Pop Culture Petri Dish

The Tractor Tavern played host to a pretty nifty show on Friday July 2, and once again I was on hand with a camera. A detailed review and slideshow can be seen at the Seattle Concerts Examiner, but I had to (again) crop the pictures and omit a few that I really liked. Rusty Willoughby: Lindsay Fuller and the Cheap Dates: Mark Pickerel and his Praying Hands:

The Columbia City Theater in South Seattle celebrated its Grand (Re-) Opening with two free shows June 25 and 26, and it was a pip by all accounts. Duties with Bizarro Movie Night kept me from seeing the June 25 show (a Hip-Hop extravaganza featuring Mash Hall, Cloud Nice, and DJ Suspence), but I was in attendance, camera in hand, for the Saturday performance by Kelli Schaefer , Drew Grow and the Pastors' Wives , and Grand Hallway . Details (and a slideshow) can be accessed at the Seattle Concerts Examiner by going here . I had an embarassment of riches, photos-wise: Chock it up to great good luck, and great subjects. Only a small portion were used for the Examiner slideshow, and I had to severely truncate the photos that did make the cut, so enclosed please find some of my favorite snapshots of the evening, in all their un-shrunk, un-cropped beauty. Click on each to see a larger version if you like. Kelli Schaefer: Drew Grow and the Pastors' Wives: Grand Hallw...

If'n you read the last entry, you know I've been a movie-watchin' mole lo, these last three weeks, and it's been quite the adventure. In addition to seeing more movies in theaters in that span than I did in the preceding six months, I was able to freeload my way into the Seattle International Film Festival Opening and Closing Night Galas, where neon-colored cocktails and much shared movie geekery amongst fellow nerds/journalists flowed freely. And I met some talented and fascinating filmmakers, to boot. I saw 28 feature films during the run of SIFF. Almost all of them were good-to-great; only a couple were straight-up disappointments. Enclosed please find my evaluations of everything I saw, along with accompanying ratings. The Extra Man : **1/2 The Fest opening film was a quirky comedy featuring Kevin Kline as a struggling playwright who escorts elderly rich women and takes recently-unemployed Ivy League professor Paul Dano under his wing. Kline's a hoot, as al...

Damn, I love this poster. Just saying. And it does have a bearing on this overdue Petri Dish missive. The last two to three weeks of my life have been spent split between my day job and the glorious rigor that has been covering the Seattle International Film Festival for the SunBreak.com . I've seen a ton of great movies, and better yet, I've been able to interview some of the makers of those films in detail. It's been the most inspiring couple of weeks I've had, writing-and-movie-lust-wise, in awhile; though the writing part's been hard to squeeze in 'twixt dashing madly between theaters, home (sleeping and eating can be quite the nuisance sometimes), and the W Hotel (site of most of the interviews I've conducted). I'm enjoying an actual vacation (or, more likely and aptly, a stay-cation) for the next couple of weeks and plan to use that time to get a lot of creative/writing things up to speed. I'll, of course, be getting the ol' Petri Dish c...

Pardon me for not posting anything new here in a spell. I haven't been idle, by any measure. Much of my non-day-job time's been parced out between a couple of enterprises. One of them is Bizarro Movie Nights at the Aster Coffee Lounge in scenic Ballard, Washington, in which I put my Doctorate of Schlockology to the test by presenting strange cinema of various stripes on the grandeur of a big(gish) projection screen. Yours Truly delivers patter so snappy you can scat sing to it (when I'm not ceding hosting duties to the eminent El Serpiente de Oro); audiences laugh and stare goggle-eyed at pinheaded giants, cackling Indonesian witches, and Satan-fighting holiday icons; and everyone can partake of fine coffees, teas, beers and wines in one of Ballard's coziest locales! Go to the Bizarro Blog for details. Next one's on May 1, and we're featuring a night of vice and sin, Depression-era style--Don't miss it! I've also been pouring a lot of spare time int...

I went to high school with Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell (he graduated one year ahead of me). We sang in choir together, and spent a lot of time talking music: He was one of the few headbangers during that halcyon time (ahem, the early eighties) that didn't grimace when you mentioned The Clash or The Sex Pistols. We even partied together some: One of the most surreal things I ever saw after an all-night party was Jerry in the front yard of Kevin Yeagher's parents' house as the sun rose, sitting hunched over like some zen gargoyle. Beads of morning dew peppered his serenely sleeping-sitting-up form like spiders' eggs as steam rose from the grass. It was a strange and humorous vision that always stuck with me, and we had a good laugh about it the following week in choir class. The last time we bumped into one another was at the taping of MTV's New Years' Show somewhere around 1993. Cypress Hill, The Breeders, and Nirvana headlined; Jerry was a VIP gu...

The third installment of The Tales of Brave Mark Lanegan (see parts one and two to catch up) showcases Lanegan's um, lateral, contribution to the Northwest Music Scene via a misapplied Ninja kick. Click on image to enlarge.   In case the joke's not immediately apparent, one of the songs on Nirvana's multi-megaton smash Nevermind was a track called "Stay Away," hence the speculative fiction on its genesis. ( The actual origin of the song is a bit less, um, impactful). OK, after eighteen years the below panel still makes me snicker. Go figure.