Happy Birthday, Tea Cozies’ Brady Harvey! (Photo: Tony Kay)
Two bands responsible for a couple of the best recordings to come out of Seattle last year (according to one eminent local wag, at least) play this weekend. Do yourself a favor, and try to catch ‘em live.
Tonight, Tea Cozies headline at the Jewelbox/Rendezvous. Their EP Bang Up augments their hard-candy, Brit-influenced pop magnificently, and they’re never less than aces live. Major bonus points for the certifiably trippy (and gorgeously shot) video for the EP’s indisputable masterstroke, the psychedelic and fabulously cool “Cosmic Osmo.”
Oh, and they’re supported by indie trio Charms (who sound like an electrified Ravenna Woods gone new wave, maybe), and the wonderfully scary, swampy and cavernous Gang Cult, too. Show starts at 10 p.m., and with a $7 cover, it’s a bargain at twice the price.
Mighty electric-blues monsters Hobosexual, meantime, are the leaders of tomorrow night’s bill at the Columbia City Theater. But for the love of all that is good and true (AND loud), do not miss either of the preceding acts.
Portland’s Black Pussy (it’s a Stones reference, kids) ladle on the heavy stoner rock fabulously, but my heart (and bleeding eardrums) have belonged to The Hounds of the Wild Hunt ever since I first heard their ambitious and frequently brilliant debut full-length, El Mago. Bless ‘em, the Hounds have made a great video for one of that album’s highlights, “A Walk to Remember.”
It sounds like a band of drunk Cossacks invading your favorite nightmare, and the clip makes magnificent use of singer/guitarist Jonny Henningson’s bull-in-a-china-shop charisma. Show begins at 9 p.m., and tickets ($7 advance, $8 at the door) are still available.
Mark Siano and Opal Peachey have created something weird and sexy (“swexy” riffs Siano) out of their alternate-universe two-online-worlds-colliding cabaret-musical Modern Luv. It was fresh from a well-received run at the Triple Door when I saw its “unplugged” incarnation Tuesday night at the Rendezvous Jewelbox.
I don’t think I’ve laughed so hard at a musical since Gutenberg! The Musical–which also featured a small but hard-working cast, dreams of making it big, and largely imagination-based production values. Modern Luv‘s cabaret roots are evident in the easy informality of its meta-narration, and the way Siano beams out at you as if you’re all guests at his party. He’s got a lounge singer’s sweaty sheen and broad smile, and displays enough jack-of-all-stages hoofer aptitude that I started picturing his soft-rock Emcee in Cabaret.
Essentially, Modern Luv is, as the title indicates, a love story, but, as the “luv” suggests, not a sappy one. Actually, there are several loves: the Seattle Siano-New York Peachey encounter, sure, but also that of disaffected hipsters for musicals, of home (Amish country, Seattle), of our increasingly virtual reality. It is only okay, after all, to for a hipster to love his or her smart phone. To love-love someone verbally is…outré. You must luv them instead.
Mark Siano
These kinds of semiotic distinctions are where most of the humor in Modern Luv arises. From the opening “Texting song,” followed by the instant-classic “Up in Your Inbox,” the show wastes no time letting you know that you are an urbane, plugged-in, roué who has been around the e-block. Every song is loaded with signifiers, and Siano and Peachey are, as fish born in this sea, able to perform them for you winningly, with the assistance of back-up dancers.
Siano’s Minority-Report-style Googling of Peachey is especially on the nose, in its translation to the stage. It relies on the audience’s willingness to go with it, but that’s where the participatory charm of show grows on you, watching Peachey impersonate her Facebook photo gallery.
There’s an improvisatory flair to some of the interstitial scenes–thanks in part to the participation of David Swidler, who I won’t review because I find him hilarious in real life, even that time, he assures me, he was in real pain after the accident. But there’s also improvisatory hurry-up set-ups (Larry David is often guilty of this–“So…uh…what’s…you’re upset with me because I did [some inappropriate Larry David thing]?” he’ll instruct his scene partner).
With a range of pop-styled music by Siano and performed by The Enablers, the show boasts both a Soft Rock Medley and Broadway Musical Medley (“It was like what was in my heart just came right up and out my throat!” says the impish Peachey) that rejoice in the power of music to overcome suppressed emotion. When the audience joined in on a soft-rock lyric at Siano’s urging, it was with the presence and timing of a choir bursting to sing.
“She Can’t Call,” a song about the interruption of their romance also features what I think is the first musical portrayal of “Damn You Auto-Correct”–here, a hooded gremlin who runs in and physically replaces words with mad lib items. “I’m Not The Man I am Online” lets Siano drop the act a bit, and express (finally) some unmediated emotion (no disrespect to his soft-rock stylings, which demonstrate an esoteric technical proficiency in yelps, sotto voce baritone, and falsetto).
“We can leave if it’s lame,” whispered someone in the dark before the show started. They didn’t. They laughed a lot, instead, and maybe…just maybe…learned a little something about love, too.
When I spoke with Seattle International Film Festival‘s Artistic Director Carl Spence and Managing Director Deborah Person a few weeks ago, the two were having trouble keeping some big news under their hats. Since the interview was taking place in their freshly moved-into offices at Seattle Center, I couldn’t imagine what else they’d be announcing. At the time, SIFF was still working on raising about $160,000 to close out its Film Center capital campaign of $2.8 million.
Then this weekend, this press release showed up in my inbox:
SIFF is excited to announce the acquisition of the historic Uptown Theater in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood. The historic neighborhood theater will re-open to the public beginning October 20, 2011, in conjunction with the Grand Opening of the new SIFF Film Center at Seattle Center, ushering in a new era of film in the Northwest.
The Uptown Theater, courtesy of our Flickr pool's Great_Beyond
A landmark neighborhood cinema since 1926, The Uptown was subdivided in the 1980s to compete with the multiplexes springing up. Its three theaters seat 480, 275, and 175 (the new jewelbox SIFF Film Center cinema seats 100). Last operated by the AMC movie theater chain, it was closed in November 2010. Now SIFF has negotiated a five-year lease with AMC.
Says Spence, “We couldn’t have scripted a better opportunity for our organization than to have SIFF Cinema at the Uptown and the new SIFF Film Center in such close proximity and located in such a vibrant part of the city.”
The Uptown’s 35-mm projection system will be accompanied by the digital system (a Sony SRXR210 digital projector) that now resides at SIFF Cinema in McCaw Hall–providing four times the resolution of HD. The sound system meets or exceeds LucasFilm THX Sound specifications, featuring JBL 3-way speakers and surround system powered by Dolby Digital Sound processing with Crown’s DSI cinema amplifiers.
In retrospect, our conversation makes a lot more sense with the Uptown in the picture. Spence and Person were throwing out a lot of great ideas–documentary series, revivals, family films, all-night movie marathons, filmmaker residencies–but so far as I knew they just had the one SIFF Cinema, with the new jewelbox theater coming online–with full concessions, by the way, “probably” beer and wine as well. (The screen for the new theater hadn’t arrived yet.) All the options they were mentioning would take three new jewelbox cinemas.
But they were clearly looking for a better fit. At McCaw Hall, they needed audiences of 75-100 people to even make opening the doors pay for itself, and they had to share the space with the ballet and opera. Spence has visions of, like MoMA, films showing on any given day–whenever you’re around, you just drop in. It’s a shift for the organization, one that takes advantage of their Seattle Center location, and the enormous amount of foot traffic now at their door–12 million people each year.
Already, “people are wandering in” to the Film Center, said Person. The Center is now home to 20-some year-round full- and part-time staff (it more than doubles in size, to 50, during the Festival), but SIFF wants to leverage their Seattle Center presence to be a destination for tourists and students, as well as local film buffs. (Currently, SIFF has about 3,000 members, who receive perks like special invitations to screenings and half-priced tickets. Memberships start at $55 annually.)
Recently, SIFF was one of eight independent non-profit cinemas selected by The Coolidge Corner Theatre and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to establish “Science on Screen” programs–screenings that use popular films to explore the science underlying them. So, suggested Person and Spence, they might show WarGames, and then invite someone from Bungie to discuss where game technology is at these days. It’s not hard to imagine that being the afternoon part of the field trip to the Pacific Science Center.
Nothing programmatically, the two assured me, is set in stone yet. The first thing is simply to open the doors. There will be a “soft” opening in September, with the Film Center’s grand opening coming October 20th through the 24th.
SIFF has officially moved their offices into the new SIFF Film Center at Seattle Center. They’re taking up residence in what was formerly known as the Alki Room in the Northwest rooms. There they will offer exhibits, presentations, and film programming, as well as educational programs.
The heart of the new Film Center is a jewelbox cinema seating about 100–they’ll continue showing film at SIFF Cinema in McCaw Hall, but this smaller space will be a better fit for niche interest screenings. If you like the Northwest Film Forum, you’ll be right at home in this space,
SIFF phone, fax, and emails all stay the same, but the new mailing address is: SIFF / 305 Harrison Street / Seattle, WA 98109. Phone: (206) 464-5830 / Fax: (206) 264-7919).
Mark Siano and Opal Peachey have created something weird and sexy (“swexy” riffs Siano) out of their alternate-universe two-online-worlds-colliding cabaret-musical Modern Luv. It was fresh from a well-received run at the Triple Door when I saw its “
