Located between Green Lake and Wallingford is a knot of streets that never ceases to confound drivers. On one corner, a signpost has two signs for First Avenue North pointing in different directions. Frightening for the uninitiated, residents like their twisting roads. The neighborhood is known as Tangle Town, but the residents don't seem to know it. Some say the area is part of Wallingford. Others locate it in the Green Lake neighborhood, and a handful of people think of it as Tangle Town. The on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia.org puts it in Wallingford, though it acknowledges, "Some consider it to lie outside of Wallingford proper."
I see, from the newspapers, that the Wallingford neighborhood has managed to derail the Seattle Parks and Recreation's plans to fill Gas Works Park with crowds of noisy people, musicians and performers that would completely disrupt the bucolic neighborhood's summertime serenity. Good for them!We all know that the people who live closest to a park use that park more than anyone else. Basically, that makes the park neighborhood property. Outsiders may sometimes use the park, too, but they should really go to the parks that their tax money supports - the parks in their own neighborhoods - and stop trespassing in other neighborhoods.I was especially impressed by the Friends of Gas Works Park's lawyers' insistence that the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) requires an Environmental Impact Statement for events, as well as for bricks and mortar.
Of all the work legislators do, nothing is as important as providing the necessary funding for educating our children. Our state constitution wisely declares that education is the paramount duty of our state, and it is a responsibility I take most seriously.Unfortunately, providing the funding for the world-class education that Washington's children deserve is always a challenge. There are only so many dollars to go around, and so many needs. And I am one vote in a body with 149 members. Working with other lawmakers who strongly support education, last year we passed one of the best-ever, biennial state budgets for our public schools. For the first time, we fully funded the class-size and cost-of-living adjustment initiatives passed by voters and increased overall education funding by 9 percent.
Roosevelt High School sophomore Mayre Squires, 16, recently took her first play, "Ultra Girl vs. Puberty: The Final Showdown," to ACT Theatre for a professional reading."Most people don't have that in their lifetime, that kind of experience," said Squires' mother, Elisabeth.Like her daughter, Elisabeth will have her first play produced, at Live Girls' theater in Ballard this summer."It just brought our relationship to a new level," Elisabeth said.Learning from writingIn 2005, ACT's Young Playwrights Program taught playwriting to 225 middle and high school students in 14 Seattle-area schools. This year, the Young Playwrights Festival staged readings by 10 of those playwrights. Professional playwright Amy Wheeler came to Squires' language-arts class for several weeks to teach the students how to write their own plays, and Wheeler subsequently directed the staging of Squires' play.
Nestled in a quiet corner of Ravenna at 20th Avenue Northeast and Northeast Ravenna Boulevard, Boulevard Grocery has been known to neighbors since the 1920s. Initially selling only beer, wine, cigarettes and magazines, the store has become a welcoming gathering place to enjoy coffee, pastries, lunch or to pick up a few grocery items only in the last 10 years.University students, professors and professionals find the shop's makeover much more accommodating to their needs. "The previous owners added coffee and sandwiches... and a lot of neighbors like it more now as a coffee shop," said new owner Keum Sil An, who purchased the business last month.
A packed house greeted Sung Yang, senior policy advisor to Mayor Greg Nickels, at the March 9 joint meeting of the Rotary Club of SODO and the South Downtown Business Association at Starbuck Center, where he gave an update on Nickels' proposal to put a strip-club zone in Seattle's South End industrial area.After welcoming members and guests, business association president Mike Perringer tactfully introduced Yang and "the issue of the gentlemen's clubs.""Adult nude dancing is a form of free expression," Yang said. "From a land-use standpoint, we had to place this use somewhere in the city."He described the proposal as "a conscientious effort to make sure Seattle would not be a strip club-friendly city."The proposed area extends from Interstate 5 over to Third Avenue South, and from South Walker to Dawson streets, just short of the South Holgate Street overpass, down to the railroad tracks. The area encompasses 333 parcels spread over 310 acres.
Randomly generated numbers, the slippery hand of fate, a few drinks and the pursuit of prizes have combined to make free bingo a popular part of the week for a crowd that fills the small bar in Greenwood's China Jade restaurant every Sunday afternoon for a couple of hours.The China Jade, at North 86th Street and Greenwood Avenue North, isn't the only North End drinking establishment that features the game. There are several, including the Baranof just up the street on Greenwood Avenue, where bingo is played Saturday mornings from 8 to 10.
Whaam! Pow! Crak! Bam! Pop ... Lichtenstein's come to town. It's been a while since there's been an exhibit of Pop Art in Seattle, so "Roy Lichtenstein: Prints 1956-97" at the Henry Art Gallery is most welcome, especially because he was one of the luminaries of the genre that breached the wall between "high" and "low" art and thus had a profound effect on the American art that followed. He and the other Pop artists were striking out against what they saw as the pretensions of the Abstract Expressionist movement that preceded them. They lived in a time of optimism, rampant materialism, urban growth and social upheaval. Warhol captured the ethos of his time with his images of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy and others. Lichtenstein celebrated the vernacular culture through comic-book subject matter realized in a machine-made look that incorporated the Benday dots used in newspaper printing.Lichtenstein, with his bold palette, affection for primary colors and his comic-book style, emphasized the ordinary, even kitschy elements of America in the post-World War II decades. Although much of the work consists of prosaic images, it would be a mistake to dismiss it lightly. He infused his prints with subtleties and through them provided a complex exploration of art and ideas.
No one who has seen "La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc," Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 silent masterpiece, can forget Falconetti's shattering performance as the God-driven Maid of Orléans. Chronicling Joan's torture, trial and conviction, "Passion" is shot almost entirely in near-unbearable closeups that terraform the actress' luminous face into a landscape of the soul. To go from Dreyer's ecstatic cinema to Marc Rothemund's plain-speaking, insistently undramatic "Sophie Scholl - The Final Days" is to descend from the sublime to the prosaic. What these two movies have in common is directorial fascination with the transcendent face of faith, whether projected by a 19-year-old French peasant in the 15th century or a 21-year-old student in Nazi Germany.Two previous films (Michael Verhoeven's "The White Rose" and Percy Adlon's "Five Last Days," both made in 1982) have celebrated the martyrdom of Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans and the other University of Munich students whose peaceful attempts to sabotage the Third Reich led to their arrest and execution in 1943, just as Germany was sinking into defeat. Newly discovered transcripts and eyewitness testimony inspired Rothemund to bring an almost documentary eye to bear on this latest dramatization of the short, brave life of one of Germany's most revered heroines. (In the 2002 documentary "Blind Spot - Hitler's Secretary," title person Trudl Junge describes the impact of her realization that she was about the same age as martyred Sophie Scholl when she first came to work for the Führer; it triggered a minor moral epiphany she took a lifetime to achieve.)"Sophie Scholl" offers little in the way of its heroine's backstory and personality traits, beginning pretty much in media res. Members of the White Rose (it's speculated that the name was borrowed from the mysterious B. Traven's anti-totalitarian novel of the same name) write, print and mail thousands of broadsheets denouncing Hitler's systematic destruction of freedom and fatherland. One day, at Munich U., Sophie (an outstanding Julia Jentsch) and Hans (Fabian Hinrichs) distribute piles of flyers around a vast atrium just before students stream out of class. At the last minute, Sophie - perhaps without thinking, perhaps as a gesture of defiance - flings the last of their leaflets out over the atrium lobby. When a toadying janitor sees and denounces them, the siblings are marched to the Rector's Office, where they look like nothing so much as kids called in after some prank, to get a dressing down by the principal. But that's the style of the film: to show a young woman who wraps herself in calm and dignity, her face a bright flag raised against the injustice and ugliness around her.
When opportunity knocks, the wise ballet corps member dances through the door as quickly and as beautifully as she can.For Lesley Rausch, that opportunity came during Pacific Northwest Ballet's opening gala last fall, when she was asked to be one of four dancers premièring "Red Angels." "The opportunity to dance in the Gala, in a principal part, was huge for me," said Rausch, who started with PNB as a professional division student in 1999 and was hired as a member of the corps de ballet in 2001.Rausch still remembers that jump from PNB student to PNB dancer as another major moment in her development as dancer. "For one thing, we start getting paid then," she joked. More seriously, Rausch added that she was happy to start her career in an environment where she already knew the company and the other dancers. "There was another girl in my class and three or four boys who all experienced that transition into the corps at the same time. And it is a big transition. You go from class and concentrating technique to focusing on rehearsal and performance. For me, that was really great. After all, why be a dancer if you don't want to perform?"
Life is far too serious to be taken seriously, quips Noël Coward's protagonist in "Private Lives," now playing at Seattle Repertory Theatre. It's obvious the five actors onstage are having a marvelous time proving this supposition. And so is the audience.Directed by Gabriel Barre, Coward's sophisticated 1930 comedy of manners, sex and hormones still sizzles in a combination of wit and style. We're plunged into the heart of the snobbish world of Britain's idle rich, when glamour and triviality were served with cigarettes and martinis. But when this posh set stops posing and preening, they expose their flaws. And we love it. Divorced upper-class lovers Amanda and Elyot are passionate, narcissistic, uninhibited, live-in-the-moment people who are now married, respectively, to Victor and Sybil. But while honeymooning with their new, young and rather boring spouses, Amanda and Elyot unknowingly end up at the same seaside French hotel, sharing adjacent balcony terraces. Preposterous? Perhaps. Amusing? Absolutely.
First, a disclaimer: I do not expect to convey in printed word the energy and enthusiasm of Simon Neale. Neither can I capture the charming English accent he retains after 23 years in the States. I hope to simply introduce one of the people responsible for keeping fun in Fremont."It's going to be really big," Simon bragged about this year's Moisture Festival, running through April 9. As one of five producers of this outrageous vaudevillian event, Simon will be on hand at every show."We've attracted a lot of fellow performers," Simon announced proudly. Artists from around the world heard of the festival and came for an opportunity to perform with other comedy/variety acts.Moisture Festival features juggling, clowning, bubble-blowing, music, trapeze and other entirely indescribable acts all done on stage, live."That form of entertainment is soaring in popularity in Europe," Simon spoke with authority after his recent European tour with Cirque de Flambé. Considering the crowds at last year's festival, some could argue it's soaring in popularity right here.
Restaurant-goers now have the opportunity to sit down for some freshly made sushi while hearing a live concert by a selection of Northwest jazz and swing performers. Sushi-lover and Pony Boy Records founder Greg Williamson, a resident of the Hawthorne Hills area, will present free jazz every Friday from 7:30 to 10 p.m. at Hiroshi's Restaurant in Eastlake."It's a little bit of an unlikely place," Williamson said. "But that's what makes it fun and a little bit different."Different guest jazz artists from the Pony Boy Records label, as well as some special guests, will perform each week. The jazz concert series started on March 3 with the Jon Hamar Trio, which included bassist Jon Hamar, guitarist Ryan Taylor and drummer Williamson. Hamar has an album under the Pony Boy label.
Advocates for the University Heights Center, at Northeast 50th Street and University Way Northeast, are cautiously optimistic that the building and grounds can be preserved for community use. It won't be easy to do that, conceded U-Heights executive director Richard Sorenson. For one thing, the financially strapped Seattle School District, which owns the complex, could end up selling the property to a developer, he said. But Sorenson believes an infusion of $1 million from the city's Pro Parks levy and $1 million from King County's Conservation Futures tax would allow the nonprofit organization to cut a deal for a long-term lease with the school district.
"Alternative spaces" are non-profit art galleries run by and for artists, venues that came into being in Seattle and other cities in the 1970s as independent organizations. They provide opportunities for increasingly diverse artistic expression and experimentation separate from the larger, more mainstream galleries. These spaces traditionally championed feminism and ethnic diversity by presenting works by women artists and artists of non-European descent. By the early 1980s, recent art school graduates could find storefront venues for their installation, conceptual, video and performance art endeavors. Without such venues, we would only have a chance to see work made for either commercial purposes in larger and established galleries, or work by mostly dead or famous artists in museums. No surprise that Capitol Hill teems with these unconventional exhibition halls sprouting, like spring, all over the place. Here is a look at just two of them.