries for car-sharing would exclude low-income Seattle residents, like those who live in Southeast Seattle, from the new system.
Most of these represent the kind of spurious, time-wasting “concerns” that this Council is infamous for–negative first impressions generated by people who haven’t looked into a project much, and still would like to put their oar in. The Council has already opened wide the door on “taking up parking spaces” around town, with the Zipcar car-share service, and the same rationale applies: in aggregate, car-share services increase the amount of useful parking available to people.
Threatening taxi business? It’s hard to know how to respond to that. Did you know that the City Council has a responsibility to protect the taxi industry from people driving themselves around? (Think of the dent in taxi fares that comes from allowing private cars in the downtown core at all.) As for boundaries, Car2Go only works if the cars — which can be dropped off at any legal public parking spot — are concentrated in a high-use area. (This is different than Zipcar, where cars stay strategically put.) Spread out 350 cars in a wide enough area, and you’ll have to take a bus to get to the closest one.
The Seattle Times explains that the public parking option is not a giveaway: the company has agreed to pay a base rate of $1,330 per car per year, with more to be paid depending upon where the cars are parked and for how long. GPS tracking will allow the city to see the ratio the cars spend parked in residential zones versus metered parking, for instance.
What’s of greater concern to anyone with 30 minutes to spend researching the company is the frequency of complaints from formerly thrilled customers. If the premise is not fully baked, then there’s little incentive to rush in just because Daimler has sales goals to meet.
Capitol Hill Seattle explains the cost structure: “Pricing includes a $35 annual fee and hourly rates. San Diego recently saw its Car2Go rates bump a $1 higher to $13.99 per hour with a $72.99 cap.” But Zipcar is $8 per hour, counter people who haven’t checked Zipcar rates recently ($10.25 to $11.25 is the norm, with certain vehicles costing more.)
With its hourly cap, Car2Go is already competitive with Zipcar, but by the minute, Car2Go’s rent for about $0.38. So on paper, at least, an 8-minute drive is just over $3. With Zipcar, of course, you have to bring the car back to its original spot, and that’s where Car2Go shines, because you can just park it and leave. (Car2Go also tries to keep the mostly-gas-powered fleet topped off for you, where Zipcar requires you to fill up at 1/4-tank or below.) The frugally minded can’t bear to take a Zipcar to a movie, for instance, because you end up paying for the time you’re not driving. Car2Go would seem to solve that.
Yet, according to Yelpers in Portland and elsewhere, Car2Go creates a host of new annoyances, largely because of its finicky electronics and a sense that the company is trying to extract every cent possible. Even if you disregard the people who didn’t seem to realize there was a one-time membership fee ($35) and that tiny cars are not great on the freeway, there are still far too many complaints about snafus with billing and the car’s glitchy electronics.
People find themselves unable to end their trip because there’s no signal. They complain about the two-part check-in and check-out system: you check in outside the car to unlock it, then check-in via a PIN and a touch screen once inside — the touch screen is said to be slow, and it runs you through a mandatory pre-rental checklist on the car’s condition, cleanliness, and so forth. The cumbersome process seems to function as a kind of meter drop — customers claim you’re billed from the moment you unlock the car. Customer service can take 10 or 15 minutes to reach. Bonus minutes are loudly promoted, but their expiration is not. Cars are too often found with too little gas or charge to make it to someone’s destination.
Car2Go offers an unusual number of apps, only one of which is free. In theory, Car2Go’s are plentiful enough that you can simply pluck them from the air, but in practice people find that it’s better to reserve the closest one you can find (you can make reservations up to 30 minutes in advance of your trip). With Zipcar, Capitol Hill residents are all-too-familiar with the frustration of turning to the car-share service at peak times, only to find nothing available within a mile, but at least you can reserve substantially in advance. With Car2Go, the race is on.
Also not noted in large type: as with Zipcar, the driver is responsible for the $1,000 insurance deductible in the event of an accident. Car2Go’s application process includes a driving record check, to screen out anyone their insurance would refuse to cover. This means your approval isn’t immediate. The driver is also dinged by Car2Go for any of the usual infractions, in addition to the infraction’s cost, usually about $25 on top of any parking ticket or towing fees.
In fairness, Yelp does not, others have already noted, seem to be the haunt of the patient and easily satisfied customer. But with a large enough sample, there’s usually a grain of truth. So far, Car2Go seems to be struggling with its rapid expansion, and has issues with communications and technology failure, and billing transparency. These are the red flags you’d hope the Council was looking at in a pilot program, rather than citywide service.
Each program this fall conducted by Seattle Symphony’s still-new music director Ludovic Morlot has come with a fresh outlook and, often, surprises. Over and over again, the different works on the program have been shown to have connections which may not have been particularly understood before the performance, and when they are, a shaft of enlightenment comes along also.
His musical direction of the orchestra is nuanced and well thought out, and the orchestra is responding with fine performances and, unusual for musicians (who often regard any — and certainly their own — conductor as having clay feet), enthusiastic approval shown by their applause as he comes on stage.
Last Thursday’s program was a case in point. The Berg violin concerto and Mahler’s 4th Symphony would seem to be a perfectly okay grouping, but it wasn’t until the performance itself that it became clear that the thread which linked them was the consideration of death in childhood.
Berg’s concerto, requested by violinist Louis Krasner, ended up with the composer’s distress and sorrow at the death of young Manon Gropius (daughter of Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler) emerging transformed into a memorial work dedicated to her. Mahler’s symphony, from 35 years earlier, channels the composer’s interest in a poem from Das Knaben Wunderhorn, where the words of children who have died describe what it is like in Heaven.
The Berg work is not an easy one for a listener not deeply familiar with it, unless it is presented by a violinist and conductor who have internalized it and can put its meaning across.
German violinist Veronika Eberle, 24, seems amazingly young to have done so, but the gentle tenderness of her performance, its heartfelt singing sometimes rising to anguish even in 12-tone serialism, gave humanity to the concerto. Fiercely difficult passages caused her no problems at all. The orchestration is often spare, but Morlot had the musicians on the same wavelength as Eberle, and the whole was a triumph, as was obvious in vociferous applause from the orchestra and also from the audience.
The Mahler appears at first thought to be totally different, from the end of a lush romantic era. The orchestra is large, the orchestration full, and all of the symphony hinges on the last movement, where a singer joins in with the words of “Das himmlische Leben” (“Life in Heaven”).
Often this is sung by a mezzo-soprano with a voice matching Mahler in its deep romanticism. Morlot chose instead a soprano, France’s Donatienne Michel-Dansac, with a chameleon voice which could sound as pure, ethereal and vibrato–free as a boy’s, yet deepen and sound warm in other sections. There was some sacrifice of volume in her lowest register against such a large orchestra, but she was able to project and could still be heard, though softly at those points in the score.
Clothing normally has little place in a music review, but Michel-Dansac’s appearance at the side of the stage toward the end of the third movement, standing motionless, with her smooth pale blond hair and a shoulders-to-floor palest pink pleated dress made one wonder if she had wings on the back.
Morlot guided the orchestra though this big work, with its many instrumental solos, deftly and with a sense of celestial lightness and often joy even in the loudest parts. Concertmaster Alexander Velinzon particularly deserves kudos for his playing in frequent solos.
