Despicable Me minions rejoicing at faster internet speeds. Despicable Me 2 opens July 3.
Seattle is getting gigabit-speed internet for Christmas this year — or thereabouts — according to Gigabit Squared. That’s 1,000 megabits, people! Have you ever seen so many?
The company promises its fiber-optic internet will supply residents in the University of Washington West Campus District, First Hill, Capitol Hill, and Central Area by first quarter of 2014, continuing the roll-out to a total of 14 neighborhoods throughout the year. Price for one gigabit-per-second (Gbps), upstream and down? $80 per month. 100 Mbps? $45.
When the plan to light Seattle’s dark fiber was announced back in December 2012, the ETA for initial service was fall of 2013, prices were going to be “competitive,” and the slowest speeds were quoted as 20 Mbps. If the timeline has slid slightly, the announced prices are indeed very competitive: Comcast’s Blast package, with a 50 Mbps download speed, is currently priced at $74.95. CenturyLink tops out at 40 Mbps, but they won’t even tell you how much that costs until you tell them whether you’re a new or existing customer.
Gigabit Seattle’s ultra-high-speed program does come with a hefty $350 installation fee, but if you sign up for a year’s service at either the 1 Gbps or 100 Mbps level, that fee is waived. A basic plan of 5/1Mbps (that’s 1 Mbps upstream) will be free for 60 months (five years), after which point, there’s a conversion to a 10 Mbps plan that’s $10 per month. The installation fee is purely location-based, so there’s no new installation fee charged if, for instance, a renter moves out and another renter moves in. I have an email in asking about whether there’s an installment plan for that $350 fee, given that the 5 Mbps plan seems otherwise a good fit for older people on a fixed-income.
[UPDATE: They’ll look at payment plans for qualified accounts, says spokesperson Matt Weinland. And, by the way, the setup will look pretty much like what you get from other service providers: They’ll give you a modem/router for use in your home.]
BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE! As part of those subscription plans, Gigabit Seattle plans to disburse a “next generation high-speed wireless neighborhood cloud service” around each neighborhood. That will enable them to offer radio-delivered 1 Gbps service even to locations inaccessible by fiber, and to your mobile device as you wander around town. That high-speed wireless will be shared, of course, so you may not get the same performance as from your dedicated connection at home.
An eager sense of anticipation filled Benaroya Hall on Thursday as audience members gathered to hear the world premiere performance of John Luther Adams’ newest work for orchestra, Become Ocean. The crowd was buzzing with questions. How exactly would Adams’ work channel the majestic waterways of the Pacific Northwest? Would Become Ocean follow the pattern of Adams’ other works, which immerse listeners in evocative soundscapes? Most importantly, what would the music sound like?
Adams is one of contemporary music’s most idiosyncratic composers. Born in 1953 in Mississippi, a passion for the natural world and wild spaces brought Adams to Alaska as a young man, where he set up shop in a remote cabin in the forest. Since then, he has called Alaska home (though he’s since traded his isolated cabin for the more urban surroundings of Fairbanks). Life amidst the Alaskan wilderness has inspired and informed Adams’ unique compositional style, which seeks to musically re-create the experience of being in nature.
Violinist Sergey Khachatryan (Photo: Marco Borggreve)
In April, the Seattle Symphony hosted a performance of Adams’ songbirdsongs in the Benaroya Hall lobby. The meditative work is representative of Adams’ compositions. Rather than focusing on telling a story with musical elements like melody, harmony, and rhythm, songbirdsongs uses sonic cues to evoke a particular scene and mood. Scored for three piccolos and two sets of percussion instruments, the piece transports the audience into a forest where birds trill melodies and the breeze rustles through the trees. Adams takes the experience of observing bird calls in the forest and distills it down into musical elements, painting a detailed, vivid picture with a descriptive musical language.
At Thursday’s concert, Seattle Symphony Music Director Ludovic Morlot touched on this penchant for rich musical description in his introduction to Become Ocean. He encouraged the audience to experience the piece in the way one would observe a natural phenomenon, likening the work to a flock of billowing clouds floating across the sky, slowly changing shape and color.
Morlot also explained how the structure of Become Ocean supported this concept, providing insight into how the piece was composed. The work splits the orchestra into three distinct groups, anchored respectively by woodwinds, brass, and strings. They’re joined by celeste, piano, percussion, and a quartet of harps, which are divided amongst the groups. Morlot brought the groups onto stage one at a time, enabling the audience to see the instrumental makeup of each. During the performance, stage lighting further accentuated this structure, bathing each group in a different color of light.
From the very first downbeat, Become Ocean envelops the audience in a sea of sound. A slow and steady timpani roll and a constant low trill on the piano provide an underlying foundation throughout most of the piece. Guided by Morlot’s steady pulse, the three groups progressed through a series of interlocking melodic and harmonic fragments, blending long tones with arpeggios and tremolos.
Like clouds, the sound is constantly shifting and changing, emphasizing the timbre of one group or another. At several points in the piece, the three streams of sound convene into an enormous swell that sweeps through the auditorium, bathing the audience in sound. Tremors in the strings are joined by long reedy tones on the woodwinds, while a chorus of brass sails above, majestic calls on the higher horns punctuated by mournful foghorn notes on the tuba.
Through its 45 minutes, Become Ocean focuses on developing a meditative mood. Unlike many works in the Western musical tradition, which emphasize the build-up and release of melodic and harmonic tension, Become Ocean creates musical drama by adding and subtracting layers of musical sound. This isn’t music that will sweep you away with soaring melodies or startle you with unexpected harmonies. Instead, Adams’ work drifts along, its ambient, drone-like qualities inspiring meditation and relaxation. I emerged from Adams’ soundscape feeling refreshed and more aware.
Armenian violinist Sergey Khachatryan opened Thursday’s concert with a dazzling performance of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto. Though he’s only 28 years old, Khachatryan is well on his way to becoming an internationally-renowned Shostakovich expert, having already released a recording of the composer’s violin concertos with the Orchestre National de France.
On Thursday, the young violinist wowed the Benaroya Hall crowd with an interpretation full of technical fireworks and amped-up drama. Though at times the tension felt a bit overwrought, Khachatryan made up for this with tender moments full of imagery, particularly in the third movement’s haunting cadenza. Morlot and the orchestra provided robust support (particularly the trio of bassoons in the first and second movements), infusing the performance with bursts of energy and momentum.
There’s still one more opportunity to hear Become Ocean in its inaugural performances. Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony will perform the same program again this afternoon.
Hannah Arendt opens on July 19 in at Seven Gables Theatre.
Adolf Eichmann, reported political theorist Hannah Arendt for the New Yorker in 1963, was “thoughtless,” a boastful bureaucrat who said, “Officialese is my only language.” When Arendt said Eichmann couldn’t think, she explained that what she meant was: “think from the standpoint of somebody else.” In many ways, Arendt’s peculiar indictment of Eichmann — a man many believed to be the logistical force behind millions of death-camp murders — was, as befitted the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, a critique of the social structures that permitted not just Eichmann but nearly all Germans not to imagine what was happening in those camps.
For Arendt, Eichmann was an edge case that demonstrated how normal people could not think about the Holocaust as it occurred. Here was a man whose job it was to know, and who nonetheless could, burying himself in the minutiae of genocide, feel no remorse as a consequence of his actions. He was, he said in the language of Nuremberg, just following orders. In at least one instance, Eichmann discovered one of the people he thought of as a “useful” Jew had been sent to a death camp. Though unwilling simply to free him — that would have meant challenging his superiors — Eichmann got the man a light work detail, sweeping a gravel path, feeling very contented with himself, although the man was killed just weeks later.
For her eponymous film, director Margarethe von Trotta worked again with Barbara Sukowa, who plays Arendt in middle age as bursting with intellectual and romantic fervor (her marriage to Axel Milberg’s Heinrich Blücher is a lusty fairytale), but with a hawkish dispossession, her eyes glinting as they fasten on Eichmann during his trial. She can hardly believe how feeble a thinker of any sort he is, this, the fabled Eichmann, and it’s this experience that prompts her to refocus on the “banality” of Eichmann’s evil. He is not heroic, a Faustian devil — he’s a mindless cog put to use by a warped ideology.
In the context of film as artwork, von Trotta’s major gesture is in the way that Martin Heidegger (Klaus Pohl) makes appearances throughout the film. Von Trotta doesn’t underline it in the American way of having Arendt deliver a subtextual monologue to Heidegger, but his presence is a counterpoint to her (salutary, I think) demolition of a cult of Eichmann. Heidegger, after all, was a German who could think, as Arendt knew from her relationship with him. And yet, there he had been, a newly minted Nazi Party member and rector of the University of Freiburg. Eichmann may have been on trial publicly, but it was Heidegger’s betrayal, von Trotta suggests, that weighed on Arendt’s mind.
The latter part of Von Trotta’s film turns on the blowback to Arendt’s incendiary article — it brought threats and cost her old friends. She’s berated for not having imagined, ironically enough, this eventuality. (It’s possible she meant it in a pedagogical way, but her discussion of the cooperation of Jewish councils with the Nazis was guaranteed to be inflammatory. If you can’t resist, Arendt wrote, you still have the option of doing nothing to help. That’s a strategic assessment, perhaps similar to the calculus on dealing with terrorist hijackers. But it sounded like victim-blaming.)
If you are not steeped in the era’s history, Hannah Arendt may feel like a Cliff’s Notes version, as arguments tend to be set up rather than developed. Minor characters come off as spokespeople doing walk-ons.
It’s possible to watch the film and feel Arendt was simply terribly put-upon, a frank academic who believed too strongly in the truth, rather than someone who made dubious claims in print about Eichmann’s “Zionism.” Von Trotta’s portrayal of the New Yorker staff also feels lightly mocking of their middlebrow concerns — they didn’t know what they were getting into. Poor William Shawn is always on the phone, checking on Arendt’s progress. (Eichmann’s trial began in April 1961. He was hanged end of May 1962. Arendt’s series didn’t run until February 1963.)
Von Trotta’s Arendt, honey-badger-like, cows Shawn with a few sharp words. But surely that truck colliding into Arendt’s taxi in Central Park in March of 1962 — she woke in the ambulance, with a number of broken ribs — also slowed her down. Von Trotta elides these kinds of things, just as Arendt did in her treatment of Eichmann, making a larger point. But in von Trotta’s case, this is a miscalculation. When all you hear at length is Arendt’s eloquent defenses, you’re robbed of much the drama of the actual debate.
Hanford tanks AY-101 and AY-102 under construction in 1970. (Photo: DOE)
News organizations (KOMO, KING, CBS, AP) are reporting today that a double-walled tank at Hanford (AY-102) may be leaking highly radioactive waste into the soil below it, based on heightened measurements of contamination in that area. Previously, when word of the leak in AY-102 leaked out in 2012 (see: “Hanford worker’s struggle to ‘do the right thing‘”), the waste was thought to be contained within the double walls.
Though it was known that the tank contained some 707,000 gallons of liquid radioactive waste, Department of Energy assistant manager of the tank farms Tom Fletcher minimized the risk at the time, saying: “This is fixed contamination on the floor. There is no liquid. There is no vapor.” By June 2013, visible evidence of wet radioactive waste, amounting to almost a half-gallon, was being reported.
This isn’t Hanford’s only ongoing leak. At least six single-walled tanks are leaking radioactive waste as well. In mid-February, the DOE confirmed that T-111 was leaking 150 to 300 gallons of radioactive liquid waste each year. (The following week, five more leaking tanks were reported by DOE.) It’s accepted that, over the decades since the tanks were built, 67 have leaked over one million gallons into the soil, contamination that over time makes its way into groundwater a few hundred feet below the tanks, and toward the Columbia River, some five to eight miles distant.
But AY-102 is one of 28 double-walled tanks built to hold millions of gallons of the most radioactive waste Hanford had created — waste that literally boils from the heat generated by Strontium-90. If its containment failure is proven, it’s not a good sign for the health of the remaining tanks, which the DOE had been hoping would last until 2052. AY-102 was also supposed to play a crucial feeder role in the clean-up of tanks going forward.
Confirmation of the leak between the walls should have triggered Washington law calling for an immediate response:
(i) If the release was from the tank system, the owner/operator must, within twenty-four hours after detection of the leak or, if the owner/operator demonstrates that it is not possible, at the earliest practicable time, remove as much of the waste as is necessary to prevent further release of dangerous waste to the environment and to allow inspection and repair of the tank system to be performed.
(ii) If the material released was to a secondary containment system, all released materials must be removed within twenty-four hours or in as timely a manner as is possible to prevent harm to human health and the environment.
Instead, the timeline worked like this: DOE took two months to confirm the initial leak between the walls. Six months later, DOE announced to Washington’s Department of Ecology that they’d be sending a plan for pumping the tank by June 14. That plan calls for pumping to be complete by 2019. So, released materials will not be removed within 24 hours: more like six or seven years, depending on when you started the clock ticking.
Stories about Hanford seem to recapitulate a cascading set of failures by the Department of Energy in its mismanagement of Hanford’s clean-up, the cost of which, averaging $2 billion per year, now totals some $40 billion. KING 5’s Susannah Frame has been investigating a seemingly endless series of missteps — or intentional footdragging — in just this one incident: for one thing, the leak in AY-102 was first detected in October 2011, but private contractor Washington River Protection Solutions, who took over the DOE tank farm contract in 2008, took a year to admit it. The DOE’s Fletcher, a month after multiple tests showed radioactive contamination, gave the Hanford Advisory Panel the impression that it might simply be rainwater intrusion. Frame discovered that the official confirmation of the leak in AY-102 came on the same day the public comment period ended for the state’s dangerous waste permit for Hanford.
This week, new U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz made his first visit to Hanford, at the request of Sen. Maria Cantwell.
“You and I have had a chance to have many conversations about a variety of issues but obviously first and foremost on my list is Hanford and Hanford cleanup,” Cantwell told Moniz in an April 2013 hearing. “First of all, I hope that you’ll make it a priority to visit Hanford very soon in your tenure as Secretary of Energy.”
Moniz replied: “My plan would be to get hard briefings immediately, go to the site because I think you need to be there to understand the issues, come back, work with the Chairman, work with you, [Senator] Murray and make sure we get a plan together going forward and do that expeditiously.”
SOMM opens at the SIFF Film Center tomorrow night (tickets here). It pulls off that oft-attempted but seldom-achieved goal of many documentaries: It introduces viewers to an obscure and exclusive subject with an inclusive and entertaining storyteller’s touch.
Director Jason Wise’s debut feature offers a window into the secretive world of Master Sommeliers. Boiled down to the basics, Master Somms are wine stewards par excellence, with palates and noses so well-honed they can ascertain a wine’s composition, its region of origin, and all of its distinctive characteristics in seconds. In the forty years since the Court of Master Sommeliers formed, scores of candidates have endured a gauntlet of training, tastings, and memorization in the hopes of passing the once-yearly Master Sommelier exam. Only 200 people, however, have earned the wine world’s equivalent of a Black Belt — the Master Sommelier’s diploma.
A barrage of information about vintages, tannins, geography, and grapes wouldn’t likely make for a riveting feature by itself, so Wise hooks viewers on an emotional level, following four buddies — reserved New Yorker Dustin Wilson, cocksure and charismatic DLynn Proctor, down-to-Earth cutup Brian McClintic, and obsessive de facto elder statesman Ian Cauble — as they train for the Master Somm exam. Each guy in the circle registers as a distinctive, compelling personality, and SOMM runs along its course with the verve of the most inspirational sports movie.
Wise chatted with me shortly before SOMM’s Seattle International Film Festival premiere earlier this month, talking about the highfalutin’ field of Master Sommeliers (and his adventures filming them) with a sensibility that was equal parts boyishly energetic, intelligent, and down-to-Earth. His healthy pinch of levelheadedness made sense: After all, to quote one of the movie’s protagonists, it’s only fermented grape juice.
This is your feature film debut, but you’ve done some directorial work on TV, correct?
Yeah. I directed a PBS travel show for about a year, so I’ve had a little bit of experience, but nothing prepares you for something like this…
What was the impetus for untertaking SOMM? I read that you started out as friends with one of the prospective Master Somms.
I bartended out of film school, and a friend of mine introduced me to Brian [McClintic], and then Brian and I became friends. Brian was going through the Master Somm exam…There were four levels, and he was in the very, very early stages. I desperately wanted to make a feature, and I had several projects floating around. Then Brian said I should come watch their blind tasting. I didn’t know him as a great sommelier, I knew him as a total goofball [laughs]. I mean, he’s my friend, you know? What blew me away was the group of people he was studying with. They were so fascinating, and so passionate, and so insane.
How quickly did the concept of the film gel into this buddy-bonding, sports-competition scenario?
I realized right away that I was trying to do this monumental thing of actually making a film, which is so much harder than people realize. Not to dismiss people who can do it, but for me making a movie about wine is not as interesting as people think it is, on its own. The best bottles I’ve had weren’t great because they were great wines, they were great because I had them with amazing people, because it was funny, or we went late into the night and talked about great stuff, or “I met my wife,” or that kind of thing. It’s the experience and the people you have it with. Those are the things that make wine great.
SOMM director Jason Wise toasts to your health. (photo by Tony Kay)
One of the most impressive things about the movie is that it’s the kind of movie you can watch even if you don’t know Boone’s Farm from Chateau Margeaux…It very much draws you into these characters.
I really hope so. One of the greatest compliments I’ve gotten on the movie from [someone] who’d seen it is, “I don’t drink wine. I don’t hate it, but I don’t drink it. And I love this movie.”
How did your perception of this cast of characters change as shooting progressed?
It was very difficult at first with Brian, because I’m friends with him. So to make a film with him and to try to be objective about him, it was just impossible. So instead, I talked to Brian very differently. I just talked to him as a friend. And that’s why he kind of takes on the role almost of a narrator in the film. He and I were friends, and I realized that there’s no reason to lie to the audience and say I don’t know this guy: I know him, and by the end of shooting this, I was friends with every one of these guys. My wife, who produced the film, had a very birds-eye view of the whole thing. And she really did a great job of making sure the characters were at the front.
There was a little bit of a kerfuffle about the fact that none of your leading subjects in the movie are women.
Yeah. Man, if you want to talk about something that would be a really bad idea, it’s to try to cast a documentary’s perspective, unless your documentary’s about that perspective. If you say, “I’m gonna try to make a movie about chefs, but I want a woman, a Mexican man, an African-American guy….” Wow. What an awful, corporate idea of how to make a film. That never occurred to us, because there are women in the film, Master Somms, winemakers…. What set the guys apart is that they were all studying at the same time, together, and we just sort of followed them. If it were [a group of] girl somms, I would’ve followed them. I never went out, looking for a black guy — DLynn is just in the film. But I would much rather have someone say, “Why are there no women?” than, “Man, that film sucked.” I’ll take that, any day.
I’d love to see this from a female point of view, if the story was worth it. If you had four candidates that were women, I’d love to see that. That’d be a great movie.
What were the spouses of these guys like? They display some boundless patience sometimes, but were there ever times when they were ready to put someone’s head through a wall?
I loved interviewing the wives: They were great. I think they were probably less happy than I showed them in the film, though [laughs]. The point at which I realized we really had a real, full-circle film is when we woke up the morning after the tasting session…it looked like Dodgers Stadium after a game in that room. It was just filled with crap everywhere: Spit buckets, glasses, bottles everywhere. My first thought was, “Who the hell’s gonna clean all this up?” I knew these guys had to work, so that’s when I was like, we’ve got to interview the wives. And when they started talking about it, it was like, you never think about the damn spit cups. It’s like, “Yeah, I should be more respectful.” That goes for guys and girls — it would’ve been husbands cleaning it up if it was women. It’s just the way it goes.
What are some of the biggest challenges of directing documentaries for you?
I think the biggest hurdle with a doc is money. It’s so damned hard to get money for documentaries, because [investors] don’t make any money off of it. If they do it, they can make a lot, but a lot of the subjects are controversial, or they’re political, or this or that. Coming up with ideas is a challenge, too. Narrative or doc, there’s so much recycled stuff out there. I really struck it lucky with SOMM.
Are you concerned about being pigeonholed as a documentary filmmaker?
Nah. I could care less. I never started out as a documentarian. All my shorts and early stuff were narrative. Working with actors is something I love. Ultimately, that won’t be up to me to decide but, no, I’m not worried. I definitely have a few narratives I have to make if I’m gonna be able to die happy. Regardless, I’m gonna make ‘em. If I have to make ‘em with my iPhone, I’m gonna make ‘em.
Okonomiyaki with a beer is a beautiful combination, and one that recently motivated me to travel south to SoDo where Epic Ales has its headquarters. It’s here that you’ll find Gastropod, a tiny gastropub within a brewpub that serves up a small, ever-changing menu of food items to accompany original craft beers and beer cocktails.
The beer menu is broken into several categories, including a “wildly fermented” (my favorite) section featuring brews that can have “quite a bit of funk.” Novices should know that there are food-pairing suggestions and various-sized pours if you want to experiment.
Okonomiyaki is a mainstay on the menu, though the contents of this savory Japanese pancake will vary week-to-week. The night I went, the offering was okonomiyaki with asparagus and mochi. The promised heart of palm and bacon salad placed atop the pancake was leafier than I expected, then again, I’m not accustomed to any salad served on okonomiyaki. Eggomaniacs (this should be a word!) will enjoy the egg-on-egg action, as Gastropod puts a fried egg on its okonomiyaki—in this case, a hen egg.
The problem was with the pancake itself. It was rather dense and dry, despite the squiggles of wasabi mayonnaise. I’m wondering if the addition of mochi (not my favorite ingredient in okonomiyaki, but sometimes used) might have sponged up the batter too much. Regardless, it was an offbeat version of okonomiyaki overall. Trout (with nicely crisped skin) similarly suffered from its combination with disparate ingredients: fiddlehead ferns, ramp cream, and pickled kumquats. Better were the more simple spring onions, oven-roasted with green garlic oil.
In comparison, okonomiyaki was my favorite dish at the newly opened TanakaSan—a Tom Douglas joint. I believe the batter was lighter than Gastropod’s, well-whipped, then cooked and served fresh, as it was elegantly delicate and crispy with delicious flavor. Filled with bacon and shrimp, the okonomiyaki was topped traditionally and just as I like it with green onions, mayonnaise, okonomiyaki sauce, and the tell-tale dancing bonito flakes.
(Both okonomiyaki plates were a bit on the expensive side, by the way. Gastropod’s was $12, while Tanakasan’s was $13.)
You can see more food from TanakaSan in my “First Look” report for Serious Eats.
