ARTZINE BLOG

Nancy's Picks 06/25/2009

Hey there;

Oh man, it’s almost July-- how in the heck did that happen?! Well, there’s no time for my whining... here’s some cool stuff to consider:


ATTENTION SUBURBANITES!
Greg Lungren one of Seattle’s super hip groovster guys has an upcoming show entitled “I Am From Bellevue”. The exhibit, at Open Satellite in Bellevue, runs July 10th thru August 1st, and is all about Greg’s investigation of suburban identity and the impact of suburbia on the artists who are born there.

ATTENTION WRITERS!
On July 18th and 19th, from 10:00 am to 10:00 am, ZAPP @ Richard Hugo House, will host a 24-hour Zine Challenge. Drawing inspiration from over 20,000 zines in the Hugo House collection, participants will pull an all dayer&nighter to create a complete and original 24-page zine. Snacks and refreshments will be provided, as well as sleeping arrangements in the ZAPP second floor offices.
This event is free, but registration is required: zapp@hugohouse.org or (206) 322-7030.

ATTENTION PERFORMERS!
If you’re interested in improving your artistic skills, look no further than Freehold Theatre's two summer intensives:

Marc Kenison, aka Waxie Moon, is a core member of the vibrant and burgeoning Burlesque and Cabaret community. If you’re already performing, or if you’re an interested novice, Marc’s “Creating Cabaret” class, happening July 6-23, is your foot in the door.

Matt Smith the best darn improviser in the city, perhaps the world, has taught thousands of people to improvise--me included-- and his approach is nothing short of brilliant. Sign up for his summer workshop, July 6-30, and walk away with improved confidence and a solid foundation of improv skills.

For more information on both classes, go to Freehold Theatre.com

That’s it for now. Stay in touch.

"Art is an affirmation of life..." - Madeleine L’Engle, writer

Amen, Sister Madeleine.

Xo, nancy g.

Lyall Bush's Notes 06/18/2009

Real Cutting, Real Pasting

I am cutting and pasting again. I mean, with real scissors and paper. I was writing a story that started with a single, clear through-line, but by the time I had generated 15 pages it had become a mass of pages with, um, not so many paragraph breaks. There were distinct scenes and episodes -- definitely a story in all of it -- but scrolling through the pages I could see that the beginning, middle and end were spread throughout. (Why the scrambling happened is another story.) I saw that I would need to comb through every page to pool the lines, sentences, and paragraphs that needed to become my first three pages. And I saw that the middle section demanded bits and pieces from page 3, 7, 9, and again on pages 11-13. And so on. The electronic cutting and pasting that I saw in my future came with a dizzying, maze-y feeling. Where to even begin?

And then I remembered what I had done once, many years ago, on the advice of a college professor. He encouraged his students to cut their papers up with scissors to improve them. "Print them out, lay them out, and cut out what doesn't work," he had said. "And paste or tape together the rest. You will be able to see how things go together much more clearly if you do." He told us we would never see text in quite the same way after we had gotten our hands dirty with our own words.

He was right. It always worked. But then I bought a computer and felt such a surge of pleasure at seeing how easy it was to eliminate the physicality of it that 3-D cutting and pasting became historical. Computers created a new paradigm that exchanged dirty for clean: with a computer editing could be as clean as thought itself. Should a paragraph come closer to the top? Not a problem: click, drag, done. It's how we edit now. But in writing that story the solution had to be dirty, not clean, and I was glad to have the old-school model.

So I printed out the whole text, the way I did so many years ago, and I laid pages out on my kitchen table. I used a Sharpie to write numbers on sections, and then I scissored pages up and taped and stapled them together, in order. I ended up with a new, shredded document in front of me that I re-typed -- which had its own effect, something else I'd forgotten: re-situated, each word became once a physical object again, and the finished story felt more hand made.

But you can still ditch the white-out.


Frank's Son's Wild Years

On the show last week I recommended the new Tom Waits biography by Barney Hoskyns, Lowside of the Road: a Life of Tom Wait. The book is not a great biography in the tradition of Peter Gay's biography of Freud or Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce: the writing lacks the music of those great biographies, and Hoskyns did not have access to Waits himself, beyond some interviews he conducted periodically with Waits up to the middle 1980s. But it is well-researched and it is full, tracing Waits' life from Whittier, California (where Richard Nixon was born and buried) to Waits' first gigs in coffee houses in San Diego, his first songs, his first time in the recording studio, and on up through his career-change in New York with albums such as swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs. New York meant a new circle of friends, which led to his scoring Frances Ford Coppola's, One From the Heart, and to his meeting Jim Jarmusch, who cast him in two of his films. A little later he worked with the avant-garde theater producer, Robert Wilson (Einstein on the Beach). Waits now holds a unique, sui generis place in the culture: he is a complex celebrity who has the scruffy respectability of a (Bukowski-esque, anyway) man of letters, the up-all-night air of a torch singer, the wit of a comedian, the allure of a star of the silver screen.

And he has another thing, too, that not many people get: people know that he is a channeler of things in the culture. Waits is, finally, one of the people who are saying things we need to hear, even if they are weird and disturbing, or have the aura of the carny barker. "Did you hear the news about Edward? / On the back of his head / He had another Face," he sings in "Poor Edward." And in "What's He Building In There?" he writes a very funny short story, told from the neighbors' point of view, with background clanking of pots and ringing of bells, about a man who won't wave back at them and who is "driving nails" into his floors.

In "Big in Japan," he writes his own comic, larger-than-life mythology:

I got the powder but not the gun

I got the dog but not the bun

I got the clouds but not the sky

I got the stripes but not the tie

But heh I'm big in Japan I'm big in Japan I'm big in Japan

And so on. The biggest merit of Lowside of the Road, in fact, is that it sends you back to the music -- all the way back, in my case, to the first fine record, The Heart of Saturday Night. It was recorded by a 23-year-old who sounded -- but we are no longer surprised -- somehow 40.

-Lyall

Theatre Highlights from Kathy Hsieh 06/12/2009

Okay, since I actually have two must-see shows for the summer, but I could only highlight one on the show, I want to at least mention the other one here. The 5th Avenue Theatre has these fabulous FREE spotlight nights where they highlight upcoming productions. I love going to these because you get to hear all sorts of backstage and behind the scenes stuff plus learn so much about the creative process in putting together a musical.

This week I attended the one on their upcoming premier of Catch Me If You Can. Yes, based on the movie (with Leo DiCaprio & Tom Hanks) and book of the same name about the fascinating life of Frank Abagnale, Jr. who between the ages of 17 – 19 charmed his way into millions of dollars while posing as a Pan Am pilot, a pediatric doctor, and a lawyer after passing the bar at age 19. Created by the same dream team who developed the Tony-Award winning musical Hairspray, written by Tony-Award winning Terrence McNally, with costumes designed by “the” Bob Mackey and featuring an all-star line-up of male leads, I have a very strong hunch this is going to be the must-see event of the season. 5th Avenue is hoping to recreate the same magic they did with Hairspray (the musical that put Seattle on the map as THE place to develop new Broadway-bound musicals). Only playing here from July 23 - August 16, be sure to catch it if you can!

And of course, as mentioned on the show, New Century Theatre Company’s Orange Flower Water is going to get folks buzzing. Provocative, intimate and utterly human, this play about the fragility of marital relationships showcases the incredible virtuosity of this dynamic new theatre ensemble. For adults only, this darkly humorous, unflinchingly honest portrayal of two couples features some of the best acting talent in the city and will be Seattle’s first glimpse at the writing talent of Craig Wright. Get your tickets now – opening night is already sold out. Orange Flower Water plays June 24 – July 20.

Enjoy!
Kathy

Robert Horton 06/12/2009

On this week's "recommend something for summer" show, Nancy insisted-insisted, I tell you-that I shamelessly plug my own comic book, Rotten (co-authored with Mark Rahner, art by Dan Dougherty), the first giant issue of which is out now. Having gotten the shameless part in, I must make amends by giving some real recommendations.

Revivals for the summer: The Seattle Art Museum kicks off a six-film tribute to Carole Lombard, that elegant yet silly princess of the screwball comedy era. The set begins July 9 with Howard Hawks's classic Twentieth Century (1934) and closes on August 13 with William Wellman's perverse Nothing Sacred (1937). Lombard was one of those forever-young stars (she died in a 1942 plane crash while on tour promoting War Bonds), and this is a chance to delight in some of her classics and rarities.

Silent Movie Mondays continue at the Paramount theater this month, with Henry King's Romola (1924) starring Lillian Gish on June 15; Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl (1929) on June 22; and Frank Borzage's Seventh Heaven (1927) on June 29. The latter helped snag Janet Gaynor the first Best Actress Oscar.

The Northwest Film Forum continues their year-long survey of 1969 films at various times during the summer. For a Sixties spy-picture marathon, look at the double bill for the week of July 31-August 6: Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz, which is a frosty and magisterial look at Cold War doings (it's not fun the way most Hitchcock is, but it is impressive), and Peter Hunt's On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which might just be the best of all James Bond movies despite having the worst James Bond (one-hit wonder George Lazenby).

And still on the 1969 score, on July 31 the Varsity theater brings a new print of Costa-Gavras's Z, an Oscar-winning political thriller that was a huge arthouse hit when it was released in the U.S. I went to see this movie as an adolescent (at the Varsity, if memory serves) and still remember how exciting it was to see a movie with subtitles, even if I didn't entirely follow the plot. Schedule

Robert Horton's blog

Nancy's Picks 06/11/2009

Hi Folks;

There is, of course, lots going on this summer. Here are a few items of interest:

First, I want to mention a couple of art benefits you might want to consider, because these kind of events are a great way to build, or start, your own personal art collection. That said, here we go...

If you like gorgeous handmade pottery and delicious salads, mark your calendar for the Pottery Northwest “Super Salad Supper Bowl” event, happening Thursday, July 16th. In addition to a wide variety of beautiful hand-made salad bowls available for purchase, this fun evening affair will feature live music, dynamic demos, and exciting exhibitions, along with a sumptuous buffet of kabobs and international salads! To reserve your seat, go to Brown Paper Tickets or Pottery Northwest.

The PONCHO Invitational Fine Arts Auction is changing its stripes this year. For the first time in it’s 8-year history, there will be a two week exhibit of the nearly 300 art works--all by artists who have some sort of Seattle connection--at Western Bridge, a marvelous art space located on 4th avenue south. Running August 12-23, this two-week exhibition is your chance to get up close and personal with work from established artists, as well as from a handful of super hot up & comers. Then, on Saturday, October 3rd, all the pieces will be auctioned off to the highest bidder—maybe you-- at the downtown Sheraton Hotel, all benefitting PONCHO.

The wonderful Jon Kertzer, founder and host of “The Best Ambiance” on KEXP celebrates the shows 25th anniversary with a killer live-lineup at the Triple Door on Monday, June 29th. Join Jon and the rhythmic, rockin’ world sounds of King Sunny Ade’ and his African Beats, with special guests Occidental Brothers Dance Band International, making their Seattle debut.

Local artist Karen Rudd has not one, but two, summer exhibits showcasing her spectacular reclaimed corrugated cardboard and wood glue tree stump sculptures. Catch Karen’s first show at the Port Angeles Fine Art Center, running July 5 through October 4, and her second at this years Bumbershoot festival, happening September 5-7.

And finally... if you’re a whiz-bang speller, drop by “Buzzword”, a zany spelling bee benefit for The Market Foundation. Happening at the Rendezvous’ Jewel Box Theatre in Belltown, the next round takes place June 23rd-- hosted by yours truly-- followed by the final “Killer Bee Championship Title” on July 28th.

Have fun out there—hope we cross paths!
Xo, nancy g.

Phyllis Fletcher 06/04/2009

If you're a minority--ethnic, ability-wise, sexual--the workplace is your daily battlefield. Maybe you win that battle every day through sheer force of personality and charm--or because you're the boss! Regardless of your position, it's likely that you encounter what academics call "microinsults" and "microaggressions" regularly. Some folks in the majority haplessly (or, sometimes, intentionally) insult you based on their discomfort with your minority status. The insults are often imperceptible to others. If you're black, the workplace insults may include requests to touch your hair, derisive imitations of your speech that are not based in reality, calling you by a jokey name that they perceive as a "black" name, asking you for a "black" opinion on a current event, etc. (All have happened to friends of mine.)

On the latest Art Zone with Nancy and Lyall, I show off Damali Ayo's How to Rent a Negro. If you thought blackpeopleloveus.com was funny, this book is for you. As the title suggests, it's a (satirical) manual for renters (whites) and rentals (blacks), complete with invoices and pricing guides for transactions that, until now, have been free--like the ones I list above.

Ayo is an author and artist from Portland whose other projects have included panhandling for reparations. She says that inappropriate requests to touch one's hair (or touching it without asking) are based in a legacy of slavery--and a false and unjust sense of ownership. So she encourages blacks to bill for actions based in that legacy.

An author even closer to home releases her book this month on winning that workplace battle while pleasing the people you need to work for. Shannea Patterson's Why I Wag My Tail is memoir, how-to, self-help, and humor all in one. She says if you're a brown person working in corporate America, the book is for you. It's peppered with anecdotes from real Seattle-area workplaces--pick it up and see if you recognize your colleagues!

-Phyllis

SIFF Blog #2 -- Over the Hump, Across the Horn 06/04/2009

A few notes for the third weekend of the Seattle International Film Festival:

Breezy from the word go, the romantic comedy 500 Days of Summer boasts a beauty of a hook, treating its tale of 20-something romance like a flipbook, which allows the narrative to switch between the blissful early days and despairing end times at the speed of light. In practice, though, things stumble a bit, with more than a few instances where the filmmakers seem to be just standing around congratulating themselves on their own cleverness. Still and all, this is an energetic, sharply written film saved from preciousness -- well, mostly -- by an amazingly unforced pair of central performances from Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Also, the best Star Wars joke in at least a decade.

Better by a degree of magnitude is Three Blind Mice, a mordantly funny, sneakily tense drama chronicling the final tragicomedic night of shore leave for three Aussie sailors (including writer/director Matthew Newton, who resembles a slightly scale-reduced Russell Crowe) bound for Iraq. Riding a rowdy, inebriated vibe, the film is full to bursting with vivid characters who shift their allegiances and motivations from moment to moment. (You know, just like real people.) What they mostly do, though, is talk, in great profane curlicues which seemingly come burbling up directly from the id. The scene where two of the sailors get trapped in a restaurant with a fiancée and her increasingly drunken parents won't be topped anytime soon for sheer hysterical fidgeting. My favorite film of the festival so far, in a walk.

And then there's the midnight zombie movie Deadgirl, in which a pair of dweeby high school guys stumble into a deserted hospital and find. and I'll stop there, partially because this is an all-ages blog, but mostly because I'm trying to wipe it from my short-term memory and successfully deal with breakfast. Give credit to the writer and director for coming up with a genuinely transgressive central metaphor, but whatever point their film attempts to make soon gets swamped by waves and waves of general unpleasantness. Grody as it all is, though, the experience of sitting in the dark listening to a hundred or so fellow moviegoers communally gag is the kind of thing that you can only really get at a festival these days. Long after everything else has faded into the haze, I suspect I'm still going to remember this one.

More to come soon (honest), including the much-buzzed My Suicide, a lightning-edited, empathetic generational study which also features a plum of a supporting performance by the newly late, great David Carradine. RIP.

For more ramblings from yours truly, check out:
The Stranger
Parallax View and
GreenCine Guru

-Andy

Robert Horton 06/04/2009

Uh, it's kinda busy in the Seattle film scene this time of year. Along with the summer blockbusters (which I talk about this week with Nancy on AZISWNG), the Seattle International Film Festival goes on and on. My must-see archival film for this weekend is Le Amiche, a 1955 film by Michelangelo Antonioni, made before he became a mainstay of the arthouse scene. Other than that:

Revival of the Week: Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, a 1941 vehicle for W.C. Fields, at the Grand Illusion (which is doing a few weeks under the umbrella theme of "flim-flam men"). When I was a lad in the 1970s, you could still see Fields movies on regular TV all the time, and early exposure to his comedy stylings is a taste acquired and never lost. This one's an extremely bizarre outing from late in Fields' career, an inside-Hollywood spoof and an excuse for a series of muttered one-liners. Visit Grand Illusion Cinema for more info.

DVD of the Week: A Married Woman, a 1964 film by Jean-Luc Godard. Not Godard's best or most alive film, and you miss the presence of his frequent leading lady and then-wife Anna Karina, but still-it's from the great period when this director was re-writing the rules of film language with every picture and the French New Wave was in full swing.

Find more movie info visit my website: roberthorton.wordpress.com

Nancy's Picks 05/29/2009

Hi there! It's time for Nancy's Picks.

If you're a Led Zeppelin fan, which I am, (just can't get enough of John Bonham's genius drumming), tune into 102.5 fm/KZOK, because they play Led Zeppelin about 90% of the time.

One of Seattle's great bands, "The Squirrels", wrap up a brilliant 25-year career with their "Death With Dignity Retirement Tour". The big show happens Saturday, June 13th, at The Tractor Tavern in Ballard.

I saw "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" @ Balagan Theatre last weekend, and a couple of the performances-Ray Tagavilla, in particular -- are not to be missed. The show closes this Saturday, May 30th, so don't delay -- call now!

Byron Au Yong unveils his newest composition, "Stuck Elevator" at this years On the Boards "Northwest New Works Festival", happening June 5-7. It's a beautiful original opera based on a harrowing and true story.

One of the coolest programs of the Seattle International Film Festival each year is their Fly Filmmaking Challenge, where 3 Seattle filmmakers make a narrative short film with just 5 days of shooting and 5 days of editing. You can check out this years crop of "on the Fly" creations, all with a "film noir" theme, on Wednesday, June 10th at the lovely Egyptian Theatre on Capital Hill.

Robert Horton 05/22/2009

Last night Nancy allowed me to tag along for the coverage of the Seattle International Film Festival's opening night, which saw us interviewing some of the actors, directors, and longtime fest-goers on the scene. It was windy outside the Paramount Theater, so I apologize in advance for any hair issues that might arise. The results will be broadcast beginning Friday night, and despite the frequent eruptions of my diva-like behavior, we had a good time.

Revivals of the Week: Visit SIFF for four screenings presented by Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne this weekend. Saturday sees The Adventures of Robin Hood (Errol Flynn version, natch) and Sunset Boulevard; Sunday brings The Third Man and Dodsworth. The first three are familiar titles, but maybe you haven't seen Dodsworth, a 1936 adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel about an American couple who go to Europe and have their lives substantially changed. Walter Huston and Ruth Chatterton give vivid performances, under the focused direction of William Wyler. More info: www.siff.net

DVDs of the Week: Man Hunt, a 1941 suspense picture directed by Fritz Lang, with Walter Pidgeon as a hunter who, for his own amusement, finds out whether he can get Hitler in his gunsights. Also: Pigs, Pimps and Prostitutes, a three-film Criterion set featuring 1960s work by Shohei Imamura, a fascinating filmmaker whose work definitely does not conform to traditional cherry-blossoms-falling school of Japanese movies.

Find more movie info, and links for the new crazed comic book I have co-authored, Rotten, on my website: roberthorton.wordpress.com

Nancy's Picks 05/21/2009

Hi there and welcome to Nancy's Picks. Before you read on, please know that there is nothing special about this list. It's just a few things that I like-- or things that I think I might like-- that I want to pass your way. Sound good? Cool. Here we go:

The annual Northwest New Works Festival at On the Boards, running June 5-14, is always full of surprises and is usually worth checking out. These are the shows that have caught my eye:

Byron Au Yong
SANDSTROMMOVEMENT
Scott/Powell
Zoe/Juniper
Sunday Service

Every Tuesday morning, from 7-10 am, Scott Lawrimore, owner of the Lawrimore Project, a gallery space in the International District, hosts an informal art talk at Café Presse, a French bistro on 12th Avenue, near Seattle University. This weekly event often has some sort of theme; sometimes features special visiting guest speakers; and is always a wonderful time of connecting with other artists and drinking good coffee!

Speaking of good ingestibles, you simply must try the cous cous w/black beans salad at Pasta & Co. The nutty cous cous, soft beans, and crunchy chunks of red and yellow peppers, are dressed with a tangy, lemon-edged vinaigrette that makes me want to eat it with a shovel!

Finally, a few theatre picks:
"Titus" from the always excellent Washington Theatre Ensemble
May 15-June 15
Get tickets at www.brownpapertickets.com
800-838-3006

"Below the Belt" from ACT Theatre, featuring 3 outstanding actors; John Procaccino, R. Hamilton Wright, and Judd Hirsch.
May 22-June 21

For more arty ideas, check out the latest Art Zone episode.

Talk to you soon.
--nancy g.

SIFF Blog #1 -- Andy Wright 05/21/2009

Speaking as a former Seattle Film Festival programmer, any discussion of said event is best doled out in small, easily graspable portions, lest one's mind be blown by the sheer, ludicrous size of the thing. (Almost 400 films! In A Time Span Running Over Three Weeks! Nearly Four, If You Account For The Time Spent Attempting to Find Parking!) So, with brevity and some sort of sanity in mind, here we go: The film to beat this initial weekend -- aside from the masterfully enraging documentary The Cove, to which Robert Horton has already given props on this week's show -- is most likely South Korea's Treeless Mountain, which has been garnering a rising amount of buzz since its inclusion in an excellent recent article on Neo-Neo Realism in the New York Times. Shot in near-documentary fashion, director So Young Kim's film tells the tale of two sisters -- one six years old, the other four -- who are abandoned by their mother and forced to live with their drunken lout of an aunt. Gigantic downer though it may appear, this admirably restrained character piece benefits hugely from its naturalistic, blessedly sentiment-free pair of central performances. A few minor gripes aside -- there's perhaps one or two too many instances where the camera just settles on the faces of its subjects and waits for something heartbreaking to occur -- this is a worthy, often wistfully downbeat film, with a lovely ending that feels eminently well-earned. Believe the hype, or at least around 90% of it.

Continuing the theme of scarily talented youngsters comes the Mexican entry I'm Gonna Explode, the highly caffeinated saga of a couple of teenaged outcasts who fall in love and proceed to grab some guns, boost a Volkswagen, and hit the road in an attempt to get away from the perceived tyranny of their clueless parents. (To say where they go, exactly, would be to ruin one of the best gags). Throughout, writer/director Gerardo Naranjo does an inspired job of contrasting his narrative's rising sense of danger with some effortlessly bubbly comedic interludes. The best reason to watch it, though, comes courtesy of first-time actress Maria Deschamps, as a good girl gone bad who doesn't feel quite comfortable with either option.

Finding a successful midnight movie is a more delicate science than one would think, with the ideal entries featuring a mixture of crude eye-opening oompf and just enough smarts to hopefully keep the viewer's gag reflex in check. A good attempt at said balance can be found in I Sell the Dead, in which a pair of outlaw gravediggers come into contact with vampires, aliens, and all other sorts of 19th century beasties bumping in the night. Featuring performances from such genre stalwarts as Lost's Dominic Monaghan and Hellboy's Ron Perlman, this is an affectionate, genuinely witty slab of comedic horror that may ultimately be a tad too genteel for proper midnight fare... even accounting for the occasional shots of spring-loaded organs flying at the camera. "Genteel," on the other hand, is not a word that applies to Saturday night's Dead Snow, which is a gory, intermittently hilarious horror film about a group of Norwegian ski enthusiasts who stumble across a troop of, well, Nazi Zombies. As with most exploitation movies, the filmmakers appear to have expended most of their energy coming up with the initial concept, resulting in some serious pacing problems in the back half. Still, even if this can't quite live up to the crass potential of its premise (although, in all fairness, not many films could), this is not a movie that anyone will ever accuse of holding anything back.

And that, for mercy's sake, is that (although I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention the archival gems The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Third Man, which are nothing less than two of the most sheerly entertaining movies ever made). More to come after the long weekend... assuming we all survive the zombie Zamboni apocalypse.

-Andy

Theatre Highlights from Kathy Hsieh 05/14/2009

This month's selections focus on three small professional theatre companies that give local audiences a fabulous value for the money. These companies offer professional quality productions for a very low ticket price, and often produce some of the hottest new scripts being created for theatre. In fact, both ReAct and Seattle Public Theatre consistently produce a steady stream of Seattle and/or Northwest premieres - top flight shows with incredibly strong talent. So if you've never had a chance to try out their productions, their current offerings would be a terrific place to start.

ReAct offers the Seattle premiere of Rabbit Hole - winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Receiving rave reviews, this current production of David Lindsay-Abaire's script explores the greatest loss that any family can bear, but does it with such tenderness and layered with much humor, that the effect is actually quite uplifting and ultimately very human. Audiences and especially anyone who is a parent are loving this play. Presented at Richard Hugo House, this production runs through May 31.

Meanwhile at Balagan Theatre Steve Martin's delightful treatise in play form, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, explores the grand concepts of love, relationships, creativity, talent and genius as only Steve Martin can. Martin imagines what might happen if a young Picasso and a young Einstein meet in a bar in Paris. But the true genius revealed in watching the play is that of Martin himself. He explores big, big ideas but mixes in a lot of wild and crazy low-brow humor - talk about someone with a huge imagination! Picasso plays through May 30 on Capitol Hill.

Seattle Public Theater presents Bryony Lavery's A Wedding Story through June 7 at The Bathhouse Theater. How can love ever equal our expectations of it? Sometimes it's easier just to run the other way and that's what Sally has always done. But as Alzheimer's begins to rob her parents of their idyllic loving relationship and Sally meets the woman of her dreams, life and love take an unpredictable turn in this exuberantly funny and elegantly moving look at unconditional love.

Really want to see a show but don't know if you can afford it? Check out the theatre's website - a) lots of tickets are a lot less expensive than you might think; b) many theatres offer great deals (2 for 1's; special discounts for those under 25, students, seniors and groups; pay-what-you-can nights; etc.); or c) often you can usher or volunteer in exchange for a free ticket.

Theatres can't really fulfill their fullest potential unless they have an audience. Play your part. Go see some theatre.

Until next time,
Kathy

Robert Horton 04/16/2009

Revival of the Week: Kind of a slow moment this particular week for revivals in Seattle. The Grand Illusion has Pasolini's Canterbury Tales (1972), a very minor excuse for bawdiness, and the Seattle Art Museum is in the early stages of a Paul Newman tribute: The Hustler (1961) shows 4/16, and Sweet Bird of Youth (1962) on 4/23; the former pretty ageless, the latter showing its wrinkles a bit. Both show off Newman in his early, strutting mode, very much an "actor" putting on a show, not quite comfortable yet in his own screen presence-having said that, you still won't be able to take your eyes off him.

DVD of the Week: Forever, directed by Heddy Honigmann. A beautiful documentary film about Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, surveying the people who come to visit the graves of the famous and the not-famous. In a very gentle way, this movie manages to be about death and art and the reasons we have for memorializing people.and it's a scandal that it never played for a proper run in Seattle. DVD should help it find an audience.

Festivals: The Seattle Jewish Film Festival, which always offers up an interesting, provocative slate of films, begins April 23 (through May 3) at a variety of venues, notably the Cinerama, SIFF Cinema, and Museum of History and Industry. Among the higher-profile films are Little Traitor (the opening-night selection) and Lemon Tree, featuring the excellent star of The Visitor, Hiam Abbass.

roberthorton.wordpress.com

Lyall Bush's Notes 04/10/2009

Writers sometimes get upset when too many people ask them where their stories come from, or where they "get" their stories. I understand that -- writers don't want amateurs fooling around in their chem labs. But the answers are almost always interesting anyway, even when they are, "I was daydreaming out the airplane window," or "This guy moved his hands the way my uncle did, which reminded me of Oedipus." Last week The New York Times published a “where stories come from” story under the title, “From Finance to Fiction,” which carried two stories of origin. The writer, Stephen Frey, starts at the beginning: graduating from college in 1982, he moved to New York and took a job in investment banking. He stayed in that career for a couple of decades, but in time, the suit, the commute, the work with spreadsheets, the fluorescent lighting led him to write murder mysteries. At first he wasn't so successful. When he showed the first ones to his friend, Steve, a former English major, he did not get a lot of encouragement: “I am not sure they are going to make it," Steve would write him. Then “it hit me," Frey writes. "I had been writing murder mysteries that took place in Minnesota. Meanwhile the financial world was taking off and I was in it.” So he began to write about the world he had come to know, and he wrote “a book about a kid who worked in a big investment bank. The opening scene was the bonus dinner. I had a friend who told me about them. The partners have envelopes in front of them with the bonuses. But they don’t know how much they are. You have to sit there and stare all through all evening at this envelope with your bonus in it. And in this scene, one guy opens his envelope and gets nothing and he goes crazy.”

And that is where a story comes from: a friend's anecdote. Or maybe better: from a friend's anecdote but only after a years of storytelling apprenticeship. Or, better yet: from a friend's anecdote but only after years of apprenticeship mixed with a now mature sense of how to do an MRI on the world you know really well, which in this case is money. The story about money invokes thoughts of greed -- a deadly sin -- and greed suggests, in that flickering twilight of the imagination, overflow: "one guy opens his envelope and gets nothing and he goes crazy." Yes. Even in telling us this, Frey shows us how he writes. For three sentences it is all what his friend told him. Then in the last sentence he turns to the world of his imagination: "And in this scene," it begins. So where did the story come from? From the writer's sensibility, his interest in seeing a thought experiment played out, his own pursuit of career, ambition, desire for success. Oh, and this thing his friend said about a pretty horrible-sounding dinner.

Notes from Nancy Guppy 04/02/2009

Hi there,

Well, I just had an incredible experience. I went out to grab a sandwich at Bakesmans, a lunch-only Monday thru Friday joint located between 1st and 2nd on Cherry in downtown Seattle. (Bakesmans is known for their fresh, made-to-order turkey sandwiches, however, much like that Seinfeld "Soup Nazi" episode, be prepared and don't dawdle when placing your order. I'm not kidding.)

Anyway, I ordered my dark meat with mayo, cranberry and lettuce on whole wheat, and was ready to pay, when I saw that I only had 3 one-dollar bills and, even though I knew the answer was "no", I asked anyway, "Do you, by chance, take credit cards?" Before the cashier could respond, the woman in front of me whipped around and handed me a ten-dollar bill. "Have a nice lunch!" she said with a perky smile, then picked up her sandwich and took off. The cashier asked if I knew her-no, I did not-then said that the sandwich was only $4.90 and she should at least get her change I grabbed the five bucks and my sandwich, yelled thanks over my shoulder, and sprinted out the door, catching her half-way down the block.

Now, truth be told, I've paid for strangers meals in the past, but it's never happened to me, and the experience was both shocking and delightful. I highly recommend you try it, and it doesn't have to be a big deal. It can be as simple as buying coffee for the person in line behind you. They don't even have to know you did it.

And speaking of edible's… this coming Saturday, April 4th, I'm one of the judges for the "Edible Book Festival", happening at The Good Shepherd Center, 4649 Sunnyside Avenue North, starting at 1:00 pm. It's a funny literary event that involves eating-lots of it! Come by if you can.

And now for some Art Zone business:

We're back this Thursday, April 2nd, at 8:00 pm with a great mix of stuff… Our featured art is from the excellent Troy Gua …we've got cool music from Scarlet Room … Kathy Hsieh brings us the latest on the local theatre scene… and we remember the wonderful Lynne Saad, who died on March 23rd after a 2-year struggle with cancer. Lynne was a tremendous person, loved by many people, as well as a very talented artist. You can see her work on-line through Catherine Person Gallery.

Enjoy these early days of spring,
Xo, nancy g.

Theatre Highlights from Kathy Hsieh 04/02/2009

Let's face it. The economy sucks right now. Lots of people are struggling. Things are looking rather bleak. And that is why more than ever we need to find ways to uplift our spirits. To connect with others. To find meaning and value in who we are as individuals and as part of the larger community. And that's the pivotal and vital role that the arts can play. We need the arts now more than we ever have.

An example? I was helping to organize a community clean-up party where volunteers help pick up trash and paint out graffiti and had asked a Cornish singer/songwriter if she wouldn't mind playing on the street corner to keep the atmosphere festive. She agreed. Random people stopped to listen and many threw some cash into her open guitar case while she played. But the donation that touched me the most was from an elderly homeless man and woman who were both carrying everything they owned in large garbage bags. They stayed and listened to every song then donated over $20. The Cornish student tried to give them their money back but they insisted she keep it. They said that it was a small token of their appreciation for her ability to "feed our souls." They said they could spend the money on food but at the end of the day, the food would be gone, whereas the music would stay with them for a lifetime. They then shared how they had first met at a Joni Mitchell concert over thirty years ago and the memory of hearing her music live with hundreds of other people still "fed" them to this day.

So devote some time this month in experiencing art in its most palpable form - live and with the company of others.

Through May 3, INTIMAN brings Dostoyevsky's classic Crime and Punishment off the page and onto the stage in a thrilling 90-minute adaptation. Staying true to the essence of the original novel, this stage production couldn't be more timely. An impoverished student commits a murder. On the surface he has committed a crime. But as an inspector tries to delve into the reasons why, he and we as the audience begin to question all of our basic assumptions about morality and what is truly a crime or not. This play has created quite a buzz everywhere it's played and with good reason. This is engrossing theatre. An added bonus? There will be post-play discussions following every performance. Plus, an open bar. Now that's what I call a "stimulating" evening.

Between April 14 - May 9 Book-It Repertory Theatre premieres their stage version of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. Book-It is the master of taking great novels and turning them into great theatre. This book was one of my favorite reads last year when it was selected as the 2008 Seattle Reads book. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is an award-winning debut novel by Dinaw Mengestu about Sepha, an immigrant who has escaped the revolution in Ethiopia. Struggling to make a life in America, the production focuses on his friendship with Judith, a white woman who moves in next door, and her bi-racial daughter Naomi. What I absolutely love about the story is that not only is it one of the most vivid portrayals of a contemporary immigrant's experience in America, ultimately it's a story about friendship in all its different forms - between buddies, between neighbors, between a man and a woman, between parent and child. It's the subtle nuances in how these relationships are navigated that make Sepha and his story so striking. And I can't think of a more visceral way to experience the novel than to see it on stage. Again, the timeliness and universality of what is truly of value in life couldn't resonate more than it will now. Book-It has put together a top-notch artistic team and don't say I didn't warn you - if you want tickets, you better get them now.

And if you're a Woody Allen fan, Our American Theater is doing a staged reading of his slapstick farce Don't Drink the Water at the Theatre Off Jackson in Seattle's International District on April 20 and at ArtsWest in West Seattle on April 21. There will be post-play discussions both evenings led by local theatre luminaries John Longenbaugh (4/20) and Paul Mullin (4/21). A Broadway hit when it first premiered in 1966, this cultural comedy of errors takes place in an American embassy behind the Iron Curtain when a New Jersey family under suspicion of espionage escapes there. So if you're looking for some wild, mad-cap humor, this reading might be the perfect escape. Admission is easy on the pocket-book, too, since it's simply pay-what-you-can.

Other shows on my to see list: When The Messenger is Hot at Theater Schmeater, Of Mice and Men at Seattle Public Theater, Stunt Girl at Village Theatre, and Rabbit Hole with ReAct. And if you haven't seen Merchant of Venice at Seattle Shakespeare, go before it closes this weekend.

When the times get tough, it's time to see some theatre!
Kathy

Notes from Nancy Guppy 03/19/2009

Good Morning,

I want to share a few thoughts I've been having lately about the state of the economy and the importance of art.

In tough financial times, it's easy to forget about the importance of art, or to think, perhaps, that art is a luxury. But I believe that art is more essential and more important to our lives than ever before, and here's why.

Art enlivens and refreshes a community: its new ideas, its opinion, its communication, and its economic stimulation. Art enlightens us, thrills us, challenges us, invigorates us, enrages us-- in short, art is a positive, dynamic force that stimulates us to feel and think and act, the opposite of getting stuck in downturn and gloom.

You see a play, and your view of yourself or of another culture is changed forever.

You view a painting, and the colors, shapes, and composition, fill you with inexpressible joy.

You attend a concert, and find yourself thinking about that dusty guitar in the back of your closet.

These kind of profound experiences wake us up. They broaden our perspective and open us to becoming more thoughtful, more curious, and more alive.

In addition to the personal benefits, art plays a powerful role in the economic health of our region. Seattle's major-league theater, music and visual arts community employs over 20,000 people and draws hundreds of thousands of audience members into the city every year. These people buy tickets, eat in restaurants, and stay in hotels. Plus, the top talent that Seattle-area businesses want to attract and hold are themselves attracted to this city's vibrant arts scene.

In other words, maintaining a vibrant arts and cultural scene is literally an investment in our economic future.

So, what does this have to do with you and me? In a word, EVERYTHING! You and I can play a positive role in helping to keep Seattle's art scene vibrant and alive with this easy to follow 3-step "You Can Make A Difference" program:

1) Become a member of an arts organization. Join at whatever level you can afford, and reap the benefits. In some cases, like at a museum, you'll get admission for a year, plus other cool perks. In others, like with theatres, you'll enjoy special "behind-the-scenes/members only" events.

2) Form an art group. Pull together people you enjoy, and pledge to attend at least one art event a month. It might be a gallery walk, or a concert, or a film, or a kooky modern dance show. The point is to experience something new, and then afterwards, talk about what you saw.

3) And finally, tell people about what you see. Word of mouth is, by far, the strongest advertisement of all. The poet Robert Frost wrote, "The only way out is through". I believe that art will help us find our way through, and out, to a better other side.

Keep in touch!
Xo, nancy g.

P.S. This weeks "Art Zone" episode, which premieres this coming Thursday @ 8:00 pm, is REALLY REALLY GOOD! Join us, won't you?

Notes from Nancy Guppy 03/12/2009

Good Morning,

Hubby Joe and I hit the Henry Art Gallery on Sunday and saw the William Kentridge exhibit… RUN DON'T WALK! It's great.

Also, while at the Henry, we stumbled into an 84 minute movie entitled "The Rape of the Sabine Women", based on a Roman myth. (fyi: the word "rape" in this case means "kidnap"). The movie, made in 2005 by Eve Sussman, is absolutely mesmerizing-- incredible camera work, excellent editing, and wonderful acting. It was shot on location in Athens and Berlin, and is set in the 1960's, so the hair, makeup and costumes are super cool. It's definitely "arty", but don't let that throw you. You might want to read up on the myth before you go, as that will help you to follow the storyline.

I'm hearing that the Garden Cosmos exhibit at the Seattle Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park is a mind blower… we plan to hit that this weekend. I'll report back-or perhaps I'll see you there.

Finally, a good food tip… I recently met a friend for lunch at the newly expanded Virginia Inn, located at 1st and Virginia in downtown Seattle. It was a cold day, so we both ordered the soup du jour, which was smoked-salmon chowder. Superb! Lots of salmon, potatoes, and other tasty ingredients, accompanied by fresh French bread from Le Panier, a terrific French bakery located in the nearby Pike Place Market. Mmmmmmm.

Have a great week… and make sure to check out the latest "Art Zone" which premieres tonight, Thursday March 12th @ 8:00 pm, then repeats throughout the weekend and always online. We've got Robert Horton, Marcie Sillman's tour of Seattle's portable works collection, and the killer sounds of Manoogi Hi

Stay warm!
Xo, nancy g.

Notes from Nancy Guppy 03/05/2009

Hi Ya'll,

When it's cold and rainy, you can do one of two things: Stay at home, all bundled up, eating cinnamon sugar toast and watching old movies, OR you can opt for a fun indoor activity that doesn't involve lying on your couch. (I know, I know, it's hard to get off the couch and out the door when its soooo gray and wet outside, but here are a few good reasons why you should.)

The Seattle Repertory Theatre's production of "Betrayal", written by the late, great, Harold Pinter, has been extended through March 28th. The sharply drawn characters and powerful use of silence will draw you into this dark tale of deception.


New City Theatre's production of "Footfalls & Rockabye" by Samuel Beckett has also been extended by popular demand. Now running thru March 14th, this gem of a play was directed by filmmaker Janice Findley and stars the mighty Mary Ewald.
Get your tickets from Brown Paper Tickets or pay cash at the door.

Running one weekend only, Thursday March 5th thru the 8th, at On the Boards is "No Dice" from the "Nature Theater of Oklahoma" (who live, naturally, in New York). Performed in an off-site office space where audience members will be served delicious homemade sandwiches, this quirky show is distilled from 100 hours of phone conversations.

And just one more:

South African artist, William Kentridge, known for his work in animated film, has a really cool exhibit at the Henry Art Gallery (www.henryart.org) now thru May 3rd. Here's a blurb from the Henry's website: "Kentridge makes large-scale charcoal drawings that he erases and redraws continually, adding new elements or transforming one subject into a very different other, filming each subtle shift to animate them, literally giving movement, meaning, and life to the images her creates." Check it out for yourself Tuesday through Sunday.


So bundle up and get yourself out there… you'll be oh-so-glad that you did.

More later.
Xo, nancy g.

Lyall Bush's Notes 02/24/2009

Alex Ross's book, "The Rest is Noise," is one of the most admired books of 2008 and when I finally read it this month I could see why. Ross writes for the New Yorker magazine and his regular reviews of classical music are among the magazine's regular highlights. In his column he writes about classical music like a food writer: reading him you can hear the relative dryness, pith or juice of the latest Schubert or Brahms concert, a recent interpretation of Mahler in, say, Vienna, where the composer was born. Ross's specialty, in fact, is humanizing the music. He can describe the sounds he hears with the professional language of musicians and he brings a novelist's eye to bear on the fit of different composers lives and art. Even if you are only a little interested in concert-hall music - his beat - there is a great readerly pleasure in reading him. "The Rest is Noise" tells the story of 20th Century composers, from Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss to Schoenberg and the Second Vienna School, and from there to the Dada experiments of John Cage and Stockhausen and the minimalism of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, each of which had, Ross claims, a great influence on rock'n'roll: the Beatles' play with noise and tape loops in the mid and late 1960s (think of the orchestral churning in "A Day in the Life") owes much to McCartney's hearing Stockhausen in 1966; Lou Reed, who formed The Velvet Underground, was very familiar with Terry Riley, John Cage and La Monte Young; and Missy Elliott, Radiohead and Bjork play with tape noises and repetition in ways that are very "classical," if that term has any continued meaning.

The book ends up arguing, in fact, that we may be headed into a kind of music tradition that doesn't differentiate much between "popular" and "classical," but along the way it is a long song about the 20th century itself, how, for example, Oliver Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time" was written and premiered in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany or how new operas such as "Nixon in China" (by John Adams) and "Einstein on the Beach" (by Philip Glass) asked audiences to think about history and culture 150 years after Wagner turned from romantic stories to myth. This world, Ross shows, has had its own story and been all around us all these years and we didn't - most of us - know it.

Unpacking the Boxes

A couple of months ago a friend gave me a memoire by the poet Donald Hall, knowing that I liked Hall - I like him a lot - and guessing that I am not in the habit of reading poets' memoires. (I'm not.) But the book is so good, so brief and crammed and full of air and eloquence that I want everyone to read it now. If you know Hall's work you know that the books he wrote on the death of his wife, Jane Kenyon, who died of cancer in the mid 90s, are among he best autobiographical poems of the late 20th century: woefully good and beautiful. Just about any page in the book is gorgeously plain, beginning at the beginning where Hall plants his title: years after his wife's death his mother's death brings him truckloads of boxes, inside of which are things from his childhood and adolescence that call up memories. If I were teaching a memoire class today I would say to my students, "Write like this."

Thoughts from Phyllis 02/24/2009

"Is your refrigerator running?" Who doesn't love a great phony phone call? OK: maybe you can't stand them. They can be rude, mean-spirited--even criminal. Comedian Jim Florentine may be some of those things. But I've been listening his Terrorizing Telemarketers series nonstop for the past week.

Florentine is a contributor to the prank call TV puppet show Crank Yankers. He specializes in the phony phone call that pranks the caller. He waits for telemarketers to call him at home. When the phone rings, he turns on his tape recorder and his magic unfolds. His tactics range from pointless and aggravating interruption, to scripted bits in which he pretends to be assaulted during the call. Meanwhile, the caller pitches away about the time share, the dating service, or the office supplies. Most calls end with the telemarketer hanging up in anger, fear, or disbelief.

How awful, you may think, for the hapless telemarketer who's just trying to make a buck at the bottom of the corporate food chain. I agree. But I also want you to know my highbrow/oral-history rationale for loving these calls, recorded in the early 2000s.

It's their connection to our disintegrating economy. Florentine takes calls from:
- newspaper companies trying to stay alive through individual subscriptions - brokers of questionable energy investments - debt consolidators that may or may not be legit

His calls document the individual transactions that have become part of our current predicament.

I feel obligated to mention that some calls poke fun at the elderly and disabled. For me, though, the calls I skip are far outnumbered by the ones I find compelling and hilarious.

So, for a unique audio timepiece of the beginning of the bust, check out Jim Florentine.

Also, if you're free on Tuesday night (Feb 24), consider an event I mention in our most recent broadcast of Art Zone: Junot Diaz at Benaroya Hall

Notes from Nancy Guppy 02/17/2009

Hey there,

Long time no blog! But I won't bore you with my lame excuses… let's get on with the show, and here, for your consideration, are a few fun arty events:

Lynne Saad has a new exhibit of work at Catherine Person Gallery entitled "Unexpected Opportunities". This intimate show, which opens Thursday, February 19th, is a beautiful and brutally honest meditation on Lynne's almost-two-year encounter with stage 4 cancer. Runs thru February 28th.

Coming soon to the Northwest Film Forum is "Harvard Beats Yale", a documentary about the classic 1968 football game between these two long time rival schools. I heard an interview with the director on NPR last week, and found myself unable to get out of the car until it was over. Runs March 20th thru the 26th at NWFF.

My good buddy, Pat Cashman, is starring in his first musical since high school, and it's a biggy: "Hello Dolly" at the 5th Avenue Theatre, running March 7th thru the 29th. Pat plays Horace, the grumpy but good-hearted guy, who ends up getting the girl! This is definitely good date material!

And finally, this coming Friday, February 20th, On the Boards, celebrates 30-years of bringing super groovy performance to Seattle audiences with "Intermission Impossible"! This one-night-only extravaganza will feature food, drink, karaoke, and a slate of wonderful performers from the past 30 years. I personally guarantee that this $15 ticket will deliver $30 of fun!

Turning now to TV news: Our bright and shiny new episode of "Art Zone In Studio" premieres on Thursday, 2/19 @ 8:00 pm, with a killer lineup! Lead singer of Presidents of the United States of America, Chris Ballew, unveils a brand new music project… we feature art from the awesome collage artist, Kate Endle… Phyllis Fletcher and Lyall Bush stop by to talk all things books… and we've got terrific music from Ivory Smith and her band, "Ivory In Ice World".

Join us, won't you?

With love,

--nancy g.

Theatre Highlights from Kathy Hsieh 1/22/2009

• Favorite local production: Seattle Shakespeare Company's Swansong by Patrick Page
• Favorite touring production: Spring Awakening at The Paramount
• Favorite ensemble acting:
  • Ian Bell, Timothy Gouran and Brandon Whitehead in Seattle Shakespeare Company's Swansong directed by Artistic Director Stephanie Shine
  • Neal Bledsoe, Quinlan Corbett, Megan Hill and Christa Scott-Reed in Intiman's The Little Dog Laughed directed by Fracaswell Hyman
  • Gavin Cummins, Trick Danneker, Heather Hawkins, Kelly Kitchens and Karen Nelsen in ArtsWest & Seattle Public Theatre's co-production of The Sweetest Swing in Baseball directed by Shana Bestock
  • Ruth McRee, Kate Szyperski and Steve Treacy in Theatre 9/12's Canyon's Edge directed by Charles Waxberg

• Favorite performances:
  • Mark Chamberlain in ACT's Eurydice
  • Kate Czajkowski in Book-It's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
  • Nick DeSantis, Eric Polani Jensen, Jennifer Paz, and Troy L. Wageman in Village Theatre's Beauty & The Beast
  • Leslie Law and Todd Jefferson Moore in Seattle Shakespeare Company's The Miser
  • Maia Lee in SIS Production's BFE
  • Toni Rose, Brandon Simmons and ShawnJ West in ReAct's Angels in America: Perestroika
  • Richard Ziman in Seattle Shakespeare Company's Henry IV

Recommendations from Robert Horton 1/8/2009

Revivals: The Northwest Film Forum launches a year-long (with interruptions) festival of movies made in 1969, a zany idea that should be a lot of fun to witness. It begins Jan. 9 with a pair of buddy movies that caught the zeitgeist, Easy Rider and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and continues Jan. 16 with two counterculture offerings, Alice's Restaurant and Oh! What a Lovely War. The latter is Richard Attenborough's first outing as director, a heavy-handed yet oddly powerful anti-war musical that uses songs of the WWI era and the real words of politicians (who do not come off well). My own list of best films of 1969

SIFF Cinema will be repertory-ing too, with a terrific two-week series called "French Crime Wave," a selection of dark stuff from the country that invented the word "noir." The titles range all over the map, but the goodies are abundant, including a fine 1969 film (see above), Francois Truffaut's weird Mississippi Mermaid. After the single bills, Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player (1960) settles in for a weeklong run.

DVD of the Month: Has to be a two-disc tribute to English director Michael Powell, packaging his 1946 classic A Matter of Life and Death--made with longtime filmmaking partner Emeric Pressburger (they made The Red Shoes)--with a much later and lesser 1969 picture, Age of Consent. AMOLAD stars David Niven as an RAF pilot who mysteriously survives a plane crash, whereupon he gets a chance to argue his case in heaven. It's a beauty. The DVD release gave me an excuse to revive an old article on my website. But mostly, see this wonderful movie.

Theatre Highlights from Kathy Hsieh 12/18/2008

As the year comes to a close, I start to look into the future and make what I like to call "Year-long Wishes" for myself. Traditionalists may refer to them as New Year's Resolutions, corporate folks might prefer a more professional term like annual goals, but call it what you will, it's always nice to strive for higher aspirations as we approach the incoming year.

So this month's theatre selections are ones that will hopefully inspire some great possibilities to try out:

• Be spontaneous - "Just do it!"
  14/48: The World's Quickest Theatre Festival is all about the fun and fantastic experiences that can be created when we just jump in and do it. 7 playwrights, 7 directors and a slew of actors, band members, designers and theatre crew create 14 world-premiere, ten-minute plays in a mere 48-hours, and then a whole new group of artists do it all over again the following weekend. There's no time to think, to fret, to re-do. It's not about perfection, it's about the amazing things that can happen when people take on a daring, go-for-it attitude.



• Do what makes you happy
  You Can't Take It With You shows us how much more fulfilling life can be when we live our passions to the fullest and lead the lives we want to live rather than trying to live up to everyone else's expections of what our lives should be.



• Celebrate life by sharing of ourselves
  Black Nativity is a joyous celebration of talent. All the performers share their gift of song, storytelling and dance in this inspiring holiday event. Not only is the show a reminder that our truest blessings in life are not material, but are found within ourselves, but it also demonstrates that the greatest celebration of life is to share our personal gifts or talents with those around us.

Finally, I want to take a little space to pay tribute to a true talent in Seattle, who in many ways embodied all of the above. Douglas N. Paasch, master puppet artisan at the Seattle Children's theatre and numerous other venues in town, teacher, and incredible artist, recently suffered a pulmonary embolism and passed away at the age of 49. His friends and family paid loving tribute to him last week at the Children's Theatre. It was a standing-room only event - he had touched so many, many people of all ages. I was completely impressed by all the people who spoke so ardently about him. It made me wonder what the world would be like if we made more time in our daily doings to let those around us know how much they truly mean to us while they're still with us. So that is my foremost year-long wish for myself - to share more of my gratitude for all the people in my life. Yes, it might make us all a little gushier and mushier than usual, but mush and gush can be good for the heart and soul. Happy positive feelings are contagious, so let's spread more of it around!

See you at the theatre!
Kathy

Lyall Bush's Notes 12/18/2008

Snow Day Reading
One of the fattest books in my library is a survey of poetry that I have kept sitting on my bedside table for much of the past year. (Mid-December, with the weather turning, is a good time to take stock of your reading habits.) I pick up the book every once in awhile and read around in it before falling asleep or while I'm waiting for the bath to run. Not a lot, that is, and not with some program in mind - "I will now master the Romantic lyric" - for example, is not what I say at 10:30 p.m. of a Thursday night. The book, though, is revelatory, laid out for readers, and meant to be this generation's Golden Treasury, the book that formed the imagination of so many poets a hundred years ago. The book holds the added pleasure of the many introductory micro-essays written by the book's editor, Harold Bloom, who also gave the book its pugnacious title: The Best Poems in the English Language. The combativeness in that title - its agon, to use one of Bloom's favored words (it means contest) - is cool. Want to duke it out, it seems to be asking.

Bloom is arguably the most prolific and restless reader since Samuel Johnson, and it goes without saying that every poem in the book is "one of the best," but at 959 pages the book, and with essays, the book does not contain all the best poems or even (as in the case of Hamlet, The Faerie Queene and The Prelude) all of the great poems in it. Bloom knows that, too, but part of what he means to accomplish in the book is give us the pleasure of making choices after a life-time of reading. Bloom, the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, and a frequent guest on Charlie Rose, is one of the rare intellectuals - Roger Shattuck is another - who really wants to popularize greatness and genius, the writing that spills into the culture, changes it. Bloom believes in the imagination, and part of what you read, when you read him, is someone who sees writing as the deepest pleasure, the thrill of remaking the world. This kind of thing, believe it or not, got him into debates a couple of decades ago with the theorists, the Marxists and feminists and cyborgists, who believed that it was the ideas in books and poems that enslaved, controlled, policed, and duped unsuspecting readers. Bloom, a kind of Romantic reader, would never have any of that, but his book isn't one of those old-school canon-debate books either. It's also a book that wants to say why, and Bloom's intros are his ongoing defenses of his choices.

In a note on Thomas Wyatt's "They Flee From Me," a poem written decades before Shakespeare was even born, Bloom explains that the poem came out of Wyatt's trip to Italy in 1526, when he discovered Petrarch, the poet who was most influential in creating the Renaissance on the continent. "They began a new poetry in English," Bloom writes, "since Petrarch's poetics had inaugurated what, in retrospect, seems the art of the unsaid, vastly developed in the ironies of Chaucer and the extraordinary ellipses of Shakespeare." Oh, that is great; I love that. No footnotes, no careful citations: just the bold assertion - "the art of the unsaid" - that sums up a revolution. That helps when you turn to the poem itself, since it opens with a trope about wildness: women are like animals, the opening stanza implies, who will no longer "take bread from my hand." But once it "hath been otherwise," the poet tells us; once at least one woman came to him of her own accord at night. So what has happened in the meantime? The poem closes with a mysterious thought about one woman's present "newfangledness" (i.e., she doesn't come around anymore), and that is it. Something happened in the gap between stanzas: something about the new world, back there in the early 1500s; but the poet, the poem, isn't saying. Bloom sees all of modernity in this, and through his eyes so will you. And, a step further, too: you can see how Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot and e.e. cummings each learned from Wyatt's translations from the Italian how to suggest drama rather than spell it out or turn it into a moral.

The Best Poems of the English Language is Bloom's 28th book and the tenth since he set out to popularize greatness, genius, wild originality, starting with The Book of J in 1990. The Book of J is a description of those parts of the Old Testament that comprise the most ironic strands of writing in the ancient world - the stories of Creation, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Abraham. Bloom makes it clear, starting here, that after decades of scholarly writing about Romanticism and about aspects of the Kabbalah that led him to form his own sense of writing and the imagination careful analysis bores him. Instead, he prefers broad (and usually accurate) assertions about writers, about their imaginations, their contributions to the course of writing. How does this younger poet seek to best, or at least converse with, that older poet? That is Bloom's ongoing agon. It's good to read him, too, even if he is not always a great writer himself. I love his sense of the drama that is going on in the back corridors of poems - the biographical theater of Shakespeare learning from Chaucer, Whitman drinking up Emerson.

One night I flipped to his pages on Edmund Spenser, the nearly forgotten Irish poet of The Faerie Queene who Bloom regards as one of the great writers in the language. It brought me to begin that great, strange, dream-like poem again after so many years. (And I will now say to you, dear reader: read it. It is enormous and beautiful, and not at all the pretty book of jousting knights you thought it was.) Another night, last night, as it snowed, I read the section on Yeats, whose occultism Bloom takes seriously, and whose lines about the Sphinx, in "The Second Coming," he loves:

What can Yeats mean when he cries out: 'Surely the Second Coming is at hand'? We know he means the Egyptian Sphinx and not Jesus, and yet he ends the poem with: 'Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.' Are we to imagine the rough beast as devouring the Christ child in the cradle? We do not know, and we are left with Yeats's final, equivocal word, "born," which must have an ironical meaning in relation to the Sphinx.

I don't know what Yeats means either. But that night, with snow gathering at my window, and Christmas looming, I leaned in to the book. I wanted to find out.

Thoughts from Phyllis 12/11/2008

The journalism industry is going through a time of self-questioning. "How long can we do this?" "How should we change to stay viable?" Just this week, the Seattle P-I, the Times, and the Tacoma News Tribune consolidated most of their local news into one section. Every news organization is seeking ways to stay relevant.

So it was with great interest this month that I perused the biographies of newspaper editors who operated under very different circumstances and times: Carl J. Murphy and John Mitchell, Jr. They edited black newspapers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Both were children of former slaves.

Mitchell, of Richmond, VA, was known as "The Fighting Editor" for his aggressive coverage of injustice and racism. His persistence in overing a murder trial with a sketchy witness eventually forced the prosecution to drop the case.

Murphy, a German scholar and a Harvard alum, saw anti-black racism as an international problem. From Baltimore, he sent reporters to cover American blacks in the military in World Wars I and II. His paper reported Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, and he personally covered the U.S. occupation of Haiti.

As these men devoted more resources to reporting, something amazing happened: their circulations went up! Different times indeed.

I was most impressed with their complete confidence. They published in a time when black newspapers were scrutinized and threatened by their federal and state governments. Their papers both had almost gone out of business before they took over. They turned the papers around, editorially and financially!

I found out about these guys because I was assigned to write about them for blackpast.org. Dr. Quintard Taylor asked me to write about Murphy and Mitchell because I'm a journalist, too. I can't flatter myself to think that my experience added a whole lot to the entries I wrote. But I'm glad I wrote them, because learning about them made me think a lot about the purpose of reporting, and what kind of journalism has historical value. Theirs does.

George Howland Jr. Reports 12/5/2008

Emily White Joins City Arts
Amidst all the gloom and doom in print media circles, I found some good news recently: Emily White is the new editor of City Arts http://cityartsmagazine.com/, a free magazine with Seattle, Eastside and Tacoma editions. From 1995-1999, White was the editor-in-chief at The Stranger while I was that weekly's news editor. White is a brilliant editor who encouraged literary writers like Charles D'Ambrosio, Matthew Stadler, Stacey Levine, Samantha Shapiro, Ben Jacklet and Charles Mudede to contribute to or join the staff of the newspaper. She picked out the talented Trisha Ready out of a stack of unsolicited submissions. White developed a bracing journalism that combined literary writers' strong voice and use of language with reporting.

She plans on taking a similar approach at her new gig. "I want the writing to be as artful as the art we're writing about," White says. Stadler will contribute an essay to the eastside edition (where he grew up) on how suburbia is an ideal environment for the arts to thrive. Levine is working on a piece about the workers who assemble the Macy's star (also the subject of a CityStream piece). White has a broad vision of art: "It's about the culture of the city and trying to make beauty." She believes the magazines have a great opportunity because of the troubles at the daily newspapers have led to the loss of many experienced arts reporters. In addition, she says, "In economic downturns, the arts thrive because people want to escape."

Notes from Nancy Guppy 12/5/2008

Hey friends,
Live theatre in Seattle is alive and well! I saw two very different plays last week and both were outstanding.

The Adding Machine, is the inaugural play from New Century Theatre Company, a brand new theatre group in town. I attended with my friend, and Art Zone In Studio producer, Sheila Mullen, and we were both BLOWN AWAY! The acting, the set, the costumes, the makeup -- all of the elements were spot on. The play was written in 1923, post Industrial Revolution and WWI, so it's a bit bleak, but extremely thought provoking, which, to our minds, is what good theatre is all about. "The Adding Machine" is showing at ACT Theatre and runs through December 13th.

The second great theatrical experience was opening night of the Seattle Repertory Theatre's production of "You Can't Take It With You". It's an old fashioned story, written in the 1930's, but it's super well acted, with great costumes, a marvelous set, and the "moral of the story" is timely. Basically, you can't take your material possessions to the grave, so you'd better focus on what's important and what gives you joy and real meaning in life. It's a feel good show, closes on January 3rd, and I highly recommend going with family and/or friends over the holiday season.

And now for next weeks show-stopping Art Zone In Studio! Phyllis Fletcher and Lyall Bush bring us tips on good books… we visit the studio of artist, Tim Marsden… writer and performer Keith Hitchcock checks in on his one man show, "Muffinface"… Marcie Sillman chats with the adorable, and little, audience members in the lobby of PNB's "The Nutcracker"… and Dudley Manlove Quartet, the best cover band in the universe, will rock the studio!

It's gonna be a good one, so plan to watch us on Thursday, December 11th, 8:00 p.m., on Channel 21. I'll be waiting for you.

Have an excellent weekend and week.
Xo, nancy g.

Recommendations from Robert Horton 12/4/2008

Revival of the Week: Francois Truffaut's beautiful 1970 film The Wild Child opens for a week-long run at SIFF Cinema. This black-and-white film re-creates an actual 18th-century case of a boy discovered living in the forest, and the doctor (played by Truffaut himself) who attempted to bring him into the civilized world. The film gleams with a silent-movie-era simplicity (I was once inspired to double-bill it—for a college classroom--with Charlie Chaplin's The Kid for that very reason, and for some similarities in story; it was a long class, but I liked it). Plays Dec. 5 through 11.

DVD of the Week: I already suggested Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express on the show. But…you might also wait around for Dec. 9, when The Dark Knight is released to stores. Also released this week: a new two-disc treatment of The Day the Earth Stood Still, that sober and admirable (if not always exciting) 1951 sci-fi classic. This is in anticipation of the new remake with Keanu Reeves—and I know we've all been waiting for that one.

More on the Robert Horton front: roberthorton.wordpress.com

Notes from Nancy Guppy 11/24/2008

Hi all,
I'll start out with the personal report. I haven't had coffee for 2 days. No big reason, I've just been feeling a little too hyped up, and I think coffee is adding to the hyped-ness. The most I can say is that it's been tough. Really tough. If you've ever stopped drinking coffee, you know of what I speak.

On the up side, I had two Top Pot donuts for dinner last Thursday. That sounds horrible and unhealthy, but it was just so perfect. I carefully cut them both into bite size pieces, put them on a plate, and ate them one by one while watching my favorite news show, The Lehrer Report on channel 9.

Donuts + Jim Lehrer = happiness.

And speaking of happiness... Over the weekend I saw a couple of great movies: Happy-Go-Lucky by Mike Leigh. A really good, thought provoking film. Also, an excellent French film starring the phenomenal Kristin Scott Thomas called I've loved you for so long. I hadn't watched a movie in a movie theatre in a while and it was soooo nice: The big screen... the comfy seats... the total darkness. Heaven.

So... it's Thanksgiving this week, and we are showing an encore presentation of Art Zone In Studio. We will return with a brand new action-packed episode on December 4th that will include: A look at choreographer Pat Graney's new work, House of Mind... A visit to the set of Cookus Interruptus, a very funny web-based cooking show... A great piece of art from Marzil Davis... And ScratchMaster Joe will drop by the studio to do his groovy scratchin' thing!

That's Thursday, December 4th, at 8:00 p.m. I'll see you then!

I hope you have a delicious and peaceful Thanksgiving holiday.
Xo, nancy g.

P.S. I wonder if anyone has ever tried using donuts for turkey stuffing...

Theatre Highlights from Kathy Hsieh 11/20/2008

I am happy to say that I finally squeezed out time this past month to write another script of my own. The initial idea came from the true story of two people I know who happen to be roommates. They both started new relationships at about the same time. The Asian American roommate started dating a European American guy and the European American roommate started seeing an Asian American guy. I thought "what an interesting premise for a romantic comedy." However, as I started to write it, my attention, kept getting drawn away towards everything going on with the election (talk about theatricality and a real-life drama unfolding before our very eyes). So it was these two ideas that converged to form the genesis of the script - is race still a factor in how we perceive others? And how much value do we place on appearance versus substance?

The momentous election of our first African American President demonstrates how far we've come, yet for anyone who spent time talking with the general public throughout the elections, the reality of how much race and appearance are still pivotal factors in how people are perceived cannot be denied.

So what does this all have to do with my theatre highlight? I guess all these issues were on my mind when I chose the selections for this month. First, I have been in a state of euphoria so the shows I'll be talking about are all very uplifting. Second, the holidays are fast-approaching, so I wanted to give people a variety of options for their holiday-viewing fare. But mostly, I wanted to choose shows that highlight the very relevant themes our country has just witnessed.

The theme for Village Theatre's Beauty and the Beast is about not judging someone based on their appearance but rather appreciating others for who they are on the inside. The Wizard of Oz at Seattle Children's Theatre demonstrates how much we can accomplish when we all work together and that all of us already possess the power to do anything we can dream of, but we have to first believe that we can ourselves.

And finally, I wanted to highlight the Seattle Men's Chorus, not only because this year's holiday concert features the fabulous Broadway star Jennifer Holliday at two of the performances, but also because the mission of the Seattle Men's (and Women's) Chorus is to use "the power of words and music to recognize the value of gay and straight people and their relationships." And even as the mantra of change has been overtaking the country, there is still a lot of work to be done in making sure that all people are recognized and respected for who they are.

So call it fun, frothy fare with relevance - we've got a lot of terrific shows going on in our community. If you're trying to think of the perfect gift for that special someone, why not give a green gift that will be an experience to remember? Take someone to see a show!

See you at the theatre!
Kathy

Notes from Nancy Guppy 11/13/2008

Hey my friends,

I was planning to blog earlier this week, but all that rain waterlogged my brain… I was getting close to building an ark!

There are a number of tasty art events to consider doing this weekend. Artist Warren Dykeman's terrific solo show, Atomic Autobody, opens at BLVD gallery on Friday, 11/14.

The Adding Machine, the inaugural production from Seattle's newest theatre company, New Century Theatre Company opens at ACT theatre. The members of this brand new company are majorly passionate about theatre, so I think it's safe to say that Seattle can look forward to lots of great future productions from this group of artists.

Another event I'm trying to fit in is Becky's New Car at ACT Theatre, followed by The Awesome Cycle, a hard-to-describe 'music/performance art/play' thing that is performed by the wonderful group, Awesome, in ACT Theatre's Bullitt Cabaret space at 8 and 10 on both Friday and Saturday night.

And finally, there is some cool ballet happening at Pacific Northwest Ballet thru Sunday. It's a bunch of brand new work that is supposed to be real good.

Will I make it to everything? No way! But if I hit some of it, and you hit some of it-- we'll be covered.

So, the new Art Zone In Studio episode is up and running, and it's packed full of fun stuff: a great profile on sculptor Phil McCracken… music from the beautiful Sarah Rudinoff and Gretta Harley of We Art Golden… Kurt Beattie shares a memorable story from his life in theatre… and Robert Kenneth Horton talks all things filmic.

To watch the show on regular TV, just go to ye old TV schedule or watch us online on ye old website.

That's it for now, so until we meet again: Get our there, try something new, and experience the awesome power of art!
xo, nancy g.

Recommendations from Robert Horton 11/13/2008

Revival of the week: Check out SIFF Cinema's two-week tribute to distributor Zeitgeist Films, and in particular try to catch The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy's glorious 1964 musical, on Nov. 14. If you've never seen it, it just might change the way you live your life. Other titles include Guy Maddin's hilariously weird Careful (1992), and Nuri Bilge Ceylan's beautiful Climates (2006). More info: www.siff.net

DVD of the week: The Films of Budd Boetticher. Six Westerns directed by Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott, that lanky exemplar of the lean, no-nonsense Westerner. The films are similarly lean, built on logic but with a very modern feel. Considering how long fans have been waiting to get these movies out on DVD, this might be the box set of the year.

This Sunday afternoon, Nov. 16, come down to the Frye Art Museum for a lecture/discussion on David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. I will show clips from the 1962 classic and talk about how it seems even more prescient today than ever. It's at 2 o'clock, and it's free.

And visit my website for links to my writing and a daily movie diary. It'll be very disappointing if you don't.

Thoughts from Phyllis 11/5/2008

I'm trying to improve my photography. I got a new camera, took a class... but how does a true bookworm learn best? How-to books, of course! And we have a photographer right here in Seattle named Bryan Peterson who's written some very helpful ones. If the words "aperture," "depth of field," and "shutter speed" are relatively new to you, you'll want o get your hands on these books. My teacher recommended Understanding Exposure in particular. Peterson's publisher says he lives in Seattle and Lyon, France.

A friend of mine inspired me to participate in the Seattle Public Library Passport program. You pick up a free Library Passport at any SPL. It has a page for each branch. You go around to all 27, get stamped, and if you finish by January 2, you qualify for a prize drawing! A different "friend" of mine thought this was so nerdy, he tried to set my passport on fire. :I But lest you think it's all for nerds, Bus Chick at the Seattle P-I is doing it --ON THE BUS. I don't care what anyone says: that's cool. The goal of the program is to show off the renovations, expansions, and new branches paid for by Seattle voters in 1998.

It's great to see all the new branches, but the most fun part is gettin' that stamp.

Lyall Bush's Notes 11/5/2008

James Wood's book, "How Fiction Works" is a very good book about reading, about the hows of the pleasure of reading. I talked about the book in my segment on Nancy Guppy's Art Zone In Studio this week, but the book holds so many pleasures that I am writing about it here, too. "How Fiction Works," in spite of the title, is not a dry "critical survey," the kind you read dutifully in order to know more about literature (and then forget). It's a juicy tour of sentences and voices, how writers use tools ("free indirect style," "realistic detail") on their way to turning flat words on paper into worlds. So, for example, some words, through these techniques, become people - characters -- who speak and move around in rooms and make us think about them and about our own lives and worlds as we read. "How Fiction Works" is, as much as anything, a book about noticing the world - but noticing it, first, by watching how writers notice it.

An example. In a thrilling chapter on the use of detail Wood goes to one of the best short stories ever written, Anton Chekhov's "The Lady With the Dog," a love story that starts out as a cynical seduction. It starts with a man on vacation. Used to seducing women, and bored anyway, he meets a woman (with a dog), finds her at first "pathetic" and then discovers, gradually and mysteriously, that he is falling in love with her, and that this is changing his life. Wood points out a detail in the beginning that makes the story particularly rich: in bed the woman, Anna, says that she feels bad, given that both of them are married. The man, Gurov, gets out of bed, and Chekhov tells us what he does: "There was a water-melon on the table. Gurov cut himself a slice and began eating it without haste. There followed at least half an hour of silence."

Wood can't get over that, the eating of a melon followed by silence, and a half hour of it at that. Chekhov does not share Gurov's thoughts and he does not show us how he sifts the experience. Chekhov trusts us, as readers, to find in the silence our own sense of the couple's sadness and satisfaction and upset.

On my calendar this month:

John Hodgeman
Town Hall, November 6 at 7:30 p.m. $5.
The author of the "The Areas of My Expertise," a compendium of invented knowledge, some of which circled around hobo culture, is back with his new book, "More Information than You Require." Hodgeman is the "PC" in those famous Apple commercials and a regular on Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show," so he has chops as a writer and a performer. The singer Jonathan Coulton appears with him.

William Least Heat-Moon
Seattle Public Library, November 10 at 7:00 p.m., Microsoft Auditorium. FREE.
William Least Heat-Moon is getting a lot of buzz for his latest book, "Roads to Quoz" and this is a rare chance to see him in Seattle. Known for his quirky book of travel, "Blue Highways," about a series of trips through small towns, Heat-Moon here traces the journeys he and his wife, Q, took following the Dunbar-Hunter Expedition of 1804 in search of the Ouachita River in Arkansas. "Quoz" is an old word meaning "anything out of the ordinary," and that is the object of this book as well.

Recommendations from Robert Horton 10/30/2008

Revival of the Week: Rosemary's Baby, playing Nov. 1-6 at SIFF Cinema. It's the 40th anniversary of Roman Polanski's skin-crawling horror picture, with Mia Farrow as a woman who unwillingly becomes the vehicle for something evil. And whaddya know, I revived an old piece of mine about the film on my website.

And more horror for the week of Nov. 7-13: the Grand Illusion has two 3-D epics, both directed by Jack Arnold. The Creature from the Black Lagoon and It Came from Outer Space are fine examples of Fifties sci-fi, and even more fun with 3-D glasses.

Notes from Nancy Guppy 10/28/2008

(The following embarrassing story is 100% true.)

I was at Memorial Stadium watching my niece, Dana, (sophomore @ Ballard high school), play soccer. The extended family was present and accounted for, including my sister's mother-in-law, Vera (one of my favorite people in the world.). As we watched, yelled encouragement, and chatted about whatever, the topic of cake came up. (I love cake, it's one of my favorite foods, and is, therefore, always a topic of interest.) The conversation was fairly mellow, until Vera mentioned that she had once baked an orange-infused, 9-egg, 3-layer extravaganza from scratch. "Mmmm, sounds good", I said, and proceeded to ask endless questions about the texture, the icing, the sheer height, hoping that she would offer to run home and make one for me that very night (never mind that the first one had been an all day project).

After the game, as we said goodnight, and got into our cars, I knew I wasn't going straight home. A mania for cake had taken hold, and I wanted, needed, satisfaction. With mouthwatering visions of cakey delights dancing in my head, I zoomed up the hill to my neighborhood grocery store, imagining the tantalizing variety of cakes slices that I'd soon be choosing from.

It was a debacle. First of all, the dessert case was packed with endless slices of pie, but only one kind of cake. Now, you might think, "well beggars can't be choosers, Nancy", but here's the problem. I'd had this particular cake slice before-it's called "New Orleans cake"-- and it isn't good. The frosting is all thick and gloppy, and the cake is too dense-- not cakey enough. In fact, the one time I bought it, I threw most of it out. But did that history pull me up short? Sadly, no. The little cake addict in my brain was not to be denied: "I want cake, damnit, and if "New Orleans cake" is the only choice, so be it!"

And so it was. You can guess the outcome. After one bite, I realized it was no better this time around. After three bites, I was convinced.

I briefly considered bringing the cannibalized slice into work, unleashing that "free food!" feeling amongst my co-workers, but decided that it was way more humane if I just threw it out. So I did. Lots of lessons to be learned here, I'm sure, but the biggest is this: "New Orleans cake" sucks!

And now, onto this weeks Art Zone In Studio: we've got crazy fun music from Kled… a tour of the awesome Pratt Fine Arts Center… a really cool piece on photographer Hugo Ludena… you'll meet solo performer, Keith Hitchcock… and Mister Horton will take us to the movies!

Join us Thursday, 10/30, @ 8:00, then catch repeats broadcasts throughout the weekend and always on online @ www.seattlechannel.org/artzone

Have a most excellent week.
Xo, nancy g.

P.S. Dana's team did win the soccer game-go Beavers!

Theatre Highlights from Kathy Hsieh 10/23/2008

Wow! This is definitely theatre season in Seattle - there is so much going on! This week on the show, I'll be talking about ArtsWest's broadly satirical Black Gold by Seth Rozin which features 6 actors playing over 80 roles in an over-the-top style that pokes fun at everything. Also highlighted is Seattle playwright Keri Healey's world premiere of Don't You Dare Love Me by Macha Monkey. It's a dark comedy about singles in Seattle, all desperately looking for love. Plus, for those who like contemporary musicals, check-out ReAct's The Last Five Years. It just finished a run at the Theatre Off Jackson and now the show is moving to Broadway - the Broadway Performance Hall, that is. A bittersweet musical about a modern-day relationship, this two-person, one piano player musical features a knock-out performance by Jessica Skerritt.

Plus, I just closed a show, so that means it's time for me to see as much theatre as possible before my next project launches! On my list?

Seattle Children Theatre's Night of the Living Dead - a campy stage version of the classic zombie horror flick (I'm just bummed that I missed Nancy playing a zombie in the show earlier this month!)

Seattle Shakespeare Company's Henry IV - this adaptation condenses Shakespeare's original two parts into a single emotionally packed production

Balagan Theatre's The Arabian Nights - this is Mary Zimmerman's adaptation of the original tales of love, lust, comedy and dreams set in ancient Iraq

Theatre 9/12's ACT ONE: Six Sundays - 4 new one-acts by Seattle playwrights marks the start of this brand new theatre company

Live Girls Theater's Love Person - a complex and beautiful play about love and language told in three languages - English, Sanskrit and American Sign Language I've seen 7 shows in October and I'm aiming for 8 in November. Whew!

Notes from Nancy Guppy 10/22/2008

Hi there,

Well, it’s been a real art-O-rama in the Guppy house as of late. I’ve been going to all sorts of cool stuff-- here’s the short list:

Laurie Anderson at the Moore Theatre. She was fantastic. The show, entitled Homeland, was super political, but in that hilarious, interesting, thoughtful Laurie Anderson way. Her voice is so beautiful and mesmerizing, and her musicians -- a cello, viola, bass guitar and keyboard -- were outstanding.

Then there was The Silvering Path, a performance in 3-acts, featuring Butoh dance from Haruko Nishimura, incredible costumes from artist Mandy Greer, beautiful film work from Ian Lucero, and super groovy sound sculpture from Colin Ernst. As with most things that Haruko is involved in, this performance was poetic, funny, sumptuous, evocative, and decidedly NOT linear. Way to go, ya’ll!

Joe and I attended SIFF’s screening of Jazz on a Summer’s Day, a 1958 film of the Newport Jazz Festival. What an incredible movie. Great performances -- Anita O’Day, Thelonius Monk, Louis Armstrong, and Mahalia Jackson, among others -- super cool cinematography, and the audience was so interesting to watch. I swear, every woman in the crowd was wearing the same color of bright red lipstick, and, of course, everyone, women and men, were smoking like chimneys. If you have a big screen TV, I highly recommend you rent this film.

And the major highlight was seeing the Fleet Foxes at the Moore. This local band, now nationally and internationally known, plays beautiful music. Kinda retro -- the harmonies are mind blowing (reminiscent of Crosby Stills Nash) -- but with a contemporary and original sound all their own. The bands lead singer, Robin Pecknold, is the nephew of my best friend from elementary school, and when I was picking up my tickets at the will call window, someone behind me said, “Hi Nancy”. I turned around, and it was Robin! How funny to see him loitering at his own concert. He is a talented, funny, and humble young man -- a killer combo, to be sure. I strongly recommend Fleet Foxes, their debut album -- pick it up at your nearest independent record store.

And now, onto the big ‘ol show. Art Zone In Studio is back this week with all sorts of good stuff, like: Tilson's first ever quilting project ... local theatre highlights from Kathy Hsieh ... a visit with local theatre legend, Suzy Hunt ... and salsa dancing from the owner of Capital Hill’s Century Ballroom, Hallie Kuperman.

The action starts 10/23, Thursday @ 8:00, on the big channel 2-1, and streams online @ www.seattlechannel.org/artzone

Keep in touch.

Xo, nancy g.

Recommendations from Robert Horton 10/13/2008

Revival of the Week: Macbeth (1948) and Othello (1952), two films directed by and starring Orson Welles. They share the same screenwriter, too: William Shakespeare, who does some of his best work. But so does Welles -- these are intoxicating, dizzying trips through the Bard. Othello is challenged by some soundtrack problems, but otherwise dazzles in almost every frame; Macbeth soars less often, but in its full-length version actually generates considerable power, even on a low, low budget. The two screen as a double-bill at SIFF Cinema on Oct. 11th; see www.siff.net for more info.

DVD of the Week: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), an offbeat adaptation of the Oscar Wilde novel, with Hurd Hatfield as the mysteriously unchanging protagonist and George Sanders as a noticeably Wildean wit. A little early for Halloween, but it still works -- and stick around for the one color sequence.

And I say one other thing about that movie on my website.

Notes from Nancy Guppy 10/8/2008

Hi folks,

Well, I am here to tell you that local Theatre is alive and well. I went to see Eurydice at ACT Theatre this week -- I didn't want to go because it was rainy and dark and I was tired -- but I'm so glad I pulled it together because it was mind-blowingly great!

Based on the Greek myth, Orpheus and Eurydice, this production set itself in contemporary times, and the 1940's and 1950's references didn't compromise the classic story in the slightest.

The location was "the underworld" and it was represented by the bottom of a drained and broken up swimming pool, complete with a decrepit high dive board above-simple and effective. Most importantly, of course, were the performances, which were excellent all around. No miscasts at all. That said, I absolutely MUST single out Mark Chamberlin. Mark, who played the father of Eurydice, is a long time Seattle actor and he knocked this one out of the park. The minute he stepped on stage, I was riveted. In fact, I was so riveted that I tracked down his phone number the next day in order to call and shower him with praise. He deserved every effusive word pouring from my mouth!

Sadly, you can't see Mark's performance, because Eurydice closed on October 5th, but don't despair -- I'm hearing that All the Kings Men at Intiman Theatre is an excellent show as well, which runs thru November 8th.

That's all for now. Take advantage of plays and movies and concerts that come your way because you never know how a performance might affect you. What it might make you think. In my case, it turned a gloomy night, and my gloomy mood, into a memorable experience.

Our upcoming show this week is full of great stuff: The incredible glass work of Etsuko Ichikawa ... a behind-the-scenes visit to Seattle Opera's costume shop ... a preview of Seattle Children's Theatre's production of Night of the Living Dead (where I make a special guest Zombie appearance)... and Robert Horton delivers the movie goods. It all happens Thursday, October 9th, 8:00 pm on Seattle Channel 21 or watch us anytime online. Art Rocks! Xo, nancy g.

P.S. By the way, Mark Chamberlin can be seen next in Seattle Repertory Theatre's production of You Can't Take It With You, opening November 8th and running thru January 3rd.

Lyall Bush's Notes 10/2/2008

Something is going on at the New Yorker. The magazine's fiction, which used to carry weight, and then (for years) didn't, has gotten a more interesting lately. Deborah Treisman, the current fiction editor, took over from Bill Buford in 2003, and until January of his year things didn't change: month after month the fiction was merely diverting, interesting. But lately the young editor (she is still, maddeningly, only 37) has developed a new eye and even contributions from regulars are surprising: this year she has chosen remarkable stories by Annie Proulx, Mary Gaitskill, Joshua Ferris and, most especially, Alice Munro, who has published three since January, including “Deep-Holes,”, a story I have been thinking about since it first appeared in the June 30 issue. The teacher in me wants to use it as a great example of how to break the rules of the short story and still make something fierce and strange. It begins with a family picnic that turns a little scary when the older son falls into a hole, a deep one, in the woods. The rescue has some tension, but it's not all that big a deal. The child lives, the family returns home. But then Munro does something she shouldn't do: she lets her story jump forward three times – to the boy's pre-teen days, his time as a teenager, and finally to his drifting 20s. It's a breathtaking series: at first the boy honors his father, then he acts out just a little, and then, in college, he drops out of sight and, at last, out of life. Even when his father dies he refuses to return home.

A few years later his mother learns that her son, now in his twenties, is living in a shelter not far away. She arranges to visit him but finds a taciturn young man who has given his life over to poverty and serving other people. Why is the story great? In part because Munro is great maker of worlds; in part it's because her story refuses to let us in on the central enigma: loved and cherished as a child the boy decides he wants out, first into a literal hole and then into a deeper one. Munro explores what it is to just want to be expelled from life.

After you read that I hope you will put these on your calendars:

Sarah Vowell The Wordy Shipmates
October 13 at 7:30 p.m., Town Hall
The author of "Assassination Vacation" and "Take the Cannoli" looks at American Puritanism, going back to the roots and including parallels with her own life and with stops at, for example, The Brady Bunch. Presented by Elliott Bay Book Company.

Aimee Bender
October 24, 7:30 p.m. Richard Hugo House
The author of comically surreal stories and novels (“The Girl in the Flammable Skirt,” “Willful Creatures”), Bender appears as part of the Hugo Literary Series. The Series presents authors reading new work written on themes for the occasion. This month it's “Road Trip,” and Bender is accompanied by the poet Marie Howe and the award-winning Matt Ruff. Music by Laurie Katherine Carlsson.

The New York Review of Books presents "After Bush," with Robert B. Silvers, Thomas Powers, Jonathan Raban and Michael Tomasky
October 30, 7:30 p.m. at Town Hall
Pre-election talk by a few regulars of the most estimable book review in the country. Robert Silvers, editor of the Review, moderates. (Please check out Jonathan Raban's terrific memoir in the summer issue of the quarterly, Granta. It's about his own relationship to nature starting with sneaking into the local seminary's private pond when he was a young teenager to fish. It goes on to Washington state, where Raban discovers that, try as we want to show our dominance over nature, we keep being reminded that nature doesn't much care. The piece also has a great section on wine-makers who ignore the water shortage to grow great wines anyway.

Thoughts from Phyllis 9/30/2008

My brother grunted when I told him I'd be taking a black history class this fall, because "all they ever told us about in black history is Martin Luther King." Not that King wasn't great, but my brother seemed to find that approach limiting and disingenuous. I'm confident that my class at UW, and my next assigned reading, will be an answer to that dated approach. The blurb on the back says the book is a collection of essays that focus on blacks as empowered people engaged in struggle to shape their futures.

Here's a plug for used book stores: the list price for The New African American Urban History is over $60! I found it at Third Place Books in Ravenna for $10.

Back-to-school also means I have to cram in as much leisure reading as I can before the quarter starts. For me, this meant that I spent part of last weekend with one of the most memorable gangsters on TV: Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, and her memoir Grace After Midnight. Pearson played a gangster based on herself on the HBO series The Wire. Her memoir appears to be a transcription of her own oral history. If you have a friend or family member who has lived a rough life, her memoir will read and ring true. One of Pearson's most striking observations is about her transition from gangster to actor. Her director asked her to be her street-self as much as possible. He wanted the authentic "Snoop," Baltimore accent, cold attitude, and all. But Pearson knew that if she were to be successful in her new field, she'd need to leave a lot of herself behind. When she first got scouted for The Wire, she was still running drugs. But she says she stopped in order to succeed in acting. If her MySpace page is any indication, hundreds of fans are rooting for her to succeed beyond The Wire.

You can hear about my other fall leisure reading on Art Zone In Studio. I'll talk about FOUND Magazine -- a collection of notes found on the ground, in dumpsters, and everywhere -- and Voices From the Storm, an oral history of 13 Hurricane Katrina survivors.

If you want to tell me what I should talk about next time, please send me a recommendation!

Notes from Nancy Guppy 9/26/2008

Hi there,

So this morning I thought of turning on the heat, which suggests that fall has officially arrived. Dang! Now, don't get me wrong -- "Dang!" doesn't translate into "Nancy hates fall". In fact, I've always loved the whole "back to school" vibe, and the leaves turning colors still gives me a thrill. It's just that I don't dig 7 months of cold air. (Which, by the way, makes me totally understand why old people migrate to warmer climates in the winter. Of course, with global warming firmly entrenched, those warmer climates are coming to us. But that's bad because of the melting ice and rising oceans and drowning Polar Bears, and… Ahhhhh! It's all too horrible and complicated! Let's talk about art instead. Okay. Good idea.)

So…

In last week's blog, I mentioned a documentary that was coming to the Northwest Film Forum entitled The Universe of Keith Haring. It did come, and I saw it this week with my good friend, Catherine Person. We met beforehand at La Spiga for a delicious snack, and then headed to the movie. After figuring out that we were sitting in the wrong theatre -- Northwest Film Forum houses two screens and we quickly realized that we were staring at the wrong one-we high tailed it across the hall to the right screen, and were quickly enveloped in the sweet, sad and wonderful tale of Keith Haring, artist and human being. I'm sure the movie will come out on DVD, so plan to rent it at your favorite local video store, or add it to your Netflix queue.

We're nearly a month into our new season of Art Zone In Studio, and are coming up fast on episode #4. Here's what we've got going for our 10/2 show: Music from the Jose Gonzales Trio; A visit with choreographer/dancer Twyla Tharp; And my field trip to the super cool McLeod Residence in Belltown.

And looking beyond 10/2… we've got lots of fun surprises planned, like Tilson's (of "The Saturday Knights" fame), a visit with renowned quilter, Laurie Shifrin, at The Quilting Loft in Ballard. Watch for this sure-to-be-entertaining segment in our October 23rd show.

And that's about it for now. As you settle into the changing of the seasons, stick with us and we'll keep you posted on what's going around town that's worth leaving the coziness of your living room couch.

Art is good, as are you.
Xo, nancy g.

Recommendations from Robert Horton 9/25/2008

Revival of the Fortnight: SIFF Cinema offers series of politically-oriented movies beginning Oct. 3, including a couple of taut numbers from 1970s ace Alan Pakula: The Parallax View (10/3) and All the President's Men (10/7). And if you've never seen Elia Kazan's 1957 film A Face in the Crowd (10/4), this is a good opportunity to catch a prescient slice of pop-culture criticism.

DVD of the Week: Three films by Finland's leading director, Aki Kaurismaki, packaged together as his "Proletariat Trilogy," although most of his other movies are about proletariats, too. The films were made between 1986-1990, and show Kaurismaki at his best in lulled, black-humored non-plots: the droll Shadows in Paradise, the brilliant Ariel, and the nastily fun Match Factory Girl. If you don't know Kaurismaki but you like, say, the films of Jim Jarmusch, you will want to see these.

Robert's website: roberthorton.wordpress.com

Notes from Nancy Guppy 9/19/2008

Dear friends,

It's been a wild week. First things first -- I gotta update you on my 30th high school reunion. It happened last weekend and, overall, was a lot of fun. I ended up going to everything; Friday night at Tini Bigs, a bar on lower Queen Anne; Saturday night at the Washington Athletic Club; and a picnic on Sunday at Gasworks Park. Of course, weird old high school feelings came up at different times, such as:

"Do I fit in?"
"I don't think she likes me."
"I wonder if he thinks I'm cute?"

Luckily, I was able to remember that I'm no longer an insecure 16-year old, so those feelings passed by fairly quickly. Progress!

The weekend was especially fun because my dearest friend from 3rd grade, Paulette Pecknold, flew in from Denver for the event. We attended the Saturday night event together, and then she spent the night at my place, which was great because the next morning we had the luxury of talking for hours over cups of super strong coffee. Here's a picture of Paulette, me, and one of our favorite high school friends Jimmy Ross.

In conclusion … if you haven't gone to any of your reunions, let me assure you that they get better over time. I think the reason is that, as we get older, we no longer have the need to "prove" something. At least that's how I feel. And let's face it -- how often do you gather with a bunch of people who have known you for the majority of your life? Sure there are awkward moments, even a few freaky ones, but the memories I'll be taking away from this event are mostly sweet and good.

And now, onto the 21st century!

I want to tell you about an exhibit at Howard House in Pioneer Square that closes on September 27th. It's a show by Sean M. Johnson entitled Love Seat, and the work is really cool. Common objects from our everyday lives, balancing precariously. The effect is disconcerting, to say the least. Check it out if you can.

And one more suggestion. I'm a fan of documentary films and there's a great one running now thru September 25th at the Northwest Film Forum called The Universe of Keith Haring. Haring was a major artist from the 70's and 80's, who died of AIDS in 1990. If you like intimate stories about real people, this is for you.

And that's it for me. We're getting ready for next weeks show -- we've got a lot of good stuff planned, including music from the St. Helens Quartet; highlights from Hazard Factories '2008 Power Tool Race & Derby' event; and movie madness from Mister Robert Horton.

I'll be looking for you next Thursday, 9/25 at 8:00 p.m. If that doesn't fit your social calendar, you can always watch online: www.seattlechannel.org/artzone.

Don't forget that you are important!
Xo, nancy g.

Theatre Highlights from Kathy Hsieh 9/17/2008

I love fall in Seattle, not only because we often get these gloriously crisp sunny days that are my faves, but also because most theatres in Seattle launch their best shows this time of year. Not only am I opening up my next show -- Sex in Seattle 16: The Space In-Between (think an Asian American sitcom ala Friends meets Sex and the City) but whether you like something completely wild and wacky -- try Strawberry Theatre Workshop's Gutenberg! The Musical! or want something you can savor with all of your senses -- my suggestion is ACT's Eurydice - Seattle theatre has it all.

And best of all, you can get free tickets to see theatre during Seattle's very own Live Theatre Week hosted by Theatre Puget Sound. During the week of October 13 - 19, you'll have a chance to catch theatre showings and events, get behind the scenes tours and participate in fun theatre activities -- all for FREE! There's going to be a special kick-off celebration and everyone's invited -- on Sunday, October 5 at 12 noon at Seattle Center's Fisher Pavilion. You'll get a chance to see some theatre, win fun raffle prizes, meet lots of local theatre companies and most importantly, be the first to sign up for free theatre tickets to Live Theatre Week!

What else do I have in my own upcoming theatre queue? ReAct's The Last Five Years an award winning contemporary musical about modern romance and Theater Schmeater's The White Devil, a fascinating tale portraying society's endless obsession with moral corruption and scandal.

See you at the theatre!

Notes from Nancy Guppy 9/10/2008

Hey Ya'll,

Well, looks like the summer we didn't get in August is here in full force and I, for one, am not complaining. Fall really is my favorite month—beautiful, crisp, warm, and nostalgic.

And speaking of nostalgic-- my 30th high school reunion is happening this weekend. Yes indeed-- the great Queen Anne High School class of '78 is convening for a series of weird and wonderful events over a 3- day period. I'm looking forward to it, however I am slightly concerned that I'll find myself looking at a bunch of semi-familiar faces and wondering, “Who in the hell are these old geezers?” Of course, as you might imagine, my real fear is that those “old geezers” will be thinking the same thing about me. Hmmm. Perhaps I should have gotten that face-lift after all… Oh well, too late now. Thick layers of makeup will have to suffice.

In other, non-self obsessed, news… I'm heading down to On the Boards this week for a tailgate party in their across-the-street parking lot. This event, in addition to kicking off their 2008/2009 season, is celebrating 30-years of presenting brilliant performance to Seattle audiences. This sure-to-rock party will include all sorts of fun & groovy arty stuff, along with an excellent meal of hot dogs, chips and, my favorite food group, CAKE!

(Quick side note: I love and adore cake. If you're with me on that, check out Simply Desserts, in beautiful downtown Fremont. They make everything from scratch, and all of it is, in a word, supercalifragilisticexpeealidocious!)

That's it for me. Hope you are having a most excellent week. Enjoy these blue-sky days. Think of the trees and birds and mountains and people as one-of-a-kind artistic creations. And if you find yourself stuck in traffic, imagine that the surrounding cars are sculptures, and that you're part of a beautiful, slow-moving sculptural parade…

xo, nancy g.

Recommendations from Robert Horton 9/11/2008

I wish I could hark back to the summer of 2008 and recount all the things that happened, but when you review movies for a living, there is really only the next weekend. So forget summer: if you are looking for a movie in Seattle in the next couple of weeks, consider the Northwest Film Forum's tribute to the early films of future Oscar-winner Milos Forman, which are tucked away on Tuesdays and Wednesdays in their schedule. Classics such as Loves of a Blonde and The Fireman's Ball (both playing /23 and 9/24) give highly amusing evidence of why Forman would later go on to a successful Hollywood career. The Grand Illusion has a "24th Anniversary" engagement of This is Spinal Tap running from Sept. 13-18, which I guess would be useful for people who like to recite the dialogue with other audience members.

DVD of the Week: How the West was Won, the 1963 epic filmed in honest-to-gosh three-camera Cinerama. The DVD, expertly produced, gives a vivid impression of the process, with its weird wide vistas and strange compositions. Even with a giant widescreen TV--and I don't have that--you won't quite get the full Cinerama effect. Cinerama really requires a curved screen, and for that you'll have to wait for the next time Seattle's Cinerama (one of three places on earth with proper Cinerama equipment) decides to show it.

And by the by, yours truly now has a website chronicling my filmic thoughts: roberthorton.wordpress.com.

Notes from Nancy Guppy 9/3/2008

Hi Everybody;

Fall is fast approaching -- the air has that special feeling that makes me want to run out and buy new school clothes -- and those lazy-hazy summer daze are fading into memory.

Speaking of ... I hope you had a great summer. I sure did. In fact, if I was in 6th grade and my teacher was making us write those annual "what-I did-this-summer" reports, here would be a few of my highlights:

Isaac Layman's incredible exhibit at Lawrimore Project. Issac created these gigantic photographs of his regular stuff in his regular house -- a medicine cabinet, a drawer of kitchen utensils -- and the images were spectacular to behold. Even better, I happened to visit the gallery when Issac was present, and he gave me a one-on-one tour. We spent over an hour wandering through the exhibit, and I can't tell you how much talking directly with the artist added to my experience, and enjoyment, of his work. Best of all, Issac is a super nice and lovely person, and he handled all my questions -- some of which were kinda stupid -- with friendly grace. Kudos to Scott Lawrimore for recognizing such a talent!

Another summer high point was a visit to SmokeFarm, a beautiful, rural green space in Arlington, run by liberal arty people who put on Woodstock'esqe type events, but without the mud and LSD. Check out their website for upcoming events -- it's definitely worth a trip north.

And now, onto the big 'ol show!

We are super-way excited to be back for our second Art Zone In Studio season. Our crack studio crew has re-assembled, our new dream-come-true producer, Sheila Mullen, has climbed on board, and we are poised and ready to deliver Seattle's fabulous local art scene right into your living room (or wherever you like to watch).

AZIS Numero Uno premieres on Thursday, September 11th, @ 8:00 p.m. sharp. Be there or be square! (Or just TIVO it.)

And that is all for now. So, until Thursday ... breathe deeply, break a rule, and remember: ART ROCKS!

xo, nancy g.

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