Category Archives: Arts & Entertainment

Theatre

Susie J. Lee’s For these Unclosings Returns for One Night Only

Friday night at Theatre off Jackson, noted local visual artist Susie J. Lee is restaging her first performance piece for one night only (409 Seventh Ave. S., 8 p.m., $7.50-$15).

A collaboration with dancer/choreographer Ying Zhou, For these Unclosings is halfway between a dance and an art installation. Lee specializes in time-based work, video pieces that capture moments sliding by, or gallery installations that focus on simple, visceral experience. Perhaps most famously, she created a digital light-and-sound rainstorm in the main space of the Lawrimore Project a couple years ago.

For these Unclosings, which debuted with two weeks of performances at New City Theatre last month, takes those techniques to a new level. A custom computer-based projection system designed for Lee by Andy Wilson of Microsoft Research allows two other collaborators, visual artist Keeara Rhoades and filmmaker Reina Solunaya, to “draw” on Ying as she dances. It’s a by turns humorous and haunting effect, which Lee uses to explore the idea of how we process experience.

Music

Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl No Likey Guitar Hero Kurt Cobain

Like everything else, you can probably blame this on Courtney Love:

 



This is a statement regarding Nirvana, Guitar Hero and the likeness of the late Kurt Cobain.

Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl

It’s hard to watch an image of Kurt pantomiming other artists’ music alongside cartoon characters.  Kurt Cobain wrote songs that hold a lot of meaning to people all over the world.  We feel he deserves better.

While we were aware of Kurt’s image being used with two Nirvana songs, we didn’t know players have the ability to unlock the character. This feature allows the character to be used with any kind of song the player wants.   We urge Activision to do the right thing in “re-locking” Kurt’s character so that this won’t continue in the future.

We want people to know that we are dismayed and very disappointed in the way a facsimile of Kurt is used in the Guitar Hero game.  The name and likeness of Kurt Cobain are the sole property of his estate–we have no control whatsoever in that area.

Film & TV

So We Think We Can Cook




[WARNING: Spoilers aplenty, including the above recap video.]

Last night’s episode of Top Chef started out tense, with both of our local cheftestants Ashley Merriman (of Branzino) and Robin Leventhal (chef-owner of Crave) in the quickfire bottom three, along with perpetual bottom (that’s what she said) Jesse.  It was a high-stakes escargot challenge–is there any other kind?–as the loser would go home right then and there, while the winner (Beardo Kevin) ended up getting to sit out of the elimination challenge and have dinner with every single French chef in the world.

 

Except! The bottom three are given one last chance to prove their worth, by making THE BEST AMUSE BOUCHE EVER. Robin prepares avocado and crab soup, Ashley sears some fois gras, and Jesse makes a tuna tartare with a quali’s egg on it.  Of course Jesse goes home, so why did we even have this extra challenge? Jesse was always going to go home, because she has been making garbage food this entire season.

Now on to the elimination challenge.  Everybody draws knives, some with names of meat and some with names of French sauces.  They pair up by what foods go together. Douchebag Mike doesn’t know much about cooking French food, so he gloms onto Brother Bryan, who shows him how to make a deconstructed bearnaise sauce.  Ashley ends up partnered with Frenchy McRedScarf who is tres excited to cook the food of his native land.  Too bad he sucks at it and makes an over-bacony veloute.  SAUCE FAIL. Robin is paired with Ron to make frog legs and brown butter meuniere.  Ron thinks that Robin is hyper and all over the place because she wants to make a wilted greens salad, when all that Ron wants to accompany his entrees is the boat he spent twenty-eight days on to escape his Haitian hellhole.

Anyways, all the Frenchies (including Joel Robuchon, who was named–no joke–the Chef of the Century) eat these slapped-together dishes.  Some are better than others, of course.  At this point, it’s pretty clear that the Brothers, Douchebag Mike, and SA-VEECH Jen (along with Beardo Kevin) are the best chefs there, while the rest of the contestants are just biding their time until they are told by Padma to pack their knives and go.  Sure, there may be a curveball or two and a Chosen One may be mistakenly sent home (see Thumbhead Hosea winning last season), but for Ashley and Robin, it’s probably just a matter of time.  Brother Bryan wins the challenge; Hector is sent home for not knowing how to cook or cut steak.

Film & TV

Fierce Light Explores Activist Spirituality

Fierce Light (at the Northwest Film Forum Sept. 11-13) is a film, simply put, both for the activist who’s burnt out on defying authority and the great views from the moral high ground, and for the spiritual quester who is finding their meditation cell a little claustrophobic.

Interviews with likely and unlikely luminaries such as Alice Walker, John Lewis, Daryl Hannah, Thich Nhat Hahn, Desmond Tutu, Julia Butterfly Hill, and Noah Levine are interspersed around a central thread–the story of L.A.’s South Central Farm and the attempted eviction of the local farmers.

Writer/director Velcrow Ripper time travels and globe-hops to meet with people who have found in themselves a drive not just to right wrongs, but to bring communities together in safety. From the U.S. civil rights marches and India’s Dalits, to Julia Butterfly Hill’s tree-sitting and Thich Nhat Hahn’s return to Vietnam for reconciliation, the documentary continually confronts you with people of all ages, classes, and races (you have to commend Ripper for foregoing the usual parade of popular white activists), who have not burnt out or retreated into hilltop solitude.

While the film is notably leftist, there is a nice moment with an evangelical gentleman outside of Fort Benning who offers to convert Ripper to Christianity. I say it’s a nice moment because while you get the sense that Ripper is horrified at what’s going on around him (photo ops for tykes to hold a sword to a swarthy, turbanned guy’s throat), he both keeps his cool and stands his ground.

He has a very personal motivation for making the film that I won’t disclose here, but it gives even the lighter moments an affecting gravity. As Van Jones (the recently discharged special adviser to the Obama administration) puts it, it’s not just a question of the spiritual reach for transcendence, but also of the soulful position, to remain on the ground, with the trouble.

Literature

Thomas Frank Talks Tonight at Town Hall



Tonight, author and Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Frank, of What’s the Matter With Kansas? fame, is giving a talk at Town Hall at 7:30, about the legacy of the Republicans’ mismanagement of government. Tickets are $5 advance or at the door starting at 6:30.

Frank’s last book, The Wrecking Crew, about Republican mismanagement of government, isn’t as good as What’s the Matter With Kansas?, but it’s better than most critics gave it credit for. A historian by training, Frank drafts a history of the Republican Revolution from the 1980s to the present that’s all tactics and no ideology. He follows dozens of little-known political organizations with important direct mail lists, which fueled public resentment of government while ensuring a steady revenue stream for dedicated Republican loyalists. He details the internal power struggles of the College Republicans, which, in the Eighties, produced some of the Right’s most notable power brokers (Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff among them). And he traces how the right embraced the radical style of the Sixties left, concocting their own heroes of Third World Liberation and generating urgency on college campuses.

Critics tended to turn their noses up at the book when it came out last year. All the talk of direct mail seemed outdated in Internet era, and anyway, in 2008, tactics were done with—this was a battle of ideas, and the right was losing. The Bush administration was departing in disgrace and American was embracing a black liberal for president.

But today, Frank looks downright prescient. The means may have changed, direct mail having given way to email lists and Facebook, but the tactics are the same. Anyone who’s read The Wrecking Crew is unlikely to be surprised by the manufactured populist outrage at health care reform, on display at Town Hall meetings last month. Critics who took issue with the fact that Frank’s book seemed indifferent to ideas should be reconsidering. On health care, liberals enjoy something approaching overwhelming public support. The fact that reform is floundering has nothing to do with ideas and everything to do with the right’s effective political tactics.

Arts & Entertainment

If You Won’t Eat it All, at Least Try a Taste of Iceland

Ólöf Arnalds

To mark Icelandair’s new direct flights to Iceland from SeaTac, Iceland Naturally is putting on a mini-Icelandic cultural festival, and that marks the most times I’ve typed “Iceland” in a sentence, ever.

 

For the foodies hungering for innovative tastes, you’ve got chefs Thorarinn Eggertsson (from Reykjavik’s Orange) and Peter Birk at Ray’s Boathouse. Their Icelandic menu is available today through the 13th.

Probably that menu will not include whale because of the potential controversy, disappointing fans of tremendously musky, salty, oily food. But if you want to talk about Iceland and sustainable fisheries, for free, then tonight you can weep salty tears of joy. Don’t miss “The Icelandic Project on Documenting and Communicating Responsible Fisheries” (6-8 p.m., UW Health Sciences, Hogness Auditorium Room A420).

There’s also a free Icelandic film fest at the Varsity in the U-District: White Night Wedding (6:30 p.m.) and Rafskinna (8:20 p.m.). For White Night Wedding, writer/director Baltasar Kormákur has updated and tweaked Chekhov’s Ivanov, and the results are a distinctly Icelandic bittersweet sensation. A middle-aged professor is about to marry a former student on the island of Flatey, during the time of year when Icelanders all get a little crazy from the unending daylight.

The third episode of Rafskinna, a DVD magazine, is about music and features: “Animal Collective, Antony and the Johnsons, Olaf Arnalds, Dalek, Emiliana Torrini, FM Belfast, Retro Stefson, Ragnar Kjartansson, Michael Madsen, Finboggi Petursson, Nico Muhly, Psychic TV, and Curver Thoroddsen.” That’s a nice segué to our next item!

Friday night, September 11, singer Ólöf Arnalds appears at the Crocodile ($10, 21+, 8 p.m.). Expect “emotionally rich” folk music of the kind you can preview right here. It’s her first West coast show. People Eating People open.