Jen Graves Profiles the Free Sheep Foundation—the Artists Behind Bridge and the Belmont—As They Move from One Dying Building to Another
“So far, the artists behind Free Sheep have delivered ephemeral monuments to the ephemeral monument we all live in, the city. They’ve been mythic and short-lived; the challenge now will be to preserve that spirit over the length of a three- or six-month lease. The idea is that once one lease expires, the artists will move to another disused space, or maybe even take over more than one at a time. It’s a moveable feast of artists in real-estate purgatory.”

Your Heatstroke-Preventing Guide to the Capitol Hill Block Party
Michaelangelo Matos interviews Craig Finn of the Hold Steady. Kelly O “interviews” Jay Reatard. Tim Harrington on the hottest show his band Les Savy Fav has ever played (illustrated!). Eric Grandy on Girl Talk. Megan Seling introduces New Faces. Plus: write-ups of every act this weekend, including Vampire Weekend, U.S.E., Kimya Dawson, Fleet Foxes, and Throw Me the Statue. Details, tickets, grid, etc., are here.

Sean Nelson on the Complex Morality of Loving Roman Polanski
“For this antisentimentalist, in film as in life, ‘acceptable behavior’ is something for other people to worry about. Which is, of course, the whole dilemma of being an ardent fan of Polanski’s movies. Because of what we know and think we know, it’s never easy to find the line between the artist and his work. Because there is no such line. Because the Polanski who made so many titanic works of cinema is the same Polanski who escaped from the Nazis is the same Polanski who not only lost his wife and unborn child to the Mansons but was initially accused of the murders in the press is the same Polanski who gave a 13-year-old girl champagne and a quaalude fragment then had sex with her on the floor of Jack Nicholson’s living room. If the 20th century happened to anyone, it happened to Roman Polanski. And as a new documentary shows, it’s still happening to him.”

David Schmader on an Alleged Nazi Living… Like, Right Over There
“Details come from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle, which alleges Herr Egner joined the Nazis in German-occupied Serbia in April 1941, after which he allegedly became part of a ‘mobile killing unit’ that claimed more than 17,000 victims. Most of the victims were Jewish men, women, and children, who Egner’s unit allegedly took from a Belgrade concentration camp, asphyxiated with carbon monoxide, and then dumped in a mass grave. Today, Peter Egner will spend a final day puttering around the Bellevue retirement community where he’s lived for the past two years in relative anonymity.”

Annie Wagner on the New Brideshead Revisited Adaptation
“It isn’t at all a bad time for a new adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s exquisite Brideshead Revisited. The BBC miniseries is over a quarter-century old, and there’s never been a proper feature. The homosexual content—never exactly disguised—can be overt now, but we’re not so advanced that the crushing guilt that accompanies it seems foreign. Meanwhile, Waugh’s simultaneous envy of and nostalgia for the perfumed decadence of the English-Catholic aristocracy between the wars seems especially poignant, poised as we are on the lip of another recession.”

Jonah Spangenthal-Lee on the CIA’s New Presence at UW
“When classes at the University of Washington resume this fall, some students at the school will be under the watchful eye of a Central Intelligence Agency spook. In fact, some of them will even be learning from him.”

ALSO DISCUSSED IN THIS ISSUE: Pink Skull; what the Zombies think of Odessey and Oracle; Implied Violence’s new show in a disused City Light warehouse; rural King County; sexual harrassment at the Washington State Department of Natural Resources; the PONCHO shakeup; being ugly; Montreal; taco trucks; Taco Time; Nabokov; French detective novels; shamanism; the Double Beer Helmet™ (see below); and more.