News, Weather

Coffee’s for Meteorologists Only

February 5, 2013 David Swidler

Sunny days this time of year (November to early July) are rare and wonderful. A sunny weekend day this time of year, that’s paradise on earth. So when the weather reports calls for a sunny Saturday, like they did last week, and instead those all too familiar clouds hang around all day, well, it’s upsetting and makes us want to have a little heart-to-heart with our local weather team. What better time than National Weatherperson’s Day?

[Local forecasters sitting around a table quietly talking, The SunBreak enters]

The SunBreak: Let me have your attention for a moment! So you’re talking about what? You’re talking about, bitching about, that forecast you shot, some fog that doesn’t want to burn off, a cold front that doesn’t want to descend, some wind you’re trying to predict and so forth. Let’s talk about something important. Are they all here?

Cliff Mass: All but one.

The SunBreak: Well, I’m going anyway. Let’s talk about something important! [Steve Pool starts to pour coffee] Put that coffee down! Coffee’s for meteorologists only — do you think I’m fucking with you? I am not fucking with you. I’m here from NOAA. I’m here from the National Weather Service. And I’m here on a mission of mercy…your name’s Pool?

Steve Pool: Yeah.

The SunBreak: You call yourself a weatherman, you son of a bitch?

Jeff Renner: [Stands up, puts on jacket] I don’t got to listen to this shit.

The SunBreak: You certainly don’t pal. ‘Cause the good news is, you’re fired. The bad news is you’ve got, all you got, just one week to regain your jobs, starting tonight. Starting with tonight’s five day forecast…oh, have I got your attention now? Good. ‘Cause we’re adding a little something to this month’s weather report contest. As you all know, first prize is a week on Good Morning America. Anyone want to see second prize? Second prize is a gift card to Cutters. Third prize is you’re fired. You get the picture? You laughing now? You got doppler data. The National Weather Service paid good money for that doppler radar! You can’t forecast with the data you’re given, you can’t forecast shit, you are shit, hit the bricks pal and beat it ’cause you are going out!

Pool: The doppler is weak.

The SunBreak: The doppler is weak. Fucking doppler is weak? You’re weak. I’ve been in this business fifteen years.

Renner: What’s your name?

The SunBreak: Fuck you, that’s my name! You know why, Mister? ‘Cause you took the South Lake Union Trolley here tonight, I drove an eighty-thousand-dollar BMW. That’s my name! [To Pool] And your name is “You’re wanting.” And you can’t play in a man’s game. You can’t figure out a pollen count, you go tell Andy Wappler your troubles. [Addresses room] Because only one thing counts in this life, getting the public to confidently make weekend plans! You hear me?

[The SunBreak flips over a blackboard, written on the board are ABC and AIDA.]

The SunBreak: A-B-C. A-always, B-be, C-clued in to coming fronts. Always be clued in to coming fronts! Always be clued in to coming fronts! A-I-D-A. Attention, interest, decision, AccuView. Attention — do I have your attention? Interest — are you interested? I know you are because it’s fuck or walk. You see that sun coming or you hit the bricks! Decision — have you made your decision on partial clouds or mostly cloudy, for Christ?! And AccuView. A-I-D-A, get out there! You got the people comin’, you think they just want to find out about the rain? Guy doesn’t check the five day unless he wants to plan a hike. School kids out there desperately wanting snow, waiting to give you their trust! Are you gonna take it? Are you man enough to take it?

[Renner scoffs]

The SunBreak: What’s the problem, pal? You. Renner.

Renner: You’re such a hero, you’re so rich. Why are you coming down here and waste your time on a bunch of non-top-ten-market bums?

[The SunBreak sits and takes off his watch]

The SunBreak: You see this watch? You see this watch?

Renner: Yeah.

The SunBreak: That watch cost more than your car. I made $970,000 last year. How much you make? You see, pal, that’s who I am. And you’re nothing. Nice person? I don’t give a shit. Good father? Fuck you, go play with the weekend guy on KREM 2 in Spokane! [Addresses room] You wanna work here? Forecast! You think this is abuse? You can’t take this, how can you take the abuse you get on a remote at the Puyallup Fair?! You don’t like it, leave. I can go out there tonight with the data you got, make an accurate humidity prediction for the next two weeks! Tonight! Two weeks! Can you? Can you? Go and do likewise! A-I-D-A!! Get mad! You sons of bitches! Get mad! You know what it takes to forecast the weather?

[Takes brass balls on the end of a weathervane out of his briefcase]

The SunBreak: It takes brass balls to forecast…. Go and do likewise, gents. The correct forecast is out there, you can get it right. You don’t, I have no sympathy for you. You wanna go on those TVs, radios, and newspapers and forecast? Then forecast. If not you’re going to be shining my shoes. You’ll know what you’ll be saying, bunch of losers sitting around in a Tully’s. [Mocking voice] “Oh yeah, I used to be a weatherman, it’s a tough racket.” [Takes a large stack of red index cards tied together with string out of his briefcase]. This is the weather data from Chinese buoys in the Pacific, and to you it’s gold. And you don’t get it. Why? Because to give them to you is just throwing them away. [He hands the stack to Mass] They’re for meteorologists.

I’d wish you good luck but you wouldn’t know what to do with it if you got it. [To Renner as he puts on his watch] And to answer your question, pal, why am I here? I came here because the National Weather Service asked me to, they asked me for a favor. I said the real favor, follow my advice and fire your fucking ass because a loser is a loser.

[He stares at Renner for a moment, picks up his briefcase, and goes into inner office with Mass]

News, Sports

Seattle’s “New” Sonics Team Not Likely to be Super Soon

February 5, 2013 Seth Kolloen 1 Comment

Give a starving man a burger, and he’s not going to ask whether it’s made from organic beef. So it is with we local basketball fans, who miss the NBA too much to quibble about the composition of the team we’re likely to get. Which, not to be harsh, but when we talk about the Sacramento Kings, we’re talking more “what-Burger-King-doesn’t-want-you-to-know” than grass-fed.

The Sacramento Kings have one good player. This is not hyperbole, it is documented statistical fact. According to John Hollinger’s widely-loved Player Efficiency Rating, only one Kings player rates among the NBA’s top 50.

That player, DeMarcus Cousins, is an immature hothead. This too is documented statistical fact: Cousins is the NBA leader in technical fouls with 12, and yesterday managed to get ejected from a game during halftime.

Cousins’ problems do not end there — he is out of shape, an inconsistent defender, and gambles too much on both ends of the floor.

On the other hand, Cousins is a rare talent. His combination of a 6’-11″, 270-pound body and world-class athleticism is once-in-a-generation. And he is a multi-faceted player — Cousins leads the Kings in points, rebounds, and steals, and is second in assists. He is unstoppable at the basket, and is a decent outside shooter. Eventually, he’ll be a threat from three-point range à la Sam Perkins or Rasheed Wallace.

The rest of the Kings one cannot say as many nice things about. Starting point guard Isaiah Thomas is a local hero — a Tacoma kid who starred at the University of Washington — but he is simply too short to be an effective defender against starting NBA point guards. Starting shooting guard Tyreke Evans struggles with an important part of his job description — shooting. I could go on, but I don’t want to depress myself.

If you read Sactown Royalty, the best of the Sacramento Kings fan blogs, you’ll see that alongside the justifiable anger about the prospect of losing their team is some gallows humor. To paraphrase, it’s basically: “Can you believe we’re fighting to keep this team?”

Sonics fans will remember the sentiment. While we were all hectoring our legislators and damning David Stern, the basketball team we were trying to save was perpetrating embarrassments like a 168-112 loss. There may even be a relocation blues phenomenon–one Kings blogger has charted a decline in the team’s play since the sale was announced.

If there’s a bright side to look on, its that the Kings are helping secure a better draft pick with little or no emotional damage to their future fans. If the season ended today, the Kings would have the league’s 7th worst record and a 1 in 8 chance of landing one of the top three picks in June’s draft. Continued awfulness would push them down the standings and potentially up the draft order.

The downside, of course, is that if the team loses a lot, they are even worse than we thought. You may not care right now, Seattle. Just want you to know that come November you could be leaving KeyArena with a bad taste in your mouth.

—

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

Maillot’s Knockout “Roméo et Juliette” Returns to PNB

February 4, 2013 Michael van Baker 2 Comments

Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancers Kaori Nakamura and James Moore in Jean-Christophe Maillot’s Roméo et Juliette (Photo © Angela Sterling)

Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancers Batkhurel Bold as Tybalt and Jonathan Porretta as Mercutio in Jean-Christophe Maillot’s Roméo et Juliette (Photo © Angela Sterling)

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This time in 2008, choreographer Jean-Christophe Maillot changed the course of history for Pacific Northwest Ballet. With Maillot’s Roméo et Juliette in PNB’s repertoire, the company now had the perfect Valentine’s Day ballet to go with The Nutcracker at Christmas. Its bold infusion of frank sensuality with gorgeous pas de deux left mouths agape — one moment Juliette was arcing backward, held aloft by her Roméo, the next, hands were everywhere!

Five years later, the stars of that fiery ’08 production, who dance now with the Maillot-led Ballets de Monte-Carlo, are returning for a one-night-only reprise on February 9, and tickets are already scarce.

The show runs through February 10 at McCaw Hall, and PNB is fielding three sets of Roméos and Juliettes of its own: Kaori Nakamura and (freshly minted principal dancer) James Moore, Carla Körbes and Seth Orza, and Lesley Rausch and Jerome Tisserand. Nakamura and Moore danced opening night last Friday, with Moore playing Roméo as a kid from the neighborhood rather than a romantic icon. This could happen to anyone, he suggests. Nakamura’s Juliette, pixieish, light as a butterfly, is his uptown girl.

At the ball where they meet, against the ponderous menace of Prokofiev’s “Dance of the Knights” — conductor Emil de Cou and the orchestra conjuring up a weightily mailed fist — Maillot develops the home life that Juliette is escaping from: an authoritarian Lady Capulet (Lindsi Dec) who’s molded Tybalt (Batkhurel Bold) into an adopted enforcer, the son she’d have preferred to have had. Juliette, you get the sense, was left to her nurse (Rachel Foster). In her “mad” scene, as Lady Capulet swirls, limbs shooting out, hair whipping (Dec somehow remains in one piece), it’s less about a wounded Tybalt as it is wounded narcissism.

Seen a second time, more and more of Maillot’s choreography falls into place, deepening the relationships between characters. The concept for the production is summed up in an anguished Friar Laurence’s (Karel Cruz) dance with a möbius strip — no matter how he tries to nudge the couple’s path away from disaster, his good intentions are warped by some balancing influence that pushes back. It’s in the nature of things; when Roméo and Juliette dance, palm to palm, their hands oscillate.

You also see Lady Capulet’s imprint on Juliette — where her mother annexes space with a hyper-extended goose step, Juliette tests the air before her as she goes, trying to tread grandly but still young and uncertain. When Nakamura, in a slip of glittering gold gown (the ravishing costumes from Jérôme Kaplan still take your breath away), steps out, it’s winsome and fragile.

Jonathan Porretta once again steals a large chunk of the show with his irrepressible, boundlessly energetic Mercutio, for whom Batkhurel’s stolid Tybalt makes a perfect foil. Porretta literally dances circles around him, while executing high-spirited little kicks. Porretta’s randy run-in with Rachel Foster’s Nurse (happily, Foster doesn’t try to play an old fossil) is another comic highlight. Kylee Kitchens pulls off the feat of being a memorable Rosaline — the girl Roméo adores before he’s met Juliette.

The set, costumes (PNB made their own, updated versions for this production), and lighting are integral to this Roméo et Juliette‘s impact. That gold dress is beautiful, but it also reminds you of gold wrapping paper, with Juliette as a present for some lucky, eligible suitor. Things ceaselessly pivot in identity: a love bed’s sheet becomes a shroud, the love bed itself, a catafalque. Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s set, a series of curved blank panels and a descending slash of walkway-balcony, is painted and transformed by Dominique Drillot’s lighting — stark, abstract bars appear on Juliette’s room’s wall, underscoring her bird in a gilded cage existence.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Seattle Baroque Orchestra Fills Town Hall with Bach Cantata Fans

February 4, 2013 Philippa Kiraly

I wasn’t the only person to think an evening of Bach cantatas with four super soloists would be something not to miss. The Early Music Guild virtually sold out of this concert, performed by Seattle Baroque Orchestra Saturday night at Town Hall. (The group returns with Haydn on March 23, 2013.)

I hope most of the audience didn’t neglect to read co-director Byron Schenkman’s thoughtful notes on the three cantatas in the main brochure. They enhanced the listening, giving background and understanding of some of Bach’s reasoning, and indicating moments to listen for.

The first two cantatas, Nos. 105, “Herr, gehe nicht ins Gericht mit deinem Knecht,” (“Lord, do not pass judgment on Your servant”) and 155, “Mein Gott, wie lang, ach lange?” (“My God, how long, ah, how long?”) are both ones of dichotomy, No. 105 the struggle between wrong and right, No. 155 between sorrow and joy, the contrasts vividly portrayed in the music.

No. 134, “Ein Herz, das seinen Jesum lebend weiss” (“A heart that knows its Jesus is living”) is upbeat all the way through, and was preceded in the program by just one aria from Cantata 170, “Vergnuegte Ruh,” (Delightful rest”) a lullaby of harmony.in music and emotion.

Four excellent soloists joined the orchestra led by Ingrid Matthews, though their voices, particularly soprano Clara Rottsolk (perhaps because her voice reached the highest register), seemed almost too big for Town Hall. Maybe St. James Cathedral next time? Alto Jennifer Lane, tenor Rufus Müller, and baritone Jesse Blumberg as well as Rottsolk, sounded well-matched and the orchestra of 16 had no trouble balancing them.

The rich, sound of Baroque voices and instruments filled Town Hall with warmth and all sorts of nuance, with many unforgettable moments. The plangent oboes of Debra Nagy and Curtis Foster and the bassoon of Anna Marsh gave an added timbral dimension.

Lengthy recitatives sung by Blumberg in both Nos. 105 and 155 sounded as though he was speaking solely to you, so expressive were they. In the former, violins and violas used bows, while cello, theorbo and double bass were plucked in accompaniment, creating an unusual and enhancing effect.

With her agile voice, Rottsolk made the most of her lilting, upbeat aria in No. 155, tricky to sing with a fast vocal line all over the register. For several recitatives and arias, both in No. 155 and for almost all of No. 134, Bach joins alto and tenor together in duet. Lane and Mueller sounded absolutely right together, their voices expressively blending and moving apart with the music, the accompaniment for this cantata including viola da gamba, here played by Margriet Tindemans.

Drinks, Eats, Food, Restaurant

A Trio of Tastings Comes to Seattle

February 4, 2013 Jay Friedman

With February comes the start of a season of favorite food and wine events. Mark your calendars and buy tickets now for any of these events of interest, as they’re quite likely to sell out quickly.

Seattle Wine and Food Experience

The “Experience” includes more than 100 wineries from around the globe, plus local beer, cider, and spirits. More than 20 chefs will serve up gourmet bites, with an emphasis on local products like Washington beef and potatoes, Oregon lamb, and seafood. Participants include Allium, Copperleaf Restaurant & Bar, Far-Eats, and Trellis—one of my favorite restaurants in the area. You’ll also find exhibitors offering samplings of products like olive oil, artisan cheese, chocolate, and other specialty foods.

This year’s highlights include:

Snoqualmie Casino Luxe Lounge featuring gaming, gourmet food, and handcrafted drinks—as well as live music.
Featured Wine Region: Oregon with more than 30 state producers pouring wines.
Sip Northwest Distillery Square where you can learn how grains and botanicals become whiskey, vodka, and gin, as well as taste some regional creations.
Tim’s Cascade Snacks Beer and Cider Exhibit to enjoy apples and hops.
Washington Beef Bistro with Chateau Ste. Michelle where you can compare mid-west corn-fed beef versus northwest corn-fed beef.
Chef in the Vineyard featuring John Sarich, cooking up beef bites to pair with some of Washington’s best wines.
Cooking With Stella Artois and Diane’s Market Kitchen where Diane LaVonne will demonstrate cooking with Stella Artois.
Fonté Coffee Bar serving some of the city’s best, locally roasted coffee.
Wine From Around the Globe to experience a tasting of international wines.
BevMo! Tasting Room offering more sampling of wine and beer.

Like last year, you might want to dress up for the event, as it ends just before the start of Oscar parties. The festivities are Sunday, February 24 from noon to five at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall. Tickets are currently available at the Seattle Wine and Food Experience website for $55.

Cochon 555

March 17 marks the return of Cochon 555, Taste Network’s national pig-cooking, pig-eating, and pig-educating tour. After a year off, it’s great to have the event back in Seattle, which means it’s time to plan on nose-to-tail pigging out.

Now in its fifth year, Cochon 555 features five chefs (accompanied by five winemakers) who will cook five heritage pigs in whatever way they’d like: braised, grilled, pressed, pickled, rubbed, smoked, seared, sauced, spiced, injected, marinated, cured, or any other method of madness. A panel of judges and 400 guests help decide the winning chef by voting on the “best bite of the day,” with the winner crowned the Prince(ss) of Porc and moving on to compete at the Grand Cochon event at the June Food & Wine Classic in Aspen.

If the event keeps true to past years, attendees can watch demonstration of a whole pig breakdown between bites, as well as enjoy a chance to sample from a whole roasted heritage breed pig and also some (likely to be porky) desserts. Word is that there will also be oyster opportunities, a Mezcal bar, and a cheese bar this year—plus more during the VIP hour. As part of the fifth anniversary celebration, look for events on adjoining dates, including a guest chef and winemaker dinner, a producer’s reception, and extra seminars and tastings.

Watch the Cochon 555 website for details, and get tickets now starting at $125 for the main event, to be held at Cedarbrook Lodge.

Taste Washington!

One week after Cochon 555 weekend is the Taste Washington event, happening at the CenturyLink Event Field Center March 23-24.

Each day starts with a few educational seminars (with their own admission fee), allowing food lovers to learn more about food and wine pairing from local luminaries. (Last year they included the Canlis crew and Tom Douglas.) After the seminars, doors open (1pm for VIPs and 2pm for general admission) for the big tasting event, as well as cooking demos on the Viking Chef’s stage.

Taste Washington is a great opportunity to meet representatives from over 200 wineries who are eager to share information and samples. Given the great amount of wine on hand, don’t feel bashful when searching for spit buckets. And to help with some sustenance, 50 of the area’s finest restaurants will serve up food to pair with your wine, including Restaurant Bea, RN74, and Toulouse Petit. This is one of the year’s most popular food events, so plan to get your tickets early, keeping an eye on the Taste Washington website for details.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Love Songs and Negotiations from She She Pop and Their Fathers

February 3, 2013 Michael van Baker

On the Boards‘ Lane Czaplinski sums up how many (if not most) of us would first react to She She Pop‘s Testament (last performance Sunday night at OtB; tickets): “The thought of my dad on stage in a highfalutin Lear terrifies me. What would he say and do?”

There’s a reason the rambunctious elderly feature in comedy so often — we’re scared of them.

But there’s another level to the German performance collective’s work that is even more terrifying, which is that parents are mortal — their decline, physical and mental, ends in death, which they are necessarily not around to give their children help in navigating.

Testament is a tender but tough-minded response to that absence, both a way of preparing oneself to be gone, no longer able to exert influence or offer aid; and to be left, no longer able to argue with or embrace.

She She Pop are careful not to call themselves actors, in the sense of people who are there purely to entertain you: “Instead, we give ourselves and others interesting tasks to fulfill and solve them in public on stage,” they write in the program notes. In this case, “others” means three of their fathers.

This doesn’t mean the collective members are not technically proficient performers — they even harmonize with boy-band precision.

But what the cast — Lisa Lucassen, Sebastian and his father Joachim Bark, Fanni and her father Peter Halmburger, and Ilia and her father Theo Papatheodorou — are doing is amending Shakespeare’s King Lear as if it were a contract: highlighting relevant areas, striking out lines, writing in new directives. (Not everyone who participated in the show’s creation appears: Johanna Freiburg, Mieke and Manfred Matzke, Berit Stumpf. Sometimes the performers trade other father-daughter parts.) The fathers wear fatherly outfits, while the younger generation wears Lea Søvsø’s Shakespearean ruffled collars, and breeches.

Much of the show was generated in rehearsals, as the fathers and daughters (and son) read and discussed Lear, and grappled both with the text, and with its modern-day analogues: last wills and testaments, costs of elder care, the day-to-day dramas of intergenerational attitudes in conflict. For the show, in a Brechtian touch, the performers don headphones and flatly repeat taped recordings from rehearsal, which at times contrasts strongly with the heated upset of the language.

The three fathers are almost all in agreement that the show demands a loss of dignity (less so in the U.S., I imagine, than back home, where people they might know socially could attend). For the first few acts, they sit to the left in plush recliners, acting as a world-weary Greek chorus: When they aren’t speaking themselves, they trade knowing glances about the younger generation. The wisdom of the papa is captured perfectly by the former physicist’s attempt to fix Lear by writing out a differential equation that optimizes Lear’s “darker purpose”: arranging a competition of sorts to divide up his kingdom among his three daughters.

Oh yeah? respond the daughters (and son), working out a tremendously detailed accounting of how grandparental affection and support is distributed unequally among child-having and childless offspring. This is all light-hearted enough, even though it touches on very real issues, and the fathers tend to bridle a bit at discussing it in public.

But the scene where a daughter recites the list of things she’s preparing herself for as her father ages (wiping his pee off the toilet, cooking soft foods, listening again to that anecdote), and he singspiels “I Will Always Love You” — that cuts right to the bone.

For Lear‘s storm, the fathers unburden themselves of their anxiety about their children’s future in theatre, their discomfort with what they perceive as simple exhibitionism, and their uncertainty over whether their kids are any good. Judging from the startled, pained laughter in the audience, more than a few people had been through the same ordeal with their parents. Sven Nichterlein’s lighting, Christopher Uhe’s music, and Florian Fischer’s sound turn the scene into a Pips-meets-punk freak-out.

One of most effective staging elements is that cameras are used to create projected portraits of whoever sits in the recliners. While the fathers watch their children onstage, the audience sees them looking out at them, head-on. It may be a virtue of necessity — though the fathers are all good public speakers, the arrangement lets them maintain a certain personal distance — but it directs the fatherly gaze at the audience, its judgment and approvals, its half-grins and raised eyebrows, its cool removal. Later, as the three 70-somethings strip down, you get a sense of the gift in the action.

It’s a gift extended to the audience. Very few moments in theatre are so theatrically Greek in this way, where the staged imitation of an action, for all its artifice, instantiates another, augmented reality. You know, King Lear is an old man lost and out of his mind in a storm, there’s a story there you may or may not relate to — the ritual of mimesis is different, more bedrock. You participate first, make sense of it later.

In a perfect world, we’d all have She She Pop’s experience, we’d all sit down while there’s time, we’d all be willing — but we live in a world of shortcomings, of our own and others. Lear is a tragedy, the foolish father a scapegoat for all our failings, driven out. She She Pop invites him in. It’s not a metaphor — there they are, three fathers, onstage, performing the way fatherhood slips out of older, tremor-shaken hands. If you are there, you feel lucky to see the majesty in it.

The SunBreak

Monthly Archives: February 2013