The Stranger back issues from May 2008:
PUBLIC EDITOR
May 01, 2008; ... Stranger Public Editor and OSHA Board of Governors Member (Retired) Since the year 2000, Arizona senator and presidential candidate John McCain has misattributed the phrase "It's always darkest before it's totally black" to Mao Zedong. The Chairman might not actually have spoken those ...
I, ANONYMOUS
May 01, 2008; ... To submit an unsigned confession or accusation go to forums.thestranger.com. Please remember to change the names of the innocent and guilty. One submission will be published in the paper every week, but all submissions to I, Anonymous can be read at www.thestranger.com. YOUR VAGINA IS ...
Mr. Clean
May 01, 2008; ... Meet Seattle's Toughest Restaurant Inspector Bruce McLean is a feared man. When he shows up at the door of a restaurant, decked out in cowboy boots and a bolo tie, he'll smile and ask to come in and wash his hands. The restaurant owners had better hope their sink is working, or ...
CAMERA SHY
May 01, 2008; ... IN THE HALL The uproar over Mayor Greg Nickels's sneaky move to circumvent the city council and install surveillance cameras in four city parks has centered on two issues: privacy (civil-liberties groups argue that monitoring citizens without their knowledge violates their civil rights) ...
False Choices
May 01, 2008; ... Who Does Dino Rossi Think He's Fooling? Gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi's transportation "choices" plan would force Washington State voters to accept billions of dollars in roads that have already been rejected by voters or by state legislators. But, it turns out, that's the least of ...
IN OTHER NEWS
May 01, 2008; ... IN THE RUNNING David Bloom, cochair of the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness says he's "strongly leaning" toward running for one of two to four council seats coming open in 2009. Council members Richard McIver and Jan Drago have said they plan to step down next year. Additionally, ...
High Standards
May 01, 2008; ... Daily Papers Ignore Half the Story on Pot Busts On April 25, DEA agents and police held a press conference detailing a string of pot raids and arrests around Seattle. If this were any other policy issue, you would expect the news reporters on the story to begin with certain basic ...
What I Can Tell You About Seattle Based on the People I've Met Who Are from There
May 01, 2008; ... (I Live in Brooklyn) SEATTLE IS FUNNY A few years ago, I worked in New York University's library and had friends in New York City who worked mostly as copywriters. We e-mailed each other in giant e-mail threads each day. Two of the people usually in the e-mail threads used to ...
A Midget Among Giants
May 01, 2008; ... Why Doesn't Amazon.com Support Seattle Arts? Seattle is home to the largest book retailer in the world. Amazon.com may have spread its catalog to engulf lawn mowers, potato chips, diapers, and-literally-kitchen sinks, but, as its recent push for the Kindle e-book reader has proven, the ...
CONSTANT READER
May 01, 2008; ... CONSTANT READER A BOY AND HIS SQUID The critic had never been to Book-It Repertory Theatre before, so he was unprepared for what was to come. He had come to see a theatrical adaptation of local author Jim Lynch's debut novel, The Highest Tide, about a 13-year-old boy who ...
Ghost Sonata
May 01, 2008; ... More Greeks, Please Ghost Sonata, Big Love, and a Lament for Forgotten Classics Ghost Sonata Open Circle Theater at All Pilgrims Church Through May 10. Open Circle is the young existentialist of theater companies-it doesn't have any money, but loves' to ...
Big Love
May 01, 2008; ... Big Love Balagan Theatre Through May 17. Any play that begins with a gorgeous redhead (Kaitie Warren) in a wedding dress heaving herself up onstage, stripping to her underwear, and taking a bath starts out solidly in the "win" column. After she changes out of her wet ...
GONGA DIN
May 01, 2008; ... THEATER NEWS Number of acts at the second annual Stranger Gong Show: 21. Number of audience members: 500. Indoor weather: As muggy as you'd expect from 500 bodies jammed into Chop Suey, drinking cheap beer, and heckling. Most heckled act: A shambling dance by Tap ...
The Greeks
May 01, 2008; ... The Greeks Nowhere. How my heart was broken when I read that Big Love, reviewed and loved by Paul Constant (see above), is only "loosely inspired by the writings of Aeschylus." I've had enough of loose interpretations of Greek tragedies. I want to see the real thing. I want to ...
IT'S THE SHIT
May 01, 2008; ... IN ART NEWS Last week in a group of artists, collectors, and writers, the painter Matthew Offenbacher handed out a stack of two folded 8 1/2 by 14 sheets of brownish paper printed on both sides and with the title LA ESPECIAL NORTE 1 across the top. It is a brand-new Seattle artist ...
The Invasion of Elar
May 01, 2008; ... The Invasion of Elar Two New Artists from the Margins Reach the Center Just over a year ago, the names Eli Hansen and Oscar Tuazon were on the lips of exactly nobody. Today, there may as well be a banner over the entrance to Seattle with "ELI AND OSCAR" emblazoned on it. This ...
Sound and Fury
May 01, 2008; ... Sound and Fury Transmissions from a Quiet Artist at a Quiet Museum Things move slowly and quietly at Seattle Asian Art Museum. Every once in a while, a contemporary show with a lot to offer opens with very little fanfare, and you can easily miss it, even though it's up for half a ...
OUT OF TOWN
May 01, 2008; ... BAR EXAM Copalis Beach, Washington (25 miles north of Aberdeen, population: 489), is known for two things: shipwrecks and razor clams. The most recent shipwreck, thought to be a steamer that had foundered in 1852, was discovered in 1987 where the Copalis River meets the ocean. The wreck ...
Fantasy Island
May 01, 2008; ... Fantasy Island Casuelita's Island Soul Dreams of a Tropical Pangaea It's unclear exactly which Caribbean island is the Island in Casuelita's Island Soul. There are wall hangings from Jamaica; the restaurant proudly serves Ting ($2), a light and tangy bottled Jamaican grapefruit ...
TEQUILA SALVATION
May 01, 2008; ... EAT & TELL In the United States, Cinco de Mayo has become a popular holiday ostensibly celebrating Mexican culture and the experiences of Americans with Mexican ancestry. It is now the holiday on which Americans consume the second highest amount of beer in a single day (the first ...
CHOW BIO: DAVID SCHOMER
May 01, 2008; ... DAVID SCHOMER Owner for 20 years of Espresso Vivace Roasteria Cafe, 901 Denny Way, (plus a few others). Sound Transit is kicking you up to the Brix Condominium building at the north end of Broadway. When's the move scheduled to happen? Right now our best guess is that ...
THE HAPPIEST HOUR
May 01, 2008; ... VITO'S 927 Ninth Ave, 682-2695. Description: An Italian eatery and beloved neighborhood lounge on First Hill. Decor: Barred windows, cavernous red booths, and a few very lovely paintings of Vito's nude wife. Mafia-scented embellishments: In the back, a full-sized, ...
Infamous Player
May 01, 2008; ... Scratchmaster Joe Is Nicemaster Nice Scratchmaster Joe is a dick. He's got a short temper, tells off-color jokes, and can be pretty intolerant of things he doesn't understand (like laptop DJing). Musically, he's an egotistical showman, a championship-level turntablist who shows off the ...
Get on the Bus
May 01, 2008; ... Dark Meat Make Me Want to Join a Cult Dark Meat's publicity describes them as "Stooges meets Neil Young, meets Albert Ayler." I can get with Iggy and the Crazy Horse, but Ayler was a saxophonist. I like a saxophone about as much as I like a greasy chicken thigh from KFC. Dark meat? ...
ZOUNDS! NOUNS
May 01, 2008; ... FUCKING IN THE STREETS I missed the No Age bandwagon the first time around. I missed them playing to a dozen or so people at Artworks on their first time through Seattle, when the only hype about them was, "Hey, these are the dudes from Wives' new band." I missed the buzz around their ...
Jim
May 01, 2008; ... JAMIE LIDELL Jim (Warp) **** In the early 2000s, in one of the more pronounced (and successful) stylistic switch-ups I've heard of since, like, ever, British IDM dude Jamie Lidell traded in his electronic madness for an earnest blue-eyed sharkskin soul-man ...
Station
May 01, 2008; ... RUSSIAN CIRCLES Station (Suicide Squeeze) *** If Chicago instrumental combo Russian Circles founded a school, their curriculum would ditch the "three Rs"-who needs language arts when your discipline for-goes words?-in favor of a trio of Gs: geography, geometry, ...
Colin Meloy Sings Live!
May 01, 2008; ... COLIN MELOY Colin Meloy Sings Live! (Kill Rock Stars) **1/2 Colin Meloy made his name as part of the Decemberists, but his distinct voice and literary lyrics have made him the group's clear centerpiece. With a catalog as dense as the Decemberists', the challenge ...
"Asistan"
May 01, 2008; ... IT'S A HIT SINGLES, REMIXES & MP3S "Asistan" by Etran Finatawa (Riverboat) This isn't a single-just the deepest, most hypnotically beautiful song on Desert Crossroads, which, after the new Erykah Badu, is my favorite album of 2008 so far. Etran ...
"Reggae Is Here Once Again" "Afro Punk Reggae (Dub)"
May 01, 2008; ... "Reggae Is Here Once Again" "Afro Punk Reggae (Dub)" by Steel an' Skin (EM, Japan) Too often, reissues of "lost classics" contain no such thing. And Reggae Is Here Once Again, a somewhat pricey CD-plus-DVD from an obscure London-based band-active from the late '70s to (at ...
"Spliff Dub (Rustie Remix)"
May 01, 2008; ... "Spliff Dub (Rustie Remix)" by Zomby (Hyperdub) In its original form, London producer Zomby's "Spliff Dub" was a rough-and-slinky dubstep track with heavy, glowering bass and a flute motif reminiscent of nothing so much as "Torgo's Theme" from MST3K ...
HIPHOP YA DON'T STOP
May 01, 2008; ... MY PHILOSOPHY Let's start it like this: Congratulations to our dudes Dyme Def for being the Unsigned Hype in this month's Source magazine (with the Snoop cover, my nizzle). Unsigned Hype, as you may well know, has given light to the heavyweight likes of Biggie, DMX, Eminent, Mobb Deep, ...
BPITCH MAINTAINS CONTROL
May 01, 2008; ... BUG IN THE BASSBIN BPitch Control has a hat trick going with its recent and upcoming releases. February saw the release of Sascha Funke's second solo album, Mango; in March, label head Ellen Allien offered up her installment of the label's mix series with Boogy Bytes 4; and this month ...
HOUSE PARTIES, HOUSE SHOWS
May 01, 2008; ... UNDERAGE It always sucks when the crowd at a show is more interested in drinking than actually watching the bands play. On a recent Friday night, my band (shameless plug, sorry) is playing at a house in the Central District. All the other bands have played amazing sets, and things are ...
ANALOG AMERICA AND OTHER DIGITAL DISCS
May 01, 2008; ... THE SCORE "Calling all moose. Or meece. Or mices. Or moose." That drunken babbling, interspersed with sniggering grunts, is one of the snippets gracing Analog America: A Four Course Meal of Found Sound (noiselorder). Culled from tapes scavenged from thrift stores and garage sales by ...
DRUNK OF THE WEEK: YOKO ONONO #7
May 01, 2008; ... What does one extremely tall gay man wearing a T-shirt covered in shiny silver penises and a xeroxed picture of Yoko Ono's face have in common with the late (and great) Mia Zapata? Not a whole lot. This tall fellow, however, did attend Homo Alive-a benefit for Home Alive-this past Sunday night ...
POSTER OF THE WEEK
May 01, 2008; ... It was a toss-up this week between two excellent posters by Rick G. For years now, Rick has been doing consistently great work for folks like Three Imaginary Girls, BOAT, Tullycraft, and many ...
PARTY CRASHER
May 01, 2008; ... WHAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF The most intriguing part about the "Unicorn vs. Narwhal Fight to the Death Party" (aside from the name, of course) is the possibility of bodily harm. Attendees fashion homemade horns out of anything they wish (foam, papier-mâcheé, dildos) and attach them to their ...
BAND OF THE WEEK
May 01, 2008; ... STAND UP & SHOUT Everett, Washington, is notorious for a lot of things-mullets, meth, that dude who got busted for stealing Geoff Tate's identity. Catering to just about every whitetrash/metalhead stereotype one can fathom, Everett is also home to the Northwest's only (as far as I ...
City of Balloons
May 01, 2008; ... City of Balloons The Touristic Pleasures of Hou Hsiao-hsien BY CHARLES MUDEDE Flight of the Red Balloon dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien The class of people who frequently watch foreign-language films must not be separated from those who frequently travel to faraway ...
SERIOUSLY, WLADY...
May 01, 2008; ... CONCESSIONS This is a stupid thing to say (get ready!), but sometimes it's hard for my brain to remember that technology existed before, like, 1991. Clearly when I was born, my parents alerted the villagers via pony express and the doctor (shaman?) chiseled my birth certificate on a ...
Made of Honor
May 01, 2008; ... On Screen This Week's New Releases Made of Honor dir. Paul Weiland This staggeringly lazy romantic comedy, written by the team behind Can't Hardly Wait and directed by a man responsible for a number of episodes of Mr. Bean, is about a male slut named Tom (Patrick ...
Then She Found Me
May 01, 2008; ... Then She Found Me dir. Helen Hunt It's hard to imagine anyone clamoring for Helen Hunt's directorial debut (outside of Helen Hunt, of course). As if to compensate for foisting this film on the public, Helen Hunt, the actress, works ridiculously goddamned hard at playing an ...
Love Songs
May 01, 2008; ... Love Songs dir. Christophe Honoré A dark pop musical about love (sort of) and grief (mostly) in the trendy 10th arrondissement of Paris, Love Songs (by nouveau nouvelle vague-er Christophe Honoré, whose work was last seen in Seattle with the 2007 SIFF entry Dans Paris) is best ...
BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT
May 01, 2008; ... * BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT Near the opening of the 20th century stands Fritz Lang's Metropolis; near its close is Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. The state of things in the first big city of cinema, Metropolis, is prerevolution; the state of things in the last big city of cinema, Blade ...
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
May 01, 2008; ... * BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN The first half is a gorgeous love story in which words are kept to a minimum and the arid, exhilarating images of high-altitude scenery and exalted flirtation leave you as breathless as the heroes. When the famous pup-tent consummation (faintly damned as "tasteful") ...
LE DOULOS
May 01, 2008; ... * LE DOULOS What connects Jean-Pierre Melville with the French new wave-which he was too old to really participate in-is American cinema. His films, like the defining films of the new wave, are made with an awareness of, or a love for, Hollywood. The type of American film that dominated ...
I (LOVE) Television
May 01, 2008; ... Man in the Iron Man Mask I've got a bone to pick with you, television! As everyone CLEARLY knows, this weekend the new Iron Man movie (starring Robert Downey Jr.) hits the theaterswhich means no one in the entire world will be watching ANY television this week, because they're gonna be ...
FOUR SHEETS TO THE WIND
May 01, 2008; ... * FOUR SHEETS TO THE WIND After his father's suicide, Cule leaves his small hometown. Through his sister Miri (Tamara Podemski) and an unlikely romance with a quirky woman named Francie, Cule finds a way forward ....
GRADUATION
May 01, 2008; ... * GRADUATION A heist movie cross-bred with a teen drama sounds like something hacked up by the hackiest hack who ever hacked his way through Hollywood. But Graduation is, at its heart, a sweet, nostalgic fable in which four high-school seniors rediscover the magic of their small ...
ENVIRONMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL
May 01, 2008; ... HAZEL WOLF ENVIRONMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL A collection of environmental-themed short and feature-length films, plus speakers and workshops. see www. hazelfilm.org for details. All films at Johnson Hall, UW Campus. Oil + Water (two kayakers embark on a 35,000 mile, biofuel-only trip) ...
MAIKO HAAAAAN!!!
May 01, 2008; ... MAIKO HAAAAAN!!! This frenzied, completely insane Japanese comedy spins around lowly noodle company worker Kumihiko (Sadao Abe), whose lust for the Maiko girls of Kyoto has turned into an outright obsession. Seizing the opportunity to transfer to the company's satellite office, Kumihiko ...
YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN
May 01, 2008; ... * YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN Gene Wilder-who built a career being both a sweet, composed gentleman and bug-eyed, raving lunatic-is perfect as the tortured Friedrich von Frankenshteen, and Marty Feldman certainly never did better. But it is the sweet-voiced Madeline Kahn who adds the vital third ...
BABY MAMA
May 01, 2008; ... * BABY MAMA Baby Mama is about as funny as you'd think it would be. That is to say: If you cringe at the idea of Amy Poehler and Tina Fey talking about rubbing olive oil on Poehler's taint, or if you don't see the possibility of humor in a story about a straight-laced infertile woman ...
DECEPTION
May 01, 2008; ... DECEPTION In this intriguing yet ultimately blundered con movie, Ewan McGregor stars as Jonathan McQuarry, a buttoned-down corporate accountant and a stiff with the ladies. Working late one night in a bland conference room, Jonathan meets the exceptionally smooth Wyatt Bose (Hugh ...
EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED
May 01, 2008; ... EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED The most bizarre thing about this new intelligent-design propaganda film isn't that former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein is being paid to extol a pseudoscience whose hypotheses can't be tested (everyone has a price), or that the film compares science with ...
THE FIRST SATURDAY IN MAY
May 01, 2008; ... THE FIRST SATURDAY IN MAY Barbaro deserves his own film. Remember Barbaro? He was the beautiful, rich brown, seemingly preternatural American thoroughbred horse who won the 2006 Kentucky Derby by six and a half lengths-a margin larger than any Louisville victory since the 1946 Triple ...
HAROLD & KUMAR ESCAPE FROM GUANTANAMO BAY
May 01, 2008; ... HAROLD & KUMAR ESCAPE FROM GUANTANAMO BAY I, like many people, enjoyed 2004's Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. It was dopey and weird and fun. And so I had high hopes (well, let's be honest-medium hopes) about its sequel, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. It seemed ...
THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES
May 01, 2008; ... THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES Evan Rachel Wood plays Diana as a succulent woman-child (the camera lingers creepily on her calves, even as it obsesses over her best friend's breasts), with Uma Thurman as grown-up Diana, in a narrative that jumps forward and backward through time so frequently, ...
ZOMBIE STRIPPERS
May 01, 2008; ... ZOMBIE STRIPPERS To his dubious credit, writer-director Jay Lee does get the plot of Zombie Strippers swiftly out of the way: Within the first 10 minutes, a soldier suffering the effects of a zomboid virus developed during the fourth term of W's administration (an idea that might have ...
SONICS DEATH WATCH
May 01, 2008; ... What will I do if the Sonics leave town? Some compassionate folks have suggested that I buy Huskies season tickets, or adopt Seattle U, or go rabid for Garfield High. Those options are inadequate because I want to watch the best basketball players in the world. Oh, you'll hear some fans ...
I, ANONYMOUS
May 08, 2008; ... To submit an unsigned confession or accusation go to forums.thestranger.com. Rease remember to change the names of the innocent and guilty. One submission will be published in the paper every week, but all submissions to I, Anonymous can be read at www.thestranger.com. PLEASE STOPTELLING ...
PUBLIC EDITOR
May 08, 2008; ... It's bad enough, of course, that The Stranger is currently paying more homosexuals than my troubled friend Roy Cohn at his peak of moral depravity. It seems not an issue of this repulsive rag can go by without one of the mistakenly employed pansies blathering on about some homosexual insight of ...
The Triumphant Return of... NOTES FROM THE PRAYER WARRIOR
May 08, 2008; ... GLORY BE TO GOD, Prayer Warriors! I am ecstatic to report that all our hard prayer work paid off last week when Yoo-hoo-America's preeminent chocolate-flavored water-rejected a $47.5 billion purchase bid from the evil homosexualists at Microsoft. Hallelujah! As many of you know ...
REVENGE FANTASIES
May 08, 2008; ... IN THE HALL Ever since Mayor Greg Nickels surreptitiously redirected a chunk of parks funding to pay for four surveillance cameras in Cal Anderson Park-in violation of a budget proviso that was supposed to bar him from spending the money-the city council has been plotting its ...