This is What a Plein Air Painting Made Using a Credit Card Looks Like: Press releases for individual artists are all the same. Until today. Apparently there is an artist, Sandy Byers, who lives in Oak Harbor—a retired software developer who now paints. One day, she forgot her brushes out on a site and turned to...her credit card. You'll be able to see her in action at the juried plein air competition Paint the Peninsula from September 8 to 14. Everybody else will, presumably, not be using their credit cards to move paint around. (Is it Visa or Mastercard? Does it get too much paint on it to be used in stores after a while?)

Landscaped by credit card.
  • Sandy Byers
  • Landscaped by credit card.

You Must See This Film: There are only two days left to watch War Story, a gorgeously photographed movie that stars one of the greatest actors of our generation, Catherine Keener. Directed by Mark Jackson, who is originally from Seattle, and also the director of Without, a film set on Whidbey Island, War Story is set in Sicily, and is about a war photographer (Keener) who is emotionally and physically caught between a horrific experience that happened in war-torn Libya and the insanity of returning to a normal life in the US. Her former boyfriend is played by Ben Kingsley.

This is a statement that Jackson sent to The Stranger about his film...

War Story is my second film. I am two-thirds of the way finished with a trilogy set on islands. I shot my first film, Without, on Whidbey Island at my sister's house with a handful of people and a credit card. The critical success of that little movie put me in a position to make War Story. I had a few more people, a few more dollars and some recognizable faces, but it was still a family affair. I shot it in small town in Sicily in my family’s hotel. I studied cinematography in Rome, but my real film school was the hours and hours of tape I watched from Scarecrow Video. It's such an honor to bring this movie home to the Northwest. Thank you!

Scarecrow Video must never die...

Catherine Keener In War Story
  • Catherine Keener In War Story

Keeping An Eye on the Opera: Last weekend was the final hurrah for departing Seattle Opera leader Speight Jenkins, who's really ushered in the modern era at this company over three long and distinguished decades. Artists and fancy people from all over converged on McCaw Hall for a performance Saturday night, and the 2,500-person event raised a million bucks on Saturday night. What we really want to know is: what, or who, is next? Next season: Don Giovanni, Tosca, Semele and the Wrath of Juno, and Ariadne auf Naxos.

Why Reviewing Art Should Be More Like Reviewing Food and Strip Clubs (See: Yelp): "Vernacular Criticism" is by a critic who works for both magazines and newspapers, and Yelps it up. He makes the case for "defy[ing] the bloodlessness of the white cube" and bloodlessness of the criticism it has wrought. This essay receives five stars.

If You're Reading This On a Screen, You're Probably Reading It Wrong: The New York Times brings some edifying news for lovers of print books: "..a forthcoming paper by researchers in France and Norway suggests that there may be some cognitive drawbacks to reading even short works of literature on a screen." You're probably not even reading this sentence, are you? Typical. How about a chart, you illiterate boor? Can you pay attention to a chart on a screen? Here you go: