(You can revisit those days—Remember them? Remember that replacement, the unctuous Corey Pearlstein? And the inscrutable board president Robb Kreig?—in a series of Theater News columns.)

^{Photos courtesy of Matthew Richter.}

Before.

After:

Richter has been hanging out at the demolition site and writes: "This morning I found, literally in a pile of rubble, this big Plexiglas sign that used to hang in the lobby welcoming people to ConWorks. If ConWorks gets a eulogy, this should be it."

Welcome to Consolidated Works. If you haven't been here before, here's the idea in a nutshell:

ConWorks is arranged architecturally like a wheel, with a hub and spokes. The lobby is the hub of this wheel, and the rooms laid out around it are the spokes. These rooms include:

* a 150-seat mainstage theater
* a 50-seat movie theater
* a 4,500 square foot gallery
* a music stage
* an arts resource center
* a full bar and lounge
* three artist studios
* offices for six fellow nonprofits

If you haven't seen the whole facility yet, please feel free to ask at the box office about taking a tour of the space. We love showing it off.

Our programming follows the same hub-and-spoke structure as our architecture, The hub, in this case, is theme, and each eight-week "Consolidation Series" examines a different theme--Artificial Life (Fall 1999), or Imagined Landscapes (Winter 2000), or Suspension (Winter 2004), for example. The spokes, in this analogy, are the various arts disciplines themselves.

Each Consolidation Series includes a film series, a music series, a visual arts exhibit, a mainstage production in our theater, and a series of lectures, all examining a common theme. The theme is the glue that ties the total ConWorks experience together. It provides our curators in each arts discipline with a common starting point and a common goal, and it offers you, the audience, a preliminary answer to the most common question heard around contemporary art -- "What was that about?"

This resource center is a good place to start exploring the current theme. Here you'll find statements by the curators and the executive director, displays tying into the theme and programming, and see and hear some of the upcoming programming in the series.

Consolidated Works is a nonprofit organization, supported by many individuals like yourself, in addition to private foundations, corporations, and municipal granting agencies. Please join us as a supporter by becoming a member or a donor today.

Help build Seattle the contemporary arts center it deserves.

Richter says he's been hanging out at the site, taking photos, and made friends with the demolition guys. They let him wander around and take photos (and took a few photos of dramatic parts falling when he wasn't there). "The demolition guys were incredibly curious about what had happened there," Richter says. "Far more curious than the board of directors ever was."

He also notes that the demo company takes the old lumber, mills it clean in Tacoma, and resells it as salvage lumber. "So if anyone wants furniture made from the old Consolidated Works," Richter says, "point them to xomonline.com."

Goodbye all over again, ConWorks.

UPDATE

Steven Vroom sent along some links to other digital panoramas at ConWorks from back when:

http://www.vroomjournal.com/panorama/lobbyvr.php
http://www.vroomjournal.com/panorama/conworks1.php
http://www.vroomjournal.com/panorama/conworks2.php

...and today the Los Angeles Times came out on my side, giving an extravagantly negative review to Criss Angel: Believe, "the gloomy, gothic muddle of a show that officially lurched into being on Halloween night like some patched-together Frankenstein's monster."

"Believe's" framing device is that Angel accidentally receives a 6-million-volt jolt of electricity that fries off most of his face (a spectacle captured by an ever-present video camera). This propels him into deep hallucinatory space where our Siegfriedian hero must confront demons and angels that stalk his imagination.

These include a sinister troupe of dancing rabbits who, in one early sequence, tear Angel's parboiled "corpse" apart and dance, exultantly hoisting his severed limbs and torso. In a later scenario Angel gets sliced in half with an electric blade, his oozing intestines visible through the smoky atmospherics.

Cirque du Soleil helps Angel with the theatrics, but it's not much help:

[W]hile Cirque's poetic imagery at its best can leave you rubbing your eyes and holding your breath, spectators here are more likely to find themselves stifling a yawn or wincing with embarrassment.

Read the whole thing here.

Thank you, World of Wonder, which is also hosting an exhibition of political art in its storefront gallery. Two samples: Sarah Fawcett Majors and Condoleeza Rice.

Why lil' ol' Johnsontown? Because, the New York Times article suggests, Representative John Murtha's wife is a major booster for that symphony and Rep Murtha (D-PA) heads a Congressional committee that "hands out lucrative defense contracts."

“She [Ms. Murtha] just loves knowing that we have an orchestra that is the quality of a larger city orchestra,” the symphony executive director, Patricia Hofscher, said of Mrs. Murtha. “Her friends have come here and been impressed by the quality of the orchestra in a geographic and economic region that, let’s face it, are not on the beaten path.”

For the first time, corporations and their lobbyists are being required to disclose donations they make to the favorite causes of House and Senate members, and a review of thousands of pages of records shows the extent — and lavishness — of this once hidden practice.

During the first six months of 2008, lobbyists, corporations and interest groups gave approximately $13 million to charities and nonprofit organizations in honor of more than 200 members of the House and Senate. The donations came from firms with numerous interests before the Congress, such as Wal-Mart, the Ford Motor Company, Kraft Foods and Pfizer, and were received by charities including prominent organizations like the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, as well as local groups controlled by members of Congress or those close to them.

This kind of corporate giving is actually an investment in the business's future profits—I wonder how the new disclosure laws, coupled with the flailing economy (and, for Seattle, Boeing's plunging stock prices) will put the screws to Seattle arts organizations?

(Read the rest at the NYT.)

Is there a Nobel prize for dressing up your pet for Halloween yet? Because whoever's responsible for the costume above should win it.

Runners-up here, here, and here.

Thank you, Slog tipper Grace.

To use one of DeLanda’s own examples, a city has a certain infrastructure that can be viewed as material, but also has facades and skylines, an excessive surface unnecessary for their current functions. The term “skyline” is so nice that it ought to be made into a technical term in philosophy: objects are not just hidden material strata, but each has a skyline with which it greets the others.

How does one turn this...

...into a term like "ontology" or "hauntology" or "ontic"? What could a science or theory of the skyline do for us?

If art criticism is to become invulnerable it must be grounded not in economics but in the body, the head, the physical brain itself. The critic must argue that this or that thing is good because the biological processes that made it happen are good processes. But how does one do this? Neurology offers the critic a solution.

What I lacked at the moment of presenting this solution was any knowledge of mirror neurons. I learned about them by accident on July 16, 2008. I was surfing cyberspace when I came across the enchanting (almost Borgesian) words “mirror neurons” (I would also have been enchanted by the words “maze neurons” or “haze neurons” or “twilight neurons”). And what are mirror neurons (which can also be called echo/dub neurons—but that’s for another post)? This is how I described them in a recent book review:

Mirror neurons are neurons in the brain that fire when a primate sees another primate perform an action. Meaning, the action (grabbing a cup, caressing a nipple, making a face) is not simply seen, it is also experienced within the head of the perceiver. Furthermore, it is experienced as if the primate had committed the action him/herself. Ultimately, learning, talking, acting are the products of direct, even crude, imitation, or, to use the language of Iacoboni, simulation. We not only learn from others, we are others.

In another post, The Future of Criticism, I wrote:

Mirror neurons in the brain fire when, for example, your finger caresses the tip of someone’s nipple. Mirror neurons also fire in the same way if you happen to see another person’s finger caressing the tip of someone’s nipple. This means the inside is no different from the outside. How you experience your own body is also how you see another human experience their own body.

My point: Discovered a decade or so ago in Parma, Italy, mirror neurons are the gateway between to two socials (or associations): the human body and human culture. With mirror neurons we can finally connect cultural processes to biological ones. Cultural developments are no longer something special or exceptional or independent but continuous with organic developments. Not only that, culture impacts its base, the body. The whole Marxist edifice of superstructure and base crumbles. The movement between the body (bios, base, production of life) and culture (ideology, superstructure, production of codes) is not one-way—it’s both ways. Culture changes the brain; changes in the brain change culture, and what binds the social of the body to the social of a community are mirror neurons. Language is not just language and art is not just art. These are the productions of natural imitation, and must be understood as having that point of departure and point of return.

On Sunday night, Sarah Silverman made her London debut with a show at the Hammersmith Apollo. It lasted 40 minutes, consisted of almost entirely recycled material, and ended with Silverman being forced to "give a Q&A session as an encore after admitting she had no other material prepared."

It sounds uniquely squirmy, and I look forward to YouTube evidence. In the meantime, here are reviews from the BBC and the Times.

Cultural rights, you say? What are those?

Exactly. It's a book you want to pick up (and at Powell's it's only $16.95). I've written about it here.

For more natural linkage between art and politics, see Modern Art Notes's series this week on contemporary art and the American flag, which also has its own gallery (that you can add to) on BuzzFeed.

My favorite of the images up now is by photojournalist Todd Heisler. Remember this one?

From page 18 of I-985 (.pdf of it here):

Dedicates revenue previous allocated to art to the "reduce traffic congestion account."

Basically, he's after the Washington State Arts Commission, which receives a fraction of a percent of money allocated for public building projects. With it, they give grants to organizations like Intiman Theater and the Spokane Symphony.

(Hey all you theater people who worked yourselves into a foaming, gnashing lather over this week's theater section—how about you summon a little of that energy and help fight I-985. Because if you think The Stranger is an enemy of theater, you haven't met Tim Eyman yet.)

UPDATE: I'm wrong, wrong, wrong. Apparently, the arts verbiage quoted above is a red herring and wouldn't actually change local public-arts funding. See more at no985.org and the Municipal League.

Poem number one:

Boy I could use a smoke.
"Scarey" very noise bullets.
Fucking scrary.
My, my maybe
the holy father
would help
wish someone would
pray for me

And the story, from a friend who works as a detective up there:

The guy, who was in his 50s and has no criminal history, just went nuts. The day before he flipped he used a backhoe to tear up his son's septic system because he was mad at his son. Then the next day he grabbed a bunch of his guns, went to a Texaco, and had a standoff with cops for hours. At one point he yelled "I'm coming out" and came out with two guns on his shoulders and two small vases in his hands with a flower in each vase. He walks out half way to the nearest SWAT team cop and says "these are for you," puts the vases down, then goes back to his hideout spot.

Eventually the cops tricked him with cigarettes

Poem number two:

Out a cigs
shit o dear
"He expects me to walk down and get some."
Shit o dear NO WAY
shit o dear
gonna stop smoke today

And more from the cop:

He came out and they tazed him.

At arraignment he told the judge his name wasn't his name on the charging documents because "that name is all in capitol letters, and all caps is reserved for DEAD PEOPLE."

And yesterday, from jail, he wrote a very polite and lucid letter to me asking to have his guns returned ASAP because he needs them.

I bet he needs them.

UPDATE: Brendan Kiley was born in Alaska. The question stands.

UPDATE 2: Jen posted about this yesterday. (Not even The Stranger's own staff can keep up with Slog.)

Twyla Tharp is the world's most famous living choreographer. She is also famously cranky. In person, she is almost the caricature of prickly genius.

She likes talking about her self-help book, but dislikes talking about her autobiography. She parries any question about her most recent Broadway production—a critically lambasted evening of dance set to Bob Dylan songs—with flat refusal: "This is not a subject for this conversation."

She is curt and evasive when talking about any dance other than her own, but witheringly loquacious about why it's a good thing that theater and dance critics are being fired wholesale from American newspapers:

"Very few journalists, critics, or writers in any arena of the arts have the depth of information to give any fodder for thought."

For any thought?

"For healthy thought."

Listen to the rest of the tense interview—her being sharp and ornery, me being occasionally flustered—here:

(Highlights: Minute 2:10, Tharp cracks wise. Minute 7:40, Tharp politely explains that young dancers ain't what they used to be. Minute 15:14, we discuss the reemergence of burlesque. Minute 21:56, we argue about criticism and philosophy—and she gives her thumbs-up to the death of my profession.)

But the 67-year-old dancer and choreographer, who has come to Seattle this month to make two world-premiere ballets for PNB, has earned the right to be ornery. She is not only the most famous living choreographer—she may be the most influential.

Tharp structurally rearranged the dance world in the early 1970s with her ménage à trois of classicism (ballet), avant-garde (minimalism), and pop (rock 'n' roll and jazz).

Read more about her in this week's theater section.

Removing a critic from his beat after 28 years is tantamount to firing him. He's been reassigned to general "arts and entertainment reporter" and the paper is refusing to explain itself, though in Rosenberg's account, he was called into the editor's office and summarily "reassigned" after she accused him of "attacking" the orchestra.

It's true that Rosenberg was deeply critical of the orchestra's current conductor, Franz Welser-Möst.

It's also true that the editor who fired Rosenberg has been at the helm of the paper a single year—and the publisher is on the board of trustees of the orchestra.

Whoa.

Stop, stop, stop.

Just about every critic worth anything has a long list of people lining up at the editor or publisher's door requesting their removal.

In this case, even the orchestra's executive director tells the New York Times: "I’ve never read anything in a Rosenberg review that was nonmusical." He says he didn't ask for Rosenberg's removal.

Probably he didn't have to. When the publisher is on the board of the orchestra, the critic is the one on the outside from the beginning.

I can't describe how wrong this is.

Welser-Möst has received mixed reviews from other critics as well. On tour in Europe, he gets good response. In New York, so-so. But these reviews are from critics who don't have to listen to his work every single week. What is a critic supposed to do when he believes, as Rosenberg told the New York Times, that "this is a case of an extraordinary orchestra with an ordinary conductor"? Be quiet about it? Who's best serving the city, the organization, and the art form then?

Repeated criticisms of the same subject by the same critic can begin to sound shrill. Readers often begin to accuse critics of having ulterior motivations. Critics have to watch out for this—and judging by Rosenberg's writings, he stayed well on the safe side of this dynamic.

But what is a critic to do when he or she disagrees with the artistic philosophy or doubts the abilities of a conductor, or a museum director, or the head of a theater?

The last time I was in a situation not unlike Rosenberg's (before his "reassignment," that is), a colleague who has been in the business far longer than I have pointed out: Editors and publishers don't mind if you write that this concert was boring and that concert was boring. But if you string it together into institutional critique—hey, everything that director does is boring, and wait, that's keeping the institution back—then you, the critic, are seen as "on the attack."

I fear that something like this happened to Don Rosenberg, when he was simply trying to do his job.

At this moment, I'm just glad I don't work for the Plain Dealer. The paper has embarrassed itself and its city.

This weekend brought a most exciting email to my in-box, from the one and only Goddess Kring:

it's nice that you mentioned my art gallery exhibit in your "last days" write up for sept 5th 2008. thank you for spelling my name and the title of my show, and the art gallery name correctly! ha!

it's however creepy and bizarre to me that you didn't talk about my actual photography or artwork and instead mentioned some strange and negative conversation two people had i don't even know who drank too much wine at the opening. what a lack of actual substance in your words about the opening i had. i spoke with quite a number of intelligent and interesting people that night about my work and art in general and what it means to do self portraits etc. the snide snotty style of the stranger always shocks me! ...but then again the only bad publicity is no publicity. i'd love it if the stranger had more sincere substance in their articles.

First, being called "creepy and bizarre" by the Goddess Kring feels like winning a trophy.

Second, Kringen shouldn't take Last Days' lack of substantive comment on her photography exhibit personally—the column regularly focuses on smaller happenings at official events. For instance: Instead of writing a review of the Sex and the City movie, I'll share the report of the Sex and the City audience member who watched a drunk frat girl try to pee in her purse on opening night.

Regarding her art, Ms. Kringen supplied me with her "statement about the meaning of my gallery exhibit" (sic throughout, bolds are mine, and special props to Shannon for capitalizing Myself):

Self Portal: Amplified Chameleon photographs by Shannon Kringen

I tend towards being an introspective person. I use my camera to create Self Portraits that amplify and exaggerate different aspects of Myself that would otherwise remain hidden within and silent.

A chameleon like variety of Passionate Self Portrait Photographs capturing very different facets. From black and white high contrast to full color in natural light with face paint to the distorted face reflected in chrome. Images that symbolize the paradox of being one person and yet having many different sides to oneself simultaneously. The Self Portrait could be seen as a metaphor using the I to represent the Macrocasm of how many different cultures we have on the planet yet it's all one humankind.

Okay.

In other news, when I shared this email with my fella Jake, he brought up the fascinating fact that Shannon Kringen has been one of the most prolific life models for Seattle art students for over a decade. (Her only competition: the man they call Naked Santa.) And while an exhibit of Shannon Kringen photos of Shannon Kringen sounds less than interesting, an exhibit of 10 years of Seattle artists' renderings of Shannon Kringen sounds potentially interesting, or at least more interesting than Self Portal: Amplified Chameleon. Heck, I'll curate this exhibit myself....Got a drawing of Shannon Kringen in your portfolio you want to share? Scan it and send it to schmader@thestranger.com! If the results are interesting, maybe I'll share them here!